A Life Less Ordinary (24 page)

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed. I hadn’t wanted such a discussion. Master Revels seemed to sense that and snorted. “I’ll be sure to use protection.”

“I’ll teach you some protective spells, if you like,” Master Revels said. He looked oddly embarrassed himself. “There are spells that can halt your menstrual cycle and prevent you having periods, but some witches prefer to ride their cycle and use it to power their magic. It was something I was going to have a friend teach you later on.”

I smiled at him. He looked cute when he was embarrassed. “It’s all right,” I said. If nothing else, I could ask Sparks or Robin. They’d probably know who I intended to sleep with, but you couldn’t have everything; besides, they seemed more composed than the average teenage girl. “Thank you for everything, really.”

“You’re welcome,” Master Revels said. “Promise me one thing.” I looked up. “Be careful.”

Chapter Twenty-One

“So…interested in Cardonel, are you?”

I flushed. Sparks had agreed to have a girl-to-girl chat with me, but she’d sussed me out right from the start. I didn’t think that I could have hidden it from her. She had a talent, I had discovered, for seeing right to the heart of any issue at once.

“Yes,” I said, and hoped that she wasn’t interested herself. “Can you help me?”

“Maybe,” Sparks said. She looked down at me, seriously. “And what can you do for me in exchange?”

I flushed again, trying to cover my embarrassment. No one did anything for nothing in the magical world. Even Master Revels had his motives in teaching me; he wanted an assistant and later a successor, something I wasn’t sure if I wanted or not. I had no idea what Sparks might want and I wasn’t sure how to ask. I shook my head. When in doubt, be direct and see what happens.

“It depends,” I said. “What would you like?”

Sparks made a show of considering her options. “Well…how about some potion recipes from your master’s collection?” she asked. “He’s supposed to have books that no one else does, even the Potion Masters Guild, and I would like to try something new and interesting.”

I considered it. Knowledge was power in the magical world, something that Master Revels had drummed into my head time and time again. There was no single school of magic, not even a shared agreement on what young magicians should be taught by society, with the result that bits of magical knowledge were lost, rediscovered and lost again repeatedly. It made little sense to me, but then I was a child of the mundane world, where knowledge was written down in mass-produced books that were made available to all, mainly through public libraries. If there was a public library in the magical world – and I had certainly never heard of one – it wouldn’t include anything that wasn’t already common knowledge.

“Something you haven’t tried before,” I said. I knew nothing about Potion Masters, apart from the obvious fact that they generally made potions and nothing else. “How do I know what you haven’t tried before?”

Sparks shrugged. “Bring a list of possible potions, the older the better, and I will choose from the list,” she said. She grinned at me. “Should we shake on it?”

I hesitated. Forming a contract in the magical world was very different from forming one in the mundane world. Breaking a promise, no matter under what conditions, could have dangerous consequences. The underlying nature of magic saw to that. But really, I asked myself, what harm could teaching her a single potion do? I could ensure that I didn’t offer her anything truly dangerous.

“All right,” I said, and extended a hand. Sparks took it and shook it firmly. I felt a tingle as our respective magical fields acknowledged the agreement. “Now…how do I protect myself from pregnancy?”

“Don’t have sex,” Sparks said, and laughed. I stared at her in astonishment as she leaned back in her chair, chuckling. “You must admit it works perfectly.”

“I didn’t promise not to turn you into anything,” I said, angrily. Sparks had just taken advantage of me and I was furious! I would cheerfully have strangled her at that moment. “You utter…”

Sparks grinned mercilessly. “Ah, the look on your face,” she said. She stuck a hand into one of her bottomless pockets and produced a small vial. “This potion is one of the simplest potions we are taught to make and it ensures perfect protection against both pregnancy and STDs for several days. Repeated doses can extend the effect, but taking it for longer than a few months can render you permanently sterile. I suggest that you learn charms if you intend to have children one day.”

