The Third Magic (40 page)

Too late she realized that the aura she saw was one of malice. The boy pulled his arm back and let fly the stone he had picked up. It hit her on the arm, so hard that the sudden pain brought tears to her eyes.

Behind him was another, coming over the crest of the hill. The first boy shouted, and the other came running also, hurling a stick. The old woman deflected it with her forearm, but caught another stone on her breast. She turned away, and a stone struck her on her back, knocking her to the ground. The boys laughed and shouted loudly at her in a language she did not understand.

Behind the boys were other voices, older voices chiding them, but they paid no heed. A third boy crested the hill, and a fourth, and they all thought it great fun to throw things at the funny old woman who now faced the ground on her hands and knees. As she tried to rise, a stone hit her elbow. It was already swollen with arthritis, and the pain felt as if her arm were exploding. As she cried out, another hit her on the head, and she fell to the ground, dazed.

For a moment she thought that she had gone back to the awful moment when the elders of the tribe had bludgeoned her with rocks in an attempt to kill her.

But these were not her tribe. They were cruel children, like the ones who looked down from the Tor, smiling, as the elders smashed the stones into her head.

Oh, she should never have come out! She had been so seduced by the sound of humans that she had forgotten how cruel humans really were.

The rocks that struck her were bigger now. The boys drew closer, sniggering. One spat on her. She looked up. The first boy was showing her an exaggeratedly innocent face while he took his penis out of the cloth that was wrapped around him and wiggled it at her.

The others fell into paroxysms of laughter at this rudeness. One of them looked over his shoulder to see the approaching men of his tribe, their faces stern and angry. He said something to the boy who had exposed himself, but this one was not to be deterred. Calmly, with half-closed eyes, he began to urinate on the old woman.

She scrambled out of the way, outraged. And then, before the boy could even stop urinating, she cast her eyes toward a flat, sharp stone. It flew at incredible speed, slicing off the boy's arm.

The faces of the other boys grew ashen as they watched. When the boy began to scream, they ran.

The first to run had his head smashed in by a rock. The second's back was broken.

It took the adults a few moments to grasp exactly what was going on, and even then they could not believe it. One, the leader, carried a sling, and some others had spears, but their weapons did them no good. One by one they were struck with uncanny accuracy by flying objects from the makeshift fortress. Stones, branches, logs, rivers of pebbles... They all seemed to pour toward the newcomers as if thrown by invisible hands.

Invisible,
they said in their language.
Demons.

The woman laughed. She stood up amid the flying debris and placed her bruised hands on her hips, and opened her toothless mouth wide in laughter while the mass of logs and stones parted around her like water.

"Witch," one shouted, pointing his finger.

"Goddess," said another.

It did not matter what they called her. They all died.

A
ll but one.

The man carrying the sling was so horrified that he did not even seek shelter from the Cailleach's wrath. He dropped his weapon on the ground. He did not kneel before her, nor beg for his life. He simply watched.

And as he watched, the Cailleach fell to her knees before the first child she had killed, the boy who had been bled white without his arm. She raised her arms to the sky. She screamed. She wept until she had no tears left.

And when she had used her eyes for the last time, she plucked them out with her own hands and laid them upon the great yellow stone.

Then, weeping tears of blood, she began to walk, widdershins, in a circle of undoing, while her bodiless eyes followed her from their place on the great rock.

The watching man did not count how many times she circled the Tor. But she walked until the day turned to night, and then to day again. When the first rays of sunlight broke upon the flat summit of the mountain, they reflected a trail that circled it like a halo.

Her eyes were withered and eaten by ants. Never again would she look upon the sunburst she had carved into the side of the yellow stone, that assurance that another day would come.

In the distance, the Cailleach heard voices approaching. A man wearing a coat of badger skin would be among them, she knew. He would be carrying a sling, but would not use it. She would find him.

The spell was complete.

"H
o, there! Stay with
the group!" the leader called to the boys who ran ahead.

They were local boys, a little too high-spirited to serve as guides, perhaps, but the only ones willing to make the trek up the Tor.

