The Magic Goes Away Read online

  THE MAGIC GOES AWAY

  Copyright © 1978 by Larry Niven

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  An ACE Book

  Cover art by Boris

  First Ace printing: October 1978

  Second Ace printing: November 1978

  Printed in U.S.A.

  Table of Contents

  Orolandes

  The Warlock

  Orolandes II

  The Warlock II

  The Skull of Wavyhill

  Fistfall

  The Mountain

  Cloudscapes

  The Nordiks

  The Cavern of the Last God

  The Frost Giants

  The God of Love and Madness

  The Mana Crisis, An Appreciation

  by Sandra Miesel

  The waves washed him ashore aboard a section of the wooden roof from an Atlantean winery. He was half dead, and mad. There was a corpse on the makeshift raft with him, a centaur girl, three days dead of no obvious cause.

  The fisherfolk were awed. They knew the workmanship of the winery roof, and they knew that the stranger must have survived the greatest disaster in human history. Perhaps they considered him a good luck charm.

  He was lucky. The fisherfolk did not steal the golden arm bands he wore. They fed him by hand until he could feed himself. When he grew strong they put him to work. He could not or would not speak, but he could follow orders. He was a big man. When his weight came back he could lift as much as any two fishermen.

  By day he worked like a golem, tirelessly: they had to remember to tell him when to stop. By night he would pull his broken sword from its scabbard—the blade was broken to within two thumbs of the hilt—and turn it in his hands as if studying it.

  He stayed in the bachelors’ longhouse. Women who approached him found him unresponsive. They attributed it to his sickness.

  Four months after his arrival he spoke his first words.

  The boy Hatchap was moving down the line of sleeping bachelors, waking them for the day’s fishing. He found the stranger staring at the ceiling in grief and anguish. “Like magic. Like magic,” he mumbled—in Greek. Suddenly he smiled, for the first time Hatchap could remember. “Magician,” he said.

  That night, after the boats were in, he went to the oldest man in the village and said, “I have to talk to a magician.”

  The old man was patient. He explained that a witch lived in the nearest village, but that this Mirandee had departed months ago. By now she would be meeting colleagues in Prissthil. There would be no competent magician nearer than Prissthil, which was many days’ journey.

  Mad Orolandes nodded as if he understood.

  He was gone the next morning. He had left one of his bracelets in the headman’s house.

  Prissthil and the village called Warlock’s Cave were six hundred miles apart. Once the Warlock would have flown the distance in a single night. Even today, they might have taken riding dragons, intelligent allies…and in one or another region where too much use of magic had leeched mana from the earth, they might have left dragon bones to merge with the rocks. Dragon metabolism was partly magical.

  It annoyed the Warlock to be leaving Warlock’s Cave on muleback; but he and Clubfoot considered this prudent.

  It was worse than they had thought. The mana-rich places they expected to cross by magic, were not there. Three of their mules died in the desert when Clubfoot ran out of the ability to make rain.

  The situation was just this desperate: Clubfoot and the Warlock, two of the most powerful magicians left in the world, came to the conference at Prissthil on foot, leading a pack mule.

  Clubfoot was an American, with red skin and straight black hair and an arched beak of a nose. His ancestors had fled an Asian infestation of vampires, had crossed the sea by magic in the company of a tribe of the wolf people. He limped because of a handicap he might have cured decades ago, except that it would have cost him half his power.

  And the Warlock limped because of his age.

  Limping, they came to the crest of a hill overlooking Prissthil.

  It was late afternoon. Already the tremendous shadow of Mount Valhalla, last home of a quarrelsome pantheon of gods now gone mythical, sprawled eastward across Prissthil. The village had grown since the Warlock had last seen it, one hundred and ten years ago. The newer houses were lower, sturdier…held up not by spells spoken over a cornerstone, but by their own strength.

  “Prissthil was founded on magic,” the Warlock said half to himself.

