Bob the Mage, ch. 7.

[Author's note: Fiction Friday! once again, with chapter seventh of our novel, Bob the Mage, which I wrote some years ago and freshened up for your edification. When last we saw Bob, our fantasy adventure hero, in chapter 6 (and before that chapter 5, chapter 4, chapter 3, chapter 2, and even chapter 1), he had his love, Princess Suzy, had escaped from the pirate-hunting ship in a small landing craft that probably would mean certain death. Next thing they knew a storm had whipped up out of no where, meaning definite certain death. A wave smashed their little boat, and Bob was cast into the sea....]

Bob the Mage

By Frederick Key

Chapter 7

I clutched the little chunk of wood so hard my fingers just about got embedded in it. When they tried to take it from me, I screamed, “I’ll drown! I’ll drown!”

“But you’re on land!” someone said.

“I’ll drown!”

“You’re on land!”

We went back and forth like this for a while until my brain finally engaged and I said, “I’m on land.”

“Gads, he’s brilliant,” someone said.

By clinging to a piece of the boat and getting awfully lucky, I had not drowned but had washed up on a beach. After a minute or so of kissing the sand, I let go of the wood and looked around for Suzy. I did not see her, but I did see my partners in dialogue.

They were both men, but there the resemblance ended. One was a gnarled, wizened little human, with a white mottled beard that looked as if it had been trimmed with a battle ax. The other was a beardless mountain of muscle, about my age, with skin the color of cedar, a slaughterhouse face, and a battle ax.

“Where am I?” I asked the wizened guy, who appeared to be the brains of the outfit.

“Astercam Island,” he said. “You’re stranded on a desert island, son.”

“Thought as much.”

“Help him up, Bourbon.”

Bourbon the barbarian pulled me to my feet with his pinkie.

“My name is Astercam,” said the old man. “This is my friend, Bourbon. We’re on one of the Broken Teeth Islands. I was here first, so I named it for myself. He may be thinking of it as Bourbon Island. I’m not sure; he doesn’t understand more than a smattering of the common lingo, just a few key phrases in our tongue. I’ve been trying to learn his language, but it’s kind of disheartening because he’s a jerk, really.”

Bourbon growled.

“I think that was one of the key phrases,” I said.

“When we found you he made it clear that he wanted to throw you back like a bad fish, because we have little food and freshwater as it is, but when I heard you screaming in my language I got him to calm down. I explained that we can always throw you back later. But I haven’t had any conversation or news in ages. So, what’s new? How’s it going?”

“Um, all right,” I said. I edged backward a step. The little guy didn’t look crazy but you never know. I said, “Our little boat was smashed by a huge wave and here I am. You didn’t by chance see an attractive young lady wash up here, did you?”

“If we had, I’d wager Bourbon would be chasing her around the island now, unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless he caught her.”

For a moment I was glad Suzy was not here with us. Then I realized that she’d at least be alive if she were, rather than being fish food as she probably was.

I gazed out to sea. It was just after dawn, and the sea was calm and the sky clear. The storm was gone like it had never been.

I felt hollowed out. A woman I loved actually said she loved me—despite what I must have smelled like after days in the brig—and now she was dead. Simon the Unsteady always taught me that no matter what blows we get in life, we have to take ’em on the chin. Wise old Simon. Too bad I have a glass jaw.

Astercam, who’d probably never seen a grown man crumple into a sobbing ball like that, took pity on me and led me to a small grove, where he made me drink some water and have some fruit.

“I wish I was dead,” I wailed.

“Now, now, friend, we’ll all get there eventually, no point in hurrying it,” said Astercam. “Here’s a nice orange. Eat.”

I ate.

“You’re supposed to peel it first,” he said.

“I wish your friend there would chop off my head and end it,” I said, spitting out orange peel.

“Don’t give him ideas.”

Eventually I calmed down. Astercam asked Bourbon with odd words and gestures to check around the little island for any sign of Suzy, first extracting a vow that he would not touch her but report back first. While he was gone, Astercam asked me how she and I had come to be out in a small boat on the high sea, and I started at the beginning. He listened with wide eyes and, I guess, wide ears.

