A Wizard in the Way

12

Gar blinked. “Am I talking to an Irish ghost?”

“I wouldn’t be knowing. Are you?” The cloud rotated toward him, rapidly solidifying into the face and form of a middle-aged warrior with a huge tear over the chest of his tunic. His nose was a bulb, his hair a fringe around a bald head, his chin a knob. His chubby face seemed made for smiling. At the moment, though, it was set in stern lines.

“I would say I am,” Gar said, “by your accent.”

“Accent? What accent would that be? Everybody talks like this in my parish!” the ghost said. “Faith, it’s yourself that has an accent!”

“Him, and all the rest of the world,” Conn grunted, and Ranulf laughed.

The Irish ghost turned toward them, raising a knobbed stick. “Be showing some respect, or you’ll have a taste of my shillelagh!”

“It looks like licorice,” Ranulf said.

“No, chocolate.” Conn grinned. “Come on, old fellow! You know we can’t hurt one another after we’re dead. Who are you and why did you answer a call for Goedelic? For that matter, what are you—outlaw or soldier?”

“It’s all of us were warriors in my day,” the Irishman answered. “There was none of this business of outlaws or soldiers, for we were all free! If any magician tried to set himself up as a lord, we taught him the right of it, and quickly, too!”

Conn and Ranulf lost their smiles. “How old an ancestor are you?”

“Four centuries it is that I’ve been dead,” the Irishman said, “or what passes for death here. As to my name, it’s Corley, and Goedelic’s my great-great-grandson! Degenerate times, when the people let magicians scare them into obeying! But Goedelic fought against them to the last, he with his wyverns, and I’ll not have you tormenting his rest!”

“I don’t think the ghost-to-ghost hookup worked,” Alea said. Gar shrugged. “There’s always interference.”

Corley turned toward him with a menacing glare. “What were you calling me?”

“We didn’t—we called for Goedelic,” Gar answered.

“But now that we have a ghost from such an early time,” Alea said, “maybe you can explain something that’s been troubling me.”

“Now, why should I be doing that?”

“Only out of kindness to a damsel.”

Corley fixed her with a glittering eye. His mouth began to curve in an appreciative smile. “Well, could be I would at that, for one so comely as yourself.”

“Why, thank you,” Alea said, blushing. Gar glanced from her to Corley, frowning.

Surely he couldn’t be jealous of a ghost! But the thought gave Alea a bit of a glow as she said, “This world of Oldeira seems to have had a very promising beginning—”

“Aye, but the promise was broken in my grandfather’s time.”

“I was wondering how that happened,” Alea said. “All your people seemed to be born with the same chances at the start of their lives, or as close to that as any society can manage. Even when they were grown up they treated each other as equals and fellows. Everyone seemed to have been tolerant of everyone else’s views and respected each other’s religions.”

“What would religion be?” asked the Irishman.

Alea stared, then recovered. “The … the worship of a supreme being, and living in accord with the principles that Being revealed.”

“Oh.” Corley rolled his eyes up, rubbing his chin. “No, I don’t think you could say we had religions as such. Philosophies, now, that would be another matter, an understanding of how everything fitted together into a grand whole that might and might not be a Being. Mind you, there were some that worshipped their ancestors—but you can understand that, when those ancestors were apt to come calling any night.”

“Uh, yes, I suppose so,” Alea said, feeling rather numb. “But how could such a free and earnest society have broken down into this patchwork of tyrannies enforced by the ‘magic’ of trickery and a few psi powers?”

“Ah, how does the old saying go?” Corley mused. “ ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ ”

“ ‘And two to take him,’ ” Conn and Ranulf chorused. “You wouldn’t be those two, would you?”

The ghostly duo only grinned in response.

“Don’t overreach yourselves, lads,” Corley warned. “That saying is far older than any of us, and you’d have to be rapscallions indeed to be deserving of it.” He turned back to Alea. “I only know what my old grandad told me—that the people lost the habit of skepticism. When you stop testing claims by reason and evidence, you’re apt to believe anything that sounds impressive, and when it’s something you see, well! You’re going to believe it, bad or good.”

“But you had schools, educated people…” Alea’s voice trailed off.

Corley wagged a finger at her. “Don’t confuse education with sound judgment, colleen. Maybe the two should go together, but they don’t when the teacher stops showing proof and the students stop thinking ideas through.”

“Surely that’s too simple an explanation,” Gar objected. “You were cut off from the mother planet, thrown back on your own resources. Didn’t that have anything to do with it?”

“Ah, well, of course it did!” Corley said. “Desperate people will seize hold of anything that promises them a full belly and a safe house—and what are they to do when the man to whom they give power doesn’t keep those promises? But I’m only guessing, you see—I wasn’t there.”

“I … don’t suppose there’s any chance that … you could arrange it so that we could talk to ghosts who lived through it, is there?” Alea asked. She fluttered her eyelashes for good measure.

