The Delusionist's Son Read online

  The

  Delusionist’s

  Son

  DANNY MACKS

  DEDICATION

  To everyone who struggles,

  as best they can,

  to get by.

  *****

  Copyright 2019. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author.

  Cover Art by vividcovers.com.

  More of Danny’s works can be found at

  https://dannymacks.com

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  AFTERWARD

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  “The problem, Mister Vatic,” Dr. Wardic rumbled in a gravelly voice, “is that despite your years of training, you aren’t really a mage.”

  Silva Vatic bit back a sharp retort and glanced to the other four University elders seated at the long table, to either side of Dr. Wardic. They were all still dressed in graduation robes. He in the plain grey ceremonial garment which signified a student was no longer an apprentice, but not yet a journeyman mage. The five of them in purple silk with wide doctorate bands of their specialty on the sleeves. Most pretended to appear relaxed, doffing the steeply sloped — almost conical — top hats they only wore for ceremonies, but they still looked like they would rather be elsewhere. Perhaps a congratulatory after-party with cordials of rum in expensive crystal glasses.

  Silva kept his voice carefully even. “Would the professor care to enlighten me?”

  If there was a problem, they could have at least said something at the Registrar's Office this morning, when he corrected his legal name on the admission records from four years earlier. Instead, the clerk looked over the birth certificate and other legal documents and processed the "clerical error." Then security stopped him at the entrance to the graduation ceremony. From the sidelines, they made him watch among the families as all the other apprentices receive their black robes. Between the ladies in their corseted dresses and bustles and the men in their suits and top hats, he stuck out like a grey gosling among peacocks.

  Dr. Wardic glanced to the other professors at the table, but none appeared eager to jump in. He coughed into a muscled hand. His long red beard, with the cheeks and lips shaved bare, waved with his bushy red hair like a lion mane. “The problem, you see, is you are still quite young and magecraft is more than casting rote magic …”

  Yes, weaving the sigils. The type of training which required mages to wear robes instead of suits and ties like other professionals. Stop pretending this is over an academic failing. You know damn well I can weave the sigils. This is about your wounded pride.

  Dr. Wardic paused. Beside him, Dr. Delan frowned infinitesimally and ran a hand across his grey beard. Something of Silva's thoughts must have leaked onto his face. Silva carefully reined in his features, then nodded.

  “Being a mage is self-control, and a certain … affinity for the subtleties of magic,” Dr. Wardic continued.

  “My age was not a problem when I passed my entrance exams four years ago. Which requirements for graduation have I failed to satisfy?” Silva said, forcing the conversation off another ‘magic is art’ speech. He'd years of practice.

  “As I said, subtlety.” Dr. Wardic leaned back as if this were the final word on the matter and a few of the professors moved to rise.

  But Silva refused to acknowledge the dismissal and held his ground. He let his hands ball into fists and widened his stance, staring the five men down.

  Dr. Wardic’s stance shifted to mirror Silva's own, but Dr. Delan ran a hand across his thinning scalp and settled back down in his seat. The other professors reluctantly followed Delan’s lead. “If you were to graduate, what would you do after leaving the University, Silva? I noticed no friends in the stands.”

  “I would return to Winterhaven,” Silva said. “The entire village contributed to my education. I owe them.”

  From the end of the row, Dr. Eston had the poor grace to laugh out loud. The other professors turned to him. “If that's what he means to do, this entire discussion is moot. I vote we let him go. In Winterhaven, the color of his robes will be meaningless.”

  Not to my father, it won’t. Father needs to see me in black.

  Dr. Delan caught Silva's eye while the other professors were looking at Dr. Eston. Silva saw sadness reflected. “I agree with Dr. Eston and vote we graduate him.”

  Dr. Eston smoothed his expression, but Silva was certain the chubby professor had meant to kick Silva out the door in grey robes. Or muddy yellow.

  Dr. Wardic turned to the remaining two department heads, but both shrugged noncommittally. “Very well, if we graduate him, what will we list as his specialty? At his own insistence, his training has been rather … eclectic. Who will put their name up for scrutiny next to his, on their department’s graduation rolls?”

  Two days before, Dr. Wardic had said he would be proud to put his name next to Silva's own. Back when he thought the nineteen-year-old graduate's name had been Silva Janos instead of Silva Vatic. Now, the professor was trying to pretend that conversation never happened.

  “I will,” Dr. Delan announced, ending the matter. “Let his black sleeves wear the blue stripe of an illusionist.”

  Suddenly, Silva understood Dr. Delan's hesitation to malign the name Vatic over the years. Dr. Delan had known Silva's father, perhaps even been friends with him, before the disaster.

  *****

  Late the next morning, dirty-faced, eager children were Silva's only audience as he stepped into the sunshine with a pack on his back, dressed in the black robes of a journeyman mage for the first time. Most of the other graduates had either left with their families or were sleeping off an evening of revelry.

