Sciona forgot that the sight of the Otherrealm was novel to non-mages like Alba, who rarely witnessed the magical processes behind their machines. To Sciona, the gray visual in Mordra’s mapping coil just looked sloppy. The lights were dim where they should have been bright, fuzzy where they should have been crisp. It would be hard to nail down the right energy source in that muck. And Jerrin Mordra knew it, his fingers shaking with apprehension before locking in the siphoning coordinates that would power his action spell.
When he hit the activation key, an explosion went off in the bowl, sending paper confetti raining through the chamber and making the idiots murmur in wonder. One of those idiots, of course, was Alba.
“Amazing!” she marveled, plucking a bit of paper from where it had caught in her waves of dark hair.
“That’s not a hard spell,” Sciona muttered under her breath. “Just flashy.”
Sciona could have done it in her sleep, and she was appalled at the uneven quality of the energy. A shred of paper that had stuck to her skirt was torn, and she noted that Mordra scrambled to restack the papers by the spellograph, which had blown out of order.
“There’s no reason to use that much force to disperse paper.” It spoke to a lack of clarity in Mordra’s mapping and, worse, a lack of precision in his targeting. To be expected of a mathematics and mapping theory major.
As the archmages gave Mordra his next prompt, Sciona found her fingers itching anew. Even knitted together in an attempt at dignified posture, she couldn’t keep them from squirming. The keys beneath Mordra’s too-slow hands were calling to her, and the knot of dread in her stomach was rapidly unraveling into a mad flutter of eagerness. What had she been anxious about before, anyway? She could do everything the Council was asking Mordra to do. Perfectly. Elegantly. They just needed to let her at that spellograph so she could show this fool how it was done.
As Sciona had expected, poor Mordra eventually fell short on a sourcing error. The brick he was supposed to levitate only hovered for a few seconds, wobbling, before banging back to the desk’s surface. The mutters this time were of mixed disapproval and confusion. Archmage Gamwen, Tiran’s foremost mapper, grimaced as he made a note. Archmage Scywin, the greatest manual siphoner in history, looked too disgusted to even note anything down.
“What happened?” Alba whispered. “Did he write the spell wrong?”
“Not the action spell,” Sciona said.
“The what?”
“The part of the spell that tells the brick where to hover and in what position… he wrote that perfectly—not that that’s hard—but it’s only half the spell.”
What the Tiranish layman understood to be a single spell—be it a spell to move a train or light a lamp—was actually two sub-spells comprised of multiple pieces: the action spell, involving naming and commanding, and the sourcing spell, involving mapping, targeting, and siphoning.
“Action spells are easy enough to learn from a book, but sourcing spells are a mix of mathematics and intuition. His action sub-spells are fine; he’s obviously read the right books. And his math seems fine too. But he hasn’t done a lot of practical magic, so he’s weak in the intuition department—the part where you have to choose a siphoning location and make sense of the visual your coordinates produce. He’s struggling with the sourcing sub-spells that power his action spells.”
“So, his spells get too little power?” Alba asked.
“Or too much. He just has very poor control over his energy input. If they ask him to do anything really difficult, be ready to duck.”
“What’s really difficult?”
“I’ll let you know.”
The prompts got more complicated from there—“make this gear into a conduit that spins when it detects heat above a hundred degrees,” “write a conduitless spell that produces light at the sound of a clap”—and Jerrin Mordra started to struggle.
When Archmage Duris asked him to power a small model automobile from one end of the desk to the other, the little car sputtered, vibrated, then shot across the desk. It would have crashed to the floor had Jerrin Mordra not lurched forward against protocol and caught it.
“Sorry.” The young mage grimaced, looking mortified, and took his hand from the car. “I didn’t—”
“Kindly keep your hands off the testing material,” Mordra the Ninth snapped at his son. “And speak when you are spoken to.”
Alba winced sympathetically and whispered to Sciona, “Was it that bad?”
“Extremely.” On both the action and sourcing end. The nerves were starting to get to the archmage’s son.
“But it worked,” Alba whispered.
“With a lag, sputter, and way too much energy. It wasn’t properly sourced or tightly composed. Imagine if real people had been in that car.” Those were, after all, the stakes involved in being a highmage whose work made its way onto the streets and into people’s homes.
Surprisingly—perhaps admirably—it was Jerrin Mordra’s own father who was the hardest on him. Any archmage at the Council table could prompt any spell from the applicant, but Mordra the Ninth was the one who chimed in most often to demand ever more challenging work. Sciona almost felt bad for the younger Mordra when his father said, “On the table before you, you will find a slab of granite. Bisect it evenly.”
Sciona obviously couldn’t see what Jerrin Mordra entered into the spellograph then, but she sensed that he didn’t have it. The composition was rushed, probably overwritten, his fingers unsure as he hit the activation key.
“Duck, Alba.”
The two women were down safely behind the bench when a bang sent rock fragments in every direction. One of the other examinees swore as a rock clipped his cheek, drawing blood, and a few people stifled yelps of alarm.
“Idiot!” someone among the spectators hissed louder than was perhaps appropriate.
Seeming to take pity on Jerrin Mordra, wizened Archmage Thelanra cleared his throat and said in his kindly wobbling voice, “That’s quite alright, Mister Mordra. Would you like to try it again?”
Try it again? Sciona fought a sneer as she and Alba climbed back into their seats. Working in a real facility, you had to whip up complex spells quickly all the time—and often, there was no redo.
To his credit, Jerrin Mordra did manage the difficult spell on his second try, so perhaps he wasn’t totally worthless. Just not quite highmage material.
When the legacy had finished his deeply mediocre demonstration, Archmage Orynhel waved a hand. His ring glowed, and the contents of the desk vanished, replaced by a new spellograph and a fresh stack of paper.
The applicants who went next were better than Jerrin Mordra, some downright impressive. As the fifth mage finished his exam, Sciona was quaking in her seat—though not with fear.
“Are you alright?” Alba whispered, clearly noting the way Sciona had started vibrating at her side.
“I just need it to be my turn,” Sciona breathed. She needed this energy out before it burned her up.
Agonizingly, of the ten names called, hers was the very last. By the time the ninth examinee was summoned to the floor, Sciona was shifting in her excess of skirts. With no outlet, her mind began to spin out into more horror scenarios: they had forgotten about her. They were going to decide at the last moment that it had been a mistake to bring a woman into the hall. This would all turn out to have been a joke. Or a dream.