I should really catch up on my recorded shows, but I’m a skimmer.  I took a few screenwriting courses in college which actually spoilt much of my enjoyment of TV and movies for a while as I carefully analyzed them for where the punch would hit.  I had my viewing of 45 minute shows down to between seventeen and twenty-three minutes depending on how much I liked the dialogue writers.  I don’t quite always get the “websurfing” metaphor when it was much more what I did on the couch (futon, yes) that was like riding the crest of a wave before crashing down into what always seemed to me to be a suspicious quagmire of commercials.

(You also get those on the radio – you hit your first button, commercial… then you hit all the rest just to find out that except for the last stanza of “Sweet Home Alabama,” which you’re really beginning to hate as a song for its being overplayed there’s no music on, just one of those points where everyone’s playing an ad.  Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t wield the big guns – I think that if I had control over the forces of the universe I might just change that.  Of course, it probably represents a deal between some forces or powers – “I’ll give needy children the power of love, but when you get a commercial on x, every other decent station will be running a commercial, too.”  Where x is your station of choice.  And this is not just an FM thing – it goes into the AM spectrum, too.  I just have to avoid tuning in in the middle of the day on my talk radio for fear of running into some stinky cheese show hosts.)

I was sliding between plot points and avoiding the Disney channel when I looked up at Doloise, who was busy poking at the one plant I have in my apartment, a very neglected Chlorophytum comosum.  (Random trivia here – did you know that two of the easiest plants to keep are the Dragon tree bamboo and the Aspidistra elatior, or Cast Iron plant.  If they had something called “Warlock’s Tongue” I’d just be inviting spirits of irony, right?)  The spider plant trailed a baby around the pot – it was a cute little ceramic toad with a wide-open mouth that I think Maggie potted.  It was a gift “for luck” from a lady who had a mild case of the gnomes.

“Are you…talking to it?” I asked.

I deserved the look I got.

“If it should happen to hold wisdom that makes my task easier to bear, I shall inquire of it.  What will you do with the dark marked sorceror?”

For a moment I wondered if she had read my Harry Potter books, but then I realized she was being literal-minded again, and I focused back on Ivan.  There was a connection I couldn’t see, but I could feel it.  It was frustrating, like walking an invisible tightrope might be if you were, say, the type of person to walk tightropes and found one become invisible.   The metaphor was stretched, yes.  Suffice it to say, I suspected it to be fine if the tightrope that became invisible was one you were used to and didn’t otherwise change in any fashion, but it would still be disconcerting.  I didn’t know how much tightrope walkers could ‘feel ahead,’ and Doloise was in my computer chair so I’d have to look it up later.

Regardless, I was frustrated.  So I broke it back into some simple steps.  Ivan had wanted to speak to the dead.  This would not likely be a matter of mere curiosity, but of a burning need to talk to someone or something that had died.  He was willing to give up a great deal of his life energy for this purpose, and now the dead have a conduit to him. Fair’s fair, a bargain’s a bargain, but his fellow sorcerors, including his wife, are concerned.

Let’s step back again.  Why do I call them sorcerors rather than wizards?  Because theirs is a magic of ritual, taught into families, and not very prone to improvisation.  They make deals with ethereal beings.  That’s why the half-a-day prep to destroy a city.  So they may have made ritual with each other in some fashion, meaning, does Ivan’s bargain affect them all?  I’ll consider the premise, but I won’t bank on it.

Feeling the dead in her husband, Nellie wants him back whole.  I don’t know if I can do that – once having experience what he had, Ivan will be changed.  That’s the nature of touching things on the outside.  It’s why I can’t have a normal girlfriend or nice things.  Well, I can blame it on Doloise right now, but there’s a like-calls-to-like in here.

Is Nellie jealous of whoever it is Ivan felt he had to speak with so badly?  Could it be an ex-girlfriend?  A mentor?  A lost child?  Find that out, and use that as my anchor to the power it holds over him.

I went back into the room and grabbed the card.  There was nothing on TV, and Doloise was going to bend the spines on my graphic novels if I left her to them.  It was an easy call to make.

