The Book of Magic

by George R. R. Martin

  Above, a door banged open. A man emerged, a small and servile creature with gravy spatters on his apron who could only be the innkeeper. As he hurried down, wiping his hands upon his apron, he caught his first good sight of Molloqos, and paled.

  As well he might. White as bone was the flesh of Molloqos, beneath his Cloak of Fearful Mien. Deep and dark and full of sadness were his eyes. His nose curved downward in a hook; his lips were thin and rather dour; his hands large, expressive, long-fingered. On his right hand his fingernails were painted black, on his left scarlet. His long legs were clothed in striped pantaloons of those same colors, tucked into calf-high boots of polished grue hide. Black and scarlet was his hair as well, blood and night mixed together; on his head perched a wide-brimmed hat of purple velvet decorated with a green pearl and a white quill.

  “Dread sir,” the innkeep said, “those…those Deodands…”

  “…will not trouble you. Death diminishes even such savage appetites as theirs.”

  “We…we do not oft see sorcerers at the Tarn House.”

  Molloqos was unsurprised. Once the dying earth had teemed with such, but in these last days even magic was waning. Spells seemed less potent than before, their very words harder to grasp and hold. The grimoires themselves were crumbling, falling to dust in ancient libraries as their protective charms winked out like guttering candles. And as the magic failed, so too did the magicians. Some fell to their own servants, the demons and sandestins who once obeyed their every whim. Others were hunted down by shadow swords, or torn apart by angry mobs of women. The wisest slipped away to other times and other places, their vast and drafty manses vanishing like mist before the sunrise. Their very names had become the stuff of legend: Mazirian the Magician, Turjan of Miir, Rhialto the Marvelous, the Enigmatic Mumph, Gilgad, Pandelume, Ildefonse the Perceptor.

  Yet Molloqos remained, and it was his intent to go on remaining, to live to drink a final cup of wine while he watched the sun go out. “You stand in the presence of Molloqos the Melancholy, poet, philosopher, archmage, and necromancer, a student of forgotten tongues and bane of demonkind,” he informed the cringing landlord. “Every corner of this dying earth is known to me. I collect curious artifacts from aeons past, translate crumbling scrolls no other man can read, converse with the dead, delight the living, frighten the meek, and awe the unenlightened. My vengeance is a cold, black wind, my affection warm as a yellow sun. The rules and laws that govern lesser men I brush off as a wayfarer might brush the dust from his cloak. This night I will honor you with my custom. No obsequies are necessary. I will require your best room, dry and spacious, with a feather mattress. I shall sup with you as well. A thick slice of wild boar would fill me nicely, with such side dishes as your kitchen may supply.”

  “We have no boars hereabouts, wild or tame. The grues and the erbs ate most of them, and the rest were dragged down into the tarn. I can serve you a meat pie, or a piping hot bowl of purple scrumby, but I don’t think you’d like the one, and I know you’d hate t’other.” The innkeep swallowed. “A thousand pardons, dread sir. My humble house is not fit for such as you. No doubt you would find some other inn more comfortable.”

  Molloqos let his visage darken. “No doubt,” said he, “but as no other inn presents itself, I must make do with yours.”

  The innkeep dabbed at his forehead with his apron. “Dread sir, begging your pardon and meaning no offense, but I’ve had some trouble from sorcerous folk before. Some, not so honest as you, settle their accounts with purses of ensorceled stones and chunks of dung glamoured to look like gold, and others have been known to inflict boils and warts on unhappy serving wenches and innocent innkeepers when the service does not meet their standards.”

  “The remedy is simple,” declared Molloqos the Melancholy. “See that the service is all that it should be, and you will have no difficulties. You have my word, I will perform no sorceries in your common room, inflict no boils nor warts upon your staff, nor settle my account with dung. But now I grow weary of this banter. The day is done, the sun is fled, and I am weary, so here I mean to stay the night. Your choice is simple. Accomodate me, or else I shall pronounce Gargoo’s Festering Reek upon you and leave you to choke upon your own stench until the end of your days. Which will not be long in coming, as pelgranes and erbs are drawn to the smell as mice are drawn to a nice ripe cheese.”

