Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy

by Gardner Dozois

  “Same as yours,” said Demwor.

  “That’s not right!” she shouted. “I’ve worked here two years already!”

  “But he carried the waterjar full.” And Demwor was gone into the house.

  Lark was furious. “Drown him and all his kittens,” she muttered fiercely.

  “He hired me,” said Runnel.

  “At far more wage than you’re worth,” she said.

  “If you like, I’ll give you part of it, since you brought me here.”

  For a moment her eyes lighted up. And then she backed away. “I won’t have no man thinking I owe him.”

  Runnel shook his head. “Your precious treasure is safe from me,” he said. “I owe you, for bringing me here.”

  “I thought you’d almost ruined everything when you refused to change your name.”

  “It turned out all right,” said Runnel.

  “How did you know it would?” she asked.

  “I didn’t.”

  “So you meant all that?” She seemed astonished.

  “It’s my name,” said Runnel.

  “You are the most ignorant person I’ve ever known. What’s a name?”

  “You guard your purity,” said Runnel, “and I guard mine.”

  Her eyes and nostrils flared and she swung as if to slap him, but then she didn’t actually hit him. Nor, however, did he flinch. “Don’t you ever dare to compare your name with my purity, as you call it. Someday I mean to earn my dowry and marry, not be some kitchen slut making coin on the side or winning favor from the master or the steward. Purity is the only treasure that a poor girl has, which is why I took this job, because people leave me alone, which means I have hope. While your name—it’s not famous, it’s not important, it’s worthless. So don’t you dare compare them again, ever!”

  She stalked away from him, into the house, leaving him to finish his water, which he did.

  What’s worthless to you might not be worthless to me, he said silently. But he couldn’t help feeling disappointed. Somehow he had managed to lose her friendship after all. It would be just like home.

  He leaned against the cistern and closed his eyes. He had a job. He would be paid money. He had no idea what money was worth, but he was being paid the same as Lark, and she believed it was enough that she could save up a dowry.

  She was young, and might be counting on ten years or more to build up what she wanted. But he was even younger, and could work longer before marrying. As a farmer, he had only just started doing men’s work, and not yet the full range of that. But here, he would learn everything and grow into whatever jobs were too hard for him.

  Lots of hard work. Years of it. Why was he so excited?

  It was because he would be with a stonemage. What did he care if he was only a cobblefriend and not one of the higher orders? He might even see magic done.

  Meanwhile, there were practical benefits. Like this cistern. He could feel how it worked inside—the water in the tank above seeped right through a porous stone that trapped anything that shouldn’t be in it. It was slow for the water to seep its way through the rock, but all impurities were removed—ironic that the purest, cleanest water in Hetterferry should be in the stonemage’s house.

  The porous stone was a surprise, though. He had never known rock like this, not in any of the outcroppings he had climbed. He wished it were outside the cistern where he could get his hands on it. If only he were a stonemage so he could understand how the filtering worked.

  Dangerous thought. He must not wish to be a stonemage. He had taken an oath not to become one. If Demwor hadn’t made such a fuss about how he shouldn’t be one, he wouldn’t be wishing he could be one right now.

  It didn’t matter. Mages were magical people, not ordinary farm boys. Mages could go out into the world in the shape of their beloved—beast mages as the beast they favored, elemental mages in bodies of stone or wind or water, lightning or sand or metal. They could not be confined, not the ones with real power. Runnel imagined himself as a stonemage like Brickel, his new master. He could walk the earth in a stone body, and then what weapon could harm him?

  I hope I can see my master in his stoneshape. Or must he keep such things secret, because Demwor was here to watch?

  “Runnel,” said an impatient voice. “What are you doing?”

  He opened his eyes and saw Lark standing there again.

  “Finishing my water,” he said.

  “Without the beaker in your hand? What do you do, suck it up through your ears?”

  Don’t be angry with me, he wanted to say. But he hesitated, and she talked again.

  “Do you think you’re going to live out here in the garden? Come with me. I’m supposed to show you your room.”

