Pozella smiled. “That cabinet in the corner has various objects to use. Now, let me continue with the other recruits.”
Quint saw two recruits practicing by a table with an object. Most of the others seemed to be struggling with tendrils and weaves.
The cabinet held all kinds of objects. One was a metal pitcher that would work for dry, water, and cold. He would start with cold since that was probably related to flame.
Quint took the pitcher and put it on the table, spreading out the diagram, and looked at his hands. He suspected learning a spell was more complicated than looking at the diagram, duplicating the tendrils, creating the threads, and wrapping them together to form a string that would work.
He tried to complete the spell and couldn’t get the tendrils to emerge from his fingers in the proper pattern. It wasn’t as easy as he thought. Quint spent the rest of the class learning to control the tendrils, but hadn’t succeeded when Pozella called on the recruits to stop.
Quint closed his eyes and fixed the feeling of the tendrils in his mind before opening his eyes and slipping the diagram into his portfolio.
“Bring a chair,” Pozella said.
Quint did as the others did, carrying a chair from the wall and setting them in two lines facing Pozella.
Pozella looked at Quint. “Don’t forget to return your object to the cabinet when we are through.”
“Yes, sir,” Quint said.
Pozella talked about weaves, showing them examples of how tendrils were wrapped. The village wizard had never enlightened Quint about the complexity of weaves. He wondered how a wizard could learn a hundred strings with only ten fingers, but different weaves could produce opposite results.
The master made sure everyone understood that they had much more to learn. Quint returned to the barracks, overwhelmed with learning strings.
Chapter Fiv
e
Quint spent four days working on the cold string when he could generate the proper tendrils, and he hadn’t gotten to weaving them. He returned to the empty practice hall on the next off-day afternoon and began working on the cold weave.
The solitude settled him down. Quint looked closely at the weave. It had a tight weave at the bottom and a looser weave at the top. There were nine tendrils instead of the ten with a flame string.
He spent an hour working on the weave and found the transition between tight and loose was the hardest part. His head began to ache when he finally succeeded in creating the string. He pulsed it, aiming at the metal pitcher.
He gave the string another pulse before he broke the string and ran to the pitcher. The metal surface was cooler than it had been before. He continued to work on intensity, using a more precise weave on the string.
After three tries to get the string wound, Quint pulsed the pitcher with a more robust effort. He didn’t have to run to the pitcher since the surface sent up a few wisps of mist. He wouldn’t increase that pulse for fear the pitcher might be damaged.
Someone clapped behind him. Quint turned to see Pozella grinning as he continued to clap. “If I didn’t see you struggle when you came in, I wouldn’t have believed you could make my cold string work.”
“It’s not the tendrils that are the problem; it is setting up the weave, sir,” Quint said.
“How did you figure out the change in the twist?”
Quint took a deep breath and inhaled slowly, nervous to be talking to a master wizard about strings. “Concentration, sir. I gave myself a headache using my will to do it. It is like a regular string weave, and then I had to relax my mind to create better precision. I’ve never done that before.”
“None of your fellow recruits can do that. It is actually the hardest string of the five I gave you. The rest is modulating your power, right?”
Quint nodded. “That and making tendrils is easy for me.”
Pozella sat down. “And then you should slow up. I suggest you work on string weave exercises. Pull up any number of tendrils and work on different patterns. Tomorrow, I‘ll give you a sheet with different combinations. Use four tendrils; you’ll find it easier than nine. If you go too fast, the other recruits will get jealous. You should complete no more than one string per month. I honestly think you could complete one or more every week.”
“I can do that, sir.”
“You could be a master in less than a year if your memory can stand all the information. That would not be good for you. Even so, I don’t think promotions will come easy for you. Hubites are barely tolerated in the corps.”
“Should you be advising me like this, sir?” Quint asked.
“No. Absolutely not, but I’ve seen few wizards with your command of tendrils. The weaving seems hard to you now, but that’s because it is new.”
“If the corps can’t tolerate me, why am I here, sir?”
“One way or another, the wizard corps must have every competent wizard filter through their organization. If they don’t need you, you are useless to the High Council,” Pozella said. “If I couldn’t reposition myself as an instructor, I wouldn’t be standing before you and would either be confined to a cloister or worse.”
“Then I’ll have to walk the fine line of learning what I can and not using it, sir.”
Pozella smiled. “You keep that in your mind, always.”
Master Pozella’s advice was correct. When Quint asked probing questions about military strategy, his favorite class, his fellow recruits roughed him up again. He had to keep his string practice to himself, but he could practice weaves without the others noticing.
Four months later, the three recruits who were more advanced were promoted to Soldiers and left the fort, assigned to one of the six wizard corps battalions stationed around Racellia and on the border with Barellia, where the Racellian forces were engaged in border skirmishes. Four of the original twelve were dismissed along the way.
The High Council wanted an empire, and Barellia was deemed the first step. That fact wasn’t stated in the military strategy class, but it was in the military history class. Quint could see the strategy clearly, even from what little he learned.
