“Glad to have you aboard,” Bran said, taking my comment to Vixie as acceptance, apparently. He reached out his hand again.
“I have more questions,” I said, not shaking his hand because I didn’t want it to be counted as agreement. “This residence, it’s… this?”
“Yes. The tower is yours, as the traditional housing for a mage. We’ve been letting Vixie and Laurel stay in it, but you can kick them out if you like. They only use the bottom floor.”
I looked at Vixie, who looked back at me steadily.
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’m not kicking anyone out, as long as we all get along.”
“We’re good people,” Vixie said. “Well, Laurel is.” She grinned. Her teeth were very white. “I’m very, very bad.” She winked.
“You and Laurel are a couple, though,” I said. It wasn’t the most important thing, but I had a zillion questions and needed to start somewhere.
“Yes,” Vixie said. “She’s my lover. You have a problem with that?”
“Nope,” I said. If anything, it made me feel better about the place. Medieval costumes, magic, all of that – but not medieval prejudices. “Love is love.”
Vixie grinned. “You’re way up here, you won’t even hear us. Well, I think your bedroom is actually one floor down. But still. We aren’t that loud.”
I groaned, trying to skip visualizing what I wasn’t going to hear. “So every time I want to go somewhere, I have to go up and down ten flights of stairs.”
“Good exercise!” Bran said. “And you have long legs. Won’t be a problem for you.”
“Ugh.”
“There are levitation spells,” Vixie said. “Dumbledalf used to use them. You just need to learn how to do it, but it must be in a book here somewhere.” She waved around at the bookshelves, and then looked at the magazine I was holding, which I’d forgotten about. “Wow, she isn’t wearing much, is she? And why is she bolted down to that table like that? Who is that guy in the white coat looming over her?”
I put the magazine back on the shelf and changed the subject by asking another question. “And to drive somewhere. That dirt road I came on is the only way from this town to get to the highway?”
“That dirt road,” Bran said, “Is the only way to get from this world to yours. We arranged for you to come on a day it was at its widest. The solstice, you know. The trees encroach quite a bit at night, and in the winter. As to your car, it doesn’t work here.”
“But I could walk.”
“Hmm,” Bran said. His eyes looked shifty. “Yes. I suppose. If you wish to leave all of us to a horrible fate, once the shields go down. You did bring enough for an extended stay, didn’t you?”
“What do you mean, the trees encroach?”
“Dumbeldalf could make them retreat,” Vixie said. “So there’s a way. Probably wasn’t in that book that you were holding, though. That looked like some kind of sex magic book.”
“It’s just a book of stories,” I said. They hadn’t warned me about this, although they did tell me to pack as if I was going to stay for a while. “Wait, the bathroom isn’t on the ground floor, is it? Don’t tell me you have a garderobe.” Medieval castles had what basically were pit toilets, and the waste fell all the way down. Sometimes they jutted out from the building a little, so the waste would fall outside.
“There’s a void sphere in the bathroom downstairs,” Vixie said, as if that covered it. “As far as I know, it still works.”
“Running water?” I asked.
“Dumbledalf could conjure water into being when he wanted it,” Bran said.
I rolled my eyes. “So no.”
“Not this high up, no,” Vixie said. “You can come down and use our sink. The town water tower doesn’t have enough pressure to push water all the way up to the top. Or we’ll cart some up each day for you. Like, as a way of paying rent.”
4000+ square feet, right. Spread over nearly a dozen floors. I’d been imagining a mansion. There were two hot women living with me, unfortunately lesbians, but I’d seen other women already who I could imagine dating, if they were good people. And it was far, far away from Stacy. On another world, if Bran was to be believed, which was even farther than I’d intended getting. I still wasn’t sure I believed what he was telling me, but I was starting to think that it was possible, just possible, that there were more things on heaven and earth than were dreamt of in my philosophy. Or, perhaps, that there were things that weren’t on heaven and earth.
