Genie and Engineer 1: The Engineer Wizard

by Glenn Michaels

  “And then, sixth, there is his clever story of portaling into outer space to trap the Oni that were chasing him. And it really is a clever story. It only has one flaw. Without a—what do you call it? Ah, yes, a spacesuit—without one of those, a person would die instantly, violently in space. Yes, a spell would provide a degree of protection, but nothing like what Mr. Armstead claims.”

  Silence reigned for several seconds.

  “Then, you don’t think he is anything special?” asked Celeste, a touch of sadness in her voice.

  “Not hardly, no,” Ruggiero answered firmly. “You touched him, did you not, when you treated his injured arm? I shook his hand twice. Tell me, did you feel any unusual powers? How would you rate his magical potency?”

  Paul could almost see Celeste biting her lower lip. “No, nothing unusual about his powers. Average for a new wizard, I suppose. Perhaps a little less.”

  “Yes, I agree,” Ruggiero concurred. “In time and with experience, he might become a decent wizard. Assuming he is what he appears to be.”

  “You don’t think he is?” Celeste inquired with a degree of surprise reflected in her voice.

  “No, my dear, I don’t. I think he is a spy. It would answer a lot of questions. Hypothetically speaking, let’s say that Shirazi or Clarke or Karlsen took one of their cohorts, and using magic, they altered his appearance so that we would not recognize him. Then they gave him a cover story and dropped him on that mountaintop with a cleverly constructed talisman. After that, they pretended to have their Oni chase him out to the desert. The Oni portaled away, leaving Mr. Armstead unconscious on the sand. Whoever sent him would count on us to notice the construction of the new talisman and investigate, following the trail to the desert. And we rescued him, bringing him safely into our midst. Isn’t that a much more plausible and likely scenario than the fable he told us?”

  More silence this time.

  “So you think he is a spy. What about his arm? I mean, if he was a spy, would he voluntarily submit to having his arm shredded like that?”

  “Why not? No doubt, it was painful, but any wizard worth his salt could grow another one in a few months,” Ruggiero countered.

  “Does that mean you plan to kill him?” Celeste asked without a single hint in her voice that she might find such a fate for Paul to be objectionable in any way.

  Ruggiero sighed. “Yes. I don’t believe we have a choice. But before I do, I would like to string him along for a bit while we are pretending to wait for his new arm to be delivered. I want to get as much information out of him as we can before we get rid of his body. We’ll try a little gentle persuasion at first, and if that doesn’t work, we can graduate to more persuasive measures.”

  “Ah?” Celeste uttered.

  “Yes? Oh, yes, I see what you mean,” Ruggiero grunted, suddenly sounding upset about something....

  Paul’s eyebrows twitched. And just what did that exchange mean? Had they noticed...? Oh, no!

  Frantically, Paul muttered a couple of words and waved the portal closed, and then he turned for the bed, reaching out to magically turn off the room light....

  But he was too late.

  His muscles froze in mid-motion, and he collapsed to the floor, paralyzed by a magical spell. Though he could not move, he could still see, and out of the corner of one eye, he saw Ruggiero standing in front of a portal, just inside the bedroom door, with what appeared to be the library visible through the portal behind him.

  “How long do you think he was listening to us?” a frowning Celeste asked, coming through the portal behind Ruggiero.

  “I don’t even know how he was doing it,” admitted Ruggiero grudgingly, scowling at the sprawled form on the floor. “And quite frankly, that disturbs me. I could have sworn that there were no magical spells in use in the library, other than our own, of course. So that part is a mystery. If you hadn’t checked in on him and seen him listening to our conversation, we might never have known what he was up to. But to answer your question, he probably heard more than enough. There is no point in trying to be nice to him anymore. I have a different idea for our Mr. Armstead now.”

  Ruggiero waved a hand, reducing Paul to an unconscious state.

  THIRTEEN

  Unknown location

  Somewhere in France

  December

  Friday (Christmas Day), time unknown

  Pain. Then again, another sharp pain. Somebody was slapping his face. And again. Not real hard. But hard enough.

