The ship Magnus insisted on thinking of as the enemy pirate ship noticeably listed to one side. It was possible Magnus had gone slightly too far there.
García seemed extremely impressed that Magnus could disable ships from a distance, but he wanted to be absolutely sure the cargo was safe, so they drew their vessel alongside the larger ship—the pirate ship was by now lagging far, far behind them.
Magnus was perfectly happy with this state of affairs. Since they were hunting pirates and adventuring on the high seas, there was something that he had always wanted to try.
“You do it too,” he urged Ragnor. “It will be dashing. You’ll see.”
Then he seized a rope and swung, dashingly, across fathoms of shining blue space and over a stretch of gleaming deck.
Then he dropped, neatly, into the hold.
Ragnor followed him a few moments later.
“Hold your nose,” Magnus counseled urgently. “Do not breathe in. Obviously someone was checking on the cargo, and left the hold open, and we both just jumped directly in.”
“And now here we are, all thanks to you, in the soup.”
“If only,” said Magnus.
There was a brief pause for them both to evaluate the full horror of the situation. Magnus, personally, was in horror up to his elbows. Even more tragically, he had lost his jaunty hat. He was simply trying not to think of what substance they were mostly buried in. If he thought very hard of anything other than the excrement of tiny winged mammals, he could imagine that he was stuck in something else. Anything else.
“Magnus,” Ragnor said. “I can see that the cargo we’re guarding is some very unpleasant substance, but could you tell me exactly what it is?”
Seeing that concealment and pretense were useless, Magnus told him.
“I hate adventures in Peru,” Ragnor said at last in a stifled voice. “I want to go home.”
It was not Magnus’s fault when the ensuing warlock tantrum managed to sink the boat full of guano, but he was blamed just the same. Even worse, he was not paid.
Magnus’s wanton destruction of Peruvian property was not, however, the reason he was banned from Peru.
1885
The next time Magnus was back in Peru, he was on a job with his friends Catarina Loss and Ragnor Fell. This proved Catarina had, besides magic, supernatural powers of persuasion, because Ragnor had sworn that he would never set foot in Peru again and certainly never in Magnus’s company. But the two had had some adventures together in England during the 1870s, and Ragnor had grown better disposed toward Magnus. Still, the whole time they were walking into the valley of the Lurín River with their client, Ragnor was sending Magnus suspicious little glances out of the corner of his eye.
“This constant air of foreboding that you have when you’re around me is hurtful and unwarranted, you know,” Magnus told Ragnor.
“I was airing the smell out of my clothes for years! Years!” Ragnor replied.
“Well, you should have thrown them out and bought clothes that were both more sweetly scented and more stylish,” Magnus said. “Anyway, that was decades ago. What have I done to you lately?”
“Don’t fight in front of the client, boys,” Catarina implored in her sweet voice, “or I will knock your heads together so hard, your skulls will crack like eggs.”
“I can speak English, you know,” said Nayaraq, their client, who was paying them extremely generously.
Embarrassment descended on the entire group. They reached Pachacamac in silence. They beheld the walls of piled rubble, which looked like a giant, artful child’s sculpture made of sand.
There were pyramids here, but it was mostly ruins. What remained was thousands of years old, though, and Magnus could feel magic thrumming even in the sand-colored fragments.
“I knew the oracle who lived here seven hundred years ago,” Magnus announced grandly. Nayaraq looked impressed.
Catarina, who knew Magnus’s actual age perfectly well, did not.
Magnus had first started putting a price on his magic when he was less than twenty years old. He’d still been growing then, not yet fixed in time like a dragonfly caught in amber, iridescent and everlasting but frozen forever and a day in the prison of one golden instant. When he was growing to his full height and his face and body were changing infinitesimally every day, when he was a little closer to human than he was now.
You could not tell a potential customer, expecting a learned and ancient magician, that you were not even fully grown. Magnus had started lying about his age young, and had never dropped the habit.
It did get a little embarrassing sometimes when he forgot what lie he’d told to whom. Someone had once asked him what Julius Caesar was like, and Magnus had stared at him for much too long and said, “Not tall?”