SWNOVELS Chapter Chapter Nine
His encounter with the boy wizard had left the sorcerer drained.
In his sanctum the sorcerer sat meditating on his meeting. It had been a good many years since he’d felt this way. Not since his encounter with Grimwood—back when he’d been naïve enough to believe that of all people and beings, that one had the answers—had he felt this depleted.
A good hour passed in this sweet repose. The sorcerer inhaled. Releasing the breath in one great squall, he opened his eyes and felt strength infusing his spirit.
He sipped delicately at his coffee, a dark roast, savoring each drop as he reclined in his EZ-Boy. There was nothing in the world as pleasurable as a fine cup of well-brewed Arabica. And no one made better coffee than leprechauns. Once he’d drained the cup, the sorcerer set it down on his lap and read the dregs. Tasseography was a street-sorcerer’s shtick, but it did occasionally provide a glimmer of guidance.
As usual all he saw was a crow. That infernal coffee-grind bird had been cropping up everywhere lately; in his tea and coffee, in his fireplace, scrying mirrors, and worst of all, in his bloody dreamscapes. Everywhere a crow. He set the cup atop a bookcase and sighed.
“Lipton?”
When no one came, he removed a miniscule wooden shaft, a twig really, and blew into it. Though soundless to humans, it was nails on a chalkboard for dogs and leprechauns.
A female leprechaun entered the sanctum a few ticks later. Standing roughly three feet tall and sporting a teal green figure-hugging outfit, she might’ve been a dancer back in her home dimension. When the sorcerer had found her he’d been extra delicate so as not to invoke a surly attitude from this one. Don’t invoke what you can’t banish; and a surly ’tude from females of any species was a most difficult thing to banish indeed.
But this one’s innate genial nature and nimble fingers always soothed him at the end of even the longest of days.
“Sir?” she said.
He nodded at his empty cup. Leona reached up on tiptoes to grab the dishes, the sorcerer watching from the corner of his eye. “How’re your cousins coming along with the troll?”
Stepping back down with the cup and saucer, Leona said, “They got him trussed up alright in the—gold—cage, but this one is going to be a tough sell, sir.” She grimaced at the use of her ’gold’ stutter.
“And why do you say that?”
Leona lowered her head, averting her eyes from his gaze. “Lipton says—gold—that this one is different from all the other creatures you have taken. He says the troll is royalty, sir. He says even you won’t be able to make it submit.” At this point Leona was trembling. Most times, the sorcerer was a fair and just master, but he was not one to tolerate failure.
With a swoosh of his robes he rushed past her on his way out of the sanctum, and charged across the house over to the locked doors leading into his bestiary.
The key ring clipped to the sorcerer’s belt was not the largest of its kind in the world, but it was no mere digit dangler either; it could hold shut the snout of a golden retriever easily, and it boasted a curious and colorful assortment of keys, including one skeleton kept in reserve for special occasions, nestled between the bestiary and the pit keys.
A worn brass bugger fit into the slot. With a turn the sorcerer activated the tumblers and shoved on the monstrous door. A gust of putrescent wind pummeled him, curling up into his mouth where it promptly tickled his uvula, activating the gag reflex. Barely managing to avoid puking up all that fine java, the sorcerer closed the door and twisted the lock. Hisses and shrieks attacked his ears. To either side of the long pine-paneled hallway were cages. Most of them were constructed identically, with only a one-foot barred window in the doors serving as viewports. A few however were completely sealed; glimmerlings were notoriously difficult to contain. But the sorcerer was no ordinary magician.
About thirty feet in he found Lipton and Laxatine—his two mythic caretaker leprechauns—cleaning out the sprite cage. Apparently they’d refused to take their potion, as usual, and so had not gotten very far along in the cleaning, too distracted by the flirtatious female sprites.
“Laxatine!” the sorcerer bellowed. The leprechaun dropped his mop and blushed. A peculiar sight, the sorcerer never grew tired of witnessing a leprechaun’s green-tinted flesh turn purple. “What are you doing with that little minx?”
As the sprite—which was flashing the leprechaun—zipped back into her cage, Laxatine mumbled, “I’m—gold—sorry sir. She was just, I was just—gold—trying to help her get um—”
“Take me to the troll.” As he followed Laxatine away from the sprites, the sorcerer aimed a grim look over his shoulder at Lipton.
