The Mammoth Book of Sorceror's Tales

by Mike Ashley

  But could she give it all up? Relinquish her status, the power at her command through Edward . . . the feeling of overwhelming boredom and discontent she felt of her life.

  Vivian wasn’t quite sure. All her life her mind had been set to climbing to this pinnacle. To climb down now seemed too much like a defeat – and besides, she had no new goal to replace this one.

  She sighed, and left her bathroom, hurrying quickly through the bedroom where Edward still snored beneath the rumpled blue comforter. In her closet, she put on a light dressing robe, and was about to leave their apartments and find some more secluded part of the castle, perhaps overlooking the ever-changing mosaic of the city, to ponder further her dilemma – when she spied herself in a small wall mirror and noticed she had forgotten to put on her illusion of her younger self. The words to the spell leapt immediately to her lips as she reached for the door handle, but Vivian paused. She wondered what it might be like to walk about as her true self, to discard her despised life in this small trial. It was not as if she would be seen by anyone of import: just a few servants, if anyone at all.

  Pleased with herself, Vivian revelled in the sensation of being free of cloaking illusions as she walked through the familiar halls of Edward’s palace. These walls, too, were authentic in their substance. The stone floor was cold beneath her feet. Hardly any other palace in Constantinople could boast the same; they were all fabrications. Her naked foot would tread upon illusions of soft rugs or stones that were always the proper warmth. But Edward, as a show of ostentation, had foregone a magic-made palace, and instead used his magic to command a vast wealth of natural substance into his abode. The other members of the Thirteen Families thought it eccentric, and odd that he chose to remain so terrestrial, while all of them had set their palaces drifting among the clouds . . .

  But its simplicity, its genuineness, not to mention the incredible magic it took to construct it, manipulating that which already existed rather than summoning from nothing what was desired, were what had attracted Vivian to Edward in the first place. She stared from a window at the city spread below her, and all the cluster of fanciful and impossible buildings illuminated by the golden globe which hung above the Grand Concourse. She had loved him once, that she couldn’t deny; but something had happened, and that love had simply vanished, like one of his illusions. Pop, and it was gone. As if, Vivian thought, staring at the shining golden globe, as if one day it simply vanished.

  And, as if in mute response to Vivian’s thoughts, the golden globe did just that.

  Vivian blinked against the sudden dimness, and wondered, awed, what had happened. Had she caused it to go out? How furious everyone would be! She felt a momentary giddy delight as she surveyed the city, now cast into twilight. There was still light coming from somewhere . . . ah, yes, the sun. How easy to have forgotten that it still shone, eclipsed by the brighter, magical sub that had been created ages ago, and which was held in place by the collective unconscious of Constantinople. Vivian was awed that she, by herself, had been able to counteract that force of will, which all these years had kept the golden globe in place . . .

  And suddenly, staring at the city in the dimness, Vivian realized that it had not been her at all. The fanciful and impossible buildings which had clogged the streets were gone. In their place stood sordid, dilapidated constructions of plain wood and brick. As she watched this diminished city, a sailship fell from the sky, and splintered into rubble.

  Vivian tried to cast a spell, to bring her customary illusions into place, a spell that was so ingrained into her mind that she could maintain it even when unconscious. But her body would not grow younger and her hair stayed grey, picking up what little light there was.

  It had not been Vivian at all, which extinguished the golden globe, but rather the fact that throughout the City the magic had been used up!

  The thought delighted her. She imagined the airborne castles of the Thirteen Families plummeting like the sailship she had seen, in great, disastrous wreckages.

  And Edward? Now he was just an ordinary mortal, like everyone else. All his powerful sorceries were gone, vanished on the winds. Vivian could not help wondering what he truly looked like without his disguises, if there was any substance to him at all. She hurried back along the corridors, feeling along the walls with her fingers since the magical lights which once had illumined them were absent now. Their bedroom, at least, would still be lit from the large windows that looked out over the gardens.

