The Mammoth Book of Sorceror's Tales

by Mike Ashley

  One day he came into the hall in the morning, looking so radiant that Mark asked him half enviously what he had to make him so glad. “Glad,” said Roland, “oh, I know it! Merry dreams, perhaps. What do you think of a good grave fellow who beckons me on with a brisk smile, and shows me places, wonderful places, under banks and in woodland pits, where riches lie piled together? I am sure that some good fortune is preparing for me, Mark – but you shall share it.” Then Mark, seeing in his words a certain likeness, with a difference, to his own dark visions, pressed his lips together and sate looking stonily before him.

  At last, one still evening of spring, when the air was intolerably languid and heavy for mankind, but full of sweet promises for trees and hidden peeping things, though a lurid redness of secret thunder had lain all day among the heavy clouds in the plain, the two dined together. Mark had walked alone that day, and had lain upon the turf of the down, fighting against a weariness that seemed to be poisoning the very springs of life within him. But Roland had been brisk and alert, coming and going upon some secret and busy errand, with a fragment of a song upon his lips, like a man preparing to set off for a far country, who is glad to be gone. In the evening, after they had dined, Roland had let his fancy rove in talk. “If we were rich,” he said, “how we would transform this old place!”

  “It is fair enough for me,” said Mark heavily; and Roland had chidden him lightly for his sombre ways, and sketched new plans of life.

  Mark, wearied and yet excited, with an intolerable heaviness of spirit, went early to bed, leaving Roland in the hall. After a short and broken sleep, he awoke, and lighting a candle, read idly and gloomily to pass the heavy hours. The house seemed full of strange noises that night. Once or twice came a scraping and a faint hammering in the wall; light footsteps seemed to pass in the turret – but the tower was always full of noises, and Mark heeded them not; at last he fell asleep again, to be suddenly awakened by a strange and desolate crying, that came he knew not whence, but seemed to wail upon the air. The old dog, who slept in Mark’s room, heard it too; he was sitting up in a fearful expectancy. Mark rose in haste, and taking the candle, went into the passage that led to Roland’s room. It was empty, but a light burned there and showed that the room had not been slept in. Full of a horrible fear, Mark returned, and went in hot haste up the turret steps, fear and anxiety struggling together in his mind. When he reached the top, he found the little door broken forcibly open, and a light within. He cast a haggard look round the room, and then the crying came again, this time very faint and desolate.

  Mark cast a shuddering glance at the window; it was wide open and showed a horrible liquid blackness; round the bar in the centre that divided the casements, there was something knotted. He hastened to the window, and saw that it was a rope, which hung heavily. Leaning out he saw that something dangled from the rope below him – and then came the crying again out of the darkness, like the crying of a lost spirit.

  He could see as in a bitter dream the outline of the hateful hillside; but there seemed to his disordered fancy to be a tumult of some kind below; pale lights moved about, and he saw a group of forms which scattered like a shoal of fish when he leaned out. He knew that he was looking upon a scene that no mortal eye ought to behold, and it seemed to him at the moment as though he was staring straight into hell.

  The rope went down among the rocks and disappeared; but Mark clenched it firmly and using all his strength, which was great, drew it up hand over hand; as he drew it up he secured it in loops round the great oak table; he began to be afraid that his strength would not hold out, and once when he returned to the window after securing a loop, a great hooded thing like a bird flew noiselessly at the window and beat its wings.

