Swords & Dark Magic

by Jonathan Strahan; Lou Anders

  Or I could think of something. Such as what?

  They tell you: be wise, don’t improvise. If in doubt, get out. Making stuff up as you go along is mightily frowned on, in much the same way as you’re not encouraged to fry eggs in a fireworks factory. There’s no knowing what you might invent, and outside controlled conditions, invention could lead to the Cartographic Commission having to redraw the maps for a whole county. Or you could make a hole in a wall, which is the worst thing anybody can do. At the very least, I’d be sure to end up in front of the Board, facing charges of unauthorized innovation and divergence. Saving the life of some farm kid would be an excuse, but not a very good one.

  I could think of something. Such as—

  There’s no such thing as magic. Instead, there’s the science we don’t properly understand, not yet. There are effects that work, and we have no idea why. One of these is spes aeternitatis, a wretchedly inconsistent, entirely inexplicable conjuring trick that no self-respecting Father would condescend to use. That’s because they can’t get it to work reliably.

  I can.

  Spes aeternitatis is an appearances-adjuster. You can use it to find hidden objects, or translate lies, or tell if a slice of cake or a glass of wine’s got poison in it. I do it by visualizing everything that’s wrong in light blue. It’s a tiny little scrap of talent that I’ve got and practically everybody else hasn’t; it’s like being double-jointed, or wiggling your nostrils like a rabbit.

  I closed my eyes and opened them again, and saw a light blue room. Everything light blue. Everything false.

  Oh, I thought; then, one-oh-five, seventy-five, and I started lining up diagonals for my escape. But that wasn’t to be, unfortunately. The room blurred and reappeared, and it was all different. It was my room; the room I slept in until I was fifteen years old.

  He was sitting on the end of the bed; a slight man, almost completely bald, with a small nose and a soft chin, small hands, short, thin legs. I’d put him at about fifty years old. His skin was purple, like a grape.

  “You were wrong,” he said, looking up at me. “The talent survives death.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “How did you get in here?”

  He smiled. “You practically invited me in,” he said. “When I heard that fool behind me, with the ax, I looked at you. You felt sorry for me. You thought: is he not a man and a Brother, or words to that effect. I used Stilicho’s transport, and here I am.”

  I nodded. “I should’ve put up wards.”

  “You should. Careless. Attention to detail isn’t your strongest suit.”

  “The boy,” I said.

  He shrugged. “In there somewhere, I dare say. But we aren’t in his head, we’re in yours. I’ve made myself at home, as you can see.”

  I looked around quickly. The apple box with the bottom knocked out, where I used to keep my books; it was where it should be, but the books were different. They were new and beautifully bound in tooled calf, and the alphabet their titles were written in was strange to me.

  “My memories,” I said.

  He waved his hand. “Well rid of them,” he said. “Misery and failure, a life wasted, a talent dissipated. You’ll be better off.”

  I nodded. “With yours.”

  “Quite. Oh, they’re not pleasant reading,” he said, with a scowl. “Bitter, angry; memories of bigotry and spite, relentless bad luck, a life of constant setbacks and reverses, a talent misunderstood. You’ll see that I failed the exam the second time because, sitting there in Great School, I suddenly hit on a much better way of achieving unam sanctam; quicker, safer, ruthlessly efficient. I tried it out as soon as the exam was over, and it worked. But I got no marks, so they failed me. I ask you, where’s the sense in that?”

  “You failed the retake,” I said. “What about the first time?”

  He laughed. “I had the flu,” he said. “I was practically delirious, could barely remember my name. Would they listen? No. Rules. You see what I mean. Bad luck and spite at every turn.”

  I nodded. “What happens to me?”

  He looked at me. “You’ll be better off,” he repeated.

  “I’ll stop existing. I’ll be dead.”

  “Not physically,” he said mildly. “Your body, my mind. Your fully qualified licensed-practitioner’s body, and a mind that saw how to improve unam sanctam in a half-second flash of intuition.”

  It says a lot about my self-esteem that I actually considered it, though not for very long. Half a second, maybe. “What happens now?” I asked. “Do we fight, or—?”

