Excerpt from A Mage's Play

Ananda pinched him. Hard. Great. Now we’re stuck with this. The first time you called me your girlfriend is while staring down a psychopath dressed like a cowboy.


“I can’t take you anywhere,” Joshua muttered loudly enough for all of them to hear. Joshua was terrified, but the banter helped. At the very least he could choose to die with a little style.

Joshua’s mind jumped from style to appearances. Appearance. That might be enough to save them. Alisa said that changing reality was a sign of status, of power. If Joshua could do it here, it might be enough to bluff. He just needed a little time to figure out how.
Joshua shut his eyes and dropped in to the basement in his mind that his neighbor’s brick had made for him. Joshua stretched out comfortably on the blue couch from his place in Pittsburgh. On the wall in front of him he could see the saloon.

Nothing was moving though. He had some time. He just needed to do something helpful with it. Alisa had said strong emotions mattered, but there had to be more to it. Joshua replayed the moment from last night on the other wall. He felt an echo of what he’d been feeling at the time as he watched and heard Ananda’s comment and smelled the burnt odor. What had he done with his mind when he’d gotten angry that was different than what he usually did?

He hadn’t been trying to communicate anything. He had a very specific cause for the emotion. He’d wanted her to know how he felt. He hadn’t been trying to be understood or to share.

He’d tried to treat the intimately ineffable as if it were a module to be inserted into some else and read.

She had said he had been terrifying, but she couldn’t say how. It was as if he had communicated meaning absent a text she could work with. Language without language. Language generating pure experience. This whole train of thought was absurdly theoretical, but Joshua had never tested his basement’s time delay effect in a situation that could result in conflict before. He had no idea how much time he had outside of this place.

Joshua needed a memory, one with powerful emotional attachments, and he needed to relive it as fully as possible. He needed to feel it all over again. It was similar to the process he used when writing a poem, but he needed to do the opposite of articulating a feeling. There was no time to figure this out properly. He’d just have to gamble and try to recreate how he felt his mind working at dinner and use what he’d just theorized to get him a bit closer.

Joshua needed to be tactical about the memory he chose though. There were a lot of cowboys. Becoming a little scarier wouldn’t help. He needed to turn things around. He needed to sap the confidence from them. Joshua searched for a moment in his life during which he’d lost his confidence.

A woman’s face filled the wall to his right. She was blond with delicate features and big, green eyes. If her betrayal saved his and Ananda’s life, then maybe some good will have come from that year. Joshua didn’t have to try to remember this moment. He’d spent months and a fortune in whiskey trying to forget it. Joshua pulled loose a few stitches on an old wound.

Joshua didn’t feel the pain on his couch in the basement. He remembered that night with a clinician’s detachment. He noted his younger self’s emotional responses and more importantly he noticed the chain reactions they caused shifting the currents beneath his own language. He never hated her. Old memories contorted. Flaws poked through denial. Quirks became faults. Mistakes became sins, and for as much as he wanted to despise her, the only reason he was anything but sad was because she was the one who pulled him down.

She turned him into someone a girl like her would even dream of cheating on.

The memory was perfect. If Joshua could use it properly, it might give them enough credibility to bluff their way out. Joshua opened his eyes. The emotional impact of the memory hit him instantly. He shoved mentally in the same direction as he had at dinner and looked lazily around the room.

Joshua noticed that the men’s clothes looked different than they had looked before. Physically there had been no change, but now they looked like grown men playing dress up. Rather than evidence of battle, the tattered state of their clothes seemed like a sad effort at authenticity.

The smell of the filth that coated their bodies wafted through the room.

The man at the bar, though, seemed exactly as terrifying as before. His only reaction was to take another sip of his drink and nod to Joshua, who could almost hear him say, “Your move, hoss.”

Joshua looked at Ananda and used the contact with her hand to communicate. Not exactly the Holy Hand Grenade. I’m still all about running away. On the upside they might not chase us now.

Joshua had used the only Magician Technique he knew that would work on multiple opponentssimultaneously when they’d encountered the pirates. It might manage ten, but that’d barely put a dent in the gang, possee, crew.

“What is the appropriate collective noun for the gentlemen you’ve assembled here?” asked Joshua.

The man rolled his eyes. Joshua shrugged.

“Just trying to be polite. I have no idea what cowboys have to do with pirates, but I assume you invited us here because of the little misunderstanding I had with a few scalliwags. I want you to know that there are no hard feelings,” said Joshua aiming for that fine line between confidence and braggadocio.

The man tapped the fingers of his right hand against the bar one and a time. Before he had a chance to do anything else a slow whistle floated down the street behind Joshua and Ananda. Joshua caught the tune a second later. It was the high noon showdown background music from every Western ever made. The man’s eyes widened a little at the sound. He looked over Joshua’s shoulder.

“Fuck,” he said. “You claiming them?”

“Yes,” said the whistler. The man wore jeans and a black t-shirt under a simple, black leather jacket. He also had a katana on his right hip.

“You release four of my boys, and I’ll let these two walk out of here.”

A familiar bark of laughter filled the street, and Joshua turned around fully. He should be shocked to see him here, but he wasn’t. Joshua had never been rescued before. It was nice.

“Chuck, you or any of your men so much as look at my nephew again, and I’ll kill every single one of you.”

Chuck stared at Joshua. He took a sip of his drink trying to seem calm. It might have been more believable if several of his men hadn’t wet themselves.

“You can’t. If we don’t resist, you’re not allowed to use lethal force so long as we remain inside the City. Them’s the rules,” said Chuck with the desperate and hollow conviction of a sore loser clinging to a technicality.

“You misheard me. I didn’t say we’d come back. This visit wouldn’t be in any kind of official capacity. I would stop by for a visit. And kill you. All.”

“Boss, that’s not right,” said the tall, thin man standing a little in front and to the right of Marcus Awen.

“Yeah,” added his virtual twin to Marcus’ left. “You can’t go around killing people to make a point.”

“Not without us,” finished the first one.

“Understood,” said Chuck.

Suddenly, there was a front wall on the saloon. The door was shut. There were no windows, and the sign hanging from the roof was legible now. It read “Closed.”

“You’ve always been subtle, Marc,” said Joshua trying to keep from rushing over and hugging his uncle.

Marcus grinned and closed the distance, but he went with a handshake instead of a hug. “Still getting yourself into trouble I see.”