A Wizard in the Way

14

The first houses they came to were burned out and gutted, roofs fallen in. Each was surrounded by dozens of leafless trunks, most with very few branches, many rotted and falling apart, all rising out of dry brown tangles of undergrowth—yards that had been overgrown until everything died. The street was choked with rubble and filled with potholes.

“However this city fell,” Alea said, “it didn’t just rot away quietly.”

“It may not have gone out with one single bang, but it looks to have been noisy,” Gar agreed. “Walk warily. Anything could be hiding in these hulks.”

They went down along the cracked and pitted road as quickly as they could without running, trying to keep an eye on all four directions at once.

“Someone’s watching me,” Mira said, her face grim. “I feel it, too,” Blaize agreed.

“We knew they would,” Gar said. “The only question is whether the watchers are alive or dead.”

“Either way, they’ll wait until we’re too far in to be able to run,” Alea guessed.

“So long as they chase away the soldiers,” Gar said. “Blaize, how many ghosts are watching us?”

“Too many to count,” the lad said, shivering. “Most of them seem sane, at least, but there are one or two whose minds are whirlpools of confusion.”

“Don’t let them drag you down,” Gar advised. “Just note them in passing. Go quickly, friends—I don’t think we’ve anything to fear until we come to the city’s center.”

The houses grew bigger as they marched eastward until they weren’t houses anymore but tall buildings—taller and taller as they went, until Mira, Blaize, and Alea gaped at the towers around them. Gar contented himself with quick glances—compared to the palaces of Maxima and the clamoring mazes of Ceres City, this wasn’t terribly impressive. “There’s not a lot of light,” he commented.

“No, these towers shut out the stars,” Alea agreed. “We could kindle a torch.”

“Here, let me,” said a lugubrious voice beside them, and ghost light flared in the darkness, bathing their faces in its bluewhite glow.

The two younger folk leaped back with shouts of fright. Gar and Alea stiffened, drawing together without realizing it, glaring up at the native who towered above them, giggling in basso tones. He wore the robes of a guru and held up a forefinger whose nail blazed in a tongue of flame.

“Welcome to the city of Charenton,” he said. “Welcome to the city of the mad.”

Then he floated there giggling while the companions gaped up at him.

Gar was the first to recover. “Thank you for your hospitality. Can you tell us if our enemies have followed us into the city?” The ghost’s brows pulled together, but his lips kept their smile as he lifted his head to gaze out along the boulevard down which they had come. “No, they’ve turned away, as anyone in his right mind would. Their masters aren’t happy about it—shaking their fists at us and cursing—but they’re turning back, too. ”

“Reasoning that we’re out of their way, if we’ve come in here.” Gar nodded. “I expect they’ll be surprised when they find we’ve come out.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” the ghost chuckled.

“Really?” Gar raised his eyebrows. “You don’t think they expect us to return from a city, do you?”

“Of course they don’t, and neither do I.” The ghost blew out the flame on his finger.

With a racket of groans, howls, and clanking chains, half a dozen ghosts surrounded them, each twelve feet tall and bending down to reach for them with claw tipped fingers.

Gar froze, and Alea rocked back against his chest while Blaize flung his arms around Mira and pressed his back against theirs. Then Alea recovered, glaring up at the guru’s ghost.

With a scream of agony, he clapped his hands to his head. Blaize saw and remembered that he was a ghost leader. He turned a cold gaze on the nearest specter, a dapper gentleman in doublet and hose with a very nasty grin—which disappeared as his mouth formed an O of surprise before he doubled over, hands clawing at the pain in his belly.

Alea turned to look daggers at a hatchet faced matron in full skirts and fuller bodice. The hatchet dulled amazingly as the woman clutched at her chest, eyes wide in panic, mouth gaping in wordless horror.

Blaize switched his gaze to a foppish ghost in a tailcoat, waistcoat, tight trousers with flaring cuffs, and a look of supercilious glee that turned to horror as he clutched at his throat, his howl choking off.

“Away!” cried the ghost of a young soldier, and all six specters vanished.

Blaize let out a sigh of relief and sagged. Mira looked up at him in alarm, then suddenly realized she was in his arms and twisted free. She caught his elbow and hauled upward. “Stand straight! They might come back—and they’re surely watching!”

“Yes, pull yourself together.” Alea didn’t look much better but managed to stand straight and tall. “Mira’s right, they’re still here, even if they lack the courage to show themselves.”

