The Flying Sorcerers

by David Gerrold

  The Flying Sorcerers

  David Gerrold

  Larry Niven

  Shoogar was on the warpath. The villagers wondered uneasily if they should pack. The last time their protector had done this he had blown the whole village to hell and they had all had to trek to find a new area. Still, he had proved his point. Shoogar was indeed a mighty witch doctor — and his flock took a kind of resigned pride in his power. After all, who knew what the new invader could do? Better the protector you know than the one you don’t. Had they but known the marvels and monstrosities that Shoogar in his rage would bring about they would have fled shrieking. Which of course they did — for a while. But Shoogar drew them back, for his power was great. And they didn’t really have any place else to go. No place, that is, that had as many interesting possibilities as Shoogar’s wild and woolly mind could conceive …

  David Gerrold and Larry Niven

  The Flying Sorcerers

  Dedicated to the men of NASA;

  We understand their problems

  I was awakened by Pilg the Crier pounding excitedly on the wall of my nest and crying, “Lant! Lant! It’s happened! Come quickly!

  I stuck my head out. “What’s happened?”

  “The disaster! The disaster!” Pilg was jumping up and down in excitement. “I told you it would happen.”

  I pulled my head in and dressed. Pilg’s joy was a frightening thing. I felt my fur rising, fluffing out in fear as I wondered…

  Pilg the Crier had been predicting disaster for weeks — as was his habit. He predicted his disasters twice a year, at the times of the equinox. The fact that we were leaving the influence of one sun and entering that of the other would make the local spells completely unstable. As we approached conjunction — the time when the blue sun would cross the face of the red — Pilg had increased the intensity of his warnings. This was disaster weather: something dire would certainly happen.

  Usually it did, of course. Afterward — and after we of the village had somehow picked up the pieces — Pilg would shake his heavy head and moan, “Wait until next year. Wait. It’ll be even worse.”

  Sometimes we joked about it, predicting the end of the world if Pilg’s “next year ever arrived…”

  I lowered the ladder and joined Pilg on the ground. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Oh, I warned you, Lant. I warned you. Now maybe you’ll believe me. I warned you though — you can’t say I didn’t warn you. The omens were there, written across the sky. What more proof did you need?”

  He meant the moons. They were starting to pile up on one side of the sky. Shoogar the Magician had predicted that we were due for a time of total darkness soon — perhaps even tonight — and Pilg had seized on this as just one more omen of disaster.

  As we hurried through the village I tried to get Pilg to tell me what had happened. Had the river changed its course? Had someone’s nest fallen from its tree? Had the flocks all died mysteriously? But Pilg was so excited at having finally been proven correct that he himself was not sure what exactly had happened.

  One of the hill shepherds, it seemed, had come running into town, panic-stricken and shouting something about a new magician. By the time I got this information out of Pilg, we were already at the village clearing where the frightened shepherd was leaning against one of the great housetrees, gasping out his story to a nervous group of men. They pressed in close to him, badgering him with questions. Even the women had paused in their work, and hanging back at a respectful distance, listened fearfully to the shepherd’s words.

  “A new magician,” he gasped. “A red one! I saw him!” Someone handed him a skin; he sucked the Quaff from it noisily, then panted, “Near the cairn of the wind-god. He was throwing red fire across the mountains.”

  “Red fire. Red fire.”

  The villagemen murmured excitedly among themselves. “If he throws red fire, he must be a red magician.” Almost immediately, I heard the word “duel”. The women must have heard it too, for they gasped and shrank back from the milling group of men.

  I pushed my way through to the center of the crowd. “Ah, Lant,” said one of the men. “Have you heard? There’s going to be a duel.”

  “Is there?” I demanded. “Have you seen the runes of the duel inscribed across Shoogar’s nest?”

  “No, but —”

  “Then how do you know there’s going to be a duel?”

