Mystify the Magician Read online

  Unless they had beards, but even then it wasn't the Grizzly Adams, beard-that-ate-my-face look. Dentistry still wasn't all it might be — it was a rare grin that didn't make you wince to look at it. And the haircuts were the kind of thing you get at SuperCuts when the hairdresser is hungover.

  One of the waiting commuters was different. He wore a long, layered robe, darkest blue over a lighter blue with a tease of creamy white. His boots were knee-high Mercedes upholstery leather. He had a large medal around his neck and a Lake Forest society lady's ring on his finger.

  He wasn't old, but he seemed like he ought to be. He had a fine gray beard going but his skin was unlined, and he stood tall and strong and sure of himself. He watched us closely and met Etain's eye and gave her a nod. Then he slipped away from the crowd and disappeared from sight.

  "Who's that, Gandalf?" I asked.

  Etain gave a polite frown, like she was pretty sure I was being witty but wasn't getting the joke. "That was Darun the Younger."

  "Was that a druid?" Jalil asked.

  "Yes, certainly," Etain said. "I hope you are not one of those who harbor a foolish suspicion and even dread of druids?"

  "Me, no," Jalil said. "I've never met one."

  "Strangers sometimes hold foolish, fanciful notions of the druids," Etain said. "They are said to be wizards, magicians, even demons, and usually malicious. Some superstitious creatures even speak of human sacrifice, as though such a thing were even possible in this blessed land."

  "Glad to hear that," I said. "We're deeply opposed to human sacrifice, what with being humans and all. So druids are not bad guys?"

  "Certainly not. After all, I am a druid. Do I seem to be malicious? Threatening?"

  "You're a druid?" I said stupidly, not sure what it might mean. What was that, like a nun or something?

  "Surely, a Druid of the Green, though barely better than a novice. The Druids of the Green are concerned with the land, with trees and stones and all living things. The Druids of the Blue are concerned with learning, with scrolls and books and medicine. The Druids of the Red are advisers to kings and to ambassadors abroad. The Druids of the Black follow the stars and the seasons. And now, of course, we have the new order: the Yellow."

  "Don't tell me: Druids that handle technology?"

  Etain was intrigued. "Technology? What is the meaning of that word?"

  I jerked my finger at Jalil and said, "Jalil? She wants to know what technology is."

  “Technology refers to science with a practiced application,"

  he explained. "The telegraph, for example."

  “Yeah. What he said," I agreed.

  "Technology," Etain said, savoring the word. “Technology."

  It gave me a chill. I'm not Jalil. I'm not some nerd I'm not all that in love with the real world, I'm not some Palm-Pilot-tapping, beeper-wearing. Web-surfing, cell-glued-to-my-head richie. My love for technology is about cars and remote controls, that's about it.

  But lord, to wander through the horror show if Everworld all this time, stumbling from one nightmare into the next, day after day of life as the gods have dictated it, man, that word, that clumsy, clunky word spilling from the luscious lips of that hottie, I don't know, it made me want to cry. I swear to God, I had tears in my eyes.

  Technology. One word that summed up central air-conditioning and hot water and escalators and The Flaming Lips cranked up in your headphones and automatic transmissions and HBO and downloadable bootleg term papers and beer that's really, really cold even on a hot day.

  Technology. It was like the words Snickers bar to a starving man. And that was just me. Poor Jalil thought he was at Disney World. We were all happy. All relieved. All but Senna.

  Screw Senna, I thought. If she's bummed, so much the better.

  Which was foolish: Even in the land of the Yellow Techie Druids you don't want to mess with a witch.

  Chapter

  VI

  Etain's father was King Camulos, and he was a happy, red-faced, turnip-nosed, gray-haired old gent with a room-filling laugh that inevitably ended in a hacking cough. May have had something to do with the fact that he kept a fat stogie stuck in the corner of his mouth, even while eating and drinking.

  I liked him right away.

  Etain's mother, Goewynne, was a different story. She was an elf. We'd seen elves here and there but had never really spoken to one.