“Courage?” a new voice hooted, and a glowing gentleman in top hat and tails danced in the air before them. “Come now! What need have ghosts for courage? None can hurt us!”

“We just did,” Alea reminded him. “Ask your friends.”

“Oh, I was watching. Foolish creatures, to let you convince them they could feel pain.”

“You, of course, know better?” Gar asked.

“Certainly! I’m Corbin the Magician! Look, Ma, no hands!” He held them, up white-gloved and fingers spread just long enough for the companions to watch them disappear, leaving wrists and arms. “Look, Ma, no head!” Corbin cried, and sure enough, his head disappeared, too.

“Magician? Or conjurer?” Gar asked Alea.

“I conjure your head to come back!” Alea cried.

With a pop, the head reappeared atop Corbin’s neck—without its top hat and saying indignantly, “I wasn’t ready for that. Really, intruding on a gentleman when he isn’t dressed!” With another pop, the top hat reappeared.

“We’re wise to that trick,” Alea informed him. “Oh, yes, but not wise enough to fear us.”

“What’s to fear?” Gar asked. “The dead can’t hurt the living, after all.”

“Perhaps not truly hurt,” the ghost said, “but there’s pain, and then there’s pain.”

Suddenly the world seemed to spin around them. The towers seemed to lean—farther and farther, until they were about to fall, revealing a bulbous moon the color of blood. Indeed, it must have been blood, because it began to drip.

“He’s mad,” Blaize gasped, “and trying to make us mad with him! This is how he sees the world, as a confusing and threatening place!”

“Surely you know better now that you’re dead!” Gar reproved—but he had to hold on to Alea to keep himself stable. “Do I? Take a closer look.” The ghost yanked his head off his shoulders and held it out, only a foot from Gar’s face. The lips still moved as he spoke. “It’s even more confusing now—you never know what might happen.”

“That’s no reason to lose your head.” Gar stared into the ghost’s empty eyes—and suddenly they disappeared, along with the rest of the head. From somewhere its mouth screeched, “What have you done? Where have you sent it?”

“If I send your body after it,” Gar asked, “will you stay gone?”

“Never, vile fellow! I’ll find it! It must be around here somewhere!” The ghost’s arms flew off, sailing all about, feeling and palping. One hand brushed Mira’s cheek; she shrieked and recoiled.

“You’ll make a fellow feel unwanted!” the ghost protested. “Any head will do, after all. I’ll try yours!”

Both hands converged on Mira. She screamed in utter panic.

“He can’t really hurt you!” Blaize cried, and pushed her aside just in time for the hands to clasp his own temples. “I feel only a chill. Can’t you find a better way to get a head in the afterworld?”

“The toe of my boot to you!” the unseen head cried, and sure enough, the toe of one of his feet shot off arrowing toward Blaize.

“Go back where you came from,” Blaize told it sternly, and the toe swung in a loop that sent it back toward its body.

“I have to hand it to you.” One of the ghost’s arms yanked the hand off the other and presented it to Blaize.

Mira shrieked and pressed against Alea.

“No, I’ll give you a leg up,” Blaize retorted. The ghost’s right leg shot toward the sky, sending him flat on his back—or it would have if it had stayed attached. It yanked itself loose instead, and came swinging toward Blaize’s face as the unseen head sang, “That’s a poor way to get your kicks!”

“You heel!” Blaize said with disgust. “How low can you sink?” Sure enough, the foot shot toward the ground—and into it. “How can a fellow make sense out of the world piecemeal?” the ghost protested.

“Oh, pull yourself together!” Alea said, exasperated, and all the parts of the specter shot back toward his torso and reattached themselves. A fuzzy ball appeared in the crook of his arm, shrinking in on itself and hardening into his head, leering out at them. “Well, I appreciate the help,” it said, “but don’t expect me to feel beholden.”

“I don’t expect you to feel anything in the state you’re in,” Alea retorted. “Just remember that we can take you apart and put you back together again.”

“I’ll remember you,” the head sang, “if you dismember me.”

“All right, if you wish.” Alea stepped forward, rolling up her sleeves.

“No, no! I believe you! just let me get my head on straight.” The ghost took its head in its hands and screwed it back onto its shoulders. “Ah! That’s better. All right, you’ve convinced me that you’ll go where you will—but where will you go?”

“Back out of this city,” Gar told him, “as soon as we’re sure our pursuers have left.”

“Pursuant to the all-clear? But till then, let me introduce you to some fascinating people! Bowles! Spenser! Solutre!”

