Wizards (18 page)

"Dalnay alter wer'd donant?" She asked politely.

I smiled back and offered her my hand. I could learn her language if we touched.

She hesitated for a second, as if shaking hands was an unusual custom in this place and then she brought her hand to mine. Even that she did with the utmost elegance. I was beginning to feel the way I did when I accidently found myself in the lingerie section of a department store. I was still in my working clothes from the wood yard and would never pass for elegant, or properly civilized.

As we touched I felt her willing me her language. That was more than a little surprising.

"Forgive me," she said as our hands parted. "I should have recognized you for an Outlands wizard by your clothes and demeanor as soon as I set eyes on you. In my own defense, I can only say such visits are rare and this is the first time it has happened to me."

"I apologize for intruding in your house. I am looking for Wizard Haldane Plath and was wondering if you could tell me where to find him?" I don't normally talk that politely, but this language forced it on me. There were no contractions for anything and every sentence I framed required an unusual amount of thought. I found myself wondering if Jenny would like to come and visit.

"Haldane is hardly a wizard, though he would thank you for your flattering expression of opinion about him. He is my younger son and possesses a small quantity of the wizardly gifts. His brother Talder is one of the few true wizards of his generation. Even on Valhalla, few true wizards are born in our lifetimes."

"I have gathered from my previous encounters that wizards are very few and far between."

"Come with me now and I shall prepare you food and drink. You would think little of me as a host if I did not."

"It is unnecessary to put yourself to such trouble."

"I find it essential that I do."

As I followed this strange polite woman along the way she had just come, I reflected on the fact that asking what time it was probably would take me an hour on this world. We hadn't even managed to exchange names yet.

"Did you meet Haldane in the Outlands?"

We were sitting cross legged in front of a slice of an ancient tree masquerading as a low table. My hostess had prepared some kind of tea in a china pot but made no attempt to pour it out into the tiny elegant cups she put out.

"I met Haldane in Wales, which is my country of birth."

"Wales," she repeated, "What a strange sounding name for a place that begets wizards."

"My name is Jake Morrissey," I managed to get in. Some part of my brain was telling me I should have mentioned my parents, grandparents and any famous ancestors, but frankly life is much too short for all that nonsense.

"I am Lindel Plath, daughter of Jonel and Tride, cousin to the Lind and of the family Brindel, all justly renowned for the number of wizards we have produced."

"What service do the wizards of Valhalla perform?" Grief, that was the nearest I could find for 'What do your wizards do?'

"It is the purpose of Valhalla to serve as a shining example of how the human race can surpass its base expectations. Our wizards travel to the Outlands, those benighted worlds where enlightenment remains only an aspiration, and they provide them with guidance in their growth of spirit."

I wanted to reply, 'By rape, murder and pillage, I suppose?' However, the language didn't have that kind of vocabulary. Seriously, the nearest description I could find for rape was, 'unwelcome attentions, not deterred by a polite refusal, but requiring the use of the single offensive word stop'. Try crying that out in a back alley and see who comes running.

I was almost relieved when Haldane ran into the room screaming at the top of his voice and wielding what looked like a garden hoe. He swung the hoe down at my head with desperate force.

I suppose I should have deflected the hoe with magic or caused it to stop in the air, but my primitive instincts took over and I rolled to one side. Lindel screamed in terror as the hoe blade missed me by millimeters and embedded itself into the table top. I leapt to my feet and manhandled Haldane off the hoe before he could free it. He fell to the floor weeping as I dragged the sharp end of the hoe out of the table top and held it defensively in front of me.

"This barbarian wizard from the Outlands has taken my birth right powers from me in violation of my person, my Mother," Haldane sobbed.

This language was beginning to wear me down. Every sentence had to be full of detail or it made no sense. If I had tried to say 'He was trying to kill me,' without saying who 'he' was it would come out as the equivalent of the single word 'kill'. Before I could compose a suitably long winded reply, Lindel replied.

"Such a removal of your powers is without precedent and certainly impossible according to the accepted theories of magic. Calm and gather yourself child, knowing that what you accuse the barbarian wizard of is in this case without any trace of credibility. Your precipitate acts of violence in front of a guest could well result in your educational retraining at a social facility."

Lindel turned to me and frowned at the way I was holding the hoe.

"Please place the garden implement on the ground where it is unlikely to cause offence or accidental injury. The youngest child of my loins has suffered some form of mental aberration from which we must pray that he recovers as soon as possible."

I decided I would love to see a shouting match on this world. I wondered if such a couple would end up sitting down with a cup of tea, exhausted long before they managed more than a couple of extremely long and complicated shouts at each other.

"I am reluctant to place the hoe within reach of Haldane given his untoward acts of extreme displeasure towards me." As soon as I finished the sentence I realized it would certainly cause offence, it was so abrupt.

Lindel frowned but made no further comment about the hoe. She knelt before her son and began to comfort him. I felt like a bit of a fool standing waving the hoe around so I took it to the far end of the room and put it down behind a bench before returning to Haldane and his mother.

"Haldane has suffered an inexplicable loss of his birth right powers, part of his heritage from the family of Plath." Lindel told me. "I can sense this absence in him where once there was a significant presence. Haldane believes, mistakenly I am sure, that this is the consequential result of some action against him on your part."

