Wish I Could Help/1

Wilfort Hobnoster took the coffee pot from the ornate metal stove that stood in the middle of his small parlor and poured himself a cup. It was early autumn and there was a chill outside that made him welcome the warmth of both the stove and the coffee. He had no appointments for the day, so Wilfort was planning to spend it reading the book his friend Professor Branes had sent him. The shelves that lined the walls of the little room were filled with a huge number of books, but he had no trouble finding the volume he wanted.

There was a large oak desk near the bay window where it would get the most light. Wilfort had just settled in there with his book and his coffee when the doorbell rang. For a moment, he considered ignoring it and waiting for whoever was there to go away, but he decide against that. It might be something important and then he would regret not having answered it.

The young man who was standing outside when Wilfort opened the door certainly did not look very important. He was thin, not very well dressed and he kept glancing about nervously.

"May I help you?", Wilfort asked.

"Oh...yes. Is this the house of Hobnoster...the Wizard?"

Wilfort nodded, "It is and I am Wilfort Hobnoster."

Although the young man tried, he could not hide his surprise very well. "You're the wizard? I was..."

He waited a moment for his visitor to continue, but when it became appearent he was not going to, Wilfort finished his remark for him. "You were expecting someone more impressive...tall, a little menacing, with a long beard." Wilfort was none of those things. He was a short, fat man with a soft face and a gentle smile. He had tried growing a beard several times, but it always itched so much that he soon shaved it off. "I may not look it, but I really am a wizard. Please, come in."

Wilfort led the young man into his parlor and picked up the coffee pot. "Would you care for a cup?"

"What? Oh, no thank you." The young man shook his head, "I'm not really thristy."

The wizard put the pot back on the stove and took his own cup from his desk. "I hope you do not mind if I drink one myself. Now tell me, what is your name and why have you come to see me."

"Tim, sir. Tim Mazil.  It's about my mother." Before he could finish, Tim's attention was drawn to a movement behind the stove. A brindled gray cat walked from there to Wilfort and began rubbing itself against his leg. "Oh, you have a pet cat."

At the word "pet", the cat turned and glared at Tim. Wilfort corrected him, "She's my companion. Her name's Molly."

Tim watched the cat who had now turned her attention back to Wilfort. "I imagine she wants cream."

"Actually, she prefers it black." Wilfort filled a dish from a shelf near the stove with coffee and set it on the floor. Molly began to lap it up eagerly.

"I didn't think cats liked coffee."

"Well, Molly does. You were telling me about your mother."

"Right, I was, sir. She's very sick.  She hasn't been feeling very well for weeks now, but this morning she was too weak to even get out of bed.  I'm very worried, sir."

"And you want me to use my magic to heal her?"

Tim nodded, "If you would, sir. We don't have very much money, but if you'll heal her, I promise I'll pay whatever you ask, no matter how long it takes me to get it."

Wilfort smiled at him, "You need not worry, Mister Mazil. I have never refused to heal anyone because they could not pay and I don't believe in charging people more than they can afford.  Now, I think we had best be on our way to see your mother."

It was rather cool out, so Wilfort was glad he had put on his long coat with the braidwork trim and his quilted skullcap. Of course, he had brought along his staff. It was beautifully made and Wilfort was quite proud of it. The staff was made of handcarved oak, topped with a brass claw clenching a large crystal sphere. With it, he knew anyone would recognize him as a wizard, no matter what he looked like.

As he walked with Tim Mazil through the streets of Tweedon, it struck Wilfort how hazy the sky was. When he was younger, fall days had ususally been crisp and clear. This kind of haze had only occurred during the heat of midsummer. It grew denser as they walked and the sun grew dimmer, until it almost seemed like twilight, even though it was midmorning.

They had entered the section of the city between the textile mills and the railroad yards when Tim said, "It's not far now, sir. Just around the corner." The streets were lined with long rows of the dreary, little houses the mills had built for their workers. They all looked identical to Wilfort, but Tim had no trouble finding the one that was his.

Once inside, Tim led the wizard up a narrow stairway and into a small room. A woman was in a bed in the corner of the room, propped up with several pillows to a position between sitting and laying. When she heard them enter, she said weakly, "Timmy?"

The young man walked to the side of the bed and rested his hand on his mother's shoulder. "It's me, Mother. I've brought the wizard.  He's going to heal you.  You're going to be alright." Several children peered in the bedroom door from the hallway, too frightened to come into the same room as a wizard.

Wilfort stood at the foot of the bed and raised his arms. "First, I must determine the nature of her illness," he said solumnly. The sphere on top of his staff emitted a shimmering, blue glow that spread to the woman in the bed and surrounded her.

Actually, the gesture, the staff and the glow were all just for show. Wilfort could have done his magic just as easily without them, but they did serve a purpose. They were a visible indication that he was doing magic, which kept people from interrupting him and allowed him to consentrate.

After a few moments, Wilfort lowered his arms and the glow faded away. He stared at the woman, trying to find the words for what he had to say.

"Do you know what's wrong with my mother, Mister Hobnoster? Do you know how to cure her?" Tim asked anxiously.

"Yes, I know what is wrong, Mister Mazil," Wilfort said slowly. "She has a condition that is called feeble-lung. People with this condition are not able to breath as strongly as they should, so all the dust and soot in the air starts to accumulate inside them.  It is a condition that seems to become more and more common each year."

