Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright / Indicia
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1: Stypek
2: Stypek
3: The Kid
4: Brandon
5: Simple Simon
6: Simple Simon
7: Carolyn
8: Simple Simon
9: Carolyn
10: Carolyn
11. Stypek
12: Carolyn
13: Simple Simon
14: Brandon
15: The Kid
16. Simple Simon
17: Carolyn
18: Stypek
19: Brandon
20: Carolyn
21: Stypek
22: Brandon
23. Stypek
24: Carolyn
25: Simple Simon
26: Dr. Arenberg
27. Robert
28: Simple Simon
29: Stypek
30. Robert
31: Simple Simon
32. Brandon
33. Simple Simon
34. Stypek
35. Simple Simon
36. Stypek
37. Pyxis
38: Stypek
39: Pyxis
40: Dave Mirecki
41: Carolyn
42: Pyxis
43: Carolyn
44: Brandon
45: Stypek
46: Pyxis
47: Simple Simon
48: Dave Mirecki
49: Pickles
50: Simple Simon
51: Dave Mirecki
52: Simple Simon
53: Dave Mirecki
54: Simple Simon
55: Carolyn
56: Brandon
57: Carolyn
58: Pickles
59: Brandon
60: Stypek
Epilog: TV Interview Transcript
About the Author
Also by Jeff Duntemann
Ten Gentle Opportunities
By Jeff Duntemann
Ten Gentle Opportunities
© 2016 by Jeff Duntemann
All Rights Reserved
This is an original novel, published here for the first time.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written consent from the copyright holder, except by a reviewers, who are permitted to quote brief passages in review.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters, locales, or situations in this work to those in the real world are purely coincidental or in the service of a fictitious or satirical context.
Cover art copyright © 2016 by Blake Henriksen.
Contact the artist at https://www.facebook.com/pinkhavok/
ISBN10: 1-932084-07-X
ISBN13: 978-1-932084-07-8
Copperwood Media, LLC
Scottsdale, Arizona
Colorado Springs, Colorado
To the eternal memory of
Sade Prendergast Duntemann 1892-1965
who gave me her 1920 Underwood Standard typewriter,
allowing me to live a very non-standard life!
Acknowledgements
First of all, many thanks to my colleagues at Walter Jon Williams’ Taos Toolbox Workshop 2011 (particularly Jim Strickland) where the first quarter of the book coalesced. Also to my worthy and patient colleagues at Writers Write in Colorado Springs, where the remainder of the book got a good chewing-over during the rest of 2011 and most of 2012. Particular thanks go to Anita Romero, Roberta Crownover, Mary Karen Meredith, and Jesse Kuiken for detailed feedback and merciless encouragement to see the damned thing through to the end.
Finally, thanks beyond measure to my SF mentor Nancy Kress, who taught me most of what I know about crafting characters, and put the idea for the story in my head all the way back in 1984. Sorry it took me 30 years to finish. I’m just weird that way.
1: Stypek
The second fireball went wide, but the bellowing magician was gaining on him. Stypek sputtered, stumbled, slid on some cornhusks lying in the gutter, and took a corner at full speed in the pre-dawn gloom. His legs were long and speed came easy to him. After all, the full name his mother had given him was Brytt Holo Mu Stypek, which in the efficient language of his own people meant “He who nails dead animals to a fence faster than the corbies can eat them.” It was a figure of speech; corbies had been hunted to extinction a thousand years before, but the figure was apt.
It had better be. Stypek had just been caught cheating at cards, playing against the meanest adamant-class magician in the entire humid, dripping, mire-riddled, zombie-infested, wormcast-begotten island of Gygugg in the archipelago of Trynng Brokklynn. Still, if he survived it would be worth the run. Stypek slapped the big pocket of his gray leather jerkin, and felt the little sack of Opportunities buzz and crackle against his hand. Ten! Now all he had to do was persuade old Jrikk Jroggmugg to lose interest in recovering the ill-won kitty, or at least fall off his steel-hooved krypp and break something.
