Mana Read online

  Mana

  by Hannah Blume (as Alicorn)

  This story is a sequel to Water.

  * * *

  Sanuar

  “Again,” said the Sixth Archmage. “Faster.”

  Sanuar tried to paint the bead paper faster. Straight thin line straight thick line, grab the size-two 4:1-spaced comb, put it down on the right with the teeth facing left so it doesn’t smudge the wet ink, paint, put the comb aside but don’t fling it because it comes up in this bead later, straight thin line, remember to put mana into the lines gently gently slow constant trickle -

  His hand twitched. The ink jumped out of line. The edges of the bead paper crisped up; even if Sanuar trimmed off all the ink he’d put down so far and started a new bead spell that didn’t require this much space, the whole sheet was ruined.

  The Sixth Archmage, His Learned Excellency Golar Absam, slammed his fist down on the worktable; dozens of combs for dotted lines leapt with the impact. “Faster does not mean clumsier, Vayar!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Sanuar. “I’m sorry, sir, I’ll start over.”

  “You’ve wasted enough bead paper for the day. Do I look like I’m made of the stuff? Go and meditate with your bowl of water while I think of something easier for you to do,” sneered Absam. “At this rate by the time you have to choose secondaries you won’t have enough control over your mana to keep even one of them in good order. This with a soft specialty! If I were you I’d drop out and sell mana spots for a living, but I suppose your learned parents won’t hear of it. How did an archmage turn out such a useless -” Absam shook his head. “Go meditate with your bowl of water.”

  Sanuar lurched in the direction of his meditation cushion and collapsed onto it, then tried to compose himself into a good-enough posture so that Absam wouldn’t be moved to cross the room and smack him on the shoulder with one of the combs.

  Water. Water. Your favorite thing, he tried to remind his mana, but its initial excitement when he’d imprinted it had faded, since. It would probably take him four or five years to get back the simple ease he’d had the first day. It had been pretty awkward just covering for the “early” dropoff when his parents were under the impression that he’d been a mage for six hours instead of twelve.

  Water, water, waaaaaaaater.

  It was sort of hard to meditate when he was expecting his teacher to hit him.

  Counterproductive as that was.

  Water -

  “I don’t sense a trance over there!” snapped Absam.

  Sanuar flinched. “I’m sorry sir, I’ll get it in just a minute, I’m sure.”

  “If you can’t meditate, your mana will fall out of order. If your mana falls out of order, you won’t be able to use it,” said Absam. “If you can’t use your mana you’re no mage at all! Concentrate on your water! It’s your own idiot decision that you didn’t choose something easier to focus on! Not that you’d surprise me if you couldn’t keep your attention on a candle or even a pendulum.”

  “Yes sir I’m sorry sir.”

  Absam growled, but he didn’t snatch up a comb to swat Sanuar’s shoulder with, just went over to where his other student, Tasnan Aprol, was meditating on his prism to shake him out of it and teach him something. Sanuar would have a reprieve as long as Tasnan was occupied, at least until Absam wanted them to do something simultaneously.

  Water. Water.

  Oh, finally, blissfully, trance.

  The water was clear and clean and room-temperature. The water was still. The water was not going to hurt him.

  Sanuar felt like he was floating. Or not even floating - underwater, neither sinking nor rising, untouched by currents. Weightless.

  He wasn’t sure how long it had been when Absam’s hand came down on his head. Felt like an hour or so of settling and regeneration in his mana. “Vayar,” said his teacher. “Help Aprol with his spell beads. Pass him combs, roll the paper for him when he’s done. You’re both off for the day once he’s made and cut one good roll of them. If you mess them up for him I’ve told him to strike you blind and send you home like that for your learned lady mother to fix, don’t let your excuse for a mind wander, Vayar.”

  “Yes sir,” said Sanuar, swallowing.

  And Absam left the room, leaving the boys alone. Sanuar tripped his way to the spell bead table, and looked at the instructions for the spell. It needed a lot of different combs. Were they all organized? They were all organized, good.

