The Oathbound Wizard

"Not even that, if what you say about their worldview is true!"

"Oh, the idea of cause-and-effect is implicit in the Judaeo-Christian attitude toward history. It's beginning to assert itself—but at the moment, it's only aborning. "

"Yet what else can there be?" the Demon cried. "When you eliminate causality, what's left?"

"Coincidence," Matt answered. "One event doesn't cause another—they just happen at the same time, more or less. The clouds are there, and so is the lightning and thunder. They go together, but they don't cause each other."

Puck raised an eyebrow. "At last, some sense!"

"Sense?!" the Demon bleated, but Sir Guy nodded. "Even so. If two armies come, there will be a battle. He who is more right, will win."

"Blasphemy!" the Demon keened. "If men think thus, there will never be peace!"

"Well, even in my world people aren't very good at seeing their own behavior in terms of cause and effect," Matt demurred.

"What fools these mortals be." Puck grinned. "Thy race is excellent, mortal—your lives are the very stuff of comedy!"

"We are such things as vaudeville was made of, huh? So you see, Max, even with the best medieval education available—which I'm sure Sir Guy has had; he knows how to read—he can't understand our physics as anything but a metaphor."

"How can physics be a metaphor?"

"Well, the Church thought that the sun revolving around the earth was proof that human life was the most important part of creation—after all, we were made in God's image. And they thought that building tall towers had to be a sign of arrogance, because God lived above the sky. They didn't quite realize that an apple falling to earth was like the human soul wishing to be closer to God—but they would have loved it."

"What nonsense! What has this to do with physics?"

Matt sighed. "Think of it as analogies. They see the world as being suspended between Heaven and Hell, and everything surrounding the earth was made solely for its benefit, because it's the most important part of creation."

"What nonsense! When you are only a small planet, far out on the tip of one arm of a quite ordinary galaxy? Wherefore should your world be more important than any other?"

Now it was Sir Guy who muttered, "Blasphemy!"

"Because human beings live on it," Matt said simply.

"How primitive a notion!"

"I told you we have a long way to go. So to them, see, the world is an analogue of the Church, because it's the most important part of society..."

"By whose reckoning?"

"The scholars."

"And whence come these "scholars'?"

"From the Church. And the sun is analogous to the king, because it controls the seasons."

Max hummed without words for a minute, then said, "The knight would thus understand entropy only as analogous to a lack of government."

"You've got it!"

"But then all my works, to him, would be..."

"Incomprehensible." Matt nodded. "Fortunately, European culture has a mental structure for dealing with things it doesn't understand—it calls them magic, and lets it go at that."

"Then they shall never approach true understanding of their world!"

"No," Puck said, "but they may understand one another—as well as human folk can be understood."

Matt threw up his hands. "What can I say? Chaucer understood people as well as anyone did, before we discovered biochemistry and neurology."

"Faugh!" Puck made a face. "These are but words. One might as well speak of the elf shot and the mad."

"See what I mean?"

"Aye, and 'tis unbearable! Wizard, you cannot leave me shackled to one whose skull holds such a vacuum!"

Sir Guy's scowl turned dangerous. "What is a `vacuum'?"

"Something for making things pure—or cleaner, anyway," Matt improvised.—"I know how you feel, Max—I'm currently dogged with a companion who rubs me the wrong way, too."

"Be rid of him, then!"

Puck grinned. "Let him try!"

"See what I mean?" Matt sighed "You don't suppose you could counteract him, do you?"

"This sprite?" Max hummed, drifting closer to Puck.

The elf scowled. "Do not even consider..."

His voice ran down the scale, and his movements slowed. His features began working themselves toward an expression of alarm, and one hand began to move in a strange, but very slow, gesture.

"No, Max!" Matt cried. "I didn't mean..."

"Leave the elf be!" Sir Guy loosened his broadsword in its scabbard.

But Puck's hand had completed the gesture, and suddenly an icicle appeared in the air—a glowing icicle, with the Demon trapped inside it.

Or maybe not trapped—the ice immediately began to melt. Puck's voice soared upscale, finishing the phrase. "...any spell against me! Nay, since you have, deal with this!" He pointed at the ice-coated spark with fingers stiffened into a sort of cylinder, and a jet of darkness sped from his hand to enfold the Demon, shrouding him in a small sphere of night so total as to be absolute.

Light flared within it, banishing the darkness, and the Demon sang, "Know that I have power over entropy, foolish elf! Do you dare beard me in my own realm?"

"Foolish indeed," Puck admitted, rolling one hand around another and tossing something invisible at the Demon. He suddenly grew a white beard, shooting down from the spark, longer and longer.

"What do you do?" Max screeched, just before he took off like a rocket.

Puck met Matt's accusing glare with a shrug. "Make him a bearded star, and Nature will hurl him back to the firmament, where he belongs."

The "bearded star" turned into a falling star, and the miniature meteorite spat, "As a comet resembles a meteor, foolish spirit, so can I return unto you! But know that, in embodying entropy, I am also the Spirit of Perversity!" And Puck suddenly grew long ears, his nose stretched out and thickened, and he stood before them wearing a miniature ass's head. He brayed in alarm.

"There will be no ending to this," Sir Guy confided to Matt, "unless we provide it."

Matt nodded. "Let's sort this out the way it should be."

"Aye," Sir Guy said. "Do you take the Demon in hand, whiles I speak with the elf."

One step ahead of Puck's gesture, Matt chanted,

"See as thou wast wont to see,
Be as thou wast wont to be!"

Puck's head suddenly reverted to normal—with a look of fury. "I asked not for aid, Wizard!"

"You have abetted mine enemy!" the spark keened. "Are you a traitor?"

"No, and he's not your enemy." Matt cupped a hand around the spark and, as he turned away, noticed that Sir Guy was doing some pretty fast talking with Puck. "We're both fighting the evil king, after all—"

" 'Tis no contest of mine!"

"Okay, then—you're free. I can't ask you to fight in a cause you don't believe in."

"Ask?" The spark hopped in astonishment. "But the Black Knight—"

"Fully relinquishes any claim he might have upon you," Matt said firmly. "You're free to go back to the void if you want to."

"But how boring! Wizard, imagine eternity with no tasks to accomplish, none save to supervise the smooth, even progress of entropy!"