The Evil Wizard Smallbone

by Delia Sherman

  When Nick finished brushing Groucho, he marched back through the rain. Curious, Mutt, Jeff, and Tom followed him into the bookshop.

  “I’m sorry,” he said into the waiting silence. “It’s just I wanted to do something, you know? Something really wizardy. I know, it sounds dumb. If Fidelou’s as powerful as Smallbone says, then I can’t stop him. I’ll give Smallbone the chart as soon as he comes down.” He sent a pleading look into the shadows. “Can we go back to the way things were now?”

  The silence grew thoughtful. Nick clenched his fists and fought the urge to keep talking, to shout and pull books off the shelves and throw them. The urge built and thickened, and just when Nick didn’t think he’d be able to control it a second longer, a book sailed out of the darkness and landed in his hands.

  It was called The Dance of the Elements.

  Nick spent the rest of the day with his nose in a book.

  His math teacher at Beaton Middle School would have been astonished to see him poring over charts of numbers and making calculations on sheets of stationery. It had rabbits on it, but paper was paper.

  Smallbone had disappeared into his tower again. He’d even sent the dogs down at five thirty with a note tied to Jeff’s collar saying he wouldn’t be down for supper. Nick studied the chart as he ate chicken pot pie, trying to line its curves and numbers up with the charts in The Dance of the Elements, but all he’d achieved so far was a headache. He needed more time, was all.

  Next morning, he was eating scrambled eggs when Smallbone came down at last, looking like a scarecrow who hadn’t been to bed all night.

  “Coffee,” he said hoarsely. “Is there any bread left? I want an egg sandwich.”

  As Nick got up to fetch the bread, the shop bell clanged brassily.

  Mutt and Jeff leaped up and tore out of the kitchen. Smallbone raised caterpillary eyebrows. “Well, what’re you waiting for, apprentice? See who it is and tell ’em to go away.”

  Nick glared at him and went out to the shop. The bell was still jangling as though it would never stop, and the dogs were under it, legs stiff and hackles up, loudly informing whoever was ringing it that they’d like to tear him to pieces. Nick had never heard them bark like that before.

  He looked out the big bay window.

  A huge, hairy white two-headed monster was on the porch, yanking at the bellpull as if he wanted to tear it out of the wall.

  Nick drew back from the window, then took another, more careful, look. What he’d taken for a monstrous second head was really a white wolf pelt, complete with head and paws, draped around the shoulders of a man. They were massive shoulders, and the man was massive, too, with a mane of black hair and a proud, cruel face that might have been carved out of stone.

  Though Nick had never seen him, he knew exactly who he had to be. The Evil Wizard Fidelou had broken into Smallbone Cove.

  The bellpull popped out of the wall. Fidelou threw the chain behind him and battered at the door until the wood shook. “Smallbone! Open the door, Smallbone!”

  Nick threw a hopeful glance at the kitchen door. Smallbone did not appear. And when he turned back, Fidelou was staring in at him through the window. His eyes were yellow, with pupils black as a starless night.

  “Ah, a boy!” A voice like dark honey slid into Nick’s ear. “Call off your dogs, boy, and open to me. I desire to speak to your master.”

  “We’re closed!” Nick yelled. “Go away!”

  The loup-garou grinned. His teeth were completely canine and horrible in his more or less human mouth. “But I am not in need of a book, me. I am a friend of your master — an old friend, you understand? We are brother wizards, he and I.”

  How dumb does he think I am? Nick wondered. “Smallbone doesn’t have friends.”

  “I am not astonished, me, since his apprentice turns them away so rudely. Go to your master, boy, and tell him the Wizard Fidelou is here.”

  “Well, if it ain’t my favorite loup-garou,” Smallbone said.

  He was standing by Nick, hat at a jaunty angle, his beard bristling.

  Fidelou howled and launched himself at the window.

  The air crackled and sparked like an electrical short, and Fidelou’s hair stood up like a Halloween fright wig. Nick made a dive under the counter.

  “You’ll excuse me if I don’t ask you in,” Smallbone said gruffly. “We got too many wizards on the premises as it is.”

  Fidelou snarled. “You make the jokes, eh? You are foolish, old man. Foolish and weak.”

