DIRK-3
Recording P-003.2 [Transcriber’s Note: Most pauses, mis-speaks, mispronunciations, and occurrences of “uh,” “um,” and “you know” have been edited out.]
Dirk: So, starting where we left off yesterday, say what you will about the Leopards, they seem to do a good job.
Rowan: I didn’t say anything about them. Did I?
Dirk: It’s an expression. For when you don’t trust somebody, or maybe think ill of somebody in some way…
Rowan: Or think they’re bad?
Dirk: Yes, or think they’re bad, and yet they haven’t necessarily done anything bad that you can put a finger on, or maybe they do good things, too, which mitigates the bad.
Rowan: So the Leopards are bad guys?
Dirk: [Laughs] No, no, they’re good guys; but they are sort of the authority, you know.
Rowan: And, the authority is bad?
Dirk: Yes, usually. Well, not all bad, all the time; but almost always at least part bad.
Rowan: Half-bad?
Dirk: Yeah, more or less. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it usually is. And actually, some people mistrust the Leopards because they’re not supposed to be the authority. They’re just supposed to step in and solve conflicts when they’re asked to by other Houses, and patrol the borders and so forth—the stuff we went over last time—but in practice, and increasingly so as the years have gone by, they take a more proactive approach.
Rowan: Oh. [Nods, seeming to consider something]
Dirk: That being said, Krallum’s great. Krallum Kallum. He’s a Leopard warrior who grew up down the river a ways, at House of Whale. He was friends with Vonnae and Jayenne and my brother Ralgo, who was a great wizard, I think I’ve told you, or would have been. Krallum’s one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, and in fact all of them, Leopards, always treat civilians with the utmost courtesy. And there’s been peace between the Houses for 200 years, and in that time the Narians have never again been able to mount a serious threat; the borders have been safe, it’s sort of an idyllic existence here in Lenima, if you compare it to any other time in history. I mean, the Houses were constantly at each other’s throats for hundreds and hundreds of years before House of Leopard.
Rowan: But you still don’t like them—all that much, I mean?
Dirk: Boy, you really are more perceptive than you let on, aren’t you?
Rowan: How come?
Dirk: Well, they are the authority. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like being told what to do.
Rowan: [Shrugs]
Dirk: Now, and this is pretty funny because it’s got the House of Leopard all worried; but it’s pretty scary, too. In fact…
Rowan: Yeah?
Dirk: Maybe I’d better not tell you.
Rowan: Tell me!
Dirk: Jayenne’ll be upset with me if you can’t sleep tonight.
Rowan: She’s the authority, isn’t she? At House of Falcon?
Dirk: You bass-tarrd! Okay, okay. Have you heard of Rahab?
Rowan: [Shakes his head]
Dirk: He was a great prophet from, well, nobody knows exactly when—the dawn of history, I suppose. He wrote the sensibly titled Prophecies of Rahab. All of his prophecies have come true. Of course, his wording is obscure, cloaked in generalizations which have sometimes been interpreted only in retrospect as having been accurate predictions of what was going to happen; but nevertheless…
Rowan: Uh…why…
Dirk: Well, he predicted the rise of the Shark, and the Shakis, and the House of Leopard; and he predicts the fall of the House of Leopard. When, nobody knows exactly, but some “textual experts” apparently think they have pinpointed it to pretty soon—within the next twenty or thirty years.
Rowan: [Seems unconcerned]
Dirk: He—Rahab—says that the House of Leopard will be destroyed by the spawn of two wizards. So, the House of Leopard is seeking out all of the wizards in Lenima, and whenever they find one who has a child, or children, they make sure that his, or her, spouse, or the other parent of the child or children, has no power—no magic, you know, in them.
Rowan: How do they do that?
Dirk: I’m not sure. Wizard knows wizard, I know that. That probably has something to do with it. I don’t know their precise procedure, though; that’s just a wild guess. But they, the Leopards, want to make sure there are no living offspring of two wizards and that none is ever born.
Rowan: There must be hundreds.
Dirk: [Laughs] No, there’s none.
Rowan: None!
Dirk: Zero.
Rowan: You’re tricking me!
Dirk: No, and I’ll tell you why. Rahab was probably the most powerful wizard ever, and he put a spell on the Fount of Magic at the world’s center, to ensure that no wizard, or “person of magic,” let’s say, because not every person with magic in them becomes a wizard—to ensure that no person of magic could ever couple with another person of magic. See, apparently back in Rahab’s day, when two wizards coupled, the level of magical power introduced into their child wasn’t an average of the levels of the parents, nor even the sum of those levels, but a product of them. You know about sums and products?
Rowan: Yes! [Nods emphatically]
Dirk: Well, do the math. Let’s just say a typical minor wizard has a power level of 8 or 10, and that Logan, House of Leopard’s wizard, probably the most powerful wizard in the world, has a power level of 100. These are arbitrary numbers, but it’ll get the point across. If two typical minor wizards coupled…
Rowan: It would be between 64 and 100.
Dirk: Yes, their offspring would be nearly as powerful as Logan, and then if their offspring coupled, well, you can see that with the proper planning, some greedy family of wizards could produce a child with deity-level power. Near omnipotence. Rahab wanted to make sure that never happened, that too much power was never concentrated in one person; that’s why he put that spell on the Fount of Magic. So, now, if any two persons of magic come within a few steps of one another, they feel immediate, overwhelming nausea, and within moments, they grow sick, like unto being poisoned; and they’ll soon die if they don’t get away from each other.
Rowan: Wow!
Dirk: And yet, the prophecy of Rahab says that a spawn of two wizards destroys the House of Leopard. So, House of Leopard is all up in a panic looking for that spawn, who they think is probably a child, now—a girl, for it’s a she in the prophecy. Which is pretty funny—but I’m sure they mean to kill her, which isn’t so funny. And it’s a little scary to think how powerful she might be, particularly if one or both of her parents was very powerful, a 50, say, half as powerful as Logan. If both were 50, then the offspring would be…
Rowan: Two thousand five hundred!
Dirk: Right! Twenty-five times as powerful as Logan. Even if one of her parents was a mere 5 and the other a 50, she’d still be two and a half times as powerful as Logan. But here’s the really funny part, which has House of Leopard up in arms, because of all the villains Lenima has ever faced, the Shark came the nearest to defeating us. Rahab says this spawn of two wizards destroys the House of Leopard with the Shark reborn as her warlord.
Rowan: Hmm… [Pretending to be impressed]
End Recording.