Wizard's Goal

by Alan J. Garner

  The harsh cry of a lonesome gull wheeling overhead momentarily distracted Garrich. Regarding the mournful seabird as it sailed effortlessly on the buffeting easterly, he grinned impishly. He harbored doubts Parndolc could emulate such gracefulness with this newest experiment of his.

  Maldoch's brother was something of an enigma. Ever since arriving at Earthen Rise, Garrich had grown aware of Parndolc's peculiarities insofar as being a wizard. Not long after the easternized Goblin moved in, Parndolc explained to him the fundamental differences between Terrath's partnering magicians.

  "You're no doubt aware by now Maldoch dabbles in spells and enchantments. That's the traditional, if archaic, form of wizardry, first indulged in by the druids way back when. But that's another story.

  'My forte is altogether different. I go in for what I've termed technical wizardry. Mechanical inventiveness is the truest form of magic there is and stems from the civilized days before the Fellow Races came into being."

  Garrich's education had been strictly military sourced, so he was understandably fascinated by talk of prehistory and Parndolc happily catered to his curiosity.

  "Oh yes,” continued the technical wizard. “Hundreds of thousands of years ago the Terrath we know today didn't exist. The landmass back then would have scarcely been recognizable. Mountains and lakes were in different places. There was desert country in the center of the continent rather than the extreme mid-east where it sits now. And the people were unalike too."

  "In what way?” the entranced youth had asked.

  "There weren't Elves, Dwarfs or Trolls, for starters. The Goblin race hadn't been born yet, and neither had the Gnomes. Dragons were—"

  "There's no such thing as dragons! They're a myth."

  "Just because you haven't seen something doesn't necessarily mean it isn't out there,” Parndolc admonished him. “There are stranger things in Urvanha and Terrath...

  "As I was saying, dragons were unheard of, so too was spellmaking. The true force of Olde Earthe harnessed by the Ancients was technology. They built forests of sky-reaching towers made out of artificial stone, drawing energy from the sun, earth, and seas to power their sprawling empires, and traveled the countryside in horseless carts."

  Garrich was suitably astounded. But more revelations came.

  "The Ancients demonstrated far greater metalworking skills than even the Dwarfs possess, building fantastic machines of steel and iron that sailed underwater, or flew through the air higher than a condor and swifter than a falcon,” Parndolc unveiled with something akin to fervor. “It was a golden epoch of mechanized achievements only dreamt of nowadays."

  "How do you know all this?"

  "By piecing together scraps of books that survived the Anarchic Years, and there are precious few pages from those rare volumes that haven't crumbled to dust, finished off with a big dollop of educated guesswork. Maldoch has no mechanical aptitude whatsoever and bugger all patience with puzzles, so I had to figure out most of it myself. I fitted the pieces quite fast actually. It only took me three hundred years."

  Garrich cringed. A wizard's concept of time radically differed to how normal people viewed the passage of the years. The Goblin then enquired, “If it was so great, why didn't it last?"

  At that point Parndolc had clammed up after citing the obscure reason, “Things change."

  Garrich had not pushed his nosiness. For one, he sensed the wizard's plain reluctance to delve fully into that matter. For another, he found himself caught up in Parndolc's most recent spurt of inventiveness—manned flight!

  A faint whistling followed by a distant report snatched Garrich from his introspection and his eyes traced the erratic smoke trail lifting up from the north turret that ended in a fading bang of exploding fireworks. That was the signal! Garrich sat bolt upright, his gaze returning to the spires of Earthen Rise and the winged contraption toppling from the heights of the castle of the wizards. He held his breath as the crude hang glider, supported by flimsy wings of fabric stretched over ribbed timber framework, dipped sharply before correcting, struggling to climb and remain aloft.