  “A red magician —” gasped the shepherd. “A red magician —”

  “Nonsense. No red magician could have the powers you describe. Why don’t you wait until you know something definite before you start spreading silly rumors that frighten women and children?”

  “You know Shoogar as well as we! As soon as he discovers there is a new magician in the district, he’ll —”

  “You mean Shoogar doesn’t know yet?”

  The man looked blank.

  I raised my voice. “Has anyone thought to tell Shoogar ?”

  Silence. No one had. My duty was clear. I must prevent Shoogar from doing something rash. I hurried through the trees toward the magician’s nest.

  Shoogar’s nest was well suited for a wizard, a squat misshapen gourd hung from a forbidding black ogre of a tree well beyond the limits of the village. (The Guild of Advisors was afraid to let him move closer; he was always experimenting with new spells.)

  I found Shoogar already packing his travel kit. His agitated manner told me he was worried. Then I caught a glimpse of what he was packing and I was worried. The last time he had used that ornate bone-carved tarinele was when he had hurled the curse of the itching red boils at Hamel the Failure.

  I saw what he was packing in on top of the tarinele and I flinched. “I believe that’s against the Guild rules,” I said.

  For a moment I thought he’d hurl a spell at me. I cringed and instinctively made a spell-cutting gesture, (forgetting for the moment that Shoogar himself had made the protective amulets I wore; he couldn’t possibly break through his own protections; at least not for a few more days — they would expire with the coming of the blue dawns).

  “You!” he snapped. “What do you know of magic? You who call yourself my friend! You didn’t even have the courtesy to inform me of this intruding sorcerer !”

  “I didn’t even know of him myself, until just a few moments ago. Perhaps he only arrived today.”

  “Arrived today? And immediately began throwing red fire about? Without first informing himself of the local gods, tidal patterns, previous local spells and their side effects? Ridiculous! Lant, you are a fool. You are an idiot of the first circle where magic is concerned. Why do you bother me?”

  “Because you are an idiot where diplomacy is concerned!” I snapped back, my fur bristling. (I am one of the few people in the village who can bristle at Shoogar and survive to tell about it.) “If I let you go charging up the mountain every time you felt you had been wronged, you’d be fighting duels as often as the blue sun rises.”

  Shoogar looked at me, and I could tell from his expression that my remarks had sunk home. “Smooth your fur, Lant. I did not mean that you were a complete fool..I just meant that you are not a magician.”

  “I’m glad you are aware of my skill as a diplomat..” I said, and allowed myself to relax. “Our abilities must complement each other, Shoogar. If we are to succeed in our endeavors, we must maintain a healthy respect for each other’s powers. Only thus can we protect our village.”

  “You and your damned speeches, he scowled. “Someday I’m going to make your tongue swell up to the size of a sour melon — just for the sake of some peace and quiet.”

  I ignored that remark. Considering the circumstances, Shoogar had a right to be testy. He closed
up his travel kit, tugging angrily at the straps.

  “Are you ready?” I asked, “I’ll send a message up to Orbur, telling him to ready two bicycles.”

  “Presumptuous of you,” Shoogar muttered, but I knew that he was secretly grateful for the thought. Wilville and Orbur, my eldest two sons, carved the best bicycles in the district.

  We found the new magician near the cairn of Musk-Watz, the Wind-god. Across a steep canyon from the cairn, there is a wide grass-covered mesa with a gentle slope to the south. The new magician had appropriated this mesa and scattered it with his devices and oddments. As we pulled our bicycles to a shuddering halt, he vas in the process of casting a spell with an unfamiliar artifact. Shoogar and I paused at a respectful distance and watched.

  The stranger was slightly taller than me, considerably taller than Shoogar. His skin was lighter than ours, and hairless but for a single patch of black fur, oddly positioned on the top half of his skull. He also wore a strange set of appurtenances balanced across his nose. It appeared that they were lenses of quartz mounted in a bone frame through which the stranger could see.

