The Only Wizard in Town

by Heide Goody

  “Good girl. Does he know what happened to Abington?”

  “Says he went off in search of a tavern but doesn’t know which.”

  “Indeed.” Merken fingered the velvet pouch which hung on his belt and then, conscious of the act, let it drop. “I think you and I had better go find our wizard, eh? The general wants him.”

  2

  The invaders held the fortified temple complex and, for now, had little need to venture beyond its walls. Six men at a time were sent out each hour to patrol the major streets and remind the locals they were under occupation. For the main part, the locals were staying indoors and safely out of the way.

  Cope and Merken split up in the corn market as their search for a tavern which might contain their wizard continued. Neither feared being alone in the occupied city. Both were experienced enough to recognise when an opponent was beaten and beyond constituting a threat.

  A loud commanding voice was coming from the open windows of a corner tavern in a two storey stone building so ramshackle that, if wasn’t for the evidence of the clay bricks and mortar, Cope would have taken it for a natural cave rather than something man made. She kicked the door open. Beaten or not, it never hurt to make an entrance.

  Five dozen eyes stared at her. Abington sat at a centre table with that scrawny girl thief of his, Lorrika. He tried to hunker down in his seat and look unnoticeable. However, being considerably taller than the average man and in possession of the biggest beard for a hundred miles around, he was very noticeable indeed.

  Cope scanned the crowd for signs of trouble – not that any would have lasted for long. She had her longsword; her weighty scabbard was a serviceable club; her belt, purchased from a very nice man in Yelzen, could be removed and used as an effective throwing bola. And – thanks to an educational pamphlet she had bought from an equally nice man in Yelzen (who had seen her purchase the throwing belt and knew a discerning customer when he saw one) – she knew thirty-seven different ways to disarm an opponent, four of them permanent.

  To a man, the patrons were far more interested in their beer, their shoes, their fingernails and pretty much anything at all, than causing trouble for Cope. On a tiny stage, constructed from fruit packing crates, two men gawped at her. The one with the silly hat and, until now, the commanding voice, burbled something incoherently, finishing with, “—It wouldn’t be Ludens without you.”

  It was a bloody peculiar thing to say.

  Cope stepped inside properly and gestured for him to explain. “Why? What would it be?”

  The two simply continued to gawp. Her arrival had clearly turned them into idiots. She sometimes had that effect. “Continue with your business,” she told them.

  As the mummers on stage babbled on about some story of dragons and temples, Cope walked over to Abington. Men stumbled over themselves to get out of her way.

  Abington sourly downed his drink and glowered at her. “Aren’t you meant to be in the temple, Cope?”

  “I am. And so are you,” she replied. “The general sent me to fetch you.”

  “And fetch me you can,” said Abington. He paused for effect and added, “After I’ve got a few more of these inside me.”

  “Only idiots drink to excess.”

  “I’ve been on enforced sobriety for over a month and am currently operating at a deficit. This is just me bringing myself back into balance.”

  “The general sent me,” Cope said again, which should have been enough to stir him. He should at least have some respect for Handzame’s position, if not her role in his release.

  Abington, like a moody child, seemed entirely unmoved, decidedly unstirred.

  “Hey,” said the thief, Lorrika, “I’ll get you both a drink. I’ll even pay with actual money.”

  Cope managed to get her hand under her armour and reached her instruction cards. They were very helpful at uncertain moments. She unwrapped them from their waterproofed leather and looked through them until she found the one she needed.

  How to Resolve an Argument with an Obstinate Person

  Think about the obstinate person’s position.

  Is their opinion or intention likely to cause significant problems for you?

  If so, restate your position clearly, offering such supporting evidence you have.

  If not, is there a compromise you can offer?

  Suggest a compromise solution and make your expected outcomes clear.

  See also:

  How to Present Evidence and Arguments to Others

  How to Identify when Someone is being Unfair

  How to Recognise when You are in the Wrong

  Perhaps one more beer would be enough to winkle Abington from his drinking stool and, Cope realised, she herself had not had anything to eat or drink all day.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “One drink and then we must go.”

