See if those books don’t suddenly seem a little less tiresome.
He was at the porch now.
A little less tiresome.
Less tiresome.
Less tiresome.
He was beginning to feel the words drilling into his head like the beak of a woodpecker. He wanted to just fall down and go to sleep right there on the porch.
“That you?”
Kasani, her voice is so beautiful.
And as the thought came to him of letting her down by walking in there and falling asleep and perpetuating their miserable existence, he realized he had nothing to lose.
Slightly suspicious, now that he was actually considering trying this strange substance that Tom had given him, he opened the box and took a hard look at it.
“Just a minute, Hon’,” he said.
It was a green powdery substance. He put his nose close to it and smelled. A sweet, pungent odor rose into his nostrils and almost seemed to lift his spirits by the vapor alone.
It’s the last of it I got left, and somethin’ tells me it’ll go to better use with you than with me.
Trusting his instincts, he pinched a small piece of the powder out and put it onto the palm of his hand, leaned down, and inhaled.
For a second, nothing.
Then, like the arrival of an asteroid, so far at first from the observer that its approach seems little different than a fly soaring high above in the sky but that then reveals itself as the mountainous, powerful structure that it is, the effect of the powder hit him. But “hit him” would be an understatement. It crashed through the surface of his mind, burrowed itself deep, and then exploded, as if it had searched for and found the energy and intelligence centers of his brain and delivered a jolt so powerful that it stimulated them within a hair’s width of destruction.
He felt as if he had awakened from a one-hundred-year nap, felt he had the energy of a young boy awakening the day of his twelfth birthday party, felt like a man on the night of his honeymoon—all at the same time.
“Hey, Hon’,” he said cheerily as he walked into the house.
“Hold the coffee for now; I’m feeling kind of anxious to get started.”
“Sure, Honey,” Janie said, a bit perplexed, as she had lately noticed his brow looking more and more tired each day he came in.
“Now, look, Janie. I don’t believe in secrets. You’re my girl—heck, you’re my wife—and I told you a few months ago I aimed to fix things, and that’s what I aim to do.”
Janie felt a shiver of fear run through her.
“Tom gave me some kind of . . . well, I don’t know what it is.” And he paused momentarily to let Janie see. “It’s some kind of herb. Well, anyway, it’s got a kick to it, and I’m feeling pretty energetic right now, so just don’t get too alarmed if I seem a little fidgety!”
A wave of relief flooded over Janie. She herself was an avid consumer of various herbs from Sally, a local botanist, that she believed to be vital for health and energy. She was thrilled to see Richie was starting to think about his nutrition.
“No need to explain, Babe,” she said, rubbing his back. “We’ve got work to do.”
By the end of the night, Janie realized this was nothing even remotely close to anything she had ever purchased at Sally’s store. Richie hadn’t even yawned the entire evening or barely looked up from his book, which she saw him devouring like a lion would a succulent animal. The pages turned rapidly, and she could tell by the rapidly darting eyes inside her husband’s head that he was not skimming: He was reading.
By the time she had gone to bed at 2 a.m., he was on his second book that night and had taken a sizable chunk out of it. Janie wasn’t sure what to think.
Chapter 25
“Glad you arrived on time.”
Eddie was standing in front of Tristan, deep inside the woods, on a large branch about the width of a stagecoach, several hundred feet up in the air.
Eddie thought momentarily about saying something enthusiastic like, I wouldn’t miss it, but realized his previous strategy of keeping his mouth shut and doing a lot more listening than talking seemed to work pretty well with this old man, and it was his personal preference to boot, so he figured he would try it again.
“I was thoroughly impressed with your handiwork yesterday, Eddie. You sensed the trap Timmy was preparing for you, preempted it, and defended yourself.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“We wizards are an unsociable breed, Eddie. We prefer isolation and very rarely pass on our skills to more than one person. And even to do that, we have to feel a very powerful connection and see something inspiring. Do you know what inspired me about you?”
“Sometimes, I know what people are thinking . . . ?”
“Exactly. Wizards rarely choose an apprentice unless they see he already has some innate gift that will make him receptive to instruction on magic. Do you know what magic is?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Most people think they do but don’t. Can you wiggle your ears, Eddie?”
Eddie moved around his scalp, his eyebrows, just about everything on top of his head, thus causing some minor movement of his ears.
“Okay, can you move them without moving anything else?”
Eddie tried a few times and realized he couldn’t.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You haven’t practiced. Your brain has the ability to send the message, and your ears have the ability to receive the message and initiate the motion, but you haven’t developed that pathways. But you could if instructed on how to do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“When a man lifts his arms or lifts a rock, no one considers it anything special. When a man uses a lever to lift an object he could never lift with his bare hands, that is considered ingenuity. When a man lifts an object without touching it, people call it magic.” And as he said this, Eddie saw a branch come bending towards them. Closer, closer, and closer till it touched Eddie’s nose. Then, suddenly it released and went springing back into its normal position.