There were eleven men in all, come from the balmy climate of the Southern Sea to this cold and desolate place in atonement for a wrong committed long before by their ancestors toward one of their own.

She was known as the Cailleach, the Watcher. A magic woman. Their grandfathers had killed a magic woman once, long ago, before the people arrived in the new land. No one had spoken of it for many years, and they had been good years, with sunlight and green fields.

But then the storms came, and grew more evil each year, until the once-lush fields had broken off and fallen into the sea, and all the people's possessions and animals with them.

And so the first whisperings began of the magic woman who perhaps had not died at all those years ago, but had lived through magic, and lived still on the Tor where she had been left for dead. She was the Watcher, the Cailleach, whose spell had reached out like long fingers to find her people and punish them for their wickedness.

The people were certain they were doomed. What had they done, the shamans who knew the magic sounds but were still only men? Had they sought to kill one who possessed the true magic, one who could not be killed? If so, Her punishment on them would be terrible. And unending. The storms were only the beginning. The babies would die, the sea would drown them all.

As soon as the misfortunes began, the family of the magic woman had been sacrificed under the shaman's knife, but that had not been enough. Now, decades later, eleven young men came on foot to right the wrong done to the one who had once blessed her people with her magic. They would bow at her grave. They would offer themselves in sacrifice. They would do anything they must to turn the Cailleach's power away.

A
t the tail end
of the group walked the shaman himself, a medicine man named Alder who wore a coat of badger skins brought from the Tor during the time of the exodus. The pelts were old. They stank and disintegrated in the rain that fell. Alder's armpits and belly itched from the badger hair that covered them. He had been warned about the cold of the Tor, but not of the rain, rain so different from the warm monsoons of his native land. This rain was vicious, spiky as pine needles, icy, blown by frigid wind.

He had been a small child when the tribe had left this place. At least he thought this was the place. There had been a flat-topped mountain, with a lake on top. A lake and a canyon, where the elders had stoned the silent one, the Watcher, before they left.

She had never spoken. All the old ones who remembered the journey away from the Tor agreed on that. And the fact that the nameless girl had possessed powers from the beginning. She had killed a boy, Alder's mother had told him. "Killed without ever opening her hand."

"You should have kept her," the boy had answered, which had earned him a hot slap at the time.

But he had been right, and after the disasters began, the others in the tribe knew also that killing the magic woman had been a mistake. Within one moon of the first big storm that had wiped out their homes, a mysterious fever had spread among the people and sucked the life from the old and weak. A year later, nearly half of the men who were left were killed by a roving band passing through the hunting fields. The women and children had stayed hidden for nearly a year. And then the second storm came. And the third. And then their very land had disappeared beneath the sea.

It was during this time that the last shaman died. Alder had trained to take his place, but the training had not been complete. And so he was now called shaman, but all the tribe knew he was not truly a medicine man.

The magic woman—and yes, her magic would be stronger than his, he was sure—would be fearsome, would kill him. She who took her strength from this cold air, these cold rocks, would see him for what he was, a soft creature of sun and sand and bright flowers, and laugh at his softness.

He looked around at the barren landscape. How he wished he could learn magic from her! In his imagination he pictured her creating these lakes with her gigantic footsteps, forming these mountains with rocks that she carried in her apron. She was the Cailleach, rock-woman, hag, witch, sorceress, goddess, source. Womb where warriors are born, a tunnel of fire between her legs. Woman in her most fearsome aspect, all the parts that mortal women hide from men because they know that to reveal their strength would be so frightening that their seed could not be lured out of them.

How he would have liked to learn the magic from her!

But he knew that would not be. Already he knew that he would die, that they would all die, that the Cailleach would not be appeased. And so he stared for a moment into the cold northern sun, pale and small and hard, and filled his lungs with stinging air, and walked forward, up the rocky spiral path leading to the top of the Tor.

T
he young boys with
them had come from a village at the base of the mountain. They had told the travelers excitedly about the hag who lived alone at the top of the Tor.

"In a fortress," one of them volunteered.

