Balthazar Fabuloso in the Lair of the Humbugs

by I. J. Brindle

  33. The Quorum

  Maglite clenched in his teeth, Balthazar crawled up the long, steeply sloped ice tunnel from the frozen depths of Thirteen-Mile Creek, a tunnel clearly designed for dumping things down, not leading people up. His family and the Fistulas followed behind, excruciatingly slowly. Like getting out didn’t matter that much to them. Like nothing mattered anymore. It’ll be fine, Balthazar told himself. We just need to get home and then everything will be okay. But the flickering, fading look to all of them made him not so sure.

  Up, up, up they climbed, using old plastic bags, crumpled cans and other old bits of junk sticking out of the ice for footholds, following the winding passageway this way and that until finally, climbing up around the last steep bend, Balthazar found himself clambering out into a small ice vestibule. The end of the tunnel.

  Two doors were just ahead, one directly in front of him and one on his left. Cold drafts blew from beneath each of them. The one on his left was colder and smelled like a meat locker. He knew that one didn’t lead outside. He also knew that behind it were answers, and also his family’s stolen magic.

  Cracking open the door, Balthazar stared into a massive rotunda, starker but even more grand than the great hall Balthazar and Pagan had first entered, its vast domed ceiling held up by eight massive lightning-bolt columns.

  Beneath the dome, the steely-eyed Humbugs were seated in one hundred and thirteen matching armchairs on semicircular ice risers. Their grim, fez-capped faces all looked down at one figure—a skinny, high-shouldered man in a cheap white suit standing before them at a simple ice podium, a white handkerchief tied across his face covering all his features, and the purple fez of the Brotherhood perched on his head like some horrible punch line.

  “Is this some kind of a joke?” one of the Humbugs burst out.

  “Our host has the talking piece,” Gandolfini said, gesturing to the jagged platinum lightening-bolt the man in white held gripped in his hand. “We must honor tradition and let him speak.” Grumbling, the assembly fell silent. “What happens after he yields the floor, however,” he added darkly, “is at our discretion. You can’t hide behind that hankie forever. You may have had the resources to buy your way into hosting this event, but we still control all the contracts and the best venues.”

  The Host bowed. It was hard to say whether it was mockingly or not, but his strange getup definitely gave it that effect. “Top of the heap.”

  “And don’t you forget it, boy,” a Southern Humbug said, sharp pride prickling in his eyes.

  “Hear, hear.” The purple fezzes bobbed in agreement. “Huzzah!”

  “And yet you are all still performing monkeys, are you not?” the Host said hollowly as the cheers died down. “Singing for your suppers.”

  A deeper, more dangerous hush fell over the gathering.

  “You may control the contracts and the venues,” the Host continued, darkness shifting behind the white linen covering his face, “but you do not control magic itself. Or how little of it any of you truly have. How poorly you stack up to the great enchanters of the past. Circe, Abra-Melin, John Dee, Merlin, Zoroaster. The kingmakers.”

  “I assume there is some point to all this,” Gandolfini cut in.

  “The point is that you deserve more. Men of your stature, you should control magic, not the other way around. Especially in these modern times, with so much technology to compete against. You have been duped. That’s what magic does. It tricks and seduces. It makes you serve it instead of the other way around.”

  “Your arguments are nothing new to us,” Gandolfini said, eyes floating oyster-like behind his thick glasses. “We have discussed these issues many times. But you have not told us what you propose to do about it. Your time to speak is almost up, and you will not be given a minute more.”

  “What I am proposing,” the Host said, “what I am offering, is a different kind of magic. Gloaming magic. A force that will mesh with the magic you already have and make it stronger. A magic that also will allow you to feed on the magic of other magicians, adding their power to yours.”

  “Eaten?” Mr. Fistula whimpered. “Our magic has been eaten?” He and the others had come up behind Balthazar and crowded around the door to watch.

  “It’s okay,” Mrs. Fabuloso whispered, squeezing Balthazar’s shoulders. “As long as we have each other.”

  But the way they were all flickering and the longer stretches of zombie-like emptiness they kept falling into gave Balthazar this sick feeling that they might not have that much longer.

