The Blood of a Dragon

Chapter Three

At Thetheran’s behest Dumery seated himself on a tall stool that stood close beside the wizard’s littered workbench. He sat there, staring at the room around him, while the mage puttered about with various mysterious objects.

This room was as large as the front parlor, maybe a bit larger, but far more crowded. The parlor had held six chairs around the hearth, a few small tables, and a divan, with a few assorted knicknacks and oddments here and there; the walls had been mostly bare. In this workshop Dumery couldn’t evensee the walls, behind all the clutter!

A stair leading to the upper storey ran along one side, and an incredible miscellany of pots, pans, and boxes was jammed under it, stacked every which way. On the opposite side several hundred feet of shelving were piled high with books, scrolls, papers, pouches, boxes, bottles, jars, jugs, and other wizardly paraphernalia. The great stone workbench ran down the center of the room midway between these, and while half of it was kept scrupulously clean and clear, the other half was strewn with scraps of paper, spilled powders in every color of the rainbow and several colors of more doubtful origin, bits of bone and bent metal, and other arcane debris.

At either end of the room a curtained doorway led somewhere-one to the front parlor, the other the gods knew where. The walls around both doorways were plastered over with diagrams and sketches and outlines, none of them making any sense at all to Dumery.

Something small and green was staring at Dumery from behind a jar; he stared back, and the thing ducked down out of sight before Dumery could get a good look at it. He wasn’t sure what it was, exactly; he’d never seen anything quite like it. Some of his brothers’ friends had been telling stories about strange little creatures that had been stowing away aboard ships from the Small Kingdoms and then getting loose around the docks; maybe the stories were true and this was one of them.

Wizard Street wasn’t anywhere near the docks, though. Maybe it was some magical creature, like the sylph, the air elemental, that must have brought his father’soushka.

Or maybe it wasn’t a sylph, maybe the tray was enchanted-wizardry was so varied and wonderful!

He sat there, surrounded by the artifacts of wizardry, and stared at it all in amazement.

Then Thetheran was back, holding a small black vial and a pair of narrow silver tongs. He put them down on the workbench and turned to Dumery.

“So, boy,” he said, “you want to be a wizard?”

“Yes, sir,” Dumery said, nodding enthusiastically. “Very much indeed.”

“Aha,” Thetheran said. “It’s not your father’s idea, then?”

“No, sir; I believe he’d much rather I do something else. But I want to learn wizardry!”

Thetheran nodded. “Good,” he said, “very good.”

He drew a dagger from his belt, and Dumery tensed, wondering if some sort of blood ritual of initiation was involved.

Thetheran reached out and touched Dumery’s forehead with the tip of the dagger, very gently. “Don’t move,” he warned.

Dumery didn’t move. Not only did he want to make a good impression, not only was he worried about magic spells, but that knife looked very, very sharp.

Thetheran muttered something, and Dumery, looking up as best he could without moving, thought he saw the blade of the dagger glowing first blue, then purple.

Thetheran blinked, then pulled the blade away. He looked at it closely.

Once again it looked like a perfectly ordinary dagger to Dumery.

Thetheran muttered something again, then said, “Hold still.”

As before, Dumery froze.

Thetheran reached out with the dagger again, but this time he touched it to Dumery’s black velvet tunic, directly over the boy’s heart. He held it there for a moment, and then ran it lightly down Dumery’s breastbone and across his belly to his navel.

Dumery held his breath until Thetheran finally pulled the knife away. As Dumery exhaled, the wizard held the blade up in front of his eyes and studied it closely, his expression at first puzzled, then annoyed.

He put the dagger down on the workbench and picked up the vial and tongs.

“Here,” he said, gesturing, “watch very closely, now.Very closely. I’m going to do a simple little spell, and then ask you to try and do it.”

Dumery nodded, almost trembling with anticipation. He leaned over and stared intently.

Thetheran opened the vial and fished out its contents with the tongs. He held up a roll of white fabric for Dumery to see.

Dumery nodded slightly, keeping his eyes on the little cloth bundle.

Thetheran put it on the bench and unrolled it with the tongs.

Inside lay a sliver of greyish wood roughly the size of a man’s finger, a tiny glass bottle half-full of a brownish-red substance, and a wad of brown felt.