  I guess I'd assumed they were just slightly bigger versions of fairies. But fairies are tolerably un-mysterious creatures: They like to make money, they take no crap, and you always got the feeling with fairies that while they wouldn't enjoy killing you, they'd sure as hell do it in a hurry if they thought it was a good idea. If fairies ever break through into the real world you'll find them all within a few blocks of Wall Street.

  But Goewynne was not a fairy. She managed to look as young as her daughter, as if no ray of sun had ever touched her cheek, as if no split end had ever dared to insult her tumbling, lustrous, diamond-dusted black hair, as if her hands had been eternally gloved in satin and never touched a rough surface.

  She was beautiful in the way a Rolls Royce is beautiful: perfect, flawless, rich, and way beyond your reach, but you don't get the hormone rush you get looking at a cherry-red Viper.

  She wasn't cold. Not really. She wasn't anything but charming and welcoming and gracious to a degree that would make Martha Stewart seem like a ragged, PMSing diva by comparison.

  And yet... there were those eyes of hers. Palest blue. Iceberg blue. Million-year-old, seen-it-all, X-ray eyes. Not-impressed eyes. If Etain and I got married, me and her dad could go to Cubs games, trade jokes, barbecue up some ribs in the backyard, and call each other Cam and Chris. Mom and I would be on a "yes, ma'am, no, ma'am," basis. She was one of those people you feel like you'd better salute or bow to. I did a little of both, just to be on the safe side.

  We had an intimate little dinner, just us, Etain, Mom and Dad, and the druid named Fios who didn't smile, didn't talk, and barely ate or drank.

  There were fairy guards and fairy waiters and a couple of crude electric lights like something out of Frankenstein's lab: arcs of snapping blue augmenting the candles.

  We ate with forks and knives and spoons. There were napkins. No one threw their food on the floor Only the king picked his teeth with a knife — all the while keeping his glowing cheroot in place. But the food was good enough and, to April's relief, included heaps of fresh green vegetables among the numerous overcooked animals.

  There was good wine and I indulged, ignoring David's puckered disapproval. Old King Camulos and I got pretty toasted, followed at some distance by April and Jalil. The elf queen drank the wine but it might as well have been water.

  There was no "thaw" button for Mom.

  "Etain tells us that you were present at the final battle of Galahad," Goewynne said at one point.

  "Yes," David answered. He was about to say more, but with Goewynne you automatically felt like a defendant being cross-examined by a district attorney looking to get the death penalty, and your lawyer had instructed you not to volunteer information.

  "We had guessed as much, yet it is bitter news," Goewynne said. "He was the perfect knight."

  "Yes, yes," King Cam said, taking a deep swig around his cigar. Then his eyes lit up and he started grinning and chuckling in anticipation of tossing off a funny line. "Though I'd always thought our wedding night was the perfect night!" As he reached the last couple of words he broke up, gasping out the punch line, and then hacking like a cat with a hairball.

  Goewynne produced an affectionate smile that kind of made me like her more. And it made me think the old king must have something going on to keep the elf queen happy.

  When King Camulos was done wheezing he said, "I once fought Galahad, you know. Only a joust, and with blunted swords, but what a warrior! He stove one of my ribs in with the pommel of his sword and damn me if I didn't have him by the hair. We ended up rolling in the mud and laughing so hard we couldn't go on." H
e shook his head. "Ah, we'll have to declare a fortnight of mourning. A pity. Galahad would never approve: He wasn't one for crying over spilt blood."

  I started to laugh, figuring that was a play on words, but Old Cam had misted up and was wiping his eyes with the back of his sleeve, so I stifled myself.

  "You are from the old world," said a previously unheard voice. Fios. The druid. Maybe the boss druid, I didn't know for sure. "Yes, we are," David answered him.

  "How is it you come to be among us?" Fios asked. He reminded me of Merlin, only Merlin without the temper or the snippy impatience with fools. And he was younger. He wore a long, layered robe that revealed three different shades of yellow. Very tasteful, nothing too garish. He was clean-shaven, with a long, kind of horsey face and sad eyes.