  “I mean, I’ll need some actual money in order to do so,” the thief added.

  Cope wasn’t sure what the difference was between actual money and non-actual money, but she knew Lorrika had spent far too much of her childhood in the company of philosophers and was prone to bouts of nonsense. Nonetheless, Abington begrudgingly handed a purse over and Lorrika spirited it away to the bar.

  “One more and then you’re coming back to the temple,” Cope told the wizard to make sure her expected outcomes were clearly understood.

  “I’ll have as many as I bloody well please, Cope,” said the wizard. “You worry too much.”

  Cope had to wait until the pub crowd had stopped cheering the entertainers before answering. “I don’t worry at all. It’s the general’s orders, not mine.”

  “It’s my plan, my maps, my knowledge!” snapped Abington.

  “Her swords, her men, her gold,” said Cope simply. “Be careful or she’ll have Merken give you a lesson in respecting authority.”

  “Hmph!”

  A chair scrape and there was suddenly a third person at their table, a thinly bearded northerner with an inquisitive glint in his eye.

  “Go on then. Tell me how it was done,” he said.

  “Push off!” said Abington.

  “How was what done?” said Cope.

  “The sneak attack on the city,” said the bearded one. “Was it magic?”

  Cope considered the eager fellow. “Shall I kill him?” she asked Abington, putting a hand on her sword.

  The man waved his hands in a hasty apology. They were pale soft hands, the hands of someone who had not done a day’s hard work in their life. “I mean, all kudos to you guys,” he said. “I’m a pacifist myself, mostly anyway, but you’ve got to recognise tactical genius when you see it. A thousand soldiers – two thousand maybe? – conjured out of the featureless plains. What was it? Some sort of mass invisibility spell? Some other trick?”

  “Only a fool thinks everything is a trick,” said Abington.

  “Ah, but we’re all fools until we work out how it’s done. It’s purely professional curiosity on my part. I’m a wizard myself. Newport Pagnell. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  He treated them to a toothy smile – his teeth were surprisingly white and neat like they were brand new and unused – and offered a hand which neither of them took. He held it out for an uncomfortable second before withdrawing it.

  “It’s not my main job,” he conceded. “My mead and meat is in oral hygiene and innovative dentistry.”

  It was all just words to Cope. This man, Newport Pagnell, talked too fast and smiled too often. She was tempted to stab him lightly just to slow him down and shut him up.

  “Oral hygiene!” jeered Abington.

  “And innovative dentistry,” said Pagnell.

  “What is den-tis-try?” asked Cope.

  “Flimflammery and nonsense,” said Abington, toying with his pipe. “It’s teeth magic.”

  Cope knew teeth magic well. She had been raised on a diet of fireside stories which included those of the pale tooth fairies to whom children offered up their baby teeth in the hope o
f gaining fairy teeth of their own (which everyone knew were as sharp as knives and never stopped growing). However, children were warned to beware of prowling grimlocks who stole the teeth of the unwary and sold them to sorcerers and such who used the teeth in their wicked spells. It was said (by various aunts and grandmothers, gummy and toothless all) that to give a sorcerer a tooth was to give them control of your very spirit.

  Cope slapped a hand across her mouth to stop the wizard stealing her teeth on the sly.

  “You’ll not steal my spirit with your fairy magics,” she mumbled.

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Pagnell assuredly her breezily. “I use a few spells in my work. Cowell’s Frictionless Unguent, Hamed’s Hammer of Loosening but dentistry is more about the application of knowledge and, occasionally, a pair of forceps of my own devising. I have them here somewhere…”

  “Don’t let this wizard bewitch my teeth,” Cope said fiercely to Abington.

  “It doesn’t work like that, Cope,” sighed the older wizard. “This man is no wizard.”

