by Layton Green
Will thought that it was beyond impressive, beyond beautiful: it was magical.
“This is where the wizards live?” Val asked, exchanging a tight-lipped look with his brothers that said, I wonder if Dad lived here.
“All the powerful ones ’ave a place in the city. Most of ’em have a castle or fortress somewhere, too, but New Victoria is Congregation headquarters.”
Every now and then a wizard would fly up to a doorway atop the spires or float down to ground level. Though pedestrians roamed the public spaces, the grounds belonging to the wizards had prominent signs warning off trespassers. It reminded Will of the slightly ominous aura surrounding the White House.
Feel free to enjoy the designated tourist areas, but wander too close and you might get shot.
“How many wizards are in the Congregation?” Val asked.
“Good question, mate. In all the Realm? Maybe five thousand full-fledged wizards, plenty more who weren’t up to snuff or didn’t want to join. Not many go out on their own who can join, though. Usually ’ave a good reason for it.”
“Such as being a necromancer?”
He gave Val a sharp look. “So ye do know a thing or two. I’d ride a hundred miles out of my way to steer clear o’ those types. Working with the dead like that?” He wagged a finger. “Wizards choose their specialty for good reason, ain’t it?”
“But necromancers can still join the Congregation?”
“If they want to play by the rules. Such as not resurrecting human beings to do their bidding.”
“Seems fair,” Val said drily.
“Ain’t many rules, though.” He lowered his voice and swung his head around to make sure no one was listening, then spat tobacco juice between the horses. “Let’s just say the Congregation wizards don’t view themselves the same as the rest o’ us.”
Will shivered as he remembered the arrogance splayed across Zedock’s face and the contemptuous way he had loosed the manticore on them, as if Will and his brothers were insects to be squashed.
A midnight blue pyramid came into view, not as high as the spires but even more imposing. A bridgeless moat surrounded the pyramid, and a pair of thirty-foot tall, sword-wielding stone statues flanked the columned entranceway.
Will watched a wizard fly over the moat and through the columns, then land and walk briskly inside the pyramid.
“The Sanctum. Headquarters o’ the Congregation.”
“Impressive,” Val murmured.
“Those statues are extremely lifelike,” Caleb said.
The driver brayed and slapped his knee. “I do love escortin’ you laddies ’round town. Every stop’s like Victoria Day. Those aren’t statues. Each one’s a colossus, alive as you and me, and the pair of ’em could destroy the city by themselves, if the wizards weren’t ’ere. Things of legend, those be.”
Will noticed a throng of tourists gawking at the colossi. Their gigantic swords were crossed across their chests, each taut biceps the size of a car. Will shivered.
As the driver circled the moat, he pointed out a polychromatic octopus carved into the rear of the pyramid. Each of the eight arms was a different color, the beak was black, and the head was the same milky color as the ornamental piece on Val’s staff. Eyes the silvery-blue of Salomon’s key completed the color scheme.
“The symbol o’ the Congregation. Always thought it a wee bit creepy, meself.”
Will had to agree. The pyramid’s dark background muted the bright colors, and the grasping arms and bulbous, oversized head imparted an Orwellian effect.
“Do the colors have significance?” Val said.
“Them’s the core disciplines.” He scratched at his beard. “Let’s see how many I can remember: red for Pyromancy, blue for Aquamancy, green for Sylvomancy, amber for Geomancy, White for Aeromancy, that flesh-colored one be Cuerpomancy, and the gold . . . Alchemancy. There be plenty more, o’ course, Cyanomancers and Illusomancers and Electromancers and all kinds o’ strange ones.”
“And the head of the octopus,” Val said. “What does that represent?”
Will noticed the head was the same milky color as the crescent stone atop Val’s staff.
The driver smacked the side of his head. “Right you are. That would be Spiritmancy, the rarest form of magic there be.”
“What does a spirit mage do?” Val’s voice was as guarded and noncommittal as always, but Will noticed his brother’s hand flexing against his thigh.
