"I remember,” Tony said unwillingly, staring at his golden reflection.
"I will treat you one more time,” the doctor decided, “on your terms. But I must take precautions. Which moles would you like me to remove?"
Tony chose the bruise greens because there were more of them.
Dr. Molnar ran straps across Tony's chest and legs, his wrists and ankles. Tony choked down a moment of panic. Of course there were no such things as vampires. Of course the doctor had never been anything but understanding and kind. The pheromone in the tea rested heavily on his tongue, but without tranquilizers his mind stayed clear.
He heard a squeaking noise as something heavy was wheeled to the side of the armchair. He glimpsed an aquarium. Something clouded the bottom that might have been algae except that it flashed from side to side with breathtaking speed.
"Past your feeding time,” remarked Dr. Molnar. He opened a styrofoam container and tipped the contents inside. The darkness flashed over. The hamburger steamed and bubbled. An oily stain spread over the water, accompanied by an acrid smell.
Now Tony wanted to ask for the tranquilizer, but the thought of lying unconscious next to whatever-that-was stopped him cold. Dr. Molnar flicked on the tape recorder.
The bruise-greens, it turned out, were fond of Wagner. As the Ride of the Valkyries filled the room, Tony felt stirrings under his skin. In ten or perhaps twelve places he felt a twitching like an ant struggling up through sand. He sensed answering thrums from other places, of creatures half-awakened but too comatose to rise.
And he felt pleasure, a startling and fierce joy to be coming together. It was a longing so intense he wanted to cry. And now the ant struggled to the top of the sand. Tony looked down. A blob the size of a raisin was heaving on his chest. As the Valkyries rode the heavens, it wrenched itself loose and began streaming across Tony's chest, trailing a long slime of obscene tendrils behind it. It was joined by another blob from the solar plexus. For an instant they reared at each other, writhing to the music, and then they flowed together. There was a single blob now, twice as large, and this was joined by a third and a fourth. From under his shoulder Tony felt a fifth struggle.
A strange emotion swept over him: Desolation, such horrible desolation as Tony had never imagined possible—howling outer darkness and loneliness and despair. It was so unnecessary, this pain. Beyond the loneliness was a togetherness where all was warmth and mingling. Tony struggled against the straps. Tears streamed down his face.
"Courage. It will soon be over.” The doctor sat by his side and watched the hosting of the moles.
Now ten, now twelve moles melted into one. The thirteenth, which had traveled all the way from Tony's ankle, arrived and melted gladly into the mass. A respectable-sized slug reared itself on his chest. It drew itself into a finger and swayed back and forth.
Dr. Molnar reached down with a long pair of forceps and lifted the slug from its base. At once, it swarmed up the metal. “Naughty, naughty,” he admonished. He laid the forceps across the aquarium.
The surface of the water heaved into a glistening hump and drew the small slug into its embrace. Then it sank back and flattened into a shadow. But in that instant Tony had seen that it was huge. It was hard to say how huge because the creature flickered restlessly from one end of the aquarium to the other. And as it moved, it thrummed the sides of the glass in a hypnotic tattoo. It made a deep sound like the thump of engines in the bowels of a ship. Tony felt himself drawn to the rhythm in a curious way. He looked down and saw his arms had turned white from his efforts to get free.
Dr. Molnar turned off the tape recorder. In the sudden silence the thrumming boomed at its true level. It seemed to move through the earth and vibrate in Tony's chest and shake apart the glue that held his cells together. It was atrocious and yet ... somehow...
Fun.
The thrumming died away. There was only the restless flickering of the shadow as it prowled the tank. Dr. Molnar removed a pair of earplugs and laid them on a table.
A door opened. Tony saw several shapes moving around in the next room. One of the shapes approached him: A small, hunched man in a lab coat. It was difficult to tell what nationality the person was because his features were oddly blurred and his skin was a strange color. If Tony had to put a name to it, he would have called it smoky topaz.
The man spoke to Dr. Molnar, except that it wasn't exactly speech. It was more like the ragged chirp of crickets in a meadow on a summer night. Dr. Molnar nodded and the man wheeled the tank from the study. The door closed.