  "I'll be buggered!” exclaimed Garrich. An unhealthy measure of Parndolc's coarse language had rubbed off on the boarding youth. He watched mesmerized as the orthopter, as its designer and maker was calling it, started to soar over the gloomy lake. The attendant gull screeched in alarm at the intrusion and banked away when the weird giant bird with a crazy old man dangling out its belly headed Garrich's way. The Goblin's wonder crashed into dismay as Parndolc's flyer, caught in a nasty crosswind, pitched nose-up and stalled. The spidery wings crumpled in the breezy air like screwed up parchment before the broken craft somersaulted downwards with agonizing slowness to plop into the waves below.

  Scrabbling for the oars, Garrich hurriedly swung the skip about and rowed with all his might to the splashdown point, ploughing through the whitecaps and wishing all the way that he sat in the self-propelled boat he and Maldoch had used to first cross Fragmere. Rowing was such hard work! That automated skip wallowed on the far side of the lake where the wind was less constant. Parndolc said that the small, pilot-less ferry was fixed in place and incapable of being moved, but had not divulged whether it was operated magically or mechanically.

  Reaching the spot, some hundred yards out from the rocky shoreline of Outcrop Isle, Garrich was relieved to find Parndolc bobbing in the water like a fisherman's float, surrounded by the wreckage of his flying contraption. Exchanging his tool belt for one of cork blocks—a pioneering lifejacket, no less—and his fragile spectacles for sturdier frog-eyed goggles helped the wizard survive the impact unscathed with only his pride injured. Extending a hand, Garrich grabbed the sleeve of Parndolc's habit and, after a great deal of heaving that almost tipped the rowboat over, managed to haul the ditched flier aboard.

  "You need to lose weight,” grunted Garrich.

  "I thought I had with your lousy cooking,” sputtered Parndolc, spitting lake water out of his mouth. He was dripping wet and shivering.

  "Are you hurt?"

  The wizard tore off his waterlogged goggles. “Just my dignity."

  "What happened up there? You seemed to be getting the knack of flying like a bird."

  "I became a victim of the Law of Gravity."

  "What's that?"

  "What goes up, must come down—I just came down a bit sooner, and harder, than planned."

  "And almost ended up as eel bait."

  "That's why I put you on station to fish me out of the drink.” That was all the thanks Garrich received.

  "So what did go wrong?"

  "I think my wing design was at fault, though I can't say why. I copied the wing shape of a pigeon perfectly. It should have ridden out those wind gusts without any trouble at all. Ah well, back to the drawing board."

  Thinking back on his boyhood woodcutting outings in Wivernbush, Garrich had a flash of inspiration. “Why not try a bat's wing?"

  Parndolc considered the suggestion. “Row me ashore, Garrich. I need ink and parchment. I feel the sudden urge to go batty!"

  That night after supper Garrich and Parndolc sat around the dining table in the kitchenette, the warrior polishing his cherished sword, the inventive wizard penning new schematics for his revised orthopter. In many ways Garrich was happily reminded of his evenings spent at Falloway with Tylar Shudonn. Adopting Earthen Rise as his home, Parndolc became his new mentor, though nobody could replace his foster father. Once Garrich delved past the hermit's roughness, aided by a nightlong introduction to ale, the morning after which Garrich implored his host to invent a hangover cure, they got along like a house on fire. Parndolc was eccentrically brilliant and an able tutor in spite of his aversion to teaching, helped no end by Garrich being a voracious learner. The Goblin's first outing into the big, bad world had not been a spectacular success, so Garrich welcomed this hermitage and the chance to swot up on Terrathian history before revisiting Anarica.

  Returning his gleaming broadsword to its scabbard, Garrich
set it on the table and watched Parndolc admiring the new wing plan for his glider, modeled on the skin membranes of a stuffed mouse-eared bat retrieved from his tower. He suspected all manner of odds and ends, gadgetry, and mounted specimens cluttered the oldster's room, but had never been allowed to set foot even upon the first step leading to Parndolc's turret. Utmost privacy was one of the hermit's major quirks.

  "Do you think the new wing design will work, Parny?"

  "Too early to say,” the wizard replied, engrossed with detailing the wing spar/airframe junction. ‘Maybe it'll show promise."

  "Perhaps you better let me test fly the orthopter next time."

