The Magic Goes Away

by Larry Niven

  “I wonder what Mirandee’s in such a hurry about? She’s coming down awfully fast.”

  The Warlock didn’t hear. He said, “Maybe Piranther was right. We use Roze-Kattee directly, get what good we can out of the last god. Wavyhill, what do you think?”

  “I want to die,” said Wavyhill.

  “What?”

  “It’s not worth it. Another ten years of life, another hundred, and so what? People die. Even World-Worms die, and gods, and magicians.”

  “Wavyhill, what’s got into you?”

  “Nothing. Nothing’s got into me. What could get into a dead man? I don’t feel good, I don’t feel bad. I guess I like it that way. Turn me off, Warlock. Use the spell we used to break through the World-Worm’s cheek. It won’t even hurt.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” Wavyhill said without regret.

  Mirandee found them that way, apathetic and dreamy-eyed, when she reached them out of breath and still trying to run. “Where is it?” she demanded.

  The Warlock looked up. “What? Oh, the god. It sleeps on.”

  “Troll dung it does! Can’t you feel it?”

  “Feel what?”

  “Why, it’s soaking up all the love and all the madness it can reach! Feeding on it!”

  The Warlock stood up fast. Of course, he’d been stupid, they’d all three slipped into sanity without noticing! Sweet reason and solid judgment and philosophical resignation, these were not common among sorcerers. As he scrambled up the piled stones behind Clubfoot, he wondered what had tipped off Mirandee, who was stable and sensible. Then he remembered the Greek swordsman.

  Clubfoot put his head in the hole. His voice was muffled. “Curse, we forgot to bring a torch! Mirandee, would you—”

  The sandstone wall next to them fell outward. A splinter of rock nicked the Warlock’s cheek; another struck Wavyhill, tok! Slabs of rock fell and smashed to sand, and behind them the last god stepped forth.

  God of love and madness, was it? Roze-Kattee seemed a god of madness alone. It was shaggy with coarse hair, hair that covered its face and chest, baring only the eyes. Its eyes blazed yellow-white, brighter than the daylight. Orolandes had called it small, but it wasn’t; it was bigger than the Warlock…and it was growing before their eyes.

  Its pointed ears twitched as it looked around at its world. Already its head was above the magicians, and it did not see them. Alien thoughts formed in the Warlock’s mind, crushingly powerful.

  ALONE? HOW CAN I BE ALONE? I CALL YOU ALL TO ANSWER, YOU WHO RULE THE WORLD…

  The last god was male and female both. Its male organs were mounted below and behind the vagina, in such a way that it could probably mate with itself. And this was embarrassingly clear, because the magicians were now looking up between the tremendous hairy pillars of its legs. It was still growing!

  How? Where did it find the power? Roze-Kattee’s range must be growing with its size, with its power. The Warlock had never anticipated this: that as the last god, Roze-Kattee was beyond competition. Every madman and every lover must now serve it as a worshipper.

  Wavyhill snarled in the Warlock’s ear. “Get hold of yourselves! Clubfoot, quick, what’s your true name? Warlock, wake him up!”

  Mirandee and Clubfoot were still gaping. The Warlock shook Clubfoot’s shoulder and shouted, “Your true name!”

  “Kaharoldil.”

  Wavyhill sang in the Guild tongue. My name is Kaharoldil, I am your father and mother…The Warlock joined, making Wavyhill’s gestures for him. After a moment Clubfoot joined them. It was the old loyalty spell they were using, a spell the Warlock had once rejected as unethical. It decreased the intelligence of its victims. But now he only wondered if it would work.

  They had come ill-equipped, and moved too fast. Too much had been forgotten about the gods. Perhaps nobody had ever known enough.

  Roze-Kattee was a hairy two-legged mountain now. Its head must be halfway up the World-Worm’s head. And still it grew. The Warlock imagined chill sanity engulfing the Frost Giants and their Nordik masters, sweeping over the Greek islands, crossing Asian and African mountains; wars ending as weaker armies surrendered to stronger, or as farmers-turned-soldier dropped their spears and returned in haste to harvest their crops; husbands returning to wives, and wives to husbands, for remembered fondness and remembered promises, old habits and the neighbors’ approval. Already Roze-Kattee had changed the world.

  Orolandes lay on his back on the crumbly rock, looking up at the sky.

