The Magician King

By seven o’clock the sun was down and the moon was on the rise, lipping up over the hills and fields behind Murs. Once it cleared the trees, a huge white arc light that seemed to be trained on their house alone, Gummidgy moved from her station in the center of the room and lit their candles one by one with the tip of her finger. Julia angled her candle so the wax wouldn’t run down it and onto her hand. A hot droplet pricked her bare foot.

Gummidgy returned to the table and began the invocation. Somehow the candles on the table had been lit in the meantime, without anybody noticing.

Julia was glad it wasn’t her in the hot seat. For one thing the invocation was long, and who knew what would happen if you munged it. Maybe it would just fizzle, but maybe it would snap back at you. Some spells did that.

For another it wasn’t a spell, exactly. There was a lot of beseeching in it, and in Julia’s opinion a magician did not beseech, she commanded. The grammar of it was all weird too. It kept repeating and circling back on itself, working through the same phrases over and over again. Frankly it sounded like junk to Julia. There was no proper structure to it, just a lot of talk about mothers and daughters and grain and earth and honey and wine, all that Song of Solomon stuff.

But it wasn’t bullshit, that was the really crazy thing. Gummidgy was getting traction with this crap. Julia couldn’t see anything, there were no visual phenomena, but she didn’t have to. It was blindingly obvious that magic was happening. Gummidgy’s voice was getting deeper and more echoey. Certain words made the air vibrate, or caused sudden rushes of wind.

Julia’s candle started flaring up like a torch. She wished it wouldn’t—she had to hold it at arm’s length to keep it from singeing her hair, which she had left loose, because it had seemed more feminine and O.L.U.-like. Something was happening. Something was on its way. She could feel it coming like a freight train.

It was only then that Julia realized something, something absolutely terrible, that it would have been hard to admit to Pouncy or the others even if it weren’t too late: she didn’t want it to work. She wanted the spell to fail. She had made a grave mistake—she had misunderstood something about herself, something so basic she couldn’t understand how she’d missed it until now. She didn’t need this, and she didn’t want it. She didn’t want the goddess to come.

Pouncy had told her when she first got to Murs that it wasn’t enough for her to love him and the others, she had to love magic more. But she didn’t. She came to Murs looking for magic, but she was also looking for a new home, and a new family, and she’d found them all, all three, and it was enough. She was content; she didn’t need anything else, least of all more power. Her quest had ended and she hadn’t even known it till this moment. She didn’t want to become a goddess. All she’d wanted was to become human, and here at Murs it had finally happened.

Now it was too late. She couldn’t stop what was happening. The goddess was coming. She wanted to throw down her candle and run around the room shouting at them, breaking up the flow, telling them it was okay, they didn’t have to do this, they had all they needed right there all around them if they could only see it. Our Lady Underground would understand that—O.L.U., goddess of mercy and fruitfulness, she above all would understand what Julia had only just figured out.

But there was no way Julia could make the others understand. And there were titanic energies in the room with them now, giant forces, and there was no telling what would happen if she tried to disrupt the casting. Julia’s whole body was goose bumps. Gummidgy’s voice was getting louder. She was building up to the big finish. Her eyes were closed, and she was swaying from side to side and singing—it wasn’t in the invocation, the melody must have come to her straight over the transom, out of the ether, via the heavenly wireless. The windows on one side of the room were solid moonlight now, as if the moon had come down from its orbit and was hovering right outside, peering in at them.

It was hard to tear her eyes away from Gummidgy, but Julia risked a glance to her left, at Pouncy. He looked back at her and smiled. He wasn’t nervous. He looked calm. He looked happy. Please, if nothing else, please let her give him what he needs, she thought. Julia clung to this truth: that O.L.U. would never ask them for something they couldn’t give. Julia knew her, and she would never do that.

One of the candles on the table had started to spit and crackle and flare. It produced a gout of flame, a big one that went halfway up to the ceiling and made a deep guttural woof, and then it spat out something huge and red that landed standing on the table. Gummidgy gave a choking cough and dropped to the floor like she’d been shot—Julia could hear the crack as her head hit.

In the sudden silence the god struck a triumphant pose, arms wide, and held it. It was a giant, twelve feet tall and lithe and covered with red hair. It had the shape of a man and the head of a fox. It was not Our Lady Underground.

It was Reynard the Fox. They’d been tricked, but good.

“Shit!”

It was Asmodeus’s voice. Always quick, was Asmo. In the same moment came the rifle shot of all the windows slamming shut at once, and the door, as if something invisible had just left in an almighty huff. The moonlight went out like a switch had been flipped.

Oh God oh God oh God. The fear was instant and electric, her whole body was almost spasming with it. They’d stuck out their thumbs and they had gotten into the wrong car. They’d been tricked, just the way O.L.U. had been in the story, tricked and sent to the underworld, if She even existed at all. Maybe She didn’t. Maybe it was all just a joke. Julia threw her candle at the fox. It bounced off His leg and went out. She’d pictured Reynard the Fox as a playful, spritely figure. He was not that. He was a monster, and they were shut in here with Him.

Reynard jumped lightly down from the table, a carnival showman. Now that He had moved she found she could move too. She was crap at offensive magic, but she knew her shields, and she knew some sledgehammer dismissals and banishments. Just in case, she began piling up wards and shields between herself and the god, so thick that the air turned amber and wavy, tinted glass and heat ripples. Next to her she could hear Pouncy, still calm, preparing a banishment. The situation was salvageable. It didn’t work, so let’s get rid of this shithead and get out of here. Let’s go to Greece.

There was hardly any time. Reynard’s mouth was a nest of pointy teeth. That’s the thing about those tricksters, isn’t it: they’re never really all that fucking funny. She knew if He went for her, if He even looked at her, she would drop whatever she was casting and run, even though there was nowhere to run to. She stuttered twice, her voice broke, and she had to start a spell over. It must have been a trick all along. It was sinking in. There never was an Our Lady Underground at all. Was there. She didn’t exist. It made Julia want to weep with terror and sorrow.

The fox was looking around Him, counting His winnings. Failstaff—oh, Failstaff—made the first move, advancing on Him from behind, soft-footed for a big man. He’d amped up his candle into something like a flamethrower and was aiming it two-handed. Big as he was, he looked tiny next to a real giant. He’d barely got the thing flaming when Reynard turned suddenly, grabbed his robe, and pulled him over with one huge hand and put him in the crook of His arm, like He was going to give him a Dutch rub. But He didn’t give him a Dutch rub. He broke Failstaff’s neck like a farmer killing a hen and dropped him on the floor.

He lay on top of Gummidgy, who still hadn’t moved. His legs shook like he was being electrocuted. All the breath went out of Julia’s chest and got stuck there. She couldn’t inhale. She was going to pass out. At the other end of the room a party of three was already going at the door, trying to unseal it. They were working together, Iris in the middle: big magic, six-handed. Warming to His task, humming what might have been a jolly Provençal folk song, Reynard hefted the big block of stone with both hands and heaved it into them. Two of them went down hard under it. The third—it was Fiberpunk the Metamagician, him of the four-dimensional shapes—kept gamely at it, ice-cold under fire, taking all three parts himself without dropping a stitch. Julia always thought he must be a bit of a fraud, with all that shit he talked, but he had chops. He was rattling off some sick self-reflexive unlocking sequence like it was no big thing.

Reynard took him with His two big hands, around the chest, like a doll, and threw him up against the ceiling, thirty feet up. He hit hard—maybe Reynard was trying to make him stick—but he was probably still alive when his head clipped the table on the way down. His skull burst like a cantaloupe, spilling a fan of bloody slurry across the smooth parquet. Julia thought of all the metamagical secrets that must have been locked in that orderly brain, now catastrophically, irreversibly disordered.

It was all over now. All ruined. Julia was ready to die now, she just hoped it wouldn’t hurt too much. Reynard squatted and put His hands in the blood and whatever else and smeared it sensually on His luxurious fox-fur chest, matting it. You couldn’t tell if He was grinning like a mad thing or if that’s just how foxes’ mouths looked.

