Misdirection

by Scott Allen Abfalter

I thought about all the steps required for the ritual that I would be performing later in the night and came to one inescapable conclusion: I was going to have to stop at Walmart.

Walmart is a sorcerer’s dreams come true. There is such a fantastically diverse amount of things to be found there that it boggles the mind. The pharmacy alone would be enough to make any Renaissance apothecary burn with jealousy. Oils, candles, animal parts, gunpowder --they have it all. I’ve found some surprisingly useful reagents in their lawn care department, for instance. Very interesting poisons can be found there as well.

I’ve been performing magic for centuries, but it has never been as convenient. Frankly, I don’t know how I managed at all before the advent of modern-day shopping. I recall spending days hunting down just the right sort of mushrooms for an unguent once somewhere back in the 13th century. I can go to the store, and they carry the exact same type --all clean, cut and pre-packaged.

The same could be said for fruit. The months of travel saved in this modern age; it is amazing. What would you do in London 500 years ago if you needed a pomegranate? Today you can just run over to the grocery store. It is a vastly different thing to be a modern-day sorcerer.

Easy shopping has made things simpler, true. But I don’t want to minimize the difficulty of the task that I was preparing for. Sorcery is a complicated and dangerous business. That is why there are so few of us active practitioners in the world.

We sorcerers are few. Less than one person in a thousand has the intrinsic ability to cast. That makes perhaps five million people with latent ability walking the planet today. As far as I understand, less than one hundredth of one percent of these potential adepts is ever recognized by a mentor. A sorcerer must be actively examining people’s aura to detect any latent ability. That means that there are only a few thousand potentials wandering around that end up getting noticed. Nine out of ten of these rare folks that are approached tend to dismiss their potential mentors are crackpots and never attempt to tap into their inner power. So perhaps one or two of those few dozen who even try can complete training each year. Of these newly-minted magicians most eventually misuse their power and end up getting themselves killed within their first decade of practice. I can think of six or seven good sorcerers that have successfully established themselves in the past century, tops. I can think of a few dozen that have managed to get themselves killed in the last decade. Magic is much easier to perform these days, but it remains easy to bungle. Mine is a dying art practiced by dying artists.

As for me, I rarely leave things to chance. That is why I have been successful in this job for the better part of eight centuries. Modern day technology has only enhanced my ability to be cautious and careful.

I can’t imagine trying to coordinate a complex ritual without my laptop scheduling software. I think back to the work I did even a few decades ago, thinking then that I was so precise and careful, and I find it hard to believe that I managed to stay alive.

Tonight was going to be very difficult. I had to go up against one of our own and I had to prepare some heavy-duty stuff. I had not been in a bona-fide magical duel since the Battle of 1812, and I was really in no mood to abandon my abstinence. But I had gone and shot my mouth off and there was no going back, so it was going to be Tao Shen or me; one of us would be in a grave tomorrow.

I probably should explain. The best place to begin would be to say that Tao Shen is an Activist, while I am an ardent Passivist. Tao Shen is one of those who argue that we ought to be active and public in our works, abandoning the secrecy that has kept our loose-knit Order mystery-enshrouded since its inception four thousand years ago. The Passivist view is the opposite and has kept us safe from public retaliation for millennia. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? So, I am a Passivist; I’m not one to rock the boat.

But Tao Shen… Now, he wanted to shake things up. There have always been Activists throughout history, and nothing they did has ever worked out for the best. I’ll cite the Black Plague as the textbook example of Activist intervention gone wrong. Yes, there is a textbook, and no, you can’t find it online. What is surprising is that Tao Shen is old school. He’s been around since long before I was born, and he has spent most of that time being unobtrusive and uninvolved. That makes him sort of a de facto Passivist. But now he has emerged as the primary leader of the Activist clique and has been stirring up emotions on both sides with rebellious rhetoric.

