The Flying Sorcerers

He stood there with his devices floating behind. Every eye was on him. His hands were on his hips as he looked thoughtfully down at his nest. How long had he been standing there?

“Fascinating,” he said. And he started briskly down the slope. His devices followed.

The nest sat like a great egg in the middle of the river. Water backed up behind it, flowed in great torrents past its bulging flank, splashed angrily up and over the trampled shore. Angry mud creatures clambered over its dull black surface, scratching determinedly at the spell designs. Gobbets of mud and bloody fur streaked its sides, but still the spells of Shoogar were visible, almost etched into its surface. It stood perfectly, almost arrogantly upright.

That made me uneasy. My eyes searched for the dents in the stranger’s ruined nest, the dents surely put there by the horns of the rams. I couldn’t find them.

Purple strode straight down the slope and into the water. Not a droplet of mud stuck to those peculiar boots of his — in contrast to Shoogar’s legs and mine, which were mud to the hip. A pair of mud-skunks attacked the magician as he entered the water. Purple ignored them; and they couldn’t seem to get a grip on his boots.

He stood under the bulge of the nest, and we waited for his scream of fury.

Carefully, with a small edged tool, he began scraping off bits of Shoogar’s curse signs and putting them into small transparent containers. His mindless speakerspell continued to translate his ramblings. “Fascinating … the power of these fluids-secreted-for-the-control-of-bodily-functions is like nothing I’ve ever seen before … I wonder if these effects could be produced artificially?”

Twice he sniffed at what he had scraped off, and twice muttered a word the speakerspell did not translate. When he finished, he dipped his hands in the river to wash them, incidentally offending Filfo-mar, the usually gentle river god.

Purple turned to the egg-shaped door of his nest; it was flush with the curved wall, but outlined in orange to make it visible. He punched at a square pattern of bumps on the nest. The door slid open and Purple disappeared inside.

We waited. Would he continue to occupy his nest, living in the middle of our defiled river?

The flying nest hummed and rose twenty feet into the air.

I screamed with the rest, a wordless scream of rage. The nest turned in an instant from black to silver; and it must have become terribly slippery, for every particle of mud and blood and potion from Shoogar’s spell slid down the sides, formed a glob at the bottom of the nest and dropped in a lump into the river.

The nest turned black. It moved horizontally across the land and dropped gently to the ground — just a few yards west of where it had stood an hour ago. Only now it rested at the edge of a region of churned mud where the rams and mud creatures had fought to destroy it.

I could see Shoogar sag where he stood. And I feared for my village, and for Shoogar’s sanity and my own. If Shoogar could not defend us from the mad magician, then we were all doomed.

There was an angry rumble from the villagers as Purple emerged from his nest. Purple frowned and said, “I wish I knew what’s gotten you people so angry.”

Somebody threw a spear at him.

I couldn’t blame the lad. No sound, no pattern of mere words could properly have answered the magician. But the young man, enraged beyond sanity, had hurled his bone spear at the stranger’s back — without a blessing!

It struck Purple hard in the back and bounced off to the side without penetrating. Purple toppled, not like a man, but like a statue. I had the irrational conviction that for a single instant Purple had become as hard as stone.

But the instant was over. Immediately he was climbing to his feet. The spear, of course, had done no harm at all. One cannot attack a magician with an unblessed spear. The boy would have to be brought before the Guild of Advisors.

If the village survived that long.