Wand: A Fantasy of Witches, Wizards, and Wands
Chapter Six

Following a lunch of pancakes doused in syrup, Nick caught up with Bruno. The bully had a number of questions for him, and more than a few lame insults, but Nick waved them all aside to pose his own question.

“Is there a spell or a ritual or maybe an herb to help you remember stuff, like dreams or something?” he added that last bit to try and throw Bruno off.

Bruno shrugged as he led Nick outside the back doors of the Institute. “Probably. But isn’t that why you’re going to spirit walk with Anaximander? To remember what happened?”

Darn, Nick thought. He’s not as dumb as he looks. How much of his Plan could he reveal to Bruno? Everything? Was it too early in their relationship to place that level of confidence in this teenage thug? Nick decided he couldn’t risk it. Instead he returned Bruno’s shrug and followed the boy down a concrete flight of steps and through a trellis so completely laced in ivy that it looked like it had sprouted from the ground rather than been placed there. It was the entrance to what Nick had spotted earlier from his window, the sprawling labyrinth carved out of eight-foot tall hedges.

“So what kinds of mythics are we gonna see in Duchaine’s bestiary?”

“All kinds, I hope,” Bruno looked down paths leading to either side before plunging straight ahead.

“Yeah, but like what?” Nick wondered aloud. The winding shrub-corridors were inciting an unexpected claustrophobia in Nick. He knew this labyrinth had been grown here to confuse evil spirits and wicked mythics should they ever escape the bestiary and try to enter the school, but he was starting to wish there was a less constricting path for students.

Bruno turned right, shoved his way past a pair of boys arguing which way to go. To Nick he said, “I know this is your first year at a school of magic and all, but didn’t your parents at least tell you about what they had here?”

“They were skimpy on the details,” Nick confessed in a white lie. In truth they hadn’t told him anything about mythics. For the life of him he couldn’t figure out why they would leave him so very far outside the loop.

Daylight began to fade as the boys made their way deeper into the labyrinth where overhanging beech trees shielded them from the sun. At a shrub wall, Bruno grunted.

“Dang it.”

Nick groaned. “Great. A dead end. I thought you knew the way?”

“I do,” Bruno growled, and shoved Nick as he turned back the way they’d come. “Those stupid girls back there distracted me. And it doesn’t help having you breathing down my neck.”

“What a load of crap,” Nick said. “You’re way too tall for me to do that.”

Ignoring Nick’s attempt at levity, Bruno plunged ahead, taking a right at the fork where they had taken a left to the dead end. Four minutes later, despair creeping in as the chill shadowed air embraced them, they reached the entrance into the forest. Half expecting to replace more stupid gargoyles to bar their entry, Nick was relieved to encounter only a simple ward.

Eventually the dirt path became a cobblestone road similar to the one in Border City. Roughly eight feet wide, its paving stones a peculiar shade of yellow, joined so tightly that even weeds could not make their way through, the path made Nick think of the yellow brick road in Oz. Except these stones were inscribed with various sigils and warding symbols.

The air hung damp from last nights’ rain and an eerie silence lay heavy over the bestiary; no insects buzzing, no birds singing, and even the students were quiet, as if this were some hollowed sanctuary. The yellow-stone path ended at a small log cabin. Duchaine was there toting a box through the front door, using his chin as leverage to keep it from falling forward. His beard dangled atop the box.

By the time Duchaine set it down and shook dust from his vest, the entire class was in attendance, awaiting his lead.

“Well, welcome to my neighborhood,” he snatched up a clipboard from the box. “I know it’s tedious, but we have to take roll call. Just bear with me. We’ll get to the good stuff, no worries.” He spent the next three minutes checking off names from his student manifest.

The class waited anxiously for the warlock to begin. In any other class they’d be chattering away, laughing and trading gossip, but Nick was pretty sure everyone was just as nervous as he. Even though they’d known about mythics for years, most of them had probably never seen one, live and up close. He noticed a few girls shifting nervously on their feet, and realized he was doing the same. He fought to remain still. I’m excited, not nervous, Nick assured himself.