  Presently he saw that the form which dangled on the rope was clear of the rocks below; it had come up through them, as though they were but smoke; and then his task seemed to him more sore than ever. Inch by painful inch he drew it up, working fiercely and silently; his muscles were tense, and drops stood on his brow, and the veins hammered in his ears; his breath came and went in sharp sobs. At last the form was near enough for him to seize it; he grasped it by the middle and drew Roland, for it was Roland, over the window-sill. His head dangled and drooped from side to side; his face was dark with strangled blood and his limbs hung helpless. Mark drew his knife and cut the rope that was tied under his arms; the helpless limbs sank huddling on the floor; then Mark looked up; at the window a few feet from him was a face, more horrible than he had supposed a human face, if it was human indeed, could be. It was deadly white, and hatred, baffled rage, and a sort of devilish malignity glared from the white set eyes, and the drawn mouth. There was a rush from behind him; the old hound, who had crept up unawares into the room, with a fierce outcry of rage sprang on to the windowsill; Mark heard the scraping of his claws upon the stone. Then the hound leapt through the window, and in a moment there was the sound of a heavy fall outside. At the same instant the darkness seemed to lift and draw up like a cloud; a bank of blackness rose past the window, and left the dark outline of the down, with a sky sown with tranquil stars.

  The cloud of fear and horror that hung over Mark lifted too; he felt in some dim way that his adversary was vanquished; he carried Roland down the stairs and laid him on his bed; he roused the household, who looked fearfully at him, and then his own strength failed; he sank upon the floor of his room, and the dark tide of unconsciousness closed over him.

  Mark’s return to health was slow. One who has looked into the Unknown finds it hard to believe again in the outward shows of life. His first conscious speech was to ask for his hound; they told him that the body of the dog had been found, horribly mangled as though by the teeth of some fierce animal, at the foot of the tower. The dog was buried in the garden, with a slab above him, on which are the words:—

  EUGE SERVE BONE ET FIDELIS

  A silly priest once said to Mark that it was not meet to write Scripture over the grave of a beast. But Mark said warily that an inscription was for those who read it, to make them humble, and not to increase the pride of what lay below.

  When Mark could leave his bed, his first care was to send for builders, and the old tower of Nort was taken down, stone by stone, to the ground, and a fair chapel built on the site; in the wall there was a secret stairway, which led from the top chamber, and came out among the elder-bushes that grew below the tower, and here was found a coffer of gold, which paid for the church; because, until it was found, it was Mark’s design to leave the place desolate. Mark is wedded since, and has his children about his knee; those who come to the house see a strange and wan man, who sits at Mark’s board, and whom he uses very tenderly; sometimes this man is merry, and tells a long tale of his being beckoned and led by a tall and handsome person, smiling, down a hillside to fetch gold; though he can never remember the end of the matter; but about the springtime he is silent or mutters to himself; and this is Roland; his spirit seems shut up within him in some closed cell, and Mark prays for his release, but till God call him, he treats him like a dear brother, and with the reverence due to one who has looked out on the other side of Death, and who may not say what his eyes beheld.

  Lawrence Schimel and Mike Resnick

  I could easily write an introduction about these two writers which would end up longer than the story, so I had better curb my enthusiasm. Lawrence Schimel (b. 1971) is a prolific writer of short and gay (in all senses of the word) fantasies some of which will be found in his collection The Drag Queen of Elfland (1997). Amongst his many anthologies are The Fortune Teller (1997), with Martin H. Greenberg, and a haunting volume of magic realism, Things Invisible to See (1998). He is currently resident in Spain writing mostly books for children.

  Mike Resnick (b.1942) has produced a bewildering array of books and novels, most notably his multi-award winning series about native Africans who colonise the planet Kirinyaga and establish a culture as it once was on Earth. Their stories will be found in, for starters, Kirinyaga
(1998). Resnick has won four Hugos, a Nebula and other major and minor awards in the USA, plus awards in France, Japan, Poland, Croatia and Spain. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages.

  Their combined talents produced this clever little story which questions the nature of reality.

  THEY WERE GATHERED IN the Great Hall when Edward looked up with an expectant smile on his face. An instant later it started raining toads inside the castle.

  As the guests began screaming, Edward waved his hand, and suddenly the rug itself became a thousand mouths, each gobbling up one or more toads. But as the last of the toads were eaten, the mouths became insatiable, and started gnawing upon the furniture.

