Fauntleroy Chen watched the witch step smoothly onto the rain-slicked bricks of the street. Water pooling in the old railroad tracks sung her presence to the rusty, narrow walls damming it in place. The wizard envied Isadora Weigl’s confidence, her air of nonchalant belonging. His sort sidled through life, slept on bus benches, hid themselves beneath grubby layers of clothing. Witches, he’d always been told, were afflicted with shameless pride.
Except on this witch that shameless pride looked like something to envy rather than to scorn. And she walked like someone who had never known pain. More envy blossomed in Fauntleroy, radiating from the hot core in his abdomen where his liver was busily nurturing his wayward adenocarcinomic children.
Even the rain wondered who she thought she was, sizzling in syncopation to his unexpected burst of wounded passion. Isadora Weigl paused in mid-stride and looked around her.
The very water in the air cloaks him, deferring the eye and swallowing reflections, making of its master nothing more than another foetid street puddle.
The witch shook her head and walked away. A block behind, Fauntleroy Chen followed her with the peculiar shuffle of the hungry and the homeless, which was itself invisibility of an entirely different kind.
***
When He Was a Young Man
“Feminism? ’S just a stalking horse for them witches.”
Fauntleroy knocked back another mouthful of stale beer and nodded along. There wasn’t much point in arguing with Vladimir when he was in one of his moods. So far as the younger wizard knew, Vladimir had been in one of his moods continuously for the past several decades.
“Ain’t no call for all that unrest and upheaval and kitchen bitchin’.” Vladimir let forth an enormous belch, seasoning the air under the Burnside Bridge with the rich, mellow tones normally associated with a brewery that has gotten hold of some very bad yeast indeed. “All the fuss and muss gives ’em cover to do their work.” He leered at Fauntleroy. “The work of corrupting us wizards.”
Chen had been a wizard, or at least a wizard’s pupil, for the better part of ten years now. He still wasn’t sure what the work of wizards was. All that stuff about keeping dark forces in balance was baloney from the minds of fantasy novelists and Hollywood scriptwriters. Even the most drug-addled drunks among Vladimir’s coterie knew that the first rule of wizardry was that the world simply is. There was no good, no evil, no balance. Just the inevitabilities of thermodynamics and entropy’s slow progression.
Wizards drew their power from the chinks created by eddies of negative entropy. The entire phenomenon of life itself was little more than an archipelago of islands of negative entropy, after all.
So they lived their own individual lives in the maximal entropy achievable in the modern, urban world—drunk, stoned, hungry and cold. Monasteries were too structured, hermitages in the state of nature too fecund. Streets suited wizards best.
Which had always led Fauntleroy Chen to wonder if there had been wizards before there were cities. Perhaps they had been called into being when the first foundations were laid along the earliest streets, creeping into existence as the random chaos of nature congealed into the focused, controlled functional chaos of civilization.
Vladimir launched into his next stanza before stopping abruptly. “Thing about a witchy woman is…”
Traffic rumbled overhead, while gulls wheeled and cried on the Willamette River. After moment, Fauntleroy realized this was his cue. “Mmm?”
He didn’t expect any particularly useful answers. Learning from Vladimir was like panning for gold in a public fountain. Every now and then you found a wedding ring, but the raw stuff was never present.
“Thing about a woman is…” Now Vladimir’s eyes narrowed, his inebriation lifting like fog on a summer morning. “They’re the opposite of us. Witches, like they’re pregnant with the world. We wizards eat shadows. Them witches make light. They try to make right and clean what was meant to be all dark edges.”
That might have been the most important thing anyone had ever said to Fauntleroy Chen about the art and practice of magic. Even in the moment, he realized this. He also knew he’d spend the rest of his life trying to figure out what the hell it actually meant.