This escalating argument came to a head at the recent Concordance. We had all met this year in Sydney. And as happens every year, the annual philosophical debate on the Activist/Passivist issue ensued. The Activists pulled out the same old beaten-dead-horse arguments that emerge year after year. The Passivists do the same. It is a vicious, angry and emotionally charged debate that has become a beloved tradition at each of our annual meetings.

Normally everyone argues and nothing is ever resolved. But this year it was very different. Tao Shen had stepped up to the microphone and had announced, quite calmly, that he intended to release the names, dates and activities of each member of the Order worldwide.

You can imagine the reaction. Even his supporters had balked at the implications of such sudden mass exposure.

The announcement effectively ended the Concordance. Tempers flared, arguments escalated, threats were made, spells were erected, minions were summoned, and chaos ensued.

I, with my big mouth, made what amounted to an empty protest: “You’ll release our names over my dead body!”

Tao Shen had sneered at me. He was twice the sorcerer I was. He could hand my head back to me on a silver platter and make my body walk away with it dancing a jig. I was no match for him. I never have been, not even on my best day.

“So be it,” he said. And then he cast a spell that had been pre-prepared and waiting for a trigger. Everyone in the room froze. I don’t mean they stopped in awe. What I mean is that they froze in place, silent and unmoving. This was an amazing feat; for the combined myriad personalized magical defenses laid upon each individual in the room (with even more having been hastily erected within the last few moments) would have taken an encyclopedia to describe. Tao Shen’s spell instantly thwarted the defense of every sorcerer in the room, which is to say every sorcerer alive.

Except for myself, he had left me exempt. He just smiled at me. The condescending bastard.

“The Activists will announce themselves at the start of the next General Assembly of the United Nations,” he informed me. “You are welcome to come and try to stop me.”

He waved his hand and vanished. A dozen or so others, each of the Activists (curiously frozen along with everyone else) vanished along with him. I was left in a roomful of statue-like magicians.

The first thing I tried to do, of course, was counter the magic and free my fellow Order members. I had hoped that the spell would fade. I spent an anxious hour or so pacing back and forth and examining it with every type of magical vision enhancement that I had at my disposal.

Unfortunately, it looked like they were locked up tight. They were not literally frozen; they were not encased in ice or anything. Neither were they paralyzed. I soon discovered that I could not move so much as a hair on their heads. My working hypothesis was that some sort of temporal magic was involved; they were trapped in an instant like a fly in amber.

They remained stuck, too. Despite my best effort I could not counter the spell.

Like I said before, Tao Shen is much more of a sorcerer than I am. I am a minor authority on the practical application of illusions and misdirection, and I have some recent notoriety as being one particularly adept at embracing new technologies and working them into my magic. But Tao Shen is a true master. An authority. I’ve heard it said jokingly that he’s forgotten more about magic than most sorcerers ever knew. That is untrue; Tao Shen has not forgotten a thing he has ever learned.

There are a few others at his level. M’babwe, Fergus O’Connell, Jack Gauge. And the Ice Princess, of course, (who, incidentally, was the only one of the frozen sorcerers to be literally frozen since she had arrived that way).

I don’t make the list of magical experts. I don’t even make the 2nd tier list. Although any of us sorcerers are elite among men, I am merely a sorcerer of average skills –-albeit a competent and careful one.

Like I said, nothing I tried was able to unravel the spell holding my peer’s hostage. We had the convention hall booked overnight, but it was not going to be long before a roomful of living statues was discovered in downtown Sydney. So, I exhausted myself that night moving them. I teleported to an air-conditioned self-storage place with which I have done business with before, secured a half-dozen units and then manually teleported every one of my fellow sorcerers there. It was grueling work. There were hundreds of attendees, they were hard to move around, and I am not all that great at teleporting anyways. Six or eight hours later I was done, and all my peers were safely tucked away in a Hoboken storage facility.