  This would be his last visit to the Royal Wizard University for at least a year and, after five long years in the capital, the occasion deserved a little panache. A special grease made his curly hair and beard glisten, and he had even applied a little of the stuff to his thick eyebrows to blacken them. It made good boot polish too. He paused for effect and the children appeared suitably impressed.

  Silva grinned at his audience, straightened his brand-new black robes with his right hand, and palmed a few copper coins out of a hidden pouch with his left. Illusion magic had severe limitations — it couldn't get him home any faster, for example — and Dr. Delan had stressed the importance of legerdemain to all the apprentices. Pulling coins from ears might not be “real” magic, but delighted children didn't care about such distinctions.

  Leaving the children to their newly discovered wealth, he followed the winding cobblestone side street past an apprentice ley bender, working alongside a bricklayer. The bricklayer placed a brick, mortared a spot on a wall, held out a hand for another brick, and the white-robed apprentice’s job was to give him one from a stack thirty feet away. The apprentice levitated the bricks three at a time in a slow line, picking up a new one from the pile as the bricklayer grasped one at the other end. The bricklayer’s eyes knitted together in an annoyed scowl each time he waited, but the corners of his mouth were smirking. The apprentice was sweating so profusely his clothes were dripping an
d he swayed where he stood, arms outstretched as if his hands were directing the line of slowly flying bricks instead of his mind.

  “You know, if you tapped into a ley line that would be a lot easier,” Silva advised. The student’s white sleeves were trimmed in ley bender red, after all.

  “Screw you,” the apprentice yelled over his shoulder, dropping his bricks when he turned. His eyes flew wide when his gaze landed on Silva's black robes. “Oh! I’m sorry, Sir, I didn't …”

  Silva held up a restraining hand, trying to look benevolent. “Moving objects requires a lot of power. That power doesn't have to come from you.”

  “Perhaps the journeyman would like to show me how to tap into a local line, here?” The university professors would have punished Silva if he used that much sarcasm.

  Silva called to mind the rote sigil which allowed him to see ley energy, and traced it in the air with his finger to strengthen the mental image. With the ease of years of practice, he fed power into it, opening his senses to the local landscape. Buildings, streets and even common people were replaced in his vision by blackness.

  He expected to see a wavy pattern of glowing blue overlaid on the scene, like a network of rivers or limbs on a tree. He saw nothing but black, the apprentice’s dwindling personal energy and his own blue glow. There were no ley lines here. Not even a tiny capillary line anywhere near the job site. That wasn't normal.

  When Silva released the spell the apprentice waited, and the bricklayer parted his beard to take a drink of water. It was likely his pay for putting up with an apprentice was greater than the price of the wall. He held out a cup to the apprentice while Silva walked around, trying to figure out what was going on.

  A block away, he found the problem. A strong ley artery went up the center of a main street and every branch for a block on either side had been bent back into the main artery to thicken it. Silva returned to the jobsite.

  “I know where the artery is,” the apprentice said caustically before Silva could speak. No verbal restraint at all. “And actual bending of ley lines is a third year skill.”

  “My apologies. I should not have interrupted your lesson in humility.”

  The apprentice looked properly stung.

  “Actually, the lesson was on how to use that.” Smirking, the bricklayer pointed to an unused wheelbarrow sitting off to the side.

  “That’s allowed?” The apprentice swayed like he'd been punched.

  The smirk became a grin. “I just need those bricks over there moved to over here where I can use them. I don’t care how. Dr. Wardic said to let you try and figure it out on your own, but I feared you were going to keel over first.”

  It appeared ley benders had their own form of non-magical legerdemain. Silva always wondered why most dedicated ley benders had strong muscles.

  “Where are you heading?” The bricklayer gestured toward Silva's pack. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Winterhaven.”

  After five years, Silva still grew annoyed by the shocked expression on people’s faces when he said that word. “I was born there.”

  “Well, good luck to you then.” Both men quickly returned to their work.

  *****

  Away from the city on the first leg of his journey home, it was nearly sundown when Silva reached an inn with a stone distance marker in front. He stepped through the door.

  “Welcome to the Twenty Mile Inn, Sir,” a squat man with a full brown beard said. “Looking for a room or just a drink?”

  “Both.” Silva clacked a silver coin on the counter, but kept a finger on it. “Could I interest you in some magic in trade?”

  The beard split into a slow smile. “Show me a trick I haven't seen before and your room is half price.”

  Silva waved a hand over the coin and it disappeared.

  The innkeeper grabbed Silva's wrist and turned over the palmed coin. “Real magic.”

  It was Silva's turn to smile as he put the coin back on the counter. He was supposed to be an illusionist. Pulling the proper sigils to mind, Silva wove them together and the coin slowly began to fade from view until it was nearly invisible.

  The innkeeper put a finger on the coin, shifted it a bit to the left, and the illusion shattered. “Better luck next time. Thanks for the show.”

  Okay asshole. You asked for it. Time to pull off the kid gloves and do some real magic.

