Wizard of Jatte by Rowan Erlking (librera reader txt) 📕

“Here. You lift that end. I’ll lift this end.” The carpenter put his arms under the woman’s to heave her up. Theissen took back the cup of water from the woman’s hands to prevent spilling.

“Play dead,” said Theissen, setting the cup onto the ground next to the bench. She was already slumped, flopping with exhaustion anyway.

With dead weight to heave, the carpenter cast his son an annoyed look.

“You could help a bit, son.”

“Oh!” Theissen hopped to her side, lifting the middle up.

His father’s expression went dry. “I meant, a little extra special help, if you please.”

Kolbran smirked and looked away, but Doreen’s glare returned.

“Fine.” Theissen let go for a moment then conjured a puff of air that pushed the woman upward with a gust, stirring up dust around them as well as their flopping shirttails and mangled hair. The doctor and his father coughed as they heaved her completely onto the flatbed. Both men looked at Theissen disapprovingly when they at last let go.

“Was that wind necessary?” the doctor snapped, wiping the layer of dirt off of his forehead then shaking out his hair.

“I meant for you to make it easier,” his father said, wiping off the coat of dust from his cheeks.

“That’s what I did!” Theissen folded his arms with a frown, not at all happy how they were looking at him. “What did you think I could do? Make her lighter?”

“It would have helped,” his father said, now shaking off his shirt and work apron.

Theissen cast him a particular look of disappointment. “It would have made her into a demon. I can’t change the nature of a thing. Only shift things around a little. What do you think magic is, anyway? Some all powerful force?”

They all stared at him, including the woman.

Doreen tilted her head, replying unblushingly from where she had been watching the entire fiasco. “Isn’t it?”

He gave her a tired look. “Of course you’d be stupid enough to believe that. No! It isn’t.”

“Then what is it, son?” the carpenter asked. It had been a long time since he had told the others not to prod him about his gift, but now Theissen seemed to be ready to answer the question that had truly been on all their minds.

Theissen looked even more hurt. He pulled away. “Dad, all I can do is see what is already around us and make it go where I want it. Though I can see how to change her weight, it would tie a knot in the flow, which is wrong—like killing is wrong.  I could even make you stronger, but that would do the same. And those knots stink worse than sick people. That’s what a demon is.”

His father stared.

“Flow?” The doctor folded his arms stepping back from the handcart. “Explain better.”

Rolling his eyes, Theissen slumped back his shoulders. “Look, I can obviously see something nobody else can see, all right? It is a flow like a current in the ocean. It is all around us, and it goes through every living and nonliving thing. It is in the air, in the earth and even in things we make with our hands. The ability to touch and manipulate that flow or current is what people call magic. But unlike an ocean’s current, this flow can knot up like a string of yarn.”

He then noticed his mother standing in the yard with the cup of water.

“Let me show you what I am talking about,” he said.

Immediately the water in the cup condensed into a cloud, rising up above his mother who recognized this act very well. She watched it as it floated over to where they were standing.

“Water is the second easiest thing to move. Air is the first. Water moves from one form to another almost without effort. I can make it rain.”

And it rained right there, forming a puddle at their feet.

“I can make it roll on the ground.”

It moved like a snake in a circle. Theissen waved his hand over it as if leading a toy on a string.

“I can even make it freeze into ice.”

And it suddenly hardened, frost thickening along the edges with feathery lines.

“But if I were to do this,” and he raised his hand over it, making the water float upwards in a globe and then change from clear to a crystal shaped drop, “Then I have created a demon.”

They stared at it. His mother crossed the yard then reached out to touch it. Theissen pulled it back before she could though, shaking his head at her.

“No one should touch it. This thing is deadly. It would turn your insides into crystal ice and kill you.” Immediately he pulled the threads of flow apart and the globe collapsed as a water puddle, splashing their shoes though also soaking his hand. Theissen wiped his palm on the side of his pants.

“Like Jatte has laws, so does magic,” Theissen said, looking his father in the eye. “The main one I learned when playing as a child is that some things should not be done, even if you can do it.”

“But how did you learn that making those crystal things could kill people?” Kolbran asked him, stepping into the puddle as if to make sure the water was no longer dangerous, like checking a dead animal.

Theissen could see they all had the same question, their stares intent on his face. The woman looked particularly curious since it was her first time meeting a wizard.

He shrugged. “I just know. I mean deadly diseases reek. Demons reek worse. It only figures that those things that are malignant would reek.”

“What does it smell like?” Kolbran asked.

The doctor sighed aloud as he shook his head. “He already told me. It is a festering moldy smell. A rotten yet stuffy sort of odor. Am I right?”

“Close enough,” Theissen said. He looked at the woman. “I had no wish to make your life worse.”

