The Knowledge That Remained

The next morning Hisnil left the tower early.

"I'll be eating and sleeping at the infirmary for a while, so make yourself at home, Artila. No need to brew any new medicine. Look around to your heart's content and enjoy yourself. Touch whatever you like. Anything that shouldn't be handled is locked in the vault anyway."

"All right. Take care."

"See you later."

He shouldered a heap of luggage and went. He was stronger than he looked, carrying a load bigger than himself as if it weighed nothing.

Left alone, Artila wound her hair up and set out to explore the tower. Until now she had only gone back and forth between Hisnil's workshop and the dining room, so this was the first time she had truly looked the place over.

The tower was large and labyrinthine; simply walking it took a long while. From a window at the very top she could see, clear as day, the houses packed tight inside the castle walls.

"Oh."

The castle, just tipping into autumn, was extraordinarily beautiful. The plain beyond, trampled into wasteland through the last war, was still scorched black and painful to look at, yet the mountains and forests that ringed it were lovely all the same.

After she had looked her fill, Artila came down and examined the rest. Every spare corner of the tower was stacked with books. They were not entirely chaotic, sorted roughly into magic, geography, history, chemistry, physics, farming manuals, astronomy, and the like. There was not a single novel or book of poetry. The section where Hisnil usually planted himself was crammed with grimoires and geographical texts. In one small, tidy room, instructional magic books had been piled in a rough sequence from the basics through the intermediate level. A bed and furniture stood ready as well; it looked like a space prepared for an assistant or a disciple, should one ever appear.

Artila picked up a volume and opened it. A primer on magic.

"Let's see."

No novels, no poetry. This would have to do.

A few days later Hisnil drifted in from the infirmary, limp as a wet rag. Artila, reading in that room, started at the sight of him.

"......You've worked yourself half to death."

He had lost a startling amount of weight, and his face was ashen. The smell of disinfectant and medicine rose off him in waves.

"I'm not made of steel like Zeldia. Overwork makes me tired. Have you been in here the whole time?"

"Yes. Mostly. There are so many books."

"Cleaner than when I use it, even. Hmm. But, Artila."

Hisnil checked the titles of the books she had read and stacked beside her, then asked,

"Are you reading quickly, or just flipping through?"

"I read quickly what can be read quickly, and I take my time with what needs it. The ones I opened and set aside weren't much use to me. I couldn't make sense of them."

"So the basic magic texts and the elementary applied ones are the sort you can get through fast?"

"Yes. I finished them right away."

Artila nodded.

"How?"

"If you do it like this, mana gathers."

She moved her fingers. The air around them rippled like the surface of water. She drew them together, calculated the mana with a simple formula, and completed the spell. A ball of fire formed at her fingertip.

"This is the simplest ignition formula."

She flicked it with the next finger. A hole opened in the center of the fireball; it stretched into a large ring, spun round and round, and vanished.

"And this is an application of the formula."

Hisnil's mouth pinched shut. His eyes went perfectly round.

"That's all. Relax your face. I don't have anything more shocking."

"Have you studied magic before?"

"If I have, I don't remember. Only, as always, the knowledge itself didn't vanish...... I think reading the books called my memory back. The way looking at your ledgers brought arithmetic back to me."

"And you did all of this in a day?"

"Hardly. It took three days to succeed the first time."

It had taken Hisnil a month, and that had been the record. There was no reason Artila should be better than he was, which meant she clearly had experience.

"In between, I also studied how to look after pigs and chickens. This library has quite a few farming manuals. I would have liked a novel or a book of poems, but there weren't any, so whenever I had time I read those instead. Breeds of pig, which pigs do well in which regions, how to care for each kind, how to make preserved meat suited to the climate......"

Hisnil waved a hand.

"Stop. I have no interest in that. Let's talk about magic."

"There's nothing more to say. Show me proper magic, Hisnil. Anyone can have mana, and with effort anyone can pick up a spell. But to become a true mage, you need the talent to master real mana and real technique. If I want to know whether what I learned was a light trick taught to someone with a little mana, or true magic, I think I have to watch the process you use."

