perfectly steady. "He is the child of a friend of mine," he replied quietly, "who is now dead." There was a moment's silence, the old man concentrating on turning back the cuffs of his faded robe, revealing a road map of old scars striping the hard, heavy muscle of his forearms. When he looked up again, that expression of gentle amusement was back in his eyes. "Not that you believe me, of course."
"Well, now that you mention it, I don't."
"Good." Ingold smiled, stepping past Rudy into the narrow hall. "It's better that you shouldn't. Close the door behind you, would you, please?"
"Because, for one thing," Rudy said, following him down the hall to the kitchen, "if you're from a whole other universe, like you say, how come you are speaking English?"
"Oh, I'm not." Ingold located one of the six-packs of beer on the kitchen counter and extricated a can for himself and one for Rudy. "Speaking English, that is. You only hear it as English in your mind. If you were to come to my world, I could arrange the same spell to cover you."
Oh, yeah? Rudy thought cynically. And I suppose you figured out how to operate push-tab beer cans the same way?
"Unfortunately, there's no way I can prove this to you," Ingold went on placidly, seating himself on the corner of the grimy formica table top, the butter-colored morning sunlight gilding the worn hilt of his sword with an edge like fire. "Different universes obey different physical laws, and yours, despite its present close conjunction with my own, is very far from the heart and source of Power. The laws of physics here are very heavy, very certain and irreversible, and unaffected by... certain other considerations." He glanced out the window to his right, scanning the fall of the land beyond, judging the angle of the sun, the time of day. The expression of calculation in his eyes, adding up pieces of information that had nothing to do with Rudy or with maintaining a role, troubled Rudy with a disquieting sense that the old man was too calm about it, too matter-of-fact. He'd met masqueraders before; living in Southern California, you could hardly help it. And, young or old, all those would-be Brothers of Atlantis had the same air of being in costume, no matter how cool they were about it. They all knew you were noticing them.
This old croaker didn't seem to be thinking about Rudy at all, except as a man to be dealt with in the course of something else.
Rudy found himself thinking, He's either what he says he is, or so far out in left field he's never coming back.
And his indignant outrage at being beguiled into admitting two possibilities at all was almost immediately superimposed on the uneasy memory of that gap of light and the colors he'd thought he'd seen beyond.
Watch it, kiddo, he told himself. The old guy's not hitting on all his cylinders. If you're not careful, he'll have you doing it next. So he asked, "But you are a wizard in your own world?" Because the outfit couldn't be for anything else.
Ingold hesitated, his attention returning to Rudy; then he nodded. "Yes," he said slowly.
Rudy leaned back against the counter and took a pull at his beer. "You pretty good?"
Ingold shrugged and seemed to relax, as if reassured by the disbelief in Rudy's tone. "I'm said to be."
"But you can't do any magic here." A foregone conclusion-the ersatz Merlins of the world did not often operate outside a friendly environment.
But the ersatz Merlins of the world didn't usually smile, then hide the smile, at the suggestion of fraud. "No. That isn't possible."
Rudy simply couldn't figure the guy. But something in that serene self-assurance prompted him to ask, "Yeah, but how can you be a wizard without magic?" He finished his beer, crumpled the aluminum with one hand, and tossed it into the corner of the bare room.
"Oh, wizardry has really very little to do with magic."
Taken off-balance, Rudy paused, the old man's voice and words touching some feeling in his soul that echoed, like the distant note of a long-forgotten guitar. "Yeah, but-" he began, and stopped again. "What is wizardry?" he asked quietly. "What is magic?"
"What isn't?"
There was silence for the space of about two long-drawn breaths, Rudy fighting the sudden, illogical, and overwhelming notion that that was the reply of a man who understood magic. Then he shook his head, as if to clear it of the