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What the hell? “Yeah, sure, go ahead.” Rudy sighed. “I’m only here myself because my car died on me – I mean, it’s not really my car – and I have to check out the pump and see if I can get it running again.” Seeing Ingold’s puzzled frown, he remembered the guy was supposed to be from another universe where, since they used swords – and he’d still like to know where the old man had picked that one up – the internal combustion engine hadn’t been invented. “You do know what a car is?”
“I’m familiar with the concept. We don’t have them in my world, of course.”
“Of course.”
Ingold led the way calmly up the steps and into the house. He proceeded straight on down the hall to the bedroom, where he placed the child on the stained, lumpy mattress of the cot. The baby immediately began working himself free of his blankets, with the apparently fixed intention of rolling off and braining himself on the cement floor.
“But who are you?” Rudy persisted, leaning in the doorway.
“I told you, my name is Ingold. Here, enough of that …” He reached down and stopped Prince Tir from worming himself over the edge. Then he glanced back over his shoulder. “You haven’t told me your name,” he added.
“Uh – Rudy Solis. Where’d you get the kid?”
“I’m rescuing him from enemies,” Ingold stated matter-of-factly.
Wonderful, Rudy thought. First the fuel pump and now this.
Untangled, the kid was revealed to be a crawler of six months or so, with a pink rosebud of a face, fuzzy black hair, and eyes that were the deep unearthly blue of the heart of a morning glory. Ingold set the kid back in the middle of the bed, where he promptly started for the edge again. The old man removed his dark, smoke-smelling mantle and spread it out like a groundcloth on the floor. Under it he wore a white wool robe, much patched and stained, a worn leather belt, and a low-slung sword belt that supported the sword and a short dagger in beat-up scabbards. The whole setup looked authentic as hell.
Ingold picked up the child again and put him down on the mantle on the floor. “There,” he said. “Now will you stay where you are put and fall asleep like a sensible person?”
Prince Altir Endorion made a definite but unintelligible reply.
“Good,” Ingold said, and turned toward the door.
“Whose kid is he?” Rudy asked, folding his arms and watching the old man and the child.
For the first time that look of self-command broke, and grief, or the concealment of grief, tightened into the muscles of the old man’s face. His voice remained perfectly steady. “He is the child of a friend of mine,” he replied quietly, “who is now dead.” There was a moment’s silence, the old man concentrating on turning back the cuffs of his faded robe, revealing a road map of old scars striping the hard, heavy muscle of his forearms. When he looked up again, that expression of gentle amusement was back in his eyes. “Not that you believe me, of course.”
“Well, now that you mention it, I don’t.”
“Good.” Ingold smiled, stepping past Rudy into the narrow hall. “It’s better that you shouldn’t. Close the door behind you, would you, please?”
“Because, for one thing,” Rudy said, following him down the hall to the kitchen, “if you’re from a whole other universe, like you say, how come you are speaking English?”
“Oh, I’m not.” Ingold located one of the six-packs of beer on the kitchen counter and extricated a can for himself and one for Rudy. “Speaking English, that is. You only hear it as English in your mind. If you were to come to my world, I could arrange the same spell to cover you.”
Oh, yeah? Rudy thought cynically. And I suppose you figured out how to operate push-tab beer cans the same way?
“Unfortunately, there’s no way I can prove this to you,” Ingold went on placidly, seating himself on the corner of the grimy formica table top, the butter-colored morning sunlight gilding the worn hilt of his sword with an edge like fire. “Different universes obey different physical laws, and yours, despite its present close conjunction with my own, is very far from the heart and source of Power. The laws of physics here are very heavy, very certain and irreversible, and unaffected by … certain other considerations.” He glanced out the window to his right, scanning the fall of the land beyond, judging the angle of the sun, the time of day. The expression of calculation in his eyes, adding up pieces of information that had nothing to do with Rudy or with maintaining a role, troubled Rudy with a disquieting sense that the old man was too calm about it, too matter-of-fact. He’d met masqueraders before; living in Southern California, you could hardly help it. And, young or old, all those would-be Brothers of Atlantis had the same air of being in costume, no matter how cool they were about it. They all knew you were noticing them.
This old croaker didn’t seem to be thinking about Rudy at all, except as a man to be dealt with in the course of something else.
