A Plague of Wizards

by Wesley Allison

  “Leaving already, Terra? We didn’t have time to speak at the Spring Festival.”

  “Yes. I’m leaving.”

  “You seem upset, Terra. What’s the matter?”

  “The matter is a war—a war between the humans and the lizzies that will dwarf all the other wars fought on this world—a war of extinction. And I think that when that war is over and the humans or the lizzies are all gone—maybe both will have disappeared, I think that you will still be here. You dragons. There are more of you than we think there are, aren’t there? There are more of you than you let on.”

  Without another word, Bessemer shot into the sky, flapped his mighty wings once, and headed off to the southwest. Terra continued her long climb down the steps of the pyramid.

  * * * * *

  There had been a great deal of contention on the subject, but at last it had been decided that Geert McCoort’s thirty-first birthday celebration would be held in his brother’s garden. Maro and Sherree McCoort were the only members of the family whose home would be large enough, and both refused to attend if the event was instead hosted at the Zaeri Shrine. On the other hand Geert was loath to bring so much noise and disruption into the home of his brother, who had only just come home from a long bout at hospital, and was still walking with a cane. But Maro insisted that if it became too much, he could easily excuse himself and find sanctuary in his study.

  Senta arrived early at the front door of the large red-bricked and grey-roofed home, along with Zoey. They were dressed alike, with complementary rather than matching colors. The sorceress rapped smartly on the door. On the other side, they could hear a woman calling.

  “… where in heaven’s name those lizzies got to!” The door opened revealing Sherree McCoort. “Oh, well, that explains everything. What do you want?”

  Senta gave the young woman a long look. Sherree was quite pretty, though she looked a little older than her twenty-three years. This might have been due to her rather traditional hairstyle—parted in the middle with plenty of ringlets, or it might have been due to the large and quite thick glasses, which in turn made her eyes appear enormous. She wore a festive white dress decorated with tiny lavender flowers and had tied a lavender sash around her waist. Around her neck was the chain, holding the ever-present and impressively large gold cross.

  “Well?” she asked, her voice now a little shaky.

  “We’ve come for the party,” said Senta. “We were invited.”

  “I invited you because I had to, but you’re an hour early.” She turned to Zoey. “I don’t even know you.”

  “I’m the dragon,” Zoey said, pushing past Sherree and walking on into the house.

  “We’ve come early to lend some assistance,” said Senta, pointing at Sherree’s left eye. “I could start by fixing your vision. I’ve recently crafted a new mending spell, though there is the slightest possibility you could end up as a Cyclops.”

  “No thank you!”

  “I’m just joking. The only way you’ll end up as a Cyclops is if I really want you to.”

  Senta stepped past Sherree and followed the direction that Zoey had taken. This led through the parlor, the dining room, and library, out a set of double doors to the garden. Two dozen pieces of outdoor furniture had been arranged around a great wrought iron table, decorated with festive blue and green coverings. Large pots of matching color featured sprays of flowers intermingled with utahraptor feathers. A large banner across the second story balcony proclaimed “Happy Birthday Geert!”

  “I don’t know why you said you needed our help,” said Zoey. “Everything looks perfect.”

  “I didn’t say any such thing,” said Sherree, and then sighed. “It’s not the looks that are the problem. This is the problem.” She pointed to the thermometer mounted beside the garden door. Its long finger of mercury pointed accusingly at 98 degrees. “I have food coming any minute, lots of it, and an ice sculpture. I don’t know if any of it will last, and even if it does, it’s just too hot for anyone to enjoy themselves.”

  “All that’s easily dealt with,” said the sorceress. “Simple spells to preserve the food and keep the ice cool—hardly worth three syllables. Then a general cooling spell over the neighborhood.”

  “You mustn’t…” said Sherree. “You mustn’t let Maro see it. I don’t know if you understand what happened to him, but you see…”

  “He was attacked by a wizard who froze him.”

