The Magic Goes Away

by Larry Niven

  The Warlock detached a mirror from the wall, brought it and held it. Wavyhill’s skull studied itself for a time. It said, “You just had to do that, didn’t you?”

  “I owed you one. Now you have a decision to make. Do you want to die? I can cancel the spell of immortality you put on yourself.”

  “I don’t know. Let me think about it. What do you want of me, Warlock?”

  “Some technical help.”

  The skull laughed. “From me?”

  “You were the world’s first necromancer. You were powerful enough to defeat me,” said the Warlock. “I’d be dead if I hadn’t brought help. You used your power for evil, but nobody doubts your skill. Tomorrow I meet two powerful magicians. We’ll want your advice.”

  “Do I know of them?”

  “Piranther. Mirandee.”

  “Piranther!” The skull chuckled. “I’d like to see that meeting. Piranther walked out on your conference, didn’t he? After you called him a shortsighted fool. I heard that he took a whole colony of his people to the South Land Mass and swore never to come back.”

  “You heard right. And he never did come back, but he’s coming now.”

  The skull was silent for a time. Then it said, “You’ve roused my interest. I don’t care to die just now. Under the circumstances that may be silly, but I can’t help it. Can you make me a whole man again?”

  “Look at me.”

  The Warlock’s back was festive with colored inks: a five-sided tattoo, hypnotic in its complexity. The famous demon trap, once a housing for the Warlock’s guardian demon, was empty now; but he still preferred to wear nothing above the waist. Its purpose had been lost, but the habit remained.

  It showed him to disadvantage. The Warlock’s ribs protruded. His small pot belly protruded. Pouchy, wrinkled, unflexible skin masked the strong lines of his face and showed the shrinkage of his musculature. Vertebrae marched like a tiny mountain range across the fading inks of the empty demon trap.

  The skull sighed mournfully.

  “Look at me! I’d wish my youth back, if wishing were all it took,” the Warlock said. “I was young for two hundred years. Now the spells are failing. All spells are failing.”

  “So you need a necromancer.” The dots on the grapes turned to the red man. “Are you involved in this madness too?”

  “Of course.”

  The Warlock said, “This is Clubfoot, our ally.”

  “A pleasure. I’d take hands, but you see how it is,” said Wavyhill.

  Clubfoot was not amused. “One day you may have hands again, but you will never take my hand. I’ve seen the villages you gutted. I helped kill you, Wavyhill.”

  The dots on the grapes turned back to the Warlock. “And this tactless boor is to be our ally? Well, what is your project?”

  “We’re going to discuss means of restoring the world’s mana.”

  The skull’s laugh was high and shrill. The Warlock waited it out. Presently he said, “Are you finished?”

  “Possibly. Will it take all five of us?”

  “I tried to call a full meeting of the Guild. Only ten answered the call. Of the ten, three felt able to travel.”

  “Has it occurred to you that magic can only use up mana? Never restore it?”

  “We’re not fools. What about an outside source?”

  “Such as?”

  “The Moon.”

  The Warlock expected more laughter. It did not come. “Mana from the Moon? I never would have thought of that in a thousand years. Still…why not? Starstones are rich in mana. Why not the Moon?”

  “With enough mana, and the right spells, you could be human again.”

  The skull laughed. “And so could you, Warlock. But where would we find magic powerful enough to reach the Moon?”

  The door rocked to thunderous knocking.

  The magicians froze. Then Clubfoot stripped a bracelet from his upper arm. He looked through it at the door. “No magic involved,” he said. “A mundane.”

  “What would a mundane want with us?”

  “Maybe the building’s on fire.” Clubfoot raised his voice. “You, there—”

  Neither the old spells, nor the old bar across the door, were strong enough. The door exploded inward behind a tremendous kick. An armed man stepped into the room and looked about him.

  “I have to talk to a magician,” he told them.

  “You are interrupting magicians engaged in private business,” said the Warlock. No sane man would have needed more warning.

