Page 8 of Reluctant Wizard

Spirit magic, like all forms of magic, functioned at escalating levels of difficulty. Anyone, even mundanes, could benefit from using the simplest and smallest spirits called elementals. Once bound and trained to a task, the elementals operated indefinitely on the instructions given to them by the binding wizard. Thus, most everyone in the Convocation, unless they lived in crushing poverty, had dust-eating earth elementals in their homes or fire-elemental heated floors.

On the next level up, anyone with some amount of magic, even familiars, could influence tamed spirits. With potent Elal magic thick in her blood, Nic had a knack for coaxing elementals and even more complex spirits into doing her bidding, despite the fact that, as a familiar, she couldn’t actually wield magic. Nic was an exception to many rules, however. Alise had been surprised to see how Nic had refined her technique over the last year to use her ability to sense magic to create a kind of passive field to influence the “mood” of spirits, for want of a better word.

Similarly, even low-level wizards of any variety could give elementals new instructions. Thus, with the air-elemental powered carriages, for example, any wizard could program in a new speed or destination, but one absolutely needed a wizard for that. Anyone could ride in the carriage, so long as you had a wizard to set it up for you.

Low- to mid-level wizards capable of wielding spirit magic could call and bind spirits of ascending complexity according to their own magical potentials, their training, the type of spirit, and their access to magic, either from their natural reserves or via magic taken from a familiar. The universe contained many kinds of spirits, in branching echelons, from the mindless elementals that were the equivalent of single-celled organisms to sentient spirits too wily and powerful to be controlled by mere humans. The old tales contained stories of immensely powerful wizards who tamed djinn or daemons and harnessed them to assist in their plans, usually to rule the world.

Those tales were always cautionary. Those wizards who essayed such ambitious workings sometimes managed to carry off such monumental feats but, while their imaginations knew no bounds, magic did. A limited resource, magic always ran out eventually. Even with a bonded familiar or even multiple bonded familiars, as had been sometimes the practice in the past but was strictly illegal in contemporary Convocation society, a wizard could drain them dry and come up empty.

Controlling a being as powerful as a djinn or daemon required constant effort. They didn’t take kindly to being captured by mere mortals. As soon as the magic ran out, they broke free. And took revenge.

Still, there were many, many kinds of spirits in the universe—many more than had been catalogued, so said her professor in History and Taxonomy of Non-Corporeal Beings. House Elal wizards all scoffed at the concept that there could be any entities they had not encountered, expressing their professional disdain, but Alise believed her professor. There was a great deal not known in the world.

At any rate, in Bossing the Bodiless that day, the advanced students all worked at the furthest extent of their individual abilities, both in magical potential and learned skills. That was the point of the advanced practicums: to push the boundaries of what the student wizards could do in their specializations.

The process of locating, summoning, and then binding a more complex spirit to a task was a threefold process. Unlike the numerous and ubiquitous elementals, the more complex the spirit, the fewer in number and the more difficult they were to find. As a wizard long practiced in Elal magic—one of Alise’s earliest memories was of watching household imps dance to make her giggle while she clapped her hands for more—she possessed a stable of bound spirits for various tasks. Like the sword-bearing spirit she’d summoned too late to defend her against Gordon Hanneil.

Don’t think about him.

The compulsion flexed painfully.

Forcing herself to concentrate on the warm-up exercises, which should be simple, Alise cleared her mind to locate a mid-level spirit. Professor Cixin would know if she tapped any of the entities currently bound to her. That would be cheating and grounds for a failing grade. If she were in the mood to push herself, as she decidedly was not, she’d locate and attempt to harness an entity along the lines of another warrior to add to her roster. She could certainly use more of them. But the one that looked to her now had been captured by her father and handed over to her after she manifested as a wizard, once she had enough skill to give it instructions and keep it bound. Locating and binding another from scratch would be a challenge, and she was not up for anything that might test her nerve.

Especially since this particular exercise skirted very close to how she’d murdered her mother.

When Nic had first suggested that Alise might be able to sever the wizard–familiar bond, she’d been intrigued. And young and arrogant enough to embrace the challenge without considering the potential consequences. So far as she and Nic knew, no one had ever thought of doing such a thing. Certainly none of the records even hinted at the possibility, and Alise had looked. Well, she’d performed a cursory search as time allowed, but her teachers had always been emphatic that the bond was unbreakable, severed only by death, and perhaps not even then. It wasn’t as if anyone had data on that. Even Elal wizardry didn’t reach the spirits of the once-living. Cillian might be able to uncover more, but he didn’t know what Alise had done, so had no reason to look.

It hurt to think about how excited she’d been initially, to see the possibility of the bond-severing and know that she could execute a trick every single person in the Convocation believed to be impossible. Even before she attempted it, she’d known she could pull it off with a bone-deep certainty such as she’d never before experienced. And it had been exhilarating, a triumph of skill and power that left her exultant, filled with giddy delight in herself. She’d actually been proud.

