The Book of Magic

by George R. R. Martin

  The Captain of the Alacráns is summoned to the Pontifexa’s Closet and told in no uncertain terms to Catch Jack. This, with a grim smile of at last she sets out to do.

  Back to our hero, little snuggies, who, of course, is aware of none of this commotion and clamor. After the aforementioned biting corgi, he gives up on stealing Love, and tries to salve his heart (and corrugated flesh) by throwing a smash to which every prime cove in town is invited. At this smash, Jack wears Luscious Fyrdraaca’s dragon dressing gown. He swills iced coffee from Georgiana Sidonia Haðraaða’s pearl-studded coffee skullcap cup. He combs the Norge Azul with Luscious Fyrdraaca’s platinum diamond-encrusted mustachio comb, his feet propped up on Luscious’s writing desk. All around him, the other coves carouse, stamping out a furious tarantella to the rollicking tune of the hurdy-gurdy band. He sees couples canoodling, colluding, mashing, dancing, laughing, and he, the greatest of them all, alone and hollow. His jackdaw sits at his shoulder and caws derisively; she doesn’t believe in love.

  Jack raises his jorum in a toast. He won’t believe in love either. Who needs love when you have stuff? He bounces off his throne and joins the frantic dance, dancing frantically. But the next morn, head splitting and heels aching, he sits drinking iced coffee, and reads the editorials calling for his head and other parts. Bored, he pages through the sheaves of broadsides celebrating and castigating (depending on who paid for the publishing) his deeds. He chews his cheefle and chuckles. Maybe it’s not so much he’s single as singular. Is this a bad thing to be?

  Then he flips over The Alta Califa and sees these boldface words: ADVICE TO THE LOVELORN BY THE HOLY WHORE OF HEAVEN…

  Why had he not considered this remedy before? An idiot he is, and thoughtless, and caught up in his own head, too silly to see the obvious way out. The Holy Whore of Heaven will help him find love; is that not her calling? Advice to the lovelorn indeed! He is definitely lovelorn and in need of advice. But he can’t wait for a letter to be composed, posted, vetted, perused, considered, replied, printed, purchased, and read. He is too frantic for that.

  So Jack jumps from his chair, replaces the dressing gown with Bibi de Quintero-Roja’s quetzal tailcoat; swirls his pearly locks with Madam Twanky’s bear grease pomade; dangles the Voivode of Shingletown’s pearls around his neck, plants the jackdaw’s perch upon his oil-slick pate, encases himself in the holocaust cape which repels notice as well as fire, and, exiting his lair, leaps up into the still star-kissed dawn, his heart singing with action.

  Houses of the Holy is a delectable confection of architecture, a cream puff of a house, oozing with curlicues and furbelows, as fancy as a swirl of ribbon candy. Jack lands on the sugary-marble steps leading up to a glossy candy-apple red door. Ascending, he yanks a taffy-like bell-pull. The shellac of the door cracks, and a crabby cherub face peers out skeptically, but upon noting the slant of Jack’s chapeau and the desperation in his face, entrance is granted. The Holy Whore’s waiting room is chockablock with the drooping, pining lovelorn all hoping for a personal audience. They glare at Jack and hiss when Archangel Bob appears, folded sangyn swan wings skimming the glittering parquet floor, and beckons Jack follow.

  The Holy Whore of Heaven herself is a bonbon of a girl swathed in a wide ribband of silk that floats around her creamy contours, barely concealing her charms. She receives young Jack—for let us not forget that success has come early to our boy, and he is just a heedless, headstrong boy—in her boudoir, a fantasy of white fur walls, white lacquer furniture flung with white fur, decadent and cozy.

  Jack sits gingerly upon a white tussock, nervous about smudging. The snake-heads on his boots hiss happily as Angel Mox-Mox offers them saucers of beer, while Archangel Bob offers Jack himself a jorum of Hearts Ease. Jack’s tongue is not inclined to be tight, but the sweet golden liquor loosens it, and a passionate litany of dreams and desires pour out of him like wine from a stove-in barrel.

  “Well, now,” the Holy Whore says, languidly, when he finally runs dry. Angel Mox-Mox is fanning her, and the silk swathe is billowing enticingly. “Who would put a curb on a burning boy? Come on, sweetie pie, and we shall fix you.”

