The Only Wizard in Town Read online

  “Girl!” said Abington and beckoned her over.

  She approached dutifully. The wizard leaned in close to her ear. “No artichokes tomorrow or I will turn you into a newt.”

  The girl hurried out wordlessly. Daedal had no idea what a newt was but got the gist of the threat. He stood to go (slowly and on one foot only). “Please don’t make idle threats against the staff, wizard,”

  Abington struck a match and relit his pipe.

  Outside a bell tolled. It was full dark now, but surely too soon to be seven bells. Another set of bells joined the first, and then a third. Bells rang out across the city. Daedal fancied he could hear shouting some way off. A cry went up in the lesser courtyard.

  “What’s happening?” he said.

  “That?” said Abington lightly, cocking an ear and pretending to listen. “Oh, that would be the sound of an Amanni army attacking the city.”

  “What?”

  Abington tilted his shaggy head. “At least five hundred of them, I’d say. They sound very fierce. Angry even.”

  Daedal’s mind spun. “What? Why? How do you know?”

  Abington grinned. There was flash of teeth among the whiskers. “Because I invited them.”

  “You what?!”

  Towering over Daedal, the wizard put a commiserating hand on the priest’s shoulder. “I’m sorry for the lies.”

  Daedal’s mouth was dry. “You can’t do this … you can’t have.”

  “You know that old thing about wizards being unable to cast magic while bound with iron.”

  “Yes?”

  Abington banged his wrists together. His manacles fell to the floor. “Lie,” he said.

  “Goddess, save me,” Daedal whispered, knees sagging.

  “If it’s any consolation,” said the wizard, “I suspect you will be receiving your most heartfelt desire before the night is through.” He grabbed his pointy wizard’s hat from a shelf and jammed it on his head. “Now, I’m off to find a tavern and a cup of beer. I welcome you to try and stop me.” He wiggled his long fingers mystically and left.

  Daedal stared after him for a long time. He then looked down. Both feet were firmly on the floor. “Bugger,” he said.

  Lorrika

  1

  “Pictures” Bez sits in the belfry of the calendarists’ tower, his back to the great bell, a bottle of beer at his side, his legs dangling over the long drop to the corn market below.

  Bez has his drawing board on his knees, held upright with one hand as he sketches in charcoal with the other. It is a picture of the temple to Buqit. The sun has just set and now Bez is racing against the fading light. With economical strokes, he draws in the broad ziggurat and the giant bronzed statue of Buqit, complete with eagle wings, which stands on its very top. The temple is the tallest building in Ludens. It beats the calendarists’ tower by a head, maybe a head and a wing.

  There is little grandeur to the city of Ludens. It is not prosperous like Sathea. It is not a beacon of civilisation like Carius. It is not burdened with a magnificent history like Qir. Its location, in the flattest, scrubbiest part of the plains, is a constant cause for complaint by the residents. It is almost as if a holy man with an edict from his goddess and no grasp of geography, trade, farming or city planning had simply wandered out from a more civilised and prettier part of the world, stabbed his staff into the ground and declared, “Here! Build it here! This will do!” The nearest waterway is the sluggish Yokigiz river delta which winds down to the coast. The fish there, like the water, are brown and tasteless. Ludens is famed for two things and two things alone: the temple to Buqit and the hot dry foehn wind which blows down from the mountains, sets everyone’s nerves on edge and drives men mad.

  Bez is handsome and, yes, he is mad after a fashion. But he’s an artist and madness is therefore expected. As an artist, he’s understandably poor. There’s little money in pictures of a temple which people can look at for free and less when he spends most of it on ale. His clothes might look fine but they’re an actor’s trick – all embroidery and no substance – and they can’t disguise the smell of dried dung and booze which hangs about him. If he just had a bath and bought some new clothes, he might be worth—

  “You do know I know you’re there,” said Bez, without looking round.

  There was a pause. “No, you don’t,” she said.

  “You’ve been there for quite some time.”

