Midnight Magic

by Cameron Darrow

  Animata, the animating force of every living thing that had a brain (by wizard reckoning), was white. Beginner wizards had to learn to filter it out or go blind from the fact their own eyeballs were full of it. After a while, however, one's own animata became simple enough to ignore naturally, the way one does the smell of their own house.

  Then there were high-energy magics, the alumita, the very creative (and destructive) energies of the universe itself. They were intensely blue, and what stupid wizards drew on. Or tried to, anyway. The alumita were very powerful, but the world was dotted with craters that attested to how wrong trying to harness them could go. It was quick energy, and so would your death be if you made a mistake.

  No ability to See or channel magic, however, prepared Vimika for the sight that awaited her at the top of her stairs when she got home.

  The coach was lacquered black and completely spotless, which was saying something in a place where it snowed half the year, and pulled by a team of animals so fine they now epitomized the word 'horse' in Vimika's mind. Equally black, they stood in perfect tranquility, their bobbed tails barely swishing as they regarded Durn the same way Apricot had regarded Vimika's cellar.

  The kind of money they represented was the kind that Vimika had long ago decided couldn't be earned honestly, or by pleasant people. She knew the allure of it well, the same way an alcoholic knows the allure of ale or brandy. In this case it was ostentatious and public at least, which made it moderately more honest than being behind closed doors and feeling of silk, smelling of incense and perfume…

  She almost turned around.

  No, this is Durn, not Maris, she had to remind herself.

  And in Durn, the Southern nobility had hoarded their wealth behind barricades made from the corpses of all the miners necessary to make them wealthy, not just rich. Rich people had second houses and butlers, wealthy people had titles and a presence at Court to go along with them.

  The eight Houses in Durn had been minor ones relative to those up north, left to freeze-dry in the southern mountains. But when rich deposits of gold, silver and jewels had been discovered, the resulting feeding frenzy shat out four survivors, rulers of the southernmost, and most remote, part of the Atvalian Empire.

  Vimika, however, was a wizard. And that meant that even if she did hail from Atvalia's capitol, she was still forced to approach her own front door with eyes downcast, leading with the brim of her hat.

  Waiting for her was a woman dressed much like the horses. Her ponytail didn't swish, however.

  "You Milkdragon?" the driver asked, her beady eyes flicking between Vimika's sleeves and her hat. Or might have been, the shadows were long this time of year.

  "My name is Malakandronon, yes," Vimika said tightly, trying to keep the suspicion from her voice. Each of the Four already had a house wizard, they didn't need to come into town for a freelancer. Nothing good could come from this conversation, but it wasn't as though she could hide. Did they know about her watch experiments, or did they have rats?

  Of a height with Vimika, the woman looked straight through her before crossing arms clad in perfectly-tailored fabrics, ending in gloves made of leather so soft as to be sybaritic. Her reflection was flawless in the polished black side of the carriage she had driven here with horses that had stepped out of a painting.

  "Good. My mistress has a job offer for you, and if you can keep quiet and manage to not break your neck getting into a carriage, you may find it lucrative." She glanced down at the sign on the door. "For a witch."

  "Wi…" Vimika swallowed. "When do we leave?"

  ~

  The house of Lady Malivia Tarsebaum, when Vimika arrived, wasn't a house at all. Or a mansion. Or a yacht that had gotten terribly lost.

  Surrounded by a high wall whitewashed to within an inch of its life (solely to blind passersby, as near as Vimika could guess) the black iron gate swung open to reveal an entire compound. No less than four buildings of approximate size orbited a massive one in the center, which was all windows, spires and showy bits with gargoyles on the ends.

  The carriage pulled up to discharge Vimika (or vomit, really, given how underdressed she felt in relation to even the servants), clattering away the moment she was under the supervision of someone else. Namely, a white-haired gentleman dressed equally monotone to the carriage driver, only with more frills and other extraneous accoutrements that could only be practical on someone who stood around and looked snide for a living.

  "This way, Miss," he said, turning so perfectly on his axis it looked like his hair subsumed his face and absconded with it through the front door.

  Inside, the sound of his heels snapping on the polished marble floor echoed in the cavernous main hall, while the scuttle of Vimika's soft leather shoes whispered among the paintings and tried not to be noticed. Or laugh at how overtly ostentatious every single thing in the house was. Who was it supposed to impress? Anyone who knew the true value of any of these things likely had them too, and anyone who didn't probably had taste.

  "Miss Vimikathritas Malakandronon," the butler announced as he admitted her into what looked to be a kind of study.

  Vimika's eyebrows raised at him in appreciation for being the only person in Durn to pronounce her name correctly on the first go. Then again in alarm that he knew what Vimika was short for. She never used her full name, except on official paperwork.

  "Thank you, Billsly, you may go," said a rather disinterested voice from a chair near the window. A woman's voice, one that had more years behind it than ahead, most of them full of cigarettes. "Come over here, girl, I won't shout at you."

