Thirteenth Beginning: Should Auld Apprentices Be Forgot

The Puzzlebark Inn did a brisker business than you would expect for an inn with no sign and no door.  Catering, as it did, to sorcerers, wizards, and other magic users, the lack of both advertising and point of ingress was no deterrent to custom.  In fact, it served to preserve the safety and exclusivity of the clientele.

There were many rooms in the Puzzlebark Inn, though how many was a subject of speculation.  There was a dining room with a magic harp for quiet enjoyment and a dining room without one for lively debate.  There was a library for study and meeting rooms for conclaves and a feast hall that couldn’t be found unless the proper deposit had been paid.  There was even a bar for boasting and carousing and meeting other wizards.

But the heart of the Puzzlebark Inn was the taproom.  The taproom was for reminiscence.  This was not enforced by either the owner or the guests.  It just seemed to be an effect of the room.

The night was a warm spring night and only the western hearth was lit, washing the room with deep blue flickers.  The tap, hanging firmly in midair in the center of the room, had been liberally employed throughout the evening and tales of past magic were well underway.  Old sea magic had been explored for awhile, but, as often happened when the denizens of the taproom were of the older sort, the subject had turned to the shortcomings of past apprentices.

 "The sloppy ones can be watched," a balding court mage named Durstan stated firmly.  "It's the angry, vengeful sort that are dangerous.  Why, I had a South Sloper, once, who became convinced that I was jealous and trying to poison him.  Before I knew it he'd turned my cook into wood.  My Cook!"

"Piffle."  An ore dowser named Roswyn flipped a graying braid over her shoulder.  "Angry apprentices are dead easy to handle.  Slap a mood geas on them or pop them into the Labyrinth of Mind.  Then if they don't learn to control their emotions, they can't do magic.  The sloppy ones are always doing something so slightly wrong that you don't notice until it's too late." 

"At least they are usually more of a danger to themselves than to others, Ros."

"Only if they live in a cave on a mountain.  Even then, watch for innocents caught in avalanches.

I had an apprentice named Opal, once.  Auspicious name for cave work, you'd think.  But, no.  Things were always going wrong about her.  We were crawling through an old 'tween hole one day and disturbed a troll.  I got out the copper blade smart enough and she knew to scramble for the jar of salt. 

But when she opened it, the salt was one solid mass stuck in the jar and no good at all for tossing on troll wounds.  She'd not fastened the jar lid tight enough and the salt had pulled moisture out of the cave air and locked itself up.  The troll kept healing and coming at us and healing and coming at us.  It was clear that we would both be troll food as soon as my arm tired.

Fortunately, before that happened, she lost control of her torch.  I assume she hadn't soaked it in lime and lichen long enough.  Suddenly it was a real, burning flame instead of seaflame, like in the hearth, yonder.  With all the sulfur in it, it nearly took her eyebrows off when it went.

She dropped it, of course.  But I only had to curse her a little to get her to cauterizing troll with it.  Once the troll was burning well, I doused the torch.  She yipped about the dark for a bit before she remembered why it had to go.  We crawled back to the surface in the dark with troll soot in our lungs.  I hope none of you ever gets a lungful of burning troll in a confined space." 

"For the benefit of us light-lovers, Ros, why did the torch have to go?"

"Why, the phlogiston, man!  Living beings and true flames both release phlogiston into the air.  When the air gets saturated with it, then the flame or being smothers.  Caves are enclosed and can't release phlogiston into the wider air with any rapidity.  It's easy to smother yourself in a cave."

"What did you do with your girl?"

"Not a thing.  She was silent and chastened the whole way home.  Concentrated on her work better than I'd ever seen.  I thought maybe this had been the shock she needed.  But, no. 

She quietly packed our gear and quietly hiked home.  She quietly stowed all the equipment and quietly cleaned herself up.  Fixing dinner that night she didn't drop a dish or add a salt measure of pepper or any of the small missteps she usually made.  She quietly ate and quietly tidied after.  Then she went to her room and quietly packed all her things.  Nothing I said could convince her to stay. 

What did you do with your South Sloper?"

"Shifted the spell onto him, of course.  As I explained to him at the time, if I could have been sure of lifting the spell properly, I would have done so and let the incident drop.  Fits of temper and all that.  But wood to flesh is trickier than flesh to wood.  There are simply more kinds of flesh than of wood.  Fiddly to get the typing done properly and deadly to miss.  Better to do a reverse curse with full correspondence.  I also explained that, while talented apprentices are easy to find, good cooks willing to work for a mage are not.

