A Sudden Wild Magic

He had been rather thrown together with Philo and Josh, the centaur lad. They were the three different ones, and they were all finding it tough here. Poor Josh — he went around perpetually bewildered. Up to now, Tod had not realized how much centaur magework and teaching differed from human. The Arth system was human-based, and Josh could not grasp it at all. Everyone thought he was stupid. The louts made fun of him all the time. They were laughing at Josh at the other end of the room at the moment. It sounded as if there was another practical joke starting.

Ah gods! Tod thought savagely. This was all I needed! He had many times tried to conjecture why in hellspoke’s name the law required him to come to this armpit of the universe. It was a very archaic law. The only modern justification he had been able to come up with was that all this adversity was supposed to toughen his soul. To Tod’s mind you did not make a soul tough by walking all over it: you just made dents.

And all the time he had this nagging anxiety. The time rate was so much slower in Arth that nearly three years would pass before he could get home, years in which his father would get even older. August Gordano was not young: he had been nearly sixty when Tod was born. Tod was terrified he would get home to find his father dead. Then.

Yells and laughter erupted at the other end of the room. Tod looked.

There was poor Josh inside a ring of louts, the ringleader as usual being Rax with the broken nose. Josh was standing helplessly up to the withers in a pile of horse manure — or it looked like horse manure, but it was evidently as hard as concrete. Josh was trying to buck his way out, but much to the mirth of his tormentors, the stuff was holding him fast. As Tod looked, someone took the joke further, picked up a ball of the stuff and flung it at Josh. Josh was quite unprepared. He screamed and put both arms over his face. The next second he was being pelted, bowed over, with blood streaming down his face. It looked as if one of his eyes was smashed. Tod left his instrument and ran. Philo, who was nearer, ran ahead of him. Tod shouted to him not to, but he saw Philo plunge up the pile of concrete dung and try to spread himself out in front of Josh. Tod heard the thud of concrete hitting his body.

“Right! That bloody does it!” Tod said. Still running, he called up his birthright. It was intensely strong, here in Arth, as they had warned him it would be. He took hold of the big, dynamic rhythms of the citadel and used them to thrust Philo away to the far wall. Then he hurled that concrete dung in all directions in a near-explosion, scoring a hit on a lout with almost every ball. Josh burst loose from the pile and staggered about with his hands to his face, only half-conscious. Tod took further energies, formed them into spears of healing, and beamed them at Josh in strong thrusts. But at this point the other servicemen turned on Tod in a pack, and he had to leave off to defend himself.

He didn’t dare kill them. He fought them instead. He felt like a fight anyway. He made sure each one he hit got a fair voltage of electricity with the blow. For a joyous few seconds he was inside a pandemonium of fighting bodies, blows, screams, and swearing, with stinking cobbles rolling about underfoot and electricity crackling and arcing all over the place. Then, as was to be expected, Duty Mages and Senior Brothers stormed into the room from all directions. A fair amount of stasis was cast. Tod could have broken it, had he tried, but someone had hit him in the stomach the instant before, and he did not feel like trying anything just then.

When he felt more himself, he was — as he supposed he should have expected — being blamed for everything. Rax had run the street gangs of Praslau before coming to Arth. He was an expert in shifting blame. Besides, after the healing Tod had thrown at Josh, nobody thought there was too much wrong with his eye, and Philo, though dazed, was only bruised. They were marched off to Healing Horn. Tod, licking a swelling lip, had to stand and endure a po-faced lecture from Brother Wilfrid. He stood. He endured, wondering anxiously throughout whether he had been in time to save the sight in Josh’s eye, and controlled his temper while Brother Wilfrid lectured on about the damage done to the vibrations of Arth. Tod might have got away merely with that lecture had not Brother Wilfrid then said, “And thanks to your folly and aggression, Galpetto could well lose an eye.”

“I saved his eye, you fool!” Tod roared at him. “Don’t give me that po- faced rot!”

Brother Wilfrid’s breath went in. His eyes and his mouth became vicious lines. “You don’t speak to people like that here. No one here is your servant.”

“No, thank the Goddess,” said Tod. “If you were my servant, I’d sack you for sanctimonious stupidity. Plus incompetence.”