I went home and poked around on the Internet to try and find out when the next meeting of the UN General Assembly was. Two weeks. He wasn’t going to waste any time. Tao Shen was going to destroy our community of sorcerers in two weeks and throw the world into an upheaval worse than it had ever known in history. I had almost no time to prepare to meet him. I had no idea what to do even if I had the time to begin with.

So, with what little time I did have, I took the first step in my grand plan to defeat him: I collapsed on my bed and got a good night of sleep praying that when I woke up I could think of something, anything, to stop him.

* * *

I unloaded all my supplies from Walmart. I live in a suburb outside of Cleveland in a nice little neighborhood where everyone keeps their lawn nicely trimmed and not a lot of people go around asking questions.

By now I did have a plan. I had no idea if it would work or not, Tao Shen had dueled and defeated a dozen better sorcerers than me over the years --one of which he still keeps living in a small jar at his home. I considered moving to Tibet and living the monk lifestyle for a few hundred years until it this all blew over. But I just could not do it.

For one, I had a lot of good friends currently locked away in storage right now. I knew enough about my own limitations to know that the only way they would be released would be if Tao Shen did it voluntarily, or if I managed to kill him. Very few spells will last after the life of the sorcerer that cast them, and all of those involve binding the spell to something else living that will be around after said sorcerer’s death. I didn’t think that Tao Shen had done anything like that with this spell. In fact, I expect that he fully planned on releasing them shortly his grand announcement. I wasn’t planning on being a martyr, but I was not going to take chances with their lives either.

I unpacked my groceries which were varied and sundry and included such things as bleach, copper pots, eight live lobsters, about twenty Wi-Fi adapters, a few dozen cheap cell phones, dozens of cameras, a rotisserie chicken and about 15 bags of other stuff that really would be too boring to list out. All of it was to be used in the preparation and execution of a spell ritual --except for the rotisserie chicken, which I ate over my kitchen sink prior to setting up for the night. No sense going into this ritual hungry.

Here is where my personal expertise came into play. Most of the sorcerers I know are old school. They use the same tried and true techniques passed on for generation after generation. Someone mixed in the eye of a newt into a potion along with ten other things somewhere along the way, and every other sorcerer follows the same recipe even if, say, a lizard eye or even no eye at all will achieve the same result. There are those who like to research and experiment, but even so this usually tends to be derived of old techniques.

There are exceptions. Hakuanaa the Large specializes in purely mental magic with no use of external supplies at all. Farouk the Dervish insists that the materials themselves are not the key, and that any material at all will do so long as the proper timing and ratios are intact.

Me? I write a lot of good custom software for magic.

A lot of this comes from having a bad memory. If a step is missed in a complex ritual the magic may go awry. If you are lucky, nothing happens. If you are unlucky, something does happen –and it’s usually bad. Unless you are Pi-Pi the Random (who uses randomly inspired rituals and for reasons unknown always seems to have good results) you really want to make sure that everything in your spell casting goes as planned.

It started as a spreadsheet, really. I was just trying to make checklists of reagents and other materials. Then I started working on scheduling software that helped with the timing of a ritual. From there, it was not too long before I learned that I didn’t always have to execute the ritual at all. I could set up various computer-controlled systems to light a fire, drop a glass ball, whistle a complex melody or do nearly anything that I could physically do myself --and much more flawlessly than my own sloppy casting. For the last ten years, any nontrivial ritual I’ve cast has been meticulously entered into my own custom spell-casting software, error checked, ran against simulation, and eventually performed by computer control.

Tonight was no exception. It was a fantastically complicated ritual, and one that took me many hours to set up, even with all the computer assistance. I worked out all the kinks in software simulation over the last few days. I only got the simulation perfected the morning of the Big Day. So, there I went, mixing chemicals, laying out wires, preparing, checking and rechecking.

Finally, I was satisfied. Well, as satisfied as my paranoia ever allows. The ritual was ready, and all I needed to do was to click a button on the computer and it would take a few seconds casting the 2,371 separate steps required for my spell ritual.

