Dragon with a Deadly Weapon

by Michael Angel

Throughout the day, I’d found myself glancing towards the sun, earning myself more than one watery eye in process. My nerves were frazzled, partly hoping to catch a glimpse of what I’d seen early this morning. Holly and Perrin had sensed my mood and headed out on their own to give me some space to sort things out.

  Now, the late afternoon sun had sunk below the level of the trees so I couldn’t try to blind myself anymore. As with most afternoons, the peak heat of the day turned the island air balmy and even a bit sticky. Blooming tropical orchids and ginger spiced the air with a dense perfume. I found myself starting to sweat as I did my best to keep up with Destry’s pace.

  “You posed an interesting question in your last paper,” he remarked, as a flight of lorikeets made their noisy way overhead. “It was in reference to the ‘schools of magic’ and where they are located.”

  I waited until the lorikeets faded into the distance before answering. “Well, you’d mentioned that not all magic training was via the apprentice system. If there are schools of magic, they have to be somewhere in Andeluvia.”

  “Not necessarily. Alas, it a problem with the terminologie. A ‘school’ is a way of thinking about how magic works. One of the ‘Ways’ to focus the ‘Will’.”

  I flushed a little at that. I should’ve figured that out on my own.

  “What mages call fundamentum magica is the most powerful, but also the most difficult form of magic to teach. These are the ‘innate’ forms of magic.”

  “Innate,” I said, as I chewed on that for a bit. “You mean someone who’s got a natural talent for learning magic.”

  Destry’s bristly shock of hair moved as he shook his head.

  “Not quite. I mean someone who’s got a natural talent from simply being born.” I must’ve looked confused at that, so he went on. “The fayleene are one example. They are natural practitioners of fey magic. The magic of the field, the forest, the quiet places in nature. Unicorns are another example, for they are natural diviners and soothsayers. And then there are the pouquelaye.”

  “Wait, the who?”

  “Pardon me. That is my français getting the better of me. You might call them the ‘pooka’. They are the most powerful of all, and therefore the most dangerous. The most treacherous. For they can delve into a mind and upend its secrets. The way you might turn over a rock in a field and see the slimy things beneath it, squirming to get away from the light.”

  I shuddered. “If I see one, I’ll be sure to head the other way as fast as I can run.”

  “A wise choice,” Destry chuckled. “You also have elemental magica, which is found among elemental spirits like the Seraphine. You call them the phoenix. There is also magic tied to schools of thought involving crystals, weather, summoning, even the movements of celestial bodies. Wizardry is the scholarly branch. Power there comes from names and the classification of things. Naming a person or power can bend it to your will.”

  We finally crested the hill. The medieval turret still stood in place, as stolid as ever. Before it, looking like a blocky version of Excalibur, lay the errant stone sticking out of the ground.

  “I guess that you’ve been teaching me what others would call wizardry.”

  “Not at all! You are using books, yes, for that is the way you best internalize knowledge. Smithing the metal that is poured to make the key, you might say. But I am teaching you sorcery, for it is the simplest school of all. And the strangest.”

  I bristled a little at that. “You chose sorcery…because I’m simple?”

  “You should know better than that,” he chided me. “I chose it because you are strange.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  “Ah, my English again! Comment dites-vous, how would you say it…you can ‘grab the absurdité’ of sorcery.”

  “Then you picked the right field for me,” I said, frustrated. “Because each of the books you’ve had me read is just that. Absurd!”

  Destry’s next words hit me like a thunderclap.

  “Good! Good! That is the key, you have it in hand. All you need to do is turn it!”

  “But how in the effing–” I started to say, but Destry carried on.

  “It is a unique set of skills you bring, Dayna. One that has always served you in your field of forensics. For you have a logical mind, yet you can bend it to take in the absurd.”

  We finally came up to the fallen block of stone. A lizard that had been sunning itself fled as our shadows blocked the light. Destry touched his fingers to the stone’s rough surface.

  “We shall know you are ready for the next step when you pass the midterm,” he said. “You have but one task: Find a way to lift this errant piece of turret from where it is buried in the ground. Any way will do, but you must do it on your own.”

  I looked at the vaguely rectangular lump with a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “I can’t go back to the cottage on my own and ask Holly to help me?”

  That earned me a dismissive shake of the head. I figured as much, but I had to ask. There was no way that I was going to be able to shovel that thing out and move it by myself, not even with a makeshift rope and pulley system.

  “Can I borrow that ruby ring again?” I asked.

  “Nice try, but no.”

  “What if I break the rock up with my pickaxe and move it a bit at a time?”

  “I would grade you an ‘A’ for creativity. And an ‘F’ for efficiency.”

  “What if I…um, ordered a backhoe and a forklift?”

  A snort. “It really should be your own effort. Also, the postage to ship construction equipment here would be most terrible, no?”

  “All right,” I sighed. “I’m going to have to think about this.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  I stared at the stone that represented my midterm. This was going to require some problem-solving. And that would take some time, I suspected.

  “I shall leave you to your deepest thoughts,” Destry said, inclining his head to me. “Do not forget to eat between them. I shall have dinner ready when you return this evening.”

