The Book of Magic: Part 2

Copyright

HarperVoyager

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2018

Copyright © 2018 by Gardner Dozois

Introduction © 2018 by Gardner Dozois

Individual story copyrights appear here

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover illustration © Stephen Youll

The author of each individual story asserts their moral rights, including the right to be identified as the author of their work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

These stories are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are the work of the authors’ imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008295844

Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780008295868

Version: 2019-01-12

Copyright Acknowledgements

“Sungrazer” by Liz Williams. Copyright © 2018 by Liz Williams.

“The Staff in the Stone” by Garth Nix. Copyright © 2018 by Garth Nix.

“No Work of Mine” by Elizbeth Bear. Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth Bear.

“Widow Maker” by Lavie Tidhar. Copyright © 2018 by Lavie Tidhar.

“The Wolf and the Manticore” by Greg van Eekhout. © 2018 by Greg van Eekhout.

“A Night at the Tarn House” by George R.R. Martin. Copyright © 2009 by George R.R. Martin. First published in Songs of the Dying Earth, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.

“The Devil’s Whatever” by Andy Duncan. Copyright © 2018 by Andy Duncan.

“Bloom” by Kate Elliott. Copyright © 2018 by Kate Elliott.

“The Fall and Rise of the House of the Wizard Malkuril” by Scott Lynch. Copyright © 2018 by Scott Lynch.

Dedication

For

All those who work magic with words,

the most potent magic there is

About Gardner Dozois

Gardner Dozois 1947–2018

As an editor, Gardner had no peers. He discovered and nurtured more new talents than I could possibly remember or recount, myself included. It’s no exaggeration to say that I would not be where I am today if Gardner had not fished me out of the slush pile in 1970. He found me in his first editorial job, reading submissions at Galaxy, where he came upon my short story ‘The Hero’ and passed it along to the editor with a recommendation to buy. That was my first professional sale.

He was also the warmest, kindest, gentlest soul you’ll ever meet, larger than life, bawdy, funny … so funny. It was an honour to know him, and to work with him. I miss him so much.

George R.R. Martin, 2018

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Copyright Acknowledgements

Dedication

About Gardner Dozois

Introduction by Gardner Dozois

Sungrazer by Liz Williams

The Staff in the Stone by Garth Nix

No Work of Mine by Elizabeth Bear

Widow Maker by Lavie Tidhar

The Wolf and the Manticore by Greg Van Eekhout

A Night at the Tarn House by George R.R. Martin

The Devil’s Whatever by Andy Duncan

Bloom by Kate Elliott

The Fall and Rise of the House of the Wizard Malkuril by Scott Lynch

About the Publisher

Introduction by Gardner Dozois

Sorcerer, witch, shaman, wizard, seer, root woman, conjure man … the origins of the magic-user, the-one-who-intercedes-with-the-spirits, the one who knows the ancient secrets and can call upon the hidden powers, the one who can see both the spirit world and the physical world, and who can mediate between them, go back to the beginning of human history—and beyond. Fascinating traces of ritual magic have been unearthed at various Neanderthal sites: the ritual burial of the dead, laid to rest with their favorite tools and food, and sometimes covered with flowers; a low-walled stone enclosure containing seven bear heads, all facing forward; a human skull on a stake in a ring of stones … Neanderthal magic.

A few tens of thousands of years later, in the deep caves of Lascaux and Pech Merle and Rouffignac, the Cro-Magnons were practicing magic too, perhaps learned from their vanishing Neanderthal cousins. Deep in the darkest hidden depths of the caves at La Mouthe and Les Combarelles and Altamira, in the most remote and isolate galleries, the Cro-Magnons filled wall after wall with vivid, emblematic paintings of Ice Age animals. There’s little doubt that these cave paintings—and their associational phenomena: realistic clay sculptures of bison, carved ivory horses, the enigmatic “Venus” figurines, and the abstract and interlacing paint-outlined human handprints known as “Macaronis”—were magic, designed to be used in sorcerous rites, although how they were meant to be employed may remain forever unknown. These ancient walls also give us what may be the very first representation of a wizard in human history, a hulking, shaggy, mysterious, deer-headed figure watching over the bright, flat, painted animals as they caper across the stone.

So Magic predates Art. In fact, Art may have been invented as a tool to express Magic, to give Magic a practical means of execution—to make it work. So that if you go back far enough, artist and sorcerer are indistinguishable, one and the same—a claim that can still be made with a good deal of validity to this very day.

Stories about magic go back a similar distance, probably all the way back to when Ice Age hunters huddled around a fire at night, listening to the beasts who howled in the inky blackness around them. By the time that Homer was telling stories to fireside audiences in Bronze Age Greece, the tales he was telling contained recognizable fantasy elements—man-eating giants, spells and counterspells, enchantresses who turned men into swine—that were probably recognized as fantasy elements and responded to as such by at least the more sophisticated members of his audience. By the end of the eighteenth century, something recognizably akin to modern literary fantasy was beginning to precipitate out from the millennia-old body of oral tradition—folk tales, fairy tales, mythology, songs and ballads, wonder tales, travelers’ tales, rural traditions about the Good Folk and haunted standing stones and the giants who slept under the countryside—first in the form of Gothic stories, ghost stories, and Arabesques, and later, by the middle of the next century, in a more self-conscious literary form in the work of writers such as William Morris and George MacDonald, who reworked the subject matter of the oral traditions to create new fantasy worlds for an audience sophisticated enough to respond to the fantasy elements as literary tropes rather than as fearfully regarded, half-remembered elements of folk beliefs—people who were more likely to be entertained by the idea of putting a saucer of milk out for the fairies than to actually do such a thing.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most respectable literary figures—Dickens, Twain, Poe, Kipling, Doyle, Saki, Chesterton, Wells—had written fantasy in one form or another, if only ghost stories or Gothic stories, and a few, like Thorne Smith, James Branch Cabell, and Lord Dunsany, had even made something of a specialty of it. But as World War II loomed ever closer over the horizon, fantasy somehow began to fall into disrepute, increasingly being considered as unhip, “anti-modern,” non-progressive, socially irresponsible, even déclassé. By the sterile and unsmiling fifties, very little fantasy was being published in any form, and, in the United States at least, fantasy as a genre, as a separate publishing category, did not exist.

When the last Ice Age started, and the glaciers ground down from the north to cover most of the North American continent, thousands of species of plants and trees, as well as the insects, birds, and animals associated with them, retreated to “cove forests” in the south, in what would eventually come to be called the Great Smoky Mountains; in those cove forests, they waited out the long domain of the ice, eventually moving north again to recolonize the land as the climate warmed and the glaciers retreated. Similarly, the lowly genre fantasy and science fiction magazines—Weird Tales and Unknown in the thirties and forties, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fantastic, and the British Science Fantasy in the fifties and sixties—were the cove forests that sheltered fantasy during its long retreat from the glaciers of social realism, giving it a refuge in which to endure until the climate warmed enough to allow it to spread and repopulate again.