Wizards (6 page)

The people in the ballroom were not making any attempt to dance. They were staring towards the far end of the room where I knew there was a stage. That was where the royal family and nobility would be sitting on their thrones and fancy chairs.

I knew the layout of the ballroom from my previous visit. This was a fortunate thing, because with all the people standing on the dance floor I couldn't see anything beyond them.

I took off my duffle coat and threw it behind one of the large doors. I wasn't exactly dressed for a formal occasion in my faded jeans and grey pullover, but my clothes would have to do. I walked into the room and stepped into the crowd.

The people had packed tight at this end of the room, and I discovered there was a considerable amount of open space in front of the stage. As I walked through the crowd, I touched people's backs lightly and wished their clothing to be lucky. It might not be much in the way of magical protection, but it might well save some of them if it came to a fight.

I zigzagged through the hall touching as many people as I could. It took some time before I found myself at the front of the crowd. I stopped to take in what was going on.

The Royal Ballroom was impressive. Its domed ceiling was thirty feet or more above us and the walls and ceiling were covered in bright murals. Gold leaf covered the ornate pillars between the paintings with embossed royal purple wallpaper above and below them. The ceiling of the room showed the gods cavorting in their celestial palaces.

Frankly, some of the scenes on the ceiling would have been regarded as pornography back home in Wales. In Salice, they were regarded as high art and educational in nature. I can't say they showed me anything I hadn't already seen on the internet, but I must admit the depictions of the male gods did give me a bit of an inferiority complex. I mean, those guys would have needed very roomy trousers.

The stage was crowded with men in colorful clothes and women in lacy ballroom dresses that reminded me a lot of wedding dresses. Almost all of them were dressed in white, except for Esmeralda who was dressed in a fetching dark blue. Her dress designer had managed to enhance and lift her breasts in a most delightful way.

There were two thrones in the center of the stage. A few feet in front of one the thrones stood a statue of a man on his knees. It took me a few seconds to recognize the statue as the king. He looked so different in polished white marble from his usual self.

A group of courtiers to the left of the thrones was comforting Esmeralda's mother, Queen Janti. One of the thrones was empty while the other was occupied by a man in his mid-twenties. He was a little difficult to focus on as he wore clothes coated in gold and a bright light shone down on him from above. It was almost as if he stood in a solid cylinder of light. The light had no obvious source, but it made his clothes shine.

This must be the wizard. He lolled on the king's throne, seemingly not taking the slightest interest in what was going on around him.

Princess Esmeralda noticed me. A thoughtful look came over her face and she looked quickly away. It took me a moment to realize she was trying to avoid the wizard noticing her interest in me. She walked along the stage and began a whispered conversation with a man wearing an enormous handlebar moustache. Whatever she said to him resulted in him turning away from the stage. Esmeralda moved back across the stage, inching ever closer to where I stood.

I didn't see the arrow that shot towards the wizard, though I did hear it as it whipped through the air. What I did see was it stop abruptly when it reached the cylinder of light, hanging in the air a mere inch into the light. You could see from its position it had been aimed at the wizard's heart.

The wizard stood up and put his eye close to the arrow tip and stared along its length. On the other side of the ballroom, people began to move away from a man clasping a crossbow and looking worried. I didn't blame him in the slightest.

I wondered if I had touched this man and if I had, whether it would do him any good. The wizard laughed and jumped from the stage, the arrow flying backwards in the air keeping pace with him.

As soon as the wizard left the stage, Esmeralda ran towards me, pausing only to run a hand over her father's stone hair. She sat on the stage and slid down from it without making a sound.

The wizard, meanwhile, was walking slowly towards the man with the crossbow, the arrow moving in front of him. The archer dropped his crossbow, which clattered loudly on the wooden floor. You could have heard a pin drop, it had become so quiet, and everybody flinched at the noise, including me.

Esmeralda took my right hand and slipped a large ring onto my index finger. The ring was made of solid gold and had a large red stone embedded in it.

"It's a wizard's ring," she whispered in my ear. "It can shoot fire at anyone you aim it at."

I gave the princess a quick hug and stepped towards the wizard. I felt much more confident with a ring on my finger and I wanted to stop the wizard from killing the archer.

"Excuse me!" I said, much more loudly than I intended. Every eye in the room except the wizard turned to focus on me. He continued to stare at the archer. The archer's arrow was poised in the air only inches from his heart. It had reversed itself while I had been busy with Esmeralda, and its point was poised to plunge into the man.

"I believe your fight is with me."

The wizard turned slowly and contemptuously towards me.

"And who exactly are you?"

"I'm the man who overthrew the Master."

"The boy wizard?" he asked in disbelief.

"The Bad Luck Wizard," I said. "I think it's time you experienced some of it."

The wizard glared at me and snapped his fingers. I recoiled, my hands raised defensively, and I heard a solid
thunking
sound. Behind the wizard, the unfortunate archer stared at the arrow, which now stuck into him, and fell to the ground.

"That wasn't very nice," I said, somewhat inanely. How do the superheroes in comic books manage to come up with all those good lines?

"What are you going to do about it, boy wizard? Good luck stone me to death?"

"If you don't undo the spell on the king and leave right now I shall burn you to death with this magic ring," I said. I made a fist with my right hand and pointed it straight at him.

I had anticipated a number of possible reactions, ranging from fear to contempt, but I must admit that raucous laughter hadn't been anywhere on my list. Maybe I can get him to laugh himself to death, I pondered as he came close to doubling up in amusement.

After a few more moments of laughter, he managed to regain some control and straightened up to face me again.

"Do your worst then, boy. I challenge you."

