by John Booth
He didn’t look like the photograph of Dafydd Williams and he didn’t have a Welsh accent, but a wizard can change his look and his accent with little effort.
“Didn’t you build a house in Cardiff?” I asked innocently. The notes in his university file said Roge had specialized in house design in his final year.
He looked puzzled. “Where is Cardiff?”
“Tell me about your project,” I said quickly, before he got suspicious.
His face lit up and he led me to a room where the ghostly outlines of large chairs were scattered across the floor.
“Pick any chair you want like this,” he touched the image of a chair with his finger, “And then put it where it feels comfortable.” He gestured and the chair materialized in the place he pointed at.
I picked a bigger chair and gestured so it would be facing the one he’d created. This was cool and would save me making a lot of replacement furniture, if I installed something similar in Fluffy’s cave.
When I sat down, all the other images vanished. I tried to work out the magic involved, but my magical sight was blocked.
“You have to buy the method from me,” Roge said smiling. “But my prices are very reasonable.”
He blathered on about the new concept he’d had for a house located in room sized buildings across the Balmack Accord. Rooms would be linked using chain bridge magic. While interesting, this was all rather pointless as I had already decided he wasn’t Dafydd and the trip out here was a waste of time.
“I must tell you I came for a different purpose, and while your house idea is great that’s not why I’m here.”
Roge looked a little annoyed, but then his face cleared.
“And your real reason for coming here?”
“I’m trying to find a man called Dafydd Williams. He would have had to be sponsored by an ally of the Balmack Accord as you were. He came to Balmack under an alias.”
Roge nodded. “This has something to do with the sabotage at the university trials doesn’t it? I recognize you now.”
I nodded. “We believe this man did that, along with a number of other bombings across the multiverse. He has killed a lot of innocent people.”
Roge scratched at his chin. “There must have been thousands of people sponsored into the university the year I started. It would be like hunting for a single word in a book when you didn’t know what page it was on.”
Tell me about it.
“Yes, a very large number of people are potential suspects.”
“Not many are sponsored by the Elves though. I only know of one other and he joined the university three years ago. A very standoffish fellow. I tried to contact him a few times, but he never replied to my messages.”
Three years ago was way outside the time frame I was interested in. That would be fifteen years after Dafydd had first disappeared.
I sighed. “Thank you for your time. I may come back and buy your chair magic. There’s a dragon’s cave I know that could certainly use that trick.”
“You know the Dragon Ambassador, don’t you?” Roge sounded eager and impressed.
I nodded.
“Then you can have it for free, if it’s for him.”
He leaned forward and touched my forehead and I then I knew how it was done.
“I’ll ask him if you can visit him when it’s done.”
We clasped hands together to seal the deal. It seemed that Roge had a thing for dragons, judging by the smile on his face.
There was a lot of noise in the lecture theatre as my fellow students stood around chatting. We were off on a field trip to visit a world destroyed by wizardry. I suspected this was part of the continuing propaganda against people like me. I knew most wizards were self-centered and prone to evil, but some of us were all right.
Someone poked me in the back and I turned to find Lana grinning like a Cheshire cat.
“You aren’t on this course,” I accused.
“All this year’s hedge wizards have to go on this trip, even me.”
Another poke in the back, this time a lot harder and it was no surprise to find Esta on the other side of me. If looks could kill, Lana would have been a smoldering pile of cinders. On her part, Lana smiled back innocently.
Okay, I have to admit it. Having Lana and Esta share my bed, very much separately, had one major drawback, but only if we were all in the same room together. My hints at a threesome had not improved the situation between them.
“Jake, they are letting anyone into our lectures now,” Esta said sweetly.
“Play nice, girls.”
“Does he make you dress up as a boy and take you from behind?” Lana asked equally sweetly.
I admitted defeat and slipped away from them before either of them demanded I should pick a side.
Professor Delor was a small plump woman of indeterminate age with a demeanor that reminded me of a terrier. She regarded the title wizard as a term of abuse and was always careful to call me Wizard Morrissey whenever she addressed me.
“Wizard Morrissey, how nice to see you here early for once, but I suppose a field trip is more fun than a mere lecture.”
“I hang on your every word, Professor.”
“Would that we could hang…” The Professor stopped and I looked down at her with an innocent look of enquiry on my face.
“And don’t look at me like a lovesick puppy. Most wizards who join the university have the decency to wait until they are middle aged. Now we have three children on my course.”
There was nothing to say to that so I stayed quiet until I thought of a question,
“What do I have to do?” There had been no instructions beyond gather in the room.
Professor Delor looked exasperated.
“Go and hold somebody’s hand. Preferably someone who knows the way. They are the ones with the green armbands, Wizard Morrissey.”
I found a student with a green armband, someone I’d never seen before. We held hands after I offered mine and a few moments later we hopped off the planet.