  The innkeep’s mouth opened and closed, but no words emerged. After a moment, he shuffled to one side. Molloqos acknowledged the surrender with a nod, ascended the rest of the steps, and shoved through the inn’s front door.

  The interior of the Tarn House proved to be just as dark, damp, and dismal as the exterior. A queer sour odor hung in the air, though Molloqos would not have ventured to say whether it emanated from the innkeep, the other customers, or whatever was cooking in the kitchen. A hush fell upon the common room at his entrance. All eyes turned toward him, as was only to be expected. In his Cloak of Fearful Mien, he was a fearful sight.

  Molloqos took a seat at the table by the window. Only then did he permit himself to inspect his fellow guests. The group near the fire, growling at each other in low, guttural voices, reminded the sorcerer of turnips with hair. Over by the ale casks, a pretty young girl was laughing and flirting with a pair of obvious scoundrels, one of whom appeared to be not entirely human. Nearby an old man slept, his head on the table, pillowed atop his folded arms. There was a woman just beyond him, sloshing the dregs of her wine and eyeing the wizard speculatively across the room. A glance was enough to tell Molloqos that she was a woman of the evening, though in her case evening was edging on toward night. Her visage was not altogether hideous, although there was something odd and unsettling about the look of her ears. Still, she had a pleasing shape, her eyes were large and dark and liquid, and the fire woke red highlights in her long, black hair.

  Or so it seemed through the eyes that Molloqos had been born with, but he knew better than to put his trust in those. Softly, softly, he whispered an invocation, and looked again through the enchanted golden eye atop his staff. This time he saw true.

  For his supper, the sorcerer ordered a meat pie, as the specialty of the house was unavailable. After one bite Molloqos put down his spoon, feeling even more melancholy than he had a moment before. Wisps of steam rose through the pie’s broken crust to form hideous faces in the air, their mouths open in torment. When the landlord returned to inquire if the repast was to his liking, Molloqos gave him a reproachful look and said, “You are fortunate that I am not so quick to wroth as most of my brethen.”

  “I am grateful for your forebearance, dread sir.”

  “Let us hope that your bedchambers keep to a higher standard than your kitchen.”

  “For three terces you can share the big bed with Mumpo and his family,” the landlord said, indicating the rustics near the hearth. “A private room will cost you twelve.”

  “None but the best for Molloqos the Melancholy.”

  “Our best room rents for twenty terces, and is presently occupied by Prince Rocallo.”

  “Remove his things at once, and have the room readied for me,” Molloqos commanded. He might have said a good deal more, but just then the dark-eyed woman rose and came over to his table. He nodded toward the chair across from him. “Sit.”

  She sat. “Why do you look so sad?”

  “It is the lot of man. I look at you, and see the child that you were. Once you had a mother who held you to her breast. Once you had a father who dandled you upon his knee. You were their pretty little girl, and through your eyes they saw again the wonders of the world. Now they are dead and the world is dying, and their child sells her sadness to strangers.”

  “We are strangers now, but we need not remain so,” the woman said. “My name is—”

  “—no concern of mine. Are you a child still, to speak your true name to a sorcerer?”

  “Sage counsel.”
She put her hand upon his sleeve. “Do you have a room? Let us repair upstairs, and I will make you happy.”

  “Unlikely. The earth is dying. So too the race of men. No erotic act can change that, no matter how perverse or energetic.”

  “There is still hope,” the woman said. “For you, for me, for all of us. Only last year I lay with a man who said a child had been born to a woman of Saskervoy.”

  “He lied, or was deceived. At Saskervoy, the women weep as elsewhere, and devour their children in the womb. Man dwindles, and soon shall disappear. The earth will become the haunt of Deodands and pelgranes and worse things, until the last light flickers out. There was no child. Nor will there be.”

  The woman shivered. “Still,” she said, “still. So long as men and women endure, we must try. Try with me.”

