Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water Read Online Free

. . . falling out. It wasn’t entirely fair. I . . . I just want to make things right between us. I owe Martin that.”
    All true statements , Jimmy thought, and totally misleading. Oh well. She doesn’t need to know that the falling out was over my attempt to kill him.

3.
    Martin and Roy materialized just outside the door of Martin’s warehouse in London/Camelot. There were a few more people milling around, but it was after dark in the twelfth century, so a street in a large city like this looked pretty much the same as the street in the medium-sized town they’d just left.
    Martin said, “So, this is Camelot. Not much to look at in the dark, I know. You’ll see a lot more of it in the next few days.”
    Martin opened the door to his warehouse and motioned for the older man to come inside. They walked in to a large, open room, about one-third of the overall volume of the building. The walls were painted black. The wooden floor was also painted black, except for a blood-red pentagram inside a circle. At the points of the inverted star there were candles. They lit themselves as Roy entered the room, which startled him.
    Martin shrugged as he closed the door. “Yeah, they do that whenever someone who isn’t me comes in. If it bothers you, I can make them not notice you. It just takes a little programming .”
    The corners of the room were home to four ten-foot-tall stone statues of fearsome creatures undreamt of in this time’s primitive mythology. Each creature stood atop a pedestal that also bore the creatures’ names, which were all unfathomable to the ears of the locals. The far end of the chamber was not a wall, but a red velvet curtain. Roy pointed at it and said, “Looks like you stole it from a movie theater.”
    “I did. I worked there when I was in high school. The manager was an awful racist jackass. Now he’s a racist jackass who has to explain to the owner how he let someone steal a huge velvet curtain.”
    As they walked across room, Roy asked who or what the monstrous statues were supposed to be. Martin pointed to each, listing their names.
    “Optimus Prime, Boba Fett, Grimace, and the Stig.”
    Roy said, “Yeah, I can read. Are those names supposed to mean something to me?”
    Martin had nearly reached the velvet curtain, but stopped and looked at his trainee, genuinely puzzled.
    “None of them ring a bell? Not even Grimace?”
    Roy shook his head.
    “What year are you from?” Martin asked.
    “1973.”
    “Wow,” Martin said. “Seriously? Huh.”
    Martin took a moment to absorb this, then said, “Well, none of these guys existed yet in ’73, except Grimace, and he probably looked pretty different. Did you ever eat at McDonald’s?”
    Roy said, “No.”
    Martin asked, “Why not?”
    “Because I’m a grown man,” Roy answered.
    Martin shrugged and parted the curtain. He gestured toward the gap and said, “After you.”
    Roy walked through the curtain into Martin’s living quarters , which took up the remaining two-thirds of the building. The walls were bare wood and plaster. The ceiling was a tangle of timber rafters. The floor was raw planks. The space between the walls, the floor, and the ceiling was filled mostly with furniture from IKEA. The layout was what designers in Martin’s time called “open plan living.” It was one space. The bedroom was distinct from the living area and the dining area, but they were delineated from one another not by walls or partitions, but by where and how the furniture was placed.
    Now Roy looked confused. “You live in a barn?”
    Martin smiled as he breezed past Roy. “Pretty much. I mean, the building is in town, so I think of it as a warehouse, but before I bought it, this building’s main job was to keep hay dry before it was fed to horses, so yeah. I guess that pretty much makes it a barn.”
    Martin walked to his work table and watched Roy explore his living space. The furniture was loosely clustered together in a little over half