We were in the ruins of an open air amphitheater. It was impressive even in decay. The circular stage was two hundred feet across and the seating area around us rose three or four hundred feet into the air. Creatures that may have been rabbits ran for cover as students arrived in small groups hanging on to someone with a green armband.
Professor Delor arrived last and walked up the first few flights of steps to a place where we could see her.
“This is the world of Tandor. It used to be a thriving and peaceful place, populated by artists and artisans. There is only one continent on this planet surrounded by a vast sea and that continent used to have four distinct races, roughly split like points of a compass to the north, south, east and west.”
“Then four wizards arrived, initially friends with each other, we believe, and they took control of a race each. They instituted programs of slavery, pandering to their physical desires and greed. This was one of the capital cities, and when you wander around you will see murals depicting debauchery and torture beyond belief.”
“Over time, the wizards fell out and began a program of wars, perhaps because their senses had become dulled from overuse and they wanted greater excitement. The causes of the wars are lost to us, but we do know they placed a compulsion on their people. A compulsion to seek out and kill members of the other races. Some were turned into living bombs, their flesh detonating when they reached their targets.”
This was exactly how Auntie May had been used against me. I wondered if cousin Dafydd had been on a similar field trip and got the idea from visiting this place.
The Professor had been droning on while I mused and I tuned back in to what she was saying.
“Once the four wizards were dead there was no one left to remove the compulsion from the few surviving humans. Over the next ten years the races slowly and methodically exterminated each other. Finally, the only people left were the children born after the wizards had died. Not infected by the compulsion
, but without adults to guide them the population dropped below a critical mass and humanity on Tandor became extinct.”
I ventured to raise a hand.
“How long ago was this?”
“Thank you for that question, Wizard Morrissey. We don’t know exactly, but from estimates using tree rings we believe it was somewhere between twelve hundred and fourteen hundred years ago.”
“How do you know the wizards were killed?” This from a girl called Paulan.
“Despite being under compulsion, or perhaps because of it, we have extensive written accounts of what happened written by the doomed people themselves.”
That was a sobering thought. One of the easiest things for a wizard was to compel a human. To kill anyone that way was obscene; there wasn’t a word vile enough to describe committing genocide like that.
“I hope you’re not thinking of me with that face,” Lana said. She took my hand and led me out of the theatre and onto the street. “We are supposed to look round and write essays on anything interesting we find. The part of the city around the amphitheater has never been explored.”
This place made me uncomfortable. It was like all the ghosts of the world were watching us.
“Sounds like a terrible idea. This place feels like a cemetery. We should leave it alone.”
We walked out onto a wide avenue. Ancient trees lined it and younger trees had ripped up stone to sprout between them.
“There might be a bed around here we can use.” Lana’s eyes glittered with excitement. “Haven’t you ever wanted to do it in a cemetery?”
A stir in my loins suggested I might. There was no one else on the avenue. The other students must have gone in different directions.
“If you catch me, you can have me.”
Lana ran into the trees and disappeared behind one of the larger ones.
Well if it was a challenge, I was up for it. I ran after her, extending my magical senses to track her. Behind the trees were majestic buildings, the sort of thing someone might build if they had unlimited slave labor. They looked in remarkably good condition, only the glass in the windows was broken. Lana’s magical trace went through some big doors into the massive building in front of me and I set off in pursuit.
The interior of the building was a dark maze. A click of my fingers brought light to the rooms as I chased Lana. Many rooms were intricately decorated with scenes of sexual depravity. Perhaps this had been a brothel?
I heard Lana laughing and increased my pace to catch up with her. I found her in an extraordinary room.
She had illuminated ancient globes that hung from the ceiling. The room was hot and steamy from water flowing through a large swimming pool. There must be a hot spring below us. Magic had created the room’s stone structure, which was smooth as glass and had no breaks. Statues, painted in lifelike colors were forever frozen in mid sex act.
“We could blend right in,” Lana said as I put my arm around her.
I stepped forward to examine a woman on her back with a man on top.
“The detail is extraordinary. You can see every line of weave in the cloth she’s lying on.”
Lana bent to look. I stood back and looked at the room using magic sight.
“We have to leave.” I found it difficult to keep the panic out of my voice.
“Why? All these statues are turning me on, and we can go swimming too.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted her to know. But we had to leave. “Look at them magically.”
Lana laughed, but then her face paled as she followed my suggestion.
“These are real people turned to stone, just for decoration.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
I started to drag her away.
“You told me once you changed a king back who’d been turned to stone.”
Had I told her that story? Possibly, you have to talk about something after sex.
“We should leave.” I noticed for the first time that there were child statues in this room. I wanted to be sick.
“You can change them back, Jake.”
I pulled her out of the room and didn’t stop dragging her until we were outside and in daylight.