  The intruder was raggedly shaved, his long black hair raggedly chopped at shoulder length. His dark eyes studied two men and a skull decorated with macabre humor. “You are magicians,” he said wonderingly. In the next instant he almost died; for he drew his sword, and Clubfoot raised his arms.

  The Warlock shook Clubfoot’s shoulder. “Stop! It’s broken!”

  “Yes. I broke it,” said the intruder. He looked at the bladeless hilt, then suddenly threw it into a corner of the room. He took two steps forward and closed hands like bronze clamps on the Warlock’s thin shoulders. He looked searchingly into the Warlock’s face. He said, “Why did it happen?”

  Clubfoot’s arms were raised again.

  Human beings are fragile, watery things. Death spells are the easiest magic there is.

  “Back up and start over,” said the Warlock. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who are you?”

  “Orolandes. Greek soldier.”

  “Why did you break your sword?”

  “I hated it. I thought maybe it happened because of the people I killed. Not the other soldiers. The priests.”

  Clubfoot exclaimed, “You were in the Atlantis invasion!”

  “Yes. We finally invaded Atlantis. First time Greeks ever got that far.” Orolandes released the Warlock. He looked like a sleepwalker; he wasn’t seeing anything here in the room. “We came for slaves and treasure. That’s all.”

  “And trade advantage,” said the Warlock.

  “Uh? Maybe. Nobody told me anything like that. Anyway, we won. The armies of Atlantis must have gotten soft. We went through them like they were nothing. But the priests were something else. They stood in a long line on the steps of the big temple and waved their arms. We got sick. Some of us died. But we kept coming, crawling—I was crawling, anyway—and we got to them and killed them. And then Atlantis was ours.”

  He looked with haunted eyes at the magicians. “Ours. At last. Hundreds of years we’d dreamed of conquering Atlantis. We’d take their treasure. We’d take away their weapons. We’d make them pay tribute. But we never, we never wanted to kill them all. Old men, women, children, everyone. Nobody ever thought of that.”

  “You son of a troll. I had friends in Atlantis,” said Clubfoot. “How did you live through it? Why didn’t you die with the rest?”

  “Uh? There was a big gold Tau symbol at the top of the steps. We were laughing and bragging and binding up our wounds when the land started to shake. Everybody fell over. The Tau thing cracked at the base and fell on the steps. Then someone pointed west, and the horizon was going up. It didn’t look like water. It was too misty, too big. It looked like the horizon was getting higher and higher.

  “I crawled under the Tau thing with my back against the step. Captain Iason was shouting that it wasn’t real, it was just an illusion, we must have missed some of the priests. The water came down like the end of the world. I guess the Tau thing saved my life—even the water couldn’t move it, it was so heavy—but it almost killed me too. I had to get out from under it and try to swim up.

  “I grabbed something that was floating up with me. It turned out to be part of a wooden roof. I got on it. A centaur girl came swimming by and I hauled her up on the roof. I thought, well, at least I saved one of them. And then she just fell over.”

  Clubfoot said, “There’s magic in centaur metabolism. Without mana she died.”

  “But what happened? Did we do it?”

  “You did it,” said Clubfoot.<
br />
  “I thought…maybe…you’d say…”

  “You did it. You killed them all.”

  The Warlock said, “Atlantis should have been under the ocean hundreds of years ago. Only the spells of the priest-kings kept that land above the waves.”

  Orolandes nodded dumbly. He turned to the door.

  “Stop him,” said Wavyhill. As Orolandes turned to the new voice, the skull snapped, “You. Swordsman. How would you like a chance to make amends?”

  Orolandes gaped at the talking skull.

  “Well? You wiped out a whole continent, people and centaurs and merpeople and all. You broke your sword, you were so disgusted at yourself. How would you like to do something good for a change? Keep it from happening to others.”

  “Yes.”

  Clubfoot asked, “What is this?”

  “We may need him. I may know of a source of very powerful mana.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll reserve that. Do the words ‘god within a god’ mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” The skull chuckled. “We’ll see what develops tomorrow. See to it that this…Orolandes is with us when we meet your friends. You, Orolandes, have you got a room here?”

  “I can get one.”