"I'm not bluffing," I warned.

"There's no such thing as a fire shooting magic ring," he said with a smirk on his face.

If there is one thing I can't stand, its people telling me I'm wrong. I felt anger building in me like a tsunami. I could almost see the tide vanishing beneath my feet as my rage backed up far behind me, ready to blow. The supercilious smirk on his face added to it.

"Do it, Jake," Esmeralda urged from behind me. "Don't let him treat you like a fool."

That did it. I was expecting his cylinder of light to protect him anyway and the rage I felt was making my vision red.

A stream of pure red fire shot from the stone on the ring and splattered across the cylinder of light. The crowd had wisely moved out of the immediate vicinity as soon as I mentioned the ring’s flame-throwing potential, thus avoiding the gobs of fire dripping from the cylinder onto the floor.

I continued aiming at the wizard's chest but risked a glance at his face. I expected to see contempt, but what I actually saw was fear. His shield was weakening and though it was still protecting him, smoke began rising from his clothing and then from his hair. He gave out a pained scream and vanished.

The cylinder of light vanished with the wizard and my beam of fire shot across the rest of the room to hit one of the paintings on the far wall. I cut the beam off and was amused to see residual flames rising from the breasts of the woman in the painting. She had been fairly hot stuff before, but now she was really cooking.

A quick thinking courtier used his cloak to douse the flames before they took hold.

"You must restore my father," Esmeralda said in the commanding voice she was so good at.

"I don't have a clue how to do it," I confessed.

"Take his hand and wish him restored. That's how wizards do it," she told me urgently.

I shrugged and did as I was told. It didn't work at first.

"Try harder," Esmeralda ordered impatiently.

I felt sweat build on my brow as I touched her father's stone hand and wished him human again. I was about to give up in despair when I felt his hand warm in mine. I cannot explain what I did then, but it wasn't the same as wishing. It was more like rebuilding the man and his clothing until they were whole.

"Very kind of you, my boy," King Petra said mildly, "But if we keep on holding hands like this, people will begin to talk."

Esmeralda and her mother ran over to the king and hugged him. I stood back and smiled at their happiness.

There was a tap on my shoulder and I turned to stare into the face of the archer. He was holding a wad of cloth over his heart, which was soaked with blood.

"My name is Robeth Noad," he told me, "And I owe you my life. My shirt stopped the arrow from penetrating more than a thumb's width and I remembered you touched me in the crowd."

"You were the bravest of us all and I owe you," I replied with feeling. "Nothing could be braver than trying to kill a wizard with a crossbow. You gave Esmeralda the chance to give me the magic ring."

I put my hand out to his chest and wished him healed. Robeth smiled at me and stepped back to disappear into the crowd. I felt another tap on my shoulder.

"I say old chap," a man said from behind me. I turned around to find the man with the handlebar moustache talking to me. "If you've finished with that ring could I have it back? It's a present from the wife, don't you know."

"Your wife gave you a magic ring?"

"Don't know about that, old boy. Esmeralda told me you needed a focus. That ring is just a trinket."

I took the ring from my finger and handed it over to the man in silence. He tapped his forehead in a salute and walked away.

"Princess Esmeralda," I said loudly. Esmeralda turned from her father and looked over at me innocently. "There's no such thing as a magic ring that shoots fire and you can't wish a statue back into a man," I pointed out rather angrily.

"Well, all I can say is it's lucky you didn't find that out until now," she replied primly.

I have to admit, I'd no answer to that at all.

Chapter Six
: Wizard's Complications

J
enny felt as if her whole world had fallen in on her. She arrived home from her trip to meet Fluffy and told her parents that she had a fight with Jake. She further told them he was no longer her boyfriend and to hang up if he dared to call on the home phone. Then she ran upstairs crying.

When she got to her room she put her mobile down on the bed and waited for Jake to call and apologize. Jenny fell into a fitful sleep waiting for that call. When she checked her phone in the morning, there were zero messages or missed calls.

"Well, if that's how he feels, then it's over," she told her bedroom, feeling nothing but despair, but she kept her mobile close to her for the rest of the day.

Many of her friends called once it was clear she had dumped Jake. The girls rang to congratulate her for getting rid of such a scruffy and unsuitable man. One or two suggested that now it was all over, Jenny should tell them about how good he was in bed, as that must be the only reason she put up with him.

A fair number of her male friends rang up offering to take her out on dates to expensive restaurants and one of them suggested visiting the opera in London. All this should have made her feel better about losing Jake, but it didn't. What she wanted most was to talk to him again.

That night the headline in the Evening Chronicle was all about the near death experience of the Chronicle's star reporter Peter Williams. The article, written by Peter Williams, was as startling as it was inaccurate.

'I was trailing the hunting party looking for the Beast of the Hills when a freak gust of wind blew me off the edge of Fingals Ridge to my certain death. As I plunged to my doom I saw a small bush clinging to the cliff face and grabbed hold of it with all my might. This stopped my fall but left me dangling two hundred feet up on a sheer stone surface.

The rest of the hunting party failed to notice my sudden disappearance and I knew I would have to effect my own rescue. Using my limited experience as a rock climber, coupled with near desperation, I managed to climb down to the bottom of the ridge, suffering only a few minor cuts and bruises on the way.

As I made my way to the top of a small hill in the hope of attracting the attention my fellow hunters, I was struck by the notion of just how remote these Welsh valleys are. Who knows what we might find in them if we were only to search them. There's already firm evidence of a panther-like beast stalking the sheep of our Welsh hill farmers. Who knows, perhaps even mythical beasts from legends might still be hiding in the hills.