unpleasant creatures or relatives confined, and so on — in short, a galaxy of requests, most of which I am unable to fulfill, and so a healthy sum remains dispersed in the pockets of the rustic population instead of concentrated in my own where it might form the foundation of a burgeoning fortune.” Lixal shook his head sadly. “I have come to tire of this woefully imbalanced state of affairs. So I come to you, good shopkeeper.”
Twitterel looked back at Lixal with more consternation than the casual observer might have expected. “I still do not grasp with certainty your desires, sir,” the old man said nervously. “Perhaps you would be better off visiting the shop of my good friend and colleague Dekionas Kroon a scant four leagues away in the pleasant hamlet of Blixingby Crown Gate — he also specializes in fine acoutrements for the performing of magic to discerning audiences…”
“You tease me, sir,” said Lixal sternly. “You must have grasped by now that I am not interested in the acoutrements of the magical arts, not in elaborate stage artifices or even the potware and piping of alchemy or other scholarly but unsatisfying pursuits. I wish to buy actual spells. There — I can make it no clearer. Just a few, selected for one like myself who has no magical training — although, it must be said, I do have a wonderful, firm voice that any magician might envy, and a certain physical presence concomitant with a true thaumaturge, as you must have noticed yourself.” Lixal Laqavee stroked his full brown beard slowly, as if comparing its lushness to the sparse clump of yellowed whiskers which decorated the shopkeeper’s receding chin.
“Why would I, a mere merchant, have such things?” Twitterel questioned in what was almost a squeak. “And why, even if I did possess such objects of powerful wisdom, would I share them with someone whose only claim to wizardly dessert is a velvet robe and an admittedly handsome beard? Sooner would I put a flaming brand into the hands of a child residing in a house made of twigs and dry leaves!”
“You misunderstand me again, good Twitterel,” Lixal replied. “You protest that you are a mere merchant, and yet unless I much mistake things, the name etched above your door does not conform to your true identity. In other words, I believe you are in fact not ‘Twitterel’ at all, but rather Eliastre of Octorus, who was once reknowned in the most powerful circles as ‘The Scarlet Sorceror’ — a pleasantly dramatic name, by the way, that I would quickly adopt for my own performances were it not that I make a better appearance in dark colors such as blacks and moody, late-evening blues.” Lixal smiled. “You see, it happens that by mere chance I studied your career while honing my impersonation of someone in your line of endeavor. That is also how I recognized you when I saw you drinking in the tavern up the road yesterday and began to conceive of my current plan. What a piece of luck!”
“I…I do not understand.” Twitterel, or Eliastre, if that was indeed his name, retreated a little farther from the countertop behind which he stood. “Why would such an unlikely set of affairs mean luck for you?”
“Step back in this direction, please. Do not think to escape me,” Lixal said. “And neither should you attempt to bluff me with the powers you once so famously owned. I know full well that after you failed in an attempt to seize leadership among your fellow magicians and wizards, the Council of Thaumaturgic Practitioners removed said powers and placed you under a ban of trying to regain them or in any other way dabbling in the profession of wizardry, under pain of humiliating, excruciating and lingering death. Please understand that I will happily inform the Council of your whereabouts and your current occupation if you resist me. I am inclined to believe your current profession, peddling alembics and flash-dust, might well fall within the scope of their ban.”
Twitterel seemed to have aged twenty years — decades he could ill-afford to add to his tally — in a matter of moments. “I could find no other way to make a living,” he admitted sadly. “It is the only craft I know. The Council did not take that into account. Better they should have executed me outright than condemn me to starve. In any case, I wished only to reform certain insufficiencies of the transubstantive oversight process — what was once a mere prophylactic has become a hideous, grinding bureaucracy…”
Lixal held up his hand. “Spare me. I care not for the details of your rebellion but only for what you will do next — namely, provide me with several easily-learned spells that will allow me to supplement my performing income by rendering assistance to those pastorals who seek my aid. I am not a greedy man — I do not wish to raise the dead or render gold from dry leaves and river mud. Rather I ask only a few simple nostrums that will put me in good odor with the country-folk — perhaps a charm for the locating of lost livestock…” He considered. “And surely there is some minor malediction which would allow the sending of a plague of boils to unpleasant neighbors. Such a thing has been requested of me many times but heretofore I had no means of answering the call.”