Rudy found himself thinking, He’s either what he says he is, or so far out in left field he’s never coming back.
And his indignant outrage at being beguiled into admitting two possibilities at all was almost immediately superimposed on the uneasy memory of that gap of light and the colors he’d thought he’d seen beyond.
Watch it, kiddo, he told himself. The old guy’s not hitting on all his cylinders. If you’re not careful, he’ll have you doing it next. So he asked, “But you are a wizard in your own world?” Because the outfit couldn’t be for anything else.
Ingold hesitated, his attention returning to Rudy; then he nodded. “Yes,” he said slowly.
Rudy leaned back against the counter and took a pull at his beer. “You pretty good?”
Ingold shrugged and seemed to relax, as if reassured by the disbelief in Rudy’s tone. “I’m said to be.”
“But you can’t do any magic here.” A foregone conclusion – the ersatz Merlins of the world did not often operate outside a friendly environment.
But the ersatz Merlins of the world didn’t usually smile, then hide the smile, at the suggestion of fraud. “No. That isn’t possible.”
Rudy simply couldn’t figure the guy. But something in that serene self-assurance prompted him to ask, “Yeah, but how can you be a wizard without magic?” He finished his beer, crumpled the aluminum with one hand, and tossed it into the corner of the bare room.
“Oh, wizardry has really very little to do with magic.”
Taken off-balance, Rudy paused, the old man’s voice and words touching some feeling in his soul that echoed, like the distant note of a long-forgotten guitar. “Yeah, but—” he began, and stopped again. “What is wizardry?” he asked quietly. “What is magic?”
“What isn’t?”
There was silence for the space of about two long-drawn breaths, Rudy fighting the sudden, illogical, and overwhelming notion that that was the reply of a man who understood magic. Then he shook his head, as if to clear it of the webs of the old man’s crazy fantasies. “I don’t understand you.”
Ingold’s voice was soft. “I think you do.”
He really did step out of that light.
In another minute you’ll be as crazy as he is.
Confusion made Rudy’s voice rough. “All I understand is that you’re crazier than a loon …”
“Am I really?” The white eyebrows lifted in mock offense. “And just how do you define crazy?”
“Crazy is somebody who doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s just in his imagination.”
“Ah,” Ingold said, all things made clear. “You mean if I disbelieved something that I saw with my own eyes, just because I imagined it to be impossible, I would be crazy?”
“I did not see it either!” Rudy yelled.
“You know you did,” the wizard said reasonably. “Come now, Rudy, you believe in thousands of things you’ve never seen with your own eyes.”
“I do not!”
“You believe in the ruler of your country.”
“Well, I’ve seen him! I’ve seen him on television.”
“And have you not also seen people materializing out of showers of silver light on this television?” Ingold asked.
“Dammit, don’t argue that way! You know as well as I do …”
“But I don’t, Rudy. If you choose deliberately to disregard the evidence of your own senses, it’s your problem, not mine. I am what I am …”
“You are not!”
Slowly, in an absent-minded imitation of Rudy’s can-squashing ritual, Ingold crushed his empty beer can into a wad slightly smaller than his own fist. “Really, you’re one of the most prejudiced young men I’ve ever met,” he declared. “For an artist you have singularly little scope.”
Rudy drew in his breath to reply to that one, then let it out again. “How did you know I’m an artist?”
Amused blue eyes challenged him. “A wild guess.” In his heart Rudy knew it had been nothing of the kind. “You are, aren’t you?”
“Uh – well, I paint airbrush pictures on the sides of custom vans, and pinstripe motorcycle fuel tanks, that kind of stuff.” Seeing Ingold’s puzzled frown, he conceded, “Yeah, I guess you could call it art.”
There was another silence, the old man looking down at his scarred hands in the sunlight on the table top, the isolated cabin utterly silent but for the faint creaking insect noises in the long grasses outside. Then he looked up and smiled. “And is it beneath your dignity to have friends with, I think you call it, nonstandard reality?”
Rudy thought about some of the people who hung around Wild David’s bike shop. Nonstandard was one way of putting it. He laughed. “Hell, if I felt that way I’d have maybe about two friends. Okay, you win.”
The old man looked startled and just a little worried. “You mean you believe me?”
“No – but it doesn’t bother me if it doesn’t bother you.”
