He (she?) had forced his (her?) way into the verminous garret hole that was all the mage could call home now without so much as a by-your-leave, shouldering the landlord aside and closing the door firmly afterward. So this stranger was far more interested in privacy than in having the landlord there as a possible backup in case the senile wizard proved recalcitrant. That was quite enough to bewilder the mage, but the way his visitor kept shifting from male to female and back again was bidding fair to dizzy what few wits still remained to him and was nearly leaving him too muddled to speak.
Besides that, the shapeshifting was giving him one gods-awful headache.
"Go 'way -- " he groaned feelingly, shadowing his eyes both from the unsettling sight and from the too-bright glare of the lanthorn his visitor still held aloft. " -- leave an old man alone! I haven't got a thing left to steal -- "
He was all too aware of his pitiful state; his robe stained and frayed, his long gray beard snarled and unkempt, his eyes so bloodshot and yellowed that no one could tell their color anymore. He was housed in an equally pitiful manner; this garret room had been rejected by everyone, no matter how poor, except himself; it was scarcely better than sleeping in the street. It leaked when it rained, turned into an oven in summer and a meat-locker in winter, and the wind whistled through cracks in the walls big enough to stick a finger in. His only furnishings were a pile of rags that served as a bed, and a rickety stool. Beneath him he could feel the ramshackle building swaying in the wind, and the movement was contributing to his headache. The boards of the walls creaked and complained, each in a different key. He knew he should have been used to it by now, but he wasn't; the crying wood rasped his nerves raw and added mightily to his disorientation. The multiple drafts made the lanthorn flame flicker, even inside its glass chimney. The resulting dancing shadows didn't help his befuddlement.
"I'm not here to steal, old fraud."
Even the voice of the visitor was a confusing amalgam of male and female.
"I've brought you something."
The other hand emerged from the rags, bearing an unmistakable emerald-green bottle. The hand jiggled the bottle a little, and the contents sloshed enticingly. The rags slipped, and a trifle more of his visitor's face was revealed.
But the mage was only interested now in the bottle. Lethe! He forgot his perplexity, his befogged mind, and his headache as he hunched forward on his pallet of decaying rags, reaching eagerly for the bottle of drug-wine that had been his downfall. Every cell ached for the blessed/damned touch of it --
"Oh, no." The visitor backed out of reach, and the mage felt the shame of weak tears spilling down his cheeks. "First you give me what I want, then I give you this."
The mage sagged back into bis pile of rags. "I have nothing."
"It's not what you have, old fraud, it's what you were."
"What... I...was...."
"You were a mage, and a good one -- or so they claim. That was before you let this stuff rob you of your wits until they cast you out of the Guild to rot. But there damn well ought to be enough left of you for my purposes."
By steadfastly looking, not at the visitor, but at the bottle, the mage was managing to collect his scattering thoughts. "What purpose?"
The visitor all but screamed bis answer. "To take off this curse, old fool! Are your wits so far gone you can't even see what's in front of you?"
A curse -- of course! No wonder his visitor kept shifting and changing! It wasn't the person that was shifting, but his own sight, switching erratically between normal vision and mage-sight. Normal vision showed him the woman; when the rags slipped a little more, she seemed to be a battered, but still lovely little toy of a creature -- amethyst-eyed and platinum-haired --
Mage-sight showed him an equally abused but far from lovely man; sallow and thin, battered, but by no means beaten -- a man wearing the kind of smoldering scowl that showed he was holding in rage by the thinnest of bonds.
So the "curse" could only be illusion, but a very powerful and carefully cast illusion. There was something magic-smelling about the man-woman, too; the illusion was linked to and being fueled by that magic. The mage furrowed his brow, then tested the weave of the magic that formed the illusion. It was a more than competent piece of work; and it was complete to all senses. It was far superior to anything the mage had produced even in his best days. In his present condition -- to duplicate it so that he could lay new illusion over old would be impossible; to turn it or transfer it beyond even his former level of skill. He never even considered trying to take it off. To break it was beyond the best mage in Oberdorn, much less the broken-down wreck he had become.
Eyeing the bottle with passionate longing and despair, he said as much.
To his surprise the man accepted the bad news with a nod. "That's what they told me," he said. "But they told me something else. What a human mage couldn't break, a demon might."
"A... demon?" The mage licked his lips; the bottle of Lethe was again within his grasp. "I used to be able to summon demons. I still could, I think. But it wouldn't be easy." That was untrue; the summoning of demons had been one of his lesser skills. It was still easily within his capabilities. But it required specialized tools and ingredients he no longer had the means to procure. And it was proscribed by the Guild....
He'd tried to raise a minor impling to steal him Lethe-wine when his money had run out; that was when the Guild had discovered what he'd fallen prey to. That was the main reason they'd cast him out, destroying his tools and books; a mage brought so low as to use his skills for personal theft was no longer trustworthy. Especially not one that could summon demons. Demons were clever and had the minds of sharp lawyers when it came to wriggling out of the bonds that had been set on them; that was why raising them was proscribed for any single mage of the Guild, and doubly proscribed for one who might have doubts as to his own mental competence at the time of the conjuration.
Of course, he was no longer bound by Guild laws since he was outcaste. And if this stranger could provide the wherewithal, the tools and the supplies, it could be easily done.
"Just tell me what you need, old man -- I'll get it for you." The haggard, grimy face was avid, eager. "You bring me a demon to break this curse, and the bottle's yours."
Two days later, they stood in the cellar of the old, rotten mansion whose garret the mage called home. The cellar was in no better repair than the rest of the house; it was moldy and stank, and water-marks on the walls showed why no one cared to live there. Not only did the place flood every time it rained, but moisture was constantly seeping through the walls, and water trickled down from the roof-cisterns to drip from the beams overhead. Bright sparks of light glinted just beyond the circle of illumination cast by the lanthorn, the gleaming eyes of starveling rats and mice, perched curiously on the decaying shelves that clung to the walls. The scratching of their claws seemed to echo the scratching of the mage's chalks on the cracked slate floor.