I happened across a likely teacher after about a week in those barren wastes. A quester is usually an aspiring magician anyway, and a burly fellow wearing a skull-surmounted headdress accosted me while I was crossing one of the innumerable streams that wander through that waste. ‘You wear the marks of a quester,’ he said in a challenging sort of way as the two of us stood hip-deep in the middle of an icy stream.
‘Yes,’ I replied in a resigned sort of way. ‘I didn’t ask for it. It just sort of came over me.’ Humility and reluctance are becoming traits in the young, I suppose.
‘Tell me of your vision.’
I rather quickly evaluated this big-shouldered, hairy, and somewhat odorous magician. There wasn’t really all that much to evaluate. ‘All in a dream,’ I said, ‘I saw the King of Hell squatting on the coals of infernity, and he spoke to me and told me to go forth across the length and breadth of Morindicum and to seek out that which has always been hidden. This is my quest.’ It was pure gibberish, of course, but I think the word ‘infernity’ – which I made up on the spur of the moment – got his attention.
I’ve always had this way with words.
‘Should you survive this quest of yours, I will accept you as my apprentice – and my slave.’
I’ve had better offers, but I decided not to negotiate. I was here to learn, not to correct bad manners.
‘You seem reluctant,’ he observed.
‘I’m not the wisest of men, Master,’ I confessed, ‘and I have little skill with magic. I would be more happy if this burden had been placed on another.’
‘It is yours to bear, however,’ he roared at me. ‘Behold the gift which is mine to give.’ He quickly sizzled out a design on the top of the water with a burning forefinger, evidently not observing that the swift current of the stream carried it off before he’d even finished his drawing.
He raised a Demon Lord, one of the Disciples of the King of Hell. Now that I think back on it, I believe it was Mordja. I met Mordja many years later, and he did look a bit familiar to me. ‘What is this thou hast done?’ Mordja demanded in that awful voice of his.
‘I have summoned thee to obey me,’ my prospective tutor declared, ignoring the fact that his protective design was a half-mile downstream by now.
Mordja – if it was Mordja – laughed. ‘Behold the face of the water, fool,’ he said. ‘There is no longer protection for thee. And, therefore – ’ He reached out one huge, scaly hand, picked up my prospective ‘master’, and bit off his head. ‘A bit thin,’ he observed, crushing the skull and brains with those awful teeth. He negligently tossed away the still-quivering carcass and turned those baleful eyes on me.
I left rather hurriedly at that point.
I eventually found a less demonstrative magician who was willing to take me on. He was very old, which was an advantage, since the apprentice to a magician is required to become his ‘master’s’ slave for life. He lived alone in a dome-shaped tent made of musk-ox hides on a gravel bar beside one of those streams. His tent was surrounded by a kitchen midden, since he had the habit of throwing his garbage out the front door of his tent rather than burying it. The bar was backed by a thicket of stunted bushes that were enveloped by clouds of mosquitoes in the summertime.
He mumbled a lot and didn’t make much sense, but I gathered that his clan had been exterminated in one of those wars that are always breaking out amongst the Morindim.
My contempt for ‘magic’ as opposed to what we do dates from that period in my life. Magic involves a lot of meaningless mumbo-jumbo, cheap carnival tricks, and symbols drawn on the ground. None of that is really necessary, of course, but the Morindim believe that it is, and their belief makes it so.
My smelly old ‘master’ started me out on imps – nasty little things about knee-high. When I’d gotten that down pat, I moved up to fiends, and then up again to afreets. After a half-dozen years or so, he finally decided that I was ready to try my hand on a full-grown demon. In a rather chillingly off-hand manner, he advised me that I probably wouldn’t survive my first attempt. After what had happened to my first ‘master,’ I had a pretty good idea of what he was talking about.
I went through all the nonsensical ritual and raised a demon. He wasn’t a very big demon, but he was as much as I wanted to try to cope with. The whole secret to raising demons is to confine them in a shape of your imagining rather than their natural form. As long as you keep them locked into your conception of them, they have to obey you. If they manage to break loose and return to their real form, you’re in trouble.
I rather strongly advise you not to try it.
Anyway, I managed to keep my medium-sized demon under control so that he couldn’t turn on me. I made him perform a few simple tricks – turning water into blood, setting fire to a rock, withering an acre or so of grass – you know the sort of tricks I’m talking about – and then, because I was getting very tired of hunting food, I sent him out with instructions to bring back a couple of musk-oxen. He scampered off, howling and growling, and came back a half-hour or so later with enough meat to feed my ‘master’ and me for a month. Then I sent him back to Hell.
I did thank him, though, which I think confused him more than just a little.
The old magician was very impressed, but he fell ill not long afterward. I nursed him through his last illness as best I could and gave him a decent burial after he died. I decided at that point that I’d found out as much as we needed to know about the Morindim, and so I discarded my disguise and went back home again.
On my way back to the Vale I came across a fair-sized, neatly thatched cottage in a grove of giant trees near a small river. It was just on the northern edge of the Vale, and I’d passed that way many times over the years. I’ll take an oath that the house had never been there before. Moreover, to my own certain knowledge, there was not another human habitation within five hundred leagues, except for our towers in the Vale itself. I wondered who might have built a cottage in such a lonely place, so I went to the door to investigate these hardy pioneers.
There was only one occupant, though, a woman who seemed young, and yet perhaps not quite so young. Her hair was tawny and her eyes a curious golden color. Oddly, she didn’t wear any shoes, and I noticed that she had pretty feet.
She stood in the doorway as I approached – almost as if she’d been expecting me. I introduced myself, advising her that we were neighbors – which didn’t seem to impress her very much. I shrugged, thinking that she was probably one of those people who preferred to be alone. I was on the verge of bidding her good bye when she invited me in for supper. It’s the oddest thing. I hadn’t been particularly hungry when I’d approached the cottage, but no sooner did she mention food than I found myself suddenly ravenous.
The inside of her cottage was neat and cheery, with all those little touches that immediately identify a house in which a woman lives as opposed to the cluttered shacks where men reside. It was quite a bit larger than the word ‘cottage’ implies, and even though it was none of my business, I wondered why she needed so much room.
She had curtains at her windows – naturally – and earthenware jars filled with wildflowers on her window-sills and on the center of her glowing oak table. A fire burned merrily on her hearth, and a large kettle bubbled and hiccuped over it. Wondrous smells came from that kettle and from the loaves of freshly baked bread on the hearth.
‘One wonders if you would care to wash before you eat,’ she suggested with a certain delicacy.
To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about that.
She seemed to take my hesitation for agreement. She fetched me a pail of water, warm from the hearth, a cloth, a towel of sorts, and a cake of brown country soap. ‘Out there,’ she told me, pointing at the door.
I