  Vivian paused before the door, savouring the moment, delaying it. She had wondered for so long what Edward truly looked like, she did not want to diminish her discovery by rushing through it. She imagined how he would look as her fingers turned upon the knob, positing some obese and slobbering old man in her mind, the way the grand and fanciful buildings had reverted to rundown tenements without the magic to support them. How much easier it would be to hate him, knowing his true and repulsive form!

  Vivian thought she was braced for anything he might seem, any repulsive, disgusting form that she found lying in her bed, a form that she knew she had made love to hundreds and hundreds of times. She had thought she was braced for anything, but what she found took her completely by surprise.

  Edward had not changed at all!

  The sheets only partially covered his finely-sculpted naked body. Even his teeth were perfectly straight. She could not resist pulling back the covers, to learn that even there, his endowment was no illusion, but his natural-born manhood.

  And suddenly Vivian understood what was wrong with their relationship; Edward was all surface. With him there was nothing else, nothing deeper, no soul. He had the thin veneer of society, with which he had been born; good looks, good breeding, and that was it.

  She laughed out loud, but softly, not wanting to wake him. She wondered how he would feel, suddenly helpless, when moments before he had been the most powerful person in the city. He would be crippled with out his sorcery, she was certain, like a month-old baby.

  Vivian did not know how long she stood, staring down at him, pitying both him and herself. She made plans, now that Constantinople had crumbled, and was grateful that Edward had constructed his palace rather than imagining it. They would likely have been killed by the fall, had he followed the fashion of the other members of the Thirteen Families. Vivian wondered how many of them still survived. She could not say she regretted their imagined deaths. And Edward’s physical palace would provide the means to establish a life elsewhere; she would take certain objects with her when she left, items that were portable yet valuable: the silver, a gold vase. But even the thought of sudden poverty did not dismay Vivian. She was brimming over with excitement, and stayed only for the pleasure of watching Edward’s face when he awoke and discovered that he was powerless.

  Then, suddenly, light flooded the room. The globe was back, and so was the city, restored to its original ostentation of imagination. As Vivian watched, reassembled palaces climbed slowly back into the sky as her plans and hopes sunk.

  Behind her, Edward woke and, dreamy-eyed, reached for her. Vivian found herself suddenly, magically, in bed with him, cuddling beneath the covers. “I had the most awful dream,” Edward whispered in her ear, running his hand down her back and along her buttocks. “I dreamed that the magic had gone away.” He laughed, and began kissing her neck.

  The magic had returned. But staring at Edward, who held her in his strong and powerful arms, Vivian knew that the magic was still gone.

  Esther M. Friesner

  As with John Morressy, mentioned earlier, I have reprinted several stories by Esther Friesner (b. 1951) in my anthologies of comic fantasy, and though she is best known for her wickedly humorous stories and novels – just check out for example Here be Demons (1988), Gnome Man’s Land (1991) or Majyk by Accident (1993), each of which are starts of series – she has written much more besides. The Psalms of Herod (1995), for instance, is a very dark dystopian post-holocaust novel, and several of the stories in her collection,
Death and the Librarian (2002), including the following, explore the darker side of life.

  THE BUS FROM PHILLY to New York was hot as hell. The air conditioning had broken down thirty miles out of the city. Not the best turn of events on a late September day that felt more like high August. Ryan Lundberg sat back limp in his seat without so much as a silent curse to spare for the sweltering air or the stink of urine from the tiny onboard bathroom. He had strength to save, a calling to heed. His eyes closed, dragged down by a weight of scales.

  The little clay dragon in his hand smoldered and pulsed with the heat. He held it to his heart and told it to lie cool and still. Time enough for fire when they found Uncle Graham’s murderers. Plenty of time for fire then. He drowsed, lapped in thoughts of flame. He was not even a little startled when his head nodded forward and he felt the sting of spiny barbels as his chin touched his chest.

