George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

“What did you do to him? You must have more power than you thought.”

Anna smiled. “I had no power,” she said. “I just pretended otherwise.”

One of the fox heads looked up and grinned.

When she got back to her seat, the note paper was waiting for her. James was looking straight ahead; he didn’t even acknowledge she had come back.

Under I have no real magic , James had drawn a question mark.

She folded the paper carefully, rested both hands on it like a talisman.

At home, she waited for dark to go down to the water.

A hundred yards out, in the dim moonlight, she could still see that the narwhal was gone.

She ran.

As she lurched over the rocks, she saw it was not really gone; it hadn’t sprung to life again and swum out to sea (as she had half-hoped).

It was devoured.

The narwhal was eaten clean down to the bones (impossible for birds to manage in three days), and the bones themselves were intact, despite the wind (impossible, impossible). The ribs rose sharply white against the green-black sky, the skin curling like parchment against the black ground as if the wind itself had pulled it gently from the flesh.

Annakpok looked in the sand for tracks. No animal tracks (she expected none), but she was surprised that only her own footprints came out this far.

She walked slowly, tracing the edge of the laid-out hide with her feet as she went, trying to still her pounding heart. She had to listen; she needed to see.

There was no flesh left on the bones at all; she would have suspected that she had been trapped in time, at the summit for a hundred years, except that the bones had not yet begun to dry. They were pearl-white still, the ribs like joyful hands, the tailbones pointing mournfully to the sea.

Anna knelt and plucked the smallest tailbone from the hide. It was the length of her palm, and hollow. She slid it over one finger.

She made rings out of ten vertebrae. They warmed against her skin; when she curled her hands they shifted against one another like she wore gloves of bone.

The ice under her feet was slippery, rotten, but she stepped where the moon reflected thickest. The bones in her hands thrummed as she breathed.

She walked across the sheet ice, out and on, past the light from shore, past her mother’s old hunting grounds, to the edge of the ice-veiled sea. There she stopped, and trembled. The ice rocked gently under her feet, and she knew if she slipped here the sea would swallow her.

It might swallow her in any case. (She thought of her mother inside the mouth of the narwhal, beckoning her home.) It was great magic, what she was attempting. It was beyond her power.

She would be the sacrifice.

Around her the world was flat and black; the wind slid mournfully against her face.

Annakpok held out her open hands before she could be afraid. If she was a shaman, the sea would bring them back to her as narwhals. She had only to wait, and be worthy.

(What are you fighting for?

Everything. )

The bones fell into the water, ten white sparks that disappeared into a black so deep that the bottom could not be seen.

When she turned for the shore, the narwhal’s bones looked like a doorway, like an open hand waving her home.

Nnedi Okoraforis the author of the novels Zahrah the Windseeker, The Shadow Speaker , and Who Fears Death . Her book for children, Long Juju Man , won the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa. She is also the winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature and the Carl Brandon Society’s Parallax Award, and has been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, Andre Norton Award, and the Essence Magazine Literary Award. Forthcoming books include Akata Witch and Iridessa the Fire-Bellied Dragon Frog . Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and in anthologies such as Eclipse Three, Seeds of Change, So Long Been Dreaming, and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones .

Our next tale is about wizardry in modern-day Africa. Africa is a less common setting for fantasy stories, but there are some notable works out there for readers who are interested in the continent. Among the best known are the adventure tales of H. Rider Haggard, including She and King Solomon’s Mines (starring the character Alan Quatermain, who also appeared in Alan Moore’s graphic novel series League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ). Charles Saunders has written a series of sword and sorcery tales starring African characters, beginning with the collection Imaro . Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed begins in ancient Africa and follows the lives of two immortals as they attempt to come to terms with their unusual abilities. Alan Dean Foster’s Carnivores of Light and Darkness follows an African tribesman who sets out on a quest to rescue a princess and who faces off against all manner of magical obstacles. And Lion’s Blood by Steven Barnes is an alternate history in which Africa is the most powerful continent on earth.

In addition to her interest in Africa, another of Nnedi Okorafor’s passions is strange creatures. Her work is full of wild and colorful animals, such as the very unusual birds in this next story.

It was Nigerian style gridlock. The worst kind of traffic. It was a carnival of vehicles from cars to supersize trucks, nose to ass for miles, oozing, spewing, dribbling exhaust into the weighted heat under the hot penetrating African sun. Only the okada were on the move. The motorbikes snaked clumsily between cars and trucks, with their one, two, even three passengers hanging on for dear life. The okada dodged opportunistic hawkers and occasionally scraped the fenders of a vehicles. They always kept right on going.

The go-slow was especially sluggish today and Nkem was smoldering with irritation. All he’d meant to do was drive from one part of Owerri to another, a matter of miles. Instead, for the last two hours, he’d been stuck behind a smoke-belching truck and beside a rusty van full of choir members from some fanatical church. He’d turned off his car an hour and half ago, despite the heat. If he didn’t die from inhaling the truck’s noxious fumes, he was going to go mad from the women’s high-pitched singing. Just then, the women started yet another verse of “Washed in the Blood of Christ.”

“God Dammit,” Nkem shouted, slamming his hands down on the steering wheel in frustration. Several of the women stopped singing to glare at him. He considered giving them the finger or cursing at them with such fury that they’d either think he had Tourette’s syndrome or been possessed by some ungodly spirit, but then he imagined how appalled his mother would be with him. She was always in his head at the wrong times. “The goddamn church can kiss my ass, man,” he muttered. “Psychos, all of them. The crippling force of this country.”

But he said nothing to the women and he kept all his fingers wrapped around the steering wheel. He gnashed his teeth. It was amazing how slowly time moved in certain situations, especially ones of deep annoyance. Go-slows were like getting stuck in time warps. He shielded his eyes, looked into the sky and spotted a large eagle soaring by. Leisurely, free, ruler of the sky.

“Goddamn bird,” he muttered.

He’d been on his way to a good fuck. He deserved it; he’d finished shooting his latest film, No Boundaries , yesterday. He owed himself the distraction and he wasn’t going to get it from his wife. Besides, what he wanted was a destructive distraction. He’d met the girl, Agnes, at a club four months ago. Of course, she’d been ecstatic to get a phone call from Nigeria’s sexiest actor. She was ready and waiting for him at a hotel twenty minutes away.