“You don’t think you can do it?” she asked.
“It was supposed to be impossible, and he had only been stone for a few seconds.”
“But you could try?” Lana put a hand on me.
“What if they come back dead?” Would that put their deaths on my hands? There were so many deaths I was already accountable for.
“Would you want to be on display like that forever? Someone will find them sooner or later and use them as decoration. I would rather be properly dead and buried.”
I sat down and considered my options.
The sun was going down. We’d been gone for the whole day and walked back into the amphitheater, hand in hand.
“Where have you two been? We have been looking everywhere for you.” Professor Delor sounded furious. Behind her, Esta looked even angrier. Her eyes locked on Lana, sure of what we had been doing.
“We found some people…” Lana said. “They were turned to stone.”
I waved and the first of one hundred and four men, women, and children I’d rescued from the swimming pool room stepped into view. They were naked and very frightened, but they were alive.
27. Magic
Esta was waiting for me outside the lecture theatre the following morning. Her face was pale and determined and I knew she was going to confront me.
“You were with Lana last night.” Her voice sounded like cracking ice.
“You’ve always known I have a relationship with her.”
“It’s her or me, Jake.” She bit her lip as if expecting me to discard Lana at this ultimatum. I liked both of them and couldn’t see why I had to make a choice. Being doubly married didn’t seem to bother either of them.
“As you wish. I’m not telling Lana to go away.”
I was feeling guilty in any case. I had wives and a mistress to be loyal to and I hadn’t been doing a very good job. Losing Esta would mean a lessening of guilt, though I would miss her company.
“So that’s it? Just like that?”
“We can still be friends.”
Her eyes widened, much like the time I’d suggested the three of get together in bed. Women, who can understand them?
“You are no better than the wizards who destroyed Tandon. Treating every woman you meet as a toy to be disposed of when she no longer suits you.”
She walked past me into the lecture theatre. I stared after her wondering what had brought that on. She had just got rid of me, not the other way round.
The lecture was part of a course on the fundamentals of magic. I’d learnt a lot about how and why spells worked. It turned out that magic could remember structures, sort of like jelly that had been set in a mold. A spell was the mold and depending on the things you built in, could last for a long time or no time at all. For the first time I knew what the factors were and how to manage them. One important rule was that the stronger the magic used the harder it was to keep it stable.
Mage Capell was our lecturer. He was a likeable young man who tended to find everything funny. He grinned at us as we sat down.
“What is magic?” he asked and the students suddenly found the notes in front of them incredibly interesting.
“Wizard Morrissey?”
Why pick on me? Oh well, I might as well give it a go.
“Magic flows throughout the multiverse and can be used to do things.”
A few muted giggles wafted through the room. Even Mage Capell smiled.
“That is what it does, not what it is.”
“It is an invisible energy,” Esta said. She turned to glare at me.
“Better, but it is more than just invisible.”
“It can only interact with the real world when a mind controls it.” Pitre said from the front row. She was the course swat. Always quoting books no one else had bothered to read.
Capell positively glowed with happiness. “Yes. It can only operate through the mind.”
“I’ve been told that seeds can’t germinate in the absence of magic. Seeds don’t have a mind.”
From the loud laughter that followed I knew I should have kept my mouth shut.
Capell smiled sadly at me. “That cannot be proven because it is impossible to remove magic from any part of the multiverse. It can be constrained in action, reduced in intensity, but it can never be totally blocked out.”
Tell that to the Fedre, I thought, but did not choose to say it out loud. They had put me in such a space using technology.
Capell continued on the subject.
“The Elves believe that magic and life are two sides of the same coin. But then the Elves are hardly objective observers. They let their religion dictate how they see the multiverse. While the technological worlds take little interest in magic at all, or sometimes try to pretend that it doesn’t exist.”
“There are empires that are a mix of magic and technology,” I offered.
Capell nodded. “Some civilizations make use of magic as though it was a technology, especially for transport, such as using chain bridges. But I know of none that hold magic and technology in equal esteem.”
“The Progenitors?” I suggested.
More laughter from the other students, this time much louder.
“Hedge wizards think they know everything,” Pitre said in a stage whisper, “When most of them can’t tie their own shoelaces without assistance.”
Capell laughed, “No one knows who the Progenitors are, Wizard Morrissey. But I think it highly unlikely they use any technology at all. They are far too advanced for that.”
I gave up. For all their understanding of magic, the Balmack Accord was notably ignorant in certain areas.
“Magic is the left over energy from the creation of the multiverse,” Capell continued. “Unused potential if you will. All living things interact with it to some extent, but only a small number of people can store and direct any quantity of it with purpose. The Balmack Accord tests its children for magic capability and those with sufficient ability are trained in school. The most powerful of them come to train at the university when they are older.”