Fiction River: Hex in the City (2 page)

“I moved to Portland almost fifteen years ago, and have always been fascinated by the city's inherent contradictions. The relationships between the rivers, the railroads and the highways is very peculiar, as if laid out on purpose. I've written about this before, and so returned to my Portland wizard’s urban fantasy continuity to tell a story of a tired, indigent wizard with cancer. That last bit is sadly autobiographical.”

King of
The Kingless

Jay Lake

In the Waning of His Days

Fauntleroy Chen lurked in a southeast Portland doorway and tried not to groan. The rain, always with the rain, this city was like living in a lawn sprinkler. In the dark of the evening it refracted the colors of the beer signs and stoplights until everything was glittering and bright as the dance floor of a rather tepid rave. Including his guts, unfortunately.

He’d been avoiding doctors for Very Good Reasons since he was about twelve, when the power had first found him. What that had meant back in the day was doing some trivial but surprising things with
Magic the Gathering
cards. What it had come to mean in the four decades since was… different.

Not that he’d live to see another decade.

Pain slid through him like the dull knife of an old friend. Familiar, those pathways, another form of the power. His kind thrived on chaos, injury, the ragged edges of society and technology and pain. They were not evil, for that implied a moral axis and a value judgment. They were not even destructive, for the world did plenty to destroy itself. Just living in the spaces created at the margins of existence.

Following that broken pathway, he’d traded away one kind of help for another when he’d been young and fit and stupid. Now he was middle-aged and dying way too soon. The bargain seemed a lot less attractive in retrospect.

Out on the Willamette River a horn blasted. The
Portland Spirit
, probably, another trip for the party boat carrying the latest round of aging debutantes or wannabe market makers for a booze cruise away from the watchful eyes of Liquor Control Commission inspectors and suspicious spouses. He mentally wished them well, then focused once more on his purpose.

Her name was Isadora Wiegl, and she was a witch.

Since Fauntleroy Chen was a wizard, this did not especially surprise him. He was a water wizard, living in a water-claimed city, and this… stranger, this come-from-out-of-town hoyden, was something else. Fire, probably.

Everyone knew how fire and water got along. Especially if the water in question was the Willamette.

If she was not fire, then her power was surely rooted in air. Witches lived on a very different set of margins than did wizards.

Shadows shifted in an upstairs window of a warehouse that now boasted two bars, a sandwich shop and a Korean tailor on the ground floor. Fauntleroy set aside the writhing pain of his burgeoning tumor and his eternal annoyance at being waterlogged, focusing instead on the power.

She moves. Walking in an empty room. Dusty dry up there, no convenient roof leaks for his perceptions to follow. Still, enough mold lurks within the walls for him to leverage his vision. She moves, an undetailed form defined by her body’s own water and the faint, colored contrails of the power.

Fire. Surely Isadora Weigl was a fire witch. Even her name had come to him in light, when most such things came to him as patterns in the mud or the chop of waves or the trickle of raindrops on rippled, ancient glass. She was here to change things. Change them in a way that only women and witches could do.

“Not in my city, chickadora,” he whispered.

The cancer in his liver answered with another infusion of pain.

***

Once Upon a Time in His Youth

Fauntleroy Chen had been fifteen when he’d taken up with the homeless wizards, who at the time had mostly lived in the old Southern Pacific roundhouse at the multimodal rail yard just below Powell Boulevard in southeast Portland’s Brooklyn neighborhood. So many of his kind found their paths to the power through drink or dope that they tended to naturally blend in with the transient population. A shopping cart and enough layers to clothe three schizophrenics was perfect camouflage for the urban wizard on the make. The rest, who like Fauntleroy himself had traded away other things than sanity and sobriety for their power, often found it simpler to follow their brethren into the gutter.

At least they could find sympathetic company there.

He couldn’t stand being so grubby himself. But he learned a lot in the months he’d spent with that collection of dysfunctional, mostly older men.

“Them as is called to the power, they gives up a lot,” said Vladimir-with-no-last-name. To be more accurate, he mumbled the words through rotten black stumps of teeth embedded in a palimpsest of perpetual gum disease. It didn’t matter so much anyway. Vladimir repeated himself often enough that the unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio smoothed out after a while. “We gets more back, but it’s on the
inside
, doncha see?”

“Maybe…” Fauntleroy had already learned to ask leading questions and act like he knew even less than he probably didn’t.

“’S like a woman, right?”

That brought a mumbled chorus of agreement and several rounds of hawking and spitting from the assembled sages huddled in their grimy sleeping bags. And
they
stank, which always bothered Fauntleroy.

“I wouldn’t know,” he admitted. Women, mature or teen-aged or otherwise, were an utter mystery to him. At fifteen, his dating skills were not yet finely honed. Or even crudely honed.

“Wizard don’t need no woman. Files off the sharp bits, she does. Blunts the rusty poker. Takes wha’s on the inside and draws it out.” Vladimir jabbed Fauntleroy in the ribs, the old man cackling until he subsided into a tubercular cough. Playing to the audience, he called, “Ain’t that right, boys?”

This brought another round of supportive phlegm.

“Not really an issue right now,” Fauntleroy admitted.

“Keep it that way, boy. You wants the power, you pays the price.”

He couldn’t help himself. He had to ask. “What do women with the power do?”

“Don’t you know nothing, boy? Men
holds
it in, women
takes
it in. They steals their power from the likes of you.” Vladimir thumped his own chest through an oil-stained Carhartt jacket. “Ain’t no woman ever going to be stealing nothing from the likes of me. Won’t let ‘em get near enough.”