***
Dawn Breaking Like Fire on the Mountain
Huddled in a doorway at the unfashionable end of northwest Portland’s former industrial district, the wizard awoke with a start, groaning. His liver was hurting bad, sending shoots of pain to colonize the entire right side of his abdomen and disturb his digestion even further. The cancer was definitely in strong voice today.
Portland in the spring was chilly but not killing cold. Still his hands felt cramped and chapped, a differing grace note of discomfort providing counterpoint to the pain that consumed his gut.
Ignoring the discontents of his body, Fauntleroy Chen extended his senses.
The witch bathes, wrapped in the water that is the wizard’s domain. This is a shock, his intimate knowledge of almost her entire body, from the long and narrow nipples that throb slightly in time to the sensuous scrape of the razor on her legs, to the warm depths of her genitalia, to the smooth, firm curve of her buttocks. He has not expected such contact, and startles sufficiently that the water in her deep clawfoot tub reflects his amazement.
“Gah!” The wizard bolted upright, dislodging his two warmest coats.
The witch stepped to the window of her warehouse loft—a real loft, he’d noted the night before with grudging approval, not a trendily labeled condo complex purposely built for digital yuppies and hipster trustafarians. There she stared out at the street. She was naked and wet, the water that beaded her body whispering powerfully to Fauntleroy Chen.
Their eyes met. A feedback loop closed. Even through the width of a street and two stories of height and the shield of rain-spotted window glass, he could clearly make out her expression as Isadora Weigl doubled over in pain.
The witch swiftly retreated into her own shadows.
“Shit, shit, shit.” He’d been made.
Not that anything too dreadful should come of it. The ancient eras of mortal enmity between witches and wizards had faded in a slow dissolve to a détente of mutual discontent amid the distractions of the modern world. But she’d seen him clearly with the senses of her power. The wizard knew he would have a much harder time of sussing out her Great Work, let alone stopping her.
***
A Bit Later On in His Earlier Life
Wizards generally didn’t bother with funerals. Mostly their corpses went unclaimed on the slab of whatever morgue they’d chanced to die nearest to. This either meant a pauper’s grave or a brief and pointed afterlife as a medical school cadaver.
Vladimir had done things differently, of course.
Now most of the city’s wizards, or at least the self-admitted ones, shuffled and coughed and held their dogs’ clothesline leashes amid the thin, endangered woods of Ross Island in the middle of the Willamette River. The founding witch of Portland had lived there a century and a half ago. She had been a widow farming her late husband’s land back when attacks by Indians or desperate whites were still a routine danger of pioneer life. And so a life surrounded by water had been a sensible precaution, for both natural and supernatural reasons.
The Widow Ross had woven the basic spells that undergirded the city of Portland’s mystic resonances. Any place with ambitions of future urban grandeur needed a witch to give it birth, even the wizards would grudgingly admit that. You could not enjoy shadowed decay to lurk unfashionably within unless someone had first built bright, straight and true. This went for both the physical and psychic infrastructures of a city.
Having established her domain, and laid the magical cornerstones for the city of Portland, the Widow Ross had then possessed the decency to pass on. This allowed the succeeding four or five generations of wizards to set about the right and proper business of eviscerating the heart of the old witch’s power. Thus was the balance between order and entropy mai
ntained, and thus over time hundreds of wizards had found a home which, if not precisely warm in its welcome, had sheltered them readily enough.
That the home of the Widow Ross had long since been turned into a mid-river gravel quarry was one of the signature accomplishments of Portland’s wizards. Witches had their uses, but they couldn’t be allowed to memorialize the fruits of their power. Otherwise women might get ideas.
Thus Vladimir was buried in a midnight ceremony amid the second growth forest that had reclaimed those portions of the Widow Ross’ fields which had not yet been scooped out and barged away. More like a nine p.m. ceremony, Fauntleroy Chen realized as he checked the rising of the moon, but it was the thought that counted. Fell deeds done in darkness or something like that.