But I wasn’t sold. I could keep asking questions, and I had a lot of them. But what was the one most important one? I decided it was this: could I actually do any magic? If I could, that was amazing. Was I going to turn my back on this town, or world, or whatever, and go back to my mundane life, if I could actually cast spells? If I could, then Vixie’s ears were probably real and Laurel probably was really a foxgirl of some kind, and all the rest.
And if I couldn’t, I not only couldn’t do the job, but there was a very good chance this was all a hoax, or these people were all crazy.
“You can teach me to do magic?” I asked Vixie.
“A little,” she said. “The rest is up to you.”
“Is there any better teacher?”
Vixie hesitated. “Not that I’m going to recommend,” she said at last.
Bran shrugged. “Vixie’s mother is –”
“A bitch,” Vixie finished. “She’d exact a price.”
“There’s Magnus,” Bran said.
“Magnus thinks he should be town mage himself,” Vixie said. “But he couldn’t figure out how to power the shields. I don’t think –” She broke off, and the two looked at each other for a long moment.
“Okay,” Bran said. “You do it, Vixie.” He turned to me and said, “But casting a spell constitutes acceptance of the job.”
“Which entails, exactly?”
“Maintaining the shields. And doing your best.” Bran shrugged. “I can’t enforce it. We’re relying on your sense of honor.”
I nodded, slowly. Something about his voice made me think he thought he had another lever to use on me. “Alright,” I said at last. “It’s not like I think I’ll be able to. And if I can’t, I’m free to go?”
“Don’t take this wrong, Gerald Kenner,” Bran said. “But if you can’t, we won’t be able to see the back of you fast enough.”
And with that, he walked out.
It was quiet, and then there was a sound downstairs like hands rubbing against each other. I looked down, and found out what it was: the friction of Bran’s pants on the bannister. Spiraling around and around he went, until he landed with a thud on the next floor, only to hop right onto the next bannister.
“Well,” I said, “I guess that makes it faster.”
“I don’t usually come up here,” Vixie said. “But I’m not going to go down that way. I would think it would be hard on your balls.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, I certainly don’t!”
I wanted to close the trap door, because having a hole in the floor didn’t seem like good safety. On the other hand, I didn’t want to be talking about sexual parts with the door closed; that might be construed the wrong way and get me in for a harassment suit. In fact, I really should change the subject.
Vixie shrugged, sending her double-D’s jiggling again. “Or maybe it would be stimulating. Maybe I should try. What do you think?”
That was flirting, right? I was out of practice. Also, she was taken. “Maybe,” I said. “So you can teach me magic?”
“Well, you were selected for your potential,” she said. “But you have to keep an open mind. And it may take a while. We’ll start where I started, with a single flame.”
“What do you do, Vixie?” I asked.
She raised her eyebrows.
“I mean, for a living. Your work.”
“Oh. I’m a smith. Not iron, but copper and silver and gold. And bronze.” She flexed her bicep. She wasn’t a body builder or anything, but she was fit. I could see it. “Iron allergy.”
“Because you’re an elf.”
“Yes.”
I almost asked, “Are you really?” but I didn’t. I watched her move instead. There were candlesticks all around, and she gathered a few of them. The shorts she wore just barely didn’t show any cheek, and she had a very nicely shaped ass.
She set the candlesticks in front of me. “We have here a perfectly ordinary candle,” she said. She was about as convincing as any magician would be, telling me that a prop was perfectly ordinary.
“I’ll do it first. Watch me, then you do what I do.”
She put out her hand, face up, in the general direction of the candle. I looked at her hand, waiting, skeptical.
“Don’t watch my hand, watch my mind.”
“Your head?”
“My mind,” she insisted.
I didn’t know any way to do that, exactly, so I looked at her face. It struck me that if she was using sleight of hand, I wouldn’t see what she did with the candle that way, so I stepped back to broaden my view.
“Not my face, my mind,” she said. “I’m going slow so you can see, but you have to really look.”
