“I remember reading about him,” Wayne says, “in your report. Quarter horses, right? He’s the one who had the permit for this land before I got it. God knows why. It certainly isn’t prime horse land.”
Wayne unfolds the map where the lands covered by his grazing permit are outlined in red. MacDonald’s holdings are indicated by a wash of yellow highlighter.
“Yep. Hell of a lot of land for a horse ranch,” he comments.
“I think MacDonald does some subsistence farming,” the government man adds helpfully. “Mostly he keeps to himself.”
“He likely to give me much trouble?” Wayne asks. “Like I just said, he was my competition for the permit.”
“I doubt it. His associates speak of him as a mild-tempered man. If he protests, it will be through the bureaucracy.”
“Not much good that’ll do him,” Wayne chuckles. “Right?”
The government man, remembering an unexpected bonus in his paycheck, smiles conspiratorially. “Right.”
“Now,” Wayne says, dismissing MacDonald and getting to the point, “these are public lands. What are the limits of my use?”
The government man gets officious. “Well, no permanent construction, of course. You can build holding pens, truck in tanks for water, even set up a shelter, as long as it all can be removed when your lease is over.”
“Good. Anything else?”
“Try to keep impact on the environment to the minimum.”
“Shit, man! I’m grazing cattle here!”
The government man simpers. “Well, needless to say, the environmental impact will be assessed in light of the use for which you contracted the land.”
“Shit. You talk more than my mother-in-law. How about hunting?”
“Well, Wayne, try not to abuse the limits of the permit.”
“How about varmints bothering my cattle? Coyotes and suchlike.”
“I don’t see any problem with that.”
Wayne takes one more look out over the land. It isn’t as good as some of the land he’s used in the past, but it’ll do. The cattle get their final fattening in a feedlot, anyhow.
“Okay. I’ll sign the papers,” he says, his tone indicating that he considers that he is doing the government a great favor. “Let’s go where you can buy me lunch while I do it.”
“Sounds good to me, Wayne,” the government man says.
Wayne waves to the land as they bounce out over the rutted road. “I’ll be seeing you—me and my cattle.”
“And,” he subvocalizes, “my rifle.”
It doesn’t look anything at all like a magic academy. There are no lofty towers, no white marble veined in gold, no pennants snapping in the wind. It doesn’t even look like the popular conception of a wizard’s cottage—no cobblestone walls or mossy paths or elf-haunted grots.
What it does look like is a cluster of squat adobe buildings set in a hollow at the end of a dirt road. The surrounding terrain is mostly covered with golden brown dry winter grass, accented by some tired-looking piñon and juniper. The scenery is lovely, though: views in one direction of the Jemez Mountains, in another of the Sangre de Cristos, both ranges topped with snow.
As he gets out of the Pendragon Productions’ van and stretches, Arthur can understand why the hippies who had first built this place had overlooked the inconvenience of the location and the likelihood that they would never be able to make a living from the dry, rocky land. It is beautiful.
More importantly, though, for the needs of the Academy, the buildings are made of old-fashioned mud-brick adobe, not the modern sham: frame stucco. Thus, there is almost no iron or steel in the superstructure. The pipes are copper—a metal that does not interfere with magic as iron does—and floors are pegged together, not nailed.
That the place had been melting back into the earth had been one of the reasons they had been able to buy it and twenty acres of the land surrounding it for a reasonable price. The other reason was that the well had gone dry some twenty years before, driving away the last of the hippies when they grew tired of trucking in their water.
Swansdown the yeti had managed to get the well working again. For appearances’ sake, however, they still truck in a few big plastic tanks of water every week. No need to raise the property taxes.
Arthur dismisses such everyday concerns when the front door of the largest building creaks open. A lean, handsome man walks out, his silver hair and beard tossed by the wind.
“Arthur! I’m so glad to see you.”