They stepped from the shadows, lean men and women in ragged tunics and patched hose, the redhead on the left with a gloating grin and a crossbow leveled, the grizzled woman on the right giggling as she raised the nozzle of a flamethrower. In the center came a man as tall as Gar but as lean as a rail, seeming to be made of sticks and straw—his hair was even the pale, pale blond of new hay. His eyes alone seemed truly sane. Light winked on the whetted edge of the three-foot sword he carried before him.

Twenty more like them loomed out of the shadows, each with a wyvern on its shoulder. Some limped, one had a twisted foot, another a greatly enlarged shoulder, a third a harelip. Two advanced with the vacant eyes and slack smiles of the very simple, but they held their crossbows steady.

“You may have nothing to fear from ghosts,” Corbin said, “but what about our descendants, and the outcasts who have sought sanctuary among us?”

Gar surveyed the approaching mob while Alea gathered herself, hand on the knife beneath her bodice, concentrating on mayhem. Gar called out, “Were you all born here, or are there some who came fleeing a cruel lord or the disgust of your fellows?”

The mob ground to a halt, the scarecrow in front frowning. “Some of us know what it is to flee,” he said, “but don’t think you can cozen us with that! This is our city and our district of it, and any who come must bow to us!”

“Don’t you welcome fellow fugitives?” Gar asked.

“Aye, if they can pull their own weight and know their places!”

“Our place is out of here,” Alea said. “Surely you won’t insist on keeping us if you don’t want us!”

“No, but we might have fun with you first.” The grizzled woman pointed the nozzle of her flamethrower at Gar and giggled again.

“Are you a magician then, to play with fire?” Gar asked. “We don’t recognize that nonsense about magicians here,” Corbin said with a laugh. “Everyone has some talent, large or small—but the tricks that are only tools and toys, why, I’ve taught that to them all.”

“How many flamethrowers did you find?” Gar asked.

“Only a dozen.” Corbin seemed mildly impressed by the term. “But they made a dozen more from spare parts.”

“We’ve something of that knack ourselves,” Gar told him. “Mira, show them your pets.”

Mira straightened as though coming out of a daze, then smiled and raised her arms, crying out with a cawing noise. The wyverns sprang from the warriors’ shoulders and streaked toward her, one landing on her outstretched leather-clothed arm, the others perching on stone ledges as close to her as they could get, hissing and cooing. Their owners cried out in indignation.

“Give us back our wyverns!” cried a voice from the crowd, and a red-faced man stepped forward. He was dressed like the others and, like them, sprouted the sores of vitamin deficiencies, but he stretched out an arm, making a noise halfway between a coo and a caw, and two of the wyverns leaped into the air to shoot back to land on his shoulder and forearm.

“Come, the rest of you!” he said sternly.

Mira stroked the scaly head and sinuous neck of the wyvern on her arm; it dosed its eyes in pleasure. “You can trust them with me.”

“Trust you to turn them against us, aye! Give them back, or I’ll loose my human friends!”

“I’d hate to have these pretty fliers torn between the two of us,” Mira said sadly. “Can’t you believe their opinion of me?” The wyverneer glowered at her and her new pet, then reluctantly allowed, “Aye, that I can. How are you bewitching them, anyway? It’s taken me a year to learn to drive that one!”

“I don’t drive them,” Mira told him. “I flatter and befriend them. They come to me for pleasure, not out of fear.”

“Spoiling them rotten, I’ll warrant,” the wyverneer said in disgust. “Still, I’ll trust their opinion. If they say you’re good, I’ll believe them. My name’s Stukely.”

“Mine is Mira,” she said, eyes wide in surprise.

“Well, if she’s trustworthy, maybe the rest of you are,” said the tall skeletal man. “I’m Longshanks.” He transferred the sword to his left hand and held out his right.

Gar took it, though his own left hand still rested on his dagger. “I’m Gar Pike.”

“Gar, are you?” Longshanks grinned. “Seems we’re named alike.”

“I’m Solutre.” The grizzled woman reached out to Alea. “I know I’m gruff, but someone has to keep these lugs in line.”

“I know what you mean,” Alea said with a smile as she clasped the woman’s hand.

Gar looked at her askance but said nothing.

“And who have we here?” The redhead advanced on Blaize. “What can you do for your friends, fellow?” He frowned as Blaize shrank away. “What’s the matter? Think I’ve got the plague?”

“I-I’ve heard the rumors.”