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I concentrated, wanting to be able to say I gave it a fair go. After a minute of that, sweat started forming on her face, and I glanced at the candle. It wasn’t lit.
“I can’t keep this going forever,” she said. “Try.”
I didn’t even know what she thought she was keeping going. The candle wasn’t burning; did she think it was? Whatever I was supposed to be doing, that wasn’t working either. I let out a breath, and relaxed.
And then I saw it in her eyes. The violet irises were now black, with purple writing on them, and I got a little closer to her to see them. The symbols were unknown to me, and the writing seemed to go around and around, a spiral, rotating. Even without being able to understand the symbols, though, I could see there was a pattern to it.
A syntax.
Like a programming language.
“I’m seeing it,” I said, softly, amazed. Nothing had happened, and yet this surely wasn’t normal. That, or Bran had drugged that whiskey and I was hallucinating. Given the bannister bit, maybe he’d been a bit high himself.
“Good. Memorize it. Almost there… almost.” Her breath quickened.
I tried to remember all the symbols. Had they been English letters, I could have memorized them in words. But as it was, I had to remember each symbol separately. A few I saw repeated, but I had to double check to make sure they were the same.
And then with a little whoosh, they were gone. The candle was lit, the flame flaring at first, then settling down.
“You get it?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No. I got part of it.”
“It’s got to be in a book somewhere.” She went looking around the shelves, and finally found a volume called Fyre Magick. She thumbed through it, then laid it out to me.
Little columns of groups of symbols, like lines of code, and yes, they were the same symbols I saw in Vixie’s eyes. Easier to memorize this way, too.
“You have to get them in a spiral,” she said. “In your mind, I mean. And then you project it.”
I was starting to get a glimmer of why they wanted a software developer. But if Dumbledalf had been around for 220 or whatever years, he couldn’t have been doing anything with computers. Unless time worked very strangely, which for all I knew it might.
I tried to do the thing. Tried to twist the symbols in my brain. But nothing happened.
Vixie smiled. “It took me a while, too,” she said. “It’s okay. Watch me. Don’t be afraid to get close.” She moved in, so that her boob was pressing against my arm. “This time, I’ll look into your eyes while I start the spell and then turn to the candle when I want to light it.”
“Right,” I said. “This isn’t distracting at all.”
If she understood what I meant, she didn’t do anything about it. I could feel the soft flesh yielding against my arm as I looked into her eyes and studied the spiral.
There was logic to it. I didn’t fully understand the logic, but the formatting made some intuitive sense. Probably one of the books talked about that, if not several of them.
“Whoosh.” And another candle was lit.
“Again?” she asked. “Or are you ready to try?”
“Again,” I said.
She smiled. “I can only do this a few times a day, because I don’t have that much mana. And the little things I can do, I can do other ways, like with a flint and steel to light a candle, so I don’t use magic much. But once more, then.”
She leaned in, and it got even harder to ignore her chest. But as she said, I had to focus. Her eyes were only inches from mine, and so were her lips. But she was spoken for, and gay, besides. Bi maybe, but still spoken for. I watched the spirals.
Another candle burst into flame.
“Now you try,” she said.
For a moment, I considered being a smart ass, and lighting a candle with another candle. Voila, magic. Because I didn’t think I could do it her way.
But I turned, and focused. I couldn’t just take the symbols and line them up and spin them around in my mind’s eye. They might not be random; in fact, I was sure they were not, but I didn’t yet understand the pattern. But they were random enough that I couldn’t memorize them all in an hour or a day. So I just tried to relax my mind and remember them as they were in Vixie’s eyes. I set them spinning, or imagined them spinning, anyway.
I stretched out my hand.
And suddenly, it felt right.
A moment later, it felt like my hand was on fire. I’d lit the candle, alright, but my finger had been practically on top of the wick.
If you ever have a chance to do magic, don’t do that.
Vixie was laughing. It wasn’t the giggly, flirtatious kind of laughing, either. She was definitely laughing at me. I supposed I could see the humor in it.