  My eyes bored holes in Destry’s back as he made his way back down to the château. For some reason, that last comment of his rankled me even more. It naturally assumed that I wasn’t going to be bright enough to figure anything out this evening. Or for an even longer period.

  I reached out with my mind, imagining the stone being plucked from the earth by a pair of invisible fingers. When that didn’t work, I switched to a rope wrapped around a giant skyhook. Then a helicopter. Then a helicopter attached to a Saturn V moon rocket.

  Nothing. I could tell by the strange coiled feeling of energy in my chest that my ‘Will’ was trying to manifest. But I wasn’t grasping something. Literally, in this case.

  From there, I switched to ‘pushing’ the block out of the ground. Toppling it over. Even squeezing it free from the moist soil like a giant stone zit.

  No dice.

  The evening was shifting along to post-sunset purple by the time I realized that I’d been at this a while. I hadn’t even thought about watching the sun sink into the ocean, to see if it would pull its ruby-red switcheroo.

  Then things got worse.

  The buttery aroma of freshly baked croissants wafted up the hill from the kitchen. I let out a string of curses. It was just like Destry to try and distract me with one of my favorite bits of French cuisine.

  I envisioned turning a dial in my head labeled SMELL to zero so I could concentrate. It was an oddball image, almost on a par with that weird click that my brain did when putting things together. But it worked for me.

  That made me pause.

  The image and my ‘clicks’ were ‘oddball’ things, weren’t they? Almost absurdly so.

  I was going about this the wrong way.

  Maybe I had to approach things from a more absurd angle.

  Immediately, my inner voice guffawed at the idea. But I didn’t shrink away from it this time. This was like a puzzle where you couldn’t con
nect the dots in a box…unless you went outside of it. I went back to square one to try again.

  Start with the most pressing question: What was I trying to do here?

  Answer: I had to move this refrigerator-sized piece of rock.

  Obvious follow-up question: Why couldn’t I move the damned rock? With my bare hands, or as a ‘sorceress’?

  Obvious follow-up answer: Because the stone was too heavy for me to lift. And my magical talent was too meager for the task.

  I walked up and gave the stone a vicious kick. All I did was hurt my toe. I hobbled back a step and gritted my teeth.

  Scratch that last part about the ‘too meager’ bit. I obviously had the talent, hidden away somewhere. If it was hopeless, then Destry wouldn’t have thought I was ready to solve it.

  A fat lot of good that did me. I had the vote of confidence of someone who served all our meals on imitation Dutch crockery and silverware stamped with Elvis Presley’s face. I could just see him giving me a sad, disappointed look as he sighed, ‘Well, at least you tried, no?’

  That made me stop a moment. Destry had said something to me the day I’d first had my abreaction.

  Your mind is trained for science. It believes that the rules of physics are pas changer.

  Just as before, my mind protested. That’s because the rules weren’t up for question. The rules of chemistry, of physics, of biology were immutable. Otherwise, everything I’d learned up to this point in my life was moot, and I couldn’t have been a crime scene analyst.

  But Destry had replied to my objection.

  What if that were not true? What if you could still do your job…but in a different way?

  In other words, what if everything I’d read since coming here was the truth?

  I’d been focusing on how I could (or couldn’t) affect the stone. Because of those same physical forces. I couldn’t smash it into gravel easily, because it was an incredibly hard igneous rock. And I couldn’t move it because it was too heavy.

  What if I focused on how everything else affected the stone?

  It was a patently stupid, absurd idea, so I went with it.

  Slowly, I gathered in my Will and held it, turning myself into my own personal magical battery. Then I focused my vision on seeing the lignes, as Destry would have called them. Since the block wasn’t mobile, the lines that emanated from it were straight and inert. A tracery of green from the sparkles of mica, reflecting the last of the heat of the day. A fuzzy gray-and-black line that tied it to the earth.

  I took another look at that. Every object had this unobtrusive line. Animate ones, like birds or griffin or people, had these buried beneath so many layers of colors that you could barely see them. All I’d noticed was that this particular line varied in thickness depending on mass. That meant it had something to do with weight.

  My breath whistled out of my lungs as my brain made one of its little clicks. The words from a book – not one of the magical texts, but from a science class in high school – popped into my head.

  The weight of an object is related to the amount of force acting on the object, either due to gravity or to some other force that holds it in place.

  There weren’t any other forces holding the stone in place right now. So all that line really did was represent…gravity?

  I reached out with my mind and flicked the gray-black line hard enough to snap it.

  The stone instantly erupted from the ground, showering me with moist-smelling earth. I windmilled my arms, trying to keep my balance as it shot up into the sky, faster than any rocket booster could take it.

  A sharp screech rent the air as the stone punched through a low-lying cloud and churned it into a celestial smoke ring.

  That was followed by a teeth-rattling KABOOM as the stone broke the sound barrier and vanished into the darkness above.

  Okay.

  That. Was. Awesome.

  I became aware of a terrific din as every bird on the island began cawing or squawking its head off. Then the sound of footsteps and loping lion paws. Holly, Perrin, and Destry came to a stop and stared at where I stood, spattered in mud, before a yawning hole in the ground.