  “And almost killed him. It’s taken weeks to get him physically well, but I think he’s still… I don’t know… fragile, I guess about what happened.”

  “You sound like you actually care,” remarked Zoey.

  “Of course I care!” snapped Sherree. “He’s my husband!”

  “Very well,” said Senta. “Uuthanum eetarri. Now, that should take care of the weather for the party. The dragon can enchant the food and the ice as it arrives, while I keep my dear cousin occupied. He’ll never know about any magic.”

  “I suppose that’s all right,” said the lady of the house. “Just don’t upset him. He’s upstairs in his study.”

  “I’ll find him,” said Senta.

  She stepped back into the library, finding a hallway and staircase at the far end. Once upstairs, she looked in every door she came to until she saw her cousin sitting at his writing desk.

  “Maro?”

  “Come in, Senta,” he said, without looking up. “One moment. Just finishing a letter. There.”

  He turned around. Though it had been four years since she had seen him, he looked at least ten years older. He had a significant amount of grey hair around his temples and crows feet at the corners of his eyes.

  “So the temperature problem is all taken care of?”

  “You knew?” she asked.

  “From this spot, you can hear everything that goes on in the garden. That’s why I put my desk here. It was kind of you to help my wife out. I know you don’t like her.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because nobody likes her.” When Senta didn’t reply, he continued. “Likability wasn’t the quality for which I married her.”

  “What was?”

  “Her family is very rich. However, I have learned to appreciate her on other levels.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought she had any,” said Senta taking a seat in a large easy chair. Pulling her purse from the crook of her arm, she opened it and pulled out a small metal box about three inches square and an inch deep, then set it on the lamp table next to her. “No, that’s not it.”

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “Oh, I have a present for you.”

  “It’s Geert’s birthday, not mine.”

  “I don’t need an occasion to give you, of all people, a present.” She examined another metal box, shook her head, and stacked it on the other. “Nope.”

  “What’s in that box then?” he asked.

  “Just a little old Dick.”

  “Pudding? We could share it.”

  “Oh, no. I’m afraid you wouldn’t care for this.” She pulled out three more boxes, now obviously more than the purse should have been able to contain without magic, before finding the correct one. “Here we go.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s not a what. It’s a whom, or a him. Or most of… some of… some of him, a substantial portion of him—just reduced for storage.” She stood up and crossed the room, placing the metal box in his outstretched hand.

  “Um, whom?”

  “His name was Hamlin Kemp, but he was fairly well-known as Icebound or The Ice Wizard.” She waved her hands a grandiose gesture that her face said was ironic. “He was a somewhat powerful purveyor of wizardry who for some reason specialized in cold magic. He had frost bolts and ice barriers and ice shards and an ice spear and… um, a blizzard spell. It was all rather tedious, really.”

  “He’s the one that…?”

  “The one that assaulted you, yes. He won’t make that mistake again. I dare say
he’s learned his lesson.”

  “You trapped him in this container?” asked Maro.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “If I open it, he won’t pop out will he?”

  “Oh dear no,” said Senta. “He is definitively, assuredly, and unquestionably dead.”

  “And in those boxes?”

  “Yes. The same. Not friends of his though.”

  “Did you use the same spell on all of them?”

  “I didn’t know you were interested in magic,” said Senta with a smile. “Why yes. I crafted it relatively recently. I was thinking of calling it ‘Crushing One’s Enemies into a Fine Powder-like Substance and Neatly Packaging it without Mussing One’s Dress’.”

  “How about ‘Foe to Dust’?” he offered.

  “I like it,” said the sorceress. “It has a conciseness that had eluded me.”

  An hour later, the party was beginning. The honoree had arrived with his wife, Honor. Her brother Hertzal and his wife Leoni came in the same car with them, the latter carrying her new baby, Hertzal Junior. Senta’s beautiful cousins Didrika and Ernst Goose arrived unescorted, despite being two of the most sought-after young ladies in the colony. It seemed that the older they got, the more they looked like Senta. Now eighteen and twenty-three, they looked enough like her to be her sisters. Tait and Bertice Vishmornam and their children arrived in two steam carriages, one belonging to their oldest son Brinn, who was seventeen. Last to arrive were Benny and Hero Markham and their growing family. Arriving with them was Benny’s brother Sam.

