Taking a slow, deep breath, Elgin’s eyes turned up from Amy’s to look at the ceiling, breaking the spell that had held her fast to her seat.
The room wavered into existence around her once again as the air pressure about her head shifted enough to make her sinuses pop. The little jewelry repair shop in what looked like an old bank building in Carytown, Richmond snapped into focus about her as the mists cleared. Slowly she realized her hands were hurting, and looked down at them to see how they grasped the edges of the old wooden chair on which she sat. Darkened by years of use, and worn down so that the grain of the chair could be felt as well as seen through the remains of a once light red lacquer. A comforting and familiar old sweat shirt of reality wrapped itself around the thoughts raging through her mind unbidden, Amy stared hard at the chair to be sure of where she was. That she was “here,” and that “Here” was “Real.
Some of these ideas were taking a hit these last two days.
She shivered. Her lips went white as the thought struck hard into her consciousness.
He’s so…I mean he must be so… She settled back into her chair as if to affirm her state of being by the sheer power of sitting. He’s just so… “OLD!” Amy blurted into the room, everyone stopping to stare at her and Elgin.
Her breath came out in a fog of condensed air as if she stood at the bus stop on a cold
December morning. With a patient look, Elgin took up Amy’s long fingered hand into his own course, thick fingered hands. A gentle smile and a shrug; “I wouldn’t let it bother you all too much, my dear; just as I don’t let it get to me. Now, if you all will excuse us,” he gave a meaningful glance at the rest of the room. “Mister Tinker and I need to go into my office for a word or two.”
Looking back to Amy, he gave her a brief nod, a smaller, sadder, more fatherly smile, and then turned to walk away. Pointing to the large tray Amy had forgotten was near to hand; he said to her, “Please finish your breakfast. And try the mini omelet sandwiches, our young mister Cole is a wizard with eggs. The ones with red toothpicks in them are very spicy, though, so be warned, Miss Amy.”
Glancing at the little omelets, she knew then that things might be getting better; next to them sat a small pile of chocolate muffins.
When life looks bad, there’s always chocolate cake… Granny would always say.
Amy heard the sound of a door opening, and saw the man Ellen had called Banner, and Mister Stark enter a small, homey office. They both had serious expressions on their faces, and then the door was firmly closed behind them.
She began to nibble demurely at the edge of one of the spicy sandwiches, and sighed in pleasure.
Over at his jewelers’ bench, Cole could not repress a broad mouthed, goofy smile.
Sitting in the small room across from the fabled Dancer was no less daunting by
daylight than it had been at the noisy little …Inn…? Public House…? BAR! Than at the bar last night. ‘Ker began to wonder what might lead such a powerful being to treat with those so obviously below him. How could “The Great and All Powerful Dancer of the People” stand to live in such anonymity? Why didn’t he rule this world? Why didn’t he rule the world before the People had taken exile over human encroachment and the war that had been imminent? He could have made the world into a paradise for the People.
“FRIE’HALAH!” He started in the language of the People. “Attend! I have very little time today for beating around the bush, boy. So please do me the honor of answering my question from last night; I’ll answer any of yours I have the time to.”
Elgin, as he seemed to be called here, was looking at ‘Tj’Chin’Ker with a stoney and
serious expression; a father about to chastise and errant child. If that father had the aspect of an angry gorilla.
With that, ‘Ker’s brows came down in truculence. In the language of the People, he answered. “I’m not a fan of being called ‘boy,’ even if you are rightly my ultimate grandfather. I would feel odd having you call me ‘Tj’Chin’Ker, even if you don’t go by that any more. It would just be too weird; Ellen called me ‘Banner,’ and for now, that might do, thank you. Ellen sometimes called me that while I was healing and learning Anglish.”
“English…”
“That. Whatever, I know she had no idea of what or who I am, but she gave me this name in her mind, and for everything she has done for me I will wear this name now.”
“This new name?” The Dancer’s eyes lit with glee at the prospect of what that might entail. “Sure, it fits you; but can you really say you look like a ‘Banner’?” With that, he began to giggle. “Well, then, Banner Tinker it is…” And the room seemed to split with the roar of renewed laughter as the ugly truth of his own ancestry sitting across from him found the sound of ‘Ker’s new name entertaining. “Or would you prefer some other variation of the name? ‘Ker Banner,” hmm?” “Just Banner for now, thank you. ‘Tinker’ feels…odd.”
The waves of laughter ebbed finally, and the expression of real business to be discussed returned to the heavy jutting brows of the legend behind the desk before him.
“That will do fine. As you like, it does me no ill to call you that. Cheers, then. What
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about my questions?”
The newly christened Banner looked at the older man, and sighed.
“I can do that. Ellen will need protection, now that she has been drawn into this mess. Her people will be missing her, and the godling those men all worked for…”
Elgin harrumphed, and then looked directly into ‘Ker’s eyes. “Yes. I will do what I can. But, now…”
‘Tj’Chin’Ker held up his hand, where the absence of the gold rings he had worn for so many centuries now pulsed darkly in his sight. He had never noticed the links before the Dancer, Elgin, had pointed them out. He couldn't, or hadn’t, felt the spells wrapped around his ring finger until last night. It was an entirely new feeling to the man with the entirely new name.
