Reckless Magus

Chapter 1

When I dragged myself out of bed in the morning, something was wrong; a typical morning started with my being hauled out of bed by my father. That morning I woke with the gradual increase in awareness that you get at the end of a full night’s sleep, fuzzily reaching consciousness until the strangeness of the experience struck me.

That fact alone provided a sudden burst of adrenaline, and I hauled myself fully awake and looked to the other bed, where I presumed my father spent the night. Aside from a small card sitting on the pillow of the bed, it looked freshly made. I snagged the card and opened it, reading the message my father had left for me.

Abe,

Your Magician’s test will be a straightforward one: It begins as soon as you read this note, and it ends when you step through the front door of our home back in the Endless City. I have left a small amount of local currency to see to your needs while you deal with the first stage of this test though it may not be enough.

Good Luck, my son.

Nerick Spellchaser

P.S. Certain things will go easier if you travel under the name Abraham Xavier Chauser until you leave this world.

The test seemed easy enough: I would use my own magics to pull myself back to the Between. I knew I had the skill for such a trip as I had been tested on my ability to navigate at least once a week for over a year. I grabbed the small satchel that I had been living out of since we started this journey so many years ago and slung it over my back. I readied myself for the spell, closing my eyes and taking several deep breaths to calm my heart.

Once the excitement of the test no longer beat an over-quick rhythm in my chest, I started to draw magic in on each breath, readying as much power as I could collect for the hardest part of the spell, opening the way. Once I had pulled to me as much magic as I could I created the image of the door to the Between in my mind; seeing the door in my mind, I reached towards the handle and started to pour energy down the connection—

And screamed as my brains attempted to leave my skull through every pore in my head. The pain hit me hard and sharp, shattering my ability to hold onto the energy for the spell, which tried to burn itself away from me as light bleeding from my skin. As the light began to fill my vision, the pain doubled and doubled again. I found new limits to the amount of pain I could suffer without dying. It was, however, more than enough pain to drive me from awareness, causing me to black out.

Chapter 2

When I next woke, I was being dragged awake, but not by my father: a skinny old man was kneeling over me, shaking me out of whatever had hit me when I tried my magic. Son, you alright?

The pain that echoed through my head made me feel as if I had decided to take on the hangovers for an entire bar, I certainly did not feel alright. No, but I can fix it.

I once again took in magic, not nearly as much as last time, just enough to power an easy hangover cure that most apprentices have cause to learn at some point in their training. The simplicity of the spell allowed it to be used even when the world was spinning around you. Magic gathered, pattern in mind, I attempted to apply one to the other...

And blacked out again as something hit my mind with a sledgehammer. When I came to again, the same old man was standing over me enunciating slowly to me as though I was incapable of complete thoughts, Son, do you have a condition?

I waved him back a little and brought myself into a sitting position with my back against one of the beds, No. I just need some more rest. Where’s the other person I was rooming with? I collected my thoughts and waited for his answer.

When it came, my stomach fell through the floor, You weren’t rooming with nobody. You came in last night, dog-tired and asked for a double. You need another day’s rest? That’ll be... I never actually heard the amount the old man asked for, I just reached into the bag my father left me and scooped out a small handful of coins and handed it to the old man; having his money, he seemed happy enough to leave me alone in the room.

I stayed on the floor for several minutes after he left, waiting and willing the pain to go away. After a minor eternity, I was no longer seeing double and pulled myself to my feet to try to identify what I had done wrong in my spells.

I took a deep breath, and felt the magical energy around me; there was energy in this world to tap and direct, I could feel it running over my fingertips as I started to open my mystic senses. I placed a hand against the wall, trying to feel if there was something in the building that was preventing my magic; I could feel no wards against power pulse against my hand. I attempted to reach out into the structure of the building to try to find a more subtle restraint. I felt the feedback coming mere moments before it hit me like a body blow against my mind, killing my concentration.

I’m not going to lie; what followed wasn’t pretty. I kept experimenting with my magic for the remainder of the day, trying to find some spell or technique I knew that didn’t create the massive feedback kick when I went to implement the spell; then recovering as the secondary kick of the power leaking away took my breath away. Every single thing I tried failed, blasting back upon me. I was in and out in my experiments until late in the afternoon, when I noticed that the sweat that I was wiping away from my brow had taken on a reddish-brown tint. That shock made me more aware of the deep ache in my body and broke me; I barely managed to crawl into bed before I dropped to sleep from utter exhaustion.

