The Affairs of Wizards - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

"He's a wizard, of course he can. Don't meddle with wizards."

"I still bet he can't!"

"Oh, go on in then, see if he notices. I'll come in if there's any trouble."

Ania knocked gently on the door as she had been trained to, and then pushed it open, entering a large room with a view of the sunset, across the bay. On the comfortable hotel chaise longue was a man of early middle age, reading The Journal of Thaumaturgical Topology in a plain house-robe of silk and cotton, with no magical symbols on it that she could see. He glanced up, smiled pleasantly, and waved vaguely at the low table beside him, where she put down her tray with its jug of Northern wine and some crisp rolls.

"Will there be anything else, sir?"

Still silent, he shook his head, and she noticed again how his bronze hair was turning white where it curled against his ears. The stiff green cotton of her uniform rubbed against her upper legs, as she bobbed respectfully and turned toward the door.

As she reached the door she stopped, and turned around. If he could, he wasn't saying anything. He didn't seem to know.

He looked up at her, and smiled again. "Yes?"

She absolutely shouldn't, there could be trouble, but Birgit would surely claim he knew, and she suddenly trusted his smile.

"Sir, can you tell?"

His eyebrows, which curled upward like rusty wire against his golden skin, arched a little and his smile became wider.

"Can I tell what, Ania?"

He knew her name! -- but wizards always know names, you learn that at school. It didn't answer her question. "Can you tell... about me..." he was still smiling, "can you tell if I'm wearing panties?"

He blinked, and somehow his smile became deeper around the eyes. "Do you mean, do I know if you are," he said, "or can I tell?"

She looked at him, a little confused.

"There are many ways I can tell, if invited," he said, "as anyone could. But I think you mean, can I tell by some use of magic - as you stand there."

She nodded.

"And you want to know if I have used it."

"I thought it would be just like... seeing," she said, "you'd simply know."

"One way, yes, is like looking, and so seeing. But even a prentice does not use magic without will, and a man who would use it as a casual intrusion is not even a prentice for long. I can tell, but I have not. Do you believe me, Ania?"

"I believe you, sir," wondering if she really did, "I believe you can, and I believe you haven't, but I do not know."

"I have always admired Doubting Thomas," he said, clearly enjoying her answer, "`Trust but verify' is the foundation of modern magic. Am I being asked for proof?"

"Sir ... yes."

"For proof that I have not? That would be hard."

She shook her head.

"You are asking me, then, to show you that I can?"

Not trusting herself to speak, she nodded.

"I may choose my method?"

"...yes."

He looked more closely at her, and she wondered how much of a spell was needed. The touch of her dress was intensely present, close to her skin and yet creating a hollow space within which she stood, under his gaze. Around her neck, she felt a softening, a cool feeling that was like water, but was not wet. It spread around her body like a quiet wave.

"Now, I can tell," he said.

Following his glance to the tall mirror beside her, she stood still, and looked at herself. She was now dressed in silk; the simplicity of her uniform had become the perfect simplicity of the dress of a great lady, and its plain green had changed while hardly changing, to something with depths like the autumn sea. There was no seam anywhere, only a line of coral buttons that ran from the neck, along each arm to the cuffs. It was shaped by its flow across her body, liquid against her skin.

No spell but the magic of silk made clear that under the tight thin green fabric, there was Ania. Nothing else.

She had always been friends with her small, muscular body, but seeing it like this, and sharing the sight with him, was different. This was not the practical object she washed briskly in cold water every morning, it was more like music. Her neat round belly was like a standing wave in a mountain stream, flowing over a stone, pouring into a rounded channel and frothing where the silk clung to the curls between her legs, welling up in a turbulent mound that somehow had more shape, more definiteness than she had ever noticed before. She wanted to cup it in her hand, to imagine the water filling and spilling against her fingers, she could almost feel the rush and tingle from inside; but putting her hand as if to cover herself... no. An inverted modesty kept her from snatching at her body, where her breasts -- normally unobtrusive, gentle swellings that needed no special support and did little to push out her clothes -- were suddenly sharply defined. Low on her ribs, but the nipples high, looking as emphatic as they unexpectedly felt; how had they become points of drama in something so undramatic as the body she lived and worked in every day?

