The Hanging

I’ve heard that, given enough time, one can get accustomed to anything; to see it as normal. After ten years of this, I can say that’s a load of hogwash.

The oohs and aahs of the audience over what amounted to basic sleight of hand annoyed me. Still, I smiled and performed as if for a classroom of five-year-olds. It shouldn’t have surprised me how easily the dupes were fooled, I guess, since they grew up in a world where they knew magic isn’t real.

They were wrong, of course, but I didn’t dare show them the real stuff. Instead, I practiced all the exercises that a budding mage learns beginning at five. Real magic isn’t possible until the complex movements and manipulations of the hands is a matter of muscle memory.

There was a couple in the audience that reminded me of Barbie and Ken. She was staring daggers at me. He’d been undressing me with his eyes since I took off my jacket. I briefly considered making it rain on her table to cool them both off. Bad idea, I think.

I always ended my show with the tiniest bit of real magic. It started by showing my hands, front and back, fingers spread. None of the awkward hand poses used to palm something or hide it behind the fingers.

My arms were bare, and my hands stayed visible and away from my body for the duration. After turning my hands palms up, I closed my right hand, raised it over the left, and then dropped a dollar coin into my open palm.

I again showed that my right hand was empty, and that my left was holding the coin. My left hand closed around the coin and immediately opened to show it was empty again.

I would go through several iterations of this, with up to twenty coins. They weren’t appearing out of thin air, of course. It was a simple minor teleportation spell, moving the coins from my pocket to my hand and back again.

The lech was damn near salivating and the woman at his side was fuming. I pointed at her, and he immediately assumed I was pointing at him. When he pointed at himself with an excited, hungry grin, I shook my head with a look of disgust.

I had gotten her attention. Using motions, I got her to place her hands flat on the table, which turned her attention to curiosity.

I ran through a quick routine, making all twenty coins “appear” one by one, then made them disappear in one grand movement. The surprise on her face was all I needed.

She’d felt the coins teleporting to the table under her hands. She lifted her hands and expressed surprise at the twenty one-dollar coins.

“Keep those,” I said. “Maybe you can afford a babysitter and have a fun night out without—” I nodded towards the man.

She laughed, and he was the one fuming. Good for him, I thought. If he was my date, he’ d find himself impotent and/or incontinent. Maybe I should anyway.

I closed out the show and retreated to the dressing room where I could let the phony smile drop. The face in the mirror was me, but it wasn’t. It was my strawberry blonde hair, freckles arguing my age with the fine lines around my eyes, my tight tee-shirt showing my underweight body and small breasts that stopped growing around the time they started.

Behind my brown eyes, though, was something that was not me. It was accusation and shame. I felt dirty and used…as if I’d been selling my body. No, that’s not right; sex work is at least honest. It was more like I was forced to sell my body to any and all comers, and the pimp forcing me was myself.

I covered the mirror to avoid my own accusatory glare and dressed in my street clothes. As I reached for the door, it swung open.

“If you hate it so much, why don’t you quit and do something different?” The Council’s Sergeant-at-Arms stood in the doorway. He looked like a spry septuagenarian at first glance. A closer look, however, revealed that his six-foot frame moved with the easy grace of a young man, and his ice-blue eyes had an unnerving intensity.

“Magus Andronicus. What are you doing here?”

“Please, Kath, call me Andy.” His smile, broad and warm, never reached his eyes.

“Fine, Andy. I know this isn’t a social call, so out with it.”

“Not here,” he said. “You look starved. Let me buy you dinner.”

“I look starved because I am,” I said. “This job doesn’t pay well at all. And before you say, ‘Do something else,’ you know I don’t have any other marketable skills.”

“You’re saying that sex work might be a better choice? Even though you’re flat as a board?”

I huffed and at the same moment felt embarrassed that I’d let him get to me and had reacted like a moody teen. He chuckled and led me across the street to the diner.