Chapter 3

When I woke up in the morning, the thought that I might be stuck here made me check how much I had left of the money my father had left me. As I opened the pouch and counted the coins, I realized that last night’s rent on this room had taken over half of the coins dad had left me.

As I looked at my empty wallet, my stomach growled, reminding me that in my rush discover how much of my blood I could sweat out my body before I collapsed from exhaustion I had forgotten to eat yesterday, and it was even emptier than the coin bag.

Thankfully, I had enough energy to make it down to the common room and sink into a chair before I let my hunger collapse me. A waitress who looked related to the old man who had woke me up yesterday approached my table and looked at me nervously before asking, Do you know what you’d like, sir?

I raised a hand to wipe some sleep out of my eyes, Some answers. The crust around my eyes had a brownish tint to it. My stomach reminded me again why I was here, growling loud enough that I’m sure the waitress heard, But I’ll settle for food. In quantity.

She nodded and retreated back behind the bar, and I sat there for several minutes waiting for my food before the geezer from yesterday came over and took a seat at my table, Son, I’ll let you eat, but I’m not sure I want you staying another night.

Um. Sure, it’s your public house. Mind if I ask why? Not that I could afford another anyways...

You realize you’re covered in blood, right, Son? I looked down at my arms: my dusky skin was coated with a thin film of dried blood and sweat that was making my shirt stick against my skin. The old man saw me examining myself and gave his reason, We don’t want no sickness here.

I’m not sick. This is... a malfunction or something. I was trying to use some magic, and it backfired on me.

Magic? He asked, with a surprising amount of befuddlement in his tone, What the weasel’s taint are you talking about?

His reaction to my statement made me stop as I tried to think about what direction to take this conversation; if most attempts to work magic resulted in what I had experienced the previous day, it wasn’t unreasonable to presume that people had no idea about magic. Never mind. Yesterday was just a bad day. Let me wash off, I’ll show I don’t have sores or anything. He waited for a second, then nodded as his (grand-?)daughter set a large bowl of eggs on the table with a piece of chicken sitting on the side. I looked him in the eye, then smiled, Before we do that, you mind if I get some food in me?

Chapter 4

The owner, who introduced himself while I ate as Tamthas Turner, waited as I appeased the beast in my stomach, finishing off the entirety of the meal before I stood up and let him lead me towards the back of the inn and through the kitchen to reach a small courtyard behind the building. As he passed through the kitchen, Tamthas grabbed a bucket that he filled with water from a pump beside the back door.

I stripped out of my shirt and began to clean myself from yesterday’s mistakes with a rag that had been offered to me. As the blood began to rinse off my skin, I tried explaining myself, Sorry about this— just a bad reaction to something. My name is Abraham Chauser, I was traveling with my father, a...tinker. It was a wild understatement of what he was capable of, but a common enough profession for a person who moved around all the time. He left me behind while he headed on to the next city on the route.

Must be brave men, to track the distance between Ashalia and Theria; it’s almost a month’s journey. I don’t recall hearing about a caravan coming through.

A month? That’s not a terrible distance. I mean, there are smaller towns and other settlements between the cities, after all. To my surprise, that comment got me a blank look almost as confused when I said the word magic.

After puzzling on my statement for a minute, Mr. Turner seemed to find a way my comment fit into his understanding of the world, There are the farms, but they don’t last you more than a day or two of travel. There’s nobody living in the wilderness, except madmen.

I was in shock at his statement, but I attempted to roll onward and replace magic with something that might fit into his world, There are ways to survive. But I’m thinking I’m stuck here till my father makes it back by this way. I had finished wiping the dried blood and sweat from my lean frame and presented my bare chest and arms for his examination, No sores, no pockmarks; an adequate human specimen.

The old man laughed, Seems I did jump to some kind of judgement. You need to stick around awhile, sounds like. Tell you what, I’ve got a niece, she runs a boarding house that might be a better place for you to cool your heels while you wait for your Pa.

Is it cheaper? I didn’t bother to check your prices before I stuck around last night, I’m near cleaned out.

As it turns out, it was far cheaper. The few coins I had remained would see me for a week’s time in Mrs. Turner’s boarding house. Well the few coins I had remaining and the excess that Mr. Turner handed back to me, letting me know that I’d overpaid him by almost half.

After a quick introduction to his niece, I was told the rules of the household and shown up to my room, where the reason for the cheap rent became apparent: the room was barely twice the width of the slim bed provided. Still, the room had a small writing desk and chair packed into the small space, which meant that I had a space to work as I tried to figure out a way out of this place and back into the Between.

