The Way of the Wizard

How to Sell the Ponti Bridge Neil Gaiman

My favorite rogues’ club is the oldest and still the most exclusive in all the Seven Worlds. It was formed by a loose association of rogues, cheats, scoundrels, and confidence men almost seventy thousand years ago. It has been copied many times in many places (there was one started quite recently, within the last five hundred years at any rate, in the City of London), but none of the other clubs matches the original Rogues’ Club, in the city of Lost Carnadine, for atmosphere. No other club has quite so select a membership.

And the membership of the Lost Carnadine Rogues’ Club is particularly select. You will understand the kind of person who makes it to membership if I tell you that I myself have seen, walking or sitting or eating or talking, in its many rooms, such notables as Daraxius Lo (who sold the Kzem a frog-bat on a holy day), Prottle (who sold the palace of the King of Vandaria to the King of Vandaria), and the self-styled Lord Niff (who, I have heard it whispered, was the original inventor of the fox twist, the cheat that broke the bank at the Casino Grande). In addition, I have seen Rogues of interuniversal renown fail to gain admittance to even discuss their membership with the secretary — on one memorable day I passed a famous financier, in company with the head of the Hy-Brasail mafia and a preeminent prime minister on their way down the back stairs with the blackest of expressions upon their faces, having obviously been told not even to think about returning. No, the ones who make it into the Rogues’ Club are a high bunch. I am sure that you will have heard of each of them. Not under those names, of course, but the touch is distinctive, is it not?

I myself gained membership by means of a brilliant piece of creative scientific research, something that revolutionized the thinking of a whole generation. It was my disdain for regular methodology and, as I have said, creative research that gained me membership, and when I am in that part of the cosmos I make a point of stopping off for an evening, taking in some sparkling conversation, drinking the club’s fine wines, and basking in the presence of my moral equals.

It was late in the evening and the log fire was burning low in the grate, and a handful of us sat and drank one of the fine dark wines of Spidireen in an alcove in the great hall. “Of course,” one of my new friends was saying, “there are some scams that no self-respecting rogue would ever touch, they are so old and classless and tired. For example, selling a tourist the Ponti Bridge.”

“It’s the same with Nelson’s Column, or the Eiffel Tower, or the Brooklyn Bridge, back on my home-world,” I told them. “Sad little con games, with as much class as a back-alley game of Find the Lady. But look on the good side: Nobody who sold the Ponti Bridge would ever get membership in a club like this.”

“No?” said a quiet voice from the corner of the room. “How strange. I do believe it was the time I sold the Ponti Bridge that gained me membership in this club.” A tall gentleman, quite bald and most exquisitely dressed, got up from the chair in which he had been sitting, and walked over to us. He was sipping the inside of an imported rhûm fruit, and smiling, I think at the effect that he had created. He walked over to us, pulled up a cushion, and sat down. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said.

My friends introduced themselves (the gray-haired deft woman, Gloathis; the short, quiet dodger Redcap) as did I.

He smiled wider. “Your fame precedes each of you, I am honored. You may call me Stoat.”

“Stoat?” said Gloathis. “The only Stoat I ever heard of was the man who pulled the Derana Kite job, but that was… what, over a hundred years ago. What am I thinking? You adopted the name as a tribute, I presume.”

“You are a wise woman,” said Stoat. “It would be impossible for me to be the same man.” He leaned forward on his cushion. “You were talking about the sale of the Ponti Bridge?”

“Indeed we were.”

“And you were all of the opinion that selling the Ponti Bridge is a measly scam, unworthy of a member of this club? And perhaps you are right. Let us examine the ingredients of a good scam.” He ticked off the points on the fingers of his left hand as he spoke. “Firstly, the scam must be credible. Secondly, it must be simple — the more complex the more chance of error. Thirdly, when the sucker is stung he must be stung in such a way as to prevent him from ever turning to the law. Fourthly, the mainspring of any elegant con is human greed and human vanity. Lastly, it must involve trust — confidence, if you will.”

“Surely,” said Gloathis.

“So you are telling me that the sale of the Ponti Bridge — or any other major landmark not yours to sell — cannot have these characteristics? Gentlemen. Lady. Let me tell you my story.

“I had arrived in Ponti some years ago almost penniless. I had but thirty gold crowns, and I needed a million. Why? I am afraid that is another story. I took stock of myself — I had the gold crowns and some smart robes. I was fluent in the aristocratic Ponti dialect, and I am, I pride myself, quite brilliant. Still, I could think of nothing that would bring me the kind of money I had to have in the time by which I needed it. My mind, usually teeming and coruscating with fine schemes, was a perfect blank. So, trusting to my gods to bring me inspiration, I went on a guided tour of the city… ”

Ponti lies to the south and to the east, a free city and port at the foot of the Mountains of Dawn. Ponti is a sprawling city, on either side of the Bay of Dawn, a beautiful natural harbor. Spanning the bay is the bridge, which was built of jewels, of mortar, and of magic nearly two thousand years ago. There were jeers when it was first planned and begun, for none credited that a structure almost half a mile across could ever be successfully completed, or would stand for long once erected, but the bridge was completed, and the jeers turned to gasps of awe and civic pride. It spanned the Bay of Dawn, a perfect structure that flashed and shone and glinted in myriad rainbow colors beneath the noon sun.

The tour guide paused at the foot of it. “As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, if you will examine closely, the bridge is built entirely of precious stones — rubies, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, chryolanths, carbuncles, and such — and they are bound together with a transparent mortar which was crafted by the twin sages Hrolgar and Hrylthfgur out of a primal magic. The jewels are all real — make no mistake about that — and were gathered from all five corners of the world by Emmidus, King of Ponti at the time.”

