Arrogan didn’t hold back. “As philosophers go, you’re about the most laughable, shortsighted, and naïve one that I could possibly imagine. That line of thinking was so simpleminded and imbecilic that it barely merits a response. The king wasn’t impressed; he was stupefied. You probably lowered his intelligence just reciting that line of half-baked bullshit within his hearing.”
“That wasn’t a counter argument,” observed Will. “It was just a string of ad hominems.”
“How’d you learn such a thing?”
“We studied logic last semester.”
“Huh. Next even pigs will learn to fly,” snipped the ring.
“You don’t have a decent rebuttal, do you?”
“Get over yourself while I’m being nice. I don’t want to crush your tiny ego. Plus, it won’t do me any favors trying to win the argument, because then you’d have to get rid of me.”
Will smiled. “I accept your surrender.”
That triggered a barrage of swearing so intense that it threatened to blister his ears, but Will merely laughed through it all. When Arrogan finally wound down and ran out of new insults, Will changed the topic to the issue of the day. “I need your help.”
“What else is new? Let me guess, you need me to tell you how to wipe your ass again?”
“I need a ritual spell powerful enough to destroy all the vampires in Cerria without killing the people or destroying property.”
“Oh, that’s easy.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. There isn’t one.”
That wasn’t an option, so Will persisted. “Can we make one?”
“So far as I know you’ve redesigned one spell. Don’t you think creating a strategic class ritual would be something of a reach?”
“Not for you.”
“Just because I was one of the best wizards to ever live doesn’t mean I can just pull something like that out of my ass. Besides, we’ve been over the reasons why I can’t teach you even simple spells already.”
“You could borrow my body and write it out, then we could switch and you could explain it to me,” argued Will.
“No.”
He was undeterred. “Why not?”
“First, I’m not sure I could resist the urge to keep your body if I had it a second time. Second, even if I did, creating such a ritual is no easy task. There were wizards who dedicated their lives to that sort of thing. It was never my forte.”
“I’d rather not ask Aislinn,” said Will.
“And you’d be wise not to,” agreed the ring. “Besides, while she’s probably better at it than I am, it still wasn’t her strongest point. Have you thought about talking to some of your teachers at the college?”
That caught him completely off-guard. He’d never heard the old man say a kind word about anything the school had to offer, much less the professors who taught there. “I only have a day. Do you really think one of them could help?”
“Maybe. They don’t have to be able to cast it, but some of them might have studied the theory that goes into it. You just need to know how to push them in the right direction, assuming you can find someone that isn’t an idiot.”
He rubbed his hands together, beginning to feel slightly less hopeless. Professor Dulaney might be able to help, or maybe even Master Courtney. “So what do I need to know?”
“I’ll go over the basics. First, there are three major considerations for any ritual: desired effect, control, and power required. The desired effect and the circumstances that the ritual will be used under have a lot of impact on the other two.”
“What sort of circumstances?”
“Where, when, geography, active resistance, that sort of thing,” said Arrogan. “Control is achieved via one of two principal ways, people and ritual design. Power is—”
Will interrupted, “Wait, explain control first.”
“Rituals create large effects and utilize a lot of power, so finding ways to control that power, to properly channel it, is a major concern in ritual magic, much more so than in ordinary spellcasting. The ritual you stopped last year, for example, was controlled with a large, elaborate, and well-designed circle. The entire chamber, from the sacrificial altar to the control runes built around the ring, was all carefully orchestrated and thoughtfully planned; otherwise a single human could not have enacted that ritual.
“But rituals don’t have to be controlled by well-designed circles. They can also be controlled by using extra manpower, auxiliary casters whose purpose is to help control and channel the energies being brought together. Rituals can also incorporate a mixture of both, so you can design it to match the resources you have. With a surplus of time and money, designing a circle is no problem, whereas if you have a shortage of those, additional helpers can reduce the need for a complex or expensive design.”
Will nodded. “That makes sense.”
“On to power. There’s lots of ways to power a ritual, but the two main ones are ley lines and people. Generally speaking, ley lines provide vastly more power, but that often creates more problems than it solves. Usually you don’t need that much, and in order to keep the effect at the scale you want, you have to overbuild your control parameters to keep the ritual from overloading. People are nice because you can add or remove participants depending on how much turyn you need. The trouble there often comes when you need more power than the people you have on hand can provide, in which case many desperate individuals resort to sacrifice, since killing one of your sources can more than double the turyn they provide.
“So, to make a long story short, if you’re using people to power your ritual you generally don’t need nearly as much effort put into control, because the power matches the ritual more closely and because the people providing that power can also assist with control functions. Understand?”
“I think so,” answered Will. “At least I know how to present the problem. I need a ritual that can destroy every vampire within the confines of the city, without hurting innocents. There’s a ley line in the city, and I know its location, so I could probably…”
“Not going to work,” interjected Arrogan.
“Why not?”
“You told me you sealed it off, right?”
“Mmhmm.”
“So, nothing has changed since you were last there. You have one day. You’d need to reopen it, get a crew of workmen down there and rip up the old circle, then lay down the new one that you just so happened to design while tearing out the old one.”