Foolish, foolish girl.

Only later did she realize the horrible consequences of her impulsive power flex, as the two familiars she’d separated from their wizards—Maman and Laryn, a traitor offered the option as an alternative to execution—both began wasting away until only empty, mindless husks remained. And then died.

Alise could never, ever risk committing such a terrible crime against humanity again.

Trying to keep her mind on her practicum, she smoothly finished the requisite warmup exercise of locating a number of likely, mid-level spirits. For someone of her heritage, often the challenge was getting the spirits to leave her alone, especially the mischievous and curious ones. Spirits of all sorts had always been attracted to her. That was part of having a high MP score in spirit magic. When she’d manifested as a wizard, that had become exponentially worse. Spirits pounced on her, demanding to be noticed, and fed with magic.

Fortunately, the academy, for all its faults, truly shone in instances like that. Her professors had been prepared for that exact eventuality, taking her under their collective wing in those early days, shielding her from the more voracious entities intent on manipulating or forcing her into doing their bidding. It had been a rough few days, receiving an intensive course in recognizing the more malicious spirits, regardless of how they attempted to trick her, and then protecting herself from them.

Spirits of all kinds still came readily to her call whenever she chose to admit them through her shielding, so assembling a variety from Professor Cixin’s list on the board took little effort. They bustled there at the edge of her wizard senses, gathered in her mental grip like a bouquet of eager, sentient flowers. She only needed to choose one to bring through the veil and into their world to add to the complement of spirits bustling around the workroom.

The various entities the other students had summoned obediently swirled through obstacle courses, ringing bells, floating objects, and shining lights as directed. Except for a few cases where the student-wizard had lost control, or never fully had it. Professor Cixin was assisting with one of those at the moment, standing behind Grey Ananiel, hands folded behind his back as if reminding himself not to take action, calmly coaching Grey to control the gremlin currently perched on a high shelf, shrieking with fury.

Alise should pull one of her eager guests and get it over with, but found herself balking at pulling through even the least of them. If she did, she’d have to bind it, lest she end up like her unfortunate classmate, chasing a rogue entity, to the disdain of all, in order to run it through the exercises laid out by Professor Cixin. He wanted the students to test the strength of the bonds, using the lightest possible touch, then severing the bond as the spirit executed its task and reestablishing the bond again.

The exercise was meant to teach them how to regain control of an entity they’d summoned, in the event they lost it for some reason. Such as in a lapse in available magic, inattention, improper establishment of the initial bond, or because an enemy wizard severed it in an attempt to take your defenders away. Alise had learned all of this early on, along with intensive education on the nature of bonding, the information rolling through her mind in the voices of her various teachers. The advanced practicum, naturally, brought that intellectual understanding into real-world application.

Rattled, beyond tired, and unnerved by the possibility of going anywhere near any kind of bond-severing again, Alise just couldn’t make herself do it. So, she fudged it.

She was clever and good enough at her skills to make it seem like she’d made a strong effort to complete the task and just hadn’t quite been able to manage it. She summoned a relatively docile spirit, bound it, and half-assed her way through the most difficult exercises, working as slowly as possible and drawing it out. That should be believable, given how behind and out of practice she was at the objectively arcane techniques. A lot of the more complex skills the academy taught were famously impractical. The wizard students often complained that they’d never use most of them in real life—how many of them, really, would find themselves in a pitched duel against another wizard?—and that these more complex tricks were simply hoops to jump through.

Finally, the El-Adrel clock high on the wall relented and pinged out the time signaling the end of the practicum. And Alise congratulated herself for getting through the practicum without collapsing or drawing undue attention. Mentally she thanked Grey Ananiel for being such a screwup that he’d lost control of a fairly minor gremlin, absorbing Professor Cixin’s attention until, with a sigh of exasperation, the professor finally seized control of the obnoxious creature and banished it. He’d then sternly lectured Grey, assigning him to remedial work on elementals until he could bind them in his sleep.

Alise headed for the door with the flood of other student wizards, burying herself in the midst of their flow while keenly aware that she had no one to chatter companionably with as everyone else did. At least she wasn’t in Grey’s position, the young wizard having flung himself furiously out the door first and even now complained bitterly to a circle of sympathetic friends.

“Wizard Alise,” Professor Cixin called. “A moment please.”

Alise nearly groaned aloud, her steps slowing as she gazed at the open doorway, escape so close and yet now out of reach. Reluctantly, she turned back, hoping she wasn’t literally dragging her feet as she returned to the professor’s desk. Professor Cixin had turned his attention to some notes in Grey Ananiel’s file and he held up a finger for her to wait.

---