“primitive.”
The fact is, we’re all still sorcerers under the skin, and magic seems to be part of the intuitive cultural heritage of most human beings. Whenever you cross your fingers to ward off bad luck, or knock on wood, or refuse to change your lucky underwear before the big game, or ensure the health of your mother’s back by not stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk—or, for that matter, when you deliberately step on them, with malice aforethought—then you are putting on the mantle of the sorcerer, attempting to affect the world through magic. Then you are practicing magic, as surely as the medieval alchemist puttering with his alembics and pestles, as surely as the bear-masked, stag-horned Cro-Magnon shaman making ritual magic in the darkness of the deep caves at Rouffignac.
In this anthology, I’ve endeavored to cover the whole world of magic. Here you will find benevolent white wizards and the blackest of black magicians. Here you’ll visit the troll-haunted hills of eighteenth-century Iceland … Victorian Ireland, where the hosts of the Sidhe are gathering for war … the remote wilderness regions of Appalachia and the hill-country of Kentucky, where ancient ghosts still roam … and the streets of modern-day New York City and Los Angeles, where dangerous magic lurks around every corner. Then you’ll visit worlds of the imagination outside the time and space we know … touring the fabled, enchanted metropolis of Calfia; the bleak marshes and crumbling towns of the Mesoge, where the dead come back to prey on the living; the grim city of Uzur-Kalden, at the very edge of the world, where doomed adventures gather to set forth on quests from which few if any of them will return … visit The Land of the Falling Wall in the last days of a dying Earth to drink and dine at the Tarn House (famous for its Hissing Eels!); shop at the Mother of Markets in Messaline for bizarre simulacrum in company with Bijou the Artificer; attend the 119th Grand Symposium, presided over by the High Magnus himself, to watch a contest of skills between the world’s greatest magicians; join a perilous quest for cold mages vital to the prestige of the Great Houses who rule an alternate version of Rome after the Empire’s fall … enter an Elf-Hill, from which it may be impossible to escape … ride in the Devil’s Terraplane, join a village wizard in a seemingly hopeless battle to stand against the most malign of magics … try to talk a comet out of destroying the world … fight Revenants with fiery eyes, a toy-eater, a sinister ensorceled book … meet Dr. Dee, the famous Victorian scholar and magician … Masquelayne the Incomparable, the Eyeless One, the Lord of the Black Tor, Molloqos the Melancholy … Djinn, trolls, elves, osteomancers, egregores, deodands, grues, erbs, ghouls, scorpion-tailed manticores … the Lords of the Sidhe; the guardian spirits of Iceland; saints and sinners; the singing heads on stakes known as the Kallistochoi, who maintain magic with their endless song; Archangel Bob; the Holy Whore of Heaven; a Bouncing Boy Terror; and the Devil’s Son-in-Law.
Such dreams are inspired by magic—in fact, you could make an argument that they are magic. Such dreams persist, and cross the gulf of generations and even the awful gulf of the grave; cross all barriers of race or age or class or sex or nationality; transcend time itself. Here are dreams that, it is my fervent hope, will still be touching other people’s minds and hearts and stirring them in their turn to dream long after everyone in this anthology or associated with it have gone to dust.
K.J. Parker
One of the most inventive and imaginative writers working in fantasy today, K. J. Parker is the author of the bestselling Engineer trilogy (Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, The Escapement) as well as the previous Fencer (Colours in the Steel, The Belly of the Bow, The Proof House) and Scavenger (Shadow, Pattern, Memory) trilogies. His short fiction has been collected in Academic Exercises and The Father of Lies, and he has twice won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella, for “Let Maps to Others” and “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong.” His other novels include Sharps, The Company, The Folding Knife, and The Hammer. His most recent novels are Savages and The Two of Swords. K. J. Parker also writes under his real name, Tom Holt. As Holt, he has published Expecting Someone Taller, Who’s Afraid of Beowulf, Ye Gods!, and many other novels.
In the sly story that follows, he takes us to the Studium, an elite academy for wizards, and shows us that a competition for an important position among three highly powerful sorcerers can soon become dark, devious, and dangerous—and quite likely deadly as well.
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