"Magic," she said. "Have you put an illusion on my dress, to look like that? Have you put a glamour on me, to look like that? Or a glamour on my mind, to think I look like that? You could do all those things to someone who does have something underneath -- I haven't said if I don't -- and it would look the same." The idea of mind-magic was an uneasy one, but then the thought of such a glamour on the Manageress almost set her giggling; it took two of the maids, every morning, to get Madame Chorny into her corsets. The image was so naturally her own, and he looked so much less of an Evil Power than Madame Chorny on her best days, that she smiled at him, a quick secret grin like the one she gave when she had lured Birgit into some new plot against the sobriety of This Great Hotel. "Perhaps it is good that I do not have such powers. I could not be trusted with them."

"No illusion, no fairy gold," said the wizard. "That is real silk, now, as real as your skin. Your body looks like that because it is exactly that beautiful, and your mind -- do you think I would hesitate to look under your clothes, and then intrude behind your eyes?"

"No, you wouldn't do that," she agreed. "So I really am like this, and your body is truly like that," considering his long legs and arms, the well cared for hands lying open on his robe, his golden skin. "And you haven't looked under my clothes."

"I am looking now, as any man might," he said, "as any man would."

"Then I believe you could look as a wizard, without showing me to others, but I do not know. Look at me, then. Look at me, wizard fashion." She turned to face him squarely, with a rustling of silk.

He looked down, as she tried to meet his eyes, and she realized he was looking closely at her feet, in the felt slippers This Great Hotel demanded in homage to its floors. She wiggled her toes, and his mouth quirked, but he did not look up. Slowly his attention moved, learning ankles, knees, thighs, between them, up the curve of her stomach to her breasts and arms, then the roundness of her lips, until he was studying her eyes. Green eyes, as she had often seen in the mirror, with dark lashes and brows. Were they beautiful, then, too? But he wasn't looking at beauty, he was looking at her, looking at her eyes, learning her.

She let out a breath as he leaned back on the chaise longue.

"You have looked, now," she said.

"I have. I have looked, and I would know you across the Rio Amazonas, in sunlight or starlight, now or a hundred years from now. It is a wizard's craft to look, and to learn."

"I think you would," said Ania solemnly, "I am sure you looked at me with the eyes of a wizard. I am sure, but do I truly know," she could not resist it, "whether you saw my panties? If I am wearing panties?"

He roared with laughter. "Ania, you remind me of my mother's junior husband. If we are to settle this, we must share eyes a little. Is this well?"

She nodded again, a little uncertain.

"Now I am touching your mind, only a little, and not with illusion -- just a link. It is easily made; the Talent sleeps in your own mind, too, but was not woken in childhood. Look in the mirror."

He came to stand beside her, more than a head taller, and they both looked at her small, smoothly clad reflection.

"A mirror is a kind of illusion," said the wizard, "but this is true seeing." He pointed at the neckline, and a handspan of green silk became transparent to her eyes, the woven surface calming like the waves on a millpond when wind and watermill rest, letting her vision pass the surface to the riverbed, to the creamy coffee color of her throat. She had never looked at her throat as a shape, before. Her eyes moved, and his followed, for the clear patch spread to her left breast, then to her right. The nipples were so red, so red; was she seeing through the skin a little too, to the blood that filled them so tight that the skin on them seemed to pinch her with a kind of pain?

Downward, to her belly, the round, gentle boulder that made the green wave in the silent river of silk, clear through the still surface; the strange cup of her navel.

Downward again, to the firm mound where dark curls clustered, and all at once she smelled them, scented with herself from the lips, almost open, that they grew along. She had not known but -- yes -- that was their purpose, hair kept when human pelts went smooth, to carry the scents that speak clearer than words. Did the knowledge come from him?

When the whole dress was clear they stood looking, for a little, at her body's form beneath it. Then her glance shifted to the image of the man beside her, and the spell faded.

"These things are by invitation," he said, as she turned to look up at him. "We have had no discussion of my clothes. And to see more of yourself you would need to keep your balance while looking from behind, which is a slow-learned skill. Now, my small disputant, are we agreed that, Imprimis, I can tell exactly what you are wearing, Secundus, I can learn this by looking, Tertius, I have indeed looked, and hence, Quartus, I do indeed know, with a sure knowledge, that you are not wearing any panties?"

She smiled at him.

"Come, Lady Logic, have you a reply to this?"

"They teach about knowledge in Sunday School," she answered, "not only in your lore schools. Your favorite saint had a test for certainty, and I may surely say what his master said to him.

"Thomas, stretch forth thy finger."

Continued in Chapter 2

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