  Doing so revealed exactly who Vimika had imagined the voice belonged to: a woman so near the sunset of her life she was squinting into it. Her round, wizened face was perched atop a pile of brightly-colored scarves capping a cone-shaped mound of fine furs. Her silver hair was done up tightly, bundled within the peel of a former rabbit. All of the above were necessary because the window she sat before was open for some reason.

  "How may I be of service, madam?" Vimika asked.

  Many students at the Academy openly complained about wizards having to learn a proper vocabulary, with accent and diction to match, but not only did it help in enunciating spells well enough to keep them from backfiring in some ironic way, it also prepared them for the day a rich person might have money to throw at them in exchange for a bit of magic.

  "I understand you have a way with animals," Malivia Tarsebaum said without bothering to introduce herself, peering up at Vimika from behind spectacles that had more glass in them than the window did.

  "It is indeed one of my specialties, yes," Vimika replied, acutely aware that being able to use words like 'perchance' and 'heretofore' in a sentence didn't account for much when you were standing in a mansion with a hangover, dressed like a freelance wizard and covered in cat hair.

  "Very good. Normally, I would enlist my house mage for this, you understand."

  "I understand," Vimika said flatly.

  It's only because he already failed that you're standing here grubbing up my rugs, and I am too old and indifferent to your feelings to care about using the word 'mage' in front of you, said Malivia's expression.

  "Good. Now, I expect utmost confidentiality from you on this matter, Miss…"

  "Malakandronon."

  "Yes. Why magickers insist on such ostentatious names, I will never understand."

  Though Vimika very much got the impression the old woman had said that to herself, she was very old, and now, Vimika knew, hard of hearing.

  "It's my birth name," she said. She tried to make it sound like a simple explanation, but was unable to completely hide the sliver of pride that glinted from every word. There were many things that made life difficult being a wizard, but shame was not one of them. However far she might find herself from her family, blood was blood, no matter how many hats she was forced to obscure it with.

  "I'm sure. As I said, I expect you to keep a secret. Mages are good at that,
aren't you?"

  "Wizard. And that is another of my specialties, I'm happy to say." Vimika did so tightly, to the point her lips hurt.

  The old woman considered Vimika another moment, though she had no idea what part of her was undergoing the most scrutiny.

  "Very well. I need you to find a gilded fennec," Malivia said.

  Vimika had to snap her eyes shut in order to keep them in her head.

  "Those are… exceedingly rare, madam. I can't guarantee…"

  "He escaped two days ago. I fear what might become of him out in the untamed wilderness."

  Escaped? Gilded fennecs weren't pets, they were wild animals! He was from the untamed wilderness! They weren't even legal…

  The scarves. The coach. The house…s.

  Of course.

  'Legal' was just a word, like 'haberdasher', or 'obsequious': it didn't mean anything unless you needed it to.

  "I will be happy to try, madam. I will need more information to increase the odds of a successful scrying, you understand."

  "Yes, of course. Anything. Just find my beautiful Oliver and bring him back to me," Malivia said, her voice cracking. Reaching into her sleeve, she dabbed at her eye with a handkerchief a shade of red that looked like it belonged on the other side of the rabbit skin. "He's been my closest companion for nearly fifty years. I shan't imagine what life would be like without him."

  As Vimika swallowed her reaction at such a mundane name for such an extraordinary animal, she felt the first shots of a war within herself go off. The fennec was where it needed to be, free from cages and ridiculous names, but an old woman missing a companion was a sight sad enough to move statues. But fennecs only lived, at most, twenty years. Either it was the most bloody-minded, well-looked-after example of its species in history, or…

  The woman was quite old. Were the staff just indulging her, ready to laugh at the stupid wizard as they sent her off into the woods on some impossible task? Testing whether she would bring back one she found at random since there were no fifty-year old fennecs? A wizard's reputation may be built on honesty, but wasting their time for sport was just mean-spirited.

  On one hand, she needed the money. On the other, she could just lie and say it was impossible, preserve her dignity. On a mysterious, disembodied third hand, she could ask for an advance and then figure out the rest later.

  That one. She did that one.

  ~

  Her broken brass cockroach swept away and forgotten, Vimika stared down at the new, much better, much shinier metal on her workbench and counted it all again for the fourth time, unable to trust that she still knew how. She had never seen this much money in one place before, and it didn't look right.

  The work she did earned her silvers and coppers, because that's what it was worth. Gold? Actual gold coins, with a man's face on one side and a dragon on the other? She'd set out from home with two, and that was supposed to last well over a year, enough so she could at least put a roof over her head until she got steady work and still have some left over for things like not starving to death.

  In front of her were six.

  The first thing she'd done was a casting to make sure they were real. After that she'd had a hyperventilation and a lie down.

  Spending any of it hadn't even occurred to her yet, she was just emerging from disbelief and had marched straight into paranoia about being robbed. No one who saw that coach parked at the top of her steps would think it had been there so its occupant could get a tankard of mead, and Wilim didn't rent rooms by the hour.

  And this was only half!

  It was too much. She would have to use most of it just to buy something secure enough to keep the rest in. Preferably something that would bite whoever tried to open it. Something magic and weird, so anybody who managed to break in would just turn around and leave.

