***
Maestro was waiting for them in the library. It was difficult to tell that he was there at all, but he made a slight movement and the gray cloak he was wearing shifted against the background of books, revealing him. It was impossible to see what he looked like because his hood was pulled up over his head. With graceful fluidity, his fingers moved over the head of the bust on the mantle he was standing beside, seeing the face with his fingers.
They could tell Ofelia was excited because the distance that separated the two evaporated as she glided across the floor. Colin thought that she was going to throw herself at Maestro, but at the last second she came to an abrupt stop, placed her hands together in front of her and bowed reverently to the tall figure.
Maestro returned the bow.
Ofelia whispered something in a low sonorous language that they couldn’t understand.
The black emptiness within the cowl turned to regard them. A thin hand flicked and three chairs at the long study table moved out by themselves.
“Please, sit. Let us not waste time. Time is too precious. Let us begin,” said Maestro, his voice, rich and pleasant. It had the calming effect of a gentle zephyr blowing on a warm summer night.
They sat down.
Maestro nodded at Ofelia, who bowed again and left.
The chairs slid in close to the table, holding them captive. Spike had his back to Maestro so wasn’t able to keep him in view all the time. Colin, across the table from Spike, watched their tutor fixedly. He had a driving urge to see within the dark interior of the hood, to explore the features there. People didn’t hide things unless they had a very good reason.
“Don’t worry; at any time during our instruction, you can leave. I will hold no one against his or her will. But there is something you should know, and that is,” he paused so as to let the importance of what he was about to say sink in, “learning can be dangerous.”
“Dangerous? Right,” said Spike chuckling, feeling a bit abandoned when Colin didn’t join in.
“Yes, my furry friend. Don’t look surprised; I see your guardian spirits around you, within you, even as we speak. And while we’re speaking about you and your spirit guardians, I also know that your number isn’t complete,” said Maestro pensively.
“Complete?” asked Colin who instinctively knew that Maestro was right. Their number was off. There should be another person at the table. “Rhea?” He hadn’t meant to say her name out loud.
“Yes, yes, you feel it too, that’s good. The Phoenix should be here. There are others too, but for now, just four. Oh, well, we’ll do our best without her, but be sure she is here the next time we meet. Now, as I was saying, learning can be dangerous. Now, why is that?”
Melissa went to reach for her pad of paper that she kept to communicate with, when Maestro held up his hand to stop her.
“I should have expected nothing short of brilliance from you, Melissa, just as I expected from Ofelia. Yes, you are absolutely right. Learning can be dangerous because once you have it you are responsible for what you do with it.”
Both Colin and Spike’s mouths were hanging open. Maestro had somehow read Melissa’s mind! Could he do the same, was he doing the same, with them?
“No, lads, I cannot read minds, I just anticipate your answers. You see, Ofelia contacted me a few months ago, and has been reporting to me frequently. Your education has been sorely neglected. Now, that being said, shall we begin?
You have special abilities, correct? The ability to see things, to use your senses, to change things? Correct? Well, that’s just the beginning,” he said pausing, “you are the ones who are normal, the rest of the world is just blind.” With this Maestro unexpectedly, thin hands fluttering up to his hood, removed it to expose his head. Colin tried not to gasp, but joined Spike and Melissa as they did.
He had a large shaggy main of hoary hair, obscuring his horribly scarred face, which looked as though it had been raked by enormous claws. Two running lines, white and thick with scar tissue, stood out, beginning at his forehead, running over his eyes and ending at his chin. The air had suddenly gone cold in their lungs. Maestro was blind. In the place where his eyes should have been were two black pits. He quickly replaced the hood.
“As I was saying, knowledge can be dangerous.”
“You’re blind!” exclaimed Spike.
“Quite so,” said Maestro, a lilt of good humor in his voice. “I’m as blind as a bat, which is to say I can see better than anyone here.”
Melissa furiously scribbled something on her note pad. Again, Maestro held up a hand to stop her.
Colin’s mind opened up as pieces of a puzzle began locking into place. Maestro’s way of stopping people with his hands--the way he moved, how he talked--was exactly like Grandfather Thunder, but obviously he wasn’t Grandfather Thunder, so why the similarities?
“First things first.” He floated behind Melissa, placed his hands on Melissa’s head, said something in the same strange language Ofelia had greeted him with and then removed them.
Melissa’s eyes went wide, and her hands began fluttering in front of her, taking on a number of various halting positions and forms. She was saying something, speaking with her hands. Maestro’s hands answered her.
“What did you do?” asked Spike aghast.
“I just taught your sister how to use sign language; it’s a site better than having to write everything down.”
Melissa was grinning gratefully, just like the first time she discovered she could play music.
