Wandmaker

by Ed Masessa

  Suddenly he was frightened. “Come on, Brianna. Let’s go.” In his haste, he yanked her arm hard enough to elicit an “ouch.”

  “Henry!”

  He stopped midway to the door.

  “Follow your mother’s instructions. And do not blame your father.” She walked across the room to the screen in the corner and stepped behind it.

  Brianna tugged her arm free from Henry’s grip and ran to see what Henry already knew.

  “She’s gone!”

  “We should wait for Mom,” Brianna whined.

  “We’re not waiting.” Henry forged ahead, not waiting for—but expecting—his sister to keep up.

  “What if she comes and we’re not there? She’s going to be maaaaad.”

  Henry didn’t answer. He didn’t know why, but he knew that he had to get home in a hurry.

  They were about to turn a corner that was partially obscured by a tall hedge when they heard a sudden movement—someone was lying in ambush.

  “Billy!” Henry cringed. But as they rounded the corner, they could see Billy was tangled in the hedge, viciously scratching his rump. He clucked like a chicken.

  Brianna giggled until she got the hiccups. Henry laughed too, and couldn’t resist the urge to cluck back.

  A few minutes later they arrived to an empty house. The back door was open and the car was gone. Brianna ran from room to room, calling for their mother. Henry could have told his sister to save her breath. Something had passed between them when the Amazing Zeppo looked deep inside him—like images of things to come. The empty house was one of them.

  “Where is she, Henry?” Brianna was too confused to be scared, but that wouldn’t last long.

  “I don’t know,” he said, which was the truth. He watched as instant tears pooled in Brianna’s eyes. “Come on. I’ll make us some peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwiches.”

  It was a forbidden combination of eating so close to bedtime and eating something on their mother’s banned list, and the sparkle of devilish mischief dried up the tears. She was already in motion before issuing the challenge, “Race you!”

  Henry smiled at how easily he was able to divert her attention. Once they had eaten, he invited her to his room. The Amazing Zeppo had pretty much spilled the beans. If Brianna didn’t know for certain, she at least suspected that Henry had been keeping some big secrets from her. And after seeing the hypnotist, Henry had to wonder if Brianna’s strange voice wasn’t its own kind of magic.

  He removed the books from his footlocker and showed her how the stone could translate from the ancient language into English.

  “It’s magic,” she whispered. “Like in the movies. Like a princess movie!” She squealed and ran off.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get changed!” she yelled from down the hall.

  He had definitely succeeded in getting her mind off their mother’s absence, but it still nagged at him. What am I missing?

  The full moon outside was bigger than ever, threatening to swallow the night sky. The bad moon is on the rise. The Amazing Zeppo’s words. Words that meant nothing to him. He flipped open his notebook of translations to a page that referenced lunar activity. Then he opened the ancient book to the corresponding page. There was a crudely drawn picture of a large circle with interesting symbols inside it, and a line of text just below it. The ulexite hadn’t translated any of that text, so Henry hadn’t bothered to copy the image into his notebook.

  An idea took form and gained momentum inside his head. He rummaged through his closet until he found an old piece of sidewalk chalk. It briefly occurred to him that his idea might not be a good one after all. But curiosity got the better of him.

  Working swiftly, he re-created the drawing on the hardwood floor. When he was done, Coralis’s wand tingled in his hand. He held it up to the moonlight. The clear veins began to glow. Quickly he flipped off the light switch and returned to the moonlit window. The wand brightened in his hand. When he dipped the point downward, the glow intensified into a single beam.

  Henry had once had a flashlight with circular covers that would project images like the Batman symbol onto a wall. The effect now was very similar, as the beam of light illuminated the circle—but nothing outside of the circle. The beam stayed within its perimeter. Henry gasped as he thought his drawing of a winged symbol actually moved.

