Book 4 Chapter 46.5: Hard Lessons

++Magician tutors are notoriously harsh and cruel in our punishments, but not without good cause. The risks being too light-handed speak for themselves when it comes to magic.++

- Aravon Voret, when asked why he publicly swung no less than three haymakers into the side of his son’s head.

I had several new potential students in the form of the senior Vorets, though as of yet none of them knew I was embroiled in necromancy—let alone lichdom. They would find out one day, when they had become too accustomed to longevity to sacrifice it for anything. Until that day came, I simply had to wait and continue my gradual corruption of the family as a whole.

The biggest obstacle came with Qaigor.

My brother was now fourteen years of age, and he was not a mere child anymore. Not fully at least. He was quite capable of thinking far ahead and making long-term decisions that were both logical and wise.

The problem was that he had not yet fully come into mastery of his own mind, and he was prone to…outbursts. I had been informed this was a ‘teenager trait’, though was sceptical of this information on account of how many ludicrous things I had also been informed were ‘woman traits’.

Nonetheless, Qaigor’s impulsivity was very real. As was his excitement. So my brother was visiting his older sister for a few weeks, long enough that I hoped to instill in him the importance of not letting the world know warrior-magician hybrids existed prematurely.

It was not very promising an endeavour so far.

“This is boring,” he told me as I tried to teach him the basics of mana manipulation one afternoon. “Can’t I just work out?”

“You cannot,” I told him. “You have done that already today quite enough, you must focus on your magic too.”

We were practicing not in my office, but in one of the living rooms of my personal quarters. The wider mansion around them was still under construction, going faster now thanks to the Voret family’s aid. My lack of a marital home was the only reason my legal marital status had not been publicly celebrated by a full wedding ceremony, and the Vorets were working on mending that as fast as they could.

For now, I lived in a set of rooms that would eventually be converted to a mere extension once the full mansion was complete. There were certainly better places to practice magic, but at least until Qaigor’s mana output increased by an order of magnitude or two, I saw no need to prioritise thick walls and inflammable surroundings over privacy and isolation.

“What’s the point of focusing on magic if it just lets me make a few sparks?” my brother moaned.

“There would be no point in that, but if you become good at magic, you will be doing much more than that. I take it Victoria told you about the way I dealt with her attempted kidnappers in Laugrey?”

Qaigor’s bluster faded fast at that. He looked at his feet, uncertain now.

“She said you…blew a ship up. An ocean-farer, maybe five hundred tonnes. She said you blasted it to bits with one go, then heated the river around it so much that it boiled all the men who tried to swim clear like lobsters.”

She had, apparently, missed out the little detail of how patches of open sewage—which was being perpetually dumped into the river by Laugrey’s far-too-numerous inhabitants, had actually combusted into open flames for brief periods until the heat dispersed itself around the rest of the banks. In retrospect, I could probably have vented my anger with a dozen gigajoules fewer than I had ended up releasing.

“Do you think you could blow a ship up?” I asked my brother.

“I could carry about a ton of dynamite and drop that in, or chuck a few hundred pounds across the river,” he suggested.

“Which would be slow, cumbersome, obvious, usable only once and, of course, rather telegraphed on account of featuring hundreds of pounds of dynamite,” I sighed. Magic is not just powerful and versatile, but done right it is far from telegraphed.

I decided to illustrate the point with a swift teleportation, translocating myself behind my brother and watching with a smile as he stumbled back in shock.

“How did you do that!?” he yelled.

“Magic,” I told him, deciding to hide the fact that I could currently teleport only a few paces at a time. The power cost ramped up proportionately with distance, and my spell matrix was currently fragile enough to withstand only a few hundred vis. If I wanted to make long-distance teleportations, I would need to first work out how to make a sturdier matrix, and then make it more efficient so that my maximum distance did not end up being a measly two hundred yards.

So much to do. Ah well, at least I was immortal. I had nothing but time.

“I just don’t like magic,” Qaigor said after a moment, surprising me by seeming to grow genuinely uncomfortable now. “Magic is…it’s girly.”

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“What?” Even I was baffled at that one, what in the world did he mean? Things had apparently changed somewhat since my time at Winzorth, but I had it on good authority that under a tenth of the world’s practicing magicians were female even now. It was about as masculine as picking up something heavy and putting it down somewhere else.

“You do it, Victoria does it…Agrian did it, and father never got along with Agrian. Always said he was feminine. I don’t want to do magic, I’m fine just being a warrior.”

I felt my face start spasming as the abject stupidity of what my brother had just said sunk into me. It was not that I failed to understand where this sentiment was coming from, irrational as it was. It was just really annoying to hear.

“Most magicians are men,” I told him.

“Feminine men.”

“And what is wrong with being feminine!?” I snapped. Qaigor bristled.

“Nothing, if you’re a woman. But men shouldn’t be.”

