Underkeeper

The library, as it turned out, did have quite a bit of historical information about the various kinds of pacts that warlocks made and had made in the past. Unfortunately, none of the sources concerned themselves with summoning demons, or any detailed theory on exactly how demonic pacts were formed. Not that he was planning to need that. Still, it might have been worth reading about.

Bernt was about to give up, re-shelving a three hundred year-old historical treatise on the crimes of late Madurian warlocks in the Mirian colonies, when a narrow book with a cracked leather cover caught his eye. It was oddly tall and stuck out a bit from the other books, revealing a bit of silver lettering on the cover.

On a whim, Bernt pulled it out. It was bound oddly, with pages that felt too tall and narrow compared to the other books here. The full title was ‘A Summoner’s Guide to Elementals’.

Bernt blinked at it dumbly for a moment. It was a book on summoning. He hadn’t noticed it before, because unlike most of the books on these shelves, it didn’t have any lettering on the spine. It wasn’t what he needed, but it had to be useful somehow. His education at the Academy hadn’t been exhaustive regarding other planes, but he knew they were all unique. Still, there had to be some parallels to piercing the veil from one to another.

Making a decision, he took the book back to Hallan.

“Can I check this out?” he asked, holding out the book for him. “It’s not really that relevant, but it caught my eye. Maybe I can learn to summon fire right from the source!”

Hallan grinned. “Go for it! Seriously, though, I wouldn’t recommend actually trying it. That sounds like a great way to accidentally melt down half the city. And yourself.”

The junior librarian took the book and noted down its title, the date and Bernt’s name before handing it back. “You can borrow it for two weeks. If you want it longer, you have to bring it back and check it out again or pay a fee.”

Bernt frowned. “That seems unnecessarily complicated.”

“It’s not.” Hallan replied, shaking his head firmly. “It’s psychology. Mages have a way of hoarding books. If we force them to carry them back here every few weeks anyway, they’ll only hold on to those they’re still actively using.”

“Ah.” Bernt nodded. “Alright, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks then.”

He started to turn, but then stopped himself.

“One more thing. Why do you shelve texts on elemental summoning in the middle of all the warlock stuff? I mean, I’m not complaining, but why?”

“Because they’re related.” Hallan shrugged. “Separating warlocks off as a unique class of spellcaster is mostly a political decision, or a social one, maybe. Doesn’t make sense to separate them in terms of their practice of ritual magic. Over in Miria, they call everyone who summons interplanar creatures a warlock, even the ones who just use elementals.”

“Right. I guess that makes sense.” Bernt nodded. It was all ritual magic, he supposed. In fact, now that he considered it, elemental summoning likely had some overlap with shamanism as well. What was an elemental, if not a natural spirit? It just came from an elemental plane, rather than this one, right?

Considering this, Bernt thanked Hallan and excused himself, but he didn’t leave the guild right away. He still had a few hours before work, and the librarian’s earlier mention of Pollock had reminded him of something he’d forgotten in all the turmoil of the past few days, since he’d gotten his second investiture.

Hiking up the stairs to the Wizards’ Society, Bernt made his way to Pollock’s office and knocked.

“In!” the magister’s reedy voice called out and Bernt entered.

The old man looked exactly as he always did, sitting behind his desk with an open book sitting on top of two other open books on one side and a disorganized mound of papers on the other. They were covered in partial diagrams and hurriedly scrawled notes, as if he’d been trying to catch each thought and put it down on paper before it escaped. Many were crossed out, and a few scrunched up papers had been tossed clear across the room, where other, much older bits of paper were already collecting dust all around an overflowing trash bin.

“Ah, Bernt! I’m glad to see all that unpleasantness yesterday didn’t cost me my young protege. How’s your spellcasting?”

“Good. Better, at least.” Bernt replied, stepping inside and closing the door before settling down in the chair across from the ancient wizard. “I worked out how to manipulate my channels – the sorcerous ones – enough to mostly bypass the investiture. Or, Jori figured it out, actually. With practice, I should be able to incorporate the parts I want into my spells. I think I can confirm the account about the Tib’nar Orcs, too. Watch.”

