Chapter 18

Ignimancy is an awful first magic. Too many esoteric concepts that don’t relate to anything a budding mage might understand from everyday life.

Foundational magicks are pretty straightforward. Everyone knows that water is wet, fire is hot, the wind blows, and rocks are heavy. So long as three of your five primary senses work well enough that you can sense the world around you, you can muddle your way through.

Ignimancy has no easy to intuit points of entry. Most folk can’t use “stochiometric” in a sentence, much less define it in any meaningful way.

Once you have the fundamentals, and maybe an advanced branch of magic or two under your belt, it’s a lot easier. The hardest part for most folk is understanding the inherent subtlety of the craft. Big, expressive evocations that take a lot of energy to work are exhausting, but you can easily understand and visualize the end result. It’s a lot harder when you’re trying to visualize changing tiny, imperceptible motes of matter. As an art, it’s closer to alchemy than pyromancy.

Luckily, Kaze had a frame of reference from the most unlikely place: knives.

“So this one,” she said, pointing to the knife stabbed upright into the solid freaking granite, “is the core. And this one orbits around it at a fixed level.”

A second knife was whirling around it at ankle height.

“Aye. And what happens when you add energy to the one orbiting?”

“The orbit widens.”

I took a cautious step back, fearing for my shins. Pesden paid the whirling blade no mind, even as it risked shearing through his trouser legs.

“And it gets more unstable. Let’s say you get it close to another core while it’s in a high energy state. It might jump from one to the other, or if you add enough energy, it might fly off entirely. Nature abhors instability. It wants to drop back down to a lower energy state. What happens then?”

The knife tightened its orbit.

“I had to bleed off some to get it back close. I’m assuming that’s what happens?”

“Aye. Energy can’t be created or destroyed. It can only change forms. When you think about it, mana is just a form of energy that will can manipulate via force of will. Some places have less and some have more, but the sum total never changes.”

“I see. So when the orbiting particle drops down an energy level, the excess is released as something else.”

“Light, mostly. That’s the flash you see when something goes bang.”

“So powder is just a conglomeration of unstable particles that want to drop down to a more stable configuration. They’re practically begging for something to come and disturb them so they can break down.”

“Heh. You figured that out quick. Took the boy months to wrap his head around it.”

She gave me a smug grin. I let her have her moment. Sure, she was starting with a formal education that I never had. That didn’t make her any less impressive.

“So, what we’re doing is helping the reaction along, ensuring that all the particles get to drop down rather than just a handful. That produces fewer byproducts, at the expense of more heat, because we can’t get something for nothing. The heat is useful, but too much can cause problems.”

“Which is why no one ever bothers with repeaters. The basic principle has been understood for centuries,” the old man said. “It’s all just ramps, levers, and springs, when you get right down to it. You can even tap off some of the combustion gas to power the system if you really want. Heat’s the real problem. Flintlocks give enchantments time to bleed off the excess heat. That’s why your receiver is brass rather than steel. It’s a more efficient conductor, both of heat and mana. Gives the enchantments more metaphysical surface area to work with. Flintlocks don’t have that problem.”

“And you don’t have to muck about with touch sensitive explosives,” I added. “Fulminated mercury? Really? That shit’s toxic to humans.”

“That’s why I switched to lead-styphnate for the lass’s cartridges, you dolt.”

“Lead is still toxic.”

“Bitch bitch bitch. It’s always something with you,” he grumbled. “Don’t huff the smoke and wash your hands after cleaning. Can I get back to the lesson, or do you need your nappy changed?”

“Boys, please,” Kaze said. “You can snipe at each other later.”

The old man glowered at me, but got on with the lesson.

“The point I was trying to make, before I was so rudely interrupted, is that all of ignimancy can be summed up as helping compounds be the best versions of themselves. With gunpowder, that means a cleaner burn. If all you take away from me is learning how to use a musket properly, that still puts you well ahead of the curve. Muskets beat bows in every meaningful way except speed, and the repeater fixes that. The true heart of the art lies elsewhere, though. Gunpowder is the least energetic compound we can use to achieve our goals.”

“I’m familiar with blasting powder and flash powder. Garan showed me.”

“Aye, those are common enough. Gunpowder isn’t a proper explosive. It just burns really fast, and it makes a lot of pressure when confined. Blasting powder, now that’s a proper high explosive. It burns fast enough to create a high pressure shockwave. Flash powder gives you a lot of heat and light, but only a moderate amount of pressure. You can tweak it either direction, depending on your needs. Both are common because they’re stable and easy to manipulate. If you really want to leave a mark, you need to think bigger.”

“How much bigger?”

“What’s the relation between matter and energy?”

“The total potential energy of a particle is equal to its mass times the speed of light, squared.”

I tried not to let my surprise show. It was decades before he taught me that equation.

“A fun fact to know, with little in the way of practical application,” he said. “There’s enough energy in one of your knives to blow this mountain clean off the map, but you’ll never get the particles it's made of to release it all at once. There are only a handful of substances that can tap into that potential, and they’re all hideously toxic. You’ll get sick and die a horrible death if you stand near them in their concentrated form for too long. All of them, save one.”

Kaze stared at him, horror dawning slowly as she realized what he was hinting at.

“Crystallized mana,” she breathed.

“Aye, lass. I didn’t invent keystones to anchor ley lines. I was trying to build a better bomb.”