  “Meet us at dawn, for breakfast.”

  Orolandes nodded and walked out. There was no spring in his walk. His sword hilt he left lying in a corner.

  From Prissthil’s gate one could make out an elliptical depression, oddly regular, in the background of low green hills. Time had eroded Fistfall’s borders; they disappeared as one came near. Greenery had covered the pits and dirt piles where earlier men had dug for starstone. From what must be the rim, Orolandes could see only that the land sloped gradually down, then gradually up again.

  It was just past sunrise; there was still shadow in the hollow. Orolandes shivered in the morning chill.

  The old man did not shiver, though he walked naked to the waist. A talking skull sat on his shoulder, fastened by straps over the lower jaw. He and the skull and the younger man chatted as they walked: trivia mixed with incomprehensible shop talk mixed with reminiscence from many lifetimes.

  Orolandes shivered. He had fallen among magicians, willingly and by design, and he was not sure of his sanity. Before that terrible day in Atlantis he would never have considered a magician to be anything but an enemy.

  In the village of the fisherfolk Orolandes had waited for the images to go away. Don’t speak of it, don’t think of it; the vivid memories would fade.

  But in the dark of sleep the sea would rise up and up and over to swallow the world, with his spoils and his men and the people he’d conquered. He would snap awake then, to stare into the dark until it turned light.

  Or on a bright afternoon he would heave at the awkward weight of a net filled with fish…and he would remember pulling at the limp, awkwardly right-angled centaur girl, trying to get her up on the broken roof. She’d had to lie on her side; he’d felt unspeakably clumsy trying to give her artificial respiration. But he’d seen her breathe at last! He’d seen her eyelids flicker open, seen her head lift and look at him…seen the life go out of her then, draining away to somewhere else.

  What had happened that day? If he knew why, then the horror would leave him, and the guilt…He had clung to that notion until last night. Now he knew. What the magicians had told him was worse than he had imagined.

  The notion he clung to now might be the silliest of all. Orolandes could read nothing in the white bone face of the dead magician. Even to its friends it was a tolerated evil. But nobody else had offered Orolandes any breath of comfort.

  On the strength of a skull’s vague promise, he was here. He would wait and see.

  The Warlock felt uncommonly alive. As they moved into Fistfall his vision and his hearing sharpened, his normal dyspepsia eased. Over the centuries the townspeople had removed every tiniest fragment of the boulder that had come flaming down from the skies; but vaporized rock had condensed and sifted down all over this region, and there was no removing it. Old spells took new strength.

  Down there in the shadow, two walked uphill toward them.

  “I recognize Mirandee,” said Clubfoot. “Would that be Piranther?”

  “I think so. I only met him once.”

  Clubfoot laughed. “Once was enough?”

  “I’m surprised he came. We didn’t part as friends. I was so sure I was right, I got a little carried away. Well, but that was fifty years ago.” The Warlock turned to the swordsman. “Orolandes, I should have said it before. You can still turn back.”

  The big man’s hand kept brushing his empty scabbard. He looked at the Warlock with too-wide eyes and said, “No.”

  “You are about to learn the secrets of magicians. It isn’t likely you’ll learn too much, but if you do, we may have to tamper with your memory.”

  It was the first time the Warlock had seen him smile. The swordsman said, “There are parts you can cut out while you’re about it.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “I’m not sure. What kind of man is that? Or is it the woman’s familiar?”

  The man approaching them was small and dark-skinned and naked in the autumn chill. His hair was white and puffy as a ripe dandelion. A skin bag hung on a thong around his neck.

  “His people come from the South Land Mass,” said Clubfoot. “They’re powerful and touchy. Be polite.”

  Piranther’s companion was a head taller than he was, a slender woman in a vivid blue robe. Snow-white hair fell to her waist and bobbed with her walk. Mirandee and the Warlock had dwelt together in a year long past, sharing knowledge and other things, experimenting with sex magic in a way that was only partly professional.

  But now her eyes only brushed the Warlock and moved on. “Clubfoot, a pleasure to see you again! And your friends.” Visibly she wondered what the scarred, brawny, bewildered man was doing here. Then she turned back to the Warlock, and the blood drained from her face.

