A Wizard's Way

Sahid stood atop the patio above the city to greet me. His smile was broad, but flat. It seemed to lurk behind the mustache.

“Apprentice Wizard Horwendell. I am glad to see you back. Please,” he said, approaching just a bit too quickly. “Let’s be off.”

No. It may have been Lady Iltara’s city of Bliss, but it was my dream just as much as it was hers.

I took one step toward him, then planted my left leg and drove, swinging my crutch like a solid, extended fist. It cracked Sahid clean on his cheekbone and sent him sprawling, his mortarboard cap tumbling away down the stairs. He hit the floor with the muffled whumph of a heavy body wrapped up in silks and jewels.

As he struggled to regain his composure and right himself, I ripped off my splint and threw it aside. I broke off into a sprint, hurtling down the stairs into the crowded streets below.

I hit street level and began weaving between people with exhilarating abandon. I was running, on my own two legs, for the first time in weeks. The freedom, the ability to simply do, was as good—no, better—than flying. It was not just the ability to move as I willed. Is that I willed to move as I will, in the realm of dreams, where that was the only thing that mattered.

I took a few minutes to simply run. Not just because it was fun. It was quite necessary. Sahid’s voice rose indignantly into the night sky as he shouted the alarm, audible in brief snatches amidst the hubbub of the streets. I sidled past the wrong side of a street food vendor, trying to avoid blasting directly through the queue for the steaming kebabs and instead nearly bowling over the woman serving them. As a handful of roasted peppers arced through the air over my shoulder, I thought to myself: if Sahid is a shard of Lady Iltara’s will, should he need to shout? How autonomous was he, really?

I reached an intersection that had been cleared out for a fire dancer. In this realm of will and beauty, he had no need for batons or sashes: he wove pure flame through the air, trailing it about and between his graceful, whirling limbs. The crowds beheld the spectacle from a safe distance. I forced myself to the edge of the audience and craned my head to and fro, trying to get a view of the cross streets. I saw green mortarboard caps bobbing and juking angrily toward the clearing, left, right, and ahead. That kind of rapid, unanimous response seemed unlikely from a single hue and cry. So it wasn’t seven men bearing down on me so much as it was a single will, taking the form of seven men. A single keen, ambitious, deadly will. A deadly will I had rebuffed, insulted, and finally, slapped in the face.

I was still riding the high of carrying forward on my own two feet, but the solution came readily to me despite that. Or because of that, really. This was a realm of will, wasn’t it? I had but to will to escape.

“Pardon me,” I said, to the two people just in front of me, as I shoved them out of the way and threw myself into the center of the intersection.

The dancer continued to dance, crouching low and spinning fire in great figure eights with his sinuous, uplifted arms. His eyes met with mine for a flash of a moment. But the show must go on, he decided, and his body whirled with the flames uninterrupted.

As that moment was ending, another began: one of the capped attendants stumbled into the ring with me. Just one? I looked side to side trying to spy the other caps in the crowd, but couldn’t pick them out in a hurry. They must have been hesitating. Reluctant to disturb this little piece of paradise for one runaway apprentice wizard, perhaps?

So I chose my escape: I ran directly at the sashed and be-tasseled man and thrilled in plowing him over. I hit him with my right elbow square in his chest and he gave like a sapling in a storm, his mustachioed face contorted with surprise. I escaped over top of him into the crowds to the east.

I sprinted down this new street, the length of my stride constantly changing, my feet always working to pick out a path between the passerby. This street was dense with obstacles, overrun with outdoor seating for some sort of public place—a bakery or winery. But furniture, occupied or not, is stationary, easier to move about than moving crowds, and I was able to fly with joyous speed down the street.

I turned one corner, then another. This entire district, filled with lights and colors, seemed dense with public amenities and thronged with the attendant crowds. It would be an easy thing to lose myself here. If I only sought out a path to escape, if I spent all of my momentum on just getting ahead of Sahid and his reflections, I wouldn’t get out. I’d only get lost, penned in, and caught despite it all.

I glanced upward at the night sky, which had a faint paleness to it, its depth washed out by the glow of the city’s lights. To follow through on my plan, I would need to navigate, and the stars were out of the question¹. I threw open the next door I saw and swung myself into the interior on the bronze handle. The sounds quieted around me, and my eyes adjusted to candlelight as I took two slowing paces into the ground floor. I could hear a rhythmic, hollow thump-thump-thump: delayed here, rapid there, absent for a span, then returned with gusto. There were people here, standing, shoulder-to-shoulder, dark shapes in a dark room. I hurried quietly to them: they were all facing away from me, looking to the center of the room. I worked my way around, searching for the stairs in the back. I finally saw the source of the thumping: some handball game, played between doubles, a man and a woman each darting to and fro, their sweat flashing in the low light.

I found the rear stairs. Not a soul had paid me attention… not until the front door burst open again. The many Sahids, hot on my trail. I hurried up, and the game disappeared from view.