  Another pause. “Prove it,” she said.

  Bez looked round and up. He pointed. “That’s you, there.”

  Lorrika dropped from the dark ceiling, slid silently down the great bell and landed equally silently on the stone floor. “I am a shadow,” she said, defensively. “You couldn’t have heard me.”

  “Didn’t say I heard you,” said Bez and sniffed, returning to his work.

  “You didn’t see me.”

  “Babe, you’re a shadow, but a predictable one. This is the third day on the trot you’ve come here, drawn to my irresistible presence.”

  Lorrika stuck her tongue out at the back of his head and took out the nectarine she had stuffed inside her tunic.

  “And speaking of predictable shadows…” He got up, whipped off the raggedy blanket which also served as his cloak, and wrapped it around the clapper of the great bell: folding it round and tying it up as if it was a pudding to be sold at market.

  “Six bells soon.” He looked her up and down. “You’ve got dirt on your face.”

  Lorrika rolled her eyes. “I’m in disguise.”

  “What as?”

  “A dirty person.”

  “Where did you pinch the nectarine?” he asked.

  “I never steal,” she said.

  “Oh, bought it, did you?”

  “No, it was mine anyway.”

  Bez raised an eyebrow. “How’d you reckon that?”

  Lorrika, swallowed the mouthful of fruit and licked her lips. “I remember, very clearly, once eating a nectarine which looked just like this one.”

  “Most nectarines look the same. I say that as a man who’s known a good few nectarines in his time.”

  “I didn’t say it looked a bit like this one. It looked exactly like this one. When I saw this nectarine on a stall in the corn market—”

  “Ah, ha!”

  “—When I saw it I was stunned. How could this be? Two nectarines entirely alike? And then I remembered. I distinctly remember eating that nectarine and dropping the stone on the ground.” She spread her hands, her story told.

  Bez thought about it. “So,” he said slowly, “you think that nectarine grew from the stone of the one you once dropped on the ground?”

  “Only explanation,” she said cheerfully, and took another bite.

  “But you still pinched it.”

  “How can I have stolen it? It was already mine. My nectarine, my stone and, with a little sunshine and rain which no one can begrudge me, my new nectarine. I put it to you that, somewhere out there, there’s a whole nectarine grove which belongs to me.”

  “You’re a shameless liar, Lorrika,” said Bez.

  “I never lie,” she said.

  Lorrika wasn’t lying. She had a clear and specific relationship with the truth. Rather than tell things which were true or not true, she found it easier to make the truth what it ought to be and then wait for the world to catch up.

  She had a sound philosophical basis for this viewpoint, one she had learned as a child when she had been sold in apprenticeship to the philosopher Rabo Poon of Carius (a city where philosophy was less an occupation than an endemic medical condition). Rabo Poon had given her the first of the many names she’d since owned, and the giving of that name was the first lesson she learned in the nature of truth: that truth was only what everyone agreed it to be, just as names were only what everyone agreed to call each other. That’s what received wisdom and common knowledge were: commonly agreed truths. If enough people believed it, it was true. That’s why it was definitely and certainly true eating bread crust
s gave you curly hair, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and a good bleeding will cure any ill. All definitely and certainly true, despite the evidence of Lorrika’s straw-straight hair, the fact her fall from the Carius market wall on her first illicit night climb had smashed her leg and left it unable to bend fully, and the fact that the doctor who came to treat her leg with a good old bleeding, when Rabo Poon feared he was going to lose his investment, was very nearly the death of her. In what Rabo Poon described as an entirely subjective universe (“For if the moon rises and no one sees it, does it truly rise?”), truth was what people agreed it was.

  Lorrika’s own personal relationship with truth and reality was cemented by a second insight gained from observing her philosopher master. When he was laughed out of the council hall for daring to suggest they could defeat the approaching Sathean war fleet by all pretending really hard it didn’t exist, Rabo Poon left knowing his tactic was perfectly sound. A man in a minority of one, he complained that night, wasn’t wrong.