  “Senta!” cried Hero, rushing toward her childhood best friend.

  Senta turned her head and lifted her nose toward the ceiling.

  “Why are you even here, traitor? You’re not my family.”

  “Traitor! I never! I was invited. Plus, I am family. My sister is married to your cousin, which makes you my cousin… sort of.”

  “And yet you stabbed me in the back the first chance you get.” Senta made the motions of trying to retrieve an invisible dagger from between her shoulder blades.

  “Hero didn’t do anything wrong,” said her sister Honor.

  “I’m not talking to you either,” Senta told her.

  “The difference is, that doesn’t bother me.”

  “Oh, this is about Mrs… um, Bryony,” surmised Hero. “But she’s so nice. Zoey is friends with her too. Clearly you’ve made up with her.”

  “Zoey is just a dragon,” said Senta. “She doesn’t understand the intricacies of human relationships.”

  “That’s hurtful,” said Zoey. Didrika patted her comfortingly on the shoulder.

  “That’s quite enough everyone,” said Sherree, struggling to keep the glee off her face. “This will not turn into a donnybrook. This is Maro’s party, to honor his brother’s birthday.”

  As the last of the crowd stepped out into the garden Sherree shouted, “Happy Birthday Geert!” and whipped a cloth off a large ice sculpture. Everyone stared at the roughly square object, most with frowns on their faces.

  “Sherree, that’s wonderful,” said Geert. “It’s a printing press, everyone.”

  “Oh, a printing press,” said half a dozen guests. A few applauded.

  The children quickly divided themselves into groups and hurried off to play games, while the adults formed similar collectives to drink and talk. Senta found herself grouped with Bertice, at thirty-eight, the eldest among her cousins, and her husband Tait, fifteen years older still, along with Ernst, Didrika, and Sam Markham.

  “We’re so glad that you’re home again,” said Bertice. “We all just assumed you’d gone vacationing, until Mr. Baxter began ranting about you being kidnapped. Thank goodness that was all just his craziness.”

  “Mr. Baxter was actually correct,” said Senta. She saw the shock appearing on the women’s faces. “Believe me, it was as big a surprise to me as it is to you.”

  Didrika and Ernst frowned at each other.

  “They didn’t hurt you, did they?” asked Sam.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, placing a hand on his shoulder, “but only for a few… years.” She then turned and walked to the drink table. The others whispered for a minute and then split up to mingle.

  “I hear this is a very good vintage,” said Geert, appearing at Senta’s shoulder and waving toward the wineglasses.

  “I thought you were all temperance now.”

  “I don’t drink myself, but I won’t judge you.” He put his arm around her and kissed her cheek. “Are you all right?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I can think of about a dozen reasons. Would you like them in alphabetical order or order of importance?”

  “You’re obviously way too smart to be wasted at afternoon conversation,” said Senta, picking up a glass and taking a long drink. “When will we be able to read your wit in the Birmisia Gazette again?”

  “When it arrives at your door, any wit therein will have Maro as its source. But it will be soon. We have a new building south of the railroad station. The presses arrive sometime next week.”

  “Presses? More than one?”

  “Yes. The colony is expanding, and so we must. We’ll be going back to daily, and eventually morning and evening—expanding the number of pages too. At the same time, our book publishing is going to be bigger and better than ever.”

  “And you can afford all this?”

  “With government loans,” he said.

  “Well, I want to invest… substantially.”

  “Are you sure you are able?” he asked. “Mr. Baxter spent a lot… a lot of your money.”

  “He had the household accounts,” said Senta. “Fear not. I’m as rich as King Magnus.”

  “Have you noticed something odd about this party?” asked Geert.