I thundered up three more flights of stairs, passing utterly silent spaces obscured from me by walls and curtains. Then, I flung the door open on the roof.

The view here was no less breathtaking than it had been from the patio I had entered the city upon. One of the tallest towers, a quadrangular colossus of paint and motif capped by a dome and a spire, stood to my right. A broad palace of some sort faced me from the distance a few blocks away to my left—the entry patio, I guessed. One more glance about was all I needed to find my destination: Lady Iltara’s court, the great temple tower before the wide public square.

Feet were pounding their way up the stairwell behind me. Even if they were coming to escort me to my chosen destination, it wouldn’t do me any good to get there in their company. Could I go back down the stairs? Could I bowl through more than just one of them, even with gravity on my side? Did gravity matter in this realm?

No matter, I thought. Giddiness seized my limbs and throat again. I wanted to go forward, right? Why not do it?

By the time the first attendant crashed through the door behind me, I had gotten up to a full sprint. I planted my right foot on the edge, placing it perfectly, and I leapt.

This improbably long jump seemed to defeat the many Sahids, at least temporarily. I wormed my way down through the bath house I had landed on and worked my way through the streets to the northeast, finding that they had given up the chase. But I could still spot them here and there in the crowd, on the lookout for their runaway guest.

So I kept low and I kept quiet, losing myself in the citizenry and avoiding causeways and empty lanes. It was easy enough: with so much beauty to behold in the city, how could anyone hope to find one plain man in a hat and a travel cloak? But Lady Iltara was a goddess, though, was she not? For someone—or something—who was capable of creating a place like this, finding someone within it would be child’s play. The many Sahids were a shard of her will: limited, lowly. That they could not find me meant only that she had something more important on her mind.

I hurried along until I found myself at the edge of the last square. The flames ringed the square, the ever-burning symbols of Iltara’s beauty and might. I stood in the shadow of a nearby stall, unused at the moment, and looked across. A pair of attendants stood on the porch, in the shade of the great entablature. They hadn’t been there the day before.

I looked at the buildings that ringed the temple. To the right, past the braziers, I spied the colonnade and the river, high and fat on its banks. I remembered its sibling in the Mundus, dry, dead. To the left, I found wide stone buildings with slightly canted walls and high slit windows, the flickering firelight teasing at images that might be visible within. One attendant stood at a high, arched wooden door in the very center.

The attendant presented a difficulty, I thought, frowning from my dark little roost. Of course a civic building like this one would be watched at all hours. But just because it was difficult—just because I hadn’t anticipated the difficulty a bit sooner—didn’t change my task.

I backed out from the stall and slipped into an alleyway, navigating carefully up the west side of the square, behind that building.

I waited for an attendant to pass, then I stepped out into the street behind the building. It was quieter here. The hum of the crowds issued down side streets and alleyways, but here a spoken conversation could be heard for a long distance. A few people moved quickly up and down on business, carefully holding their gazes straight ahead. My heart leapt and quailed to see why: iron lattices were set in small rectangular windows, the windows marching down the side of the building in triplets, one each at ankle level, waist level, and eye level.

It had been exactly what I had been hoping to find: the jail. But if it was one window to a cell, these cells would be little larger than coffins.

It wouldn’t be long before another attendant came by, I reasoned, so I hurried down the street. “Hester,” I rasped, toward each triplet of bars. This elicited a few muttered curses and at least two awful moans of despair, emerging from perfect darkness in which I could not make out their sources. My skin crawled. I got a dirty look from a passing woman. With each column of cells I passed, I worried that I was in the wrong place. With each prisoner I set to oathing or weeping, I worried that an attendant would be by to renew the chase and foil my plan.

That was him, in the bottom cell. His voice, issuing from the perfect darkness. I knelt down.

“A minor setback,” the voice mused from the shadowy cell. Even if I couldn’t see him, that answer was proof positive that he was in there.

There was silence in the darkness for a beat. I glanced over my shoulder again. Finally, Hester said “I tried to fight them.”

“I tried to get outside the dream and wake you up. You can’t be woken up.”

Another pause, this time of comprehension. “It’s an enchanted sleep,” Hester’s disembodied voice said.

“Right. But think, Hester. From here, I can pass into the Mundus with magic. Much like I can pass into the Halls with magic. But when I pass into the Halls…”

There was a shout from down the street. A well-appointed man was hustling down the lane toward me, shouting for help in Uri-Kedis.

“I trust you,” he said. I could hear a twist of anxiety in his voice. He knew he had to, and feared that I would ask something difficult of him.

But all I said was, “do what you do best. Strike when the iron is hottest. But leave the queen for me. Now, grab my hand.”

And besides that they were difficult to see, I also hadn’t found any time to make a proper study of them. Were they the same here as they were in the Mundus? It seemed unlikely. ↩

XXXI: Realm of Thought and Will