  He knew that they should be getting out of there. That every second they delayed was a second in which they could be discovered. But he found himself rooted to the spot by the horror of what he was seeing.

  “This all sounds well and good in theory,” a Humbug interrupted. “But where is the proof you could deliver on such a proposal?”

  “Excellent question,” the Host said approvingly. “I have prepared a demonstration. Bring in the girl.”

  A door on the other side of the room swung open and Stan stepped through, and with him, held tightly by the wrist, was a pale, disheveled and very, very frightened girl.

  “Pagan,” Balthazar groaned, fingers tightening on the edge of the door. She hadn’t gotten out after all.

  “A child?” one of the Humbugs said, frowning.

  “A child,” the Host said, nodding and taking her from Stan. “Also the grandniece, prospective protégée and sole heir of a certain financial wizard you may have heard of. Buffy Fisterton. A woman who has shown herself to be no friend of your organization.”

  Instantly, the scattered pools of sympathy froze into lumps of ice: “woman refused my loan”; “foreclosed on my casino”; “cost me millions.”

  “Sole heir?” Mrs. Fistula hissed at Mr. Fistula. “Did you know this?”

  “No fair,” Blake protested.

  “Let me go!” Pagan shouted, her hands bursting into flame. But it was only harmless stage fire; the Host didn’t even flinch. “When my great-aunt finds out about this, she’s going to ruin you. All of you.” Clearing her throat, she spit in the Host’s face.

  “Ruthless little thing, isn’t she?” the Host remarked, spit freezing on the handkerchief. “But soon she will be harmless enough. When I first began,” he continued, “I required big theatrical disasters to destabilize the subjects’ grip on their magic before I could extract it. But I have since refined the process.”

  A buzzing sound had started up behind his mask, getting louder and louder as he spoke.

  “Watch now.”

  “Stop!” Balthazar shouted, running into the rotunda.

  But he was too late.

  With a sharp, sudden intake of breath, the Host sucked a thin filament of light out of Pagan’s body, brighter and more beautiful than anything Balthazar had ever seen, then slurruped it through the handkerchief into whatever lay behind it.

  “Easy as pie,” his said, brushing his hands together as Pagan’s gray, lifeless body dropped to the floor.

  34. Death in the Round

  Silence fell over the rotunda as the shock of what everyone had just witnessed sank in.

  “You killed her!” Balthazar cried, running to Pagan’s side.

  “Not killed,” the Host corrected him. “Normalized. It will take a while for her to adjust. But she will. In time.”

  Slowly Pagan opened her eyes. There was a terrible blankness to them.

  “Take his hand,” the Host commanded.

  Nodding dully, Pagan laced her icy fingers through Balthazar’s.

  “Now hold him there. I will have no more interruptions.”

  Pagan’s hand tightened around Balthazar’s, anchoring him to the spot.

  “Sorry,” she said, shivering helplessly as Balthazar tried to pull his hand free. “I can’t let go.”

  “It’s all right,” he said to make her feel better, although it was pretty clear at that point that things were about as far from all right as they could get.

&
nbsp; As they had been talking, Monsieur Paraqueto and a group of Empty Ones had filtered into the back of the theater and taken hold of the Fabulosos and Fistulas. Only none of them were struggling. They just stood there blankly against the back wall, eyes glazed over, barely more alive than the ice around them.

  “Ah don’t know who yew think yer foolin’,” the Southern Humbug said irritably, rising from his seat. “But ah know bad magic when ah see it, and ah’ll have no part of this hokery-pokery.”

  “We don’t negotiate with upstarts,” Bone added darkly, also getting up to leave. “We destroy them.”

  “So,” the Host replied, a black stain seeping across the handkerchief, “do I.”

  And as he spoke those words, all the doors slammed shut, freezing over with ice, sealing everyone in.

  Panic rippled over the assembly, but Gandolfini remained calm. “May I ask what it is you hope to gain from these cheap theatrics?”

