The Un-Magician

by Christopher Golden

  A change came over the creature then. Its expression contorted, altered by a sadness that mirrored his own. The beast seemed crestfallen and its head sagged, eyes narrowing, so that for the first time it seemed not at all horrid to him. With a flourish it brought both hands up to its face in the same gesture of respect and peace that Ivar had used, fiery eyes gazing out between its talons.

  “I am Verlis of the Wurm, Timothy Cade, and I am sorry for your loss,” it said, its voice bubbling with the liquid fire that still boiled in its throat. “My tribe and I share your grief, for without Argus Cade, there is little hope for us.”

  Verlis narrowed its eyes, black teeth flashing as it spoke. “I am sorry to have intruded, young Master Cade. With your father gone, you and the rest of the Alhazred have troubles of your own.”

  Timothy frowned, shot a glance at Ivar and Edgar, who was now perched on the Asura’s shoulder, then looked back at the Wurm. “What do you mean? What troubles?”

  The Wurm gazed at him curiously. It dipped its head in an odd sort of nod, as if displaying its horns to him for inspection. Then Verlis gave a short jerk of its head, a motion that Timothy interpreted as the Wurm’s idea of a shrug.

  “Of course you must know. You are the son of Argus Cade. How could you not know? Without your father, there is nothing to keep the terrible, withered sorcerer Nicodemus from pursuing his dark intentions.”

  Timothy felt as though he could not breathe. The shadows in the study seemed to deepen and he shivered, a new chill seeping into the room. His suspicions had churned in his mind and gut ever since he had fled the citadel of the Strychnos, and his encounter with Nicodemus had only strengthened them. But now, to hear the accusation stated so flatly, so boldly, he shook his head.

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean, ‘dark intentions’?”

  Verlis swayed, serpentlike, gaze drifting a moment as though deciding how much he wished to say. At length he glanced up at Timothy again. “Nicodemus has greater ambition than he has revealed. Your father knew this, and opposed him, but only in secret of course. Nicodemus wants the Order of Alhazred to usurp the government so that he can destroy the other guilds and force their members to join his own order, to follow him.”

  In that moment it felt to Timothy as though a great weight had been laid across his shoulders. He sagged, deflated. Moments before, he had determined to live courageously, and he would … he would. Yet it was difficult for him to let go of the hopes that he had held in his heart. His life on the Island of Patience had been one of loneliness and solitude. When Leander had brought him back into this world, he had cautiously allowed himself to believe that there might be a way for him to become a part of the society of mages, despite his uniqueness. That there might come a day when he could be happy here.

  The truth was difficult to take: that he had been happier alone.

  A low, trilling murmur came from Edgar, but the rook said nothing. Ivar reached out and laid a comforting hand upon the boy’s shoulder. Slowly Timothy looked up at the burning, fire eyes of the Wurm.

  “How, Verlis? Tell me exactly what Nicodemus has in mind.”

  The chamber of the Grandmaster was filled with a high, eerie whistling noise, as though whatever remained of the souls of the mages he had murdered were crying out in pain and despair. Leander had awoken and now stood at the center of the chamber. He raised his hands as though he might defend himself against these poor shades, these wraith creatures.

  The old mage dropped the pretense of pleasantry, the smile disappearing from his face. His already pale skin grew ashen, and his eyes lit up with an uncanny glow that seemed to dim the other light in the room. Alastor hissed and began to creep slowly across the stone floor toward Leander, the hairless feline baring fangs that dripped with a pearly venom.

  That whistling cry of sadness wrenched Leander’s heart, filling him with grief. Though they were but shades, he saw in the wraiths around him the features of mages he had known, members of other guilds whose acquaintance he had made. Some of them he recognized only from the records he had examined in his investigation into their disappearance for the Parliament.

  Nicodemus stroked his long mustache, his slender body now wreathed in a golden energy that buffeted him like a strong wind and raised him up off the ground. Even weakened, his magic was astonishingly powerful.

