Spell Games

by T. A. Pratt

  “He came out into the sunlight earlier this summer, actually, but only against his will. I think that was the first time he'd seen daylight in decades, if not longer. He comes to council meetings, but they're usually after dark. He wouldn't tell me what it was about, just that it was important, and he needed to discuss it with me in person. He knows I hate his dried-up undead guts, so it's not a social call.” She looked at B's face reflected in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, and was pleased to see the concern there. He was worried about her, which was sweet, if unnecessary.

  “Let me know if it's anything I can help with.”

  “Oh, I will. You can take the Bentley over to the park, if you promise not to cause another multicar pileup.”

  B tapped his temple. “All the bats are cleaned out of my belfry. No worries there.”

  “Good. There's a map in the glove compartment. Park near the east entrance, by the statue of the family of bears. Granger will meet you there. You'll be able to recognize him—he'll be the fat slovenly dude grinning like a moron.”

  “Will do, boss. Good luck with the walking corpse.”

  Bradley walked into the park, and instantly felt soothed. Fludd Park was a little oasis from the honking horns and crowded sidewalks of nearby downtown Felport, a place of trees, paths, statues, and neatly tended flower beds. A wide-shouldered man crouched near a plot of bright yellow-and-white flowers, his fingers plunged in the dirt, his waistband sagging to reveal far too much butt-crack. “Mr. Granger?” B said.

  The man rose, turned, and smiled. He was ugly as a jack-o’-lantern and just as merry, extending one dirt-smeared hand in greeting. B shook it, deciding not to be annoyed at the damp earth soiling his hand. The wizard of the park said, “Just call me Granger. Mr. Granger was my father, and my grandfather, and on and on. I'm the last and there's no little ones, so no mister needed for me.”

  “I'm Bradley. My friends call me B.”

  Granger got a sad and faraway look in his eyes. “B, bee, buzz buzz. Some bad wizard is stealing the bees away, you know, all over. Wild honeybee workers just disappear, colonies die, and then plants die. A bad wizard. At least, I hope it's a wizard. Somebody can fight a bad wizard, beat him, make him stop, bring back the bees. But if it's just the world, just the working of the world that's stealing the bees away, then I don't know. I just don't know. The poor flowers. The poor trees. The poor everything.” Then he grinned again. “But the bees here are good, plenty good, I tend them, I do, I keep my little patch of the forest healthy.” He slapped B on the back with a hand that seemed as broad as a tennis racket, but it wasn't a painfully hard slap—Granger seemed like a man who knew his own strength.

  B decided he disagreed with Marla. He liked Granger. Maybe the guy wasn't all there mentally, but it seemed more likely his thoughts just ran in directions that were incomprehensible to Marla. She didn't have a lot of patience for the natural world, but B had always liked green spaces. B suspected Granger didn't have a particle of malice in his whole being… which was also probably part of why Marla didn't like him. She distrusted the gentle and the kind. “It looks beautiful here,” B said. “I can't wait to see what you have to teach me.”

  Granger made a puffing noise that, perhaps, indicated uncertainty. He tucked his thumbs in his waistband and whistled low. “Well, now, well. Well well well. Marla said I had to teach you a trick. Something good. I said I'd teach you how to make beautiful things grow, and she said, ‘No no, Granger, no no, that won't do, teach him magic.’ I said I'm not so good at seeing where tending the land and doing magic come unmixed, and she said do my best, do what other gardeners can't do, no matter how green their thumbs are. So I thought. I thought and thought and thought.” He stood for a moment, gazing down at the flower bed.

  B gazed down with him. After a couple of minutes, he said, “So what did you decide?”

  Granger looked up at him, expression strangely searching, as if wondering who B was, and what he wanted. Then he grinned that face-crossing grin again and said, “I'm going to teach you how to be a bird.” Granger snapped his fingers, and the trees and Granger himself and the whole world rushed away fast and got very big and tall, and when B tried to shout, he produced only a startled sort of coo, and when he flapped his wings—

  Oh, shit. B hopped in frantic little circles on the ground. I'm a fucking pigeon.

  “Pretty bird,” Granger said, and B flew away in a flurry of terrified fluttering, his bird-body reacting with panic before his human brain could intervene.

