’ Mortirmir shrugged, as Baldesce had shrugged, but it was a different gesture altogether – Mortirmir’s shrug implied there was more to say rather than Baldesce’s indifference to the question. ‘Magister, I think you can manipulate the aethereal directly inside your own memory palace. If he didn’t give the answer, would they like him better? He met the magister’s eye – and hesitated. Mortirmir couldn’t render potentia into ops, but he head read every grimoire available and every scroll of philosophy, ethical or practical, that he could lay hands on.

‘Guesses do not interest me at this stage. Sister Katerina made a slight sound – more like a moan than anything.īaldesce was not the sort of boy – young man – to writhe. ‘Why can you not wield the hermetical power directly inside your own memory palace?’ ‘Let me restate the problem,’ Magister Abraham said in an increasingly dangerous tone. ‘Baldesce?’ he asked, his voice rising a half-octave in academic impatience. He was one of the kindest of the masters – until he felt he had been ignored. He was a Yahadut – the first Morgon had ever met. ‘Come, come, my children,’ Magister Abraham said.

Sixteen students in advanced hermetical thaumaturgy squirmed. Morgan shared his bench with three other students: two of the religious sisters from one of the great cities dozens of convents for women of noble blood, sisters Anna and Katerina, almost invisible in long brown gowns and wimples, and his sole near-friend, the Etruscan whose father was Podesta of the foreign merchants, Antonio Baldesce. The windows were mullioned and leaded and offered only the haziest glimpse of the outside world to the bored or frustrated mind. The benches had, carved in so deeply you had to wonder how the professors and tutors had missed the vandalism, the graffiti of a hundred generations of would-be magisters in ten languages and in Archaic itself. The classroom in which he sat was over a thousand years old it featured dark oak benches and solid desks that sat four students per bench. A s the Red Knight left the abode of the Wyrm of the Green Hills and rode south to the Inn of Dorling, Morgan Mortirmir, late of Harndon, sat in class in the Imperial capital of Liviapolis.

The fell sword miles cameron