I told him that if the cook died or left me, I'd shift him back."

"As if the cook won't outlive you!"

"Ah!  Fixed that with the Mayor.  If I die, then our wooden boy goes up for auction to any magic user willing to turn him back.  In fact, he's in the Mayor's office as we speak, just in case."

"Why would anyone pay for the opportunity to cast wood to flesh?"  Roswyn was puzzled.

"Not wood to flesh, it would be another reverse with full.  Much easier than wood to flesh.  Any good hedger could do it."

"Again, why?"

"As a means of execution, of course.  There aren't many Princes in my section of the Worldshore, at least not many worth mentioning.  But we have a lot of Mayors and Constables and so forth who have occasional need of a showy execution.  A retransfer of the curse would leave a body for permanent display and preserve the hope, for any followers or relatives of the deceased, that the focus of their interest might be revived at a later time.

There may be any number of political reasons why such an execution would be handy.  Yes, the resale could be quite profitable under the right circumstances.  My cook is willing to take the resale value as his inheritance."

"Bah!  Sometimes I don't see how you court mages can stomach it."

Durstan chuckled over his mug of red beer.  "You slog through muck and dark and breathe the occasional burning or salting troll and you ask how I can stomach a little social maneuvering!  Honestly Roswyn, I sometimes wonder if you. . ."

It was not a large sound that stopped Durstan's speech, that, indeed, halted all conversation in the taproom.  It was merely the shifting of the blankets tucked about the shoulders of the eldest mage in the room.  But though the sound was small, it was unexpected, for the eldest mage seldom moved or spoke.  And since magic users habitually attend to the unexpected, when the eldest spoke, the entire room was already listening.

He spoke in a soft, lifeless voice, and cleared his throat several times at the beginning.  "I never had any trouble with either sloppy or angry apprentices." he intoned.

"But beware an apprentice with an uncontrollable sense of humor.  Especially beware the apprentice who cannot forgo the opportunity to form that perversion of speech known as a pun.  Puns  and spells do not mix. 

Ignore the affability and charm of the aspirant.  Inveterate punsters are invariably affable and charming.  It is a defense they adopt to prevent them from being bludgeoned to death.  Ignore their nimbleness of mind.  Sadly, a certain nimbleness of mind is required for punning.  But once a person's mental agility has been harnessed to such an engine of perversion, it cannot easily be unhitched.  No.  Avoid the apprentice with an uncontrollable sense of humor."

Here the eldest mage seemed to be content to mumble himself back into quiet.  But the curiosity of the taproom had been aroused.  Standing folk gathered about the eldest and seated folk leaned in.  A general murmur of interest sounded and faded.  When that was insufficient, Durstan spoke.

"Venerable one.  Pardon my curiosity, but can you give us an example?  Can you speak of a time when spells and puns brought disaster?”

"I can easily name an embarrassing incident.  But the true disaster is painful to relate.  Durstan, have you ever been called upon to form a nimbus of light about a princeling setting forth to parade before his people?  You will understand how seriously they take it and how angry they become when the spell is ill cast. 

The particular prince in this incident was a preening example of his kind.  He decided that not only he, but also his horse should glow.  He spouted some rot about symbology and loyalty.  If the horse could glow by association with his greatness, then the peasants and merchants and petty nobles must flock to greatness by association or . . .  some such.

It was a suitable spell for this apprentice, whose name I will not speak.  In light of his unfortunate tendencies, I required him to write out the amended version of the spell he would cast.  It contained an unfortunate repeating phrase:  '. . .and the horse you ride", an obvious allusion to the common curse.  But the prince would never hear the words as the magic would distort them, and it was a mild enough aberration.

Unfortunately, when he actually recited the spell, he could not prevent himself from punning.  The change in pronunciation was slight enough that I did not notice it.  I was merely surprised when the horse failed to glow.  The apprentice looked appalled and ran, which was the proper course when things went badly about this prince.  So I thought nothing of it.  I stayed to apologize and almost lost my head."

You see, I only knew that the horse wasn't glowing.  I didn't know that other things were.  During the parade, several well known ladies of the evening were noticed to be glowing in the nooks where they watched the parade.  Once it was noticed, it was chuckled at.  The prince had made such a fuss about his horse not glowing that many courtiers understood the switch that had been made.  And they only glowed if the prince was nearby.  It was a good bit of gossip.