  Another wave of Edward’s hand, and the furniture turned to solid gold. Teeth cracked against it, mouths withdrew, and, sprouting wings, the furniture began hovering a few inches above the rug daring it to test its strength once again. The mouths vanished, the furniture gently came to rest upon it, and golden legs metamorphised into wood as Edward grinned and bowed deeply for his applauding audience.

  Vivian sighed, wishing she were elsewhere, but she displayed no outward sign of her boredom, laughing along with the other assembled members of the Thirteen Families. She tried to recall when it was that the magic had faded from her and Edward’s relationship. There was a time when his every trick delighted her, simply because they were his. Now, when they made love, she murmured cantrips she pretended were moans of ecstasy to disguise his appearance with that of another man, any other man – she didn’t care.

  Somewhere along the way, things had come undone.

  Her heart, which once had felt as buoyant as the Emperor’s sailships, now felt as if it were a splintered wreckage of silken sails and ebony timber, as if the spells which had kept it aloft had malfunctioned, now that Edward’s sorceries no longer amused her. He seemed to send the craft hurtling Earthward once again, into the mud. All of Constantinople looked muddied to her now, the bright and glittering splendour eclipsed by her mood, as if the sun had become blotted out by a cloud of dust, or had simply stopped shining altogether.

  An intricately-patterned python engulfed Edward from behind his chair. He opened his mouth wide enough to accommodate the snake’s thick body and swiftly consumed it as the assembled elite erupted once more into laughter, like giddy schoolgirls over some titbit of gossip. Vivian was so tired of it all, and of Edward in particular. Something was lacking in him, something which she desperately craved from him, though she could not pinpoint precisely what was wanting. She wondered, not for the first time, what he was truly like beneath his illusions and spells – if perhaps, accidentally, she might once have seen the true Edward even as she gave him other men’s faces to wile the time away, might have seen the man he was beneath his young and virile exterior. Vivian herself augmented her looks, retarding the vagaries of aging with spells and illusions, but she imagined the true Edward to be a void, as if he were nothing more than his elaborate and powerful sorceries.

  Though young, and not merely young-seeming, he was unquestionably the most powerful magic-maker in the city, and therefore the most celebrated member of the Thirteen Families, who were Constantinople’s most accomplished magicians and who enforced that status with a swift and iron fist (although always from afar, and via their magic, so as never to sully their own fingers). It had been a coup for Vivian to attract his attentions and even more so to have kept them this long. Although, knowing Edward as she did, Vivian found the task simplicity itself. For all his sorceries, Edward seemed lacking in all artifice in life, easily swayed and manipulated by her cunning. Vivian spent long hours concealing his naïveté, protecting him, and her own position as his consort and lover, from others who would exploit him. That was reserved for Vivian alone.

  But even that privilege had long since paled in its thrill, and was now more of a chore than anything else – defending her throne from any and all assailants, petty and overt.

  Of a sudden, Vivian’s chair dropped through the floor, which had opened a hole as quickly as a champagne bubble bursting up from the glass’s bottom to crack the surface with fizz. She idly wondered whether to cast about for some spell to save her life, lest she fall to her death from the heights of the castle they’d been visiting, but she trusted Edward would spare a moment’s thought for her and save her (if this were not in fact another of his own pranks).

  Vivian took the moment to enjoy her respite from the society of her fellow members of the Thirteen Families, who in their aggregate sum she found quite tedious and sadly droll. She stared down at the city from her aerial vantage: the Grand Concourse, hub of Constantinople and gate through which all visitors passed, the golden globe that shined down from above its dome an earthly sun; and a short ways to the left, the Cathedral, equally majestic in its non-magical splendour of stone and human construction that rivalled, nay, dwarfed, the magical fabrications which had sprung up along and beyond the road that stretched between the Grand Concourse and the Cathedral, puny and insubstantial flights of fancy.

  Her reverie was interrupted by Edward wrapping his arms about her from behind the chair. “Were you not even the slightest bit concerned?” he asked, burying his face in her long, curly black locks and running his hands up along her belly to her breasts. “You looked so ravishing up there, I couldn’t help stealing you away. Let’s make love in mid-air,” he whispered into her ear.