"She's old and ugly," another said, making a face. "Sometimes we go up there and throw rocks at her animals."

"You'd be too cowardly to hit her, though," a third boy taunted.

"I could hit her if I wanted to!"

"She lives with deer and wild rabbits," the first boy said. "And wolves."

This last had convinced the members of Alder's expedition that they had come to the right place. Of course. Alder thought with admiration, the wild wolves would come to her.

And so the eleven men of the tribe began the long climb to the Tor. The village boys, who had accompanied them unbidden, danced around their legs like bees, chattering and boasting, thrilled to meet strangers from so far away, ecstatic at the prospect of seeing the witch herself, and perhaps besting her in battle.

It was one of the boys, then, who was the first to reach the flat summit of the Tor, the first to encounter the Cailleach who waited for them, the first to throw a rock at the hag.

She caught it.

The boy was stupefied. The old woman had her back to him. And yet, at the moment he let fly the pebble that he hoped would strike her hard enough so that she would cry out and prove his triumph to the other boys, she reached up with one hand and caught it,
thuk,
as if it were a slow-moving fly.

The other boys, who were just cresting the hill, saw it as well. They all stopped in their tracks.

She smiled.

They bowed down to her, to a man. All but Alder, who was too surprised to move, but could only watch.

The Cailleach walked toward him.
She knows,
Alder thought as she approached. She knows this is not what I see in my vision. I see her killing me, killing us all, taking our heads and carrying them by our hair to the yellow stone. I see her walking in a long circle…

And then he could see her face clearly. The woman had no eyes.

"I am Alder," he whispered when she drew close to him. "Thank you."

"Alder," she rasped, as if she recognized him. It was the first word she had ever spoken.

With that sound, the Cailleach had called him to her and initiated him into the Mystery. What the shaman felt, from that moment to the present, in which, after countless lifetimes, he still found himself learning from her, was something like love.

T
he globe dropped to
the ground. "It was you," he said in quiet astonishment. "That's why you're blind. It was the spell. The End of the World."

"Rather a grandiose term," the Innocent said. She assumed her guise as an old woman. "You were Alder, you know."

He was stunned. "I? I've lived before?"

She smiled. "Even magicians come and go," she said.

He hesitated. "Our lives..." He looked pained. "They just go on and on, don't they?"

"Are you disappointed?"

He looked about, confused. "I thought the gods, at least, would be immortal."

"We are all immortal," she said softly.

"Are there gods beyond the gods, then?" he asked. "Unknown gods to whom the gods we know pray?"

"Oh, yes."

"And are they, too, destroyed before they are worshipped?"

"Perhaps."

"Where does it end?"

A small smile played at the corners of her mouth. "At the beginning," the Innocent said.

Morning broke.

"Go, little bard." She patted his knee. "Be who you are and do what you can."

COMING HOME

T
itus made it safely
to Panama, where he immediately found work on a freighter headed for Dover. Why he would want to go to England, of all places, was something he asked himself again and again during the sea voyage. The Coffeehouse Gang was centered in London, for one thing. So was MI-6, which still employed a number of people who might recognize Titus as a former field agent who was supposed to have died many years before.

That the FBI meanwhile had a perfectly accurate photo of Titus Wolfe was a source of some anxiety to him, although the FBI was not Titus's main concern. The significance of the photo was not lost on the Coffeehouse boys. It was only a matter of time before they found Edgington's body and figured out the truth.

But they wouldn't think to look in England, Titus told himself. Right under their noses. He could get lost in London, easily. He would make himself bald, tan, with contact lenses and a stone in his shoe to make him limp, put on a hundred more pounds, get a job in a small college somewhere, or shoot billiards for a living...

He knew he was lying. For in truth, he had no good reason for coming to England except that when he learned that the freighter was headed there, he knew with uncanny urgency that he must be on it. His call to return to his native land was as strong as the need to mate.

The peculiar thing was that he did not know why he wanted to go there.