I looked it up, and it’s a fair shake that a tightrope walker is constantly feeling ahead with their feet already.  It’s a terribly contrived metaphor, but I do follow-up on these things.  Apparently one learns first to stand on the rope, and then attempts movement, and then the learning how to turn.   Not that I was feeling like trying it, but wouldn’t it be an awesome kind of magic if you could just read something like that and then do it perfectly? Some kind of physical adept, perhaps?

Alas, sometimes my imagination is bigger than magic, I think.

Doloise followed me in her tailored tie-influenced suit.  The tell-tale hart was probably only obvious to anything that had scoped out my closet, and since the Dragon Princess wasn’t the useful kind of fey (you know, like a brownie who would clean my house or give me a deal on Girl Scout cookies or something) I expected those things to be few and far between, like girlfriends.

Nellie met us outside the restaurant.  “He is inside,” she said.  She grabbed my hands.  “He would not sleep.  He spoke cold words that raised bones in the kitchen, and had them seek life’s blood.  I do not know–” she broke off.

“If you could bind him?  No, better not.  Not if you still love him,” I said, looking into her eyes for a moment.  I knew whatever support I could offer was going to be broken in my next question.  “Who died?”

I had thought over how I would ask it on the car ride, and it didn’t come out as smoothly as I’d hoped.  She broke away from me, and looked any direction but the one I was in.  I sighed, letting my breath out slowly in the humid afternoon.  It was hot, and I could feel a sweat beginning to build.

“You would judge, and you could not know,” she said.

“But you judge without giving me the opportunity,” I fought back, suddenly.  “Look, just tell me if it’s important.  If it’s not, if you know it won’t be part of what keeps the cold inside him, tell me that.  I don’t want your life story.  I want to do my job, get paid, and go home.  If you’re happier after that, great, fine, shiny, but I’m not a therapist, I’m not a real doctor, I’m not some white knight, I’m just a guy who kicks doors closed when he sees them open.”

She looked at me, then, and said something I didn’t understand.  Her eyes glittered black for a moment, and a rumble of thunder followed her pronouncement.

I couldn’t tell if she had prophesied or cursed me.  I just pointed at the restaurant.  “He’s in there?” I confirmed without waiting for an answer.  I didn’t care if Doloise followed or punched Nellie in the gut or if I was walking head on into some kind of obscure trap, I just opened the door with a wide sweep of my hand and waited for my eyes to adjust.

“O! Angel of death, I await you here, heh, heh, heh,” Ivan said.  I could tell from his voice that his “heh”s weren’t up to their usual vigor.  “Do your duty, but Ivan’s neck is thick!  It will take more than one blow from your tiny axe.”

“I am not the angel of death, nor do I play it on TV,” I said.  “What ails you, Ivan the Great and Terrible?”

“Ah, to feel that Ivan again!  I left him behind in the place where the bones clack and play their unhappy songs.”

“Many a man has given something up for wisdom,” I said, slipping into the booth across from him.  “An eye, a drink from a cauldron, their firstborn child.  Does anyone ever come back with more than, `Boy, that was a dumb deal?'”

He slammed a meaty hand on the table.  “You do not make a funny!”

Well, I try, but sometimes I miss.  “Tell Ivan to come home.  His Nellya misses him.”

He lurched over me faster than I thought he could move.  “He cannot.  The veil is there for a reason!  We are not to see!”

“But you did.  And you speak the tongue of the dead.  What do you say to them, Ivan?  What is it that was so important to leave behind your heart?”

“Ha-ha!  Small wizard, you have a point!”  He pulled me by my collar so close I could smell his breath.  “There is only one thing ever worth saying,” I was as pinned down by his gaze as his hand at my neck.  “You tell them you loved them.”

He let me go and I fell back onto the bench.   He turned away from me and I don’t know if I was going to see him cry.

I gave Ivan a few minutes to compose himself.   To be completely honest, I would have to say I probably would have wiped away a tear, myself, if I hadn’t been a total jerk.  I mean, I was pressed to fault his logic, such as it was.  I could think of no other reason, myself, to leave my heart in the lands of the dead.