  “For the world to see? Like some common sailor and his whore.”

  “We’re invisible,” he said, fumbling at the laces of her dress, and Vivian knew that in that moment he had indeed made them so.

  “Please, Edward, you know it’s not that I don’t trust your spells to keep us aloft, but I really do prefer the comforts of solid ground beneath my feet, and a bed, and – ” Vivian had a long catalogue of her preferences, hoping she might thereby be able to put him off, but they were suddenly back in Edward’s terrestrial palaces. For all his sorcerous might, he had constructed his home of natural substances, though equally elaborate and plush as the wholly-dreamed airborne castles of his peers. If Vivian needed to suffer the emotional discomforts of making love to him, she would rather it occur among the creature comforts she had grown accustomed to as his consort. Edward lifted her in his arms and placed her upon the thick, feathered comforter of the bed they shared, climbing atop her. The words to the spell which would change Edward’s appearance began running through her mind, and at the first opportunity she uttered them, her fingers clawing Edward’s back as she twisted them to form the proper signs. Edward mistook the signs as Vivian goading him, and was further aroused. He no longer bothered with the clasps and stays of her clothing, but made the entire contraption disappear in an instant, leaving her body naked beneath him. Mercifully, it was over in a few minutes, and Edward fell promptly asleep.

  The moment he began to snore, Vivian extracted herself from beneath him and pushed away from the bed. She went into the bathroom, locking the door behind her, though she knew such a safeguard meant little to Edward, or practically any of Constantinople’s inhabitants for that matter. In this city of magicians, it was simplicity itself to cause a lock to undo itself with a spell most children learned before they had stopped wetting their pants. Still, it was something Vivian felt compelled to do, an emotional signal to herself that she was locking him and them out. She let the illusions fall from her body, and stood regarding herself in the mirrored wall before stopping to run hot water into a basin and scrub his scent from her skin with sponges and soaps. It was a long time before she again felt clean.

  Vivian towelled herself dry, though she might as easily have spelled herself so. It was not that she disdained magic, or its benefits; like all the other inhabitants of Constantinople, Vivian’s life was thoroughly saturated with magic. She practiced it daily, casting spells and illusions almost before thinking; and that was why she preferred to dry herself, and to perform a hundred other tasks manually, lest she become so dependent on magic that she lose herself to it. It kept
her alert to consciously not use her magic to handle the minor details of life, and it was that alertness of mind and attention to detail which was how she had been able to attract and keep Edward’s infatuation all these years.

  Staring at her image in the mirror, Vivian had to ask herself if the effort was worthwhile. Not the honing of her consciousness, that she would not forsake even for all of Edward’s powers – but Edward himself. True, while she lived in Constantinople, his presence in her life gave her access to a society and privilege to which she could not otherwise hope to aspire. But, having now climbed her way all the way to the top, up, even, to their airborne palaces which floated high above Constantinople’s towers, Vivian found herself bored.

  Life was too easy.

  That was perhaps what bothered her about Edward; because of him, there was no longer any sense of competition in her life, no challenge for anything. Edward could by force of magic do or give her anything she desired. And, since he was so easy for her to manipulate, he did. Vivian had nothing left to stimulate her, and her frustration was driving her to distraction. Though she was free to roam throughout Constantinople, she was trapped by her relationship.

  She looked at herself in the mirror, saw how she was getting so much older, despite the care she took with her body. Her once raven-dark hair was now heavily greying beneath her illusions. How much longer could she live like this? Vivian felt she would die, suffocated by the tedium of this life and illusion. She almost thought she would have been more content to have stayed far from the city, to have become some farmer’s wife, the two of them forever battling with nature to eke out a living for themselves and their family. Vivian knew, of course, that such positing was idle, especially surrounded by such pampering splendour as she was right then, but she would at least have felt alive every day in such a life, she thought. Bitter perhaps, but she felt bitter now, and with less reason.