I laughed and folded it up. At this rate, soon I wouldn’t be able to think of myself as a city boy any longer.
I had only a rather vague idea of how newspapers were produced, except that the presses which covered piles of newsprint with black ink were powered by wizardry. But I hadn’t thought before how localized newspapers were, all produced in the City, by wizards trained in the school, carrying ads for the City emporia or sometimes ads sent in from distant kingdoms, like Yurt, that were aimed at people in the City, like young wizards. I opened the paper again, and saw that on the inner pages there was some news of political events in some of the western kingdoms, but for the most part the paper was devoted exclusively to topics that would interest people of the City. When I stopped at a stall to buy a bun topped with spices and melting cheese, I held the newspaper under my chin to catch the drips before they reached my clothes.
If I belonged anywhere, I thought, I now belonged to Yurt, not the City. Both my parents had died when I was very young, and the grandmother who had brought me up and operated their wholesale warehouse for a few more years had died my fifth year in the wizards’ school. I had made some good friends at the school, but now that we were scattered over the western kingdoms we would not see each other very frequently, and probably not in the City at all.
Even if I wasn’t a city boy anymore, I was exhilarated to be back in busy streets, where people on foot and horseback jostled with carts and booths. Competing music rose from every corner. I tossed coins to the best musicians, or at least the ones I enjoyed the most. As the afternoon dimmed toward evening, lamps were hung above the shop doors, and the shadows danced over faces that in many cases now were painted and decorated. Men, and a few women, with glasses in their hands spilled out of tavern doors. Although this was a small city, we were certainly not the only ones to have come to the carnival from far away. This, I thought, compared favorably to the harvest carnival in the City itself.
The relief after a long summer’s worry and the work of harvest, of knowing food was stored away for the next year, made people giddy. Or at least I could imagine myself saying that to Joachim, to show him I often thought deeply about human nature, not just magic. On consideration, it didn’t appear as deep or unusual a conclusion as I hoped. For that matter, the chaplain wasn’t spending the carnival being giddy; he was doubtless at this moment describing the purity of his heart to the bishop.
But I was enjoying myself. I tried all the different kinds of food being served, from sausages to sweet hot pastries. I stopped briefly at a tavern, though the air inside was so thick and hot that I moved back out to the street after a single glass of wine. I admired and tossed coins to a girl doing a fairly provocative dance. I was startled and had to leap back against a wall as six people collectively wearing a dragon costume came running around the corner. For one horrible moment, I was afraid it actually was a dragon.
They certainly made a spectacular dragon. Seeing they had startled me, they paused in their progress and did a dance for my benefit and that of several people near me. The dragon’s fringed ears whirled around its head, its twelve legs stamped and weaved, and its eyes glowed red, not, as I realized in a moment, from fire but from magic.
I threw down a few coins, and a hand emerged from beneath the dragon’s chest to scoop them up before the dragon continued down the street, roaring convincingly. I felt somehow inadequate. My great triumph at Yurt so far had been making lamps for the chapel stair, and yet a group of people in a dragon costume, who most probably had access to nothing as exalted as a Royal Wizard, were apparently able to make glowing dragon eyes without difficulty.
My steps took me back to the square in front of the cathedral. Since I had been there an hour before, the scene had changed. With the coming of evening, the merchants selling leather and bolts of cloth and the farmers selling loads of vegetables were all gone. The musicians and dancers were however thicker, and at least half the people in the square were wearing some kind of costume. I saw no priests, even though we were next to the church; I guessed they stayed well inside during carnival.
And then I saw the most startling thing I had seen all day. Floating toward me, just over the heads of the crowd, was a glowing red bubble. As it came closer, I could see into it, and there, looking right back at me, was a grinning demon.
I was too struck with panic to think and therefore reacted out of instinct. I said the two words of the Hidden Language that would break an illusion, and the red bubble and the demon with it dissolved first into red dust and then into nothing.
And then I saw the magician. He was wearing a long, flowing robe, covered with every symbol imaginable, from the zodiac to a crucifix to a gleaming sun. On his head was a tall, pointed hat, and in his hand a heavy oak staff.
“What did you do that for?” he demanded. “Those take a long time to make, you know!”
I recognized him at once, not him personally, because I had never seen him before, but as a type. He was a magician, the sort of fellow who might have, in the youth of Yurt’s old wizard, picked up a little magic in an abortive apprenticeship. Nowadays he most likely had studied for a year or two at the wizards’ school. He was appreciably older than I; he would have left there before I arrived.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know they’re hard to make. But it was so convincing you scared me.”
He smiled at that, a slightly gap-toothed grin over a scraggly beard in which the grey was real. “Not bad to be able to scare a real wizard,” he said with a chuckle.
He would have known of course that I was a wizard. I had tried to explain once to the manager in the emporium how wizards can always recognize each other. He had thought it was some magic impress put on us at the same time we received our diplomas, but I had argued that that couldn’t be the case, as many young wizards appeared to be wizards long before the eight years were up, and old wizards who had never gone to the school were always recognizable.
“Shall I help you make a replacement?” I said to the magician, then realized it was tactless as soon as I said it. I had been spending too much time with the chaplain.
The grin disappeared. “This is my corner. If you want to do some illusions of your own, go somewhere else, but don’t interfere with my business.”
I stepped back without saying anything, watching as he set to work on a new magic bubble. This one he made green, and instead of a demon he put a dragon inside. He was good, I had to admit. In a few moments he had it finished and launched it into the air. A crowd started to gather, and several people tossed him coins, which he snatched up while continuing to concentrate on the next bubble.
“Did you make the eyes for those people in the dragon costume?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said with a quick glance in my direction, as though doubting my motives for asking.
“I just wanted to say that they’re excellent dragon eyes.”
“Well, thanks for your exalted opinion.”
I wandered off through the crowd without saying anything more. I should have known better that to risk appearing to be condescending. Wizards fight all the time with each anyway, and it’s even worse with magicians, who are constantly imagining an insult or a joke at their expense.
I was walking more or less in the direction of the castle when I was surprised but highly pleased to see two familiar forms coming toward me, the king and queen. I was delighted not to be a carnival magician. There was nothing I could imagine better than being the Royal Wizard of Yurt. I would have to ask the chaplain to teach me a proper prayer of gratitude.
The king seemed rested from the journey and was looking around with enjoyment, while the queen’s emerald eyes sparkled with excitement. “I’m sorry I haven’t been to the harvest carnival for a few years,” the king said as we met. “It’s even more fun than I remembered. The king of this kingdom never comes, preferring to go to the big carnival at the City by the sea, but I think he’s missing something. You must have seen them both-what do you think?”