The Only Wizard in Town

by Heide Goody

  Pagnell slipped off his outer coat, raised it to attract the bird’s attention. He saw the vicious rips all along the bottom hem. “When the hell…?” he muttered. “I paid good money for this.” He huffed in exasperation before waving it back and forth like a flag. “Here!” he shouted. “Over here!”

  The giant eagle turned almost instantly. Pagnell’s legs trembled at the sight of its eyes. They were just like Tibshelf’s vicious pet bird’s: horrible beady things.

  “What’s the plan?” shouted Cope, helping Lorrika to her feet.

  Pagnell didn’t have a plan as such. It wasn’t developed enough to be labelled a plan. “Plan? Well, I do have this pouch and—”

  Tudu’s beak jabbed down at Pagnell. It moved fast for such a huge animal. Pagnell jumped back. The beak struck the ground just in front of his feet, sending a waft of dust past his ankles.

  “Birds of prey,” he said, as much to himself as to anyone else. “They’re very good at spotting movement.” He swung the coat, left, right, left, right, left. And released.

  The coat flew high, which was something; Pagnell was not one of life’s great throwers. Tudu’s eyes stayed on the coat as it flew up and down to the ground. Pagnell felt the weight of the box moss pouch in his hand. All he had to do was sneak round somehow, perhaps throw it into the bird’s mouth…

  Tudu snorted at the coat on the ground. Losing interest, it turned around and locked its eyes on Pagnell.

  “Bugger,” he said with feeling.

  There was a grimlock yell from across the hall, but that was in a whole other world. His world was barrelling towards him on sword-like talons, a golden beak of certain death poised to strike him down no matter how he dodged. Pagnell turned to run but it was too late. The beak gripped his shoulder with vice-like pressure, forcing a scream of pain and fear from Pagnell’s lungs. Tendons and muscles burned in agony. An instant later, Pagnell was up in the air: flung high and weightless.

  There was no time for conscious decision making. Instinct told him to draw his arms and legs in, get the extremities out of the way. He slapped into something wet and spongy and all-enveloping; wrapped tightly about him like a blanket tucked in by an over-zealous housemaid.

  It’s a truth rarely aired, but generally acknowledged, that it’s hard to think straight when being swallowed by a giant eagle. Images and hopes and emotions bombarded his mind. More than anything, he wanted to scream and cry and make it all go away, but he was squeezed inside a dark airlessness and had no voice. Part of his brain had retreated back in time to an anatomy lecture by some interminably dull wizard, and a diagram of a chicken’s digestive system. There was a crop and gizzard and another stomach, the three of them in some sort of order: one was just a holding sack and one was where pellets were formed and from which indigestible food was expelled. It had been a really, really dull lecture and Pagnell’s flailing mind wondered if he might be able to save himself if he’d paid more attention. While thoughts screamed and flashed back and chided his younger self, yet another part of his mind was working on a half-formed plan. His hands turned over each other in the confined space, found the ritual gestures to perform the spell of Cowell’s Frictionless Unguent. Masses of bitter, oily slime poured from his hands. He forced himself to focus on the spell, to keep it going, feeling the jelly-like lubricant coat his body. His lungs ached dreadfully in the smothering confines, and he hoped he was giving the damned bird indigestion.

  Tudu bucked. Even in the animal’s cushioned innards Pagnell felt himself being swung from side to side and, most unpleasantly, forced upward, feet first. He had just enough presence of mind to squeeze open the box moss pouch and push it away before he was vomited out into stark light and the unforgiving hardness of stone. Cowell’s Unguent poured from Tudu’s open beak. Unaccountably, Pagnell’s coat was draped over its eyes. If the expressionless face of a blindfolded bird showed anything, this one looked like it was experiencing a thousand hangovers, all at once.

  Pagnell was exhausted and hurting enough to wish he could simply play dead and wait for the bird to go away. The drying slime covered his entire body, all but gluing him to the floor. However, it was increasingly clear nausea had brought out a rotten temper in the giant bird. It screeched and clawed the earth. All it had to do was stretch out and those talons would make pulled pork of the wizard’s innards.

