The Way of the Wizard

by John Joseph Adams

“Do you remember the Robert Frost poem I read to you when you were a boy?” she said. “The one that starts ‘Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice’? Do you recall how it ends?”

  “No, Mother.”

  “It ends, ‘I think I know enough of hate / To know that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice.”

  “Please, Mother,” Watt said.

  She shook her head, sadly. “You had your fire already, my darling. And now . . . ” Ice flowed from her fingers, covering him in a frosty shell, and his amber lights dimmed. She glanced at the two terrified meth monkeys, waved her hand casually, and they froze in place, transformed into ice sculptures of themselves.

  She turned to look at Marla, smiling. “Now, dear, what’s your name?”

  “Uh. Marla Mason. And you are . . . ?”

  “I call myself Regina Queen.”

  Marla blinked. “Doesn’t that mean, like, ‘Queen Queen’?”

  She smiled indulgently. “Some people need to be told things twice before they understand them, dear. I’ve been married to two men—bore them both sons—but I didn’t want to keep either of their last names, so I made up my own, suitable to my station. Some called me the Snow Queen, though I’m not from a fairy tale.” She stretched her arms overhead, turning her face up to the sun. “Oh, it’s so nice to be out and about. I love the winter, but that was too much of a good thing. Now. Why did you set me free?”

  Marla considered lying, but who knew which lie would keep her from being turned into an icicle? “I was sent to, ah, blow that guy up. Your son. No offense.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “And to steal the snow globe, though I didn’t know there was anybody in it.”

  “Mmm.” Regina sat cross-legged on the dirt, produced a hairbrush from somewhere not entirely obvious, and began brushing out her long black hair. “Who hired you?”

  “A sorcerer in Felport, named Viscarro.”

  “I see. I mentioned I was married twice. My second husband was the Reverend Reginald Watt, poor Savery’s father. My first husband, father of my firstborn, was Captain Antonio Viscarro. So I assume your employer is my son Leland? And that my boys had some sort of falling out?”

  Viscarro’s name was Leland? He didn’t look like a Leland, but then, he didn’t look like anything except maybe Methuselah. “He didn’t tell me his family history. Ma’am. Just sent me with a dud bomb and orders to steal a snow globe.”

  She finished brushing her hair and stood up. “All right. I have no intention of being imprisoned again, which means, as much as it pains me, I’ll have to go kill my son Leland.”

  “Is that totally necessary?”

  “I’m afraid so. You’ll take me to him, of course.”

  “That’s maybe not such a good idea.”

  “If you aren’t with me, Miss Mason, then you are, by definition, against me.” She walked over to one of the meth monkeys and kicked his arm, the limb snapping off and shattering into chunks of ice. “Which is it?”

  “Right.” Marla had no great love for Viscarro, but he was a ranking sorcerer on Felport’s council, and if some outsider came into the city and murdered him there would be consequences. Chaos, retaliation, all-out magical warfare, and other disruptive, city-wrecking unpleasantness, and if Marla was on either side of the conflict, it would be bad for her. Plus, Marla wouldn’t be able to get paid if Regina killed Viscarro. “So, you want revenge against your son, or . . . ?”

  “Of course not. I love my boys. They had their reasons for imprisoning me. But once Leland realizes I’m no longer in the snow globe, he’ll come after me, to kill me, or trap me again, and . . . I can’t abide that. I don’t know for sure if I’ll win a fight against my son, but with the element of surprise on my side, and your help getting in to see him, it’s possible. I’d prefer to go somewhere up north and avoid the whole ordeal, but what choice do I have?”

  Marla thought furiously. “What if Viscarro didn’t know you’d escaped?”

  “The snow globe is empty, dear. That will be readily apparent when you deliver it. And while we could, I suppose, kidnap some hill person and trap them in the globe, they would soon perish in the snow there, and the ruse would be revealed. Only someone with certain . . . immortal qualities . . . can survive inside that sphere.”

  “Yeah, okay, but what if we put him in the globe?” She pointed to the frozen junk sculpture that was Savery Watt. “Getting your other son out of the way too?”

  Regina shook her head. “That’s not my son. That’s just a pile of junk. His soul isn’t in that body, he was just using it. His soul resides in some object—probably an egg, or stone, or jewel, but a lich’s phylactery can be almost anything. I grant you, your plan works in theory, but without the phylactery, we can’t trap him. No, I’m afraid war is the only solution.”

  “Come on,” Marla said. “I know where Savery lives. You’re his mother. Are you saying you don’t know your son well enough to guess where he might have hidden his soul?”

  Regina shook her head as she surveyed the interior of the cavern. “Savery, you hoarder. You’re almost as bad as your brother. I got them started collecting baseball cards—I love baseball, it’s funny, you’d think I’d prefer winter sports, but I don’t—and from there they both started collecting everything.” She walked along the shelves, peering at porcelain dogs, ceramic unicorns, and, of course, the profusion of snow globes.

  Marla, meanwhile, found a metal safe, punched it open with her brass knuckles, and scooped out several banded bundles of crumpled cash. She traded her services to sorcerers for knowledge, not money—so she had to make money where she could.

  “Oh,” Regina said softly. “I can’t believe he kept this.” Marla walked over as she lifted a metal toy monkey from the shelf. “It’s a tin toy from England. I bought him this, for his collection, the same Christmas he and his brother . . . Well. They gave me a snow globe that year.” She cocked her head. “This. This is his phylactery.”

  “You sure?”

  She shrugged. “If I’m wrong, we can just try sticking everything else in this house into the snow globe, until I grow too bored, and decide to go to war instead.”

  “Gotcha.” Marla took the two halves of the snow globe from her bag. Regina set the toy monkey on the globe’s base and started screwing on the top. It didn’t look like it should fit—the monkey was too big—but the glass sphere fit over it easily, and when Regina screwed it down, the globe filled with whiteness . . . and there, in the center, a black shape ran in wild circles.

  “That’s it, then,” Regina said. “Seems a shame to trap my son this way, but it’s more merciful than destroying his soul.”

  “Just think of it as putting your kid in time out,” Marla said, and Regina looked at her blankly. Right. She came from a time when disciplining your child meant sending him out to cut the switch you intended to beat him with. “Never mind. Can you help me get that frozen junkpile body up here? I need to cover my tracks.”

  Marla checked her watch, figured the timing was right, and said, “Let’s do it.” She and Regina stood well back and watched as the meth lab exploded, a simple fire spell combining with the chemicals inside to make a big ugly boom that engulfed Savery Watt’s robot body in fire. Regina whispered down a ring of ice to contain the fire and keep the woods from burning, which was considerate of her, Marla thought.

  If Viscarro sent someone to check up on her story, he’d find a smoking ruin and a bunch of scrap metal to support Marla’s version of events. Sure, he might start wondering when he never heard from his brother again, but with luck he’d just assume Savery was in hiding. Viscarro was arrogant. He’d be fine believing he’d utterly overpowered his brother.

  “So where are you going now?” Marla asked.

  “Better you don’t know, Marla. Thank you for saving me, even if it was unintentional. I’ll find a peaceful place and catch up on everything that’s happened since I was trapped.”

  “Wait�
�ll you hear about global warming,” Marla said. “You’re going to hate it.” She waved goodbye and went down the hill, and the car pulled up soon after she reached the bottom. The driver was a full two minutes late, which spoiled the perfectly-timed arrival she’d envisioned, but she was feeling magnanimous, so she didn’t even threaten him, just said, “Home, Jaws.”

  They passed a fire engine and two cop cars on the way, and the scream of sirens made Marla homesick.

  “Fine, fine,” Viscarro said when Marla finished her tale, in which things went much as planned, unlike in real life. He held up the snow globe to the light, grunted, and placed it on a shelf behind his desk. “You did well. I suppose you’d like to be paid. What trick did you want me to teach you?”

  “I thought it would be cool to learn to summon an incubus,” she said.

  Viscarro shuddered. “Youth is disgusting. The young and their urges and fluids repulse me. Fine. Return to me on the next new moon and I’ll show you the ritual. Are we done?”

  “Ah, ah.” Marla waved her forefinger at him. “You still owe me a secret.”

