The Un-Magician

by Christopher Golden

  The storm had subsided, but the night air was still cool and ripe with moisture.

  “We have to find Edgar,” Timothy yelled over the sound of the gyro’s motor as he worked the craft’s control stick. The flying machine banked to the left, arcing back toward the hovering estate.

  “There!” Ivar cried out, and it took a moment for him to spy what the expert hunter’s eyes had seen almost immediately.

  Edgar, blacker than the diminishing darkness, flapped his wings furiously, hovering at a ledge not far from the window they had just left. As Timothy moved the craft in for a closer look, he saw the hairless Alastor balanced on his two back legs on the outcropping of stone, his front paws swatting at the bird. The rook beat his wings crazily at the feline familiar. The cat hissed fiercely, lashing out with its hooked claws as Edgar dipped, wove, and fluttered in the air, narrowly avoiding the cat’s strikes. But Alastor proved cunning. He feigned a strike to the left, then spun around to lash out to the right with his other paw. The claws ripped across Edgar’s wing, sending feathers fluttering in the early morning breeze.

  The rook screeched, then retreated, flying back from the ledge to collect himself. The cat saw its opportunity, slinking along the stone sill, on its way to the next open window and back into SkyHaven.

  “Edgar!” Timothy cried out.

  The familiar flapped in the air, glancing over his shoulder briefly. Their gazes connected, and Timothy was certain that the rook was well aware of the importance of stopping Alastor from getting back inside. Edgar spread his wings, and angling his body toward the estate, dove at the hairless cat, his earsplitting battle cry filling the air.

  Timothy held his breath as the two familiars raked at each other with claw and talon, unable to tell where the cat ended and the rook began. The furiously fighting animals seemed to be suspended in the air, their cries and hisses a cacophony of battle—and then they began to fall.

  Purely on instinct, Timothy dipped the gyrocraft toward the plummeting figures still locked in combat. “Hold on, Ivar,” he warned.

  Suddenly Edgar unfurled his impressive wingspan to slow his descent and reached out with his talons to grip the loose, pale flesh around the neck of Nicodemus’s familiar. Edgar flapped furiously to keep aloft with the struggling feline. He flew out over the cold ocean, opened his claws, and dropped the flailing cat into the water below.

  Timothy watched as Alastor was swallowed up by the churning sea, but felt a spark of relief when the cat’s head broke the surface, and it began to paddle toward the distant shore. That should give us plenty of time, he thought.

  Edgar landed on the smooth surface of the gyro’s nose and began examining the missing patch of feathers on his wing. Just as the sun broke over the horizon, spraying spears of gold across the surface of the ocean, the rook looked up at Timothy with his dark eyes.

  “I suggest you hurry.”

  Chapter Nine

  Leander Maddox shifted in his favorite chair, and with a sigh, prepared to view the next student presentation. The crystal eye of Xanthari hovered in the midst of his study and now it blinked once, clearing away the images it had just shown and preparing to display the next.

  “All right, Desmond,” the professor said wearily. “Show me what you’ve learned this semester.”

  The image of a rotund youth, his golden robes pulled tight against a pronounced middle, shimmered to life before him. The young man was about to perform a spell of transmutation—transforming a block of stone into wood. Leander doubted he would succeed, having taught at least three others of the boy’s family. He would have wagered that this difficult enchantment was far beyond the young man’s magical abilities.

  Leander reached for his goblet, eyes carefully studying the way Desmond’s hands moved when calling forth the mystical energies. Distracted by a sudden noise from outside, Leander pulled his hand away from the wine goblet and sat up straighter. He listened, but heard nothing over Desmond’s droning voice. The mage moved a forefinger about in the air and the crystal eye immediately shut down, plunging the room into silence.

  Leander had been jumpy of late. With mages mysteriously disappearing in Arcanum and in other cities as well, one couldn’t afford not to be overly cautious. Extensive investigations yielded no explanation as to why these mages were being taken, and the level of concern in the Parliament continued to rise.