"Not a nice experience, eh?” the doctor said, undoing the straps and buckles that held Tony to the armchair.
"Not nice,” Tony agreed. He stood up and vomited on the carpet.
* * * *
Tony only returned to Dr. Molnar's office once, or rather he returned to the area. It looked different with the fall leaves turning red and gold. He walked up and down, searching for a small, bronze plaque in the ivy, but he couldn't find it.
Perhaps it was because he wasn't needy enough, or perhaps he had become one of the wrong sort. He was still in possession of eight speckled blacks. That didn't seem to qualify him for treatment.
Tony knocked on a few doors. People looked at him curiously and turned away when he asked for a mole doctor. And yet he was certain that somewhere, either on this block or the next, hidden behind a wall, the shepherd was still gathering his flock: Here, Blue! Come here, Blue! Good boy!
When enough of the Many came together, they became the One. He might have passed such a being on the train, holding onto a strap with a damp hand. Or shuffling along a sidewalk after dark, hunting for new territory with abundant food. When it found such a haven—a maternity ward? A playground?—did the One become the Many again?
Tony no longer drove everyone crazy with disinfectants and sunscreen. He took Laura to Hawaii and their lovemaking was spectacular. He was promoted at work. He was voted most popular employee by his peers. He was happier than he could ever remember being.
And if he had to leave the theater halfway through Walk the Line, no one commented on it. Or if he started scratching wildly during American Idol or locked himself in the bathroom and screamed when someone put on a Patsy Cline record—why, everyone is entitled to a few odd moments. By all reports, the rest of his behavior was without blemish.
[Back to Table of Contents]
A Wizard of the Old School by Chris Willrich
Last time we saw Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone, it was in “Penultima Thule” (Aug. 2006) as we read of their efforts to dispose of the cursed book, Mashed Rags Bound in Dead Cow.
After that story—in which the wizard Krumwheezle plays a small but important role—Mr. Willrich started thinking more about the old mage. And he found the wizard's story was worth telling. We think you'll enjoy reading it. (By the way, as an experiment, we're reprinting one of the Gaunt and Bone stories on our Website this month. If you like it, tell your friends.)
In a time when Fable passed its torch to History, when the old gods slept under hillsides or gravestones, and banking more than blades sealed countries’ fates, two well-mannered rogues called upon a wizard of the Old School.
This wizard had known ne'er-do-wells of many kinds: Spiral Sea corsairs, lastborn Swanisle nobles, pugilists from Amberhorn's alleys. He nodded at their wants—eversharp cutlasses, say, or toxic caviar, or fingerbones of adamantine—and gave them what they needed: a book on meditation, or a trade map to the Spicelands, or a letter of introduction to a Blacksmiths’ Guild.
For his forbearance folk ceased calling him Krumwheezle of the Old School, and named him the petty-mage of Scuttlesand, after the dilapidated fishing village he'd guarded these sixty years. They said his power had dried like his wrinkled hide, frozen like his joints, and few rogues, adventurers, or kings called at his door. Mostly he served his villagers with a cup of tea and a respectful ear, or sometimes a small adjustment in the weather, or a cunningly contrived wooden toy.
; Krumwheezle was not without pride, however. Sometimes he straightened himself before his magic mirror (without waking the poor cracked thing) and wondered where the lean wisp of an apprentice had gone, that rangy pale customer crowned with wild dark hair, graced with quick frosty eyes. Who was this pudgy master with the scraggly salt beard, the leathery face, the permanent stoop? He'd never been handsome, really, but always he'd envisioned his grayer self framed by a court wizard's finery, marked by a gaze weighty with the dooms of empires. Instead he bore a fisherman's sweater and laugh-lines from generations of children's birthday parties. At times he missed the old visitors from the mighty cities and storied lands. And to anyone who still listened, he styled himself Krumwheezle of the Old School.
That was how he introduced himself to the wayfarers with the intriguingly sinister names Gaunt and Bone.
* * * *
They made a striking couple—for couple they surely were, though they made no mention of it, nor showed affection at first.
