A Tale of Scholarship
“So that’s how we apprehended Dr. Gertude Mallory and came back from the Plane of Sopor. Questions, Carlos?” said Alice, letting her gaze wander to the ceiling trim and experimenting with closing her eyes. Slumped on the couch, she leaned artlessly on Bob, who likewise put his head on her shoulder, ready to collapse.
“Fascinating. Would you care to revisit the beginning of your journey?”
“How much detail? I have hyperthymesia.”
====
Alice stood in Dr. Mallory’s cluttered office, nervously tweaking the lamp pendant on her necklace. Around them piled the cozy detritus of work that Alice had lived in, loved, and now come to dread. Scrolls, rolling chalkboards, forgotten teacups. Outside the large windows she saw barges floating past on the Great Canal, crews blissfully unaware.
“Doctor Mallory, I have, um, a few reservations about our recent work. Are you sure this is…ethical?”
“Alice. Dear,” said Dr. Mallory, visibly displeased by the unfinished grant proposal on her desk as well as Alice’s unwelcome interruption. “This is groundbreaking work. If we perfect the technique, we’ll be the next Murph and Magus. You’ll have your pick of tenure-track positions, if we aren’t picked up by the Arcosian Council, sweetie.”
Alice bristled. She wasn’t Dr. Mallory’s sweetie. She cleared her throat and reminded herself of the facts: I am Alice Nomos. I am a postgraduate at Ketelswatch University. I study fundamental unified magic. I am finally saying no.
“Firstly, I think, our work is getting into thorny territory. Mental divinations are fraught enough, but alteration…I’ve thought we’d present our existence proof without demonstration, and I’m not entirely comfortable with contacting Glasya, and—” she was cut off mid-sentence as Mallory handed her a piece of chalk, partly in confusion, and partly because—
A circle of runes inscribed around the room started glowing. Panic sweat flashed over her before conscious realization. She had foreseen this; When your hands are white, the writing lies on the wall.
Alice easily fought off the Instant Friends enchantment with Descartes’ Ego Ward, but Mallory was already speaking the final words of something far worse. She hoped that Descartes would hold it off, but Mallory twisted the final syllables in a way that Alice didn’t understand and overtopped her mental walls.
Alice was thrown into a living nightmare. Her mother, a spitting image of Alice, reduced to a breathing corpse drooling on her deathbed, mind gone to pieces. The image turned into Alice herself. She clutched her head in terror, doubling over and almost collapsing. It took all of Alice’s faculties to decide the nightmare was probably a spell, even if she couldn’t break free. Even with her wards, she wouldn’t survive long. Through the crushing headache she traced the empty set intersection and spoke the zero matrix for universal nullification. Unfortunately, that blunt instrument dispelled her own wards too, leaving her open to an immediate two-pronged assault. First, inside her own mind: You’ll never be good enough. Alice shoved it off with anger. “FUCK—”
“Don’t curse, Sweetie. Look at me.” Alice looked. Mallory was enchanting, hypnotic, her command utterly irresistible. Alice sank into syrupy-sweet oblivion. “We will recall the sequence of events in which you decided to question me, and then you will forget them, replaced by—”
“Counterspell,” said Robert Sifr, spilling through the door. That little guy with a scruffy beard who showed up to classes late with nothing prepared except only and exactly all the answers. The disarmingly unassuming mascot of the department, every teacher’s pet, and the last person Alice wanted to be saving her.
“—YOU!” Alice snapped back as Robert slapped her cheek. “Hold Person!” She exclaimed, summing up a logical formula for Zeno’s stationarity by geometric series that she had prepared that morning.
Mallory was already in the middle of laying out new spell-predicates, her own Counterspell. Alice was expecting this, her fingers already forming the negating runes of a Counter-Counterspell, but the sequence died with a final cancellation term as an N+1th Glyph of Warding fired a Counter-Counter-Counterspell at her. And then, with yet more insult onto injury, another Glyph released a twisting swirl of hypnotic colors, followed by Mallory’s own Suggestion: “Walk into the hallway and clamp your hands over your mouth to await and heed Professor Gertrude Mallory’s instructions.”
Alice managed to close her eyes against the Hypnotic Pattern but had already started walking outside, though she was choosing to interpret “and” as “and then”. “Don’t mind me, do something about Mallory! No, run and get help!” she shouted to Robert.