The redhead laughed. “What, that we’re all diseased maniacs?”

“That, and that every one of you is a witch and has a familiar in the form of a wyvern.”

There was a moment of silence. Then the warriors exploded into laughter, their weapons drooping.

“Well, that’s a new twist on the old lies,” the redhead said, grinning. “Most of us do have pets, but they’re real wyverns, my lad, not demons. As to witchcraft, why, what’s the difference between that and a lord’s magic, I’d like to know?”

“Magic—magic follows rules,” Blaize stammered. “Witchcraft breaks them all and intends evil.”

“Oh, and the magicians only use their powers for healing and helping? Pull the other one, fellow! We’ve the same sorts of power as the lords, only we don’t think of it as magic! That lass with you, now, she has a way with animals, nothing more.”

“So … you’re not witches?” Blaize asked.

“Not a bit,” the redhead assured him. He called to his fellows, “Any of you have dealings with devils, mates?”

They all shook their heads with a chorus of denial, some amazed at the idea, some angry, most amused.

“So unless you’ve made a pact with a devil yourself, there are no witches here,” the redhead said. “I’m Bowles, by the way. Who’re you?”

“B-Blaize is my name.”

“Well enough then, B-Blaize,” Bowles mimicked. “What good are you, though? Do your friends just carry you along out of kindness?”

“Of course not!”

“What can you do, then?”

“Why, bring friends of my own,” Blaize answered. “They’re right here, waiting to see if I’ll need them.”

“Oh, are they indeed,” the redhead scoffed. “Tell them to show themselves and I’ll believe you.”

“Why wait?” asked a voice.

Bowles spun about to see Conn towering over him, glowing and glowering.

“Just say the word, Blaize,” said a voice behind Bowles. He spun about to see Ranulf leaning down with a genial grin and a spectral saber, its point at the man’s throat.

“Here, now! That’s my great-great-grandson!” Corbin cried, affronted. “Just because you died too soon to father a child is no reason to be jealous!”

“Oh, I fathered one, all right.” Ranulf cast the conjurer a quick glance. “I just didn’t get to stick around to watch him grow up—well, not in the flesh, anyway.”

“A ghost father’s better than none,” Conn protested.

“Yes, but not much, is he?” Ranulf said sourly. “He can’t play ball with you, after all. But my boy and girl did develop amazing imaginations.”

“How did you know we were coming?” Gar asked.

“Why, we heard your thoughts, of course!” Longshanks grinned. “Didn’t think you were the only one who could tell what a man was thinking, did you?”

“I can, but I usually don’t,” Gar said. “That doesn’t mean I won’t listen, of course,”

“Of course,” Longshanks agreed.

“Mind you, I’m always glad to make new friends,” Alea said warily, “but what made you decide we were all right so quickly?”

“Well, partly the wyverns liking your young friend there,” Longshanks said judiciously, “and partly that we can hear your thoughts and don’t find any malice in them…”

“…but chiefly that you were able to take all my teasing and toss it right back at me,” Corbin said.

“Well, it means we wouldn’t want to fight you if we didn’t have to, anyway,” Longshanks said with a grin. “Come share a meal with us, if you think you can trust us.”

They found the rest of the clan in an overgrown park surrounded on four sides by blank faced, empty-windowed ruins of buildings. The ragtag horde was gathered around a central campfire in the plasticrete ring of what had once been a goldfish pond. They were dressed in tunics, hoses, blouses, and skirts dyed in bright colors. Alea wondered where they had found the dyes. They hailed the newcomers cheerfully. Walking among them, under trees with varicolored leaves that none of the companions had ever seen before, Alea saw deformities of all sorts, as well as the wild or distracted eyes of madness and the vacant gazes of mental retardation—but most seemed quite sane, and many weren’t deformed at all, though they bore the scars of their lords’ cruelty. Runaways they were, like Mira and Blaize, but few seemed bitter and all seemed cheerful, even happy. Alea marveled that the outcasts had made a home.

Over meat-they didn’t ask what kind-the bragging contest began. It started with a question-innocent enough in its way, if you took it as it was intended. Longshanks looked straight at Gar and asked, “Are you a madman, a criminal, or a runaway?”

Gar stared, then smiled and asked, “Do I have to be one of the three?”

“No one else comes to the cities,” Solutre told him. “They’re afraid of the ghosts—and us. They’re right to be, too.”

“Are you so powerful a group of warriors as that?”—

“We have to be, to hold our own against the Hawks and the Hounds,” Bowles said.