  Parndolc squinted at the proffering Goblin over the rim of his spectacles. “Whatever for?"

  "Because I'm, ah, well, I am, uh..."

  "Younger than me?"

  "Yep. You could seriously hurt yourself in a crash. I'm fitter and stronger, more able to bounce back from a plunge into the lake.'

  "Phooey, boy! It has nothing to do with age. Have you a basic grasp of flight mechanics, of the concept of gliding? No, you don't! Piloting comes down to using the brain, not flexing the brawn. Besides, what sort of inventor lets someone else test his theories? Experimentation is the key that unlocks the door of invention.” Parndolc paused. “Hmmm, that's not half bad as a maxim.” He scribbled it down in the margin of his plan. Who knows, he might be quoted someday.

  "You could teach me to fly,” suggested Garrich.

  "Stick to your history books,’ Parndolc advised. ‘Reading is a much safer pastime and Maldoch will be most unhappy if I accidentally drown the savior of Terrath."

  "He wouldn't be the only one put out. We made a pact, Parny. You school me and I help out with your experiments."

  "Help being the operative word here, Garrich, not take over."

  The youth pouted, muttering, ‘Every wizard I've so far met breaks his word."

  "There is something you can do to help me with this project,” Parndolc put to the boy. “Start shaping timber. Construction of the mark two orthopter begins tomorrow and I detest sawing wood."

  Garrich should have seen that coming!

  "Be a good lad and top up my tankard,” added Parndolc. “I'm beginning to sober up."

  Garrich freshened the wizard's drink and poured himself a half tankard. Parndolc's capacity for ale was staggering and the youth rashly tried to match him cup for cup during his baptism into boozing. He vowed never to be that stupid again in a hurry.

  "When do I get to be this predicted champion of the Fellow Races?” Garrich sighed after sipping his beverage, a beer brewed in northern Carallord and purported by Parndolc to be the nectar of the god himself. As Garrich had not touched a drop of rival brew to compare he could not really say it was that good. But he was developing a taste for it.

  "When the timing is right, I suppose,” Parndolc answered at length.

  "And when will that be?” pressed Garrich.

  "How should I know, boy? I'm not psychic."

  "Then what use are the three prophecies."

  Parndolc put down his quill and removed his glasses. He looked irritated, but when he spoke next his voice exuded deadly calm. “The Dissension Scroll and Codretic Text are the single most important documents on the continent. They foretell events yet to come, as well as the odd happening from the past. Frustratingly for us no dates were ever given, so they can't be used as a timetable. We must decipher what lines we can and keep an eye out for the warning signs that'll accompany those messages from the past."

  And that is exactly what they were: ancient revelations. The Dissension Scroll, penned by a lunatic monk by the name of Riann the Heretic, formerly of the Landosfharr Monastery, surfaced at the close of the Second Epoch. This particular oracular script dealt primarily with the past, with snippets of the future messily intertwined for good measure.

  The Codretic Text was the older and purely prophetic of the two. S'ran Korr, the Troll seer who lived and died in the eleventh century of the First Epoch, was the visionary responsible for Terrath's fundamental delineation of the future. However, like the prophecy that came 2,300 years after, this was a riddle demanding a lengthy and ongoing deciphering. Maldoch took upon himself the challenge of making sense of this harder puzzle, delegating to Parndolc the task of finding meaning in the Dissension Scroll due to his brother's affinity with the past. Both were pointers to pivotal developments in the growth of the Fellow Races and the wizards accordingly devoted themselves to uncovering their joint mysteries. And so too was Garrich roped into the equation.

  "That reminds me,” said Parndolc. “Have you made any headway with the Shamanist script?"

  The Goblin shook his head. “I can't make head or tail of the work. It's gibberish."

  "Seldom is anything what it seems and nothing worthwhile comes easy.” Parndolc grinned. “I should write a book of sayings. I must have a million of them by now."

  "Yeah, you're full of it,” the youth snidely agreed. “I'm guessing it was pretty straightforward for Maldoch to get his hands on copies of the Scroll and Text. But how did he come by a western prophecy?"