“I couldn’t really tell ye, except they’re the most powerful wizards o’ all. Ye’ve about exhausted my wizard knowledge, to be honest. I’m just a commoner, and a right common one at that.”
The horses trotted deeper into the forest of wizard fortresses. “A bonus sight, laddies, since ye’ve entertained me. Just ahead’s the Hall o’ Wizards, and I’ll let ye take a quick look-see. Oh, and speaking o’ spirit mages, that right there belongs to one.”
He was pointing at the largest of the Gaudi-esque buildings, a central spired tower surrounded by five conical beehive towers of varying size, linked to the main tower by a series of bridges, walkways, and Gothic arches. The blue-white spire rose higher than any other in the district.
The dun-colored stone flowed and dripped and smeared in dreamlike patterns that looked impossible to craft by hand. It reminded Will of some genius sculptor’s combination of a castle, a collection of circus tents, and a melting wedding cake.
“City residence of Lord Alistair, Chief Thaumaturge of the Congregation and, as of the last constitution, equal in power to the Queen. ’E has another tower in Londyn, but they say ’is home fortress is a giant castle in the sky somewhere in the land of the Scots.”
A moat of glacial blue water surrounded the property, lined by braziers blazing atop spiked copper stands. Across the moat sprawled a green space filled with topiary and a collection of rock sculptures. Beyond that, a series of interconnected fountains surrounded the main structure. Liquids that looked like molten metal ran through the fountains, jade and platinum and mercury, multicolored streams spraying into the air and pouring into exquisitely carved basins.
As they took in the view, a small child, too young to read the signs warning him away, dashed towards the bridge spanning the moat. A woman screamed in the background, but the child, giggling all the while, kept running.
Their driver rose and swore. Will whipped his head around and saw the hysterical young woman, presumably the mother, sprinting towards the child and waving her arms.
“Help!” she cried. “Someone help him!”
Other bystanders stopped what they were doing to observe the scene with horrified stares. No one was close enough to intervene.
“Should we do something?” Will asked.
“Stay back, lad,” the driver said sharply.
When the child reached the bridge, the mother went berserk. Will didn’t understand the concern, since as far as he could tell there was no one on the other side. Yet the tension in the air was palpable. The driver gripped the reins with white knuckles, the murmur of awed tourists had ceased, the only sounds were the wails of the mother and the chortles of the mischievous boy.
As the screaming woman neared the bridge, the child, finally sensitive to his mother’s hysteria, decided to stop and turn.
It was too late.
The child must have crossed some unseen barrier, because the moat erupted in a spray of liquid as a watery form geysered into the air. Ten feet tall, it was a genie-like thing, a spinning whirlpool of a torso with aqueous limbs and a featureless head. In a blur of movement, it gathered itself above the child, then shot its arms downward with the force of a fire hose.
The child cringed and wailed. Will’s own scream stuck in his throat, a strangled cry of disbelief, sure the power of the impending blow would kill the little boy.
Just before the water being slammed into the child, Will heard a thunderous command in a language he didn’t recognize, and the monster exploded into a million drops, drenching the terrified boy but leaving
him unharmed.
A wizard carrying a shortened trident flew into view and scooped the child in his arms. The mage pointed the trident, which had a blue gemstone inset into the hilt, at the mother and barked a command. A group of majitsu, already racing out of a guardhouse, surrounded the woman and carried her into the complex as she moaned for her child. The wizard flew off with the boy in another direction.
Out of the corner of his eye, Will noticed that some of the topiary creatures had moved, and he even caught one of them, a two-headed lion, settling back into position. Gaping, he saw Lord’s Alistair’s grounds with new eyes: the moat rippling with water elementals, the line of braziers waiting for a pyromancer to ignite a crossing army, hedge monsters and rock creatures thick enough to crush a tank, and the final layer before the fortress, fountains of molten liquid whose purpose he couldn’t guess at but which he had no doubt was destructive.
The Chief Thaumaturge of the Congregation, it appeared, did not like visitors.