  Pagnell reached for his pocket, nearly crying out at the pain in his shoulder. He groped instead with his good arm and hand. After a bit of awkward fumbling, he dragged out a bottle. He flung it as far away as possible. It smashed against a wall or a floor – Pagnell didn’t bother to look – and Lorrika’s previously bottled and stoppered screams of pain burst out.

  “Gods! No! No! Don’t!”

  Tudu whirled and stomped blindly towards the screams. They went on at length. Either Lorrika had a low pain threshold or Pagnell wasn’t half the field surgeon he thought he was.

  Tudu snapped and clawed at the empty air, unable to seize the source of the screams. The bird stumbled, walked into a wall, shook its head as though to clear it and then, very slowly, settled down to roost – before tipping over onto its side, unconscious.

  “Hooray for box moss,” said Pagnell, weakly. He started to peel his gooey, sticky body away from the floor.

  A head popped out of the stone urn next to him. “What happened?” asked Cope.

  “It ate me,” said Pagnell.

  “I saw that.”

  “And then I knocked it out with a sleeping draught.”

  “That’s clever,” came Lorrika’s echoing voice from within the urn.

  Pagnell frowned. “What are you two doing in there?”

  “We were hiding,” said Cope.

  “Not much of a long-term strategy.”

  “Was getting eaten a better one?” said Lorrika as her head popped up next to Cope’s.

  Pagnell shook himself off. He whimpered at the pain in his shoulder. “I wouldn’t recommend it,” He looked across at the doorway which had been revealed when Tudu had risen from its slumber.

  “The fifth threshold?” said Cope.

  Pagnell nodded. “The final threshold. Foesen’s Tomb and the Quill of Truth are through there.”

  Lorrika climbed nimbly from the giant pot. Cope followed, hauling herself out with a technique which could best be described as graceless but effective.

  “Bez?” queried Pagnell.

  “Turned tail and ran,” said Lorrika.

  “Left us to die,” added Cope.

  “Yes,” said Lorrika. She sounded like she was trying to speak around a stone on her throat.

  “He didn’t choose to come here,” said Cope. “Merken forced him.”

  “You don’t blame him?” Pagnell was surprised.

  Cope gave him a blank look. “Blame? What good will that do?”

  “But if I try to run you’re going to…”

  “Damn well kill you. Merken’s instructions.”

  “Good job I’m going nowhere but onward.” He jerked his head towards the final gateway. “Shall we?”

  Cope pointed to the sleeping eagle. “Should I kill it?”

  Pagnell wiped unguent from his hair and flung it away. “Do you want to kill it?”

  “Are we coming back this way once we have the Quill?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “How long does the sleeping draught last?”

  “That much would knock out a human for a month.”

  “And a giant eagle?”

  Pagnell gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Couldn’t say.”

  Cope strode towards the bird, sword ready.

  “Although Buqit might not take kindly to you killing her pet,” said the wizard.

  Cope hesitated. “Pet?”

  “Maybe.”

  In the heat of the battle, he would have had no problem with Cope beheading the beast or running it through; now it was fast asleep, he was suddenly squeamish about the idea. He could have spent an age wondering what moral difference
there was between the two scenarios, but for now, he was happy to trust his squeamishness.

  “Let’s not ruffle any divine feathers,” he said. “No more than we already have.” He picked up one of the long feathers Cope had sheared off in her attack and twirled it meaningfully in his hand.

  Cope lowered her sword and the three of them went to the final gateway. The corridor beyond the threshold was dark, but a yellow light flickered at its far end.

  “Are there any more traps ahead?” asked Cope.

  Pagnell could offer no assistance. “If Abington had notes or records of this section, we’ve lost them. I’ve got—” He ransacked his pockets. “—a very damp journal which is all stuck together and … some diagrams for traps and devices we’ve already passed.”

  “I’ll lead the way,” said Lorrika. “Follow slowly.”