  The set of his features was odd and disquieting, and his bones seemed strangely proportioned. Certainly no normal being would have a paunch that large. The sight of him made me feel queasy, and I surmised that some of his ancestors had not been human.

  Magicians traditionally wear outlandish clothing to identify themselves as magicians. But even Shoogar was unprepared for the cut of this stranger’s costume. It was a single garment which covered most of the stranger’s body. The shape of the cloth had been woven to match his own precisely; and an oddly bulging shape it was. There was a hood, thrown back. There were high-flared cuffs on the pantaloons to allow for his calf-high boots, and over his heart was a golden badge. Around his middle he wore a wide belt, to which were attached three or four small spell devices.

  He had also set up a number of larger devices. Most of them had the blue-white glimmer of polished metal. (There is little metal in our village — it rusts quickly — but I am a man of the world and have traveled much. I am familiar with the sight of metal, having seen it in the highlands; but nothing so finely worked as this.)

  These devices stood each on three legs so that they were always level, even where the ground was not. As we watched, the stranger peered into one of them, peered across the canyon at the sacred cairn of Musk-Watz, the god of the winds, and then into his device again. Muttering constantly to himself, he moved across the clearing and adjusted something else. Evidently this was a long and complicated spell, though just what its purpose was neither Shoogar nor I could fathom.

  Occasionally he would refer to a large egg-shaped nest, black and regular of shape, sitting on its wide end off to one side of the pasture. As there were no trees in the area large enough to hang it from, he had set it on the ground. (An unwise course, to be sure, but the shell of that nest looked like nothing I had ever seen — perhaps it was able to resist marauding predators.) I wondered how he had built it over-night. His power must be formidable.

  The stranger did not notice us at all, and Shoogar was fidgeting with impatience. Just as Shoogar was about to interrupt him, the stranger straightened and touched his device. The device responded by hurling red fire across the canyon — directly at the cairn of Musk-Watz!

  I thought Shoogar would suffer a death-rage right then and there. The Weather gods are hard enough to control at best, and Shoogar had spent three long lunar configurations trying to appease Musk-Watz in an effort to forestall another season of hurricanes. Now, the stranger had disrupted one of his most careful spells.

  Redder than ruby, eye-searing, bright and narrow, straight as the horizon of the ocean (which I have also seen), that crimson fire speared out across the canyon, lashing Shoogar’s carefully constructed outcrop. I feared it would never end: the fire seemed to go on and on.

  And the sound of it was dreadful. There was a painful high-pitched humming which seemed to seize my very soul, a piercing unearthly whine. Under this we could hear the steady crackling and spattering of the cairn.

  Acrid smoke billowed upward from it, and I shuddered, thinking how the dissipating dust would affect the atmosphere. Who knew what effects it would have on Shoogar’s weather-making spells? I made a mental note to have the wives reinforce the flooring of our nest.

  Suddenly, just as abruptly as it had begun, the red fire went out. Once more the silence and the calm descended over the mesa. Once more the blue twilight colored the land. But across my eyes was a brilliant blue-white afterimage. And the cairn of the wind-god still crackled angrily.

  Amazingly enough, the cairn still stood. It smouldered and sputtered, and there was an ugly scar where the red fire had touched it, but it was intact. When Shoogar builds, he builds well.

  The stranger was already readjusting his devices, muttering continuously to himself. (I wondered if that were part of the spell.) Like a mother vole checking her cubs, he moved from device to device, peering into one, resetting another, reciting strange sounds over a third.

  I cast a glance at Shoogar; I could see a careful tightening at the corners of his mouth. Indeed, even his beard seemed clenched. I feared that a duel would start before the stranger could offer Shoogar a gift. Something had to be done to prevent Shoogar from a rash and possibly regrettable action.

  I stepped forward boldly. “Ahem,” I began. “Ahem. I dislike to interrupt you while you are so obviously busy, but that bluff is sacred to Musk-Watz. It took many cycles to construct the pattern of spells which…”

  The magician looked up and seemed to notice us for the first time. He became strangely agitated. Taking a quick step toward us, he made a straight-armed gesture, palms open to us, and spoke quick tense words in a language I had never heard. Instantly, I threw myself flat on the ground, arms over my head.