“Wow, this learning is going to be easier than I thought!” said Spike expectantly.
“Colin, what do you think?” asked Maestro. “Do you think learning is going to be easy?”
Colin, trying to absorb everything, squinted cautiously, and shook his head slowly. “No, we don’t understand what she is saying, so we have to learn the language.”
“But can’t you just put your hands on our head and give it to us, you know, the ability to understand?” blurted out Spike.
Maestro shook his head. “I can’t teach you, or give you anything that you do not already have. Your sister knew how to do this; her years of frustration have prepared her for it. I just had to bring it to the surface. Also, she was ready to use it. This is the part about great responsibility. What if you had the ability to turn anything into food? Right now, what would you do?”
Spike looked at the table excitedly. “I’d turn this table into chocolate!”
“Exactly! You would react without thinking, without knowing that by turning the table into chocolate, the wood would have to go somewhere, and the chocolate would have to come from somewhere. What would you think if a little girl on the other side of the world were just biting into her chocolate birthday cake when it turned into wood?”
“I would think it was funny?” said Spike unsure.
Maestro shook his head. “This is my point. With knowledge comes great responsibility.”
“What creature blinded you?” asked Colin softly, unable to restrain himself from asking the question that had been lurking behind his lips.
“My guardian spirit,” said Maestro letting the profound weight of his words settle on them. “You didn’t think that a guardian spirit, who was supposed to protect you, could hurt you? This is what I mean by learning, by knowledge being dangerous.”
Colin’s mind was reeling. Grandfather Thunder had once told about how guardian spirits didn’t like to be fooled, how they took their job very seriously, how they wouldn’t react violently towards their charge unless….
“…Unless I was tampering with the purpose of the guardian spirit,” finished Maestro, the dark contents of the topic focusing directly on him.
“I wish you would stop doing that, reading our thoughts,” complained Spike squirming in the chair.
They were all caught between wanting to get out of the room and being riveted by fascination to their seats.
&nbs
p; Colin swallowed hard. His stomach churned. He had just been thinking about how he could get Sergeant Peary to do things.
“No, I’m not reading your minds. There are only a certain number of things someone in your position, with your character traits, could say. In short, I’m guessing. We’re talking about this because you are of the age when it might become too tempting; you might try to get your guardian spirit to do something it isn’t empowered to do.”
“But I can see things, change things. Is that dangerous too?” asked Colin.
“Possibly, but not anything like tampering with your guardian spirit. When I made the chairs move out and in, I was just playing with laws that already exist. I wasn’t breaking them. When you make something depart from its purpose, there is a price to pay; that too, is part of the law.”
“This is magic, right?” asked Spike excitedly. “I always wanted to do magic!”
“If I said I was using magic, it would be erroneous. Magic is the twisting away from its purpose, something separate, something counterfeit. When something is used within its law, its purpose, it’s all right. You’re just tapping into the laws that exist. Magic occurs when you break the rules, but rules cannot be broken without consequences,” said Maestro gravely.
“Like guardian spirits?” commented Colin.
“Like guardian spirits. You see you can’t just go about using power, abusing responsibility, without dealing with the consequences. Every action has a reaction. My mistake was being young and not having a teacher. The problem was,” and here he turned to face Spike, “I didn’t think, I just reacted. My guardian spirit took my eyes. The most important lesson is to never use something it was not designed for. Never use magic!”
Melissa’s hands were flying in front of her, her eyes wide and full of emotion. After she was done, Maestro nodded.
“True, very true. You are very perceptive. By taking my sight I was taught how to see. Just as you cannot talk, the sounds, the notes, you can create are exquisite. It is the balance, the harmony of how things truly are. It’s when you get people trying to twist those laws that things go terribly wrong.”
“Like Zuhayer Horwood, and this house,” said Colin feeling the urge to stand up.
“Yes, like Zuhayer, but not the house. The house is a manifestation of the power. He just shaped, or twisted it, with magic--especially the broken tower--into a form he could best understand. Now, there is something I’d like to show you.” Maestro reached into his cloak and pulled out three large, clear marbles. He rolled them down the length of the table, one coming to rest by each of them.
Colin tentatively picked up his and stared into the clear limpid space. He noticed how similar to a drop of water it looked, except that the water in the marble was glass complete with little air bubbles. Almost immediately, he began to fall into the marble, swimming, arms and legs kicking vigorously, unaware of where he was going, but instinctively knowing his destination was important. Colin opened his eyes and discovered he was floating above a peculiar, solitary scene.
