Page 29 of Hexbound
Bishop set his knife and fork aside. "What do you know of sorcery?"
She shrugged. "If you want something bad enough, sometimes you can mentally force the world to adapt to your will."
"True enough. The mind is a powerful tool. The first time, it occurs when someone finds themselves in a situation where they want something so desperately that their mind forms... some sort of connection, and they force matter to rearrange itself around them. Usually it's something destructive and physical like burning down a house, or forcing floodwaters to part, which is what we call Telekinesis. But sometimes it's purely on the mental plane. Perhaps a girl's father beats her so often that she just wants him to stop, and so she forms a compulsion in his mind. He cannot hit her anymore. Or maybe there is a miner trapped underground and he wants his wife to find him, so he links to her, tells her where he is. This is Telepathy, and they are the two separate spheres of sorcery."
Fascination made her pause with her fork hovering. The most she knew of sorcery was curses and hexes, or tricks and strange talents. Everyone in the Hex had their own ability, perhaps a couple more, but that was usually it. "So... I'm Telekin...."
"Telekinetic," he replied, picking up his knife and fork again. "By natural inclination, yes, you are, but you could learn to control Telepathy if you apply yourself. I am Telekinetic by nature, but can do both. What was the first manipulation you formed?"
Verity shifted uneasily. "I translocated."
"Why?"
Of course he would pursue this. "I was twelve and coming home from my shift at the workhouse. We had to unpick ropes until our fingers bled, and our meals were small and infrequent. So... sometimes I would go home through the markets and steal food for Mercy and me. A bit of bread here and there. Maybe an apple." She stared into the distant past. "You don't know what it's like to be so hungry that you feel hollow all the way to your bones."
There was no condemnation in his expression, merely curiosity. "And?"
"One of the vendors caught me. He threatened to chop off my fingers or send me to Newgate, and I was so terrified that I just wanted to be home in my cot. Home, safe. And I don't know what happened, but when I came to... that's where I was. It sent me into a fever, and I shivered there for two days straight."
"It's a very rare talent, Verity. I'm not surprised." Bishop laced his hands over his middle. "I don't think you understand how truly difficult teleporting—or translocation, whatever you want to call it—is. The simple laws of physics that you break...."
Verity frowned. She had no idea what he was talking about and it rankled, because he was educated and she was not.
"I've only ever heard of it happening once, and Sir Edgar spent years studying the base knowledge of every cell in his body, of space, of time, of pure matter... and he was an eighth level sorcerer."
"Was?"
"Well," Bishop hesitated, "it didn't end well for him. He only made the jump twice, and then.... Nobody ever saw him again, but there were bits of him strewn through his house."
She pressed her fingertips to her lips. "Do you mind?"
"Sorry. You do it so easily that it must be your natural inclination."
"My what?"
"Our first impression always locks hold. Whatever we do first remains our natural inclination for the rest of our lives. Perhaps we learn other methods, but our strongest and easiest spell craft is what happened first."
That made sense.
"So after you did it once, how did you keep doing it? Sometimes people can never perform a sorcerous working ever again."
Picking up her fork, she chased a pair of peas across her plate. "The vendor worked for Murphy, and told him I'd vanished into thin air. Three days after it happened Murphy came looking for me. Offered me a place in the Crows if I worked for him. It was a good deal. Better than the workhouse, at any rate. I insisted that Mercy be included, and so we joined the Crows.
"He pushed me into... a sort of training. It took me a long time to be able to translocate again—I couldn't work out how to make that energy shift—but he locked me in a tank and started pouring water in. Said I needed to be desperate again. It was almost over my head before I managed to get out of there." Stabbing the peas, she popped them in her mouth, giving him a little shrug. "It became easier after that. Then he started giving me items, telling me to find where their owners were, or their matching pair. It was a trick he knew. He always had ways to make you desperate enough, and eventually I learned to pull it together myself at will. That's when he started me cracking houses. I've earned him a small fortune over the years."
"I'm sorry."
"For what?" She took a sip of the wine and swirled it around the bottom of the glass. "If he hadn't taught me I'd probably be dead by now. Or living in some hovel somewhere. Learning something new is the most valuable thing one can ever receive."
"Yes, but it seems a rather ruthless way of doing it." Bishop frowned.
"What was your natural inclination? Did you kill someone?"
That stopped the conversation in its tracks. "Yes," Bishop replied, and his tone was cool enough to make her consider other questions.
"Oh. I'm sorry." She searched for something else to say. "So what was your training like? You said you're a seventh level sorcerer, was it? How many levels are there?"
Bishop relaxed, telling her all about the Order. Verity could scarcely hide her amazement. The Order not only shared their knowledge, but could learn all different kinds of tricks, like divination, wards, pyrokinetics, necromancy, healing. To advance to a different level they had to sit tests and prove that they'd conquered the steps of each level.
