Past Tense (Schooled in Magic Book 10) (7 page)

“There were stories of nexus points,” Master Wolfe said, vaguely. “I’ve always wondered what one could do with a great deal of power.”

“Anything,” Emily said.

She studied the diagrams for a long moment, slowly working her way through them. They were flawed—she could see a number of serious problems that Wolfe would have to overcome—but she could recognize the bare bones of what would eventually become the control room. The control room they’d discovered under Whitehall. It had a long way to go ...

Perhaps too long
, she thought. Master Wolfe had done a good job, but his proposed network of spells was far too inflexible to control a nexus point.
And yet, the nexus point was tapped in this time.

“Your tutor clearly had
some
idea of what to do,” Master Wolfe said. He picked up a roll of parchment and unfurled it. “The spells you used to tap the nexus point
worked
.”

“Imperfectly,” Emily said, as she studied the parchment. Master Wolfe was clearly brilliant, perhaps the smartest man she’d ever met. He’d not only copied the work she’d done, with assistance from the commune, but used it as a starting point to devise his own spellwork to control the nexus point. “It nearly killed me.”

“But it worked, once you had help,” Master Wolfe said. “Your tutor must have been truly brilliant. Master Stark? Master Joffre? I know that both of them chose to withdraw from society to carry out their own research, rather than taking more apprentices. One of them could have taught you.”

Emily shook her head, wordlessly. It was tempting to claim she’d studied under one or both of them, but Master Wolfe had
known
the two men he’d mentioned. He’d catch her in a lie and then she’d be in real trouble. She considered, briefly, telling him the truth, yet she knew she didn’t dare take the risk. It would blow a hole in established history. And yet ...

She looked back at the parchment. Master Wolfe had done a remarkable job, but he still had a very long way to go before he could hope to tap the nexus point properly. It was unlikely that he would
make the breakthrough he needed tomorrow. The more she looked at his work, the clearer it became that he’d crafted a brute-force solution to the problem, rather than something capable of adapting and evolving to changing circumstances. There was no Warden—and there wouldn’t be, if he didn’t alter his approach.

And if this is a stable time loop
, she thought,
I need to help him
.

She leaned on the table, thinking hard. If time
couldn’t
be changed, then she was
meant
to be here --
meant
to be in the past. And if that was true, perhaps she was
meant
to be helping Lord Whitehall and Master Wolfe establish the school. It was what the Dark Lady had
done
, if the remaining stories were to be believed. And no other candidate for the role had shown up, as far as she knew. None of the other women in the castle knew magic.

The possibilities opened up before her. If she was
meant
to help Master Wolfe, she’d have a chance to use the nexus point to get back home. And watching—and helping—as the original spellwork slipped into place would show her how to do it for herself, later. She’d be able to answer all of Professor Locke’s questions, even if it didn’t look as though there
were
any real secrets of the ancients. Only demons ... and the start of something more.

Find out what else needs to be kicked off
, she told herself. She’d have to pick Bernard’s brains and find out what he knew—and what he didn’t know.
And then see how you can start the ball rolling
.

“Lady Emily,” Master Wolfe said. “Are you going to answer my question?”

Emily blinked. What question?

“I’m sorry, Master,” she said. “I was miles away.”

“I could tell,” Master Wolfe said, sardonically. “I was asking you what your tutor taught you about controlling a nexus point.”

“I didn’t learn everything,” Emily said, carefully. “He didn’t trust me with
all
of his secrets.”

“A common problem,” Master Wolfe said, disdainfully. He sounded angry, although not with her. “A sorcerer discovers something new, then refuses to share it with his friends and apprentices. The secret is lost when he dies, only to be rediscovered years later by another sorcerer.”

“And the whole pattern just keeps repeating itself,” Emily said. “Time and time again.”

“I’ve been trying to convince some of the other masters to share their secrets more openly,” Master Wolfe told her. “But very few of them are willing to discuss such matters.”

He sighed, then looked up at her. “What
did
your tutor tell you?”

Emily took a breath, thinking hard. She didn’t know everything. She’d barely had the time to start unlocking the secrets beneath Whitehall before she’d been tossed back into the past. She couldn’t help feeling that Professor Lombardi would have done a better job, if
he’d
been sent back in time instead. But what she
did
know would be enough to start Master Wolfe working towards a
proper
control system. And he’d put it together personally, so he’d understand—at a very basic level—how it worked.

“He believed that basic spellware was too ...
rigid
to handle the power flow,” she said, reaching for a sheet of parchment. She stopped herself a moment later. A piece of parchment would be hideously expensive in
this
time. Paper ... there was no way she could introduce paper, not now. “You need something that adapts to changing circumstances.”

“Like a living mind,” Master Wolfe said. She’d half-expected him to dismiss the concept out of hand, but he sounded thoughtful rather than dismissive. “Did your tutor believe he could take control of the nexus point directly?”

“He might have,” Emily hedged.
Shadye
had certainly believed
he
could take direct control of the nexus point, but he’d been halfway to being an eldritch abomination at that point. “I think it wouldn’t have worked.”

“Trying to channel that much power would have been fatal, surely,” Master Wolfe said. “Do you think that was why he died?”

Emily shrugged. She had
no
idea what would have happened if Shadye had tapped the nexus point, but she didn’t want to find out the hard way. If necromancy could drive a person mad, she hated to imagine what tapping a nexus point could do. Perhaps it would simply have shattered his mind beyond repair ... or, perhaps, it would have turned him into a dark god. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

“There are supposed to be rituals for transferring power,” Master Wolfe mused. “But they don’t always work.”

He looked down at the parchment for a long moment. “The spellwork would have to be more than merely adaptable,” he said. “It would have to
be
a living mind. But how to make it work? How to make it survive?”

“Tell it to survive,” Emily said.

Master Wolfe looked up at her. “What do you mean?”

“You’ll be setting the conditions when you create the living mind,” Emily said. “You can just tell it that it can handle the power. It won’t be smart enough to realize it should be dead.”

“I shall have to meditate on that,” Master Wolfe said, slowly.

He reached for a slate and started to scribble down notes. “Taking control of the nexus point was risky enough,” he added. “But if we have so much power at our disposal, making it do anything—without worrying about spell structures—would be quite possible.”

Emily watched as he worked, unsure if she’d said too much or too little. There were too many gaps in her knowledge, both of the school’s history and of the ancient piece of spellwork, for her to be sure. Master Wolfe seemed to have taken her ideas and run with them, but who knew how far he could go? How much did
they
know?

“I wish your tutor had left you some notes,” Master Wolfe said, grimly. “Did he have anything written down?”

“Not as far as I know,” Emily said. It was true enough. “All I have is my memory.”

Master Wolfe muttered several unpleasant-sounding words under his breath as he returned to scribbling. Emily didn’t blame him for being frustrated, not if new tricks and techniques were discovered, lost, and then rediscovered time and time again, rather than allowing later researchers to build on the early discoveries. Even in
her
time, the Sorcerer’s Rule had made it harder for research notes and details to propagate through the Nameless World. A sorcerer could not be forced to share his work ...

... And even though it had worked in her favor, she knew it was a problem.

It will be worse here
, she thought, numbly. If history was to be believed, Lord Whitehall had been the first person to set up an actual magic school.
The unattached apprentices are lacking even the basics of magical education
.

She cleared her throat. “Do
you
share what you know of spellwork?”

“Far too many magicians are not interested in my work,” Master Wolfe said, flatly. “I have offered, regularly, to teach them, but they do not care.”

Emily blinked in surprise. Spellwork—understanding spellwork—was the key to everything from transfiguration to subtle magic and wardcrafting. She’d thought Master Wolfe’s spell notation was primitive ... perhaps it
was
primitive. Perhaps she was looking at the very early stages of what would become charms ...