Thetheran spread the wad of brown felt to reveal a lock of hair. He plucked out a single strand with the tongs and held it to one side.

Then, using his other hand, he pried the black rubber cap from the miniature bottle.

He dipped the single hair into the open neck of the bottle and drew up a single misshapen drop of the substance within, and as he did so he said something, speaking very slowly. The words sounded to Dumery like, “Fulg the walkers nose arbitrary grottle.”

Then he moved one hand in a circle while the fingers of the other seemed to dance madly about, and then he lowered the hair with the drop of stuff down to the piece of wood.

The instant before it touched, he said what Dumery took for, “Kag snort ruffle thumb.”

When the stuff did touch, a white spark appeared. Thetheran dropped the tongs and let the hair fall-except that it seemed to Dumery it fell the wrong direction, and when he tried to follow it with his eyes he couldn’t find it.

Then the wizard reached down and picked up the glowing spark between his two index fingers. He brought his thumbs down to it, hiding it from sight.

Then he announced, “Behold, Haldane’s Iridescent Amusement!” He drew his hands apart, and there in the air between them, stretching from one thumb to the other, was a string of gleaming polychrome bubbles the size of oranges, each joined to the next at a single point, colors shifting eerily around their surfaces almost as if they were somehow alive.

Dumery stared, delighted.

Then the bubbles all silently popped and were gone, without leaving even a trace of moisture. Thetheran smiled a tight little smile, then touched his hands together and drew them apart again, and there was a new string, the bubbles even larger this time. Where before the commonest hues had been blues and reds, now green and gold predominated.

Then these, too, popped, and once more the mage drew out a new string, this time milky and streaked with purple.

When those vanished there were no more.

“There,” Thetheran said. “Now you try it.”

Dumery blinked, and reached out for the tongs.

The hair had vanished, along with the drop of stuff, so Dumery picked up a new one from the felt. He was unfamiliar with the tongs, so it took several attempts before he managed to pick up one, and only one, strand.

He dipped it in the little bottle and drew up a drop of the reddish gunk. He announced, “Fulg the walkers nose arbitrary grottle.”

He waved one hand in a circle while wiggling the fingers of the other.

He touched the hair and goo to the piece of wood and said, “Kag snort ruffle thumb.”

Then he waited for the spark to appear.

Nothing happened; the thick stuff on the hair dripped onto the wood, but that was all.

He waited, but his hand quickly grew tired, holding the tongs steady like that, and at last he had to put them down.

“It didn’t work,” he said.

Thetheran was staring at him.

“My boy,” he said, “you are a phenomenon. A curiosity, really.”

Dumery blinked. “What?” he asked.

“You are a fluke, an aberration. You have absolutelyno talent for wizardry whatsoever!”

His previous blink had been from startlement; this time he blinked to hold back tears that were suddenly welling up. “What?” he said again.

“Lad, I tested you first with a simple spell with that dagger,” Thetheran explained. “It should have glowed green, at least, when I touched you with it. If you had the talent strongly, it would have been golden, and if you were destined to be one of the great wizards of the age it would have glowed white-hot. You saw what it did-a flicker of blue, no more, and it stayed as cold as iron.”

Dumery stared up at him, uncomprehending.

“I thought perhaps I’d misspoken the spell, or something else had gone wrong,”

Thetheran continued, “so I tried again, with your heart instead of your head, and still got nothing. Well, I thought, perhaps you’re a special case. So I gave you a chance to show me a spell. I took the hair and blood of a beheaded murderer, and a piece from the scaffold he died on, and I worked one of the simplest little spells I know, one that can’t go wrong easily, if at all, and then I let you try-and you gotevery single step wrong! Not one word of the incantation, not one gesture, was right! You didn’t even speak the second stanza until too late in the procedure. And with some of the most potently charged ingredients I have on hand, short of wasting dragon’s blood, you raised not a single spark of eldritch energy. Not one little twinge.Nothing.”

“But...” Dumery began.

“It’s amazing,” Thetheran said, shaking his head.

“Let me try again!” Dumery said. “Please! I’ll do it better this time, I swear I will!”

Thetheran stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Go ahead,” he said.

Eagerly, blinking away tears, Dumery picked out another hair with the tongs.

Maybe, he thought, the power wasn’t there because I didn’t know what these things were. The hair and blood of a beheaded murderer-gods!