  Runnel dutifully followed her into the house. She walked briskly, so he scarcely had time to notice the different rooms or try to guess what they were used for. His family’s hovel was one room, with a chimney at one end. He had no idea why so many rooms would be needed; they did not look convenient for sleeping, there was so much furniture in odd shapes. Tall boxes with doors all up and down them. Tables with cloth covering them, and so bumpy that you couldn’t possibly get any work done on them. Until he realized that they were really huge, wide chairs, and the cloth was there to cover the wood so it wouldn’t hurt to sit a long time. Cloth, just to dress chairs and make them soft! No one in Farzibeck would even have understood it.

  They went up a flight of narrow wooden stairs. “Why didn’t we use the wide stairs in the front?” asked Runnel.

  She didn’t answer.

  He sighed. So much for the hope that she might forgive him for what was, after all, an unintentional offense.

  “Always use these stairs,” she finally said. “The front stairs are for the master, Demwor, and guests. Servants use the back stairs.”

  So decency and good order had prevailed over temper. She didn’t want him getting in trouble because she never told him about the stairs rule. That was almost…compassionate.

  Up two, three flights, to the very top of the house. And then up another even narrower stairway to a room where the walls and roof were the rafters.

  He had never climbed so high inside a building. Farzibeck had only one barn as tall as this, and he wasn’t allowed inside it. He had gone once anyway, with a group of his brothers, but they wouldn’t let him climb a ladder and he hadn’t wanted to anyway. It’s not that he was afraid of heights—he could climb as high as he wanted, outdoors. But going up the stairs he felt as though he were climbing right up into the air, leaving the solid earth too far behind him.

  Three floors between him and the earth, each one shakier than the one before. He felt as though the house were swaying. He hated the feeling. “We have to sleep up here?”

  “Too proud?” she asked pointedly.

  “Too scared,” he said. “What holds us up?”

  She looked at him as if he were crazy. “The walls of the house, the floors.” She touched one of the heavy rafters. “Huge beams of heavy wood.”

  “It trembles.”

  “It does not,” she said, as if he had just accused her of something.

  He tried to think of some rational basis for his discomfort. “It can fall. It can burn. I want to sleep outside on the stone flags of the courtyard.”

  “Do you want to shame our master by making people believe he doesn’t have enough rooms for his servants to sleep in?”

  “Who would know?” asked Runnel.

  She apparently had no answer, so she glared at him. “Take it up with Demwor. I took you where he said you should go.”

  She started for the stairs.

  Runnel hated that she was so angry with him. “Please, Lark,” he said. “If I do ask him to let me sleep in the courtyard—”

  She answered him scornfully before he could even finish his question. “What do you think happens to a servant who makes trouble on his first day?”

  Since he had never had a paying job, working for strangers, the
fear of being dismissed from his position had never occurred to him. The most he had feared was a blow or two—he knew, from life with Father, that he could easily cope with that. But he could not take the chance of giving up this place.

  He didn’t even know whether this was a good place to work or not—there were probably reasons why this house did not have enough servants and needed to hire a stray freshly arrived from the mountains. It was his own problem that sleeping three floors above the ground bothered him. Other people did it. He would have to get over being such a mountain boy and learn to live in a town.

  As all this dawned on him, Lark’s expression showed such contempt for him that it was like a slap. “Whose face is proud now?” he asked her.

  She whirled her head away from him and went on down the stairs. He could hear the soft sliding of the soles of her bare feet on the wood. It was a sound he didn’t like. It made him shiver. Feet were meant to walk on grass or soil or hard-packed dirt or stone, not on trees sliced up and laid out sideways. It was unnatural.

  He surveyed the straw-filled tick that was apparently meant to be his bed. Even in the scant light coming into the attic through cracks in the eaves, he could see that there were fleas jumping on it. He had nothing against fleas, he just couldn’t imagine how they had stayed alive with no one else sleeping up in this hot space.

  Then it all came clear. Someone had been living up here until just recently. These were his leftover fleas. If he had happened along just a bit earlier or later, the job would have been taken.

