The man on the bench finished the edge of the last beak, touched up the shadow on a nape, and put down his pencil. The boy who was watching him slid closer and leaned in. The man tucked his pencil into a coat pocket. The coat had frayed cuffs. The hand had three fingers and one thumb. The boy nodded approval, and the man took a deep breath. [Read more…] about The Book of Worlds
strangers
Ordinary Wizardry
Lesson: First
“There are only two types of magic, Mr. Lauds. The magic of perception and the magic of dexterity.” The man who had spoken these words pulled on his pipe without moving his lips. He sat in a Queen Anne chair with feet flat on the floor in a coiled posture, as though he might launch like a spring. Yet he vaguely caressed a bronzed pocket watch, in a day when you didn’t see them much, as though he was two people, one also quite relaxed. It was not the type of watch you carried as an affectation – it was dented and darkly oxidized, and his hand did not turn it over and again, flipping the lid open and closed like a pocket lighter. His fingers moved on it gently, as though it were a pendulum of concentration extended from the pivot point of his otherwise still body. He had just finished lighting a pipe. That prop is not enough, then – he is a man who thinks about more than one thing at a time. [Read more…] about Ordinary Wizardry
The Man Who Could Not Drown (part 1)
All three of them went at it, struggling without gaffs to hoist their haul across the gunwale and on board the Abysmal. They had caught a real, live man in the stormy seas off Sable Island. He was squirming like a man might when hauled from the brine, weak, half-drowned, but breathing, freezing, and displeased. Three mariners, their coats scuffed beyond hue, their hats laden with the salty wet, their beards crusted with weather and age, stood in awe of a thing that was no fish but could not have survived if he were an ordinary man. [Read more…] about The Man Who Could Not Drown (part 1)