  “Restrain him,” the Grandmaster said, his voice thick with revulsion and disdain, his upper lip curling. “Do not concern yourselves with being gentle. I won’t mind at all if you break bits of him in the process. But do not leech too much from him. He is mine.”

  The coldness of that voice shook Leander deeply. With the wraiths that had gathered in the chamber all around him, there had been something unreal about the threat he faced. And in his heart, there had been a kind of surrender, a bitterness that made him feel as though he had no hope. Now he narrowed his eyes and wondered how much of that feeling was his own heart, and how much was some kind of magical control Nicodemus was attempting to exert over him.

  The wraiths floated toward him, encircling him with no expression at all on their haunting features.

  Leander drew a long breath, his massive chest filling, and his nostrils flared with hatred and the pain of betrayal. He reached up and slid the hood of his cloak over his head, the spells woven into the fabric casting his own body into shadow, so that he was barely more than a wraith himself.

  “What is … no!” Nicodemus snapped. “Stop him!”

  The wraiths wavered, but their senses were not limited to those of a human. They continued to gather around him, several darting forward with their shadow mouths open as though they intended to rip his soul out with fangs of sharpened darkness. Yet it seemed to him that they were uncertain of his precise location, so perhaps the enchantment of his cloak was more effective than he’d hoped.

  “You underestimated me,” Leander growled. “An error you often make. It will be your undoing.”

  He dropped both hands in a slashing gesture, as if he could have carved the air with his fingers. But it was not the air that he was attacking. Nicodemus would have hexed the doors and windows of this chamber so that there was no hope of escaping that way. Leander did not waste the time to even attempt it.

  “Eternal entropy,” he whispered, and a silver dust sprinkled from his outstretched hands onto the stone floor.

  Instantly the floor aged thousands of years, the stone weakening, eroding, and the wood beneath it rotting. With a great, thunderous crack, a segment of the floor just under him gave way. The wraiths screamed in that soul chilling whistle and whipped after him, but Leander was falling, tumbling through the hole in the floor even as it sifted into nothing more than sand beneath him.

  The wraiths clawed and bit him, darting in with shadow fangs, and where they drew his blood, he felt a cold unlike any he had ever known, and his bones went numb. But Leander would not stop.

  As he crashed down into the chamber beneath the Grandmaster’s—the dwelling of several of his acolytes—he let the magic flow through him, buoying him, levitating him just enough to keep him from shattering his legs. It slowed his fall, and in the eyeblink of a moment, before his feet would have touched the floor, he performed the entropy spell again. It was powerful magic, something Argus Cade had taught him, and which very few mages in modern times had ever mastered.

  The floor crumbled to nothing.

  Leander continued to fall.

  The wraiths screamed and pursued him. The massive mage looked up into their faces and he wept for them, knowing that even if he survived, they were beyond help. Their souls were tainted, corrupted, their bodies destroyed, their magic gone, their spirits in chains, leashed to the cruel hand of Nicodemus. Leander tried not to feel the betrayal that ate at him, the knowledge that this man whom he had trusted, the master of the guild to which he had given his life, had a black, venomous heart.

  In the air, Leander tucked himself into a somersault, becoming calmer, more in control of the magic now. He
plummeted headfirst toward the wooden floor of the chamber below, part of the servants’ quarters, and with a gesture he rotted the floor to nothing.

  His heart ached, the pain thrusting deep within him.

  Drained, he thought. I’m being drained. And though he told himself it was the magic, that any mage would be shaken and weakened by what he was doing, he knew that it was the wraiths who were draining him, feeding off of him, taking back in sips and scrapes what Nicodemus had taken from them. And the worst of it was, he could not blame them.

  He crashed through the next floor and into a storeroom whose shelves were piled high with scrolls and dusty artifacts. Some of the wraiths clung to him now, their hungry mouths fastened to his flesh like leeches. He trembled, his magic beginning to fail.

  “Eternal entropy,” he rasped, spraying silver dust upon the floor. It gave way and once more he tumbled through it.

  This time he had no more strength to keep himself aloft.

