Scholar of Magic (Art of the Adept #3) - Michael G. Manning Page 0,8

He had never imagined having something so pretentious as an office of his own, much less the grand house it was located within, but he was learning to adapt to the circumstances.

He found his place in the cushioned chair and put his feet up on the desk. Then he summoned the limnthal and addressed the ring he wore on his right hand. “I think I hurt myself today.”

Arrogan’s sour voice replied from the air in front of him, “And so you felt the need to wake me up to cry about it? Don’t be such a titty baby.”

It had been a considerable length of time since he had last spoken to the spirit of his former master, so the language caught him off guard. “What?” he sputtered.

“You heard me.”

Will’s eyes narrowed, though the expression was pointless since the ring had no eyes to see his face. “It’s been well over a month since we last talked.”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” said Arrogan. “I told you before. I have no sense of time when I’m inactive. For all intents and purposes, I cease to exist, so every time you speak to me it feels as though our last conversation was just seconds ago.”

“I guess that makes it easy to remember what we were talking about then.”

“It’s damned annoying,” the ring shot back. “My entire existence is one endless conversation—with you. Think about that from my perspective for a moment.”

“I see,” said Will without sympathy.

“The hell you do, otherwise you’d be screaming as the existential horror seeped into that lard-filled bag you use for a brain.”

Will found himself snickering. He’d missed the old man’s biting conversations. “I’ll try to meditate on your misery later. In the meantime, I really do think I hurt myself.”

The ring sighed. “And that’s the extent of the sympathy I can expect. I suppose I should be happy with that much. I’m just a piece of jewelry after all. Fine, let’s talk about your problem. I’m sure it’s serious.”

“And you called me a ‘titty baby’ just a minute ago.”

A long pause followed before Arrogan finally responded, “Point taken. All right, tell me what’s wrong with you this time.”

Will did his best to describe what he had experienced at the dam when he had been struggling to draw enough turyn to maintain his spell, but he had difficulty finding words to express what he had done. “I sort of pulled all my turyn into a tightly concentrated knot, but I kept the outer shell I was using to draw turyn in with large, even though it was mostly empty.”

“You maximized the concentration differential and the active surface area at the same time, is that what you mean?”

“Yes!” He felt a surge of excitement as the ring’s description perfectly captured what he was trying to say. The terms Arrogan used were commonly used in alchemy, which was something entirely different, but they matched what had happened.

“Perfectly normal,” pronounced his mentor. “Most second- and third-order wizards stumble across the technique eventually.”

Will frowned. “You’ve mentioned orders in reference to wizards in the past, but you didn’t have a ranking system for spells like we do these days. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

“People use classifications to make sense of the things that are important to them. That should give you a clue as to the fundamental difference between the wizardry of my day and the wizards of yours.”

He thought about it for a moment. “You’re saying they were more concerned with the skill of the wizard in your day, but now all we think about is the difficulty of the spell? I’m not sure why that would be the case. We still use the same spells, for the most part.”

“But the wizards today are different,” Arrogan pointed out. “Back then spell difficulty didn’t matter because any wizard could manage just about any spell. That’s why we just called them hard or easy but we didn’t bother giving them fancy ranks and orders.”

“And now there’s only one order of wizardry,” finished Will.

“Wrong. Now there’s no order of wizardry.” Will