  He shrugged. “If you like,” he said, and extended his arm. It was ten feet long, thick as a gatepost. He gripped my throat like a man holding a mouse, and crushed me.

  I guess I was about 70 percent dead when I remembered: I know what to do. I drew a rather shaky second ward; he closed his fingers on thin air, and I was standing behind him.

  He swung around, roaring like a bull. He had bull’s horns sticking out of his forehead. I tried second ward again, but he got there before I did, grabbed my head, and smashed my face into the wall.

  Just in time, I remembered: there is no pain. I used Small Mercies, softening the wall into felt, and slipped through his fingers. I was smoke. I hung above him in a cloud. He laughed, and fetched me back with vis mentis. The back of my head hit the floor, which gave way like a mattress. I became a spear, and buried myself in his chest. He used second ward and was on the other side of the room.

  “You fight like a first-year,” he said.

  Which was true. I clenched my mind like a fist; the walls closed in on him, squashing him like a spider under a boot. I felt him, like a nail right through the sole. Back to first ward, and we stood glowering at each other, in opposite corners of the room.

  “You can’t beat me,” he said. “I’ll wear you down and you’ll simply fade away. Face it, what the hell have you got to live for?”

  Valid point. “All right, then,” I said.

  His eyes opened wide. “I win?”

  “You win,” I said.

  He was pleased; very pleased. He grinned at me and raised his hand, just as I got my fingers around the handle of the door and twisted as hard as I could.

  He saw that and opened his mouth to scream. But the door flew open, knocking me back. I closed my eyes. The door was, of course, the intersection of two lines drawn diagonally across the room, at 105 and 75 degrees precisely.

  I opened my eyes. He’d gone. I was in the boy’s room, the room upstairs. The boy was sitting on the floor, legs crossed, hands under his chin. He looked up at me.

  “Well, come on,” I snapped at him. “I haven’t got all day.”

  They were pathetically grateful. Mother in floods of tears, father clinging to my arm, how can we ever thank you, it’s a miracle, you’re a miracle-worker. I wasn’t in the mood. The boy, lying on the kitchen table under a pile of blankets, looked up at me and frowned, as though something about me wasn’t quite right. A quiet, analytical stare; it bothered the hell out of me. I refused food and drink and made father get out the pony and trap and take me out to the crossroads. But the mail won’t be arriving for six hours, he objected; it’s cold and dark, you’ll catch your death.

  I didn’t feel cold.

  At the crossroads, huddling under the smelly old hat father insisted on giving me, I tried to search my mind, to see if he’d really gone. There was, of course, no way he could have survived. I’d opened the door (Rule One: never open the door) and he’d been sucked out of my head out into the open, where there was no talented mind to receive him. Even if he was as strong as he’d claimed to be, there was no way he could have lasted more than three seconds before he broke up and dissipated into the air. There was absolutely nothing he could have done, no way he could have survived.

  The coach arrived. I got on it, and slept all the way. At the inn, I got a lamp and a mirror, and examined myself all over. Just when I thought I was all clear, I found a patch of purple skin, about the
size of a crab apple, on the calf of my left leg. I told myself it was just a bruise.

  (That was a year ago. It’s still there.)

  The rest of the round was just straightforward stuff: a possession, a small rift, a couple of incursions, which I sealed with a strong closure and duly reported when I got back. Since then, I’ve volunteered for a screening, been to see a couple of counselors, bought a pair of full-length mirrors. And I’ve been promoted; field officer, superior grade. They’re quite pleased with me, and no wonder. I seem to be getting better at the job all the time. And I’m writing a paper, would you believe: modifications to unam sanctam. Quicker, safer, much more efficient. So blindingly obvious, I’m surprised no one’s ever thought of it before.

  Father Prior is surprised but pleased. I don’t know what’s got into you, he said.