  Granted, anybody who broke into a wizard's laboratory had to be prepared to spend the rest of their life as a toad or a brain in a jar (the two Vimika had were just for show), but there were some out there desperate enough to take that risk.

  Durn was nice enough, a sleepy mountain town with rich people on the outskirts, and so free of crime the members of the city Watch all shared the general roundness of the gold in front of her. But until now, she'd never had enough worth stealing to worry about it.

  No freelance wizard did. If you were a house wizard, like her newest client had, you lived fat and happy; or if you ran a school, or if you were of the sorcerous persuasion willing to explode people with lightning, you could become a mercenary and grow rich avoiding all the people who would kill you on sight because of what you did for a living. But they were few and far between. Most wizards valued, above all else, stability. Ambitious, power-hungry ones were booted out of the reputable magic schools, ensuring that it stayed that way. House wizards were just lazy toffs with 'good breeding' and 'connections,' they weren't any better at magic. Most were worse, since they'd spent their time at school with their noses in more posteriors than books, even if their wider reputation was that they were retained for 'security' reasons, when it was really all backstabbing skullduggery. Magic was opaque to the common folk, and if a wizard was being paid by the most powerful families in Atvalia and being dressed in the finest robes money could buy, it had to be for a real reason.

  Wizards knew better.

  And because of it, Vimika had all but impoverished herself by choice. But now she had a minor fortune and a fistful of fennec hair with which to double it. More than enough for what she had planned: she could give up the whole talisman enterprise altogether and live as she truly wanted to, away from people, away from expectations. No one to point, no one to stare. No suspicious glances, no one to cross the street rather than brush up against her on the sidewalk. No one to break their promises, no one to lie to her, no one to hurt her.

  Except herself.

  But money seemed to solve everyone else's problems, why not hers?

  ~

  A scrying for something as rare as a gilded fennec should have been no problem. Vimika had his name, hair samples, had seen where he slept, the genuine desire of his 'owner' to see him returned. More than enough to figure out where he had gotten off to.

  And it had been.

  She'd just found a lot more than she was looking for.

  Following Oliver's trail hadn't been difficult at all, since it was a blazing white trail of magic the likes of which Vimika had never seen in something so small. It would have been difficult for her not to be able to follow it, since it would have required her to be not a wizard.

  The question, as it always seemed to come down to, was why. Magic would explain the little critter's long life span, certainly, but that only raised more questions. Did he spend every night in suspension, time locked every minute the old woman showed no interest in him? He was just far enough away that Vimika couldn't work out any answers, but she knew he had to be a lot more than the product of the most perfect pedigree in history to have survived almost triple the lifespan typical of his species.

  But thinking about it only made it worse, because the more Vimika thought about it, the more she began to suspect that he was even older than Tarsebaum knew. Or admit to, at any rate. For an animal to be suffused with as much magic as Vimika could deduce from Oliver' trail, he should have a lot more eyes, be partially inside-out and sport a tentacle or two. And be made of shadows. And make a sound like a pig being juiced by a horde of rusty hinges. Underwater.

  As such a thing would have been noticed by the staff at least, if not an old woman who had a vested interest in making sure her only trusted companion wasn't a nightmare from a place no one could give name to without going insane, Vimika concluded that Oliver was one of two things, both of them impossible.

  One, he was an illusion.

  Two, a relic of a time when all the great magickers of Atvalia had collectively decided to jump off the planet by being stupid.

  For One to be true, then Two would have to be as well, since there were no wiz
ards strong enough to make an illusion stand up to fifty years of scrutiny the level of which Oliver had been receiving.

  Not anymore.

  Vimika would be the first to admit she wasn't a great wizard. She was good, she would give herself that much credit, but the fact she had only been able to draw two conclusions, both of which were impossible, was leading her to reassess her own self image.

  The smart thing to do, when faced with a dilemma like this, would be to consult someone smarter than herself. There was no shame in that among wizards. If there was, there would be no wizards, because they would have all melted, exploded or dissolved from both the trial and error of avoiding it.

  But.

  If Two was true, then that could only mean Bad Things, and wizards kept Bad Things to themselves so there would continue to be wizards.

  Sheer probability said that a few mechamagical creatures had to still exist. In addition to the immortality was the fact that so many had been made, regardless of the number that had been destroyed along with their creators. The survivors would be so highly prized by their owners that it stood to reason a few would have been 'lost', 'escaped', or 'get off my property or I'll have my private army take that crown off your head the long way'.

  Every wizard knew it. Their continued survival depended on them ignoring that fact, however.

  The race of magic practitioners had barely survived the culling brought on by the hubris of their forbearers. A lot of bowing, scraping, regulation and acting invisible were the only reasons there were any wizards left at all some 200 years later. The meek had inherited a messy, ugly legacy, not the world someone had mentioned somewhere. Anything that reminded those in power of a time where they almost weren't anymore, or at the very least humbled them with a reminder of what true power looked like, which was worse, risked a renewed scrutiny that wizardkind couldn't survive. Magic was useful, it wasn't necessary. Having grain stocks that were never lost to weevils, or being able to tell fake jewels from real ones were both, in a word, neat.