Behind him, Stypek heard the magician round the corner, the krypp roaring in anger. This street was a merchants’ row, narrow and cluttered, with mule carts resting at odd angles awaiting enough light to be filled with the day’s merchandise. A hundred cubits down the row, things got cluttered enough that Jrikk would have a tough time getting through at full gallop. The stones were slick with yesterday’s broken melons and fish a little too long from the sea for easy sale.
Stypek wove and slid around the carts. He was slender and agile, and used to fleeing those he had fleeced. A few more streets like this and Jrikk would likely give up. The magician could always make more Opportunities, and with the power of an adamant-class Third Eye, he could make them faster and more easily than anyone short of a sorcerer. That was the primary perk of fifty years of study and hard work: Adamants could blik up Opportunities and trade them to no-account ruby-class dabbler magicians for useful things like beer, fruitcakes, and silverware. An Opportunity was, after all, a frozen nugget of pure uncommitted magic, and if you didn’t have the will or the skill to blik up your own magic there was always the open market. The 99% of humanity without the Third Eye had to be content with gold and silver coins. Opportunities were the preferred currency of magicians, and the better a magician you were, the easier you could fill your own pockets.
Of course, for the one one-hundred-fiftieth of a percent of humanity who had a functional but incomplete Third Eye, Opportunities were the only way to do magic. Stypek was of that tiny and despised cohort who could neither create nor destroy magic…but could bend it. He could snerf the presence and shape of magic, and gront existing spells to change them, but his half-developed Third Eye could neither blik spells into existence, nor frit them back to primal chaos.
Stypek paused, his hand on the splintery side of an ancient oxcart. Jrikk had stopped screaming curses, and Stypek’s snerf-sense made it clear that the magician was summoning power for a spell. It would be something considerably more subtle than the half-assed fireballs Stypek had been dodging since fleeing the magician’s manor at three ayem.
He took hold of another oxcart to shove himself into motion, but at that moment the spell ripped free of Jrikk’s Third Eye with a deafening (to his snerf-sense, at least) wubble. The spell was strong and simple. The oxcart he was gripping heaved to one side in the grip of the spell, so fast and so hard that Stypek was thrown to the cobbles onto a pile of reeking week-old fish.
Once the blue flash in his brain faded enough for him to snerf again, Stypek recognized that this was a work of brilliance: A tessellatio
n spell that forced all inanimate objects in its path into tight alignment. The carts, the empty crates, and the trash had been thrown toward the stone walls of the houses on both sides of the narrow lane, everything nesting with everything else so perfectly that what had been a cluttered lane was now wide-open down the middle. Even the rotting fish were now stacked tightly in the bottom of a crate. There would be no bending spells like that.
Stypek got some traction against the now-clean stones and was off again down the narrow lane. That Jrikk would go to such lengths indicated that the magician considered his pride to be at stake. Someone must have noticed that the great Adamant had been snookered by a half-starved Spellbender. This would be a run to the death, or worse.
Worse. There were tales of Adamant-class magicians capturing hapless spellbenders and keeping them as zombies, and while Stypek considered the tales unlikely, he would prefer not to be a test case. But yes, zombies…now that was a thought!
Without pausing his headlong run into near-darkness, Stypek reached up to the iron headband of his wormshell helmet and flipped down its twin wereglass roundels to their places in front of his eyes. The roundels magnified and clarified the subtle emanations of magical spells, and allowed Stypek to see with his eyes what his snerf-sense less distinctly revealed.
Through wereglass lenses, the predawn world was a canvas of shadows against which magical spells glowed like webs and rivulets of moonlight, enmeshing small stars and tiny shapes that pulsed with silver-gray luminance. Magicians were the sole source of magic, but the market for predefined utilitarian magic was strong, and everywhere he turned his gaze Stypek saw spells adhering to windows to keep them from breaking, and to doors to keep them from being jimmied. Glimmering scale-like patterns on roofs betrayed magic to keep stray coals from igniting the shakes. Sharp spikes of pearlescent light on chimneys and roof ridges warded off lightning. Little lights like stars on doorknobs could sense fingerprints, and at the touch of an enemy would begin screaming bloody murder.
Competition among magicians for such business was intense, and precast spells were far less expensive than they had been even in Stypek’s youth. The clumsiest spells, glued together from magical odds and ends by Ruby-class bumblers to keep themselves in beer and whores, were so cheap that they were often misplaced or simply discarded after doing their work. Stypek could see them leaning crookedly against walls and crushed into the cracks between cobbles.
He began watching for a couple of types that could be useful in what he intended to do. Up ahead he knew there was a wall that would be difficult for old Jrikk to get through.
Ahh! There it was! Just the thing!
The merchants’ lane ended in a narrow iron gate. Stypek scaled it in seconds, several very cheap but highly malleable spells grabbed from the gutter now wubbling off-tune in his pocket. At the top of the gate he grabbed one of the manor-trash treasures and held its immaterial substance between his right thumb and forefinger. With his left index finger he stroked it, felt its lumpy subroutines and crude user interface elements, and through the wereglass roundels found all its patches and compulsion leaks. It was a cheap cowfollow, to be wrapped around dairy cattle tails. At day’s end it would begin smelling like fermenting silage, and if your best cow knew the way home, all your dumber cows would fall into line behind it.
Stypek found the scent property and cleared it; he then rubbed the cowfollow against his sweating right armpit and poked the new scent firmly back into the scent property. The run interval property he grasped and pulled apart along the perimeter of its widget so that its ends met in the middle. There would at best be a few minutes of idleness around noon. Finally, he stuck one thumb into the intensity property and twisted the widget to its maximum. Making the entire lane reek of silage would be of little use; making it reek of Stypek, on the other hand, might buy him a few vital minutes.
Stypek threw the now-bent cowfollow spell into the blackness of a narrow gangway between two stone houses. He then dropped into near-darkness on the other side of the gate.
Guided by the luminance of trash-heap spells lying in the gutters, Stypek worked his way down a narrow alley. He sniffed the wind and summoned some very old memories to decide which way to go, then set off in his chosen direction. To his left were the back doors of the merchant houses, to the right a peculiar wall with a peculiar smell, and its own peculiar sound. It was the lychwall running around the field set aside for interring zombies, especially the persistent and difficult-to-keep-buried specimens that had become such a nuisance in recent years. The walls had magic in them, simple and ancient, but it was earth-magic and thus impossible to bend.
The wall was ten cubits high, granite from the deep earth, slabs polished and fit to one another without mortar. From deep artesian wells water flowed into channels atop the wall, and from the channels it trickled over the edges and down the stone sides with small sounds that somehow did not reassure. Green threads and sheets of slime sustained by the water hung down from the stone, making the wall noisome and virtually impossible for anyone to climb, be they living or dead.
Jrikk Jroggmugg could still be heard in the distance, his krypp clomping about in the lane, which now smelled of Stypek like a careless hound might smell of muskpig. Running on the tips of his toes to quiet the sound of his footfalls, Stypek watched the wall on his right as much as thin starlight and the glow of trash magic would allow. The wall’s magic did not glow but instead seemed to swallow light whole, and he saw it more by light’s absence than its presence.
Soon, soon…there! The alley opened up into a longish elliptical space. At the center of the space the wall was pierced by the lychgate, a stone tunnel seven cubits long that led to one of only two openings in the lychwall.
The sound of iron groaning under stress behind him was worrisome. Jrikk’s reptilian mount, though stupid for a magical creature, was extremely strong. Without guardian spells, iron gates were porridge to its stone-hard teeth. The cowfollow had failed to slow Jrikk down as much as Stypek had hoped. His next move was a little scary, but it had to be done, and soon. With some luck, he then would have a little time to think.
