Limits of Power by Elizabeth Moon
The white-bearded Magister studied him for a moment, then nodded ever so slightly. “Perhaps introductions will make things a bit more clear. I am called Ramirus, Magister Royal of King Danton.” He introduced two more men by his side, both members of the same company. “And this …” he indicated a swarthy man wrapped in a black burnoose and turban, “is Severil of Tarsus.”
The sardonic essence faded from Colivar as quickly as it had possessed him. “Truly? A Tarsan? That is a long and arduous journey, even for one who commands the soulfire. I am honored to meet one who has come so far.”
“And Del of the Crescent Isles.”
Colivar’s brow elevated slightly as he nodded, acknowledging silently the distance and effort involved in that journey as well.
“Suhr-Halim of Hylis. Fadir of Korgstaat. Tirstan of Gansang.”
The list went on. Names and titles in two dozen languages, from as many nations. Some of them were from places whose names Colivar didn’t even recognize, and he had thought himself well schooled in all the known places of the world.
“Quite a collection of visitors,” he said, when the introductions were done at last. There was no longer humor in his voice; it had given way to something colder. “I have never seen so many of us, from so many places, brought together. We do not tend to trust one another, do we, my brothers? So I assume there must be some pressing business that is truly extreme, for our brother Ramirus to have called us all here.”
“If I said a threat to our very existence,” Ramirus said quietly, “would that suffice?”
Colivar digested the words with the somber care they merited, then nodded.
“Very well,” the Magister Royal said. “Then you shall come with me, and see for yourself.”
And without further word he led his wary guest out of the dark chamber and into the heart of the palace.
CHAPTER 2
ETHANUS REMEMBERS:
Whoever is at the door will not go away. He’s ignored their knocking for some time now, preferring not to be disturbed, but time after time they keep coming back. The knocking is soft but insistent, not harsh enough to anger him outright, and the attempts are spaced far apart, as if their purpose is not to force him to obey so much as to remind him that the visitor has neither left nor forgotten him still.
At last with a sigh he rises from his studies, leaving behind the Chantoni hieroglyphics he has been working so hard to decipher, to confront whoever it is that thinks that he has time to waste on visitors.
It’s a spring day (he recalls), and as he opens the door a gust of pollen-laden air sweeps into his sanctum. Fresh, sweet, and brimming with life. He should have built the place with more windows, he notes mentally, and not been constrained, as he was, by concerns over heating it in the winter.
On his doorstep is a girl. Not quite a child, but thin and has a hard life is nothing he needs magic to discover; it is etched in the very outline of her features, in the way she moves, even in the way she breathes. So is the fact that she has defied her environment and thus far come out on top. Her eyes gleam with the cold determination that the poet Belsarius once called “the diamond glare,” meaning that nothing can scratch its surface. Her face and hands are meticulously clean—probably scrubbed not an hour before—but the rest of her has the faintly weathered patina of one who is not truly intimate with cleanliness. Peasant stock, he guesses, city born, and not raised gently or treated well yet trying nonetheless to present herself politely. Interesting.
Briefly he toys with the notion of binding enough Power to know more. But the habit is long gone and the temptation passes.
“Master Ethanus, Magister of Ulran?”
His expression darkens, and the passing interest he had in her quickly dies. “I no longer lay claim to that title, girl, or any other.” His voice is gruff, as befits her question. What, is this some little chit that wants a spell cast for her, and has trudged through the depths of the forest to find him here, in this place he built for himself precisely so that he might live undisturbed? Of all the things he might be interrupted for, that is by far the most annoying. “Go find a witch if you want help, there are plenty about.”
He closes the door in her face and goes back to work. At least, that is his intent. But her small foot is in the doorway, and to his surprise he finds that he is not quite callous enough to crush it.
He glares at her. Diamond eyes, indeed.
“So it please you sir,” she says—and she bobs a bit, in what might have been a curtsey had it been done properly—“I have come to learn the ways of magic.”
“Then like I said, go find a witch. I’m not a teacher.”
Again he almost slams the door shut. He is hoping that if he looks like he really means it she will pull back her foot just in time, and he can close it. But she doesn’t move, and he is not willing to cripple her—or to make the commitment to healing her—so with a sigh he resigns himself to finishing out the conversation.
“I don’t wish to learn from a witch, sir. I wish to learn true sorcery.”
With a sign of pure exasperation he says, “Well, you’re a girl, so you can’t. Now may I get back to my work?”
But the chit doesn’t budge. Nor do the diamond eyes so much as blink. “And pardon my asking, but why won’t you teach girls, sir?” The words are polite but there’s a hard edge to her tone, as if that isn’t the answer she wants and damn it all, she’s going to stay here until she gets a better one.
With a sigh he opens the door, and crouches down slightly to meet her at eye level. “Because women can’t master the power, girl. That’s simple fact. You think others haven’t tried? Their nature is not compatible with the demands of true sorcery. Many have tried, and they master the power as witches do, and die as witches do, of their own exertions. So it will be with you if you follow this course.” He stood again. “Forget the Power. Live a long and happy life. That’s my advice for you.”
“Men do both.”
“Yes. Men do both.” But even the majority of those men who seek to become Magisters fail, he thinks, and are never more than witches. To try to do it alone, without training, all but guarantees failure, a short life grasping after a dream that only a precious few are allowed to attain, prematurely exhausted as the soulfire expires. Or sometimes, in the worst cases, success is attained … and brings madness in its wake.
To become a Magister is one thing. To understand what that is, and what one has become, and to accept it and go on living, that is another.
“So what is it in me that makes it impossible?” the girl demands. “Some female part? I’ll cut it out.”
