"Efanian, the language of magic, reaches well back into the beginnings of structured magic. The Wizard Corela, one of the early great practitioners, invented it, although it has naturally been constantly refined. The sigils were designed to allow each symbol to be a single word, and the language attempts to remove all ambiguity, so there are no homonyms – no words that can mean more than one thing. Think, for instance of telling Efera to make something light, to light a fire, to conjure light."
"How would you make it float with Symbolic magic?"
"Mm. Not the most appropriate candidate for Symbolic casting. Make a soap bubble, perhaps, and then use either Thought or Sigillic magic to suggest that the bowl is like a soap bubble. Symbolic magic takes advantage of characteristics of objects and concepts to transfer those characteristics to the subject of your casting. The problem is a symbol is often worse than a homonym – the colour red can symbolise anger, passion, blood, romance, death, or indeed anything the caster thinks it means. Some argue that even things that the caster doesn’t know it means matter in Symbolic. With a soap bubble, the bowl would probably float, but since I consider a soap bubble a symbol of the ephemeral, it might also pop out of existence when I next touched it. To cast Symbolic magic, there must first be a sense of…rightness, of surety over what symbols you have chosen and the result they will bring. In a way you have to dominate the outcome, by being certain in yourself what your symbols mean. Otherwise you could end up with almost anything. Scary magic, as you say."
"What kind of magic do you mostly use?"
"Mostly? The best casting is usually a combination. What do you think circles are? A symbol of perfection, of a cycle, of a line not to be crossed which has no end."
Kendall was fascinated, enjoying this explanation far more than she’d expected, not least because: "You’re saying that almost everyone learns magic the wrong way round."
"Not precisely. The Teremic Approach would be appropriate – a necessity – for people who don’t have a great deal of strength of mind. Advanced Thought casting is absolutely more dangerous than anything except perhaps Symbolic, and I would not recommend any move past the simple exercise Seb gave you unless precise control is gained. But if you don’t start with it, you’re unlikely to ever use it. The stronger you become the more damage you’ll be able to do."
"So what can’t you do with magic?"
"In theory, nothing. In practice, you are of course limited by your ability to convey your intention, and your strength. Understanding exactly what you’re trying to do is fundamental. I, for instance, probably wouldn’t have done very well getting that poison out of Seb. To be a good healing mage, you need to understand how people work, and my studies have focused on the Eferum and divinations, not blood and bile and flesh.
"Size and distance also limit you. The further you try and send a message by magic, the less likely it is to arrive. Think of the difference between looking into the next room, and looking into a room on the far side of the country. Scrying is one of those things all the legends show the great mages doing, but no-one knows how they structured the spell. It seems a simple thing doesn’t it? One of Tiandel’s sons spent a great deal of time trying to work out a way to scry over distance, and when he finally succeeded the casting took all his energy and killed him."
"But he succeeded?" Lieutenant Meniar took a step forward eagerly. "A functioning distance scry? Truly?"
His excited advance brought a shutter down over Rennyn’s face, but then she shrugged and plucked the still-floating bowl out of the air. "Yes and no. It’s technically functional, but even I’m not powerful enough to cast it." She handed the bowl to Kendall. "Distance is a huge limitation, but choosing to learn only Sigillic is merely a self-imposed constraint. It’s up to you two whether you attempt Thought casting exercises or not. It’s not necessary to becoming a Sigillic mage."
"What about being a real mage?"
Rennyn Claire paused, turning her head toward the darkening horizon and the line where the grass stopped and the sky began. "The question would be whether you can truly understand magic if you ignore all but one of the ways of performing it. And that’s all Seb means by real mages – people who understand magic, and have the full set of tools to manipulate it."
There was a little silence, a weirdly upset pause, and then a shadow between the two tents behind Rennyn resolved into Captain Faille.
"What time do you wish to be woken, my Lady?" he asked.
"Midnight, I suppose. Three hours ahead should be safe enough."
Kendall was impressed that Captain Faille had managed to give Rennyn an order, just by not giving it to her. As soon as she had gone into her tent, everyone who had been lingering about shifted away, some only a short distance to stand guard and the rest to the busier end of the camp, where the noise immediately dropped to furious whispers. Kendall, retreating obediently with Sukata, considered the rearrangement appreciatively.
"It’s like she’s got a hundred nannies. The scariest woman in the kingdom, and they all tiptoe around her like she’s made of glass. She doesn’t strike me as fragile."
Sukata didn’t respond, heading for the cliff’s edge. She was obviously upset, though Kendall had only begun to be able to spot the signs. It was in the way she held herself, and the fact that she wasn’t being so proper and correct. Kendall held off prodding, and peered cautiously down. The water had moved, the beach growing to half again its width, and the Sentene had found a way to pick their way down the cliff to the water, where they were conjuring balls of light.
"Going into the Eferum here is already risky," Sukata finally said. "Going into the Eferum when obviously in need of a full day’s sleep is courting disaster."
"She probably has nightmares," said Kendall, who had suffered enough herself in the past few days. "Why is it so risky going into the Eferum here?"
"The ocean is said to be like the Eferum – cold and dark and full of currents. When travelling between two such similar places there’s a danger of missing your direction."
"She didn’t seem that worried about it. Was what she said about Thought magic right? How come people do this Teremie stuff, if it means you get all messed up? Is it really that hard to do?"
The Kellian girl sat down on the cliff’s edge, which was more than Kendall was willing to do. "Force magic – too often children died trying to master it. The accepted wisdom is that it is simply not worth it. What can it accomplish that a well-constructed Sigillic cannot? It wears on the caster far more, and the danger of interruption or lapses of concentration is considerable. The basis of the Teremic approach is that a dead mage can’t cast any kind of magic, and the speed of something as crude as Force magic doesn’t balance the risk."
"Then why did everyone act like she was welcoming Fel to dinner? Hearts in boots and trying to put a brave face on it."
"There – there has been a great deal of debate over how much of what Lady Montjuste-Surclere does is Force magic. During the Asentyr incursion she was seen to use highly advanced Sigillic circles culminating in a Symbolic summoning, but much of her casting must be either pre-prepared or not Sigillic. I’m not sure she even carries a slate. She is powerful enough to maintain a number of pre-cast spells, it is true, but that casting after the palace incursion–"
"What casting?"
"You remember, an hour or so after sunset, there was a wash of colour? And then some lights in the sky?"
"I didn’t see the lights."
"It was a casting which altered Asentyr’s main circle so that it would pinpoint any Eferum-Get within its bounds. And it revealed two, both of them guised as the larger had been. Spies. Eferum-Get spies." Sukata’s voice dropped with the enormity of this idea, then lifted again. "From what I have been told, Lady Montjuste-Surclere went to the place the Eferum-Get attack had been most destructive and set up an idea of what Eferum-Get are like, and then used that idea to call to her a Life Stealer to cause a reaction with the shield. During all this she simply chanted three words which might count as Sigillic magic except she didn’t write them on anything, and the names of sigils alone do not constrain Efera. Which means that the spell was almost entirely Symbolic and…Thought."