Corley gave her a knowing grin. “For so pretty a colleen as yourself? Sure and I will! But be wary—what you get may not be what you think you’ve wished for!” He disappeared suddenly and completely.

Alea stared. “Where has he gone?”

“To find a friend who was alive when things fell apart, I expect,” Conn said.

Ranulf said to Gar, “You may have hooked up your ghosts more thoroughly than you knew.”

Corley burst upon the scene like an exploding firecracker, arm in arm with the ghost of an old woman wearing a long skirt and a voluminous shawl over a blouse. Her hair was wrapped in a kerchief, her lean and lined old face was wrinkled and, even in the colorless glow of her spectral form, seemed leathery. “Is this the lass, then?” she demanded in a voice like the cry of a jay.

“I-I am the young woman who asked to speak with one of the oldest ghosts, yes,” Alea said, taken aback by the old woman’s energy. “My name is Alea.”

“Odd name.” The crone sniffed. “Still, mine is Lodicia, so who am I to talk? Corley tells me you wondered how our wonderful world fell apart.”

“I’m curious, yes. So many things about the way you lived seem so very right. Did you live through the collapse?”

“No, but I saw it as a ghost, and disgusting it was, I can tell you!” the old woman said. “Mind you, we had gurus and chelasteachers and students, to you—even when we came here, but there were philosophers, too, and they had great and wonderful debates, teaching us all to think through the issues for ourselves!”

“When you came here?” Alea’s eyes widened. “Are you one of the original colonists?”

“That I was, though I was in the third ship. By the time we came, the streets were laid out and some of the houses already built. The farms were producing, of course—the first ship saw to that.”

“How many ships were there?” Gar asked.

“Twenty there were—one a year, each with five thousand immigrants aboard. Everyone who wanted to go to a world where philosophy was the only king, where cooperation was prized above competition, where people ruled themselves and worked out their differences by talking in councils—well, you’d be surprised how many there were who were eager to leave old Terra to come here.”

Alea stared off into space with a haunted gaze and Gar knew she was remembering the oppression and constant warfare of her home world. “I can believe it,” she said.

Lodicia’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Then you won’t believe how quick our grandchildren were to turn away from it.”

“Every generation tries to establish its identity by rejecting some of the ideas of its elders,” Gar said with a haunted look of his own.

“Yes, well, it was our children who were the cause of it, really—I shouldn’t blame the grandchildren for listening to them,” Lodicia allowed. “Some of them became gurus in their own turn, of course, we expected that, wanted that—but we didn’t look for a dozen of them to get hungry for power and try to seize it by gathering young lonely ones about them to pay them virtual worship.”

“They rejected reason, then,” Gar said with a frown.

“Yes, and rejected with it the idea that all people are only that, people that there aren’t any prophets or reborn saints,” Lodicia said bitterly. “One of my own grandchildren joined such a cult. Oh, his guru played right smartly on his followers, awing them with fireballs that were no more than flash powder and mind reading that was no more than the old vaudeville mentalists’ tricks! But the worst came when one of them died and sent his ghost to overawe his worshippers. Then his son really had them by the hindbrain, with an actual ghost to conjure!”

Light exploded near her with a boom that shook the leaves about them. Blaize leaped up in a fighter’s crouch. Mira was on her feet, too, ready to run but waiting to see if she should.

Gar and Alea sat still, though, staring at the apparition that appeared next to Lodicia: an old man in a robe and pointed hat embroidered with zodiacal symbols. His beard fell down over his chest, his hair around his shoulders. “Why don’t you tell them the rest of it, old woman? About the tractors that wouldn’t work because Terra wouldn’t send us any more parts, the ethanol distilleries that had to shut down, the famine that stalked the land as we reinvented plowing with horses and oxen!”

“Yes, all of that happened, Aesc,” Lodicia said, her lip curling, “but that didn’t give you the right to set yourself up as a petty tyrant.”

“Right? It was my duty!” Aesc exclaimed. “Everything was falling apart when Terra cut us off! No one knew how to repair the machines, or what to do when the villages couldn’t talk with the towns anymore, to call for help or to plan! Everyone swarmed out of the cities, leaving only the idiots and the deformed to hunt for nuts and squirrels to eat! People were starving, whole villages were turning bandit and stealing other villages’ food! Someone had to gather people together and show them how to farm like primitives! Someone had to overawe the bandits and chase them away! We were one step away from turning into a feudal society with all its oppression!”

“So you beat them to it and made lords of the magicians, instead of the warriors,” Lodicia said with scathing sarcasm. “Wasn’t it the better way?” Aesc demanded. “Now, instead of lords leading armies to kill each other by the hundreds, we had magicians with scarcely a score of soldiers battling it out by illusions and tricks!”

“And how were you to know that some of you had turned into telepaths and were making your tricks deadly?” Lodicia sneered.