“I care,” she said. “My tutor cared.”

Master Wolfe looked up. “Master Myrddin? Myrddin the Sane? No one knows what happened to him after Lord Whitehall was released from his apprenticeship.”

Emily shook her head, surprised. Myrddin ... Myrddin was an old name for Merlin, a
very
old name. A coincidence? Or, perhaps, a hint that she wasn’t the first person from Earth to walk the Nameless World. She’d often wondered just how humans had managed to evolve in a
mana
-rich environment, but perhaps they hadn’t. If
she
could be yanked across the dimensional barriers and dumped into the Nameless World, why not a few hundred thousand others?

“I’ve never heard of him,” she admitted. “Who was he?”

Master Wolfe gave her an odd look. “Only the sorcerer who managed to make magic
work
,” he said, softly. “Without his work, none of us would be here. He
shared
his secrets.”

Emily met his eyes. “What happened before him?”

“Sorcerers would go mad very quickly,” Master Wolfe said. “They would start showing signs of magic as they grew older, then rapidly lose control as their powers grew. No one could reason with them ... they did terrible things to everyone unlucky enough to be nearby ... men were killed, women were enslaved, children were blinded merely for laughs. Smart villagers killed magicians as soon as they began showing signs of power, which didn’t make matters any better. But what choice did they have?”

“None,” Emily said, quietly.

“None,” Master Wolfe agreed. “You don’t know any of this?”

“I had a very sheltered upbringing,” Emily said.

Master Wolfe frowned. “Your tutor did you no favors,” he said. “But then, teaching women to use magic is frowned upon.”

He went on before Emily could ask why. “Master Myrddin was the first to work out how to control and channel magic to prevent accidents,” he said. “He devised the first true spells and taught them to others. In his later years, he would walk from village to village, taking magical children and teaching them how to control their powers. Those magicians, in turn, taught others.”

Emily considered it for a long moment. She
had
heard of Myrddin, she recalled now, but only as a throwaway line in
Life of Whitehall
. Offhand, she couldn’t remember if he’d been mentioned in any of the other history books she’d read. But then, there were so many legends about the time that it was impossible to tell just how much was true and how much had been added later. Lord Whitehall might well have overshadowed his former master.

“I see,” she said, finally.
Necromancy
drove its practitioners insane, but she’d never heard of other magicians going mad. And yet, all of the older magicians were a little erratic. Lady Barb had even suggested that
Void
was dangerously unstable. “I didn’t know any of this.”

“Then I suggest you learn,” Master Wolfe said. He gave her a reassuring smile. “You’re part of our commune now.”

He frowned down at his notes. “The spell structure will have to be built up, piece by piece,” he said. “Putting something so ... so
big
... together would be impossible, even for us. I’m going to have to give this a great deal of thought. The binding we’ve placed on the nexus point may not last if we start fiddling with it.”

“Channel the power elsewhere,” Emily suggested. “Make it work for you.”

She closed her eyes in thought. It wouldn’t be
hard
to make one of her batteries—she’d practically
have
to make one of her batteries to expend her power, unless Whitehall kept her busy casting spells. They could channel the power from the nexus directly into a pocket dimension, then use it to power ... something. But they could only do that if they could tame the nexus.

Master Wolfe scowled as there was a sharp knock at the door. “Enter!”

The door opened. A boy—he looked around twelve, although there were faint hints of stubble on his dirty chin—stepped into the room and knelt before Master Wolfe. He didn’t look at Emily. “My Lord,” he said, “Lord Whitehall wishes to remind Lady Emily that she is to meet him in the courtyard.”

“Then she will go to the courtyard,” Master Wolfe said. He looked at Emily. “I’ll want to go through this in more detail with you later.”

“Of course, My Lord,” Emily said. If nothing else, she had a feeling that Master Wolfe was well on his way to understanding how to tap and manipulate the nexus point. How long would it be before he started crafting basic wards? “Just call me when you need me.”