  He wondered why his predecessor had been dismissed. He asked to sleep on the ground? Or he tried to learn magery? Or he spoke slightingly of Lark’s purity? Any of these offenses seemed near fatal, as far as Runnel could tell.

  Since it was still broad daylight outside, and he hadn’t eaten anything, and neither had anyone else, judging by the smells coming from a kitchen somewhere on the property, he figured he wasn’t meant to try to sleep right now, though he was tired enough. If he was to get along well here, he’d need to show himself a hard worker—that was about the only thing that could ever postpone Father’s wrath, so it was worth trying here.

  The trouble was, he had no idea what tasks he ought to do. Nor did he want to bother anybody with asking. But unless he asked, he’d…

  No point in thinking any longer. He headed for the stairs and set his foot on the second-from-the-top step and felt it tremble under him and all at once he was as dizzy as if he’d just spun in circles for a dozen turns, the way they all used to do as little kids, until somebody threw up.

  He sat on the top step. There was no railing. Going up had been easy enough—he only had to keep his eyes on Lark ahead of him, a sight that was engaging enough that he hadn’t really been aware of the drop-off on either side. Now, though, he had neither companion nor handrail nor distraction, and he was only able to make his way down the stairs by sitting on a tread, extending his legs to a lower one, then sliding his buttocks down to the next step.

  The rest of the stairs were much easier, since there was a wall on one side or the other, and a railing as well. But the house never stopped trembling, and Runnel never felt secure until he was on the ground floor.

  Which was foolish, he knew, since there was a cellar beneath that floor, so it wasn’t truly the ground under his feet even now. But being level with the ground seemed to be enough. Maybe it was just that the floor beams rested on stone foundations instead of wooden walls.

  How would he find out what work he ought to do? Without asking Lark or bothering Demwor? It was easy to guess that he shouldn’t go in search of Lord Brickel.

  He ended up following his nose to the kitchen, a stone building behind the main house—far enough that if the kitchen burned down it wouldn’t take the house with it, but close enough that hot food would still be hot when served, even after being carried through the coldest weather.

  The cook turned out to be cooks: a tall, lean black man and a fleshy woman with slanting eyes. As he approached the kitchen, Runnel could hear him calling her Sourwell—a watername—and her calling him Nikwiz, which wasn’t a word he knew, any more than Demwor’s name had meant anything to him. Their tones were quiet, and when Runnel entered the fire-dried room—so hot that he thought having an oven was redundant—they ignored him and kept speaking to each other.

  “Ready for that.”

  “Steady with the salt.”

  “Taste it, you’ll see.”

  “Old.

  “But edible.”

  “Perfect.”

  If Runnel hadn’t been watching, it wouldn’t even have sounded like a conversation, but he could see that “ready for that” led to her handing him what looked like a large spoon, but with holes in the bottom so that when he shook it over the steaming pot, white granules came out. “Steady with the salt” was said after he made his second pass with the shaker. “Taste it, you’ll see,” led to Sourwell dipping a finger into Nikwiz’s pot as she passed on an errand of her own; she nodded and he made yet another pass with the shaker.

  “Old,” she said when she picked up a couple of turnips and eyed them skeptically. He didn’t even look—he was busy now mincing an onion—so he must have bought the turnips, because his “but edible” sounded authoritative. By then she was on to the oven, where she slid out a long tray with two round loaves on it—“perfect” was pronounced as judgment on the bread.

  Neither of them had yet shown a sign of knowing Runnel was there, but as Nikwiz scattered the onions into a hot pan, making the grease in it sizzle, he said, “If you’ve come to beg for scraps, no. If you’ve come to steal, I promise you dysentery.”

  “I’ve just been hired, and I came to ask if you’ve any work for me,” said Runnel. “My name is Runnel.”

  “Can you cook?” asked Sourwell.

  “Anyone can cook,” said Nikwiz. “You just climb into the oven.”

  It took a moment for Runnel to realize that this was a joke—Sourwell didn’t even break a smile, and yet Runnel could see that both she and Nikwiz were both shaking with mirth at the remark.

