Forward the Mage

by Eric Flint

  "Not that, you idiot!" roared the sergeant. "Not the Popes! What about the King? What did you do to the King?"

  "Which king?" Then, thinking I was bordering dangerously on proclaiming innocence, I immediately howled with glee and pain. "There have been so many! Butchered kings by the score, I have! The Kaysor of Kushrau I poisoned! And then—I fed the poisoned meat to his hounds! They died in agony! And then I cut the canines from the canines"—(here followed demonic shrieks of ecstasy at the pun)—"and with these newfound weapons I slew the Great Mogul of Juahaca! Plunged the teeth into his throat while he slept! Gave him a dog's collar of his own!" (Lunatic laughter.) "And then! Oh! I murdered the Doges of the Philistine! All of them at one swoop! Crept up on them while—"

  "Not that, you idiot!" roared the sergeant. "The King of Goimr! Here—in Goimr! What did you do to the King of Goimr!"

  "Oh! Him!" Here I fell into a minute or two of insensate ululation, for at the mention of the King of Goimr, the two policemen applying the bastinadoes had fallen into a truly vigorous beating of my feet. Then: "I forgot him! There've been so many kings! But him! Yes! Yes! I remember now! I disemboweled him with a scythe! Danced a fandango with his guts!"

  "The King's still alive, you idiot! And not a mark on him! But he's insane! How did you drive him mad?"

  I gasped with shock. "Still alive! You mean I missed? With a scythe? Missed! I'm going mad myself! But that's it! That's it! It must have been the horrible sight of my demented leer—the ghastly scythe in my hands!—drove the King of Goimr mad! O wondrous! O wondrous! I am such a criminal! Such an archdevil! A paragon of purest evil! Drove the King mad! Yes! Yes! I remember now!"

  "It's looking bad, sir," I heard one of the policemen say, his voice filled with discouragement. The bastinado slacked off.

  But the sergeant was made of sterner stuff. "I'll have none of it!" he roared. "You there! Apply the cudgels smartly! D'you hear me, you laggards?"

  The bastinado renewed itself with a frenzy. Not to be thwarted, I immediately launched into a semi-coherent confessionary babble, recalling to mind all of the various crimes which my uncle Ludovigo had made me memorize. Fortunate I was in my training! On my own, I couldn't have thought up a tenth of those deeds of villainy.

  At length, the bastinado fell off again.

  "It's hopeless, sir," came the same policeman's voice, now sullen in its failure.

  "Yes, I know," came the sergeant's morose reply. "Truth to tell, I lost heart earlier, when he confessed to seducing the Elf Queen's unicorn and abandoning the beast in her pregnancy. But this latest! Kidnapped the magnetic monopoles. Prevented the decay of the proton. And then—did you hear him? Murdered every one of the world's astronomers and cosmologists to protect the dark secret."

  "Perhaps," came the obsequious voice of another policeman, "we could try the rack?"

  "To what purpose, you fool?" demanded the sergeant. "What crime has he not confessed already?"

  "Well," hemmed the obsequious voice, "he hasn't confessed to buggering and murdering the Maharaj of Naham."

  "Oh, but I did!" I screeched. "It was my greatest crime! Through the use of cunning potions I brought all his mahouts under my sway! Taught them to sodomize the great war elephants! And then! The elephants now corrupted! The immense creatures filled with unnatural passion! I had but to wave the King's bedclothes under their snouts! The hideous sight! The herd of aroused pachyderms! Their tusks and trunks raised to the heavens! Their great bellows of lust! The palace trampled flat! The King fleeing for his life! But in vain! My greatest coup! There! The King! Racing across the Royal Grounds! There! The pachyderms in hot pursuit! And then! Oh! Oh! The—"

  "Shut up!" roared the sergeant. "Just shut up!" I fell silent, grimacing in an effort to hide my smirk.

  "Untie him," grumbled the sergeant. "We'll take him to Gerard." Then, very gloomily: "There's going to be hell to pay when the Chief Counselor hears about this."

  A minute later I was carried out of the building, a burly policeman hoisting me by each arm. I could have walked quite easily, though I wouldn't have cared to dance a gavotte. But I saw no reason to enlighten the brutes as to the true condition of my hardened feet.

