The Serpent's Orb

by Guy Antibes

  “Yes,” Jack said. “The wizard said I would eventually be using my education. When would I ever get a chance to do that planing boards for a living?”

  “In four or five years, you would be trusted to cut and shape.”

  “You’ve answered your own question, Father,” Jack said. “I’ll be sent on an errand outside of Raker Falls as soon as I turn eighteen.”

  His father nodded his head. “Just the age when I can’t stop you from leaving the village. Are you sure you trust the wizard? Remember how Wizard Porson tricked the entire village and ran off with hundreds of shillings? What if Fasher Tempest does the same?”

  Jack didn’t have an answer to that. “I can always quit. It’s not as if I’m an apprentice.”

  “And that is a good thing?” his father said. “As I see it, there is no security there, son.”

  “You wouldn’t take me on as an apprentice,” Jack said.

  His father blushed. “Well, I have Teena’s husband as an apprentice. He will be through in two or three years, and maybe then you can take his place.”

  “Is that a promise or words to keep me at home?” Jack asked.

  “Are you accusing me of tricking you?” His father was becoming angry.

  Jack shook his head. “No, I don’t really have a commitment from you or from Fasher Tempest. All I really want is not to waste six months of my life as a village guard.”

  “Oh,” Jack’s father said, realizing Jack’s plight, “and if you are hired by family, in you go.”

  Jack nodded and his father nodded along with him. “You work for the wizard for a while. I will take you back when you are ready.”

  Jack smiled. “You’ll give me an option to work for you?”

  “I can’t think of a better planer when you aren’t leaving early to raise hell with your friends.”

  “My friends left me two months ago. I haven’t bothered to get any others.”

  Jack’s father nodded. “The one good thing that resulted from that disastrous duel. Whatever happened to the girl?”

  “She is the wizard’s formal apprentice,” Jack said, wincing, “and she has it in for me.”

  ~

  Jack sat in the village pub farthest away from his home. His father liked the other one, so naturally, Jack chose to go to this one. He wouldn’t be able to buy alcohol until he turned eighteen, so he ordered the non-alcoholic brew offered to minors and those who had sworn off drink. With Alderach’s teachings frowning upon strong drink and drunkenness, there were plenty of customers for the vile stuff.

  The drinking part never excited Jack, but he sat in the pub looking across at his former friends, now all eighteen, imbibing and just beginning to make fools of themselves. He guessed they wouldn’t bother to sneak behind the temple of Alderach to sneak a drink any longer, and that made it easier for him to keep his promise to the priest. One of his erstwhile friends spotted him, Dabbitt Jenner, the one who lied about him killing Penny. He pointed Jack out to the rest of his friends, so they all rose from the table and brought their tankards with them to sit at Jack’s table.

  “I hear you have a soft spot for the girl you killed,” Dabbitt said.

  “I didn’t kill her, not that any of you helped save her life,” Jack said. “You will notice I did not go to jail, either. That is proof my story was true.” Jack didn’t know why he was attempting to justify his actions.

  “Are you and the wizard going to…” Dabbitt raised his eyebrows as if to finish his repugnant sentence.

  Jack had enough of this. He stood up, knocking the chair over. “Why don’t the four of you find yourself a cesspit to crawl into.” His language began to get a bit more colorful when Dabbitt threw a punch that missed.

  The pub went silent for a second and then the men began to egg the boys on. It was plain they wanted to see a fight, and Jack was in the mood to comply. One of the other boys punched Jack in the back, making him wheeze. Jack turned around and kicked the boy’s knee before twisting out from the center of his friends. Dabbitt missed another punch that grazed Jack’s shoulder. That was provocation in Jack’s mind, so he stepped forward and punched Dabbitt square in the nose which connected beautifully to Jack’s way of thinking as he watched the boy collapse to the floor.

  Jack turned around and collided with a pewter tankard aimed squarely at his face. The next thing he knew he woke up in a jail cell.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while,” the guard said sitting outside the open door. “I had to take you in. Can’t have one of my guards punched in the face without making an arrest. You do understand.”

  “How long am I in for?” He touched the painful lump on his cheek.

  “As long as it takes for you to walk through the door. I found enough witnesses that said the other boys started it, and you were surrounded. Like I said, I had to take you in. Dabby and Ted are on night duty for the next month. When are you going to join us?”

  “I got a job,” Jack said, “working for Fasher Tempest.”

  “Doesn’t he already have an apprentice, the girl that you nearly killed?”

  “I was just hired as his helper. I will start wearing the white of a helper tomorrow.”

  The guard laughed. “What does a helper do? It sounds like a servant. I’ll bet that will allow the girl to order you around. Are you sure you’d rather do that than spend six glorious months in the guard?”

  Jack nodded. “I’ll not plane another board. All I get are vague promises of promotion from my father. I’ve seen him and his promises to customers before. They aren’t always fulfilled; besides, Fasher Tempest said I’d get to travel. He’ll pay me to leave Raker Falls for a bit on an errand.”

  “What does your father think about that?”

  “I leave after I turn eighteen,” Jack said.

