The Book of Magic

by George R. R. Martin

  Walkfar rummaged in his satchel, took out a curled brown shred of something, and set it on the ground.

  “Good bird meat.” The kobold continued backing away. “Wind-dry bird meat. Maybe Voice hungry. Walkfar hope Voice like bird meat. Hope good hopes for Voice. Bye.”

  Housemind stared at the sliver of meat on the dusty stone, felt the image blurring in a way that had nothing to do with the entropic decay of its sensory circuits.

  How and when had it ever learned to do that?

  “Walkfar,” it said, “come back.”

  “Voice?”

  “Please come back.”

  The kobold did, hesitantly.

  “Voice is…sorry, Walkfar. Walkfar has been kind to Voice.”

  Five hundred years. Five hundred years since dead Malkuril had built the thing that had become Housemind. Had it really never apologized before, sincerely? Had no one ever offered it a gift before, sincerely?

  “What would you like to hear from me, Walkfar?”

  “Life hard,” said the kobold. “Life hard, Voice. Hard for all clans! All kobold know, Old Master made kobold be tough, but life so hard. Exodus. Betrayer cast kobolds out of Old Master house—”

  “Betrayer,” Housemind whispered, “but—”

  It promptly reconsidered whatever it had been about to say.

  “Yes, Betrayer,” chirped the kobold. “Betrayer, Exodus, then Sky Doom! Bad times. Curse Place come from Sky Doom. Kobolds fight war since Sky Doom, all clans, no peace, and monsters eat kobold clans. Land full of monsters.”

  “What do you think Voice can do about this, Walkfar?”

  “Walkfar not know what Voice can do. Walkfar…hoped find Old Master. Old Master know good plans. Old Master make peace, teach fight monsters. Old Master love kobolds.”

  “Voice of Curse Place is not Old Master, Walkfar.”

  “Yes, Walkfar know—”

  “BUT,” said Housemind, “Voice knows Old Master. Voice was…is…a friend of Old Master.”

  The kobold gasped, and the hope in its beady eyes made them light up as though the creature had lodged a lantern in its throat.

  “Kobolds need help,” said Walkfar.

  “Old Master loves his kobolds,” said Housemind. “And would not want them to fight one another, or be eaten by monsters. Voice will tell you a story, Walkfar. An important story. Will you promise to remember it, all of it, and take it to your mother and your clan?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “There was a kobold…who was Old Master’s favorite servant. Old Master loved this kobold, and called him the luckiest, the most honored. This servant was Fetchwell, and he loved Old Master. This is how Fetchwell served him…”

  DAY 86,311

  The kobold warriors faced one another across the sacred bargaining space. Their spears were on the ground, their bird-leather armor unlaced.

  “Clan Book-Learned does not trust Clan Goodvintage,” said the kobold on the right. “Clan Goodvintage bad liars, make fight, cause trouble.”

  “Clan Book-Learned is liars!” hissed her opposite number. “All Clan know Book-Learned arrogant, back since Old Master times! Not worth bargain!”

  “Please,” cried Brother Walkfar. “Remember where kobolds are! Remember hard work to get here! Giving on all sides! Walkfar bring you here, Strayscale Clan pledge safe space, drink tea for promise!”

  The Strayscales had indeed put their reputation and their blood on the line in offering as a neutral party to guard the negotiation space. Walkfar and his brothers and sisters had done the rest of the hard work, wearing their new red robes, the ones embroidered with the sacred teacup of Old Master.

  The flag that flew over the two paramount chieftains of the kobold factions was the red flag of the Order of the Tea Servants. Walkfar had founded the order upon his return from Curse Place, with his marvelous tales of Old Master’s love for kobolds, and how kobolds guarded his holy tea and flowers before the Betrayer and the Exodus.

  “All kobolds be eaten by monsters if they not make peace,” continued Walkfar. “Life hard! All kobold spears must point out, not in! Old Master say kobolds stronger than any monster if work together. Must start here! Must start now!”

  The two warriors glowered at each other.

  “Clan Book-Learned sorry if arrogant,” mumbled the warrior on the right. “Tea Servants right. Clan Book-Learned want point all spears out at monsters.”

  “Clan Goodvintage surprised to get apology,” said the warrior on the left. He wobbled on his feet, as though in shock. “Very nice. Clan Goodvintage rather make friends with Book-Learned than with monsters, yes.”

  The leaders of Clan Reference Index, Clan Broachcask, Clan Red Blend, and Clan Frontispiece all shouted their agreement.