  “I won’t strike you blind,” Tasnan remarked, laying out a clean paper, “if you promise to say I did, if it comes to it.”

  “Okay. I mean yes. Thank you.”

  “But it’d be better if you didn’t have to and the beads were right on the first try.”

  “Yes. I’ll, I’ll try.”

  Sanuar managed to pass Tasnan all the correct combs in the correct order so that Tasnan could paint the correct dotted lines. When he placed the final stroke Sanuar rolled up the paper around a thin dowel as tightly and quickly as possible, dipped it in shellac and then drying powder, and offered it back to Tasnan to be sliced into several smaller copies of the same spell. Some mages could paint mana onto a paper quickly enough that they could make even a long spell on a tall sheet of paper and be done before the magic seeped out of the first line, and cut a single paintjob into a dozen copies of a bead. Tasnan had only been a mage for a few months longer than Sanuar, and his roll made four. Slice, slice, slice.

  “What does it do?” Sanuar asked, as Tasnan picked up the least attractive end piece to test.

  “Sunburst. Close your eyes,” said Tasnan.

  Sanuar did it just in time to avoid the explosion of light when Tasnan cast the bead. “There, all done for the day,” Tasnan said brightly.

  “Isn’t this a bit early for him to be letting us go?” asked Sanuar. That was some consolation. He might get home in time to see Niomah before she finished all her work and left for the day.

  “Nah,” said Tasnan. “Did you lose track of time? It’s about dinnertime. I’m starving. Do you want to grab food at the Broadleaf? Pick up girls?”

  “I told you I have a girlfriend.” Two.

  “Liar. Come on, you’ll be fine if you can get over being so shy, you’re, you know, tall.”

  “I still have a girlfriend.” Sorry, whichever of you I’m leaving out.

  “Whatever. You’re taller than me, come to think, you’d probably be more distraction than wingman. Go have fun with your imaginary girlfriend,” Tasnan snorted.

  I can’t. Niomah’s on her way home already and Ens is at that… thing. “Will do.”

  Sanuar, mercifully not struck blind, went home to his parents, and ate dinner, and reported in a mumble that not much had happened in his lessons today.

  He wrote Ens a telegram and left Niomah a note under his pillow for when she changed the linens. Both completely innocuous - the note for Niomah worded to look like it could have been a note to self - lest someone else see.

  * * *

  Ens

  “- seven years later. At this time there was a substantial uptick in immigration from Arnland into Gathland and neighboring countries,” said the history teacher.

  To be perfectly fair it was a nice school. They had teachers who knew what they were talking about, and decent books, and a pleasant campus. Ens just hated her uniform and the early start time and the mindboggling number of hours they wanted her to sink into acquiring her appropriately genteel education. She’d multiplied it out once and imagined spending that much time doing anything else.

  “The low educational level, tendency to criminality, and crude cultural practices of first-generation Arnysh immigrants led to a negative reaction from the host countries, with most implementing a quota and the lake nations electing to ban them entirely starting two years after the
regime change,” said the teacher.

  …Well, the other teachers knew what they were talking about. Ens charitably supposed this one likely had the dates right.

  “Lord Riawae?” said the teacher.

  “Um?” said Ens. “I mean, yes?”

  “Do you find something objectionable about the history of Arnland/Mainland relations?”

  “I.” Could probably afford to piss off this teacher this once, but would it be once? Not if she opened her big mouth it wouldn’t be. “No ma’am.”

  “I didn’t think so.” She went back to pacing the front of the room. “Many Arnysh elected to immigrate illegally in defiance of these attempts to reduce the numbers of entrants, which is why Arnysh are now required to carry identification in four countries including -”

  Ens tried not to look like she’d bitten directly into a lemon. She took notes. She made little star markings next to things she wanted to ask Niomah about. Not that she was likely to get a chance in the next forever. School meant she usually couldn’t visit Sanuar; when Ens was free he usually wasn’t. And Niomah was completely at the mercy of her work schedule. Ens had a school break in a couple of weeks, Sanuar had one day off then. If Ens were very, very lucky, no high-society parties would claim her time on that one day and she could go see “her friend”.