  David didn't hesitate. "We don't know how we came to be here," he lied.

  Maybe Old King Cam bought that but Fios didn't and Etain didn't and Goewynne sure as hell didn't. But they were all polite enough about being lied to,

  David dug the hole deeper, as poor liars often do, by offering more detail. "One moment we were there, then suddenly we were here. Not here in Ireland, here in Everworld.

  Viking country, actually. And since then we've been traveling.

  We actually were just in Atlantis. Actually, we're trying to get back to Olympus because we've been trying to help the gods there fight Ka Anor."

  "Try not to use more than a dozen 'actuallys' in a sentence,"

  I muttered. The boy was a pitiful liar.

  There was an embarrassed silence while the elf queen and the half-elf princess and the druid all pretended not to notice that we were full of crap, and while we pretended not to know that they knew we were full of crap.

  At last Etain spoke up. "Visitors who reach our shores are most often very happy to remain with us. And visitors such as yourselves, why, you would be honored guests. You have so much to teach us, and we honor learning in my father's kingdom and throughout the land. You would want for nothing: food, drink, pleasant lodging, servants, companionship."

  "Sounds good to me," I said. I met her gaze and did my best to project sincerity, not something I do well. "This is the greatest place we've seen in Everworld. Nicest people, too. The most beautiful ladies." I nodded in a terrifically courtly, knightly sort of way, at Etain and at Mom. As smooth as I am capable of being.

  Etain's smile was perfectly poised between vast amusement and sincere gratitude. Goewynne looked at me as if she'd just discovered that I wasn't a human at all, but a chimpanzee wearing pants.

  The dinner wore on to a close with all of us talking pleasantly and dishonestly. Fios expressed the hope that real-worlders would get together with him and some of his boys the next day, and we agreed. We agreed because Goewynne very graciously endorsed the idea, and none of us wanted to find out what happened if you blew off the elf queen.

  Plus, it seems, Etain was going to be there, too. And as far as I was concerned, I was going anywhere she was going.

  Chapter

  VII

  I don't know, maybe it was just time for me to fall in love. I'd been through some changes. I'd gone from being a fairly normal kid wondering how to get into a college a long, long way from home, to being the official punching bag of the gods.

  I'd seen things I wasn't going to soon forget. I'd seen the poor, doomed, tortured men in Hel's underworld. And I'd seen humans marching up an Aztec pyramid like so many cows on their way to the big Oscar Meyer package in the sky. I'd seen Ka Anor himself, that nasty piece of work, seen him eat a sweet, handsome poof named Ganymede who'd never done any harm to anyone.

  Regular life had sucked, but it had sucked in the usual, barely tolerable ways: School was a joke, my parents were drunks, and life was pretty much centered around my couch, my remote, and Nick at Nite.

  Now life sucked in color. It sucked in stereo. This was true broadband suckage, the suckage of the future, a whole new world of suckery. People were trying to kill me. Lots of them. Not out of any special malice toward me, it wasn't personal, it was just that whether it's Amazons or Aztecs or trolls or mermen or fairies or Hetwan or... well, one way or the other they had the one thing in common: an inexplicable desire to kill me.

  So, yes, doctor, it has been a stressful time in my life.

  Prozac? Sure. I'll take a truckload.

  Maybe that was it, maybe it was a reaction to stress, you know? My own tiny life force reaching out for something to hold on to. And Etain was something to hold on to. You know why?

  She laughed and even David couldn't help but laugh along.

  She was beautiful and she was smart and she had a sense of humor, and yes, she had a nice body, but honest to God that wasn't it.

  It wasn't her body I was seeing as I lay there in the dark on a comfy bed with a fire slowly dying in the stone hearth. It was her face. Now that has to be love, right? You're thinking about a girl's face and laugh and movement and hair color and eyes and all that usually irrelevant stuff?

  Stress. There's no other explanation.