“They call it magic because they can’t explain it. That’s what magic is, Eddie—that which man cannot explain. But it is a physical force, just like when you lift an object with your bare hands or with a lever. There is a part of your brain that could control your ears and make them move without all that silly squinting, eyebrow raising, and cheek twitching you did a moment ago. But you haven’t trained it.
“There are physical forces surrounding us right now, Eddie. I can see some but not all of them. I can manipulate some, but not all. When I moved that branch a moment ago, I merely instructed my brain to exert an action upon the physical force to which that branch is connected. You have that part of your mind too, but it is untrained. In most people’s minds, it will remain untrained throughout their entire life.
“Sorcerers possess much more than secret information. That is only a small, but very important, part of it really. The magical intonations will stimulate parts of your brain that otherwise would rarely, if ever, be stimulated throughout your entire life. But those parts of your brain are like a baby’s legs. A parent can show a baby how to walk, but the legs take many months to develop the strength and coordination to do so.
“In the case of sorcery, I am afraid, it is still far more difficult. By teaching you incantations, I will thus merely give you the basic tools with which to develop these parts of your brain. It will take long periods of tedious practice. Do you wish to proceed?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I asked you if you were aware of what special gift you have. In my case it was the power to move things around that caught my master’s attention. That is called telekinesis. Like your gift—which is called, telepathy, Eddie—mine was innate. But it was weak and had to be developed through rigorous training. Likewise, your telepathy can be taken to a drastically higher level with the right training. It is always one
’s innate magical gift that one can take to a higher level than any other, but to be a great sorcerer, you must develop some strength in many areas.”
Eddie nodded silently.
“I see your natural strength of physical balance as a good starting point, a base upon which we can later build your skills at telekinesis. Repeat after me: ‘Iksun’”
“Iksun.”
“‘Iksun’ means balance.”
“Say it again.”
“Iksun.”
“You’ll find that most of your training will be solitary. I will check on you from time to time, and when you think you are ready to move on to the next stage of your training, you will receive a rigorous test—one that could prove fatal to you if you do not pass it. Thus, I would advise not to request to move on until you are sure you have attained a high skill level in each lesson. To practice your balance, stand upon a branch, and repeat the word ‘Iksun’ over and over. Imagine yourself becoming one with the branch. Imagine roots growing out of your feet, burrowing themselves in to the pulp of the branch beneath your feet, and fastening you to the tree as if you were part of it. And as you do this, repeat the word over and over and over. It can be silently or out loud; either way, you will be building the part of your brain that attains balance with the forces surrounding you. When you believe you are ready, you will send me a signal.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You may call me ‘master,’ Eddie. For you are now my apprentice.”
To some, the news that one can now address another as “master” would bring about less than a felicitous response. But in Eddie’s ears, he had never heard a more pleasing sound in his entire life.
“Yes, Master.”
Chapter 26
The next day at school Eddie marched to his desk as usual, but the classroom was anything but usual. There were two words on the chalkboard in large font:
DARE SUICIDE
Mrs. Reichart’s manner was grave.
“Class, today we have two very important concepts to talk about.”
Eddie drifted off into his own world as Mrs. Reichart began a monologue on the dangers of accepting dares and on the foolishness of suicide. In Eddie’s mind, her thousands of words could be boiled down to two aphorisms: “Don’t do something stupid just to impress others, because you just might drop dead like Brian,” and, “Don’t kill yourself, because hard times never last forever.”
Confident that he had adequately absorbed the philosophical pith of her message, he began focusing on his chant. If it took thousands of repetitions and possibly months to master, he figured every waking moment of the day he spent upon it the better.
Unlike his usual daydreams, in which he buried himself into a world of wizardry by drawing slyly on a piece of blank paper stuck between the pages of some mind-numbing textbook, such as mathematics, today he held his head high and looked right at Mrs. Reichart and feigned the most noble attention, while repeating the chant over and over in his mind like Master had instructed.
Although not perched on a branch hundreds of feet above the air, as he would have liked, he did his best to imagine that his feet were growing roots into the wooden floor beneath him and that even if a hurricane came he would have held fast to his desk.
At one point, Mrs. Reichart broke his reverie with the words, “Hairy, I know you were good friends with Timothy and Brian. Is there anything you want to say?”
