Way of the Wizard Read online

  “Hmm,” said Saint Oswald, thoughtfully. “Only kings can hunt deer, you know.”

  The Charcoal Burner looked blank.

  “Let us see,” said Saint Oswald. “A man in black clothes, with powerful magic and ravens at his command, and the hunting rights of a king. This suggests nothing to you? No apparently it does not. Well, it so happens that I think I know the person you mean. He is indeed very arrogant and perhaps the time has come to humble him a little. If I understand you aright, you are angry because he does not speak to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, I believe I shall loosen his tongue a little.”

  “What sort of punishment is that?” asked the Charcoal Burner. “I want you to make Blencathra fall on his head!”

  Saint Oswald made a sound of irritation. “What do you know of it?” he said. “Believe me, I am a far better judge than you of how to hurt this man!”

  As Saint Oswald spoke John Uskglass began to talk in a rapid and rather excited manner. This was unusual but did not at first seem sinister. All his courtiers and servants listened politely. But minutes went by—and then hours—and he did not stop talking. He talked through dinner; he talked through mass; he talked through the night. He made prophesies, recited Bible passages, told the histories of various fairy kingdoms, gave recipes for pies. He gave away political secrets, magical secrets, infernal secrets, Divine secrets and scandalous secrets—as a result of which the Kingdom of Northern England was thrown into various political and theological crises. Thomas of Dundale and William of Lanchester begged and threatened and pleaded, but nothing they said could make the King stop talking. Eventually they were obliged to lock him in the little room at the top of the castle so that no one else could hear him. Then, since it was inconceivable that a king should talk without someone listening, they were obliged to stay with him, day after day. After exactly three days he fell silent.

  Two days later he rode into the Charcoal Burner’s clearing. He looked so pale and worn that the Charcoal Burner was in high hopes that Saint Oswald might have relented and pushed Blencathra on his head.

  “What is that you want from me?” asked John Uskglass, warily.

  “Ha!” said the Charcoal Burner with triumphant looks. “Ask my pardon for turning poor Blakeman into a fish!”

  A long silence.

  Then with gritted teeth, John Uskglass asked the Charcoal Burner’s pardon. “Is there any thing else you want?” he asked.

  “Repair all the hurts you did me!”

  Immediately the Charcoal Burner’s stack and hut reappeared just as they had always been; the trees were made whole again; fresh, green leaves covered their branches; and a sweet lawn of soft grass spread over the clearing.

  “Any thing else?”

  The Charcoal Burner closed his eyes and strained to summon up an image of unthinkable wealth. “Another pig!” he declared.

  John Uskglass was beginning to suspect that he had made a miscalculation somewhere—though he could not for his life tell where it was. Nevertheless he felt confident enough to say, “I will grant you a pig—if you promise that you will tell no one who gave it to you or why.”

  “How can I?” said the Charcoal Burner. “I do not know who you are. Why?” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Who are you?”

  “No one,” said John Uskglass, quickly.

  Another pig appeared, the very twin of Blakeman, and while the Charcoal Burner was exclaiming over his good fortune, John Uskglass got on his horse and rode away in a condition of the most complete mystification.

  Shortly after that he returned to his capital city of Newcastle. In the next fifty or sixty years his lords and servants often reminded him of the excellent hunting to be had in Cumbria, but he was careful never to go there again until he was sure the Charcoal Burner was dead.

  Delia Sherman is the author of the novels Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove, and The Fall of the Kings (with Ellen Kushner). She has also written two novels for young adults: Changeling and The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen. The Freedom Maze, a middle-grade historical novel about time travel and slavery, is coming out from Big Mouth Press in 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and in numerous anthologies, and she has new stories forthcoming in the teen vampire anthology Teeth and Ellen Datlow’s urban fantasy anthology Naked City.

  Sherman has only written one other story about a wizard—the Duke of Malvoeux in The Porcelain Dove, who was truly pure, mad evil, and preyed on small children. This story, too, is about an evil wizard, or it is according to the eponymous wizard, anyway.

  “No matter what I try to write about,” Sherman says, “somehow it always, on some level or other, boils down to finding and making family outside of the ties of blood.”

