Anyone who knew the key to deciphering the verses could learn new magicks. The Church had, in essence, adopted the same sort of book-based code that the Prince shared with his father and with Owen, but in this case the key was also the message. And since books and verses were independent of page counts, any Good Book, big or small, in multiple volumes, would serve, provided it faithfully reproduced the King Robert Version text.
It seemed clear from Fire’s writing that he felt his discovery of these spells within Scripture were confirmation of God’s hand in their original transcription and in the KRV translation. Prince Vlad had no difficulty seeing the Church having a different reaction-primarily one of panic to learn that a madman had somehow cracked their code. This meant that anyone who learned it could use their grimoire, even Tharyngians. And some Church officials must have seen the even greater ramifications of Fire’s work. He’d discovered the key by looking at nature, which meant anyone could rediscover the key.
Vlad shivered. The implications of all that were beyond his ability to fully comprehend. He wondered, however, if basic magick principles worked in ways he’d not considered before. The Law of Sympathy, for example, or the Law of Contagion. Could the Church use a person of a certain bloodline to control others in that bloodline? The Church encouraged-and often selected-members of noble families to enter its ranks. Vlad had seen that as a measure the nobility had taken to guarantee that the Church would not betray political leaders, but what if it was reversed? What if his father, for example, was a means through which King Richard could be controlled? And not just because he might be a hostage, but through some sorcerous influence that Prince John might not even understand. What if my father’s prayers for his brother constituted a formula through which the King was magically controlled?
Though that thought disturbed Vlad the most-primarily for its implication for his children-he set it aside for the consideration of a greater issue. He went back to Fire’s texts. Fire had used his observations of the natural world as confirmation of patterns in Scripture. Prince Vlad reversed that. He found a formulation that most closely approximated the words used to teach him to shoot a musket. He copied out the lines and included the numbers. The jumble of verses read, “The sun stood still and lit the way, shadows growing small.”
He compared the words and data to plants, animals, and anything else he could think to use. Correlation escaped him at first, then he closed his eyes and composed a mental picture of what the words suggested. The sun was standing still, so he visualized it at its zenith. That would naturally make shadows small, but not completely invisible. Depending upon how far north one was from the equator, the angle of the shadow to the base of a rod would vary. It struck Vlad that while the image mirrored the noonday sun, it did so without invoking the sun directly. He suspected it did so because the image created would trigger magick sufficient for lighting brimstone and because, somewhere lost in the annals of time, a sorcerer invoking the power unleashed by the sun’s direct image had accessed incredible power or caused a disaster, or perhaps both.
So the image we are trained to focus upon limits us. Prince Vlad frowned. The reason a musket spat fire when shot was because not all of the brimstone used in the charge was consumed before the ball left the muzzle. More powerful magicks might consume the brimstone completely, creating more pressure. That might burst a gun barrel, but were the breech strong enough, the greater propulsion would make a bullet go further and faster.
The reverse engineering of the spell cracked the door on an area of study that was at the root of all magick. The Tharyngians, when they overthrew the King and Church during their revolution, had begun to use scientific methods of measurement and observation to study and quantify the basic principles of magick. Had they had Fire’s notes, they might well have understood everything and be so far beyond any other nation in the ability to control magick that they would be unstoppable. There was no doubt that the infinite power granted through magick could so thoroughly corrupt one that he might attempt to take over the world-and make him believe he might be successful in that attempt.
The Tharyngians’ study had uncovered several things. Guy du Malphias had been able to reanimate the dead. Owen’s reportage about what Prince Vlad took to be a control center suggested the Laureate could control his pasmortes at range. Owen had also seen du Malphias move objects with magick. This meant that either the dictum that magick only worked by touch was wrong or that du Malphias had managed to redefine touch. The idea that magicians were taught that magick only worked at touch certainly limited their ability to use it, but exactly how one could redefine touch escaped the Prince.
And then he heard Mugwump give his usual trumpeted bellow to welcome the wurmwright and dinner. In his laboratory, the sound came muted because it had to travel through the wall. Outside it would be crisp and clear and in the wurmrest it would be deafening. Then he remembered the times he’d ridden Mugwump while the dragon dove for fish in the river, and how the bellow had sounded different in water. Then it struck him.
Magick did only work by touch. The key was in defining the medium through which it moved. Just as water and the wall changed the nature of the sound so, too, might magick be changed by communication through another medium. Depending upon range and air pressure one might have to adjust a spell, just as one would have to speak louder to be heard over a storm. The cost paid for invoking such a spell might well be greater, too, so that limiting spells used at range would be a way to guarantee that magicians did not exhaust or kill themselves.
And using little devices, as du Malphias did for controlling his pasmortes, that used the laws of magick might make invoking those spells easier. If like spoke to like through channels that didn’t involve air or, somehow, the intervening space, then magick might become even easier at range. Two halves of the same stone, no matter how far apart, might react within magick as if they were still part of a whole.
Vlad closed his eyes. Tangents and angles, symbols and their duplications, and the implications of all that spread through his mind. He could see the spells he knew lining up in a new order. If the spell to shoot a gun was near the top of the sun spells, then the spell to light a candle would be much lower. And, not surprisingly, he’d always visualized that spell as the sun dawning. The spell to extinguish such a flame he saw as the sun setting.
He saw what Ezekiel Fire had seen, though he doubted Fire had completely understood what he discovered. Prince Vlad could peel the limitations that clothed magick and take it back to its most raw and powerful form. He could provide greater access more simply for more people, which would make their lives infinitely easier.
And give everyone the chance to be corrupted by that power. In a heartbeat he understood why the Church had done what it did. In the next he feared what their knowledge would allow them to do. They had distributed grimoires so their selected agents would have access to advanced magicks as needed. Until Vlad knew who those people were, and why they were being given knowledge forbidden to the average man, he couldn’t judge whether their effort should be encouraged or destroyed.
And he wondered, as he opened a blank notebook and began to outline his own system of magick, if he would fall victim to infinite power or if his purpose-balancing the Church’s tyranny-might somehow save him from magick’s corrupting influence.
Chapter Fifteen
1 May 1767 Antediluvian Ruins Westridge Mountains, Mystria