  Pagnell and Cope kept to the shadows while Lorrika tapped and prodded and stuck nasty sharp things in suspicious cracks. Death conspicuously failed to leap out and claim them.

  “Maybe Kavda the Builder assumed an enormous death-eagle would weed out any final interlopers,” Pagnell suggested.

  Lorrika paused not far from the corridor’s end.

  “Problem?” said Pagnell.

  “Does anyone else…?” She sniffed and frowned.

  “What?”

  “Does anyone else smell roast chicken?”

  6

  Pagnell, still trying to comb pernicious magical unguent from his hair and beard, failed to notice the step down as they entered the room, and stumbled. He thrust his hand against the edge of a table to stop catch himself, gasping at the stab of pain in his wounded shoulder.

  “Are you hurt?” said Cope.

  Lorrika, not half as clumsy as Pagnell, stepped cautiously down the step and inspected the room. “What the hell is this?” she said in soft wonderment.

  The room was, in many senses, exactly what one would expect for the final resting place of a revered Hierophant. There was a large tomb chest, carved from onyx and alabaster. Across the top was a finely worked effigy of what could only be Hierophant Foesen, laid out as in death. The open braziers were very much in keeping with the tomb aesthetic, although the fact they were alight was mildly surprising. The other elements in the room were more difficult to comprehend.

  There was a large bed in the corner, topped by a canopy of silks, and hung with fine curtains in peach and pink. There was an arrangement of plump cushions, and a small selection of musical instruments – a lute, a sacbut and a zither – leaned against a nearby wall. The table Pagnell had come up against was long and low, with bench seating either side, laid out for a banquet fit indeed for a Hierophant. There was roast chicken, but more besides. Glazed hams, dates in syrup, flat breads, tomatoes and aubergines in oil, oven-cooked goat, bowls of ripe fruit and thin-necked jugs of wine crowded the surface.

  “Was someone expecting us?” said Lorrika suspiciously.

  Pagnell stepped back from the table and tried to apply some rational thought. “Either this is all specifically for us,” he said. “Or the room is always like this.”

  “I have never seen a tomb like this before,” said Cope.

  Pagnell considered the bed, and the cushions, and the steam rising off freshly cooked meats. “No,” he agreed, slowly.

  “Is it a trap?” asked Lorrika.

  “I don’t know. I don’t see how.”

  “Because that’s the Quill of Truth, right?” she said and pointed.

  Pagnell had not previously noticed the carved effigy of Hierophant Foesen held a carved version of the Book of Truth under one hand and a long eagle feather in the other.

  “So it is,” he said.

  “Maybe the food and that is just a distraction,” said Lorrika. “To tempt people from taking the treasure.”

  “What? You think grave robbers might be diverted from their goal by juicy dates and the opportunity to play the sacbut.”

  “What’s a sacbut?” asked Cope.

  “The food could be poisoned,” said Lorrika.

  “It’s that curly horn instrument,” Pagnell said to Cope.

  She nodded. “I ate some bad dates once. Couldn’t leave the privy for three days.”

  “See?” said Lorrika.

  Pagnell gawped. “See what? They’re now trying to defeat us with poor food hygiene?”

  “What’s hy-giene?” asked Cope.

  “The point is,” said Pagnell, feeling the point had entirely escaped him, “I don’t yet know the purpose of all this stuff.”

  “So, none of it’s a trap?” said Lorrika.

  “I said, I don’t see how.”

  “Well, in that case…”

  She stepped up to the tomb and reached for the Quill of Truth.

  “Wait!” said Pagnell. “Let’s just think—”

  Lorrika’s fingers touched the Quill.

  7

  Pagnell, still trying to comb pernicious magical unguent from his hair and beard, failed to notice the step down as they entered the room, and stumbled. He thrust his hand against the edge of a table to catch himself, gasping at the stab of pain in his wounded shoulder.

  “Are you hurt?” said Cope and then stared about her in confusion. “Hang about…”

  Lorrika cautiously trod down the step into the room. “What the hell just happened?”