There was a silence, and since he noticed other people doing the same, he seized the moment to turn around in his desk and look at the object of Mrs. Reichart’s inquiry. But unlike the other students, who scanned tough Hairy Larry’s face for the hint of a tear or even a sob, Eddie only glanced once rapidly at his face before averting his gaze to Larry’s general vicinity.
Larry noticed the glance and the diverted gaze, and he felt his skin crawl. So, did Bobby. They both got a creepy sensation in the moment Eddie’s gaze came anywhere near them, as if it held some foul power that would cause them great harm.
“No, ma’am,” he said, trying with every ounce of strength in his body to sound tough, but he knew it didn’t sound tough. Not by a long shot. He hadn’t sobbed, but the tremor in his voice was unmistakable. The gang had been cut in half. Brian’s death had been Eddie’s fault. That much Hairy knew for sure. As for Timmy, he wasn’t exactly sure how, but somehow he suspected Eddie was involved. He’d get him one day for that. As long as there was life in his body, Creepy Eddie just better be careful.
Eddie picked up on that before he returned to his world of “Iksun, Iksun, Iksun.”
Chapter 27
Hilfen walked into the bar with a wide grin on his face.
“Hallo, mates,” he said cheerily, in that strange Sodorfian accent he brought with him from Sodorf’s southernmost regions. He had only been with the Lumber Reconstruction Unit 40 for several days, but already he was as well-liked as if he had been cutting wood with them for years. The fact of the matter was that their unit, like most of the units currently traipsing off into the forest each day to challenge their ax blades against the fortitude of the trees, was recently formed, as the City of Sodorf was in dire need of new lumber to complete the reconstruction of the august city. Other units were planting trees where the Dachwaldians had so recently felled them to the ground to use as materiel in their devilish missiles.
But the Sodorfian nobles wanted to rebuild Sodorf fast, and thus, the Noble Council had approved millions of dollars for the reconstruction. This created a lot of jobs, and the word soon spread throughout the forests that there was money to be made for those that could swing an ax. This quickly created a motley assortment of hardy woodsmen, many speaking with different accents and some with different dialects. Their lack of acquaintance with one another often turned them into the best of friends, as there were few cliques to contend with, and these were simple folk who liked to swing their ax ten hours a day, douse their gullet in beer and whiskey for five, sleep, and then repeat the process. Hilfen seemed as adept as any of them at this trifecta, and thus, he rapidly assimilated into the good graces of nearly all.
When they were five beers deep into backslapping, arm wrestling, joke telling, and storytelling, Hilfen suddenly said, amidst heaving giggles, “No, wait—I’ve got one better. They say that the day Dachwald was defeated, giant, flying birds came down from the heavens—”
At this point, he was interrupted by a chorus of laughs so raucous that, had a tornado touched down, they wouldn’t have noticed before being scooped up and hurried away by that devilish sky monster that has long haunted mankind.
Hilfen joined in with them for several moments, before saying, “Gents, gents, let me finish! It gets better!” The laughter died down to that of a low thunder roll.
“They say that these birds then started havin’ a little chitchat with one of the generals!”
“As they indeed DID!” Like a bolt of lightning piercing the darkness of a pitch-black night, the voice cut through the raucous laughter that was just starting to erupt.
The good-natured tree whackers turned round to see what esteemed gentleman they had offended, perhaps intending to teach him a lesson or two in the art of not taking himself so seriously by bashing their fists against his skull.
They faced the steely eyes of a man wearing mail armor about his chest, and his waist was adorned with a sword against which they didn’t think their fists would fare too well, perhaps not even their axes, which they didn’t have with them. The bartender wisely required those be deposited in a side room prior to entering the drinking area.
“As they indeed did,” he said confidently yet more softly. The ax men felt their muscles relax a bit, only to be replaced with a chill running down their spine. “Those birds were bewitched. It’s not in its nature for a majestic bird like the pholung species to allow a man to ride upon its back as if it were a domesticated horse. And with my own two ears” (as he said this he rotated his head each way just enough to sho
w these gents he did indeed have two ears, and in the process revealed several nasty battle scars) “I heard one of them talk. He was talking to my former general. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. His name is Pitkins.”
A shudder washed over the room. Even to these newly arrived forest folk, Pitkins was a household name. His rise from sword smith to noble, his marriage to the most beautiful woman in Sodorf, his disappearance, and then his act of rescuing Sodorf from total annihilation was not a story they needed retold. And the man’s precise description of Pitkins’ status as his former general identified the man as one of the famed Nikorians, who were also now legendary due to their heroic participation in the battle.
“No offense was intended, good sir,” stated Hilfen diplomatically. “Stranger things I have seen deep in the forests. Sometimes, a good laugh in the company of good comrades and plenty of ale help a man forget the things that sometimes disturb him in his sleep.”