  “I have to take a gift.” Viscarro slammed his palms down on the long library table. “You idiot, I'm going to see the chief sorcerer of Felport, and I must come bearing a gift! You wish me to offend the woman I'm supposed to be gently interrogating?”

  “I do not trust you.” Bulliard crossed his arms.

  “What, do you think I'll try to smuggle her a special mushroom magician-destroying sword? If you want her to be angry and suspicious, then, by all means, send me empty-handed. I can't be responsible.”

  “You know, mossface,” the messenger said, “it's not exactly unheard of in social protocols for somebody lower in a hierarchy to bring a gift for someone higher in the hierarchy I know your social sphere is limited to you, the bugs you eat, and the Mycelium, but—”

  “I sometimes bring the Mycelium gifts,” Bulliard said slowly “Hikers. Campers. Careless park rangers.”

  “This is just like that,” the messenger said. “Only instead of, you know, dead bodies, Viscarro wants to take Marla Mason a scented candle or something.”

  “She's more partial to jewelry,” Viscarro said. “That vault there is full of pretty things. There's a particular necklace—”

  “No,” Bulliard said. “I will allow a gift, but I will not let you choose it. Messenger. Go to the vault. Bring back something appropriate.”

  The messenger went to the vault, used the combination Viscarro provided to open it, and stepped inside as the lights automatically came in.

  The vault was a treasure cave, walls lined with hooks, shelves lined with stands, all holding necklaces, bracelets, rings, brooches, circlets, and tiaras, all the colors of the Earth, silver and gold and platinum, adorned with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, black pearls, and more and more and more. He cast around, overwhelmed by the splendor, knowing that if he filled his pockets here he'd never have to work as a courier again, he'd be able to pay off all his debts (except the karmic ones), and live in a mansion eating foie gras topped with caviar washed down with champagne forever.

  “Quickly!” Bulliard shouted, and, as quickly, the messenger's fantasies shimmered and dissolved. He chose a necklace at random—a simple silver choker with a large and somehow luminous black stone in the center—and carried it out.

  “Here,” he said, and tossed it to Viscarro, who caught it, looked at it, grunted, and nodded.

  “Fine,” Viscarro said. “It will do. Perhaps Marla will like it enough that she will refrain from beating me for wasting her time with inquiries about imaginary spores.”

  “I don't mind if you're beaten,” Bulliard said.

  “He really doesn't,” the messenger agreed.

  B landed in a tree… and Granger was already there, improbably perched on a branch as wide as a park bench. He was chewing on an apple, and looked like he'd been waiting there patiently for hours, though B had only flown away from him seconds ago.

  Granger wiped juice from his mouth with his sleeve, and said, “Sorry. Too quick? Should have been slower. Explained more. But, see, you're a bird. The hard part of being a bird is being a bird the first time. After the first time, your body remembers, your mind remembers, you know how to do it, if you aren't careful, you can go birdie in your sleep just from dreaming it. But, oh, to fly…”

  B squawked impatiently.

  “Oh, yes.” Granger snapped his fingers again, and suddenly B was all big again, and falling out of the tree—but Granger caught him, almost offhandedly, grabbing him under the armpits and hauling him up t
o sit on the branch beside him. B was closer to the trunk, and he grabbed on as tight as he could, hugging the bole. “Did I do bad?” Granger said, sounding miserable.

  B glanced down. He couldn't even see the ground, which seemed impossible—hadn't he flown to just an ordinary little tree with a few sparse branches? This tree seemed huge—shouldn't it have seemed smaller, now that B himself was bigger?

  “I—no, you didn't do bad. I was just… startled. I've never been a bird before.”

  “Being a bird is great. Flying, when you're a person, is hard.” He shook his head. “Lot of sorcerers can fly that way, but you have to make gravity angry, hurt gravity's feelings, and even then it's not so much flying as falling away from the center of the Earth. Like skydiving, only backwards. But when you're a bird…” He flapped his arms, apparently unconcerned about the vertiginous drop below them. “It's nice to fly when you're a bird.”

  “It… was nice. I think. Once you take away the terrified. But why a pigeon?”

