The Way of the Wizard

by John Joseph Adams

  “If you’d like to leave it with me, in, ah, storage—” Viscarro began.

  “What, so you can lock it in a vault and give me back a duplicate cloak with some shitty temporary enchantments and hope I don’t notice?” Viscarro’s covetousness in regard to magical artifacts was legendary, and he didn’t scruple when it came to acquiring new toys for his vast collection. Obsession like that wasn’t healthy. Doubtless indicative of some deeper psychological flaw. Probably something to do with his upbringing. “I’ll make my own arrangements.”

  Marla caught a pre-dawn flight to the airport in Greensboro North Carolina, and one of Viscarro’s local contacts drove her the two hours or so into the mountains near Sweetwater. The driver was a fairly attractive guy with short blond hair, about Marla’s age, but he had his jaw wired shut, so his conversation was limited mostly to grunts. Marla wondered if the wiring was due to an injury or if Viscarro was just worried about the guy saying things he shouldn’t.

  She’d never been to the mountains before, and she had to admit, the drive had some beautiful moments—the side of the road dropping away to reveal vast chasms of green, with hazy blue mountains in the distance—but for the most part it just made her uncomfortable, especially when hillsides hemmed the road in tight on both sides, exposed rock faces looking like avalanches waiting to happen, and even the scenic lookouts grew disturbing as she contemplated all that . . . nature—just sitting there, empty and waiting. Marla lived in the heart of a city and loved it, and the only green she saw on a regular basis these days was the occasional windowsill garden and grass growing up through cracks in the asphalt. She felt a little better when they passed antique malls and Christmas tree farms—crass humanity and consumerism made her feel more at home.

  The driver stopped the car in the middle of a curving road crowded by pine trees and pointed at a nearly-hidden steep driveway that wound up the side of a wooded hill. “Bet that driveway’s a bitch to get up in the winter,” she said. “My guy’s up there?”

  The driver nodded and held up two stopwatches, each set for one hour. He pressed their start buttons simultaneously.

  “You’ll be back for me here in an hour, when this runs out?” Marla said.

  Another nod.

  “And if I’m not here, you’ll come back every hour after that until I am here.”

  He couldn’t frown, exactly, but he tried to, winced at however it felt, and shook his head.

  Marla grinned, reached into her knapsack, and withdrew her favorite dagger. The blade was old, but she kept it sharp. “That wasn’t a question, Jaws. You will be here every hour, or I will come find you after I’m forced to make my own way out of this place. I know all kinds of magic—how to start fires with a word, how to insinuate myself into dreams, how to make myself unseen—but I won’t bother with any of that stuff. I’ll just cut your balls off with this knife. After I do some whittling first to make the blade duller. Understood?”

  Wide-eyed, he nodded, rather more vigorously this time.

  “Excellent. Maybe pick up some doughnuts or something for the drive back, too, huh?” She slipped out of the car and headed up the driveway, and though she was in good shape, she soon felt a burn in muscles she didn’t often use. She’d have to start running up and down stadium bleachers or something—just traveling the relatively flat streets of Felport wasn’t sufficient conditioning, obviously.

  Birds sang, a cool breeze blew—that first nip of autumn in the air—and she had to admit, the fall foliage was pretty, where it peeked out from the zillions of evergreens that mostly surrounded her. The driveway petered out next to a low cinderblock foundation that had probably once supported a mobile home, and she sighed, looked around, and followed what might have been a deer path deeper into the woods. The perpetual motion machine in her bag was heavy as hell, and every time it bumped and shifted she got more anxious, even knowing the ball of plastic explosive at its heart wouldn’t explode until she pressed the button on the garage door opener in her jacket pocket.

  The trail opened into a clearing with two structures: an old-school vaguely oval-shaped silver RV, and a cozy little log cabin, some serious Abe Lincoln shit. The door of the RV banged open and two simian-looking skinheads in denim overalls bounded out, followed by an invisible cloud of chemical stink. The men held new-looking black scatterguns at ready position. They were both potential medalists in the Olympics of Ugliness, but the one on the right showed him her teeth, and they were green where they weren’t yellow, and yellow where they weren’t black, and black where they weren’t entirely absent, so he won the gold medal by the skin of his nasty teeth. “She don’t look like the law,” Silver Medal Ugly said.

