by Heide Goody
“They need a wizard. Since I am the best wizard in town, I’m the obvious choice.”
“The only wizard in town, you mean,” said Spirry.
“And therefore the best.”
Spirry opened the bag. She frowned, shaking it upside down to demonstrate it was empty.
Pagnell reached forward and pulled a dry jaffled cake from behind her ear. “Amazing sleight of hand,” he said.
Spirry snatched the jaffled cake from him. “We need the Quill of Truth to stand any chance of completing our greater mission. Failure will be disastrous, Pagnell.”
“Have faith,” he said.
3
The Upgate market in Ludens was crowded and dusty. Pagnell and Spirry had wedged themselves in the small gap between a baker’s stall and a cloth merchant’s to watch a magician performing on a stage made from trestles laid over barrels. Spirry stood on an upturned crate to see over the crowd. The magician’s robes were black and billowing, cobweb thin. Mystical shapes, embroidered in silver, hung on it like moonlit dew. He was doing a lot of talking and not a lot of magicking.
“Do you fear the gods?” asked Spirry.
“Where did that come from?” said Pagnell.
Spirry’s eyebrows rose with a lazy thoughtfulness. “We’re going to steal the Quill of Truth.”
“Borrow.”
“Without permission.”
“Yes.”
“I was thinking how the goddess Buqit might feel about that.”
Pagnell gave the matter some thought. He was about to answer the question when Spirry asked, “Why’s that woman on the stage not wearing any clothes?”
Pagnell tutted irritably. “You were asking me about the gods. And she is wearing clothes.”
“Not many.”
“Some.”
“If I went out into the streets wearing as few clothes as that, you would have something to say about it.”
An awkward uncomfortableness caught in Pagnell’s throat. “I … I certainly would. And I am grateful you’ve taken my advice regarding human clothing so seriously. It’s okay for that woman to dress like that, with all the bangles and veils and whatnot, because it’s part of her job.”
Spirry wrinkled her nose. “Job? All she’s doing is wandering up and down the stage, waving her arms about and winking at the men in the crowd.”
“And that’s her job. She’s trying to add an air of ineffable mysticism to the act by appearing foreign and exotic; an alluring creature from some far off place.”
“Where’s she meant to be from?”
“She’s not meant to be from anywhere. She’s just trying to be foreign, in general.”
“Ah. And what does ineffable mean?”
“Hmmm. It’s hard to describe.” He scratched his beard reflectively. “Of course, the magician’s assistant’s real job is to divert the audience’s attention from noticing the trick he’s about to pull.”
“Trick?”
“The table he’s using is clearly too thick, and there’s a concealed compartment within it from which he’s going to produce— What’s he supposed to be doing?”
“Conjuring a banquet fit for the Hierophant’s table.”
“Yes. That.”
Spirry stood on tiptoes to see better over the crowd. The crate she stood on wobbled. Pagnell put a foot on it to keep it steady.
“So, the magician is going to trick the onlookers into thinking he’s performed magic,” said Spirry. “He’s making fools of them.”
“We’re all fools until we work out how it’s done,” said Pagnell.
“And the assistant is only there to distract the people from noticing how it’s done?”
“Yes.”
“By not wearing many clothes and appearing alluring.”
“Yes.”
Spirry thought about it. “Do you think she’s alluring?”
Pagnell opened his mouth to answer. A thought struck him, and he hesitated. “I do not have questionable taste in women, Spiriva Handihaler.”
She smirked.
Pagnell fumed silently for a minute while the magician produced pigeon and pineapple and pomegranate out of nowhere, announcing each with alliterative smugness.
“To answer your original question,” Pagnell said coldly, “I believe Buqit will not object to our actions.”
“You think she won’t mind you stealing the Quill of Truth?”
“I think it’s more of a case she won’t notice, or won’t bother to notice. I don’t see the gods getting involved in the affairs of the world that often. Why meddle in the affairs of men when you’ve got priests to do it for you?”