  “Not so weak as all that,” Smallbone said. “I can still throw you into the middle of next week if I got a mind to.”

  “I think not.” The wolf wizard sneered. “You have lived too long, old man. Your Lantern is dark, your Wind is stilled, your Stream is frozen between its banks. I have even breached your Wall. Soon Smallbone Cove will be mine, and my pack free to hunt as they will. It is a hungry pack, Zachariah Smallbone: hungry as death. And you will starve here in your magic house with this poor slave. Would you not rather face me upon the dueling field? You will lose, bien sûr, but at least you will die with honor.”

  Nick glanced up at Smallbone. Behind his bushy beard and round spectacles, the old man’s face was stern. But the skirts of his coat shivered like water about to come to a boil. Smallbone was scared, and that scared Nick almost as much as Fidelou did.

  With one last sharp-toothed grin, the wolf wizard disappeared. Nick scrambled up in time to see him swing himself into the saddle of a huge black motorcycle propped against the railing. It looked dangerous, a sleeping panther or a machine gun on wheels — a real evil wizard’s ride.

  Fidelou revved the engine and ripped out of the parking lot, his white fur cloak rippling behind him like a banner.

  The dogs ran to Nick, very proud of themselves for scaring the intruder away and wanting to be petted. He fussed over them for a moment, then gently pushed them away.

  “I got something to give you,” he muttered, and without waiting for an acknowledgment, raced to his room, where he grabbed the chart out of his bureau.

  When he got back to the bookshop, Smallbone was still by the window, his shoulders bent. He took the chart Nick handed him, unfolded it, and peered at the lines and numbers. “This is for the Stone Wall. Thank you, Foxkin.”

  Smallbone mad and sarcastic Nick was used to. Smallbone sad and grateful scared him witless. “So what? You’re the Evil Wizard Smallbone. Why not just fight him like he wants, blast him with a spell or something?”

  Smallbone snorted. “Blast him with a spell? This ain’t a jeezly movie, Foxkin. This is the real world — my real world, anyway. Magic has Rules. A wizards’ duel ain’t pretty, Foxkin. I could win and Smallbone Cove could still be stomped flat by a giant or burnt to a crisp by a dragon, and I would hardly know I was doing it.” He tucked the chart into his pocket. “Best bet is to reset the Sentries and make sure them blubberhead seals keep ’em wound up proper. You attend to your studies. And keep your eyes peeled for the other charts. I wouldn’t wonder if some jeezly apprentice didn’t take and hide ’em somewhere for spite.”

  Since Nick had done just that, he knew Smallbone was right. Evil Wizard Books offered lots of places a frightened, angry boy could hide something he didn’t want found. And Nick thought he knew where one was.

  He said that, and Smallbone gave him a suspicious look. “You playing me, Foxkin? Because if you are, I swear I’ll turn you into a cockroach and set Hell Cat on you.”

  Nick looked him in the eye. “No, you won’t. But Fidelou would. That’s why I’m telling you.”

  There was a startled silence. “So where’s it at?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. I found it when I was a rat. It’s stuck in a crack.”

  “An old newspaper, most likely,” Smallbone said glumly.

  “It felt like magic,” Nick insisted. Smallbone lifted a bristly eyebrow. “No, really. Elemental Magic feels prickly, like static electricity.”

  “Well, you better get looking, the
n.”

  So Nick probed the baseboards in each of Evil Wizard Books’ empty rooms. He found two of the steel wool–stuffed rat holes, a yellowed copy of Rocket Ship Galileo, and some very old coins. In one of the small spare rooms, his probing fingers felt a tiny prick of electric energy. Unfortunately, the paper was stuffed in so tightly there was no way to extract it.

  No natural way, that is. Smallbone got it out with a few sharp-edged words and a pair of needle-nose pliers, then sat down on the sagging bed and unfolded it. “I think . . .” He turned it around. “Ah! The wily old so-and-so. Ha!”

  “What’s it for?”

  “The Lantern.”

  “Maybe I can help,” Nick offered.

  Smallbone’s beard bobbed as he munched thoughtfully. “Maybe you can at that.”