  And so Lorrika’s personal philosophy was born. Accepting truth as a matter of consensus, and starting with a consensus of one (her), she bent the reality of the world to her needs. She was not a thief: she was a material goods redistributor. She was not a burglar or housebreaker: she was a rooftop traveller and amateur lock enthusiast.

  She munched down the rest of the sweet sticky nectarine flesh. “I’m a very moral person, me,” she told Bez. “Will you be in the taverns later?”

  “My adoring public demands it,” said Bez and jiggled the near empty bottle. “And my hungry belly. Have a look at this.” He held up his drawing board. He’d sketched in a vast winged creature over the temple.

  “There was no dragon,” she said.

  Bez tilted his head. The fact he was poor and smelly didn’t seem to matter so much when he tilted his head and looked at her like that: his ragged mop of hair curling round his cruelly beautiful (if slightly ruddy) face.

  “Artistic licence,” he said. “I offer the chance for mere mortals to share my frankly astonishing vision of the world. I bet someone did see a dragon today.”

  Lorrika sucked the last juice from the stone and tucked it in her tunic. Bez, like Lorrika, was a dabbler in presenting the world as something other than it might traditionally appear to be. However, he’d not had Lorrika’s philosophical training, so he was just a bloody liar.

  “Oh,” she said, pointing at the fastidiously drawn figure in the foreground of Bez’s picture. “And Chainmail Bikini Woman was there too? She’s in a lot of your pictures.”

  Bez grinned. “Yeah. That’s right. She gets about a bit, that girl.”

  “Never met her in the flesh.”

  “She’s very busy.”

  “Because I’ve got some questions for her.”

  “Yes, well…”

  “I mean, it must chafe. The chainmail. Cos it’s chain, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve always considered chafing a matter of personal taste. Besides, I’m pretty sure they don’t make woolmail.”

  “And there’s those,” she said, indicating a bosom any adventuring woman would find unbalancing, to say the least.

  “There are always those,” he agreed.

  “Yes, but they’re not always that size.”

  “I assure you they are within what would be considered the normal range.”

  “Everyone says you have a problem with perspective,” she said.

  “Well, everyone can go to hell.” He tipped up his bottle to drink and received only dregs. “I do not have a problem with— Look, if you don’t mind, it’s been a slow News day, but I’ve got to get this finished if I want to eat.”

  “You want some news?”

  “I could be persuaded to listen if it means I get to eat.”

  Lorrika took him by the shoulders and steered him round the great bell to the other side of the belfry. She pointed towards the north gate.

  “Not listen: look. In that direction.”

  Bez peered. Shadows were deepening and the north wall was becoming indistinct from the sandstone plain beyond.

  “I’m not exactly unfamiliar with the view, so if that’s all your news….”

  The rope pull which ran all the way down the tower twitched and the great bell began to rock. The clapper struck the bell and, even muffled by Bez’s cloak, it was tremendously loud. Six bells.

  “Just watch,” Lorrika shouted over the noise and stepped off the edge of the belfry. She dropped twenty feet to a narrow ledge, bounced and jumped to the buttress, which she slid down to a narrow roof. Foot over foot along the roof edge and then a jump, a swing, a dramatic pose for no one’s benefit but her own, and it was just a hop between roofs to the wall of the temple courtyard.

  She scrambled down a stack of empty barrels to the lesser courtyard and nipped through the archway to the cells of justice. There were no guards in the lesser courtyard. A trio of holy men in their silly robes were hurrying towards the temple itself, too blind and preoccupied to notice her. She slipped through the arch and tried the door to the jailer’s room. It was locked. This did not present a problem. Whoever had built these cells had clearly been of the mind that locks should be big and sturdy rather than difficult to pick. Lorrika could have picked this lock with a bent spoon. Not having a spoon handy, she contented herself with a sturdy lock picks instead.

