Way of the Wizard Read online

  Jam tried to pry Gan’s hand from his wrist, but he couldn’t—his grip was like iron. “Come on, Gan, I can’t fasten the diaper if you—”

  “Show me,” said Gan.

  Jam looked at his face, looked close. Had Gan really said it? Or was it in his mind, the way Jam always knew what Gan wanted? Gan’s eyes were still closed. He looked completely unchanged. Except for the grip on Jam’s wrist, which grew tighter.

  “Show you what?”

  “The stone,” said Gan.

  A shudder ran through Jam’s body. He hadn’t told Gan anything about the stone. “I don’t have it.”

  “Yes you do,” said Gan.

  “Gan, let me go get Mama, she has to know you’re talking.”

  “No, don’t tell her,” said Gan. “Open your hand.”

  Jam opened the hand that Gan was gripping.

  “Other hand.”

  Jam’s right hand was still holding the tab on the diaper, preparing to fasten it. So he finished the action, closing one side of the diaper, and then opened his hand.

  Right in the middle of his palm, half buried in the skin, was the stone. And it was shining.

  “Power in the stone,” said Gan.

  “Is it the stone that healed you?”

  “I’m not healed,” said Gan.

  Then, as Jam watched, the stone receded into his palm and the skin closed over it as if it had never been opened.

  “It wasn’t there before, Gan. How will I know when it’s there?”

  “It’s always there. If you know how to see.”

  “How’d I get it? I never touched it. How’d it get inside me like that?”

  “Your chem teacher. He serves the enemy who trapped me like this. He gathers power for him and stores it in the stone. Steals it from the children. When he has to tell his master that he lost it. . . .” Gan smiled, a mirthless, mechanical smile, as if he were controlling his body from the outside, making himself smile by pulling on his own cheeks. “He’ll want it back.”

  “Well, yeah,” said Jam.

  “Don’t touch him,” said Gan. “Don’t let him touch you.”

  “Who’s his master?”

  “If he ever finds out you’re involved in this, Jam, you’ll end up like me. Or dead.”

  “So it wasn’t Daddy?”

  “Daddy hit me, yes, like he hit me a hundred times before. Do you think I’d ever let him hurt me? No, my enemy struck me at the same moment. And Daddy got blamed for it.” Then, as if he could read Jam’s thoughts, he added, “Don’t go feeling sorry for Daddy. He meant to hurt me every time.”

  “Is it the stone that’s letting you talk?”

  “The power stored up in the stone. When you stop touching me, I’ll be trapped again.”

  “Then I’ll never let go. Can you get up and walk?”

  “I’d use up everything in that stone within an hour.”

  “What’s going on, Gan? Who’s your enemy? Are you in a gang?”

  Gan’s body trembled with grim laughter. “A gang? You could say that. Yes, a gang. The gangs that secretly rule the world. The turf wars that are invisible to people who have no nose for magic. Sorcerers with deep power. This is the price I pay for being uppity.”

  “Isn’t there anybody who can help you?”

  “There’s nobody we can trust. You never know who is a servant of the Emperor.”

  “There’s no emperor in America.”

  “In the real world, there’s no America. Only the wizards and their toys and playthings in the natural world. What’s a president or an army or money compared to someone who controls the laws of physics at their root? Now let go of me, before we use up the stone. We’ll need its power.”

  “Are you under a spell? Like in a book?” But there was no answer, for Gan had let go, and now skin was not touching skin. Gan lay there as he had for all these years, slack-faced, inert, unable to move or speak or even show that he recognized you. But he was inside that body, just as Jam had always believed, just as Mother pretended to believe but didn’t anymore. Gan was alive and he had spoken and . . .

  Jam sank to the floor beside Gan’s bed and cried.

  Mama came into the room. Jam stopped himself from crying, but it was too late, she had seen.

  “Oh, baby,” she said, “are you really sick? Or is there something wrong at school?”