Unfortunately, that gossip had spread by the time the main festivities started.  At the ball that night, any young lady who had both mated with the prince and accepted a gift from him glowed if she was in the same room.  Dabbling in street merchandise was worthy of a chuckle, but collecting the favors of the daughters and wives of his sworn men was an entirely different matter.  To say nothing of the state those women got into when they discovered they were part of such a crowd.

The prince had to call his guard to clear the party.  He needed his army to hold the manor in the weeks that followed.  Eventually, an advisor got to him and he married a princess from one of the northern isles.  There was a great deal of publicity given to the magical backing that their vows of fidelity were to be given.  If he had gotten his hands on me while he lived, he would have attempted to execute me."

"How dreadful!"  Duran was appalled, though appreciative snickers peppered the room.  "And you consider that to be merely an embarrassment?  Pray what would you consider to be dire if that was not?"

"As many Princes as there are in the Worldshore’s main reach, and as short as each one’s reach is?  No, it was only an embarrassment for me.  I popped somewhere safe.  I left the punster to find his own way which, unfortunately, he did." 

The eldest emitted a sigh like a slowly deflating buffoon's bladder.  Everyone leaned in again, encouragingly.  Another dry sound wheezed from the eldest.  Upon repetition it was discovered to be a chuckle. 

"And I made a few coins from the situation.  Finder's fees.  I spread the word to other mages that there might be those attending the wedding who would be interested in an expert opinion on the strength and validity of the magic performed.  Likely every fifth attendee at the solemn occasion was there as a consultant.  Very remunerative.

Now I suppose you want to hear about the disaster.  It's a painful thing to remember, let alone to relate."

Durstan found the eldest's glass and filled it from the tap.  Everyone waited patiently as the eldest fumbled a few small sips of support.

"I had decided that the southern isles would be the safest place for us for awhile.  And the southern isles means boating.  As you know, all the southern isles are small, most supporting less than a dozen inhabitants.  To do any sort of business at all requires a boat or boats.  The sort of magic most in demand is the sort that deals with boats:  bits of wind to puff your sail one way without pulling all the other boats along, woodwarp to seal cracks, lightness to increase cargoes, that sort of thing.

After his difficulty, my jolly apprentice had been chastened for awhile, rather like Roswyn's Opal, and he was affable enough to easily attract customers.  All was well until the Pizan fleet arrived.  The Pizans come from a land beyond the Worldshore, where most of the land is surrounded by other land.  But they had come to trade and had been generous enough with their goods to find great welcome.  The south islanders invited them to sail their seas freely, giving them maps to guide their deep-keeled ships away from shallow waters.  They also hired us to bless the ships of the fleet.

Blessing a boat or a ship is a simple enough thing.  It does little more than bring the craft a bit of extra luck, which might be handy for strangers with deep-keeled boats tootling around islands, but which would be impossible to measure.  No one would ever know if the spell failed, you see.  So it was a guaranteed success.  Blessings are complicated, though, with much naming of boatly parts.  My unfortunate apprentice had been spending time drinking with islanders and knew well all the parts.  Unfortunately, he had also learned all of the local phrases of color and his infirmity was still with him, though hiding.

Still, the disaster might have passed us by, had not one of his drinking companions gone aboard the main ship of the fleet.  There we were, on our little boat, floating among the ships and there he was, watching us. . . listening to us . . . an audience for my apprentice's perversion.  Again, I was unaware of the danger.

And I was not as familiar, either with the names of the parts of boats or with the local insults.  I did not notice as my apprentice's chanting of hulls and masts and spars and rigging, of booms and gaffs and jibs, slipped sideways somewhat.  I did, however, notice with sinking heart, as his friend slapped his thigh and doubled over with laughter.  I glared, but did not dare interrupt.  Then I heard him add a cantrip.  As a final jibe at his laughing companion, he recited an untying spell, meant, I am sure, for his friend’s pant string. 

But it was recited too close to the other, mangled spell.  With horror I watched as each and every connection in the fleet disconnected.  Board parted from board and rope parted from sail.  The cargo of the Pizan fleet plunged through the separating pieces of their ruined ships.  I fled immediately, teleporting to safety.  He was too stunned to move, and was taken captive, though he bartered his way to freedom quickly enough.  From that day to this I have avoided humorous apprentices."

Magic users are a cunning and subtle lot.  So the horrified hush that fell over the taproom had nothing to do with thoughts of maritime economic setbacks.  For every wizard and witch could piece the rest of the story together quickly enough.  The name that the eldest had refused to speak was known to them all; was, indeed, know to all the peoples of the Worldshore:  Narnemvar the Great, the mage who discovered the shipblast spell upon which the peace and safety of the Worldshore now depended.

