“I only know that my boy is standing in the back yard in his underwear while a high school teacher is lying in the cucumbers,” said Mother. “That’s enough for me to call the cops.”
Laudon chimed in. “He already called somebody.”
“Do you think he’d waste his time?”
“Are you still loyal to him?” demanded Laudon. “I haven’t been helping you commit treason, have I?”
“Shut up, Laudon,” said Mother. “Nobody wants to hear what you have to say.”
Jam turned to see how Laudon would react, but saw instead that Laudon had no mouth. Just a smooth expanse of skin from nose to jaw.
Mother reached out her arms to Jam. “Come on inside, baby.”
“He was going to cut me with this,” said Jam, holding up the obsidian blade.
She held out her hand for it. “That’s too dangerous for you to play with it.”
“Dangerous for me, Mama? Or you?”
“Come inside.”
“Are you the one who locked Gan inside his body? Are you the one that made him a vegetable?”
“A talky vegetable, judging from your attitude right now. Jamaica, don’t make me cross with you. We’re too close for such a spat between us.”
“You haven’t denied it yet.”
“Oh, how television of you. No, darling, I didn’t hurt Gan. But if I had hurt him, would I tell you? So why bother asking a question that has only one possible answer, whether it’s true or not?”
“Has it all been an act? All your tears for Gan?”
“An act? Gan is my son! Gan owns my heart. Do you think I could do this to him?”
“I don’t know,” said Jam. “I don’t know anything. Nobody’s who I thought they were. Nothing’s what it seemed like up to now.”
“My love for you is real.”
“Are you Laudon’s master?”
“Jam, I’m not anybody’s master.”
“You’ve got Gan on a bed where he can’t do anything, not even speak.”
“And that is the greatest tragedy of my life,” said Mother, starting to cry. “Are you going to find a way to blame me for that?”
Arms closed around Jam from behind. “I’ve got him now, Master,” said Laudon.
Jam fended him viciously, and abruptly he was free. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Laudon sprawled on the grass.
“Oh, very nice,” said Mother. “Is that how I taught you to treat company?”
“What I want to know is, does Father have any of this power? Are we all magicians?”
“You’re not, and your father isn’t, and Gan was but now he’s not,” said Mother.
“But if you have so much power, Mother, why don’t you heal Gan?”
“Heal him? He chooses to be the way he is.”
“Chooses!”
“He was not a dutiful son,” said Mother.
“And what about me?” said Jam.
“There has never been a better boy than you.”
“Unless I refuse to give you the stone.”
Her face grew sad. “Ah, Jamaica, baby, are you going to be difficult too?”
“Was that what happened to Daddy? He got ‘difficult’?”
“Your father is an animal who doesn’t deserve to be around children. Or anybody, for that matter. Now come here and open your hand to me.”
“It doesn’t show,” said Jam.
“Then open your hand so I can see for myself that I can’t see it.”
Jam walked to her, his hand open.
“Don’t try to deceive me, Jamaica,” said Mother. “Where is it?”
“This is the hand it’s in,” said Jam.
“No, it’s not,” said Mother. Then she pressed her ear against Jam’s chest. “Oh, Jamaica, baby,” she said. “Why did you have to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Swallow it.”
“But I didn’t.”
“I’m going to get it from you,” said Mother. “One way or another.” She reached out a hand toward Laudon. In a moment, the obsidian knife was in her grasp and she was singing something so softly that Jam couldn’t catch a single word of it.
She reached out with the obsidian blade toward Jam’s bare chest. “It always hides in the heart,” she said. “I’ll have it now.”
“Are you going to kill me, now, Mother?” asked Jam.
“It’s not my fault,” she said. “You could give it to me freely, though—then I wouldn’t have to cut.”
“I don’t control the thing,” said Jam.
“No,” said Mother sadly. “I didn’t think so.”
The obsidian flashed forward and she drew it down sharply.
But there wasn’t a mark on Jam’s skin.
“Don’t try to outmagic me,” she said. “Your father tried it, and look where he is.”
“He’s better off than Gan.”
“Because he’s not so dangerous to me. I trusted Gan before he turned against me. Now stop fending.”
“It’s a reflex,” said Jam. “I can’t help it.”
“That’s all right,” said Mother. “I can get inside your fending.”
“Not if don’t let you.”
“You’re part of me, Jam. You belong to me, like Gan.”
“As you told me growing up, if I can’t take care of my toys, I’m not entitled to have them.”
“You’re not my toy. You’re my son. If you serve me loyally, then I’ll be good to you. Haven’t I always been till now?”
“Till now I didn’t know what you did to Gan.”
“I must have that stone!” she said. “It’s mine!”
“That’s all I needed to hear.”
Mother and Jam both turned to see who had spoken—the voice certainly wasn’t Laudon’s.
In the middle of the back yard, standing on the lawn, was a slim, young-looking man with flashing eyes.
“Who are you?” asked Jam.
“I’m the one you called,” said the Emperor of the Air. “Now your mother has admitted that the stone is for her.”
“For me to give to you,” she said, sinking to her knees.
“What would I do with it?” he asked.
“Why, how else do you get your vast powers?
“Virtue,” said The Emperor of the Air. “You hid your deeds for years, but you should have known you couldn’t hide forever.”
“I could have, if this boy hadn’t—”
“She’s not really your mother,” the Emperor of the Air said to Jam. “No more than Gan is your brother. She took you, as she took Gan, because you had the power. She tried to use Gan’s power as a wizard, but he rebelled and she punished him. You’re the substitute. She stole you when Gan was confined to bed.”
“She’s not my mother?”
The Emperor of the Air waved his hand and suddenly the dam inside Jam’s mind broke and he was flooded with memory. Of another family. Another home. “Oh, God,” he cried, thinking now of his real father and mother, of his sisters. “Do they think I’m dead?”
“That was not right,” said Mother—no, not Mother—she was Mrs. Fisher now. “We were so close.”
“Not so close you weren’t willing to tear his heart out to get at the stone. But you wouldn’t have found it,” said the Emperor of the Air. “Because you never knew what he was—and is.”
“What is he?” demanded mother.
“His whole body is a philosopher’s stone. He gathers power from everyone he touches. The stone flew to him the way magnets do. It went inside him because it was of the same substance. You can’t get it out of him. And that knife of yours can never cut him.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” she cried out from her heart.
“What am I doing to you?” asked the Emperor of the Air.
“Punishing me!”
“No, my love,” said the Emperor. “You only feel punished because you know you deserve it.” He held out a hand to Jam.
Wordlessly, Jam took his hand, and together
they passed Mrs. Fisher by, entering the house without even glancing at her.
The Emperor led Jam to Gan’s bed. “Touch the lad, would you, Jamaica?”
Jam leaned down and touched Gan.
Gan’s eyes opened at once. “My lord,” he said to the Emperor of the Air.
“My good servant,” said the Emperor. “I’ve missed you.”
“I called out to you.”
“But you were weak, and I didn’t hear your voice, among so many. Only when your brother called did I hear—his voice is very loud.”
Jam wasn’t sure if he was being teased or not.
“Take me home,” said Gan.
“Ask your brother to heal you.”
Jam shook his head. “I can’t heal anybody.”
“Well, technically, that’s true. But if you let your brother draw on the power stored up inside you, he can heal himself.”
“Whatever I have,” said Jam, “belongs to him, if he needs it.”
“That’s a good brother,” said the Emperor.
Jam felt the tingle, the flow, like something liquid and cold flowing through his arm and out into Gan’s body. And in a few moments he was out of breath, as if he had been running for half an hour.
“Enough,” said the Emperor. “I told you to heal yourself, not make yourself immortal.”
Gan sat up, swung his legs off the bed, rose to his feet, and put his arm around Jam’s shoulders. “I had no idea you had so much strength in you.”
“He’s been collecting it his whole life,” said the Emperor of the Air. “Everyone he meets, every tree and blade of grass, every animal, any living thing he has ever encountered gave a portion of their power to him. Not all—not like that trivial stone—but a portion. And then it grew inside him, nurtured by his patience and wisdom and kindness.”
Patience? Wisdom? Kindness? Had anyone every accused Jam of such things before?
Gan hugged Jam. “We can go home now,” he said. “I to the Emperor’s house, and you to your true family. But you’re always my brother, Jamaica.”
Jam hugged him back. And with that, Gan was gone. Vanished. “I sent him home,” the Emperor explained. “He has a wife and children who have needed him for long years now.”
“What about Mother? I mean Mrs. Fisher? What she did to Gan. To me. Taking away even my memories of my family!”
The Emperor nodded gravely, then gestured toward Gan’s bed.
Mrs. Fisher lay there, helpless, her eyes open.
“I’m kinder to her than she was to Gan,” said the Emperor. “Gan did no wrong, yet she took from him everything but life. I’ve left her eyes and ears to her, and her mouth. She can talk.”
Then Mr. Laudon stood beside the bed. “And that will be Laudon’s punishment, won’t it, dear lad? To take care of her as Jam once cared for Gan—only you get to hear what she has to say.” The Emperor turned to Jam. “Tell me, Jamaica. Am I just? Is this equitable?”
“It’s poetic,” said Jam.
“Then I have achieved even beyond my aspirations. Go home now, Jam, and be a great wizard. Live with kindness, as you have done up to now, and the power that flows to you will be well-used. You have my trust. Do I have your loyalty?”
Jam sank to his knees. “You had it before you asked.”
“Then I give you these lands, to be lord where once this poor thing ruled.”
“But I don’t want to rule over anybody.”
“The less you rule, the happier your people will be. Assume your duties only when they demand it. Feel free to continue high school, though not at Riddle High, alas. Now go home.”
And at that moment the house disappeared, and Jam found himself on the sidewalk in front of the home where in fact he had lived for the first twelve years of his life. He remembered now, how he met Mrs. Fisher. She came to the house as a pollster, asking his parents questions about the presidential election. But when Jam came into the room, she rose to her feet and reached for his hand and at that moment he was changed, he remembered growing up with her as his mother, and being Gan’s brother, and the tragic incident where “father” knocked him down and damaged his brain. None of it true. Nothing. She stole his life.
But the Emperor of the Air had given it back, and more besides.
The door to the house opened. His real mother stood there, her face full of astonishment. “Michael!” she cried out. “Oh, praise God! Praise him! You’re here! You came home!”
She ran to him, and he to her, and they embraced on the front lawn. As she wept and kissed him and called out to everyone in the neighborhood that her son was home, he came back, Jam—no, Michael—murmured his thanks to the Emperor of the Air.
Robert Silverberg—four-time Hugo Award-winner, five-time winner of the Nebula Award, SFWA Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame honoree—is the author of nearly five hundred short stories, nearly one hundred-and-fifty novels, and is the editor of in the neighborhood of one hundred anthologies. Among his most famous works are Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. Learn more at www.majipoor.com.
For most people, learning magic is no easy feat. It’s not really the sort of thing you can just puzzle out for yourself in your spare time. I mean, what are the chances that anyone’s going to accidentally stumble across just the right incantation or just right quantity of eye of newt? Sure, you might be one of the lucky ones who gets invited to some sort of amazing wizard academy, but most practitioners of the arts are just going to have to suck it up and apprentice themselves to some crotchety old coot.
Being a sorcerer’s apprentice typically involves a lot of scut work—sweeping floors, emptying chamber pots, polishing beakers. And the most frustrating thing is, you’ve probably learned just enough magic to get an enchanted broom to do the job for you, but not enough to actually make it stop.
Our next story points out that while fiction would have us believe that most wizarding masters are ancient graybeards, some aspiring magicians may in fact find themselves apprenticed to attractive female wizards. However, for an amorous young man, this can be a mixed blessing. This story also points out that the ways of the heart can be as tricky, mysterious, and potent as any other form of enchantment.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Robert Silverberg
Gannin Thidrich was nearing the age of thirty and had come to Triggoin to study the art of sorcery, a profession for which he thought he had some aptitude, after failing at several for which he had none. He was a native of the Free City of Stee, that splendid metropolis on the slopes of Castle Mount, and at the suggestion of his father, a wealthy merchant of that great city, he had gone first into meat-jobbing, and then, through the good offices of an uncle from Dundilmir, he had become a dealer in used leather. In neither of these occupations had he distinguished himself, nor in the desultory projects he had undertaken afterward. But from childhood on he had pursued sorcery in an amateur way, first as a boyish hobby, and then as a young man’s consolation for shortcomings in most of the other aspects of his life—helping out friends even unluckier than he with an uplifting spell or two, conjuring at parties, earning a little by reading palms in the marketplace—and at last, eager to attain more arcane skills, he had taken himself to Triggoin, the capital city of sorcerers, hoping to apprentice himself to some master in that craft.
Triggoin came as a jolt, after Stee. That great city, spreading out magnificently along both banks of the river of the same name, was distinguished for its huge parks and game preserves, its palatial homes, its towering riverfront buildings of reflective gray-pink marble. But Triggoin, far up in the north beyond the grim Valmambra Desert, was a closed, claustrophobic place, dark and unwelcoming, where Gannin Thidrich found himself confronted with a bewildering tangle of winding medieval streets lined by ancient mustard-colored buildings with blank facades and gabled roofs. It was winter here. The trees were leafless and the air was cold. That was a new thing for him, winter: Stee was seasonless, favored all the year round by th
e eternal springtime of Castle Mount. The sharp-edged air was harsh with the odors of stale cooking-oil and unfamiliar spices; the faces of the few people he encountered in the streets just within the gate were guarded and unfriendly.
He spent his first night there in a public dormitory for wayfarers, where in a smoky, dimly lit room he slept, very poorly, on a tick-infested straw mat among fifty other footsore travelers. In the morning, waiting on a long line for the chance to rinse his face in icy water, he passed the time by scanning the announcements on a bulletin board in the corridor and saw this:
APPRENTICE WANTED
Fifth-level adept offers instruction for serious student, plus lodging. Ten crowns per week for room and lessons. Some household work required, and assistance in professional tasks. Apply to V. Halabant, 7 Gapeligo Boulevard, West Triggoin.
That sounded promising. Gannin Thidrich gathered up his suitcases and hired a street-carter to take him to West Triggoin. The carter made a sour face when Gannin Thidrich gave him the address, but it was illegal to refuse a fare, and off they went. Soon Gannin Thidrich understood the sourness, for West Triggoin appeared to be very far from the center of the city, a suburb, in fact, perhaps even a slum, where the buildings were so old and dilapidated they might well have dated from Lord Stiamot’s time and a cold, dusty wind blew constantly down out of a row of low, jagged hills. 7 Gapeligo Boulevard proved to be a ramshackle lopsided structure, three asymmetrical floors behind a weatherbeaten stone wall that showed sad signs of flaking and spalling. The ground floor housed what seemed to be a tavern, not open at this early hour; the floor above it greeted him with a padlocked door; Gannin Thidrich struggled upward with his luggage and at the topmost landing was met with folded arms and hostile glance by a tall, slender woman of about his own age, auburn-haired, dusky-skinned, with keen unwavering eyes and thin, savage-looking lips. Evidently she had heard his bumpings and thumpings on the staircase and had come out to inspect the source of the commotion. He was struck at once, despite her chilly and even forbidding aspect, with the despairing realization that he found her immensely attractive.
“I’m looking for V. Halabant,” Gannin Thidrich said, gasping a little for breath after his climb.
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