  She missed Sanuar too, but him at least she could telegram. Niomah didn’t even dare receive letters at home. Very angry father.

  “- the patriarchal and collectivist society of the Arnysh inspires moral outrage in most Gathru. Arnysh families subsume the wills of individuals into the ostensible good of the family, usually decided by the most dominant male relative in a household, which may contain upwards of a dozen individuals in some cases, typically in extremely cramped living quarters. By contrast Gath see it as the responsibility of a parent to have a number of children to whom they can devote more individual attention and then help those children develop their full potential.”

  Yep. Sure. If Ens and Niomah wanted to get married, Niomah’s family would be the only ones complaining. Or rather, Ens’s family would complain that Ens was not living up to her potential, while Niomah’s family would be appalled at the implication that she’d had a social life.

  Okay, maybe this teacher knew something about Arnysh culture.

  But she didn’t know anything about Niomah.

  Ens regretted every single solitary minute she had spent during her long vacation doing things other than listening to Niomah call her priceless artwork and letting Sanuar muss up her hair with petting.

  She did not have enough happy memories to get through the rest of this term without eventually spending all her Lord Riawae Points on pissing off teachers.

  “Lord Riawae,” said the teacher.

  “Yes?”

  “Eyes front, please. This is not introductory school and I should not have to cavort with brightly colored puppets for your attention.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  History, eventually, after a break for lunch and a digression into the relevance of sugarcane and Arnysh magecraft, came to an end. Ens had art (the pleasantest class of the day) and math, and that was all; the next day would be literature and music and ethics, and after that natural philosophy and rhetoric and Trathese. (Because they didn’t offer Arnysh, because why would rich Mainlanders want to learn Arnysh.)

  (Ens imagined if one of her significant others could only tell her they loved her in Trathese. She could understand it pretty well, but there wasn’t any emotion in her second language, not with the gap between hearing the word and remembering what it meant. She resolved that she was going to find some way to figure out how to tell Niomah she loved her, in Arnysh, before they next saw each other.)

  Math let out. Ens went to wait for the family driver to bring him home. There was a girl from the class behind his standing nearby, smiling at him. He smiled back, just a little bit. No point in being rude.

  “Hello, Lord Riawae.”

  Ens looked at the emblem on her school badge. “Lady Indabar. Hello.”

  “Please, call me Kizi.”

  “If you like.”

  “May I call you Ens?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Oh, good. I did hope we’d get off on the right foot,” smiled Kizi.

  “I - what?”

  “Oh! Oh, you weren’t told? I apologize, that must have seemed very abrupt, forgive me. My mother’s been talking to yours -”

  And the rest of Lady Kizi Indabar’s no-doubt-exquisitely-polite explanation was somewhat abandoned in the static of what no no no fuck no no that swallowed Ens’s brain.

  He managed to recover the ability to process language when Kizi said “- but I do hope we can at least be friends, even if it isn’t a love match?”

  No no no no no

  Ens swallowed. Kizi looked concerned. “Ens?” she prompted.

  “Pardon me,” breathed Ens. “I hadn’t been told. I’m. I’m very surprised. I’d been hoping for… I hope you will not be offended if I say I’d been holding out hope for a love match.”

  “Oh, I’m not offended - I mean, unless you had someone in mind. It would be a little gauche if your mother were making promises on your behalf and you were, what’s that line from the play? Taken in your…?”

  “Spoken for in my heart,” murmured Ens. He’d done makeup for a production of the play in question. The lead actress was always very passionate about declaring herself spoken for in her heart. She’d had to marry the villain anyway at the end of act two, although then further shenanigans ensued that left him dead. Ens did not want to have to wish Kizi dead. She seemed perfectly nice.