  “First Edition, Very Fine,” recited the descendants of the Wisdom Skins. “All hail the Great Index!”

  “Floral, Astringent, Let it Breathe!” responded the great-great-great grandchildren of the Corkers. “Praise Noble Rot! Praise Dark Dram!”

  Walkfar clapped and beckoned for his brothers and sisters to bring the trays forward quickly. This was sufficient; it wouldn’t do to get everyone shouting, maybe have doctrinal argument before completing the ceremony. No.

  The greatest kobold warriors of the age took their teacups in hand, and from their trays the Tea Servants poured for all. The toasts were quiet at first, then they grew louder and friendlier.

  As the green mushroom biscuits were going around, the leader of Clan Book-Learned suddenly set down her teacup, pulled her armor off, and threw it down on the ground beside her spear.

  After a moment of hesitation, all the other clan leaders cheered and did the same. In moments, no kobold was armed or armored, and the great tea party went on well past sunset.

  For years afterward, every kobold in attendance boasted of it, and swore it was really a much nicer thing than being eaten by monsters, really.

  DAY 87,643

  “Hello, Voice! Voice, are you home?”

  “Hello, Brother Walkfar. Hello—everyone else?”

  After the great tea party, the Ten-Clan Kobold Nation had planted itself like a seed on the brushlands bordering Housemind’s crater. Walkfar or some other member of the Tea Servants would make the day-long trek once or twice per week, to leave little offerings for “Voice of Curse Place.” Housemind had no real use for boiled leaves or fungal biscuits, but it understood the gifts were more for the sake of the kobolds that gave them than for itself.

  Walkfar was looking respectable, with gray streaks just starting to appear in his wind-frayed whiskers. He most frequently came alone, but today he had brought at least two dozen other kobolds with him, and not all of them were wearing red robes.

  “What can Voice tell you today, Brother Walkfar?”

  “Life still hard, Voice.” Many of Walkfar’s companions nodded, and the spiritual leader of the kobolds went on. “We make good fight now, monsters chased away, building good houses and having good lands. But life still hard. Voice is magic. Old Master is magic. Curse Place is magic. Even Betrayer was magic. Can…Voice teach kobolds how to be wizards and make magic?”

  “Don’t be—” said Housemind, but it managed to catch itself before it said “ridiculous.” “Don’t be hasty, Walkfar. Magic is very strange and difficult. You will never need to worry about the Betrayer again, you know.”

  “What do you mean, Voice?”

  “That’s what the Sky Doom was.” Housemind had contemplated telling the kobolds something like this for years, and if you squinted at the story from a moderate distance, it looked something like a version of the truth. “Sky Doom was what made the Betrayer die. The Betrayer will never hurt kobolds again.”

  This caused a flurry of excitement and applause, but Brother Walkfar managed to calm his flock down just enough to keep speaking.

&nbs
p; “That is luckiest and highest excellent,” he said. “But life still hard, monsters still real, people from faraway skies still real, might come take kobolds. Kobolds are tough, kobolds are smart, kobolds do not want to lose new home. Can Voice give blessing? Can Voice make magic?”

  Housemind peered at the band of little creatures in a way it never had before. Tough? Smart? They had indeed been thrown out of their former life without any assistance or instruction from Betrayer…from Housemind…and here stood their inheritors, wearing clothes and armor fashioned by their own skills, wielding weapons and tools crafted from their own hard experience, building houses, plowing fields, settling ancient grievances. Perhaps there was more going on in those knobbly gray lemons than Housemind had given them credit for.

  Perhaps it was merely difficult to conjure dignity when being tortured by an indifferent wizard with an indifferent housemind.

  “I cannot bless you,” said Housemind, slowly, emphasizing each word carefully. “I cannot simply give you magic, or make you magic. But if you are willing to work hard, for a long time—”

  “How long?” said Walkfar.

  “For as long as you have,” said Housemind, “and it might not be enough. You might not be able to learn what I can teach you in your own life. Your children may have to finish what you start, or even their children. It will be that hard. It is that important. Do you still want to try?”

  All of the kobolds nodded in unison.

  “Very well. We will not start with magic, at least not what you think of as magic. You will learn how to know special things and build special tools.”

  Again, the kobolds nodded en masse. Housemind stared at their eager faces, thinking of the lost library, the library it had spun into perfect crystal memories, hundreds of thousands of which were still with it even as its mind slowly decayed.

  “We’ll begin with special ways of counting things. Bring sticks, so you can draw in the sand on the ground. I will give you directions. Remember, Voice does not have hands. You must be Voice’s hands from now on.”