Caleb’s voice was shaky. “Where are they taking the child?”
“The boy’ll be fine,” the driver said grimly. “It’s the mother who needs to worry. The wizards don’t like trespassers, especially not ones who reveal their defenses.”
“Will they hurt her?” Will asked.
He spat and gathered the reins. “Dunno. But she better pray she’s taken her Oaths.”
The driver spurred the horses. Will took a seat, shaken. He had been lulled by the beauty of the Wizard’s District, spellbound into forgetting just how dangerous this land of might and magic really was.
A minute later, they arrived at the Hall of Wizards. Will turned to see yet another jaw-dropping sight, a hundred foot tall rectangular building surrounded by columns of red-gold marble. The structure stretched the length of a football field.
“Go on, lads, get a gander. No more ’an a few minutes, eh?”
They hopped off the carriage and filed into the entranceway with a crush of other tourists. The size of the place made it seem as if a colony of ants had just swarmed the Parthenon.
“My, my,” Caleb said, craning his neck to look at the frescoed ceiling far above their heads.
“Indeed,” Val murmured.
Intricate scrollwork covered the columns, and hundreds of lifelike wizard statues filled the open-air interior. Each stone wizard sported an actual gemstone of some type, either worn as jewelry or integrated into a staff or other item. Each jewel Will saw—a ruby-studded scepter, an emerald wand, a diadem of black pearl, a diamond bracelet—was a show-stopping piece of jewelry worth an untold amount.
Were these the remains of the deceased wizards themselves, somehow immortalized in stone?
Each of the statues bore a nameplate with the wizard’s discipline and birth and death dates. Will gaped at the select few with lifespans spanning several hundred years.
A door-size plaque filled with a few dozen names stood at the rear of the Hall of Wizards. No sign displayed the purpose of the roster, but Will gleaned from the dates underneath each name, each of which bore a dash instead of a second date, that the wizards on this plaque had gone missing—or something else had happened.
As the others joined him in silent perusal of the names, Val gripped his shoulder and pointed at the second name on the last row.
Will’s eyes flew to where Val was pointing, his stomach bottoming out at the same time Caleb whispered a curse.
Dane Blackwood
Spirit Mage
1850—
-18-
“Blackwood,” Lance said, his face pale, “what the hell’s your Dad’s name doing up there?”
Will couldn’t stop staring at the plaque.
“C’mon, Will,” Val said gently. “We have to get back.”
Val placed his hand on his arm, but Will shrugged him off and approached the memorial. He put his palm on the engraving of his father’s name and stood there, head bowed, as Val and Caleb put their arms around his shoulders.
“Is this Dad?” Will asked. “What is this? Who are we?”
But it didn’t really matter where he was, who he was, what he was. It didn’t matter that they had journeyed to a different universe, or that fantasy was real, or whether consciousness was a dream or a quantum hiccup or a flicker of synapse in the mind of God. Nothing mattered in that moment except the unbearable ache in Will’s heart, a grieving son yearning for his lost father.
Will sat between his brothers as the carriage cantered away from the Wizard’s District. As they passed through the massive entrance portal, Lance patted Will on the back. “Sorry, buddy. Not to poke around the wound, but didn’t your dad have a middle name? Surely there’s more than one Dane Blackwood.”
Will replied in monotone. “More than one Dane Blackwood who was our dad, owned a wizard’s staff topped with azantite, and whose name is written in the Hall of Wizards?”
“His middle name’s Maurice,” Caleb said.
“Well, where’d he come by that?” Lance asked. “Why wasn’t it on the plaque?”
“We don’t know,” Will said. “He told us he was an orphan.”
“I know,” Val said quietly.
Will jerked his head around. “What?”
“Maurice was one of the principal characters in Dad’s favorite book.”
Will glanced at Caleb. “Well yeah,” Will said, “we know about that.”
Val waited for him to continue, eyebrows raised as if to say then what are you asking me for?
Caleb and Will exchanged another look, this one sheepish. “I only read fantasy,” Will said.