  There! It had moved! And another had too! They were re-forming themselves to look exactly like the pictures in the book. He reached and was able to slide the book over without removing the light from the circle. With a good deal of effort, he managed to pick up the book and balance it so he could read it. What am I doing? A silent alarm went off in his head, but the moment was absolutely magical and he didn’t want it to end.

  Henry imagined what might happen if he were in a movie, and he began to read the mystery text aloud, sounding out the unfamiliar words. He was halfway through before he realized he didn’t need the book. The words were in his head! If he closed his eyes, it was as if he could read them on his eyelids.

  As he neared the end of the passage, the words on the page began to illuminate, whiteness now shining where black ink once appeared. And as he chanted the final word, he imagined himself a wizard and waved the wand with a flourish … just as Brianna reentered the room, dressed in her blue fairy-princess costume.

  She stopped in the center of the circle with a smile on her face as bright as the light around her. She was on stage and reveling in the moment—a star performer!

  A brilliant flash of whiteness exploded from the wand. The circle of light solidified into a cylinder that extended to the ceiling, trapping Brianna in the center of it. She screamed silently—as if the light had imprisoned the sound.

  Henry panicked and began waving the wand in any and all directions, trying to undo whatever he had unleashed. “Brianna! Get out of there!” He tried to reach for her, but the light formed an impenetrable wall that singed his hand.

  Her mouth formed the word “Henry” as she screamed his name over and over. Henry threw the wand on the bed and, in desperation, began rummaging through the footlocker.

  What did I do?

  He tossed out books, toys, and photos until there was nothing left but a lining of thin green fabric. In a rage born of desperation, he tore at the fabric, ripping it clear from the glue that bound it. A bright gold stone that had been stuck to the fabric flew across the room and began to glow.

  A thin tendril of light—so thin and wispy it looked like bright smoke—snaked away from the cylinder of light and toward the stone. The tendril touched the stone tentatively—then pulled back like a mouse that realized it had entered a trap.

  But it had already been ensnared by the stone. Not a stone, Henry realized—a nugget of gold. And the nugget was winning the battle.

  As the thin strand of light flowed into the nugget, the cylinder began to spin, like a giant ball of yarn unraveling with ever-increasing speed. Henry shielded his eyes as it spun faster and faster. Brianna was nothing but a blur that got smaller and smaller as the cylinder shrank away.

  And then … it was gone.

  And so was Brianna.

  But what remained was a small blue hedgehog, wearing a tiara.

  Dai She ran his stubby fingers over the map on the table as if it were a sacred relic. Unable to deny his pleasure, he laughed, and his high-pitched giggle wrenched through the small confines of his workroom, almost shrill enough to blister the paint off the walls. On an impulse, he touched the map lightly with his wand. It rippled in response. That simple touch, he knew, had sent a shock wave through the tectonic plates under the Indian Ocean. A tsunami would hit the coast of Sri Lanka within a few hours.

  Oh, the fun he was having!

  The Corsini Mappaemundi had changed hands several times over the course of its long existence. Created by the great Wand Master Epifanio Corsini almost four thousand years ago, the map had first been stolen from the High Council of Aratta’s safe repository by Dai
She’s father, the infamous Wand Master Malachai. It had eventually been recaptured by a group of sanctimonious monks in the Himalayas—only to be re-stolen by Dai She. His father would have been proud if he were still alive. Especially if he could have witnessed the devious method Dai She had devised to steal it …

  Everyone was afraid of something, and Dai She was a master at twisting that fear into its most horrifying forms. He had decided to go biblical on the monks, tormenting them with the ten plagues of Egypt from the Old Testament.

  Turning their water supply into blood was child’s play. Their screams had made him giggle with glee and fueled his wickedness. He was just getting started.

  Unleashing a horde of frogs wasn’t deadly enough for his taste. So he made sure the frogs were not only poisonous, but also an invasive species that would wreak havoc on the local environment for years to come.

  It was fun to watch the monks gag on a plague of gnats, which he had waited to release until they had all gathered at an outing far from any protection.