  “Yes, fine. Do you want to know the true identity of Kaspar Hauser? Where Ambrose Bierce ended up? What happened to the Lost Colony?”

  “I was thinking more, I want you to tell me who’s trapped inside that snow globe, and why.”

  Viscarro’s hands curled into configurations even more clawlike than usual. “Those are secrets that touch on me, Marla.”

  She shrugged. “You didn’t say no personal questions. I like to know about the people I work for.” She knew Viscarro would keep his promise. Sorcerers would twist, lie, and deceive all day and all night, but if they said they’d do something, they did it—a sorcerer’s word was one of his most valuable currencies.

  “Fine.” He spun in his desk chair, looking at the snow globe, which stood between a blue glass bottle and a Faberge egg, on a shelf full of similarly dissimilar bric-a-brac. “If you must know, my mother, Regina Viscarro Watt, is trapped inside the snow globe. As for why? Because she’s incredibly dangerous.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m sure your sense of history is as stunted as those of every other person in their twenties, but perhaps you’ve heard of the Blizzard of 1899? No? Well. It snowed in the South, that year. It snowed in Florida—the only time in recorded history Florida has ever experienced sub-zero weather. It snowed in Louisiana. There were ice floes in the gulf of Mexico. Where we lived, in Erasmus Tennessee, the temperature dropped to thirty below zero. And do you know what caused that cold? My mother did. She was a weather witch with ice water in her veins. And do you know why she froze the South? Because my stepfather wouldn’t take her on vacation. She was angry, and she threw a fit, and the world paid the price. It was not the first time she did something like that, nor the last.” He shook his head, and swiveled his chair back to her. “The man you took the snow globe from is my half-brother, and he has been . . . unreliable since his body was destroyed. The ordeal drove him a bit mad. I felt I would be a better choice for custodianship of our mother. He disagreed. So I sent you to press the issue. I am a dangerous person, Marla, as you well know, but I am nothing—nothing—compared to my mother. The world is a better place with her on this shelf.”

  “Wow,” Marla said. “That’s, uh . . . Wow.” What had she set free? Hell. It wasn’t her fault. Viscarro should have given her a bomb that worked.

  “Leave me now,” Viscarro said, and turned in his chair to stare at the snow globe.

  Marla walked out of Viscarro’s catacombs, past hurrying apprentices, down narrow corridors, through brick-lined tunnels, and climbed a ladder to emerge from a manhole not far from her apartment. Autumn was getting a grip on Felport, and there was a definite nip in the air. Winters here were always hard, but did it seem . . . colder than usual, for October?

  “Ice will suffice,” she muttered, and wrapped her cloak more tightly around herself, and set off for home. Maybe this year she’d send her mother a Christmas card. All things considered, maybe the old lady wasn’t so bad.

  Jeremiah Tolbert’s fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, Ideomancer, and Shimmer, as well as in the anthologies Seeds of Change, Federations, and Polyphony 4. He’s also been featured several times on the Escape Pod and Podcastle podcasts. In addition to being a writer, he is a web designer, photographer, and graphic artist—and he shows off each of those skills in his Dr. Roundbottom project, located at www.clockpunk.com. He lives in Colorado, with his wife and cats.

  In everyday life, when people use the word “wizard,” they’re almost always talking about a “computer wizard,” and that’s no accident. There are many striking parallels between the wizards of old and our modern-day IT folks. Both are conversant in inscrutable languages full of strange symbols where even the tiniest error can spell disaster, both spend hours locked away in rooms full of books and equipment, and both can produce dazzling effects.

  In fact, to most people computers seem like magic. In one Too Much Coffee Man comic, the hero’s computer attempts to explain to him how it works, in terms of RAM and binary numbers and machine code. A skeptical Too Much Coffee Man tears the computer apart only to reveal what he’s always suspected—inside is nothing but a tiny devil standing on a flaming pentagram.

  It’s no surprise then that many fantasy writers have speculated about how sorcery and computers might intersect. Our next tale is one of a series in which Tolbert utilizes his formidable knowledge of computers to present a world in which hackers and geeks are also wizards and witches, where a “sprog” (“spell” + “program”) can do almost anything, and where spam can be deadly.

  One-Click Banishment

  Jeremiah Tolbert

  STUCK THREAD * Six Lessons Learned in MAA’s Captive Servitude

  Posted by Hidr at 7:42 PM Yesterday

  Yeah, the rumors are true. Big Mother caught me (note the past-tense, indicating that it happened in the past and it’s no longer the case. Isn’t language fun?). Before I get started, I want to make one thing very clear—anyone who asks me when Tometracker will be back online will be banned from the board and cursed with a sprog that turns your dick into a cactus. If you don’t believe I own that sprog, just ask @DedJonny. The word on Tometracker is, I’m working on moving the servers. It takes time when they’re located on an astral plane.

  Some of you kids might not know who I am. I’ve stayed away from the general forums for a long time because I can’t stand the crap you nerds talk about. Check my two-digit user ID and tremble, n00bs. But I’ve come in here to share with you some very important lessons.

  Everybody’s got a talent, and mine’s damned useful when you’re a m4g1ck pirate (yarr). My handle is Hidr for a reason. I make things very hard to find. I’ve been evading the MAA’s goons and daemons for almost a decade. Yes, by your standards I’m an old geezer. When I joined up, we downloaded sprogs on 28.8 baud modems. My 8086 barely had enough processing power to cast even the most simple cantrips. Also, I walked to school uphill both ways without an energy boost sprog. Oh, and our music was better than the crap you kids listen to.

  You are using defensive or obfuscation sprogs that I crunched from tomes or coded myself. I’ve personally developed a toolbox of tricks that Big Mother has not been able to beat. Until a few days ago.

  Your MAA countermeasures are only as good as your own personal paranoia. MAA has been slow to catch on to our tactics and methodology (you learn slower when your organization is made up of immortal wizards born in the time of cave people, I guess), but they had someone new, younger, working in their Anti-Piracy division. I was not expecting to be taken out by a fucking social engineering hack.

  I won’t go into the personal details. It’s too embarrassing. Let’s just say that Big Mother never would have caught me if it wasn’t for my weakness for nerdy redheads. Stay off of Craigslist, boys and girls. They are probably still planting honey pots in the form of geeky love interests that don’t exist. Well, they might
exist, but they’re not posting in the “casual encounters” area of Craigslist.

  They tagged me because I was running a minor glamour on my jailbroken iPhone, covering up some acne scars from my misbegotten youth. Even something small, low-mojo-using, makes you stand out in a crowded restaurant to their scryers. Lesson number one: run obfuscation at all times. You should have enough mojo to do that, and if you don’t, better start collecting it. (Plenty of files in the FTP for you to put on tracker sites with a personalized collector sprog.)

  So the worst of it is, they weren’t even trying to catch a higher-up like myself. They were canvassing for any m4g1ck pirates they could find and got lucky. Go figure. But you want to hear all the gory details, huh. Here we go.

  So the ordeal starts with MAA agents sucking me into a Box sprog running on what looked like a pretty necklace worn by the undercover MAA agent. Turns out to be a mini-computer the size of a USB stick. It’s pretty awesome. I’ll tell you more about it later—

  —Hold on, I need to reboot a router. I’ll pick this up in the next post.

  Posted by Hidr at 8:14 PM Yesterday

  Time’s funny in a Box. I lose track of it banging on the glass-smooth walls and screaming obscenities. I burn through a gig of mojo trying to crack my way out. Enough time goes by that I can write a sprog in Aleph-code to try to overwrite the Box’s World-Object-Model. But I’m Hidr, not Escapr. I carry just about every defensive sprog ever cracked, but I don’t carry escape tools when I go out on a date. Paranoia FAIL. That’s lesson number two. You can never be paranoid enough with the MAA around.

  When they crack open the Box, I slurp out into an interrogation cell with two MAA pirate hunters. These assholes are so stereotypical. They’re in black suits and dark shades, all business, but the menacing Fed look is ruined by the unkempt gray beards and pointed wizard caps. So yeah, I can finally say that I have seen not one but two agents in person. I’m just guessing here, but they probably don’t wear the hats in public. Which is where I would like to be right about now: in public.