Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [0]
By Lloyd Rose
Prologue
The magician had a problem. There was a fish-hook in his heart. It was a metaphorical fish-hook, of course, but he sometimes forgot that because the hole it had torn and now kept seepingly open was of such a perfect fish-hook shape - a soft-walled, meticulously fitted case for the tool that wounded it.
As a small boy, fishing with his father, he had caught a hook in his hand, in the web of flesh between his index finger and his thumb. There hadn't been much blood. There hadn't been that much pain until he tried to pull the hook out and screamed. Then there had been plenty of pain, and choking, drowning waves of panic. He pulled and screamed and ran for what he remembered as a long time until his father caught him and slapped him to make him stop.
Later, in the emergency room after everything was over, he could see that the actual injury the hook left when, barb clipped, it had been withdrawn was a tiny thing. Nothing like the red tears around it that he himself had made. Just a neat, almost invisible hole. 'There's a lesson there,' his father had said, and he was sure there was, but he had never been able to figure out quite what. He kept this failure, along with the many others, to himself.
So when the thing - the rip - happened to his heart, he understood immediately that he had been caught on a fish-hook.
The magician liked children and was protective of them. It made his work difficult. As soon as he had begun to study, he had realised that children were almost a necessity. Oh, you could get along without them, and he had, but it was like walking rather than taking a jet. And in the end there were places you simply could not reach by foot. Swamps and fissured glaciers of the psyche. Those airless places in the soul. At times he felt as if he were standing on the bank of a great river, eyes narrowed at the dim far shore, unable to cross because of the damned inviolate children he had held his chilly gaze upon and then passed by.
Because there was no doubt about it - children were different. To use the language of physics, they had stronger energy fields. It was odd, when you thought about it, that in all the millennia of writing on magic no one had actually made a specific study of the value, the absolute and utter value, of children. Only Abramelean magic, with its emphasis on the child as a pure medium, had come close to addressing the matter.
Of course, self-styled 'black' magicians - a nonsensical distinction - went after children immediately, but that wasn't because the fools understood power: they just wanted society to perceive them as evil. So naturally they chained themselves to society by adapting its definition of evil and then running after it as fast as they could, practically tripping over their lolling, panting tongues. Their true ambition wasn't to become magi but to inspire a serial-killer movie.
The magician scornfully considered himself too sophisticated for such sophomoric antics. But his years of study and a penchant for intellectual honesty forced him to admit that, while 'black' and 'white' magic were specious terms, there did seem to be two differently structured varieties, one of them considerably more unreliable and dangerous than the other.
With a nod to the labelling of DNA, he thought of them as left-and right-handed magic.
He also had to acknowledge that the practices involved took on a no doubt coincidental but undeniably moral overtone. There was the unmistakable sense of contracts agreed to, then broken, of good faith betrayed, of what might almost be called slyness. There was the unavoidable fact that sacrifice – of oneself, of others - produced biases to the left or right, and the peculiar corollary that more sacrifice was necessary to accomplish effects tending towards the right. To put it in Sunday school terms, the evil way was easier.
Not that there was anything evil about the - to use the word in its chemical sense - elements of his art. Or anything good, either. They were in themselves as morally neutral