  And this story is no exception. In it, Nick Chanticleer finds himself in need of a safe haven and finds it in an unlikely place when he becomes the accidental apprentice to a self-proclaimed evil wizard who runs a bookshop called Evil Wizard Books.

  For some people there is no place more magical than a bookstore. A bookstore is bigger on the inside than the outside, because it contains entire populations and worlds that exist only between the pages of the books within.

  In bookstores, we are reminded not to judge a book by its cover—advice that applies as well to the volumes on the shelves as to the people who man the stacks.

  Wizard’s Apprentice

  Delia Sherman

  There’s an evil wizard living in Dahoe, Maine. It says so, on the sign hanging outside his shop:

  Evil Wizard Books

  Z. Smallbone, Prop.

  His shop is also his house, which looks just like an Evil Wizard’s house ought to look. It’s big and tumble-down, with a porch all around it and fancy carving around the eaves. It even has a tower in which a light glows balefully red at hours when an ordinary bookseller would be asleep. There are shelves and shelves of large, moldy-smelling, dusty leather books. Bats nest in its roof and ravens and owls nest in the pines that huddle around it.

  The cellar is home to a family of foxes.

  And then there’s the Evil Wizard himself. Zachariah Smallbone. I ask you, is that any kind of name for an ordinary bookseller? He even looks evil. His hair is an explosion of dirty grey; his beard is a yellow-white thicket; his eyes glitter behind little iron-rimmed glasses. He always wears an old-fashioned rusty black coat and a top hat, furry with age and broken down on one side.

  There are rumors about what he can do. He can turn people into animals, they say: and vice versa. He can give you fleas or cramps or make your house burn down. He can hex you into splitting your own foot in two instead of a log into kindling. He can kill with a word or a look, if he has a mind.

  It’s no wonder, then, that the good people of Dahoe, Maine make a practice of leaving Mr. Smallbone pretty much alone. Tourists, who don’t know any better, occasionally go into his shop to look for bargains. They generally come out faster than they went in, and they never come back.

  Every once in a blue moon, Mr. Smallbone employs an assistant. A scruffy-haired kid will appear one day, sweeping the porch, bringing in wood, feeding the chickens. And then, after a month or a year, he’ll disappear again. Some say Smallbone turns then into bats or ravens or owls or foxes, or boils their bones for his evil spells. Nobody knows and nobody asks. It’s not like they’re local kids, with families people know and care about. They all come from away foreign—Canada or Vermont or Massachusetts, and they probably deserve whatever happens to them. If they were good boys, they wouldn’t be working for an Evil Wizard, would they?

  Well, it all depends what you call a good boy.

  According to his uncle, Nick Chanticleer was anything but. According to his uncle, Nick Chanticleer was a waste of three meals a day and a bed: a sneak, a liar, a lazy good-for-nothing.

  To be fair to Nick’s uncle, this was a fair description of Nick’s behavior. But since Nick’s uncle waled the tar out of him at le
ast once a day and twice on Sundays no matter what, Nick couldn’t see any reason to behave any better. He stole hot dogs from the fridge because his uncle didn’t feed him enough. He stole naps behind the woodpile because his uncle worked him too hard. He lied like a rug because sometimes he could fool his uncle into hitting someone else instead of him.

  Whenever he saw the chance, he ran away.

  He never got very far. For someone with such low opinion of Nick’s character, his uncle was strangely set on keeping him around. Family should stick together—which meant he needed Nick to do all the cooking. For a kid, Nick was a pretty good cook. He also liked having somebody around to bully. In any case, he always tracked Nick down and brought him back home.

  On Nick’s eleventh birthday, he ran away again. He made a bologna and Wonder Bread sandwich and wrapped it in a checked handkerchief. When his uncle was asleep, he let himself quietly out the back door and set out walking.

  Nick walked all through the night, cutting through the woods and staying away from towns. At dawn, he stopped and ate half the bologna and Wonder Bread. At noon, he ate the rest. That afternoon, it began to snow.

