A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [18]
That first day, while Aderyn did his usual chores in the garden and hut, he kept thinking about the task ahead. He had at his disposal a vast amount of ritual lore—tables of correspondences, salutations to the gods, invocations and mighty calls to the spirit world, signs, sigils, and gestures to set in motion streams of force and direct inner energies. In his excitement, his first thought was to use them all, or at least as many as possible, to create a ritual that would sum up and climax all rituals, as elaborately decorated, braided, laced, and spiraled as a beautiful brooch fit to give a king. While he weeded cabbages, his mind raced this way and that, adding a symbol here, a prayer there, trying to fit twenty years of work into a single mighty pattern. All at once he saw the irony: here he was, grubbing in the dirt like a bondsman and making grandiose plans. He laughed aloud and contemplated his mud-stained fingers, callused with years of menial work such as this. The Great Ones had always accepted his humble status and lowly sacrifices before. No doubt a simple ritual would be best now. With the insight came a feeling of peace, because he’d passed the first test.
But just as with a simple meal or a simple garden, every element would have to be perfect of its kind and perfectly placed. The second day, Aderyn worked furiously all morning to finish his chores by noon. He ate a light meal, then went outside to sit under a willow tree by the shore of the lake, sparkling in the soft spring sun. On the far shore the stony, hard mountains rose dark against a blue sky. He looked at them and thought over his lore, rigorously pruning instead of proliferating it. A simple approach to a central symbol—he looked at the peaks and smiled to himself. For the rest of the day he practiced every word and gesture he would use, mixing up the order so no true power would run through them. In the evening, by firelight he prepared his magical weapons—the wand, cup, dagger, and pentacle that he had made and consecrated years before. He polished each one, then performed the simple rituals of consecration again to renew their power.
On the third day, he was quiet as he went through his work. His mind seemed as still as a deep-running river, only rarely disturbed by what most men would call a thought. Yet in his heart he renewed, over and over, the basic vows that open the secret of the dweomer: I want to know to help the world. He was remembering many things, sick children he’d helped heal, children who died because they were beyond the help of herbs, bent-back farmers who saw the best of their harvests taken by noble lords, the noble lords themselves, whose greed and power-lusts drove them like spurs and made them suffer, though they called the suffering glory. Someday, far in the future, at the end of the ages of ages, all this darkness would be transmuted into light. Until that end, he would fight the darkness where he found it. The first place he would always find darkness would be in his own soul. Until the light shone there, he could do little to help other souls. For the sake of that help, he begged for the light.
At sunset, he put his magical weapons in a plain cloth sack and set off for the shore of the lake. In the twilight, he made his place of working, not a rich temple glittering with golden signs and perfumed with incenses, but a stretch of grassy ground. He used the dagger to cut a circle deosil into the turf, then laid his cloth sack down for an altar in