  "Good old fashioned luck."

  "Luck?"

  "You'd be surprised at how often things are the result of chance, my boy. Fate and Destiny play the biggest parts, but Lady Luck too has a strong hand in shaping events."

  Garrich had heard mention of the deciding factors of Fate and Destiny before by the wizards, but this day he was uninterested in learning more of those controlling forces. Goblins occupied his mind and his knowledge of the Carnachians remained pitifully limited.

  "If I remember right,” explained Parndolc, “Maldoch was at the end of one of his secret excursions over in Carnach and heading back east when his sore old feet got the better of him and he hitched a ride on a mule train rolling out of Serepar bound for Haston. Don't ask me what year, or even what century it was, ‘cos I'm terrible with dates. Anyhow, he got yakking to the teamster who, as it happened, was carting the body of his brother back home for burial. The fellow unluckily got himself killed in the back alley of some squalid alehouse. Burnt to a crisp, I hear tell.

  "That whole meeting would've meant nothing if this wagoner's dead brother hadn't been a boozy scribe whose final job was for a shady character that, from all accounts, was the spitting image of Maldoch in his guise as Sulca. The driver thought from the look of Mal that the two might be related and so offered him the lift, hoping to learn the whereabouts of his brother's last employer and probable murderer, who was none other than that scoundrel, Omelchor."

  "Parny, just who is this Omelchor to you and Maldoch?” interrupted Garrich. Vague allusions had been made to this rogue spellcaster since the youth acquainted himself with the wizards, and none of it flattering. Specifics, however, were lacking.

  "Someone I wouldn't spit on if he was on fire. Let's just say that every story needs a baddie and he's ours.” That ended that query for the moment. Parndolc resumed his tale. “Maldoch hadn't the faintest idea what rock Omelchor might have crawled back under, so the wagoner passed on to him what he thought might be a clue."

  "A copy of the Ode of the Shamanist,” reasoned Garrich.

  Parndolc flashed a toothless grin. The boy had a brain behind his muscle. “The scribe was a drunk, but a clever drunk. He made a copy of the verses Omelchor dictated to him, probably intending to sell it to make some extra profit from the deal. His brother found the charred, but mostly intact, parchment when he picked up his belongings. Not that he stood any chance of getting a broan out of Omelchor. That viper has the nasty habit of killing occasional helpers to avoid paying them out, as well as to cover his tracks."

  Frowning, Garrich voiced his bafflement. “Omelchor's a fellow wizard presumably from the east, right? How might he get hold of a Goblin prophecy?"

  Parndolc shrugged. “He sided with the Westies long ago. They foolishly see him as some sort of messiah. He pretty much does what he pleases over in Carnach and the daft buggers encourage him."<
br />
  "Then why hire an eastern scribe?"

  Gulping down a mouthful of ale, for storytelling was thirsty work, Parndolc revealed, “Oh, that's easily explained. Goblins have no written language. Every scrap of their knowledge and history is handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. I'm picking Omelchor was relayed the verses, maybe by the Goblin oracle responsible or if not him then a close follower, committed them to memory, and hastened east to find a stooge to pen it for him. He detests dirtying his hands with menial tasks and Serepar's the closest thing to a town in that remote part of the princedom.” The wizard took another sip from his emptying tankard. “On reflection, perhaps luck had nothing to do with Maldoch running into that wagoner. Maybe he was destined to meet up with him all along, just as Omelchor was fated to seek out that particular scribe."

  Garrich did not register that rumination. He was too busy taking in the little bit of insight into Carnachian society. “What else can you tell me about Goblins?” he pushed, eager for more from Parndolc. It was the first solid piece of information relating to Goblin life he had prised out of the old wizard after two years of badgering. Little did he know that before departing Maldoch firmly instructed his brother to tell Garrich nothing of his racial stock, for it was the hook that kept the boy on the line he was playing out.

  Cussing his slip of the tongue, Parndolc covered himself by snapping, “Maldoch's the resident expert on Goblins in these parts, boy. Quiz him."

  "He's never here to ask."