Magic City

by Paula Guran

  At the top of the ziggurat of Marduk again, he released her. The brazier had been kicked over, igniting the trailing fringes of Tapputi’s skirt. She snuffed out the smoldering wool, her eyes wide with the witnessed horror.

  “That chariot, the one that charged. The young man in it looked like my eldest son, grown into adulthood.”

  Down the generations, Azubel knew, Tapputi’s line would persist in Mesopotamia. But better for her not to think her distant descendant might have exploded into flame before her eyes.

  “And what happened to him! It was worse than the Assyrian! Was it your Khemeia too?”

  “Its descendant.” Petrochemicals . . . She was silent, biting her lip.

  “Take me home,” she said. “To my house, before the sun rises. I must tend my still, and when my children wake, make their breakfast. You can keep your lightning and your Khemeia. I want nothing of it.”

  He had hoped for a bridal flight from her. Now, her hand in his again, he flew her down to her home, the courtyard. She lifted her daughter to her feet, holding the half-awake child, her eyes still drooping, in a fierce embrace. And watched him as he flew away.

  He did not forget Tapputi the remaining decades of her life, but kept his distance from Babylon. He returned to Egypt, tried to shake their obsession with embalming without success. Then, because she would always be a wavelength, be attuned to him, he heard an unmistakable call from her.

  He found her this time in the royal palace, in a room of her own, the door guarded by courtiers and her zealous female descendants. In the anteroom mourners were preparing for a major funeral, in rehearsal. They prostrated themselves as the King of Babylon was ushered out, having made his farewell to the greatest perfumer in the world.

  He slipped past, and into her presence. She lay on a simple bedstead, but wearing all her gold jewelry. She was old now, but like a date, the wrinkles were merely a surface decoration for the great sweetness within.

  He sat beside the bed, folding his wings neatly behind him.

  “I did tell you the King of Babylon would want your perfumes.”

  She smiled, that crooked tooth again.

  “Better than any divination. I even was appointed palace overseer for perfume. With an assistant to help me.”

  Though there never was the meeting of two minds between them, still they were pleased to see each other.

  “Did anybody buy your lightning?”

  “Not in this time. There was, Tapputi, nobody like you.”

  “I was widowed several summers after I last saw you. He died in great pain, with my hand in his.”

  He reached out, similarly took her withered little paw.

  “He said I was the best wife a Babylonian could have. Because I was faithful when I could have saved him?”

  “I could have given you more than lightning. You know that.”

  “But then I would not have done what I did all by myself!”

  “And you did achieve much. Your fame will last forever.” He will ensure—as Babylon is burnt by the Assyrians, and built up again, to face yet another set of conquerors—that in the mess of cuneiform tablets one will survive, with the name of Tapputi, the perfumer. The first distiller, and thus, the first chemist.

  “It was all I wanted.” She breathed, her voice becoming tired. “Not that I wasn’t tempted by your knowledge. Or you. You were ever the most beautiful thing I saw.”

  A long silence, her breaths coming far apart now, and shallow.

  “Can I touch your wing?”

  In answer, he stroked it across her face. That smile again.

  “Now that I have no time to use it, can I know about the lightning? And other, more peaceful knowledges you might know?”

  “Is this a proposal?”

  “If you want it to be so, from an old woman, then yes.” Even near extremis, she could surprise him. He wrapped his wings around her, moving so that his beak was just above her own hooked nose, and her open lips. She gazed up into his eyes, gave a faint nod. He put his beak to her lips, then struck deep into her mind. In this deep kiss, the real alchemical marriage, the union of minds, knowledge passed between them, his tirhatum [bride price], her sheriqtum [dowry]. She gave him her life, in ancient Mesopotamia, the transient—yet because of that, the most intense—joy: a small girl gazing into the heart of her first flower and inhaling its scent; running alongside the Euphrates, her shawl flowing behind her like a sail; the sight of her firstborn’s wet, wrinkled face; the moment of pure pleasure when her distillery began to work. He in turn gave her what it would take nearly two millennium to discover, the intricate sequence of the elements: hydrogen, helium, all the way to thorium, uranium, and beyond. A great knowledge given freely to the only mind of her era that could appreciate it.

  One of these elements could have been named after Tapputi. No matter, too late now. There was a little blood on her lips, but her expression was peaceful, replete. He laid her small, heavy head down, the eyes closed, and took his leave.

  Much later, the High Priestess of Ishtar—fat no longer, and also an old woman—found, when preparing the body of her friend, the great perfumer, for burial, a feather clasped in Tapputi’s hand. It had a faint, indefinable, sweet, even heavenly scent. And as the priestess gaped at it, the feather vanished from view.

  Lucy Sussex was born in New Zealand. She has edited four anthologies, including She’s Fantastical (1995), shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Her award-winning fiction includes books for younger readers, and the novel, The Scarlet Rider (1996, to be reprinted 2014). She has five short story collections, My Lady Tongue, A Tour Guide in Utopia, Absolute Uncertainty, Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies (a “best of”), and Thief of Lives. Currently she reviews weekly for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Her latest project is Victorian Blockbuster: Fergus Hume and “The Mystery of a Hansom Cab” (forthcoming).

  The City: Chicago, Illinois.

  The Magic: When a curse lasts as long as this one—and matters to so many fans—it’s time to bring in a wizard.

  CURSES

  Jim Butcher

  Most of my cases are pretty tame. Someone loses a piece of jewelry with a lot of sentimental value, or someone comes to me because they’ve just moved into a new house and it’s a little more haunted than the seller’s disclosure indicated. Nothing Chicago’s only professional wizard can’t handle—but the cases don’t usually rake in much money, either.

  So when a man in a two-thousand-dollar suit opened my office door and came inside, he had my complete attention.

  I mean, I didn’t take my feet down off my desk or anything. But I paid attention.

  He looked my office up and down and frowned, as though he didn’t much approve of what he saw. Then he looked at me and said, “Excuse me, is this the office of—”

  “Dolce,” I said.

  He blinked. “Excuse me.”

  “Your suit,” I said. “Dolce and Gabbana. Silk. Very nice. You might want to consider an overcoat, though, now that it’s cooling off. Paper says we’re in for some rain.”

  He studied me intently for a moment. He was a man in his late prime. His hair was dyed too dark, and the suit looked like it probably hid a few pounds. “You must be Harry Dresden.”

  I inclined my head toward him. “Agent or attorney?”

  “A little of both,” he said, looking around my office again. “I represent a professional entertainment corporation, which wishes to remain anonymous for the time being. My name is Donovan. My sources tell me that you’re the man who might be able to help us.”

  My office isn’t anything to write home about. It’s on a corner, with windows on two walls, but it’s furnished for function, not style—scuffed-up wooden desks, a couple of comfortable chairs, some old metal filing cabinets, a used wooden table, and a coffeepot that is old enough to have belonged to Neanderthals. I figured Donovan was worried that he’d exposed his suit to unsavory elements, and resisted an irrational impulse to spill my half-cup of cooling coffee on
it.

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “What you need and whether you can afford me.”

  Donovan fixed me with a stern look. I bore up under it as best I could. “Do you intend to gouge me for a fee, Mr. Dresden?”

  “For every penny I reasonably can,” I told him.

  He blinked at me. “You . . . you’re quite up front about it, aren’t you?”

  “Saves time,” I said.

  “What makes you think I would tolerate such a thing?”

  “People don’t come to me until they’re pretty desperate, Mr. Donovan,” I said, “especially rich people and hardly ever corporations. Besides, you come in here all intriguey and coy, not wanting to reveal who your employer is. That means that in addition to whatever else you want from me, you want my discretion, too.”

  “So your increased fee is a polite form of blackmail?”

  “Cost of doing business. If you want this done on the down low, you make my job more difficult. You should expect to pay a little more than a conventional customer when you’re asking for more than they are.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “How much are you going to cost me?”

  I shrugged a shoulder. “Let’s find out. What do you want me to do?”

  He stood up and turned to walk to the door. He stopped before he reached it, read the words HARRY DRESDEN, WIZARD backward in the frosted glass, and eyed me over his shoulder. “I assume that you have heard of any number of curses in local folklore.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I suppose you’ll expect me to believe in their existence.”

  I shrugged. “They’ll exist or not exist regardless of what you believe, Mr. Donovan.” I paused. “Well. Apart from the ones that don’t exist except in someone’s mind. They’re only real because somebody believes. But that edges from the paranormal over toward psychology. I’m not licensed for that.”

  He grimaced and nodded. “In that case . . . ”

  I felt a little slow off the mark as I realized what we were talking about. “A cursed local entertainment corporation,” I said. “Like maybe a sports team.”

  He kept a poker face on, and it was a pretty good one. “You’re talking about the Billy Goat Curse,” I said.

  Donovan arched an eyebrow and then gave me an almost imperceptible nod as he turned around to face me again. “What do you know about it?”

  I blew out my breath and ran my fingers back through my hair. “Uh, back in 1945 or so, a tavern owner named Sianis was asked to leave a World Series game at Wrigley. Seems his pet goat was getting rained on and it smelled bad. Some of the fans were complaining. Outraged at their lack of social élan, Sianis pronounced a curse on the stadium, stating that never again would a World Series game be played there. Well, actually he said something like, ‘Them Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more,’ but the World Series thing is the general interpretation.”

  “And?” Donovan asked.

  “And I think if I’d gotten kicked out of a Series game I’d been looking forward to, I might do the same thing.”

  “You have a goat?”

  “I have a moose,” I said.

  He blinked at that for a second, didn’t understand it, and decided to ignore it. “If you know that, then you know that many people believe that the curse has held.”

  “Where the Series is concerned, the Cubbies have been filled with fail and dipped in suck sauce since 1945,” I acknowledged. “No matter how hard they try, just when things are looking up, something seems to go bad at the worst possible time.” I paused to consider. “I can relate.”

  “You’re a fan, then?”

  “More of a kindred spirit.”

  He looked around my office again and gave me a small smile. “But you follow the team.”

  “I go to games when I can.”

  “That being the case,” Donovan said, “you know that the team has been playing well this year.”

