Third Time Lucky: And Other Stories of the Most Powerful Wizard in the World, Page 3

  "And I want your strength tonight," she told him gently, drawing him into the room and shutting the door.

  Some hours later, the captain untangled himself from her embrace and rolled over on his back. "Is there anything," he asked, trying to get his breath back, "that you don't do well?"

  Magdelene ran her fingers through the matted hair on his chest. "I'm a lousy mother," she admitted.

  * * * *

  Everyone with a plausible excuse crowded into the throne room the next morning. People were packed so tightly against the walls, they had to cooperate with their neighbours in order to breathe. Even the queen, who hated public functions and wanted only to be left alone, was there. The king was almost quivering with excitement, anticipating when he would control the most powerful wizard in the world. Polsarr stood alone in the centre of the room.

  When Magdelene entered, the room released a collective sigh. She had not escaped in the night.

  Leaving the captain and his men by the door, Magdelene walked forward until she stood only three body-lengths from her son.

  "Morning, Tristan. Sleep well?"

  Polsarr ignored the question. He drew himself up to his full height and declared, "Already I have defeated seven lesser mages."

  "Seven," said Magdelene. "Imagine that."

  "I banished even the mighty Joshuae to the Netherworld!" He saw what he thought was worry in Magdelene's eyes and chuckled.

  Magdelene wasn't worried. She was annoyed. "You banished Joshuae to the Netherworld? That was remarkably rude; the man is your name-father."

  "I HAVE NO NAME-FATHER!"

  His outraged volume was impressive.

  "Well, you don't now, that's for sure. I only hope he finds his way back."

  "I WAS BORN IN THE BELLY OF THE MOUNTAIN AND SPEWED FORTH WITH FIRE AND MOLTEN ROCK!"

  Magdelene sighed. "And the time before this you were ripped from the loins of the North Wind. The time before that..." Her brow wrinkled. "I don't remember the time before that, but it was equally ridiculous I'm sure. Now, can we get on with this?"

  Polsarr shrieked with wordless rage. Blue lightning leapt from his fingertips.

  Magdelene stood unconcerned, and the lightning missed.

  A fireball grew in Polsarr's hand. When it reached the size of a wagon wheel he threw it. And then another. And then another.

  Magdelene disappeared within the fire. The flames burnt viciously for a moment, then suddenly died down. Although the floor was blackened and warped, Magdelene remained unscorched.

  Polsarr screamed a hideous incantation, spittle flying from his lips to sizzle on the floor. There was a blinding red flash between the wizards... and then a demon.

  The demon was three times the size of a man, with green scaled skin and burning red eyes. Six-inch tusks drew its mouth back into a snarl and poisons dripped from the scimitar-shaped talons that curved out from both hands and feet. It raised heavily muscled arms, screamed, and lurched towards Magdelene.

  Magdelene looked it right in the eye.

  The demon stopped screaming.

  She folded her arms across her chest, and her foot began to tap.

  The demon paused and reconsidered. Suddenly, recognition dawned. It gave a startled shriek and vanished.

  Polsarr began to gather darkness about him, but Magdelene raised her hand.

  "Enough," she sighed, and snapped her fingers.

  When the smoke cleared, the most powerful wizard in the world cradled a baby in her arms. Polsarr's robe lay empty on the floor, and the wizard was nowhere to be seen.

  "Here, hold this." She handed the baby to the king. "I want to say good-bye to some people." She walked to the door where the captain and his men still stood. The silence was overwhelming as the audience tried very hard not to attract the wizard's attention.

  "Colin."

  The young man stepped forward, for the first time a little afraid.

  "This is for you." She wrestled a silver ring with three blue stones off her finger. "There aren't many wizards left in the world, but should you run afoul of one this will protect you." Then she grinned, and everything was all right. "Only from wizards though: it won't raise a finger against outraged parents." She pulled a string of coral beads out of the air and dropped them on his palm. "These are for your Aunt Maya." Reaching up, she pulled his head down until she could whisper in his ear. "Tell her I said..." Magdelene paused, glanced at the captain, and snickered in a very unwizardlike way. "Never mind. If we're as much alike as you seem to think, she'll come up with it on her own." A kiss on the forehead and she released him. "Come and visit me some time."

