“One fire coming up,” Fitz said, and lifted his hand.
I caught his wrist. “Fitz,” I said. “What happens when there’s a fire in a closed room?”
He paused. “Smoke?”
“Air gets burned up, too,” I said. “And fire tends to be a little hard on buildings sometimes. Fire’s for outdoors and emergencies only.” I nodded up toward the ducting mounted on the walls and ceiling. “This place is ventilated for propellant fumes, so we probably wouldn’t run out of air. But that also means the fire has what it needs to spread to other fuel.”
Fitz frowned. “So what do I do?”
“You’ve read McCoy. What would he say?” I asked him.
Fitz screwed up his face, thinking. “Long, closed, narrow space. Not really a lot of air to work with. It’s dry, so water is out. I’ve got to use either earth or force.”
“Good,” I said. “Earth is a hell of a lot harder to use without years and years of practice. You’re going to start that, but I’ve been slinging evocation for a couple of decades and change now, and I don’t trust myself to use earth magic in a real fight yet.”
“So, force?” he asked hesitantly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Force is the least efficient way to translate your will into energy, but also the most flexible and it’s the easiest to control. You pick out your word yet?”
“Yeah,” he said.“Forza.”
I tilted my head and looked at him.
“I figure Italian kinda learned from Latin, only it’s not old as sh— as hell,” Fitz said. “Like me and you.”
“Hah,” I said. “Okay. But don’t just go around saying the word. Useit only when you use the spell, or you’ll wind up burning out things in your brain. Okay?”
“Right,” he said.
I nodded at him and stepped back.
Fitz closed his eyes for a few seconds and drew in his breath slowly. I didn’t press him to go faster. You don’t learn to shoot a gun as fast as you can when you start. You learn to make it go bang while pointing it in the right direction and not getting anyone killed when you do it.
It took him about ten seconds to draw the energy together, making the air around him crackle, and then he opened his eyes, his young face set in dark, intense focus. He held up his right hand, pointed his index finger at the cartoon ghoul, and snarled,“Forza!”
Magic lashed downrange in a wave and a cascade of sparks and small shrieking sounds like runaway fireworks. Fitz hadn’t been able to focus all the power he’d poured into the spell into pure directed force, and the inefficiency spilled out into other expressions of energy. By the time the invisible wave reached the target, it had dissipated severely. The plyboard plank rocked about half an inch off the floor and then wobbled back down. The cartoon ghoul grinned triumphantly.
Fitz gasped and fell to his hands and knees, his head down. He breathed hard for half a minute, then groaned and fell over onto his side.
I dropped to my heels beside him. “Actually, not that bad,” I said to him. “The first time I tried force, I threw myself into a chain-link fence. You could play tic-tac-toe on my back with markers for a week. You paid attention to your McCoy.”
Fitz nodded, bringing his breathing back under control. “Use as much force to stabilize yourself as you throw out.”
“Correct,” I said approvingly, rose, and offered him my hand. “We’ll try it again, but we’ll try to focus the energy better. This time don’t just point your finger. I want you to visualize poking that ghoul in the eye with it as you release the power.”
“Wait, I gotta add another layer to all of that?”
“Gets easier with practice,” I said. “You’ve got the mind for this. Use it.”
Fitz grimaced down the range, clenched his jaw, and took my hand, rising. “Okay. Why was that so hard? When I set that thing on fire the night of the battle, I just kept running.”
“Hell of a lot of power in the air that night,” I said. “Made everything easier. And you just threw your instincts into that one, all unconscious thought. You had to piece this one together.”
He frowned, panting. “So how come I don’t just do it all by instinct?”
“Good way to get killed,” I said. “Happens to a lot of untrained practitioners. Things happen when you get upset. Or don’t happen when you really need them to. It’s better to learn the process, so you have control over when something gets set on fire. That’s the whole reason Mort brought you to me. That’s the whole point of what we’ve been learning.”
Fitz frowned and chewed over that thought for a moment, and I let him. It was pretty important that he was on board with the concept. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Okay. But it gets easier?”
