The source of magic, p.7
The Source of Magic, page 7
John realised she wasn’t being polite: she just needed to reach his head.
Olga pressed the head of each key to John’s forehead. First she ran through some different kinds of wood, then stone and then crystal. The most delicate of them was a feather. Each time she held a key up she made a small thinking noise at the back of her throat. When she was done she replaced the keys back in her draw and shooed John away to reclaim her chair.
“Those keys,” she explained, “are for training young people to carve totems. The head of each key can hold a small amount of magic. When Melanie was young, I would charge them up and she would use them to test different objects to see if they were made of a material that would absorb magical energy. Each key corresponds to a different one of the magical streams of the universe. You know when you have found an item to carve and what magic they correspond to when it drains the small amount of magical energy from the key.”
“So am I some sort of magically aligned material?” John asked
“Please don’t try and carve me into a totem," he added, only half-jokingly.
“Living things can’t be totems. Maybe if they could, the old human magicians wouldn’t have been corrupted and killed by the raw magic they were wielding.
Those keys haven’t been charged in years. Melanie is well past the point of needing them. But now….”
She held up the keys again, this time so both John and Melanie could see them. Each key was charged, their heads were faintly glowing like the totems.
“When I charge these keys I either have to hold each of them to a totem of the corresponding material and type and magical energy, or I use a device to channel a magical stream directly into it.”
“Sorry, I’m still not following you. You said I couldn’t be a totem, so what does that leave?”
“As far as I can tell, you are spontaneously creating magic from within yourself. And thats not the only thing that is impossible, you are also generating all of the known types magical energy. Some of them fight and destroy each other when they meet, yet you have not exploded” Olga explained.
“Bring those totems over here. We can’t have them glowing for all the world to see,” said Olga, waving John and Melanie over.
They deposited the glowing stones on to the work bench and Melanie assisted Olga in depositing them into small bags which they marked with a piece of chalk to indicate the totem within. John slowly paced small laps of the shop, his head bowed thinking, occasionally stopping to pick up an uncharged totem to examine then place back on a shelf. When he thought no one was looking, he held a totem to his forehead for a moment to see what would happen. There was no noticeable change. After quickly glancing left and right and confirming that Melanie and Olga were still busy, he held it against his crotch for a few seconds to no avail.
When the all the totems were in bags, sealed with tight knots and marked, Olga went over to the window and scanned the early morning pedestrians. She spotted a small boy and summoned him over to the shop. He had been using some crates and debris in the street as an obstacle course, zooming from over and under from start to finish and back again with manoeuvres Earth’s best Parkour runner would be jealous of, but now stood solemnly in front of Olga. He had a look of awe and a little fear on his face while he concentrated on the instructions she gave him in a whispered voice. He then dashed off, going from standing to maximum speed in an instant.
“Melanie dear, why don’t you go get us all some breakfast while this young man tells me a little more about himself and where he came from,” said Olga in a voice that neither John or Melanie took as a suggestion.
John recounted everything he knew about how he was summoned from Earth and his movements and actions since then. He also retrieved the three gold and handed it over to Olga, who seemed suitably impressed with his handling of the situation with Greegson, and didn’t raise any objections to John’s reasoning behind keeping the extra gold for himself and Melanie. She seemed to gain particular joy, and even chuckled a little, when John told her of how he stomped on Greegson’s tail, rubbing at her own back where the tail connected as a sympathetic reflex. When John outlined his suspicions that the war and what the king and magicians were telling everyone was not all as straightforward as it seemed, Olga nodded approvingly but didn’t interject or elect to expand further.
Melanie returned partway through and distributed fried egg sandwiches while listening in. She blushed a little when Olga heard that she had been involved when John had filled the totems with magic. Olga gave a grunt and wave of her hand to indicate she thought bashfulness about sex was ridiculous. John imagined that this is what older women who had been young and part of the free love movement in the nineteen sixties were like now.
“Well, I don’t suggest we try and kill you with an axe to release your energy,” announced Olga when John had finished his account, “and that only leaves one other option. When you’re ready, go upstairs and masturbate. Make sure that there are some totems nearby, and let's see if you can do it again.”
It was John’s turn to be scandalised by the old woman but he refused to let it show. They finished their breakfast and Olga found an old sack just big enough to fit all the little bags of totems in to make for easy transport.
“Melanie, while John takes care of things here, you take this bag to The Patient Crow Inn. Find a table, one where you’re not too obvious, and wait. Someone will come to you to collect the totems. Only give them to the person who says ‘the mad king only keeps cut flowers’. Otherwise keep them tucked away with you," instructed Olga.
“How much should I get for them?” Melanie asked dutifully.
“These aren’t for sale, they have another purpose,” Olga said.
“But Grandma, this must be worth almost forty gold,” Melanie pointed out.