Gar frowned. “What are the Hawks and the Hounds?” Bowles peered closely at him. “You really don’t read minds unless you have to, do you?”

“Uncommonly polite,” Longshanks noted.

“I can’t listen to every thought that comes by or I’d go crazy,” Gar said.

The others looked up, startled.

Gar decided that it took some effort for them to read minds.

Even then, they could probably only hear thoughts that were put into words or pictures. “Well, think of the Hawks and the Hounds and I’ll see them in your mind.”

“No need,” Bowles said quickly. “They’re the tribes that border us on each side of our wedge.”

“Wedge?” Gar asked.

“The road we followed came straight from the edge of the city,” Alea told him. “It probably goes straight through to the center of town. If there are more radial roads like that, the whole city’s cut up into … what? Eight wedges? Twelve?” she asked Bowles.

“Six,” he told her, “and we have to keep the Hawks and the Hounds away from our game if we want to have enough to eat.”

“Game?” Gar asked. “Are there animals in this city?”

“You’d be surprised how they came in and multiplied once the magic juice stopped flowing through the wires and the city died,” Longshanks said grimly. “Come hunt with us and see for yourself. What weapons can you use?”

“Weapons?” Gar asked. “Well, we all carry daggers and staves.”

“Won’t do much good against a dog pack,” Solutre opined. “Can any of you use a sling?”

“I can,” Gar and Blaize said together, then looked at one another in surprise.

“Take these, then.” Solutre handed them each a leather cup with thongs wrapped about it. “Spenser, fetch spears for these two! Just think of it as a staff with a point on the end,” she told Mira and Alea.

Spenser was a hard-faced woman who looked to be in her thirties, which in a hardscrabble society like this probably meant she was about twenty-five. She gave each of the women a spear. Thus armed, and with half the people in the party accompanied by rangy knee-high lop-eared mongrels with tan fur, long muzzles, and curving tails, they set off to see what kind of game a concrete forest could hold.

It had trees, for one thing, some in odd places. Wherever dead leaves had drifted and rotted to make humus, seeds had caught, sprouted, and, in growing, split the pavement. Even more, the wedge had apparently been laid out with a little park every few blocks; each had developed an orchard.

“Hold on—let’s see what’s ripe,” Solutre said.

“Ward!” Longshanks snapped. He, Bowles, Spenser, and half a dozen others took up their stations with bows and spears on two sides of the little park, the other two walls being buildings. Some ancestor, with knowledge and cunning, had espaliered fruit trees against those walls, and a dozen trees filled the square. Between the grove and the walls stood a stand of maize. Solutre inspected it, seeming satisfied. “Most of the ears have set on,” she told Alea.

“So you’re farming, too,” Alea said.

“In a small way,” Solutre said. “We can’t exactly clear—Watch out!”

Something pink and bulbous came charging out of the stalks. Alea leaped aside, sweeping the point of the spear by reflex. The hog squealed in rage and turned on her, but an arrow buried itself in the animal’s side, and it stumbled, then fell. Alea turned away and left Solutre to finish the beast. “We’ll eat well tonight,” the woman said.

Alea turned back and saw her sheathing a knife as a young man tied the hog’s hooves together and shoved a spear through to carry it. Solutre inspected the animal’s belly. “A sow, right enough, but not nursing. Too bad—we could have used a few more in the pen.”

“How … how did pigs come into this city?” Alea asked. “Our ancestors tell us some folks had started keeping them as pets,” Solutre told her, “a special breed, pretty little things that never grew much hair or got to be any bigger than kneehigh. When the crash came, they started running loose and bred back to your average wild pig.”

Alea looked at the sow slung between the shoulders of a young man and a young woman. Its back had stood halfway up her thigh, and it was covered with mottled black and white hair. “A far cry from a pet indeed.”

“So are we,” Solutre grunted.

When the sun slipped below the tallest buildings, they started back. Every structure they passed had the lowest two stories of windows boarded up, even if the higher ones lacked glass. The doors were stout and locked. Alea wondered why.

They hadn’t gone more than a few blocks through the ruins when she found out. They were going down a wide street, laughing and chatting as they detoured around rusted hulks of vehicles and piles of fallen brick and stone, when they head a deep, hollow sound. Instantly they stilled. The sound came again, and Longshanks said in a tense whisper, “Listen for thoughts, Solutre.”

They were silent a moment. Then, “Hawks!” Solutre hissed.