Read Online Past Tense (Schooled in Magic Book 10) by Christopher Nuttall - Free Book Online

Emily hedged. Shadye had certainly believed he could take direct control of the nexus point, but he’d been halfway to being an eldritch abomination at that point. “I think it wouldn’t have worked.”
    “Trying to channel that much power would have been fatal, surely,” Master Wolfe said. “Do you think that was why he died?”
    Emily shrugged. She had no idea what would have happened if Shadye had tapped the nexus point, but she didn’t want to find out the hard way. If necromancy could drive a person mad, she hated to imagine what tapping a nexus point could do. Perhaps it would simply have shattered his mind beyond repair ... or, perhaps, it would have turned him into a dark god. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.
    “There are supposed to be rituals for transferring power,” Master Wolfe mused. “But they don’t always work.”
    He looked down at the parchment for a long moment. “The spellwork would have to be more than merely adaptable,” he said. “It would have to be a living mind. But how to make it work? How to make it survive?”
    “Tell it to survive,” Emily said.
    Master Wolfe looked up at her. “What do you mean?”
    “You’ll be setting the conditions when you create the living mind,” Emily said. “You can just tell it that it can handle the power. It won’t be smart enough to realize it should be dead.”
    “I shall have to meditate on that,” Master Wolfe said, slowly.
    He reached for a slate and started to scribble down notes. “Taking control of the nexus point was risky enough,” he added. “But if we have so much power at our disposal, making it do anything—without worrying about spell structures—would be quite possible.”
    Emily watched as he worked, unsure if she’d said too much or too little. There were too many gaps in her knowledge, both of the school’s history and of the ancient piece of spellwork, for her to be sure. Master Wolfe seemed to have taken her ideas and run with them, but who knew how far he could go? How much did they know?
    “I wish your tutor had left you some notes,” Master Wolfe said, grimly. “Did he have anything written down?”
    “Not as far as I know,” Emily said. It was true enough. “All I have is my memory.”
    Master Wolfe muttered several unpleasant-sounding words under his breath as he returned to scribbling. Emily didn’t blame him for being frustrated, not if new tricks and techniques were discovered, lost, and then rediscovered time and time again, rather than allowing later researchers to build on the early discoveries. Even in her time, the Sorcerer’s Rule had made it harder for research notes and details to propagate through the Nameless World. A sorcerer could not be forced to share his work ...
    ... And even though it had worked in her favor, she knew it was a problem.
    It will be worse here , she thought, numbly. If history was to be believed, Lord Whitehall had been the first person to set up an actual magic school. The unattached apprentices are lacking even the basics of magical education .
    She cleared her throat. “Do you share what you know of spellwork?”
    “Far too many magicians are not interested in my work,” Master Wolfe said, flatly. “I have offered, regularly, to teach them, but they do not care.”
    Emily blinked in surprise. Spellwork—understanding spellwork—was the key to everything from transfiguration to subtle magic and wardcrafting. She’d thought Master Wolfe’s spell notation was primitive ... perhaps it was primitive. Perhaps she was looking at the very early stages of what would become charms ...
    “I care,” she said. “My tutor cared.”
    Master Wolfe looked up. “Master Myrddin? Myrddin the Sane? No one knows what happened to him after Lord Whitehall was released from his apprenticeship.”
    Emily shook her head, surprised. Myrddin ... Myrddin was an old name for Merlin, a very old name. A coincidence? Or, perhaps, a hint that she wasn’t the first person from Earth to walk