Below him, two young boys were playing in the hull of an old abandoned fishing boat. There were seagulls circling in the air, waiting hopefully for the opportune appearance of some morsel of food. A potent, fresh, briny smell punctuated the air. Colin recognized one of the boys, just barely. The two were about the same size. The features of one of the boys were sharper, more defined, giving him the appearance of being arrogant. Even in youth, Zuhayer Bombast Horwood demanded attention, insisted on being in charge, the leader. The other boy was clearly struggling against the other’s will, but not wanting to argue he was playing along. A third boy appeared, walking up to them. He was a couple of years older, and had his long hair tied back in a braid. He just stood in front of them, watching, waiting. He said something and the one boy got up and left Zuhayer. The last image Colin had before things began to swirl again was of Zuhayer glaring hatefully after them, searing their backs with his eyes.
The second set of images was of the same two boys again, but this time they were older, in their adolescent years. Zuhayer and the other boy, who Colin still couldn’t place, were standing on a field of white broken ice, a jigsaw of pieces separated by dangerous lines of blue water. They were running and jumping across the open water from one ice chunk to the next. They were moving towards the open blue expanse of the sea and into extreme danger. The cold wind funneled down on them trying to push them back, but Zuhayer forged forward, taunting the other youth to follow him. Then Zuhayer was gone, slipped down into one of the blue cracks.
Bursting out of the air, making it sizzle with extreme heat, a dragon, its iridescent scales reflecting the sun’s light, almost blinded Colin. The dragon, from flaring nostrils to whip-like tail, was magnificent. It undulated through the air like a snake, fangs and claws bared, eyes burning white hot. Colin had never seen a dragon, only representations of them. The dragon seemed to be tied to the unnamed youth by some invisible string, like a kite. The boy gave a tug on the string and the dragon swooped down and pulled Zuhayer out of the water, saving him. There were many things Colin could have been focusing on at the time--the rescue, the cold, the dragon--but all he could see were Zuhayer’s eyes and the mocking triumph in them. Colin watched in horror as the dragon turned on the youth and, with a casual flick, dragged its spiny tail over the youth’s face, blinding him.
Colin, along with Spike and Melissa, were back in the library, all three of them having shared the same vision, now staring wordlessly at Maestro. He was standing there, his face once again hidden in the dark recess of his hood.
“You’re the boy?” asked Colin knowing it. Suddenly he was grateful for having the temporary guardian spirit of Sergeant Peary, yet he shivered at what the Wind might be able to do to him.
“Wait a second,” said Spike, his face a pasty shade of white, “aren’t guardian spirits supposed to protect you?” He was thinking about all the nasty things his coyote could possibly do to him.
“If you let them do their job,” said Maestro slowly, making sure his words were heard. “But, if you force them to do something they don’t want to do, well, you have to pay the price, and that price the guardian decides.”
Melissa’s hands were fluttering pointedly.
Maestro shook his head and moved his own hands in response. “No, my guardian spirit wasn’t being mean, or vicious, or betraying me, he was just giving me a lesson.”
“Some lesson! I hope your lessons aren’t going to be like that,” said Spike wryly, then became deathly silent when Maestro didn’t respond right away.
“No, I should have seen Zuhayer for who he was. He tricked me into using my spirit guardian to rescue him. I should have been thinking. He had his own guardian. He was in no real danger, he just wanted to see what would happen if we tried to turn a guardian spirit to some purpose. I was the experiment. I trust my first lesson has made a point?”
Spike nodded emphatically. Melissa gave a definite sign with her hand, but Colin couldn’t hold back anymore.
“Why do I have Sergeant Peary and another guardian spirit?”
“Good question. Sergeant Peary is on special assignment. Your guardian, as you found out the other night, is very temperamental, and very powerful. Jim’s idea was to have Sergeant Peary break you in until you learn about your real guardian. You see, while the spirit guardian manifests itself externally, it is also part of who you are. You most likely have felt it moving within you.”
“Not only that, but on Halloween we actually became our spirit animals, except Melissa who was dressed like a witch,” blurted out Spike excitedly.
Maestro removed his hood and, again, stared discerningly at them with black, sunken sockets. “How interesting, how very interesting,” he whispered. “That should not have been possible. And what was the price for such magic, because magic it was.”
“We lost our clothes when we turned back into ourselves, but Sergeant Peary said
it was all right,” said Spike.
“He did, did he,” commented Maestro tightly. “You’re lucky you got off so lightly. I’ll have to have a chat with our Sergeant.”
“It’s not his fault,” said Colin not wanting to get the ghost into trouble. “I mean we didn’t have to go along. We chose to.”
“So, what you are saying is that you accept responsibility for your actions?”
“Yeah, sort of, I guess so.”
“Colin, you must not use your true guardian until you learn more about yourself. If you do, you could die. Now, any more questions? No? Very good, I believe this lesson is over. I trust you will think hard about what you’ve learned today.”
The chairs slid out from the table and when they looked up, Maestro was gone.