Stypek dug in a deep inside pocket for a precast spell he always carried (having paid dearly for it) but hoped he would never have to use. He dove into the low-ceilinged tunnel of the lychgate, one hand extended forward in utter blackness until it touched an iron grille. At Stypek’s touch, the grille revealed its shape as a man-tall skull flickering green.
“Go back,” the grill said, in a voice that sounded like stone itself being ground to dust. “You may not enter here.”
Yup. Just as the old books said. “Why not?” Stypek demanded, fishing for the spell he sought and yet dreaded to use.
“You are not dead.”
“Not yet,” Stypek muttered. The lychgate tunnel brought him the sound of the krypp’s scaled hooves. Time was short. The spell came to hand, and Stypek withdrew it from his pocket. He took a deep breath—this was one he had only read about, and never tried!—leaned against the green-lit bars of the gate, and poked the spell’s execute method with the tip of one finger.
Stypek died.
At first it felt like being sat on by an overfed rhinodont, slowly. Then his perspective changed, and from a place somewhere near the top of the tunnel he saw his now-lifeless body leaning against the grill of the lychgate.
“That’s better,” said the grill, and with ominous slowness swung back. Stypek’s body fell forward and tumbled roughly down a small slope into darkness. The gate’s green glow winked out, and it closed without a sound.
Stypek, meanwhile, felt himself drawn into a vortex like a tunnel made of howling, cloud-clotted immaterial wind. Far off was a light, faint but brightening. Drifting toward him were several spectral human figures.
The first to reach him was a woman, who was staring at his ankles. “Stypek! Your socks don’t match! Didn’t I teach you anything at all? No wonder no woman will look twice at you! And what’s all that crap in your pock
ets?”
“Magic, mum,” he said, trying to remember how long the spell would last. “I’m a collector.” He wondered what would happen if it lasted long enough for him to reach the light. He was ambivalent enough about his life without wanting to review it with someone as fussy as God.
Then his mother drifted away, and another figure approached, gripping a cane and frowning. Great Uncle Tryppit. He should have guessed.
“They’ll let anybody in here,” the sour-faced old man grumbled, and swung at Stypek with his cane.
The cane didn’t connect, and Stypek swept past his deceased relatives. A moment or two apart from his body was all he needed. There were dangers in lingering in the far astrals. Indeed: Something reared up out of the gloom ahead, something huge and dark and far more threatening than grumpy uncles. Stypek saw a thing of shadow emerge from the swirling walls of the tunnel and pace him. Three slitlike green eyes opened around the perimeter of a mouth like a lamprey’s, full of backward-pointing teeth.
He knew what it was, and struggled not to speak or even think its name. The old books had described and sketched it (accurately, in fact) but had not prepared him for the horror of it. And now the word was forming in his traitor mind, try as he might to suppress it.
“Vuldt!” he shouted, spreading his arms out to each side with a short, barbed dagger in each hand. Maybe it would swallow him, but he was going to hurt going down.
Thunk! Stypek felt his body hit a rock and come to rest, and opened his eyes. He was alive again—and now he was inside the lychfield.
2: Stypek
Getting the dead to stay dead was an increasingly serious problem. Formerly living material was powerfully endomagical: Once the Great Magic of life drained out of it, a corpse would soak up any Third Eye magic in its immediate surroundings, and if enough were available would get up and start shambling around again, breaking things and getting into fights.
For most of history, magic had been rare and valuable, and the few magicians in the world were well-bred and tidy. Unnecessary or broken spells were always fritted back to the primordial chaos from which they had been drawn. Alas, as the archipelago grew crowded, younger magicians without an inheritance turned to careless spellmaking to get what they wanted. The spells blikked up by drunken Ruby-classers were complicated and fragile, and rapidly broke down into increasingly tiny fragments that still had to be fritted individually to be rid of them. No one would bother, and so little by little, invisible grains of useless magic blew around the world on the very winds, ready to be absorbed by a corpse’s hungry substance.
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 1
