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Wizards 1
All stories on this web site are purely FICTIONAL. The people depicted within these stories only exist in someone's IMAGINATION. Any resemblence between anyone depicted in these stories and any real person, living or dead, is an incredible COINCIDENCE too bizarre to be believed. If you think that you or someone you know is depicted in one of these stories it's only because you're a twisted perverted little fucker who sees conspiracies and plots where none exist. You probably suspect that your own MOTHER had sex with ALIENS and COWS and stuff. Well, she didn't. It's all in your head. Now take your tranquilizers and RELAX.
This story is another from the archives, and is not written by me.
Requests for just about anything concerning these posts will be ignored.
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Archive-name: wizards-1
Everything in this story is fictional, except for the way that magic
works. Since some of the wizards on the Net are not entirely sane,
I am not taking the risk of publicizing my True Name.
The Affairs of Wizards
"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 that flowing green,
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, there or 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 cleared 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 part ii]
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