  Pagnell gave up searching for his four seps (though Cope kept a watchful eye on him, in case he tried to enchant her or summon grimlocks to attack her) and straightened his coat lapels with petulant self-importance.

  “I am the finest wizard you’ll find in a month of searching and I have letters of recommendation from the king of Yarwich and the finest merchants’ guilds of Aumeria to prove it but—”

  “Wizard?” scoffed Abington. “He doesn’t even have a hat.”

  “But I was actually talking about my primary occupation,” said Pagnell. “Oral hygiene and innovative dentistry. For example – Cope, was it? – by looking at just one of your teeth I could tell all manner of things about your diet, your history, your very soul which mere magic could not.”

  Abington was childishly indignant, as though he was made jealous simply by another wizard’s presence. “Calumnious codswallop!” he spat, snatching the pipe from his mouth in anger.

  “Or you, miss,” said Pagnell, looking past Cope.

  Lorrika has returned, with two cups of beer and one of the fool performers from the stage. The pictures man nudged Lorrika. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Cope. This is Bez. He does pictures. He wanted a chat.”

  “About what?” said Cope.

  “A request. A commission, if you will,” said Bez a little beerily. He gave her the most ridiculously toadying bow. Up close, she could see the man’s otherwise handsome face was covered with a fine tracery of red lines. A few more years of bad living and this drunken sot would either look like a ruddy farmer or be dead in a ditch.

  Cope had come in to retrieve Abington. Now, she just wanted to get away from the tooth mage. She stood quickly, let her hand drop from her mouth but kept her lips firmly sealed. She looked at this Bez character and jerked her head towards a corner of the room where they might talk.

  They stood by the stairs, the space under which was evidently used as storage for empty casks and drunkenly unconscious customers. Cope stood with her back to the wall and one eye firmly on Abington and the tooth mage, Pagnell.

  “You wanted to talk?” she said, barely glancing down at the painter man.

  “Yes, absolutely,” said Bez, “but first let me say, wow.”

  “Wow?”

  “Impressive or what.”

  “What?”

  “The Amanni rising out of obscurity to reclaim their former glory and you…”

  “Me?”

  “You! In the vanguard as you smashed through the city gates. I’ve seen heroism in its time and you … you…”

  “We didn’t smash through the city gates,” said Cope. “They were already open.”

  “Well, yes, and I want to have a chat about that too.”

  This strange little man spoke even faster than the tooth-obsessed wizard and, as best she could tell, he’d not even got to the end of a complete sentence, let alone any kind of point. The tooth-wizard was currently staring into Lorrika’s mouth and prodding her teeth while Abington watched and scraped out his pipe bowl.

  “I have to say I’ve always been a great admirer of the Amanni,” said Bez. “Decisive leadership. Great fashion sense. Strength through unity and all that. And I’ve always felt the city leaders of Ludens have been far too complacent of late. I’ve put some fairly scathing posts about them on my wall, trolled a few of the more hypocritical ones too, you know?”

  She didn’t know and didn’t understand his babbling nonsense. She considered getting out her instruction cards. She had one entitled How to Deal with Fools and Simpletons somewhere. “You had some sort of request to make,” she reminded him.

  “Less of a request than an offer. A chance of immortality. An opportunity to be front and centre in the annals of history. Picture it, if you will: the rebirth of the Amanni horde – horde has a good ring to it, don’t you think? – marching under the standard of the great General— What’s his name again?”

  “Her name. Handzame.”

  “I like it. The valiant but woefully outnumbered guards of the city falling back before your might and thunder. The sun gleaming off your chainmail. Divine providence writ large on your face. I can picture it so clearly. Magnificent.”

  Cope might have asked what divine providence would look like on someone’s face but she was already caught up in another snag.

  “There was no sun gleaming off my chainmail.”