I considered whether to further negotiate with my brother, but the notion of it seemed both exhausting and tedious, and each day that he delayed in practicing his magic earnestly was another sliver of power he would never enjoy. Even for something that lived forever, as I planned him to, accidents happened, and he would one day die. He would only have so many days of magical practice in his life.

And he had already missed out on thousands of them.

“Qaigor,” I said evenly, “I am about to do something drastic. It will be very scary and painful, but I need you to understand this. It is for your own good.”

He was immediately fearful, as well he should be. My brother took his backstep faster than a mortal eye could have followed, but my own newly-enhanced senses were just barely quick enough to follow him. Magic wrapped around his body and hoisted it off the ground. I felt my Vessel strain itself slightly with the effort, as if I were lifting an additional seven or eight tons alongside Qaigor’s own weight, but the warrior magic imbued in his body was not nearly as strong as my own powers, and he never had a chance of truly keeping himself locked to the floor.

With his feet dangling, limbs lashing out frantically, Qaigor’s strength was useless. His was a tactile power, and now he had nothing to kick off, nothing to leverage all that physicality against. He was a lever with no fulcrum. While he dangled there, five feet off the ground kicking and growling with panic-turning-to-fear, I conjured up the next stage of my lesson.

A fireball. It was bright and big at first, larger than a head and glowing with orange fire. Heat like that may well tickle a warrior of Qaigor’s calibre, but he would not be scared of tickling, so I made it smaller and intensified the fire, until it was a streak of screaming white so hot I had to hold it equidistant from floor and ceiling to keep from igniting either.

Now Qaigor was truly scared.

“Isabel, stop,” he asked now, all the fight punched right out of him by fear. I did not stop, instead letting the orb of fire levitate closer to him, bringing it near enough that he could feel the heat. Then nearer still, mere inches away from him, so that even his preternatural skin would throb, so that he could anticipate the moment of it actually touching him. He had stopped squirming now, just hanging there frozen with terror.

And that was when I dispelled my magic, letting him drop and dissipating the fire.

“I will never hurt you,” I said, as Qaigor heaved on the ground. “But others will, and I will not always be there to protect you. If you live purely as a warrior you will one day be one of the strongest to ever live, but you will not be unkillable, untouchable. An Archmage, or several Highmages working in conjunction, would render all that strength as worthless as I did just now.”

In truth, there were a few practical complications to doing that on a resisting enemy. Warriors tended to be so quick that natural magicians had a hard time targeting them at all, and doing so with a spell as finicky as single-target telekinesis was out of the question. Qaigor did not need to know that, though. The lesson here was more important than the details, and by the time he knew enough magic to realise it for himself, he would hopefully already be enamoured with the craft.

Qaigor was glaring at me now that he realised the danger had passed.

“I hate you,” he spat.

I took the declaration without blinking, and just sighed.

“I did not do that to hurt you, you must understand.”

“Well it did!” he snarled.

“And it is for your own good!” I snapped back. “One day another might do that, one who does not care for you…as I do.” The words came out of me with a bit of a choke, and for a few moments my brother and I just continued glaring at one another. I dully wondered how long our staring match might continue for. An hour, perhaps? Qaigor had inherited Agrian Senior’s bull-headedness without a doubt, when he was driven to it the boy could sustain an outburst of friction for a very long time indeed.

But this time he caved in first, dropping his gaze. “Teach me magic,” he demanded, not meeting my eye still.

I had half a mind to refuse until he requested it in a more cordial tone, but I decided that I had claimed enough of a significant victory today that I did not need another petty one to go along with it.

“Very well then,” I sighed. “The first thing we are going to learn is, as I said before, projecting the mana out of yourself in waves. The output of these waves is something I measure in ‘vis’.”

***

Qaigor’s lesson ended up dragging on for six hours, but not because of any difficulty on his part. As much as the boy had protested, I could tell that my demonstration had succeeded in conveying the fundamental point to him; that the acquisition of power was more important than anything else, because it was only with acquired power that you could stop others from taking everything else.

That did not mean his mood improved, or that he forgave me. I did not need him to. If I could be liked by my family then that was good, but if I had to choose between that and keeping them well protected…well, it was no choice at all. Qaigor was growing strong because of what I did, and so, given the chance again, I would do it over in a heartbeat.

His lesson ended and he stormed away from me, leaving me to watch him go with the confidence that he would continue to work at the exercises I had taught him.

It was in my bed that the second visitor came, and for once it was not Sethira. I slumbered when a presence pressed itself against my mind, old and vast and more cunning than all the world’s foxes put together. I was sitting bolt upright in an instant, already mustering my mental defences.

I need not have bothered.

“Isabel Vornholt. Lord Dread. Old one. Whatever title you choose to go by now, it is I, Shuo Meg, and I am contacting you to let you know that I have found the artefact you came to my lands in search of. But there is a…Complication.”