  “An alliance,” the Host answered. “A partnership that will have audiences bowing to us and not the other way around. Your Brotherhood has the resources and means to draw in magicians from all over the globe. I possess the means to claim from them what is rightfully yours. To make you Magi. There is still some magic in the girl. Who would like to partake?”

  “How would that work exactly?” Fist-Face demanded. “This partaking?”

  “You simply accept this gift I am offering. That is all. And then it is inside you. It’s as easy as breathing in. As listening. As agreeing. A simple choice.” The temperature dropped lower and lower as he spoke, his voice coming from nowhere and everywhere, until the entire icy hall buzzed and shook with his words.

  “So tired,” Pagan said. Closing her eyes, she laid her head against Balthazar’s chest. The Host was draining her, like she was some kind of battery.

  “What’s in it for you?” Bone demanded suspiciously.

  “Revenge,” the Host said. “Revenge on the magic that let me down when I needed it the most.” With long, delicate fingers, he peeled off the sticky, dark-stained handkerchief to reveal the black sucking hole behind it, the hole where his face should have been. Horror ripped through the assembly, but there was interest as well. To defeat death—this man had true power. Power they might be able to turn to their advantage.

  Silently the Host toyed with the pendant he wore around his neck as he waited for the cries to subside. It was the same pendant, Balthazar recognized, that Blake had been wearing. And for the first time he realized what it was: a bullet.

  “A vote,” someone cried. “It must be put to a vote.”

  The rest of the Humbugs agreed. The matter would be decided the same way the lives of the gladiators were decided in ancient Rome, the same way the International Brotherhood of Real Stage Magic decided all policy matters: by a show of thumbs.

  “All in favor,” cried Fist-Face, “thumbs up.”

  Fifty-six thumbs turned up.

  “All those against,” Bone countered, “thumbs down.”

  Fifty-six thumbs turned down.

  An even split.

  “And so,” frail old Gandolfini said, fumbling for his cane as he rose awkwardly to address the assembly, “it falls to me to break the tie.”

  The gathering fell silent.

  “There are,” he continued, his thin, reedy voice echoing through the assembly, “more than a few tyrants and despots in our ranks. And we have never been ones to shy away from that fact. It’s how one gets where one gets in this world. But today a new tyrant has joined our circle. Fear. Fear of falling behind the times, of losing of our place in the world. Fear of the force we have hitched our cart to yet we cannot fully control. But my biggest fear, watching this evening’s proceedings, is my certainty that decisions made from fear will inevitably end in folly. I did not come here today unprepared.

  “My intelligence reveals this fellow standing before us to be a shill—a washed-up ex-magician with a hole through his head and a chip on his shoulder. A man who conned and bribed his way into hosting this event because he could have never earned it any other another way. In short, a front man. What I do not know,” he added, “is what is this force you bandy around like a cheap carnival trick? The force that is pulling your strings? And how do we know the cure is not worse than the disease? All are things that must be explained before I cast my vote.”

  “It cannot be explained,” the Host said. “It just is.”

  “So you ask us to take it on faith, then?” Gandolfini scoffed. “How is that any different from our magic?”

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

  Gandolfini nodded. “It is fortunate, then, that I am not so desperate.” Clenching his arthritic old hand into a knotty fist, he jerked his thumb down.

  The Host shrugged. “Guess I should have known better than to try and teach an old Doge new tricks.” The bullet hanging from his neck had begun to glow. An icy tremor shook through Pagan’s body and the temperature dropped.

  The wily look of triumph in Gandolfini’s eyes changed to confusion, then fear. Clutching his arm, he toppled forward.

  “He’s dead!” cried one of the Humbugs.

  “Shame,” the Host said as Gandolfini’s tall gold-tasseled hat bounced and wobbled its way toward him down the bleachers.

  “You killed our Doge,” accused another.

  “And what if I did?” the Host replied calmly. “How many knives have you stuck in backs to get ahead? How many competitors have you sabotaged? It’s not the murder you object to, it’s the breach of protocol—a breach which can be easily mended by a change in leadership,” he added, picking up the Doge’s hat, “if there aren’t any objections.”

  “I object,” one of the Humbugs said boldly.