  "I will."

  She moved over to the captain and took both his hands in hers. "It won't be very safe here for you now. You were responsible for me, and I defeated the king's wizard."

  They both turned to look at the king who was holding the baby as if he'd rather be holding the demon.

  The captain smiled down at her. "I was thinking of leaving the king's service anyway."

  "That might be a good idea. You can always come and stay with me; young Tristan is going to need a father figure." She gurgled with laughter at the look of terror on his face, kissed him hard enough to carry the feel of his lips away with her, and went to collect her son.

  "You really should keep a better eye on him," she said to the queen, with a nod to the king who was rubbing at the damp spot on his knee.

  And then she vanished.

  * * * *

  "Not again, Mistress," sighed Kali as Magdelene handed her the baby.

  "Sure looks that way." Magdelene sighed as well, then grinned at a suddenly inspired thought. "See if you can find his father's lute!" she called after the demon and went to look for Silk and her kittens.

  [Publisher’s note: “Third Time Lucky” is the fourth story in chronological order. To go to the fifth chronological story, jump to “And Who is Joah?” To continue in written order, proceed to the next page.]

  Author’s Note for "And Who is Joah?"

  I honestly don't remember much about writing this. I know Joah and her brother were influenced by fading memories of Reba Paeff Mirsky's Thirty-One Brothers and Sisters (I was ten when I read it and I really need to read it again!) and I know I wrote it specifically to send to George Scithers at Amazing Stories. Other than that... nada.

  Although, you'll notice I managed to include the obligatory Canadian content.

  And Who is Joah?

  The green and gold lizard leapt from his favourite sunning spot and darted for a crevice in the coral wall. Although he moved with panicked speed, another tiny missile bounced off his tail before he reached sanctuary. Once safe, he turned and allowed himself the luxury of an unwinking glare at his attacker.

  Magdelene sputtered with laughter and spit another watermelon seed over the wall. "If you'd held still, little one," she admonished, waving a gnawed bit of rind, "I'd never have hit you."

  The lizard gave that statement the answer it deserved. Whether she'd meant it or not, he had been hit, and a lizard's dignity is easily wounded. He flicked his tongue at the wizard and then vanished into the dark and secret passageways of the wall.

  Magdelene laughed again, tossed the rind on the growing pile to her left, and plucked another slice of fruit from the diminishing pile to her right. It was a beautiful day. Not a cloud blemished the sky, and the heat of the sun lay against her skin like velvet. She stretched luxuriously and considered how wonderful life could be when there was nothing to do but lie in the garden and spit seeds into the ocean.

  "You don’t look much like a wizard."

  At the sound of that clear, young voice, Magdelene unstretched so rapidly she cramped her neck. Fortunately, before she could add to the damage by turning, the owner of the voice came forward to perch on the wall and peer with frank curiosity at the woman in the chair.

  She was small, this intruder, and young; probably no more than thirteen years old, still a child, but already beginning to show signs of the grea
t beauty that would be hers as an adult. Her skin was the deep, warm brown of liquid chocolate, and her black hair curled tight to her head. The linen shift she wore was torn and travel-stained, but still held the hint of bright embroidery beneath the dirt.

  The dark skin, even more than the calloused and dusty feet, told of the long road from the child’s southern home. The most northerly cities of her people were more than six weeks’ hard walk away, and her dialect placed her home farther south than that. Her presence in the garden gave rise to an amazing number of questions. Perhaps the most important was how had she done the impossible and entered the garden with neither Magdelene nor Kali, the housekeeper, aware of her.

  "I came through the gate," she replied simply when asked.

  Magdelene blinked at that. The coral wall didn't usually have a gate. After a moment of mutual staring, she asked, "Who are you?"

  "I am Joah."

  "And who is Joah?"

  "Me." Golden flecks danced in Joah's eyes. "You don't look much like a wizard," she repeated, grinning.

  Magdelene couldn’t help but grin back. "That depends on what you expect a wizard to look like."