"The fact that you know that theory is itself proof you were formally taught magic."

"Why?"

"It's the first thing new students hear when they enter the Magic Tower. 'Anyone can use mana. Becoming a mage is an entirely different matter. Don't imagine that the skill to burn a single thread will make you a mage. You become a mage only when, after burning the thread, you figure out for yourself how to burn the forest.'"

Anyone can throw a punch, but warriors and knights are another matter; anyone can learn letters, but scholars are another matter still. People who pick up one or two simple spells are not rare, yet not all of them become mages. It is the difference between those for whom that is the beginning and those for whom it is the end.

"First, watch."

Hisnil raised a hand and made a simple fireball. It looked finer and more solid than the one Artila had produced. She studied it carefully, then made one in exactly the same way.

Hisnil was certain. This was not something learned a moment ago. It was the instinctive fluency of someone long trained. It could not be self-study. She had a teacher.

"Artila, I think you really were a mage. That would explain how you lost only your memory, without being brainwashed."

"How does it explain it?"

"You cast a memory-destruction spell on yourself. Even without your memories, you have an innate gift that lets you sense danger, so you could flee safely. By the time you reached Commander Ilesin, the memories would have been completely destroyed."

"If that's what happened......"

Artila hesitated, then said,

"Could the memories come back?"

"I don't know. I can't tell whether they were covered over or destroyed outright. Even so......"

Hisnil smiled wide.

"I can't say what grade of mage you were, Artila. But if you can do this much just from watching, then at the very least you're a mage who finished the fundamentals. It won't be so much learning as reviewing what you already mastered, so I think you'll recover at least half your old skill, however far that skill went."

"Then will there be work I can do?"

"Closer to work you already know how to do. Whether it's useful, whether it's needed — that's a question for later. In the meantime, don't expect too much. Don't strain yourself, either. Let's start by finding out what you can do. If you can't remember who your teacher was, consider becoming my disciple. Whoever taught you, they couldn't have been better than me."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because I'm the best!"

Artila was mildly offended.

"Don't disciples usually start as children?"

"That only applies to certified craftsmen and performing artists. Plenty of mages start late. There's even a sage-class mage who began at forty. So you, Artila, are not late at all!"

And Hisnil handed her the basic magic text.

"First, a solid foundation."

"A mage?"

The moment Pamila carried out the ledger Ilesin had finished signing, Hisnil blurted it.

"She's a mage!"

"Who."

"......Miss Artila."

Ilesin lifted one eyebrow and waited for the rest.

"Miss Artila is a mage."

"What kind of mage."

"I don't know yet. If she met an examiner from the Magic Tower, it might be measurable, but as you know, ever since the Tower was blown apart ten years ago it still can't produce officially certified mages. I was the last...... Given Miss Artila's age, she wouldn't be a mage who studied at the Tower."

Ilesin was freshly reminded of a fact he was always forgetting: Hisnil was a full six years older than he was. The man's competence at daily life was that of a ten-year-old, and both his prospects for improvement and his will to improve were those of a ninety-year-old, but he was, in any case, an adult past thirty and in his prime. Hard to believe, and yet his reputation stood high. It was a reputation built alongside Ilesin's; the two of them had climbed at nearly the same steep angle.

"What do you make of her."

"Her mana isn't particularly strong. A little more than an ordinary person's. That's why I couldn't tell at first. But a mage's quality depends less on the total amount of mana than on the ability to handle it, so it doesn't matter much."

"It's also true that if your mana is low, you can't rise past a certain level."

"Which is why she was probably a battle mage. In that post, control matters more than the mana itself. If anything, having less mana is an advantage. People like that handle it more delicately. But then a bad hypothesis becomes possible."

"What."

"That Artila might have been a collaborator of the demons. More and more mages have been learning magic from demons — because the Magic Tower fell, of course. She might have destroyed her own memory on purpose when the fight turned against her."