The Wizard from Earth

by S. J. Ryan

  When they emerged, a very few who had been blind and deaf and sick were cured, but all were relieved of coins.

  On the street before the former mansion, rickshaws and their carriers were waiting for the wealthier supplicants to emerge. One of the carriers was a teenaged boy, normally known to be sociable with the other drivers and charming to his passengers. This day he had spent the last hour refusing the requests of passengers and doing nothing more than frown at the temple windows.

  Then a shutter on the second floor cracked open. A hand emerged, made a sign, then retracted. The rickshaw driver stood straight.

  The front door cracked open, and a sole supplicant emerged. She was in her early twenties, dressed a cut above the common style. She headed for the rickshaw behind the boy's.

  "The one I wanted to see wasn't there," the boy heard her grumble to the carrier as she climbed inside. "And the one who was there wouldn't help me. But they took my money at the door just the same! They are supposed to be paying me! This whole accursed morning is wasted. Now, I'll need to go to the palace fast, so – "

  The boy touched her driver, who instantly fell unconscious to the road. The girl looked up, saw the body of her driver, then the boy standing over him.

  “What happened to him?”

  “Must have swooned from the heat.”

  “I did not think it was that hot.”

  The boy shrugged. “I can take you in my rickshaw.”

  She sighed, and changed vehicles. “The palace in speed.”

  "Yes, ma'am."

  The boy bolted up Golden Street, but before they got to the first turn, he re-routed to Dan Street.

  "Taxi Boy! This isn't the way to the palace!"

  "I know a short-cut."

  He trotted them through a maze of streets that became ever more narrow and decrepit.

  "Mind the potholes! I am not a bag of flour!”

  The boy steered through a narrow opening into an alley bounded by sheer, windowless walls. He stopped, dropped the rickshaw handles, and stepped back, blocking the exit.

  "Where are we? What are we doing here?" she demanded. Fear crept into her voice as she said, “If – if this is a robbery, then you should know that I serve at the Emperor's table and my disappearance will be investigated by the palace guard. I will give you my money, but it is best for you that my life be spared.”

  “This isn't about money,” the boy replied.

  He handed her an envelope with a black seal. She removed the letter and read – or pretended to do so, for the boy knew she was only slightly less illiterate than he.

  “What – what is this?”

  “Your death warrant, signed by the High Priestess.”

  Then her eyes randomly turned to the side, and she noticed the pile of garbage against the wall – and the motionless, prone and naked body of a boy who was a twin of the one who stood before her. She gasped and the document slipped from her fingers.

  “But how can it be! I do not recognize your transformation scent!”

  “Your gifts were revoked while you were in temple. Soon you will be deaf and sickly and blemished as you were before. But I will spare you that!”

  The girl climbed from the rickshaw and prostrated herself.

  “There must be a mistake! I have served loyally!”

  “If you have followed our instructions, then why is the Emperor again in good health?”

  “I don't know, but I administered the poisons as I was told!”

  “Evidence says otherwise.”

  The girl flattened herself until she seemed to melt into the pavement. Face down, she wept.

  “Please! I beg you! I have served you and the Sisters faithfully in all that I have done!”

  The boy watched for a moment, put his hands behind his back, and said calmly, “Very well. If you say so. Then rise.”

  The girl arose, sniffing and wiping tears from her eyes.

  The boy gazed serenely – and then snarled, “Lying girl!”

  Simultaneously, both hands lashed out from behind his back. In a blur, the girl might have seen the claws that took the place of fingers. But then they were at her throat, and blood spurted. Her eyes went wide and her mouth was silent and then she crumpled.

  The boy looked down and whispered, “Lying girl!”

  He bent over the corpse, wiped his hands on her clothing, tore off the clothing that he was wearing, unwrapped a parcel among the garbage, took out the articles of clothing within and put them on. As Inoldia transformed back into herself, she smoothed her dress and departed the alley.

