In celebration of the imminent release of Peter S. Beagle’s THE OVERNEATH, Tachyon presents glimpses from some of the volume’s magnificent tales.

­­­The
Green-Eyed Boy

by Peter S. Beagle

I
have never had a student who worked as hard as that scrawny,
green-eyed boy. Nor have I ever, to this day, known any young wizard
as spectacularly incompetent as he. Oh, he has never made a secret of
it—I know that—but unless you were present at the time, you can
have no notion … goodness, even he rarely speaks of that moment
when, attempting once more to float a rusty old horseshoe in the air,
there was suddenly an entire horse,
bellowing in panic, coming straight at my head! I made the poor thing
vanish, certainly; but that was a good deal easier than calming
Schmendrick, assuring him that both I and the horse were undamaged,
and then persuading him that this was actually a good sign, an
indication of his born, bone-deep connection to the world beyond the
world we know—the world on the other side of the mirror. Oh, I do
remember his terror, both of his failings … and of his skills.

“The
whole secret of magic,” I told him over and over, “is that
nothing is fixed,
nothing is forever; that everything,
from the house I built, to that willow tree I planted, to that
mountain you can see from my front door … all of it yearns to be
something else. This is the true fluid of the world—as for the
universe, I cannot honestly say, though I have my suspicions. But
here, where you and I are, a wizard is merely one with a certain gift
for tapping into those wordless cellular desires of a kitchen table
to be a meadow. Do you see, boy—Schmendrick? Do you see?”

“Yes,”
he said, very softly. “Yes, Master Nikos. I do.”

And
he did
see, that’s the point I’m making. It’s not that he didn’t
grasp what I was trying to teach him—I never had another student
who could go as straight and swiftly to the heart of my lesson as he;
there was no comparison. The problem was the connection—or lack of
it—between his understanding and his ability. Magic isn’t all
gestures and spells, fiery powders, chanted words, bargains with
unpleasant beings … but there’s that in it too, and that’s
where my poor Schmendrick almost invariably lost his way. Right
gesture, scrambled spell … perfect pronunciation of the wrong
words … summoning of demon, flawless—dismissal of demon, not so
good. And then there was that embarrassing business with the mermaids
… but that was as much my fault as the boy’s. I thank God, and
a few other people, every night, remembering that one.

The
power itself was never in question; but there comes a moment when a
responsible wizard has to consider the danger of having such wild,
uncontrollable power loose in the world in the hands of a young man
with family problems. Schmendrick, legendary as he is today, won’t
remember me attending the annual conventions of the Council of Mages
while he was with me—because I didn’t go. I didn’t dare. The
least of the wizards present at that gathering would have taken one
look at him, or even at me alone, and … and—I don’t know
what. Recognized what he was, and how untrainable he was, and ordered
him abolished,
as we say? It could have happened. I won’t say that the great mages
are cruel, or unreasonable, but realistic? Yes, you could definitely
pronounce them realistic.
Besides, my dues to the Council were not in the best shape—as they
are not today, thinking about it—and I did think it best to take no
chances on having the subject come up at one festive dinner or
another. Legendary I may officially be now, but I wasn’t then, and
you can’t be too careful.

For more info on THE OVERNEATH, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story