  A few days later found Nick standing on a flat granite stone in the Lantern Glade. There’d been a sudden return of winter. Snow dusted the ground, and the wind had a savage bite. Every few minutes, Nick swiped his dripping nose with the cuff of his jacket.

  The jacket was red. So were his socks. Smallbone had insisted, since red was the color of fire. The old wizard was wearing a red muffler that shone with eye-aching brilliance against the dark background of pine and spruce and naked tree trunks around the clearing. The Lantern Glade itself was maybe half the size of a motel swimming pool, studded with rocks and carpeted with moss. An oak stood at one end. It was a giant of its kind, with a double trunk lumpy with galls, and twisted branches that would have blocked the sun if they’d been leafed out. Nick thought it was the most beautiful tree he’d ever seen. It was certainly the most alive.

  To the south of Nick’s stone, Smallbone was performing the ritual laid out in the chart Nick had found when he was a rat. The Lantern was looking a lot better than it had — more like a powerful magical artifact and less like something an elephant had stepped on. Nick had spent a whole day banging the dents out of the top and polishing the salamanders with stove blacking. He and Smallbone had mended the Seaweed of Pele, melting the volcanic glass in a crucible and cooling it in the pentagram without even scorching the floor.

  The sun touched the top of the great oak, and Nick shivered nervously. When it was directly overhead, Smallbone would give the signal, and it would be up to Nick to light the Lantern.

  “What do you mean, I’m going to light it?” he’d asked when Smallbone told him the plan. “You’re the evil wizard.”

  “You want to help, don’t you?”

  “Well, yeah. But this is really big magic, right? What about all those complicated rituals and stuff?”

  “I’ll take care of those. All you have to do is light the jeezly thing. You do know how to light a candle, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” Nick said, offended.

  “It’s like that, only bigger. There’s no actual candle, you see. You’ll have to give it all you got.”

  Smallbone was crossing and recrossing the Glade. Nick watched him stop at a rock, mutter, wave the Lantern, turn, check his heading against the chart, then march off in a new direction, leaving a bright little thread of magic behind him. He’d been doing it for some time, and the clearing was crisscrossed with a complex, brilliant web of red-gold light. Nick could feel the magic in it humming down his bones.

  The sun stood directly overhead. It was noon, the hour of fire. Smallbone slid the Lantern onto a branch of the grandfather oak and nodded.

  Nick closed his eyes and opened himself to fire.

  It should have been easy. He’d lit hundreds of candles and lanterns — well, twenty or thirty, anyway. But candles and lanterns had wicks, and fuel for the fire to feed on. The Lantern had only magic, which he must set alight. He and Smallbone had discussed it, and he knew he could draw it from the sun. But it was March, and it had snowed yesterday, and the sun, though bright, wasn’t nearly hot enough to melt it. Nick’s feet ached, his nose was numb, and he was horribly aware of Smallbone — and, oh, yes, the Lantern — watching him.

  He couldn’t mess this up.

  Okay, he thought. Big fire.

  Nick thought about how the sun felt at midsummer when the air was hot and close and the light on the water shone blindingly bright. He thought about sunspots and solar flares, about the magma that was melted rock.

  His feet felt warmer.

  Magma reminded him of volcanoes, which reminded him of seeing The Return of the King on TV and how scared he’d been when Gollum fell into the Cracks of Doom. Behind his closed lids, he saw the heaving mass of red and black and molten gold, with Gollum sinking into its depths. His body shook with the trembling of the earth beneath his feet. He smelled sulfur.

  A familiar voice cut through the crackle of bubbling lava. “That’s enough, Foxkin. You can open your eyes now. Land o’ Goshen, Foxkin — STOP!”

  Nick forced his lids open. It didn’t help much, since all he could see was fire.

  A freezing load of soft snow landed on his head, sliding icy fingers down his chest and neck. He gasped and shuddered and swiped it out of his eyes. “What was that for?”

  Smallbone brushed the snow off his hands. His hat looked slightly singed and the hem of his coat was smoldering. “You needed cooling down.”

  Nick looked up. The Lantern was burning brightly, and the branch it hung on was charred black.

  “I’m going to have to move it,” Smallbone remarked. “That branch won’t hold. When I told you to call fire, Foxkin, I didn’t mean a thousand burning suns.”

