A knock came at the door and Eric started so hard he knocked Ix’s face with his knee. “Ow, sorry. Sorry,” he mumbled as he scrambled off the floor.
A servant came in, closing the door behind him nervously. “Your Highness, the Grand Magister is here.”
“The Grand Magister! Maybe he does have an answer.” Eric quickly wrestled his black jacket back on. He was meant to still be in full mourning.
Ix reached out an arm. He stilled when he remembered he didn’t have his magic and walked over to snag his robe off the back of the sofa. “Show him in.”
Lord Pern, the Grand Magister, looked more like a war general than the realm’s highest ranked mage, with his close-cut white hair and ramrod-straight posture. He must have been almost eighty by now but held himself with the bearing of a man half his age. Eric knew he had been in the army originally, rising in the ranks with the favor of the previous king before transferring to create the Magisterium as it stood today. He had trouble reconciling this man with the other scholarly mages who puttered about the Magisterium with their books.
“Your Highness.” Lord Pern saluted sharply. If he had any thoughts about the fact that it was well past midday and Ix wasn’t dressed, he was too well-bred to let them show. “How goes the meditations?”
“Pern. I didn’t expect you to make a personal visit,” said Ix, waving the man towards the sofa. Eric had only met him a couple of times in passing at court events, but he knew Ix steered clear of him. Pern was the realm’s longest-standing mage, being one of the first to deliberately call on a demon in the name of the king and though Ix had never said it in so many words, Eric knew he found that unsettling.
“I take it no progress?” said Pern.
Ix scowled. “No.”
“Unfortunate. We’d hoped that your magic would naturally recognize you and attach itself back to you if you opened your aura.”
“Your plan was to wait and see if it fixed itself?” Ixthan drummed his fingers on the table, a clear sign of irritation. If it bothered Pern at all, the man didn’t show it.
“Ourhopewas that your magic would return to you. Our plan is somewhat more complex.” Pern started an explanation that would have bored the most ardent of academics. So that was where the military and the academic had come together for Pern. Eric found the long words slipping in one ear and straight out of the other, and spent the time observing Ix instead. Whatever Pern’s idea was, Ix wasn’t encouraged. There was no flash of an easy smile, no furrow of thoughtfulness. Just a flat, stony stare he’d seen often enough, though never directed at him.
“And how long would this take, by your estimate?” asked Ix. Eric sat up, trying to look like he’d definitely been listening the whole time.
“Hard to say, Your Highness,” said Pern with a tight smile, which probably meant he knew the answer but thought it would displease Ix. “Given the limited number of mages who would be permitted to work on this, I would say six… or eight months.”
Eric choked. Surely he’d misheard. Six or eight months! He had thought Pern was going to say ‘days’ and even then he would have considered that too long.
“You understand the difficulty,” said Pern briskly with a gleam in his eye that Eric couldn’t decipher. “And we must request permission from your esteemed father before we proceed with such a new experiment.”
Ix’s face clouded over, the muscle in his jaw twitching as he clenched it. “Indeed. Do let me know of my father’s response.”
Pern bowed perfunctorily. His eyes had already glazed over, as if Ix (and Eric, by extension) were too unimportant to continue paying attention to, his thoughts already elsewhere.
“Something about him unnerves me and it annoys me that I can’t tell what it is,” said Eric once he was gone, to break the silence. “In any case, I didn’t understand any of that. What is his plan and why would it take so long?”
“He was obfuscating. He wishes to try out some new spells, ones that are currently forbidden, I suspect, and is using my… condition as an excuse to carry them out,” said Ix shortly. Energy radiated off of him as he paced up and down the room furiously. “That’s why only a few mages would be allowed to know.”
“What kind of new spells?” Eric tried to rack his brain. The most common spells that he knew came out of the Magisterium for the public were practical: wards for safety, clothes enchanted to be warm, the magelamps, that sort of thing. Anything more complex and the demon who was lending their power to a mage might demand a better bargain, which would open up the mages to a higher risk of losing control of their demon.
“Demon experimentation. Imprisoning demons and dissecting them,” said Ix with a scowl. “He’s trying to find a way to use magic without the possession part, I’d wager. If he could bottle the essence of a demon into a little elixir, it would be so much more convenient for him.”
Eric flinched at the idea of drinking a dead demon. “How does that help you in any way?”
“His idea distills down to the idea of me stealing a different demon’s power. Demons consume each other all the time to obtain their magic but if I can’t absorb it, the magic would just dissipate because after all this time he still doesn’t fully comprehend that a demon doesn’t use magic, itismagic.” The contempt dripped off Ix’s every word.
Eric frowned. Even he had known that a demon was made entirely of magic, how could the Magisterium – oh, of course. Because most ofEric’sknowledge of the demonic came from Ix, who avoided sharing the results of his various studies with the Magisterium as much as possible. It occurred to Eric suddenly that he likely held inside secrets of the demonic that even the king’s mages did not, just from hearing Ix talk to him over the years. There were people out there who would kill for the knowledge he held so casually. He touched his warded necklace, thankful he hadn’t needed one earlier.
“So the Magisterium is useless. That’s nothing new, we already thought they would be. But what Lymond said, there’s something there,” said Eric, trying to turn the conversation before Ix’s mood turned even more foul.
“He said he couldn’t help, and he’s already the most powerful demon I know.”
“Yes, yes, but I think… Hear me out. I know I’m ignorant and don’t know anything,” said Eric.
Ix turned, a surprised look on his face. “I don’t think you’re ignorant.”
That, in turn, surprised Eric back. “Aboutmagic. I don’t know anything, and that’s fine, Ix. I’ve always known that this is a thing that you can just naturally see and sense and feel when you describe it, but it’s like describing colors to a blind man. But maybe that’s why Lymond can’t help. He’s full demon, he’s always lived immersed entirely in magic. I’ve not seen him do any actual spells to form his magic, he just exudes the stuff. You said he tore open the barrier between realms with his bare hands, he’s not going to know how to do it with chalk and mirrors.”