Raising both hands Bernt cast a torch spell in his left while pooling mana into white flame on his right. “It takes focus and intent to cast a spell normally, but since the new investiture shapes and activates the mana on its own, I can essentially cast two spells at the same time. It’s just this one spell, but it saved my life a couple of times yesterday. Since the individual flames don’t dissipate, they also build up on the battlefield over time. It… well, it made quite a difference once I realized that I could pull them all together with a control cantrip.”

Pollock stared wide-eyed at the two different flames flickering in Bernt’s hands.

“Remarkable! You spent an entire battle just flinging practically unaltered perpetual flames around willy-nilly? Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”

“I found out. Yes.” Bernt suppressed a shudder as fresh and gruesome memories played before his eyes. “But there wasn’t much choice, and the chance of friendly fire was low.”

“Just… don’t ignite anything that’ll make a bigger fire than you can handle.” Pollock said in a heavy tone that made Bernt suspect he was speaking from experience. “Sometimes, the collateral damage…” he stopped, apparently lost in a painful memory of his own. Then he blinked and he was back. “Well. Just be sure you know what you’re lighting on fire, alright?”

Bernt nodded and let the silence settle for a moment before reaching into his bag. Pulling out his mysterious wizard’s journal he set it down on the table.

“You said that, when we fixed my spiritual injury, you were going to tell me what the author of this thing was trying to do.” He held up his right hand as if to demonstrate. His sleeve fell down, and the glowing patterns of the perpetual flame’s spellform cast a soft glow out from under his skin. “I spent an entire battle casting one spell after another, and I don’t feel a thing. It’s fixed. So, what was the old archwizard up to?”

Pollock watched him thoughtfully for a moment. “I don’t know that we’ve really solved your problem. As you just said, you’re still working on adjusting to your new situation. We barely even know what it is. Don’t you think your attention is best focused on that for the time being?”

“Maybe.” Bernt said. “But maybe not. You seemed pretty excited about it at the time. I’m trying to decide what I can do now, sure, but I need to know how to move forward, too. And, well, I’ve been thinking. If I can cast two spells at the same time, then the diagrams in the book don’t seem quite as impossible anymore. Don’t get me wrong. I can’t cast these spellforms here, but… well, I can do something. If I learn more about what this archwizard was thinking, I might learn something about where I could take this.”

Magister Pollock pursed his lips for a moment, then grimaced and grabbed the book. “Oh, alright. But only because you’re dead right! I didn’t think you’d be able to do it so quickly, or that it would be so simple to do.” He flipped the book open and began to leaf through it. “Here, at the back, he discusses his ‘soul shaping’. That’s an archaic way to talk about mana architectures.”

Bernt sat up straighter. That did sound interesting. “He wrote down his architecture? How did I miss that? What investitures did he use?”

“No, no. Nothing so specific. It’s not important. Information about specific novel investitures can be fun, but they’re not that interesting for a wizard. What you want to look out for are the ideas behind them. The why. That’s what this section here is about.” Pollock pointed at a page containing three short paragraphs. There were no reference diagrams in this part of the journal, and Bernt couldn’t remember if he’d tried to decipher it himself. “He tried to develop an augmentation to help him disintegrate normal matter into its constituent elements, and another one for what he calls ‘reintegration’. Do you see what he was doing?”

Bernt nodded. “Sure. He was going to try to create two separate augmentations in hopes that he could work out a way to combine them to cast a single spell to transmute matter. That, or maybe he decided that he could cast them sequentially. If he could do that, he would just have to tweak the spellform for the reintegration augmentation a bit to change the output.”

“Almost.” Pollock said. “And I doubt it would work sequentially. Spells to reconfigure more basic forms of matter into more complex forms isn’t new, and there’s a reason we don’t generally use it. It takes too much energy, and you have to know precisely what elements you’re dealing with. Very clunky, and not very useful.”

He flipped excitedly back toward the front of the book and showed him one of the diagrams. “The way the shells are formed in these diagrams suggest that the reintegration part of the spell is supposed to draw on the energy released by the disintegration process in a pattern describing the original material. So, in a way, the first part of the spell gives the second part instructions on exactly what it’s reintegrating, and supplies the energy to do so in the process. It’s genius!”

“I don’t know,” Bernt said. “Maybe if it worked…”

Pollock tapped the side of his nose. “Ah, but I think it did! Think about it! He didn’t need the augmentation to do all the work – just one of the spells. Most likely, he could have manually cast his disintegration spell through the reintegration augmentation. The resulting spellform would likely require a lot of adjustment before it would work, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible.