“We have our three gold from yesterday, and a bit extra for yourself. We don’t always see those in need but they are still there,” Olga insisted.
Melanie was confused as to Olga’s exact meaning, her brow furrowing slighting and just the tip of her tail giving little flicks, but she eventually shrugged her shoulders and accepted her instructions and headed out the door. However, the use of code words and package handoffs at the local pub was not lost on John.
John appreciated the quasi-scientific approach Olga had suggested to figuring out John’s power by repeatable experimentation. However, it did feel a little odd when he was climbing the stairs to Melanie’s bedroom to jerk off with some little old lady fully aware of what he was doing. “This must be what sperm donors feel like,” he mused to himself.
Standing in the middle of Melanie’s bedroom John scanned the totems that stood inert, ready to be filled with magical energy, that lined every flat surface. Without further explanation there was no way for him to know if his selection of totems mattered. He assumed that like batteries, the bigger the totem the more magic it would take to fill it up. John grabbed a variety of shapes, carvings and sizes, and lined them across the bedhead where the totems that he had charged last night had been. He then grabbed a few extra to sit beside him on the bed to see if proximity mattered.
John then stripped and tossed his clothes onto the wicker basket. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it right. Whipping out your cock through your unzipped fly for a quick, chafing wank in your room was something fifteen-year-olds did when they were scared their mother would catch them.
Lying down on the bed, John relaxed with his hands behind his head. It occurred to him in that moment that he couldn’t remember the last time he had masturbated without some sort of visual aid. Computers, smart phones and the internet porn they provided were ubiquitous. Even half the advertisements these days would be considered soft core porn thirty years ago. He settled on remembering in vivd detail the night before with Melanie, and what he was going to do with her the next time the opportunity presented itself.
The phrase ‘la petite mort’ or ‘the little death’ has come to mean the short period of melancholy some people feel after orgasm. However, there was no fancy French word or phrase to describe John’s disappointment and perplexity at the inability to get a small stone statue to glow by jerking off.
He had felt the build up of magical energy in his muscles the same as he had the previous time but it didn’t release. The feeling simply faded back inside him and the totems remained inert.
John washed himself up with the bowl and pitcher of water on the bookshelf, dressed and headed back down stairs to deliver a report to an old lady. It was an activity that John thought of as depressing on multiple levels.
“I’m afraid it didn’t work," John said.
Olga was at her work desk as always. This time, however, she had two large stones the general size and shape of watermelons sitting side by side and she was staring at them intently.
“You couldn’t finish or the magic didn’t come?” she asked without looking up from her stones.
“The latter," John responded dryly, “I don’t know what things are like here, but men don’t go through puberty on Earth without extensive practice.”
“What was the problem, then?”
“I could feel the magical energy building up the same as before, but this time it didn’t shoot off or blast or anything.” John was painfully aware of the puns he was unintentionally making and hoped they would be ignored by Olga as well.
“You had the totems nearby?”
“Yes, some right on the bed with me. The missing thing was the other person.” John paused for a moment and made a shaking motion with one finger, a habit he had when he was thinking out loud, “What if magic works like electricity?”
Olga looked up from her stones to give John a look that he recognised from his great aunt when he was trying to explain an imaginary world or comic books to her. In this instance John realised he may be talking about technology that didn’t exist. He had to dig deep into his memory final year of physics classes.
“Electricity is what lightning is made of. On my world we have ways of storing it and making it do work. While on the surface, lightning or electricity is just bright sparks, on a tiny scale it is the movement of particles called electrons. One of the ways we can use these electrons is to have two parallel plates and build up the amount of these electrons on one and eventually they will start to jump over to the other plate. What if I’m like the first plate getting all of this magical energy built up and to make it work, I need another person there for the magic to start to flow?”
It was an explanation of physics and electromagnetism that would have his physics teacher shaking his head in dismay if he heard it, but it worked to get the point across.
“Lucky for you then. If I had a choice between learning to carve totems out of stone or having sex, I know which I would have chosen," Olga raised an eyebrow in a suggestive manner.
“Only half lucky, I still need totems to charge up though. So I’ll still need a supply from you, and if I understood you correctly, Melanie.”
“She has been learning from me since she could walk. I had hopes that she could take over from me one day, but she is too reserved, too deferential to the humans. When I was her age, my mother had to hold me back from hissing and spitting at what ever aristocrat was make a speech on behalf of the nobles to us lowly peasants. Now she works as a maid for them, cleaning up after the very humans who have stolen and bastardised the knowledge which is her birthright, preventing it as their own.”
“You mean taking over from you carving totems, right?” John probed.
John noticed Olga’s tail pause for a moment, then continue swishing a slower pace. Her ears had also picked up a bit a John’s question. He made a note to find some rich Nekovolk to play poker with.
“Yes,” replied Olga, trying to sound nonchalant, “what else could I be referring to?”