  Leander crashed into the ring table in the aerie, the meeting chamber at the base of the floating fortress. His left arm shattered on impact and streaks of darkness slashed across his vision. He nearly slipped into unconsciousness but would not allow it, forcing himself to remain alert. He had to escape.

  The outer walls and the floors and ceilings of SkyHaven would have nearly unbreakable charms by which Nicodemus could keep him from escaping. But the round aperture in the base of the aerie gave way to the open air beneath SkyHaven and the churning ocean waves below. If only he could reach it.

  Leander forced himself up. He might not have enough strength left to survive the fall, or to get himself to shore, but it was his only chance.

  His fingers grabbed the inner edge of the ring table. He pulled himself toward it, breathing in the fresh ocean air.

  Then the wraiths tugged back his hood. Shredded his cloak of shadow. One after another they began to feed on him.

  And the darkness claimed him.

  In the front parlor in his ancestral home, Timothy Cade leaned upon the window sill and gazed out at the blue sky, and at the sun-splashed city of Arcanum that stretched out far below at the bottom of August Hill. A chill breeze whispered through the window—its spell-glass eliminated by his presence—and he gratefully inhaled the fresh air. With a soft sigh he traced his fingers along the wooden window frame and his gaze lost its focus, the city beginning to blur.

  Timothy recalled all too vividly the disdain of the guild masters who had attended Nicodemus’s conference, not to mention Romulus’s willingness to simply kill Timothy, to end his life. Nicodemus had protected him; the old mage had been his defender and champion, if not his friend. Timothy had friends, of course—Ivar, Sheridan, Edgar, and Leander—but of those, only Leander had a place of respect in this world, and he was a member of the Order of Alhazred.

  Not that Timothy questioned Leander’s honor or intentions. Not at all. But he worried that if what the Wurm said about Nicodemus was true, his father’s old friend might be blinded by his loyalty to the order.

  “Hurry back, Leander,” Timothy whispered. “Hurry home.” His words were stolen away by the breeze that rustled the curtains in the parlor and somehow managed to slip inside the lamp on the table beside him, causing the Hungry Fire within to flicker and dance.

  With a squawk that was still tinged with pain from his scorched feathers—now quickly healing—Edgar glided into the room and alighted upon the floor. The black bird hopped several times, coming nearer to him.

  “Your tea is ready,” his familiar announced.

  Timothy smiled and glanced at the rook. “Thank you, Edgar. I’m coming.”

  The bird cawed, wings fluttering, but instead of flying, he simply turned and left the room on his feet, walking and hopping along ahead of Timothy. The ambient health spells in the house were already at work on Edgar, healing him, but the rook still winced slightly with each hop. Timothy felt badly for him, and for just a moment deeply regretted that he had no magic to heal his friend.

  They went down a corridor and a moment later were in a comfortable sitting room. There were chairs and a long, brocaded divan, but Ivar and Verlis had chosen to seat themselves on the intricately woven carpet. There seemed to be an element of ritual to the way they had positioned themselves directly across from each other, yet even with the somber quiet in the room, Timothy was amused by the sight of the two of them—the grim warrior and the monstrous fire-breather—hunched over cups of aromatic mint tea on either side of the low serving table.

  “Hukk!” Edgar croaked. “Master of the house! Hukk!”

  Ivar and Verlis both rose immediately and turned toward Timothy to bow. This formal courtesy made him extremely uneasy, and there was something more than a little odd about the Wurm bowing to him, but now Tim was the master of the house.

  “Please, sit,” Timothy said.

  The Asura and the Wurm returned to their previous positions, once again arranged almost as though there was purpose to every gesture, to the placement of every finger. Edgar flapped his wings lightly and flew up to stand on the back of a wooden chair that looked as though it had been carved by hand rather than by magic. Timothy did not want his companions to feel awkward, so he joined them on the ground beside the table.

  The mint brew smelled wonderful. He took a small sip from the cup Ivar had brought him and closed his eyes, breathing in the steam from the hot drink, letting it pass through his lungs, soothing him. When he opened his eyes, they were all staring at him. A kind of resolution formed within him, and he turned to regard Verlis.

