by Tad Williams
“How could I miss that chance? A whole new culture, language, and even more importantly, a whole new art form! Nine muses aren’t going to be enough anymore, Mr. Jatt. So that’s why I made this recording, my friend. Either way, I wanted to say thank you — and goodbye.” And with that the recorded Balcescu held out his comwand and the recording went black.
Maybe he hadn’t guessed how soon I’d watch the recording – maybe he was still on the alien ship. I commed the captain’s cabin but she was on the observation deck with everyone else, celebrating. I rushed up, but before I could say a thing to Captain Watanabe or any of the other officers I spotted Dr. Swainsea leaning against the biggest view-portal looking out at the jellyfish ship, so strange, so large, so distant.
“Doc…Doc…!” I called as I ran up.
“I know, Rahul,” she said without turning. “Look – there it goes.” She pointed. I thought I could see a dim streak of light moving away from the alien ship – but not toward the Visser ring, I was surprised to see. “God only knows what kind of path those things travel,” she said. “Well, Stefan will find out soon enough.”
“You knew what he was going to do?”
“Of course. I helped him.” She looked at me. “Oh, Rahul, what else was I going to do? Beg him to stay? We had…maybe the beginning of something. How could that compete against a Big Idea, especially for a man who lived for big ideas? No, I couldn’t have asked him and he couldn’t have agreed — we both would have hated ourselves. You’ll understand someday.”
I understand now, I wanted to say, but everyone needs to tell their own story their own way. You don’t have to be six feet tall to know that. “It was just…” I shook my head. “At first I didn’t like him. But then, I kind of thought he and I might be…we might…”
“It might have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship?” she asked. Something in my expression must have amused her, because she laughed. “You don’t think you’re the only one who watches old pictures, do you?”
“I guess not.” I frowned. “I think Balcescu’s crazy, anyway. We’ve already got music and art and Fred Astaire and Katharine HePRETTY BOYurn and Howard Hawks — do we even need a tenth muse?”
“I need a drink,” she said. “Then maybe I’ll feel a little bit less like Ingrid Bergman.”
We walked across the observation deck, threading our way through the happy crew members, many of whom were already well into the champagne. She still looked sad, so I reached up and took Doc Swainsea’s hand…Diana’s hand. Lose a friend, make a friend. Sometimes life does imitate art, I guess.
“Well,” I told her — my best Bogart — “whatever else happens, we’ll always have Rainwater Hub.”
The Lamentably Comical Tragedy (or the Laughably Tragic Comedy) of Lixal Laqavee
“I AM NOT A MAGICIAN,” LIXAL Laqavee announced to the shopkeeper who had come forward at the ringing of the bell upon the counter, “but I play one in a traveling show.”
“Then you have come to precisely the right place, sir,” the man said, smiling and nodding. “Twitterel’s Emporium is known throughout the length of Almery for its unrivaled selection of effects, marvels, and confidence enhancers.”
“And are you Twitterel?” Lixal inquired. “The one whose name is above the door of this establishment?”
“I have that honor,” said the small, bewhiskered man and brushed a fleck of dust from his velvet robe. “But let us not waste time on such trivia as my name. How may I serve you, sir? Flash-dust, perhaps? It gives the impression of a great outrush of thaumaturgical energies while posing no great danger to its employer.” Twitterel reached into a ceramic jar on the scarred counterop and produced a handful of silvery dust, which he threw to the floor with a flick of his wrist. It burst with a percussive crack and produced a voluminous puff of white smoke. The shopkeeper then fanned vigorously with his hand until he and Lixal were face to face again. “As you see, it also provides ample distraction for a well-conceived disappearance or sleight-of-hand effect.”
Lixal nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I think a portion or two of flash-dust might serve admirably, although by no means will it fulfill all my needs.”
“Ah!” Twitterel smiled, showing fewer teeth than one might expect even in a man his age. “A gentleman who wishes his impostures to be both believable and exciting. May I say, sir, that your audience will thank you for your care. Perhaps this length of rope, which when properly exhibited seems to have the living qualities of a serpent? Or this Benaraxian Cabinet, whose interior can comfortably contain a shapely female assistant – the type whose curvaceous form, and your menacing of same with these cleverly constructed sabers, will particularly stimulate your audience…”
“No, no,” said Lixal, waving his hand. “You have incorrectly conceived my needs. I do not wish to employ mere trickery, especially of the expensive variety embodied in this monstrous, mirrored sarcophagus.” He flicked a finger at the lacquered surface of the Benaraxian Cabinet. “The performing troop with which I ply my trade is a small one, accustomed to the back roads of Almery, and we have but one wagon to carry all our goods. Also, and far more importantly, in the vicinities we frequent the distinction between performing the role of magician and being a magician is often a blurry one.”
The shopkeeper Twitterel paused. He reached up and plucked out a bit of his breakfast that had lodged in his beard (or at least Lixal hoped it was from a meal no less recent.) The old man seemed oddly disturbed by his customer’s words. “I am not sure I grasp the sum of your meaning, sir,” Twitterel said. “Elucidate, please, so that I may better serve your needs?”