  Clubfoot heard. “Was it?”

  The Warlock pointed to a dish-shaped depression north of the city wall. “That crater is old, but you can still see the shape of it, can’t you? That’s Fistfall. This village started as a trading center for talismans: fragments of the boulder of starstone that made that crater. The merchants ran out of starstone long ago, but the village keeps growing. Don’t you wonder how?”

  Clubfoot shrugged. “They must be trading something else.”

  “Look, Clubfoot, there are guards under Llon! Llon used to be all the guard Prissthil needed!”

  “What are you talking about? The big stone statue?”

  The Warlock looked at him oddly. “Yes. Yes, the big stone statue.”

  Winds off the desert had etched away the fine details, but the stone statue was still a work of art. Half human, half big gentle guard dog, it squatted on its haunches before the gate, looking endlessly patient. Guards leaned against its forepaws. They straightened and hailed the magicians as they came within shouting distance.

  “Ho, travelers! What would you in Prissthil?”

  Clubfoot cried, “We intend Prissthil’s salvation, and the world’s!”

  “Oh, magicians! Well, you’re welcome.” The head guard grinned. He was a burly, earthy man in armor dented by war. “Though I don’t trust your salvation. What have you come to do for us? Make more starstone?”

  Clubfoot turned huffy. “It was for no trivial purpose that we traveled six hundred miles.”

  “Your pardon, but my grandfather used to fly half around the world to attend a banquet,” said the head guard. “Poor old man. None of his spells worked, there at the end. He kept going over and over the same rejuvenation spell until he died. Wanted to train me for magic too. I had more sense.”

  A grating voice said, “Waaarrl…lock.”

  The blood drained from the head guard’s face. Slowly he turned. The other guard was backing toward the gate.

  The statue’s rough-carved stone face, a dog’s face with a scholar’s thoughtful look, stared down at the magicians. “I know you,” said the rusty, almost subsonic voice. “Waarrllock. You made me.”

  “Llon!” the Warlock cried joyfully. “I thought you must be dead!”

  “Almost. I sleep for years, for tens of years. Sometimes I wake for a few hours. The life goes out of me,” said the statue. “I wish it were not so. How can I do my duty? One day an enemy will slip past me, into the city.”

  “We’ll see if we can do something about that.”

  “I wish you luck.”

  Clubfoot spoke confidently. “The best brains in the world are gathering here. How can we fail?”

  “You’re young,” said Llon.

  They passed on. Behind them the statue froze in place.

  It was luck for Orolandes that Prissthil was no farther. Else he would have died on the way. He made for a place he knew only by name, stopping sometimes to ask directions, or to ask for work a
nd food. He was gaunt again by the time he reached Prissthil.

  He circled a wide, barren dish-shaped depression. It was too circular, too regular; it smacked uneasily of sorcery. There was a great stone statue before the city gate, and guards who straightened as he came up.

  “We have little need for swordsmen here,” one greeted him.

  “I want to talk to a magician,” said Orolandes.

  “You’re in luck.” The guard looked over his shoulder, quickly, nervously; then turned back fast, as if hoping the swordsman wouldn’t notice. “Two magicians came today. But what if they don’t want to talk to you?”

  “I have to talk to a magician,” Orolandes said stubbornly. His hand hung near his sword hilt. He was big, and scarred, and armed. Perhaps he was no longer an obvious madman, but the ghost of some recent horror was plain in his face.

  The guard forebore to push the matter. The stranger was no pauper; his gold arm band was a form of money. “If you’re rude to a magician, you’ll get what you deserve. Welcome to Prissthil. Go on in.”

  The inn the Warlock loved best was gone, replaced by a leather worker’s shop. They sought another.

  At the Inn of the Mating Phoenixes they saw their mule stabled, then moved baggage to their rooms. Clubfoot flopped on the feather mattress. The Warlock dug in a saddlebag. He pulled out spare clothing, then a copper disk with markings around the rim. He moved to set it aside; then, still holding it, he seemed to drift off into reverie.

