MASTER OF CATS
BESSARIAS CAREFULLY HELD the calengalad balanced a half-hand above his palm, studying it closely as the delicate structure rotated slowly widdershins, its blue-green lattice of light sparkling like a precious jewel. The tiny giloi were flowing rapidly in, around, and through the dark center of the structure, and occasionally he could see a glowing red streak as the sequence he’d marked happened to flash past his eyes.
He whispered a word, and the rotation slowed, almost imperceptibly. He frowned, still unable to properly track the tiny ruby-red lights that whirled about inside the luminescent spider’s web. Then he found them, but, infuriatingly, not where they should be. In fact, if his eyes did not lie, they were precisely somewhere they could not possibly be. It was hopeless!
The temptation to hurl the damnable construction from his high window overlooking the river was almost overwhelming, but he resisted the urge despite his great frustration. A mere physical smashing couldn’t harm the calengalad itself, but any force inadvertently released from it could endanger anyone passing by. Furthermore, such an incident would attract far too much unwanted attention.
“Darro, be gone!”
The calengalad disappeared, safely banished into the aether from whence it had been summoned. Arilon, his legendary master, dead these past two hundred years, taught that everything in the material plane was constructed of miniature grains, far too small for the eye to see, and yet large enough to contain all the secrets of the universe just as the seed of an animal carries within itself the secret of life. Grains upon grains, bound together by a magic beyond magic, everything was made of it: the stone walls surrounding the great keep, the dancing flames ensconced in the stairwells, even the flesh that had long ago rotted from the bones of an elven archmage.
“They are like the dots of the Ponschule,” Arilon explained to him once, referring to an artistic style that had reached the height of its brief popularity when Bessarias was still a young apprentice. “One dot, in itself, is nothing. But thousands upon thousands of dots, placed in a particular order by the hand of a creative adept, can be a truly meaningful construction indeed.”
“And who is the creative adept, in this case?”
The archmage had frowned at his impertinence, properly recognizing it as such.
“This silliness does not become you, Bessarias. If you would amuse yourself with debates of gods and origins and forms, there are masters who will be delighted to indulge you. I am not one of them.”
So chastened, the great one’s student had ducked his head in apologetic submission. And now, centuries later, Bessarias found himself smiling at the thought that his question, however silly at the time, had perhaps not been so far adrift.
In twelve hundred years, the Collegium Occludum had never known a mind so great as Arilon’s. Less accomplished masters of magic had left behind legacies of greater fame in the outside world, but although demon lords, masters of the Deep, and vauderistes cast terrible magics that annihilated armies, sank mighty fleets, and otherwise decided the fate of nations, there was not one that did more than make skilled use of the Who, the What and the Where. Arilon had been the first to plumb the secret depths of the Why and the How.
