Fiction River: Hex in the City (3 page)

“Gah!” The wizard bolted upright, dislodging his two warmest coats.

The witch stepped to the window of her warehouse loft—a real loft, he’d noted the night before with grudging approval, not a trendily labeled condo complex purposely built for digital yuppies and hipster trustafarians. There she stared out at the street. She was naked and wet, the water that beaded her body whispering powerfully to Fauntleroy Chen.

Their eyes met. A feedback loop closed. Even through the width of a street and two stories of height and the shield of rain-spotted window glass, he could clearly make out her expression as Isadora Weigl doubled over in pain.

The witch swiftly retreated into her own shadows.

“Shit, shit, shit.” He’d been made.

Not that anything too dreadful should come of it. The ancient eras of mortal enmity between witches and wizards had faded in a slow dissolve to a détente of mutual discontent amid the distractions of the modern world. But she’d seen him clearly with the senses of her power. The wizard knew he would have a much harder time of sussing out her Great Work, let alone stopping her.

***

A Bit Later On in His Earlier Life

Wizards generally didn’t bother with funerals. Mostly their corpses went unclaimed on the slab of whatever morgue they’d chanced to die nearest to. This either meant a pauper’s grave or a brief and pointed afterlife as a medical school cadaver.

Vladimir had done things differently, of course.

Now most of the city’s wizards, or at least the self-admitted ones, shuffled and coughed and held their dogs’ clothesline leashes amid the thin, endangered woods of Ross Island in the middle of the Willamette River. The founding witch of Portland had lived there a century and a half ago. She had been a widow farming her late husband’s land back when attacks by Indians or desperate whites were still a routine danger of pioneer life. And so a life surrounded by water had been a sensible precaution, for both natural and supernatural reasons.

The Widow Ross had woven the basic spells that undergirded the city of Portland’s mystic resonances. Any place with ambitions of future urban grandeur needed a witch to give it birth, even the wizards would grudgingly admit that. You could not enjoy shadowed decay to lurk unfashionably within unless someone had first built bright, straight and true. This went for both the physical and psychic infrastructures of a city.

Having established her domain, and laid the magical cornerstones for the city of Portland, the Widow Ross had then possessed the decency to pass on. This allowed the succeeding four or five generations of wizards to set about the right and proper business of eviscerating the heart of the old witch’s power. Thus was the balance between order and entropy maintained, and thus over time hundreds of wizards had found a home which, if not precisely warm in its welcome, had sheltered them readily enough.

That the home of the Widow Ross had long since been turned into a mid-river gravel quarry was one of the signature accomplishments of Portland’s wizards. Witches had their uses, but they couldn’t be allowed to memorialize the fruits of their power. Otherwise women might get ideas.

Thus Vladimir was buried in a midnight ceremony amid the second growth forest that had reclaimed those portions of the Widow Ross’ fields which had not yet been scooped out and barged away. More like a nine p.m. ceremony, Fauntleroy Chen realized as he checked the rising of the moon, but it was the thought that counted. Fell deeds done in darkness or something like that.

The simple truth was that no one wanted to be out here at sidereal midnight. With the sun on the far side of the world and memories stirring from the very stones and soil, that was a time of power when old ghosts walked and forces darker, stranger and more impenetrable than the wizards themselves could all too easily be called to attention by the murmurings of ritual.

To his surprise, Fauntleroy found himself giving what passed for a eulogy.

“…not a good man, but most of us aren’t.”

That produced the expected round of sniggers.

Gamely, the wizard carried on. “He taught me much.”
Sort of.
“He kept the voice and memory of us all. Vladimir was king of the kingless, leader of the leaderless, first among a group with no equals at all.”

Someone was noisily sick in a tangled bank of scrub. Which seemed a fitting memorial.

He gathered his thoughts to put to words what the ending of such a life meant. “Power is as much a curse as a blessing. Our ways are sometimes too subtle even for ourselves. Vladimir knew what was true, and kept us focused on that truth. May his bones rest quietly and his spirit journey onward in whatever peace is given to our kind in death.”

Somehow after that night, Fauntleroy Chen had inherited Vladimir-with-no-last-name’s largely imaginary mantle of authority, such as it was among Portland’s wizards. He’d also begun his journey into cancer. Another price for power, in the end.

He’d spent much time since wondering who would be moved to deliver his eulogy, and what the fat-bellied moon might hear them say.

***

Morning Steams Like Souls on Ice

The witch Isadora Weigl squatted on her heels in front of him. There had been no point in running away. The wizard knew she’d homed in on his morphic signature once they’d locked eyes. He would have just tired himself out while also annoying her, to no particular benefit.

Sweat lightly slicks the hollow of her back. Her shoulders and hair are yet damp from the bath. Her groin is damp for other reasons he tries to ignore. The day’s humidity tells a more subtle version of the same story. He ignores that as well.

She was beautiful, he noted. Beautiful in the way of most witches. Which is to say, not necessarily pretty. Rather, the same power that brought wizards to a grubby desuetude lent their distaff correspondents a sheen of spell-wrought glamour. Thick waisted and short legged, bright eyed, with close cropped hair dyed maroon and purple, the witch wore those layers of unremarkable black that passed for urban camouflage on the streets of the Pacific Northwest. Styled and dressed differently, she could have passed as a local anywhere from Sofia to Yerevan to Tehran.

“What do you want?” Isadora Weigl finally asked him. Her voice was surprisingly gentle. “You’ve been tracking me for days.”

For the same reason he hadn’t run away, Fauntleroy Chen didn’t put up a fight now, either. “You’re working on something.” He was very conscious of how raw his voice sounded, how short his tone. Truly he was not trying to pick a fight. “Weaving a pattern around the city. Portland doesn’t need the imbalance.”