  “Looks like a college girl who got lost,” Gold Medal said.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Watt. I’ve got a delivery for him from Felport.”

  Silver grunted. “Go on in then.” He gestured at the cabin’s front door.

  “Just like that? You don’t want to search me for weapons or anything?”

  Gold laughed. “You pull a weapon on Mr. Watt and he’ll take it away from you and stick it where God split you.”

  “The ladies must love you guys,” Marla said, and went for the front steps. She wondered if she’d have to fight those two after she blew up their boss, or if the confusion would cover her escape. Maybe the explosion would make the silver trailer, which doubtless held a meth lab full of assorted inflammables, go up in flames too. She didn’t murder people, but if they turned out to be collateral damage, well, they were in a dangerous line of work, and she wouldn’t feel guilty.

  She knocked, and a voice that sounded like air whistling through pipes and blowing over bottle tops, and puffing out of a bellows said, “Come.”

  Marla opened the door and stepped inside, but she didn’t see anybody, just a bunch of junk. The cabin was small, crowded with shelves that held a godawful profusion of knick-knacks and gimcrackery, including—she was dismayed to note—at least forty or fifty snow globes lined up on several shelves. A table made out of a big cable spool held a half-dissected car engine, and a low workbench along one wall was scattered with bits of metal shavings and fragments of wire, various tools hanging on the wall above it. And right in the middle of the floor there was a heap of junk almost as tall as her, car grilles and a refrigerator door and shiny hubcaps and long hinged metal bars and fist-sized glass fuses and rubber hoses and—

  The top of the junk pile turned toward her, two amber lights glowing, and that fluting voice emerged in a puff of diesel-scented air, saying, “You brought me the engine?”

  Viscarro had told her Watt was a “a junkpile robot,” but she’d expected something more robot and less junkpile. “Yes, sir. You have the snow globe?”

  A few puffs of high-pitched air emerged, and Marla assumed it was his version of evil laughter, because evil sorcerers enjoyed their evil laughter. “I do have it. But first let me inspect your merchandise.”

  Marla shrugged, removed the engine from her knapsack, and held it out to him. Watt extended a multi-hinged arm that terminated in a profusion of crazily jointed fingers and grasped the engine, flicked it into motion, and watched as it spun. “Marvelous.” He reached into his . . . chest—Marla guessed—and opened what appeared to be a circuit breaker panel. While he was absorbed in putting the engine into his chest and attaching it to various cables, Marla eyeballed the snow globes. Typical souvenir junk: snowman, Santa Claus, Eiffel Tower, Hollywood sign—like it ever snowed there—clowns, polar bears, Christmas tree, a menorah, mountains, a pyramid, sailing ships . . .

  But they were all currently snow-free, since no one had shaken them up recently. All but one. One snow globe on the top shelf—about the size of a baseball mounted on a round black base—was full of swirling snow, nothing in view but churning whiteness. Now, maybe it was some fancy wind-up or battery-powered snow globe or something—Marla didn’t keep up with the cutting edge in snow globe technology—but so far it was the likeliest one to be magic. She stepped
closer, peered in at the glass, and saw what looked to be a tiny shapeless black figure moving in among the whiteness, disappearing and reappearing in swirls of snow.

  “I’ll be taking this.” She stood on tiptoe and snatched the snow globe down.

  “No, you won’t.” Savery Watt’s eyes began to glow more intensely. “I think I’ll wipe your mind and sell you to some gentlemen I know in the next valley instead.”

  “Praesidium,” Marla said, though she thought using incantatory trigger words in Latin was dumb—why couldn’t she just say “protection” or “force field” or something? But Viscarro had woven the spell, so she was stuck with his technique. She felt the spell click into place, the room around her becoming faintly shimmery as if seen through warped glass, and then triggered the garage door opener in her pocket.