  But I didn't want to go to sleep. It had been a long day, what with escaping from the bottom of the freaking ocean and being some giant's Juicy Fruit, but I didn't want to sleep because if I slept I'd slip across to the real world. And over there the other Christopher, the one who hadn't seen Etain up close, the cynical, smart-ass Christopher untouched by love would dilute, water down the feeling I had.

  You know, I'm basically a jerk when it comes to the finer emotions in life. It was pitiful but I was afraid of confronting myself with my own feelings. Especially because I knew it didn't make much sense. I mean, not if you believe love is about sharing things in common, believing the same things, doing the same stuff. Etain and I didn't have any of that.

  Me, I think if love exists at all it's this kind of automatic "click"

  that you can't control, that doesn't maybe make any sense at all, that you can't rationalize or defend. That's what I believe to the extent that I've ever spent any time thinking about it. Which I never had, until this very night.

  So, anyway, I was already awake when the yelling and the running started.

  I jumped up, jammed my feet in my skanky old sneaks, and was reasonably clothed when someone started pounding on the door.

  "Who is it?" I yelled. Hey, you don't open doors in Everworld without knowing who's on the other side. Or back home, either, for that matter.

  "Etain," came the answer and for about a millisecond I tried to resolve the yelling and pounding with the possibility that Etain had dropped by to ask for my hand in marriage and a test drive on the honeymoon. But no, that was pretty unlikely.

  I opened the door. She was wearing a robe, full-length but not entirely opaque, mostly covered over by a heavy velvet cloak. Two tough-looking fairies were holding torches that hissed as they fumed

  “What's up?" I asked.

  "Lorg is dead."

  "The giant? What happened?"

  "We don't know," she said, and for a moment there was definite suspicion on her part, definite stink-eye. "He was killed by some magic we do not comprehend. We feared... we hoped... will you come to see his body?"

  "Yeah, of course."

  The others were being roused out of their rooms. April and David were in the hallway, having been awakened by fairy soldiers. I was the one Etain had come to waken personally.

  Well, all right

  We hustled down dark stone corridors and out into a courtyard where horses were being saddled for us. It was chilly out, and steam came from the horses' nostrils. Their hooves made a lot of noise on cobblestones and an upper window creaked open to reveal the king himself.

  Everyone paused in what they were doing to look up at him. You'd expect an old man like him, an old man who'd drunk by my count three bottles of wine to be a bit on the frowzy, confused, hazy side.

  No. The old boy was wide-awake. Not pissed exactly, but not happy, either. Taking care of business.

  "Daughter," he called down. "Take car
e to learn the truth.

  No matter the consequences, learn the truth: I rely upon you."

  "Yes, Father."

  And then, the weirdest thing. The old man hauled a sheathed sword up from out of sight, and threw it down to Etain.

  It spun in the air as it fell, and the sword itself came out of the scabbard and I had no time to react, no time to do the hero thing and throw myself in the path of the blade.

  Just as well. Etain caught the scabbard with her left hand, and caught the spinning sword with her right hand. And maybe it was just a trick of moonlight, but I swear the blade glowed blue when she touched it.

  One of the fairies snapped the scabbard around her waist, under her cloak, and Etain slid that blade in with the practiced ease of Wyatt Earp bolstering his six-gun.

  She swung up into the saddle of a big, black, snorting monster of a horse and held it in check, prancing, while David and April and Jalil and I all saddled up.

  Senna stood alone. They hadn't brought her a horse. Which was a message in itself. Horses won't carry a witch, and the fact that there was no horse for her meant as plain as day that Etain and her family knew perfectly well what Senna was.

  "You guys have a broom for Senna?" I asked.

  Senna took it all pretty well; no one ever accused her of being a wimp. She didn't say anything, just waited, head high, gray eyes indifferent, above it all. And sure enough, a fairy drove up in a sort of chariot and with studied insolence invited her aboard.

  And off we went into the night, out the gate, across the drawbridge, pelting down through a cold fog that had eaten the town and seemed to force refrigerator hands inside my clothes. The moon was up and it wasn't dead dark, but still the countryside beyond the village looked a lot more Tim Burton than it did during the day.