  A few blocks later, she was admitted through the gates of the estate of the Family Valarion. The general was alone in the courtyard, sitting among the orchids and hummingbirds next to a small table with a teapot, a dish of cookies, and two cups.

  "Tea?" he asked. "The cookies are your favorite."

  "You were expecting me?”

  He poured her cup to the brim. "I thought you would like to unwind after the execution.”

  She took the cup and sat. The tea was steaming but she drank it in a gulp.

  “You have spies watching me, that's how you know what I was doing.”

  “They don't watch too closely, of course. You would likely kill them if they did.”

  She smiled.

  Valarion continued, “But today it was my spy at the temple who informed me only minutes ago that the Emperor's serving girl had to change rickshaws when her carrier fainted.” Valarion blew on his tea. “From there it's simple logic. Of course it was simple logic from the moment you learned that the poison didn't work, that you would blame the girl.”

  “I am certain of her guilt.”

  “Inoldia, to be frank, I am certain that you don't even know her name.”

  “Zu – Zuno, or something. So you think she was not guilty?”

  “I have told you that I have spies watching the House of Archimedes. The report is that the Emperor went in tired and weak. He came out healthy and hearty. The change happened while he was in there.”

  “The witch girl could not have healed him. Do you think Archimedes had an antidote?”

  “I think we have underestimated the boy.”

  “Boy?”

  “As I told you, Archimedes took in a girl and a boy. The girl is your witch, and the boy seems to have been mythologized in Britan as the Wizard from Aereoth. From reports I have received about him, I am beginning to suspect that the people of Britain were not so gullible in coming to that conclusion.”

  Inoldia remembered then that Pandora had warned her about the Wizard. But she relaxed when she remembered what else the Mother had said about him.

  “He is only a baseline.”

  “A what?”

  “I meant, he is only a normal human.”

  “So is Archimedes, and yet he irritates you as much as me.”

  She examined the delicate gold inlays in the ornamental flower patterns of the tea cup, and then she crushed it.

  Scattering the fragments on the lawn, she said, “You were going to take care of Archimedes, and the girl, and the boy. You assured me, but your plan failed.”

  “There's an old military adage: 'No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy.'”

  “Then why plan at all?”

  “Ah, you see, plans seldom fail completely. Often they bring you closer to success, and can be improvised in mid-battle so as to lead on to success.”

  “If you have a new plan, say it, and then have it done quickly. Your first plan was almost our undoing. Be thankful that I pressed for the girl's swift execution. If she had happened to mention to any of the other Sisters that I had given her a second poison for the Emperor, I would have been brought before the Mother and questioned, and then you and I would both be punished.”

  Valarion tilted his head. “How interesting. You just so much as admitted that you can't lie to whoever this Mother person is. I take it you don't even have a choice in the matter.”

  “Valarion, I am losing pat
ience, and you have a house full of things which I can break.”

  “Very well, to business. You want to know about the new plan. Well, the Emperor is always having parties at the palace, right? We'll see to it that the girl, the boy, and Archimedes are invited to one, and that they have the opportunity to be blamed for murdering him while present at the palace.”

  “You are confident they will attend? Archimedes never attends parties, and the girl and the boy come from Britan and I do not see them wanting to linger among senators either.”

  “I will ensure they will all come. That part of the plan is already in motion.”

  “But then how can we poison the Emperor now? The servant girl was our only contact within the Palace. Do you have one of your own?”

  “No, I don't. Hadron has always had a sense about infiltration. I was surprised you were able to slip in an agent of your own. But it doesn't matter. We don't need a spy, a contact, or an agent. We have you. You'll kill him personally – and leave incriminating evidence that points to the girl as the perpetrator, of course.”

  “What kind of evidence, and points to the girl as to the what?”

  “Isn't the meaning obvious from the context? Oh, never mind. I'll need to give you a brooch, it's being fabricated now. And in infiltrating the Emperor's quarters, try not to be seen by the guards or to kill too many of them. That also will arouse – “

  “Valarion! I was assassinating people before you were born!”