  “What…what happened?” Perrin squeaked.

  “It seems,” I said, beaming, “that I just passed my midterm exam.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Holly gave me a lift back to the château, with Perrin doing celebratory loop-the-loops overhead in the warm night air. Then it was time for a quick visit to the showers and a change of clothes before returning downstairs for a champagne toast.

  “Here’s to victory,” Holly declared. She raised a mug shaped for her lion’s paw. “Surely, Dayna’s clan has been honored tonight!”

  “She’s going to be the best sorceress that ever did sorceress-ing!” Perrin enthused, as he raised his custom champagne flute, which was about the size of a thimble.

  “Félicitations à vous,” Destry added, as he raised his own flute in toast. I tipped my glass back for a sweet, spicy sip of its contents. It was so good, I went in for seconds.

  “Thank you,” I finally said. “To be honest, I was just as surprised as all of you when that block of stone took off.”

  “It was amazing!” Perrin danced excitedly on his perch. “That stone went from just sitting there to…BOOM!”

  “Doubtless you have found your own form of martial art,” Holly put in, after licking a stray droplet of champagne from her paw. “Though I do wonder when that stone shall come back down.”

  Destry looked faintly amused as he spoke. “The answer to that is jamais. Never. I thought Dayna might manipulate how the laws of gravity affected the object. I didn’t think she would revoke the law! She passed, that is to be sure, but I think she knows the next thing she must learn.”

  I nodded. “Control. Or at least, finer control of my powers.”

  “Among other things, yes. Yet that is for tomorrow.” He rose, picked up the champagne bottle, and poured us each another glass. “This is for tonight.”

  We carried on until the moon had risen high in the sky, as Destry brought out a batch of freshly made croissants which all but cried out to be eaten. Perrin eventually fell asleep on his perch and even Hollyhock had begun to yawn before I decided to call it a night.

  “Bonne nuit,” Destry said warmly. “Sleep well, for come the morning there is work.”

  He bent forward to give me a traditionally Gallic peck on the cheek. I took note of the man’s unique scent as he did so. Destry never smelled bad, just a little unusual.

  My nose picked up a trace of sweat, which was normal enough. But also notes of baled hay or freshly cut grass. Which was especially interesting, because I’d never seen either substance on this tropical island.

  It puzzled me for the thirty seconds it took for my overloaded brain to call it a night and fall asleep.

  Morning brought a rain squall and deep rolling cracks of thunder. One especially loud rumble sent Perrin to duck under the covers with me. Holly cracked one eye open, let out a hmmph as she saw the kid’s tufted feathers sticking out from under the sheets, and turned over.

  Which was a good thing, because the bed wasn’t nearly big enough for three people, especially if one was griffin-sized.

  The rain lifted by early afternoon, leaving mist to waft off the fronds of the palm trees as the sun came back out. Destry met me outside, where he’d swept a stretch of sand clean and set out a ring of objects ranging from a freshly harvested coconut to a green glass marble. He smiled and gave me a hearty bonjour as I joined him.

  “I’m guessing that this is how I practice control,” I speculated. “By lifting these items.”

  He nodded. “Yes, but just to eye level, not into orbit. You shall start with the largest object and move to the smallest as you master each one.”

  That sounded reasonable enough to me. At least at first. However, even though I sweated through the rest of the afternoon with Destry’s encouragement, I barely budged the coconut from where it sat. Apparen
tly, I was an ‘all or nothing’ sort of magic user.

  “I’m not complaining,” I complained, as we sat outside on the porch after dinner. “It’s just that…if I’m needed because of my magic, then why bother with fine control? Raw power should be enough to handle anything someone throws at me, right?”

  “La quantité a une qualité,” he replied sagely. The whiteness of Destry’s teeth gleamed against his dark skin in the dim light cast by the string of Chinese lanterns. “Quantity has a quality all its own. You would be right, except that one cannot go about the world shooting things off into space, to use our most recent example.”

  “Why not? I mean, I don’t want to go around doing that, but it would make it easier.”

  “Use your sight on the palm over there,” he said, pointing to one of the more swaybacked trees near the house. “See if you can cut it loose as you did that piece of castle turret.”

  I squinted at it for a moment before shaking my head. “I can’t. The line I saw on that block of stone is buried amidst the other colors.”

  “I did not weaken the lignes on that piece of turret for your test. But I have cleared away much of the ‘clutter’ around the objects in my demesnes so that you or I can easily manipulate them.”

  A moment passed as I let that sink in. Distant flutters and clicks told me that out in the darkness, the island’s bats had begun their evening hunt.

  “You’re saying that I won’t be able to do that trick again, except around your tower,” I finally said. “That’s too bad.”

  “Oh, it is not quite so bad,” Destry said, with one of his classic shrugs. “After all, random sorcerers cannot go about uprooting trees or throwing people off the planet if they feel un peu grincheux. In fact, we should talk about the limits of your power in this school of magic I have chosen for you.”

  I immediately sat up to pay close attention.

  “Sorcellerie is a simple art, and that means many limits to its use,” he began. “Yet there are two primary limits. The first limitation lies in applying magical energy outside of one’s self.”