  Next, he added his own sick twist by using large, biting horseflies as plague number four. They were relentless and merciless. Seeing the itching welts they left behind gave Dai She so much joy that he did a little dance.

  The next plague called for killing their livestock, but that was too easy. Instead, he hypnotized one of the monks into believing all of their cattle and goats were demons, then sat back and watched as he took their lives. Dai She’s pet, a king vulture named Viktor, ate well that night.

  Plague number six—boils—was the most fun of all. Dai She took immense pleasure in causing others physical pain. A few boils—red, pimplelike abscesses of the skin—could be manageable, but Dai She left no room for comfort. He made them erupt on the bottoms of the monks’ feet and completely covered their torsos … especially their backsides. There was no relief. The monks could not comfortably stand, sit, kneel, or lie down.

  The plague of hail covered the ground three feet thick and partially collapsed their roof.

  The few crops that survived the storm were wiped out when he released millions of hungry locusts for plague number eight.

  If he were following the plagues by the book, number nine should have been three days of darkness. But Dai She was so sad that there was only one plague to go that he hid the sun from them for a month. And in the meantime, he took the opportunity for a nice vacation at a villa in Italy, resting up for the grand finale.

  According to the Old Testament, the tenth plague had been the deaths of the firstborn. Dai She was stumped. What if all the monks were themselves firstborn? He didn’t particularly want them to die, just to suffer as long as humanly possible.

  He was still pondering his dilemma when he returned to the monastery and heard the wailing. As it turned out, he’d needed only nine plagues. The monks had gone stark raving mad.

  Dai She simply waltzed in and took the map while whistling a happy tune.

  Cold, damp, and miserable—three words that could have described either the weather or the person in it.

  Gretchen had tried to offer Coralis advice on what to expect with modern-day travel. “I read newspapers!” she had scolded. He should have paid closer attention. The last time he had reluctantly flown in an airplane, it had had propellers, and he had entered it via a portable staircase on the runway tarmac.

  Today, just the process of going through security was a nightmare. A uniformed woman with a badge had even made him remove his coat. Of all the nerve! But he got the last laugh when their so-called X-ray machine failed to penetrate the invisibility shield that protected his wands.

  Gretchen had also tried to talk him into first-class seats, but he’d insisted on what they called “coach.” He’d pictured a horse-drawn carriage in the sky. But there was nothing coachlike about it. In a coach he would have had room to stretch his legs and would not have been crammed into a seat meant for a child, stuffed into a row with two more adults, one of whom snored loud enough to wake the dead.

  He had come close to leaving the plane by fading himself through the walls of the fuselage, but traveling at five hundred miles an hour at thirty-seven thousand feet was too much of an obstacle to overcome—even for someone with his abilities. At one point he tried to escape from his misery by entering a “restroom,” but quickly retreated to his seat when he realized it was the airline’s version of a practical joke.

  The simple act of leaving the airport required a torturous ride in a leaky taxicab. The downpour slowed traffic to a crawl, but eventually he arrived at the corner of Second Avenue and Third Street in Manhattan.

  He was sorely tempted to kiss the ground after the nightmarish ride, if not for the distinct possibility of coming into contact with some form of deadly fungus or parasite lying in wait on the filthy sidewalk. He waited patiently for the cab to turn the corner before continuing on his journey.

  The city had changed enormously since his last visit. Buildings were too tall. Road maintenance was entirely inadequate for the amount of traffic. Yet once he got his bearings, the street grid became familiar. One block away, near the corner of Second Avenue and Second Street, was the unmarked and seldom-used entrance to a members-only tavern. Coralis stepped through the entrance into a small foyer. On the opposite wall, a heavily paneled door made of chestnut and inlaid with sets of ancient runes carved from blue-green amazonite provided a formidable barrier to anyone who might stumble upon the entrance. In every major city in the world, enclaves like this were managed by Wandbearers as a refuge. Places where they could sit among their own kind, share stories of their travels, and discuss recent discoveries in the science of Wandulurgy.