“I can see that,” said Fauntleroy politely. He resolved to learn more about witches.

Unfortunately, he’d never really managed to learn the right lessons.

***

Slightly Later That Same Evening

He faded into the brickwork of an old wall across the street from the warehouse where Isadora Weigl was in the process of conducting her feminine misdeeds. The fading wasn’t a spell, not really—those tended to cost too much of his energies lately—and wouldn’t fool the witch for a second if she were seriously looking for him. But it would make him far less noticeable to a casual glance on her part. And damned near invisible to anyone just passing by.

Fauntleroy Chen was still there right where he’d been standing all along, but the little ‘notice me’ light that almost everyone carries to varying degrees was dead as a Baptist church when the bar down the street was having two dollar pint night.

She descends down the stairs, the vestigial water in the old wood of each tread counting out its changes as her weight presses down. The door awaits her coming, still breathless with the slick ease of her entry, handled as no one had handled it in several generations. Power follows her like fireflies on a Midwest summer evening.

Fauntleroy Chen watched the witch step smoothly onto the rain-slicked bricks of the street. Water pooling in the old railroad tracks sung her presence to the rusty, narrow walls damming it in place. The wizard envied Isadora Weigl’s confidence, her air of nonchalant belonging. His sort sidled through life, slept on bus benches, hid themselves beneath grubby layers of clothing. Witches, he’d always been told, were afflicted with shameless pride.

Except on this witch that shameless pride looked like something to envy rather than to scorn. And she walked like someone who had never known pain. More envy blossomed in Fauntleroy, radiating from the hot core in his abdomen where his liver was busily nurturing his wayward adenocarcinomic children.

Even the rain wondered who she thought she was, sizzling in syncopation to his unexpected burst of wounded passion. Isadora Weigl paused in mid-stride and looked around her.

The very water in the air cloaks him, deferring the eye and swallowing reflections, making of its master nothing more than another foetid street puddle.

The witch shook her head and walked away. A block behind, Fauntleroy Chen followed her with the peculiar shuffle of the hungry and the homeless, which was itself invisibility of an entirely different kind.

***

When He Was a Young Man

“Feminism? ’S just a stalking horse for them witches.”

Fauntleroy knocked back another mouthful of stale beer and nodded along. There wasn’t much point in arguing with Vladimir when he was in one of his moods. So far as the younger wizard knew, Vladimir had been in one of his moods continuously for the past several decades.

“Ain’t no call for all that unrest and upheaval and kitchen bitchin’.” Vladimir let forth an enormous belch, seasoning the air under the Burnside Bridge with the rich, mellow tones normally associated with a brewery that has gotten hold of some very bad yeast indeed. “All the fuss and muss gives ’em cover to do their work.” He leered at Fauntleroy. “The work of corrupting us wizards.”

Chen had been a wizard, or at least a wizard’s pupil, for the better part of ten years now. He still wasn’t sure what the work of wizards was. All that stuff about keeping dark forces in balance was baloney from the minds of fantasy novelists and Hollywood scriptwriters. Even the most drug-addled drunks among Vladimir’s coterie knew that the first rule of wizardry was that the world simply
is
. There was no good, no evil, no balance. Just the inevitabilities of thermodynamics and entropy’s slow progression.

Wizards drew their power from the chinks created by eddies of negative entropy. The entire phenomenon of life itself was little more than an archipelago of islands of negative entropy, after all.

So they lived their own individual lives in the maximal entropy achievable in the modern, urban world—drunk, stoned, hungry and cold. Monasteries were too structured, hermitages in the state of nature too fecund. Streets suited wizards best.

Which had always led Fauntleroy Chen to wonder if there had been wizards before there were cities. Perhaps they had been called into being when the first foundations were laid along the earliest streets, creeping into existence as the random chaos of nature congealed into the focused, controlled functional chaos of civilization.

Vladimir launched into his next stanza before stopping abruptly. “Thing about a witchy woman is…”

Traffic rumbled overhead, while gulls wheeled and cried on the Willamette River. After moment, Fauntleroy realized this was his cue. “Mmm?”

He didn’t expect any particularly useful answers. Learning from Vladimir was like panning for gold in a public fountain. Every now and then you found a wedding ring, but the raw stuff was never present.

“Thing about a woman is…” Now Vladimir’s eyes narrowed, his inebriation lifting like fog on a summer morning. “They’re the opposite of us. Witches, like they’re pregnant with the world. We wizards eat shadows. Them witches make light. They try to make right and clean what was meant to be all dark edges.”

That might have been the most important thing anyone had ever said to Fauntleroy Chen about the art and practice of magic. Even in the moment, he realized this. He also knew he’d spend the rest of his life trying to figure out what the hell it actually meant.

***

Dawn Breaking Like Fire on the Mountain

Huddled in a doorway at the unfashionable end of northwest Portland’s former industrial district, the wizard awoke with a start, groaning. His liver was hurting bad, sending shoots of pain to colonize the entire right side of his abdomen and disturb his digestion even further. The cancer was definitely in strong voice today.

Portland in the spring was chilly but not killing cold. Still his hands felt cramped and chapped, a differing grace note of discomfort providing counterpoint to the pain that consumed his gut.

Ignoring the discontents of his body, Fauntleroy Chen extended his senses.

The witch bathes, wrapped in the water that is the wizard’s domain. This is a shock, his intimate knowledge of almost her entire body, from the long and narrow nipples that throb slightly in time to the sensuous scrape of the razor on her legs, to the warm depths of her genitalia, to the smooth, firm curve of her buttocks. He has not expected such contact, and startles sufficiently that the water in her deep clawfoot tub reflects his amazement.