I sometimes wonder about slaves back in the day. How does it happen a free woman’s taken and broken until she accepts servitude as a natural condition? If the true nature of woman is to yearn for freedom, then how come everywhere she’s in chains? Always seemed hypothetical, the kind of shit that went down in other places, other eras. Serfs. Indentured servants. Bondsmen. What makes one person bend at the waist before the other? Feel like I get it a bit better, lying here in the bottom bunk. The only currency more powerful than money in this world is the violence of man.
Willie’s in the bed next to me. Four nights in and he’s still not talking. Head under the covers, balled up all foetal. Gets suffocating in here without windows. It smells of old chemicals snagged into the paint. The walls weep around me. Forlorn wailing of destitution and despair. It’s so hopeless it threatens to break the spirit.
But I won’t break.
Never.
I’m gonna have to take this slimeball head-on. I might lose. But if it comes to that, I’m still gonna make sure I land the mortal blow. If I’m going down, this house is coming with me. Every single brick and layer of mortar. At least that way, no one else need ever go through this bullcrap.
In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option: I’m gonna have to magic the shit out of this. I take out my copy of Foundational Aspects of Scientific Magic from my bag. Slide under the duvet and turn on my torch. Been moving so much doing the tasks Wilson’s set me that my battery’s almost full. I could have the light on all night if I need to. I skip the introductory shit and go straight to the fire spell. Reckon I’ll burn this place to the ground. But I’ve gotta be able to create a spark first. Though I’m gonna need a bonfire after that.
During the Cold War, the Russians had a fully automated system called ‘dead hand’ set up. If the system sensed a nuclear attack on Russian soil, by seismic activity or radiation or some such, it would send a signal to their silos, unleashing a retaliatory volley of nukes at the Americans, even if the Russian leadership had been decimated. Mutually assured destruction was the doctrine of the age: if you take us out, we’ll make sure you’re coming straight to hell with us.
Let’s see what Montague and Chandrasekar have to say about all this. The upside of reading them is that, compared to Thomson, they’re more modern and easier to understand. They don’t use five sentences when one will do. And reading up on this will take enough time as it is. I get to it.
These two recommend different incantations depending on ‘mood’. Fire has many uses – to warm, to incinerate, to light, for work, and so on. So the idea seems to be that a softer incantation might be suitable for a fire whose purpose is to light a candle at a romantic dinner. Whereas one meant to arson the shit out of a house of horrors will need something heavy. I skip the soft shit because I need full-on pyrokinesis on an industrial arson scale here. I want any fire I start to be a MIRV intercontinental ballistic missile – targeting all the rooms at once, so there’s no chance of saving this place. I feel myself getting angry as I think about the house, but calm myself so I can focus.
So you got this thing called ‘yield’, the power a spell can produce, which Montague and Chandrasekar go on about for a bit. Seems once a practitioner masters the fire spell, they can control the rate of the burn and even the temperature too. There are limits, though, and these limits are governed by the energy available within the area covered by the spell. So if it’s a fire spell, we’re talking about the amount of wood available for burning, the amount of oxygen in the air et cetera. Roger that. This is shown by the Somerville equation. Gotta don my math goggles and get super scholarly here. I take in the equation on the page.
y = w(c + a – N)/t
y – Yield
w – Practitioner’s potential
c – Combustible material
a – Agitative threshold
N – Natural resistance
t – Time
Kind of a drag when your math is all letters and symbols and not even any numbers, but hey ho. These theory guys are like, this is one of the finest achievements in magical theory. Before this, incantations for fire were well known and their effects widely observed. But Somerville was the first to provide a mathematical proof, giving the logical backbone to these incantations. This made pyromagic predictable and quantifiable in ways it had not been before. Then in 1833 the American Rosenberg-Taylor backed up the equation, confirming it was accurate with experimental evidence.
I flip to the next page, see what’s there . . . Hmm. Looks kinda heavy, but I have no choice – if I want to use magic, I have to suck it up.
So nowadays, the Somerville equation is mainly used as a way of deriving w – or the practitioner’s magical potential – in magic schools around the world. New students are taught fire incantations, and then rigorously tested to find their personal ‘w’. This is the benchmark method of measuring a magician’s power. Before that, it was commonly assumed the chap with the longest, greyest beard in the room was the most powerful. Not really what I’m interested in now, though . . . I just need to get my fire going. Problem with this magic stuff is it’s not like in the films where the hero sees a couple of tricks – and before you know it they’re off casting spells. You actually have to understand what it is you’re doing before you can do it. I sigh and turn back to the page.
