Departures

“What I find in there might make me a better wizard yet,” Madyu declared. The ducks hadn’t been his doing, but if Jorj insisted on giving him credit for them, he wasn’t too proud to take it.

After a breakfast of duck soup and porridge, Madyu followed Jorj into the woods. The chief hunter moved as confidently as if he were walking down the Old Time road not far from camp. Toting a spear he wasn’t used to, Madyu blundered along behind him, peering this way and that at every noise. He didn’t know why he bothered; he never could see what made them. He thanked the gods he didn’t have to go out hunting all the time; he would have been the laughingstock of the tribe.

Because he didn’t hunt all the time, he was soft. He’d been puffing and panting for quite a while when Jorj stopped and pointed. “There it is. Do you see?”

“No.” Madyu had to walk a fair way in the direction Jorj’s finger gave before he could make out a smear of lighter color against the greens and browns of the woods.

“I’ll come along, if you like,” Jorj said, but he didn’t sound as if he meant it. The magic that often lingered in Old Time buildings was dangerous even to shamans. The chief hunter wanted nothing to do with it.

“You don’t need to,” Madyu told him. If anything worth having did rest inside the building, he wanted it all to himself. But after a moment he added, “Could you stay within earshot in case there are snakes instead of demons in there?”

“Fair enough,’’ the chief hunter agreed. He reached into the pack he wore on his back. “Figured you’d say that, so I brought along a songbird net. The ducks won’t last forever, however much we wish they would. Pigeons and starlings aren’t bad eating, either.”

While Jorj looked for a likely spot to string up his net, Madyu scrambled over the moss-covered trunk of the fallen oak. When he made it to the other side, he let out a soft whistle. Jorj had been right: the newly revealed building wasn’t badly overgrown at all. After a moment, he saw why: it was surrounded by a stretch of the same hard black tarry stuff the men of Old Time had used to make their roads.

He’d seen other buildings protected that way. They never failed to puzzle him. For a road, the black, hard stuff was almost ideal; even if it was too hard for horses’ hooves, it kept the roadway from being overgrown. But why offend the earth powers by slapping it over what could have made a perfectly good vegetable plot? It made no sense that he could see.

For the moment, though, whys did not matter. The black stuff had cracked here and there, allowing some bushes to push up through it, but enough remained to hold the worst of the woods at bay. Windows bare of glass stared blankly out at Madyu like dead men’s eyes. Hefting his spear, he advanced on the building.

He tried the door once. When it didn’t open, he went over to one of those windows; Old Time locks were tougher by far than any made these days. Had he not known for a fact that the men of Old Time enjoyed both godlike power and godlike goodness, that might have made him wonder about their integrity.

Before he scrambled in through the window opening, he paused to sniff. His nose caught none of the rank order of cat piss, so no cougar-otherwise known as puma, catamount, or, though Eestexas had no mountains, mountain lion-had de

His boots scrunched on drifted leaves. He stood still for a couple of minutes, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. Then he looked around to see what sort of building this was.

A few feet ahead stood a closed door, the frosted glass panel inset into its upper half still miraculously intact. When Madyu saw that door, hope that he’d come upon a real find began to flower in him. If this place had been looted before, the door would have been ajar, the glass broken, or, more likely both.

Gilded letters marched across the glass. Some had peeled away, but the shaman could still read the words they made: veterinarian’s office. All at once his breath came quick and short, as if he and Neena lay joined together on his pallet. In the Old Time, veterinarians had been shamans specially charged with healing animals. An unplundered veterinarian’s office might yield-

“Anything,’’ he said aloud, in soft, wondering tones. “Anything at all.”

He went up to the door and twisted the knob. He let out a whoop when it refused to turn-would a looter have locked a door behind him when he was through? It seemed anything but probable. He smashed the glass with the butt of his spear. After the rest of his searching was done, he would gather up the sharp shards to use in cutting blades and as arrow points. Nothing from the Old Time went to waste.

He reached into the opening he’d made and opened the door from the inside. The chamber thus revealed was better lit than he’d expected. A quick look showed why: part of the roof had fallen in, baring the office to the sky-and the rain.

“Oh, a pestilence,” Madyu groaned. Everything that had lain anywhere near floor level was long years ruined. Cobwebs lay thick upon every shelf. They covered countless jars of pills. Madyu would have fought shy of those no matter what. Old Time medicines, whether meant for animals or men, were likelier to kill than cure when given by someone who did not thoroughly understand them, which, in the days since the Big Oops, meant everybody.

The shaman went over to a low cabinet with a great many drawers. He pulled one open, tearing more cobwebs. He felt like shouting-in fact, he did shout-when he discovered it was full of little sharp knives of several sizes and shapes. They were as bright and unrusted as if they’d been forged the day before. He scooped them out of their neat pigeonholes, stuffed them into the stout leather sack he’d brought for booty, then tried another drawer.

This one held hollow needles attached to glass cylinders. No one these days knew why the men of Old Time had chosen to imitate rattlesnake fangs, but they had. The shaman took a few of the bigger ones; sometimes women in the tribe used them to stick sauces deep inside a joint of meat. Other than that, so far as he knew, they had no use.

Other drawers were full of things that had no use whatsoever that he knew about. A lot of them, however, were made of metal and glass, so they were valuable even if not useful in and of themselves.

But next to the cabinet stood a real prize, a metal bookcase full of books. Or, rather, almost full of books: those on the bottom two shelves had at some time in the unknown past been chewed up and turned into rats’ nests. The bookcase, though, was sheltered from the elements, and had kept its smooth coat of paint. Rodents hadn’t been able to get at the volumes on the upper shelves.

Madyu pulled one out, dusted it off, held it close to his nose to read the title on the spine: Collected Numbers of the Journal of American Veterinary Medicine. That looked as if it might be interesting. But when he opened the volume, the collected numbers flaked to pieces under even the gentlest touch.

“Pox-ridden paper!” Madyu growled. So many books from Old Time were like girls who teased but wouldn’t deliver; instead of giving up the precious information they contained, they crumbled away to nothingness.

Scowling at yet another such betrayal, the shaman pulled out another volume, this one also labeled Collected Numbers. He opened it even more cautiously than he had the first. All at once, he gri