A Life Less Ordinary (2 page)

I thought about it. “Be careful what you choose,” Revels added. “The name you choose is going to have its own effect on you.”

“My friends used to call me Dizzy,” I said. It felt right, somehow. “Will that do?”

Revels gave me a very vague look. “The choice, my dear, is yours,” he said, affecting a bored tone. “If it feels good, use it; if not, choose a different one.”

I cleared my throat. “And now we’re on assumed names terms,” I said, “just what is going on?”

Revels smiled. “It is really quite simple,” he said. “You have a gift, just like me and a handful of other people around the world, the gift of magic. Welcome to the magical world.”

I stared at him. Somehow, it was impossible to disbelieve him. “Are you saying that there’s a magical world out there, like Harry...”

“Don’t get me started on those books,” Revels interrupted, annoyed. “It doesn’t work anything like that.”

I wanted to ask more questions, but somehow I refrained. “Those of us who have real magic tend to stay out of sight,” Revels continued, taking my silence for an invitation to continue. Most of the world is simply unable to see magic or anything touched by magic, such as Fiona there.” He waved a hand at the dragon, still perched on my shoulder. “A horde of dragons could fly over Edinburgh and all the mundane population of the world would see would be dark clouds covering the sky. Everyone is so busy looking for humdrum explanations for everything that they miss the magic.”

He grinned up at me, his eyes glittering with light. “But you saw the magic,” he said. He waved a hand through the air and a rainbow appeared out of nowhere, shimmering in the air before it faded away into nothingness. “Welcome to the world.”

I felt strange, almost...dizzy. I had never felt as if I really belonged anywhere, but now, sitting with this strange older man and his pet dragon, I felt as if I were home. We relaxed together, sipping our tea, and somehow it felt perfect. The dragon flew off my shoulder and somewhere into the distance, suddenly calling my attention to the fact that the room was impossibly big. How could anyone have shaved out so much space in Edinburgh? The room seemed to be larger than the castle itself.

“So,” I said, tearing my eyes away from the piles of items on the floor. Some looked like junk still; others looked as if they were interesting and perhaps even valuable. “What do we do now?”

Revels grinned at me, removing his hat and reaching inside. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to see his arm go so far in, right up to the shoulder. He reached around inside the hat and eventually pulled out a smaller hat, which opened up at his touch. It was another black top hat. He passed it to me and started digging around again, producing a silver ring and a tiny knife made out of crystal. Could it be diamond? I took them in some bemusement, feeling a tingle running down my spine as I touched the ring.

“Does this mean we’re engaged now?”

He didn’t smile at my weak sally. “There are no coincidences in the world of magic,” he said, seriously. “I need a new apprentice; you need a master to train you in the art of magic. I think that we were intended to meet and become acquainted.” His voice darkened. “Will you do me the honour of becoming my apprentice?”

I stared down at the ring, feeling it tingling. The knife didn’t feel so...magical, yet there was a curious deadness around it, something that felt weird to my touch. The top hat fitted perfectly. Why, I wondered, was I not surprised?

“I don’t know,” I admitted, finally. “What happens if I say no?”

Revels looked surprised, but answered the question. “You walk out of that door and never see me again,” he said. “Your magic may fade away without proper direction, or you may grow and develop on your own, or you may find yourself a victim of...darker magicians. Later, once you develop your powers, you may decide to leave me and strike out alone.”

He smiled at my expression. “Go take a look at yourself in the mirror over there,” he said, pointing to a mirror that was large enough to show my entire body. “You might be pleasantly surprised.”

I did as I was bid and looked into the mirror. I saw myself; tall, brown-haired, with pale skin and dark brown eyes. My breasts were smaller than I would have preferred – my second boyfriend had seriously proposed a boob job, which I couldn’t have paid for without his help – but on the whole I was rather pleased with my appearance. An observer would hardly guess that I spent six days out of seven slaving for one of those soulless corporations raping the planet, pretending to smile at a boss who made normal assholes seem bland by comparison. My shirt and skirt were worn to make me seem carefree...