Heads nodded about the taproom as all there agreed with the thing that the eldest had left unsaid.  The apprentice who surpassed his master so completely that his name became a part of history while his master’s name crumbled slowly to dust - - that was the apprentice to be avoided.  That was the worst apprentice of all.

Tenth Beginning - Face of Evil

The sun rained heat onto the truck roof.  The man inside twisted to write on a small red book propped on the steering wheel.  The pages weren’t staying flat, so the man had to struggle with it.

"The ghost of Charles Dickens is trying to finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  He's decided there shouldn't be any ghosts in it because he doesn't believe in ghosts anymore.  He's become a bit frayed over they years, a bit unraveled.  He's never been good at possessing people, not even when he was freshly dead, and his increasing incoherence has made things progressively worse.  That and the writer's block probably mean that the world will never know who dunnit. 

There is a reporter or an author or a wandering temp who is following the ghost of Charles Dickens.  He swings back and forth between trying to banish the ghost and trying to help the ghost finish the story.  He may be the descendent or past protégée of other ghost followers.  This will have to be a short story.  It could never be a TV series or a comic book.  It lacks the necessary gettings:  Getting the Girl, Getting Along, Getting Ahead, and Getting the Bad Guys.  Getting laid could substitute for getting the girl.  Could making a friend count?  Maybe.  If the show followed other trends or if the comic had a really popular artist."

The man sighed.  He was wandering from the story after only a paragraph and a half.  May as well get on with the task he was avoiding.  It was a hard thing when his most trusted means of procrastination failed him.  (Was there such a word as anticrastination?) He made a note to look that up.  

A later note, stuffed into the red book would read:  1540s, from L. procrastinationem "a putting off," noun of action from procrastinare "put off till tomorrow," from pro- "forward" + crastinus "belonging to tomorrow," from cras "tomorrow," of unknown origin.

On the back of the note would be:  “So, would anticrastination be doing things now or would it be consciously working against the future.  That puts me in mind of a story about a witch trying to live forever, but being fed incomplete information by the demons she summons.  Her final spell slows her life processes so that she will not die until the universe ends, but only because each second of her life has been smeared over millennia.  She becomes, effectively, a statue and the world has become an unintelligible blur to her.”  

But that will happen later.

Now the man is stretching and closing the truck door.  It’s an old Chevy, old enough to have a starter pedal.  It’s blue paint has oxidized and the white powder on the surface brushes off onto your clothes if you’re not careful.  The truck door shuts with a heavy clunk.

The man isn’t old enough to be retired, but he’s getting there.  His jeans and denim shirt are faded, but unstained.  They’ve been carefully worn and carefully tended.  He can make clothes last a long time.  No sense paying extra for carelessness. 

The hair he palms back is faded brown and the cowboy shaped hat is woven of straw.  He settles the hat on his head to ease the glare.  Squinting gives him a headache.  The hat and the cowboy boots make him think of something he heard a comedian say, once.  The comedian had a name like a western lawman.  What was it, now?  Gallagher.  Strong name.  The boy had said something about the only difference between a lady and a cowboy was that the lady tucked her elbows in while the cowboy stuck his out.

He had strutted around the stage demonstrating.  Out – cowboy, in – lady.  Both with pointed toes and high heels.  Both with hats.  Out – In. 

The man walked down the dirt driveway towards the trailer, conscious of his elbows.  He decided they weren’t really out or in, and that the real difference was that he walked with his knees loose.  A lady wouldn’t do that.  A woman wouldn’t, either.

She knew he was there, of course.  Probably had known before he got there.  Maybe she’d see the time spent at the end of the drive as politeness.  Maybe not.

Dogs came pouring out from under the trailer, straight through the dusty red fringe around its bottom.  They were baying or yapping, depending on their bent.  Although running, they weren’t running in much of a hurry.  They’d have a few seconds before they got far enough down the drive to reach him.

He stopped and shifted his hat.  They were an odd assortment, but he couldn’t place any new ones.  No danger or nips or bites, then.  At least none from the dogs.

He let them boil around him, sniffing and raising a dust.  The whole yard was dusty, with a bit of coarse grass growing here and there.  He looked around while he let them get their noses full of him.