Lixal frowned. “You force me to greater crudity than I would prefer. However, I will do my best to make plain my desire.” He cleared his throat.
“I travel with a troop of performers, providing entertainment and instruction, and sometimes even hope to those who previously found that quality in short supply. Not all perceive us in this wise – in fact, some ungenerous souls have suggested that I and my associates are little better than venal tricksters, a claim I reject vigorously.
“In the course of our educational performances we offer to our auditors certain medicines and tonics of a curative nature. Despite the slurs of the uncomprehending, our record of cure is bettered by no other similar organization, and even compares favorably with the more common medicinal advice offered by the sort of physic to which our rustic audiences generally have access. Do you grasp my meaning?”
“You sell dubious cures to the peasantry.”
“In a nutshell, good shopkeeper, in a nutshell, although I might take exception to the word ‘dubious’. By certain measures life itself is dubious. However, generally speaking, your perception is admirable. Now, because my part in this organization is a portrayal of magicianship, at times I am approached by members of the buying public separately from the rest of the cast, customers who believe the illusions they have seen are real. Many of them wish only to know whether the silver coin I produced had truly been lodged in their ear in the first place, and if so should it not then belong to them.” Lixal shook his head ruefully. “Others, though, have requests for magical assistance of a more precise nature, usually concering some petty problem in their lives – a failure of certain human apparatus of a privy nature being the most common. Then there are those who would like to see a family member hastened to peace so that the division of his or her possessions might be practiced sooner rather than later.” Lixal held up his finger. “These commissions I would not take, I hasten to assure you, even had I the means, and not only because of my naturally ethical composition. Our rural folk tend to carry both grudges and sharp hand tools, so I have no urge to excite malice.” He cleared his throat. “Other supplicants have desired lost objects found, unpleasant creatures or relatives confined, and so on — in short, a galaxy of requests, most of which I am unable to fulfill, and so a healthy sum remains dispersed in the pockets of the rustic population instead of concentrated in my own where it might for
m the foundation of a burgeoning fortune.” Lixal shook his head sadly. “I have come to tire of this woefully imbalanced state of affairs. So I come to you, good shopkeeper.”
Twitterel looked back at Lixal with more consternation than the casual observer might have expected. “I still do not grasp with certainty your desires, sir,” the old man said nervously. “Perhaps you would be better off visiting the shop of my good friend and colleague Dekionas Kroon a scant four leagues away in the pleasant hamlet of Blixingby Crown Gate – he also specializes in fine acoutrements for the performing of magic to discerning audiences…”
“You tease me, sir,” said Lixal sternly. “You must have grasped by now that I am not interested in the acoutrements of the magical arts, not in elaborate stage artifices or even the potware and piping of alchemy or other scholarly but unsatisfying pursuits. I wish to buy actual spells. There – I can make it no clearer. Just a few, selected for one like myself who has no magical training – although, it must be said, I do have a wonderful, firm voice that any magician might envy, and a certain physical presence concomitant with a true thaumaturge, as you must have noticed yourself.” Lixal Laqavee stroked his full brown beard slowly, as if comparing its lushness to the sparse clump of yellowed whiskers which decorated the shopkeeper’s receding chin.
“Why would I, a mere merchant, have such things?” Twitterel questioned in what was almost a squeak. “And why, even if I did possess such objects of powerful wisdom, would I share them with someone whose only claim to wizardly dessert is a velvet robe and an admittedly handsome beard? Sooner would I put a flaming brand into the hands of a child residing in a house made of twigs and dry leaves!”
“You misunderstand me again, good Twitterel,” Lixal replied. “You protest that you are a mere merchant, and yet unless I much mistake things, the name etched above your door does not conform to your true identity. In other words, I believe you are in fact not ‘Twitterel’ at all, but rather Eliastre of Octorus, who was once reknowned in the most powerful circles as ‘The Scarlet Sorceror’ – a pleasantly dramatic name, by the way, that I would quickly adopt for my own performances were it not that I make a better appearance in dark colors such as blacks and moody, late-evening blues.” Lixal smiled. “You see, it happens that by mere chance I studied your career while honing my impersonation of someone in your line of endeavor. That is also how I recognized you when I saw you drinking in the tavern up the road yesterday and began to conceive of my current plan. What a piece of luck!”
“I…I do not understand.” Twitterel, or Eliastre, if that was indeed his name, retreated a little farther from the countertop behind which he stood. “Why would such an unlikely set of affairs mean luck for you?”
“Step back in this direction, please. Do not think to escape me,” Lixal said. “And neither should you attempt to bluff me with the powers you once so famously owned. I know full well that after you failed in an attempt to seize leadership among your fellow magicians and wizards, the Council of Thaumaturgic Practitioners removed said powers and placed you under a ban of trying to regain them or in any other way dabbling in the profession of wizardry, under pain of humiliating, excruciating and lingering death. Please understand that I will happily inform the Council of your whereabouts and your current occupation if you resist me. I am inclined to believe your current profession, peddling alembics and flash-dust, might well fall within the scope of their ban.”