  Once more the bullet glowed. Another tremor shook Pagan’s body, and again the temperature dropped. The Humbug instantly dropped dead.

  “Anyone else?”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Very well, then,” the Host said, removing his fez and raising the Doge’s hat above his head. “All in favor . . .”

  A loud chalkboard squeal interrupted as large letters carved themselves into the wall behind him: I OBJECT!

  Then, with a loud crash of shattering ice, one of the doors slammed open and there, framed in the entryway, was Ignatius, drunk, disheveled and glowering like an avenging ogre.

  Staring at the Host, he spoke only one word.

  “Benjamin.”

  35. The Incomparable Ignatius

  “He came back.” Pagan shivered.

  “Yeah,” Balthazar agreed. But judging from Ignatius’s malodorous and highly inebriated condition, he wasn’t so sure this was a good thing.

  “Here to admire your handiwork?” the Host sneered, his long, thin hand closing reflexively around the glowing bullet.

  “No,” Ignatius said. “I’m here to . . .” He trailed off, his eyes falling on the emptiness where his brother’s face used to be.

  “Yes?”

  “I am here,” Ignatius slurred. “I am here . . . I am here to shurrender my magic.”

  “No!” Balthazar cried.

  “I don’t want your pathetic magic,” the Host snapped, the blackness in his face swarming darker and darker. “Just your life.”

  A third tremor shook through Pagan and the temperature plunged. Ignatius staggered back, eyes bulging. Only instead of falling like the others, he thumped hard on his chest three times and let loose a loud Vienna-sausage-scented belch. “Fine,” Ignatius agreed, “take anything you want from me. Just let the boy and the others go.”

  “No conditions,” the Host replied, his face swirling darker as the temperature in the room plummeted even lower.

  Ignatius was staggering a bit now, struggling to stay standing. A thin trickle of blood ran out of his nose.

  “Incomparable Ignatius the Scene-Stealer. Ever one for the grand, dramatic gesture. Well, not tonight. Tonight you all die like rats.”

  “Get out!” Ignatius shouted. “All of you. N
ow!” With a final burst of concentrated focus, he blasted all the doors open.

  The Humbugs didn’t need any more invitation. Frantically they raced for the doors, pushing and shoving, trampling over Balthazar and Pagan like they weren’t even there. But before any of them reached the exits, the ice beneath their feet turned to liquid, flowing up their bodies and freezing them to the spot. A garden of ice sculptures.

  “Magic betrayed me,” the Host continued in a different, wounded voice, younger than before. “Just like you did.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. It’s that stuff inside you that did that,” Ignatius gasped. “The Gloaming. That’s what did this to you.”

  The figure was silent for a moment, shadows swirling deeper and deeper into the emptiness of his face as the buzzing sound grew louder and louder.

  “It is all I have,” he said. “That and my revenge.”

  The shadows flared out of his face, plunging the room into darkness. Ignatius dropped to his knees. Pagan, her skin the color of a burned-out lightbulb, also fell away, her hand releasing Balthazar’s as she dropped.

  Stunned, Balthazar struggled to his feet. He turned, and his eyes fell on the lightning-bolt talking piece still resting on the lectern.

  Blood was trickling now from Ignatius’s ears and nose, dropping hot onto the cold ice floor. “Get out of here, you moronic specimen,” he shouted furiously at Balthazar.

  “Not so fast, my darling,” the Host said.

  “The kid’s a dud,” Ignatius wheezed. “No magic. Don’t waste your time.”

  “And yet,” Benjamin persisted, “you still care for the boy, don’t you? Ignatius the great narcissist has found his heart.”

  “No,” Ignatius choked out. “He’s an annoying brat and he doesn’t listen.”

  “Fine, then you won’t mind watching him die.” And with an inhuman, swarming roar, the Host pounced. Things were moving incredibly fast, but adrenalin had sped Balthazar’s mind up even faster, so that he was seeing it all in slow motion. Ignatius’s scream, the Host swooping down at him, the blackness of his empty face opening up into a huge gaping pit of jagged black teeth, spraying out tarry flecks of reeking blackness that splattered Balthazar’s face with freckles of burning-cold frostbite.