Ian Lovern, once known as Merlin, grasps Arthur’s hand in his own. As he returns the handclasp, Arthur notices that though the mage’s fingers are still as beringed as ever, the palm is rougher and more callused than it had been a month and a half before.
“And I’m glad to see you, Lovern. How are things?”
“Busy. Chaotic. Insane. Demanding. Maddening.” Lovern sighs, rubs his clear blue eyes with one bony fist. “Swansdown has most of our small circle working on an amulet. I bowed out so I could speak with you privately.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Come inside. It’s nippy out here.” Lovern leads the way through the ornately carved Mexican front door into a Talavera-tiled foyer lined with boots and overshoes in various sizes and a few odd shapes. From there he turns into a small room lined with bookshelves.
“My office,” Lovern explains. “It isn’t much, but at least most of my references are at hand.”
Looking about the cramped room, rubbing his hands against the chill, Arthur recalls the spacious suite Lovern occupies when at Pendragon Estates and silently agrees that this cubbyhole isn’t much.
He doesn’t want to sound depreciating, though, so he words his reply carefully. “You’ve certainly got it fixed up so everything is in reach. Now, tell me what’s bothering you.”
“Resources.”
“If you mean your last order,” Arthur says, “there are more supplies in the van. Chris notes where he made substitutions and for what reasons. Is that the problem?”
“No,” Lovern says. “My problem is—for lack of a better word—human resources. I simply don’t have enough people to carry out even half of the requests for magecraft you’ve forwarded. Swansdown is talented, but her skills are more geared toward healing and creative curses, not magecraft. The same is true of many of the others. Alice Chun came to help for a few weeks, but she says that she has other things to do and refuses to become a permanent part of the Academy. You’d think a former queen would have a greater sense of responsibility.”
Arthur nods. “You would think so, but she hasn’t been a queen for centuries. These days, she’s just a novelist.”
Lovern sighs.“You know, at first, the work we did here was kind of fun. We worked up a disguise amulet for Frank MacDonald to use on the unicorns. It was a simple enough illusion—hide the horn, bulk up the frame, fluff out the tail, fill in the hooves.
“Then we designed the shapeshift for Vera. That was more complicated, but I felt my students were learning something, and we were becoming a team. Now it seems that every day we get more requests for some amulet or other. Worst of all, everyone seems to think that I owe some service to them.”
“You did,” Arthur reminds him gently, picking up a pencil and drumming it against the arm of his chair, “nearly get yourself thrown out of the Accord when the rest of the athanor learned about the Head.”
That moment, when Sven Trout had confronted Lovern with the result of his—well, not exactly black but certainly at least dark grey—magical experimentation, had been one of the worst of many bad moments during the recent upheaval. Lovern looks momentarily angry at the reminder, then he sighs.
“Yes. I did. But that’s over now. The Head is residing in a hamster cage on Frank’s ranch, and I’m forced to cope without my most potent magical tool.” Lovern points to a pile of handwritten notes on his desk. “I haven’t even had time to finish transcribing my spells.”
“Aren’t you using the computer we sent y
ou?”
“Yes, to do the final draft”—Lovern pulls at his neat beard—“but I can’t compose sorcerous prose on a computer. I just can’t!
“And,” he continues sulkily, “I don’t type very well.”
Arthur swallows a smile. That Lovern had resisted learning to type when typewriters had been made of steel had been understandable, but the advent of computers made mostly of plastic had not changed his resistance. Only recently had the King learned why. Lovern had possessed something far better than a computer.
Back in the days remembered as Ragnarokk, Lovern had grown himself a second head. When he separated it from himself, this truncated homunculus had become his organic computer and a repository for all his spells.
Although Lovern had kept the Head hidden for millennia, Sven Trout—once known as Loki—had located it and seduced it from its allegiance to its maker. But their rebellion had ended in defeat and, just as the rebels were about to be led away for punishment, someone had changed them into rodents.