  Joah nodded, but her face clearly said she hadn't expected anything like what she’d found: a naked woman, not young, for the untidy mass of red-brown hair was lined with grey, laying in the sun with watermelon juice running between her breasts to pool amid the faint stretch marks on her belly. If she were less pink, the girl realized suddenly, she'd look much like Lythia. And no one would ever mistake her father's good-natured and indolent third wife for a wizard.

  The two stared at each other for a moment longer – brown eyes curious, grey eyes thoughtful.

  "I don’t usually have unexpected visitors," Magdelene said at last. She took an absentminded bite from the slice of watermelon she still held. That the child had power was obvious from the moment she'd entered the garden unannounced. That the child had so much power – and Magdelene in all her dealings with wizards had never touched anyone with a higher potential – was another thing entirely. "Well," she finally continued, as Joah seemed content to sit and stare, "now that you're here, what did you plan to do?"

  Joah spread her hands. "They say you’re the best. I want you to teach me."

  "Oh." It lacked a little something as a response, but it was all Magdelene could think of to say. No was out of the question. Untrained, Joah would be a hazard to all around her and a temptation to those who would use her for their own ends. Magdelene sighed and said good-bye to lazy afternoons in the garden. It looked like she had an apprentice.

  "You might as well have some watermelon." Magdelene sighed again. Even to her own ear that sounded less than welcoming, and the smile that went with it was barely second best. She dragged herself from the chair and walked over to the wall, handing Joah the half-eaten piece of fruit she carried. "I'll show you around as soon as I've washed up." That was a little better. Very little. She hoped the child realized it was nothing personal… just… well… an apprentice? Magdelene couldn’t remember the last time she'd even considered an apprentice, and suspected it was because she never had. She clambered to the top of the low barricade and launched herself off the cliff in a graceful dive… which unfortunately flattened out just above the water.

  A resounding slap broke the even rhythm of the waves.

  "Lizard piss," said the most powerful wizard in the world a moment later. "That hurt."

  * * * *

  "But why doesn’t she ever do any magic?" Joah, industriously scraping clean one of Kali's largest mixing bowls, demanded of the demon. "I mean, if you didn’t know who she was, she could just be somebody's mother."

  "She is."

  "That doesn't count." Joah dismissed Magdelene's absent son with a slightly sticky wave of her hand. "The old shaman back in the cohere used to do more hocus-pocus, even if she wouldn't teach me any of it. Do you know what Magdelene told me she did this morning? She said she was arguing with the wind god to stop him from destroying the village."

  "She was."

  "Yeah, right. Even if there is such a god, you just don't go out and argue with him. I mean, you've got to do things first – light fires, wave wands, sacrifice goats."

  "Hard on the goats."

  "Ok, skip the goats. But you don't just go argue with a god. I mean, it's undignified. I'm finished with this bowl. Can I have that one now?" Bowls were duly exchanged. As to ivory horns and burning red eyes, well to dark-skinned Joah everyone in this part of the world looked strange. And the demon certainly could cook. "Do you know what she's teaching me? She says I have to know myself and keeps asking me who I am. As if I didn't know who I was. I grew up with me. This is new. What flavour are these?"

  "Pumpkin."

  "What’s a pumpkin? Never mind, it doesn't matter as long as it tastes good. She says all power comes from within and that self-discipline is the key to all magic."

  "It is."

  "Ha," Joah snorted. "You’re just saying that because of the chickens. I mean, I'm glad you took care of them while I was busy, but I was going to get to them. I really was." She licked the last bit of batter from her fingers and studied her hands.

  "Remember," Magdelene had said, "how your hands looked when you were a baby. Imagine how they’ll look when you are old." As she spoke, her hands shifted and changed, fat and dimpled one second, gnarled and spotted the next. "When you can do this, then we'll go on."

  Joah's hands had stubbornly stayed the age they were, although to her astonishment she had watched a scrape across her knuckles heal in seconds.

  Now, she sat and watched her nails slowly growing and muttered over and over, "I am Joah. I am Joah." A dimple flickered for an instant on her wrist. "I am bored," she said aloud.

