The Mongolian Wizard Stories (online stories 1-7)

by Michael Swanwick

  The saboteurs looked at one another.

  “At the very least, it will be quieter,” Ritter said.

  Unspoken assent passed from person to person. The false nun drew a ring of keys from a hidden pocket. “I will let you into the room where we are keeping them. Make no attempt to leave it. Are you by any chance a Catholic?”

  “Of course not. I am, naturally, Lutheran.”

  “A pity. Still, when you are found with your throat cut, surrounded by small corpses, everyone will presume the worst of you.”

  The room had been an office once, perhaps for the mother superior. Now it held only the litter of bygone days. Light came from a small stained-glass window high on the back wall, showing a dove with streams of glory radiating from it. In the gloom below were five little girls, three standing and two sprawled unhappily on the floor.

  As the door closed and was locked behind him, Ritter said, “Children! What is all this weeping? You must let your Uncle Franzie know so I can make everything all right again.”

  “I want my mama!” cried a little girl with pigtails, and “I don’t like it here!” sobbed a girl with pockmarked cheeks, and “I want to go home!” declared a redheaded freckly girl. The two smallest merely wept wordlessly.

  Ritter sat down in the middle of the room on the floor, placing himself on the same level as the children. “You shall be restored to your parents very soon,” he said as convincingly as he could manage. “I have sent for them and they will be so happy to see you that they will give you nuts and sweetmeats enough to feed you for a week. But right now we have to wait just a little bit longer. Gather around me and I will tell you all about my wolf, Freki.”

  “I’m afraid of wolfs,” the redhead said.

  “You would not be afraid of Freki. He is very sweet and gentle. But he is also a greedy-guts, always hoping for a snack. He’ll put a paw on my knee and then look at me like this”—Ritter pulled a face like Freki’s when he was begging and two of the girls laughed—“and make a little mew-new-mew noise. That means, ‘Oh please, boss, pleeeeeease feed the nice wolf. Oh! I’m so hungry I’m about to faint.’ ” He made one hand into a paw and touched the back of it to his forehead melodramatically. “ ‘If you give me some food, I promise I’ll shine your boots for you and sweep the floors and wash the dishes too.’ ” Now all the girls were laughing, even the smallest, shyest one who still had tears running down her cheeks. “So what choice do I have? I get a little scrap of meat and I hold it up and say, ‘Who wants a treat? Who does? Who?’ And what do you think Freki does?”

  “He says ‘Me!’ ” the redheaded girl said, and “Me! Me!” the others cried in imitation of her.

  “Yes, he does. He runs around and around in tight little circles, barking yip! yip! yip! That means me! me! me!”

  “Do you give him the treat then?” the smallest and shyest asked.

  Ritter made a mock indignant face. “Of course I do. Who could turn down a poor sweet hungry wolf like that? Not I!”

  By now two of the girls had climbed into Ritter’s lap and the others were clustered close around him. He wrapped his arms around them, gently drawing them closer, and went on talking about Freki: How smart he was and how brave. How fast he could run, and how silently. The girls grew still as he described the wolf hunting a rabbit in the forest: Tracking it by scent. Spotting its tail bouncing before him. The sudden burst of speed as he caught up to it. And then, crunch, snap, and gobble.

  “Can you lift your paw like Freki?” They all could. “Can you pretend to lick off the blood the way he does?” They all did.

  Speaking softly, Ritter drew the little girls into the world of the wolf. He guided them as they pretended to be wolves themselves. And as their thoughts became more and more lupine, he began to ease his own thoughts into theirs.

  It was not easy, for he had never tried to enter a human mind before—for both moral and practical reasons, it had been strictly forbidden by his instructors. But he knew, from certain smutty rumors of forced seductions and young officers stripped of rank and familiar just before being summarily executed, that it was not impossible.

  And the more the girls thought like wolves, the less impossible it became.