The red fringe on the trailer was raveling a bit, but might still be usable.  Rolled flying carpets laid around the front, in a disordered pile under the one tree.  Two rose bushes flanked the front porch stairs.  They weren’t blooming now, but when they did the tops of each petal was a velvety red while the bottoms were a silky white.  They were quite a sight when they were going at it. 

Around each bush was a round watering trench, currently dry and cracked, the way clay soil did when it dried.  Each trench had a green garden hose balanced on the crater’s edge. 

Just off the drive from where the man was standing was a yard lamp.  There was a small model rug tethered to it with some fringed macramé.  It dipped and flew in the breeze, looking sharply patterned and dust free.  He guessed it was gathering solar energy to power the lamp at night.  Big Kay did good repair work when she got around to it. 

The dogs began to lose interest.  He started back up the driveway, then stopped as Big Kay, herself, came around from the back.

“It’s on the front porch,” she said.  “I left it alone because I knew someone would send someone out to check.  I was perfectly legal.  Perfectly within my rights.”

The woman was dressed in faded denim overalls and a purple flowered shirt.  She wore work boots and black leather work gloves with the ends of the fingers gone.  Two grey and brown braids were looped back and tied at the base of her neck.  She was probably less than five feet tall, but stocky and solid and obviously used to getting her way, although, if he remembered correctly, she was usually polite about it. 

“Hey, Kay,”  he said.

“Hey, Jasper,” she replied.

He waited.  They looked at each other for a space.  Then he ducked his head.

“Better get on with it, then,” he said, and sauntered up the swaying steps. 

There were only two steps, and the porch was maybe four foot deep and ten foot wide.  Jasper knew the steps and porch had been meant to be temporary, but had been there nearly twenty years, now.  That’s the way temporary fixes went, sometimes.

A roof rug hovered over the porch.  It was striped white and black and brown and red, although nearly all of the colors were closer to grey than when it was new.  There was a slit running against the stripes through two thirds of it.  It had been patched.  You could see the sagging interlacing holding it together.  Only Big Kay could get a carpet that damaged in the air on a regular basis.  At least, she was the only one that he knew of.

She followed behind him, but didn’t step up.  She stayed back out of his business and let him get on with things comment-free.  He appreciated that.

“You get a complaint?  Or was it just a tattle?”

“Oh, it was a full-on complaint.  Went to the Sheriff.”

“Any particular reason that the Sheriff didn’t come?”

“Got paperwork, I expect.  That or the Deputies are near overtime.”

“Yeah, that would do it.”

Jasper looked at the porch.  There were shards of glass.  He squinted.  If he looked at them just right, If he thought of them as coming originally from the front door, well, then they looked like they had sprayed out in a narrow cone from the door to nearly east. 

“Mirror?” he said.

“Yup.  Defensive spell.  Pure defence.”

“Well, nothing is completely pure.  This all finished?”

“Yeah.  It’s spent.  Completely inert.  Unless you want to say that nothing is completely inert.”

“Well, that is true.  Nothing is.  At least not completely.  Mind if I take a sample?”

There was a squeaking sound, like rubber netting being stretched.

“Flying pigs?” he asked. 

“Yup.  No idea why anyone would want them.  I raise ‘em up, they take them home.  Then they end up back here again. “

The pig pen was located in the back of the lot.  Jasper would take a look at them before he left.  He had a weakness for flying pigs.

He got out his metal retractable tape measure with the plumb bob and the compass.  He fiddled with it a bit on the porch.  Then he backed down off the porch and fiddled with it across the porch, from ground level.  When he was satisfied, he made a few marks in the little red book.  Then the book went back in the back pocket and the measure clipped to his belt. 

“Recon you know who it was.”

“Coulda been, oh, about three different folks.”

“Folks?”

“Well, three different groups a’ folks.  Some people just don’t want to believe that their rug can’t be fixed.  Or that it ought to cost what it does.  Or that they bought a lemon.

Over all time it’s more than three bunches a folks that might be mad at me.  But recently – only the three.  And I don’t suspect one bunch more than another, I just wanted to be safe and sure.  The babies need me to look after them.”

Jasper looked back at Kay.  Some of the dogs were laid in the dust around her.  Two of the bigger ones had gone to lay in the shade of the tree.  They were sniffing out a good place in the rug pile to sprawl. 

“And some folks just don’t take kindly to wizard . . . esses.  At all.”

“Just wizard, Jasper.”

“Wizards, then.  They just don’t like them.”

“Then they shouldn’t come looking for one.  Pure foolish, that is.”

“I’d have to agree with you, there.  Say. . . “ he squinted at the trailer.  “Is that a whistle hanging from the doorknob?”