  Jack follows her drift into her office where he is measured for height, weight, eyesight, character, bile, dreams. He answers questions, questions answers, provides samples of all possible bodily fluids, of handwriting. The Holy Whore of Heaven peers at his palms, at the soles of his feet, palpitates his scalp, his stomach, his heart, peers into his ears. Listens to his hopes, his dreams, his fears. By the time she is done he has been measured as thoroughly as any person might be measured; there’s no stone in his soul, in his body, left unturned.

  The Holy Whore and Archangel Bob confer softly, and then Jack follows Archangel Bob’s rustling red wings to the library, where Bob gives Archangel Naberius Jack’s fat file. For ten impatient minutes, Naberius squints through his bulbous fish eyes at the file, then swims upward through the lofty dim space, toward some distant part of the rotunda, dwindling in the depths. When he returns, he bears a book as big as he is, a hefty tome with embossed leather boards and gilt-edge pages.

  Looking for love, the book whispers. Looking for love.

  The book thumps down upon a vast library table; glasses are pinched upon Naberius’s bulbous nose, and Jack waits in exquisite agony as the Holy Whore bends her beautiful head over the pages. She whispers; Naberius scribbles. Naberius whispers; she scribbles. Archangel Bob remains impassive.

  Jack chews his finger, and jiggles his knee, he paces, and wrings his hands, he tugs his ear, his hair, he pinches the jackdaw until it flaps up into the dusty motes of drifty air high above, cawing complaints. Jack rocks his heels, the snake-heads spit and hiss, and every sinew of his body, every nerve, every fiber of his being is stretched to the breaking point. He might soon scream. The Holy Whore and her angels take no note of his nervous distress; they continue their calm calculations until at last all three heads, one epicene, one piscine, and one just plain delicious, nod in agreement.

  Three smiles bestow upon Jack, who grins nervously back. His heart will surely soon tear a hole in his weskit.

  “Jack,” says the Holy Whore in her sugary voice. “I have the perfect love for you.”

  “Ayah!” Jack and the snakes wait breathlessly.

  “But…there is a wee bit of a matter. My heart is sore too, snuggie, and do you know for what?”

  What could the Holy Whore of Heaven desire here in her candy castle? Jack furrows his brow in confusion and even the corbie looks perplexed.

  “Dear Crackers, my sweet little blue parrot, so cruelly torn from me—” Fluttering eyelashes do not take the edge off the steel in her sweet voice. Archangel Bob seems to have grown two or three feet taller, and Naberius’s teeth are revealed to be carp-y sharp. Belatedly, Jack remembers the Norge Azul parrot, kipped from the Holy Whore of Heaven’s carriage while she was at the opening night of the Califa National Opera.

  “Oh, dear,” says Jack weakly. The snake-heads try to look small and wormlike. Jack’s unprotected back begins to itch. He dare not turn but he can feel Angel Mox-Mox’s violet-tinged breath ruffling his side curls.

  “Dear, sweet Crackers, what I brought up by hand,” the Holy Whore says sadly. “Light of my life, fire of my heart, my only true love—”

  The jackdaw coughs derisively.

  The Holy Whore of Heaven has terrible taste in parrots. The Norge Azul had kept Jack up all night long with its squawking and squabbled with the jackdaw over a mouse chew-toy. At dawn, he’d opened the window and kicked the parrot out; the last he’d seen of the miserable bird was a flash of blue vanishing into the fog.

  “I cry your pardon,” Jack says, and screws his face into the cute expression that always worked so well upon his mam. The Holy Whore will have none of it. She will have her parrot back or Jack will never find his love. He protests that he knows not of the parrot’s adventures once the bird
struck out on its own—the booting being re-characterized as an escape. But the Holy Whore of Heaven does know where the parrot is, and the parrot’s return is the price of Jack’s true love.

  So where did the parrot end up?

  Jack’s heart sinks when he hears the answer: Bilskinir House, seat of the Pontifexa of Califa.

  Of all the places that Jack has burgled, Bilskinir House is not one. He’s reckless, is our boy, but not careless. Other denizens are easily rooked by his rapid in-and-out routine; they may move fast to block intrusions, but Jack and his boots are faster. By the time they are espied they are gone. And not all houses in Califa have denizens anyway. Some rely on armed retainers, or mercenaries; some on charms and ensorcells, all of which are easy enough for the boots to evade. But Bilskinir House is another flavor of cake completely, far too rich for our boy’s taste. Firstly, there’s the Pontifexa; Jack knows how much cheek he can get away with with her: answer, zero. Georgiana Haðraaða has little sense of humor when it comes to overstepping of boundaries; just ask the poor bounder who trod on her train at the opening of the Califa Opera last week. Or rather, ask his head, currently adorning a post high above the Opera’s proscenium arch. Best seat in the house, if only he could enjoy it.