“It was Laxatine who forgot to take the potions. I told him to remind us this morning.”
In defense, Laxatine started barking excuses and soon the little golden-skinned men were trading insults with whip-lash gusto. The sorcerer rubbed his temples and prodded Laxatine away from his cousin. Within days of capturing his first pair of leprechauns the sorcerer had discovered that their kind excelled at precisely three things: following orders, stealing stuff, and making excuses for not following orders and taking stuff.
They approached a second locked door. Laxatine unlocked it, using his own keys, and preceded the sorcerer down a flight of steps. At the bottom they entered a large pole barn complete with food stores, a prison cell, and a small paddock to their left where a shaga roamed. The ground trembled beneath their feet as the colossal mythic caught their scent and charged. Laxatine zipped around to hide behind the sorcerer’s legs. Even through the four-foot high reinforced concrete barriers, and standing seven feet away, the sorcerer could feel heat permeating off the shaga’s body when it barreled into the concrete bumpers. Were the paddock any bigger, the shaga would be able to build up more speed, and no force would be able to stop it. It had taken a good part of a month and every containment spell in A.E. White’s Book of Beasts to nab that monster.
But it was worth it. The beast was beautiful—in an oh-God-it’s going-to-kill-us-all-horribly-if-it-ever-escapes kind of way. If the warlocks ever found out he had it . . .
To the right the sorcerer peered through bars into a generously sized cage holding his fourth captured troll. The others were long dead. This mythic was standing motionless, staring at its captor. For most of his life the sorcerer had enjoyed the ego-building position of being taller than most people, but next to the troll he felt almost petite. It was not an experience he relished. The other trolls, while larger than most men, had all been smaller than this one.
“Do you speak English?”
The troll nodded. Off to a fine start. The other trolls had only grunted and growled.
“What is your name?” the sorcerer asked as the shaga barreled into the concrete barrier behind him.
The troll stepped forward. Its bulbous nose flared as it inhaled the sorcerer’s scent. “I am Aggerwon. King of my people.” His English came out in a harsh guttural rumble, his accent and inflections reminding the sorcerer of an old hexenmeister he’d known long ago. He was absorbing the troll king’s revelation when the shaga slammed into the barricade again, shaking dust from the trusses overhead as the vibrations shimmied up from the support beams.
“It’s going to escape!” Laxatine cried. “Please, master, do something.”
Following a long sigh, the sorcerer tromped over to the barricade, locked eyes with the shaga, and scolded it as though it were a naughty dog: “Go lie down!”
The shaga turned and raced to the back of the paddock, but not to lie down. It bent forward on massive shoulders, drafted the ground with huge hoofed feet, setting to charge. The sorcerer closed his eyes. Finding out he had a troll with whom he could converse—the king no less—he had little patience for the showboating of the even the world’s most powerful predator.
The sorcerer knelt down, spat in his hands, rubbed the saliva together between his palms until he felt warmth, and promptly dug his fingers into the cold clay ground. The ley line responded instantly to his will, a communion of energies coalescing on a quantum level. The ground trembled; earthen cords erupted, commencing at his fingertips and rippling outwards underneath the barricade, racing towards the shaga as an immense and unbreakable chain of earth and stone.
The shaga, surprisingly nimble for a two-thousand pound behemoth, sidestepped the mystical cords and continued its charge unimpeded.
He let the earthen chain dissolve. And then he stood, spreading his arms wide, summoning and gathering energy from the air itself. He did not feel it, but the temperature in the paddock dropped seven degrees.
The shaga continued its inexorable charge.
Sensing—and conquering—resistance from the air elemental, he swung his arms together until his hands met in a fierce echoing clap. Wind gushed from his clasped hands, whistling through the paddock, assembling into a focused gale force that pummeled the shaga. The beast tumbled over and rolled all the way to the back of the paddock, where it lay, smoking and motionless, but alive. The fissures between its body plates still glowed red-hot.
For a bitter moment the sorcerer couldn’t breathe; most of the oxygen had been siphoned when he summoned the gale force. Within seconds his breath returned, and the temperature rose back to a more forgiving fifty-five degrees. He took five deep gulps of air before opening his eyes. Ley line magic, an offshoot of sorcery, was easier and much quicker than ritual magic, but manipulating the elemental forces of the universe like this took its toll. Turning around, he learned just how much.
