Clare Cassandra - What Really Happened in Peru

You could not tell a potential customer, expecting a learned and ancient magician, that you were not even fully grown.

Magnus had started lying about his age young, and had never dropped the habit.

It did get a little embarrassing sometimes when he forgot what lie he’d told to whom. Someone had once asked him what Julius Caesar was like, and

Magnus had stared at him for much too long and said, “Not tall?”

Magnus looked around at the sand lying close to the walls, and at the cracked crumbling edges of those walls, as if the stone were bread and a careless hand had torn a piece away. He carefully maintained the blasé air of one who had been here before and had been incredibly well dressed that time too.

“Pachacamac” meant

“Lord of

Earthquakes.” Fortunately, Nayaraq did not want them to create one. Magnus had never created an earthquake on purpose and preferred not to dwell on unfortunate accidents in his youth.

What Nayaraq wanted was the treasure that her mother’s mother’s mother’s mother, a beautiful noble girl living in the

Acllahausi—the house of the women chosen by the sun—had hidden when the conquerors had come.

Magnus was not sure why she wanted it, as she seemed to have money enough, but he was not being paid to question her.

They walked for hours in sun and shadow, by the ruined walls that bore the marks of time and the faint impressions of frescoes, until they found what she was looking for.

When the stones were removed from the wall and the treasure was dug out, the sun struck the gold and Nayaraq’s face at the same time. That was when Magnus understood that Nayaraq had not been searching for gold but for truth, for something real in her past.

She knew of Downworlders because she had been taken by the faeries, once.

But this was not illusion or glamour, this gold shining in her hands as it had once shone in her ancestor’s hands.

“Thank you all very much,” she said, and Magnus understood and for a moment almost envied her.

When she was gone, Catarina let her own glamour fall away to reveal blue skin and white hair that dazzled in the dying sunlight.

“Now that that’s settled, I have something to propose. I have been jealous for years about all the adventures you two had in Peru. What do you say to continuing on here for a while?”

“Absolutely!” said Magnus.

Catarina clapped her hands together.

Ragnor scowled. “Absolutely not.”

“Don’t worry, Ragnor,” Magnus said carelessly. “I am fairly certain nobody who remembers the pirate misunderstanding is still alive. And the monkeys definitely aren’t still after me.

Besides, you know what this means.”

“I do not want to do this, and I will not enjoy it,” Ragnor said. “I would leave at once, but it would be cruel to abandon a lady in a foreign land with a maniac.”

“I am so glad we are all agreed,” said

Catarina.

“We are going to be a dread triumvirate,” Magnus informed Catarina and Ragnor with delight. “That means thrice the adventure.”

Later they heard that they were wanted criminals for desecrating a temple, but nevertheless, that was not the reason, nor the time, that Magnus was banned from

Peru.

It was a beautiful day in Puno, the lake out the window a wash of blue and the sun shining with such dazzling force that it seemed to have burned all the azure and cloud out of the sky and left it all a white blaze. Carried on the clear mountain air, out over the lake water and through the house, rang Magnus’s melody.

Magnus was turning in a gentle circle under the windowsill when the shutters on

Ragnor’s bedroom window slammed open.

“What—what—what are you doing?”

he demanded.

“I am almost six hundred years old,”

Magnus claimed, and Ragnor snorted, since Magnus changed his age to suit himself every few weeks. Magnus swept on. “It does seem about time to learn a musical instrument.” He flourished his new prize, a little stringed instrument that looked like a cousin of the lute that the lute was embarrassed to be related to.

“It’s called a charango . I am planning to become a charanguista !”

“I wouldn’t call that an instrument of music,” Ragnor observed sourly. “An instrument of torture, perhaps.”

Magnus cradled the charango in his arms as if it were an easily offended baby.

“It’s a beautiful and very unique instrument! The sound box is made from an armadillo. Well, a dried armadillo shell.”

“That explains the sound you’re making,” said Ragnor. “Like a lost, hungry armadillo.”

“You are just jealous,” Magnus remarked calmly. “Because you do not have the soul of a true artiste like myself.”

“Oh, I am positively green with envy,”

Ragnor snapped.

“Come now, Ragnor. That’s not fair,” said Magnus. “You know I love it when you make jokes about your complexion.”

Magnus refused to be affected by

Ragnor’s cruel judgments. He regarded his fellow warlock with a lofty stare of superb indifference, raised his charango, and began to play again his defiant, beautiful tune.

They both heard the staccato thump of frantically running feet from within the house, the swish of skirts, and then

Catarina came rushing out into the courtyard. Her white hair was falling loose about her shoulders, and her face was the picture of alarm.

“Magnus, Ragnor, I heard a cat making a most unearthly noise,” she exclaimed.

“From the sound of it, the poor creature must be direly sick. You have to help me find it!”

Ragnor immediately collapsed with hysterical laughter on his windowsill.

Magnus stared at Catarina for a moment, until he saw her lips twitch.

“You are conspiring against me and my art,” he declared. “You are a pack of conspirators.”

He began to play again. Catarina stopped him by putting a hand on his arm.

“No, but seriously, Magnus,” she said.

“That noise is appalling.”

Magnus sighed. “Every warlock’s a critic.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I have already explained myself to

Ragnor. I wish to become proficient with a musical instrument. I have decided to devote myself to the art of the charanguista , and I wish to hear no more petty objections.”

“If we are all making lists of things we wish to hear no more . . . ,” Ragnor murmured.

Catarina, however, was smiling.

“I see,” she said.

“Madam, you do not see.”

“I do. I see it all most clearly,”

Catarina assured him. “What is her name?”

“I resent your implication,” Magnus said. “There is no woman in the case. I am married to my music!”

“Oh, all right,” Catarina said. “What’s his name, then?”

His name was Imasu Morales, and he was gorgeous.

The three warlocks were staying near the harbor, along the shoreline of Lake

Titicaca, but Magnus liked to see and be part of life in a way that Ragnor and

Catarina, familiar with quiet and solitude from childhood on account of their unusual complexions, did not quite understand. He went walking about the city and up into the mountains, having small adventures. On a few occasions that Ragnor and Catarina kept hurtfully and unnecessarily reminding him of, he had been escorted home by the police, even though that incident with the

Bolivian smugglers had been a complete misunderstanding.

Magnus had not been involved in any dealings with smugglers that night, though.

He had simply been walking through the

Plaza

Republicana, skirting around artfully sculpted bushes and artfully sculpted sculptures. The city below shone like stars arranged in neat rows, as if someone were growing a harvest of light.