One, the red rat who was Sven, had managed to escape, was missing, and, by the optimistic, presumed dead. The other two—a white mouse who had been the sorceress Louhi, and a ground squirrel who had been the Head—were indeed living in cages at Frank MacDonald’s Other Three Quarters Ranch.
“Did you ever learn,” Arthur asks, “who turned the three rebels into rodents?”
Lovern shakes his head. “I haven’t. We’ve tried, but we come up with nothing but dead ends. These days I know the personal signatures of the mages who were present to cast the spell as well as I know my own: Swansdown, Lil, Tommy, the Cats of Egypt.”
“I thought you said the signature had vanished by the time we’d stopped the critters from escaping?” Arthur asks suspiciously.
“The immediate signature was gone.” Lovern waves his hand in the air, leaving behind a glowing rainbow trail. “However, one can uncoil a spell and learn from it—especially one so powerful that it won’t disintegrate under the pressure.”
“I understand,” Arthur says, and does.
“Currently,” Lovern continues, “my belief is that the Head was responsible. That would explain why I didn’t recognize the signature. It would also explain the choice of shapes. He wasn’t very worldly.”
“No,” Arthur agrees and thinks: You made certain of that, didn’t you, old friend?
“So, until given other data—and more time to consider the question—that’s my answer.”
“Thanks.” Arthur clears his throat, uncomfortably aware that he’s about to add to Lovern’s burdens. “Have you been following the developments with Tommy Thunderburst’s new Pan tour?”
“Enough,” Lovern scowls. “Swansdown’s niece, Rebecca Trapper, has called her aunt repeatedly for advice.”
“Tommy doesn’t want to recruit her now, too!” Arthur exclaims, panicked that such a development could have occurred without his knowing.
“No”—Lovern strokes his beard—“but Rebecca is very close to the fauns and satyrs—you know she was one of the ringleaders of their movement. She wanted her aunt’s advice as to what course they should follow.”
“Did Swansdown encourage them?” Arthur asks, curious despite himself.
“Not that I know. Of course, I don’t know if she discouraged them either.”
“Well, that’s neither here nor there.” Arthur clears his throat, drums a rapid tattoo with his pencil eraser, and charges in. “The latest development is that I have convinced the faun Demetrios Stangos to take the job Lil Prima offered him as manager of the fauns and satyrs.”
“You convinced him to join them?”
“I can tell which way the wind blows. At least some of the satyrs were going to take the job no matter what I said. I’ve gotten to know Demetrios quite well. He’s steady, reliable, and, unlike some of his fellows, not in favor of their surging into society all at once.”
“He wouldn’t be,” Lovern agrees. “He’s the one who has protected the dryads all these centuries. He knows the risks.”
Arthur sniffs slightly at the mention of dryads. Something hardheaded and practical in him resists the idea of sentient trees, despite ample evidence of their existence.
“Demetrios agreed to take the job on the condition that”—Arthur sighs—“that I add even more to your burdens, old friend. He insists, and I must agree, that he must have a way to make the theriomorphs appear human—at his will, not theirs.”
“Does he have any idea how impossible that will be!” Lovern wails, his customary dignity vanishing for a moment beneath sheer panic. “Unwilling shapeshifts are among the hardest spells to work—even Math the Ancient could only work a couple, and those were on his kin.”
“Louhi didn’t seem to have any problem,” Arthur says, deliberately pricking the tension between Lovern and the woman who has been his lover, enemy, and rival. “Or was that just part of Circe’s myth?”
“No,” Lovern agrees grudgingly. “She could do it. I never knew how—she wouldn’t share her secrets. I wondered after a while if it wasn’t an innate talent, closer to a unicorn’s ability to neutralize poison than to a true spell.”
“Ah.” Arthur lets the matter rest. “But Demetrios doesn’t want the power to shapeshift his charges, only to disguise them. Wouldn’t that be easier?”
“It might be,” Lovern concedes.