  “As you wish.” He was Molloqos the Melancholy, and he had seen her for what she was. “When I retire, you may come to my bedchamber, and we shall try the truth of things.”

  * * *

  —

  The placards were made of dark black wood, sliced paper-thin and brightly painted. They made a faint clacking sound when Lirianne turned them over. The game was simple enough. They played for terces. Lirianne won more than she lost, though she did not fail to note that whenever the wagering was heavy, somehow Chimwazle showed the brightest placards, no matter how promising her own had seemed at first.

  “Fortune favors you this evening,” Chimwazle announced, after a dozen hands, “but playing for such small stakes grows tiresome.” He placed a golden centum on the table. “Who will meet my wager?”

  “I,” said Rocallo. “The earth is dying, and with it all of us. What do a few coins matter to a corpse?”

  Lirianne looked sad. “I have no gold to wager.”

  “No matter,” said Chimwazle. “I have taken a fancy to your hat. Put that in the wager, against our gold.”

  “Oho. Is that the way of it?” She cocked her head and ran the tip of her tongue across her lip. “Why not?”

  Shortly she was hatless, which was no more than she had expected. She handed the prize to Chimwazle with a flourish and shook out her hair, smiling as he stared at her. Lirianne took care never to look directly at the sorcerer seated by the window, but she had been aware of him since the moment he had entered. Gaunt and grim and fearsome, that one, and he stank of sorcery so strongly that it overwhelmed the lesser magics wafting off the odious fraud Chimwazle. Most of the great mages were dead or fled, slain by shadow swords or gone to some underworld or overworld, or perhaps to distant stars. Those few who remained upon the dying earth were gathering in Kaiin, she knew, hoping to find safety there behind the white-walled city’s ancient enchantments. This was surely one of them.

  Her palm itched, and Tickle-Me-Sweet sang silent by her side. Lirianne had tempered its steel in the blood of the first wizard she had slain, when she was six-and-ten. No protective spell was proof against such a blade, though she herself had no defense but her wits. The hard part of killing wizards was knowing when to do it, when most of them could turn you into dust with a few well-chosen words.

  A round of ales arrived, and then another. Lirianne sipped at her first tankard while her second sat untouched by her elbow, but her companions drank deep. When Rocallo called for a third round, Chimwazle excused himself to answer a call of nature, and loped across the common room in search of a privy. He gave the necromancer’s table a wide berth, Lirianne did not fail to note. That pale, grim creature seemed deeply engrossed in conversation with the inn’s resident doxy, oblivious to the wattled, pop-eyed rogue scuttling past, but the golden eye atop his wizard’s staff had fixed on Chimwazle and watched his every move.

  “Chimwazle has been cozening us,” she told Rocallo when the toad-faced creature was gone. “I won the last showing, and you the two before that, yet his pile of terces is as large as ever. The coins move whenever we’re not looking. Creeping home across the table. And the placards change their faces.”

  The prince gave a shrug. “What does it matter? The sun grows dark. Who shall count our terces when we’re dead?”

  His ennui annoyed her. “What sort of prince sits by and lets some feeble wizard make a fool of him?”

  “The sort who has experienced Lugwiler’s Dismal Itch, and has no desire to experience it again. Chimwazle amuses me.”

  “It would amuse me to tickle Chimwazle.”

  “He will laugh and laugh, I have no doubt.”

  Then a shadow fell across them. Lirianne looked up, to find the grim-visaged necromancer looming over them. “It has been three hundred years since last I played a hand of peggoty,” he intoned in a sepulchral tone. “May I sit in?”

  * * *

  —

  The Great Chimwazle’s stomach was a-heave. The meat pie might be to blame, all that gristle and suet. Or perhaps it was the Twk-men he had eaten in the woods. Delicious little things, but never easy to digest. They might be in his belly still, stabbing at him with their silly little spears. He should have stopped at a dozen, but once he had started, it was so easy to think, well, one more would be nice, and perhaps another after that one. He wondered if their spears were poisoned. Chimwazle had not considered that. It was a disagreeable thought.

