Apprentice (3 page)

“Perfect. It’s not in the sky at all right now,” said the wizard. He turned to the others gathered in the square. “I have found what I was looking for. I’m taking this boy, he will be my apprentice.”

“No!” screamed Benen’s father. He was restrained from rushing to grab his son, or worse, hitting the wizard, by his fellow villagers.

“This is an honour for the boy,” said the wizard.

“He’s my son! You can’t just take him.”

“In fact, I can,” corrected the wizard. “It is my right.”

“It’s your right because we can’t stop you,” muttered Smith, just low enough the wizard might not have heard.

If he did hear, he let it pass. Benen didn’t know what to do or say. He didn’t want to be apprentice to this wizard, but he feared if he tried to refuse, others would be hurt. Worse, he himself might be hurt.

“It is settled then,” said the wizard as though an agreement had been reached. “I will take the boy with me now. He will not need to take any of his previous possessions. I am so pleased to have found a suitable candidate that you can be assured I will not seek further retribution against your village for having defied me today.”

The wizard smiled magnanimously at the crowd of angry men. He kept the smile on his face for a second or two then let it fall when he saw the stony looks on the faces of his audience. After letting go of the squirming Cooper’s boy, the wizard turned about, still holding Benen’s hand, and started walking out of the village.

Behind him, Benen could hear the whispered conference between the men of the village as they discussed what to do about his abduction. He felt the wizard tense through his grasp on his hand, when Benen’s father demanded the others let him go run the wizard through and get his son back. Unfortunately, Benen then heard the other villagers argue that it was no use. The wizard would not be harmed so easily and his anger would surely doom the village.

“Better to consider the boy dead, Vellen,” counselled Urgest. “He died in service to the village.”

Benen sobbed when he heard his father grudgingly agree.

When this decision had been made, the wizard increased the pace of his walking.

“You were listening to them, weren’t you?” Benen asked the wizard. The bearded face turned toward him.

“Master,” the wizard said to him.

“I’m sorry?”

“You will address me as Master and you shall not talk to me unless I have first spoken to you. This is your first lesson.”

“Is that really the first thing you teach about wizardry?”

The wizard’s brows came together and a wicked smile came upon his face. By this time, they had walked far enough to be out of any villager’s line of sight. The wizard stopped walking and turned upon Benen, looming over him menacingly.

“No. You’re right.
This
will be the true beginning of your education in wizardry, boy.”

Using only one hand to make arcane gestures, the wizard intoned more of the syllables Benen was beginning to recognize as parts of magical incantations. The wizard’s other hand was holding onto Benen’s arm, preventing him from running away. Benen could feel a strange sort of tingling through this contact; it made his hair stand on end.

When the wizard had done with his casting, he smiled again, quite broadly.

“Lesson one, my apprentice, is that a wizard can use a single hand to perform magic if there is need. It is more difficult, but manageable to experienced wizards. Even more difficult is casting with no hands, but it is still possible to do.”

“What was the spell you cast?” Benen asked. Immediately after the words were out of his mouth, Benen started hearing them echo again and again, rising in pitch and intensity until he felt his ears would burst and his head explode. He screamed involuntarily at the pain. When it reached its peak, a minute later, it began to recede. Benen was left panting, his head aching.

“I think that answered your question,” said the wizard smugly. “Remember: address me as Master and no talking unless I have given you leave.”

Benen almost said
Yes, Master
but stopped himself in time. The wizard smiled again.

“Maybe you
can
learn. Come along now, my home is some distance away.” The wizard let go of Benen’s hand then and instructed him to follow until told otherwise. Benen did as the wizard asked. He suspected the spell did more than just punish him when he spoke out of turn. He feared what it would do to him if he disobeyed a direct order like this one.

CHAPTER 2: SCULLION

The walk to the wizard’s abode was long enough they had to camp overnight. When it came time to stop, the wizard looked up to the sky and stared at it for a few seconds before nodding with satisfaction.

“Boy, find some wood and bring it back here. Enough for a fire to last the night. Do not stray and come back here without delay. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Master,” Benen replied, as he must. He left the meadow and searched for dead fall in the brush and light forest nearby. He gathered his findings in a big pile central to his search area. As he was carrying his latest armful back to his pile, he heard a howl in the distance. It startled him so that he dropped the load and stood frozen in place.

I have no weapon to protect myself
, he thought. Then he realized that even with a weapon, he wasn’t trained to fight and he was a small seven year old; what could he do against a wolf or worse?

Having worked this logic out in his head, Benen decided he needed to get back to the wizard. He loaded his arms with wood from his pile and made his way back to the meadow as fast as he could.

Looking back to make sure nothing was following him proved to be a mistake: there
was
something behind him!

From the darkness in the near distance he saw the faint glimmer of moonlight reflecting on animal eyes — eyes looking at him.

He hurried and his rushing made him lose, bit by bit, his load of kindling and branches. He didn’t care though, he didn’t want to be eaten. As the last of his load fell from his arms and he broke into a full out run, he heard a deep growl much closer behind him than he cared to think about. His panic made him reckless and he tripped on a root, falling face first into the soft carpet of dead leaves on the ground.

Benen stayed down, putting his hands over his head and hoping whatever it was that was coming for him would overlook him there if he kept quiet and still. He heard soft padding footfalls nearby, barely causing the leaves to crinkle. The sounds came closer until they were coming from directly beside Benen. He heard breathing, like the panting of an animal having exerted itself.

O Mysterious Creator, I wish I’d paid more attention at church so I could pray to you properly,
Benen prayed in his head.
I meant to, I swear! I was just always distracted and church is so boring . . . .