I nodded as I took the vial. It looked rather like a capsule of paint. Carefully, I opened it, sniffed it and recoiled. It smelt rather like paint too, or a drink made of pure alcohol and only a tiny amount of flavouring. I tasted it, very carefully, on my tongue and winced. It could probably be used as paint-stripper.

“Just swallow it in one gulp,” Sparks advised. “That’s what I do, if I can’t be bothered to maintain a contraceptive charm…”

I poured the vial down my throat and swallowed, hard. The taste was appalling, as if I had swallowed poison instead of a simple potion. I gagged and choked, somehow forcing it down my throat. The taste seemed as if it would never fade away, but as I kept swallowing it somehow started to disappear. I felt as if it had permanently damaged my teeth.

“How…” I broke off, gasping. “How do people take this stuff on a regular basis?”

“My master says that anyone can get addicted to anything,” Sparks said. “He tells us to make sure that potions taste bad to ensure that only people who need them drink them. I once told him that if potions tasted better, he’d have more customers. He wasn’t too pleased.”

I nodded. After everything that had happened to me, I could guess at what form his displeasure had taken. Sparks had pretty much confirmed it herself back when we’d first met. I suspected that her master had a point, even though it seemed counter-intuitive; people would pay for treatment, not for sweet-tasting liquid. If the potion worked, no one would question the person who’d made it; if it failed, they would have other things to complain about. And besides, I knew who to blame if the potion I’d taken failed. There were no vast chemical companies in the magical world.

“So,” Sparks said, as my throat slowly recovered. “What do you think of our friend then?”

I flushed. This time, rather than go out clubbing, Cardonel had invited me, Sparks, Robin and Linux to his apartment. It was surprisingly mundane for a person who lived within the magical world, although there was no TV or DVD player. The apartment held a surprising number of books, mainly on the elves and how they related to other magical societies, and a set of comfortable beds. As far as I could tell, Cardonel lived alone, which raised the question of who the other beds were meant for. Come to think of it, I added to myself, who was paying for the apartment?

“I think he’s attractive,” I said. I wasn’t about to discuss freeing the slaves. Master Revels had made it clear that discussing that little exploit with anyone else was asking for trouble. The slave owners might have survived the fire and come looking for revenge. The newspapers were still chattering about a new dragon war, although no dragons had been sighted for several days. “What do you think of him?”

Sparks considered it carefully. “He’s good company,” she said, finally. I settled back to listen. I hadn’t had any proper girl talk since I had entered the magical world. Talking about boys was, after all, entertaining. “I’ve never actually done anything with him beyond being friends. I know he can’t control the glamour-spell surrounding him, but it bothers me. It suggests that he wants to influence people even though he doesn’t.”

“Oh,” I said. Truthfully, I was glad that she wasn’t interested in him, although my own thoughts and feelings were a confused muddle. “Do you know if he had any other girlfriends?”

“He had a couple,” Sparks said. “The Witch Poison and Cardonel were an item for a few years. It ended about as well as you would imagine with a witch who called herself Poison. After that, he had a brief affair with a mundane that didn’t last long. I’m not sure why it fell apart.”

I snorted. “She called herself
Poison
?”

“It was a very accurate name,” Sparks said, dryly. “She wasn’t a very nice person at all.”

I would have asked more questions, except I heard Linux shouting for us both, inviting us back into the main room. Cardonel had set up a table and produced a deck of cards, although in typically magical fashion the deck was enchanted to produce odd results. I listened carefully as they explained the rules of the game – they called it Black Five Magic – and how the magic in the cards actually worked. Cheating, it seemed, was legal as long as someone didn’t get caught. A cheater who
was
caught faced punishment at the hands of the deck, a punishment determined by how they held their cards. One combination meant missing a turn – by being frozen magically until their next turn came around – and another meant spending a turn or two as an object. With careful timing, one could even turn someone else’s cards against them and trick them into triggering some of the magic within the cards.

“You should see some of the weirder games there are out there,” Linux said, when I commented that mundane card games were more…mundane. “There’s a version of Monopoly that does all kinds of things to the players as they move through the game.”