  No explosion. She jammed the button harder, to similar lack of effect. Shit. Was it a double cross? No, Viscarro wanted the snow globe, she believed that, and the spell he’d designed to protect her from the explosion was working, after all. He’d probably just had one of his idiot apprentices put the bomb together and not bothered to double-check the work.

  Fortunately the magical shell protected her just fine against the jagged lances of lightning that sprayed from Watt’s body. Marla ran as fast as she could—“run like your ass is on fire and your head is catching,” her mother used to say—and the force field bobbed around her like an impregnable soap bubble. Which was fine as far as that went, but the bubble wouldn’t last for more than a few minutes. Watt bellowed behind her—high pitched bellowing, yes, but still loud—and Gold and Silver Ugly popped out and started firing at her, shots bouncing harmlessly off her shield . . . for the moment.

  She pulled the stopwatch out of her pocket. The whole thing, walk and all, had taken only twenty-eight minutes, so even if she hauled ass down the driveway, Jaws wouldn’t be there waiting to pick her up yet. She had to lose her pursuit first, so Marla veered into the trees and started looking for a place to go to ground. For the first minute her force field snapped tree branches all around her, leaving a clear trail, no doubt, but then the field sputtered out and she started stepping more carefully, trying to cover her tracks, though she was crap as a woodsman.

  The noise of Watt crashing around behind her was still audible, but getting quieter. She was about to cast a look-away spell to make herself less noticeable—it probably wouldn’t fool Watt, but it might work for his meth monkeys—when she jumped over a big log and found a steep drop-off on the other side. Her mom always said “Look before you leap,” which invariably pissed Marla off, both because it was a stupid cliché and because her mother liked having one-night-stands with abusive rednecks and was thus hardly qualified to counsel caution, but this was a situation where the advice could have helped.

  Marla managed to snag the stem of a bush as she fell instead of rolling down the hill. As far as upsides went, she’d had better. And to make matters worse, as Marla clung halfway down a muddy hillside in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, she couldn’t stop thinking about her mother. She hadn’t seen the woman in almost seven years, since running away at fifteen, and she didn’t miss her much at all, but she had to admit, life with her was better than waiting for a junkyard robot to come kill you. Marla’s mom had been most tolerable during her occasional forays into 12-step programs, though she usually hit a wall right around step 4: making a searching and fearless moral inventory. Marla’s mom wasn’t much for introspection. In that respect, mother and daughter had something in common.

  Marla decided to do a fearless personal inventory of her own, though—not of her morals, but of her resources.

  In the hand not clutching the bush, she held a battered leather knapsack, which had slid off her shoulder and nearly tumbled down the hill—it seemed a lot more like a mountainside than a hillside to her, but she was from Felport by way of Indiana, so what did she know from mountains?—which would have been bad, since the bag contained various valuable things, fragile and otherwise, including:

  A pair of knives: an antique dagger her mentor had given her, and another balanced for throwing that she’d purchased herself;

  A coil of thin, strong line fifty feet long, attached to a clever collapsible grappling hook;

  A pair of brass knuckles with a wicked inertial enchantment worked into the metal, perfect for face-punching;

  Spare socks;

  A rain poncho;

  A slightly-rusty Altoids tin that contained a survival kit in miniature, consisting of a small signal mirror, waterproof matches, flint and a little hacksaw blade, cotton balls, a tiny (non-magical) compass, a brass wire small animal snare, a twist of nylon fishing line with fishhooks, a bit of candle, a flashlight the size of a lipstick, a plastic bag for carrying water, and iodine tablets;

  And, of course, a cursed snow globe. Everything else would be more or less useful if she had to hide out in the woods overnight—hideous thought—but she wasn’t sure what good the snow globe could possibly do her.

  For now, if she could get the grappling hook out and snag it on the bush she was clinging to, then she could lower herself down this slope, hoping it didn’t end in a river or leg-breaking deadfall or something, and from there maybe hike to high ground, climb a tree, figure out which way the road was, hike that way, and maybe possibly get to her extraction point before—

  “She’s down there!” shouted a voice up on the ridgeline. Sounded like one of the meth-lab-monkeys.