  Another rough ride followed—the cobblestones of Goimr's streets shared the general state of disrepair—and we debouched onto a large plaza bordering a sluggish river. This, I realized, must be the river Moyle, at whose mouth the city of Goimr is located. And there, on an island in the middle of the river, lay the Royal Palace—just as described in the travel brochures.

  Ha! The actual palace bore the same relation to the one pictured on the travel brochures as the corpulent and toad-faced Madame Hexe bore to my grandfather Goya's portrait of her, The Naked Madame.

  "Isn't there one building in this city that isn't half-crumbling?" I asked.

  "Silence!" roared the sergeant. Then, sourly: "It's a poor country, we are. Not like your precious Ozarae."

  His own gloom was no deeper than my own. To Goimr had I come, my brain flushed with visions of making my fame and fortune—invited by the King himself. A Royal Artist already—and me not yet twenty-four years of age! But now, gazing at the Royal Hovel, I reflected that I would be lucky if the King of Goimr could afford the paints, much less any decent fee. And I was not pleased by the suggestion, during my interrogation, that the King was not quite in possession of his senses.

  But I had little time for reflection. Soon enough, a barge was found to transport the policemen and myself over to the Isle Royale, and from there it was but a few minutes before I was ushered into a large chamber.

  The furnishings in the chamber were of the sort I was coming to expect. The tapestries were particularly wretched, although they did serve to cover most of the grime and water stains on the walls. Behind a desk sat a man of easy grace.

  "What's this, Sergeant?" he demanded, as soon as we entered the room. "Have you captured the wizard?"

  The sergeant coughed apologetically. "Well, Chief Counselor Gerard, the truth is—we believe this man's innocent."

  Chief Counselor Gerard's face was a study in confusion.

  "What man?" he demanded.

  "Why, this man here, sir," explained the sergeant, pointing to me. "The one we caught red-handed at the travel station. But after we put him to the question, it became clear that—"

  "Imbecile!" The Chief Counselor's face was flushed with anger. "What has this man to do with anything? I told you to capture the wizard! Does this man look like a wizard to you? Look at his clothes—he's obviously from the Ozarine. Why would you seize him?"

  The sergeant looked embarrassed. "Well, sir, when we arrived at the travel station—following your instructions, sir, I must point out—everyone fled but this man here. Stood there as guilty as sin, he did. Well, sir, as you know, it's the first law of secret police work. Only a guilty man would attempt to act innocent. And then, after we caught him, he pleaded his innocence! Well, sir, as you know, only a guilty man—"

  "Oh, be quiet," snapped the Chief Counselor. A look of weariness crossed his face. "The end result of all this is that if the wizard did make his escape from the city through the travel station, then he's long gone by now."

  "Well, yes, sir. They move along right quick, sir, the Consortium's transports do. Not at all like it was in the good old days. The bad old days, I mean to say."

  The sergeant drew himself up, attempting a gesture of subtle reproof aimed at a superior. "And in any event, if you don't mind my saying so, sir, we really have no reason to think the wizard would have tried such an obvious escape route as the official travel station of the city. More likely, sir, he'd have tried to leave through one of the lesser-used gates."

  "Yes, yes, I know. I've got police squads covering all the gates. We should know something soon. Fortunately, the wizard's a noticeable man. That ridiculous gown! The hat and the staff! The perfect image of the sorcerer of popular superstition. And that horrid servant. God, Sergeant, did you ever see such a frightful dwarf? And that in
credible sack he carries!"

  Well, I am neither stupid nor unobservant, and it was immediately obvious to me that the wizard of the police search was the very same unpleasant fellow I had encountered on my way out of the station. Had the police not been distracted by my stupidity they would have apprehended their culprit but moments later.

  Warring impulses—I should say, warring advice—raged within my mind.

  On the one hand, I was mindful of the unanimous advice of my artist uncles:

  Always curry favor with the rich and powerful. As long as you curry favor with the swine, you can do anything else—cheat 'em, take their money, seduce their wives, whatever. But always curry their favor.