  They were also safe havens for those who needed them.

  Coralis reached for a chain he wore around his neck: an iron pyrite flower pendant that sparkled with energy. He had worn it for over three hundred years, since it was presented to him as a gift from a shaman in the Peruvian Andes.

  Touching the pyrite to the runes in a diagonal cross sequence unlocked the door. He let himself in and reversed the pattern to reseal the door. He entered a long narrow room with tables lining one side and an ornately carved breakfront that served as a bar on the other.

  A single patron sat in the farthest booth, quietly eating a bowl of stew, reading a book about a boy wizard. Gretchen had recently introduced him to some of the current literature—all balderdash! Coralis gnashed his teeth and vowed to have a long talk with the author. Her facts were all wrong.

  Coralis removed his dripping trench coat and sodden hat, and a row of pegs shaped like dragon claws flexed to grip the coat and hat firmly in their talons. The proprietor, a woman in her mid-hundreds (but who looked much like she was in her mid-thirties) leaned casually across the bar, resting on her elbows and smiling.

  “Molly.” Coralis had not seen her in over fifty years, but she hadn’t aged a day.

  “Coralis.” Her voice, with its lilting Irish accent, was just loud enough to reach the patron in the back, who promptly dropped his spoon, splashing thick drops of gravy onto his gray flannel shirt. He looked up sharply from his book like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  Coralis’s reputation as a despiser of books about wizardry stretched to every corner of the Wandmaker universe. He was a stickler for facts—not fiction.

  Coralis placed a fist on the bar top and extended two fingers. Molly set out a cocktail glass and selected a bottle containing a glowing blue liquid, filling the glass to the two-finger line. Three short taps on the glass with a pencil-sized wand of rutilated quartz, and Coralis brought time within the bar to a standstill.

  “Ah, that’s better.” He stomped over to the patron, who had frozen holding a spoonful of stew just shy of his mouth. “What have we here? Do even the First-Order Wandbearers fancy themselves to be wizards these days? It’s no wonder the world is in such a rotten state.”

  “I was going to warn him you were on your way here, but I figured, why spoil all the fun.” Molly had a round face and a plea
sant smile. She was a first-generation immigrant—one of the first Irish to settle in what was known as the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan. Her father had been a Wandbearer Monarch who’d died in the great gang wars of the 1850s.

  She had all the right qualities to make her an excellent Wand Master, but chose to live a quiet life in relative obscurity. Still, she was a street-tough New Yorker, not to be trifled with.

  “Your message said it was an urgent matter,” he said brusquely. “I hope it has nothing to do with wizardry.”

  “You’ll not need to take that attitude,” she scolded. “If I say it’s urgent, then bet yer finest wand that it’s darned important.”

  “Humpf.” He turned the patron’s spoon to a slight downward angle. “Let’s get to it, then.”

  Using an amber amulet with markings similar to those on the padlocks at the castle, she unsealed a hidden door adjacent to the restrooms. “Need to use the facilities, sir?” she asked.

  Coralis scowled. “I may be old enough to be your great-great-grandfather, but my kidneys work just fine.”

  “I meant nothing by it, sir. It’s just that it must have been quite a trip for you.”

  “I have witnessed the horror of the modern-day restroom and have no intention of subjecting myself to such humiliation,” he growled.

  “Ah.” She tried unsuccessfully to suppress a rueful smile. “I think you’ll find my water closet a wee bit more accommodating than those on the plane.”

  She pointed to a door marked WC, and as the door closed behind him, he said to himself: “This is more like it.”

  Upon exiting, he nodded humbly. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s good to see the world has not lost all sense of civility and decency.”

  Molly stifled a laugh as she led him down the exposed staircase. It was thirty-seven steps down—no landings. “How was your trip?” she asked.