  He had not brought the dragon with him on the bus – he knew that with the same certainty that he knew his own name – yet here it was. Here. Not where his hands had placed it, tucked away safe in his top drawer at school, keeping watch over photographs, condoms, dryer-orphaned socks he never got around to throwing away. He’d found it in his wasn’t-it-empty pocket after the bus left the rest stop on the turnpike. He did not try to understand how it had come to be there; that was to invite madness.

  “I just draw the castles,” Uncle Graham used to say. “People who ask me when they can move into them and if the rent includes unicorns, they’re the ones who’ve got problems.” And he would laugh.

  Problems . . . The echo of the long-since spoken word faded into the far-and-far behind Ryan’s eyes. Yeah, Uncle Graham, there’s more than a few of us around with problems now. He flexed his hand and felt claws gouge deep chasms into the cheap plastic armrests. Insanity is not what you see, but what you admit to seeing. The litany he’d composed to hold onto some sliver of control warmed his mind. Craziness is the compulsion to explain. The dragon that’s suddenly, solidly here when I know I never brought – Let it be here unchallenged. And what I feel closing over me . . . let that come for me unchallenged too. Just accept the apparitions and no one needs to question if I’m numbered among the sane.

  You must do more than accept, the thin, sharp voice hissed in his head. If you would have the reward I’ve promised, you know you must do more.

  A reward? Ryan repeated, wasting irony on the echoes in his skull. A world!

  The key to Uncle Graham’s apartment was also in his pocket, but at least he knew there was no magic connected with its presence. He had taken it himself, stolen it from Mom’s dressing table last night, while she and Dad lay sleeping, after he awoke from the dream. The key had arrived with Uncle Graham’s body, in a small envelope entrusted to the funeral director’s care by his uncle’s landlady. Included with the key was a friendly note urging Ryan’s mother to come to New York as soon as possible to see about the disposal of Uncle Graham’s possessions. That was the word she used: disposal. When Ryan read it, he thought of a hungry hole in the universe, devouring even the memory of a life that had been – honestly, now – an inconvenience and an embarrassment to so many, even to those who owed it love.

  Ryan leaned his head against the window, feeling a film of sweat form between flesh and glass. The black kid in the seat ahead of him lost another battle with the window catch and cursed it out with a fluency one of Uncle Graham’s graybeard wizards might have envied, stolen, but never improved. Ryan sighed, a hot gust of breath that only added to the bus’s burden of muggy air.

  He hadn’t known deceit could be so exhausting. His parents had no idea where he was, what he intended to do once he got there. They thought he was back at college. The day after Uncle Graham’s funeral, back home in Clayborn, Ryan’s father had put him on the bus almost before it was light. When it reached Philadelphia he had only stayed in the city long enough to get some things from his dorm and give his folks a call to tell them that he had arrived safely. Then he went right back to the terminal and took the next bus to New York.

  What would they say if they knew? Mom would have a cat-fit, most likely, and Dad . . . Dad would look at him that way again. Why does Uncle Graham matter so to you? He’s dead now, safely dead, but you – Why, Ryan? Why care? You’re not—?

  And the question, even in thought, would die away, withered by the chill fear Ryan saw in his father’s eyes, the fear should his only son give him the answer he could not stand to hear.

  No, Dad, Ryan responded to his father’s phantom face as the heat drank him further into sleep. I’m not, don’t worry, I’m not like him. Remember last year, the time old man Pitt showed up on our porch, mad as hell, yelling for you to keep me off his daughter? God, I don’t think I ever did anything in my life that made you happier, not even the scholarship. Just the hint that I was screwing a girl, some girl, any girl –! He shifted his shoulders against the rough fabric of the seat back. So now is it okay with you if I care about Uncle Graham? If I’m not gay, is it safe for me to love him now that he’s dead?

  In his cupped hands, the little clay dragon stretched out a single paw and dug into his flesh with the talons of dreams.

  So you’re Ryan. Graham’s told me all about you.