“Quite a tale,” he said when I finished. “The Gallstone of the Gods. Huh. The ancients always wondered if that one was really useful. The Elves called it the Little Rock of Nothing. I guess your friends in Tegora will find out.”

“What about you? How did you and Bourbon wind up here?”

Astercam told me first about Bourbon, who had washed up a couple of months ago after being thrown off his longship for some obscure crime. “Bad table manners, perhaps,” said Astercam. “But he’s been good to me, perhaps because I have nothing worth taking.” They had planned to build a boat to escape the island, but hadn’t got past the planning stages.

“In two months?” I asked.

“The blueprints are nearly complete.”

“You’re talking about a raft here.”

“Did I mention that I used to be in government work?”

“Say no more.”

“And now I’ll have to revise to plan to accommodate you, so the gods only know when I’ll be done.”

I sighed. “Good thing I like fruit,” I said. “So how did you wind up on this particular Broken Tooth island?”

“Well.” He leaned back against a tree and put his hands behind his head. “Have you ever been to the city of Grauphalinks?”

“Never heard of it.”

“My hometown out west.”

“That explains your accent.”

“That, and my adenoids.”

It turned out he was once a great scholar in that kingdom. He rose through the cutthroat ranks of academia to become special adviser to Queen M’huggla in all matters of learning. Then he published a treatise on geology, explaining that the world was not a cube, as the Grauphalinksians generally believed, but actually a globe. Astercam was fired, his books were burned, and his enemies plotted to get him burned too. Well, you don’t get to be a special adviser without learning a few tricks, and he escaped the kingdom with a few books and a sack of gems and precious metal from the royal petty cash fund. He took to traveling, and saw many parts of the world—“And it was round, just like I said! Idiots!”—but he was getting old and wanted to settle down with “three squares a day, lots of time for writing, and some young thing to keep me warm at night, heh heh.” He accomplished the first two, in a small hamlet named Snyrrg, a couple of years back.

“Snyrgg? That’s where I’m from originally!” I said. “But I left there almost a decade ago.”

“Not surprising. The food’s terrible. Anyway, one day I was writing at my desk, when a small red imp popped out of my inkwell.”

The imp, which he said was about as big as my index finger, had little horns and a pointed tail, as imps generally do. “He asked about my C.V. I gave him the outline and he seemed satisfied. Asked if I’d like to work for a forward-thinking, progressive-minded outfit with a modern headquarters, great benefits, high pay, and a lobby full of plants. I said sure.”

The imp handed him a ticket and vanished. Astercam’s first misgivings came when he saw the name of the destination: Big Evil Island.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“I only knew of one being on that fabled island,” said Astercam. “The darkest, cruelest human being to ever acquire the powers of a demigod. The most ruthless mage in all the world, so evil he’d sacrifice his own mother to the god of mother-consumption for an improved transformation spell. Nasty character, see? But, like all your really bad bad guys, he tempted me in a moment of weakness, when I was tired of globetrotting, eating lousy Snyrgg food, and sleeping alone.”

“And at your age, too.”

“Never you mind. Anyway, of course I should have burned the ticket, but I didn’t think it would matter much if for once one little old guy, an old guy whose career had been ruined by the jealous and the stupid, could finally get a little bit of his own back from a dry and unrewarding world. After all, I told myself, this wicked mage is going to keep doing what he’s doing whether I join him or not, and I’ll just be a little cog in a machine, hardly making any difference to the whole operation. And so I went.”

“Who is this mage, anyway?”

“They call him… no, no, Bob, I dare not say the name that so strikes me with terror! I shall not!”

“Aw, come on.”

“Very well. They call him… they call him…”

“Yes?”

“They call him… Morwor Mordrun Mormor!”

He paused, looking at me with wild eyes, like he’d expected some minor-key music to play or something.

“Run that by me again, chief?”

“I said… Morwor Mordrun Mormor!”

Nope, no music.

