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Chapter 24: Conjuring

  Jayde woke just before dawn. In a month she had advanced greatly since becoming a novice conjurer in the order.

  She could hear Marl snoring down the hall, as she quickly went through her morning routine. She slid down the long pole which landed her near the front of the clinic. Marie waited for her as she landed.

  “Up early again, aren’t we?” Marie said.

  “It’s the only way I can get time in the practice rooms. The older conjurers kick me out during the day, so I usually end up training by myself,” said Jayde.

  Jayde wolfed down a plate of eggs and juice. She had been training for four weeks. Yow Li had called her a prodigy, but she still had so much to learn. She woke up each day excited to learn more.

  Jayde sent out a thought to Fang, who bounded down the stairs. During breakfast Jayde would dress and conjure Fang in new and interesting ways. One morning she had changed her fur to black, and had changed her size and coloring to make her look just like a panther. Fang and Jayde had developed a sense of communication. They could tell what the other thought, and both enjoyed a bit of mischief.

  Jayde told Fang to hide behind one of the curtains in a patient’s room, while Jayde went to tell Cameron that a sick patient was there. Jayde waited till the split second when Cameron opened the curtain and told Fang to jump. Even for a vampire it was quite a shock to see a jet-black jungle cat pouncing out of nowhere.

  “Jaaaayde!” he yelled.

  The black panther instantly changed into an adorable gray kitten and purred as it rubbed its tiny face against Cameron. Then it was Cameron’s turn to disappear. He reappeared directly behind Jayde.

  “Jayde,” he said, his voice quite dark, “how much blood do you have?”

  “Um, I dunno. A lot?” said Jayde, a quiver in her voice.

  “Would you like to keep it that way?” he asked.

  That was the last time Jayde and Fang snuck up on Cameron.

  Jayde ran to the Order Hall with Fang at her heels. The cat received strange looks on the walk there, mainly because it was a purple-and-green cat with a full pink mane and an extraordinarily long tail with a poof of fur at the end, but Grandeur was a strange city.

  Jayde walked into the hall and smiled at the familiar sights. Despite the early hour many creatures worked throughout the Great Hall. Beasts of all shapes and sizes attended to the chores to keep the Great Hall in order. A flying bird-ferret swept out the embers from yesterday’s fire. A creature that looked like a purple pumpkin with five legs walked back and forth across the floor; wherever it walked, the floor became clean. An enormous brown praying mantis with huge hands stood behind the bar cleaning glasses.

  Jayde now knew that all these creatures had been conjured and came from the imaginations of the order members. The conjured creatures had differing levels of intelligence, personality, and attributes. All of them seemed to be permanent members of the Order Hall.

  “G’morning, Norris,” said Jayde to the mantis.

  “Salutations, Jayde. Here early again to train? Chocolate milk?” asked the mantis from the bar.

  “That’d be great. Thanks, Norris,” said Jayde.

  “Yow indicated he would like to see you this morning,” said the mantis, sliding a frosty glass down the bar, where it came to a halt precisely in front of Jayde.

  “Line up!” came a yell from the balcony.

  All the creatures stopped what they were doing and went to the middle of the room. They stood in a straight line. Jayde was confused but followed them, joining them in one of the lines.

  Yow Li made his way down the stairs, smiling briefly at Jayde as he approached the line of creatures.

  He walked in front of each of the creatures and then slowly ambled around the spotless hall. He mentioned an area here or there that did not have as much sparkle as the rest of the hall before he dismissed them. The creatures slowly dispersed. Most went out the front door into the streets; a few others went upstairs or into the labyrinth of the Order Hall. A couple remained to tend to their duties. Norris returned to the bar.

  “So how are your Conjurings coming?” Yow asked, sitting in a cushy chair in front of the now cheery fire burning in the fireplace.

  “Pretty good, I guess. I mean, every day I try to conjure Fang in different ways that I have never done before. You know, like you told me to,” said Jayde.

  “Good, good,” said Yow.

  “And it’s kinda cool too. I mean, Fang and I know what the other is thinking. And I’ve been delivering now for a month, though they don’t give me any deliveries anywhere near the Thieves’ District, nor near the East Side—not that I’m complaining about that,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “And I have been getting up early every day so that I have time to come here and use one of the rooms to practice.”

  “Indeed you have. Very good, Jayde. You really have shown remarkable interest in Conjuring, despite what we’ve thrown at you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, even though I saw the raw Talent within you, I still had to treat you the same as I treat every novice in the order, though it pained me to do so. Every new member to the order normally starts with a month of service to prove they are truly dedicated to their new calling. Not only that but they must also prove their loyalty. Most novices know this ahead of time and accept the first month as a sort of hazing ritual that must be lived through. You, on the other hand, took a multitude of deliveries, harder and harder work schedules, and less and less personal time, yet you did so willingly, so that you could become a better conjurer,” Yow said with a grin.

  “Oh, that’s good then, right?” she said.

  Yow Li laughed. “Indeed, that is quite good.”

  “So then why won’t anyone teach me new stuff?” she asked.

  Yow sighed. “To be honest, Jayde, many of the conjurers here are intimidated by you.”

  “Intimidated by me? But I don’t know anything! I’ve seen all their cool tricks, and, every time I ask them to show me, they find some excuse to go somewhere else. I mean, I can conjure a few things, but the only thing I really seem to be able to do is change Fang. I can’t create new things except in the practice room. I can’t make something appear out of nothing. The only one here who ever talks with me is Norris, but he keeps saying, ‘Not till you pass your novice test.’”

  “Well, consider the test passed. As for your complaint about Fang, I must confess that I limited your Conjuring. You have too much raw power for you to try anything too advanced without guidance. So, when you came here the first time, I limited your abilities by using Fang,” he said.

  “What? You limited me? What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Now don’t be angry. I did this to protect you. You have an incredible ability to conjure. But, without training, you could hurt or even kill yourself or others quite easily. That is why I am training you myself,” he finished.

  Jayde tried to take it all in. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “But I still don’t think I get it! I mean, it’s cool to be able to change Fang into any color cat I want. But what’s the point? I still don’t think I get what a conjurer does. As far as I can tell, not even the good ones can do magic spells at all. The best I ever did was changing Fang to look like a panther which scared Cameron and—”

  “Very good, Jayde. Completely wrong but very good,” said Mr. Li.

  “Uh, what?”

  “Well, your insight is brilliant. You have shown remarkable patience for one of your age, so I suppose you deserve some straight answers.”

  “Finally!” she said, sitting down on a chair with her empty glass, all the chocolate milk gone.

  “To understand Conjuring, we must define it,” he began. “In the simplest terms it means to create. Conjurers are limited only by their imaginations, which can make them the most powerful of all the orders.”

  “Everyone I talk to says that wizards are the most powerful, then maybe enchanters or witches, but most just laugh when I tell them I am a conjurer,” said Jayde.

  “It’s all situational. A water elementalist can manipulate all the properties of water. They can turn it into ice crystals and shoot shards of ice at you. They could make a cloud come down from the sky or create fog out of a nearby stream. Yet they would not be able to give you a drink of water in the desert. They have to have the water in order to manipulate it. A conjurer though …” He waved his hand. A small popping noise sounded near her, and she saw that her glass was refilled with cold chocolate milk again.

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  “Whoa! So why don’t you just make giant piles of gold and be rich?” she asked.

  “Cut right to the chase, don’t you? First of all that would disrupt the entire global economy,” he said.

  Jayde shrugged. “I could live with that.”

  “And then there’s the second part of Conjuring. Whenever you conjure, you must use your will. I slightly misspoke when I said we can create from nothing. We create from our wills and various components. In order to make that milk, I had to partition a small part of myself in order to create it. Most conjurers, when they start out, only have enough will to manipulate a very small object. Also the quality and weight of the object take substantially more will. This is the reason most conjurers use substrates. If I wanted to create a gold coin, that would take a remarkable amount of effort and use a large amount of my will. But if I wanted to make a clay bowl, and I already had a large handful of dirt, it would take much less will to make the bowl. For your milk, I just replaced the milk that was in there with some of the milk from the bar. I changed milk into milk, so it really did not take much will at all,” he said.

  “I think this is what Marie was explaining to me earlier,” said Jayde. “I told her it sounded like everyone has an icicle inside them, and, in order to do any Conjuring, you have to chip off a piece of the icicle. The icicle will grow back, but it grows back slowly. Also, if you used too much of your icicle, there won’t be enough ice left for it to grow back, and the whole thing stops working.”

  “A decent-enough analogy, though, in your case, it seems to be a bit different. Most people have quite small icicles of will. It takes every bit of the icicle to do any Conjuring at all. Most become good at Conjuring one or two things, and then they are done until they recover.”

  “What do you mean, recover?”

  “Conjuring takes incredible power of will and mind. It also drains one’s physical stamina. Conjuring large complex objects will mentally and physically exhaust the conjurer. Recovery times vary, depending on the complexity of what is conjured. You can think of it like running ten leagues, only you do it all in a fraction of a second. After doing so, the body demands time to recover,” he said.

  “Makes sense, I guess. Can you ever unmake something?”

  “Like this,” he said, pointing again to her glass.

  Jayde watched, as she heard a strange sucking noise, and the chocolate milk vanished.