He nudged her and pointed at a priest in the crowd. The round-faced man was watching the magician whilst hopping on one foot. He looked quite out of breath.
“What’s he doing that for?” said Spirry.
“I think it’s one of the items on their list of things to do.”
“Or maybe he’s just stubbed his toe and is keeping his weight off it.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I could ask him.”
“Don’t ask him.”
“He won’t mind.”
“Don’t ask him,” insisted Pagnell, but she was already gone.
4
The invasion came shortly after nightfall.
Pagnell and Spirry were already in the tavern on the corner of Kidgate and Mercer Row when it happened. Pagnell sipped at his tankard as shouts and roars and screams filled the streets outside. Spirry stared at her ale.
“Why do they do this?”
Pagnell looked at her. “Are you referring to beer or war?”
“Um. I was thinking of beer, but I suppose both.”
“Well, beer is delicious and a good use of barley. War is stupid. Both are strangely irresistible to certain people with no consideration of how today’s actions might have consequences tomorrow.”
“I don’t like it,” said Spirry.
“Beer or war?”
The sounds of fighting faded as the hour passed. By seven bells, there were no more shouts from the streets. Those who had cowered in the tavern afraid to go home, did so. Those who had cowered at home and now needed a drink to settle their nerves took their place.
Spirry nudged Pagnell. Pagnell nodded: the wizard Abington had just walked in.
Pagnell had a hazy recollection of seeing him before, at a meeting of a wizardly order or some such in Yarwich. Tall, broad and swinging his beard about like it was his royal standard, Abington had argued with his fellow wizards, said something to upset Pagnell’s friend and mentor, Tibshelf, and swanned out again. It was like having a disreputable and cantankerous uncle who no one saw except at funerals, and who only turned up to rekindle old family feuds and maybe start some new ones.
“Yep,” said Pagnell softly.
“Who’s the woman with him?” said Spirry.
“The one with dirt on her face?” He shrugged.
Abington and the grubby young woman took seats at a central table. He sent her off to fetch him beer.
“So, what now? When are you going to perform your amazing sleight of hand?” asked Spirry.
Pagnell squeezed the pouch of box moss in his hand, slowly flexing and unflexing his fingers. “I have to choose my moment carefully. First, I’ll let him slake his thirst and—”
“Slake?” said Spirry.
“Yes, slake. It means to satisfy with drink.”
“So, you’re going to wait until he’s had a drink or two.”
“Yes.”
“You should have just said that instead of using a fancy word.”
“I’m going to wait until he’s slaked his thirst—”
“Had a drink or two.”
“—and then I’ve got a choice. I can charm my way into his confidence and get close to him. Or I can be generally obnoxious and grating and draw him in through confrontation, rather than ingratiation.”
“The second one,” said Spirry. “Definitely the second
one.”
Pagnell gave a joking sneer but she was right. Rubbing people up the wrong way came more easily.
So, as the two performers on their makeshift stage tried to entertain the clientele with their accounts of the day’s doings, Pagnell interjected like the self-important know-it-all he knew himself to sometimes be, and criticised the quality of the artist’s paintwork along with the logical consistency of their stories.
“Shut your jabber, fool!” called Abington with a scowl.
The storyteller struggled on with his tales, drawing some old chap at the back of the tavern into his account. Pagnell was about to throw some other unhelpful comments into the mix, maybe get Abington embroiled in an argument, when the tavern door was flung open and a giant of woman in Amanni armour stepped in. That she was here for Abington was certain.
While the performers stuttered in the presence of one of the supposed invaders, Pagnell leaned over to Spirry. “I want you to go back to the house. Now.”
“Why?” said Spirry.
“I hadn’t planned on doing this with one of Merken’s soldiers watching.”
“Does it make a difference?”
“She’s been sent to fetch Abington. I’m out of time. Just go.”
“But I haven’t finished my beer,” she said, looking at the pot which had stood untouched all evening.
Pagnell attempted to give her a stern look. It was easy to forget Spirry wasn’t a child; stern looks just slid off her like peas from a knife. “Please,” he said.