  It was the nicest thing Nick had heard Smallbone say. He grinned. “I was thinking of a volcano. I sure lit the hell out of that Lantern, didn’t I?”

  “You durn near lit the whole tree on fire,” Smallbone said drily. “And don’t say ‘hell’— it ain’t manners.”

  Despite the chill wind, Nick was burning hot and his head felt light. He tumbled off the stone into the snow and lay still. “So, is Smallbone Cove safe now?”

  A cool hand felt his forehead and withdrew. “Well, it should slow them down, anyway, which is all to the good. You didn’t do bad at all, though you need to work on that Control. When you get your strength back, we’ll make a start on the Wall.”

  Nick smiled weakly and passed out.

  It took Nick three days to get his magic back, and that was without using any at all.

  “Control, Foxkin,” Smallbone told him. “Hardest thing to learn for a trickster like you. It’s like spinning a good yarn: you need to know how to stop before you hang yourself.”

  Ever since Nick had relit the Lantern, Smallbone had been treating him like a real apprentice. Which seemed to mean wasting a great deal of time making sure Nick knew the Rules.

  Nick hated the Rules. Nothing about them made any sense. They were confusing and ambiguous and annoyingly restrictive. Apparently every wizard worth his pipe knew them, even though they weren’t written down.

  “So how do I know if I’ve broken one?” Nick asked.

  Smallbone chuckled. “Same way you know you’ve walked off the edge of a cliff.”

  “You die?”

  “If you’re lucky.”

  “So how do you know what they are?”

  “You hark to your elders.” The old man sighed. “Go away and take the dogs with you. I’ve had my belly full of company for one day.”

  Nick went down to the bookshop. “I want to know more about the Rules,” he said.

  A good-sized book sailed down the aisle. Not written down, huh? Nick thought smugly. I guess the old coot just doesn’t know how to ask. And then he saw the title: Glamourama: The Magic of Illusion and Disguise.

  Ever since Animal You, Nick had known that the bookshop had its own agenda. It gave him what it wanted him to have, not what he asked for. If it had been a person jerking him around like that, Nick would have been mad, but he couldn’t be mad at the bookshop.

  Unlike Animal You, this book got down to the good stuff right away. Right in the first chapter, he found a spell for making a spoon look like a flower.
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br />   Nick went to the kitchen, took a wooden spoon out of the dresser, and said the spell while imagining a flower, just like he was supposed to. The handle of the spoon turned green and the bowl turned pink.

  Maybe if he imagined a particular kind of flower. A tulip, maybe. Tulips were easy.

  An hour later, all he’d managed was a slightly pointy pink blotch sticking out of a pair of long green splinters.

  Disgusted, he left the spoon on the table and started dinner.

  When Smallbone came down, he was amused. “Strange color, that. Can’t say I’ve ever met it before, outside a box of Crayola crayons. What was you aiming for, anyways? A sow’s ear?”

  Nick scowled. “A tulip.”

  Smallbone sat down. “You’re going at this all barse-ackwards, Foxkin. Before you cast a glamour, you got to know how to recognize one.” He picked up the spoon and frowned at it. A perfect scarlet tulip bloomed in his hand. He handed it to Nick. It felt like a wooden spoon. “Don’t believe your eyes. Look with your magic. The tulip should start to shimmer like water just on the boil. Then you’ll see the spoon and the tulip at the same time, only the tulip will be hazy and the spoon will be solid.”

  Nick stared at the tulip until his eyes stung. “It’s not working.”

  “You’re trying too hard,” Smallbone said. “Cross your eyes a little and think of nothing.” He gave a dry chuckle. “That should come easy.”

  Nick tried again. The image of the tulip shimmered, brightened, thinned into a scarlet mist around a solid wooden spoon. “I saw it!”

  Smallbone shoveled chipped beef onto his plate. “Now remove the glamour so I can see it, too.”

  Nick concentrated on the scorches on the handle, the slightly lopsided shape of the bowl, the ding on one side. A moment later, a wooden spoon lay on the table.

  “Good,” said Smallbone. “Do it again.”

  Next morning Nick woke, as usual, to Tom’s whiskers tickling his nose. He opened his eyes, and Tom yawned, displaying a curled pink tongue and all his teeth.