“Mage Alain.” Asha looked at him, her eyes revealing some deep emotion. “I learned something more concerning you. By what elders have told me, and by what they did not say, I have learned that Mage Alain was to be humiliated by failure on his first contract. If he also died, that would have been a matter of welcome to the elders.”
“Do you mean Alain was set up, too?” Mari demanded. “The Mage Guild knew he was going to run into serious trouble?”
“The elders at Ringhmon knew more of the plans of the shadows there than they revealed to Mage Alain,” Asha continued. “They were not surprised that the caravan he guarded was attacked, nor that the attack was so powerful as to be beyond any Mage’s ability to counter. They did not expect him to survive, believing that either in the attack or afterwards, alone in the waste, he would die.”
Mari stared at Asha, aghast, but Alain simply nodded, his expression perfectly calm. She could see him withdrawing a bit into his Mage state to deal with the ugly news.
“This explains much,” Alain said tonelessly. “I wondered why the elders in Ringhmon were unconcerned with the fate of the caravan but acted much distressed over my arrival. All of their questions centered on the Mechanic who had accompanied me in escaping the ambush and the desert waste.”
“Just so,” Asha said. “She had not been anticipated. This also I learned, Mage Alain. Your suspicions regarding the attack in Imperial territory were correct. The plan was again that you should fail in your task, and this time surely die in the process. Your fate would not be left to the efforts of commons or chance. Some Mages would be ordered to ensure you did not escape, and if possible the common military force that you accompanied would be eliminated completely, leaving no witnesses and ensuring the magnitude of your failure would be as great as possible.”
“I had wondered why so many Mages were in the force that attacked the Alexdrian soldiers, and how those Mages could have known so surely where I and the Alexdrians would be,” Alain said. “If not for Mari’s arrival, I would surely have ‘failed’ again just as the elders planned. But I was ordered to the Free Cities from Dorcastle. Do you say the plan had already been decided upon at that time?”
“Yes, Mage Alain, your fate had already been decided before you left Dorcastle.” Asha paused. “I was able to learn much because the elders themselves are asking many questions, and in the questions asked, answers can be found. The elders do not understand how you escaped the dragon in the north. They know no single Mage could have defeated that spell creature, nor any force of commons.” Her eyes went to Mari. “The elders do not even consider the possibility that one of the toys of the Mechanics could have accounted for the dragon.”
Mari, stunned by what she had been hearing, managed to nod. “They’re partly right. If my friend Alli hadn’t designed those special weapons, I couldn’t have nailed that dragon.”
Alain had let some puzzlement show. “Could you learn why this decision was made, Mage Asha? To humiliate me and see my death before ever I met Mari? I had assumed my errors after coming to know Mari had led to the decision that I must be eliminated as a threat to the Guild.”
“I cannot be certain,” Asha said. “But the elders do now openly declare you to be in error, ensnared by the wiles of a seductive young female Mechanic whose charms you could not resist.”
“Oh, give me a break!” Mari burst out. “Just who is this irresistible, seductive young female Mechanic?”
“You have ensnared me,” Alain pointed out.
Not in the mood for joking about that, Mari glared at him so strongly that Alain visibly flinched. “Any time you want to be free of my snare all you have to do is ask, Mage Alain. Did you learn anything else, Asha?”
“Yes,” Asha replied. “Mage Alain, you are not the youngest ever to have been declared a Mage. A century ago, one was declared a Mage at the age of sixteen. She died before she became seventeen, in a failed contract. The records say she had neither the experience nor the skills of a Mage, despite having been declared so by several elders at the Mage Hall in Cathlan. Forty years before that, one gained Mage status at twelve. He died at the age of thirteen, also on a failed contract, and also because of a lack of skills and experience, the records say. I suspect that the records lie. I found records of a few other young Mages who did not die, but failed in major tasks and were returned to acolyte status.”
“That’s an interesting and disturbing pattern,” Mari agreed.
“Why?” Alain asked. “Why must young Mages die, Mage Asha? Could you learn that?”
“No one admitted to deliberately seeking the elimination or discrediting of those judged too young. You know what we were taught: that skill and wisdom alone determine whether one can be a Mage. No physical issue such as age should have any bearing on the matter, for all is illusion,” Asha explained. “Instead, I was told, sometimes those given Mage status are unwilling to accept guidance from their elders and thus lack sufficient wisdom. Sometimes they have yet to become themselves, their nature still in flux. Sometimes they are more prone to feelings, lacking enough self-control.”
“How could those arguments be aimed at me or other young Mages?” Alain asked.
“Focus not on the illusion of the words but on what they conceal,” Asha advised. “Turn those points about and you see what the elders reject. Who questions the wisdom of elders, Mage Alain? The young. Who changes the most in a short time as they age? The young. Who feels the changes of the body the most strongly as it grows, making self-control indeed more difficult? The young. Unpredictable. Questioning. Prey to the emotions given extra strength by the changes in their bodies.” Asha shook her head. “You, like other Mages deemed too young, were judged too likely to err, too likely to seek new answers, too likely to challenge the elders. And this is what you have done, though perhaps that only happened under the force of the elders’ attempts to eliminate you.”
“Self-fulfilling prophecies,” Mari said, seeing both Mages turn questioning looks upon her. “That’s a saying for when you create the conditions that make a prediction come true. Your elders said that young Mages would fail, and then set them up to fail. Your elders believed that Alain would deviate from what they call wisdom, and they forced him into circumstances in which he did just that. So they were correct, because they did things to make themselves be correct.”
Alain nodded to Mari. “Wisdom which justifies itself.”
“But why not just admit those concerns?” Mari asked. “Why not say you need a certain level of maturity before you can be a Mage, whether it’s true or not? My Guild has done that, setting experience requirements in place that mean in the future no one else can be promoted as fast as I was, regardless of how well they master Mechanic arts.”
This time Alain shook his head. “The elders cannot admit such a thing. As Asha said, a fundamental aspect of the wisdom they teach is that the physical is irrelevant. Nothing is real.”
“Wow,” Mari commented. “We’ve gone days without you saying nothing is real, and I haven’t missed it at all.”
“But it is so by the wisdom Mages are taught,” Alain said. “If nothing is real, to say that the physical body in fact creates conditions which prevent anyone from being a Mage would be to undermine much of what they teach.”
“As Mage Alain said in Severun,” Asha added, “the wisdom we were taught is lacking. The elders should examine where the errors lie and make changes, but instead they cling to what they know.”
Mari couldn’t help a short, sardonic laugh. “Just like what Professor S’san and I talked about with the Senior Mechanics who control the Mechanics Guild. Different wisdom, but the same refusal to contemplate changes.”