  Slim and dark and exotic looking, only just into the beauty of his twenties, Uncle Graham’s lover offered a hand that closed around the little clay dragon and cupped it in transparent flesh long since returned to earth. Through the milky prison of those ghostly fingers, Ryan could still see the dragon swirled roundabout with Christmas snow.

  Ryan patted the last handful of snow into the dragon’s side and smoothed it down, embedding jagged holly leaves for teeth, clusters of the bright red berries for eyes. His hands were damp and cold, even through his mittens. Mom was on the porch, holding her sweater tight around her, calling him home. Uncle Graham stood beside her, laughing at what his eleven-year-old nephew had done.

  You know, most kids make snowmen.

  Ryan shrugged. I like dragons.

  Uncle Graham put his arm around Ryan’s shoulders. Watch out, kid. If you’re any good at it, you get to leave this town.

  Ryan grinned. Eleven years old, he was just waking up to the possibility that he might want to live out his life somewhere else besides Clayborn.

  Christmas in Clayborn. Christmas in a place where there were still things like corner drugstores with real working soda fountains, and big autumn bonfires down by the lakeshore, and pep rallies, and church bake sales where everyone knew how each housewife’s brownies were going to taste even before they bit into one. There were still such things as high school sweethearts here, and special pools of warm, sweet, private darkness, down the shady orchard lanes, between the rolling Pennsylvania farmlands, where a boy could take his best girl and see how far she’d let him go.

  And this was where Uncle Graham brought his New York lover. Even without people knowing, Bill would have drawn stares. On Christmas morning he sat right up close beside Uncle Graham, resting his chin on Uncle Graham’s shoulder while the presents were unwrapped, softly exclaiming the proper oohs and aahs of wonder and feigned envy as each gift was brought to light.

  Ryan watched, fascinated. Whatever Mom had said about Uncle Graham’s way of life, the reality was infinitely stranger. He sat on the floor, like Uncle Graham and Bill, and felt as if he were peering through an overgrowth of jungle vines at bizarre creatures never before seen by the eyes of civilized man. Bill’s low laugh sent peculiar chills coursing over Ryan’s bones. His mind blew a glass bell jar over Uncle Graham’s lover and held him there, safely sealed away for observation.

  Outside there was snow, crusted over, hugging blue shadows to every curve of the slumbering land. It threw back the brilliant sunlight in harsh assaults of dazzling whiteness. Ryan sat at his father’s feet and looked up to see a taut jawline, a gaze fixed and fastened on Uncle Graham and Bill. Ryan felt his father’s hands come to rest on his shoulders many times that morning – more times than felt right, when ri
ght means usual. The sunlight struck a wall of darkness cast by the shadow of the wings that Ryan’s father called up out of empty air to mantle over his son. This is mine; you won’t touch him hung across the room like a fortified castle wall that Ryan’s father made and maintained and walked guard on from that moment until the day Uncle Graham and his lover left to go back to the city.

  Ryan’s father was not invisible and Uncle Graham was not blind.

  There were no letters from Uncle Graham the rest of the winter, no calls, no more news than if New York were really a cloud kingdom full of so many sweet, glorious pastimes and amusements that the souls lucky enough to live there lost all track of time as it was reckoned on the earth. No one said anything, not even when Ryan’s birthday came and went without a card from Uncle Graham, without a word.

  And then, in late November, the telephone shrilled. Ryan answered. “Hello?”

  “Chessie?” The voice was broken, shattered, and around the shards it sobbed the nickname Uncle Graham had always used for his beloved sister.

  “Uncle Graham?” Ryan’s cheeks flamed. His voice was changing. It was a sharp humiliation every time someone mistook him for his mother on the telephone. “It’s me, Ryan.”

  “For God’s sakes, Ryan, get your mom!” Uncle Graham’s words stumbled through tears, his breath rags of sound torn out of his chest.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Just get her. Please.”

  So Ryan did as he was told, and when his mother got over the surprise of hearing from her brother after so long, there was worse to come. “How are you?” was slashed off into, “Oh, my God! Oh, Graham, I’m so sorry! When did he—?”