I looked at the clock. About 90 minutes to go if one assumed that he materialized right when the delegates were first called to order. I went to the fridge, got a beer and watched a rerun of Cops while I waited for Tao Shen to arrive at the UN.

How would I know he was going to arrive? Good question. But it was easy enough to set up.

You see, all I had to do was travel to New York, walk into the UN headquarters, set a bunch of broadcast cameras up and set them up to start transmitting at the time the meeting started.

Sounds difficult, but it is easy enough. At least for someone like me.

One of the most common and useful spells we sorcerers know is one that affects the minds of the target to accept that whatever it was that they are seeing is something that is perfectly normal. This is something essential for any sorcerer, for we will invariably find ourselves at different points of our careers with unwelcome eyes watching what we are doing. The textbook name for the spell is a Lesser Suggestibility Dweomer, and it’s had a dozen other names over the years but ever since 1977 everyone just calls it the Jedi Mind Trick. “This is not the sorcerer you are looking for...” Wave.

That spell made it easy to walk around and install cameras in the building. It made it easy for me to explain to security personnel there that I was dreadfully sorry for not getting the cameras they requested installed earlier. It made it easy for me to walk out of the building with the ability to call up a few dozen different views of the main meeting room whenever I wished. There was not an inch that was outside of my ability to monitor. This made it possible for me to safely monitor from home for signs of Tao Shen’s arrival.

I looked at the clock. He would arrive any time now. I started scanning camera feeds, looking for him.

And suddenly there he was. A few people around him were startled by his sudden appearance.

I clicked a big red button on my computer display labeled “Go”.

* * *

Software loaded, bits flipped, pulses were sent, reagents were mixed, sparks flew, smoke was generated, and a few lives were ended (lobster). In short, my spell ritual was executed, and the teleport occurred.

Tao Shen saw me appear several feet in front of him.

I winked at him and then waved my arms, performing a series of gesture very similar to the ones I saw him use at the Concordance a few weeks ago.

The look on his face when every single delegate in the room instantly froze was priceless. He gasped, audibly, and stared at me open-mouthed.

“Didn’t think I had it in me, did you?” I said, smiling.

He didn’t reply at first. I watched his face transform from disbelief to anger.

“You made the mistake of leaving me alive to study your little trick,” I continued. “I could not rouse those as the Concordance from their sleep, not while you are still alive. But, of course, you know that. But that didn’t mean that I was incapable of learning how you did it.” I gestured around me. “You can make all of the announcements that you want, but I don’t think these people are going to be listening to you.”

“You are a better magician than I gave you credit for,” admitted Tao Shen. His voice was low as a green nimbus of power grew around his hands. “But it will not matter. You are not one of the Great Ones.” With a savage and contemptuous gesture, he hurled whatever greenish power he had gathered toward me.

I waved my hand casually and a large purple bubble encased the energy that he had thrown. Another gesture and the bubble shrank, smaller and smaller, until it winked from existence with a cartoonish popping sound.

Tao Shen looked surprised.

“So,” he said, the trace of a smile appearing on his soft features. “It is a real duel then. That is fine; I have not had a real challenge for quite some time.”

I am somewhat familiar with his standard combat repertoire. I studied it. In fact, we all had studied it when learning magical combat, it was required reading.

He opened with three instances of the Biting Lotus flying at me and, while I was distracted, also called down the Foot of the Dragon from up high above me. Sneaky bastard.

My Cloud of Tinkerbells countered each Biting Lotus. I was saved from the Foot of the Dragon by a danger-triggered Titanium Umbrella. I’m fond of cartoon spell effects.

Now fully angered, he flung a Twin Phoenix to explode at my feet. But I was unharmed. My Instant Snowstorm spell was able to soak up any excess heat before both spells cancelled each other out.

The air whirred about me as I was assailed by his 10,000 Hammers spell. Again, I was untouched. With a dismissive gesture I invoked my Giant Super Magnet spell and drew them all safely away from me.