On the journey, he puzzled over his desire. It would be almost certain death to dangle himself in front of the Coffeehouse Gang. They would have found him even in Panama; surely the wide network of information the Boys had created would find Titus Wolfe in England. And yet he stayed on the freighter.

By day he worked at whatever job was given him— cleaning lavatories, washing dishes. That didn't matter. Those hours flew by without a thought. He spoke to no one, absorbed in his own obsession to reach England. Sometimes he felt as if he were single-handedly guiding the ship toward its destination by the power of his will alone.

At night, though, he felt the threads of his reason unraveling. He began to draw, for one thing, obsessively and badly. One of the motifs of his dubious artistry, drawn with lead pencil on lined notebook paper, was a flat topped, ziggurat-shaped mountain. He caught himself doodling again and again, and each time he tore out the page and threw it away in embarrassment. It was like something he'd seen in a movie once. Yes, that must have been where the idea came from. A stupid American movie.

He was compelled to draw other things, too: figures as crude as the drawings on cave walls, of hunters or something. Or rather, one hunter, a single man with certain characteristics which always appeared in the doodles, even if they were drawn in a state of stuporous drunkenness, which had become the norm during the long, frightening nights.

His stick figures always had tongues, for one thing. Big, bulging black tongues. They were creepy images, real meat for any psychiatrist worth his salt, Titus thought, although he himself did not understand any of it.

Then there were smaller figures, children from the looks of them, throwing stones. One of them was missing an arm. It was lying on the ground at his feet, while blood spurted out of the torso in paisley-shaped droplets. Another was a girl with spiky black hair and a bullethole on the side of her head.

Daddy, she said.

Sometimes the figure would come to life in his mind. She would stand up, the bullet wound still fresh and dripping at her temple, and walk off the page, trailing bubbles of blood that exuded from her wound. The bubbles would turn into faces, grimacing, disembodied, disturbing as the floating heads in Picasso's "Guernica."

The faces filled Titus with so much dread that he took pains to burn these drawings as soon as he realized he'd made them. And then, feeling utterly embarrassed, he drank more of the whiskey he'd taken from Edgington's boat.

Unfortunately, the whiskey was gone by the second night. On the third day, after viewing his creation of the resurrected child who, this time, was speaking to him through a cartoon bubble containing the words, "You'll go to the Tor to make things right," his hands shook as he held the empty bottle to his lips, hoping for a drop to fall into his mouth.

He became so distraught that at one point he rummaged through his duffel bag and held the misshapen little cup in his hands, hoping that somehow, in some magical way, it might take away his sorrows and his fears and the memory of his daughter's eyes as she lay dying. But of course, the worthless thing did nothing.

It had all been for nothing. What was left of the finger he had cut off was festering. His fever, rising steadily, caused all the stick figures he drew to jiggle and move now, the one-armed boy, the black-tongued warriors, as if they were trying to come to life. The girl with the bullet in her brain, of course, hardly ever kept still anymore.

Weeping, his tears running hot down his fevered face, he opened Edgington's stash of heroin.

After Edgington's death, Titus had taken the stash from the captain's cabin, earmarking it for use as bribes. Indeed, he had been recommended for the job on the freighter as a result of just such a bribe.

Titus had followed Edgington's addiction from the beginning. During their years at Cambridge, a number of the idealistic young men in Professor Darling's inner circle experimented quite openly with the more popular recreational substances. They were actually encouraged to do so by their teacher, who was then able to determine who among them might be prone to addictions. These were washed out of the program on some pretext or other, or—more likely— sent on assignments of extreme danger.

Edgington had been one of these. In retrospect luck, rather than skill, had probably been the deciding factor, but the fact that he had survived the first assignment, and the second, which had been equally dangerous, had bought Edgington immunity for a long time.

Eventually, of course, his time had run out. Titus knew that if he himself had not killed his former classmate, someone else would have, probably within days. As it was, that killer was now looking for Titus Wolfe.

He was well aware of this fact as he heated the heroin in a spoon in one of the ship's heads.