My appearance changed, suddenly. I saw myself naked and yelped aloud, looking down to check that I was still wearing clothes. When I looked up again, I saw myself wearing the same suit and top hat that Revels was wearing, which rapidly shifted to a traditional witch’s outfit, complete with broom and bubbling cauldron. My appearance shifted again and again, some interesting, some absurd and some downright slutty. I looked away from the mirror and back towards him. He was smiling, clearly in no doubt as to what I would choose.

And he was right. I had wasted my life in the mundane world. I didn’t have a hope of finding a proper job, not one that would allow me to grow and develop into someone important. Perhaps, as a magician, I could be something remarkable; even if there were dangers, surely it was worthwhile. I touched the top hat and smiled at the feel of the felt against my fingertips. Even if there was a price to be paid, I would gladly pay it, just for the chance to be something else. If I was being honest with myself, I hated my life.

“As my apprentice, I will teach you how to master the powers you have,” Revels said, answering my unspoken question. “In exchange, you will help me carry out the more complex spells and do other duties for me. Cooking and cleaning, mainly; I just don’t have the time and aptitude to actually do the work and wasting magic on cleaning is a bad idea. And, as my lovely assistant, you will get a share in the proceeds from every show.”

I didn’t understand until a few days later just what he had meant. Most of the magical community, those who weren’t powerful enough to maintain a permanent separation from the mundane world, tended to hide in plain sight. They were stage magicians, performing their arts in public, showing the general public real magic and getting paid for it. The mundane world never truly realised that they were seeing actual magic, for they all
knew
that magic didn’t exist. The next time you go watch a stage magician at work, wonder how the trick is really done. You might be looking at a real magician.

“That sounds wonderful,” I said, sincerely. “What should I tell my employer?”

“You don’t have to tell them anything,” Revels assured me. “If you agree to learn from me, I will see to it that no one questions your absence. Your employer will take on a new person without ever quite knowing what has happened to you. Your flatmates will find someone else to take your place.” I shrugged. I’d been sleeping on the sofa for the last couple of months, an uncomfortable position at the best of times. “You will just blur out of the mundane world, part of it yet never truly involved.”

The dragon flew back towards me and landed neatly on my shoulder. I reached up absently and stroked the back of her neck, almost as one would stroke a cat. The dragon hummed and pushed closer to me, a long snake-like tongue flickering out to lick at my ear. I didn’t flinch. Somehow, I was sure that the dragon wouldn’t harm me. In fact, I was sure that it was more intelligent than it seemed.

Revels smiled at my expression. “It’s your choice,” he said, gently. He wasn’t trying to pressure me into anything. “A life of magic, of wonders and terrors you can barely begin to imagine, or a return to the mundane world of boredom, where you were sleepwalking through life. What do you choose?”

“I accept,” I said, holding out my hand. He took it in a surprisingly gentle grip and shook it firmly. “This looks like the start of a beautiful friendship.”

Chapter Two

I’d had the idea that I’d be learning magic from dawn till dusk. How wrong I was.

“You know, you could help with this,” I grumbled to Fiona. The tiny dragon was perched, parrot-like, on top of a massive pile of books. “How am I meant to sort all of them out by myself?”

“You start at the beginning and go on to the end, where you stop,” Fiona said. One red eye winked at me. “See? It’s easy when you know how.”

I glared at the dragon and stared down at the books. There were thousands of them – perhaps millions – in a room that was large enough to hold a football field. Most of the books looked old, yet there was very little damage, suggesting the presence of a preservation spell. Fiona had explained when we’d been left alone to get on with it that the owners of the magical apartment had been gathering books for hundreds of years. Looking down at them, I was prepared to believe that they’d just scooped up everything they could, dumped them in the chamber and never come back to read them. It was easy to believe.

Some of the books were written in English, with titles that ran from
Dangerous Potions
to
Demon Summoning for Women
. Others were written in French, or Latin, or what looked like a strange combination of Chinese and Arabic writing. I couldn’t even begin to divine what they might contain; hell, I wasn’t even sure how to catalogue them, let alone put them into something reassembling a proper order. I had never realised just how much hard work went on behind the scenes in a library.

