David Gerrold - The Flying Sorcerers

At last he said, “I’m ready.” There was a click as he switched on the device. A dial on its face gave off a soft glow. Before he even pressed the call button, he peered at this dial. “There is power enough, Lant. More than enough. I can call my mother nest ten times, maybe more, with the power in this battery.”

“Is it enough to recharge the windbags too?” I asked hopefully.

His face was a dark blur. “No, not that much. That requires vast amounts of power, Lant. It needs a heavy-duty battery like my other one — but don’t worry. When my mother egg gets here, I’ll see that you and your sons get safely home.

“Home,” he repeated. “I’m going home. No more double shadows. No more furry women. No more black plants —”

“Green, Purple. Plants are green.”

“Green is a bright color where I come from. No more odd food and foul drink. No more scratchy clothing. No more medicine shows for yokels .” He chanted this litany in man’s tongue and demon’s tongue. It was a homegoing spell and he spoke it intensely. “I’ll have books, music, normal weight —”

“You intend to diet?”

He laughed at that and kept laughing from sheer joy. “I’m going home!” he bellowed into the night.

“Why not try your calling device?” I was getting impatient.

He said, “I’m afraid to.”

“Oh.”

He turned the knob. A yellow eye opened brilliantly.

“Hah!” Purple shouted. “And the red eye means that the mother nest has answered.”

“What red eye?”

Purple twiddled the knob impatiently. “Come on,” he whispered. “Come on.”

Nothing happened.

He shook the device. “Come on, damn you! I want to go home!”

The yellow eye burned steadily. There was no red response light.

“We’re far enough north,” said Purple. “Close enough to the equator . The seeing should be good; the curve of the planet isn’t in the way. What could be wrong? It can’t be sending the wrong frequency ,” he mumbled. If he was making magic, it wasn’t working.

“Perhaps it’s your battery.” I suggested.

“It’s not my battery. Why doesn’t it answer? Why doesn’t it answer?” He jumped to his feet and went raging off into the dark. After a moment, I followed him.

I found him sitting in ashes and despair. He had his device on the ground in front of him and was banging on it with a rock.

He hadn’t damaged it though — only pounded it deeper into the soft dead earth.

“Purple, stop,” I said softly. “Stop.”

“Why should I?” he said bitterly. “We’ve come all this way for nothing. All of your devices have worked, Lant. None of mine have. Your aircloth got us here, your generators got us here, your airpushers got us here — but my calling device doesn’t work. So why did we bother to come at all. The only one who’s going to get any benefit out of this will be Shoogar.”

“Huh?” Did he know about the duel ? Had he realized?

“Yes, Shoogar,” he answered my questioning look. “He needed to know about the moons. He had to come north.

The rest of us might as well have stayed home.” He started pounding again.

“Perhaps we have not come far enough north,” I suggested.

He made a sound that suggested he thought me a fool.

I was grabbing for ideas now, anything to restore his spirit. “Or perhaps there is still a planet in the way.” Whatever that meant. He had used the word before.

For a moment, there was silence. “What did you say? —”

I opened my mouth to repeat it.

“Never mind. I heard it the first time.” There was a sound of digging in the dirt. A scraping and a crunching. “Damn me. I’m so stupid sometimes —”

“What are you talking about?”

He stood up, a blur in the darkness. He held his device in his hands. “Lant, you are a genius sometimes. And all this time I thought you didn’t understand a thing I was talking about but were only being polite and pretending that you did. Of course there’s a planet in the way,” he stamped his foot. “This one.”

“H’m,” I said, pretending to understand. Who was I to shatter his illusion?

“Don’t you see? My egg hasn’t risen yet. Like the suns, it’s probably on the other side of the world. I will have to wait until it is in sight, before I try calling it again. That’s probably why it didn’t work before.”

When magic doesn’t work, a good magician usually has an explanation ready. Purple was one of the best. I wondered if he understood his own explanation. I asked, “How long will it take before you can call it down?”

“A couple of hours should be all I need. I’ll try calling it every fifteen minutes. Its orbit is only two and a half hours. I couldn’t possibly miss it, no matter how low on the horizon it is.”

I left him mumbling happily to himself, explaining things to no one in particular.

Blue dawn snapped up over the eastern rim, revealing a world even bleaker and drearier than before — if such was possible.

Aching with hunger I stumbled up a black hill to find Shoogar tracing a gigantic pattern in the greasy dust. He was using a brilliant white powder and mixing it with various colored potions as he trickled it into graceful curves. Every so often he stopped to consult a parchment in his hand.

I recognized the skin, with its circles and ellipses looping around a central dot — then I recognized the larger pattern. “Shoogar! What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m casting a spell!”

“And your oath of fealty?”

“You know perfectly well that I swore by the local gods. Different territories imply different gods and different oaths. Now we’re on my home territory. Here, I painted the runes of the duel against Purple. Here, that duel is still in progress!”

“But so much has changed —” I stopped, for he was right. “And you stole his map of the moonpaths.”

“No. He gave it to me, the fool. I’ll use his own magic against him. And his own name — his real name! Of course, he wasn’t worried before. He knew I couldn’t hurt him because his speakerspell hadn’t told his true name. But this time —”

“Maybe he was lying,” I said quickly.

Shoogar gave me a contemptuous look. “Lant,” he explained patiently, “the act of saying ‘my real name is,’ is a consecration spell. Even if he was lying when he said it, the act of saying it made it as good as his real name. And it can be used against him! If this were not so, a magician would have no power at all. People would change names at will to avoid local spells.”

“But why the moonpaths?” I said. Then it dawned on me. “No — you can’t!”

“I can — and I will. I’m going to drop a moon on his head.”

I felt a strong urge to laugh. It was insane. Wildly, incredibly insane.

And he meant every word of it.

“Shoogar,” I said. “A moon did fall once. Do you know what the results were?”

“I have seen the Circle Sea .”

“ Circle Sea was once a rich farming area. Now the sea rolls in a circular depression of blasted stone, where nothing grows at all.”

Shoogar shrugged unconcernedly. “This place is already accursed, Lant. What harm can a falling moon do here?”

“It can kill us !” I almost shouted.

“I’ll pick one of the little ones —”

“Even a little one can kill us — they say that the Circle Sea was a ring of molten rock for many years, before the sea stopped boiling and moved in to cover it.”

“Probably, they exaggerate.”

“But —”

“Lant,” he said, “I can do no less. Consider: Purple has insulted the Gods themselves. He has claimed repeatedly that they do not exist at all — and he has had the incredible effrontery to build a flying machine that proves it! In his violations of reason, such as his games with the ballast concept, he mocks the laws that even the gods obey.”