There was a trap here, somewhere.
COMES THE DAY, COMES THE MAN. THE CHALLENGE CREATES THE MAN. I HAVE STRIVEN, ACROSS AGES, TO PRESERVE KNOWLEDGE AND PROLONG THE HOURS OF THE SUN. THE STRUGGLES OF THE 18TH AEON COST ME MY POWER AND AFFLICTED WOUNDS THAT GNAW ME TODAY.
Could the snare be emotional?
EVEN HIDDEN, UNKNOWN, WITH ALL THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE AGES, I COULD NOT RECLAIM WHAT HAD BEEN RIPPED AWAY. BUT NOW CHANCE OFFERS AN OPPORTUNITY. I CAN PREPARE A REPLACEMENT.
Alfaro concealed all cynicism. He did not believe. He could envision reality only through his own character. Te Ratje must be another Alfaro Morag, ages subtler and craftier.
Even so, Alfaro sustained his resolution to honesty. “I’m not the man you need. The best I can be called is rogue or scoundrel.” And he did have obligations elsewhere.
YOUR BROTHER. OF COURSE. YET I HAVE ALL THESE DELICACIES. TEN THOUSAND OF THE SWEETLINGS, WHO LIVE BUT A DAY OF EACH HUNDRED YEARS. I HAVE THE WORLD, WHERE THE SUN’S TIRED OLD LIGHT WOULD BE EXTINGUISHED BUT FOR TE RATJE’S MIRACLE ENGINES.
“You read minds?”
SOME, I DO. YOURS IS OPEN. THOSE OF MY ANCIENT ANTAGONISTS, THOSE PRINCELINGS OF CHAOS AND SELFISHNESS IN THE SQUARE, NO. BUT I KNOW THEM. AND THE ENGINES UNDERSTAND THEM.
IT IS DETERMINED. AFARO MORAG WILL BEGIN TRAINING TO BECOME THE GOOD MAGICIAN.
Alfaro’s companion snuggled close and purred.
14
Ildefonse stepped into the library. The girls squeaked in surprise. The Good Magician shimmered.
The Preceptor asked, “Morag, what is this?”
Alfaro blurted, “What happened? How did?…”
“Mune the Mage arrived. He broke the stasis. Only, I’m sure, after making sure there were no loose treasures in need of pocketing. Answers, please.”
“Te Ratje would like me to become his assistant.”
The Preceptor chuckled wickedly, his mirth echoed by the other magicians, outside. Ildefonse turned to the doorway. “I spent my Forthright Option of Absolute Clarity. Does anyone have a spell meant to disperse illusion?”
Vermoulian the Dream-walker pushed forward. “I have a charm, not a true spell, which will distinguish illusion from waking dream.”
“Try it. Young Alfaro needs to see how far in he has been drawn.”
“That seems profligate.”
“We were all young once.”
“Very well. The charm is renewable.” The Dream-walker gestured, said a few words.
Ildefonse asked, “Is it time release? Nothing happened.”
“The effect is instantaneous.”
“Nothing has changed.”
Not strictly true. Nothing he wanted to be illusion had changed. Ildefonse himself reverted to his natural form. The change lacked drama. He developed a paunch and lost some looks, hair, and his avuncular warmth.
A brief disturbance arose outside the library, where the magicians saw one another clearly for the first time.
The library remained precisely unchanged. Likewise, the three beautiful girls. But an odor pervaded the scene.
“Ach!” Alfaro gasped. “Te Ratje!”
The Good Magician’s response to the charm was to grow old again, to become the wizened gnome, then to stop moving.
Nearest, Alfaro pronounced, “Dead! A long time dead. A mummy. Have we been dealing with a ghost?”
A shimmer formed about the husk. A voice inside Alfaro’s head said, I am a memory in the same engines that recall the delicate legion. Even the beautiful must die. But an idea, a dream, lives forever in Amuldar. The engines will labor on after the last star gutters.
“Not a dream,” Vermoulian opined. “A nightmare, brought to life.”
Ildfonse nodded. Alfaro failed to comprehend. His kitten slithered up him and nipped at his left earlobe. “I lack key information. Te Ratje did not discuss his old feud. He dismissed it as of consequence only insofar as it might interfere here.”
