Salo groans. “Please don’t say that.”
“I don’t need to.” She points a playful finger at the talisman curled around his left wrist. “What you’ve hidden in that little snake of yours says it all.”
He sits back, frowning. “Are you blackmailing me?”
The smile Nimara was wearing congeals on her face and then dies. “I’m asking for your help. You can always say no.” She begins to gather her things, but Salo motions for her to stop.
“Wait.” He subtly tilts his head toward the oldest cabinet in the workroom, where he keeps a particular soapstone carving hidden. “I had help, too, you know. You could have the same help if you wanted it.”
Nimara settles back down but gives him a cynical look. “You’re joking, right? That thing almost killed you. I was there. You were a mess.”
“It’s the best teacher you could ever ask for,” he says, but she shakes her head.
“Absolutely not. I know my method is slow—”
“Too slow. This clan needs a mystic yesterday.”
“—but I’ll build my Axiom the conventional way. If it takes me years, fine. When I finally earn my shards, it’ll be because I got there the right way. Not because I took shortcuts.” Salo sees a crack in Nimara’s composure, something vulnerable in her eyes. “I don’t want to mess this up, all right? Everyone’s counting on me.”
He has never been good at saying no to people he likes, and Nimara is one of the few people in his life he can call a true friend. She has certainly kept his secrets, some of which could have gotten him banished many times over. There was also that incident with the Carving when she found him writhing on the floor and saved him from choking on his own vomit.
He pushes up his spectacles and sighs, clasping his hands together on the table. “For your information, not all shortcuts are bad. But fine. Show me what the problem is, and I’ll help if I can.”
She doesn’t need further prompting. Following her silent command, the red steel spider on the table releases a stream of brilliant light from the clear crystal set onto its back, producing a mirage in the air above it.
Nimara gives the image an exasperated glare. “That’s the thing. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I thought I was ready for the next stage, but what am I supposed to do with this? It would take me hours just to summon enough energy to mend basic flesh wounds. Don’t get me started on internal injuries and viral infections. What good would I be? I can’t use this, Salo. I need your help.”
Salo takes a look at the mirage, a monochromatic graph of golden light. He knows that the displayed curves are a measure of how effectively Nimara’s cosmic shards will perform given the Axiom she has built for them. Should she proceed to awaken, her shards will behave according to this Axiom, and in general, the better the Axiom, the more finesse she will be able to employ in her spell casting.
Based on the luminous graph in front of him, Salo understands why she’s so upset.
“Let’s see your prose,” he says, and she performs a slight gesture, summoning a different mirage from the spider talisman. This time the vision appears as a projected scroll of green and blue ciphers drawn in neat rows as if on a perfectly transparent window. Flicking his finger sends the ciphers rushing up the scroll. Each row describes an arcane instruction—just one of thousands that collectively make up the prose of an Axiom.
Nimara has explained her steps in the margins, so it’s easy for him to follow her reasoning. Her prose is enviably succinct and elegant, keeping simple what could have easily become bloated and dauntingly complex. A cursory inspection tells him she’s focusing solely on the disciplines of Blood and Earth craft, a typical combination for an aspiring healer.
Altogether, it would have been an acceptably effective Axiom, were it not for a few major flaws.
“I would definitely hold off on awakening if I were you,” Salo says. “This would be a criminal underuse of your shards.”
Nimara gives him the look of a predator about to pounce. “Explain yourself.”
Shifting on his stool to face her, he says, “The thing is, you’re ignoring one vital quality of cosmic shards: they are absolute beasts at multitasking. Literally nothing does it better. But this Axiom of yours would have your shards execute every operation in series, one step at a time, in chronological order—a terribly slow and wasteful way of doing things.”
Nimara exhales through her nostrils, clearly frustrated. “What am I missing?”
A pity he can’t be detailed in any explanation, since that would only render her Axiom nonviable and likely get her killed during her awakening. That’s the first rule of Red magic: the moon does not suffer aspirants who did not devise their Axioms entirely by themselves. He can discuss the broad strokes of her Axiom’s architecture with her, but never specific details of her prose. Those are for her and her alone to figure out.
How to explain? “Let’s think this through, shall we?” he says. “So casting a spell, any spell, is a multistep process. Correct?”
She frowns like she’s thinking it over. “I guess.”
“First, your shards assimilate the moon’s raw essence from the environment; then they convert this essence into any of the six arcane energies—in your case, just two, which, by the way, I don’t know why you’ve limited yourself to two when you could easily do at least three if you tried—”
“Stay on topic,” Nimara cuts in. “We’ve discussed this. Two disciplines are all I need. They’re giving me enough trouble as it is. I don’t think I could handle more.”
“I disagree completely, but anyway. My point is, the shards take in raw essence, convert it into useful arcane energy according to the rules of your Axiom, then allocate this energy to a particular spell or spells. A process that must be carried out sequentially, one step at a time. Correct?”
“Correct,” Nimara agrees.
“Wrong,” Salo says, and he has to fight against a crooked smile. He’d never admit it to her, but he enjoys it when they discuss the intricacies of the arcane art. “Shards don’t experience time and causality as a linear unidirectional flow, like we do. You can actually have them perform all parts of a multistep process simultaneously by assigning each step to a different operating block. That way, there’s virtually no wait between assimilating essence, converting it, and casting spells. They are all performed at the same time.”
She begins to drum her fingers on the table, frowning at him in thought. “Huh.”
“This is especially useful for multidisciplinary spells,” he explains, “where you need to handle multiple forms of arcane energy at the same time. You could even turn the process on its head if you need to. Say it’s an emergency, and you need more energy for a spell than your shards can draw. Well, with nonlinear causality you can borrow this energy from the future, a bit like harvesting grain you haven’t planted yet. Amazing, isn’t it?”
“Borrow from the future?” Nimara studies the ciphers of her Axiom for a bit, then tilts her head toward him with a dubious look. “Is that how most people do it? Because I feel like I’d know if it was.”
“It’s not,” Salo admits. “But to be fair, writing prose for parallel and nonlinear operations isn’t exactly easy. Most people just do everything sequentially, relying on clever tricks and tweaks to eke out more efficiency where they can. Use enough of them, and eventually you get something passable. Lucky for us, however”—he beams at Nimara—“you are not most people, so you won’t be doing that.”