  Paul opened his eyes, but there were multiple spinning images of everything around him.

  “Ah, we are making progress,” a voice said in dry humor.

  The words had no meaning to Paul. He felt completely disoriented, like he was waking from a nap without knowing where he was. Only this was worse. He couldn’t form a cogent thought at all.

  “Pass me that glass,” ordered the voice. “Here, drink this, it will help.”

  A hand slipped behind Paul’s head, raising him up. There was pressure on his lips and a sense of wetness. Without conscious control, he swallowed.

  “Good. Drink more.”

  The liquid warmed him up internally, making its way from his stomach up to his head and out to his arms and legs. A sense of strength flowed into him, and then suddenly, his mind began to clear.

  “You see, it works every time,” muttered the voice. This time, the words made sense, in a distant fashion.

  Paul snapped upright and looked around, his eyes blinking as he tried to take in his surroundings. And they weren’t good. What he saw intimidated and appalled him.

  Standing next to him, floating a few inches off the ground, were Dr. Ruggiero and Celeste. Both of them were staring at him as if he were some form of interesting insect.

  The room was totally unfamiliar to Paul. Large, with stone walls and a dirt floor with scattered stacks of wooden crates. High overhead was a roof with rafters, but no ceiling. From the background sounds and the chill in the air, Paul sensed that he was in an outdoors facility of some sort, like a barn or livestock building, but without animals.

  Beneath him was some sort of gurney.

  But it was the two Oni stationed nearby, watching him closely, that captivated Paul’s undivided attention. And with the hair lifting on the nape of his neck, he noticed that the Oni weren’t smiling at all, just staring at him with those big black eyes.

  Paul had goosebumps on top of goosebumps.

  Celeste noticed Paul’s wide-eyed look at the Oni. “As long as you behave yourself, they won’t hurt you. Understand?”

  Paul nodded slowly, not taking his eyes off the monsters.

  Ruggiero tossed the glass into the air, where it disappeared in a small flash of light, and then he floated a few feet farther away. Celeste followed.

  “Bring him,” the doctor commanded.

  The Oni grabbed Paul by his right arm and the stump of his left, dragged him in front of the two wizards, and forced him to his knees. One small corner of his mind noted that he was no longer wearing the red pajamas but was instead wearing his original clothes, the ones from California. But he ignored the thought, concentrating instead on the direness of his current situation.

  “Now, Mr. Armstead, I am not willing to waste time here trying to drag information out of you yet. I hit you too hard and you haven’t fully recovered your senses. Also, the way I see it, you need a little bit of time by yourself to do some meditation. Later, we will talk. And when we talk, if you cooperate, we will get along fine. If not, I’ll let the Oni deal with you. And they will do a lot more than just remove part of one arm. So, you think about that for a while.”

  He nodded to the Oni, and they yanked Paul to his feet, dragging him away.

  • • • •

  They quite literally tossed Paul through the air, into a small room with a hard wooden floor, slamming the door behind them as they left. For a while, he lay still, trying to get his breath back while also fighting to remember what had happened. One minute, he ha
d been in the house in Paris, and the next, he was in this place.

  The memory of the library conversation came flooding back into his mind.

  Oh, yeah, he had been well and truly busted.

  The lighting in this room was poor, but sufficient for him to make out a few details. Perhaps six feet by six feet, the available space felt very restrictive. Almost claustrophobic.

  Climbing slowly to his feet, Paul carefully examined the room. It didn’t take long. There was no furniture, no fixtures at all, and not a single window. The sole object in the small room was a bucket in one corner. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all wooden planks nailed tightly together. The door was locked and didn’t budge even one iota. A soft glow was coming from somewhere in the room.