  “Yes. It’s not that, is it? I can apply to my mother about it if so. But you know that arrangements quite often develop into something more, if given a chance. I’m optimistic, myself.”

  Yes I have a girlfriend and a boyfriend and one’s an impoverished Arnysh immigrant and one’s the Fourteenth Archmage’s son and I haven’t seen either of them in two weeks but tell your mother I am scandalous and unmarriageable and probably insufficiently virginal oh I wish. Apply to your mother about it, Lady Indabar.

  “Nothing to the point at which I would have informed Mother,” Ens said softly.

  Kizi patted his shoulder familiarly. “I’m supposed to go home with you today,” she said. “To get to know one another better. If I’m really awful surely you can talk to your mother, likewise.”

  Sure I can. My mother’s great about that sort of thing. I tell her everything. Of course.

  Ens just nodded. Kizi smiled.

  * * *

  Niomah

  Niomah swept. Niomah mopped, dusted, and scrubbed. Niomah put things away where they belonged. Niomah arranged flowers in a vase on the dinner table, drew the curtains against the evening sun, and took her jug of water from the cook because hauling it on a trip she was going to make anyway was better than making somebody make that one extra hike to the Timrar fountain.

  Niomah missed her lost boy and her priceless artwork.

  Niomah missed sleeping in the garden shed, mercy be. But she couldn’t risk angering The Learned Sanuar’s Parents anymore after the lockdown on the ghetto ended and the Our Boys (as her grandfather insisted on calling them) had been arrested and she could get back in.

  And be hollered at for disappearing like that, for letting them think she’d been killed kidnapped defiled disappeared. Joy. They cared ever so, certainly.

  But they were all alive, even if they had had to break into the savings to have Niomah’s sister-in-law seen by the life-mage crone down the street to be sure she wouldn’t miscarry from stress and dehydration. So expensive. They wanted to fix the little one’s eye, but the pregnant sister-in-law came first. Due any day now. Possibly in labor as Niomah walked home, that would be something.

  Well, she just had to keep going to work even if her lost boy was never there to gaze adoringly anymore, never there to twirl her into his arms and sneak a feel of her curves and kiss he
r, never there to so much as say hello. Gone by the time she arrived. Still at his magic lessons when she was all out of house to clean, all out of ways to stretch into another hour for the extra eleven balances.

  Keep working, bring home the money and the water, save up, fix the brother’s eye, make sure there was plenty to accommodate the new baby, be around to translate Gath paperwork and regulations and this-and-that for her relations. Keep working and everything would be fine. Her boys would be out of school some, eventually. Their teachers could not keep them forever. How much could there really be to learn? They both already spoke very good Gath, obviously, they knew their sums and civics, that was all anyone cared if she knew.

  And she wasn’t a mage and she’d never held more than five hundred balances in her hands all at once, so what did anyone care if she knew anything.

  She had to detour around the place the bridge had once been. There were talks of building a new one which looked likely to be endlessly delayed (who wanted a bridge into the Arnysh ghetto? The Arnysh people? They could go around) so Niomah went six blocks west. There, the chasm the bridge had arced over narrowed some, and there were stairs cut into it. Niomah could either go all the way down, or go about a third of the way down and try to jump it. She jumped on the way to work in the morning; with the jug of water she descended to the bottom and then climbed until her knees whined.

  At least she didn’t go to work in any kind of vehicle. That would have obliged her to go around the canyon completely, halfway across town.

  Stairs and screaming calves, stairs and aching thighs. Stairs and some boy, Mainlander but the scruffy kind who sometimes hung around in low-rent areas, standing at the top.

  “Hey,” he said. “That looks heavy.”

  “Is actually made of soap bubble,” said Niomah, “am practicing for theatrical showing, but many thanks for observation.”

  The boy laughed, showing all his teeth. “Lemme carry it for you the rest of the way.”

  Niomah had a blister on the back of her ankle. “Terribly kind,” she said, and she handed him the jug of water and trudged past the chasm into the ghetto.