Banner would have marveled at the sight, and the feeling, if the majority of those spells had not been pulsing with malevolence.
“You said I needed to cut these. That each one was tying someone to me like a slave.”
He and Elgin had been speaking in the language of The People, but Elgin said the word for slavery that was in common usage in the human kingdoms. The word that most closely aligned itself to the concept as the Romans and Egyptians had used the word when he had been a youth. And one Banner viewed with a great deal of distaste.
Slavery was something the People engaged in from time to time, in limited situations and with very specific terms. Tj’Shae, the People, HIS People, took prisoners in battle. Those prisoners would serve the Family that held them for a set term of five years, though their bond could be bought back with a gift equal in value to the labor they would otherwise have done.
Criminals who didn’t warrant execution would work for the crown to make reparations for their crime to those they had wronged.
But Elgin had specifically used the foreign word for slave. The word that denoted hopeless, endless drudgery. Working in shackles for another unto one’s own death, and any children born to that enslaved person is born a slave as well. It was an evil of which any real contemplation made Banner nauseous.
And the thought that humans, short lived little mayfly-like beings would make their fellows waste what little life they possessed in an unending servitude. Monstrous.
Thick fingers snapped under his nose with a cracking like a whip.
“Did you hear me, son?”
“Sir!” ‘Tj’Chin’Ker was startled into answering and caught off center as the old man stared holes through him. “I was just thinking of what you had said. About the spells holding those people in thrall…”
“Slaves.” Elgin insisted.
“Yes.” He answered. He wanted to cry. “I had no idea. I couldn’t even see the bonded links binding them to me until you showed me how to do so.” He paused, and breathed heavily for a few moments before he continued.
Holding up his off hand, ‘Tj’Chin’Ker forced his will into the right shape in his thoughts, and opened his eyes to stare at his hand. The thin, laughably diaphanous strands of what one might be able to think of as Life and Intent twining about one another as they drew themselves from the center of his being, and then spun themselves off from his hand into the aether, linking the newly minted Banner with three other beings somewhere out in the world.
Two of those tethers, as black as the soot and creosote left after a pine fire, were messy and delicate, and unfathomably complex. Elgin, the Dancer himself, had told him he would help him remove. The others were of his own manufacture, and he had been told he would have to remove them himself.
He looked at the mix of colors. The greens, and blues, spun and braided together with yellows and reds. It was all done in patterns he recognised as his own work, though he had never actually seen them before, and had only ever felt those forces combined as his mind and soul had bound and plated them.
But they were, each one, wrapped in a succession of veins in shaded hues of darkest black so foul and malevolent that he was having trouble imagining from what part of himself those foul vapors might have been drawn.
Elgin talked him through the process of slowly severing those ties. Doing so quickly, and all at once might kill those poor slaves he had placed under his power. Banner still struggled to think of who they might be.
Of who they possibly could be.
And then Elgin reached for him, and made a ripping motion in the air with his broad, calloused hands.
And Banner’s world went black.
Later, as he sat at his desk in his small alcove of an office, Elgin stared at the small mound of ash that had gathered on a blank sheet of stonepress.
He missed “paper.” Most things “paperlike” were now some variation of pressed, recycled matter. Microplastics harvested from the sea. Clothing fibers harvested from the fashion industry as well as reclaimed from clothing recycling drives. His favorite NeuPaper was the crystalline micro-granules harvested from quarry cast-offs.
Some people loved the bamboo paper products, but Elgin didn’t enjoy their smell. Nor did he like the feel of bambaper as his pen moved across the surface.
But, as in most things, Elgin was in yet another fast fading minority. Most people didn’t use any paper-like products of any kind, and relied solely upon all of the digital forms of data this modern world offered.
Halo’s, and crystal sets, and verb-viz interface. It all was a slow walking of the greater world toward a long off path. Toward a form of magic that Elgin had been trying to direct the world toward for three centuries now. And someday he would watch as technology and magic were inextricably bound together and free and accessible for all to use. Sometimes the First Human dreamed bigger than those first, idle dreams he had dreamt in a rift valley that no longer existed.
The long, elegant form of his wonderful wife, Ahoo, slipped into the office behind him, and wrinkled her nose at the stench.
“The boy is asleep in the break room. His lovely young woman, Ellen, is beside him. Fretting.” She must have smiled as she said it, Elgin could hear the warmth of it in her slightly husky voice. “Those were the curses?” She indicated the small piles of ash on the scrap papers on his desk as she draped her supple frame across and around his broad shoulders.
Reaching a hand up to lay on her forearm where it wrapped about his neck, Elgin nodded. "One of them, at least. THe other has woven itself into his soul so tightly that I could only pull out some of the worst of it. The rest? Well, we shall have to work on that together. For now, though, we'll just have to be happy that at least the Father's curse has been lifted."
“Well.” His wife said, "Indeed, we shall." Then, holding up and waving a fine ivory envelope of papyrus and rag paper. “We have been invited to come out to dinner tomorrow night.”
"Oh?" Elgin asked, his deep voice rising in curiosity.