  “Could've made you a hawk. A bald eagle. Those get noticed, though. Marla said teach you something good, something useful. Owls are okay but bad in the daytime. Gulls are okay but only by the water or the garbage dump. Pigeons? Pigeons are okay fast, okay good fliers, best of all nobody notices a pigeon, day or night, anytime, pigeons are just pigeons. You can be a pigeon in this city and nobody will think anything about it.”

  “That makes sense. Keep a low profile. I get it. So, ah, now that I've been a bird once, I can—”

  “Yes.” Granger reached over, grabbed B by the arm, broke his grip on the trunk, and tossed him out of the tree.

  “Fuuuuuuck!” B shouted, but by the time he got to the end of the word, it wasn't so much a shout as a caw, and he was a bird again. Granger was perched on a limb below him, holding out his hand, palm up, and B landed on it. Without intending to, he pooped in Granger's hand.

  Granger laughed and laughed and laughed. He set B down on the branch, wiped his shat-upon hand on the branch, and said, “Okay, change back.”

  “How am I supposed to—Oh.” B looked around. He was himself again. “That was… surprisingly easy.”

  Granger shrugged. “Like I said. First time's hard. Almost impossible, to do by yourself. So I did it for you. Not the, ah, responsible way? My daddy made me learn to do it by myself. I had to watch birds. Talk to birds. Live with birds in the trees. Eventually, I understood. Daddy would say this is a shortcut, a bad shortcut, teaching bad habits, but it's okay for you, you aren't a Granger, you don't have to watch out for the park.” He sighed. “Nobody but me to watch out for the park.”

  “Are we…even in the park anymore?”

  “Sort of. Sort of the park. You know. Daddy called them fishbowl worlds….”

  “Pocket universes?” B was thinking of Ernesto's lessons with twisted space.

  “Yes. This is… next to the park. Above the park. This is where the trees go as big as they want, as big as they can, without worrying about water, sun, food, gravity, weight, parasites. Trees tall as mountains here. Up higher, there are branches so wide that other trees grow on them. There are branches as wide as streets. And the sun up there… it's the best sun ever. It nourishes all. Being connected to this place, it helps the park.”

  “This is a beautiful world, Granger.” B wondered if Marla had any idea how amazing this place was, the power Granger truly had. Probably not. It wasn't the sort of thing she was likely to investigate.

  “You come here when you want. When you're a bird—only when you're a bird. You can't climb high enough when you're you. I like you. You're nice, B.”

  “I like you, too, Granger. Thanks for teaching me to be a bird.”

  “Practice. Be a bird for a little while every day, until it's as easy as blinking, as easy as stand-up-sit-down. But don't be a bird too long, or you'll be more interested in eating bread crumbs than going to work and brushing your teeth. Not too long, or when you're a person again, you might forget the rules and just poop wherever you are as soon as you feel like it instead of going to the bathroom.” Granger looked at his hand and giggled, a very childlike giggle. “You pooped on my hand. You showed me.”

  “And you showed me,” B said. “So… should we get down now?”

  “You can fly down. Just fly down. I want to stay here for a while. The air smells better up here.”

  B took a deep breath. Granger was right.

  “If I can ever do anything for you…”

  Granger looked hopeful, almost embarrassed. “Would you… could you… ask Marla something? I don't like to talk to her. She gets mad. She gets impatient. Worse than Daddy”

  “Sure, Granger, anything.”

  “Ask her if the new nature magician is here to be my apprentice? I'm the last Granger. No sisters, no cousins, no babies. The ducks have babies, the bees have babies, the trees have babies, but no babies for me. But Daddy said, ‘If no babies, an apprentice is okay, somebody to take care of the park.’ I will live a long time yet, but there's a lot to learn, and this new one should start studying—”

  “New one? I'm sorry, Granger, I don't understand.”

  “The sorcerer,” Granger said patiently. “He came last night. I felt him come into the city, a big force of green, as powerful as me, nearly, maybe more stronger, even, except for I have the park. Not the same as me—I am trees and leaves and things that fly, mostly, and he is things that crawl and squelch, I am canopy and he is undergrowth, not what I would choose, but he's nature, he knows nature, he will do.”

  B blinked. “Is he… this sorcerer you felt… he's connected to fungus? To mushrooms?”