  “Fasher is a shrewd man. Are you sure you trust him?”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “We all have choices, lad.” The guard stood. “Time for you to go, so you won’t be too late for beddy-bye.”

  “Thanks for the talk.”

  “I can’t convince you to join us, but if you ever need someone to talk to, I’m willing to listen.”

  Jack nodded. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  He left the guard office and walked home. Jack passed the pub his father frequented. He looked through the window and could easily see he was still inside, whooping it up with his friends. Friends, thought Jack. He didn’t have any, except maybe the guard. But then the guard wanted Jack to join the village guard for six months, so perhaps he couldn’t be trusted, either.

  ~

  It wasn’t hard for Jack to rise early. He had to complete chores around the house and at his father’s shop every morning except on Alderach’s Day when everyone was supposed to rest, but no one did.

  His face felt odd, and when he looked in the silvered glass mirror in the hallway, he shook his head, gently. The right side of his face was swollen and purpled. Now he had to worry about Fasher firing him before he even started. Jack quickly did his chores getting a gasp from his mother and a visiting sister. His father just grunted and left for work. With that look of derision, Jack wasn’t about to help clean up the shop.

  He kept his swollen face to the building side of the road as he walked through the town. When he entered Fasher’s house, Penny laughed. It wasn’t a pretty laugh nor was it meant in good fun.

  “Been out fighting again?” she said.

  “Oh, when was the last time I was out fighting?” Jack asked.

  “Don’t you go out all the time to get drunk and brawl?”

  Jack didn’t feel like getting into a verbal altercation with the girl. It was his first day, after all. “Is the wizard in?”

  Penny raised her eyebrows and adjusted a brown robe. She hadn’t worn it yesterday, so Jack guessed she could wear any color she desired. “He has gone out on a call. I will show you to your place.” Penny led him to a standing desk next to a worktable in the workroom where Jack had gi
ven his disastrous demonstration. He levitated a pen to eye level and set it down without touching to see if he could do it. The trick with the rat was the first time Jack had tried to grab anything out of the air before. He was positive he couldn’t do such a thing before the wizard pressed him into service healing Penny.

  Jack hadn’t expected a ‘place’ at the wizard’s house, and his corner barely exceeded his expectations. The room was still a mess from the day before.

  “Make yourself at home,” she said, plopping a loose linen bag on the worktable. “There are three robes in there. I can wear any color as an apprentice, but you have to wear white, to show the world how limited your importance is here.” Penny turned and walked out.

  With nothing else to do, Jack tried a robe on. It barely fit him across the chest. The sleeves were nearly a third up his forearm, and the robe extended a few inches below his knees. He felt like he was wearing one of his sister’s dresses. Jack couldn’t go out dressed like that.

  He removed the offensive garment and began to tidy up the workroom that he supposed would be his home when he wasn’t out on errands.

  Penny poked her head into the back room. “You took it off. Uncle Fasher will be disappointed,” she said with a smirk on her face.

  “I don’t think so,” Jack said. “If I wear the robe, I will be as much an embarrassment to him as I’ll be to myself, won’t I?”

  The young woman frowned and left.

  Putting order to the workroom was a lot easier than cleaning up his father’s shop. He was done soon enough to wander into the front of the house.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  Jack shrugged. “I’ve finished in the back,” he said. “Is there anything I can do in the front?”

  “Don’t go into Uncle’s office,” Penny said. She made a face and then pulled a thick book from the shelves. “Read this.”

  “A magic book?”

  She shrugged. “I guess. He wanted me to read it before I started, but I only got through the first few chapters.”

  “I’ll get started.”

  Jack took it back to the workroom and sat on the tall stool he found on the other side of the workroom that made the standing desk into a sitting one. He opened the book and began to read. The book didn’t seem so difficult to read for him. Even Jack could see the book was a primer and didn’t seem to go into any detail about anything.

  The Alderachean priest had given Jack enough of a background so that he wasn’t completely lost as he progressed. There was a little more theory than he expected, but he soon discovered it was all embellishment. Once the basic manipulations were mastered, everything else came by lots of practice using the exercises outlined in the book. Even lighting a candle had three methods of practice.

  As he scanned ahead, Jack found a few more advanced techniques that he had used. The technique he thought matched up to catching the rat in mid-air involved catching a ball thrown in the air and stopping it. There wasn’t much more in the First Manipulation section, so he figured it counted as an advanced trick, which surprised him. There had to be more, much more.

  “Are you finding that interesting?” the wizard asked, as he walked into the workroom and looked around. “This room hasn’t been this orderly since I moved in.” Fasher walked to the desk and looked over Jack’s shoulder. “You understand that?”

  Jack nodded. “I’m not a dummy,” he said, “I did as well at those who were going to university. I understand most of it. Once you get the hang of a manipulation, it is a matter of practice. What is the trick?”

  “Trick?” Fasher asked.

  “Yeah. How do you move from one manipulation to next? I couldn’t see that.”

  “Practice and something I call enlightening.”

  Jack pursed his lips. “That sounds like something the priests of Alderach would come up with.”

  “Advanced magic was once the sole province of religionists,” Fasher said. “So in a sense, they did. Wizards took their magic and raised it from three manipulations to five.”