  (He is, of course, unaware that she’s already put her scorpions on his tail.)

  Then there is Paimon, Bilskinir House’s denizen. Jack has a healthy respect for egregores of the second order and their shiny, sharp lapis-blue tusks. And then there is, well, there is patriotism. Jack’s a Califian through and through. He’s her grace’s loyal subject, he would never dream of stealing from her.

  (But, the dumplings wonder: what about the Pontifexina’s cup? That, little ring-a-dings, was kipped from her favorite coffee house, where it was kept in a locked cabinet only accessible to her favorite barista, who is now out of a job. Jack remains oblivious to its owner.)

  The heights of Bilskinir House have been left hitherto unscaled.

  But in love, all bets are off.

  Now Jack hardly needs the boots to soar; his heart alone is so light that it fair lifts him up into the air, each beat sending him higher and higher. In the shadowy dusk he bounds through the city streets, dodging horsecars, and broughams, mule-carts, and flies, over fountains and hedges. He passes over the city boundary into the Outside lands, his boot-heels hollow on the corduroy roadway. Up and over sand dunes he flies, past scrubby graze, arching over a surprised goatherd; on the horizon the sun is a golden coin sinking into a jade-green sea, the dimming sky shredding with fog.

  Jack sees none of these glories; his head is full of heartfelt visions of romance, of intimate cheese suppers, cozy chess games, of long walks on the beach, and silvery sleigh-rides, of blissful waltzes, and blissful (Jack’s ideas of romance, quite obviously, have been completely informed by the overconsumption of too many romantic broadsides). All he has to do is get in, get the bird, get out, and Live Happily Ever After.

  Another thing Jack does not see is that he is being followed. When he bounced out of Houses of the Holy, another crept behind him, slinking through the door just before it closed, down the sugary steps, close behind. The jackdaw sees this dark shadow, has flown from Jack’s hat to circle around behind their tail, but before it can sail back to Jack and caw a warning, the bird’s wings go limp as newsprint, and it plummets to the sandy ground, where a canvas bag awaits it. Beak sealed with some sigil, the jackdaw is stuffed into the sack, where it lies limp and angry, helpless.

  Our hero doesn’t notice his sidekick’s lack either; now he’s springing along the Pacifica Playa, dodging surfer-shebangs and hobo jungles. The sun dunks below the sea’s edge; a cold wind feathers off the sword-colored water. Bilskinir’s bulk hulks on the watery horizon.

  Meanwhile, not too far behind, a shape slinks behind Jack, four legs, scraggly amber fur, jade-green eyes: a mangy looking coyote, inexplicably carrying a sack in its mouth.

  Jack laughs out loud as he approaches Bilskinir’s swale, realizing that the trickery required to enter the House will be of a trivial nature. A scrum of coaches congregates around the end of the causeway; a symphony of whip-hand shouting and curses, jingling bridles and whickering horses fill the air as the carriages of the à la mode jockey for position. Judging from the lavish personages alighting from these carriages, the Pontifexa is giving a very lavish party.

  Jack watches the tangled embarkation from the heights of a sand dune, giggles to himself: is that Luscious Fyrdraaca in the beaverskin hat? The Duque de Grandsellos in Corinthian velvet petti-pants and lemur fur cape? Cheddar La Roque arm in arm with the Princess Naproxine, both blazing in matching black leather jackets trimmed in crimson feathers? A jingle tingle of excited alarm runs up and down Jack’s spine; if they should realize who he is…such fun!

  The tide is in, causeway flooded; the luminous personages are loading onto swan-shaped barges, which float along the sunken road, limned with flickering water elementals caged in fish-shaped weirs, toward the welcoming gape of Bilskinir’s lower gate. The sheriffs milling around the grand personages, grimly festooned with warpaint and rifles, are just for pure show. Paimon’s influence is extensive and can handle any intruder even at this distance.

