She made an enquiring sound, abruptly wrong-footed, unable to see where he was coming from.
“Do you understand what you have promised these people?” the sorcerer asked her.
Still not understanding him, she set her shoulders. Perhaps this was a test, in the way of wizards. “You have promised me your aid, according to your compact with my blood. I told you of the demon, and you came with me here to defeat it. And we will. Your magic will overcome it, Nyrgoth Elder, and then all will be well and everyone will be saved.” She had been about to force out his personal name, to call him “Nyr” as though they were companions of old or something more, but her nerve failed her on that score.
The sorcerer stared at her for an uncomfortable span of time, and she braced herself. I had forgotten the price, of course. Here it comes. But what he said next was so far from what she expected that she actually staggered, as though trying to force an open door. No demands of flesh or fealty, but only:
“There is no magic.”
She and Esha goggled at him, and eventually Esha said, “Nygoth Elder, we have seen you curse a man to barrenness and dominate a flying monster with mere words.”
The sorcerer looked from one to the other. “This, what you have told them, it is not fair, nor true. There is no universal magic that can accomplish these things. When it was just your stories and your journeys, I held my peace. That is what I’m supposed to do, after all. I am supposed to let you people get on with your traditions and your beliefs and just note it all down. But these people are desperate.” His voice was dreadfully flat, the lack of emotion in it positively crying out. She had the sense of something huge and buried rising towards the surface like a sea monster about to break a fishing boat across its back. “They are hungry and sick, hurt, displaced. And you have given them false hope on the back of a story about magic. There is no magic.”
“I . . .” She tried a smile. “Nyrgoth Elder, you are testing me. I have faith in you. You will be able to defeat the demon.”
She saw the precise moment when something broke inside him, and all that mastery of himself was just cast aside. “No!” he snapped, and most of what he was radiating was sheer frustration. “There is no such thing as magic, you stupid girl. There are no such things as demons. There is only the way the world works. I come from a people who understand the world, and so there are things we can accomplish with it that you cannot. I know of the ancient words to command the servants and workers of elder days, like that wise fool Ulmoth unearthed. I have items of power which can chastise my enemies and protect me. There is no magic. I am not a magician, but a wizard.” He grimaced. “Not a wizard but a sorcerer, a magus. A . . .” And he said a word she had never heard, sharp and alien sounding, unsettling as metal on a tooth. And then a tirade, a whole sentence of the same words cast upwards, past the ceiling to the uncaring sky. A wizard’s curse.
She and Esha waited for transformations, plagues, horrors. But apparently, whatever the curse was, it would come to light on them later, not now. Now was for Nyrgoth Elder to stare at her, his hands crooked into terrible claws, his square, white teeth bared, eyes bulging.
“There is no such thing as magic. I don’t care about the rules. I don’t care what I’m supposed to say and not say. I can’t let you just use my name to lie to all those people out there. I don’t know what this demon of theirs is, save that there are no demons. For all I know, it’s some natural process of this world, something that arises once in a thousand years, and something I have no way of influencing. Something that just happens, only now it’s happening and there are humans here in the way. And if it’s that, then I can’t help. I don’t think I can help anyway. I’m not a wizard; I’m . . .” He deflated, for a moment the most forlorn thing she’d ever seen, not the Elder sorcerer but some misshapen prodigy from a travelling show. Then the rage was back without warning, and he slammed his fists into the wall hard enough that he left bloody smears where the skin over his knuckles had broken. Lyn flinched and heard her own whimper in the silence that followed, but Esha just pointed at Nyrgoth’s hands, where the skin was visibly knitting, torn edges crawling together and leaving no sign nor scar.
“It’s not magic,” he insisted, against all reason. “I am just made this way. I am just of a people who understand how the world works.”
“Nyrgoth Elder,” Esha said slowly. “Is that not what magic is? Every wise man, every scholar I have met who pretended to the title of magician, that was their study. They sought to learn how the world worked, so that they could control and master it. That is magic.”