  “My mother never let me near the cooking. Or knives. My sisters—”

  “Fascinating,” said Sourwell in a tone that meant the opposite.

  “Put the owl on the roof,” said Nikwiz, “to scare the birds and mice away.”

  And they were back to cooking.

  I’m supposed to catch an owl? Or is there a tame one?

  “Outside,” said Sourwell. “Blew off in the last storm.”

  He went out and walked almost all the way around the kitchen building before he found a carved stone owl leaning against a wall. It was cunningly shaped, and it had been daubed with paint to make it more convincing to birds and mice, though Runnel wondered whether those beasts were really that stupid.

  The owl was also very heavy. He realized at once that they expected him to be too small to manage it.

  But the end walls of the kitchen were stone all the way up, gables and all, the thatch of the roof resting between them like hay in a manger. The owl must rest on the peak of the stone gable—and now that he looked, he could see that another owl rested on the peak of the other end of the kitchen.

  Tucking the owl against his body, Runnel had a tough go of it, climbing up the stone wall one-handed, but with bare feet he managed it well enough, and within two minutes after picking up the owl, he was back down, with the owl perched menacingly atop the crest of the kitchen.

  He went back inside. “What next?” he asked.

  “We didn’t ask you to find the owl,” said Sourwell. “We need it put atop the roof.”

  “Did it,” said Runnel. “What else?”

  As if it were part of her regular routine, Sourwell swept out of the kitchen and in a moment came back in and resumed her cooking. In a perfectly mild voice she said, “Singe my sockets, but the boy must fly.”

  “Bet he left the ladder outside to rot,” said Nikwiz.

  “Ladder?” asked Runnel.

&
nbsp; Their smooth dance of food preparation finally came to a halt, as both of them looked for a long moment at Runnel, then at each other. “Break eggs much?” asked Nikwiz.

  “Prone to spilling things?” asked Sourwell.

  “No more than most,” said Runnel. “I’m not careless, but I’m not perfect.”

  “We wanted perfect,” said Nikwiz, visibly disappointed.

  “Best use me for jobs that can be done by the less-than-perfect,” said Runnel.

  “Here,” said Sourwell, slapping a knife down on a cutting stone and pointing to a pile of peppers. “Don’t cut yourself.”

  For the next hour, Runnel chopped and minced peppers and onions on smooth-cut slabs of granite. He quickly learned not to rub his eyes. He cried a lot and sneezed now and then. His eyes burned. He was useful. He was earning his keep.

  Then they kicked him out of the kitchen with orders to wash his hands with soap three times before washing his face—again with soap—to clear the last of the onion and pepper residues from his face. “Scrub,” said Sourwell. “Hard,” said Nikwiz. “Never a soapmage where you need one,” added Sourwell.

  “I never heard of soapmages,” said Runnel.

  “Me neither,” said Nikwiz. “Go wash.”

  He found a washbasin outside the kitchen, made of stone, of course. He rocked the small cistern and filled the basin with water, then lathered his hands with one of the cakes of hard soap. He was scrubbing his face, including especially his closed eyes, when he heard voices.

  “Doesn’t look like much,” said an old man.

  “Isn’t much,” said Demwor. “But he made himself useful in the kitchen this afternoon without being ordered.”

  “All arse and elbows,” said the old man. “And what is he wearing?”

  “The latest in mountain village fashions,” said Demwor.

  It had to be Lord Brickel himself that Demwor was talking to, and Runnel wanted to see him, but he couldn’t see anything until he rinsed his face, and thoroughly. By the time he was able to towel himself on his shirt and turn around, he could just see them disappearing into the house.

  He didn’t see him at supper, either. Lord Brickel ate with company in his dining room; Runnel ate at the big table in the kitchen with the other servants, of whom there were only the ones he’d already seen: Demwor, Nikwiz, Sourwell, and Ebb, the stupid man from the doorway. Demwor, Nikwiz, and Sourwell kept up a constant conversation about the business of the house and gossip in the neighborhood. Ebb said nothing, which was what Runnel said as well.