  Ritter was not a sentimental man. He prided himself on having few delusions. Yet even he was shocked at how easily the children entered into the amoral and ruthless mind-set of the wolf. He was, it was true, urging them in that direction with both his words and his thoughts. But still. It was alarming how little distinction there was between a young girl and a savage predatory beast.

  So deeply involved was Ritter in his task that he almost missed the clatter in the chapel of brushes and buckets of paint being flung away. He kept talking, softly and soothingly, as footsteps sounded in the hall. All of his captors at once, by the sound of it.

  A key turned in the lock and Ritter withdrew his arms from the little girls. “Look, my little Frekis!” he said. “Here comes your prey!”

  The door opened and he launched his small wolves, snarling and biting, straight at the throats of the three startled saboteurs.

  The premier of Haydn’s War in Heaven earned the refugee Austrian composer a standing ovation that seemed to go on forever. Of course it did. The oratorio depicted a senseless rebellion against the natural order, the unswerving loyalty of the Archangel Michael’s forces in the face of impossible odds, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil when God Himself takes the field on their behalf. The political allegory could not have been more obvious. It depressed Ritter greatly. Still, as music, the piece deserved its plaudits. He noted, as they emerged from St. Paul’s Cathedral, that Sir Toby was humming (off-key, of course) the glorious and chilling chorus that marked Lucifer’s fall:

  Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky

  With hideous ruin and combustion down

  To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

  In adamantine chains and penal fire . . .

  It did not hurt, of course, that the oratorio had Milton’s glorious language to draw upon.

  “Let’s take a stroll by the river,” Sir Toby said. “To digest what we’ve heard.” It was not so much a suggestion as a polite command. Ritter, who had been brought up to understand such subtleties, nodded his compliance.

  Two days had passed since Sir Toby had burst into the priory at the head of a small contingent of soldiers, only to discover the corpses of the saboteurs and five blood-sated little girls. So far, he had said nothing about the aftermath. But Ritter could feel it coming.

  “Wait out here with Freki for a moment,” Ritter said, and went into a pie shop. When he emerged with a package of beef pasties, they resumed their stroll.

  Upon reaching the river, the two men paused to lean against a brick wall above a stone stairway leading down to the Thames. The tide was low and a scattering of basket-carrying mudlarks were probing the silvery muck like so many sandpipers. Merchant ships rode at anchor, sails furled, lanterns at bow and stern, while small boats scuttled back and forth on the water, taking advantage of the last cold gleams of daylight. Ritter set his meat pies down on the wall and waited.

  At last, Sir Toby said, “The girls’ parents are uniformly outraged by what you made them do.”

  “Their daughters are alive,” Ritter said. “They should be grateful.”

  “The trauma can be undone. In many ways, the physick of the mind is more advanced in our modern age than is that of the body. It comes from the prominence of wizardry, I suppose. But the memories will remain—and who knows what will come of those memories as the girls grow into women?”

  Ritter turned to face his superior. “Are you criticizing my actions?”

  “No, no, of course not,” Sir Toby said. “Only . . . one could wish that your otherwise admirable ability to improvise was accompanied by a less insouciant attitude regarding what your superiors might have to deal with afterwards. To say nothing of your damnable indifference to the welfare of children.”

  “In this, I
am only typical of the times.”

  Sir Toby looked away from his subordinate and lost himself in contemplation of the river. At last he sighed and turned his back on the Thames. “Well, it turns out I had less to say than I thought I did. The wind is chill and I think it is time we made our way to our respective domiciles.”

  They walked in silence for a time. Then Sir Toby said, “You left your meat pies behind. On the wall by the river.”

  “Did I? Well, there’s no point to going back after them. Doubtless some mudlark has stolen the package by now.” Ritter imagined an urchin wolfing down the food as ravenously as Freki might, and smiled wanly. Possibly he would come back and lose another package tomorrow.

  The river disappeared behind them. Then, remembering a resolution he had made earlier in the day, Ritter cleared his throat. “Sir,” he said. “I have a joke. A priest, a minister, and a rabbi chanced to be riding together in a carriage. Suddenly a highwayman—”

  Sir Toby held up a hand. “Oh, Ritter,” he said. “You didn’t think I meant that request literally, did you?”