  He had tried a drug once. Something an American was carrying. The red man had burned leaves in a fire, and Orolandes and some of his troop had sniffed the smoke. He had felt like this, then. Abstracted. Able to view himself, his friends, his environs, from a godlike distance and with godlike clarity.

  It had not seemed worthwhile to follow Mirandee down the mountain. Whatever she and the others were planning, it could hardly be worthy of his attention.

  Even the guilt was gone. That was nice.

  There was a muffled booming somewhere far away. He ignored it.

  Then a section of rock the size of a parade ground, not far from where he was lying, settled and hesitated and dropped away. Thunder sounded below him.

  The corpse of the World-Worm was decomposing.

  Orolandes moved by reflex. He swept gear into his pack (leaving gear on the battlefield could get you killed next time), donned the pack and went backward down the rope. He tried to keep his weight on the rock, not on the line. The knob of rock could crumble. His life was at stake, and Orolandes truly did not have the gift for abstraction.

  I CALL YOU TO ANSWER, YOU WHO RULE THE WORLD…

  Orolandes stiffened. Those were not his thoughts. He looked around.

  He was then halfway down the slope, several hundred feet up. He saw a beast-thing with glowing yellow eyes, eyes level with his own. The great eyes locked with his, considered him, then turned away.

  Orolandes continued to descend.

  Certainly it would have been easy to let go. His muscles ached from the strain of climbing…but the hurt didn’t seem to matter either. It was easier to follow his training.

  I am Kaharoldil, your teacher and your wet-nurse and your ancestors’ ghosts. I tell you things for your own good. Wavyhill and Mirandee and Clubfoot sang, and the Warlock’s fingers made patterns in the air.

  Roze-Kattee heard.

  The tall ears twitched, the head swiveled, the blazing yellow eyes found them clustered on the ground. Roze-Kattee dropped to knees and hands, the better to observe them.

  Wavyhill said, “Ah, never mind.”

  Right. What did it matter? Clubfoot had stopped singing too. Roze-Kattee covered the sky; its yellow eyes were twin suns. The Warlock sat down, infinitely weary, and leaned back against crumbling rock to watch the last god grow.

  A thought formed, and tickled. Roze-Kattee was amused.

  YOU WOULD USE A LOVE-SPELL ON ME?

  Why, yes, a loyalty spell was a form of love spell. They’d been silly.

  SILLY AND PRESUMPTUOUS. BUT YOU HAVE WAKED ME FROM MY DEATH SLEEP. HOW MAY I REWARD YOU?

  The Warlock thought about it. Truly, he didn’t know. What must be would be.

  YOU WISHED TO BRING DOWN THE MOON? Again the thought tickled. PERHAPS I WILL.

  “Wait,” said Clubfoot, but he did not go on.

  Now the Warlock imagined a fat sphere, blue and bluish-brown and clotted white. He sensed a watery film of life covering that sphere…and he sensed how thin it was. Remove the life from the world, and what would have changed?

  This resignation, this fatalism, this dispassionate overview of reality went far beyond mere sanity, thought the Warlock. Roze-Kattee had practiced his power long before men ever put names to it. Now he imagined a smaller sphere, its rough surface the color of Wavyhill’s skull. It cruised past the larger sphere in a curved path. Now it stopped moving, then began to drift toward the larger sphere. Now the spheres bumped, and deformed, and merged in fi
re. A sticky cloud of flame began to cool and condense.

  IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED?

  “No,” Mirandee whispered.

  “No!” Wavyhill shouted. “No, you maniac! We didn’t know!”

  BUT IT IS WHAT I WANT. I CAN LIVE THROUGH THE TIME OF FIRE. I NEED THE…STATE OF THINGS THAT LETS GODS LIVE, THAT WARPS DEAD REALITY TO LIVING REALITY. WITH THE DEAD MOON’S AID I WILL PEOPLE THE CHANGED EARTH WITH MY CHILDREN. BECAUSE YOU HAVE SERVED ME, I WILL CREATE EACH OF YOU OVER AGAIN.

  The last god had grown so huge that Orolandes couldn’t even find it at first. He stepped back from the rope and looked around him. There were the magicians, a good distance away, doing nothing obvious about the menace. There, what he’d taken for a mountain became a pillar of coarse pale hair…leading up into a hairy torso…Orolandes froze, trying to understand.

  Then pictures invaded his mind and sent him reeling dizzily against the rock wall.