  “Whoa! Where’d it go?”

  “It was composed mainly of my will, so much of it went back to me. Granted some of the energy is lost in the transfer,” he said.

  “Wait. What would have happened if I had drank that, and then you sucked it all back again?” she asked.

  “That depends. If you drank it quickly, it would have disappeared from your stomach. You would have gone from feeling full to an empty stomach in an instant. If I had waited an hour, the milk would have been absorbed and distributed through your whole body. I would not have been able to distinguish the Conjuring from you, so I would not have been able to undo it. Granted, undoing Conjuring is an advanced skill. When most people conjure, whatever they create usually remains permanent.”

  “Stop showing off and show her,” said the giant mantis behind the bar.

  “Yes, yes, you are right, Norris,” said Yow. He got up and slowly made his way to one of the training rooms with Jayde following.

  “Like I was saying, Jayde, most people only have an ice cube of latent Conjuring Talent in them. For you it is more like a glacier,” he said.

  “What’s a glacier?”

  “Oh, well, bad example. Most people have only a tiny little flame, whereas you are a brewing volcano,” he said with a smile.

  “What’s a volcano?” asked Jayde.

  “Jayde, your pool of will is enormous. Your potential is incredible. Not only that but your ability to regenerate is the best I have seen since Franky,” he said.

  “Who’s Franky? One of the regulars around here?” Jayde asked.

  Yow’s face became serious. “No, Franky was the Elite Grand Master Conjurer who taught me.”

  “That’s quite a title.”

  “Indeed. I’d guess only a few thousand people in the world can conjure at a master level. Of them, only a hundred could do so as a Grand Master. I only know of perhaps three people who could be Elite Grand Masters, my master being one of them,” he said.

  “Really? They are that rare? Who’re the other ones?” she asked.

  “Me and you,” he said.

  Jayde laughed. “Thanks, Mr. Li, but I haven’t been able to conjure anything more than changing Fang’s stripes,” she said. The cat mewed in response to her name and then changed her stripes.

  “Come with me,” he said. He led her to a room similar to the one they had practiced in a month earlier. It was empty, but Jayde could sense something unique.

  “You can feel it now, can’t you? You might not have been able to put your finger on it the first time you were in here, but now you can feel the energy. You can feel the room helping you conjure. The other practice rooms don’t have the enchantments like this one does. This room allows you to create without sapping your reserves. However, whenever you leave this room, whatever you conjure will disappear as well.”

  “Wait, what about Fang?” Jayde asked.

  “I conjured her up before we even came into the Order Hall, remember?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Now, Jayde, I want you to imagine a bumbleberry pie,” said Yow.

  “Sure.” Jayde closed her eyes. She then opened one eye to look back at Yow. “What’s a bumbleberry pie?”

  “What? What kind of little girl doesn’t …” said Yow. “Haven’t you looked in any of the boxes that you have been delivering?”

  “No. I was told just to take them right to their location,” Jayde answered. Then she grinned.

  “Oh, you little thief, I almost fell for it,” Yow said.

  “Yeah, I just happened to ‘accidentally’ lose a pie from time to time. They’re really good. I see why everyone keeps ordering them,” Jayde said.

  “I want you to picture that in your mind. Keep your eyes closed. Imagine the pie. See it clearly in your mind. You can smell the aroma wafting up, see the berry goodness, and touch the smooth, delicious, crispy crust. Keep picturing it, Jayde. Keep that picture in your mind. Now very slowly I’ll release the lock that I put on you with Fang. This will feel a bit odd, but just keep the picture in mind, and don’t open your eyes.”

  Jayde could feel the block inside her releasing. It felt as if her whole body had been numb and only now was the blood rushing back through her.

  “Hmm. Quite interesting. I wasn’t the only one who put restrictions on your power. Oh, well, let’s see what you can really do,” said Yow.

  She concentrated on the picture in her mind. The unnumbing sensation continued to gush through her. She could almost smell the pie, but again it became difficult to think with the tingling sensation all over her body. Slowly the tingling went away.

  Pop!

  “Open your eyes, Jayde,” said Yow.

  She did. The mass in front of her looked like the mangled insides of an exploded pumpkin. Stringy, lumpy dough looked floppy and uncooked on one side of the crust. The other side looked like a fried cheese-covered pinecone. It smelled like burned fruit. Mr. Li’s grin lit up his entire face.

  “I knew you were good, but, until I saw it for myself, I just wasn’t sure. Well done!” he said, laughing.

  “What do you mean? I made a burned-up slime pile. Maybe, if you cut out the part right in the middle, where the cold side meets the hot, it might be edible. I don’t know,” she said, but Yow was actually laughing. “Are you making fun of me?”