  “Gan,” said Jam. And then she thought she understood, and sat beside him on the floor, and cried with him for her great strong son Ghana, who had once been her friend and protector, and now lay on a bed in her living room like a corpse in a coffin, so her life was one long endless funeral. Jam understood now, and longed to tell her what was really going on. But Gan had told him not to, and so he didn’t. He just wept with his mother until they were worn out with weeping.

  Then she went to work, and Jam went outside and watered the tomatoes and sprayed them for the fungus that wiped them out last year. They’d already had so many tomatoes this year, what with Jam spraying them every two weeks, that they’d been sharing with half the neighborhood. And Jam and Mother were so sick of tomatoes that they were giving them all away now. But Jam couldn’t stop watering and spraying them. It was as if having too many tomatoes this year made up for having almost none the last.

  Jam thought about what Gan had told him. An emperor. Wizards. Gan involved in a war—a revolution?—and nobody knew it. How futile it was that Jam had worked so hard last year to learn the name and capital and location of every nation in the world—only to find that they don’t even matter. He wondered what the map would look like, if the cartographers knew who really ran things.

  And yet the government still took taxes and controlled the cops and the army—that was power, it wasn’t nothing. Did the wizards meddle in the wars of ordinary people? Fiddle with the laws that Congress or the city council passed? Mess with zoning laws? Or bigger stuff, like the weather. Could they stop global warming if they felt like it? Or had the caused it? Or merely caused people to believe it was happening? What was real, now that a small part of the secret world had been revealed?

  I have a stone in my hand.

  Mr. Laudon showed up so soon after school let out that Jam suspected he dismissed class early. Or maybe his last period was free. Anyway, if he knocked on the door, Jam didn’t hear it. The first he knew Laudon was there was when he saw him standing near the gate to the front yard, watching as Jam pick the ready beans off the tall vines. Jam was carrying the picked beans in his shirt, holding the bottom of it out like a basket.

  Jam couldn’t think of a thing to say. So he said, “Want some tomatoes?”

  Laudon looked at the beans in his shirt. “That what you call a tomato?”

  “No, we just got plenty of tomatoes. We ain’t sick of beans yet.”

  He could see Laudon wince at “ain’t.” Laudon was the kind of teacher who would never catch on that whenever he wanted to, Jam spoke in the same educated accents and careful grammar as his mother. The kind of teacher who thought there was something morally wrong with speaking in the vernacular.

  “I came for the stone,” said Laudon.

  Jam rolled up the front of his shirt to hold the beans, then pulled it off over his head and set it on the back lawn. He pried off his shoes. Pulled off his socks. Pulled off his pants and tossed them to Laudon. Wearing only his jockeys, he said, “You want to sniff these, too, Mr. Laudon? That what you came over for?”

  Laudon glared—but he went through the pockets of the pants. “This proves nothing. You’ve been home long enough to hide it anywhere.”

  As if I’d let it out of my sight, now that I know what it can do. “What’s so important about this stone, Mr. Laudon?”

  “It’s an antique.”

  “A genuine philosopher’s stone.”

  “A stone that people in the middle ages genuinely believed to be one.”

  “That’s such a lie,” said Jam.

  “Watch what you say to me.”

  “You’re in my bac
k yard, watching me strip my clothes off. I’ll say what I want, or you’ll be explaining to the cops what you’re doing here.”

  Laudon threw the pants back at him. “I didn’t ask you to take your clothes off.”

  “There were a lot of kids in that room, Mr. Laudon. I’m the one who was unconscious, remember? Why not search among the ones who were awake? What about Rhonda Jones? She’s the one who dropped it. Whatever’s in that stone, it bothered her, didn’t it? Maybe she took it.”

  “You know she didn’t,” said Laudon. “You think I don’t know how to track the stone? Where it is, and who has it?”

  “And yet you checked the pockets of my pants.”

  Laudon glared. “Maybe I should go ask your brother.”

  “Go ahead,” said Jam. But inside, he was wondering: Was Laudon the enemy who did this to Gan? Would he harm Gan, lying there helpless in bed?”

  Laudon smirked. “You haven’t given it to him, I know that much. You don’t know how.”