Duchaine began in a gruff but subdued voice. “Despite what crazy old Carnivales would have you believe, or what cranky Mr. Ussane will say, their classes are playgrounds compared to bestiary. This is the most dangerous course in any school in America.” Here he leaned over and pointed at each student in turn. “So when I give you an order or make a suggestion, you’ll want to listen—or you’ll get eaten and killed.” Scratching his chin and looking upwards with a grin, Duchaine added “But then you’ll rid me of your stupidity and that’d be an end of it, so I guess no worries either way.” He clapped once. “Alright, let’s have some fun. Everyone grab a pair of Horus glasses from the box here. You don’t need to wear them until I say, and then you better get them on right quick, or you’ll likely end up enthralled to an efrit.”

“Wow,” Nick heard a boy with a ponytail telling his friend. “He sure knows how to get us psyched, huh?”

Nick followed Bruno in line to grab their glasses before setting off on a small trail into the thick forest. As he walked he inspected the glasses. They looked like a prop for some steampunk flick, the lenses perfectly round and protruding from the frames, the frames themselves comprised of tarnished brass twining about itself. He put them up to his face for a quick look. Despite the opaqueness of the lenses, he could still see through them.

Duchaine’s booming voice seemed to reverberate off the foliage as he explained today’s lesson. “As the rumors have no doubt already flown, I feel no guilt about breaking my promise to the DME in discussing yesterday’s mishap.” While speaking, he led everyone down the much narrower cobblestone path. Even in the darkness of the forest, the stones remained luminescent. Enchanted, no doubt. “Since some of you have already witnessed a glimmerling in action, I thought it only fair for those who missed out on yesterday’s entertainment that we began this semester with a lesson on these mystical critters.”

The warlock stopped beside a twelve-foot square Plexiglas cube and waited for the class of thirty or so students to gather around. Surrounding them like enormous sentries were pine trees, their branches pruned all the way to the trunks to about fifteen feet up, creating a spacious clearing.

When everyone was gathered and peering into the seemingly empty cage (with a few students even donning the glasses), Duchaine said, “Okay, here we are. Now, can anyone tell me what a glimmerling looks like?”

“Sir,” a little blonde with all the amulets poked her hand into the air; the dainty charms on her bracelet jangled. “Glimmerlings don’t look like anything. They are invisible until they animate something.”

“Not exactly,” Duchaine said. “We don’t know precisely what they look like in their home world. But here, while in their incorporeal form, glimmerlings appear as heat waves rippling through the air. As young Lisa pointed out, it is difficult to see them at the best of times, and almost impossible through this inch-thick Plexiglas.”

“Is that cage completely sealed, sir?” someone asked.

“Indeed,” Duchaine boasted, and rocked on his heels. “It is absolutely air tight. Even the slide-through drawer here has its own self-sealing system. Quite ingenious work. Make sure you compliment Shamgar on it when you see him.”

“But how’s it get air to breath?” Lisa asked, concern flavoring her soprano.

“Oh, glimmerlings don’t require oxygen,” Duchaine said. “At least, we don’t think they do. Best whip out Fantastic Beasts and check. Page twenty-seven, I believe.”

Lisa drew her book out while everyone else tittered at her naiveté.

“Now, that little bugger we caught yesterday—” Duchaine winked at Nick “—is floating around in there. How would you all like a demonstration on its animating abilities?”

Everyone cheered. The jocularity swiftly died, however, as if they were all afraid of upsetting some old caged god.

Duchaine said, “Raise your hand if you have something in your pack you won’t mind never getting back. A deck of cards, an old copy of Standard Necromancy and its Applications by Vesper Ussane; even a bag of marbles could be fun—aha. Thank you Charlie.” He caught a deck of used tarot cards from a boy.

“Stand back while I open the drawer,” Duchaine waved aside a few of the braver (or dumber) students as he approached the sliding Plexiglas drawer. With almost laughable care he unlocked the drawer, slid it out, placed the ratty tarot cards inside, and then quickly slid it home. After locking it, Duchaine stepped back.

“Here it comes,” he said. “See that ripple in the air? It’s taking the bait.”

Nick watched, captivated, as the bodiless mythic glimmered through the air, streaming toward the cards. What looked like heat waves dove into the drawer. The cards shifted. All was still for a few silent moments.