“Who could have guessed that could happen in only three generations?” Aesc countered. “Who could have known that the strange gossamer clouds blowing through the air could turn into ghosts when dying minds seized them? Who could have known that those ghosts would select and pair up people who had ESP talents? It’s not as though we set out to become real, genuine mind readers!”

“Oh, I believe that,” Lodicia said. “Tricks are so much easier to control.”

“All right, the new powers became unpredictable!” Aesc admitted, thin-lipped. “Is it any surprise that even we who wielded them began to believe in the supernatural and came to call ourselves shamans instead of magicians? After all, we were healing with one hand while fighting off bandits with the other! Who could have guessed that we were really using psionic talents as much herbs and weapons? But we kept the warlords from rising!”

“You became warlords!” Lodicia retorted, eyes burning. “You turned into the very monsters you claimed to be fighting! What did it matter that you were using your so-called magic instead of armies? You were still petty tyrants, feudal lords!”

“Fewer people died in battle, only a handful—that’s what difference it made!”

“And the only difference! You fought each other to stalemates and kept any real government from rising! You overawed the councils so that they withered away! There was no power left to protect the poor and send food from those who had plenty to those who had none! You made each magician into a petty king over his own few square miles with the power of life and death over his hundreds of people—and he wouldn’t let them leave his estate, because what’s a lord without somebody to browbeat? The people became serfs and the shamans became lords just as surely as though you had called yourselves dukes and earls! You were no better than any other kind of warlord—you oppressed your people just as harshly! The only thing you really changed was the kind of power you used to bully them—charlatans’ magic instead of fists and clubs!”

“Scoff if you like,” Aesc said, eyes blazing, “but we never did let a warlord rise and conquer his way into a kingship. Individual domains remained free!”

“Aye, the magician lords remained free, but no one else! Now the serfs dress in rags and are driven to grub in the fields so their lords can dress in velvet and loll about in their great padded chairs taking their ease! Guards still march to war at the commands of their lords! Serfs who displease you and escape your death sentences take to the forest and become bandits, harrying all the villages! You have fashioned a living nightmare from the ruins of your grandparents’ dreamt”

Before Aesc could retort, Gar said quickly, “ ‘Needs must as the devil drives,’ as the old saying goes. Maybe the shamans made a worse choice than they could have, but they did keep the people alive, kept some vestige of civilization.”

“Vestige indeed!” Lodicia said indignantly. “Can you really call it civilization when there is no trade, no arts, no crafts more skilled than rough carpentry?”

“Civilization is the way of life of people who live in cities,” Alea put in.

“Yes, and there are no cities here, only mansions and villages!”

“But there is a basis for civilization to grow again,” Gar said in as soothing a tone as he could manage. “A crystal city may still grow from the ruins.”

“How, as long as the magicians block any power but their own?” Lodicia asked bitterly.

“By reviving the power of your dream,” Alea answered. “If we can teach the villages to cooperate again, they will outdo the power of the lords’ conflicts.”

Aesc eyed her narrowly but said nothing, only listened. “How are you to do that?” Lodicia demanded.

“By learning how to command wyverns, for a beginning,” Alea answered. “We have a young woman here who has discovered she has a talent for it—discovered it rather abruptly and rudely, at that. Can you find us the ghost of a wyvern-handler to teach her?”

“What! Raise up one more magician?” Lodicia cried. “I will never be a magician!” Mira said hotly.

Lodicia chopped the denial aside with a wave of her hand. “If you learn to work magic, you are a magician.”

“But I will never oppress the poor! I will use my gift to make their lives better, sweeter!”

“So said many who are now lords,” Lodicia said sourly, “and look what power has done to them.”

“Surely taming beasts is not truly magic,” Aesc objected, “no matter how supernatural their appearance. If the lass uses wyverns to protect the poor, can you really object?”

Lodicia gave him a simmering glare while she looked for the flaw in his argument. At last she said, “It takes a talent, you can’t deny that. What’s the difference between talent and magic?”

“When I look at the paintings of the masters and listen to the symphonies of the great composers, I have to agree with you,” Gar said. “Still, I don’t think their magic is quite the same thing as throwing fireballs or raising hosts of ghosts.”

Lodicia glowered at him but didn’t answer.

“She is a serf,” Alea reminded the crone’s ghost, “and means to send wyverns to defend serfs’ villages.”

“Perhaps,” Lodicia allowed, then turned on Mira with eyes that flamed. “Though mind you, girl, if you betray your fellows with this power, I shall haunt you for the rest of your days!”

“Do so.” Mira bore up bravely under her glare. “If I should so forget the hurts my people have borne, I could deserve no less.”

Still Lodicia held her stare, but the fire in her eyes faded until they only glowed. Then she gave a single nod. “Well enough, then. I shall summon Hano.” She scowled more deeply than ever. The companions waited, holding their breaths.