  Jam wondered what would happen if he touched Laudon. Not hit him, just touched him. Would Laudon get a jolt of power the way Gan did? Or would Jam have power over Laudon? How did this stuff work?

  “You’ve got the fire in your eyes,” said Laudon. “Ambition. You’re wondering if you can use the power in the stone. The answer is, you can’t. It’s a collector. A battery of magic. Only someone with power can draw on it. And that’s not you.”

  He said “you” with such contempt that it made Jam angry. He bent over and plunged both hands into the muddy soil around the tomatoes. But he did it while fending, so that when he pulled his hands out, they were clean—not a speck of dirt or mud clung to them. He showed his hands to Laudon and then walked toward him. “Does this look like ‘no power’ to you?”

  “You can fend?” asked Laudon, glancing around. “Then why did you let me. . . . ” He clamped his mouth shut.

  Why did I let him in here? Interesting. So the fending he did was supposed to work farther than just a micron’s depth of air surrounding his body. Jam had never tried to push things farther away than that. He tried to do it, to use the fending to push outward.

  It was like when he decided to try to wiggle his ears. He had already noticed that when he grinned, his ears went up. So he stood in front of the mirror, grinning and then letting his face go slack, trying to feel the muscles that moved his ears. Then he worked at moving only those muscles, worked for days on it, and pretty soon he could do it—move either ear up and down, without stirring a muscle on the front of his face.

  This was the same thing, in a way—not a muscle, but he did know how to fend a little. Now he isolated the feeling, the thing he did to make the fending happen, and pushed it outward from himself. At first he had to move his arms a little, but quickly he realized that this had nothing to do with it.

  His shirt, twisted up on the ground with the beans inside, began to roll away from him. The garden hose snaked across the grass. Laudon took a step back. “You don’t know what you’re doing here, Jam. Don’t attract the attention of powers you don’t understand.”

  “You’re the one who doesn’t understand,” said Jam. “You said the stone was nothing but a collector, but that’s not true. That’s what you are, gathering whatever magical power your students have. Rhonda had a lot of it, didn’t she? But you don’t know what I have.”

  “I know you fainted when you touched it.”

  “I never touched it,” said Jam.

  “And I know it’s here. Somewhere close.”

  Jam gathered his fending power and made a thrust toward Laudon.

  Laudon staggered back. He looked frightened. Now Jam was sure that Laudon himself was no wizard. He tried to bully Jam only as long as he thought Jam was powerless, just a kid who stole something. Now that he knew Jam had some power—apparently more than Jam himself had guessed—it was a different story. Laudon was frightened.

  “The emperor will hear of this.”

  “As if you ever met the emperor,” said Jam contemptuously. “All you’re good for is gathering power for somebody else. And not the emperor.”

  “A servant of the emperor,” said Laudon. “The same thing.”

  “Unless it isn’t. Didn’t you take history? Don’t you know how this works? How do you know the one you serve, the one you’ve been gathering power for, how do you know he’s really loyal to the emperor? How do you know he isn’t gathering power to try to challenge him?” Jam gave Laudon another shove, which knocked him off his feet this time.

  This is cool, thought Jam.

  He flung the hose at Laudon now, and it went after him like a flying snake, hitting him, splashing him with the dregs of water left in the hose.

  “I’ll report this!”

  “What can you do to me that’s worse than was already done? My brother’s lying in there like a vegetable, and you think I’m worried about the treasonous wizard you serve?”

  “He’s not treasonous!” But Laudon looked worried now—about a lot more than a garden hose or a few grass stains on his butt. “You don’t know who you’re messing with!”

  Which was true enough. Jam had no idea who the emperor was, or who Laudon’s master was, or anything but this: He had a stone inside his skin, and now when he touched Gan, his brother came to life under his hand.

  He also knew that when he made wild accusations about Laudon’s master, he got more anxious and fearful. So maybe there was some truth to it.

  I shouldn’t mess with this, thought Jam. I’m out of my depth. Whatever Laudon’s afraid of, I should be afraid of it too.