  He smiled. “Yes, but this is the ruler of Rome in his palace surrounded by a thousand guards, and not a village chief's wife gathering flowers by the river alone.”

  She kept her expression fixed. “She wasn't alone. She had her daughter.”

  “Who is the girl you seek to kill now.”

  “You seem to know a great deal.”

  “Not what I want to know.”

  “You mean, what the Sisters are seeking in Britan.”

  “Yes.”

  “The day you learn that, Valarion, is the day you shall die.”

  “Oh, that again. Very well, I'll change the subject.”

  He yawned, then opened a binder on his lap to a bookmarked page and penciled an annotation beneath a block on a flow chart. “You know, planning an assassination and a coup on top of it is a morass of headaches. In the field I can always charge expenses to the treasury but here the budget has to come out of my own pocket. And I never had to figure out how to forge invitations for a siege. Imagine, the fate of Rome hinges on whether I can find card stock of the correct color and texture!”

  A servant entered and bowed. "Your appointment is early, my lord."

  Valarion gave a sharp nod. "Have him come – and bring more cups."

  Inoldia placed her hands on the chair arms – gently – and made to rise. "I have had enough of your petty affairs to bore me on this day.”

  Valarion snapped the book shut and motioned her down. "You will want to listen to what this person has to report. It is very fascinating in its own right, and moreover it is the main reason why I have allowed Archimedes to remain alive so long." He sipped his tea and stared into space. "Indeed, Archimedes should thank me for keeping his little secret. For if Hadron knew what I know, he might have his good friend promptly executed for treason even sooner than I will."

  The servant returned with an older, very fidgeting man.

  Valarion beamed and said, "Ah, Landar! Have you met the Lady Inoldia?"

  36.

  Over the following days, Archimedes kept Matt preoccupied with a flow of projects. Their relationship seemed on the surface not to have changed. Archimedes was as cheerful as ever (in his crusty way) and never mentioned the airship. Or so Matt thought at first. Then he noticed that Archimedes was giving him assignments that could have 'alternative' applications.

  Project #1: "I need you to implement a way to increase the strength of iron. The ancients called it 'steel.' And by the way, do they have in Seattle what the Mentors refer to as 'aluminum?'"

  Project #2: "Provide a table of temperature and pressure versus various mixtures of alcohol and air when ignited within a containment of metal."

  Project #3: "Riveting. What do you know about riveting, Matt?"

  Project #4: "I want you to redesign this tooling machine for greater precision. It's for the production of more efficient . . . sewer pumps."

  At first Matt was happy to oblige, relieved there had been no permanent rift with someone he consciously admitted he was coming to view as a father figure. But slowly it dawned that he was being asked too often how to radically lighten parts that didn't need to be lightened if they were indeed intended to sit on a factory floor.

  Then one day he was asked to build what Ivan identified as a very large spark plug, one just the right size to fit into the engine that Prin had mentioned was being constructed on Steam Island.

  Matt started to lose enthusiasm. He slowed in his work, and Archimedes began to replace crustiness with testiness. Matt excused himself by pretending various ailments, but Archimedes saw through that too.

  “You seem to be having a lot of stomach pains lately,” Archimedes observed. “Perhaps you should visit a physician.”

  Matt knew that given the state of medical science on Ne'arth, that might be more lethal than any ailment. But he nodded feebly and hobbled away. Shortly, he was standing in the courtyard by a ventilation shaft to the basement, and heard the sound of a hammer against metal coming from below.

  “Wasn't there a god who made weapons in a cavern?” Matt asked. “Vulcan, wasn't it?”

  "The Greeks called him Hephaestus," Ivan said. "He made armor and arrows for the gods."

  "Well, Archimedes has him outclassed.”

  Matt returned to his room, flopped on his bed, and resumed ceiling-staring mode.