  House of Dreams

  “Have you ever killed a man?” the vagrant asked.

  “That is not something we discuss,” his companion replied.

  “I myself have killed five. That is not many. But two I killed with my bare hands, which, I assure you, is not easy.”

  “I am sure that it is not.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  The second vagrant said nothing. They both continued trudging across the frozen German countryside. Winter had been almost as hard on the lands hereabout as the war had been to the lands to the east. It had buckled roads and destroyed bridges and collapsed roofs, and if there were any leavings to be gleaned in the fields they were buried under sheets of ice. The stubble crunched like glass underfoot making the going difficult. But the main routes were all choked with refugees and since the vagrants were headed in the opposite direction, toward the front, to use them would only draw attention to themselves.

  “Ritter?” the first vagrant said.

  “Mmm?”

  “Do you remember our instructions?”

  Ritter stopped. “Of course I do,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  “Oh, I remember them. I just don’t believe in them anymore. We’ve been walking so long that all my life seems like a dream to me now. Sometimes I cannot even remember our destination.” When Ritter said nothing, his companion turned away. “But let’s not stand out here in the open, waiting for the Cossacks to discover us.”

  They resumed walking. A leafless tree rose up in the distance, crept slowly toward them, was a brief respite from the monotonously unchanging fields, and then dwindled away to their rear. “Ritter?”

  “Eh?”

  “I address you by name, the way a true comrade does. Why do you never do the same for me?”

  Again Ritter stopped. “That is a good question,” he said. “A very good question indeed.” Anger entered his voice. “Let me ask you some of my own. Why do you not know our mission or our destination or even your own name? Why is everything so silent and still? Why are my legs not weary from all this walking? Why does the sky look so much like a plaster ceiling? Why can I not make out the features of your face? Why are you neither tall nor short, nor thin nor fat, nor ruddy nor pale? Exactly who are you and just what game are you playing with me?”

  You should never have used the word “dream,” a woman’s voice said.

  That wasn’t it. When I tried to find out who his companion was, something told him I was an imposter.

  In any case, this session is done.

  Everything went black.

  When Ritter awoke, he found himself lying under a feather bolster in a bedroom with yellow walls and green trim, a flowered jug atop a washstand, and a winter landscape outside the curtained window. A short man with the broadest shoulders he had ever seen on a human being stood looking out that window, hands clasped behind his back. An old woman sat in a wooden chair, embroidery loop in hand, sewing tight little stitches with a sharp tug at the end of each. “Where am I?” Ritter said. His head felt thick and dull.

  “Someplace safe.” The man turned, smiling. He had a round, benevolent face. To see him was to want to trust him. “Among friends.”

  “Ah.” Ritter’s heart sank. “I see.” He closed his eyes. “At least I made it through the front lines.”

  “Too bad for you that you did,” the old woman said. “We have already determined that you are in the pay of the British Secret Service. Your presence here in civilian clothing is by itself enough to justify your execution as a foreign spy.”

  With a touch of asperity, Ritter said, “I am a German citizen in Austro-German-Bavarian territory. It is my right to be in my own country.”

  The man shook his head in gentle reprimand. “The land you were born into ceased to exist weeks ago. Legally, you are a nationalist partisan in the westernmost provinces of the Mongolian Empire. But we are getting off on the wrong foot. Let us start over. Dr. Nergüi and I are alienists. We have begun a program of dream therapy intended first to obtain information from you, then to use that information to cure you of your unthinking loyalty to an anachronistic and dysfunctional regime, and finally to convert you wholeheartedly to our cause.”

  “That is not possible,” Ritter said with conviction.

  “Think of Borsuk and me as dam-busters,” Dr. Nergüi said. “We drill and we drill with no discernable results until at last our labor produces a single drop of water. Shortly after that, another follows, and another, and before you know it, the wall bursts open and the lake that the dam has been holding back explodes outward, inundating all before it.”

