Sourcery

grinned, and snapped his fingers. A lighted cigar appeared in his mouth.
    “Haven’t been able to do that in years,” he mused. “Big changes, my boy. They haven’t realized it yet, but it’s the end of Orders and Levels. That was just a—rationing system. We don’t need them anymore. Where is the boy?”
    “Still asleep—” Spelter began.
    “I am here,” said Coin.
    He stood in the archway leading to the senior wizard’s quarters, holding the octiron staff that was half again as tall as he was. Little veins of yellow fire coruscated across its matt black surface, which was so dark that it looked like a slit in the world.
    Spelter felt the golden eyes bore through him, as if his innermost thoughts were being scrolled across the back of his skull.
    “Ah,” he said, in a voice that he believed was jolly and avuncular but in fact sounded like a strangled death rattle. After a start like that his contribution could only get worse, and it did. “I see you’re, um, up,” he said.
    “My dear boy,” said Carding.
    Coin gave him a long, freezing stare.
    “I saw you last night,” he said. “Are you puissant?”
    “Only mildly,” said Carding, hurriedly recalling the boy’s tendency to treat wizardry as a terminal game of conkers. “But not so puissant as you, I’m sure.”
    “I am to be made Archchancellor, as is my destiny?”
    “Oh, absolutely,” said Carding. “No doubt about it. May I have a look at your staff? Such an interesting design—”
    He reached out a pudgy hand.
    It was a shocking breach of etiquette in any case; no wizard should even think of touching another’s staff without his express permission. But there are people who can’t quite believe that children are fully human, and think that the operation of normal good manners doesn’t apply to them.
    Carding’s fingers curled around the black staff.
    There was a noise that Spelter felt rather than heard, and Carding bounced across the gallery and struck the opposite wall with a sound like a sack of lard hitting a pavement.
    “Don’t do that,” said Coin. He turned and looked through Spelter, who had gone pale, and added: “Help him up. He is probably not badly hurt.”
    The bursar scuttled hurriedly across the floor and bent over Carding, who was breathing heavily and had gone an odd color. He patted the wizard’s hand until Carding opened one eye.
    “Did you see what happened?” he whispered.
    “I’m not sure. Um. What did happen?” hissed Spelter.
    “It bit me.”
    “The next time you touch the staff,” said Coin, matter-of-factly, “you will die. Do you understand?”
    Carding raised his head gently, in case bits of it fell off.
    “Absolutely,” he said.
    “And now I would like to see the University,” the boy continued. “I have heard a great deal about it…”
    Spelter helped Carding to his unsteady feet and supported him as they trotted obediently after the boy.
    “Don’t touch his staff,” muttered Carding.
    “I’ll remember, um, not to,” said Spelter firmly. “What did it feel like?”
    “Have you ever been bitten by a viper?”
    “No.”
    “In that case you’ll understand exactly what it felt like.”
    “Hmmm?”
    “It wasn’t like a snake bite at all.”
    They hurried after the determined figure as Coin marched down the stairs and through the ravished doorway of the Great Hall.
    Spelter dodged in front, anxious to make a good impression.
    “This is the Great Hall,” he said. Coin turned his golden gaze toward him, and the wizard felt his mouth dry up. “It’s called that because it’s a hall, d’you see. And big.”
    He swallowed. “It’s a big hall,” he said, fighting to stop the last of his coherence being burned away by the searchlight of that stare. “A great big hall, which is why it’s called—”
    “Who are those people?” said Coin. He pointed with his staff. The assembled wizards, who had turned to watch him enter, backed out of the way as though the staff was a flamethrower.
    Spelter followed the sourcerer’s stare. Coin was pointing to the portraits and statues of former Archchancellors, which decorated the walls. Full-bearded and point-hatted, clutching ornamental scrolls or holding mysterious symbolic bits of astrological equipment, they stared down with ferocious self-importance or, possibly, chronic constipation.
    “From these walls,” said Carding, “two hundred supreme mages look down upon you.”
    “I don’t care for them,” said Coin, and