The Evil Wizard Smallbone

by Delia Sherman

  “Unlocked!” Smallbone growled. “I’ll show you unlocked!” And he raised his hand in an all-too-familiar gesture.

  Nick gritted his teeth. This was it. He couldn’t stop Smallbone’s spell, but he should be able to turn himself back — if he could just hold on to his human mind. Know who you are, Animal You had told him. All right. Who was he?

  I’m Nick, he told himself. I’m an elemental wizard, even though I don’t know much about it yet. I like science fiction and I can milk goats and cook. I’m smart enough to make an evil wizard think I’m dumb. I’m Nick Reynaud of Beaton, Maine, and some old geezer in an ugly old coat can’t make me be any different.

  The other times Smallbone had transformed Nick, everything had gone fuzzy or black, and next thing he knew, he was waking up with a set of strange new memories to sort out. This time, he felt the change as it happened. It was a little like having the measles and a little like riding a roller coaster and a lot like something he’d rather not go through again.

  Then it was over, and Nick was still Nick, with all his human memories intact.

  In a rat’s body. With a rat’s senses and instincts. It was like seeing double, only inside your head.

  The smell of dog hit Nick like a sledgehammer, sending him scuttling to the safety of the wall. He scurried farther into the darkness, looking for a place to hide, his sensitive whiskers guiding him around and over piles of books, until he was stopped by something big and solid.

  He sniffed carefully. Meat and wood and salt and age, and something dark and jumpy and sharp, like old blood and lightning.

  Box full of magic, his boy-self said. Danger, his rat-self added. Run away!

  He darted through a crack that led to the narrow space behind the wall.

  As soon as he was safe, Nick peed and pooped on the floor. Then he sniffed what he’d done, because that’s what rats do. One part of him confirmed that he was a healthy young male rat and that he was afraid. The human part thought, Ew, gross, and backed away.

  I am Nick Reynaud, he thought. My best friend is a bookshop. I know magic. I can turn myself back into my right shape any time I want.

  He could feel the words of the spell in his mind, ready to do their job, but his heart was beating too fast for him to concentrate. Which was probably a good thing, since the space between the walls would be a tight fit for a twelve-year-old boy, even a skinny one.

  There was nobody to fight, nobody to yell at. He was alone and lost and, yes, he had to admit it, scared out of his mind. Half of him wanted to stay very still and hope it would all go away. The other half, the stubborn half, was telling him to get his furry butt in gear and search out a good place for his transformation.

  He squeaked experimentally and listened to the echoes. The walls were there and there. All he had to do was go straight, and he’d be, well, somewhere else. The crack he’d escaped through couldn’t be the only rat hole in the place. He scuttled into the darkness, squeaking at intervals, investigating with his whiskers anything that sounded promising. The first opening he came to was stuffed with steel wool. He tried to chew through it and only cut his mouth. The next crack was also blocked, and the next and the next. The next was stuffed with paper folded into a fat packet. When Nick gave it a hopeful shove with his nose, his whiskers tingled.

  Magic, he thought, and left it alone.

  Beyond that was a solid stone wall and a hole in the floor that smelled of dust and damp plaster, magic, and — was that bacon grease?

  Rat-Nick was suddenly ravenous, but boy-Nick knew that getting lost in the walls was not going to help him. He retraced his route to Smallbone’s workshop, stuck his nose cautiously through the crack, and sniffed. Smallbone and the dogs were gone, so he emerged.

  The world was all blue shadows and green smudges; rats, apparently, are almost blind. Their noses, however, are super-sensitive. Besides dog and ancient wizard — and magic, of course — he could smell dust, paper, old fish, ashes, varnish, paint, stone, stale bread, fresh wood, chicken.

  Mouth watering, Nick sniffed and scurried his way to the moldy remains of a chicken sandwich under the bench. Boy-Nick was revolted even as rat-Nick tore into it with sharp little teeth. When it was gone, both Nicks felt steadier. It was time to do some magic.