“This place is boring anyway,” she replied.
“Stay in the rooms. Stay hidden.”
She pouted. “You say it like I’m going to fly around the city, shouting ‘Look at me!’”
He made a reproachful noise but reproachful noises were as effective as stern looks on Spirry.
As the Amanni warrior ploughed through the crowd, and the crowd nearly came to blows trying to get out of her way, Spirry slipped away.
The Amanni giantess sat at the table across from Abington and the grubby young woman. Pagnell watched their conversation, hoping to glean something of the tenor of their interactions; something to give him an edge; a way in when he approached. The wizard and the warrior weren’t friends: that was as much as he could see.
He told himself he was just stalling now so, when the young woman went to the bar for more drinks, Pagnell tried to still his nervous innards, put on his best smile and crossed to their table.
“Go on then,” he said, beaming as he sat down. “Tell me how it was done.”
Abington was curtly angry. The woman was quizzical.
“The sneak attack on the city. Was it magic?” persisted Pagnell.
At that comment, the woman offered to put him to the sword. Well, at least he had their attention. He backtracked, made some bland comments, introduced himself, and offered a handshake which both of them pointedly ignored.
In response, Pagnell launched into his general spiel on his career in oral hygiene and tooth care, partly out of spite and partly because talk of dentistry either brought out the angry side in people or lulled them into a bored stupor. In the case of the warrior woman, Cope, it brought on wide-eyed terror. As far as Pagnell could work out, she feared he was a tooth-stealing sorcerer and in league with the fairies, which was only partially true. Offers to show her his dental tools did little to assuage her fears.
Abington was unimpressed with Pagnell’s wizarding credentials and his offer to inspect Cope’s teeth. Abington declared Pagnell’s claims of dental prowess to be “Calumnious codswallop,” and set about savagely scraping out his dead pipe. The older man had three pouches tied to the cord of his rope belt. The nearest was fringed with crumbs of pipe weed. Pagnell only needed a moment’s distraction to add the box moss to it.
That distraction came almost at once with the return of the dirt-smeared woman from the bar, along with the handsome painter fellow about whose work Pagnell had been unnecessarily rude. While introductions were made and the artist chap, Bez, tried to engage Cope in some proposed artistic endeavour, Pagnell reached under the preoccupied Abington’s arm, and thumbed a pinch of the box moss into the top of the pouch. What he hadn’t planned for was the loop of twine holding the pouch to the belt coming loose, and the pouch dropping to the floor.
No one noticed it fall. Eyes were elsewhere as Cope rose to speak privately with Bez, and the young woman took her seat.
“Do me then,” she said to Pagnell.
“Sorry?” said Pagnell. He saw her toothy grin and understood. “Yes, indeed. Open wide.”
Pagnell ached to pick up the dropped pouch. It was now tainted with the narcotic box moss and if Abington saw it had fallen, he would be suspicious. He might check its contents before smoking them.
As he chit-chatted mindlessly about the young woman’s dental history, he composed a plan of sorts. He would inflict a petty conjuring trick on Abington, a jaffled cake from behind the ear or something, a plainly obvious and entirely unmagical piece of legerdemain guaranteed to irk the self-important man. Behind that distraction he could bend down and retie the pouch to the belt. He even had a spell he could adapt to that end.
“You’re from Carius, Lorrika,” said Pagnell, espying the evidence of Carian dental work on one of her milling teeth. “Or thereabouts. Someone has tried to use beeswax to cure a rotten tooth. Failed, but tried.”
“I’m amazed,” said Lorrika.
“Then you’re a fool!” muttered Abington.
“As I said, we’re all fools until we work out how it’s done,” said Pagnell. “Half of magic is trickery.”
“Trickery be damned,” snorted Abington.
“For instance, if I was to do this…” He reached forward and was about to produce a previously palmed coin from out of Abington’s beard when there was a loud metallic crunch from the corner of the room. Pagnell glanced over to see the artist chap, Bez, falling to the ground, Cope standing over him. Abington turned to look properly.