“Yup.”  Kay shifted something around in her mouth.  She knew Jasper meant something more by that question and she was making him figure out how to ask it.”

“What does the whistle add to the mirror?”

Damn.  The man knew more about the spell than she thought. 

“I know that the silver disappears from the mirror glass when the spell is triggered.  I know that the glass splinters to absorb the force of the spell and then rebounds back the way the off-en-sive spell came in.

I also know that it usually happens quiet-like and slow.  The glass floats down slow and deliberate-like and looks like it’s going too slow to embed in the wood like that, but it’s going fast just, well, on a different plane or something.  And it’s spooky quiet.  Nothing to warn the caster that his spell’s coming back at him.  Or her.”

“That about covers it.”

“I’ve heard it needs the quiet to turn certain kinds of spells, just like it needs the slow to turn certain other kinds.  If you tied a whistle in, you’d be introducing a flaw into your defence. 

Seems to me a body would only do that if they knew what kind of spell was coming in.”  He turned to squint at her.  “Did you know?”

“I . . . suspected.”

“That’s a lot to leave riding on ‘suspected.’”

Kay rolled something around in her mouth and than spat onto the porch.  The spit sizzled, hopping around in shiny little balls, like angry mercury.

Jasper’s jaw dropped.  “That’s an active spell.  Dammit, woman!  That’s an active spell!”

“Yup,” said Kay. “I had a suspicion that someone would be stubborn.  So I added the whistle, to warn them.”

“You mean they’re hearing the whistle.  They’re feeling the spell come back at them, and they’re still pouring it on?”

“Yup,” she said.  “Stubborn.  And possibly they think women are weak.  Lotsa men make that mistake.”

“Damn.”

“Yup.  Some folks,” Kay shook her head , “some folks, there just ain’t no tellin’ ‘em.” 

“Damn.  Can you tell what kind of spell it’s sending back.”

“Not safely.  And I don’t feel like getting burned or worse to help out someone who’s doing me harm.  Especially not when they’re this determined about it.’

“You just going to sit here and wait to see what breaks first, your hater or your front door?”

“Well, the other thing the whistle does is warn me when the spell’s about to break, or when his spell stops.  There’s that comfort.”

“You sure it’s a he?”

“Pretty sure.”

“I’d still be worried about staying near that.”

“Can’t take the babies away with me.  Certainly can’t take the pigs.  Don’t want my roses to die, or my lilies.”

“You got lilies, now?”

“In the back.  I’m making a patio.  With a fountain and a patchwork dome.”

“That sounds nice.  You’d know if an actual ‘nother wizard moved in, wouldn’t you?”

“A full-on wizard, sure.  If it’s just someone who stored up a lot of spite and then let it go – that wouldn’t show up on the radar, as they say.”

“I’ve heard that phrase.  You know what a radar is?  It’s one of those capital words.  Well, almost.  It takes more than one letter from a couple of the words in the phrase.”

Jasper waited.

“It stands for RAdiating Demon ARray.”

“Huh,” said Jasper.  “That makes sense.  Sounds military.”

“Commercial, too.  If I could do radar, even just the maintenance and repairs, I’d be making the big bucks.”

“You do all right.  That’s a nearly new double-wide I see there, right?  With the fringe still on so you can move it?”

“Yeah, if I had sense or more get up and get, I’d wrap that so the dogs didn’t fray it.”

“They like the added shade, though, don’t they.”

Kay blushed a bit at being caught out.  Not that there was anything wrong with liking your dogs and indulging them a little.  Still.  Working fringe was expensive.

Speaking of which – Kay dug into her pocket.  She fumbled with what looked like a tassel, mumbling to herself. Then she tossed it out into the yard.

It went dancing and bobbling along, just over the heads of the dogs, who ran after it with wide grins.  It took fifteen to twenty seconds before one of them caught it and started to shake it in snaps of the head from side to side.

“Release.” Kay called, and the tassel rose and bobbed again.  The chase resumed.

“They love that thing,” she said. 

“You sell those?” Jaspar asked. 

Kay shrugged.  “Have to tune it to the yard it’s used in and to the hand that throws it.  Have to figure the command that would work for a non-wizard.  Be expensive for what it is.”

“Less than a day’s wages?”  They both knew he meant a field hand’s wages.  There were all kinds of local currencies.  Folks sorted them out by comparison to minimum wage in all of them.  Hour, day, week, etc.

“Almost.  Well, about that.”