She smiled at him, reached over with her tired arm. She patted his hand. “It is already better. I have a friend.”

“She’s now your friend?” someone behind them said in a biting voice.

Theissen cringed and turned around. “Milrina, you only heard part of the conversation.”

But she went over and punched him in the arm. “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Now that you’ve budded you start making friends with that kind of woman? Don’t think I don’t know what line of work she is in!”

“I’m a seamstress,” the woman said with a calm smile, resting her head on the sack of sawdust.

“Shut up! He’s my fiancé not yours!” Milrina shoved Theissen back to reach the cart as if to claw the woman to pieces.

However, the carpenter held her back with a gentle but firm hand, giving his son a sympathetic yet chastening look to tell him to take care of this situation as quickly as possible. “Milrina, calm down.”

“Yeah, calm down,” Doreen said with a derisive snort. “Theissen is too immature to look for a woman of ill-report anyway. He’s only helping the doctor—”

“He hates working with the doctor! It makes him throw up!” Milrina clenched her fists, stomping her foot as if seeking Theissen’s toes to tramp on.

“Quit being so jealous!” Theissen stomped his own foot then drew her aside. “I am helping the doctor. I already threw up—”

“Several times,” Kolbran put in.

Theissen cast him a sharp look, noticing his mother’s concerned expression also. “The point is, you can help us or you can go home. It’s your choice.”

With that, he walked to the other end of the cart to push it towards the gate. Kolbran hopped over to do likewise, giving Milrina a playful smirk as he grabbed a hold of the bar.

Milrina stared, blinking at him and then looked over at the carpenter who went to join them. The carpenter’s wife sighed aloud then gestured for Milrina to join her and Doreen in collecting the cups of water that Theissen never got to drink. Milrina frowned as she watched the group, realizing that they were telling her the truth. The men pushed and pulled the cart into the road and then out into the street, not stopping but continuing on their way as undeniable proof that Theissen was doing exactly what he said he was doing. She turned with a disheartened sob, wishing that he had blushed at least and tried harder to convince her that they were still engaged regardless of the flirtations of that woman.

Nearly everyone in town saw the Carpenters and the doctor take the woman to the doctor’s shop. She lay limp in the cart as Theissen has told her to. And when they carried her into the shop, she hung limp while they hefted her inside.

But then Theissen and Kolbran ran out again, darting here and there on errands that did not make much sense except to those people they visited. The butcher gave up folds of pigskin he was about to cast off into the larder with two ham hocks added and some pig’s eyes. The barber dumped off bags of hair he had swept up, setting them into Kolbran’s arms. Theissen returned to the butcher for any cast off bones he could purchase, though he also begged for a sheep’s brain that his mother used in making cheese almost yearly. He stopped off at his aunt’s to get a basket along with a few other things, and then at his home once more as if he were dropping off his purchases. Normally Doreen did such shopping, so the village gossip went out in such fervor—especially when Theissen returned to the doctor’s shop with several things in his arms.

That afternoon the carriage from Lord Baron Kirsch arrived at the doctor’s gates. The undertaker had already provided a casket for the body and the woman was well inside it, double-checked by the lord baron’s steward with a defined frown. He eyed Theissen once with a major weight of disappointment in his stare before climbing back into the carriage seat with the casket. The driver flicked his reins, getting the horses off again down the road in a trot. They were gone. The lord baron would not be leaving until later that week. Theissen wished for his departure sooner.

He turned, glancing once at his father before walking back into the doctor’s shop with some resignation. The doctor was already looking at the young man as he were his property. Their agreement was necessary, though it made Theissen’s skin crawl to think of it. The doctor patted his shoulder to reassure him that he would not forget their deal.

“Now, what should we do about her?” the carpenter said just above a whisper once they were all well inside.

Tilting the chemical in the glass beaker he had been using to clean off his hands after handling all that pigskin, the doctor gave a small snort. “I’m done with my part of this little intrigue. You can do with her as you want.”

Kolbran’s jaw dropped in a stare at the man.

Theissen looked ready to vomit again, though for different reasons. He turned towards his father. “We need to hide her somewhere safe while that baron is still in town.”

“But after that,” his father said, squatting down to sit on the nearest stool. There was only one, usually used for examinations. “She can’t stay in Lumen. That man is going to come back for all of his merchandise. And we will be too busy fulfilling own orders to give her work at our place.”

“Pardon me?” The woman stuck her head out of the stairwell doorway. “Are they gone?”

Theissen gave a nod with a smile. “They are.”

She sighed with relief as she came the rest of the way. She was wearing a dress Theissen’s mother lent them, her old one now on the dummy corpse Theissen had made from all those random parts, assembled like a doll to look just like her. Theissen counted on it rotting and stinking