  By nightfall, Nick was freezing, soaked, and starving. Even when the moon rose, it was black dark under the trees, and full of strange rustlings and squeakings. Nick was about ready to cry from cold and fear and weariness when he saw a red light, high up and far away through the snow and bare branches.

  Nick followed the light to a paved road and a mailbox and a wooden sign, its words half-veiled with snow. Beyond the sign was a drive way and a big, shadowy house lurking among the pine trees. Nick stumbled up the porch steps and banged on the heavy front door with hands numb with cold. Nothing happened for what seemed a very long time. Then the door flew open with a shriek of unoiled hinges.

  “What do you want?”

  It was an old man’s voice, crotchety and suspicious. Given a choice, Nick would have turned right around and gone somewhere else. As it was, Nick said, “Something to eat and a place to rest. I’m about frozen solid.”

  The old man peered at him, dark eyes glittering behind small round glasses. “Can you read, boy?”

  “What?”

  “Are you deaf, or just stupid? Can you read?”

  Nick took in the old guy’s wild hair and wilder beard, his old-fashioned coat and his ridiculous top hat. None of these things made Nick willing to part with even a little piece of truth about himself. “No. I can’t.”

  “You sure?” The old man handed him a card. “Take a look at this.”

  Nick took the card, turned it upside down and around, then handed it back to the old man with a shrug, very glad that he’d lied to him.

  The card said:

  Evil Wizard Books

  Zachariah Smallbone, Proprietor

  Arcana, Alchemy, Animal Transformation

  Speculative Fiction

  Monday-Saturday. By Chance and by Appointment

  Mr. Smallbone peered at him through his round glasses. “Humph. You’re letting the cold in. Close the door behind you. And leave your boots by the door. I can’t have you tracking up the floor.”

  That was how Nick came to be the Evil Wizard’s new apprentice.

  At first he just thought he was doing some chores in return for food and a night’s shelter. But next morning, after a breakfast of oatmeal and maple syrup, Mr. Smallbone handed him a broom and a feather duster.

  “Clean the front room,” he said. “Floor and books and shelves. Every speck of dirt, mind, and every trace of dust.”

  Nick gave it his best, but sweep as he might, the front room was no cleaner by the end of the day than it was when he started.

  “That won’t do at all,” said the Wizard. “You’ll have to try again tomorrow. You’d best cook supper—there’s the makings for scrapple in the icebox.”

  Since the snow had given way to a breath-freezing cold snap, Nick wasn’t too unhappy with this turn of events. Mr. Smallbone might be an Evil Wizard, ugly as home-made sin, and vinegar-tongued. But a bed is a bed and food is food. If things got bad, he could always run away.

  After days of sweeping, the front room was, if anything, dirtier than it had been.

  “I’ve met dogs smarter than you,” Smallbone yelled. “I should turn you into one, sell you at the county fair. You must have some kind of brain, or you wouldn’t be able to talk. Use it, boy. I’m losing patience.”

  Figuring it was only a matter of time before Mr. Smallbone started to beat up on him, Nick decided it was time to run away from Evil Wizard Books. He took some brown bread and home-cured ham from the icebox, wrapped it and his flashlight in his checked handkerchief, and crept out the back door. The driveway was shoveled, and Nick tiptoed down it, towards the main road . . .

  And found himself on the porch again, going in the back door.

  At dawn, Mr. Smallbone found him walking in the back door for the umpteenth time.

  “Running away?” Mr. Smallbone smiled unpleasantly, his teeth like hard yellow tiles in his bushy beard.

  “Nope,” Nick said. “Just wanted some air.”

  “There’s air inside the house,” Mr. Smallbone said.

  “Too dusty.”

  “If you don’t like the dust,” Mr. Smallbone said, “you’d best get rid of it, hadn’t you?”

  Desperate, Nick used his brain, as instructed. He started to look into the books he was supposed to be cleaning to see if they held any clues to the front room’s stubborn dirt. He learned a number of interesting things, including how to cast fortunes by looking at a sheep’s liver, but nothing that seemed useful for cleaning dirty rooms. Finally, behind a chair he’d swept under a dozen times before, he found a book called A Witch’s Manual of Practical Housekeeping.