  “So go down and get her,” Watt said, his voice weirdly high and fluting and artificial, but his annoyance and impatience still coming through loud and clear.

  Oh well, Marla thought. Let’s go, gravity. She relinquished her grip on the bush. Marla bumped and slid and rolled along, collecting a full suite of bruises. Damn I wish I had my cloak, she thought, and then she rolled over an especially big rock and went airborne.

  Marla sailed through the air, though not far, since falling human bodies are not especially aerodynamic. She landed in a mound of damp leaves at the base of the hill and sat up groaning, but nothing was broken, just generally battered. Marla tore open her knapsack, slipped on her brass knuckles, considered her knives, and finally just lifted out the snow globe. Running away hadn’t worked so well, and from the sound of things Watt and his imps were coming down the hill in a more controlled way than she had, so it was time to make some kind of stand.

  The scatterguns came sliding down the hill first, no doubt lost in transit, and Marla grinned. That was a bit of luck. She snatched up one gun and chucked the other behind her into the trees. The meth monkeys landed a moment later, covered in mud and not too happy about it, and they looked less happy when Marla pointed the gun at them, low, and fired. They both collapsed, their legs riddled with shot, howling. They’d live, but their injuries probably hurt badly enough they wished they wouldn’t.

  Marla tossed the gun down. Shooting the junkyard golem where Savery Watt’s spirit resided wouldn’t even piss him off. It’d be like tossing snowballs at the sun.

  Watt trundled down the hill on a combination of tanklike treads and spidery articulated multi-jointed legs. “College girl. Give me the snow globe, and I’ll kill you fast.”

  “How about you let me go, or I smash the globe?”

  “It’s magical, fool. You can’t just crack the glass.”

  Marla lifted her metal-wrapped hand. “Not even with brass knuckles enchanted for extra smashy-ness? I can punch through a bank vault with these.”

  “Try it.”

  Uh oh. Marla smashed her fist into the top of the snow globe, and, predictably, nothing happened except the tink of metal tapping glass. “Huh.” So that was no good. But now that she looked closer, this was clearly not a mass-produced snow globe, with the glass top glued on—it was more homemade looking, and the base appeared to just be a jar lid painted black, which meant maybe . . .

  Marla twisted the glass top one way, and the base the other way, and at first it didn’t want to give, but she
was a champion opener of pickle jars, so she strained, and then—

  “No!” Watt screamed, and the woods filled with swirling whiteness, deadening sound and reducing visibility to no more than a foot or two at most.

  “You rescued me,” came a voice from within the whiteness.

  A woman dressed in ragged black furs stood before Marla, who still held both pieces of the now-empty snowglobe in her hands. She was tall, black-haired, black-eyed, still strikingly beautiful despite being at least twice Marla’s age, and when she spoke, arctic puffs of air emerged from her mouth. She shivered. “I’ve been walking in that snowstorm for . . . how long? Time is strange in there. What year is it?”

  Marla told her. The woman’s lips quirked in a half-smile. “That means I missed the 1936 World Series then. I don’t suppose you know who won?”

  “Uh. I don’t really follow sports.”

  “No matter. I can look it up.” She waved a hand in front of her face, and the snow that filled the air sizzled and turned to steam, replacing the opaque whiteness with merely misty vapor . . . allowing them to see Savery Watt, who was trying without much success to trundle his way back up the hill.

  “Son,” the woman said, and Watt stopped, then slowly rolled backwards and rotated on his treads to face her.

  “Mother,” he fluted.

  “Oh hell,” Marla said. “Did I step into a family thing?”

  The woman approached her son and touched his robot face. “Oh, Savery, you naughty boy. What have you done with your body?”

  “I . . . it was destroyed in a fire, Mother. An explosion in a, uh, factory I owned.”

  “That breaks my heart, baby. I carried that body in my own body, I gave birth to it, and you let it be destroyed? In a fire, no less? I take that as a personal insult.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “How about trapping me in a jar for all those decades? Was that an accident?”

  “I didn’t do that! It was Leland! I just held onto—”