Quickly, Pagnell reached down, snagged the pouch between fingertips. At the mutter of Nolan’s Magic Thread it secured itself tightly to Abington’s belt in the space between the other two pouches. Even as he sat back, and Abington returned his attention to the conversation, Pagnell began to wonder if he’d reattached the pouch in the correct place. Abington looked down and seemed not to realise.
“So, what else can you tell about me?” said Lorrika as Abington filled his pipe with a furious energy. “What do my ears say? I’ve been told I’ve got ears like a fairy.”
“That I wouldn’t know,” said Pagnell, smiling, relieved the tricky part of the job was done. “My experience of fairies is limited, and dentistry only extends to teeth and gums and the apparatus of the mouth. What would we be without our mouths and our voices, eh?”
“Quiet, perhaps,” grumped Abington and rammed his pipe into the corner of his mouth.
Pagnell no longer cared for the old man’s uncharitable mutterings. Abington just needed to take a few puffs of the pipe and he would be asleep and out of Pagnell’s misery.
“Show me another tooth and I will speak all manner of truths,” said Pagnell. Cope immediately placed a very recently removed cutting tooth on the table. “Well, I didn’t mean it quite like that,” he said.
“We’re going now,” Cope told Abington.
Not yet, pleaded Pagnell silently. Not just yet.
Abington extracted a bundle of fire-matches out of his robe sleeve.
“At a guess – and it is a guess,” said Pagnell, looking at the tooth which had until very recently belonged to a young artist, “I’d say this is the tooth of an idiot.”
Abington lit a match. “Toss a stone in this place,” he said, putting it to his pipe, “and you’d hit a dozen brainless idiots.”
Abington drew deeply on the pipe. Pagnell saw a curl of green smoke rise from the bowl. Green smoke? Sathean fire powder! But—
The flash of the explosion blinded Pagnell. Something hot sliced past his face. Whe
n he came groggily to his sense, his body was trying to stand, to get away from the table. The warrior woman, Cope, grabbed him firmly by the collar.
“You’re going nowhere.”
Pagnell blinked. “What?”
5
Pagnell blinked. “What?”
They were in the bowels of Foesen’s tomb, in a hall littered with the dried, mingled remains of hundreds of individuals (most of which were now on fire). A mob of insanely tenacious grimlocks was charging at them through the room’s only exit, and Bez had chosen that moment to mutter some nonsense about eagles descending from the abode of the gods.
Pagnell had no time to remonstrate with the artist or consider his words. The rock beneath his feet bucked and rose and the world twirled. Pagnell came down hard on his shoulder, the air knocked from his lungs.
A massive shape moved through a sudden cloud of dust which enveloped everything. The dust confused perspective and scale, but to Pagnell’s eyes it looked like a giant bird was stalking across the room. Pagnell had a healthy dislike for birds. His mentor, Tibshelf, had owned a colourful caged bird which snapped at unwary fingers, and squawked constantly unless its cage was covered and the brainless creature was fooled into thinking it was night.
The giant bird screeched. It was like a fanfare from the world’s most hateful orchestra.
A grimlock spear rebounded off the bird’s flank.
Pagnell abruptly jumped to a working hypothesis. It was, as Bez had muttered, the divine eagle, Buqit’s mount, Tudu. It made a certain illogical sense. The Quill of Truth was down here. No reason for it not to be guarded by the whole bloody bird.
Pagnell got to his feet. Tudu was chasing through the hall, not discriminating between humans and grimlocks. It snatched up a grimlock in its beak, flattening Lorrika on the backswing. Before it could spear her with its talons, Cope ran in and hacked at it with her longsword. Against the monster’s hide the sword was only an irritant, a distraction, but it gave Lorrika opportunity to scramble away.
If they were to defeat the creature (rather than simply escape it), they would need something other than mundane weapons. Pagnell stuffed his hand in his pocket and found a small tightly-packed pouch. It contained enough box moss to put an army to sleep. He could only hope it worked on the physiology of gargantuan god-birds as well as humans.