  He heard the sound again. A spell of defense on the tip of his tongue, he left the study and moved down the darkened corridor toward the back of his modest home. His housekeeper, Miss Fogg, had left hours ago after serving dinner, so he knew he should be alone. But there were faint noises coming from the back of the house—from his solarium. The magician’s blood began to boil with anger. Somehow, someone had managed to bypass the wards of security that he himself had conjured. Clearly, whoever the intruder was had no idea who lived within. This evening prowler was in for a rude awakening.

  Leander softly began the first syllables of a defensive spell that made the tips of his fingers tingle and carefully approached the door to his sunroom. He could hear voices within: two, maybe three intruders. This spell was one that he hadn’t used in years. Leander was not a violent man, but when push came to shove he could conjure spells that would make the most battle-hardened combat magician stare in awe. He uttered the last of the incantation, the explosive power of magical force collected at the ends of his fingers, just waiting to be released.

  The intruders were moving closer to the open doorway where he waited. How dare they break into my house and skulk about, he thought, enraged. Leander snapped his arms forward, his fingers extended, and let the supernatural energies flow.

  “Did you think you would catch me unaware?” he bellowed, the magic cascading from his hands to engulf the first of the intruders. The room was bathed in an eerie supernatural light, and Leander finally saw the invaders clearly.

  Timothy Cade’s eyes widened in shock as the raging magical energies struck him square in the chest, with no effect at all.

  Leander drew back in surprise. “Timothy,” he said, dropping his smoldering hands to his sides. “Whatever are you doing here?”

  With nary a whisper, Ivar emerged from the shadows with Edgar perched on his bare shoulder. Leander scanned the remainder of the sunroom for Sheridan, but the mechanical man was not to be found.

  Then Timothy began to speak. It was as though Leander’s question had opened a floodgate and words began to flow from the boy’s mouth in jumbled torrents. What he could discern from the young man’s fevered ramblings filled the mage with dread.

  “Calm yourself, Timothy. Obviously there’s trouble afoot, but panic will not cure it. Let’s go to my study and settle down, and you can explain yourself at a more understandable pace.”

  Leander showed them to the study, urging them all to be seated as he himself sat down in his favorite, high-backed, leather chair. The Asura squatted on the floor, tensed as if waiting for something to happen. Edgar was strangely silent as he fluttered his wings and perched atop a marble bust of Lexius II, one of the most famous of Arcanum’s mayors. Timothy was the only one who took a chair, but he set himself on its edge as though he was about to jump out of his skin.

  “Now, Tim,” the professor said in his most calm voice. “Slowly. You went on your first mission for the order, spying for Nicodemus. What went wrong?”

  “I … I think that Nicodemus … he might be doing something bad.”

  The mage chuckled, attempting to put the boy’s fears at ease. “Now why would you think that?” he asked. “What did you hear that would make you believe that Lord Nicodemus could ever—”

  “Mistress Belladonna and Lord Romulus believe that he can’t be trusted—that he’s going to use me as some kind of weapon against the guilds.”

  Leander frowned. Suspicions played at the edges of his mind and he was short of breath, as though a gigantic hand was squeezing his chest as the words spilled from the boy’s mouth.

  “Well, of course
they would think that. Neither of them are beyond suspicion either. And, after all, in a way the Grandmaster is using you as a weapon, isn’t he?”

  The boy shook his head. “That’s not the way they meant it, I’m sure of it. And there’s more. They suspect he has something to do with the mages who are disappearing, the ones you’re investigating.”

  Timothy’s accusations were unbelievable, treasonous, the thought of them carrying any truth a nightmare. “You do realize, Tim, that the guilds are often at odds with one another and—”

  “You didn’t see the look on the oracle’s face,” Timothy said, his voice a whisper filled with genuine fear.

  “The oracle?” Leander asked.

  “The Oracle of Vijaya,” he explained. “I think it was having a vision, and it had something to do with Nicodemus.”

  Leander’s mind was racing again. “You saw the Oracle of Vijaya?” he asked the boy, moving to the edge of his chair.

