George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

After that, it’s in and out of all the pokey little bars in the back streets, checking for the kind of leeches that specialize in grubby little gin joints. They look human enough, especially in a dimly-lit room. You know the kind of strangers, the ones who belly up to the bar next to you with an ingratiating smile, talking about nothing in particular, but you just can’t seem to get rid of them. It’s not your company, or even your money, they’re after. Leeches want other things. Some can suck the booze right out of you, leaving you nothing but the hangover. Others can drain off your life energy, your luck, even your hope.

They usually run when they see me coming. They know I’ll make them give it all back, with interest. I love to squeeze those suckers dry.

Personal demons are the worst. They come in with the night, swooping and roiling down the narrow streets like leaves tossed on the breeze, snapping their teeth and flexing their barbed fingers. Looking to fasten on to any tourist whose psychic defenses aren’t everything they should be. They wriggle in, under the mental barricades, snuggle onto your back and ride you like a mule. They encourage all their host’s worst weaknesses — greed or lust or violence, all the worst sins and temptations they ever dreamed of. The tourists go wild, drowning themselves in sensation — and the demons soak it all up. When they’ve had enough they let go, and slip away into the night, fat and engorged, leaving the tourists to figure out where all their money and self respect went. Why they’ve done so many things they swore they’d never do. Why there’s a dead body at their feet, and blood on their hands.

I can See the demons, but they never see me coming. I can sneak up behind them and rip them right off a tourist’s back. I use special gloves that I call my emotional baggage handlers. A bunch of local nuns make them for us, blessed with special prayers, every thread soaked in holy water, and backed up with nasty silver spurs in the fingertips. Personal demons aren’t really alive, as such, but I still love the way they scream as their flimsy bodies burst in my hands.

Of course, some tourists bring their own personal demons in with them, and then I just make a note of their names, to pass on to the Big Boys. Symbiosis is more than I can handle.

I bump into my first group of Grey aliens of the night, and make a point of stopping to check their permits are in order. They look like ordinary people to everyone else, until they get up close, and then they hypnotize you with those big black eyes, like a snake with a mouse, and you might as well bend over and smile for the probe. Up close, they smell of sour milk, and their movements are just wrong. Their dull grey flesh slides this way and that, even when they’re standing still, as though it isn’t properly attached to the bones beneath.

I’ve never let them abduct anyone on my watch. I’m always very firm; no proper paperwork, no abduction. They never argue. Never even react. It’s hard to tell what a Grey is thinking, what with that long flat face and those unblinking eyes. I wish they’d wear some kind of clothes, though. You wouldn’t believe what they’ve got instead of genitals.

Even when their paperwork is in order, I always find or pretend to find something wrong, and send them on their way, out of my area. Just doing my bit, to protect humanity from alien intervention. The Government can stuff their quotas.

Round about two or three a.m., I run across a Street Preacher, having a quiet smoke of a hand-rolled in a back alley. She’s new, Tamsin MacReady. Looks about fifteen, but she must be hard as nails or they’d never have given her this patch. Street Preachers deal with the more spiritual problems, which is why few of them last long. Soon enough they realize reason and compassion aren’t enough, and that’s when the smiting starts, and the rest of us run for cover. Tamsin’s a decent enough sort, disturbed that she can’t do more to help.

“People come here to satisfy the needs of the flesh, not the spirit,” I say, handing her back the hand-rolled. “And we’re here to help, not meddle.”

“Oh, blow it out your ear,” she says, and we both laugh.

It’s not long after that I run into some real trouble; someone from the Jewish Defense League has unleashed a Golem on a march by British Nazi skinheads. The Golem is picking them up and throwing them about, and the ones who aren’t busy bleeding or crying or wetting themselves are legging it for the horizon. I feel like standing back and applauding, but I can’t let this go on. Someone might notice. So I wade in, ducking under the Golem’s flailing arms, until I can wipe the activating word off its forehead. It goes still then, nothing more than lifeless clay, and I put in a call for it to be towed away. Someone higher up will have words with someone else, and hopefully I won’t have to do this again. For a while.

I take some hard knocks and a bloody nose before I can shut the Golem down, so I take time out to lean against a stone wall and feel sorry for myself: My healing spells only work on other people. The few skinheads picking themselves up off the pavement aren’t sympathetic. They know where my sympathies lie. Some of them make aggressive noises, until I give them a hard look, and then they remember they’re needed somewhere else.

I could always turn the Golem back on, and they know it.

I head off on my beat again, picking them up and slapping them down, aching quietly here and there. Demons and pixies and golems, oh my. Just another night, in Soho.

Keep walking, keep walking. Protect the ones you can, and try not to dwell on the ones you can’t. Sweep up the mess, drive off the predators, and keep the world from ever finding out. That’s the job. Lots of responsibility, hardly any authority, and the pay sucks. I say as much to Red, when we bump into each other at the end of our shifts. She clucks over my bruises, and offers me a nip from her hip flask. It’s surprisingly good stuff.

“Why do you do it, Charlie boy? Hard work and harder luck, with nothing to show but bruises and bad language from the very people you’re here to help? It can’t be the money; I probably make more than you do.”

“No,” I say. “It’s not the money.”

I think of all the things I See every night that most of the world never knows exists. The marvelous and the fantastic, the strange creatures and stranger people, gods and monsters and all the wonders of the hidden world. I walk in magic and work miracles, and the night is full of glory. How could I ever turn my back on all that?

“You ever think of giving this up, Charlie boy?” says Red.

“What?” I say. “And leave show business?”

T.A. Pratt(also known as Tim Pratt) is the Hugo Award-winning author of several novels featuring the sorcerer Marla Mason: Blood Engines, Poison Sleep, Dead Reign, and Spell Games. Additionally, two Marla Mason novels, Bone Shop and Broken Mirrors are available as online serials on Pratt’s website, timpratt.org. Another novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl , is a standalone, “cowpunk” fantasy. Pratt is also the author of many short stories, which have appeared in such venues as Subterranean, Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons , and reprinted in Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best SF, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror . His short work has been collected in Little Gods and Hart & Boot & Other Stories .

Our next tale concerns Pratt’s above-mentioned series character Marla Mason, the tough, no-nonsense sorcerer who presides over the fictional city of Felport. (Each city needs a wizard to keep it safe, and the wizards of each city are constantly vying for the top spot.) In this universe, every sort of magic you’ve ever heard of (and many you haven’t) is real — sympathetic magic, necromancy, pyromancy, etc. (Not to mention — memorably—“pornomancy.”)