  “There isn’t a Sixth Manipulation?”

  Fasher shook his head. “Wizards have tried for more than a thousand years to find one, but haven’t discovered it. I think five is enough. At least for today, don’t you think?”

  Jack knew the wizard was talking down to him, a bit, so he just nodded. “What do you want me to do next?”

  “Read until you don’t understand. Make notes. You seem to be resourceful enough to find pen and ink.”

  Jack nodded. “I know where they are.”

  “Good. Come into my office first, and let me take care of your face.”

  “Face?” Jack had forgotten about his swollen appearance. He turned to follow the wizard and caught a flash of Penny fleeing around the corner.

  “You will regret hiring him,” Penny said as Jack and the wizard passed her small desk. It wasn’t much bigger than Jack’s.

  “I heard that,” Jack said.

  “As I intended,” Penny said.

  He chose to ignore her as he entered the wizard’s office. He hadn’t really spent any time in it. One wall was filled with books behind glass-paned doors. That must have cost quite a bit. Anything with glass in his father’s shop did. An examination couch, higher than the level a person would normally sit, was on the opposite side under a window covered with drawn drapes.

  “Lie down on the couch,” Fasher said.

  Jack did as he was told. “It isn’t going to hurt, is it?”

  “Some discomfort might arise, but I want you to feel the magic. I hope you will be able to.”

  The wizard opened a drawer, filled with random objects seated in velvet cradles. “My objects of power,” Fasher said. “If I had one or two of these the night of your duel with Penny, I might never have discovered your abilities.”

  Jack shrugged off the comment. He didn’t have much more magic than his friends. They had played tricks on each other often enough. Those times were in the past, he thought. He closed his eyes, waiting for the discomfort, which to him meant pain.

  Fasher touched his cheek with the palm of his hand. “You might feel some heat and some tingling,” he said as he hummed a few bars of some tune.

  Jack opened his eyes to see Fasher holding onto a polished wooden rod. The wizard grunted, and Jack’s eyes shut involuntarily. His cheek began to feel like it was bubbling, like putting his feet into a cold swirling brook, except this time it was warm water. The swirling turned into what felt like a limb that fell asleep awakening. The tingling grew, but Jack didn’t know how to describe what he felt until it stopped.

  Fasher said, “You can open your eyes, now.”

  Jack looked into a mirror that the wizard held in front of his face. The swelling was down, but the purpling had turned to a lighter sickly green as if the bruise had been around for a week or two. “You used the Third Manipulation?” Jack asked.

  “I did, and this,” he showed Jack the rod, “is an object of power. You will hold onto this for a quarter hour each turn of the clock for the rest of the day.”

  “I won’t discharge it?”

  Fasher laughed. “I need to activate an object with a spell for it to transfer power. When you are here, you will hold onto the objects of power that I give you until they have recharged.”

  “Is that something helpers generally do?” Jack asked.

  Fasher looked at the door leading out of his office. “It is. Penny is not to that level, yet. That is another thing not to tell her, since I will tell her that holding onto the objects is a punishment.”

  “It sounds like a punishment,” Jack said.

  Fasher pursed his lips. “Just do as I say, and we will all get along splendidly.”

  Jack wasn’t so sure about that. Not that he minded lying to her about the real purpose behind holding onto the objects of power. It served her right. This was his first day on the job, and already Jack was keeping information from Penny Ephram. That would help him endure the nasty looks that he wa
s sure to get in the future.

  “Come over here,” Fasher said. “Feel the objects.”

  The objects didn’t look like anything special. There were several wooden objects, some small hand tools, and decorative items. He didn’t really know what he was looking at.

  “Touch them and tell me which ones are filled with power and which ones are depleted.”

  Jack blinked. How could he tell such a thing? He put his hand on a pink teacup and felt nothing. Then he picked up an iron ladle. It sort of buzzed when he touched it. “This?”

  “That one is full. I don’t use it much, but the ladle would have been the object I would have taken to bring back Penny.”

  “Instead you used a live object,” Jack said, “Me.”

  “A surprisingly good live object. I thought I would have to administer many treatments over weeks, but Penny responded remarkably well to your essence and was healed nearly instantaneously.”

  “With a cost,” Jack said.

  “There is always a cost if you go too far, but restoring the power to my objects by holding them for for a few minutes or a few hours won’t harm you, and it is part of your duties. I am paying you to do it, after all.”

  Jack nodded. He touched the remaining objects and found it easier than expected to find the ones that needed power. “I can do this.”

  Fasher smiled. “I knew you could.”

  “I don’t think I could before you used me to heal her.” Jack didn’t care to use her name. “I think my magic improved at that point.”

  “Possible. If it did, consider it payment from Alderach for your good deed. You could have run off with your friends and left her for dead.”

  “Not with her little sister looking on,” Jack said.

  “You have a point. Here, take the rod. Even if you put it in a pocket, it will charge, but faster if you hold it.”

  Jack thought about holding onto something all day long. “What if we made a pouch somehow that I could tie to my leg or something to keep in constant contact without holding onto it all the time. Won’t that get tiresome?”

  “Good idea. You can get back to the book once you set the workroom into complete order.”