  Again Timothy nodded. “Nicodemus said that the Strychnine had stolen it, and that I was to take it back for the Alhazred.”

  Amazing, Leander thought. The Oracle of Vijaya had been lost to the Alhazred order for twelve years. Before it had gone missing, it had been one of the most important magical items in their arsenal. Its visions were often deadly accurate. “What did the oracle say, Tim?” he asked, hoping there was a logical explanation for the boy’s fears.

  “It asked him, ‘What have you done?’ and you should have seen the look on its face, Leander,” Timothy said, his face twisted with the recollection. “Whatever the oracle was seeing, whatever it thinks Nicodemus did or will do—it must be really horrible.” The oracle’s question reverberated through the mage’s troubled thoughts, becoming his own. “What have you done, Nicodemus?” he muttered.

  Sunlight washed over Leander’s face as he sat in the back of his sky carriage being carried across the city of Arcanum. It was a beautiful day, the sky crystal clear. He should have been light of heart. Instead Leander’s mind was in turmoil.

  For years the accusations had been whispered among the Order of Alhazred and even among the Parliament of Mages. There had been many petty complaints about the Grandmaster, suggestions that Nicodemus had used unsavory practices to manipulate some of the lesser guilds into voting with the Alhazred on Parliamentary matters. Leander had heard them and dismissed them as exaggerations of the truth, but now he was being forced to rethink his view.

  The beauty of the new day, the morning sky above Arcanum, was lost upon him. Leander was far too preoccupied with the concerns Timothy Cade had expressed to him that early morning.

  Timothy had been genuinely distraught, and Leander had done everything in his power to calm the boy, to get him to remember everything exactly as he had experienced it. He wanted all the facts to be accurate, for the implication of those facts was unthinkable.

  Leander gazed out the window, for the first time this morning actually taking note of his surroundings. They were over the ocean now; it wouldn’t be long before he reached SkyHaven, and hopefully some answers to his questions.

  The boy and his companions had wanted to accompany him back to the floating fortress estate, to return for their mechanical friend, but Leander didn’t think it wise. If Nicodemus was secretly acting out against certain guilds in Parliament and he learned that Timothy had been responsible for exposing him, there was no telling how the Grandmaster would react. No, Timothy and the others would be better off elsewhere. Leander had insisted that they be brought to the Cade mansion as a precaution. He hoped that the magical wards of protection at Argus’s estate would be enough to protect the boy and his friends from harm.

  “We’re approaching SkyHaven, Master Maddox,” his driver communicated from his perch atop the carriage.

  “Fly around back, please, Caiaphas,” he told the navigation mage. “I’ll use the staff entrance. I’d rather not have it known that I’ve come to pay a visit.”

  “Very good, sir,” the driver replied, and Leander felt the craft tilt to the right as it traveled around the always impressive expanse of SkyHaven.

  The carriage gracefully dropped toward the garden at the rear of the estate. A fine, early morning haze rose up from the rich, green land around the fortress, dispersing as the skills of the navigation mage brought the craft in for a gentle landing before the back entrance. It was still quite early in the morning, and the grounds were abandoned. Leander opened the carriage door on his own and climbed out.

  “Should I wait, sir?” Caiaphas asked, the hands usually sparking with the energies of supernatural transport now resting in his lap.

  Leander gazed at the back of the estate, at a large wooden servants’ entrance that would take him inside.

  “No, that will be all for now, my friend,” he said, a creeping unease growing in the pit of his stomach. For a moment, he thought he might be sick. Leander had not the slightest idea of what he would find inside the fortress, or what he might learn upon confronting the Grandmaster, but there was no other way. For the continued safety of all the guilds, he could not allow this to go unexamined.

  “Master Maddox?” the driver ventured from his seat. “Are you well?”

  With a deep breath, Leander nodded. “I’m fine, old friend. Too much on the mind.” He tapped the side of his head with a finger. “Off with you then. I’ll send a summons if I should need you to return for me.”