Laxatine lay sprawled on the ground. His usually olive complexion now waxen beige, as if the life had been drained out of him. The sorcerer raced over, bent down and cradled the leprechaun in his arms. Digging out the slim whistle, he put it to his mouth and blew.
As he waited he returned the whistle to its pocket. “Why didn’t you run? I told all you fool’s to steer clear of me when I perform that type of working.” He ran a hand through the leprechaun’s lime-green hair. Laxatine did not stir. The sorcerer found a weak pulse, kept his fingers in place on the leprechaun’s neck. “Fool!” he spat. “Why are you doing this to me?”
A pair of female leprechaun’s rushed into the paddock. The sorcerer handed Laxatine over and ordered them to take the body to Endor. “Have her perform a full body pranic healing over him.” Struggling with the seizing form of their cousin, they rushed out of the paddock. “Faster!”
The sorcerer retrieved Laxatine’s top hat as he shuffled back to Aggerwon. It was dented, and its green sash hung in shreds.
With a peculiar expression—ugly even by troll standards—the troll stood gazing at the sorcerer, gripping the bars. “That was ancient magic,” he accused. “They do not teach that at your school in these mountains. Are you the one they call the Mythmage?” His dark, lined face was inscrutable, but his hairy knuckles were curled to the limit as he gripped the corroded bars.
“What do you know of the Mythmage?” the sorcerer wearily settled into a folding chair.
“We know he was the bildrig who opened the door to our world and forced us into this perrokan place,” the troll’s voice rumbled out of his chest.
This was astounding. In all his interrogations, the sorcerer had never come across any mythics who admitted to such knowledge—not of their own volition anyway. He would have to tread carefully with this troll king; clearly he was not as dim-witted as his underlings.
“And what would you do if you got your hands on the Mythmage?”
The troll stepped back. There was a chair in his cell. He eased himself down onto it, sitting perfectly erect. Most trolls walked and sat hunched over, their heads thrust forward as if guiding their way. It looked wrong, seeing this one park himself in such a polished manner. It did not sit well with the sorcerer. “I would force him to open the doorway again, so I might lead my people back home.”
“I see,” the sorcerer said. He ruminated a long time before continuing. “How?”
The troll belched, unleashing a gust of reeking air. Drool oozed out the corner of his mouth before he spoke. “I will hobble him. Slice off his hands and feet one by one. If he yet refuses to open the door, I will continue, slicing off pieces from his arms and legs. I will keep cutting until the bildrig is nothing more than a bleeding lump of flesh. Then I will remove his mating bits.”
The sorcerer scratched his smooth scalp. “I don’t know. Magicians need their limbs. Without our limbs we are unlikely to be interested in continuing to live, let alone helping you. I’m not sure your plan is entirely sound. Have you considered threatening to kill his loved ones? That’s the go-to arm-twisting method in the villains’ handbook, isn’t it?”
Aggerwon squinted at the sorcerer. His eyes, already mostly concealed by a protruding brow, vanished during the squint. “Are you the Mythmage?”
The sorcerer froze a grin in its tracks, deciding it was time to change tactics. “Ever been to Beaver Meadow in the St. Hubert section of the Preserve? It is near a lake with a waterfall.”
Aggerwon nodded.
“Ever encounter anything beyond your capabilities there?” Insulting a trolls’ capabilities was always the shortest route to manipulating its emotional state.
“Never. I am Aggerwon, troll king. By birth and by right I take whatever I like.”
Nodding sagely, the sorcerer said, “Wow, you managed to make that rhyme. You must be the wit of every troll party. Now all you need to do is find a nice bridge to lurk beneath.”
In a blink Aggerwon was off his chair and railing at the bars, his bulbous nose jutting out between their oxidized shafts. “You want to watch what you say next, perroc.”
Ah, the moment had come round at last. “Ever run into the Old One?”
Reverently the troll stepped back, almost tripping over his chair. Hunkered down, he assumed a beleaguered demeanor. “A few moons past I sent a raiding party to clear a nest of gnomes that had been pilfering from our caves. The squat little nisses fled. My soldiers gave chase, pursuing them into ITs region. Only one of mine made it back alive.”
The sorcerer popped the dent out of Laxatine’s hat, then looked back up at the troll. “And what did this one see?”
Aggerwon bowed, hands clenched into fists. “He would not say at first. I had to . . . convince him to explain what did happen to the others. In the end he howled and shook like a klanger. After, he dug his eyes out with a fire-touched dagger.”