Two minutes after the fox-god arrived Pouncy, Asmodeus, and Julia were the last of the Murs magicians, the cream of the safe-house scene, left alive on the planet. For a moment Julia felt her feet leave the floor—it must have been Pouncy, trying to buy them a minute by taking them up to that high ceiling, but Reynard cut the spell off when they were only a couple of feet off the floor, and they dropped back down hard. He picked up the heavy silver bowl, dumping out the rainwater, and threw it at Pouncy like a discus. Just as He did, Asmodeus finished up something she’d been working on since the god arrived, a Maximal Dismissal maybe, with a little something extra on it, something sharp that actually tweaked Reynard’s attention.

It didn’t hurt Him, but He felt it. You could see His big pointy ears twitch with annoyance. The cup struck Pouncy hard, but off-center. It crunched his left hip and went rocketing away. Pouncy groaned and folded in two.

“Stop!” Julia said. “Stop it!”

Fear: Julia was all out of it. A dead woman didn’t feel fear. And she was all out of magic too. She was going to say some regular words for a change, non-magic words. She was going to talk to this asshole.

“You took our sacrifice,” she said. She swallowed. “Now give us what we paid for.”

It felt like she was trying to breathe at thirty thousand feet. The fox looked down His narrow muzzle at her. With His doggy head and human body He looked like the Egyptian death-god Anubis.

“Give it to us!” Julia shouted. “You owe it to us!”

Asmo watched her from the other side of the room, frozen. All her knowing, savvy Asmo attitude had fallen away. She looked about ten years old.

Reynard gave a loud bark before He spoke.

“A sacrifice is not to be taken,” He said, in a deep, reasonable voice, with only a very slight French accent. “A sacrifice is to be freely given. I took their lives. They did not offer them to me.” It was like He couldn’t believe the rudeness of it. “I had to take them.”

Pouncy had pushed himself up into a sitting position against the wall. The pain must have been appalling. Sweat stood out all over his face.

“Take my life. I’m giving it to you. Take it.”

Reynard cocked His head. Fantastic Mr. Fox. He fingered His whiskers.

“You are dying. You will be dead soon. It is not the same.”

“You can have mine,” Julia said. “I’m giving it to you. If you let the others live.”

Reynard groomed Himself, licking blood and brains off the back of His paw-hand.

“Do you know what you have done here?” He said. “I am just the beginning. When you call on a god, all gods hear. Did you know that? And no human has called down a god in two thousand years. The old gods will have heard too, you know. Better to be dead when they come back. Better never to have lived, when the old gods return.”

“Take me!” Pouncy moaned. He gasped as something inside him gave way, and he whispered the rest. “Take me. I’m giving you my life.”

“You are dying,” Reynard said again, dismissively.

He paused. Pouncy said nothing.

“He has died,” Reynard announced.

The fox-god turned to Julia and raised His eyebrows, studying her. A real fox wouldn’t have those, Julia thought meaninglessly.

“I accept,” He said. “The other one can live, if you give yourself to me. And I will give you something more. I will give you what you wanted, what you summoned me for.”

“We didn’t summon you,” Asmo said in a small voice. “We summoned Our Lady.” Then she bit her lip and fell silent.

Reynard regarded Julia critically, and then He went for her. He went right through her wards like they weren’t there. Julia was ready to die—she closed her eyes and let her head fall back, baring her throat for Him to rip it out. But He didn’t. His hairy hands were on her, He dragged her across the room and forced her upper body down so she was bent over the yew table. Julia didn’t understand, and then she did and she wished she hadn’t.

She fought Him. He pinned her torso down on the wood with one hard, heavy hand, and she tore at his fingers but they were like stone. She had agreed, but she hadn’t agreed to this. Let Him kill her if He wanted. It hurt when He tore her robe off—the fabric burned against her skin. She tried to look behind her at what was happening, and she saw—no, no, she didn’t see that, she saw nothing—the god’s big hand working casually between His legs as He positioned Himself behind her. He kicked her bare feet apart with a practiced kick. This wasn’t His first time at the rodeo.