It seems Montague and Chandrasekar agree with Thomson that the basic spell has three parts to it, known as the AAA. The first ‘A’ is the Approach, according to Thomson. But Montague and Chandrasekar prefer to call this initial stage – the channelling of the practitioner’s will – ‘Supplication’.
The easiest Supplications, according to our two guys, have religious overtones. This is because religious practice encourages the type of mental state that is also necessary for magic . . . The ‘right state’ being where an individual’s will can somehow connect with the external universe in order to prompt a change. Lucky for me, you don’t need to be religious to do magic, it seems. But earlier ‘proto-scientific’ practitioners invariably had religious leanings.
So, the spell then flows seamlessly into the ‘Anchor’ part of its formula – the second ‘A’ of AAA. This is supposed to be a word or trigger image, something that the practitioner associates with what they want to do – i.e. the intended outcome of the spell. The trigger could be related directly to the outcome or, in the case of more poetic incantations, tangentially. For example, through use of metaphor or hidden meanings.
I pause for a moment to let that sink in.
Apparently hidden meanings were important for medieval practitioners. They worked in secret and didn’t want their spells falling into the hands of commoners, which was potentially dangerous. It wasn’t thought proper for ordinary folks to know this stuff back then . . . Though I don’t think it’s much different nowadays. The book says secrecy also safeguarded the practitioners by disguising their craft in poetry and song. This is why a lot of medieval spells sound like gibberish when compared to modern or post-Enlightenment spells. In those days, the more abstruse the incantation, the better it was thought to be . . . Well, that and the fact that the Scots they spoke back then’s a wee bit different from ours today.
When the ‘Anchor’ successfully encapsulates the intended outcome, the incantation moves into the ‘Accelerant’ stage of the spell. This is the final stage of that AAA mnemonic, and in some ways it’s the trickiest to follow at first. The Accelerant, as the name suggests, functions as a catalyst. It adds a boost to the spell, so the desired result happens faster. From there, I can easily map out for myself that if the spell works more quickly, its impact is greater. Or looking at that equation, if ‘t’ (or time spent) is a small number, the ‘y’ (yield or effect of the spell) over that short time is high. Okay, think I’m heading somewhere useful now. Though this stuff is dense.
Finally on that last A, the term ‘Accelerant’ is a reminder to the novice. It’s a nod to the fact that the spell speeds up something (though they call the something ‘an entropic shift’) that was going to happen anyway, given enough time.
There’s then an interesting digression, to me anyway, into the local peculiarities of N – the Natural Resistance of a given area to magic. It would have been way more interesting if I had more time for this stuff. N is in the equation because some places in the world are more receptive to magical practice than others. And, in those areas, it is easier for a practitioner to work a spell. These locations are often ritual sites where generations of practitioners have gathered to do magic, and certain naturally occurring locations qualify too. For example, areas where ley lines meet – or transdimensional zones. Maybe they’ll explain those later. I figure this house must be good for it then, since there’s already a Brounie in residence.
Conversely, it goes on to say, there are some rare spaces where only the most skilled practitioners can practise. That’s because this Natural Resistance is too high. If the N is too great, the spell simply doesn’t work – because that equation produces a negative magical yield. However, apparently some scholars claim something else is happening here. That negative Ns result in the spell merely taking place in a different dimension. They point to incidences of spontaneous combustion as an example. Seems these are not that spontaneous, but a case of luckless people being fried to a crisp by mistake – because practitioners are doing magic elsewhere, in a parallel universe.
Montague and Chandrasekar say that these claims, while fascinating, are impossible to prove. They are therefore set aside as interesting speculations, but not taken seriously by the mainstream scientific community. I chuckle to myself. Could I use ‘parallel-world magic use’ as an excuse, next time I burn the bacon in our cara?
I skim through the ‘Agitative Threshold’ malarkey. That’s ’cause it’s kinda similar to N, though a bit different, and I’m fine with N. The important thing now is that I’ve got that theoretical know-how pinned down. And I know a lot more about this shit than last time, when Priya tried to get me to do magical stuff in front of her.
I lie under the covers and memorize a spell these guys say is pretty damn powerful. I’m finally getting what they’re arguing. And – coupled with the learnings from Thomson’s book – I think I know what I’m doing. The spell’s not that long and the words are easy to recall. Once I’m done memorizing, I’m gonna be ready to rain down fire and brimstone on this place.
And I’ve got it. I’m now a certifiable, badass magician.