George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

There was no possible way this was happening. It just wasn’t possible. Most of the people in this hex weren’t within four levels of her! She gambled and spent some of her dwindling energy on a Maximal Dismissal, snuffing everything within ten yards. At least it brought her trachea back online. She sucked wind.

Paper was thick in the air around her. Some of it was on fire, and somebody kept trying to form it into a kind of golem-shape, which wanted to wrap its papery arms around her. She ripped up the carpet, wrapped people up in it, blocked them off. Between them they were tearing the place apart, right down to the reinforced concrete. The Matron was blitzing her with the whole spellbook, major and minor, smart and stupid, presumably with the idea that something would get through and it didn’t really matter what. She was strong, really strong. Not a captain. Higher than that.

Sweat was freezing on her face. This was not sustainable. She had to stop it, all the bullshit. Make it go away. The hair was rising on the back of her neck, static fuzz bristled on the carpeting. Something shorted out in the cubicle next to her. Computer monitors ruptured with a sound like busting piñatas. Frost crystals bloomed wildly on glass surfaces all around her, and snow condensed out of the air. The Matron was building up to her big finale.

But at the same time she was having a ridiculous idea. Really wonderfuckingly ridiculous. And impossible. But listen: there was a clock on the wall. There was a clock in every computer and every phone and printer and fax on this floor. Clocks were wild magic — not much by themselves, but put them together and gather all the threads and cut them … desperate times call for batshit insane measures.

Adding a couple of magical feet to her vertical leap, she vaulted into the air and snatched a fluorescent tube out of the ceiling and made it into a Griggs’ Scepter, hard and magnesium-bright. She whipped it in a series of intricate patterns, tracing letters and sigils and wards in the air around her, then stabbed it down into the floor in front of her, with both hands. Something rippled out from around it.

Time snagged on something, got stuck. Groaning and complaining, it jerked to a halt.

Silence. She breathed hard, raggedly, resting her forehead against the rough carpet. Time hadn’t really stopped, of course. They were all breathing and their hearts were beating. But they couldn’t perceive it. Or time couldn’t perceive them. Or something — in the heat of the moment her spellcraft had leapt ahead of whatever theory was supposed to be underpinning it. But it worked. They would spend years adjudicating the legality of it, but meantime it would just add to her legend. And she would have the Blue Cube. Possession. Nine tenths of something. Now to find it.

And, looking up, she found it. It was in the right hand of a tall, skinny stranger who was strolling down the aisle toward her, between the shattered cubicles. Stray papers were hanging in the air, suspended; he batted one aside with his free arm. His clothes were odd. Fancy embroidery. If she had to describe his expression she’d say it was melancholy and humorous.

Well, she’d give him something to be melancholy and humorous about. She would lay him out flat. She still had the Scepter for a few more minutes.

But then she didn’t. He’d made it go away somehow — put it away somewhere she couldn’t get at. Really, it was the most eyebendingly strange casting she could ever remember seeing. Totally alien gramarye. She could have followed up with the fainting charm — her standard second serve — but she didn’t. Something told her it was pointless. And anyway if he was unconscious she couldn’t ask him how the hell he’d just done that.

In that same foreign style of magic, he immobilized her. Not in a mean way, but thoroughly. Like he meant it. She could try and cast something vocally, but she didn’t feel like having her mouth bound too. And she still had to pee.

“Annie,” he said. “Poppy Muller.”

She shrugged, as best she could under the circumstances. Yeah, and?

He spun the cube cleverly on one finger. Not a magic trick, just old-fashioned fingersmithing. His clothes really were odd. Old-timey and yet not. He might have been twenty-five, twenty-seven at most. Whose side was he on?

“You’re ranked number one in the world. Overall.”

“And in three individual categories.”

“I’m Quentin.” He sniffed at the air, wrinkled his nose. Yeah, lot of toxic smoke in here. Burning plastic. “I haven’t seen a Griggs’ Scepter for years.”

She wasn’t afraid of him exactly, but he was talking very slowly, and her time spell wouldn’t hold much longer. She needed to move. She had to make him let her. Mentally she ran through angles, looked for points of leverage. She didn’t find much.

“You don’t really want to spend the rest of your life playing games, do you?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. Keep it flip. “Maybe. It’s not like I had anything else planned.”

“I understand. Would you like to see a real magic trick, Poppy?”

She frowned. Her eyes stayed glued to the cube.

“What do you mean, real?” she said.

She’d gone really off piste now. He let the spell dissipate. Just like that she was free. Watching her carefully, as if she were a small wild rodent of some kind, prone to unpredictable behavior, Quentin put his hand on her shoulder, and with the other hand he reached inside his jacket.

Then he must have touched something, something quite small and extremely magic, because the ruined office vanished from around them. And just before a new world arrived to replace it (she really hoped they had bathrooms there) and everything changed forever, she had time to think: this is really going to fuck up my average.

But the funny thing was, she really didn’t care.

Simon R. Greenis the best-selling author of dozens of novels, including several long-running series, such as the Deathstalker series and the Darkwood series. Most of his work over the last several years has been set in either his Secret History series or in his popular Nightside milieu. Recent novels include The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny and The Spy Who Haunted Me . A new series, The Ghost Finder s, is forthcoming. Green’s short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Mean Streets, Unusual Suspects, Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, Powers of Detection , and in my anthology The Living Dead 2 .

Our lives are ruled by routines: wake up, take a shower, eat breakfast, go to work, eat lunch, and so on, always the same, day after day. We may move to a new city, a new country, and tell ourselves that we’ll break the routine, discover something new every day, but pretty quickly we inevitably find ourselves frequenting the same shops, following the same routes to and fro.

In a wide world full of endless possibilities, why do we find ourselves doing the same things in the same way day after day? We’re creatures of habit, as the saying goes, and of course there’s a certain comfort to be found in the familiar, the predictable, the everyday. When we read stories about wizards, we tend to see them at moments of high drama: exploring a dungeon or preparing to work some grand casting. But of course wizards, like everyone else, must have their average days, their normal routines. What would it be like, a day in the life of a wizard? That’s what our next tale explores. Though of course there’s quite a bit more to the life of a modern urban wizard than cubicles and commutes.

I believe in magic. It’s my job.

I’m a street wizard, work for London City Council. I don’t wear a pointy hat, I don’t live in a castle, and no one in my line of work has used a wand since tights went out of fashion. I’m paid the same money as a traffic warden, but I don’t even get a free uniform. I just get to clean up other people’s messes, and prevent trouble when I can. It’s a magical job, but someone’s got to do it.