“Tell me something,” I said. “What would the Master say if we went back to him and told him that it was hopeless?”

Fiona pretended to consider. “It isn’t hopeless,” she said, finally. “You might take most of a year sorting the books – longer, as you wouldn’t be here all the time – but you could do it. I don’t think the Master would like that very much.”

“Oh,” I said, bleakly. “And what would he do?”

“Well...he could shout at you a bit,” Fiona said. That didn’t sound too bad. “That’s magical shouting, of course; what he called you might become real. Or he could turn you into a frog and leave you that way for a while, or perhaps settle for punishing you in a more traditional style, or...”

“I get the message,” I said. I bent down and picked up a handful of English books. I had pretty much decided to separate out the English books – which I could read, if not very well – from the remainder of the collection. I could at least put them in order before I went to Master Revels and explained that I couldn’t sort the remainder of the collection. Holding the books, I looked around for somewhere to put them, but there was nowhere apart from back on the floor. The few tables in the room were covered in books. It looked like a library that had been torn apart by a hurricane, scattering the books everywhere. “Where am I supposed to shelve them?”

Fiona snickered. “It’s only a vague suggestion, but what about on the shelf?”

I counted to ten under my breath. “There are nowhere near enough shelves in this room to hold all of these books,” I said, in what I hoped was a calm and composed voice. I didn’t want my frustration leaking out into the atmosphere. “Where am I supposed to get more?”

The little dragon fluttered through the air towards the shelves. “These are magical shelves,” Fiona said, in tones that suggested that she thought I was stupid. “All you have to do is put the books on them and allow them to extend to the size required.”

“Oh,” I said. I walked over to one of the shelves – it was barely larger than I – and pulled some of the books off it. A moment later, I found myself on the floor as dozens of books spilled off the shelves, knocking me down as they fell. There was a sound rather like a snap and I looked up to see that one of the shelves had completely vanished. My chest hurt after the books had landed on me. I crawled out from under the pile of books and swore. “Now what do I do?”

“I don’t think that that is how you do it,” Fiona said, dryly. The dragon peered down at the pile of books. “You just broke the spell holding the shelf together.”

I glared at the dragon, who – for once – decided to explain. “The original magician crafted a spell that created a pocket dimension for his books,” Fiona said. “You could put an entire library onto a single shelf if you knew the key. Instead, you collapsed the spell and every book held within the pocket dimension was unceremoniously tossed out – onto you.”

“I had noticed,” I said, as I rubbed myself. I was going to be covered in bruises tomorrow. It was funny how I’d never realised that a book could be used as a deadly weapon before. “Now what do we do?”

Fiona smiled a dragonish smile. “Well,” she said, “you could go see the Master and explain what happened and ask him to help...but perhaps he might turn you into something for a few hours, just to make the point about tampering with something you don’t understand. Just don’t let him turn you into a rabbit. I love eating rabbits.”

I shuddered. “What will happen if I touch the next shelf?”

Fiona took to the air and floated over towards a safer perch. “I’ll watch from a safe distance as you try,” she said, dryly. “This is a magical library. Sometimes the books read you.”

Something went
click
in my mind. “This is a magical library,” I repeated. “Does that mean that, somewhere in here, there is a spell to create those...pocket dimensions?”

“Of course,” Fiona said. “Do you know a magician who would willingly give up a book once it had fallen into his hands?”

I only knew one magician - Master Revels – but I could see her point. There were thousands of books just lying around in the library, suggesting that no one had ever cleaned it out and removed any of the older and less useful books from the collection. Actually, it made a great deal of sense. Knowledge is power, after all, and I could see magicians gathering hundreds of books to themselves, rather than filing them away in a public library.

“All right,” I said. Part of my mind was saying that I shouldn’t even be thinking about it, but it was drowned out by the thought of having to spend months sorting the books. “How do I find the spell?”