Edgington had never thought of himself as a heroin addict. The term conjured an image of proletarian squalor which the aristocrat found laughable. Instead, he—and the other users, too, Titus recalled—would talk about the drug as a kind of ultimate solution.

There was no other substance, Edgington would argue passionately, with quite the same blanket effect at making one's problems disappear. He had said more than once that when a man's troubles became unbearable, heroin was the best way out.

That had certainly held true for Edgington, Titus thought, although there had hardly been any philosophical thought behind the man's demise.

It had been easy to talk about easy death when death itself was so remote as to be nearly imaginary, he thought as he shot the liquid into his arm. When death lay under your bed, when it came up out of the bathroom sink every morning or snaked into your window like a vine, it no longer seemed so pleasant.

The heroin worked. For an hour that felt like eternity, he experienced nothing but blessed, perfect oblivion. He had found the elixir of life. Heroin, he decided, put everything into perspective. If someone was waiting to kill him in England, it didn't matter a whit. Life was today, now, this liquid, soft moment when he was wrapped in arms more secure than any mother's.

He got sick afterward, puking into the head in the middle of the night. Several people heard him. He used the incident to go off duty the following day to get high again. The experience had left him with a gray feeling, which was dispelled the instant the magic liquid entered his arm. Then the perfection returned, the blissful state of pure being unburdened by thought, emotion, or conscience. He slept.

In his dream, an unwanted and disconnected image of Edgington spoke to him from the plane of death:

You'll have to go back to make it right, old bean.

No, Edgington hadn't said that, Titus recalled. The girl had. The girl he'd killed because she had seen the bodies at Miller's Creek.

His daughter. Ah, yes, he remembered now. He had killed his own daughter.

As she lay dying, she was the one who had spoken those odd words to him:
You'll have to go back to make it right.

He remembered that he had wanted to hold the cup out to her, the magic cup that would save the girl from death. She reached out for it, gratitude in her eyes. But Titus had snatched the cup away again and left her to die.

You'll have to go back…

He shot up again, and felt immediately better. Everything was going to be fine, Titus told himself. He was clever and resourceful, probably the best mercenary in the world, Professor Lucius Darling's protégé. Nothing bad was going to happen to him.

H
e screamed himself awake.

"Shut up!" someone called, tossing a shoe at Titus.

But he did not stop. He couldn't. It seemed the scream crawled out of him like a snake, long and agonizing.

"Asshole." An ashtray filled with cigarette butts hit him on the head.

But still, he could not stop. He made other noises, frightened, panting sounds, and he vomited again, this time all over himself in his bunk, but he came back to the scream again and again. His hands shook. He held them in front of his face as if staring at something alien and terrifying, and continued to scream.

"Gone buggy," someone said.

"Get frigging security."

In the end, still screaming, Titus was dragged out of the room and thrown into the brig, where he remained until the ship docked at Dover. There he was unceremoniously dumped, blinking into the unaccustomed sunlight. His duffel was thrown on top of him.

I
t was not raining
in Dover that night, but there was no moon to see and no stars. Titus struggled to his feet, clutching feebly at the strings of the duffel bag. It was too much for him. He felt as if worms were crawling beneath his skin. He dragged the bag for a few feet, then let it go.

He looked up blearily. The only thing visible in the night sky was a highway billboard illuminated by powerful floodlights. It showed a silhouetted skyline of Lakeshire, with a castle that was supposed to be Camelot superimposed upon it. Beneath the castle were words advertising a travel agency. They read: "Come to the Days of Adventure."

Titus did not notice the castle. All he saw was the silhouette of the Tor, the flat-topped mountain, looming in the distance. It called to him. He began to babble. He walked away from the docks with empty hands.

Some distance away, a man in a telephone booth put a pair of infrared binoculars into the pocket of his jacket. He inserted some coins into the phone box and dialed a number.

"I've found him," the man said. "This isn't going to be difficult."

F
rom the opening of
the forgotten duffel bag, the unprepossessing little cup rolled out and traveled along the dock for a few feet before plopping into the water and disappearing from view.

Titus never noticed it. Long before now, he had forgotten all about it.