This went on for some time. I made no attempt at a counter-attack. He simply tossed spell after spell at me, and I quietly and calmly defeated each one as I waited for him to exhaust his supply. I had to admit, he was extraordinarily well prepared for battle –more than I had even dreamed possible. I was even finding myself a little bored while I thwarted spell after spell.

When I recognized that he was going to cast his Memory of Nagasaki spell I called out to him.

“Enough is enough!”

He glared at me, exhausted from nearly a half hour of frantic magical battle. I made a show of examining the back of my fingernails, just to show him how little I had been affected.

“Look, that ain’t going to do you any good,” I explained, patiently. “All you are going to do is blow yourself up and take all these poor innocents with you. What makes you think that I am not just as prepared for your self-sacrificial Armageddon spell as I was for everything else you just tossed at me?”

He stared at me for a few moments, panting and trying to catch his breath.

“You...surprise me,” he finally admitted. “I never knew you were so good. I never suspected.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Well, maybe that’s part of my shtick. Maybe I don’t want everyone to know that I am the Big Kahuna. Maybe I just want to be left alone, and if I were to let on just how advanced I had become then I would be pestered to no end. Come on, now. You have seen the work I’ve done with computers. Old School sorcerers like you are just out of date. I can do things that you can’t even begin to imagine.”

He shook his head in resignation. We stood there silently for a few moments.

“What is to become of me?” he asked, resigned. “Do I live? If so, what is my punishment?”

I had him. He’d fallen for it. I tried not to smile.

“Why none,” I said. He looked surprised. “After all, no harm is done.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“I would have put your talking head on a platter and fed it to my pet demons,” he admitted.

“Yeah, well, I guess I am a better man than you, Tao Shen. But I do have some demands.”

He nodded, bracing himself for the worst.

“First kneel before me.”

He did, with obvious reluctance.

“Second, mass teleport the rest of the sorcerers here. All my magic is geared to battle right now.”

He nodded. In a few moments we were surrounded by our peers.

“Now, release them.”

He made a simple gesture. Scores of sorcerers came to life around us, breaking into confused conversation. I raised my voice above the crowd as they began to realize that they were surrounding both Tao Shen and me and no longer in Sydney.

“You are surrounded by your peers, to whom you did a great disservice,” I announced loudly, speaking as much to the newly unfrozen sorcerers as I was to my defeated opponent. “Your magic is expended. You are essentially defenseless among us. Do you agree?”

“Yes,” he said bitterly. “I agree. You have bested me. I don’t know how, but you have bested me.”

“Would you like to see how?” I asked, grinning.

He glared at me.

I smiled and snapped my fingers.

All around us the illusion of the UN General Assembly vanished. Tao Shen, the assembled sorcerers, and I were all standing in the middle of a large empty field about ten miles outside of Cleveland.

“What is this?” he cried.

“What is my specialty?” I asked, still grinning.

“Computers,” he replied.

“And before that? A hundred year ago?”

Comprehension dawned.

“Illusion!” he cried. “It was all a fake!”

I nodded. “I never teleported to the UN. I teleported you out of New York and into this field. And I also had camera broadcasts from the UN feeding into my evolving illusion, creating my own mirror version of the room you had teleported out of. All the time you were not where you thought you were.”

“And how did you stop my spells?” he asked.

“Easy,” I said, smiling. “I am not here, either!” I snapped my fingers a second time the illusion of me standing before him became translucent.

“I was never here,” I informed him. “In fact, I am sitting at home right now, in my basement.”

“I was never a match for you, Tao Shen,” I admitted. “I could not beat you on your own terms. So, I had to fight you on my own.”

He stood up.

“I will destroy you for his,” he snarled.

I shook my head and gestured a translucent arm at the hundreds of angry sorcerers surrounding us. Many were preparing combat spells and they all looked at Tao Shen with fury.

“I doubt it,” I replied, sardonically. “In fact, I’d be surprised if you live long enough to take revenge on anyone at all.”