  * * *

  GARTH NIX grew up in Canberra, Australia. When he turned nineteen, he left to drive around the United Kingdom in a beat-up Austin with a boot full of books and a Silver-Reed typewriter. Despite a wheel literally falling off the car, he survived to return to Australia and study at the University of Canberra. He has since worked in a bookshop, as a book publicist, a publisher’s sales representative, an editor, a literary agent, and as a public relations and marketing consultant. His first story was published in 1984 and was followed by novels The Ragwitch, Sabriel, Shade’s Children, Lirael, Abhorsen, the six-book YA fantasy series the Seventh Tower, and, most recently, the seven-book the Keys to the Kingdom series. He lives in Sydney with his wife and their two children.

  * * *

  A SUITABLE PRESENT FOR A SORCEROUS PUPPET

  Garth Nix

  Sir Hereward licked his finger and turned the page of the enormous tome that was perched precariously on a metal frame next to his sickbed. It was not a book he would have chosen to read—or rather to fossick through like a rook searching for seed in a new-sown field—but as it was the only book in the lonely tower by the sea, he had little choice. Having broken two small but important bones in his left foot, he could not range farther afield for other amusements, so reading it had to be. This particular book was entitled The Compendium of Commonplaces and presented itself as a collection of knowledge that should be at the command of every reasonably educated gentleman of Jerreke, a country that had ceased to exist some thousand years before, shortly after the book was printed.

  The demise of Jerreke and the publication of the book were not likely to be connected, though Sir Hereward did notice that the pages were often bound out of order, or the folios were incorrect, and that there was a general carelessness with numbers. Together, these might be symptomatic of the somewhat unusual end of Jerreke, a city-state which had defaulted on its debts so enormously that its entire population had to be sold into slavery.

  The finger-licking was required by the book’s long, dark hibernation inside a chest up in the attic of the tower. A thoroughly damp finger was a necessary aid to the separation of the sadly gummed-together pages.

  Sir Hereward sighed as he turned another page. His enthusiasm for reading had diminished in the turning of several hundred pages, with its concomitant several hundred finger-lickings, for he had found only two entries worth reading: one on how to cheat at a board game that had changed its name but was still widely played in the known world; and another on the multiplicity of uses of the root spice cabizend, some surprising number of which fell into Hereward’s professional area of expertise as an artillerist and maker of incendiaries.

  In fact, Hereward was about to give up and bellow to the housekeeper who kept the tower to bring him some ale, when the title of the next commonplace caught his eye. It was called “On the Propitiation of Sorcerous Puppets.”

  As Sir Hereward’s constant companion, comrade-in-arms, and onetime nanny was a sorcerous puppet known as Mister Fitz, this was very much of interest to the injured knight. He eagerly read on, and though the piece was short and referred solely to the more usual kind of sorcerous puppet—one made to sing, dance, and entertain—he did learn something new.

  According to Doctor Professor Laxelender Prouzin, the author of this particular, far-from-commonplace entry, all sorcerous puppets shared a common birthday, much in the manner of the priests of a number of particularly jealous godlets, who allowed no individuality among their chosen servants (some of them even going as far as the Xarwashian god of bookkeeping and ware-houses, who not only refused his servants individual birthdays but referred to them all by the same name).

  Sir Hereward quickly calculated this shared birthday of the puppets, transposing the Tramontic calendar that had been used in Jerreke with the more modern Adjusted Celestial, and discovered that it would occur in a matter of days, depending on whether it was currently the first or the second day of what the Adjusted Celestial calendar prosaically called “Second Month” and the Tramontics had termed “Expialomon.”

  As Sir Hereward had been laid up for a week already, and had no urgent matters to attend to, he had rather lost track of the date.

  “Sister Gobbe!” called out Sir Hereward. “Sister Gobbe!”

  Sister Gobbe was the priestess-housekeeper who looked after the tower and its guests as a representative of the Cloister of Narhalet-Narhalit. Colloquially known as Nar-Nar, it was a gentle and kindly deity whose slow but healing powers had aided tens of thousands of petitioners over the last several millennia. This particular tower was one of the more remote bastions of Nar-Nar’s presence upon the earth, and likely to be abandoned in the not too distant future. Hence it was staffed only by Sister Gobbe and an as yet unseen novice Sir Hereward believed might be called “Sisterling Lallit”—a name he had overheard being hissed by Sister Gobbe outside his door the previous evening. There was also a guard, a small but broad-shouldered fellow with a very large ax, who doubtless could call upon Nar-Nar’s rather less well-known powers to open wounds that hadn’t even happened yet, rather than heal ones that had.