He trembled slightly at the very idea.

He dipped the hair in the bottle of blood and drew it out, and Thetheran coached him. “Pfah’lu gua’akhar snuessar bitra rhi grau k’l,” the wizard said.

“Fall oogah acker snoozer bid rory grackle,” Dumery said. He watched closely the gestures Thetheran made, and tried very hard to imitate them.

“Khag s’naur t’traugh f’lethaum,” Thetheran said.

“Cog sonar to trow fill them,” Dumery said, just before he touched the drop of blood to the bit of scaffold.

Again, nothing at all happened. Dumery stared at the bit of wood in abject disappointment.

When Thetheran started to say something, Dumery burst out, “Let me try a different spell! This one’s too hard to start with; let me try another!”

“It’s an easy spell, boy,” the wizard said, and when Dumery started to protest he held up a silencing hand. “It’s an easy spell. But we’ll try another, if you like.”

Dumery nodded.

He fared no better with Felojun’s First Hypnotic than he had with Haldane’s Iridescent Amusement. The ingredients were simpler-a mere pinch of dust from the floor-and the incantation shorter, being a single word, but still, Dumery failed utterly.

“Face it, boy,” Thetheran said after the third unsuccessful attempt. “You have no knack for wizardry. Teaching you wizardry would be like trying to make a minstrel of a deaf man. There’s no shame to it; it’s just the way you were born. It’s not just that you don’t hear the words clearly, nor that you get the gestures wrong; it’s that the magic doesn’tlike you. You don’t feel it, and it avoids you. I don’t know why, but it’s true; I can sense it.”

Dumery had run out of protests. When Thetheran jogged his elbow he got down from the stool silently; he followed quietly when the wizard led the way back through the curtain and into the parlor, where Doran was sitting, watching the fire.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Thetheran said when Doran looked up expectantly, “but I’m afraid your son is not suitable for an apprenticeship with me.”

Doran blinked in surprise.

“He seems like a fine lad,” Thetheran explained, “but he has no innate aptitude for wizardry. It’s just not in his blood. I’m sure he’d do well in any number of other fields.”

Dumery stood, silent and woebegone, as Doran looked past the mage at him.

“You’re sure?” Doran asked Thetheran.

“Quitesure,” Thetheran said.

“Well,” Doran said, “thank you for your time, anyway.” He glanced at the silver tray, where the crystal goblet had clearly been used. “And theoushka, too; it was quite good, and just what I needed on a day like this.”

“Thankyou, sir,” Thetheran said, with a trace of a bow, “and I’m sorry I couldn’t take the boy.”

“Well, that’s all right, I’m sure we’ll find a place for him.” He gestured.

“Come on, Dumery, let’s go.”

Dumery stood, not moving.

His father said, “Comeon, Dumery!”

“It’s notfair!” Dumery wailed suddenly, not moving from where he stood. “It’s notfair!”

Doran glanced at Thetheran, who gave a sympathetic little shrug. “I know, Dumery,” Doran said. “It’snot fair, but there’s nothing we can do about it. Now, come on.”

“No! He didn’t give me achance! He said the words so fast I couldn’t even hear them properly!”

“Dumery,” Doran said, “I’m sure the wizard gave you a fair test. He’s as eager to find an apprentice as you are to be a wizard, and he wouldn’t send you away without good reason. Now come along, and we’ll go home and figure out what’s to be done about it.”

Reluctantly, Dumery came.

Out in the street, during a lull in the downpour, Doran called, “Well, now that wizardry is out, you’ll need to give some thought to what you want to do instead.”

“No,” said Dumery, emphatically, “I won’t. I want to be awizard!”

His father glared at him silently for a moment.

“Youcan’t be a wizard,” Doran said. “You heard what Thetheran told us.”

“That’s just Thetheran,” Dumery said. “He’s not the only wizard in the World.”

“No, he’s not the only one,” Doran agreed, “but he’s a good one, and he knows his business. Don’t be an idiot, boy; we’ll find you something else.”

“No,” Dumery said again. “I want to be a wizard, and by all the gods I’mgoing to be a wizard!”

“No, you’re not,” his father said flatly. He could be stubborn, too.

Dumery didn’t reply. He didn’t want to argue any more.

At least, not right away.