Hugh Cook: The Wazir and the Witch

The crashing waters thrashed around the helpless living flesh, buffeted across the embankment, reached the first shacks and boathouses, the first shopstalls and housefronts… and there hesitated, paused, then, realizing they had exhausted their momentum, began to slide back into the Laitemata.

The backsliding waters carried away with them a good three dozen soldiers and a princess, the princess in question being the elegant Sabitha Winolathon Taskin-jathura, she of the noble lineage, the impeccable breeding. Fortunately, she could swim; and the soldiers could swim as well; and when the excitement was over and all the swimmers had been hauled from the water, it was discovered that the damage done by the tsunami amounted to no more than an impromptu bath for one princess (the above mentioned Princess Sabitha) and some three or four dozen soldiers.

For not all tsunamis are equal, and this one (like Nixorjapretzel Rat’s demon) was more unequal than most.

Your historian regrets the fact that he is unable to conclude this account by providing you with a final scene of cataclysmic destruction, but what happened is what happened, and history cannot be amended merely to spice up a story. So we cannot here have any account of the overthrow of Injiltaprajura, of the bursting of buildings, of the screams of helpless victims staring uphill in horror as the ship-sized monument known as Pearl pounds down upon them, of splattered blood and broken bones and skulls exploding as life and hope are eyeblinked into oblivion.

No, what happened is commonplace — indeed, batho-tic — by comparison. But it is the truth. The wave came, the wave broke, and Injiltaprajura was much the same thereafter, for it was a wave far too small to fit the real dramatic needs of the moment. And Justina Thrug escaped by air from the hooks and claws of justice and (to the best of the historian’s knowledge) was never seen again on Untunchilamon.

Of Untunchilamon and its politics you now know; or, to put it another way, you know as much as your historian can reasonably be expected to convey, given the limitations of his sources, the dictates of mortality and the outrageous price of ink, pens and fooskin. However, one final duty remains, and that is for the historian to clear up a small mystery. How did the Empress Justina swindle the innocent Jean Froissart? You will remember that the Empress set three glasses in a row on a table. That she flip-flopped two at a time. That three such manipulations gave her two inverted glasses and one standing upright. Froissart, challenged to duplicate the feat, failed.

Despite his genius level intellect.

How so?

The reader has already been warned that the answer is bathotic, and so it it. For when we come to the question of conjuring, the interest is all in the illusion; and the explanation of that illusion is necessarily disappointing.

The answer is this:

Justina started off with a row of three glasses, the beakers at the end inverted and the central glass standing upright. When she rearranged the glasses, the Empress inverted the central beaker and let the other two stand upright. Froissart, let loose on this array, thought he was tackling the problem so easily solved by the Empress. Of course he was not. Hence his mind-buckling frustration and his inevitable defeat.

That Froissart was so easily fooled is not to his discredit, for nine people out of ten will fall victim if the Manipulator has any skill; and Justina, coached well by the conjuror Odolo, had mastered the art of subtly misdirecting the mind.

Naturally Froissart was predisposed to think Justina a witch, which made her deception easier; however, the fact remains that it usually takes a trained Observer to reveal the deceits of an adroit Manipulator, and that some of the world’s greatest Investigators have been fooled by tricks equally as feeble as that to which Froissart fell victim.

It follows that conjurors can often pass as wizards or wonder-workers; and many have done just that, often winning great honours from naive rulers, and sometimes continuing their deceits until overtaken by death in a wealthy and much-honoured old age. However, should the reader be tempted to adopt such a stratagem, be warned that such deceits have sometimes failed in a truly spectacular fashion; and the writer will not accept responsibility for the consequences!

With that said, our history is, strictly speaking, at an end. Let us write it thus: