Hello!
This week’s story heads in a more fantasy-oriented direction, but of course, in the spirit of Arthur Clarke’s Third Law of Science Fiction, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Enjoy!
The Archivist
She was orphaned at nine years old, when her mother and father caught the red wheeze and were among those who could not recover. He had been a fisherman, with strong hands and grey eyes. She had black hair, and nimble fingers that tied nets and sewed sails and made her enough money that sometimes she hid how much it was from her husband so as not to shame him. Her father was stern but not a terror, her mother attentive but not smothering, and all was well until it wasn’t, which is as much grace as anyone gets.
And when they knew it was the end, and they would waste to nothing, they shut themselves away, and a neighbor took the girl out of the house, up to the oldest and poshest part of the city, to the Moonshadow Door of the Wizard’s Tower, and left her there, and told her to knock. Then the neighbor—whose name she always struggled to remember—walked away with eyes averted and was gone. She knocked on the Moonshadow door, and was taken in.
The Wizards’ Society was much more normal than she would have guessed. It mostly was not people using magic. At times it seemed to mostly be people getting drunk and arguing. Wizards came and went from the tower freely, and soon enough she was allowed to go back to her old neighborhood and visit her friends. They had always thought of the Wizard’s Tower as a scary and mysterious place, and when she told them that’s where she was living, they did not believe her, no matter how much she swore it to them.
* * *
“The true magic is always in the mind,” said Vermose Valiant. Most of the wizards had dumb little sayings like that, and she always rolled her eyes inside, though she never actually did outwardly, because also most of the wizards brooked absolutely no nonsense from anyone. Also, most of the wizards repeated themselves.
“The true magic is always in the mind. We have objects in this castle that can alter the very fabric of reality, yet they must always be wielded in a single place, in a single moment, by a focused wizard in order to achieve a single effect. This is grossly inefficient. Much more elegant a magical effect, for example, is the spell we’ve placed on the town’s water supply, causing all who drink from it to be aware of the existence of the Wizard’s Tower, but to refuse to believe they know any actual wizards personally. This effect is passive, perpetual, and impersonal. In a word, perfect.”
Vermose was staring off into space as he talked, a smile touching his lips, not even thinking of his students anymore. The girl tuned him out. Over her three years in the tower, she had discovered that the Objects were what attracted her. She had already begun to study in the Solarium with Demimonde the Archivist, and though she was dutiful to her other studies, nothing else held the immediate, obsessive appeal of the Objects.
They had told her that as she learned the ways, she would likely find a focus, one aspect of magic that called out to her more than others. They had tried to describe the hunger that would plague her when not engaged with her focus, but when it came it was more distracting than she had anticipated. Hers was so strong that even when her old friends outside the tower began to chase mates and eventually sneak away to dark corners where their urges were unbound, the girl did not join them. Whatever impulse she felt in that direction paled in comparison to cleaning the last speck of dirt from the last crevice of some new Object and making it perfect, ready for its next chosen User to arrive and bond with it.
* * *
“All things find their use in time,” Demimonde said. His bushy white beard completely covered his mouth to the point of obscuring its movement, so the words almost seemed to emanate from a bush. She had not thought any of the wizards would be fat, but quite a few of them were. The kitchens had magical devices that created the most delicious food she had ever tasted, but there was no spell for controlling waistlines, as the masters were fond of complaining.
“All things find their use in time,” he repeated. He had this annoying habit of saying something cryptic and then seeming like he was going to continue before lapsing into silence. The wizard currently in the Gallery with the girl and the Archivist started looking confused, then concerned, as Demimonde’s silence stretched into almost a minute, until finally the girl cleared her throat directly at him. Demimonde stirred as if from slumber.
“Yes, so of course this is The Gambler’s Ring. When you bond with this ring, you will experience extraordinary luck in all games of chance. It comes with a warning label that you must use it sparingly because people will think you cheat, and several wizards who previously checked out this Object were murdered while using it. I’m sure you’ll do fine, though. What is your intended Adventure with this object, and where will you be taking it?”
“I’m going to my brother’s rescue, he’s been hexed into marriage by a Lesser Wight.” The other wizard looked somewhere between confused and horrified as he spoke. “Surely there’s a better Object for this mission. What good will this even do?”
He looked at Demimonde for an answer, but the Archivist just stared back at him, confused. The girl felt sorry for the old wizard, who was really starting to lose it lately, but also she wondered how soon the position of Archivist might be open and whether she was doing enough in terms of Wizard’s Tower politics to assure her elevation at that time.
“The Object chooses its user according to need,” she explained. “This is the Object that gives you the best chance of success.”
“Didn’t he just say several people had been murdered using this?”
“She said ‘best chance’, not ‘guarantee’,” said Demimonde, suddenly rousted and out of patience. “This is magic. If you want miracles, pray.”
* * *
“We deal in the stuff of the gods, without understanding,” said Guenerin, petting the snake wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl as she spoke. Its tongue flicked in and out of its mouth in what the Archivist assumed was an expression of pleasure.
“We are not wizards at all, but Miraclists,” she continued. “We make miracles.”
The Archivist rolled her eyes behind Guenerin’s back, and not just inwardly. She could do that because Guenerin was the consummate politician, and Guenerin knew that the Archivist, having reached her most desired position within the Wizard’s Tower, was no threat to topple Guenerin from her perch as Head Wizard.
Even now, during this important budgetary meeting at which so much of the Archivist’s quality of life during the coming year would be determined, all she could think about was being back among the Objects. She walked among them daily now, hour after hour polishing and categorizing them.
She allowed others to walk among them at her discretion, watched as objects reached out and bonded with them, and then sent them out on adventures together, doing the business of wizards while she stayed back and honed the Object collection. She checked the Objects back in after the wizards had completely their adventures or, in some cases, sent security-wizards out to retrieve the Objects if it became clear that some particular wizard had failed at their task and died, or become too attached to their Object and decided not to return with it.
The Archivist should have been happy. Yet as the years went by, and Object after Object passed out her door and returned, she instead grew troubled, for she wished herself to bond with an Object and have an adventure, and yet no Object called to her. She celebrated her hundredth loaned Object, then her thousandth, and yet she never herself knew that pull, that feeling, of being chosen by an Object.
She went out of the Wizard’s Tower to visit her old friends from before her adoption, and found herself a stranger among them. They still did not acknowledge her as a wizard, instead thinking of her as a whimsical traveler, who blew in from parts unknown with fanciful stories that were a delight to hear. They had children, and the Archivist was now too old to have any of her own. This thought did not disturb her, exactly, but it was like the Objects and becoming the Archivist; what she thought was a positive choice turned out to have negative choices—about things she would not do—embedded in it, inextricably and obviously linked and yet invisible to her until they were too late to change.
Now she walked among the Objects, and honed, and polished, and categorized them as before. She still felt the same pull to do that, and the same satisfaction in doing it. But now, when a Wizard came to walk fresh among the gallery and be chosen by an Object, a hush came over the Archivist’s heart, like what happened when a non-Wizard saw magic for the first time.
“Guenerin was right,” she thought, as she watched a Wizard walk away from her desk, bonded to a sword that could cut stone like cloth. “We make miracles. I just looked past them to what was ordinary for a long time. The miracle is not in the magic, it is in the choosing.”
* * *
“All things find their use in time,” she said. She had a flash, of Demimonde—now long dead and but a memory—saying that to her, all those years ago. Her mind lingered on him, just for a moment, and her lips repeated the phrase as if they, of their own accord, wished to taste the words’ nuanced wisdom a second time.
“All things find their use in time,” she finished. Then thought: “Oh Goodness, I’m old.”
She realized that her eyes were unfocused, and that she hadn’t spoken for several seconds, as awareness returned to her of four young, sharp eyes staring her down. The eyes weren’t rolling, but she could sense that they were rolling inside, as hers had so long ago.
She had acquired the two young apprentices without really meaning to—they had just started appearing at her mealtimes, too regularly to be coincidence, and one day approached her with folded hands and asked her about the Objects in tiny, halting voices.
She came once more to consciousness of the fact that her apprentices were staring at her and she still was not speaking. She had an Object in her hand. What was it? Oh, yes.
“This is the newest of our Objects,” she explained. “It was unearthed from a Baron’s castle just the other day and returned here. We’ll begin experimentation soon to determine its use. And this—“ She put that object down and picked up a leather belt engraved with an ocean motif. “—and this is the Object we have had longest without ever lending it out. It is a belt which will allow the wearer to swim like a fish.”
One of the apprentices—she reminded herself again to learn their names eventually—raised her hand, and The Archivist nodded to her.
“Why do Objects bond with the wizards they do?” She squeaked. “How do they know?”
The Archivist smiled, more at the voice than the question. The voice was falling in love with the wonder of the Objects, just as she had.
But this also made The Archivist sad, because she knew the pain that awaited the apprentice, the pain of not bonding with an Object one’s self, of watching other wizards chosen, some again and again, and wielding Objects of immense power that The Archivist was consigned only to organize and maintain—her great wish and her curse.
This pain had become familiar to The Archivist, as all pain does in time, but pain it remained.
* * *
The Archivist was dying. Her eyes were gone, and she could no longer see the Objects clearly. Her hearing was dulled, so that she could receive wizards’ requests to walk among the Objects only through an intermediary apprentice. She still hobbled among the Objects when she had the strength, feeling their pull and giving herself to them fiercely for a while before retreating to her chambers to recover. This was her life, and she was proud of it, and it was almost over.
In the middle of her life there was the pain of not bonding with an Object, and she thought she had measured that pain. She thought of that pain as the price of her choices, the foreclosed possibility that would remain forever a regret. Making it a friend seemed impossible.
But now, as she slowly died through the coldest winter any of the wizards could remember, that pain was the only friend she had. All the good moments, all the hushed, early-morning strolls through the Objects, they were all deniable. They might have been dreams. But the pain of what she had been denied was now undeniable. It was real, it was hers. It was proof that she had made choices, had lived her life, had taken a path and not strayed from it. The pain of what she had not done was proof of what she had done, and that brought her comfort.
Her apprentices were grown now, ready to take over when she had gone to join Demimonde and Pasalaver and all the other Archivists before her. They loved her and cared for her and no longer seemed afraid when they spoke to her.
Just before she became too ill to leave the Wizard’s Tower, they had taken her in a litter back to her old neighborhood, to see her old friends. Most were already gone, but their children and grandchildren welcomed her back, and begged to hear the stories of her life of adventure on the road. For the first time in all her visits, she did not even try to correct them or explain that she had been living in the Wizard’s Tower the entire time. When an object was returned to the collection, where it had been was of no consequence to its next user.
One morning she woke, and knew it was the last day of her life. She could feel the breaths in her body, barely passing through her now. She told her apprentices that she wished to see the Objects and they carried her up to the collection room, where she had spent most of her life, one last time.
And then she was among them, feeling them, visiting her true friends on her final day, and she felt at peace. But then they gave her one more gift. As she passed them, Objects started disappearing from her vision. One by one they left. At first she thought it was just her consciousness receding as she prepared for the end. But then she saw one Object grow brighter. It almost seemed larger. Then it began to pulse with the rhythms of her heartbeat.
Her apprentices seemed to sense this, because they walked her closer to that particular Object. It was a brooch with a ruby inset into it, that allowed the user to change their clothes into any disguise just by thinking about it.
But for the first time ever, the intellectual details of the object did not seem to matter. They slipped from her mind, and all that remained was the immediate experience of the Object, its outlines and depth and the pulse of its power in time with her own.
“My goodness,” she thought, “I’m bonding with it.”
And then she gave in and embraced it. She felt the Object meld with her, felt its absolute embrace of every crevice of her being, felt it capture her soul as she captured its. The experience was beyond description in its perfection.
She knew that she would never use this Object. It would not save her life, or even give her another day of it. There was no known Object that would extend life, or call back the dead. And yet this object had given her life, in its way, just by existing and reaching out for her.
She smiled at her two apprentices for the last time.
“The true magic is always in the mind,” she said. “The true magic is always in the mind.”