“Sorry for your loss.” Without preamble the sorcerer stared into the trolls’ eyes and held his gaze. There was a limit to how much a practitioner could sense in the mind of another during a soulgaze, but there was usually some useful tidbit lurking near the surface. In most mythics the sorcerer could glean this knowledge easily enough, like skimming the cream off of churned milk. But with Aggerwon he detected only pure blind rage. Below the surface, on the surface, growling in the forefront of his thoughts, the troll oozed hatred.
Still, fury could be shaped to the sorcerer’s will like anything else. It was just a question of time and pressure. Like diamonds.
“Why did you capture me?” Aggerwon barked.
The sorcerer stood. “Sure, why don’t I lay out my evil plan so that when you escape you can muster your forces and foil all my years of careful preparation?”
Aggerwon growled.
“Sir!” Lipton came charging into the paddock. “It’s not working, sir. Lady Endor can’t help Laxatine—gold. We need you.”
Without glancing back, the sorcerer followed Lipton out of the paddock and back up the stairs. He noticed cracks in the concrete barrier containing the shaga and filed this knowledge away. In the bestiary a stabbing sensation attacked, and he clutched his head, dropping to his knees.
“Sir?” Lipton braked in his race towards the exit. “What is it?”
“I have to get to my sanctum.”
The leprechaun’s mouth formed into a large oval. “Oh but . . . you must save Laxatine. He will die if you don’t help him right now—”
“You think I don’t know that?” the sorcerer bellowed, getting to his feet by leaning on the leprechaun’s shoulder. The pain in his head had sharpened into a full-blown migraine. He hesitated at the doors, key in hand. “Someone has passed before the Black Mirror. I must go.”
“Oh golden rainbow,” Lipton cursed, lips trembling. “Sir! Don’t you care about him—”
Door unlocked, legs rearing to go, the sorcerer paused. Weighed his options. “Ten seconds,” he said. There was only one quick remedy for healing a leprechaun drained by sorcery, and even this was a long shot. One way or another, he would lose his servant tonight.
Taking a quick detour down the hall, away from his sanctum, the sorcerer barged into Endor’s section of the cabin. Flowers of every size, shape, color and scent decorated all the tables and shelves in the place. The sorcerer spotted Laxatine on the table; he’d been concealed by a bushel of blossoming rhododendrons, and a sprig of elder hung overhead. Not bothering with the ceremony he usually afforded himself during Wish Time, he opened his mouth and uttered the dreaded words: “As my third and final Wish, I Wish you to be healed this instant.”
Laxatine’s stubby fingers twitched, then his arms shook, and finally he sat up. Looking around dizzily, he spotted the sorcerer. “Golden throne, it actually worked. I’m free!”
“You agitated the shaga, and then intentionally remained by my side during the working,” the sorcerer realized, astounded. “You manipulated the situation so I would make my final Wish, saving you and setting you free.” He looked back at Lipton. “Were you in on this too?”
Cowering behind a table of bonsai pines, Lipton nodded.
Betrayed by his own servants. The limey runts, anyway.
Laxatine jumped down off the table, waved his hand, stepped forward and vanished.
On his way out of the apartment, muttering curses under his breath, the sorcerer paused beside Lipton. “I’ll deal with you later.”
Lipton hiccupped ‘gold’ a few times.
Back in his sanctum the sorcerer whipped a pillowcase off of a one-foot by two-foot mirror. The migraine vanished. He grabbed hold of both sides of the mirror’s gilded brass frame. Burnished into the metallic crevices beneath his sweating palms were dozens of tiny identical sigils—the Enochian name of John Dee. Procured at great cost, this mirror was a perfect—albeit miniature—replica of the notorious Black Mirror, handed down from John Dee himself to his son and so on for countless generations. The Dee family had not parted from it willingly.
In place of a reflection showing his candlelit sanctum, the mirror displayed a dank and desolate room. Nothing was distinct. The sorcerer inhaled. Light from his sanctum bent as he conjured, siphoning luminance from half a dozen candles and sending it into the dark room—or more accurately, into the reflection of the dark room, so he could perceive its contents.
Lying on the floor, looking blindly around for help, was the strange boy wizard he had encountered in the Dreaming. His experimental enchantment on the boy was working splendidly, it seemed. “It’s about time. Get up, boy, we’ve got work to do, you and I.”