Magician's Gambit

Actually it's very simple, but simple things are always the hardest to explain."
    "That doesn't make any sense," Garion retorted, a bit irritably.
    "Oh?" Wolf looked at him with amusement. "Let me ask you a simple question, then. What's two and two?"
    "Four," Garion replied promptly.
    "Why?"
    Garion floundered for a moment. "It just is," he answered lamely.
    "But why?"
    "There isn't any why to it. It just is."
    "There's a why to everything, Garion."
    "All right, why is two and two four then?"
    "I don't know," Wolf admitted. "I thought maybe you might." They passed a dead snag standing twisted and starkly white against the deep blue sky.
    "Are we getting anywhere?" Garion asked, even more confused now.
    "Actually, I think we've come a very long way," Wolf replied. "Precisely what was it you wanted to know?"
    Garion put it as directly as he knew how. "What is sorcery?"
    "I told you that once already. The Will and the Word."
    "That doesn't really mean anything, you know."
    "All right, try it this way. Sorcery is doing things with your mind instead of your hands. Most people don't use it because at first it's much easier to do things the other way."
    Garion frowned. "It doesn't seem hard."
    "That's because the things you've been doing have come out of impulse. You've never sat down and thought your way through something - you just do it."
    "Isn't it easier that way? What I mean is, why not just do it and not think about it?"
    "Because spontaneous sorcery is just third-rate magic - completely uncontrolled. Anything can happen if you simply turn the power of your mind loose. It has no morality of its own. The good or the bad of it comes out of you, not out of the sorcery."
    "You mean that when I burned Asharak, it was me and not the sorcery?" Garion asked, feeling a bit sick at the thought.
    Mister Wolf nodded gravely. "It might help if you remember that you were also the one who gave life to the colt. The two things sort of balance out."
    Garion glanced back over his shoulder at the colt, who was frisking along behind him like a puppy. "What you're saying is that it can be either good or bad."
    "No," Wolf corrected. "By itself it has nothing to do with good or bad. And it won't help you in any way to make up your mind how to use it. You can do anything you want to with it - almost anything, that is. You can bite the tops off all the mountains or stick the trees in the ground upside down or turn all the clouds green, if you feel like it. What you have to decide is whether you should do something, not whether you can do it."
    "You said almost anything," Garion noted quickly.
    "I'm getting to that," Wolf said. He looked thoughtfully at a lowflying cloud - an ordinary-looking old man in a rusty tunic and gray hood looking at the sky. "There's one thing that's absolutely forbidden. You can never destroy anything - not ever."
    Garion was baffled by that. "I destroyed Asharak, didn't I?"
    "No. You killed him. There's a difference. You set fire to him, and he burned to death. To destroy something is to try to uncreate it. That's what's forbidden."
    "What would happen if I did try?"
    "Your power would turn inward on you, and you'd be obliterated in an instant."
    Garion blinked and then suddenly went cold at the thought of how close he had come to crossing that forbidden line in his encounter with Asharak. "How do I tell the difference?" he asked in a hushed voice. "I mean, how do I go about explaining that I only meant to kill somebody and not destroy him?"
    "It's not a good area for experimentation," Wolf told him. "If you really want to kill somebody, stick your sword in him. Hopefully you won't have occasion to do that sort of thing too often."
    They stopped at a small brook trickling out of some mossy stones to allow their horses to drink.
    "You see, Garion," Wolf explained, "the ultimate purpose of the universe is to create things. It will not permit you to come along behind it uncreating all the things it went to so much trouble to create in the first place. When you kill somebody, all you've really done is alter him a bit. You've changed him from being alive to being dead. He's still there. To uncreate him, you have to will him out of existence entirely. When you feel yourself on the verge of telling something to 'vanish' or 'go away' or 'be not,' you're getting very close to the point of self destruction. That's the main reason we have to keep our emotions under control all the time."
    "I didn't know that," Garion