  Nick noticed that his whiskers were all gummed up with chicken. Nobody can do anything with gummed-up whiskers. He sat up and groomed them clean, then attended to his paws. He’d started on his haunches when he remembered that he was supposed to be turning himself back into a boy. His fur rose in panic. Suppressing the urge to lick it flat again, he began to recite the spell in his head.

  It didn’t work. He remembered the words, but they were just sounds. It was like when he meowed at Tom or baaed at the goats. It sounded kind of like animal-speak, but it didn’t mean anything.

  Will, Concentration, Control. It was so hard to keep his focus when everything smelled so interesting and his whiskers and fur kept sending him messages he couldn’t quite understand. And he’d been doing spells all morning. What if he’d wasted his magic on gathering eggs and opening the door? What was he going to do?

  Ratty panic overcame him, and he ran blindly for the darkness. He came to himself again under the worktable, crouching against a book that made his fur tingle. Magic, he thought. I need more magic.

  Wasn’t there a pentagram in the middle of the floor?

  Nick scurried out into the light and stopped, his heart beating so hard he felt sick. All around him was emptiness, cold, hostile, unknowable. When he squeaked, only confused echoes answered him. Quivering from nose to tail, Nick slunk back to the safe, close dark under the table and groomed his fur thoughtfully.

  Books. There were books all over the floor. If he stuck to the books, maybe he could get closer to the pentagram without having to go out into the open.

  Whiskers twitching nervously, Nick ran through the uneven papery maze, squeezing between tall stacks, climbing over lower ones, making his way toward the electric smell of magic. Once he stepped on an open book and peered at the writing until his eyes would have watered if rats had tear ducts, but he couldn’t read a word. Was it because his eyes were wrong for reading or because he’d forgotten how?

  Why was he looking at this thing, anyway?

  Some time later, Nick crouched at the edge of a terrifying open space. He’d forgotten exactly what he was looking for, but he knew it was out there and that he was going to go after it no matter how terrified he was.

  With a defiant squeal, Nick launched himself into space and landed on something that stung his paws like ice. All at once, he remembered walking on two legs and seeing more than a few inches away. And he knew exactly how he could do those things again.

  Nick closed his beady rat eyes and poured all his fear and all his trust into the words that would make him human.

  The magic rushed through him, making his blood and his whiskers tingle painfully. Then the world tilted and turned itself inside out, taking Nick with it. Everything hurt, everything was falling apart, like Uncle Gabe’s worst beatings, only ten times worse. Nick tried to squeal or scream but couldn’t make a sound.

  When it was over, he was lying on the floor. Boy or rat? He hurt too much to care.

  There was a clatter, like metal rings sliding, and the clump of boots on the wooden floor, accompanied by the familiar stink of Smallbone’s tobacco. Not the nose-busting blast it would have been for a rat, but a faint, human-size whiff.

  Despite the trouble he was certainly in, Nick grinned.

  “You got no call to be so cheerful, Foxkin,” Smallbone said. “You’ve made an everlasting mess of my workshop and pooped all over my books.” The boots thumped nearer. “You’re white as a hake’s belly. Here.”

  Something hard poked Nick in the ribs. Opening his eyes, he saw Smallbone bending over him, his hat squashed down over his wild hair. Bony fingers grasped Nick’s shoulders, sat him up like a doll, and shoved a steaming cup into his shaking hands. It smelled of hot choco
late, with cinnamon and something slightly bitter he couldn’t identify.

  “Sage,” Smallbone said. “It’s good for dispersing magic. You called up enough just now to turn a goat into a senator. Next time, hold back a little; use just what you need and no more.”

  Nick swallowed the chocolate and glanced sideways at Smallbone. “Aren’t you going to turn me into a slug and salt me or something?”

  “Turn you into a slug?” Smallbone sounded amused. “Why should I do that? Just because you ain’t as full-up numb as I thought?”

  This conversation, Nick thought, was getting stranger by the second. “But I lied to you. I told you I couldn’t read.”

  “So you did,” Smallbone said. “But I didn’t believe you. Better than a greased-pig race at the fair it was, watching you busily pulling the wool over my eyes.”

  Nick was getting annoyed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it wouldn’t have been a real test if you knew you was being tested.” The old wizard heaved himself to his feet. “And now, if you’re done asking fool questions, it’s past five, and I want my supper.”