Persimmon Gaunt was not quite so grim as her surname implied; her frame was sturdy and a faint smile warmed a pale face beneath auburn hair. Imago Bone was better dubbed, a tall, wiry sort with hard eyes and fidgety, slender hands. They did not seem so disreputable as their introduction claimed—We are thieves, honored wizard, but mean no harm to you or your furnishings—though Krumwheezle noted that Gaunt was tattooed with a rose-and-spiderweb motif, and that Bone bore a pair of facial scars, one from blade, one from flame.
They walked politely enough behind Krumwheezle to the solarium, and were discreet in sizing up the Empress Nayne-era suits of armor, the Palmarian astrolabe-chandelier, and the Mirabad red carpet with the one less-than-obvious flaw. The wizard could warm to thieves who used the door knocker and wiped their feet before entering. But there was something about the pair that aroused his unease. He hoped he could place it.
They reached the solarium, and the gasps behind him were satisfying.
Krumwheezle affected no outward displays of power save one. His tower was an ordinary, moss-covered, three-story affair jutting from a lip of rock overhanging the foam of the Spiral Sea, and it boasted no golem doormen, no demonlocks, no omnidirectional lightning rods.
Its only magical conceit was that it extended downward from the bluff rather than upward, so that on stormy days the wavetops kissed its upper turrets, and saltwater speckled the glass dome of the solarium. Gaunt and Bone had entered through a tunnel in the coastal rock, one cunningly designed to loop about and ease visitors through the gravity reversal. The wizard smiled at the impact of the view. He'd built the sanctum in imitation of the Topless Tower of the Archmage, which hung in the great cavern of Ebontide. It had been too long since he'd had new visitors.
Krumwheezle served his guests Mirabad tea as the waves boomed and hissed overhead. While the three made halting chitchat, inverted seagulls bobbed against the blue like little clouds drifting before a stormbank.
"It is something of a disposal problem,” Persimmon Gaunt said at last. She focused on the waves overhead, as if uncomfortable with soft chairs and porcelain cups, but ever ready to appreciate wonders.
"Ah, hm,” Krumwheezle said, warming to Gaunt, but fearing what was coming. “Perhaps I am, well, guilty of false advertising. Though I style myself a wizard of the Old School, I am estranged from my colleagues and their noxious ways. To be blunt, I do not assassinate."
"We know,” Imago Bone said. “It is not a person. It would be easier if it were.” By contrast with Gaunt, he lounged easily in his chair, having without visible result added five cups of tea and eight sweetcakes to his lanky frame. But he avoided looking up, as if magic disagreed with him. “It is an item of enchantment."
Gaunt reached into the pack beside her, producing a tome. It was old, drab, and undecorated, yet when she placed it among the teacups, Krumwheezle's neck tingled as if she'd unhooded a cobra.
Bone said, “We acquired it in a caper rife with supernatural acrimony. We wish to be rid of it."
"In so many words,” Gaunt said, tapping a fingernail on the cover, “the book imposes fatal ill-fortune on anyone who reads it. So please don't. Simply tell us how we might destroy it, and name your fee."
Krumwheezle pulled out a rune-covered silver monocle upon a white gold chain.
He'd torn the crystal from the ocular socket of a cockatrice that had lost a staring contest with a Gorgon. He'd drenched it in the eye of a roc. Last, he'd ground it with stones from the darksome plains of the Man in the Moon's stare.
A wizard peering through such a monocle could of course be just as deluded as one using ordinary vision. But there was far more information to be deluded by.
Krumwheezle could not help noticing, for example, that the man Bone had an ashen aura implying extreme age, despite his twentyish appearance. Flecks of bright passion stirred within the ash, like embers in a rekindled fire.
But Gaunt's aura was something else again. It crackled with youth, as Krumwheezle would expect. But it too had its ashen quality, as if Gaunt's spirit pined for the grave. Oddly, in her there seemed nothing unhealthy about this morbid streak, which merely enriched the generous glow of her being. Indeed, seen within her aura, Gaunt struck him with her profound beauty.
Where her aura neared the book, however, it dimmed. The book itself was shadowed, as though despite the ripples of sunlight that threaded the chamber, it were nighttime on that corner of Krumwheezle's table. “Nasty aura you've got there,” he remarked, running his hand over the thing.