  “Not at all, my dear. Oh, my, no. Jayde, you just passed the second test, and you have not even broken a sweat. Oh, how to explain? Where to start? You don’t even realize how hard it is to do what you just did. You had bread dough and sauce, and let me see.” He looked at the mess on the ground. “Blueberries and sugar and cinnamon and also icing on top. Not only that but you added temperature to cook it all and had a specific shape in mind as well. Having never conjured before, you managed not only to get all the ingredients but you also combined them and associated them all together! You did it just from my description. Without components you did it, with only your will!”

  “I imagined a pie, Mr. Li. That’s all,” she said.

  “No, you completely envisioned a complex completed project. You did it as your first actual Conjuring. In three centuries—well, actually, I have never had anyone have such a Conjuring for their first attempt. I have seen people try but never like this. The other part I neglected to tell you is that bumbleberries don’t really exist. Well, they do, and they don’t. They can be conjured, but there are no bumbleberry bushes or trees. They exist only in the mind of a conjurer. Yet you seem to have no difficulty creating them for your pie,” he said, plucking one from the ground. He continued to grin.

  “Well, what do people normally start with?” she asked.

  Yow held out his hand. Jayde heard a small pop, and a round gray stone appeared in his hand. It had a swirl of white through it and seemed polished to perfection.

  “Usually I have a person concentrate with something in their hands, and they conjure a replica.”

  He tossed the rock to Jayde. Jayde stared at the rock and concentrated. She could feel the tingling sensation just under the surface and released the energy.

  Pop!

  An identical rock appeared next to the other one and fell to the ground. Mr. Li picked it up and examined it with a grin.

  “Well done again. Most novices actually do not begin with this rock,” he said. “Most start with a tiny pebble, though you had no trouble.”

  “Well, it’s easy to copy someone else’s work,” said Jayde.

  “Oh, really? Would you like something more challenging?”

  “Bring it on, old man! Uh, sorry, Master Li,” she said. He laughed.

  “Try this then,” he said, followed by a pop.

  He conjured objects of all shapes and sizes from the magic sand in the room. He made intricate wooden boats inside bottles. He made glass sculptures, ice sculptures, a lute, as well as a wall of stone.

  Jayde copied each object perfectly.

  He made ladders—some of stone, some of wood, some made out of string—all of which Jayde replicated. He made a wide array of weapons and clothing. After two hours both panted with exhaustion. Yow concentrated and conjured a tall glass of water; Jayde did the same. He then conjured a simple chair, which Jayde copied. They both then sat down and had a drink.

  “That’s an impressive start. Remember, though, that Conjuring outside this room will sap your energy, and this sand works as the perfect component to make anything. Thus, Conjuring here is much easier. Also do not try to conjure anything living,” he said.

  “Living? Like Fang?” she asked.

  “Indeed. Don’t worry. We will get there in time, but a living animal is much more complicated than a pie. I have seen dreadful creatures that do nothing but exist in agonizing pain. Whenever you create a familiar, which is what conjured creatures are called, you share a bond. If you create such a creature without honed skill, their pain will become yours. I do not recommend you attempt anything living until you are able to unconjure what you have made, and that takes many years of training,” he said.

  Jayde looked disappointed.

  “Promise me this, Jayde. Take it slowly. I know this is all new and exciting to you, and you have more potential than anyone I have seen in my entire life. This also means you have more potential to hurt or even kill. Outside this room, for now, the most complicated thing I want you to attempt is a pie. One pie. Do not try to do more than that in a day. Please trust me on this. Until you can make one good enough to eat, don’t conjure anything other than what we have made outside this room. If you feel the need to work on your imagination, you can continue practicing on Fang. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  They sat in their chairs, recovering from a busy morning of Conjuring. Jayde broke out into a laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Yow asked.

  “I’ll be able to make anything, won’t I? Anything I want?” she asked.

  “With time you will only be limited by your imagination. For you, that seems to be hardly a limitation.”

  He looked around the room for the cat. The room now had objects of varied shapes and sizes strewn all over the place. In their busy morning of Conjuring, the cat had been forgotten. Jayde called out for her, and a tiny meow came from under a pile of conjured torches. The kitten had wormed her way under the assorted chaos and had been spending her time licking the middle portion of the pie Jayde had created.

  “You have to make a pie good enough for me to eat, not her. Why don’t you take a break with Mr. Norris outside for a little bit. We can continue training in about an hour.”

  Jayde walked from the room. As soon as she crossed the threshold, half the objects in the room vanished. Fang hissed as the pie she had been eating vanished in front of her. Yow walked over to the tiny cat and picked her up, talking to her as he walked out the door.

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