Master Summoner
The Master Summoner is one of the Nine Masters of Roke, the wizards who govern the School for Wizards on Roke Island. He is described as a stern man, aged and hardened by the deep and somber wizardry he teaches. Unlike the Master Hand or the Master Changer, who deal with illusion and the lesser arts of transformation, the Master Summoner deals with no illusion, only true magic: the summoning of such energies as light, heat, the force that draws the magnet, and those forces men perceive as weight, form, color, and sound—real powers drawn from the immense fathomless energies of the universe, which no man's spells or uses could exhaust or unbalance.
Teaching and Philosophy
The Master Summoner taught his pupils that the weatherworker's and seamaster's calling upon wind and water were crafts already known to them, but it was he who showed them why the true wizard uses such spells only at need, since to summon up such earthly forces is to change the earth of which they are a part. He warned them with a principle that Ged would later come to understand deeply: "Rain on Roke may be drouth in Osskil, and a calm in the East Reach may be storm and ruin in the West, unless you know what you are about." As for the calling of real things and living people, the raising up of spirits of the dead, and the invocations of the Unseen—those spells which are the height of the Summoner's art and the mage's power—he scarcely spoke of them to his pupils. Once or twice Ged tried to lead him to talk a little of such mysteries, but the Master was silent, looking at him long and grimly, until Ged grew uneasy and said no more.
Role in the Loosing of the Shadow
When Ged, goaded by Jasper's mockery, performed the forbidden Spell of Summoning on Roke Knoll and tore open the fabric of the world, letting a nameless shadow-beast into the sunlit world, the Master Summoner was among those who sensed the act of great wizardry and came swiftly to the scene. He was one of the Masters who arrived after the Archmage Nemmerle had already driven the shadow off and collapsed from the effort. That night, while Nemmerle lay dying in the unroofed court and Ged lay wounded in the healing-chamber, the Master Summoner stayed on Roke Knoll all night long, keeping watch. He waited there lest the shadow, which had fled from Nemmerle and from the mighty spell-walls that surround and protect Roke Island, try to find the doorway Ged had opened and clamber back into its own domain. If Ged had died that night, the Summoner reasoned, the shadow might have followed him into death's realm or slipped back into whatever place it had come from; for this reason he kept vigil on the hillside where the stuff of the world had been torn open.
Counsel to Ged
During Ged's long convalescence, the Master Summoner came often to sit with him. He was grim and grave as ever, but Ged knew now his compassion and loved him well. When Ged pressed him for knowledge about the shadow-beast, the Summoner gave him the most honest and terrifying answer any of the Masters offered: "I do not know. I know of the thing only this: that only a great power could have summoned up such a thing, and perhaps only one power—only one voice—your voice. But what in turn that means, I do not know. You will find out. You must find out, or die, and worse than die." He spoke softly and his eyes were somber as he looked at Ged. Then he added a reflection that cut to the heart of Ged's youthful arrogance: "You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do." This was the only direct counsel the Master Summoner gave Ged about the shadow, and it was the truth that Ged would carry with him through all his subsequent trials.
Significance
The Master Summoner represents the Roke School's most severe and honest face: the teacher who will not flatter a gifted student with easy answers, who knows the limits of his own knowledge, and who understands that the highest arts of magic are not tools for glory but paths of necessity that narrow a wizard's choices until only the essential remains. His vigil on Roke Knoll after the disaster, his refusal to pretend he understood the shadow, and his stark warning to Ged all mark him as a figure of uncompromising integrity in a world where power too easily corrupts.