  Nothing happened.

  When I looked up, Shoogar was still beside the other bicycle with his arms outstretched in a spell-breaking pattern. Either the stranger’s spell had miscarried, or Shoogar had blocked it. The stranger threw no more spells. Instead, he backed toward his oddly shaped nest, never taking his eyes from us. He continued his strange words, but now they were slow and low pitched, like the tone one uses to calm an uneasy animal. He disappeared into his nest and all was quiet and blue.

  Except for the crackle of cooling rock which still reached across the canyon to remind us that Musk-Watz had been defiled.

  I turned to Shoogar, “This could be serious.”

  “Lant, you are a fool. This is already serious.”

  “Can you handle this new magician?”

  Shoogar grunted noncommittally, and I was afraid. Shoo-gar was good; if he were not sure of his skill here, the whole village might be in danger.

  I started to voice my fears, but the stranger abruptly re-appeared carrying another of his metal and bone carved devices. This one was smaller than the rest and had slender rods sticking out on all sides. I did not like its looks. It reminded me of some of the more unpleasant devices that I had seen during the dark years.

  The magician watched us all the time he was setting it up on its three slender legs. As he turned it to face us I tensed.

  It began to make a humming noise, like the sound of a water harp when a string bow is drawn across its glass tubes. The humming rose in pitch until it began to sound disturbingly like that of the device of the red fire. I began gauging the distance between myself and a nearby boulder.

  The stranger spoke impatiently to us in his unknown tongue.

  “You are discourteous,” rumbled Shoogar. This business can wait, surely?”

  The spell device said, “Surely?”

  I landed behind the boulder. Shoogar stood his ground. “Surely,” he repeated firmly. “You violate custom. In this, my district, you must gift me with one new spell, one I have never seen. Were I in your district —”

  The spell device spoke again. Its intonation was terrifying and inhuman. “New spell gift — ne
ver known — surely.”

  I realized that the stranger had spoken first. His device was attempting to speak for him, but in our words. Shoogar saw it too, and was reassured. The device was only a speakerspell, and a poor one at that, despite its powerful shape.

  Shoogar and the speakerspell and the stranger stood on that wind-swept mesa and talked with each other. Or rather, they talked at each other. It was infant’s talk, most of it. The thing had no words of its own. It could only use Shoogar’s; sometimes correctly, more often not.

  Shoogar’s temper was not improving. He had come to demand gift or duel from an intruding warlock only to find himself teaching a simpleminded construct to talk. The stranger seemed to be enjoying himself, unfortunately at Shoogar’s expense.

  The red sun was long gone, the blue was near the horizon, and all the world was red-black shadow. The blue sun settled behind a clump of deep violet clouds. Suddenly it was gone, like a taper blown out by the wind. The moons emerged against the night, now in the configuration of the striped lizard.

  During certain configurations Shoogar’s power is higher than during others. I wondered if he were master or servant to the striped lizard. He was just drawing his robes imperiously about his squat and stubby form. Master, apparently, from his manner.

  Abruptly, the stranger repeated his palms-out gesture, turned, and went back to his nest. He did not go inside. Instead. he briefly touched the rim of the doorway, and there was light! Garish “light it spurted from the flank of the nest, bright as double daylight.

  And such a strange light. The ground and the plants seemed to take the wrong colors and there was something not right with their shadows, an odd blackness of shade.

  The new magician’s motive was obvious, even to me — and even more so to Shoogar. He leapt back out of the light with his arms raised for defense. But it was no use. The light followed him, swept over him and dazzled him, effectively cancelling out the strength of the lunar light. The stranger had effectively negated the power of the striped lizard. Shoogar stood trembling, a tiny figure pinned in that dazzling odd-colored glow.