Robert snapped his fingers and somehow produced a recognizable and incredibly cheesy “badum-tss” rimshot. The sudden absurdity snapped Alice out of it. He turned to Mallory, twisting arcane power into his words. “Hey, why are bards taxonomically fish? Because they’ve got scales!”, but didn’t get a chuckle, let alone the paralyzing fit of hideous laughter he hoped for. “Alice, try again with the Observational Zeno effect!”
From the hallway, Alice went for it. Somehow, she knew it was going to work. Alice fixed her gaze on Dr, Mallory, continually pinpointing her professor’s quantum location. Just like the glimpses of liquid visions Alice had after an all-nighter, Mallory started moving in slow-motion.
Evidently, Mallory reconsidered her plans. She struck a tuning fork on the table. A crack appeared in the air, and Mallory stepped through, leaving a shimmering line behind her.
“...”
“...”
“...Will you follow her planar signature? The tuning fork was nnnnnnnnn,” he hummed at the fork’s pitch.
“You’re mad. You want me to follow Mallory? To who-knows-where? Into a trap?” She exclaimed.
“You must do it now. I haven’t perfect pitch and won’t remember it in fifteen minutes. You can Plane Shift, right?” He rummaged through the drawers. “At least, with reference notes?”
“It’s banned.”
“As if that’d stop you. I’m sure you weren’t auditing music theory to suss out the sonic component.”
“How’d you—”
“Knew it. Look,” he continued, “It’s us or the authorities, and while there’s probably enough proof in this office to nail her, it’ll take too long. She could go anywhere, or worse, come back and finish us. I’m willing to bet you’re as prepared as you ever will be. You don’t even get out of bed before playing twenty questions with Hione.”
“Alright, but why do you want to come?”
“Because we’re both responsible for that abomination of a spell and we need to stop her.”
“But are you ready?”
“Of course, are you daft? I’ve been waiting ages for you to make up your mind. You’re an archetypal diviner, an overplanner. You don’t really need me; you’re already one of the most competent wizards on the continent. You developed the telepathy ritual—”
Alice was surprised to hear such explicit praise from the wonder child of Octavian Hall. “I’d note you did the wordless communication component—”
“Enough indecision. This is the third time I’ve seen you march into Mallory’s office all grim-faced, only to walk back out in a daze. You’ve finally broached it; too late for second thoughts.”
“The third time!?” Alice was aghast at the realization. She flinched when Bob put a hand on her shoulder. “Alright. Let’s go.”
====
“Whoa there, you have the right to say less. You don’t need to embody all seven Daughters of Knowledge.” chuckled Carlos.
Bob burst out tired-laughing. “She follows diviner Cassandra, but I think she wants Stefani’s lived experience too.”
Alice was not too exhausted to give him a glare.
“The two of you do represent very different traditions of arcane knowledge. But you’ve had quite the interdisciplinary success in the ritual of mind linking, and were both in Mallory’s lab working on this memory modification enchantment. Robert, you study at the Woolworth College of Bardic Lore, and Alice, you’re in the Ketelswatch University Department of Divinations, correct?”
“They’re not so distinct, truly,” mumbled Bob. “It’s only, rather than trying to build every spell ground-up from fundamental theory, we tap into the power of stories.”
“So it’s the same except for, you know, the everything that’s different,” complained Alice.
“Is not.” went on Bob. “Songs and stories we study, collate, they channel unconscious feeling with enough resonance to warp the weave, while you’re directly wefting the weave guided only by formalized abstractions, but, get this, it’s all literature review, you and me both!”
“Easy to say when you’ve never done lab time to deconstruct a third-order spell into cantrips just to rebuild a silly little Floating Disk.”
“Quit whinging! There’d be no wizards without bards, we started the deconstructive tradition of arcane casting by identifying resonant notes and motifs from divine and sorcerous magic to do microtheogeny from first principles using the same belief and fear and hope that created the gods who empower clerics and druids. Universal latent unconscious reality warping, just most people can’t do it solo.”
“It’s not fair that he can heal people just by telling a story that makes him feel like a cleric.”
“... and thereby tapping into the collective hope and love behind that ancient cleric.”
Carlos cleared his throat. “Ahem. Now, you have mentioned the Plane of Sopor. Would you care to further describe your meeting with Glasya?
====
Alice grumbled as she trudged past the fetid blossoms sprawling beneath the yellow-green lamps burning sickly on the cavern roof. Her pack straps wore tender spots on her shoulders, despite discarding all nonessentials and a few things more to boot. They had chased Mallory by land, air, water, and planes, but when the chips were down nothing beat feet. She started mumbling to herself before she remembered Bob was there, still playing that chipper song on his ocarina—he’s trying to fool himself about our exhaustion—and spoke up. “I think we’re cooked… worse than the first-years who manned the battlements when Gustav Fireball’s army besieged the University. Even if Mallory doesn’t unleash her memory enchantments, the cat’s out of the bag that mages can. Even the possibility robs people of their sureness and sovereignty of self.”