“I’m guessing that whatever you are running here goes beyond selling the odd charged up totem on the black market.”
John left the implication hanging in the air. There was a long pause between the two of them. Eventually Olga, having seemingly made up her mind about something, turned to back to her two stones.
“When you leave this shop, head right down the street you will come to a main road. Take that road towards the castle and once you have passed the gateway into the second city district you will immediately see a large two-storey building on a street corner. That is The Patient Crow. You’ll know you have the inn correct by the taxidermied crow attached to the shingle above the door. Go and make sure Melanie is okay.”
John sensed that a decision had been made, though he was unsure of exactly what it was. Considering the nebulous nature of their conversation, he wasn’t sure what he was expecting but he was satisfied with instructions that kept him close to Melanie and involved in the clandestine goings on. He smiled to himself as he left the shop as a comedy skit revolving around ‘She knew he knew that she knew and so on’ ran through his head. At any rate, he knew that the longer he spent around Olga and Melanie the more he would find out. The question that raised itself for John was if Olga knew about some secret with the king and the war or if she was just happy that someone shared her dislike and distrust of the humans of this world.
Chapter 4
Walking through the city by himself for the first time made John realise how used to Melanie’s presence he had become in a day and a half. There was no commentary on the shops and streets, the people or odd snippets of history to drown out his own thoughts.
In his short time here, he had been tumbling from one strange situation to another like a tin can kicked down the road of time by fate, and it was starting to grate on his nerves. So he used the time to take stock of his situation.
The value of being able to charge totems without using a convergence was not lost on him. He was a disruption to the government’s – or at least the human magicians’ – monopoly on magic. With physical power, provided he could charge a totem that could rival the magic that was used in the attack on the city last night, came political power. The catch was that he needed someone else to make use of that power. If he could persuade Melanie to assist him on a permanent basis then it would be the most pleasant catch in history.
Getting back to Earth wasn’t completely off the table either. While Lord Detier had stated unequivocally that there was no safe way for him to return home, Olga’s assessment of the human wizards ability at totem carving gave him the idea that either Olga or some other more proficient carver might be able to create something to send him back to Earth.
At this thought there was a small voice at the back of his mind that raised the possibility of him not needing to return. The voice noted that simple cost-benefit analysis showed a lot of positive factors to him staying on a planet where he had magical abilities and a superior knowledge of technology.
By the time he had passed through the gate in the second wall he had at least decided that he was going to talk to Melanie about what they could achieve together.
The Patient Crow was as easy to locate as Olga had said. The ground floor was made of small oval blue stone with the first floor constructed of wooden beams and some sort of pale render.
The stuffed crow sitting on the beam that held the shops shingle had an evil look owing to the taxidermist using reflective red marbles in its eye sockets. It watched as John walked up and pulled on the heavy brown wooden door and he was half expecting it to swoop down on him if he were to dawdle.
The interior was relatively well lit by a series of windows running the length of a street-facing wall. There was a level of privacy afforded by the green tinting of the thick glass that sat in the window frames.
The Patient Crow was not a pub in which there was dancing. The centre of the room was filled by four long tables with bench seats. The bar itself was to the right of the entrance and was stocked with barrels in a range of sizes on lying on their sides with brass taps wedged in for dispensing their contents. There were also a range of huge glass bottles with stoppers fastened on with wires. To the left of the entrance was a set of stairs which took sharp right-hand turn and continued upwards to take guests to the first-floor rooms.
John drew some looks of passing interest from the few patrons that were sitting at the long tables with drinks and the odd plate of food in front of them.
It was in a series of built-in square booths along the back wall that John spotted Melanie. She stood out, not so much as she was the only female Nekovolk in the place, but because the table in front of her was devoid of a drink and she kept scanning the crowd, presumably to see if anyone was going to come up to her to say the passphrase.
John smiled at her naïveté, but he kept in mind that everyone was young and dumb once. Stepping up to the bar, he looked at a board that listed the food and drink on offer. Fortunately whatever spell had summoned and allowed him to speak the language of this world had also made him literate.
He ordered two ales, which were poured from one of the large barrels into rough clay mugs, and two plates of lunch to be served at Melanie’s table. He wasn’t sure what would come out, the board just said ‘lunch’, and he was not going to ask in case it marked him as foreign.
He carried the ales over to Melanie and sat down, placing the drink in front of her.
“Cheers!” He toasted raising his mug to her.
She beamed a smile at him and perked up, completely forgetting about her nervous searching for her contact.
He went to drink and noticed that the beer didn’t have much of a head to it and didn’t seem to be bubbling at all. He sniffed at his drink and it smelt like an ale, so he took an experimental sip.
“I think their ale is flat,” John said with a sour look on his face.
“Oh it isn’t flat, it just comes like that. If you want bubbles you want beer that comes in the bottles.”