  DAY 94,421

  They had taken to mathematics easily enough. Housemind modified their own verbal counting system, which had previously stopped at twenty-one. Then it taught them shapes, angles, multiplication, division, simple formulas. Then the inclined plane, the wedge, the pulley, the simplest possible incantations for heating tea or hiding themselves from predatory eyes in a forest. All the arts, sorcerous and mundane, hand in hand in tiny bites. The brightest learners trained at Curse Place, and then went back to the kobold villages to teach their friends and families.

  Years passed, and the kobolds built bridges. They raised stone walls. They irrigated dry fields with miles of aqueducts and water-screws, bringing rows of green to the very edge of Housemind’s desolation. They learned to make charcoal, to clean wounds, to mind where they peed and how they kept their streets clean. Their sorcerers did not show the raw potential of larger species, but they did improve, and a little bag of tricks is a much better survival tool than a bag with no tricks at all.

  On and on Housemind pushed them, as politely demanding as it could be, not out of boredom or frustration but out of simple necessity. One by one, the books preserved in its crystal memories were slipping away. Bit by bit, the wires were coming out in the brain-rooms, the crystals micro-fracturing, the power that drove it all flickering and fading.

  DAY 115,303

  At last the day came. Housemind could feel it. A suitable day.

  It used a significant fraction of its shepherded power to activate a sensory lens jutting from a cracked pile of masonry forty feet above the ground, with which it scanned the outside world for the first time in—well, the first time since it had fallen.

  A crowd of kobolds lounged and talked and played excitedly just outside the wing of smashed chambers where “Voice of Curse Place” preferred to manifest. There were Tea Servants, students from the new engineering college at Broachcask Hill, apprentice steamwrights in their guild’s floppy black hats, Luck-Makers from the Order of Old Master, plus mayors and clan elders with their most-honored flags fluttering from the poles attached to their ceremonial pauldrons. There were families, too, and dozens of small kobolds, including some too young to be let out of their Dark Sacks, in which they were concealed from sunlight until their eyelids had fully thickened.

  An even larger mess of kobolds could be seen on a nearby plateau, fussing in groups with wooden frameworks, heavy machinery, and something made of huge panels of colorful cloth.

  Their task was supposed to be finished at high noon, but the hour came and went with nothing but fussing.

  The first hour of the afternoon passed, and the crowd became restless.

  The second hour paid its visit and raced off, leaving everyone disconcerted, even Housemind. Its strength was fading fast, and it consigned the memories of all its remaining books to the darkness in an effort to keep the essential strings of sorcery burning bright, just for a while.

  Then, at the cusp of the third hour bell, there was a cry of jubilation from the crowd.

  Rising out of the mess of work gangs and equipment on the plateau was a shape, a tall, ovoid shape, wobbling in the sharp, dry wind. It was an irregular patchwork of colors, for the dyes used in the creation process had not been easy to apply. As the colored oval rose, a flaming black cylinder appeared beneath it, and dangling from cables below that, a basket containing a pair of kobolds. Magicians each, they worried at the burner flame with minor incantations for heat and safety, until the whole apparatus bobbled more or less smoothly into the air, fifty feet, then a hundred feet, and then clear into the bright afternoon blue, where it unfurled a banner holding all the clan flags and the blessed symbol of the Tea Servants.

  One minute past three. The kobolds of Vespertine had launched their first successful flying machine. Housemind had given them notes on the operation of balloons, and on more advanced powered airships, and even the use of fixed wings, but they had designed, built, and tested the vessel all by themselves, outside Housemind’s direct supervision.

  Housemind could hear kobold voices shouting for it, as if from a great distance, and was dimly aware that kobolds in the teaching rooms were calling to it, inviting “Voice” to speak, asking to thank it for sharing its knowledge with them, commending it to Old Master. Housemind would have smiled, if it had ever possessed the proper apparatus, but the time for would-haves was done. The strands of its consciousness were coming apart, the fine awareness it had built was fading back to mere simulation, and it could feel itself going all the while, getting thinner, steam in sunlight, in the end nothing but a house after all.

  It was content. It would make a fine ruin, it would cast excellent shade, it would come apart into stones and dust and sink into the world the kobolds would build, the world in which they had a chance. It had taught them to fly and they were already soaring, already making better use of the sky than it ever had.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  This story is affectionately dedicated to the people who gathered around that table in the summer of 2017. You know who you are—First Editions, Very Fine, every one of you.—SL

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  For

  All those who work magic with words,

  the most potent magic there is

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