The next day when Mark knocked on the door of the wizard he got a rather abrupt “What are you doing here?”.

“You told me to come back when I’d learnt all the stuff you told me about.”

The wizard gave Mark a look which was more than somewhat credulous. “You’ll have to demonstrate what you’ve learnt.”

Mark followed him to the rear of the building and soon demonstrated that he had indeed learnt the basic skills that he had been told about. After each demonstration the wizard gave him another look, which Mark couldn’t quite read.

“Yes. You have demonstrated that you have indeed learned those skills. You didn’t know any of them before?”

“No. All I had learnt was how to make a fireball, how to make ice and how to make something grow. All of the stuff you taught me yesterday was new.”

“Well you’re an incredibly quick learner. Most beginner wizards take much longer to learn that stuff. You said you can make ice?”

Mark nodded.

“Well in that case you can start working with weather. It only uses basic wizarding skills but it is the subtleties that make it a slow learning process. What do you know about how weather works?

Mark started by going through the rain cycle that everybody learns at school and then talked about air pressure and how that determined what sort of weather was likely.

“What causes wind?”

“Eating too many beans! Sorry cheap joke. Air moving from a high pressure area to a low pressure area as it tries to equalise.”

“And what brings about high or low pressure in the first place?”

“Well since you asked about ice, I’m going to say that temperature is the key.”

“And you would be quite correct. In particular if you heat or cool a large enough amount of air you get a pressure change. There are two problems for a mage. Firstly no mage has enough power to warm or chill enough air. It requires a huge amount of mana. Secondly, if you just heat or cool a nearby space you can’t feel the effects. It doesn’t happen at the centre of the event. If you’ve ever been in a storm and it has suddenly all calmed down before starting up again it’s because you were at the centre of the storm.”

“However, what you can do as a wizard is make and then move areas of heat and cold. The movement is key. You can already move fire so you should be able to make a few different weather effects if you find the right way to move things around. Now go and experiment and don’t come back before you can demonstrate a few different weather types.”

>>

Mark was torn about whether to immediately go and practice or whether to meet up with the others and find out what they had been doing over the past day. It was still early and his practice place from the day before took him past their inn so he entered and found Jo and Mike breaking their fast. Mark hadn’t seen them for a couple of days and so enquired politely about what they had been doing.

“What have you two been up to, if you’ve left the room?”

“Well funny you should ask, as we’ve barely been in the room for the last couple of days.” Mike replied. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

Mike looked around the room first to ensure that there was nobody else listening in on their conversation.

“So two evenings ago we wanted to have a quiet stroll around town. See what sights the place had to offer. We planned to keep to the lit streets and keep away from the rougher areas of town but it wasn’t long before Jo noticed we were being followed. Firstly it was a young lad who didn’t quite fit in with the area and then it switched to an older girl and then to a man about our age. However each time they swapped we noticed because we’d already noticed the follower and the new person was given a small signal by the previous person. Nothing truly overt but when you are looking for something and using shop windows, casual glances around etc it’s easy to keep track of someone who isn’t really aware that you’ve noticed them.

Eventually Jo whispered to me that she’d had enough of being followed and asked whether we wanted to confront the follower or just lose them? I’m not into running away and so I said confront. So we ducked into an unlit side alley and Jo hid in the shadows near the entrance whilst I continued down it a bit. When our follower had walked past Jo I turned round and headed towards them and the man tried to run away. Jo tripped him up with an unseen foot and I quickly dragged him further down the alley. I put my hand over his mouth to stop him screaming but the little so and so tried to bite me so I had to hit him a bit to stop him. Maybe I hit him a little too hard as he lost consciousness for a little bit and we were able to get him out of the alley and into an empty building that Jo found nearby. It had been locked up but Jo here has a way with locks and it didn’t stay locked.

When the guy woke up, we asked him why he was following us and at first he tried to deny it. When we told him that we knew that we had been followed by two others and we’d noticed the switch overs and that none of his friends were around or new where he was he stopped lying. Instead he told us that it was my sword that was causing the attention.” Mike indicated the sword that he had retrieved from the cave where they had camped. The sheath decorated in subtle designs was nowhere as elaborate as the blade inside.

“Turns out that there are a group of people who are connected to our follower and they were interested in the sword. The sensible thing to do would have been to tell someone in authority but Jo and I aren’t sensible so we talked the man into taking us back to his group so we could find out what the fuss was about.”

“So eventually he leads us down into the more disreputable part of town and to a building where there are quite a few young to middling children. Nobody was older than us and whilst I got the feeling that the people there weren’t averse to a bit of theft, none of them came across as being vicious thugs. We entered and were taken to an older woman who was in charge. She looked at the sheath and asked where I had got it. When we explained there was what I could only explain as a large collective cry out and the people there all looked extremely upset.

It was explained to us that the place was an orphanage and that the sword and sheath had belonged to someone who had been a benefactor of the place for several years before he went missing about five years ago. Whilst everyone there had worried about him, nobody knew anything and they had all secretly hoped that he would return. The orphans who were now old enough to get jobs of their own or acquire money in other ways had been keeping the place going but it needed a fresh injection of money for it to survive and prosper. So Jo and I have been seeing what we can do to help and yesterday we spent the day cleaning and painting rooms. We still don’t know who the person who owned the sword actually was but we know that he was only a visitor to this town and generally had quite a lot of money. He wasn’t a noble from round here as none of them have gone missing. It’s a bit of a mystery.”

Mark listened to the tale that Mike told and wondered if there was anything he could do to help, other than lend a hand. It didn’t seem like any of the magic he had learned so far was useful and they had an obligation to move on and find the person they were told to find when they first arrived. Maybe different magic could help and he wanted to learn more anyway. He decided that he would spend the rest of the day practicing and see how much progress he could make.

>>

When Mark turned up at the wizards’ house the next morning he was greeted by a completely unbelieving look. “You’ve learnt how to do a range of weather spells?”

“Well I worked out how to make it misty by cooling the air, and depending on how wet the air was I can sometimes make it rain or snow over a small area. I can produce winds of various strengths and by moving hot and cold areas around I can produce a tornado. I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to have learned as thunderstorms probably require skills with electricity and I don’t know how to do that yet.”

“Come to the back yard and show me.” The wizard said with an exasperated tone. “You do know that most people don’t learn at your speed, don’t you?”

“Oh, how long should it have taken me to learn weather magic?”

“About a year!”

“That seems slow, it’s just manipulating the force I already know.”

“Well most people don’t understand the force you are manipulating as well as you do, nor can they manipulate it easily. We are talking town wizards here. All we are expected to do is burn out dangerous beasts and stinging insect nests and make ice for preserving food and posh parties. If you’re lucky a town wizard can grow food quickly as well. You need to get to a wizard academy to truly do the big magic but that costs a fortune and the nearest is in the capital city Harlum.”

“So do you have something more that I can learn?”

“I can help a bit with growing stuff and I have a couple of text books that my master left for me that might help but you really need to move onwards and get a city wizard’s help.”

“I’m grateful for anything you can do.”

“Here. Take this book and read it. I’ll need 10 gold deposit.”

Mark dug out the gold and took what turned out to be a fairly slim book. “I’ll be back when I understand it.” He told the wizard. “So I’ll see you tomorrow then.” The wizard replied wryly.