The Sorcerer's Dictionary

A word is no trivial thing to kill.

Yes, stones break bones, and words can do no harm. But do not mistake harmlessness for fragility. After all, many things on God's earth can break bones with a brawny arm. A word, however, is as impenetrable as a castle wall. As ephemeral as a robin’s song. As inhospitable as a Saracen desert.

Even among sorcerers, few possess the arcane puissance to kill a word. I should know, being one of them. I will not regale you with the words I have murdered. You would know none of them—at least, not anymore.

Murder is a touch inaccurate. My lexical crusades have ever been prosecuted at behest of king and country. No different from how an English soldier kills a Frenchman, or a conquistador puts a heretic native to the sword. Such casualties, definitionally, cannot not be murders. Although I doubt such distinctions much matter to deceased.

And so, it was one dreary November morning that our fair king rode to my lonely tower. I pressed my wine bottle to my lips as he marched to my door, delighted to discover some dregs remaining from last night’s revels. Although not nearly enough to endure my impending audience.

I had hoped to spend a quiet morning feeding my homunculi and catching up with Dartagnan and his musketeer comrades in the latest Dumas. Yet magic has ever served at the Crown’s whims. And our dearest king has always suffered a surfeit of whims.

With a gaping yawn, I opened my pounding door. His Majesty huffed and puffed, his face as purple as a carrot.

“Sorcerer! Have you seen this?” He smacked me in the face with the morning newsprint as I went to bow.

“No, Your Grace.” I covered my mouth with a fist to stifle an oncoming belch. “I have not yet had the opportunity.”

“They’re raking me over the coals again! Those weasels think themselves brave, throwing stones at me from behind their printing press. They lack the spine to say it to my face.”

“Undoubtedly, Your Grace.” Perhaps because any critic who possessed such a spine found their head adorning the castle wall.

“This slander must stop at once. I require your services again.” The king tapped on the headline.

I squinted to read it. “’Despot’, Your Grace?”

“Are you familiar with the term? At first, I thought they were comparing me to cookware. But my seneschal tells me it means a king who performs wicked acts. What a ridiculous notion. It’s a contradiction, is what it is. If the king does them, his acts cannot perforce be wicked.”

“Indeed, Your Grace,” I muttered. “Per force.”

“I want this silly word gone before it falls on every tongue in the kingdom.”

“Let us discuss this in my study, Your Grace. I shall require a potion.”

My homunculi, pickling in their amber jars, screeched like alley cats as we entered. Atop my levitating ladder, I travelled past quicksilver and aqua regia and selected a viridian ampere filled with fine rum.

One of sorcery’s most valuable secrets, dear reader. You can drink whenever you like if you hide your libations in a colorful bottle.

The nip of sweet liquor eased my niggling doubts about the morning’s enterprise. Though, to a layperson, such spells may appear a simple matter of magic words and flashing lights, the work ahead was more akin to surgery.

Every word is but a brick within the precarious tower we call language. If I killed the word ‘philanderer,’ for example, I might unwittingly destroy concept of fidelity itself. For what would fidelity mean without an opposite to prop it up? And so, the bricks would fall, perhaps collapsing our very notions of marriage or love. Indeed, to the trained sorcerer, the Book of Genesis’s tale of the tower of babel carried a different sort of warning.

Frequently, I cautioned our king of the dangers of his requests. Elucidated the details of what unintended harms we might wrought. Yet details were not the ambit of kings, and always my warnings fell on deaf ears.

I had not entered this profession to satisfy royalty’s whims. Once, I dreamed of employing my talents to feed the hungry and cure the ailing. To follow in the footsteps of our Lord Jesus Christ. Yet those dreams’ embers had long ago cooled. Sometimes, I fantasized about killing the word ‘magic’ just to rid the world of this entire sordid enterprise.

With a heavy sigh, I led the king to a prodigious book balanced on an oaken lectern. Bound in the skin of Nephilim. Ink harvested from the Leviathan. Its pages were filled with runes of the Primordial Language, which all people of the world once spoke.

“You are familiar, by now, with the Lex Arcana,” I said with a half-hearted wave to the grimoire.

“Yes. Yes.” The king licked his lips. “Say, this business has nothing to do with that Webster’s book, does it? Should I worry about the Americans catching up to us?”

“No, Your Grace. The American Dictionary is founded on the philosophy that language describes the world. But the truth lies in the opposite direction. Language is the foundation from which the world emanates.”

“Very good.” The king made a dismissive gesture. “Get on with it, would you?”

My forehead creased as I flipped the pages. This would be a delicate procedure, indeed. While the word ‘despot’ had only recently come into fashion, its roots stretched deep within human history—all the way back to Nineveh’s cruel warlords.

A spark of conscience stayed my hand. Evidently, my potion had not quite done the job.

“Your Grace,” I said with measured hesitation. “Perhaps we should reconsider.”

“What? You’re not saying you agree with these reprobates, are you?”

“Perish the thought. I merely wondered if we have adequately exhausted our other remedies. Would it not be simpler to behead the writers? To make an example of them, I mean.”

“No, that wouldn’t do at all. A swift chopping might muffle the papers here, but the foreign press would keep wagging their tongues. No, I need this matter settled at the root. Europe has browbeaten me at every opportunity ever since the war started. It’s libelous, I tell you. If England can colonize India, there’s no reason we can’t colonize France. Those backward fellows would fare better under us. Our Kingdom is the birthplace of magic, after all.”

“Indeed, it is…” I said with a thoughtful click of my tongue. “But I must warn you—”

“What you must do is cast this damnable spell. Do you doubt me, Sorcerer? Do you question your king’s wisdom? Do not forget who gave you this tower. Who provides you meals. Who funds your little experiments. If you cannot abide your king's commandments, I am sure one of your apprentices would happily take your place.”

“Perish the thought, Your Grace.” I turned back to the grimoire. “As the king commands.”

A pillar of argent lightning shot from my fingertips into the vellum pages. The spell whined like a barber’s tooth drill. A slight pang would be flaring across the foreheads of every soul on earth as the spell scraped the word from their collective consciousness.

And so, it was done. Smoke filled the room as I wiped a bead of sweat from my brow.

The king stared, wide-eyed. “Did it work?”

“Take heed of your newspaper, Your Grace.”

The king examined the first page. Sure enough, the word ‘despot’ had scrubbed itself from the headline. Then the article collapsed entirely. Its words swirled into a jumble, as if caught inside a whirlpool, until they disappeared completely.

“What’s happening?” the king asked.

“A referent purge. Without the word, there is no story.”

“I see.” The king’s expression grew more jubilant as the other articles fell next. Before long, the entire paper dissipated to ash in his grasp.

“And without a story, there is no newspaper,” I said.

“Ye gods, Sorcerer! You’ve shut them up for good. This spell worked better than I could imagine.”

The king went to pat my back, but his arm passed right through me. He stared at his hand in disbelief, flesh turning as translucent as a wraith. “What’s happening to me?”

“We have overused the spell, Your Grace. It seems there are no words left that describe you.”

“No words to describe me? Why didn’t you warn—”

The king vanished. His crown shattered against the stone floor as if it were made of glass.

Without the words, there was no king.

I drifted up the stairs to the tower roof. With another draught of my rum, I watched foreign borders ride toward me. To the North came the Netherlands’ tulip fields. To the South, Belgium’s coastal sand dunes. The Kingdom’s lands compressed like the folds of an accordion.

Without a king, there was no kingdom.

I smiled as I pressed the bottle to my lips. A fitting end to all this. Suicide by censorship. Genocide by grammophobia.

No, indeed. A word is no trivial thing to kill.