“Right now it’s communing with the material of the cards on a quantum level,” Duchaine whispered. “Any second now it’ll gain full possession of the cards and animate them. They’ll—”

The deck exploded, cards bursting into the air. A dozen students backed away from the cage, uttering lame excuses for their shocked reactions. Before the cards could even flutter to the floor of the cage, they began to gather together in midair, assembling into various shapes. At first what looked to be giraffe shivered into being, followed by the semblance of a buffalo pawing the ground, and then a tarot-card satyr posed in the cage.

“Now it’s searching for its desired shape,” Duchaine explained, looking away from the cage for the first time. “Glimmerlings vary greatly in their tastes and natures. Some prefer human shapes, while others reproduce likenesses of what we believe to be oddities from their home dimension. Ah, there it is. It’s decided to imitate a bear, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Actually, it kinda looks like you, Duchaine,” Lisa offered, oblivious to the insinuation.

The warlock tried tugging his vest together; his torso was too large for this, and the glimmerling was imitating his motions, so he gave up with a look of bemused acceptance.

“Sir?” a long haired Shaman girl said. “Before, you said the glimmerling would ‘possess’ the cards. Does that mean what it does is like a ghost or a demon possessing someone?”

Most of the eyes in the crowd turned to Duchaine, but a few pairs remained glued to the tarot card Duchaine-approximation prancing in the cage. “Well, no, not exactly,” the warlock explained. “What a glimmerling does is more akin to what we do when we borrow into the mind of an animal. We don’t take it over and control it with malevolent intent, like a demon would do with a human. It would simply repel our consciousness. But we’ll get into that next time. Excellent question . . . Darlene?”

The long haired girl nodded, brimming with pride.

For the next half hour Duchaine detailed the various attributes of glimmerlings, gesturing at and using the one in the cube as if it was his assistant and he the stage magician. Nick took his notes along with everyone else, jotting down their weaknesses. The best was the apparent inability of the glimmerling to learn from its mistakes. Occasionally it threw itself against the surfaces of the cube, temporarily dismantling itself in vain attempts to escape. It did this every few minutes, apparently forgetting that it had already tried and failed.

“All right everyone,” Duchaine declared. “Put away your books and notepads. I’ve got one final treat for you today.”

While waiting for the students to pack up, Duchaine slipped a stick of gum into his mouth and chewed with relish. When they were ready, he led them on past the cube, eventually turning left onto a four-foot wide version of the yellow-stone path.

Beech and elder trees loomed over the path, sporadic branches reaching so low they forced the taller boys to either duck or risk messing up their carefully coiffed do’s. Sunlight failed to penetrate this dense canopy; antique gas lamps spaced every twenty or so feet provided the only real light in this section of the forest. They cast an eerie slanting sort of glow over the students. Under its dull radiance Nick tried deciphering the sigils embedded in the cobblestones. Most were unfamiliar to him, but he did recognize one repeating sigil.

It was the Eye of Horus, an ancient Egyptian pictograph designed to both protect those who could read it, and to warn them against encroaching danger.

Nick paused beneath one of the gaslights. Holding up his Horus goggles, he squinted, struggling to make out the smudged sigil. A swipe of dust with his thumb revealed it. “Hmm.”

Five minutes later Duchaine called everyone to a halt. With a finger to his lips he shushed the chattering conversations. “We’re about to enter the efrit sanctuary,” Duchaine whispered. “If those of you up front look down, you’ll notice this single long marker stone emblazoned with glyphs. I like to call this the point-of-no-return block. There’s another one a hundred yards down the path. In between these two blocks you must where the Horus goggles at all times. What we’re about to see must never be encountered without the goggles.”

A hushed murmur passed through the class.

“This time of day, they should be sleeping, but they’re still dangerous,” Duchaine explained, donning his own pair of goggles. “Whatever you do, don’t wake ’em up.” He turned to lead the way, but then paused. “If the efrits are awake, keep walking and don’t look directly in their eyes—or at their markings. Okay, let’s have some fun.”

Crossing the marker stone, the warlock led the way. Everyone was careful to fit their goggles snugly in place over their eyes before following him in. Nick and Bruno did the same from their position midway in line, and then trailed the others into the efrit sanctuary.

Somewhere an owl hooted. Perhaps the darkness was mucking up its sense of time.

Nick didn’t notice the cage built of heavy iron bars until he was walking parallel to it. He turned. The iron bars were corroded, tiny layers of orange crud and paint crinkled on the metal. Like camouflage they blended into the surrounding trees, so that the cage looked like a continuation of the forest, the bars like branches growing in oddly parallel rows.