I had doubt, then.  Doubt is an insidious worm at the best of times, destroying what love and faith have made glorious.   The Serpent in the Garden was doubt, I am certain.  Part of it was a very personal doubt, that I would ever love anything so much as to be willing to do something that significant between our worlds for that reason, and part of it was doubt about my job here.

If I closed the gateway, there was only one way for Ivan to be reunited with his heart.

Possibilities flashed before my eyes, and I kept coming to the question: did Nellie love Ivan so much as to have him without his heart?  Was the safety of the Red Poets so much more important than her love that she wanted him cured first, and sacrifice her relationship second?  What would Ivan’s life be like, heartless as it was?

He wouldn’t be the first – it’s practically a fairytale trope (for which there ought be a whole ‘nother Wiki) to hide one’s heart somewhere else.  Perhaps there were support groups.  “Hi, my name is Ivan, and I have hidden my heart.” “Hi Ivan!” “I first lost my ability to care about other people when I traded it for the ability to speak the tongue of the dead.”

I focused after a moment.  I liked Ivan.  He was still in touch with his heart, or he wouldn’t be so likeable, would he?

Was this even my decision to make?  I was hired for a particular job.  I could just “follow orders.”

Yeah, that sticks in my craw, too.

“So?” Ivan turned around and asked.  It was a challenging tone.  “Do your…hocus-pocus, heh.”  He waved his hand as if he had no care in the world.

“Tell me first of dragons,” I said, suddenly.  I looked for Doloise without turning my head, but couldn’t feel her under the pressure of the situation.  Maybe she was behind me.  I wasn’t going to worry.

“Ah,” he said, as if I had suddenly earned a point, or at least some kind of respite.   He sat down again, his enormous frame fitting into the booth with the ease of practice.  He looked at me, squinting for a moment.  His hands moved in a way that indicated something specific, and he made words with the movement of his mouth.  “First, tell me why you ask.”

I felt the spell seize up the air around us.  It both relieved and intensified the oppressive sensation I’d been feeling since before I’d woken up.  It was a lovely privacy curtain, excellently delivered.  Ivan wasn’t just one of the Red Poets, he was at least a middle-weight champ.  I knew heavy-hitters who would have been hard put to do that with so little effort.

(It made me think of spy movies from the Cold War period, however irrelevant to the current situation.  What had Ivan been before he became a cook?)

“It has been weighing on my mind,” I tried to explain.  “Something about the way you referred to Doloise.  Was Artur trying to give me a hint?  The amulet that your Nellya wears.  Some ideas that just popped up in my head.”

He squinted at me again.  “You are a small wizard.”  He made that pinching motion with his fingers one uses to indicate distance.  It was not flattering.  “Andrei has good words for you.”   He leans back.  “And you come with daughter of Dragon to ask questions to one the Dragon has spit back!  You are small wizard, but parts of you are very big!  Hah!”

I didn’t ask him to elaborate.

“There are many routes to the lands of the dead.  I asked a Dragon to take me there.”

Oh.  “Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons.  I am crunchy and good with ketchup.”

“Pfah.  Ketchup!”  He gestured at the side of the table.  “We do not use it here!  But point! small wizard.  Dragons do not like each other.  Not even to,” and he made a motion with his hands that left very little to the imagination.  Might be why there’s so few of them left, really.

Ivan continued.  “I spent three days dead.  I spoke with many guardians of that land and ours and made deal for passage.   They were not all fair, but passed them I did.  I thought of my Nellya, and would return.”

He sighed, deflating.  “To return, I said, was part of the bargain.  The Dragon agreed, but wanted to choose his time.  I held my way.  He said he would then hold on to something to summon me at his need.  I agreed.  He took my heart.”

He smiled and pulled up his shirt.  In the middle of all the pasty flesh was something my eyes refused to focus on – I’ve told you, I can’t see gates.  But something from it still smoked.

“Once marked by Dragon’s blood, marked forever.  I do not know how a small wizard like you can fix it.”

I could close it.   I heard the sound, and it was not  a complicated pattern.  I felt the openness, the wrongness of the portal, and I wanted to, I really did.  So why were the words, “I guess that means we need to talk to the Dragon,” what came out of my mouth?