“Our problem is,” Arthur explains, “that whether or not your crew here can make disguise amulets for the satyrs and fauns, some of those satyrs and probably a few fauns—the New England contingent is less influenced by Demetrios than are his California brethren—are going to be part of Tommy’s stage show. My human advisors...”
Arthur pauses, well aware that Lovern considers Bill and Chris little more than useful errand boys, but the wizard says nothing.
“Chris and Bill assure me that during the show most of the audience will rationalize what they’re seeing as special effects. Where we’re in danger is between shows—especially—well, if the female element enters the picture.”
Lovern cocks a brow, for beneath his reddish gold beard Arthur is blushing.
“You mean that fauns and satyrs are well-known for their fondness for sex.”
“Well, yes.”
“And that if some nubile groupie eager to have bragging rights about a novel conquest flings herself at one of our theriomorphic brothers, he isn’t likely to have the willpower to resist.”
“That’s it.”
“Arthur”—Lovern chuckles, his tension easing for a moment—“for a man who has had as many wives and lovers as you have had—and especially given some of the tales that have survived about Gilgamesh—I am astonished to find you a bit of a prude.”
“I’m not!” Arthur protests. “It’s just the satyrs are so...”
“Earthy?” Lovern offers, still chuckling.
“That. And graphic. Georgios, the one who calls himself Loverboy, can imply more without resorting to obscenities (which Rebecca Trapper has ruled out-of-line in their chatroom), in more detail, than I ever imagined. I almost admire him. He’s wasted as a computer programmer. He should be writing smut.”
“I think he did,” Lovern says, “back in the sixties, before pornographic videos replaced dirty books. However, to address your request... You want me to come up with some sort of ‘instant illusion’ that Demetrios can use if things get out of hand.”
“Basically.”
Lovern chews a fingernail. “And this on top of the illusion or shapechange amulets that several of the theriomorphs have requested so that they can attend the Pan concert.”
“Right.”
“And that in addition to the magics that Vera is requesting for Atlantis.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And that on top of the routine magics I was doing before this—wards for your household and other sensitive areas, permanent shapeshifts for athanor whose identities must be changed, communication spells for those who are traveling where they will be out of contact, and
the rest.”
“That’s it,” Arthur agrees.
Lovern shakes his head. “The problem remains the same. We don’t have the human resources.”
A thin, somewhat nasal voice, interrupts Arthur’s reply.
“And that way of thinking, Lovern, is and always has been your greatest weakness.”
There is a dull thump, and a cat lands amid the papers on Lovern’s desk. She is Purrarr, queen of the Cats of Egypt.
Sitting up straight and tall, tail wrapped to encircle neatly aligned paws, Purrarr is a perfect match for one of the many statues of the Egyptian goddess Bast, right down to the gold hoop in her right ear. Her sleek, short fur is a reddish tan ticked with black, similar to the coat of a purebred Abyssinian.
Fixing her greenish hazel gaze on Lovern, Purrarr repeats:
“That way of thinking, Lovern, is and always has been your greatest weakness. You think of magic as a human thing, but it is a force far older than you hairless newcomers believe.
“Humans”—and now the cat shifts her attention to the King—“are so amusing that way.”
Except for a slight tendency to lose her plosives, the cat’s speech is quite clear, m’s forming neatly despite the absence of lips.
I wonder, Arthur thinks, not for the first time, if that is because we expect a cat to be able to say an ‘m’? After all, in how many languages does a cat say ‘meow’ or some close variant?
“What,” Lovern says to Purrarr, “are you talking about? Right now, I have a yeti working with me and all of you cats. I’m not restricting my resources.”
Purrarr looks smug, something that is not difficult for any cat and is innate in one of the Cats of Egypt.
“Oh, yes,” she says. “You have been so generous letting us come here and help.”
“Don’t tease,” Arthur pleads. “You were a good advisor to me when I was Amenhotep. Tell us what we’re overlooking.”
The cat licks the tip of her tail, toying with them as much as one of her mortal kin might play with a mouse.
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