“Might be worth it for some.  Especially old folks whose arms get tired before their dogs do.”

“Thinking of anyone in particular?”

“Sadly, thinking of someone who lives a ways out of town.”

“Well, it might be worth it if you help me out with this.”

Jaspar let himself look completely surprised.

“I thought you were holding back on me, here.  You know I’m working for the Sheriff, right?”

“Yeah, and I’m not offering to give it to you for nothing.  I’m just willing to travel, assuming it’s only about a day and the boys can ride in the truck.”

“We’ll see.  You’re gonna have to come cleaner than this, though.”

“I expected that.”  Kay looked Jasper over, then sighed and said, “Come on around back.  That’s where the real money is.”

Jasper felt a tightening in the small of his back.  Wizards got up to things.  Even wizards out in the sticks in trailers with dogs in the front and pigs in the back.  He did not relish having to decide whether to tell the Sheriff whatever he was about to find out. 

But he couldn’t leave that spell twanging away on the front porch, there.  It was dangerous.  The Sheriff would approve of lying to the Wizard to get that cleared up.  Unfortunately, the Wizard would approve of lying to the Sheriff for the same reason.  Jasper had an older sister and a younger sister and they had given him a profound aversion to being caught in between.  It never worked out well.

He straightened and concentrated on holding his elbows in a manly way as he followed Kay around the trailer.  As he came around the corner, he saw the pig pen and the sheds behind it.  They were low-roofed.  One was directly behind the pen, so that the pigs could get in, out of the sun.  He bent and looked into the shadow.  There were only three pigs, total, in the pen.  It sounded like more.  There was plenty of room for more. 

Three more sheds ran parallel to the trailer, the last in the line being deeper and therefore coming out even with the edge of the pig pen, making an upside down U from his perspective.

Perspective, he thought.  That’s a word about seeing.  Spec.  That meant either seeing or eye, he wasn’t sure which.  Spectacle.  Specs. Inspect.  Suspect. Speculate? Did that fit with the others? 

The pigs were big.  Not a piglet in the lot.  Fully grown.  Fully grown pigs could get mean.

There was a rubber net over the top of the pen.  It looked rugged.  The wings on the pigs looked tiny compared to all that pork.  Could one of them really get airborne?  Airborne enough to make the net creak?  They sure weren’t doing it now.

One of the sheds rattled and more pig noises came through the closed doors.  The movement of one of the doors drew Jasper’s eye.  The door didn’t quite reach to the ground and Jasper could see hooves milling around behind it.  Pig sounds were coming from all of the sheds.  It sounded like old boars, and not happy ones.

Kay unlocked the padlock on the deep shed and threw open the door.  Inside were no pigs, just the sound of pigs.  Jasper ducked and entered slowly.  He looked around.  Here and there, in corners or on tables, were teacups.  They were thin and white and delicately fluted.  Jasper inspected one.  There was water inside.  A single lily was balanced straight up in the water. 

Jasper looked more closely.  There was nothing propping the lily up.  Its stem barely broke the surface of the water, he was sure.  Up from the cup and through the lily came the sound of irritable pig. 

Wizards.

He looked around for something besides dangerous pigs, now.  On six saw horses, resting on plywood planks were four rugs in the process of being sewn together.  Well, not just four.  At each junction, another small rug overlapped, and then another overlapping on top of that, so that there were two rugs on three rugs on four rugs.  Then at the ends, there were runners that crossed the front and the back and draped down the sides to the ground.

String came out from the inner joints of the rugs and wound around spindles and spools.  More spools held red and black yarn.  On a frame, the red and black yarn was being woven and knotted into netting and tassels.

The yarn in the rugs had been bleached light grey and was being slowly dyed into geometric shapes by clasping syringes.  He was sure that if he took it apart, the exact pattern would match up on each layer of rug.

“It’s a semi-tapestry,” he breathed.

“Almost,” she said.  “It’s illegal for someone unlicensed to build the engine.  So this has to be towed by a cut-back hauling tap.  It’s an all purpose commercial- weight hauling trailer.”  She sounded proud, and Jasper didn’t blame her.  This was going to sell for a pretty penny.

“Does anyone know that you’re doing this?”

“I’d have said no, but then I’ve got a spell knocking on my door.  One more persistent than normal.  Not that there aren’t people fool enough to do that over a small slight.  I’ve met a few who would have.  The ones I know of, mainly, their families would step up and shake them out of it.”

“But if one didn’t have a family. . .”

“Eventually they’d come to the notice of the law.  The law frowns on resentful, defensive Wizards.”

 “True.  Well, now I suppose it’s time to get the names of the folk who might be peeved at you.”

“S’pose it is,” said Kay. 

Eighth Beginning: The Two Habits of Highly Effective Gully Dwarves

#	Habit
1	Grovel Early/Grovel Often:  Groveling, and other signs of abject cowardice, reassures possible attackers that you will not attack them and that you are probably willing to work for them.  This makes them much less likely to kill or maim you.
2	Fall Between the Cracks:  Develop a taste for food and clothing that no one else wants.  This removes ‘Removing the Competition’ as a reason to kill or maim you.  Also learn to like sleeping where no one else wants to sleep.
2	Carry Good Luck Tokens:  Dead rats work well and are easy to find if you are following habit #2.  Maimed rats work less well.
2	Befriend the Wonderful:  Magic Users are wonderful and should be helped at all times.  They will do you favors like writing down the effective habits for you.
2	Save for Later:  This applies especially to food that no one else wants.  Even if no one wants it, it’s better to save some for later, just in case.  Sleep on it if necessary or if it is soft.  If you save it long enough, it’s sure to get soft eventually.
2	Look Ahead:  that’s where your feet are going anyway and if you don’t look there, you might step on something that you’d like to eat later.  Not that you can’t eat it anyway, just that it’s startling.  You also tend to walk into trees if you’re looking behind you.
2	Save this Space:  for when you learn to write.  Not that you’re ever going to. You’re probably just going to use this to wrap your dead rat in, and I don’t want to know whether you mean it to be a good luck token or your lunch.  If it wasn’t raining and I didn’t need someone check the beacon every hour, I’d have slit your throat already.  So here, play with this piece of paper and stop trying to talk to me before I decide that your incessant drivel is worse than the cold and dampness I’d suffer if I killed or maimed you.

Seventh Beginning: Delta Drabble

A Drabble is a story with exactly 100 words.  If you don't believe me, check Wikipedia. 

I've written two.  I already posted one.  This is the other. 

Delta Drabble

“Did you know San Francisco Bay is the home of more invasive species than any waterbody in the world?” 

“Nope.  Just here for the fish. “

“A lot of the fish aren’t native either – stocked by fishermen missing eastern fish.”

“I can understand that.”

“A lot of the other species came when visiting ships dumped ballast water.   Completely unintended.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Mitten crabs were food, water hyacinth was pretty; then they got loose.”

“Mmm.”

“So what do you think of that new quantum information scoop?”

“Think I got a bite – feels like a striper.”

“Hey, buddy!  How many hands do you have?”

(The great thing about Drabbles, is that it's hard to leave them half-finished.)

Comments on Fifth Beginning

In the first copy of the first section of the story mentioned in the Third Beginning (which is now titled Depress Button), I had the following written at the top of the first page.

shrink proof wrapping
depress button
no building permit
organ donation card
charged cards
marketing analyst

As sometimes happens, I ended up with several copies of the story in various stages of completeness on my work computer and home computer . . . mostly on my home computer. Am I the only person who emails myself stories and then adds a bit to them and then emails them back? Anyway, by the time I had spread them out in several different folders and then re-collected them to make an official version, I had fogotten what I had been planning to do with that list.

The depress button bit is obvious. The no building permit obviously mutated a bit. The rest, I'm not sure about. I'm pretty sure that our pair were intended to save themselves from the spider mage by explaining how he can shift his research to the magical equivalent of spam blockting. (1)Or at least that he can claim on paper that's what he's researching. That's the shrink proof wrapping and the marketing analysis. I'm less certain what the organ donation card and charged cards were supposed to represent, other than slight puns.

I've had one beta reader (BR) so far, and she described Sums as feisty. That's not a word that I would have used for a character who I see as a middle-aged accountant with a certain stubborn thoroughness and a dislike for having her time wasted. BR liked the story and that's encouraged me to keep going with it. But so far, that has taken the form of trying to discover different directions that the plot could go. There will be, as mentioned above, spiders. The spam blocker is supposed to fit into there somewhere.

There are two thoughts that keep recurring. One is that I need to know a lot more about spiders and about how magic works in this world. That's one thought. The other is that Charles is about to get treated very badly, and not by Sums. Also that Charles is . . . but that's enough spoilers for now.

(1) Yes, that's an actual spoiler if you're reading Depress Button as a story. I must also warn you that the story does not yet have and ending. Or a middle. Reading it as a story may not be a good idea at this point.