“So, you think he already could transmute materials, but it would have been excruciatingly slow to cast.”

“Right, and that’s what this third augmentation was supposed to be for. He thought that if he could get a complementary third augmentation, it and the previous two might fuse into… well, some kind of super-augmentation, the same way that investitures synergize once they fuse into an augmentation. We don’t have a word for that, because no one’s ever succeeded, so far as we know.”

Bernt sat back, trying to let the implications sink in. Three augmentations. He had the notes of someone who’d actually tried it. Not that there was much to go on. It sounded like the author had mainly attempted it to try to gloss over the problems with his initial architecture. But that brought up another question.

“Why couldn’t he use both augmentations in a single spell to begin with?” Bernt asked. “I mean, I know that you can’t – the lecturers at the academy were clear about that – but it’s not something they went in-depth about, since the fewest people actually attempt more than one. It’s not as though they’re not already connected within the same mana network. What’s actually stopping him from using both?

“Ah.” Pollock frowned severely. “I’m surprised standards have slipped so much at the Academy, then. As I mentioned before, the why of an issue is often far more important than simple information without context.”

Bernt made a vague noise of agreement, trying not to seem impatient.

“You can apply any part of or all of your spirit to the casting of any single spell.” Pollock went on, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers. “Or rather, a typical mage can. We’ve already learned that your sorcerous investiture doesn’t work this way. Excluding any part of your mana network when casting requires incredible control of your internal mana flow. Developing that normally takes years of dedicated practice, and it’s something few non-archmages bother to master. As you know, each investiture built into your mana network will attempt to weave itself into the spell you are casting. Your two investitures are highly compatible, so it’s not an issue for you, but if they were too incompatible, they would scramble your spellforms to the point that they would be nearly impossible to cast. It’s one of the most common pitfalls for wizards attempting to develop their own augmentations – few institutions will invest in a mage who won’t be able to cast spells for years, much less a wizard whose future capabilities are completely unknown.”

Bernt winced. He understood the issue of incompatible investitures, of course – but he hadn’t really considered what it meant for wizards. Unlike mages, they were often taking shots into the dark with their investitures. If the second investiture didn’t work as planned, odds were that they needed to take time to analyze the result and rethink their future development as well.

“Traditional mages don’t generally have this problem, they’ll know what’s coming, so they can gather the material they need for their third investiture and finish the augmentation as quickly as possible. Once the investitures are fused, they function as a whole. Whenever you cast a spell, the augmentation will greatly modify and augment the spellform in a way that expresses all the constituent investitures to their fullest compatible extent.”

Bernt nodded, understanding where Pollock was going. “You’re saying that, if this archwizard tried to use both augmentations, the resulting spellform would be too scrambled to make sense of.”

The wizard nodded emphatically. “That’s right. The augmentations don't naturally synergize. It would be an enormous mess – orders of magnitude more complex than incompatible investitures. Practically impossible to make sense of, much less to adjust into a usable form.”

“Alright, but how do we know he didn’t succeed with the third investiture? What if he died before he could tell anyone, or if he just wanted to keep it a secret?”

Pollock shrugged. “Because of where you found the notebook. My guess is that he tried to barter his knowledge for some kind of support from the elder dragon. A near-immortal like that, who has spent untold millennia collecting secrets and magical knowledge would be the perfect source of information for this kind of thing. The dragon probably just wasn’t very impressed with his work.” Pollock looked down at the book for a moment before flipping it closed and setting it down on the table. “Or maybe none of this was news to him. Who knows what kinds of secrets an elder dragon might be hoarding, after all?”

Bernt frowned, thinking for a moment as he picked it up and stowed it back in his bag. Could any of this help him? For that matter, what would happen when he attempted his next investiture. Would it even be able to fuse into an augmentation? What was going to happen?

“Don’t worry too much about the dead archwizard or his project.” Pollock said, correctly interpreting Bernt’s expression. “You still have a lot of work to do understanding where you are now. You should spend the time to find your footing properly before you try to forge ahead. The notebook is fascinating, certainly, but you shouldn’t let that distract you from yourself and what you want to do.”

Bernt nodded. Pollock had been right. It was fascinating, but for now, it was just a distraction.