  “You mean Didrika and Ernst? They’re unusually quiet and shifty-eyed.”

  “Yes, they’re odd. And why is Sam Markham here? I didn’t think he and Benny even got on. Uh oh, Hero and my wife are coming this way. Be nice to them.” He slipped away from her side just as the two women arrived.

  “We need to talk,” said Hero.

  “Fine,” said Senta. “Give me your apology and I will be as gracious as I can.”

  “I’m not apologizing!”

  “I don’t mind apologizing,” said Honor.

  “No!” Hero grabbed the sorceress by the shoulders and turned her around. Then she wrapped her arms around Senta in a great hug, pressing her face into Senta’s shoulder. The sorceress stood there for a moment before dropping her face onto the shorter woman’s head and burying it in her mass of black wavy hair.

  “I love you, Senta, and I’m going to hold onto you until you understand just how much.”

  “I love you too, Hero. You mean more to me than I can ever tell you.” Hero didn’t move. “You can let go now. I forgive you.”

  “No. That’s not good enough.”

  “All right. You’re right. You didn’t do anything wrong. Now let go of me.”

  “No. We have to settle this right now.”

  “Settle what?”

  “You have to promise not to kill Bryony Baxter.”

  Senta lifted her head. “Really? You go on like I kill people on a daily basis—like I’m some kind of assassin. How many people have you known me to kill exactly?”

  “Maybe five or six, I guess.”

  “But if the stories are to be believed,” added Honor, “you’ve depopulated most of the empire of wizards.”

  “What stories?” wondered the sorceress.

  “News feeds from Brech City. Geert still gets them, even though the Gazette isn’t in full production now. He tells me about them.”

  “They’re probably exaggerated,” said Senta. “A wizard goes missing and it must be the crazed Birmisian Sorceress.”

  “Like Grand Master Wizard Cavendish?” asked Honor.

  “Exactly like him. If it makes you feel better, I promise not to kill Bryony Byenthal.”

  “Are yo
u trying to create a loophole?” asked Honor. “She’s Bryony Baxter now.”

  “I promise not to kill her regardless of her name, now or in the future. Satisfied?”

  “And you promise not to change her into anything,” added Hero.

  Senta shook off Hero’s hug, stepped back, and crossed her arms, narrowing her eyes. “I promise not to transform her into anything—magically. I may change her to a divorcee or an abandoned wife, because I intend to have Mr. Baxter back. Anything else?”

  “Yes. You have to protect her.”

  “Protect her from what?” sneered the sorceress.

  “You have to give her the same magical protection you give all the people here at this party.”

  “What do you know about that?”

  “One of the police wizards was searching our neighborhood and performed a spell to detect magic,” explained Hero. “He said there were more magical wards protecting our home than the King’s palace in Brech City.”

  “I don’t protect everyone at the party,” said Senta. “Only you.”

  “Oh, well. You must protect Bryony.”

  “Fine!”

  “And one more thing…”

  “If you stop right now,” said Senta. “I will do what you’ve asked, nay demanded of me, so far. But if you demand one more thing, I will teleport to Baxter’s home right now, transform his short wife into a slug, and pour salt on her until she is nothing but a wet spot on the floor!”

  “That’s very fair,” said Honor, taking her sister by the hand and leading her away.

  Senta quickly downed three glasses of wine and then headed into the library, another in hand. Benny was looking at the books in the shelves. When he saw her, he turned as if to speak to her, but she ignored him and continued up the stairs.

  When Senta reached the door she now knew led to Maro’s study, she found the lock engaged. With a quick gesture, she completed a spell that unlocked it and walked in. She stopped dead in her tracks, her mouth open in shock. In front of her was her cousin Ernst, bent over Maro’s desk, her dress pulled up around her waist. Behind her was Sam Markham, his pants around his ankles. Though he was far too busy giving Senta’s cousin a rogering to notice anything, Ernst opened her mouth in a mirror of Senta’s expression.