  Silva traced the rote to adjust his vision. In the blackness, he noticed all the glow lamps in the building ran off a single elementary circuit, bent up through the inside of the walls with no anti-tampering sigils woven in. It would be simplicity itself to unweave the power regulator sigil from the spell. The little blue string of power would thicken and every lamp in the building would glow like the sun … right before they all burst into magically-fueled flame. The fire would crawl inside the walls first, setting fire to window frames, door frames and wooden lath first. The wall plaster on top of the lath would contain the fire only long enough for the inn's occupants to see their deaths coming.

  He shuddered, took a deep breath and laid a second coin on the counter, signaling defeat, then forced a self-deprecating smile.

  “Moving illusions are always the hardest,” Silva admitted. “Original name for an inn, by the way. Is there a Forty Mile Inn?”

  A quick nod. “And a sixty. My brothers run them. Are you headed that far?”

  “My destination is my own.”

  “Just asking. I won’t bother you. Here’s your ale.”

  Safe in his room after an ale to clear the trail dust, Silva reviewed the contents of his pack.

  On top was trail food from the university kitchens. It was a tradition the kitchens prepare a package to assist graduates on the road ahead, but most students threw the stuff away. It was nutritious and imperishable, but tasted only slightly better than dirt. Anyone with two coins to spare would eat something else. Silva didn't have coins to spare, and no clue what he would find at home, so had scrounged a few unopened packets out of the trash.

  He set aside the food packets, the grooming kit for his hair and beard, and pulled out the hardbound book which filled the majority of the pack. He smiled at the title written in his own eleven-year-old hand: When I Become a Mage. The blank book had been a birthday gift from his mother, right before she died.

  Three years later, when Father abruptly sent him away to prepare for admission to University, his clothing and this book had been his only possessions. When he burned his shirt and pants in the ceremony which gave him his apprentice robes, some older students told him the book was supposed to burn, too.

  Silva smiled as he leafed past several singed pages full of crossed out items, born of Magical Fiction Magazine stories and late night conversations with Kate, his first crush: ‘send my voice to another person hundreds of miles away’, ‘create an intelligent golem’, ‘create a winged carriage’ …

  Leafing through the book, his eyes fell on a page that wasn’t crossed out: ‘graduate University’, ‘get my master's degree’, ‘become the most powerful mage in Winterhaven’, ‘get at least three doctorate degrees’ then, written in an older hand, ‘ask Kate to marry me’.

  Silva smiled thinly, started to cross out that last line then left it alone. There was nothing wrong with a little vain hope. He placed a check mark next to ‘graduate University’, blew the ink dry, and closed the book.

  Last, Silva pulled Dr. Delan’s final gift from the pack, his master exam scroll.

  When Dr. Delan presented it to him after his meeting with the University elders, Silva knew he could learn to cast the single spell transcribed upon it with very little effort. The master level ribbon attached to the outside of this scroll was a joke. A year or more for an undergraduate journeyman to learn his first master spell? A skilled fourth-year apprentice could figure out this spell, and wouldn't need a year to do it. He accidentally let doubt slip onto his features.

  “Professors are supposed to be impartial,” Dr. Delan said in a hushed
whisper, even though the pair were alone in the windowless stone room. “Swear to me you will never tell anyone you were assigned this spell, what this spell does or that it even exists. And not only this year, but even after your master test.”

  “The other department heads will notice. I mean, certainly somebody knows …”

  “This is a legitimate spell for your master test. The ribbon is not a forgery and the sigils are all new to you. It will be accepted when you present the scroll.”

  “But, isn't that cheating?”

  “All master scrolls have a hidden danger or difficulty the journeyman discovers when trying to unlock it. Dr. Wardic was correct regarding your lack of subtlety, so I am giving you a scroll with subtle danger, befitting an illusionist.”

  Silva thought about unlocking the sigils in the inn, but reconsidered. Appearances could be deceiving, and magic was never something to treat lightly. Serving in the Home for the Misshapen was the first task assigned to any apprentice mage. Unlocking the spell would wait until he was home in Winterhaven.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Silva woke to a furious pounding at his door, and flung it open.

  “Sorry to bother you, Mister Wizard sir,” the innkeeper said, wringing his hands. “But there’s a problem out on the street.”

  Silva rubbed tired eyes as he stepped away from the door to find his robe. “I’m an illusionist, not an enforcer.” He found the robe, scratched the hairs on his naked belly, realized the servant was staring at his fuzzy butt, and pulled his robe on over his head.

  “That’s the problem, sir. Please, you need to see for yourself.”

  Silva nudged aside the curtain and peered down at the street below. A dome-shaped absorption shield was erected on the path between the inn and the road. An injured woman lay inside.

  Just like Kate, back in Winterhaven.

  The unconscious woman wore the heavy green jacket and slacks of an enforcer, with a grey stripe down the seam of her pants and multiple stripes on her epaulets. A knife protruded from her back and her black tricornio hat laid in a growing pool of blood. A junior enforcer, in darker green without the stripes, swung a sledgehammer at the transparent blue shield encasing her, while a crowd gathered, uncertain how to help.