Her dark eyes flicked up. “Welcome, Tetcomchoa. The maicana have chosen me to teach you the ways of magic. If it pleases you, we shall begin.”
Jorim nodded in accord with the formality of her words and manner.
She looked down at the flame for a moment, then back up. A tremulous note entered her voice. “I would ask of you one favor, Lord Tetcomchoa. I am returning to you what you gave the maicana. Please do not humiliate me for showing you what you already know. Do not patronize me. Guide me and all I possess will be yours.”
Jorim let the corners of his mouth twitch back in the hint of a smile. “I would never humiliate you, Nauana. I know nothing and am anxious to learn.”
She remained silent for a moment, then pointed a finger at the flame. “You will learn the most important invocation first. You see the flame. Which of the elements does it possess?”
Jorim concentrated. The Amentzutl had developed an interesting cosmology, which was all tied up with their six gods, half of whom had two aspects. The three singular elements or aspects of anything were solid, fluid, or vapor. Tetcomchoa, the serpent god, ruled the aspect of vapor, since smoke rose and twisted in most serpentine ways. Three other gods, with their dual aspects, covered the paired elements of light and shadow, heat and cold, and destruction and healing. In the Amentzutl world, anything could be described as a mixture of those elements.
“I see it as having four elements: heat, light, destruction, and vapor.”
She nodded. “It also heals, for in destruction new things are created. Recall that Omchoa, the jaguar, slew his twin Zoloa and consumed him, so he is two that are one. This flame has five elements, all in a balance that allows the flame to thrive. At the same time, the elements of shadow and cold have been unbalanced.”
“I see the sense in that.”
“Good, then we shall have you see the sense in something else.” Reaching back, she dipped a finger in water and then allowed a droplet to drip onto the lamp. It hit close to the flame, sizzled, and rose in a puff of steam. “Here you see water that is fluid become water that is vapor. You know that water can also be solid.”
“Ice, yes.”
“But you know it cannot be those three things at the same time, yet it is always water.”
Jorim nodded. He’d not thought about anything in that manner before, but could instantly see that most everything could be found in those three states. He’d seen metal turned fluid in a furnace, and had no doubt that were it hot enough, it might rise as steam.
Nauana half closed her eyes. “The very nature of a thing’s being-that which makes it what it is regardless of form-this is how these things exist in the mai. Mai is like the light from the sun, but there are many suns and they always shine. Mai is everywhere and defines everything. That which we see and touch and taste and experience are all maichom-you would call it magic-shadow. Only through mai may we see the thing as it is, and as we know it through mai, we can use and manipulate it.”
She reached a hand toward the flame, palm out. “Use a hand to feel the flame. Feel the heat. See how the light plays over your flesh. Watch the flame dance. Encompass all of it.”
Jorim took a deep breath, then slowly exhaled. He raised his right hand and stretched it toward the flame. The light did play over it, wavering shadows as it twisted and flowed. He brought his hand close enough to feel the first hints of warmth, then closer. The heat intensified and where his hand eclipsed it, some of the light glowed red through his skin. He watched the flame, matching its undulations to the rise and fall of heat and the sway of shadows.
Her directive to “encompass” the flame baffled him for a moment. What she wanted was for him to take physical aspects-things he could sense-and to carry them into the theoretical realm of the mai. He knew magic existed, but only in the way that he accepted the existence of things he’d never seen. While he had seen Mystics duel and otherwise had seen evidence of magic, he had still been insulated from its reality. She wanted him to push past that.
He could identify the aspects of the flame and sought to keep all of them in his mind, according none of them ascendance, even as the light flared or the heat rose. By opening himself to all of them, embracing all of them, he would not be doing what most people did, which was to diminish things. Most people, while they knew all the elements that went into fire, tended to concentrate on one or the other. If you needed light, you lit a torch. If you were cold, you kindled a fire. If you wanted to clear brush or get rid of debris, you burned it, then spread the ashes on the fields as fertilizer. Fire was thought of not as what it was, but as a means to an end.
Jorim refused to allow himself to be so lazy. He forced himself to experience the flame as an amalgam of his sensory experience. He listened for it, watched it, felt it. He brought his hand through the flame and back, feeling the way it caressed his flesh. He caught the acrid scent of hair singeing on his hand.
And then he found it. Just for a heartbeat, there was something more. A fusion of everything that surrounded its true essence like a shell on a nut. He sensed the thing within. It existed, the truth of fire. The second the concept of truth struck him, he knew that was how his mind would classify the essence. It was truth. It was distillation. It was that without which the thing did not exist.
His head snapped up. “I felt it. I saw it. The truth of fire.”
Nauana smiled. “Very good. My lord recovers his knowledge quickly. The truth, as you call it, is part of the secret teaching. When you realize that, you have the key. That which defines the truth is mai. The mai is what you use to change the truth, to redefine it. For this first lesson, however, you only need a trickle, and you only need to modify two aspects of this particular flame.”
“Which two?”
“The flame exists because enough mai was used to stabilize an imbalance. Where the flame exists, cold and shadow are held at bay.” She looked into his eyes. “You will touch the mai and rebalance things.”
Jorim found himself nodding matter-of-factly even though his hand trembled and his stomach began to tighten. His first brush with magic, just sensing the truth of flame, was passive, learning to see things in a new way. He’d had that experience countless times before. As a cartographer, he saw the world quite differently from others.
He steeled himself. He did not know if he truly were Tetcomchoa-reborn or not. He did not know if he could use magic-at least not beyond how it would be used as a Mystic cartographer, if he ever became that good. His learning how to use it, however, did not demand that he would use it. The learning itself did no harm; it was only in how it was used that could do harm.
And if the Amentzutl are right about centenco, to refuse to learn could be a disaster.
Jorim calmed his mind and reached out to find the truth of fire again. It took work, but he retraced the steps that had led him there before and found it. Reflected from it, like sunlight from a mirror, he found the mai. In his mind it was soft and resilient, like a porridge that had not hardened, but was not fluid either. When he tried to grasp it, it squirted away from him. So he stopped trying to grab it and, instead-as if it were a living thing-teased it forward.
He wove it through the shadows of his fingers and bound into it the sense of cold he felt from his wet hair against the nape of his neck. He used the mai to strengthen shadow and cold, to embolden them. He brought them forward and they lapped at the flame the way water flows and recedes on a beach. With each successive wave, the cold dark tide rose and the flame shrank.