  Caiaphas bowed his head, extended his arms, and lifted the craft up into the air and away. Leander watched his carriage depart. He adjusted his robes as he prepared himself, standing before the door. He waved his hand before the door’s eye-shaped locking mechanism. The magic within the lock recognized the man for who he was, a frequent visitor to SkyHaven and a dignitary, a high-ranking member of the order. The door opened to admit him.

  Silently he padded down the hall, cautious as he passed the doorway leading into the kitchen, not wishing to be seen. He could hear the sounds of the kitchen staff as they bustled about, preparing breakfast for their master.

  Nicodemus had often spoken about his morning ritual of rising before the sun to review the matters of the day before he would settle down for breakfast. The Grandmaster held the belief that only after he had contemplated what was expected of him that day could he truly enjoy his morning repast. Leander intended to give him plenty to fill his mind with this morning. Stealthily he proceeded to the Grandmaster’s office study.

  As he moved into the main body of the house, he wove a glamour of concealment about himself. It would be best to confront Nicodemus without giving him an opportunity to prepare for the questions Leander wished to ask him.

  The staff was already hustling about SkyHaven, beginning their daily duties for the order. Leander sidestepped secretaries, secretaries’ assistants, assistants to the assistants, maids, and maintenance workers on his way to Nicodemus’s study. SkyHaven was coming alive, and he needed to quicken his pace if he was to catch the Grandmaster in his office before breakfast was served. Winding staircases and seemingly endless hallways were the course to his destination, but eventually the mage reached the place he sought.

  Standing before the door to the Grandmaster’s chamber, he composed himself, dismissed the glamour of concealment, and brought his hand up to knock. The door to the study clicked open before his knuckles could land upon the wooden frame, and Nicodemus’s voice drifted out for him to hear. The Grandmaster was in the midst of conversation.

  Leander stepped into the office. Nicodemus had his back to Leander. The Grandmaster was dressed in splendid robes of emerald green, facing a magical window that hung shimmering and pulsating in the air.

  “In fact he’s just arrived,” he heard Nicodemus say to the one he conversed with on the other side of the mystical portal. The Grandmaster turned his head slightly and gestured to Leander that he would only be a moment longer.

  A chill ran through Leander. Somehow Nicodemus had learned that he was coming. He squinted, attempting to discern the identity of the person on
the opposite side of the communication, but to no avail. Magical windows could be used for spying, or for mages to converse over vast distances. They were meant to allow the speakers to see one another, but the image of whomever Nicodemus was conversing with was blurred and dark.

  “Have no fear,” the Grandmaster assured the mysterious figure beyond the portal. “The minor annoyances will be dealt with, I assure you.” Nicodemus bowed.

  “Be sure that they are,” said the cold, cruel voice from the other side.

  Leander felt the hair at the back of his neck stand on end as he watched the window collapse in upon itself with a sound very similar to that of breaking glass, leaving behind only a pinprick of light. And then that, too, was gone.

  The Grandmaster turned, a warm, welcoming smile upon his face. “Enter, Professor Maddox. Please.”

  “I find it hard to believe that you’ve been expecting me,” Leander said, voice firm, posture straight; he would not be intimidated. If the Grandmaster of the Order of Alhazred was involved in dark deeds, he would be held accountable.

  “When I learned that the boy and his friends were missing, I assumed that they had gone to you,” Nicodemus said with a hint of a smile. “It seemed only logical that I would find you upon my doorstep this morning.”

  A pale shape leaped up onto the Grandmaster’s desk, startling Leander. It was Alastor. The animal did not look at all well. Its skin was a sickly gray and tracks of a dark fluid leaked from the corners of its eyes.

  “Is there something wrong, Leander?” Nicodemus asked. “Did I do or say something to cause the boy to flee my hospitality and nearly drown poor Alastor?” He took the cat from the desk and held the hairless animal lovingly in his arms.

  There was a tension in the room that he’d never felt in the presence of the Grandmaster before, as if a storm was about to break.

  “Timothy told me of his mission last night. And he told me of a conversation he overheard between the leaders of the Strychnos and Nocturne guilds.”