"Pray don't open it,” Gaunt said quickly, before lifting her own hand.
Their fingers’ proximity and Gaunt's concern gave Krumwheezle a guilty, giddy tingle. But he focused on the sensations rising from the book. It was as though hordes of invisibly tiny insects were gnawing new hives into his fingertips. He recalled a similar feeling once when he'd touched a flask full of noisome vitriol concocted by Sarcopia Vorre herself, long before she became Archmage. The memory had other associations, almost as dark. He frowned, looked the rogues over again. Yes, now that he was watching for it, he saw traces of the book's aura spattered across Gaunt's and Bone's, like inkdrops in a kettle of tea. He put the monocle away. “A viral enchantment,” he muttered.
Then he leaned back in his wicker chair beneath the stuffed remains of his familiars, Graymilk, Croaksong, Squeakfellow, and Coalwing. He missed them; it had been long since any new ones had inquired at his door.
"It is a cacography, this book,” Krumwheezle said at last, unease and memory making him speak abruptly. “Forgive me—a term of Art."
Gaunt was staring up through the solarium glass, as though avoiding sight of the book. “Cacography. I assume you don't simply mean ‘badly written?’”
"That is the mundane meaning. But mundane ‘bad writing’ merely annoys. Magical cacographies corrupt and kill. They are full of tantalizing lore. Yet their ink is rife with contagion.” He thought of the books he'd studied under close supervision at the Old School, the Visible Sorcerer, made from an illusionist's flesh ... or the Codex Marginalis, deranged notes scrawled by a necromancer across thirteen books of wholesome instruction ... or the Dictionary of Missing Magi, which somehow contained dread biographies of wizards who vanished while reading that selfsame work. “And,” he continued, “I have never seen one that dripped so with malice. Indeed, I suspect the creator exceeded expectations. Most authors of cacographies hope their work will be copied, to plague the world. But no one could survive the ordeal of transcribing this tome. How ever did you come by it?"
"The price of escaping a more immediate problem,” Gaunt said, and did not elaborate. “You say it's growing in strength."
"Over time the viral enchantment has evolved. It is learning how to damage its victims without killing them. You two, for instance."
Imago Bone stirred at that. “Us?” he said.
"Your auras are tainted by the thing. You probably have been having your own sorts of ill luck.” He questioned them as to strange coincidences, the unexpect
ed arrival of old enemies, the targeting of their inns by exotic horrors. He saw the look of recognition in their eyes. Then, not so gingerly, he asked about pregnancy.
Gaunt was annoyed, which pained Krumwheezle. But Bone answered frankly; Krumwheezle gave him that much. “No,” the thief said. “For many years my associates were angels of death. Long before I met Gaunt, it seemed such company had made me infertile."
"Ah, that may be. But I suspect the book's proximity would prevent children in any case. It's begun to draw its noose around you."
"So it's trying to kill us?” Gaunt said. “Even though we've not read a word?"
Bone slapped his knee, startling Krumwheezle. The wizard lost track of what the thief was saying, preoccupied with the implications of the book. Oddly, his mind wandered back to his last night at the Old School, standing above poor trussed Gibberly with the sacrificial knife in hand ... and all at once teetering, not so much with the evil of what he'd intended, but the sheer pathetic waste.
"That's what comes of charity!” the thief was saying.
Krumwheezle was vexed at his own lapse in focus, but annoyed with the thief's babbling as well. “It is worse than that, Imago Bone,” Krumwheezle said, wanting to shock him into silence. “This book may kill us all."
That stole their attention. He explained how the contagion of ill luck could spread far and wide, slowly destroying more and more of the world. And how this exposed the fragility in creation's fabric.
"The more lives snuffed by the book, the more meaning dims. Indeed, our world—a flat Earth where the nearer stars are luminescent dragon eggs, the farther ones divine campfires—cannot exist without meaning and beauty.” He recalled discarding both dagger and career and stalking out of the Old School ... and how in his misery he still apprehended the thousands of brilliant pinpoints piercing the desert night. “Like as not we'll vanish like a punctured soap bubble."
FSF Magazine, August 2007 Page 13