  “Oh, yes,” Granger said. “Fungus among us. Fungi. Fun guy!” He frowned. “Maybe not a fun guy”

  “He's… I don't think he's here to learn from you, Granger. I'm sorry. But I'll talk to Marla about helping you find an apprentice, okay?”

  “That's good.” He nodded. “Good good good. You go, be a bird. Don't eat too much birdseed! Don't poop on anybody who doesn't deserve it!” And he laughed and laughed again, and despite the growing unease within B over Bulliard's apparent arrival, it was a good enough laugh that he laughed along a little, too.

  “This is for you.” Viscarro placed a gift-wrapped box on Marla's desk.

  Marla prodded the box with a dagger. It had a bow. A pink bow. “Huh,” she said.

  “It is a gift, to thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice.”

  “What, is it full of poison gas? That wouldn't bother you, since walking corpses don't breathe. But you wouldn't be stupid enough to assassinate me after making an appointment to see me. So, what? Some slow-acting poison?” If this was an attempt on her life, she'd be annoyed—B had sensed no traitorous intent from Viscarro, but his powers had been haywire at the time, so maybe he'd missed something.

  “It's not gas, or poison, or mind control, or anything else.” Viscarro perched himself on the edge of one of her guest chairs. “It is nothing but a gift, I assure you.”

  Marla severed the ribbon with her dagger, levered up the lid, and tipped the box over on its side. A necklace, silver with a shimmery black stone in the center, slid out onto her blotter. “Am I suppose to wear this? What, is it cursed?”

  “It is merely a beautiful necklace. Wear it, pawn it, throw it out the window, it's your choice. It's yours.”

  “Okay. Well. Thanks? This better not be an attempt at courtship.”

  Viscarro shuddered. “Such things are of no interest to me, anymore. This is strictly a business meeting.”

  Marla leaned back in her chair, still keeping an eye on the necklace. Viscarro didn't give gifts. He was a taker, a hoarder, and wouldn't part with one of his treasures, even a gaudy trifle like this, without reason. And if it wasn't meant to hurt her in some way, that meant… “So what can I do for you?”

  “I have heard… certain rumors… about a valuable item that may be in Felport.”

  “Why come to me? You chase down antiques all the time by yourself.”
<
br />   “Considering the nature of the item, I thought it best to come to you,” Viscarro said.

  “Gods, just spill, would you? What are you talking about?”

  “The Borrichius spores. If they're here, and for sale, I would like the opportunity to bid on them.”

  Marla laughed. “You're kidding, right? Do you want me to bring you Santa Claus's sleigh and the Easter Bunny's magical never-ending egg basket while I'm at it?”

  “I have always believed the spores were imaginary as well,” he said stiffly. “But I have recently received… actionable intelligence… to suggest they exist, and are in the city, or will be soon.”

  “You took some bullshit rumor seriously enough to come up out of your dank dark hole in person? I'm surprised at you. Look, I can tell you with one hundred percent honesty that I have no reason to believe the spores are in Felport, or ever will be.”

  “Very well,” Viscarro said. “I apologize for wasting your time. I simply felt compelled to come and ask.” He stared at her fixedly when he said “compelled,” and Marla rolled her eyes. What, he thought she was an idiot? The completely out-of-character gift and his earlier unprompted mention of mind control were plenty to clue her in.

  “Fine, whatever, get lost, would you? I've got work to do.” As Viscarro rose, Marla said, “Oh, by the way, where'd you hear this rumor about the spores? I don't like people throwing my name around so carelessly.”

  “It was an anonymous source,” Viscarro said. “But one I had reason to take seriously”

  “Helpful as always. I'll see you at the next council meeting. Don't let the door hit your bony ass on the way out.”

  Viscarro departed, and Marla picked up her phone and called Hamil. “Hey, big guy, I just had a meeting with Viscarro, and somebody's got their hooks into him. I don't think it's a straight-up puppet-master mind control thing, because he was dropping hints to tip me off, but somebody's got heavy leverage over him.”

  “I see. What would you like me to do?”

  “Maybe you could drop by his lair, casual-like on some pretense or another, and see if you can suss out what's going on?”