  On the other, there was the unanimous advice of my condottiere uncles:

  Don't tell the high and mighty anything. There's nothing more suspicious than a man who volunteers information. The torture chambers are full of blabbermouths. It's the seventh law of secret police: "If he spills his guts freely, just think what he'll do under The Question."

  In the end, oddly enough, the question was resolved for me by the memory of the pitiful dwarf. A nice enough boy he'd seemed, ugly though he was. And I had no illusions as to a dwarf's fate in the hands of the secret police. So I kept my mouth shut. And in so doing, I sealed not only my own fate but that of the world.

  "You may go, Sergeant," said Chief Counselor Gerard. Then, as the sergeant took my arm and made to drag me away, Gerard added: "Leave him here."

  The sergeant began to say something, thought better of it, and left.

  When the door closed, Gerard turned to me. "Who are you, sir? Am I not correct, that you are from the Ozarine? What are you doing here in Goimr?"

  "Quite so, Chief Counselor. My name is Benvenuti Sfondrati-Piccolomini, of the famous clan of scholars and artists. I just arrived from Ozar on board the CSS Lucre. Indeed, I do not believe I had spent more than ten minutes on Goimric soil before I was seized by your secret police."

  The look of embarrassment on Gerard's face encouraged me to press home the advantage.

  "As to the reason for my being here, I was invited by the King of Goimr to set up as the Royal Artist." With a flourish, I drew the King's letter from my pocket—which the secret police of Goimr, in that inefficient manner which I was coming to associate with everything Goimric, had not even searched.

  "And here," I added dramatically, as soon as Gerard finished reading the King's letter, "is a letter of recommendation from the Consortium's Director of Companies."

  I handed him the second letter. Gerard's face grew gloomy. The King's letter had not seemed to produce much effect on him. But the letter from the Director of Companies was a different story altogether.

  " 'Upstanding young man,' " he read from the Director's letter, " 'scion of a great family' . . . 'one of Ozar's most promising new artists.' " Etc., etc., etc.

  Actually, I'd never met the Director of Companies. My uncle Giotto, however, is one of his favorite artists, and he'd persuaded the Director to sign the letter, which, needless to say, Giotto had written himself.

  "This letter wouldn't do you much good in Ozar, of course," my uncle had said to me as he handed it over. "Everybody here knows that wretched plutocrat hasn't the faintest sense of art. But in Grotum it'll stand you in good stead. Fawn all over Ozarine wealth, they do, the nobility of Grotum. A miserable, medieval place. But there's no denying it's the greatest source of the world's art as well as most of its mischief."

  The truth of his words was attested to by Gerard's very evident discomfort.

  "Recommended by the Director of Companies himself! Um. A fine man. No—a great man! Been a mighty blessing to us here in poor and backward Goimr, he has. Um. No need to mention this recent unpleasantness to him, I should think?"

  I nodded my head graciously, mentally rubbing my hands with glee. Get something over the bastards as soon as you can, my uncles had told me—artists and condottiere alike.

  Gerard smiled feebly. Then he heaved a sigh.

  "Unfortunately, sir, I'm afraid you've arrived at a bad time. Our blessed King has become unhinged—driven to insanity by the machinations of the villainous sorcerer Zulkeh. The realm is in an uproar. The King mad. The Heir Apparent a hopeless incompetent. All the heirs, indeed—well! No need to go into that here. But the point is, my good young man, that there's simply no place at the moment in Goimr for a Royal Artist. Not likely to be for—for some time, I should think."

  I pleaded and remonstrated, but all to no avail. Truth to tell, now that Goimr was a reality rather than an illusion, I was none too sure myself that a promising young artist's career would be much advanced by lingering in such a place.

  I did, however, in the course of my ensuing discussion with the Chief Counselor, manage to achieve a modest victory in what my uncles call The Artist's Quest.

  I squeezed some money out of him.

  Not much, I admit. But then, I found myself not disbelieving his claim that the treasury of Goimr was practically empty. But I got enough to enable me to survive, while I decided on my next course of action. I also obtained a brief letter with his signature which would, so he assured me, avoid any further complications with the police.

  When I left the palace, it was sundown. My first task, clear enough, was to find lodgings for the night. I hired a small boat to transport me back across the river and began searching for a hotel.

