"My Norwegian-English dictionary proved of little use in translating their ancient language, but desperation makes a damn good teacher. Eventually, I learned to communicate with them. They called me Geirmagnus. At first, I thought it was their accented pronunciation, but that didn't quite fit. Then I convinced myself it was a title of respect. Within a year, I met six other Geir-magnuses and realized it was simply a common name and the closest to my impossibly strange American one.
"No history text could describe just how filthy, foul-smelling, and diseased these people were." Larson looked up quickly, but his companions did not seem to take offense. "More than ever, I wanted to go home, but the same curiosity which pushed me into research drove me to gain their trust and experiment. It was then I discovered the fascinating truth. Not one of them could be hypnotized! I tried every technique I could think of, carefully adapting it to the culture of their time without success. Certainly, there are people from my own time who can't be hypnotized, and theories abound as to the reason. But, after due consideration, there was only one reason I could see for an entire primitive race, perhaps the entire era, evolving barriers to mental exploration. Protection. Apparently someone or something could meddle with minds, perhaps destroy them. And I was the only one defenseless against it!"
Larson ate the jerked meat Taziar handed him, feeling a sudden kinship with a parapsychologist named Gary Mannix. But how did a man without mind barriers become a Dragonrank Master? Understandably intrigued, Larson read on.
"Obviously, the people had little or no knowledge of their gifts. When questioned about mind-reading beings, most mentioned mythological gods. Nevertheless, my persistence won out. Eventually, I was told of a rare subculture of people known as "dream-readers." For a fee, a dream-reader would interpret dreams and thought obsessions, provided his client withdrew the mental barriers. As with all things not well understood, the dream-readers were looked upon with a mixture of fear, hatred, and respect.
"Scientist to the end, I couldn't let the discovery rest. I began a search which took me across Norway and parts of Sweden. I believe I interviewed and hired every dream-reader in existence. There were only eleven. More importantly, my efforts turned up Hosvir. He was a gawky youngster, not well suited to feats of strength or skill. After failing at multiple apprenticeships and on his father's farm, Hosvir was sent away from home. But Hosvir had the ability to perform tricks which I would have believed were simple sleight of hand were it not for the fact that he had the coordination and agility of an old plow horse. Because of his odd gift, he decided to try becoming a dream-reader.
"Hosvir did not fare well. He lacked the honey-tongued, used-car-salesmanlike sweetness which successful dream-readers use to relax clients enough to drop their mental barriers. Of course, I was no challenge. Hosvir read my thoughts. Then he read my memories. When I asked about his past, he didn't tell me. He showed me, with vivid images placed directly in my own mind. Hosvir was to other dream-readers what Harry Houdini's water tank was to my six-year-old son's card tricks. I thanked Hosvir for a unique experience. He thanked me for having flawed mind barriers. I took him back to the lab, and the first Dragonrank sorcerer was made."
Larson sighed, wishing his own experiences with Dragonrank mind powers had been equally benign.
"It didn't happen overnight. Through trial and error and good communication, I elicited the mechanism for Hosvir's ability. Some special difference in his internal makeup, I never discovered exactly what, allowed him to channel what I called 'psychic energy' and he referred to as 'Chaos.' In truth, his term was probably more accurate. He would summon this entropy as a scattered force and mold it into whatever he wanted or needed. It was the ultimate conversion of energy to matter, an alchemist's dream. Hosvir could turn lead to gold, but it was just as easy for him to create gold from nothing.
"It didn't end there. Strengthened by psychic exercises of my invention, Hosvir's powers seemed unlimited. He could create anything his mind could conceive, even life itself. He made Ingeborg, a large-boned, stout, and sturdy woman, beautiful by the standards of the era. Unfortu-nately, he couldn't conceive of antiparticles, nuclear fusion, or time travel. Even his exploration of my thoughts didn't help. Spanning epochs remained beyond Hosvir's abilities. And we soon discovered that we paid a great price for Hosvir's art.
"There is truth to the Chinese concept of yin and yang. Our world has two forces which must remain in relative balance: one, the natural entropy or randomness of the universe, the other, the ordered systems of matter. Hosvir's magic required him to summon large magnitudes of chaos-stuff from some source I never uncovered. The working of his spells would consume a certain amount of that energy, but there was always some left over. With time, the liberated chaos was becoming significant. Gradually, it took on a physical form. It looked to me rather like a small, European dragon. (Later, I learned this is the natural shape of huge volumes of banded entropy. Perhaps this opens a new area of research in Europe.) Unfortunately, the single purpose of the entropy-force was destruction.
"Initially, it was weak. It killed cattle now and again, uprooted a few trees. I left it alone, making the fatal mistake of believing that since I understood it, I could find a way to control it. Ingeborg turned out to have Hosvir's chaos-channeling abilities, and a search by Hosvir gained me two more magicians besides her. They reveled in the newfound power my psychic exercises opened for them. And the entropy-force grew."
Larson paused for a drink of water. Gaelinar and Ta-ziar watched him expectantly. Bramin fidgeted with impatience. Larson gulped slowly, savoring a little power of his own before returning to Gary Mannix's narrative.
"Some ten years after I discovered Hosvir, a claw-shaped scar appeared on the hand of every sorcerer. Somehow, they knew it came from the entropy-force, but it was quite some time before we realized the creature was stamping its prey. We called the scars 'dragonmarks' after their source, and the sorcerers became known as my 'dragon ranks' or 'dragon troops.' The mark helped bring us all together. The first accidental channeling of chaos would cause the mark to appear on adults and chil-dren with the potential to become sorcerers. Frightened parents brought their marked sons and daughters to me. I took them all in, hoping one could learn the time travel 'magic' which would take me home.
"Luckily, the gift was rare. Over the next nine years, my dragon ranks swelled to eighteen. And the chaos force grew exponentially. It had begun to kill people, at first singly. Then it slaughtered entire towns. A few of the sorcerers attempted to destroy or contain it, but they were beaten before they started. The chaos they summoned to use for spells against it only added to its power. And the entropy-force grew.
"Eighteen years of training sorcerers gave me enough knowledge of their craft to finally realize how to reroute their energy and stop feeding the entropy-force. Rather than summoning an extrinsic chaos force, I taught the novice mages to tap only the psychic power within themselves. In good faith, the higher ranking sorcerers tried to do the same. But the change limited their powers to a tiny fraction, and old habits die hard. Hosvir and his earlier-trained companions frequently slipped back into previous patterns. Worse, the tapping of self-energy required keener judgment of the amount of summoned force needed for a spell. Bringing forth more life energy than necessary simply sapped their own strength, and depleting life force too far resulted in death. We lost six of my dragon ranks in the first week. Though more slowly now, the chaos force continued to grow, leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake.