The Way of the Wizard

by John Joseph Adams

  But it was not tempting. Angie knew the difference.

  “Forget it,” she said. “Forget it, buster. You’ve got nothing to show me.”

  El Viejo did not answer her. The old, old eyes that were all pupil continued slipping over her like hands, and Angie went on glaring back with the brown eyes she despaired of because they could never be as deep-set and deep green as her mother’s eyes. They stood so—for how long, she never knew—until El Viejo turned and opened his mouth as though to speak to the silent old lady whose own stone eyes seemed not to have blinked since Angie had first entered the Santeria shop, a childhood ago. Whatever he meant to say, he never got the words out, because Marvyn came back then.

  He came down the dark hall from a long way off, as El Viejo had done the first time she saw him—as she herself had trudged forever, only moments ago. But Marvyn had come a further journey: Angie could see that beyond doubt in the way he stumbled along, looking like a shadow casting a person. He was struggling to carry something in his arms, but she could not make out what it was. As long as she watched him approaching, he seemed hardly to draw any nearer.

  Whatever he held looked too heavy for a small boy: it threatened constantly to slip from his hands, and he kept shifting it from one shoulder to the other, and back again. Before Angie could see it clearly, El Viejo screamed, and she knew on the instant that she would never hear a more terrible sound in her life. He might have been being skinned alive, or having his soul torn out of his body—she never even tried to tell herself what it was like, because there were no words. Nor did she tell anyone that she fell down at the sound, fell flat down on her hands and knees, and rocked and whimpered until the scream stopped. It went on for a long time.

  When it finally stopped, El Viejo was gone, and Marvyn was standing beside her with a baby in his arms. It was black and immediately endearing, with big, bright, strikingly watchful eyes. Angie looked into them once, and looked quickly away.

  Marvyn looked worn and exhausted. His eyepatch was gone, and the left eye that Angie had not seen for months was as bloodshot as though he had just come off a three-day drunk—though she noticed that it was not wandering at all. He said in a small, dazed voice, “I had to go back a really long way, Angie. Really long.”

  Angie wanted to hold him, but she was afraid of the baby. Marvyn looked toward the old woman in the corner and sighed; then hitched up his burden one more time and clumped over to her. He said, “Ma’am, I think this is yours?” Adults always commented on Marvyn’s excellent manners.

  The old woman moved then, for the first time. She moved like a wave, Angie thought: a wave seen from a cliff or an airplane, crawling along so slowly that it seemed impossible for it ever to break, ever to reach the shore. But the sea was in that motion, all of it caught up in that one wave; and when she set down her pipe, took the baby from Marvyn and smiled, that was the wave too. She looked down at the baby, and said one word, which Angie did not catch. Then Angie had her brother by the arm, and they were out of the shop. Marvyn never looked back, but Angie did, in time to see the old woman baring blue gums in soundless laughter.

  All the way home in a taxi, Angie prayed silently that her parents hadn’t returned yet. Lidia was waiting, and together they whisked Marvyn into bed without any serious protest. Lidia washed his face with a rough cloth, and then slapped him and shouted at him in Spanish—Angie learned a few words she couldn’t wait to use—and then she kissed him and left, and Angie brought him a pitcher of orange juice and a whole plate of gingersnaps, and sat on the bed and said, “What happened?”

  Marvyn was already working on the cookies as though he hadn’t eaten in days—which, in a sense, was quite true. He asked, with his mouth full, “What’s malcriado mean?”

  “What? Oh. Like badly raised, badly brought up—troublemaking kid. About the only thing Lidia didn’t call you. Why?”

  “Well, that’s what that lady called . . . him. The baby.”

  “Right,” Angie said. “Leave me a couple of those, and tell me how he got to be a baby. You did like with Milady?”

  “Uh-huh. Only I had to go way, way, way back, like I told you.” Marvyn’s voice took on the faraway sound it had had in the Santeria shop. “Angie, he’s so old.”

  Angie said nothing. Marvyn said in a whisper, “I couldn’t follow you, Angie. I was scared.”

  “Forget it,” she answered. She had meant to be soothing, but the words burst out of her. “If you just hadn’t had to show off, if you’d gotten that letter back some simple, ordinary way—” Her entire chest froze solid at the word. “The letter! We forgot all about my stupid letter!” She leaned forward and snatched the plate of cookies away from Marvyn. “Did you forget? You forgot, didn’t you?” She was shaking as had not happened even when El Viejo had hold of her. “Oh, God, after all that!”

  But Marvyn was smiling for the first time in a very long while. “Calm down, be cool—I’ve got it here.” He dug her letter to Jake Petrakis—more than a little grimy by now—out of his back pocket and held it out to Angie. “There. Don’t say I never did nuttin’ for you.” It was a favorite phrase of his, gleaned from a television show, and most often employed when he had fed Milady, washed his breakfast dish, or folded his clothes. “Take it, open it up,” he said now. “Make sure it’s the right one.”

  “I don’t need to,” Angie protested irritably. “It’s my letter—believe me, I know it when I see it.” But she opened the envelope anyway and withdrew a single folded sheet of paper, which she glanced at . . . then stared at, in absolute disbelief.

  She handed the sheet to Marvyn. It was empty on both sides.

  “Well, you did your job all right,” she said, mildly enough, to her stunned, slack-jawed brother. “No question about that. I’m just trying to figure out why we had to go through this whole incredible hooha for a blank sheet of paper.”

  Marvyn actually shrank away from her in the bed.

  “I didn’t do it, Angie! I swear!” Marvyn scrambled to his feet, standing up on the bed with his hands raised, as though to ward her off in case she attacked him. “I just grabbed it out of your backpack—I never even looked at it.”

  “And what, I wrote the whole thing in grapefruit juice, so nobody could read it unless you held it over a lamp or something? Come on, it doesn’t matter now. Get your feet off your damn pillow and sit down.”

  Marvyn obeyed warily, crouching rather than sitting next to her on the edge of the bed. They were silent together for a little while before he said, “You did that. With the letter. You wanted it not written so much, it just wasn’t. That’s what happened.”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “Me being the dynamite witch around here. I told you, it doesn’t matter”

  “It matters.” She had grown so unused to seeing a two-eyed Marvyn that his expression seemed more than doubly earnest to her just then. He said, quite quietly, “You are the dynamite witch, Angie. He was after you, not me.”

  This time she did not answer him. Marvyn said, “I was the bait. I do garbage bags and clarinets—okay, and I make ugly dolls walk around. What’s he care about that? But he knew you’d come after me, so he held me there—back there in Thursday—until he could grab you. Only he didn’t figure you could walk all the way home on your own, without any spells or anything. I know that’s how it happened, Angie! That’s how I know you’re the real witch.”

  “No,” she said, raising her voice now. “No, I was just pissed-off, that’s different. Never underestimate the power of a pissed-off woman, O Mighty One. But you . . . you went all the way back, on your own, and you grabbed him. You’re going to be way stronger and better than he is, and he knows it. He just figured he’d get rid of the competition early on, while he had the chance. Not a generous guy, El Viejo.”

  Marvyn’s chubby face turned gray. “But I’m not like him! I don’t want to be like him!” Both eyes suddenly filled with tears, and he clung to his sister as he had not done since his return. “It was horrible, Angie, it
was so horrible. You were gone, and I was all alone, and I didn’t know what to do, only I had to do something. And I remembered Milady, and I figured if he wasn’t letting me come forward I’d go the other way, and I was so scared and mad I just walked and walked and walked in the dark, until I . . . ” He was crying so hard that Angie could hardly make the words out. “I don’t want to be a witch anymore, Angie, I don’t want to! And I don’t want you being a witch either . . . ”

  Angie held him and rocked him, as she had loved doing when he was three or four years old, and the cookies got scattered all over the bed. “It’s all right,” she told him, with one ear listening for their parents’ car pulling into the garage. “Shh, shh, it’s all right, it’s over, we’re safe, it’s okay, shh. It’s okay, we’re not going to be witches, neither one of us.” She laid him down and pulled the covers back over him. “You go to sleep now.”