Chapter 5

As I settled into the room, I decided the first task in front of me was to examine my own notes and whatever resources my father left me. As I tossed my bag on the desk and opened it, I realized that my father had taken with him most of my notes and personal materials. In the place of my personal notes were three research journals and a slim book filled with hand-written notes.

I first dug into the research journals, thinking that Nerick had possibly transcribed my notes into these three volumes, but after almost an hour spent flipping though the three books I had to conclude that I had been given three empty research journals. I sighed and swore at my father under my breath. My notes would have been incredibly helpful, but if my father had taken my notes and left me a set of blank books it was because he wanted me to work from my personal knowledge and whatever I could collect on the ground.

As I turned to the last book I realized it was filled with my teacher’s handwritten notes, I recognized the code that it was written in (though I didn’t know how to decode it). The only part of the book that I could read was an inscription he had left inside the front cover: Remember, Abraxas: knowledge is power. Stubbornness led me to waste another hour flipping through the smaller book, trying to will myself to decipher the code my father worked in. Aside from accidentally drawing in magic to assist me three times, the hour spent accomplished nothing.

The headaches that those misfired attempts at magic gave me were good for one thing: after I concluded that I would get no answers from reading through what I had been given, the pain reminded me that I needed to start working in one of the journals, taking down my observations on what I had discovered so far.

By the time I had finished recording the last day and a half of mistakes, it was late afternoon, and just sitting in my room wasn’t going to get me any of the answers I needed. I decided to head downstairs and talk to Mrs. Turner. When I found her, she was in the kitchen, prepping the soup that would be tonight’s dinner. I offered my help and she put me to work chopping vegetables.

As we worked, I set to some amount of small talk, telling her the same basic story that I had related to her uncle about what brought me to Ashalia and reassuring her that if I couldn’t find a way to catch up with my father, I would have a job within the week. In response, I asked her about local legends, tall tales, or other bits of folk wisdom, labeling myself as collector of such things. Which was true in a sense, it was often possible to ferret out a kernel of truth in much of the fictions that people bandy about. Though I found the stories I heard were remarkably mundane: no ghosts, goblins, or boggarts seemed to haunt my landlady’s imagination.

I also got a much better glimpse at the nature of the place it seemed I was stuck in, a number of far-flung and unaffiliated city-states, hundreds of miles separating the nearest of them, with empty wilderness in between. I asked her why no one lived out in the wild and she seemed to regard that idea as the pinnacle of silliness, living so far away from other people, surrounded by dangerous wild animals.

In fact, aside from a few unfortunate souls who had to live outside to take care of their animals or crops, every Asher lived inside the city. This made housing the largest expense a person saw in their life-time; most of my fellow boarders were clerks or civic functionaries who were saving up for a personal apartment nearer the heart of the city or waiting for an elderly relative to die off and leave them their residence.

We kept on talking until other tenants began to show up, looking for, if not exactly forward to, dinner. I was able to introduce myself to my fellow residents at that meal: I was a tinker’s son who had gotten separated from his traveling father. As I mentioned what profession I had assigned my father, I could see a look of disdain come into the expression of most of the people at the table. It seems that working with your hands was considered a profession for the lower classes.

I turned around their impressions by starting to relate tales of some of the places I had visited while travelling with my father. I edited most of the stories to match what seemed like local sentiments, talking only about the different cultures, food, and people I had met in the past five years. Those stories spent well as currency to open them back up to me, and we soon were talking about what they did for their daily bread. Over the course of the next several days, I made it a point to attend every common meal to meet the rest of the residents (most tended to take at least one of their meals each day elsewhere as Mrs. Turner’s meals tended towards both the bland and the thin).

It was at one of those meals two days later that I heard one of my fellow residents talking about a caravan that had just passed through Ashalia. He was cursing it because it meant that he and the rest of the library staff would be spending the next week moving the new stock around as the library tried to figure out where it was going to put everything.

I’ll admit, I was rolling my eyes a bit at his complaining about dragging books around, but this was the first time I had heard him talk about his workplace, before this he had been pretty quiet. I commiserated with him about having to do manual labor and asked if given the increased workload if they might have any room for some extra staff, even on a part time basis.

Even if they didn’t, I figured it was a decent chance to get inside the library. I figured any collection of books as large as he was describing had to have some information that I might be able to use.