Val pressed his lips together as the spires receded in the distance. “Dad’s favorite author was John Fowles, one of the great English novelists of the twentieth century. His first novel was Dad’s favorite. It was called The Magus, and the name of the title character—the magus—was Maurice.”
Will held his head in his hands as he half-laughed, half-cackled, to release the tension pressing inside him like a coiled spring. “The Magician! That’s great! He just went ahead and told us who he was, didn’t he?”
They rode in silence as the import of their discoveries sank in. Val glanced at the declining sun and called out to the driver. “Any idea when the Museum of History closes?”
“Of the Protectorate? At sunset. If you fancy a look, I know a shortcut.”
Val laid a silver coin on the seat next to the driver. “A token of our appreciation for the extended tour.”
The driver’s gnarled hand whisked the coin away. “I don’t know where ye laddies call home, but my regards to the woman who raised ye.”
At the next intersection he clicked his tongue and took a cobblestone side road. “We ’ave to pass through a bit of the Fens to get there, so ye might want to cover your noses.”
A few blocks later, Val said, “There was something else interesting about the Hall of Wizards.”
Caleb had resumed his insouciant slouch. “Hit us.”
“I read the names on all the statues,” Val said.
“All of them?”
“And the dates. The earliest I saw was 557, which might tell us something if we knew any history. I could be wrong, but I assume all wizards of major significance since that date were represented. And there was one name I distinctly did not see.”
“Salomon,” Will said.
“That’s right.”
“Maybe he’s not part of this Congregation thing, or fell out of favor. Or maybe he has a pseudonym. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means something,” Val said. “We just don’t know what.”
“Maybe all wizards can travel to our world,” Caleb said, “and Salomon’s no big deal.
“Something tells me that’s not the case,” Will said. “Zedock was arrogant and powerful, but Salomon was sort of like an absent-minded professor and . . . I dunno. When he was talking to me, it was almost as if he was playing a game of chess with a three-year old on a Sunday afternoon, while reading the paper and doing the New York Ti
mes crossword at the same time.”
Instead of replying, Caleb’s face scrunched and he covered his nose and mouth with his arm. Will looked up, realizing they had entered a warren of dim byways barely wide enough for the carriage. The horses splashed through layers of muck and sewage more akin to troughs than roads.
Wary, grime-covered faces peered out from shadowed doorways and half-cracked windows. A group of urchins kicked a ball of rags back and forth, rats and feral animals slunk through garbage-strewn courtyards.
“The Fens?” Will said.
“Ah, not quite,” the driver said, with a note of embarrassment.
Will soon realized why. The slum seemed to last forever, but when they exited they found themselves on a wide road on the outskirts of the city, the urban blight continuing on their left. To their right, a vast, watery swamp stretched to the horizon. A maze of rotting wooden planks separated a horde of wretched souls from the stagnant fen below.
Most of the people were slumped against crates or lay unmoving on the fringes. Some had crude fishing lines cast over the sides of the planks, and more than a few hovered over some type of shared pipe.
To Will’s dismay, he could see the ridged backs of alligators cutting through the slimy waters, inches from playing children. The whole place had to be a cesspool of disease, mosquitoes, garbage, and human decay. Will’s empathy welled up inside him.
The driver’s voice was subdued. “That would be the Fens, laddies. Pray you never end up there.”
“My God,” Val murmured.
“God nothing,” Caleb said in a low voice. “If there were a God, we wouldn’t have that.”
Lance balled his fists. “There’s a God all right. He’s just really questioning the wisdom of that whole free will thing.”
Will couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything other than lower his eyes and try to shut off the valve to his soul. “There’re so many people out there. Kids. Babies.”
“Homeless, debtors, former prisoners, those poor souls who just can’t get on their feet,” the driver said. “Mostly gypsies and pagans, o’ course.”
Will exchanged a glance with the others at the state of the gypsies, and the driver’s odd use of pagan. They reached an unspoken decision not to probe until they knew what they were dealing with.