  He stuffed it under his sweater and smuggled it upstairs to read. It told him not only that there was a spell of chaos on the front room, but how to break it. Which he did, taking a couple of days over it, and making a lot of noise with brooms and buckets to cover up his spell-casting.

  When the front room sparkled, he showed it to Mr. Smallbone. “Humph,” said Mr. Smallbone. “You did this all yourself, did you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Without help?”

  “Yep. Can I leave now?”

  Mr. Smallbone gave Nick the evilest smile in his repertoire. “Nope. The woodbox is empty. Fill it.”

  Nick wasn’t at all surprised when the woodbox proved as impossible to fill as the front room had been to clean. He found the solution to that problem in a volume shoved out of line with the books around it, which also taught him about carrying water in colanders and filling buckets with holes in them.

  When the woodbox was full, Mr. Smallbone found other difficult tasks for Nick to do, like sorting a barrel of white and wild rice into separate jars, building a stone wall in a single day, and turning a branch of holly into a rose. By the time Nick had mastered these skills, it was spring and he didn’t want to run away any more. He wanted to keep learning magic.

  It’s not that he’d gotten to like Mr. Smallbone any better—Nick still though he was crazy and mean and ugly. But if Mr. Smallbone yelled and swore, there were always plenty of blankets on Nick’s bed and food on his plate. And if he turned Nick into a raven or a fox when the fit took him, he never raised a hand to him.

  Over Summer and Fall, Nick taught himself how to turn himself into any animal he wanted. November brought the first snows and Nick’s twelfth birthday. Nick made his favorite meal of baked beans and franks to celebrate. He was just putting the pot to bake when Mr. Smallbone shuffled into the kitchen.

  “I hope you made enough for three,” he said. “Your uncle’s on his way.”

  Nick closed the oven door. “I better move on, then,” he said.

  “Won’t help,” said Mr. Smallbone. “He’ll always find you in the end. Blood kin are hard to hide from.”

  Round about dusk, Nick’s uncle pulled into the driveway of Evil Wizard Books in his battered old pick-up. He marche
d up the front steps and banged on the door fit to knock it down. When Mr. Smallbone answered, he put a beefy hand on the old man’s chest and shoved him back into the shop.

  “I know Nick’s here,” he said. “So don’t go telling me you ain’t seen him.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it,” said Mr. Smallbone. “He’s in the kitchen.”

  But all Nick’s uncle saw in the warm, bright kitchen, was four identical black Labrador puppies tumbling under the wooden table.

  “What in tarnation is going on here?” Nick’s uncle face grew red and ugly. “Where’s my nephew at?”

  “One of these puppies is your nephew,” said Mr. Smallbone. “If you choose the wrong puppy, you go away and don’t come back. If you choose the right one, you win two more chances to recognize him. Choose right three times in a row, and you can have him.”

  “What’s to stop me from taking him right now?”

  “Me,” said Mr. Smallbone. His round glasses glittered evilly; his bushy beard bristled.

  “And who are you?”

  “I’m the Evil Wizard.” Mr. Smallbone spoke quietly, but his words echoed through the uncle’s brain like a thunder-clap.

  “You’re a weird old geezer, is what you are,” said the uncle. “I oughta turn you in to the county authorities for kidnapping. But I’ll be a sport.” He squatted down by the puppies and started to rough-house with them. The puppies nipped at his hands, wagging their tails and barking—all except one, which cringed away from him, whining. Nick’s uncle grabbed the puppy by the scruff of the neck and it turned into a wild-looking boy with black hair and angry black eyes.

  “You always was a little coward,” his uncle said. But he said it to thin air, because Nick had disappeared.

  “Once,” Mr. Smallbone said.

  Next he took Nick’s uncle to a storeroom full of boxes, where four identical fat spiders sat in the centers of spun four identical fine, large webs.

  “One of these spiders is your nephew.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Nick’s uncle. “Shut up and let me concentrate.” He studied each spider and each web carefully, once and then a second time, sticking his nose right up to the webs for a better look and muttering angrily under his breath. Two of the spiders curled their legs into knots. The third ignored him.