“Whoa, check it out,” Bruno gushed, approaching to within inches of the cage while other students corralled around him. No one else seemed interested in lingering in this place. “You see it? How ugly is that!”

“Ugly is academic,” a smooth voice emanated from the opposite end of the cage.

Bruno recoiled, noticed the second efrit—the one that wasn’t sleeping—and raced away.

Nick’s impulse was to follow Bruno and possibly add some screams and shouts for good measure. But something else was pulling him towards the mythic. He was alone now, the last of the students having fled at the sound of the efrit’s voice. With almost sick fascination, Nick stepped up to the cage and wrapped a hand around the bars, knowing how dumb he was being.

The efrit stood. In the dark its white flesh seemed to radiate, like that glow-in-the-dark bowling ball his dad had bought him last Christmas. As it approached, Nick observed the blue markings delineating its skin. They were similar to Delrisa Morgana’s tribal tats, only far more extensive, and Nick got the feeling the efrit had been born with these markings.

“Hello,” he said stupidly.

“Well met, Nicholas Lovecraft Hammond,” the efrit said. To Nick, listening to the sound of its voice was like biting into a slice of rich chocolate cake. No variation in tone or volume, and no annoying squeak to ruin the effect.

“You know my name,” Nick said. It felt as though he’d stepped into a dream. Everything was moving in slow motion and he and the efrit were the only beings in the world. “Knowing the name of a thing gives you power over it. Can you read minds?”

The efrit, who looked like a man, fat and sleek, was now standing three feet away on the other side of the bars. “I can read the minds of humans, but only while touching them. I know your name because we all know of Nicholas Hammond.” The efrit paused to inhale deeply, sucking at the stale afternoon air. When at last it spoke again, the efrit’s eyes blazed a brilliant blue, brighter even than its markings. “I can smell your brand of magic. You are the one they created, the one not born. The one tainted with his magic.”

Someone was coming. Nick could hear footsteps trotting his way in a hurry. He had time for maybe one question. Which one did he want answered the most?

“You said you know of me,” Nick shoved the words from his mouth. “You mean all the mythics? Every species?”

The efrit nodded before swiftly retreating to its corner. “Come see me again, Nicholas.”

“What are you doing?” Duchaine shook Nick. “Did it talk to you? Did you tell it anything?” He started dragging Nick down the path, away from the cage. Before they met the students on the other side of the opposite marker, Duchaine demanded, “Tell me what you told it.”

“I . . . I didn’t tell it anything,” Nick stammered.

Duchaine shook his head, sighed. Once he’d rushed Nick over the marker stone, Duchaine took the goggles from him. He spent a good minute checking them over. Then he lowered them and consulted his watch. Addressing the class, he said, “That’s all for today. If you’ll follow the path for three dozen paces, it’ll take you to a fork. Turn right at the fork and you’ll be back to the cabin in a jiffy. Study pages twenty-five through twenty-eight in Fantastic Beasts and How to Kill Them. Off you go.”

When they were alone, Duchaine said, “I’m sorry, Nick. I should’ve gone over every pair.”

“Wait,” Nick said. “The goggles were broken?”

Duchaine grunted. “Just cracked a bit. Give that efrit an ‘A’ for effort. If it spoke to you . . . faltering Fates,” he cursed. “I’ve spent the last six weeks setting this place up. Today was my first day on the job. If it turns out a student became enthralled to an efrit and word gets out—”

“I’m fine,” Nick said.

Duchaine set a heavy hand on Nick’s shoulder. “I hope that’s true. If you’re willing, there are a few tests we can perform to make sure you haven’t been enthralled.”

Nick hesitated, wondering if being enthralled included feeling drawn to the efrit. “Okay. Yeah, sure. Um, like what kind of tests?”

“Well, for one you’ll have to stay awake for the next forty-eight hours.”

“What!” Cold panic crept into Nick’s bones as he considered the ramifications of foregoing sleep for the next two days. He’d be totally drained come his Thursday spirit walk with Anaximander. But if he didn’t agree to do as Duchaine said, then the poor warlock could lose his job and Nick might have to leave the Institute for a while to recover. But that was all assuming he had been enthralled by the efrit.

“No problem,” he said at last, forcing himself to smile.