  "JOAH!" Magdelene's summons, in less than dulcet tones, echoed around the kitchen. "I NEED YOU IN THE TOWER! AND RIGHT AWAY!"

  The girl grinned at the demon and swung gracefully off her perch on the high stool. "She needs me in the tower right away," she explained unnecessarily and skipped from the room.

  Kali shook her head, retrieved her bowl, and, although her face had not been built for the expression, looked relieved.

  * * * *

  Magdelene's tower was only one of the peculiarities of the turquoise house on the hill. From the outside, it appeared to be no more than a second-story cupola. From the inside, the view put the room some fifty feet above the rest of the house. And the room was mostly view; walls provided only an anchorage for the roof and a place to hang the huge window shutters.

  It was a little longer than right away before Joah appeared in the tower. She'd run out of the kitchen into a hall she'd never seen before, and it took some time to reorient.

  "Why," she demanded, throwing herself down on a pile of cushions and narrowly missing the overweight black cat who'd curled up there for a nap, "did you make this place so much bigger on the inside than on the outside?"

  Magdelene shrugged. "It left more room for the garden."

  "Well, then can't you get it to stop shifting around? I mean, I never know where I am."

  The most powerful wizard in the world considered it. The house had been getting more eccentric of late. Visitors often discovered that the shortest distance between two points became the long way around. Eventually, Joah would learn to impose her will on the building; in the meantime, chaos was a handy way of preventing her from discovering there were places she was not permitted to find.

  "I can," said Magdelene at last. "But I won't." She dropped to the cushions beside the apprentice. The cat stalked off to find a safer place to sleep. "What do you have to say about this?" She waved a hand at the oval mirror propped by the south windows.

  "Wow! Is that ever great!" Joah leaned forward, her eyes wide. "When are you going to teach me to do that?"

  The mirror held a bird’s-eye view of a running man. Except that it was totally without sound, the two wizards might have been looking out another window.

  "When I think you're r
eady," Magdelene replied firmly. The view moved closer. "Do you know this man?"

  Joah nodded, her face splitting in a grin. "Oh, yes. That’s Zayd, one of my brothers. I mean, one of my older brothers. He's one of the first six."

  "The first six?"

  "Father's first wife had six sons, which pretty much secured the heritage, but Father took another four wives anyway. Mother says that was a good thing 'cause it needs five women to get all the work done around the cohere and take care of Father too."

  "Joah, tell me your father isn’t the Tamalair."

  "Well, I'll tell you if you want me to, but he is." The grin disappeared. "That doesn't matter, does it? You won't send me away."

  "Probably not." Magdelene put an arm around the girl and hugged her close. "I've gotten kind of used to having you around. But, if your father is the ruler of Alair, that does explain why this young man is a scant twenty-four hours away and still running hard."

  Joah giggled. "Zayd isn’t young. He's almost as old as you."

  Magdelene laughed and somehow didn't look much older than Joah while she did it. "Impudent brat. No one is as old as I am."

  Joah stuck out her tongue, and Magdelene attacked. Unfortunately, the most powerful wizard in the world was the more ticklish of the two, and Joah soon began to turn the tables.

  The shriek of the wind through the room and the crash of the mirror on the tiled floor stilled the laughter. Magdelene stood, pulled Joah up from the cushions, and with a wave of her hand backed the wind out the windows and blocked its re-entry. They stared down at the shards of glass, each fragment holding the entire original image. Magdelene shook her head.

  "You broke that mirror," she said firmly out the west window. "The seven-year curse I place on you."

  Joah's hand tightened on her teacher's. Just for a heartbeat, she saw a man's face, huge and ethereal and looking more than a little miffed, hanging over the ocean to the west.

  * * * *

  "Mistress, the..."

  "Not now, Kali, whatever it is. That little imp spent the morning badgering me, and I'm exhausted." Magdelene closed her eyes and a breeze came out of nowhere to rock the hammock. "She wanted me to teach her how to shoot lightning bolts from her fingertips. Lightning bolts, yet. I finally taught her sparks. I'm sorry, Kali, but she just wore me down."