  Marvyn looked up at her, and then at the wizards’ wall beyond her shoulder. “I might take some of those down,” he mumbled. “Maybe put some soccer players up for a while. The Brazilian team’s really good.” He was just beginning to doze off in her arms, when suddenly he sat up again and said, “Angie? The baby?”

  “What about the baby? I thought he made a beautiful baby, El Viejo. Mad as hell, but lovable.”

  “It was bigger when we left,” Marvyn said. Angie stared at him. “I looked back at it in that lady’s lap, and it was already bigger than when I was carrying it. He’s starting over, Angie, like Milady.”

  “Better him than me,” Angie said. “I hope he gets a kid brother this time, he’s got it coming.” She heard the car, and then the sound of a key in the lock. She said, “Go to sleep, don’t worry about it. After what we’ve been through, we can handle anything. The two of us. And without witchcraft. Whichever one of us it is—no witch stuff.”

  Marvyn smiled drowsily. “Unless we really, really need it.” Angie held out her hand and they slapped palms in formal agreement. She looked down at her fingers and said, “Ick! Blow your nose!”

  But Marvyn was asleep.

  Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of innumerable SF and fantasy classics, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and A Wizard of Earthsea (and the others in The Earthsea Cycle). She has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and is the winner of five Hugos, six Nebulas, two World Fantasy Awards, and twenty Locus Awards. She’s also a winner of the Newbery Medal, The National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

  There are few fictional realms as well-loved and respected as Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea. It is a place of islands and water, wizards and words, and for more than thirty years, it has been a remarkable influence on the writers and readers of fantastic fiction.

  While the books set in the Earthsea universe are most famous—A Wizard of Earthsea, the first Earthsea novel, was originally published in 1968 and remains in print to this day—the world was first introduced in our next story. It is the tale of Festin the wizard, an introverted lover of nature confronted by the dark greed of an evil sorcerer for whom one life is not enough.

  As Festin struggles to escape from what he believes is eternal captivity, his powers as a wizard are challenged, and a hungry darkness revealed. As evil settles over his homeland, Festin must find a way to save not only himself, but the place he loves.

  Here is a classic story of one man’s courageous fight against evil—and the power we hold when we sacrifice everything for love.

  The Word of Unbinding

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Where was he? The floor was hard and slimy, the air black and stinking, and that was all there was. Except a headache. Lying flat on the clammy floor Festin moaned, and then said, “Staff!” When his alderwood wizard’s staff did not come to his hand, he knew he was in peril. He sat up, and not having his staff with which to make a proper light, he struck a spark between finger and thumb, muttering a certain Word. A blue will o’ the wisp sprang from the spark and rolled feebly through the air, sputtering. “Up,” said Festin, and the fireball wobbled upward till it lit a vaulted trapdoor very high above, so high that Festin projecting into the fireball momentarily saw his own face forty feet below as a pale dot in the darkness. The light struck no reflections in the damp walls; they had been woven out of night, by magic. He rejoined himself and said, “Out.” The ball expired. Festin sat in the dark, cracking his knuckles.

  He must have been overspelled from behind, by surprise; for the last memory he had was of walking through his own woods at evening talking with the trees. Lately, in these lone years in the middle of his life, he had been burdened with a sense of waste, of unspent strength; so, needing to learn patience, he had left the villages and gone to converse with trees, especially oaks, chestnuts, and the grey alders whose roots are in profound communication with running water. It had been six months since he had spoken to a human being. He had been busy with essentials, casting no spells and bothering no one. So who had spellbound him and shut him in this reeking well? “Who?” he demanded of the walls, and slowly a name gathered on them and ran down to him like a thick black drop sweated out from pores of stone and spores of fungus: “Voll.”

  For a moment Festin was in a cold sweat himself.

  He had heard first long ago of Voll the Fell, who was said to be more than wizard yet less than man; who passed from island to island of the Outer Reach, undoing the works of the Ancients, enslaving men, cutting forests and spoiling fields, and sealing in underground tombs any wizard or Mage who tried to combat him.