“There could be consensual uses. Traumatic memories, simulated vacations, people you’d like to forget.”
“Bob. You’re not hearing me. Nobody could ever trust a high-tier mage again. Nobody could trust you or me. You couldn’t trust me. And even worse is everything Glasya could have taught her.”
“This plane has looser notions of distance, don’t speak of the dev—”
“Welcome, sojourners. Have they come to bargain?” Before them stood a statuesque figure of unearthly beauty, with small horns, large sumptuous wings, and a forked tail, dressed in regalia of unimaginable splendor. “Power, knowledge ... I sense Alice envies for divine grace, and Robert desires for the primordial tales, when magic was wild as the wind.”
“We want nothing,” Alice started, but Bob already asked, “What did you and Mallory trade?”
“Ah...knowledge. Magicians always do. We exchanged secrets beyond what Alice and Robert could possibly imagine. Now, for the details...” she smiled, “They’ll pay...”
Alice cut in. “You desire worship. The worship of us mortals that creates gods. We won’t give it, no cap.”
“How about I add…for the wanderers…a map. They must be so lost, my guests. Punched out from a thin, spiderwoven bubble of Reality. Leaving their precious leyknot of life and magic. Only inches towards the Void at infinity, and already the gentle loosening of the certain has left small minds reeling. What if these do-gooders were told what lies next and where to find Mallory’s tower?”
We’re not really that lost, Bob telepathically sent to Alice.
We a little are, Alice responded.
You’re a diviner for gobsakes. I believe in you!
“We’d like a little space to consider,” said Alice, starting to sprint away with Bob.
They ran for quite a while, though they knew Glasya could follow them anywhere in her domain. Some hastily attuned privacy wards bought the space to think that running could no longer provide.
We don’t want to go much further, do we? thought Alice to Bob.
And you don’t actually want more power, do you?
Only enough to stop Mallory…
Alice, you already are enough. We’re enough. Let’s end this story.
You’re a bard. What are you going to do with this story?
I think it’s going to cast the greatest magic of all: a cautionary tale about casting the greatest magic of all.
====
“So you avow that you made no deal with Glasya or any other extraplanar entity you encountered. Would you care to confirm or deny?”
“Confirm,” said Alice, with unexpected enthusiasm.
“Yes, we’ve made our mistakes, but I hope our conduct meets your exemplary standards,” said Robert.
“Yes, the criteria to join your program … I foresee great challenges in the Ages to come. Would I or Bob be there…,” added Alice.
“Criteria...” said the catlike fellow in robes sitting before them. “I’m afraid our standards are not quite about exemplitude so much as transgression.”
Realization pierced Alice’s exhaustion as her assumptions about the man before them—about the entire interview—shattered.
Carlos didn’t need to be a diviner to read the thoughts plastered across her face. He broke a tiny grin. “No, I’m not with the Arcosian Council. We are the Knights in Shadow, sworn in Oath of Integrity to Janda and Ratri.”
“Janda and Ratri?” asked Robert, astonished by the unlikely pairing.
“Yes, order and secrecy. You have broken the seal of planes and consorted with Outside entities. This cannot be forgiven.”
Alice heard Bob think of running. Alice would have too, but she saw: Carlos was no mere functionary. They could run. He ran faster. They could ensorcell him. He could still his mind against any enchantment. They could fight. He could stun with a single touch. As they had trained to learn the ideas of generations of mages before them, Carlos and lineages of monks like his had trained to replicate the deeds of heroes past, using the body as the brush to write the secrets of the Weave. They replicated with discipline what legends had done by birth and blessing. As bards twisted emotion and wizards accumulated intellect, monks honed body and soul. Alice and Bob mastered theory while the monks’ mastered themselves. They were surrounded and outmatched.
“You’ve done nothing wrong, only something forbidden,” continued Carlos. “You transgressed knowingly, with noble purpose. You will not be heroes; you will not even be villains.”
Alice was aghast, shocked, and mortified. Bob started to cry, imagining a dark oubliette.
“There is knowledge that can never see the light of day. So we will move at night. You wished to suppress Mallory’s Memory Modification. Instead, we will use it to suppress knowledge of outsiders and planes. Would you care to join us?”
[Next time: A Tale of Artifice]