  Almost as disagreeable as this inn. He should have paid more heed to the Pooner. The Tarn House had little to recommend it, save perhaps the pretty freckly thing who had joined his little game of peggoty. Already he had won her hat. Her boots would soon follow, and then her stockings. Chimwazle was only waiting for some of the other travelers in the common room to retire to their beds before beginning his assault in earnest. Rocallo was too dull and diffident to interfere, he was certain. Once he’d won her clothes the girl would have nothing to wager but her indenture, and afterward he could harness her to his cart an arm’s length ahead of Polymumpho. Let the Pooner chase after her henceforth; that should serve to keep those hairy legs of his pumping briskly. Chimwazle might not even need to ply the whip.

  The inn’s privy was cramped and smelly, and offered neither bench nor bar, but only a ragged hole in the floor. Squatting over it with his breeches around his ankles, Chimwazle grunted and groaned as he voided his bowels. The act was never a pleasant one for him, attended as it was by the risk of waking the imp nested in the fleshier portions of his nether parts, whose second favorite amusement was loudly describing Chimwazle’s manhood in terms of withering scorn (its first favorite amusement was something Chimwazle did not wish to think about).

  He was spared that ordeal on this occasion, but worse awaited him when he returned to the inn’s common room and found that the tall magician with the fearsome face had taken a seat at his own table. Chimwazle had had enough experiences with great sorcerers to know that he did not want any more such experiences. His present appearance was the legacy of a misunderstanding at a crossroads with one such, and the imp with the loquacious mouth hidden in his breeches was a souvenir left him by the witch Eluuna, whose affections he had enjoyed for a fortnight when he was young and slim and handsome. This sorcerer in scarlet and black lacked Eluuna’s charms, but might well share her fickle temper. One never knew what small gaffes and innocent omissions a wizard might take for mortal insult.

  Still, there was no help for it, unless he meant to flee at once into the night. That course seemed less than advisable. The nights belonged to grues and ghouls and leucomorphs, and there was some small chance more Twk-men might be awaiting him as well. So Chimwazle donned his best smile, resumed his seat, and smacked his lips. “We have another player, I see. Innkeep, run fetch some ale for our new friend. And be quick about it, or you may find a carbuncle growing on the end of your nose!”

  “I am Molloqos the Melancholy, and I do not drink ale.”

  “I perceive you are of the sorcerous persuasion,” said Chimwazle. “We have that in common, you and I. How many spells do you carry?”


  “That is none of your concern,” warned Molloqos.

  “There now. It was an innocent inquiry, between colleagues. I myself am armed with six great spells, nine minor enchantments, and a variety of cantraps.” Chimwazle shuffled the placards. “My sandestin awaits without, disguised as a Pooner and bound to my cart, yet ready to whisk me off into the sky at my command. But no sorcery at table, please! Here dame fortune rules, and may not be confounded by spells!” And so saying, he placed a golden centum in the center of the table.

  “Come, come, put in your stakes! Peggoty has more savor when gold is glinting in the pot.”

  “Just so.” Prince Rocallo laid his centum atop Chimwazle’s.

  The girl Lirianne could only pout (which she did very prettily). “I have no gold, and I want my hat back.”

  “Then you must put your boots into the wager.”

  “Must I? Oh, very well.”

  The sorcerer said nothing. Instead of reaching into his own purse, he rapped thrice upon the floor with his ebon staff and pronounced a small cantrap for the dispelling of illusions and concealments. At once, Chimwazle’s centum transformed into a fat white spider and walked slowly from the board on eight hairy legs, while the pile of terces in front of him turned into as many cockroaches and scuttled off in all directions.

  The girl squealed. The prince chortled. Chimwazle gulped down his dismay and drew himself up, his jowls a-quiver. “Look what you have done! You owe me a golden centum.”

  “Far be it!” Molloqos said, with outrage. “You aspired to hoodwink us with a cheap conjurer’s glamour. Did you truly believe such a feeble ploy would work upon Molloqos the Melancholy?” The great golden eye atop his staff was blinking, as green vapors swirled ominously within its crystal orb.