It tormented him each and every day, was there no loyalty forged between Masters that the old one would bother returning in the flesh to ratify the truth for his successor, or to mentor or explain things, was there no real gratis in these exalted men?
What kind of mentality, then, would he have when he became one of them?
Or, so much worse, what would happen to his soul, – to his whole being – WHEN HE MESHED WITH THE MASTER?
He didn’t even know how it would be done. Ominously, it surely must entail a losing of one’s own life in some way in the process!
These thoughts now filled his mind. There seemed no last mote of goodness to be found anywhere in the Academy to cling to. So, could he trust what big sacrifice the Master would want from him?
He endlessly reviewed it all according to the yardstick of his old human standards: nothing in their majicks was toward helping those few kindly sellers in the market who used to give him leftover bread or a drink of clean spring-water or shelter from storms, nothing to save the crude-talking beggar families who’d nevertheless seen to his fevers and taught him all they could, even risking their own necks to shield him sometimes, – and didn’t those people have the same need of escaping death or going through it safely? Without reaching a ‘high level of existence’ or knowing the ‘right’ majicks, they wouldn’t stand a chance of escaping the worst! Majic was always for overruling others, for seeing to oneself. And what of his own mother, his dad, his grandmother? They’d been by-passed by all that was supposedly on offer to these expert men of majic!
Hamar wasn’t fooled. But he also wasn’t sure of anything. He was neither bloodthirsty, nor obsessed about himself and his own ascending, instead only by his one hope of freedom to taste again the beautiful world of normal men. In odd moments he felt he’d even trade all his powers just to walk there like a peasant. How he craved it now! He watched the adepts’ work hard toward the big death day, trying to outrun their very Self before it was too late, and so, he saw they were clearly as scared for their Self as anyone else. No! Scale-pan Schools were just plain wrong. And the witchcraft schools hellish. But there was no escape he could see!
Ready or not he was going to have to go beyond any of them, his royal killing task on the Master worse than any other kind. The day of The Tryst grew nearer.
Relentlessly, the questions sped up. A savage act, or a mystic performance he’d have to really believe in for the Grand power to work? Which of the two of them on that day, each one a Master Majician, would have to do the great sacrifice involved?
“And what if, at the last second, either one of us resists the killing?” He imagined a battle against the colossal powers of the Master. “Even if it all goes well and it turns out the Master just eases himself out of his own body by himself, what sort of attacks come then? From things neither of us know?”
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