“You’re this city’s wizard king.” It was not a question.

He nodded. His liver hurt like crazy, and he had to pee dreadfully. Messages from the fluids in his body were more informative than any CT scan or oncologist’s advice, and Fauntleroy Chen was uniquely qualified to read them. Not for him the endless, stabbing blood tests and the quiet click of infusion pumps measuring out his remaining ration of life.

He
knew
without ever being told.

“I’m not going to hurt anyone,” she added after a thoughtful moment.

The wizard could sense that those words weren’t even a lie. At least, not in her view of the world.

“Women’s power…” He stopped, searching for the phrases that Vladimir might have used to explain matters. “Things will change. People will be hurt, even if they don’t know it.”
Wizards will lose power and security
, he thought. That last was an argument both obvious and uncompelling to a witch.

She shrugged. “Things always change. The only certainty is that stasis cannot be maintained. It’s time for something new.” After a moment, she added with a wry smile, “Admittedly it’s always time for something new. The question is, what now?”

“What did you have in mind?”
What is your Great Work?

“Light and air,” Isadora Weigl said simply. “Light and air, to lift a veil of disease and filth and turmoil from the face of the city.”

“You’re going to clean the streets?”

The look she gave him was something between despisal and pity. “Don’t be a fool. It’s not about grimy gutters. Not down at the heart of things. A sister long passed away laid the foundations of this place. I come back to lift us all to new heights in her honor. A future, bright and long. For
everyone
.”

Not me
, Fauntleroy Chen thought as his liver stabbed him in the heart. “Without toil and struggle, we remain undefined.”

Entropy ultimately flowed only one way. Wizards always stood knee-deep in the tension of that return to chaos. Isadora Weigl was going to make things cleaner and prettier, which left fewer spaces for him and his kind.

“Death is the final entropy of self,” she answered obliquely.

“At least death frees us from pain.” He sat up straighter. “Besides, that is our way.”

“What is your way?” Now the witch gently mocked him, reflecting his own earlier obtuseness. “Death? Pain? Or just low, raw messiness?”

He deserved that. “All of them, I suppose. We wizards live and die as we know how.”
At least this one does.

Trembling slightly, her hand reached toward him. “It doesn’t have to be so, mister king of the wizards. You’d be surprised at how encompassing my Great Work can be.”

“I know your name,” Fauntleroy Chen whispered. “But I will not give you mine.”

Behind her, homeless men filled the northwest Portland street. They pushed their overladen bicycles and high-piled shopping carts, led their dogs. Wizards, mostly. He knew who these people were. “Is it time for my funeral already?”

“She found us first,” said Older Fred. Two-dozen grizzled, bearded heads nodded as if tugged by the same string. “You weren’t going to the doctor none,” he added.

“No I have not,” said Fauntleroy Chen. “Nor will I.”

“Power doesn’t need to pay this price,” the witch told him with a smile.

He felt balanced in the moment, like a thrown ball briefly at the illusion of rest as it reached the top of its arc. Rain wandering idly down from on high whispered his name. The river close by muttered in its voice of power, ceaselessly complaining to the embankments. The tumors in his liver tugged at the edges of his attention. He wondered why the wizards cared now, when they’d let Vladimir go, and all the kings before him.

Older Fred coughed. “Times change,” he mumbled, fingers twisting in his wiry beard.

It was almost what Isadora Weigl had said to him earlier. Fauntleroy Chen wondered if she had taken them all under her spell one by one before finally cornering him. Or perhaps he had that backwards. Who could say?

Then she touched him, stroking the right side of his abdomen through the swaddling layers of coats and cloth. The king of the kingless understood why witches always walked crowned in light and air.

He laughed as the pain soared free into the sky.

Introduction to “
Speechless in Seattle”

Lisa Silverthorne hit the Hex in The City target perfectly with her cleverly titled, “Speechless in Seattle.” I really want the Seattle Library of the Hidden Arts to exist, even more than I want Hogwarts to exist, and I think she should develop the story into a series. It truly is an intimate look at what happens when someone makes a mistake and has to reveal their insecurities to a stranger. She might be the first Library Witch.

Lisa’s lifelong passion is writing. She has published over fifty short stories in the fantasy, science fiction, and horror genres. She is fascinated by the magic of ordinary things and frightened by the darkness in all of us. Somewhere between those extremes is our humanity, the place where her explorations in fiction begin. Lisa writes:

“Seattle is one of the most magical places I know. It resonates with such charm and beauty and an energy I can’t explain, but I feel whenever I’m there. Libraries are also magical places.

“Once I’d conjured my magical library, Brant taught me about Seattle’s great Houses of magic—and persistence. Zip taught me the importance of familiars in her neurotic, tortoiseshell cat way. Willa taught me about attraction and how the library held all the magic (and the wizards) together. I fell in love with the Seattle Library of the Hidden Arts and I hope you will, too.”

Speechless in Seattle

Lisa Silverthorne

Thunder rumbled through the evening sky as storm clouds rolled off Elliot Bay where Brant Trenerry stood in Kerry Park, staff raised, ready to change the world.

The air prickled with energy, alive with the swirling of ancient forces as he summoned the power of all the wizards who’d carried this staff before him. Already he smelled the acrid, almost electric tang of magic from the eye of the storm, a crisp, pungent odor that tingled his nose like cracked pepper.

He gripped the family staff tighter and whispered a spell he’d spent months crafting. It hissed from his lips, quickly joined by ancestral voices that echoed from the family grimoire he carried in the messenger bag underneath his cloak. He just needed to get the words right.