“Te Ratje was a zealot, of the narrowest focus, prepared to wreck civilizations to enforce his concept of right. The city outside, the gray, is the gift the Good Magician planned for us all.” Ildefonse spoke passionately.
“And yet, after the excesses of Grand Motholam, he ceased intercourse with mankind. He focused on sustaining the sun.”
“For which we must express gratitude, of course. But…”
The nymph had a hand inside Alfaro’s coat and shirt. He had trouble concentrating.
The Good Magician—or the machine inside which his ghost still conspired—read his mind.
The truth is the truth, whatever hat it wears.
Alfaro disagreed. “The truth is different for each observer. Even the laws of nature are protean in some circumstances.” He eased the hand from beneath his shirt, pushed the girl far enough away that her warmth no longer heightened his blood. “Forces try to enlist me, by seduction or implied threat. Why?”
Ildefonse betrayed a momentary surprise.
“The seducer is easily understood. My wants and fantasies will be fulfilled. The Preceptor, on the other hand…”
Ildefonse visibly controlled his tongue.
Truth is truth. The spell has been spun. Henceforth none can lie, save by silence. But truth will fill their thoughts. The Preceptor wishes to plunder Amuldar, then complete its destruction. So much does he loathe the vision of the Good Magician.
“Even to the cost of the sun?”
Even the beautiful must die. There are other suns. The magicians of Ascolais can travel in the palace of Vermoulian the Dream-walker.
Why did the magicians so hate the Good Magician’s vision?
The engines showed him the world Te Ratje would have made, first according to his truth, then according to neutral machines capable of calculating the sum vector of all the stresses presented by the ambitions of the beings within that world. There was little resemblance.
Morag rode the engines’ memories, observing incident and fact, absorbing the truths lurking between the biases.
15
Time had fled. Ildefonse had gone into a stasis again, his mouth open to protest. Likewise, the girls and the mummy.
Who had not been the Good Magician. Te Ratje had perished in the ancient conflict. He had been replaced by a follower with a lesser grasp of magic.
And had been replaced himself, in time.
“Relax the stasis.”
Ildefonse resumed protesting. The yelp of his stasis alarm interrupted. “What happened?” he demanded.
“The engines shadowed me through history.”
Ildefonse had no comment. Neither did the magicians outside.
“Preceptor, Te Ratje did fall at Fritjof’s Drive. The Good Magician here was a follower who salvaged Amuldar and carried on in secret. He made sure the engines will not fail in the lifetime of this universe. Amuldar is no threat to you. It will tend to the sun. It will care for Te Ratje’s beloved daughters. It will protect itself.”
Ildefonse absent his normal semblance could not conceal his inner self. Nor could he hide from Amuldar, which did not withhold salient information from Alfaro.
Morag said, “You all need to understand that none of the things you’re thinking will work. Content yourselves with the status quo.”
“Which is?” Vermoulian demanded.
“We are guests of Amuldar. For so long as Amuldar wishes.” Alfaro flung a thought at the engines. “A buffet is being set out. Follow the young women with the lights. Restrain your lusts. Vermoulian, go. Preceptor, stay. Rhialto, join us in here.” At a thought from Alfaro, the husk of the Good Magician floated away. Morag did not look. He feared it might be watching him as it went.
The dimensions of the library shifted. There was room for three men in three comfortable chairs attended by three implausibly beautiful young women. Alfaro reviewed his own sour history. One vision plagued him: Tihomir’s injury.
Several new girls appeared. They brought wines and delicacies.
Alfaro said, “I’ve been b
itten by the serpent whose venom moved Te Ratje. I’ll do as he asked. So, now, the question. What to do about you?”
“Release us,” Rhialto said, distracted. He had a princess on either knee.
“The machine considers that dangerous. It knows your minds. You are who you are. Yet returning you to Ascolais would be my preference.”
Alfaro was amazed. He was talking like the man in charge.
He asked, “Who among you can be trusted?”
Rhialto and the Preceptor instantly volunteered.