  Refugees from ruined islands told always the same tale, that he came at evening on a dark wind over the sea. His slaves followed in ships; these they had seen. But none of them had ever seen Voll. . . . There were many men and creatures of evil will among the Islands, and Festin, a young warlock intent on his training, had not paid much heed to these tales of Voll the Fell. “I can protect this island,” he had thought, knowing his untried power, and had returned to his oaks and alders, the sound of wind in their leaves, the rhythm of growth in their round trunks and limbs and twigs, the taste of sunlight on leaves or dark groundwater around roots.—Where were they now, the trees, his old companions? Had Voll destroyed the forest?

  Awake at last and up on his feet, Festin made two broad motions with rigid hands, shouting aloud a Name that would burst all locks and break open any man-made door. But these walls impregnated with night and the name of their builder did not heed, did not hear. The name re-echoed back, clapping in Festin’s ears so that he fell on his knees, hiding his head in his arms till the echoes died away in the vaults above him. Then, still shaken by the backfire, he sat brooding.

  They were right; Voll was strong. Here on his own ground, within this spell-built dungeon, his magic would withstand any direct attack; and Festin’s strength was halved by the loss of his staff. But not even his captor could take from him his powers, relative only to himself, of Projecting and Transforming. So, after rubbing his now doubly aching head, he transformed. Quietly his body melted away into a cloud of fine mist.

  Lazy, trailing, the mist rose off the floor, drifting up along the slimy walls until it found, where vault met wall, a hairline crack. Through this, droplet by droplet, it seeped. It was almost all through the crack when a hot wind, hot as a furnace-blast, struck at it, scattering the mist-drops, drying them. Hurriedly the mist sucked itself back into the vault, spiralled to the floor, took on Festin’s own form and lay there panting. Transformation is an emotional strain to introverted warlocks of Festin’s sort; when to that strain is added the shock of facing unhuman death in one’s assumed shape, the experience becomes horrible. Festin lay for a while merely breathing. He was also angry with himself. It had been a pretty simpleminded notion to escape as a mist, after all. Every fool knew that trick. Volt had probably just left a hot wind waiting. Festin gathered himself into a small black bat, flew up to the ceiling, retransformed into a thin stre
am of plain air, and seeped through the crack.

  This time he got clear out and was blowing softly down the hall in which he found himself towards a window, when a sharp sense of peril made him pull together, snapping himself into the first small, coherent shape that came to mind—a gold ring. It was just as well. The hurricane of arctic air that would have dispersed his air-form in unrecallable chaos merely chilled his ring-form slightly. As the storm passed he lay on the marble pavement, wondering which form might get out the window quickest.

  Too late, he began to roll away. An enormous blank-faced troll strode cataclysmically across the floor, stopped, caught the quick-rolling ring and picked it up in a huge limestone-like hand. The troll strode to the trapdoor, lifted it by an iron handle and a muttered charm, and dropped Festin down into the darkness. He fell straight for forty feet and landed on the stone floor—clink.

  Resuming his true form he sat up, ruefully rubbing a bruised elbow. Enough of this transformation on an empty stomach. He longed bitterly for his staff, with which he could have summoned up any amount of dinner. Without it, though he could change his own form and exert certain spells and powers, he could not transform or summon to him any material thing—neither lightning nor a lamb chop.

  “Patience,” Festin told himself, and when he had got his breath he dissolved his body into the infinite delicacy of volatile oils, becoming the aroma of a frying lamb chop. He drifted once more through the crack. The waiting troll sniffed suspiciously, but already Festin had regrouped himself into a falcon, winging straight for the window. The troll lunged after him, missed by yards, and bellowed in a vast stony voice, “The hawk, get the hawk!” Swooping over the enchanted castle towards his forest that lay dark to westward, sunlight and sea-glare dazzling his eyes, Festin rode the wind like an arrow. But a quicker arrow found him. Crying out, he fell. Sun and sea and towers spun around him and went out.