Chapter 6

The library where he worked was the public library for the city of Ashalia (technically, it was a government library), and it was in the center of the city, right across the street from the hall of public justice. My fellow roomer said the two were so close together because of the moribund nature of Ashalia’s legal system, a common law system that reached back at least three hundred years, if not longer. There were no bureaucrats or tyrants to decide the law like some cities, only the keenest of legal minds, whose job it was to sort through the mountains of case law to argue that their case had the oldest precedent or the strongest. The coins were even given the names historic legal thinkers. From what he said, it worked, but it sounded like one of the most sclerotic governments I’d ever heard of.

As he related to me his grand political thesis we passed through the front door, past a guard who would not have looked out of place in some of the seedier bars I had sunk into before. I mentioned this once we were out the bruiser’s earshot; kind of burly to be working the door, isn’t he? He told me that all of the non-librarian staff were built that way, the head librarian’s preference; thick-necked porters who did most of the heavy lifting and prevented any scum from trying to steal the library’s treasures.

As I absorbed this information I pointed away from him, at a shelf that was loaded with potential knowledge sources, I mean books, and asked him if it would matter if I looked around before deciding if I wanted to volunteer to join their merry band.

Only if you don’t try to walk away with a book, he said before he left me to my own devices, chuckling at his own line like he had made a particularly funny joke, leaving me to think he’d spent too many days lost in the stacks.

Left to my own devices, I tried to divine some rhyme or reason behind the library’s sorting system; as I looked at the shelves, I could tell they didn’t use any of the systems I’d been made to memorize.

I wandered for a while, stopping randomly and taking a book off the shelf to examine its contents, then inevitably re-shelving it as it proved to be another book that contained either laws, long-winded explanations of said laws, or transcriptions of court cases for the implementation of said laws.

I had just pulled down a volume titled On the Separations of Affection (It was a collection of divorce cases) when an old woman’s voice cut into my pattern, You can read that? I looked up, and saw a wrinkled white raisin walking towards me, leaning heavily on a cane. A porter was standing behind her, presumably in case she needed any books moved or me removed.

I took a look at the page, all those little glyphs standing for sounds, then up at the woman and nodded, Yeah, it’s a little archaic, but I understand most of it.

Amazing. I don’t think I’ve got more than three librarians who can decipher the books in this section. I looked around me, most of the titles of the books in this section were in the same language, with a slip of paper hanging from the spine with its title in the local language.

The woman watched me look, a proprietary air in her stance and I made a guess, Your librarians? I take it you’re in charge here.

The old woman smiled, showing a remarkable number of teeth, Library Chief Miriam, mister...?

There was a pleasantness in her voice that it was hard not to reflect back, Abe Chauser, amateur researcher and collector of strange tales.

And that pays well?

And I could start to see the direction this conversation was going. Not nearly as well, or as often as someone doing it might hope.

Then can I interest you in adding some translation work to help supplement your income? I believe there’s an extra desk assigned to the translation project.

Chapter 7

I needed the money, and it gave me an excuse to be in the library every day to look for something that might give me a chance to escape this strange world. And no, the fact that I might be stuck here forever never entered my mind; my father might set some hard tests for me, but he had never yet set me against an unsolvable problem. So I trusted in time and effort to bring me closer to an answer.

The one thing I had to contend with was how close to terminally boring the position was; week after week transcribing old legal texts so that the pleaders could have more obscure sources for their arguments in front of the barristers. At least it paid the bills and allowed me pretty much unfettered access to the library’s collections.

I had access to almost any texts I might desire as a member of the translation team, and I used that access to the oldest texts in the library’s collection. In those, I found a few fascinating things: the first, and smallest, was actual sets of laws that had long ago been handed down by some larger government. The significant discovery was that many of these old laws and case books dealt with trade between worlds. I started to focus on trade law from this era, having found the first hint that I needed to identify a possible route back towards the Endless City and the completion of my test.

In these books, most of the travel seemed to center on a series of gates that granted access to other worlds, though this nugget of information was hidden in a pile of endless minutia about the types of animals that one was allowed to trade through the gate or what kind of worked goods you were allowed to bring with you through the way-point.

And in none of these cases could I find even the first clue as to the potential location of any of these gates; all the cases, no matter where they were argued, seemed to skip any mention of the case having taken place in the right and proper city of Wherever-the-Hell. It was as I set down the fifth such book of trade law that I had mined for knowledge that I realized that it wasn’t just the locations of the cities that had been excised: all proper names, even any references to relevant landmarks seemed was missing from the records. In fact, when I finally found a proper noun, it was a