  Fortunately for all concerned, Narhalet-Narhalit was far from a proscribed entity, but a welcome extrusion into the world, so the god and its followers were not an item of business for Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz. Consequently, their discovery of the tower en route from Tar’s End to Bazynghame had been a welcome opportunity for the lame and hobbling knight to rest up and let the bones in his foot knit faster than they would anywhere else.

  Mister Fitz had also taken their forced rest as an opportunity to engage in some activity that he said had hitherto been impracticable on their travels, though Sir Hereward was not entirely sure what that meant. The sorcerous puppet was up to something. He had taken to exploring the sea caves that ate into the cliffs near the tower, and he returned each evening covered in a layer of what looked like salt, suggesting immersion in the ocean and subsequent drying. This was odd in a creature who usually avoided complete submersion, being made of papier-mâché and carved timber, albeit sorcerously altered, but Sir Hereward had not made enquiry. He knew that Mister Fitz would tell him of his activities in due course, if there was any need for Sir Hereward to know.

  “Sir?”

  It was not Sister Gobbe who appeared in the doorway, red-faced and puffing as she always was from the tightly spiraling stair, but a considerably younger and far more attractive attendant, who might have wafted her way upstairs on a beam of sunlight, for she was neither out of breath, nor was her habit or broad-brimmed hat in any disarray.

  “I am Sisterling Lallit,” said the vision. “Sister Gobbe has had to go into the village, to speak to Boll about the veal to go with the crayfish sauce for Your Honor’s dinner. Is there anything you need?”

  Sir Hereward continued to stare and failed to answer. It had been some months since he had even the slightest conversation with a beautiful woman, and he was both surprised and sadly out of practice. But as she continued to stand in the door, with her head down and her face shadowed by her hat, he recovered himself.

  “My companion, Mister Fitz,” he began. “The puppet, you know…”

&nb
sp; “Yes, sir,” said Sisterling Lallit. “A most wondrous puppet, and so wise.”

  “Yes…just so,” said Sir Hereward. He wondered what Mister Fitz had been talking about with Sisterling Lallit, but pressed on. “It is his birthday on the fourth of Second Month—”

  “Tomorrow!” exclaimed Lallit, proving Sir Hereward had been even more careless about the passage of time than he’d thought. She raised her hands and inadvertently looked up, to show Hereward a face of great charm and liveliness, though sadly marred by the lack of the old and faded facial scars he had been brought up to regard as necessary to true beauty. “You should have said! It will be a doing to manage a feast—”

  “Mister Fitz does not eat, so a feast is superfluous,” said Sir Hereward, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “However, I wish to give him a present. Given that we are leagues from any shop or merchant, and in any case, I cannot for the moment leave my bed…I wondered if there might be something suitable in the tower that I might purchase for Mister Fitz.”

  “Something suitable?” asked Lallit. She tugged her earlobe and frowned, a gesture Sir Hereward found irresistible. “I don’t know…”

  “Come and sit by me,” said Sir Hereward. He slid over and patted the mattress by his side. “To begin with, you can tell me what is in the attic above. Most particularly, a musical instrument would meet the need.”

  Doctor Professor Laxelender Prouzin had written that musical instruments were the usual gift to an entertainer puppet, and Sir Hereward supposed that one might be of interest to Mister Fitz, who was quite capable of appearing to be an entertainer puppet. He could sing most sweetly and seemingly play any musical instrument, and dance fascinatingly as well. But Mister Fitz was not an entertainer puppet, and usually only deployed these talents as a ruse or deception, shortly before unleashing his other, even more greatly developed skills as a practitioner of arcane arts that were not generally the province of puppets. Or of people, for that matter.