Twitterel seemed to have aged twenty years – decades he could ill-afford to add to his tally – in a matter of moments. “I could find no other way to make a living,” he admitted sadly. “It is the only craft I know. The Council did not take that into account. Better they should have executed me outright than condemn me to starve. In any case, I wished only to reform certain insufficiencies of the transubstantive oversight process – what was once a mere prophylactic has become a hideous, grinding bureaucracy…”
Lixal held up his hand. “Spare me. I care not for the details of your rebellion but only for what you will do next – namely, provide me with several easily-learned spells that will allow me to supplement my performing income by rendering assistance to those pastorals who seek my aid. I am not a greedy man – I do not wish to raise the dead or render gold from dry leaves and river mud. Rather I ask only a few simple nostrums that will put me in good odor with the country-folk — perhaps a charm for the locating of lost livestock…” He considered. “And surely there is some minor malediction which would allow the sending of a plague of boils to unpleasant neighbors. Such a thing has been requested of me many times but heretofore I had no means of answering the call.”
Eliastre, or Twitterel as was, rubbed his hands together in what looked like genuine unease. “But even such minor spells can be dangerous when improperly used – not to mention expensive!”
“Never fear,” said Lixal, with a certain air of noblesse oblige. “When I have begun to earn the money I so richly deserve by employing these spells, I will most certainly return and pay you their full worth.”
“So,” the shopkeeper said bitterly. “You would extort me and rob me.”
“Not at all.” Lixal shook his head. “But lest such an ill-considered notion set you scheming to punish me somehow for merely trying to better my situation in this uncertain life, let show you the warding bracelet on my wrist, an object of true power.” He flourished the twist of copper he wore around his arm, which indeed seemed to have a glow greater than the ordinary reflection of metal. It had been given to Lixal by a young lady of the troop during a time of pleasurable intimacy – a charm that she swore would protect him from premature death, inherited by her from her aunt at the time of that elderly lady’s quite timely demise. “Oh, by the by,” Lixal continued, made uneasy by the speculative way Eliastre was examining his wrist jewelry, “if in your misdirected bitterness you decide that some knowledge or stratagem of yours could overcome the efficacy of this ornament, I would like you to be aware that the bracelet is not my only protection. Should anything untoward happen to me an associate of mine unknown to you will immediately dispatch to the Council of Thaumatrugic Practitioners a letter I have prepared, detailing both your recent crimes and your exact location. Remember that as I choose my spells and you guide me in their recommended usages.”
The old man stared at him for a long time with an expression on his face that it would have been difficult to call either friendly or forgiving. “Ah, well,” Eliastre said at last. “My hands appear tied, as it were, and the longer I resist the more the binding rope shall chafe me. Let us proceed.”
* * *
When he had completed the transaction with the ex-wizard to his satisfaction, Lixal took the manuscript pages of the new spells and bade Eliastre goodbye.
“By the by, I frown on the word ‘extortion’,” Lixal called back to the old man, who was still glaring at him from the doorway of the shop. “Especially when I have given you my word of honor that I will come back at a time when my pockets are full and repay you at market rate. The expression on your face suggests that you doubt this promise, or else that you are otherwise unsatisfied with our exchange, which to me seems to have been more than fair. In either case, I am displeased. Until that cheerful day when we meet again, I suggest you cultivate an attitude of greater humility.”
Lixal made his way back out of the city of Catechumia toward the forested outskirts where his traveling theatrical company had made its camp. He wished he had been able to force the old man to recite the spells himself, as proof that none of them had been primed like a springe trap to rebound painfully or even fatally on its user, but since Eliastre had been forcibly curtailed from using magic by the Council of Thaumaturgic Practitioners Lixal knew there would have been little point: no flaws would have been exposed because the spells themselves would not have worked. He would have to trust to the curbing effect of his threat to have a colleague notify the Council if anything hurtful should happen to Lixal. The fact that this colleague was an invention, created on the s
pur of the moment – Lixal had long practice in improvisation – would be unknown to Eliastre, and therefore no less effective an intimidation than an actual confederate would have been.
Most of the rest of his fellow players were still in town, but Ferlash, a squat, ill-favored man wearing the cassock of a priest of the Church of the Approaching Horizon was toasting a heel of bread at the campfire. He looked up at Lixal’s approach.
“Ho!” he called sourly. “You look cheerful. Did you bring something to eat? Something which, by sharing it with a deserving priest, you could store up goodwill in the afterlife? I do not doubt your soul’s post-horizontal standing has need of a little improvement”
Lixal shook his head in irritation. “As everyone in our company knows, Ferlash, you have not been a celebrant in good standing of your order since they expelled you years ago for egregious impregnation of congregants. Thus, I suggest you leave off discussion of my own particular afterlife. I would no more listen to your speculations about the health of my soul than I would accept similar advice from the piece of bread you are toasting.”
“You are a testy young man,” Ferlash said, “and too pleased with yourself by half. In fact, I must say that you seem even more self-satisfied than usual today.”