  Pagnell stepped back from the banqueting table. “That was weird.”

  “Did everyone else just have a vision of the future?” said Cope.

  “Vision of the future? Was that what it was?”

  “I recall us entering this room, and Lorrika looking at the food and wondering if it was a trap, and you explained the bent horn thing over there was a … what was it, again?”

  “A sacbut.”

  “Sacbut. And you were convinced none of these things were traps and then Lorrika went over here.” She crossed to the tomb chest and held out her hand. “Then the vision ended on the moment Lorrika touched the—”

  Pagnell was scraping Cowell’s Unguent from his hair and didn’t see the step in front of him. He stumbled clumsily forward and came up sharply against a table edge. He gasped.

  “Are you—” Cope paused and frowned deeply. “—hurt?”

  “Okay, it just happened again,” said Lorrika.

  “It did,” said Pagnell, putting a hand to his painful shoulder. “And I don’t think it was a vision of the future.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s stopping us taking the feather,” said Lorrika, approaching the tomb warily. “As soon as it sees us take the feather, it transports us back over there. So, maybe…”

  Lorrika grabbed for the Quill of Truth, already turning away to run for the exit.

  His hands full of slime, Pagnell fell against the table and gasped in pain.

  “Are—?” began Cope and fell silent.

  With a roar, Lorrika sprinted to the tomb chest, clutched at the Quill—

  Pagnell stumbled, collided with the table and gasped.

  Cope said nothing.

  Lorrika ran for the Quill of Truth.

  Pagnell fell forward again, banged against the table again.

  Lorrika was already running.

  “Stop that!” he grunted in pain.

  Lorrika skidded to a halt. “Why?”

  Pagnell straightened slowly. “One, because it’s clearly not working. Any time one of us touches the Quill, we get … zapped back in time to the moment we entered the room.”

  “But if we were quick enough…” said Lorrika and snatched at the feather in Foesen’s stone grasp.

  Pagnell fell against the table and barked at the pain it drove through his injured shoulder.

  “And two—!” he shouted, “—every time you do it, it hurts! It hurts a lot!”

  “Fine,” sniffed Lorrika, standing casually behind him by the entrance. “I was only trying. You know, a bit of experimentation.”

  “The point of experimentation is to try different things and maybe get an improved result,�
� muttered Pagnell. “There’s a name for people who repeat the same thing again and again, expecting something different to happen.”

  “What do you mean: zapped back in time?” said Cope.

  “I meant exactly what I said.” He tapped a brass goblet on the food-filled table. “We arrived in the room at a certain moment in time, we stood around, we talked—” he traced his hand lightly over the table top “—Lorrika touched the Quill of Truth and – bam!” He tapped the goblet. “Time wound back to that first moment.”

  “Time does not wind back,” said Cope.

  “Not usually, no,” agreed Pagnell.

  Cope sounded cross. “The past is done and the future does not exist. There is now and that’s it. Time is not a path you can wander up and down.”

  “Again, not usually.”

  “You’ve really confused me!”

  “I can see that.”

  “If it helps,” said Lorrika, “my old master, Rabo Poon, believed time was a conceptual, abstract framework which provides structure to the mental apprehension of events by the rational observer.”

  “It doesn’t help, actually,” said Pagnell.

  Cope shook her head furiously. “Travel back in time? Travel back in time? No. It’s not possible. It’s not a thing. It’s like asking someone how tall they weigh or whether they can remember what up was like. No.” She kept shaking her head and it didn’t look like she was going to stop.

  Lorrika frowned. “Aurelion Pippo, the philosopher who claims to think for all men who do not think for themselves, argued the present was an infinitesimally small moment between the remembered past and the imagined future. The now is an invisible knife blade between two states of time which don’t exist.”

  “Really not helping at all,” said Pagnell.

  “Essentially, time does not exist,” said Lorrika cheerfully. “Which is handy because no one can ever accuse me of being late for anything.”