  Hundreds of years ago, and far east of Prissthil, there had been a proud and powerful magician. He was barely past his brilliant apprenticeship; but he had the temerity to forbid the waging of war throughout the Fertile Crescent, and the power to make it stick. He consistently hired himself out to battle whichever nation he considered the aggressor.

  Oh, his magic had been big and showy in those days! Floating castles, armies destroyed by lightning, phantom cities built and destroyed in a night. In his pride he nicknamed himself Warlock. Had he known that his nickname would become a generic term for magicians, he would not have shown surprise.

  But over the decades his spells stopped working. It happened to all magicians. He moved away, and his power returned, to some extent…then gradually dwindled, until he moved again.

  It happened to nations too. Bound together by its own gods and traditions and laws and trade networks, a nation like Acheron might come to seem as old and stable as the mountains themselves…until treaties sealed by oaths and magic lost their power…until barbarians with swords come swarming over the borders. All knew that it was so. But the Warlock was the first to learn why, via an experiment he performed with an enchanted copper disk.

  If he kept his discovery secret through succeeding decades, his motive was compassion. His terrible truth spelled the end of civilization, yet it was of no earthly use to anyone. Fifty years ago his secret had finally escaped him, for good or evil; it was hard to know which.

  “Never mind that,” said Clubfoot. “Let’s get dinner.”

  The Warlock shook himself. “Shortly,” he said. He set the Wheel aside and reached again into the saddlebag.

  Clubfoot snorted. He gathered up spilled clothing and began hanging it.

  The Warlock set a wooden box on the table. Inside, within soft fox skins, was a human skull. The Warlock handled it carefully. One hinge of its jaw was broken, and there were tooth marks on the jaw and cheekbones and around both earholes.

  Clubfoot said, “I still think we should have contrived to lose that.”

  “I disagree. Now let’s get dinner.”

  The inn was crowded. The dining hall was filled with long wooden tables, too close together, with wooden benches down both sides. The magicians fitted themselves into space on one of the benches. Citizens to either side gradually realized who and what they were and gave them plenty of room.

  “Look at this logically,” Clubfoot said. “You’ve carried Wavyhill’s skull six hundred miles, when we had to throw away baggage we needed more. It’s just a skull. It’s not even in good condition. But if there’s enough local mana to power your spells, and if you work your spells exactly right, you just might be able to bring Wavyhill back to life so he can kill you!”

  The Warlock stopped eating long enough to say, “Even if I revive it, it’s still just a skull. You’ll be all right if you don’t stick your fingers in its mouth.”

  “He’s got every reason to want your life! And mine too, because I’m the one who led you to Shiskabil and Hathzoril. If I hadn’t found the gutted villages, you’d never have tracked him down.”

  “He may not have known that.”

  “I’d rather he did. Hellspawn! He’s branded my memory. I’ll never forget Shiskabil. Dead empty, and dried blood everywhere, as if it had rained blood. We may never know how many villages he gutted that way.”

  “I’m going to revive him tonight. Want to help?”

  Clubfoot gnawed at the rich dark meat on an antelope’s thighbone. Presently he said, “Would I let you try it alone?”

  The Warlock smiled. Clubfoot was near fifty; he thought himself experienced in magic. At five times his age the Warlock might have laughed at Clubfoot’s solicitude. But the Warlock wasn’t stupid. He knew that most of his dangerously won knowledge was obsolete.

  The mana had been richer, magic had been both easier and more dangerous, when the Warlock was raising his floating castles. Clubfoot was probably more in tune with the real world. So the Warlock only smiled and began moving his fingers in an intricate pattern.

  Primary colors streamed up from between the Warlock’s fingers, roiled and expanded beneath the beamed roof. Heads turned at the other tables. The clattering of table knives stopped. Then came sounds of delight and appreciative fingersnapping, for a spell the Warlock had last used to blind an enemy army.

  Now a lean, scarred swordsman watched the Warlock with haunted eyes. The Warlock did not notice. As he left the dining hall he took with him a bunch of big purple grapes.

  The Warlock could remember a time when murder was very dangerous; when the mystical backlash from a careless killing could reverberate for generations. But that was long ago.

  The magician nicknamed Wavyhill—as all magicians carried nicknames, being wary of having their true names used against them—had learned his trade in an age when all spells were less powerful. There was still strong mana in murder, but Wavyhill had learned to control it. He had based a slave industry on the zombies of murder victims, and sold the zombies as servants, then set them to killing their masters to make more zombies…

  He had also used magic to make himself unkillable. For these past twenty years he must have been regretting that terribly.

  Wavyhill’s skull sat grinning on the table. Clubfoot regarded it uneasily. “It may be we’ve had too much wine to try this sort of thing tonight.”

  “Would you rather try it tomorrow, before dawn, with hangovers? Because I want Wavyhill with me when we meet Mirandee and Piranther.”

  “All right, go ahead.” Clubfoot bolted the door, then worked spells against magical intrusion. Reviving a murderous dead man was chancy enough without risk of some outsider interfering—and there were amateur magicians everywhere in Prissthil. Magic was an old tradition here, dating from a time when starstone was plentiful.

  The Warlock sang as he worked. He was an old man, tall and lean, his head bald as an egg, his voice thin and reedy. But he could hold a tune. The words he sang belonged to a language no longer used except by members of the Sorcerers’ Guild.

  He knotted a loop of thin leather thong to mend the broken jaw hinge. Other strips of thong went along the cheekbones, the jaw hinges, the ears. Many overlapped. When he finished they formed a crude diagram of the muscles of a human face.

  The Warlock stepped back, considering. He cut up a sheet of felt and glued two round pads behind the ear holes. A longer strip went inside the jaws, the back end glued to the table between the jaw hinges.

  He looked at Clubfoot, who had been
watching intently. Clubfoot said, “Eyes?”

  “Maybe later.” The Warlock said in the old language, “Kranthkorpool, speak to me.”

  The skull opened its jaws wide and screamed.

  Clubfoot and the Warlock covered their ears. It didn’t help. The skull’s voice was not troubling the air, and it did not reach the ears. At least it would not bother the other guests.

  “He’s insane! Shut him off!” Clubfoot cried.

  “Not yet!”

  The skull screamed its agony. Minutes passed before it paused as if drawing breath. Into the pause the Warlock shouted, “Kranthkorpool, stop! It’s over! It’s been over for twenty years!”

  The skull gaped. It said, “Twenty years?”

  “It took me almost that long to find your true name, Kranthkorpool.”

  “Call me Wavyhill. Who are you? I can’t see.”

  “Just a minute.” The Warlock plucked two of what was left of the grapes. He picked up the skull and inserted them into the eye sockets from inside. He inked in two black dots where they showed through the sockets.

  “Ah,” said the skull. The black dots moved, focused. They studied Clubfoot, then moved on. “Warlock?”

  The Warlock nodded.

  “I thought I’d killed you. You were two hundred years old when I cancelled your longevity spells.”

  “I was able to renew them. Partly. I give you a technical victory, Wavyhill. It was my ally who defeated you.”

  “Technical victory!” There was hysteria in the skull’s falsetto laughter. “That werewolf rug merchant kept tearing and tearing at me! It went on forever and ever, and I couldn’t die! I couldn’t die!”

  “It’s over.”

  “I thought it wouldn’t ever be over. It went on and on, a piece of me gone every time he got close enough—”

  The skull stopped, seemed to consider. Its expression was unreadable, of course. “I don’t hurt. In fact, I can’t feel much of anything. There was a long time when I couldn’t feel or see or hear or smell or…Did you say twenty years? Warlock, what do I look like?”