The simple truth was that no one wanted to be out here at sidereal midnight. With the sun on the far side of the world and memories stirring from the very stones and soil, that was a time of power when old ghosts walked and forces darker, stranger and more impenetrable than the wizards themselves could all too easily be called to attention by the murmurings of ritual.
To his surprise, Fauntleroy found himself giving what passed for a eulogy.
“…not a good man, but most of us aren’t.”
That produced the expected round of sniggers.
Gamely, the wizard carried on. “He taught me much.” Sort of. “He kept the voice and memory of us all. Vladimir was king of the kingless, leader of the leaderless, first among a group with no equals at all.”
Someone was noisily sick in a tangled bank of scrub. Which seemed a fitting memorial.
He gathered his thoughts to put to words what the ending of such a life meant. “Power is as much a curse as a blessing. Our ways are sometimes too subtle even for ourselves. Vladimir knew what was true, and kept us focused on that truth. May his bones rest quietly and his spirit journey onward in whatever peace is given to our kind in death.”
Somehow after that night, Fauntleroy Chen had inherited Vladimir-with-no-last-name’s largely imaginary mantle of authority, such as it was among Portland’s wizards. He’d also begun his journey into cancer. Another price for power, in the end.
He’d spent much time since wondering who would be moved to deliver his eulogy, and what the fat-bellied moon might hear them say.
***
Morning Steams Like Souls on Ice
The witch Isadora Weigl squatted on her heels in front of him. There had been no point in running away. The wizard knew she’d homed in on his morphic signature once they’d locked eyes. He would have just tired himself out while also annoying her, to no particular benefit.
Sweat lightly slicks the hollow of her back. Her shoulders and hair are yet damp from the bath. Her groin is damp for other reasons he tries to ignore. The day’s humidity tells a more subtle version of the same story. He ignores that as well.
She was beautiful, he noted. Beautiful in the way of most witches. Which is to say, not necessarily pretty. Rather, the same power that brought wizards to a grubby desuetude lent their distaff correspondents a sheen of spell-wrought glamour. Thick waisted and short legged, bright eyed, with close cropped hair dyed maroon and purple, the witch wore those layers of unremarkable black that passed for urban camouflage on the streets of the Pacific Northwest. Styled and dressed differently, she could have passed as a local anywhere from Sofia to Yerevan to Tehran.
“What do you want?” Isadora Weigl finally asked him. Her voice was surprisingly gentle. “You’ve been tracking me for days.”
For the same reason he hadn’t run away, Fauntleroy Chen didn’t put up a fight now, either. “You’re working on something.” He was very conscious of how raw his voice sounded, how short his tone. Truly he was not trying to pick a fight. “Weaving a pattern around the city. Portland doesn’t need the imbalance.”
“You’re this city’s wizard king.” It was not a question.
He nodded. His liver hurt like crazy, and he had to pee dreadfully. Messages from the fluids in his body were more informative than any CT scan or oncologist’s advice, and Fauntleroy Chen was uniquely qualified to read them. Not for him the endless, stabbing blood tests and the quiet click of infusion pumps measuring out his remaining ration of life.
He knew without ever being told.
“I’m not going to hurt anyone,” she added after a thoughtful moment.
The wizard could sense that those words weren’t even a lie. At least, not in her view of the world.
“Women’s power…” He stopped, searching for the phrases that Vladimir might have used to explain matters. “Things will change. People will be hurt, even if they don’t know it.” Wizards will lose power and security, he thought. That last was an argument both obvious and uncompelling to a witch.
She shrugged. “Things always change. The only certainty is that stasis cannot be maintained. It’s time for something new.” After a moment, she added with a wry smile, “Admittedly it’s always time for something new. The question is, what now?”
“What did you have in mind?” What is your Great Work?
“Light and air,” Isadora Weigl said simply. “Light and air, to lift a veil of disease and filth and turmoil from the face of the city.”
“You’re going to clean the streets?”
