Introduction
Greetings, Webfarer:
If your idea of fantasy fiction is the muscle-flexing hack-and-slash of Robert E. Howard, or the richly drawn tapestries of David Eddings, then this may not be your cup of tea.
On the other hand, if you enjoy the tongue-in-cheek, pun-laden works of Christopher Stasheff and Robert Aspirin, you may have stumbled onto something good...
Have Wand, Will Travel is based on the old "person from our world suddenly transported to a fantasy world" premise, with one difference: What if that person were a magician? No, not the Gandalf/Merlin type, but the standard "pick a card, any card" version we have here on earth. How would a collection of tricks from your average magic shop stack up against the dark powers of the Evil One? (Hey, nobody ever said being a fantasy hero was easy!)
Sound interesting? Read on.
Since this genre doesn't seem too popular with publishers (Oh, to be a White House insider!), it's available for freebies on the web. The entire manuscript is presented here with links to each chapter (while it is strongly recommended that they be read in order, I'm aware that there are some sickos out there who like to skip to the end). On the other hand, if you'd rather not spend hours squinting at the screen and have a printer that can spit out 180+ pages in a reasonable time, the whole thing is available in a zip file.
Enough background--enjoy!
Prologue
If all the world's salesmen were ranked like tennis players, the little man with the thick glasses would be about the billionth seed. Still, he was giving the sales pitch his best shot. I must've been his first customer all day, so I was being treated to the grand tour. The store was one of those dreary little shops that you find scattered among the decaying ruins of any large city's downtown area. The place seemed to specialize in the occult; Unique Antiques, I think the name was.
As a practicing magician, I have little belief or interest in such things, but I was dutifully paying attention to everything I was being shown. This was not entirely due to courtesy. I found that whenever I allowed my attention to drift, I would be face to face with a shrunken head, voodoo mask or other abomination. So I'd pretended to be interested when the clerk had shown me jewelry that supposedly had belonged to the Borgias and some sort of Aztec crystal. He was currently speaking in reverent terms of a large, ornately framed floor mirror.
"This mirror was created by an alchemist in the fourteenth century," he said in hushed tones. "Legends say that it can be used to travel to other lands." He adjusted his glasses and looked at me for a suitably impressed reaction.
I stared into the mirror and saw the same face I'd been shaving all these years. It looked way too young, with eyes that were too pale to be piercing and a chin that refused to jut. The body was nowhere near as tall as I wanted and the sandy blond hair refused all efforts to stay combed.
On the other hand, I thought my outfit was pretty spiffy.
The salesman took no notice of my detour into self-appraisal, which was fine with me. I had smiled pleasantly and nodded in all the right places throughout his sales pitch. But it was the store itself, not the merchandise, that I was most interested in.
It was my hiding place.
Several days earlier, there had been a slight altercation over the matter of fifty dollars that I'd collected on one of your typical bar bets. You know the type: if there's forty people in a room, and you offer a guy 10-to-1 odds that two of them have the same birthday. He figures there's 365 days in a year, and only 40 people, so he jumps at the chance. The actual odds make it a virtual certainty that two of the forty will have been born on the same day. It's little things like this that allow me to supplement my meager performer's income.
Anyway, after considering the matter for a while, the loser, one Mr. Victor Petroni, apparently decided that he didn't like being played for a sucker. If I'd known at the time that Petroni's connection with gambling extended into the professional arena, I would've chosen another pigeon, but hindsight didn't help.
So I was holed up in this dingy little shop listening to a skinny guy do an overly long spiel about a magic mirror. Meanwhile, someone named Big Bruno was scouring all my usual haunts with possibly violent intentions. Under the circumstances, hearing a lecture on mirrors was definitely the better choice.
"Hey, you! Is your name Alec Kazzam?"
Actually, it's Alec Schultz, but that didn't quite cut it as a name for a street magician, so I'd changed it years ago. I rather liked the new one.
Something very large and ominous was blocking the door leading to the outside. If it turned out to be who I thought it was, it would be the biggest damned Bruno I'd ever seen. He had a chest that looked as though he'd recently swallowed a potbellied stove and his shirt sleeves seemed to be filled with bowling balls. More importantly, he didn't look particularly friendly.
"Oh, hi," I said, trying to sound casual. "I suppose you want to talk about that fifty dollars that Mr. Petroni lost..."
"He didn't lose it, pal. The way I hear it, you stole it from him. I'm here to let you know that Mr. Petroni doesn't like to be cheated."
"Hey, nobody likes to be cheated," I commiserated. "But it was a bar bet. You know. I won. He lost. It happens all the time." I could tell he wasn't buying it.
"Lemme explain something," he said, angling his massive shoulders through the doorway and taking a step toward me. Whenever somebody with the brain-to-weight ratio of a stegosaurus feels the need to explain things to me, I figure I'm in trouble.
Normally, I have a few items on hand to help me deal with such situations but, ever the optimist, I hadn't really expected him to find me here. So everything that might be useful was tucked away in my backpack, along with the rest of my worldly possessions.
As I'd suspected, his idea of an explanation involved the laying on of hands. I backed away as he swung a lazy fist the size of a toaster in my general direction. I ducked it easily. He was slow, and I wasn't. I allowed myself a slight twinge of hope. "Gentlemen, please!" the shopkeeper said. It was just enough of a distraction to get me in trouble. I turned toward the little man for an instant and felt a hand grasping me by the collar. Maybe Bruno was just a tiny bit faster than I'd thought.
"Here's a message from Mr. Petroni." He lifted me like a piece of styrofoam and hurled me across the room. The mirror that the merchant had been showing me was suddenly directly in front of me and rapidly getting closer. I covered my head with my arms, bracing myself for the crash.
It never came...
1 Through the Looking Glass 2 The King and I 3 A Flash In the Pan 4 Off to See the Wizard 5 A Sticky Thicket 6 A Pit to Hiss In 7 Over the River and Through the Woods 8 Karl's Bad Tavern 9 On, or Among, Thieves 10 Any Old Port in a Storm 11 A Dark and Stormy Knight 12 Delight at the End of the Tunnel 13 Hermit Crab 14 Sands Across the Border 15 Downtown After Dark 16 Road to the Final Foe 17 How the Quest Was Won 18 Homecoming Miscellaneous links
This entire work is © 1996, Gary Long