"Then you have seen this before, sir, and you are able to cure it?"

"I have seen it many times. Normally, it is not at all difficult to cure it."

Tim grasped his mother's shoulder more tightly. "But this isn't one of the normal times, is it?"

Wilfort shook his head. "No, I'm afraid it is not."

"But you will try, sir, wouldn't you? And if you can't, we'll find someone else, a more powerful wizard, who can."

"I am truly sorry, Mister Mazil, but I can not even try to cure your mother. Nor can any other wizard."

Tim looked at his mother, trying to fight back his tears. "I don't understand. My mother is a very good woman.  She has worked very hard to raise me and my sisters and my brother." He looked back at the wizard with a mixture of desperation and anger on his face. "Why wouldn't you help us, sir? Why wouldn't you at least try?"

Wilfort looked down at the floor to avoid the young man's gaze. "There is a connection between certain events that must be preserved. Wizards call that Destiny.  We do not really understand it or know how it comes to be, but we are able to detect it.  Like all wizards, I have taken an oath not to use my magic to break the flow of Destiny.  I know this is difficult for you to accept."

"You're saying my mother is destined to be sick? That she's destined...to die?"

"No, I do not know that. She may recover somehow, but I am bound by my oath not use magic to cure her."

"And every single wizard takes this stupid oath?"

"There are magicians who do not take the Oath of Wizardry, but they are unscrupulous people who prey upon the desperate. I beg you, Mister Mazil, do not go to those people for help.  You and your mother will certainly regret it."

Tim stared at Wilfort. "I regret asking you for help. If you're not going to do anything, then leave."

"I will, but I want you to know..."

Tears started streaming down his face and Tim screamed, "I said, go!"

Molly had changed when Wilfort returned to his house, but she did that quite often. She was still a cat, or at least she was very cat-like, but now she was standing on two legs, wearing a tiny scrub woman's dress and sweeping the floor with a little broom. Dispite the gloomy mood he had been since leaving Tim's house, Wilfort could not help laughing when he saw her.

"I doubt there's another man in Tweedon who comes home to a sight as strange as this, Molly."

"Oh sure, I'm working hard to make our house nice and clean and do I get any gratitude? No, just ridicule." Molly's face was now much more expressive than any normal cat's and her expression made it obvious she was not the least bit serious about what she had said. "Did you take care of that young fellow's mom, Willie?"

The gloom returned to his face. "No, I couldn't help her."

"Why?" Molly stopped her sweeping and looked up at Wilfort with concern. "Was is some really strange disease?"

"No, just common feeble-lung. But with her, it's a matter of Destiny.  My oath wouldn't let me do anything."

"Then that's the end of it. It's a shame for her, but you can't intefere with Destiny."

"I know, but it's so hard to just do nothing." Wilfort plopped down in one of the big, overstuffed chairs next to the stove and looked around the room. "I wonder if there's some way I could help her without exactly curing her. Some way to work around Destiny."

"Those are dangerous ideas, Willie. Remember that's a magically binding oath.  You can't talk your way out of it."

"You're right, of course. But it wouldn't hurt to read a little and see if it helps me think of anything.  I promise I won't do anything foolish.  Let's see how many books I've got with anything about feeble-lung in them." As he said this about three dozen books started to give off a reddish glow.

Molly looked at the glowing books thoughtfully. "Can you make other groups of books glow. I mean, could you make all the books that have nothing to do with magic glow."

"Yes, but what good does that do?" The red glow faded and a large number of them started to glow green. "Those mundane books are the ones I've read for fun."

"Now, do both colors together."

Doing two glows at once was a little tricky, but Wilfort managed to do it rather quickly. "I'll make the books glow all the pretty colors you want later, Molly, but now I've got to..." Suddenly, Wilfort understood what Molly was trying to do. There amid the red glows and the green glows and all the books that were not glowing at all was a single book that glowed bright yellow. "That's it, Molly. That's the book I need.  Thank you."

Wilfort hurried over and picked the book off the shelf as all the glows disappeared. "Hmmm...A History of Folk Remedies and Cures. Let's see what it says about feeble-lung." He set the book on his desk and started to page through it. "Ah, here it is."

Despite her changes, Molly was still as agile as any cat. She leaped up onto the desk and looked in the book with Wilfort. "Warts of a speckled rock toad. Mushrooms picked under a full moon. Whiskers from a strangled cat!  You're not going to try this, are you?"

"Don't worry, Molly, I don't intend use anything it here." He turned back to a page near the front of the book. "See, it says most of these remedies are now know to be ineffective, or even harmful."

"Why would anyone ever want to make something so disgusting?"

"Before the empire established the Council of Wizardy, most people feared magicians. They did not want to deal with them if they could avoid it, so they tried to find their own ways of healing themselves."

"So, you still have no way to cure that woman."

"Actually, this has given me an idea. When I was a boy, my mother would go to this little medicine shop and buy some kind of elixar.  It was terrible tasting, but it was supposed to keep me healthy.  I wonder if that place is still there."

The medicine shop he remembered had closed a long time ago, so Wilfort went looking for another one. It took him all afternoon, but on the far side of the city, he finally found an old, narrow building with a sign over that door that said, "Eldone Grone, Maker of Medicines and Elixars."