  Patting his pockets revealed that all his personal items were gone. No wallet, no car keys, no change, no watch, and worst of all, no talisman. And his glasses were gone as well. He groaned in anguish, sliding down one wall into a sitting position on the floor. What a way to spend Christmas Day! He would gladly trade this situation for the chance to go back to his day job. In a blue funk, he thought of all the movies, TV episodes and books where the hero or heroes had been thrown into a jail cell. And there a lot of such stories, many of them involving nasty, vile dungeons, cruel sadistic guards, foul food and back breaking prison labor. And yet the heroes of such tales had universally faced their dire plights with courage, confidence, a degree of humor and a steadfast determination to escape at all costs.

  Paul felt none of those heroic tendencies here.

  I am not a hero! he silently screamed at the ceiling of his prison. I can’t do what they did! My situation is hopeless!

  Crawling into a corner of his cramped quarters, he huddled there on the floor with his knees up against his chest. Despair gripped him in a thousand icy fingers. In short order, he felt lightheaded, he was sweating profusely, his heart was beating rapidly, he was short of breath and his chest hurt as if his heart was being squeezed in a vise. A feeling of intense doom descended upon him.

  “What’s going to happen to me now?” he whispered in a tiny voice.

  • • • •

  He awoke a few hours later, feeling somewhat refreshed and more alert but also feeling stiff, sore, hungry, and thirsty—and still depressed. Again, he cast a small spell on himself to block his discomfort. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no spell to cure his emotional state of mind.

  It was still Christmas Day. Gee, what a cheerful thought that was! A prisoner of wicked wizards on Christmas! Such fun!

  He gritted his teeth. There were questions to be answered. He needed some of that super-genius assistance again. But not Merlin this time.

  “In the name of Basil Rathbone, Robert Downey, Jr., and Lt. Commander Data, let a virtual reality image of Sherlock Holmes appear.”

  A hologram of a man of medium height materialized wearing an old-fashioned dark suit of Victorian cut and a deerstalker hat. His hair and sideburns were an unruly brown and framed a thin, but serious face with small black piercing eyes and thin, colorless lips.

  The hologram doffed the hat, tossing it into a corner. Then he turned to study the walls. Reaching out, he ran a finger along a wood seam.

  “Pinus Pinaster, commonly known as the maritime pine or cluster pine. Primarily found growing in Portugal, Spain, southern and western France, western Italy, and northern Morocco. Not a common lumber. Has a low magical quotient, I expect.”

  Holmes flashed Paul a quick, thin smile. “Let me guess your questions. One, where are you? Two, how did you come to be here? Three, what do your captors want? And four, how do you escape? Shall we start with those?”

  Surprised by Holmes’s quick intelligence and evaluation of his situation, the corners of Paul’s mouth quirked up hopefully. “Yes, please.”

  Holmes waved a hand at the walls. “Certainly, you are in the western Mediterranean area, probably still in France and most likely somewhere along the southern French Atlantic coastline, say between Saint-Jean-de-Luz and Bordeaux. Obviously, Celeste and Ruggiero put you here when they discovered you had eavesdropped on their conversation. So now they are quite convinced you are a spy and now plan to kill you, just as soon as they finish interrogating you. Naturally, they want to know what information you are trying to obtain, who sent you, and what plans your spymaster has for them. Of course, you can’t tell them, because they have drawn the wrong conclusion about your presence here. However, you won’t be able to convince them of that. The fact that you will insist on a story they find unacceptable and that you will continue to refuse to answer their questions will madden them. I anticipate that the torture sessions will not be pleasant, and following those, the Oni will make your death an extremely painful one.”

  Crestfallen, Paul closed his eyes and bowed his head. Yeah, Holmes was right. He had screwed up. Again.

  “Now, how do you escape?” Sherlock continued, seemingly oblivious to Paul’s emotional state of mind. “An interesting question. But there is something else we need to cover that’s even more important. Let’s consider the evidence. Ruggiero was quite puzzled about how you managed to listen in on their conversation without a direct spell. Now, why is that?”

  Holmes turned to Paul and waited expectantly while Paul blinked in surprise.

  “How should I know that?” Paul asked frankly, not understanding the sudden change in the conversation.