  Imagine, if you will, the tedium of looking for lodgings in Goimr. Even in the vicinity of the palace, the choices seem to vary from shabby to grim to hazardous. In the end, I settled on a run-down boardinghouse, whose proprietor seemed not quite as avaricious and slovenly as most I had encountered. Not saying much, that. Exhausted as I was by the day's travails, I was up half the night confronting the most sullen and difficult batch of rodents it has ever been my displeasure to encounter.

  The next morning—not much rested, I can tell you—I returned to the travel station and obtained my belongings from the locker. I then set out in search of other lodgings in a poorer part of town. My experiences of Goimr had so quickly lowered my threshold of fastidiousness that I was determined, at the least, to find lodgings which were not exorbitant in their price.

  By early afternoon, I had wended my way into a truly disreputable part of the city. Truth to tell, I had long since forgotten about finding new lodgings. I had become absolutely fascinated by the baroque squalor which surrounded me. Ozar, of course, has its miserable tenements and ghettoes, like any great city. But nothing to compare to these slums!

  The determination to capture this nonpareil wretchedness on canvas seized me. In part, this determination was prompted by my artist's instinct. But, in the other part, it was prompted by my artist's reason. For, as my uncle Giotto had told me many times, there are two subjects which—captured with paints—the rich will always pay through the nose to hang on the walls of their mansions: their own glorified features, and the misery of the poor. The misery of the poor, because it comforts them to ponder the tragedy of the human condition. Their own idealized portraits, because it comforts them to ponder their own worth in escaping that condition.

  Rounding a corner, I found myself on a particularly odious street. Not only were the cobblestones in severe disrepair, not only were the gutters strewn with garbage and less mentionable items, not only were the ramshackle buildings which loomed over the street the very epitome of tenements, but—

  There—not twenty feet before me—a woman was being attacked by a mob of cutthroats!

  I was taken completely off guard. Until I rounded the corner, I had heard not a hint of clamor. The struggle under way was being waged in complete silence, save the occasional hiss and grunt.

  For a moment, I was paralyzed, like a statue, rooted to the spot. From horror, you would think. But no, it wasn't that. I am an artist, with an artist's eye, and it was the impossible drama of the scene which transfixed me—like a tableau from ancient legend.

  The struggle bore little if any resemblance to the i
mage which might normally come to mind when one hears of "a woman assaulted by a mob of cutthroats." Think rather of "a lioness assaulted by a pack of hyenas."

  The woman was a striking figure. This, in three ways. First, she was—not beautiful; not, at least, in the normal sense of the term—but so fierce in her countenance as to burn every feature into my mind. More so, indeed, even in the first instant I saw her than any woman I had ever seen before, or have seen since. The regal poise, the nose with the pure curve of a hawk's, the gleaming black eyes, the firm jaw and chin, the full lips, the great mass of kinky hair like midnight, the swarthy complexion now even more flushed with passion and fury. No, not exactly beautiful, but what has a goddess to do with earthly concepts of beauty?

  Then, she was big. Not obese, you understand. To the contrary. Her every movement—and these were fierce and energetic even as I took in the scene—bespoke a body that was muscular and sinewy. Even shrouded as her body was in a plain and baggy set of tunic and trousers, there was no denying its quite evidently female nature. The woman seemed almost a giantess. She matched my six feet of height, if not exceeded it. And though I am considered a large and well-built man, I had no doubt that she weighed perhaps as much.

  She certainly outsized her opponents! For these men, as I saw when I finally tore my gaze from this fantastic vision of a demi-goddess out of a desert nomad's legend, were rather small and rattish in their every aspect. Yet they pressed their assault with great vigor, lunging at the woman from every side. They seemed actually in a frenzy, leaping at her with drawn knifes, attempting to stab and slash any portion of her body they could reach.

  I said that the woman was striking in three ways. And the third of these ways was the unbelievable ferocity of her defense. With her right hand she would pluck an assailant out of the air—in mid-leap—and with her left hand, which clasped an immense butcher knife, she would remove her opponent's head with one blow of the blade. For all the world like a farmer's wife beheading chickens! Even as I watched, two heads joined the half dozen which—I now noticed—were lying about in the street like an urchin's rag balls.