  The jailer’s room was a mess. A filthy cot of a bed, piles of unwashed crockery, baskets of cruddy odds and ends. The prisoners’ cells couldn’t possibly have been much worse. As she searched (Abington’s description of the required key had been precise and unambiguous), she wondered if the jailer’s poor housekeeping was an unconscious attempt to create a cell of his own. Perhaps he had a guilty conscience and didn’t think he deserved any better than his charges.

  Or perhaps, the jailer was suffering from what Rabo Poon called rude particulates, gained from too much contact with prisoners. Poon’s theory was when two objects came into contact with each other, rude particulates would rub off from each and onto the other. Thus, a cup regularly placed on a table would become increasingly table-y and the table become ever more cuppish. Rabo Poon cited this theory in explaining how seasoned warriors developed resistance to pain and injury from their constant contact with armour, why fishermen were the best swimmers and why consorting with the poor and needy was bad for one’s wealth. As Rabo Poon grew older his beard thinned and he’d blamed this on regular and unwholesome contact with his obviously beardless wife and banished her from the bedroom.

  The last Lorrika heard of Rabo Poon was he had been sentenced to death for corrupting the young, this by rubbing himself against them in the city street to soak up some of their youthful particulates. He had elected to face trial by combat in the city arena, preparing for this by wearing a suit of solid armour day and night for a week before entering the arena: confident he now needed no external armour to protect him. Lorrika recalled Rabo Poon was fond of saying, “A philosopher, in search of truth, is always happy to be proved wrong.” She was comforted to believe he died a happy man.

  The key was underneath a small cage containing a furry lump which might once have been a pet or a piece of food, but was now definitely neither. The key was finger length, reed thin, and made for a lock that would be a challenge to any lock-picking enthusiast.

  She slid the key up her sleeve, left the room and immediately collided with a priest who wasn’t watching where he was going.

  The priest was unapologetic. “Watch where you’re going! You almost had me over!”

  The stupid, moon-faced man was, for no discernible reason, wobbling around on one foot rather than the customary two.

  “Have you ever tried standing?” she asked.

  “Today is the day to hop on one’s right foot,” said the priest grumpily.

  “Is it now?”

  “Tell me: what will you do today?” asked the priest, as though there could be nothing more important than hopping.

  “Dunno,” she said. “
I climbed a tower. Ate some fruit.”

  “Then they are done and will not need doing again,” said the priest pointlessly. “Where is the jailer? I wish to see the wizard.”

  Lorrika pointed down the steps to the cells. It was as good a guess as any.

  The priest, persisting with the hopping, struggled down the stairs, grunting on every step. Maybe today was also the day to break one’s neck doing something stupid. The priest was certainly going about it the right way.

  Lorrika locked the door again with her picks and considered her next move. With the priest and the jailer down there, it wasn’t going to be easy to just sneak past. A disguise was in order. She was sure Abington would be content to wait a few minutes more.

  “No, I am not!” came Abington’s shout from below stairs. “I’m in bloody prison!”

  Tough, she thought and stepped outside.

  In short order, Lorrika liberated a pie from the kitchens, borrowed a skirt and apron from a cupboard and fashioned a headscarf from a tablecloth that clearly nobody wanted. She walked back to the cells, down the stairs and bobbed a clumsy curtsey to the fat jailer before entering Abington’s cell.

  Her master, Abington, was in conversation with the stupid moon-faced priest and had a look of crabby consternation on his face: his natural expression. Lorrika found serving under wizards and philosophers equally tolerable. They were similar in many ways: both had a very poor understanding of the real world, despite claiming unique insights. As far as Lorrika could tell, the significant difference between the two professions was when their beliefs were at odds with the world, philosophers bent their beliefs to match the world, whereas wizards blasted the world with magic until it learned to conform.

  Lorrika went to collect the dirty pots on the table.

  “Girl!” snarled Abington.

  She turned. The wizard crooked a finger to call her over. There was a scowl upon his face but Lorrika could see a twinkle in his eyes. It was a tiny twinkle, hidden behind layers of impatience, exasperation and general miserableness, but there nonetheless.