  The detective clenched his jaw, looking annoyed. “Come on, man, think! Let me give you a clue. Celeste asked if you might be something special, remember?”

  Paul shrugged, still puzzled. “Yes. So what? They both agreed that I am not. Just another ordinary run-of-the-mill rookie wizard. So what are you talking about?”

  Sitting on an imaginary chair that had popped up out of nowhere, Holmes leaned forward earnestly. “But you might be special. You could be, especially if it saves your life.”

  Shaking his head, Paul protested, “You are not making sense. Slow down and explain!”

  “As you wish,” Holmes replied, grinning. “Remember what Ruggiero asked Celeste? If you had some sort of special or superpowers?”

  Paul thought back over the library conversation. “Yes. I didn’t give it much thought at the time. Again, what are you driving at?”

  Holmes smiled again. “Your claim of unusual powers.”

  Paul frowned, his brow furrowed, surprised by the detective’s statement. “I didn’t claim any unusual powers!”

  “The ability to pass one material object through another on a molecular level,” Holmes pointed out. “The ability to survive in space. Remember, those were the reasons Ruggiero didn’t believe you and thought you a spy.”

  Paul considered the hologram’s analysis. It seemed so outlandish, so preposterous an idea.

  “It’s another reason that he is keeping you alive,” Holmes argued intensely. “And he has put you here, in this tiny room, without your talisman, in order to soften you up before he interrogates you. It’s a common enough tactic, a sort of sensory deprivation, to make you more cooperative.”

  That last part Paul could understand.

  “Then he will likely leave me in here for a few days,” he guessed, knowing that it was what he might have done, if the situation were reversed and if he were mean-spirited enough.

  “At the very least.” Holmes gave him a nod in agreement.

  Paul slowly shook his head in discouragement. “And when he finally gets around to questioning me, he’ll discover that I can’t answer his questions, because I am not a spy. Then, eeeeccch!” he said, drawing a line across his neck with one finger.

  “I would not be so quick to leap to that conclusion,” Holmes contested. “We know that you are not a spy, but on the other hand, perhaps you are not an ordinary wizard either, as you say. It behooves you to investigate the possibility that you are not. And to be quite frank with you, I really think you just may possess powers that are superior to theirs.”

  Paul ogled at him. “What makes
you think that?”

  “Think, man, think! The library that Ruggiero and Celeste were so proud of, that you found so blasé. Did you see anything modern in it? Any periodicals, anything published after the year 1900?”

  “Ah, no, not really,” Paul admitted, mystified by where Holmes was going with all of this.

  Holmes persisted. “And nothing on science, engineering, or mathematics. Did you see anything electronic in their house? Computers, cell phones, LED TVs? Even a telephone or a wall clock? Any modern devices at all?”

  “No. I just thought, well, maybe wizards don’t need any of that stuff,” Paul replied, sulking. Holmes’s logic was still baffling him.

  “Maybe it’s more basic than that,” Holmes pointed out, leaning close to Paul again. “Tell me. How old are all the wizards on Earth?”

  “At least 400 years old. In most cases, older than that,” Paul answered, puzzled that Holmes would ask him that question. He was supposed to answer Paul’s questions, not the other way around.

  “Correct,” Holmes responded with a tight smile. “All of them were born long before the modern age, long before the first steam engines, let alone jet aircraft, space travel, quantum physics, or science fiction. Did you not see the way Ruggiero and Celeste froze when you mentioned a science-fiction movie? Like you had just blasphemed in their presence.”

  Paul blinked in surprise. Holmes was finally getting through to him.

  “Yes, I noticed,” Paul admitted thoughtfully, reaching up to push his nonexistent glasses up on his nose and scowling in impatience when he remembered that they weren’t there to be pushed up anymore. “But it didn’t make sense to me at the time. You’re saying that they don’t understand the modern age?”

  Holmes nodded vigorously. “Yes! How many times have you bragged about your stepson, Douglas, and his ability with computers?”