  But Jack’s hat is not just for show, though showy indeed it is. The capacious crown holds excellent storage, and within Jack has stowed all sorts of dainty tricks, charms, philters, and other useful objects. Most of his capers require only speed for success; but sometimes more subtlety is called for. Where’s that dratted jackdaw? Flown off after some espied shiny, no doubt; well, Jack is fine on his own. He removes the hat and from the hat removes a thick bar of chocolate. “Madam Twanky’s Glamorous Confection,” proclaims the flowery label. A nibble of this and no one will be the wiser of Jack’s true identity; he’ll be swathed in a glamour impossible for even Paimon’s sharp eyes to penetrate. Too easy? Perhaps, but there is one possibly lethal catch: the glamour wears off quickly, an hour at the most. He will have no time to waste.

  The black bittersweet taste lingering on his tongue, Jack skids down the sand dune, careens through the carriages, splashes through the surf, jumps into a swan just as it pushes off from shore. “Lovely night,” he trills to the startled occupant. “And glorious party, eh what? I adore your pelerine and your chapeau too, dearheart, isn’t this barge just too divine? Our lady has such good taste!”

  Luscious Fyrdraaca, for it is he already swan-seated, is bemused by the chatterer, who is so glorious that he makes Luscious’s eyes water. But exquisite good manners are bred into the Fyrdraaca bone, so he politely agrees, while fishing in his pocket for a spider-silk hankie to blot before his eye maquillage goes raccoon-y.

  Back on the beach, the coyote serpentines through the thickets of carriage wheels, horse legs, dashes behind the Countess of Castoria’s landau. There, unobserved, the animal braces legs, and shakes itself. When the fur stops flying, a woman springs from four legs to two, spins a serape out of thin air. Thus covered, she tucks the sack under her arm, and strides out of her concealment to push to the front of the swan-line, ignoring the bleating protests of the other guests—who, when they see the scars on her face—quickly shut their gobs and let her pass.

  Of course, the guests of the Pontifexa cannot hike all the way up Bilskinir House’s height—their ribbands might go limp, their wigs frizz, their high heels rub, their lace droop! So when the swan scrapes the shore, our new duo is immediately ushered by one of Paimon’s adjuncts into a luxurious miner’s cart, and elevated up the hill by the sweetest, softest blue donkey Jack has ever seen. (He determines to snitch it on the way out.) At the top, they are deposited in front of a wall of towering redwood trees with trunks as big as houses and crowns so tall they create an arboreal sky. Jack and Luscious patter down a soft-mossy pathway, two shadows in a stream of many, chatter hushed by the dreamlike darkness.

  Oh, my duckies, Jack is enchanted. A child of the city, he’s neve
r seen trees so tall, or felt air so moist with green growing. They exit the grove into a lush grassy meadow, high grass speckled with fireflies, and there’s the House itself, a cozy wooden bungalow, shingled sides, eaves capped with fanciful carvings of sea-creates and oceanic motifs. How delightfully cozy Bilskinir House looks in the gloom; windows brilliant with a welcoming glow. A sort of dizzying relief washes over our lad; the sudden wobbly sensation that he has come home. He wishes suddenly that he was there under other circumstances. Not a thief, but a welcome guest.

  A long receiving line caterpillars across the front porch and down the wide friendly front steps. Jack does not wish to be received; he bows to Luscious, presses hand to lips, gums the pearl out of Luscious’s signet ring (reckless but oh, so irresistible) and bounds off. Spotting a duffer in a very wide farthingale, Jack ducks down, slithers under, and thus is able to make it through Bilskinir’s front door, undetected.

  If Jack had ever read respectable newspapers instead of sticking to the lurid yellowpress (more likely to award him favorable coverage) he might have known the occasion of the party. It is the Pontifexina’s coming-of-age birthday party.

  And such a party! The fancy is so thick that Jack is almost overcome by the vapors. Never before has he seen so much richness so thick and ripe for the taking. For a moment, Jack’s romantic resolve blurs. Flooded by the shiny people, and shiny sackcoats, shiny wigs, and shiny lip rouge, shiny shoes, and shiny stockings, shiny eyes, and shiny shiny jewels, he falters; his knees wobble, his elbows waggle. Moments like these the jackdaw usually brings him back into focus, but the crow is still missing, so he bites his own finger, hard and to the bone. This bright spurt of blood mingles with the echo of the bittersweet chocolate in his mouth, and he recalls what he has come to do and how little time he has to do it.