"I had reason to believe that Haldane would use his transportation powers to harm the girl I am enamored of in the place of my birth. Haldane has already travelled with her against her desires in a manner that would indicate he might be planning such a course of action. Therefore I placed upon Haldane a magical instruction to cease and desist from travelling until such time as I could ascertain that he would not cause injury or commit malfeasance upon my beloved's person."

Phew, this could take forever. I was going to have to find a way to short circuit this whole discussion before my throat or my mind gave out. Lindel shook her head in disbelief. I held out my hand to her.

"There is a way that can let you observe the actions of your son Haldane by magical re-enactment of the events, as perceived by my eyes and heard by my ears."

Lindel hesitated and then grabbed my hand defiantly. I gave her my memories of my encounters with her son and while I was at it, I gave her the English language.

"Haldane! How could you do such things?" she asked in English and then put her hand to her mouth in realization of what she had said. "This is such a dirty brutal language."

"Which I need to use if I'm to explain," I replied curtly. It was such a relief to talk in short sentences again that I smiled inappropriately.

"He hurt Talder, mummy," Haldane broke in, also speaking in English. He had stopped crying, but was still sitting on the floor with his hands hugging around his tucked up legs.

"You caused Talder's facial injuries?" Lindel accused.

"He turned the King of Salice to stone and stabbed a man with an arrow. Would you like to see for yourself?" I held out my hand to her again, but Lindel backed away from it as though it was a snake.

"Mummy, I wanted revenge for Talder. These Outworld scum have no right to decent treatment. They are ours to do with as we will. All our wizards do it. We take whole Outland kingdoms and bend them to our desires."

Lindel backed away from her son, much as she had just backed away from me.

"We are a force for good in the multiverse," she protested.

"Your wizards are murderers and rapists, taking anything they want without thought of the consequences or the good of the people they attack." Gosh it was good to use words with a bit of power in them, even though I seemed to have inherited a touch of the verbose from my contact with the language of Valhalla. I hoped it was going to wear off soon.

My words hit Lindel like physical blows. There were no words for murder or rape in her native language.

"Centuries of lies," she whispered.

"Come on, you must have known. Surely your wizards have taken you to other worlds?"

Lindel looked at me in astonishment. "No wizard can transport more than the clothes on his back and perhaps a small bag or two."

Haldane hid his face behind his legs. What a world this was, a conspiracy of wizards who chose to use their powers in ways forbidden to them at home. I suppose that if I had been brought up here in all this stifling politeness, I might go a little mad when I was abroad. But there was a real difference between cutting loose and acting evil.

I stalked up to Haldane.

"How did you follow me home?"

Haldane sobbed, but didn't answer.

"Tell him," Lindel ordered, her voice as cold as ice.

"I followed you from Salice. All wizards leave a trace that lasts a few seconds. You took your dragon and girl through and that created a hole that lasted much longer than normal."

"I shall use detours in future. I'll leave now, since only you know the way to Earth and you can't show anybody now your powers are gone."

"Restore my powers, please."

I stared down at Haldane without the slightest trace of sympathy. When I cast a magic light or a shield, it drains power continuously from me. Whatever I did to Haldane was a one-off and seemed to be permanent. I suppose I could have experimented to see if I could put his powers back, but under the circumstances I'd no desire to try.

"Sorry, that isn't possible."

I turned to Lindel who looked at me with distain.

"Your world produces monsters. I've stilled this one's powers and I shall do the same to any of your people I come across. If I could do it, I'd block your world from the civilized communities of the Outworlds."

"We are not as you claim," Lindel protested.

"You export sickness into the multiverse while keeping your hands clean at home. What would you call yourself?"

I didn't wait for an answer but hopped straight to Salice. I sat in my empty bedroom for a few minutes to make sure no one was following me. Then I hopped back to the roof of the accommodation tower in the college.

It was getting dark and I had to cast a glow of light around me to see what I was doing. The top of the tower block was empty and the inspection doors onto the roof were locked. I searched around and could see no sign of Jenny's phone. I was certain I put it on the roof.

I hopped to the bench I'd been sitting at. I had dropped my own phone when I hopped to attack Haldane. There was no sign of my phone at the bench, which was no great surprise. I sat down and thought about what to do next.

"She came home and rushed out again an hour or so ago, Jake," Jenny's father told me at his front door. "Jenny seemed quite upset. Have you two had an argument? We've noticed how you never come around these days."

"No, not really Mr. Owens. I've got to dash." I escaped down the drive and hopped to the only place I could think of where Jenny might have gone.

"Meep!" [You're safe!]

"Jake, we've been so worried!"

Jenny and Fluffy were all over me and I spent the next few minutes fending off their hugs. Fending off a dragon is not the easiest thing to do. After a few minutes we settled down and I told them what happened to me.

"I saw you tumbling off the roof to your death," Jenny told me. "Then you vanished and I thought you'd hop back to me. When I gave up on that, I found I was trapped. Haldane hopped us up there and I didn't have any way to tell anybody where I was. I thought I was going to end up dying there when I found my phone on a ledge. I called campus security and told them some boys locked me on the roof as a joke. I was so worried about you, Jake."

"Meep, meep, meep." [When Jenny came to me, I was worried too. We thought he might have killed you.]

"We're safe now," I explained. "Only Haldane knows how to hop here and his powers are gone."

"Do you think Valhalla is the world all bad wizards come from?"

"I've no idea, but it seems a lot of them come from there."

"But you said their mother was so civilized. How could they turn out such evil people?"