Eliastre, or Twitterel as was, rubbed his hands together in what looked like genuine unease. “But even such minor spells can be dangerous when improperly used — not to mention expensive!”
“Never fear,” said Lixal, with a certain air of noblesse oblige. “When I have begun to earn the money I so richly deserve by employing these spells, I will most certainly return and pay you their full worth.”
“So,” the shopkeeper said bitterly. “You would extort me and rob me.”
“Not at all.” Lixal shook his head. “But lest such an ill-considered notion set you scheming to punish me somehow for merely trying to better my situation in this uncertain life, let show you the warding bracelet on my wrist, an object of true power.” He flourished the twist of copper he wore around his arm, which indeed seemed to have a glow greater than the ordinary reflection of metal. It had been given to Lixal by a young lady of the troop during a time of pleasurable intimacy — a charm that she swore would protect him from premature death, inherited by her from her aunt at the time of that elderly lady’s quite timely demise. “Oh, by the by,” Lixal continued, made uneasy by the speculative way Eliastre was examining his wrist jewelry, “if in your misdirected bitterness you decide that some knowledge or stratagem of yours could overcome the efficacy of this ornament, I would like you to be aware that the bracelet is not my only protection. Should anything untoward happen to me an associate of mine unknown to you will immediately dispatch to the Council of Thaumatrugic Practitioners a letter I have prepared, detailing both your recent crimes and your exact location. Remember that as I choose my spells and you guide me in their recommended usages.”
The old man stared at him for a long time with an expression on his face that it would have been difficult to call either friendly or forgiving. “Ah, well,” Eliastre said at last. “My hands appear tied, as it were, and the longer I resist the more the binding rope shall chafe me. Let us proceed.”
When he had completed the transaction with the ex-wizard to his satisfaction, Lixal took the manuscript pages of the new spells and bade Eliastre goodbye.
“By the by, I frown on the word ‘extortion’,” Lixal called back to the old man, who was still glaring at him from the doorway of the shop. “Especially when I have given you my word of honor that I will come back at a time when my pockets are full and repay you at market rate. The expression on your face suggests that you doubt this promise, or else that you are otherwise unsatisfied with our exchange, which to me seems to have been more than fair. In either case, I am displeased. Until that cheerful day when we meet again, I suggest you cultivate an attitude of greater humility.”
Lixal made his way back out of the city of Catechumia toward the forested outskirts where his traveling theatrical company had made its camp. He wished he had been able to force the old man to recite the spells himself, as proof that none of them had been primed like a springe trap to rebound painfully or even fatally on its user, but since Eliastre had been forcibly curtailed from using magic by the Council of Thaumaturgic Practitioners Lixal knew there would have been little point: no flaws would have been exposed because the spells themselves would not have worked. He would have to trust to the curbing effect of his threat to have a colleague notify the Council if anything hurtful should happen to Lixal. The fact that this colleague was an invention, created on the spur of the moment — Lixal had long practice in improvisation — would be unknown to Eliastre, and therefore no less effective an intimidation than an actual confederate would have been.
Most of the rest of his fellow players were still in town, but Ferlash, a squat, ill-favored man wearing the cassock of a priest of the Church of the Approaching Horizon was toasting a heel of bread at the campfire. He looked up at Lixal’s approach.
“Ho!” he called sourly. “You look cheerful. Did you bring something to eat? Something which, by sharing it with a deserving priest, you could store up goodwill in the afterlife? I do not doubt your soul’s post-horizontal standing has need of a little improvement”
Lixal shook his head in irritation. “As everyone in our company knows, Ferlash, you have not been a celebrant in good standing of your order since they expelled you years ago for egregious impregnation of congregants. Thus, I suggest you leave off discussion of my own particular afterlife. I would no more listen to your speculations about the health of my soul than I would accept similar advice from the piece of bread you are toasting.”
“You are a testy young man,” Ferlash said, “and too pleased with yourself by half. In fact, I must say that you seem even more self-satisfied than usual today.”