If he’s schizo, Rudy found himself thinking later in the morning, he’s got it all down. Wizardry, the mythical Realm of Darwath, the Hidden City of Quo on the Western Ocean where the garnered learning of a hundred generations of mages was stored in the dark labyrinths of Forn’s Tower – Ingold had it all, seemed to know it as intimately as Rudy knew his own world of bars and bikes and body shops, of smog and steel. Through the long, warm morning, Rudy messed with the Chevy’s engine, Ingold lending a hand occasionally when one was needed and staying out of the way when it wasn’t, and their talk drifted over magic, the Void, engines, and painting. Ingold never slipped up.
Not only was he totally familiar with his own fantasy world, but Rudy noticed he had the lapses of knowledge that a man imperfectly acquainted with this world would have. He seemed totally fascinated with Rudy’s world, with the wonders of radio and television, the complexities of the welfare system, and the mysteries of the internal combustion engine. He had the insatiable curiosity that, he had said, was the hallmark of wizards: the lust for knowledge, almost any kind of knowledge, that superseded even the most elementary considerations of physical comfort or safety.
If it wasn’t for the kid, Rudy thought, glancing from the tangled shadows of the car toward the wizard, who was seated in the long grass, thoughtfully dissecting and examining a seed pod, I wouldn’t care. Hell, the guy could claim to be Napoleon and it’d be no business of mine. But he’s got no business with a kid that young, wandering around a million miles from noplace.
And his hangover hallucination of their stepping out of the burning air returned to him, the absolute reality of the vision, far clearer than anything muscatel or anything else had ever done for him. Something about it troubled him, something he could not yet define.
Then the rusted nut he was working on gave way, and other matters claimed his attention. Ten minutes later he crawled out from under the car, grease-smudged, hot, and disgusted. Ingold set aside the seed pod and raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
Rudy flung the wrench he was holding violently into the dirt. “Goddam fuel pump,” he sighed, and dropped cross-legged to the ground at the wizard’s side.
“It is the pump, then, and not the line?” Rudy had briefed him on the problem.
“Yeah.” He cursed, and elaborated on the car, its owner, and things in general. He finished with, “So I guess the only thing to do is walk to the highway and hitch.”
“Well,” Ingold said comfortably, “my contact in this world should be here very shortly. You could always get a ride back to civilization with her.”
Rudy paused in wiping his oily hands on a rag he’d fished out of the back seat. “Your what?”
“My contact in this world.” Seeing Rudy’s surprise, Ingold explained. “I shall be stranded the night in your world and, though on occasion I’ve starved, I see no reason to do it if it can be avoided.”
“So you’re just passing through, is that it?” Rudy wondered if there was, in fact, such a contact, or if this was yet one more strange figment of the old man’s peculiar imagination.
“In a manner of speaking,” Ingold said slowly.
“But if you’re a wizard in your own world, how come you’d starve?” Rudy asked, more out of lazy curiosity than anything else. “How come you can’t just make food appear if you’re hungry?”
“Because it doesn’t work that way,” Ingold said simply. “Creating the illusion of food is relatively simple. To make a piece of grass like this one convincingly resemble bread requires only that in taste, texture, and appearance, I convince you that you are eating bread. But if you ate it, it would provide you no more nourishment than the grass, and on a steady diet of such things you would quickly starve. But literally to transform the inner nature of the grass would be to alter reality itself, to tamper with the fabric of the entire universe.”
“Lot of trouble to go through for a crummy piece of bread.”
“Well, more than that, it’s potentially dangerous. Any tampering, no matter how small, with the fabric of the universe is perilous. That is why shape-changing is seldom done. Most high-ranking wizards understand the principle behind turning oneself into a beast – with the mind and heart of a beast – but very, very few would dare to put it into practice. An archmage might do it, in peril of his life. But …” He raised his head suddenly, and Rudy caught the far-off chugging of an engine in the still, pale air of afternoon.
“My friend,” Ingold explained. He got up, brushing dry grass and twigs off his robe. Rudy scrambled likewise to his feet as a dusty red Volkswagen beetle crept into view around the shoulder of the hill.
“This I gotta see.”
The bug’s tires surrounded it in a light cloud of dust as it made its slow approach, bumping cautiously over every rut and pothole of the treacherous road. It came to a stop a few yards away, the door opened, and a girl got out.
She took one look at Rudy and stopped, her eyes filled with suspicion and distrust. Then Ingold stepped down the bank toward her, both hands held out in welcome. “Gil,” he said. “This is Rudy Solis. He thinks I’m crazy. Rudy – Gil Patterson. My contact in this world.”
They regarded each other in silent animosity,
Gil would almost have preferred the Highway Patrol. This character had “biker” written on him in letters a foot tall: greasy jeans, grubby white T-shirt, scarred boots. Dark hair faintly tinged with red fell loosely on either side of a long widow’s peak almost to his shoulders; cocky dark-blue eyes under sharply backslanted black brows gave her an arrogant once-over and dismissed her. She noted the bump of an old break on his nose. RUDY was tattooed on a banner across a flaming torch on his left wrist. A real prize.
Kind of tall and scrawny, but not bad-looking, Rudy decided, checking her out. Bitchy, though, I bet. A real spook. Beyond that he noted the worn jeans, blue checkered shirt, lack of make-up, unworked hands and bitten nails, and cool, pale, forbidding eyes. Where’d Ingold dig her up?
Ingold went on, “Rudy’s been stranded here with car trouble. Could you take him back with you as far as he needs to go when you leave, Gil, as a favor to me?”
Her eyes went warily from Ingold to Rudy, then back to the wizard’s face. Ingold rested a hand briefly on her shoulder and said quietly, “It’s all right. He doesn’t have to believe me, Gil.”
She sighed and forced herself to relax. “All right,” she agreed.
Rudy had watched all this with curiosity bordering on annoyance. “Well, don’t do me any favors.”
Those pale gray eyes grew colder. But Ingold’s hand tightened almost imperceptibly on Gil’s bony shoulder, and she said, in a more natural voice, “No, it’s all right.”
Rudy, in turn, relaxed and meant it when he said, “Thank you. Uh – can I give you a hand with that?” for Gil had turned back to the car and was fetching out assorted provisions, including canned beef stew and diapers, from the back seat. He dropped back a pace to walk beside her as they followed Ingold up to the cabin, however, and as soon as the old man was out of earshot Rudy asked softly, “Who is he?”
She regarded him with those pale schoolmarm eyes – old-maid eyes in the face of a girl his own age. “What did he tell you?”
“That he was some kind of a wizard from another universe.”
When Gil was embarrassed, she became brusque. “That’s his story.”
Rudy refused to be put off. “Where’d you meet him?”
Gil sighed. “It’s a long story,” she said, falling back on Ingold’s usual explanation. “And it doesn’t matter, not really.”
“It matters to me,” Rudy said, and glanced up ahead of them to where Ingold was just vanishing into the shadows of the little house. “You see, I like the old guy, I really do, even if he isn’t playing with a full deck. I’m just worried some kind of harm will come to the kid.”
They stopped at the foot of the rickety steps, and Gil looked carefully for the first time at the young man’s face. It was sun-bronzed and sensual, but not a crass face, nor a stupid one. “Do you think he’d let any harm come to Tir?”
Rudy remembered the old man and the child together, Ingold’s gentle competence and the protectiveness in his voice when he spoke to the baby. “No,” he said slowly. “No – but what are they doing out here? And what’s gonna happen when he goes wandering back to civilization like that?”
There was genuine concern in his voice, which Gil found rather touching. Besides, she thought, if I hadn’t had the dreams, I’d probably think the same.
She shifted her burden from one hand to the other. “It will be okay,” she assured him quietly.
“You know what’s going on?”
She nodded.
Rudy looked down at her doubtfully, not quite satisfied and sensing something amiss. Still, in one real sense this girl was Ingold’s contact with reality, which in spite of his obvious shrewdness and charm the old man sorely needed. And yet – and yet – troubled visions of the old man stumbling out of a blazing aura of silver light returned to him as he started up the steps, Gil climbing at his heels. He swung around on her abruptly, to ask, “Do you believe him?”
But before Gil could answer, the cabin door opened again, and Ingold re-emerged onto the narrow porch, a flushed, sleepy infant in his arms. “This is Prince Altir Endorion,” he introduced.
Gil and Rudy came up the last few steps to join him, the question left unanswered. On the whole, Gil disliked children, but, like most hard-hearted women, she had a soft spot for the very young and helpless. She touched the round pink cheek with gingerly reverence, as if afraid the child would shatter on contact. “He’s very beautiful,” she whispered.