It was busy, so I thought it odd that he felt it was a better place to talk. I didn’t have a choice, though, so I followed him to a table and let him order a bacon cheeseburger with an egg on it and large fries for each of us. It was more calories than I’d eaten in a single sitting in months.

While I stuffed my face, I saw the subtle movements of his left hand and felt the magic swirl around us. I recognized the privacy spell. Any person overhearing our conversation would hear only the most trivial thing that they’d prefer to actively ignore.

It worked well for people, but not for recording devices. I wondered if that was why he chose to talk here rather than at the theatre.

“I’ll begin while your mouth is too busy to talk back,” he said. “We’ve let you get away with the minor teleportation, illusion, and levitation spells, as long as they can’t be differentiated from parlor tricks.”

I nodded and continued savoring the juicy, fatty burger.

“Tonight, though, you went too far.” He took a drink of his water. “You let your magic touch a normie; she felt it.”

I swallowed hard. “Wait, that’s what this is about?” I rolled my eyes. “And what do you call what you’re doing now?”

“Interrogating a criminal,” he said. The false smile was gone, and his mouth was set as hard as his eyes.

“By doing the very thing you accuse me of?”

“When you have the kind of control I have,” he said, “you’ll learn how to directly influence the normies without them feeling it. It only took me a hundred years to learn it.”

“So, what’s the verdict?”

“We know you’re guilty,” he said, “there’s no verdict to reach.”

“You really need to keep up with changes in language usage. What happens now?” I asked.

“You will be forbidden to do any magic outside the collegium for a period of fifty years. Punishable by death.”

I felt myself deflate. My whole body felt heavy, and the greasy food sat in my belly like a lump. I was screwed. “If I don’t use magic for fifty years, I’ll age so rapidly that I’ll be dead of old age before the end of the sentence.”

“That’s an unfortunate side-effect of the sentence,” he said with the first smile I’d ever seen reach his eyes.

“You’re a sick bastard.”

“I’ve heard that, yes.” He took a bite of his burger and chewed it thoroughly while staring at me. He swallowed with a satisfied sigh. “If you want to continue to use magic, I guess you’ll need to move back to the collegium.”

“What am I supposed to do there?” I asked. I knew that no one stayed at the collegium for free after graduating.

“There’s an opening for a primary teacher for the five-year-olds. I’m sure they would appreciate your help.” If he was expecting a reaction, he didn’t show it. “You’ve had ten years of practice with what, five shows a week?”

“When does this start?”

“As soon as we leave; you only have one shot at this. You can either come with me to the collegium or make your own way without magic.”

“I suppose the Council has already sealed and bound it? It’s done?”

“The bond is sealed the moment I step out that door.”

I smirked. Since I’m already in trouble, I thought, I might as well make it worth it. I remembered his leering gaze, his raw, unfiltered lust. I reached out until I found him.

His thoughts were open to me. He was fantasizing about me begging him for sex; calling him “Daddy.” I fought back the urge to vomit. A movement of my right hand within my left and it was done.

“What did you do?”

“You said it’s binding once you step out that door,” I said, “so I just took care of a minor annoyance before it goes into effect.”

He reached out with his mind, following the tendrils of my spell. “I’m still not sure what you did, but it was the man with the woman who felt your magic earlier.”

“Right. They reminded me of Barbie and Ken, but only if Ken was a perverted creep who ignored Barbie on a date to drool over a random woman on a stage.”

“And?”

I sighed. “I was going to just give him a minor case of erectile dysfunction until I saw his fantasies. So…the Ken doll is now hung like a Ken doll.”

“Hung like a…you mean…?”

“Exactly.”

“You say I’m sick?” His eyes betrayed a moment of humor, as though only an act of cruelty could reach his centuries-buried emotions.

I shrugged. “What? It’ll wear off in a couple months. In the meantime, he might learn that not every woman is a porn actress there for his amusement.”

Andy shook his head. He rose and started for the door. “This will probably add another fifty years to your sentence.”

I followed him, laughing. “Worth it.”