  Or maybe not. Maybe I shouldn’t let fear decide what I’m going to do. Gan never showed fear of anything.

  Then again, Gan ended up as a vegetable for all these years, trapped inside a body that couldn’t do anything. What might happen to me?

  What will happen to me—and Gan, and Mother—if I don’t do anything?

  “Who is your master?” demanded Jam.

  Laudon rolled his eyes. “As if I’d tell you.”

  “I’ll ask Gan.”

  “Yes, yes, go ahead,” said Laudon, taunting him now. “If he knew, do you think he would have let down his guard? You don’t know anything, little boy.”

  “I know that you don’t know anything, either. In fact, you know less than nothing, because the things you think you know are wrong.”

  “It’s the madness of power on you, boy. You think you’re the first? You realize you’ve got something that nobody else has, you realize you’ve got your hands on something powerful, and suddenly you think you’re omnipotent. But go look at your brother. See what you think about his omnipotence!”

  “No, I don’t think I’m powerful,” said Jam. “Just more powerful than you.”

  “But not more powerful than the one I serve. Never more powerful than that. And every word you say, every push you make with that fending power of yours will only draw attention to you. Attention you truly do not want.”

  “But I do want it,” said Jam. “I want the emperor to come here! I want the emperor to judge between us!”

  Where had that idea come from?

  Gan? Was it Gan, telling him what to say?

  “You tell the emperor who your master is, and how he trapped Gan, and how he’s using you to gather power.”

  “It’s for the emperor, I told you, all the power I’ve gathered.”

  “Then let the emperor come, and I’ll give the stone to him!”

  “So you do have it.”

  Jam rolled his eyes. “Duh.”

  “That’s all I needed to hear,” said Laudon. He stood up. Started walking toward Jam.

  Jam fended him. Laudon didn’t even pause. “I can feel your little pushes, boy,” he said. “That made it easy to pretend you had power over me. But you don’t. You’re like a baby with a squirt gun.” Laudon reached out and took Jam by the throat. “Where is it? Not in your head—though that wouldn’t stop me, I’d have your head, it belongs to my master just like every
thing else does.”

  “Nothing belongs to your master!” cried Jam. “It all belongs to the emperor!” Or at least it would if this magic society worked like feudalism.

  “Do you think the emperor cares what happens to you?” Laudon ran a finger down Jam’s neck and chest until it rested directly over his heart. “Which arm?” he asked. Then his finger traced out and down to Jam’s right hand. “I’ll have that back now, thanks.”

  “No you won’t,” said Jam. He rammed his knee into Laudon’s groin.

  “Owie owie,” said Laudon, sarcastically.

  “I should have known,” said Jam. “You gave your balls to your master along with everything else.”

  “Open your hand.”

  “Open it yourself.”

  “Right down to the bone if I have to,” said Laudon. Then he pulled a sharp piece of obsidian from his pocket and prepared to slice Jam’s palm open.

  So all his bravado had come to nothing. And yet there was a power that could save him—or destroy him—but what else could he call upon? He had only just learned that there was an emperor, and yet somehow he knew all about him. No, he knew nothing about him but his true title—and the only other thing that mattered. That Jam could trust him.

  He pulled away from Laudon and fended him with all his might. “I call upon the Emperor of the Air, to come and judge between you and me!”

  His fending was more powerful than Jam had dared to hope—Laudon flew away from him clear to the fence and fell into the cucumbers.

  “Oh, master!” cried Laudon, reaching out his arms beseechingly.

  Oh. It wasn’t Jam’s power that had thrown Laudon so far. Jam had called on an outside power, but it wasn’t the emperor who had come.

  Jam turned to see Mother standing in the back door. “Why did you come back here!” she demanded of Laudon.

  “He has it,” Laudon said. “I told you he had it.”

  “I would have known,” she said. “Do you think he could have it, and I not know?”

  “He admitted it! And he can fend. He has power.”

  “He has no power,” said Mother. “Do you think I can’t tend my own house?”