“I’d be scared to say that name too. It’s silly.”

“Mock not! I caution you, friend Bob, that—”

“What’d you call me?”

“Friend Bob.”

“Why does the word ‘friend’ become a title just before someone tells you something horrible?”

Astercam chuckled, told me to shut up, and continued his tale.

As bidden, Astercam found a ship willing to honor his ticket and arrived at the plant-filled vestibule of the foreboding Castle Terror on Big Evil Island. He was sent to the library, where further instructions awaited.

“So many books! It was a scholar’s dream. I was allowed to do my own research as well as whatever my new master demanded, and I saw myself becoming the most learned man in the world. So full of joy I was—at first.”

Astercam worked diligently for several months, never meeting his employer, fired up by the old thrill of learning. He received instructions through impish underlings. Slowly, though, he realized that the nature of Mormor’s research was darker than he could tolerate. Astercam prepared projects on biology (how to hurt people), physics (how to hurt people with machines), chemistry (how to hurt people with formulae), and meteorology and geology (how to use nature to hurt large numbers of people together). It was as though Mormor, who had mastered magic for misery, now sought to use science the same way.

“It was fascinating work,” said Astercam, “and I was well-fed and safe, but I could not face myself in the looking glass. The darkness in the soul of that place was creeping into my own, and I had to leave. I respectfully turned in a resignation letter to an imp and packed up.”

“Just like that? Big Mr. Evil just let you go?”

“Hardly. I sailed from the island in a skiff, manned by several Purgor sailors I had engaged for that purpose, but suddenly a storm whipped up out of nowhere. I had heard Mormor could summon such things, but to see it happening and know it was coming for me—well, even my teeth went limp with fright. And sure enough, sheets of rain and giant waves and thunderbolts smashed our little boat, and everyone perished but me.

“I was washed ashore here, as were you. As I lay weak and battered, spewing salt water on the sand, I heard a harsh and raspy voice over me say, ‘Stay here and study, old fool! And know that your disloyalty has caused the death of innocent sailors on your vessel!’ The sky fairly shook with his laughter, and then I was alone.” Astercam sighed heavily. “That was two years ago, and here I remain. I never thought I should see a human face again, until Bourbon the Barbarian arrived, and I’m not so sure about his.”

“Well… I’m sorry, old-timer.”

Astercam shook his head. “It might have gone much worse for me. Mormor did this because he thought it would be funny, I expect. If he had really been mad he would have simply annihilated me, or locked me in his dungeons. I’ve heard rumors that that is where Mormor performs… experiments.”

“Ooookay! Well, never mind about that.”

“Mind you, Bob, there have been times when I have been so lonely and frustrated and hopeless that I contemplated suicide.”

“I’m leaning that way myself at the moment. How do you overcome it?”

“The academic’s curse. Indecision. Should I or should I not? If not, how do I face another day? If so, how? And what have I learned that might foretell what awaits on the other side? So I get all worked up, do nothing, and the days pass.”

Bourbon came crashing through the vegetation then. We looked at him in askance and he shook his head. I sighed hard enough to rattle my ribs.

We sat in silence for a time, eating fruit and some dried fish and thinking. Finally, I said, “Astercam, I’m confused. The suddenness of the storm that wrecked my boat seemed like a work of magic to me, and I wonder why your former employer would bother with it. But it looks like he killed Suzy, and I know he almost killed me. So now, what should I do? Go back to civilization, where I am wanted for crimes I didn’t commit? Walk into the ocean and let the waves finish what Mormor started? But you and Bourbon have been kind to me today, and I do wish to repay you. I want to help you build your boat, with whatever skills and sinew and small magic I have. But I ask you to promise me one thing.”

“Yes?”

“That you will approach the task less like a civil servant and more like a professor looking for tenure.”

Astercam scratched his beard and said, “Very well, if I must.”

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[Can Bob escape Astercam Island (or Bourbon Island) with his new friends? Is Suzy really dead? Will Bob learn how to eat tropical fruit? Return next Friday for the amazing answers!]