“And very wet,” Ingold replied, and led the way back into the house.
It was Rudy who ended up doing the changing as the only one with experience in the task, while Gil made a lunch of beef stew and coffee on the kerosene stove, and Ingold investigated the light switches to see how electricity worked. Rudy noticed that, among other things, Gil had brought an extra can of kerosene; though, if he recalled, the little stove had been out of sight beneath a counter when he’d first come in, and there had been no signs that the house had been entered in years.
How had Ingold known?
Gil came over to him and set a styrofoam cup of steaming black liquid on the floor at his side. She watched Rudy playing tickle-me with Tir for some moments, smiling, then said, “You know, you’re probably the first man I’ve ever seen who’d volunteer for diaper duty.”
“Hell,” Rudy told her, grinning. “With six younger brothers and sisters, you get used to it.”
“I suppose so.” She tested one of the wobbly chairs, then sat in it, her arm resting over the back. “I only had the one sister, and she’s just two years younger than I am, so I never knew.”
Rudy glanced up at her. “Is she like you?” he asked.
Gil shook her head ruefully. “No. She’s pretty. She’s twenty-two and already getting her second divorce.”
“Yeah, my next-next younger sister’s like that,” Rudy said thoughtfully, fishing in the pocket of his discarded jacket for his motorcycle keys, which Tir received with blissful fascination and proceeded to try to eat. “She’s seventeen years old, and she’s been around more than I have.” He caught Gil’s raised eyebrow and askance look, and followed her eye to the decoration on the back of his jacket – skulls, roses, black flames, and all. “Aah, that,” he said, a little embarrassed at it. “Picasso had a Blue Period. I had my Pachuco Period.”
“Oh,” Gil said distastefully, not believing him. “Are you in a gang?”
Rudy sat back on his heels, hearing the tone in her voice. “What the hell do you think I do, live in Fontana and go out on raids?”
Since that was exactly what she thought he did, she said, “No. I mean—” She broke off in confusion. “You mean you painted that yourself?”
“Sure,” Rudy said, reaching over to spread out the offending garment with its elaborate symbology and multiple grease stains. “I’d do it better now – I’d have different lettering, and no fire; the fire makes it look kind of trashy. That is, if I did it at all. It’s kind of tacky,” he admitted. “But it’s good advertising.”
“You mean you make your living at that?”
“Oh, yeah. For now, anyway. I work at Wild David Wilde’s Paint and Body Shop in Berdoo, and painting’s a hell of a lot easier than body work, let me tell you.”
Gil contemplated the jacket for a moment longer, her chin resting on her folded hands on the back of the chair. Though morbid, violent, and weird, the design was well-executed and argued a certain ability and sensitivity of style. “Then you’re not a biker yourself?”
“I ride a motorcycle,” Rudy said. “I like bikes, work on them. I’m not in a gang, though. You can run yourself into real trouble that way.” He shrugged. “Those guys are really heavy-duty. I couldn’t do it.”
Ingold came back in, having traced the power cables to their sources and explored the land around the little house as if seeking something in the dusty silence of the groves. Gil dished up canned beef stew and bread. As they ate, Rudy listened to the girl and the wizard talk and wondered again how much this thin, spooky-looking woman believed the old man, and how much of her conversation was tactful humoring of an old, well loved, and totally crazy friend.
It was impossible to tell. That she was fond of him was obvious; her guarded stiffness relaxed, and with liveliness her face was almost pretty. But it was Ingold who dominated and led, she who followed, and there were times when Rudy wondered if she was as crazy as the old man.
“I never understood that about the memories,” Gil was saying, blowing on her coffee to cool it. “You and Eldor talked about it, but I don’t understand.”
“No one really understands it,” Ingold said. “It’s a rare phenomenon, far rarer than wizardry. To my knowledge, in all the history of the Realm it has appeared in only three noble houses and two peasant ones. We don’t know what it is or why it works, why a son will suddenly recall events that happened to his grandfather, when the grandfather never exhibited such a talent in his life, why it seems to descend only in the male line, why it skips one generation, or two, or five, why some sons will remember certain events and be ignorant of others that their brothers recall with exacting clarity.”