  “I’m sorry. I needed a moment to collect my thoughts.”

  The Wurm’s fiery eyes widened, and it dipped its head toward him, horns gleaming in the sunlight that streamed through the window. “I understand. It was necessary for me to gather my own wits. Your father’s death has great ramifications beyond the grief of those who cared for him.”

  Timothy took another sip of mint brew, watching Verlis over the rim of the cup.

  “You began to speak of that before,” the boy said, glancing at Ivar. “But I know nothing of your people and less of whatever crisis you find yourself in that caused you to seek my father’s help.”

  The Wurm’s gaze lingered on Ivar with respect, but also a trace of animosity. Then Verlis turned his savage gaze upon Timothy once more, horns shining gold in the light streaming through the windows. Despite his scaly, plated hide, vicious talons, and the furnace that burned in his chest, superheating the air around him, there was a sadness in Verlis’s eyes that made him seem very little like a monster and quite a bit like someone in need.

  “Once upon a time the Wurm lived in tribes in the dark, lonely places of this world. We had descended from the Dragons of Old, in the days when Wizards still walked the pathways. Fierce warriors and capable magicians, the Wurm wanted nothing more than to see the human species wiped from existence. Of all the Tribes of People, perhaps our greatest enemy was the Asura.”

  As he said this last, Verlis glanced at the floor as though burdened by shame. His great bellows churned as he sighed, and fire flickered from his nostrils. Timothy shot a look at Ivar, but the warrior did not even acknowledge him, his focus completely on the Wurm.

  “In time, however, we found ourselves with a common enemy,” Verlis continued, reaching up to scratch beneath his chin, talons raking his plated flesh with a rasp like footsteps on gravel. “The mages had begun to gather into a terrible union. The Parliament of Mages. It was peace for your kind. But there were enough who hated all those different from themselves that a peace amongst mages could only mean the destruction or elimination of other races.”

  A chill passed through Timothy, and he wrapped his hands around his cup for warmth. He nodded slowly as he listened to the growl that was the Wurm’s voice.

  “So the Wurm and the Asura became reluctant allies,” Timothy said, at last able to make sense of the formality and ritual between Verlis and Ivar.

  “Precisely,” Verlis confirmed. “But it wa
s too late. The Asura were warred upon in secret by certain factions within the Parliament and destroyed, all save him.” Verlis nodded toward Ivar. “Your father saved him, hid him away.

  “The slaughter of the Wurm began shortly after that. With the mages working together around the world, there was nowhere for us to retreat to. Hundreds of thousands were destroyed before Argus Cade rose to secretly thwart the will of those dark and cruel sorcerers who would rid the world of any creatures who were not like themselves. It was, in truth, no less than my species deserved, though we had differences amongst our tribes. My ancestors had lusted for the blood of humans and wanted to decimate their cities. Not all of us were like that, but it was the behavior of the Wurm that allowed the blood-hungry amongst the Parliament of Mages to muster the support to destroy us.

  “Yet we were never the threat that Alhazred made us out to be.”

  Timothy flinched at the name, eyes widening as he stared at Verlis. “Alhazred? The Alhazred? The founder of the order? But my father said he was a great mage. A great man.”

  The memory seemed to haunt the Wurm, for he hung his head slightly and the fire in his eyes dimmed. “Once, perhaps. So the stories say. But he grew in power, and power corrupted him. It may be that he wore a mask of his old self in front of other mages, but it was only that. A mask. Beneath it, he was the worst of them, whipping up the hatred of our tribes, urging the Parliament to wage war upon us, when what he really wanted was to leech us.”

  Timothy frowned, brows knitting. “Leech you? I don’t understand.”

  “Their magic,” Ivar said, speaking up for the first time.

  Verlis glanced sharply at him, but Ivar was not to be silenced.

  “Alhazred captured as many Wurm as he could, and he drained the magic from them. Leeched them. In this way he grew more and more powerful. In the end, the only way your father could save them was to convince the Parliament that instead of destroying the Wurm tribes, they could be banished from this dimension.”