“And there’s a gambling house where you can sell yourself into object slavery, at least until someone raises the money to free you,” Robin said, sharply. I got the feeling that she disapproved of such places. Given her missing face, it made a great deal of sense. “The people who run them lure in people from the outside world and give them enough slack to get into debt, and then take them for their own. You should know by now not to treat magic lightly.”

Linux didn’t look abashed. “We have been exploring magic for the last hundred years,” he said. I blinked in surprise – he didn’t look that old – until I realised that he meant the Rationalists. “We know most of the rules governing the use of magic. If those rules are followed, and honoured, the dangers are minimised.”

“So you have said,” Robin said. I got the impression that it was an old argument. “I suggest that we have the first game without magical surprises, just so that Dizzy can learn the rules.”

Cardonel seconded this opinion and we went through a slow game. I was glad of her suggestion, because the game was deceptively simple. At first, I thought I understood the rules, but the more I played the more I understood that there was an element of strategy in it. Taking the easy way out tended to result in being snared and dragged back into the game. Every so often, just to confuse the issue, the cards shifted randomly. The winner was normally the player who adapted rapidly to the cards the game gave him.

“We don’t normally bet money on our games,” Cardonel explained earnestly, when we had finished the first game. “There’s too much chance of causing bad feeling.”

Everyone laughed. “What he means,” Sparks said, “is that he keeps losing money that way.”

Robin snorted. “One day he will lose everything that way,” she said, as she dealt the cards. She had one great advantage over everyone else. She had a perfect poker face. Staring into her blank face was creepy as hell. “Gambling is too dangerous if you cannot afford to lose.”

“But then there would be no fun in gambling,” Cardonel countered, as he picked up his cards and made a show of gloating over them. I picked up my own cards and examined them. There weren’t any really good or bad cards within the set, sadly, which might work out in my favour. No one could deprive me of something I didn’t have. “You need to learn to live a little.”

I smiled behind my cards. Did that explain his willingness to help me free the slaves?

The objective of Black Five Magic was to get rid of one’s cards as quickly as possible. The fewer cards one held, the fewer options the game had for punishing cheating behaviour or allowing other players to get at you. At the same time, the fewer cards one held, the harder it was to get rid of the remaining cards. And that didn’t include how other players could attack – tactically – players who seemed to come close to winning. At first, I played without a killer instinct, but as the game continued, I realised that that was a foolish position. Everyone else was determined to stab the other players in the back.

“You’d think that people would be keen to perform experiments to get their hands on more magic,” Linux said, as he put a pair of cards down in the centre of the table. The cards rebounded onto Robin, who countered by putting down a card of her own that neutralised the attack. “But no, we are not allowed to risk experiments that might reveal how the Great Powers operate. Heaven forbid that we annoy them in any way.”

“I would have thought that that was a wise decision,” Sparks said. She put down a card of her own, reversing the flow around the room. I felt magic twitching around me and looked down at my cards. They had changed…and I suddenly held two of the most powerful cards in the deck. I understood, now, some of the underlying issues in the game. I could build up to using them, only to lose them just before I used them. “You do know how powerful the Great Powers are, don’t you?”

“That’s my point,” Linux said, as Cardonel put down his cards. I recognised it as a gamble at once. “If we could learn how they do what they do, we could deal with them as equals, perhaps even control them. What could we do for the world if we learned how to control the snow demons?”

“We could destroy it,” Robin pointed out. She stood up, leaving her cards on the table, and walked over to get a bottle of coke. I’d discovered that none of them were willing to drink alcohol while playing cards. “The snow demons are part of nature and tinkering with nature is never wise. Don’t you remember the Chinese warlock who managed to create a drought in his native…?”

Her words bit off as she sat down. There was a flash of light and, where she had been, there was a tiny silver button. “Sorry,” Sparks said. She didn’t sound sorry. In fact, she sounded positively delighted. “You were the only real target.”