  “And the Cubs want to hire yours truly to prevent the curse from screwing things up.”

  Donovan shook his head. “I never said that the Cubs organization was involved.”

  “Hell of a story, though, if they were.”

  Donovan frowned severely.

  “The Sun-Times would run it on the front page. CUBS HIRE PROFESSIONAL WIZARD TO BREAK CURSE, maybe. Rick Morrissey would have a ball with that story.”

  “My clients,” Donovan said firmly, “have authorized me to commission your services on this matter, if it can be done quickly—and with the utmost discretion.”

  I swung my feet down from my desk. “Mr. Donovan,” I said. “No one does discretion like me.”

  Two hours after I had begun my calculations, I dropped my pencil on the laboratory table and stretched my back. “Well. You’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right,” said Bob the Skull. “I’m always right.”

  I gave the dried, bleached human skull sitting on a shelf amidst a stack of paperback romance novels a gimlet-eye.

  “For some values of right,” he amended hastily. The words were conciliatory, but the flickering flames in the skull’s eye sockets danced merrily.

  My laboratory is in the subbasement under my basement apartment. It’s dark, cool, and dank, essentially a concrete box that I have to enter by means of a folding staircase. It isn’t a big room, but it’s packed with the furnishings of one. Lots of shelves groan under the weight of books, scrolls, papers, alchemical tools, and containers filled with all manner of magical whatnot.

  There’s a silver summoning circle on the floor, and a tiny-scale model of the city of Chicago on a long table running down the middle of the room. The only shelf not crammed full is Bob’s, and even it gets a little crowded sometimes. Bob is my more-or-less-faithful, not-so-trusty assistant, a spirit of intellect that dwells within a specially enchanted skull. I might be a wizard, but Bob’s knowledge of magic makes me look like an engineering professor.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing you missed?” I asked.

  “Nothing’s certain, boss,” the skull said philosophically. “But you did the equations. You know the power requirements for a spell to continue running through all those sunrises.”

  I grunted sourly. The cycles of time in the world degrade ongoing magic, and your average enchantment doesn’t last for more than a few days. For a curse to be up and running since 1945, it would have had to begin as a malevolent enchantment powerful enough to rip a hole through the crust of the planet. Given the lack of lava in the area, it would seem that whatever the Billy Goat Curse might be, I could be confident that it wasn’t a simple magical working.

  “Nothing’s ever simple,” I complained.

  “What did you expect, boss?” Bob said.

  I growled. “So the single-spell theory is out.”

  “Yep,” Bob said.

  “Which means that either the curse is being powered by something that renews its energy—or else someone is refreshing the thing all the time.”

  “What about this Sianis guy’s family?” Bob said. “Maybe they’re putting out a fresh whammy every few days or something.”

  I shook my head. “I called records in Edinburgh. The wardens checked them out years ago when all of this first happened, and they aren’t practitioners. Besides, they’re Cub-friendly.”

  “The wardens investigated the Greek guy but not the curse?” Bob asked curiously.

  “In 1945 the White Council had enough to do trying to mitigate the bad mojo from all those artifacts the Nazis stockpiled,” I said. “Once they established that no one’s life was in danger, they didn’t really care if a bunch of guys playing a game got cursed to lose it.”

  “So what’s your next move?”

  I tapped my chin thoughtfully with one finger. “Let’s go look at the stadium.”

  I put Bob in the mesh sack I sometimes tote him around in and, at his petulant insistence, hung it from the rearview mirror of my car, a battered old Volkswagen Beetle. He hung there, s
winging back and forth and occasionally spinning one way or the other when something caught his eye.

  “Look at the legs on that one!” Bob said. “And whew, check her out! It must be chilly tonight!”

  “There’s a reason we don’t get out more often, Bob,” I sighed. I should have known better than to drive through the club district on my way to Wrigley.

  “I love the girls’ pants in this century,” Bob said. “I mean look at those jeans. One little tug and off they come.”

  I wasn’t touching that one.

  I parked the car a couple of blocks from the stadium, stuck Bob in a pocket of my black leather duster, and walked in. The Cubs were on the road, and Wrigley was closed. It was a good time to knock around inside. But since Donovan was evidently prepared to deny and disavow all knowledge, I wasn’t going to be able to simply knock on the door and wander in.

  So I picked a couple of locks at a delivery entrance and went inside. I didn’t hit it at professional-burglar speed or anything—I knew a couple of guys who could open a lock with tools as fast as they could with a key—but I wasn’t in any danger of getting a ticket for loitering, either. Once I was inside, I headed straight for the concourses. If I mucked around in the stadium’s administrative areas, I would probably run afoul of a full-blown security system, and the only thing I could reliably do to that would be to shut it down completely—and most systems are smart enough to tip off their home security company when that happens.

  Besides. What I was looking for wouldn’t be in any office.

  I took Bob out of my pocket so that the flickering golden-orange lights of his eyes illuminated the area in front of me. “All right,” I murmured. I kept my voice down, on the off chance that a night watchman might be on duty and nearby. “I’m angry at the Cubbies and I’m pitching my curse at them. Where’s it going to stick?”