  “But that’s enough chatter for now.” Borsuk patted Ritter’s shoulder. “Go to sleep, my friend. We have hard work before us. Very hard indeed.”

  All against his will, Ritter felt himself tumbling down into the darkness, into the depths of sleep. Somewhere far, far away in the forests of the night, he thought he sensed someone or something searching for him. Somehow that seemed important.

  In his dreams, Ritter was standing in Sir Tobias Gracchus Willoughby-Quirke’s classically austere, oak-paneled office. Arrayed on the desk between them were the clothing and accoutrements of an indigent.

  Sir Toby waved a hand at the ragged clothing. “Everything you see here is convincingly shabby, and yet serviceable as well. The coat is good, dense wool—even the patches. Soaking wet, it will keep you warm. The shoes look decrepit but are cut to the measure of your feet. They have been waterproofed with candle wax, as a hobo might do. Inside the laces are lengths of pianoforte wire suitable for making snares or garrotes. It would be suspicious for you to carry a gun. However, you will have this.” He picked up what looked to be a common kitchen knife. “Sheffield steel. Antique but sharp. The wooden handle is broken and taped together with strips of linen in a manner that looks makeshift. Yet in a fight, you may rely on it.”

  “I see that I have some rough traveling ahead of me,” Ritter said. “Where exactly do you wish me to go?”

  “I am sending you and your partner to the Continent, behind enemy lines. You will rendezvous there with a member of the resistance who has important information to share with us.” Sir Toby presented an envelope and Ritter, feeling a strange, sourceless reluctance, opened it and read. It contained a name, an address, and a date. That was all.

  “Is that all?”

  Sir Toby took back the envelope. “I am reluctant to give you more than an absolute minimum of information, lest you be captured.”

  “I will not be captured. But if I am, I am confident that I shall escape.”

  “Oh?” Sir Toby placed his hands on the desk and leaned forward. His eyes gleamed. “How?”

  Astonished, Ritter said, “You know how. My— ” He looked around the office, at the walls that swelled and snapped like canvas in the wind, at the bust of the archmage Roger Bacon in the tympanum over the door that leered and winked at him, at the
inkwell that went tumbling in the air without spilling a drop of its contents. It all felt wrong. Even Sir Toby himself seemed an unconvincing scrim over some darker and truer version of reality. Ritter’s head ached. It was hard to think logically. “Or do you?”

  “Let’s say that I don’t. Purely as a sort of exercise. It’s your partner, isn’t it? You’re counting on him to rescue you.” Sir Toby smiled in a way that was avuncular, predatory, insincere. “Aren’t you, son?”

  Convulsively, Ritter swept his hand over the desk, sending clothes, shoes, knife, and all flying in all directions. “You are not my father. Nor are you the man you pretend to be. Clearly, you are part of a conspiracy of some kind. Well, it won’t work! You’ll get nothing out of me!”

  Excellent work. I shall return him to consciousness now.

  “You see how easy that was?” Borsuk said. “Dr. Nergüi put you under and I guided your thoughts, and now we know your mission, the name by which your contact will identify himself, and where and when he may be captured. All that remains to be discovered is the identity of your oh-so-mysterious partner.”

  “Do you still think you will not break?” Dr. Nergüi asked.

  When Ritter did not reply, she picked up her embroidery and set to sewing again.

  For a long time, Ritter lay in the bed, eyes closed, listening to the scratch of a goose-quill pen—Borsuk writing up his findings, no doubt. The rest of the house was uncannily quiet. He could hear small creaks and groans as boards shifted slightly. But no voices, no footfalls, not the least indication that, save for the inhabitants of this room, the house was occupied. Finally, he said, “So it is just you two here? No orderlies or guards?”

  Abrupt silence. Then Borsuk said, “This one’s an optimist, Dr. Nergüi. Even in extremis, this clever young man probes for information, tries to seek out our weaknesses, makes plans for escape.” He sounded almost proud of Ritter.