  “This isn't working out.”

  Ivan conducted a contextual analysis. "You mean, being an assistant to Archimedes."

  "It's not like I'm good and he's evil. He really wants the best for the world. Well, so do I. He may be older than me – in physiological age, I mean – but I have more historical knowledge. Centuries more. I'm not wrong, am I? About not introducing air war to this world, I mean."

  "I have a suite of generic battle simulation programs that could be adapted to analyze warfare between airships."

  "That won't help by itself. We'd have to gather accurate data on the status of technological development for all the nations on Ne'arth, then simulate an arms race and see whether it would lead to arms control negotiations and a balance of power, or to an international crisis and global war. But we don't have that kind of data, it would take years to gather, it would be of questionable quality – and then chaos theory says there are so many unknown variables that we shouldn't have bothered in the first place.”

  "I do not have an arms race negotiation simulation program in my archives. It would have to be developed from scratch."

  Matt sighed.

  "Here we go again, talking about altering the course of a world's history. That stupid program would probably say I'm being narcissistic again."

  He was lost in thought when he heard a loud knock on the wall. It was Carrot.

  "Come quickly!" she said. "There's been an accident!"

  Then she was gone, darting down the stairway at mutant-speed. Matt followed and when he reached the kitchen, he found the women clustered around Nilla, who was weeping and clutching a red and moist rag around her left hand.

  "I'm going to lose it!" she cried. "I'm going to lose it!"

  Matt saw the knife on the cutting table, the half chopped onion, the copious amounts of blood.

  Carrot said to him, "This is beyond me."

  "Let me see," Matt said.

  Nilla unraveled the rag. The cut on her thumb was deep, but it would not have been outside even twentieth century technology to heal, albeit with a scar. With what passed for medical care on Ne'arth, though, she could well lose her thumb to infection.

  Matt subvocaled, "Tell me wh
at to do."

  Ivan directed him to grasp her thumb and press the severed flesh together. Ivan's microscopic tentacles infiltrated her wound and Nilla ceased to moan. After a minute, Ivan retracted his tentacles and Matt released her hand.

  "There's not a scar!" Mola exclaimed.

  “No scar!” Mola said. “Your hand was bloody, girl! What happened to the blood?”

  The household staff stared at Matt.

  "The, uh, injury, wasn't as bad as it looked," Matt said.

  They continued to stare.

  Nilla laughed and held her thumb to Gwinol. "Look, Gwin – it feels perfectly fine!"

  Gwinol eyed Matt. "How much do you charge?"

  "Nothing, free of charge."

  "Thank you, Matt! It's just like Carrot said – you are a wizard! Oh thank you!" Nilla continued to admire her thumb. "The Sisters of Wisdom would have charged a fortune! But I would never go to them, not after what happened to Zula!"

  Matt frowned. "Who's Zula?"

  "Zula is the friend of Drila, who is the friend of Balil, who is the friend of – "

  "Okay," Matt interjected. "What happened to Zula?"

  "Didn't you hear? It's all over town. She was slashed to ribbons in an alley off Dan Street, just blocks from here!"

  Matt thought of Carrot going out at night armed with dagger. But no, he knew Carrot now, and she would not doing anything like that. And when he studied her face as she stood in the kitchen listening to Nilla, he saw only shock.

  "Drila says it's disturbing because Zula was doing so well," Nilla said. "She was deaf from childhood, but the Sisters cured her. Then, so suddenly, she was hired into the Emperor's household and all seemed to go well. And then – slashed to ribbons!"

  "You sounded before like you were connecting her death with the Sisters of Wisdom," Matt said.

  "Drila says Zula was always at their temple – and then the constables found her body in the alley right next to a rickshaw boy who used to wait outside the temple. He was slashed to ribbons too! They say these things sometimes happen to those who cross the Sisters. Poor Zula, what could she have done to make them so angry?"