The Flying Sorcerers

I looked from him to Purple. My head reeled. I felt I was drowning. My mouth opened and closed like a fish tossed upon the bank to die. How could this disaster have found us out?

“You were dead,” I said to the magician, how did — how could — which God —” but there I got stuck for the question itself was insane. Purple believed in no Gods, he had said so many times. I could not look at him, at his paunchy frame, his alien flesh, his pale hairless skin and his patches of unnaturally straight black fur. He was ugly in my eyes, and menacing to my soul and sanity.

Gortik was smiling, pleased at our discomfiture. I gestured at Purple and managed to croak, “How?”

“He was a gift from the gods,” Gortik said. “For many years we lived with a magician who was not as well appreciated as he might have been.” He frowned darkly. “Dorthi was a fine magician and strong, but there were those who were unhappy with his spellcasting.”

“Dorthi? We trained together,” Shoogar murmured.

I nodded. Gortik’s was a familiar story. Sometimes magicians endure long after their powers and their respect have vanished. Villages suffer because of it.

“It happened at the last conjunction,” Gortik continued. “A miracle. There was a great storm that night, a great wind and a fireball of Elcin that swept across the sky and turned and made another pass. Then suddenly there came a crash from the edge of the village. When we came forth from our houses we discovered that a strange magician had fallen on old Dorthi’s house and smashed him flat. A strange magician indeed.”

“He fell from the sky?”

Gortik nodded. The other Advisors interrupted each other in their eagerness to explain, “From the sky he came!” “Yet he suffered no hurt!” “Like a great falling star!” “None suffered hurt, not even Dorthi!” “He must have been killed instantly.” “There was much singing and dancing then!”

“Quiet!” Gortik roared.

There was quiet; Gortik said, “We gave Purple Dorthi’s scarlet sandals and his robe and made him magician immediately. What else could we do? But he was little help to us, for he could not even talk. We had to burn Dorthi without incantations.”

“We trained together,” Shoogar repeated. “Poor Dorthi.”

“But how could a man fall from the sky and not be killed?”

“Purple is no ordinary man,” Gortik said, as if that were explanation enough.

“He’s a demon,” said Shoogar, and that was explanation enough.

“It was my impact suit,” Purple said. He took a step forward and thumped himself hard in the belly with his fist. His belly was big and soft, so the blow should have made him wince. It did not. I thought for a moment that Purple had become as rigid as stone.

“My impact suit,” he repeated. “Normally it flows like cloth, but under a sharp blow it becomes a single rigid unit. Lant, you remember that a boy threw a spear at me in your village.”

“I remember. You were not hurt.”

“The suit is skin tight. With the hood up it covers all of me but my eyes and mouth, and of course it holds my shape. It saved my life.

“I did not realize,” said Purple, “that my flying egg was moving. You had painted thick gray goo over all the knobs and dials, so that I could see none of the settings on my —” he hesitated, then used the word, “— spellmakers.” The loss of his speakerspell must have taught him to think his words out more carefully.

To his own villagers, Purple explained, “Somehow they had gained entrance to my flying egg — which I have told you about — and done terrible things to it.” To us, he continued, “I was furious, Lant. I would have killed the pack of you.”

I shuddered. He still might. In fact, what was he waiting for?

“Later,” he continued, “I realized that you had acted from ignorance. Perhaps you thought that the egg was alive and dangerous. Perhaps that was the reason for Shoogar’s earlier attacks on me. I wanted to know why, why you had dirtied and broken implements in my flying home.”

“Unfortunately, I did not realize how badly you had damaged it. There is a spell in any flying device that compensates for sudden, sharp motion. It also compensates for the lack of a world underfoot. Well, I did not know that I was in the air. The windows had been painted gray, the screens likewise, the dials had all been tampered with.

“When I opened the door to go looking for you, the wind of my passage picked me up and sucked me out. When I realized I was falling, I pulled my hood up and curled in a ball. My impact suit saved me by holding my shape — much as water in a vase does not change shape when you set it down hard.”

“I wish the vase had broken,” muttered Shoogar.

“The fall knocked me out,” continued Purple, “but I broke no bones. But I saw very little of the landscape coming down. I still don’t know just where here is — my flying egg does not respond to my signals. It has not answered me for months. I fear it may be beyond my scope.”

“True enough,” I answered. “Shoogar’s spells entirely destroyed it. It was over the mountain called Critics Tooth when Elcin’s hammer struck it.”

“Elcin?”

“The small, but mighty, god of thunder.”

“Ah, yes. I know him. You say he struck my egg?”

“He struck it with a great flash, and a sound loud enough to shake the world and shatter the sky. I could neither hear nor see for many moments afterward.”

Purple made an odd strangled sound. Tell me, Lant, does the ground glow blue at night now?”

“In the old village, yes. And all the trees and grass have died. Villagers and animals as well. Look, Pilg and Ang have lost their fur, and Pilg is covered with sores.”

Purple looked, he stepped closer; Pilg, brave man that he was, did not shrink from Purple’s feverish examination. Both their faces were pale. “It’s true,” Purple murmured, “I am marooned.” He used a word from his own demon’s tongue. “Those are radiation sores.

“Radiation sores,” he repeated. “You blew up the pile,” He was trailing off into gibberish in his excitement. He looked blindly around. “You hairy half-humans have smashed my flying machine. I’ll be lost here forever! Curse you, curse you all —”

We all shrank back, even Purple’s own villagers. He was being too free with his curses. But Gortik and several of his Advisors stepped forward to comfort Purple. There, there,” they murmured, patting his shoulders with visible reluctance.

“Let me alone!” Purple cried, jerking loose from the hands that held him. He collided with Pilg who still stood forward baring his naked and festering chest. Purple hesitated.

“Can you cure me?” asked Pilg with a quaver.

Purple looked at Pilg’s disease-ridden body as if for the first time, he looked into his eyes, then he stepped forward and took Pilg by the shoulders. “Oh, my friend, my friend, my poor dear friend.” He released the shaken Pilg and turned to the rest of us. “My friends, all of you —”

Again we shrank back. There was not a man in two villages who wanted to be the friend of a raving, hairless madman.

“My friends, I need you more than ever now. I have lost a major source of my power. My flying egg has been destroyed. All the wonderful things I said I would do for you when I recovered it, I can never do now.”

At that Shoogar straightened a bit. “And I did it,” he reminded us. There was a hint of pride in his voice. He was the only one smiling.

“And you did it,” Purple echoed, in such a way that two Advisors stepped up to take his arms.

Gortik glanced at me, at Purple, at Shoogar. He must have been thinking furiously. He had thought his magician better than ours; but now Purple had admitted to being hurt, and hurt badly, by Shoogar’s dueling spells. Obviously both magicians were powers to be reckoned with.

How they must hate each other! It boded not well for either village.

Gortik, the Speaker, drew me aside. “I think we had best break up this meeting.”

“Before our magicians do it for us,” I agreed.

“You take yours back to your encampment, we will return ours to his nest. You and I will meet later, privately, to discuss this situation. If either of our villages is to survive, there is much that we will have to work out.”

I nodded immediately. How much longer would Shoogar restrain himself? We had to get away from Purple’s own dueling ground as fast as we could. I waved my hands frantically at my Advisors. “Let’s go, let’s go.” All I wanted was to put as much distance between Shoogar and Purple as possible.

We hurried back up the slope. One thought was uppermost: we were trapped on an island with two mad magicians — Elcin’s Wrath — what had we done to deserve such a fate? Could we have possibly angered the Gods that much?