The Rossem Project

The Saboteur - Part 1

     Thomas and Lirenna held hands tightly as they watched their son being strapped into the testing chair.

     An attendant, a young man with sandy brown hair, wrapped a strip of soft cloth around the boy's wrist to protect it from the hard leather strap that would hold it in place on the arm of the large, solid looking wooden chair. Having done one wrist he then did the other, and then he knelt down to strap his ankles against the chair's legs, adjusting the hem of the boy's long, white robes so that they hid his bare feet before rising. The agony of the test sometimes made prospective wizards soil themselves, so Derrin wore nothing under the robe, which was split up the back like a hospital gown. Its billowing floor length hem, together with a shallow depression in the floor under the chair, were designed to protect the applicant from shame and embarrassment.

     Derrin flattened his palms against the arms of the chair and tried to slide his hands out from under the straps. Thomas saw the muscles under his robes tensing and bunching as he gave several experimental tugs, but he succeeded only in sliding his hands back and forth by half an inch, the straps sliding with them so that he was held as securely as ever. Finally the boy gave up and made an effort to appear casual and relaxed, as if he could get up and walk away any time he chose, which, of course, he could. He only had to say the word and he would be released. He could take the test another time. Derrin remained silent, but his chest rose and fell with his rapid, frightened breathing and his eyes flitted nervously around the room, jumping from one person to the next and lingering longest on his parents, standing close in front of him.

     "It'll all be over in a couple of minutes," promised Lirenna, bending over with her hands on his shoulders to kiss him on the forehead. She let her lips linger there for a time, letting him feel the depth of her love for him and smelling the fragrance of his hair. Then she pulled back to look at him and brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

     "I want to be a wizard." replied the boy. "If I've got to do this to be a wizard, then I'll do it."

     Thomas’s chest swelled with pride and a lump rose in his throat. He took one of his son's hands and squeezed it. "It'll soon be over," he promised, stroking the boy's fingers, "and then you'll never have to do anything like this ever again. Not ever!"

     Derrin grinned nervously and Thomas squeezed his hand harder, hating how impossible it was to raise it from the arm of the chair. He remembered his own test, so many years before. He remembered the agony of it. That his son should have to share that agony was hateful to him, but he knew the wisdom of it. If Derrin lacked the potential to be a wizard, better to find out now rather than after he'd gone through years of hard and potentially dangerous training. That way, he could be given the much safer, but still superb, education that the University gave the non-wizard children of its wizards.

     Jamus Banacus, the elderly wizard who would be performing the actual test, allowed the anxious parents a minute or two with their child before moving in with the headpiece, a hemisphere of metal straps with a padding of soft leather to which the attendant had added several layers of soft cloth so that it fitted the young boy's head. Thomas and Lirenna moved aside to make way for him as he gently fitted the buckle under Derrin's chin and gave it a couple of gentle tugs to make sure it would stay in place during the convulsions of the agony.

     "The headpiece contains about ten times as much magic as is required for an average low level spell," he said conversationally as he made small adjustments to the padding. "You and I routinely absorb several times as much magic force into our bodies every day with no discomfort at all. Almost without even knowing we're doing it, but for his young body, unaccustomed to the experience, it will be very painful. We'll give him sixty seconds to expel the magic from his body, to prove he has the latent ability to manipulate and control it. If he hasn't managed to do it in that time, the headpiece will withdraw it by itself, ending his ordeal, but of course that would mean that he can never become a wizard."