At another time he might laugh at such ridiculous audacity, but her tone makes it clear she is deadly serious. “What,” he challenges her, “take a knife to your gut and gouge out living flesh? At my command?”
“No,” she says evenly, “I’ll go to a witch and have them take it out, so that I don’t die of it. And then I’ll come back here and show you. And if you say there’s another thing that’s got to go, then I’ll have that one taken out too. Until there’s nothing left of me that a man would not have, and you are willing to teach me.”
He steps back a bit, into the shadows of the small house, and gestures to the walls surrounding. “Look at this place, child. Do you see magic here? Is there one brick here laid with the soul’s power, one piece of furniture sculpted by any vehicle other than human sweat and toil? I built this place myself, with my own hands, every inch of it, choosing it to be that way. Now you come to me for lessons? Me?” He shakes his head. “I admire your determination, but you’ve come to the wrong place. Go to the courts of Selden or Amarys and ply your arguments there; perhaps the Magisters will listen to you. Ethanus of Ulran is not Magister any longer, and he does not teach. Not boys, and not girls who would cut themselves up and make themselves into boys.”
The girl points quietly to a far corner of the room, near where the wall meets floor. “There.”
“There what?”
He turns and looks where she is pointing, ready to deny the allegation, but with a start he realizes that she’s right. Down there, in that very spot, the year of the great rains … all his fledgling masonry skills had proven unable to hold the groundwater at bay, so at last he had sealed the inside of the house against leaks. Just in that one place. The rest had been adequate as it was.
“And I’m not a child,” she adds.
He looks back at her. Studying her more deeply this time than before, weighing not only her outer appearance but the fire in her soul as well. It is strong, very strong. A witch with such athra might last many years. A man with such athra … he might risk madness and death to join the ranks of the Magisters, and perhaps succeed.
And she has the Sight. That is rare in anyone.
“What is a child?” he asks her.
The diamond gaze does not flinch. “Creatures that are sold on the street by their parents, to get the coin to make more children.” She paused. “Adults sell themselves.”
So cold. So very cold. Was it strength he was seeing in her, or an outer shell containing a battered soul which would shatter at the first real trial?
“Is that what you have come here to do?” he asks. “Sell yourself?”
“If I must,” she says evenly.
If I were to imagine a woman with the spirit needed to become Magister, he thinks, to survive Transition and the aftermath, this is what she would sound like.
He lowers himself before her again. Eye to eye. Searching deeply for the things that are hidden behind flesh, hints of a soul so sheltered from a stranger’s view that a man might search for years, he senses, and never catch sight of it.
“Have you ever made a flame dance upon a windowsill?” he asks softly. “Or called a lightning bug to your hand on a summer’s night? Have things ever happened because you wished they would, or those who would hurt you gone away suddenly and no one knows the reason?”
The crystalline gaze is steady. “No, sir, because those things bring death. And I do not mean to die.”
Yes, he thinks, that is what is required. A hunger to live, at any cost. That is the first thing and the last, besides which all other requirements are superfluous.
“And if I said that to cheat Death we must embrace Death?” he asked her. “What is your answer then?”
A flicker of a wry smile plays across her lips—plays there, and then is quickly gone. “That a lifetime of whoring prepares one for such bargains,” she says evenly.
Yes. Yes, I suppose it does.
He stands straight again, noting that her foot is no longer in the door.There is no need for it any longer.She has intrigued him and she knows it. Maybe a city Magister would turn her away, having more important business to attend to, but a hermit in the woods who has devoted himself to study and reflection, who has sworn off all Magister’s business till the end of his time on earth, and therefore has very little to do with that time, such a one might well be tempted to take on a girl apprentice, just for the challenge of it. Just for the mad, improbable, and utterly pointless challenge of it.
There are no female Magisters. Never have been. Never will be.
She waits. Silently. It is a good sign. Discipline is always a good sign.
Imagine if there could be one. What a stir it would cause! What a project that would be, to make it happen!
“What is your name, child?”
Her eyes flare a bit as she bridles at the title—as he intended—but her voice is still formal and calm as she answers, “I am called Kamala, sir.”
“And if I turn you down, Kamala?” His voice is equally formal, equally calm. “If I say to you that I have sworn never to take on another apprentice—which in fact is quite true—and if I then say to you that there are reasons no woman has ever succeeded in mastering sorcery, and I know what they are, and you will be no exception, and I will not waste my time on you … if I say to you all those things, and then close the door in your face, what then?”
“Then I will make my camp outside your house,” she answers. “And I will serve you in whatever ways I can until you change your mind. I will be as an apprentice would be, paying for his lessons. I will split wood for your fire, I will weed your garden, I will carry you fresh water from the stream every day by my own hands—by my own sweat and labor—and not use witchery to do those things, even though I probably could, until you agree to teach me how to use the power without dying. And every day you’ll see me labor for you, and you will know in your heart that I won’t ever give up on you, and in the end you’ll teach me what I wish to know.”
The diamond eyes sparkle defiantly.
Slowly he draws himself up to his full height, many a handspan over hers. Then he turns away from her. No smaller footsteps follow, nor is protest voiced. Good. He goes to the place where his tools are and chooses a heavy ax, one that only a large man might wield comfortably, and returns to the door. She is still waiting. Silently. Good.
He drops the ax at her feet, head first.
“Woodpile’s in the back,” he tells her.
Her foot is no longer blocking the door. He shuts it and returns to his desk. Turning up the wick on his reading lamp, he opens up the next scroll of Chantoni writing, pinning its corners down with river stones.
He does not start reading again until he hears the sound of wood splitting.
Elizabeth Moon, Limits of Power