“I see. The engines disagree. I want to send for something. But whoever I send is likely to plunder those who stay behind. Excepting Nahourezzin, who would fail to remember his mission. Yes. An excellent strategy. There. And done.”
“What is done?” Ildefonse asked, nervously.
“The sandestins from the whirlways have been enlisted for the task, in return for remission of their indentures.”
“In just such manner did Te Ratje become unpopular, making free with the properties of others.”
“A paucity of otherworldly servants should make actions against Amuldar less practical. Enjoy the wine. Enjoy the food. Enjoy the company.” Alfaro leaned forward to whisper, “I’m doing my best to get you out of here alive.”
16
Tihomir stared at the gray city, childlike. The sandestins had deposited him, and the contents of the tower beside the Javellana Cascade, in the center of the acre square. Alfaro rushed to greet his brother. Several favorite nymphs followed. He anticipated meeting the others wholeheartedly. Ten thousand of those precious, wondrous gems!
There were no magicians or whirlways in the square.
After embracing his brother Alfaro commenced the slow process of making Tihomir understand their new situation. He worried overmuch. Tihomir would be comfortable so long as he remained near Alfaro. He had arrived frightened only because they had been separated for a time, then strange demons had come to carry him away.
Alfaro Morag. The bad magicians are escaping.
“How can that be?” Though he had noted the absence of the whirlaways, including his own.
The one called Barbanikos propped the way open when the demons returned. The demons themselves had no confidence in your promise to relax their indentures.
Golden-tongued Rhialto and Ildefonse would have leveraged any demonic doubt to adjust notoriously evanescent sandestin loyalties.
There was a reason they were indentured rather than hired.
Alfaro shrugged. He remained irked that his whirlaway had been appropriated—by Mune the Mage, surely—yet here was a problem solved without his having to offend Amuldar. A prodigy. He was free to be the Good Magician and free to make Tihomir whole.
A dozen more girls arrived to help Alfaro move his possessions into his wondrous new quarters, shaped by Amuldar’s engines based on his deepest fantasies.
Not even Ildefonse’s Boumergarth could match their opulence.
He had fallen into paradise.
Paradise was a blade with vicious edges.
Across subsequent centuries, individual magicians, or, occasionally, a cabal, attempted to avail themselves of the riches of Amuldar. Every stratagem failed.
Only Vermoulian the Dream-walker penetrated Amuldar’s shell—by stalking the nightlands. The Dream-walker traced the nightmare into which the Good Magician descended.
Alfaro Morag, as all the Good Magicians before him had, discovered that only a few millennia of this paradise left him unable to continue to endure the cost. As had they, he began to yearn for the escape of the beautiful.
The better grounded and rounded Tihomir Morag would gain fame as his brother’s successor.
Afterword:
I entered the Navy out of high school in 1962, severely afflicted by Ambition Deficit Disorder. Nevertheless, when the Navy offered to send me to college for an additional four years of my life I said “Yo-ho-ho!” and went off to the University of Missouri. As a gangly, uncoordinated freshman I lurched about in the wake of a senior keeper whose name I have forgotten but whose greatest good turn remains with me still.
On learning that I favored science fiction, too, he dragged me into the independent bookstore next door to the tavern where we spent our evenings practicing to become sailors on liberty. There he compelled me to fork over the outrageous sum of, I believe, 75 cents (plus tax!) for the Lancer Limited Edition paperback of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. I was aghast. Paperbacks were 50 cents or, at most, 60 cents at the time. But I got my money’s worth, yes I did. That book is gone, along with a couple of subsequent editions, because I have read and read and read, I cannot say how many times.
I was hooked from the first page. This was intellectual meth. I cannot shake the addiction, nor have I ever lost the tyro’s longing to create something “just like—” What every author feels about favorites who blazed new roads throught the ravines and thickets of literature’s Cumberland Gaps. One of the great thrills of my writing career was being invited to participate in this project. So, for the first time in two and a half decades, I wrote a piece of short fiction, to honor one of the greats who lured me into this field.
Events here chronicled occur at the extreme end of the 21st Aeon, in anotherwise dull epoch some centuries after happenings recorded in Rhialto the Marvellous.
—Glen Cook
Elizabeth Hand
The Return of the Fire Witch
Elizabeth Hand is the author of ten novels, including Generation Loss, Waking the Moon, Mortal Love, and Winterlong, and three collections of short fiction, the most recent of which is Saffron & Brimstone: Strange Stories. She is a longtime contributor of book reviews and essays to the Washington Post, Village Voice, Salon, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among many others. In 2008 her psychological thriller Generation Loss received the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, and her fiction has also received two Nebula Awards, three World Fantasy Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, the James M. Tiptree Jr. Award and the Mythopeoic Society Award. She recently completed Wonderwall, a Young Adult novel about the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. She lives on the coast of Maine with her family, and is currently at work on Available Dark, a sequel to Generation Loss.
The Return of the Fire Witch
Elizabeth Hand
Insensibility, melancholia, hebetude; ordinary mental tumult and more elaborate physical vexations (boils, a variety of thrip that caused the skin of an unfaithful lover to erupt in a spectacular rash, the color of violet mallows)—Saloona Morn cultivated these in her parterre in the shadow of Cobalt Mountain. A lifetime of breathing the dusky, spore-rich air of her hillside had inoculated her against the most common human frailties and a thousand others. It was twelve years since she had felt the slightest stirring of ennui or regret, two decades since she had suffered from despondency or alarm. Timidity and childish insouciance she had never known. There were some, like her nearest neighbor, the fire witch Paytim Noringal, who claimed she had never been a child; but Paytim Noringal was wrong.
Likewise, Saloona had been inoculated against rashness, optimistic buoyancy, and those minor but troubling disinclinations that can mar one’s sleep—fear of traveling beyond alpen climes, the unease that accompanied the hours-long twilight marking the months of autumn. Despair had been effaced from Saloona’s heart, and its impish cousin, desire. If one gazed into her calm, ice-colored eyes, one might think she was happy. But happiness had not stitched a single line upon her smooth face.
Imperturbability was an easy emotion to design and grow, and was surprisingly popular with her clients. So it was, perhaps, that she had inhaled great quantities of the spores of imperturbability, because that was the sole quality that she could be seen to possess. Apart, of course, from her beauty, which was noted if not legendary.
This morning, she was attempting to coax an air of distinction from a row of Splendid Blewits, mushrooms that resembled so many ink-stained thumbs. The blewits were saphrophytes, their favored hosts
carnivorous Deodands that Saloona enticed by bathing in the nearby river. She disabled the Deodands with a handful of dried spores from the Amethyst Deceiver, then dragged them up the hillside to her cottage. There she split each glistening, eel-black chest with an ax and sowed them with spores while their hearts still pumped. Over the course of seven or eight days, the sky-blue sacs would slowly deflate as the Splendid Blewits appeared, releasing their musty scent of woodlice and turmeric.
After a week, she could harvest the spores. These became part of an intricate though commonplace formula usually commissioned by men with aristocratic aspirations—in this instance, a dull optimate of middle years who sought to impress his much younger lover, a squireen who favored ocelex pantolons that did not flatter him.
It was no concern of hers if her clients were vain or foolish, or merely jaded by a terminal ennui that colored their judgment, much as the sun’s sanguine rays stained the sky. Still, she needed to eat. And the optimate would pay well for his false magnificence. So: arrogance and feigned modesty; a dash of servility to offset the stench of self-love…a few grains from the Splendid Blewits, and the physic would be complete.
But something was wrong.
Yesterday evening, she had unrolled nets of raw linen fine as frog-hair, arranging the filmy cloth beneath those indigo thumbs to catch the spores they released at nightfall. Morning should have displayed delicate spore-paintings, the blewits’ gills traced upon the nets in powdery lines, pollen-yellow, slate-blue.
Instead, the gauze bore but a single bruised smear of violet and citron. Saloona bent her head to inspect it, holding back her long marigold hair so that it wouldn’t touch the cloth.
“You needn’t bother.”
She glanced aside to see a Twk-woman astride a luna moth, hovering near her head. “And why is that?” Saloona asked.
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