  “Yes, now. I like the plate armour. It’s traditional but it’s a concealer, not a revealer. Artistry is all about emotion expressed through the human form. The muscles, the sweaty sheen, the powerful and philosophical symbolism expressed by some tastefully exposed flesh. I’ve done a lot of work recently with Chainmail Bikini Woman. She is very popular and—”

  “The sun didn’t gleam at all,” said Cope. “We came at nightfall.”

  “I know!” said Bez, as though it was the most tragic occurrence. “And we’ll need to fix it in the final painting. Absolutely. Though for your information, for future reference, don’t attack at night. Night attacks, no good. No one can see you. As my old fella used to say, if there’s a battle in the dead of night and no one sees it, did it really happen? Now, I’m going to suggest we paint you as a heroine out of myth. Tasteful, as I say. A scrap of chainmail here, a wisp of gauze passing by on the wind here.”

  As he raised his hands to indicate exactly where and what chainmail scraps and wisps of gauze might be covering, Cope deliver a sharp uppercut to his jaw which knocked him clean out and sent a chunk of broken tooth pinwheeling into the air.

  Instinctively, Cope caught the tooth as it fell. The idiot she let bounce off a chair and drop insensible to the floor, next to the drunk asleep under the stairs.

  She needed to get Abington back to the general and she needed to speak to Merken urgently. Enough time had been wasted.

  She strode over to the drinking table, put the tooth in front of Pagnell (in the hope it would pacify him and his grimlock confederates) and gave Abington her sternest glare.

  “Well, I didn’t mean it literally,” said Pagnell, picking the tooth up.

  “We’re going now,” said Cope.

  Ignoring her instruction entirely, Abington gave a bark of discovery and pulled out a bundle of matchwood from his robes.

  “At a guess – and it is a guess,” said Pagnell, “I’d say this is the tooth of an idiot.”

  Abington ran one of the matchsticks along the tabletop, magicking a small flame at its end. “Toss a stone in this place,” he said and put the flame to his pipe, “and you’d hit a dozen brainless idiots.”

  Cope reacted to the explosion before she even consciously registered it. The flash momentarily blinded her, the bang temporarily deafened her, and she turned away automatically. She found herself blinking away the wheels of colour in her eyes, once more facing Abington, sword already in her hand. Abington was sat exactly as before, apart from his arms which hung loosely at his sides and his head which was … well, it was
gone.

  It took a second or two for her hearing to return, or maybe it took the tavern patrons a second or two to find their voices; either way, there was a moment of utter silence and then all manner of screaming, hollering and shouting.

  The wizard Pagnell pushed himself back from the table, eyes wide, his face spattered with gore, sooty streaks, and a couple of minor cuts, possibly caused by flying shards of clay pipe. As he made to get up, Cope grabbed him.

  “You’re going nowhere!”

  “What?” he said, shocked and bewildered.

  Men fought to escape through the door. Others hid under their tables or behind the bar. Some, with more pragmatic and short-sighted goals, used the opportunity to drink beers which weren’t theirs.

  Cope had lost sight of Lorrika and wondered if the thief girl was among the press of bodies at the door. And then she saw her, on hands and knees, crawling back and forth, feverishly picking among the grue on the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Cope called to Lorrika.

  “Picking up bits of wizard,” said Merken, suddenly at her shoulder.

  Cope didn’t question where the old man had come from.

  “Who’s this chap?” he asked, nodding at Pagnell.

  “I don’t know his part in this,” said Cope. “He’s a dentist.”

  “Just a dentist!” agreed the blood-soaked Pagnell, pulling ineffectually against Cope’s grip.

  “Is he now?” said Merken. “What happened to Abington?”

  Cope shook her head, stumped. “I think he might have done something really bad in a past life,” she suggested.

  Cope was a follower, not a leader; she served, not commanded. She was content with this, but it did not mean she was blind to the theories of warfare, the need for strategy. A great military leader always had a strategy and, if that strategy failed, another to take its place. When, in the heat of battle, things went completely wrong, as they so often did, a great military leader improvised and made best use of the materials to hand.