The look she gave him was something between despisal and pity. “Don’t be a fool. It’s not about grimy gutters. Not down at the heart of things. A sister long passed away laid the foundations of this place. I come back to lift us all to new heights in her honor. A future, bright and long. For everyone.”
Not me, Fauntleroy Chen thought as his liver stabbed him in the heart. “Without toil and struggle, we remain undefined.”
Entropy ultimately flowed only one way. Wizards always stood knee-deep in the tension of that return to chaos. Isadora Weigl was going to make things cleaner and prettier, which left fewer spaces for him and his kind.
“Death is the final entropy of self,” she answered obliquely.
“At least death frees us from pain.” He sat up straighter. “Besides, that is our way.”
“What is your way?” Now the witch gently mocked him, reflecting his own earlier obtuseness. “Death? Pain? Or just low, raw messiness?”
He deserved that. “All of them, I suppose. We wizards live and die as we know how.” At least this one does.
Trembling slightly, her hand reached toward him. “It doesn’t have to be so, mister king of the wizards. You’d be surprised at how encompassing my Great Work can be.”
“I know your name,” Fauntleroy Chen whispered. “But I will not give you mine.”
Behind her, homeless men filled the northwest Portland street. They pushed their overladen bicycles and high-piled shopping carts, led their dogs. Wizards, mostly. He knew who these people were. “Is it time for my funeral already?”
“She found us first,” said Older Fred. Two-dozen grizzled, bearded heads nodded as if tugged by the same string. “You weren’t going to the doctor none,” he added.
“No I have not,” said Fauntleroy Chen. “Nor will I.”
“Power doesn’t need to pay this price,” the witch told him with a smile.
He felt balanced in the moment, like a thrown ball briefly at the illusion of rest as it reached the top of its arc. Rain wandering idly down from on high whispered his name. The river close by muttered in its voice of power, ceaselessly complaining to the embankments. The tumors in his liver tugged at the edges of his attention. He wondered why the wizards cared now, when they’d let Vladimir go, and all the kings before him.
Older Fred coughed. “Times change,” he mumbled, fingers twisting in his wiry beard.
It was almost what Isadora Weigl had said to him earlier. Fauntleroy Chen wondered if she had taken them all under her spell one by one before finally cornering him. Or perhaps he had that backwards. Who could say?
Then she touched him, stroking the right side of his abdomen through the swaddling layers of coats and cloth. The king of the k
ingless understood why witches always walked crowned in light and air.
He laughed as the pain soared free into the sky.
Introduction to “Speechless in Seattle”
Lisa Silverthorne hit the Hex in The City target perfectly with her cleverly titled, “Speechless in Seattle.” I really want the Seattle Library of the Hidden Arts to exist, even more than I want Hogwarts to exist, and I think she should develop the story into a series. It truly is an intimate look at what happens when someone makes a mistake and has to reveal their insecurities to a stranger. She might be the first Library Witch.
Lisa’s lifelong passion is writing. She has published over fifty short stories in the fantasy, science fiction, and horror genres. She is fascinated by the magic of ordinary things and frightened by the darkness in all of us. Somewhere between those extremes is our humanity, the place where her explorations in fiction begin. Lisa writes:
“Seattle is one of the most magical places I know. It resonates with such charm and beauty and an energy I can’t explain, but I feel whenever I’m there. Libraries are also magical places.
“Once I’d conjured my magical library, Brant taught me about Seattle’s great Houses of magic—and persistence. Zip taught me the importance of familiars in her neurotic, tortoiseshell cat way. Willa taught me about attraction and how the library held all the magic (and the wizards) together. I fell in love with the Seattle Library of the Hidden Arts and I hope you will, too.”
Speechless in Seattle
Lisa Silverthorne
Thunder rumbled through the evening sky as storm clouds rolled off Elliot Bay where Brant Trenerry stood in Kerry Park, staff raised, ready to change the world.
Fiction River: Hex in the City Page 2