  What was this? Was she reacting to the bizarre decorated skull on his shoulder? No. She took a half-step forward and said, “Oh my gods! Warlock!”

  So that was it. “The magic goes away,” he told her gently. “I wish I’d thought to send you some warning. I see that your own youth spells have held better.”

  “Well, but I’m younger. But you are all right?”

  “I live. I walk. My mind is intact. I’m two hundred and forty years old, Mirandee.”

  Wavyhill spoke from the Warlock’s shoulder. “He’s in better shape than I am.”

  The woman’s eyes shifted, her brow lifted in enquiry.

  “I am Wavyhill. Mirandee, I know you by reputation.”

  “And I you.” Her voice turned winter-cold. “Warlock, is it proper that we deal with this…murderer?”

  “For his skill and his knowledge, I think so.”

  The skull cackled. “I know too much to be absent, my dear. Trust me, Mirandee, and forgive me the lives of a few dozens of mundanes. We’re here to restore the magic that once infused the world. I want that more than you do. Obviously.”

  But Mirandee was looking at the Warlock when she answered Wavyhill. “No. You don’t.”

  The age-withered black man spoke for the first time. “Skull, I sense the ambition in you. Otherwise you conceal your thoughts. What is it you hide?”

  “I would bow if I could. Piranther, I am honored to meet you,” said Wavyhill. “Do you know of the god within a god?”

  Piranther’s brow wrinkled. “These words mean nothing to me.”

  “Then I have knowledge you need. A point for bargaining. Please notice that I am more helpless than any infant. On that basis, will you let me stay? I won’t ask you to trust me.”

  Piranther’s eyes shifted. His face was as blank as his mind, and his mind was as dark and hidden as the floor of the ocean. “Warlock, I should be gratified that you still live. And you must be Clubfoot; I know you by reputation. But who are you, sir
?”

  “Orolandes. I, I was asked to come.”

  Wavyhill said, “I asked him. His motives are good. Let him stay.”

  Piranther half-smiled. “On trust?”

  Wavyhill snorted. “You’re a magician, they say. Read his mind. He hasn’t the defenses of a turtle.”

  That, and Piranther’s slow impassive nod…“No!” cried Orolandes, and his hand spasmed above the empty scabbard. He backed away.

  The skull said, “Stop it, Greek. What have you to hide?”

  Orolandes moaned. His guilt was agony; he wanted to burrow in the ground. One flash of hate he felt for these who would judge him: for the Warlock’s sympathy, the woman’s cool curiosity, the black demon’s indifference, the red magician’s irritation at time-wasting preliminaries. But Orolandes had already judged himself. He stood fast.

  Corpses floated in shoals around his raft. They covered the sea as far as the horizon. Sharks and killer whales leapt among them…

  Piranther made a grimace of distaste. “You might have warned me. Oh, very well, Wavyhill, he’s certainly harmless. But he trusts you no more than I do.”

  “And why should he?”

  Piranther shrugged. He settled gracefully onto a small grassy hillock. “I had hoped to be addressing thirty or forty trained magicians. It bodes ill for us that no more than five could come. But here we are. Who speaks?”

  There was an awkward pause. Clubfoot said, “If nobody else wants to…”

  “Proceed.”

  Mirandee and the Warlock settled cross-legged on the ground.

  Clubfoot looked toward Mount Valhalla, collecting his thoughts. He may have been regretting his temerity. After all, he was the youngest of the magicians present. Well—

  “First there were the gods,” he said. “Earth sparkled with magic in those days, and nothing was impossible. The first god almost certainly created himself. Later gods may not have been that powerful, but there are tales of mountains piled one on another to reach sky-dwelling gods and overthrow them, of a god torn to pieces and the fragments forming whole pantheons, of the sun being stopped in its track for trivial purposes. The gods’ lives were fueled by magic, not fire. Eventually the mana level dropped too low, and the gods went mythical…as I suppose we’d die if fires stopped burning.