He might have continued praying in this vein, heading deeper into blasphemy, if a voice hadn’t spoken from directly beside and above him.

“Boy? Would you please explain to me what you’re doing?”

It was the wizard! Benen looked up and saw no sign of the beast. What he did see was the wizard. More of the wizard than he could possibly have ever wanted to see. The wizard was naked!

The old man’s naked body was not a pleasant sight. The skin that was usually hidden under robes was slug-white, except in the many places where the wizard had red blemishes and pimples. His penis was a tiny shrunken thing, all wrinkles and dirt, sitting in the middle of his large unruly mat of pubic hair. Benen averted his eyes after that, feeling he’d overstepped by even gazing upon the wizard’s naked form.

“You think I look poorly don’t you, Boy? That I look old and withered and unwell. See if you look half so good when you’re over eight centuries old.”

More than 800 years old?!
Benen’s first thought was that the wizard was lying, but having seen what wizards can do, he was uncertain where the truth lay.

“Get up Boy!” the wizard said. “Go and get the wood where you dropped it in your foolishness and let’s return to the camp. I’m famished.”

“But, the . . . .” Benen wasn’t sure what to call the beast. What he had seen was most like a wolf, but over-sized. He settled for pointing back the way he had come.

“What?!” The wizard demanded.

“There’s a wolf, Master, but not a normal wolf,” the spell over Benen brought out the words.

The wizard rolled his eyes. He muttered an incantation he had evidently practised many times; he said it much faster and more fluently than any of the other spells Benen had seen him perform. The wizard finished the incantation and then stood as if expecting an attack, tense and ready to react to anything.

Benen jumped back from the wizard suddenly, when he saw, moving under the skin of the wizard’s belly, what he thought was the shape of large wolf’s head. The shape moved within the soft skin of the belly and made its way up the wizard’s body, deforming it as it went, bending it out of shape. When the head moved past ribs, the ribs broke and the wizard screamed in agony. He fell to the ground and began convulsing. The wolf’s head made it to his neck and came out beside his real head. The howl of the wizard’s pain mingled with that of the released wolf’s head.

Benen scrambled to find a branch he could use to defend himself, all the while keeping an eye on his master’s death-throes.

Did he try to summon it? Did the spell backfire?
Benen wondered. He thought he’d probably never find out.

As he watched, the wolf head crushed the wizard’s in its jaws and began ripping and tearing at the wizard’s remaining human form. Where flesh was removed, wolf was revealed until only wolf remained. There was gore everywhere around the wolfish shape.

It looked like a wolf, only too large. It stood three feet at the shoulders. The head had grown once freed from the constraints of the wizard’s body, and the wolf that came out of the wizard similarly also became much larger as it shed its human prison. It looked at Benen, standing over him. He felt silly with his little branch held before him menacingly.

The wolf did not attack him though; the next thing Benen saw it do was something he’d never imagined a wolf could do: it laughed at him. It was half-way between whining and spastic barking, but Benen was sure it was laughter. He did not understand what was going on.

The wolf continued laughing for a few more seconds, then used one of its paws to write characters on the ground. They were human characters!

Unfortunately Benen didn’t know how to read. He’d seen writing and recognized this as exactly that, but he didn’t know what the wolf was writing. When he looked at the writing uncomprehendingly, the wolf rolled its eyes. Just like his master had. The body language was the same.

“Master?” Benen asked uncertainly.

The wolf nodded.

Benen stared at the wolf who was his master. His jaw dropped.

I might be a wizard like him someday. This could be me,
he thought. Then he shuddered as he thought of the transformation he had just seen.

The wolf tossed its head toward Benen’s abandoned firewood pile and growled impatiently at him. Benen hurried to gather the pieces of wood and run back to the meadow they had chosen as their camp site. The wolf hounded his steps, discouraging him from any dallying.

When Benen reached the campsite, he was surprised by the presence of a small wooden cottage, complete with thatched roof, filling the meadow. It had glass in its windows — more than many of the poor back in Oster’s Gift could say — and a front door painted bright red. He stopped dead and dropped the wood when he saw it, causing the wolf behind him to bowl him over. When Benen got back up, the wizard was standing near him, the wolf gone once more.

“Damn you, Boy,” the wizard said. “Can’t you be amazed
and
continue doing things at the same time? Useless!” The wizard walked away from Benen without waiting for a response and entered the cottage. Benen followed a minute later, firewood in hand.

The inside of the cottage contained a small wood stove — doing double duty as heating and cooking stove — a bed, a chest, and a desk. The floor was wooden planks, largely covered with a rug made from the pelt of some sort of giant white bear, or so Benen assumed. At a motion from the wizard, Benen put the firewood beside the stove and began to build a fire. He was rather inept at this and the wizard lost patience with him quickly.

“Step aside, Boy,” he commanded. The wizard piled some wood into the stove willy-nilly, then muttered a very short incantation, punctuating it with a flick of his index finger toward the stove. The wood burst into flames instantly. “There,” he said with satisfaction. Noticing that Benen was still disturbed by his nakedness, the wizard went to the chest and retrieved his clothing. He also brought out some jerky and a jar of water. “Make a soup of this, will you?” he said to the boy as he handed the items to him. He handed Benen a pot and kettle next, “boil some of the water for my tea too.”

Benen was dying to ask the wizard where the cottage had come from. How could magic create all this from nothing? He was beginning to think it might not be so bad to be an apprentice to someone so powerful, but stopped when he realized that he would never be able to understand all this, he was too simple.