The next time Magnus was back in Peru, he was on a job with his friends Catarina
Loss and Ragnor Fell. This proved
Catarina had, besides magic, supernatural powers of persuasion, because Ragnor had sworn that he would never set foot in
Peru again and certainly never in
Magnus’s company. But the two had had some adventures together in England during the 1870s, and Ragnor had grown better disposed toward Magnus. Still, the whole time they were walking into the valley of the Lurin River with their client, Ragnor was sending Magnus suspicious little glances out of the corner of his eye.
“This constant air of foreboding that you have when you’re around me is hurtful and unwarranted, you know,” Magnus told
Ragnor.
“I was airing the smell out of my clothes for years! Years!” Ragnor replied.
“Well, you should have thrown them out and bought clothes that were both more sweetly scented and more stylish,”
Magnus said. “Anyway, that was decades ago. What have I done to you lately?”
“Don’t fight in front of the client, boys,”
Catarina implored in her sweet voice, “or
I will knock your heads together so hard, your skulls will crack like eggs.”
“I can speak English, you know,” said
Nayaraq, their client, who was paying them extremely generously.
Embarrassment descended on the entire group. They reached Pachacamac in silence. They beheld the walls of piled rubble, which looked like a giant, artful child’s sculpture made of sand.
There were pyramids here, but it was mostly ruins.
What remained was thousands of years old, though, and
Magnus could feel magic thrumming even in the sand-colored fragments.
“I knew the oracle who lived here seven hundred years ago,” Magnus announced grandly. Nayaraq looked impressed.
Catarina, who knew Magnus’s actual age perfectly well, did not.
Magnus had first started putting a price on his magic when he was less than twenty years old. He’d still been growing then, not yet fixed in time like a dragonfly caught in amber, iridescent and everlasting but frozen forever and a day in the prison of one golden instant. When he was growing to his full height and his face and body were changing infinitesimally every day, when he was a little closer to human than he was now.
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 blase 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.
1890
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
“I wouldn’t call that an instrument of music,” Ragnor observed sourly. “An instrument of torture, perhaps.”