  After his day as a rat, Nick slept straight through two nights and the day between. When he woke, he sat up, feeling better than he’d felt in weeks. Tom, who had been asleep on his chest, picked himself out of the covers and meowed resentfully.

  “I’m a wizard,” Nick told the little cat. “I passed Smallbone’s test. I’m going to be the best elemental wizard in the world. You just watch.”

  Unimpressed, Tom yawned, stretched, curled up on the pillow, and went back to sleep.

  It was snowing, one of those heavy, wet snows that Maine can deliver in March. Nick ran downstairs, grabbed an apple from the barrel in the larder, threw open the back door, and called up a wind to blow the snow out of his way.

  The wind wouldn’t come. When he tried to reach for his power, there was nothing to reach for, just a damp blankness. Nick was clean out of magic. Furious, he marched, head down, into a wind he couldn’t control and forked the soiled straw out of the pens and washed the buckets and worked the pump and even gathered eggs without a lick of magic to help him. It took him twice as long as it usually did, and the longer it took, the madder he got.

  It had all been a trap. He imagined Smallbone up in his tower, carving little ducks and having a good laugh over what a fool Nick had made of himself, blowing out all his magic in a single spell. Knowing Smallbone, that was a whole lot easier to believe than that he actually didn’t mind that Nick had learned magic on his own.

  When Nick got back to the house, Smallbone had already eaten breakfast and was sitting in his rocker with Tom on his knees and his foul pipe stuck in his beard. The smell of sausage and onion and sage from the pan on the stove told Nick he was hungry. He got a plate and filled it with scrapple.

  Smallbone emptied his pipe into the fire and set it back on the mantelpiece. “When you’re done in here, Foxkin, you might as well come up to the tower. But clean up the kitchen first.”

  Nick choked on his scrapple. Was it possible the old man was actually going to teach him something?

  Nick sped through the cleanup in record time and ran upstairs. The tower door was wide open, the stairs were lit, the curtain was drawn back, and the workshop was bright and almost neat. Smallbone had draped a sheet over the shelf of wooden carvings, stacked the maze of books, and swept the floor. Beside the worktable, Nick saw the corner of the box of magic he’d bumped into when he was a rat. It looked like an old sea chest, with a seal painted on the lid. He wondered what was in it.

  A faint sour smell suggested that Smallbone had missed some of the rat poop. I should teach him my gathering spell, Nick thought, and grinned.

  Across the room, Smallbone was hunched over the worktable like a crow in a top hat. He flashed his glasses over his shoulder. “Come here, Foxkin, and tell me what you make of this.”

  “This” was a twisted framework of reddish iron with some bits of cloudy glass hanging from it like broken teeth. “It’s a lantern,” Nick said carefully. “It’s rusty and the glass is all brown and bubbly. The corners are lumpy. No, wait.” He looked more closely. “They’re supposed to be lizards, aren’t they? There’s no fuel tank or wick, but I suppose you could put a candle in it, if there was a holder for it.” He looked at Smallbone. “It’s the Lantern, isn’t it?”

  Smallbone gave him a glittering look. “The Sentry of Fire,” he said. “The glass is volcanic — Seaweed of Pele, it’s called: very rare. And these critters”— the old wizard tapped one of the iron lizards —

  “Are salamanders,” Nick said. “They live in fire and speak with tongues of flame.”

  Smallbone poked at the Lantern irritably. “Ayuh. And right now, it doesn’t do a jeezly thing. When it’s up to speed, it lights up the Town Limits with magic fire. It’s mostly for show — I ain’t interested in starting a conflagration. That’s why it went down, I guess. Not enough real fire behind it to keep it going.”

  “So Fidelou took it down?”

  “Well, he certainly did what he could, howling around the Limits five nights out of seven, but the jeezly thing would’ve held up just fine if the Smallbone Covers had kept up their side of the Contract like they was supposed to.”

  Nick touched one of the salamanders. It was rough with rust, but Nick could feel a faint warmth in it, like old ashes waiting to be coaxed back to life. If he’d known how, he would have tried.

  Smallbone jerked the Lantern out of reach. “You stop that! Land o’ Goshen, Foxkin, didn’t them jeezly books warn you about fummydiddling with enchanted doo-dads? With your Control, you’d most likely set a fire would burn a thousand years, and then where would we be? It takes a barn-load of figuring to create a ritual that’ll keep it in its place.”

  “You did it once,” Nick pointed out.

  Between the glasses, the beard, and the hat, not much of Smallbone’s face was visible, but that little looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Of course I did,” he snapped. “Jeezly hard it was, too. You know”— another flash of the round glasses —“that Elemental Magic is the art of making things do what they’d do anyway, only in the direction you want. The Sentries are more complicated. First off, they’re a trap, set to catch only certain kinds of fish. Second, they’re tuned so the seals can reset them. That’s why I made charts with everything laid out so I could build ’em again if I had to. Thing is,” he went on casually, “two hundred and fifty years is a long time. Might be I’m having trouble laying my hand on one or two of the charts. Not that I need ’em, mind. I can just work faster if I don’t have to start from scratch. I thought, with all your dusting and cleaning . . . ?”

  He was wearing an expression that reminded Nick of Mutt when food was on the table — half hopeful, half resigned to disappointment. And he was going to be disappointed, because Nick had no intention of handing over his precious chart. Served the old man right for jerking Nick around with his threats and his tricks and his spell that kept him in the yard like a straying dog. The bookshop had given Nick that chart, and he was learning to understand it. He was sure it was based on earth, with other magics woven in. He recognized Protection, he thought, and that knot there was clearly meant to bind the stones in one place.

  So the old coot could just put that in his pipe and smoke it. It’d probably smell a lot better than his tobacco.

  Nick shook his head regretfully. “Nope. Nothing like that. Sorry.”

  That afternoon, a nor’easter blew up along the coast, with a howling wind that sent the rain driving sideways across the field. It would have been perfect reading weather, if the bookshop hadn’t decided to go on strike.

  It started with Elements of Elemental Magic going blank. Nick was startled, but he just figured the book was giving him an enforced vacation. Fine. He hadn’t read anything but magic for ages. He could do with a little science fiction, he thought.

  There wasn’t any science fiction. There wasn’t hardly any fiction at all, except in the
ROMANCE section. There wasn’t even any nonfiction Nick was interested in reading, only books on accounting and politics.

  It took him a little while to figure out what had happened, and when he did, he couldn’t believe it.

  “It’s not fair,” he said, standing on the rug and facing the shelves. “It’s not even the right chart!” His voice rose. “If it’s so dad-blamed important to keep Fidelou out of Smallbone Cove, why didn’t you give Smallbone the chart instead of me?”

  He glared at the books, waiting for a response. No rustling or rattling, not the smallest prickle at the back of his neck. The bookshop was completely empty of any sign or scent or feeling of magic.

  Nick got mad. “Fine,” he said. “I don’t give a fart in a high wind.”

  He stomped out to the barn. The goats were chewing their cud and flavoring the air with hay-scented burps, and Ollie was snuffling hopefully through the straw in his pen for something to eat or play with. The chickens strutted everywhere, heads bobbing as they searched for bugs. Nick climbed into Groucho’s pen and picked up the curry comb and rubbed it in brisk circles along the donkey’s bony shoulder, his anger draining slowly out of him.

  After a few minutes, he rested his forehead against the dusty gray flank and closed his eyes. If he was honest with himself — and he couldn’t be anything else, thank you, Animal You — he had to admit that he hadn’t given Smallbone the chart because he wanted to fix the Sentries himself. If he did that, Smallbone would have to admit he was a real wizard and stop talking to him like he was just a dorky kid.

  Groucho snorted and gave Nick’s shoulder a reminding nudge. Nick wiped his face on his sleeve and went back to brushing.

  Who was he kidding? Smallbone didn’t make friends with his apprentices. He didn’t even train them. If Nick pushed him too far, he might turn him into something that couldn’t think — a brick or a chair or a plate. That would be the end of Nick, and nobody would ever know or care, except a handful of animals and possibly a magic bookshop.