Not even the most powerful wizards can shoulder life’s burdens alone, which is why most of them find it expedient to employ some good help. First of all, you’ll need someone with a strong back. (Wizards are typically far too busy contemplating the numinous to spend much time at the gym.) After all, someone’s got to do all that stomping about under the full moon yanking up mandrake root, or digging up all those graves to supply bits and pieces for necromantic recipes, or lugging that cauldron up to the top of the tower.
It also really helps to have some sort of animal servant — a cat, a bat, a snake, whatever suits your style. It’s just a fact that everyone looks more dashing with an owl perched on one shoulder, and animals are always good for doing a little spying, or passing along messages, or offering wry advice.
So, just procure yourself an animal and an assistant with a strong back, like the wizard in our next story, and you’ll be good to go. Just be sure to treat them well. In the wizarding world, disgruntled employees can be a real nightmare.
The Sorcerer Minus
Jeffrey Ford
Minus was considered the most evil of all sorcerers because his sorcery was backwards. He didn’t enchant. He beckoned no wretches from the dead. He commanded no shadow people, slipping along the corridors of night. His work was to seize the day by the hair, pull back its head and slit its throat to let the last glistening drop of magic pulse out and reveal the grisly carcass of reality. He then read those stark remains of the day as a soothsayer might the entrails of a chicken and offered shrewd advice to the rudely awakened about what was left.
Sorcerers feared him, knowing he could sap their art and leave them mere men and women. Wealthy families hired him to cause a conversion in a patriarch gone grandiose with the family fortune.
“He’s lost touch,” they’d say to Minus.
“Do you want him to see reality or your reality?” the sorcerer always asked.
“Anything you could do would be fine,” they usually said and then Minus went to work with the diligence of a crooked banker. There was no detail too small to obscure.
Sorcerers usually control spirits of the dead; instead Minus had two living creatures in his employ. One was a tall, gaunt man, in a black hat and raincoat, named Bill Mug. The other was Axis, an ingenious rat, whose loyalty was perfect to the cheese in the sorcerer’s hand. When Mug took the job, Minus put certain spells on him to slowly leach away all but one single drop of his self-delusion. As for Axis, Minus knew he could never rival the rat’s dedication to reality. He spent a mountain of cheese to learn the rodent’s secrets.
What the sorcerer prized most about Bill Mug was his slowness, not physically — rumor was he could rapidly punch a man in the face for a solid hour without stopping — but mentally. Mug liked to mull things over, scratching his chin, forgetting what it was he’d been thinking. His conclusions, when they came, were like smoke becoming nothing. It was a constant reminder to Minus that illusion begets speed because illusion begets need. The pointless maunderings of Bill Mug were a tonic to the quicksilver of private Dreamlands. When Minus needed assistance, though, he always called first for the rat.
Given but a single name at birth, Minus found himself making a concession to the times in which he lived and attached a first name to his title so that he could move easily among the magically unendowed. A popular moniker of the day was Skip. Movie stars, singers, athletes had that name, and so he became Skip Minus. He drove a fast yellow car, wore sunglasses, and was known as an easy going guy. He could mix a drink and play a hand of Whist; he could cut a rug. He could shovel snow, smoke a pipe, or recite in its entirety “The Hall of the Mountain Springs” by Miss Stattle Dees.
Underneath all of this, though, at his very core, he was an evil sorcerer. It was whispered that a fair number of his human “patients,” for whom he was paid to rub their noses in harsh reality, didn’t survive the treatment. Of those that perished in pursuit of stark enlightenment, ninety percent committed suicide and one curious case could have been construed as murder. The victim was a Martin Aswidth.
Aswidth was found in a garbage dump, his face caved in, beaten to a shattered, bloody pulp. The last to have seen him alive was his maid who happened upon her employer and Minus and a drab, long fellow in a hat and raincoat. It was in Aswidth’s bedchamber, amid the purple curtains. Skip Minus stood at his bedside, frantically gesticulating and rhythmically grunting. The prostrate Aswidth shivered and cried, “No, no, no… ” like a child from a nightmare. The sorcerer called over his shoulder, “Bill, come and see if you can work your magic with Mr. Aswidth. He’s a stubborn fellow.”
Then Minus noticed the maid, a witness to it all, and he commanded her to leave. When Aswidth’s body was discovered, she did come forward to tell the police what she’d seen and heard, but she only told them once. Two days later she disappeared from her locked bedroom in the middle of the afternoon on a clear day and was never seen or heard from again.
It’s surmised that after she’d left the room that night, ordered out by Minus, Bill Mug went to work, beating the enchantment out of Aswidth’s brain. The hardest punch is one thrown by a wiry man with thick wrists. Aswidth, for his part, was besotted with delusion like a fruit cake soaked in rum. He was, after all, a writer of genre stories.
At the trial, Minus told the jury that it was Axis who’d engineered the disappearance of the maid. “For a block of cheese,” confessed the sorcerer, “he brought me a mercenary army of his brethren. They took her out through a mouse hole.” The jury was aghast. “Those rats could be right now in the walls of this courthouse, laying dynamite charges,” he said. He waited for a small panic to brew throughout the court, and then added, “But I wouldn’t let that happen, of course.”
Bill Mug was then called to the stand. The prosecutor asked, “How many times did you strike Mr. Aswidth on the night in question?” Mug mulled it over for two hours which gave Minus time to work a spell. He let it out slowly into the courtroom, a barely discernible gray miasma that spread and wafted over everything. Eventually, Mug answered, “I didn’t strike him on the night in question, I struck him in the face. I lost count at three hundred.” Both defendants were convicted and sentenced to the death penalty.
That’s when Skip Minus rose, combed his hair, and bellowed for everyone to sit down and be quiet. The commotion that had been sparked by the reading of the verdict instantly ceased. Minus looked around. “I’ve had enough of this. I’m leaving and you won’t want to stop me. If anyone raises a finger, I’ll steal the magic from your children. I already have your self-confidence; perhaps I’ll return it someday if I learn to forgive you. Come, Mug,” said Minus and the two of them strode out of the courthouse, got in the yellow sports car, and sped away.
Humans could complicate his life and in the gnat storm of their complications his distraction could open him to truly dangerous attacks from other sorcerers. Minus knew he had to lay low. They fled to a rented cabin in the mountains where they met Axis. The place, a hunting lodge, was enormous and well stocked with provisions. They lit a fire in the stone fireplace and hunkered down for winter.