  Nobody had ever told him that the world was round. After the daydream-pictures stopped flitting through his mind, he remembered that. He remembered that everyone was about to die. But the pictures he had understood so well, grew muddled now, and faded…

  Never mind. What to do next? Orolandes thought of fleeing; but he wasn’t frightened.

  HOW CAN I STOP THE MOON IN ITS COURSE? YOU WHO WORK IN A LAND THAT IS ALMOST DEAD, YOU MUST HAVE CONSIDERED THIS. The question came with crushing urgency, and Orolandes thought frantically. How would a Greek soldier go about stopping the Moon? Then his head cleared…

  Well. The last god was proving very dangerous. Perhaps it would be best to kill the thing, Orolandes thought. The magicians seemed in no position to do so, and killing wasn’t really their field.

  He pulled the silver chain from the back pack. He found the red chalk too, looked at it…but he had paid no attention to Mirandee’s symbols. Nor to the arm-waving. Best stick with the chain and the sword.

  And still he wasn’t frightened. It was strange to be thinking this way, as if Orolandes had no more importance than any other man or woman. He had lost even love of self. This was no drug dream. It was like battlefield exhaustion, when he had fought and killed and run and fought until even his wounds no longer hurt and dying meant nothing but a chance to lie down. Thrice he had known that terrible death of self. He had not stopped fighting then.

  YES, GOOD. I CAN DO THAT, he thought; and he imagined himself stretching into the sky, growing very thin and very tall.

  But it was Roze-Kattee that stood upright and reached skyward. Roze-Kattee’s furry legs grew narrow, and the knees went up and up; but Roze-Kattee’s torso receded much faster, up through a stratum of broken clouds and onward.

  There was no way to reach a vital spot now. Well…Orolandes marched toward the last god’s foot.

  There was now something spidery about Roze-Kattee. The eyes were tiny dots of light, stars faint by daylight and right overhead. The fingers of both hands seemed thin as spiderweb strands: a web enclosing a pale crescent moon. The feet had spread and flattened as if under enormous pressure, and Orolandes had no trouble stepping up onto the foot itself, though it must cover several acres.

  At no time did he picture himself as a mosquito attacking a behemoth with cold-blooded murder in mind. Orolandes’ sense of humor was stone dead.

  He jogged toward the slender ankle. His skin felt puffy. He guessed that the sensation came from Roze-Kattee, and ignored it. He never guessed its origin: most of Roze-Kattee was in vacuum.

  The last god’s ankle was like an ancient redwood, slender only in proportion. Orolandes looped the silver chain and held it against the furry skin. He thrust through the loop. The blade grated against bone. He withdrew the blade, moved the loop and thrust again. The point scraped bone, found a joint and sank to the hilt. He grasped the hilt in both hands and worked the blade back and forth. Roze-Kattee was slow to respond. Without impatience he withdrew the blade and stabbed again.

  HURT! Orolandes yelled and grabbed his ankle. It felt like a snake had struck him. He found no wound…but he would not be unwounded long, because Roze-Kattee’s spidery hands were descending in slow motion.

  Something else had changed. Suddenly it mattered very much whether a Greek swordsman survived. Orolandes ran limping across the last god’s foot, swearing through clenched teeth.

  The Warlock said, “What?” exactly as if someone had spoken. He shook his head. Now what had startled him? And how had he hurt his foot? He bent to look, but the scream stopped him.

  “Orolandes!” Mirandee’s scream.

  It was a puzzling sight. Roze-Kattee was spread across the view like a child’s stick-figure drawing defacing a landscape painting. The scrawled line-figure stopped as if to tie a bootlace. And Mirandee was running toward where a flea seemed to be scuttling across the thing’s foot…

  Then it jumped into perspective, and the Warlock saw Orolandes running for a gap in the World-Worm’s cheek. He snapped, “Wavyhill!”

  “Here. Somewhere we have lost control.”

  “He had us controlled till Orolandes distracted him”

  “Suggestions?”

  “Kill it.”

  Wavyhill didn’t like the taste of that. “How?”

  “The Warlock’s Wheel.”

  “You built another one? Why?”

  “I was trying for a prescient dream. Success or failure for the Guild meeting. I took the right drugs, and I slept in the right frame of mind, and I had a nice, peaceful, dreamless sleep. Understand? Where I was trying to look…no mana. So maybe I’d be using a Warlock’s Wheel.”

  Now the swordsman was somewhere inside the World-Worm’s mouth. Roze-Kattee reached with spidery fingers into the hole a much tinier Roze-Kattee had broken through the sandstone.

  Clubfoot was on the ground, his arms over his face, his body clenched like a fist.

  “That’s suicide for us both. There’s got to be a better way. Warlock, there’s mana in god-murder. If we can kill it and take its power—”

  “How?”

  “Mirandee’s vampire spell!”

  “She’d be cremated, or turned into something shapeless. Could you hold that much power? Could I? Poor Clubfoot’s already had more than he can take.”

  “I hate it. All our work, lost! That’s the world’s last large source of mana, and you talk of burning it out to save a swordsman!”

  “To save the world,” the Warlock said gently.

  “Even Roze-Kattee can’t bring down the Moon by pushing on it!”

  Pain stabbed at the Warlock’s hand. Roze-Kattee howled in their brains…and was suddenly quiet. It turned to look at them, to study them.

  The cavern was black. Orolandes stayed on his hands and knees. Stalagmites he could feel his way around, but a drooping stalactite would take his head off. His foot hurt like fury. He turned left, toward the cavern’s main entrance.

  Marble pillars tipped with claws blasted their way through the wall and began feeling their way around, knocking World-Worm teeth in all directions.

  Now there was light. Orolandes waited.

  The hand paused as if bewildered.

  Orolandes sprang. He slashed at a knuckle, howled, set himself and slashed again. He ducked under the wounded finger and slashed at another. Nobody who loved Orolandes would have recognized him now, with saliva dripping from his jaws and his face contorted in murder-lust.

  The hand reacted at last. It spasmed. Then it cupped and swept through the cavern gathering spires of rock. It gathered Orolandes. He stabbed again, into a joint. Then closing fingers squeezed the breath from him. His eyes blurred…

  Wavyhill was shouting, “But what about us?” when the god’s blazing yellow eyes found them. “Never mind,” he said. “I think I see.”

  Those eyes: they could make you not care; they could make you lose interest. But they guaranteed a dispassionate overview and a selfless judgment.

  “I don’t care if it can bring down the Moon or not. It’s got to die,” said the Warlock. “The wo
rld belongs to the gods or it belongs to men.”

  “I said I understand. Go ahead.”

  The Warlock’s legs wouldn’t hold him. He started to crawl. Orolandes’ backpack was yards away, and his knees and hands hurt. Roze-Kattee’s vast spidery hand emerged from the cavern.

  “Come on.”

  “This is my top speed. Hell, at least I did it to myself.”

  “What?”

  “This is where it ends, the killing of Glirendree. Maybe I made the wrong choice. It was a long time ago…”

  The young magician had had to leave his home…again. Somehow his spells lost power. It happened to everyone. Irritated, but curious too, the Warlock had devised an experiment.

  He had made a simple copper disk and set two spells on it. One was simple and powerful: it held the metal together, gave it near-infinite tensile strength. The other spun it. He put no upper limit on that spell.

  And when the Wheel had destroyed itself, he knew.

  He had kept the secret for more than a century. But the demon-sword Glirendree had come to challenge him…

  “I didn’t have anything else that would kill it.” The Warlock spilled the pack and picked a copper disk out of the litter. “I couldn’t let Glirendree run loose, could I? Then the secret spread like a brushfire. The battle made too good a story.”

  “You and your damn Wheel.”

  “The magic goes away and never comes back. All the magicians panicked. You made a whole discipline out of murder and resurrection. Piranther and his band scrambled for a place of safety. Rynildissen City barred magicians—”

  “Do it. Before we’re stopped.”

  The Warlock spoke a word in the old Guild language and let go fast. The Wheel hovered in the air, spinning.

  Roze-Kattee reached for them.

  The Warlock heard a humming, rising in pitch. Sudden weakness dropped him on his side, limp. The disk glowed dull red. Roze-Kattee’s fingers disappeared into the glow, stretching and thinning like smoke in a draft. The Warlock felt no pain from the god, only the god’s amazement changing to horror.

  Roze-Kattee set its feet and pulled back. Now the disk was yellow-hot. Bursitis, arthritis, kidney stones, all the agony of a body that had lived too long flared and faded, and the Warlock’s strength and his senses faded together. His eyes blurred. The disk was a blue-white sun, and Roze-Kattee was pulled into it. The god’s panic was thick enough to touch…and then that faded too.