A small boy near the front of the group turned to his mother and announced loudly, “We did him in school. He’s called Emmidus the Last, because there weren’t any more after him. And they told us—”

The tour guide interrupted smoothly. “The young man is quite correct. King Emmidus bankrupted the city-state obtaining the jewels, and thus set the scene for our current beneficent Ruling Enclave to appear.”

The small boy’s mother was now twisting his ear, which cheered the tour guide up immensely. “I’m sure you’ve heard that confidence tricksters are always trying to play tourists for mugs by telling them that they are representing the Ruling Enclave, and that as the owners of the bridge they are entitled to sell it. They get a hefty deposit, then scarper. To clarify matters,” he said, as he said five times each day, and he and the tourists chuckled together, “the bridge is definitely not for sale.” It was a good line. It always got a laugh.

His party started to make its way across the bridge. Only the small boy noticed that one of their number had remained behind — a tall man, quite bald. He stood at the foot of the bridge, lost in contemplation. The boy wanted to point this out to everybody, but his ear hurt, and so he said nothing.

The man at the foot of the bridge smiled abruptly. “Not for sale, eh?” he said aloud. Then he turned and walked back to the city.

They were playing a game not unlike tennis with large heavy-strung racquets and jeweled skulls for balls. The skulls were so satisfying in the way they thunked when hit cleanly, in the way they curved in great looping parabolas across the marble court. The skulls had never sat on human necks; they had been obtained, at great loss of life and significant expense, from a demon race in the highlands, and, afterward jeweled (emeralds and sweet rubies set in a lacy silver filigree in the eye sockets and about the jawbone) in Carthus’s own workshops.

It was Carthus’s serve.

He reached for the next skull in the pile and held it up to the light, marveling at the craftsmanship, in the way that the jewels, when struck by the light at a certain angle, seemed to glow with an inner luminescence. He could have told you the exact value and the probable provenance of each jewel — perhaps the very mine from which it had been dug. The skulls were also beautiful: bone the color of milky mother-of-pearl, translucent and fine. Each had cost him more than the value of the jewels set in its elegant bony face. The demon race had now been hunted to the verge of extinction, and the skulls were well-nigh irreplaceable.

He lobbed the skull over the net. Aathia struck it neatly back at him, forcing him to run to meet it (his footsteps echoing on the cold marble floor) and — thunk — hit it back to her.

She almost reached it in time. Almost, but not quite: the skull eluded her racquet and fell toward the stone floor and then, only an inch or so above the ground, it stopped, bobbing slightly, as if immersed in liquid or a magnetic field.

It was magic, of course, and Carthus had paid most highly for it. He could afford to.

“My point, lady,” he called, bowing low.

Aathia — his partner in all but love — said nothing. Her eyes glinted like chips of ice, or like the jewels that were the only things she loved. Carthus and Aathia, jewel merchants. They made a strange pair.

There was a discreet cough from behind Carthus. He turned to see a white-tuniced slave holding a parchment scroll. “Yes?” said Carthus. He wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his hand.

“A message, lord. The man who left it said that it was urgent.”

Carthus grunted. “Who’s it from?”

“I have not opened it. I was told it was for your eyes and the eyes of the Lady Aathia, and for no other.”

Carthus stared at the parchment scroll but made no move to take it. He was a big man with a fleshy face, sandy receding hair, and a worried expression. His business rivals — and there were many, for Ponti had become, over the years, the center of the wholesale jewel business — had learned that his expression held no clue to his inner feelings. In many cases it had cost them money to learn this.

“Take the message, Carthus,” said Aathia, and when he did not, she walked around the net herself and plucked the scroll from the slave’s fingers. “Leave us.”

The slave’s bare feet were soundless on the chill marble floor.

Aathia broke the seal with her sleeve knife and unrolled the parchment. Her eyes flicked over it once, fast, then again at a slower pace. She whistled. “Here… ” Carthus took it and read it through.

“I–I really don’t know what to make of it,” he said in a high, petulant voice. With his racquet he rubbed absentmindedly at the small crisscross scar on his right cheek. The pendant that hung about his neck, proclaiming him one of the High Council of the Ponti Jewel Merchants’ Guild, stuck briefly to his sweaty skin, and then swung free. “What do you think, my flower?”

“I am not your ‘flower.’ ”

“Of course not, lady.”

“Better, Carthus. We’ll make a real citizen of you yet. Well, for a start, the name is obviously false. ‘Glew Croll’ indeed? There are more men named Glew Croll in Ponti than there are diamonds in your storehouses. The address is obviously rented accommodation in the Undercliffs. There was no ring mark on the wax seal. It’s as if he has gone out of his way to maintain anonymity.”

“Yes. I can see all that. But what about this ‘business opportunity’ he talks about? And if it is, as he implies, Ruling Enclave business, why would it be carried on with the secrecy he requests?”

She shrugged. “The Ruling Enclave has never been averse to secrecy. And, reading between the lines, it would appear that there is a great deal of wealth involved.”

Carthus was silent. He reached down to the skull pile, leaned his racquet against it, and placed the scroll beside it. He picked up a large skull. He caressed it gently with his blunt, stubby fingers. “You know,” he said, as if speaking to the skull, “this could be my chance to get one up on the rest of the bleeders on the Guild High Council. Dead-blood aristocratic half-wits.”

“There speaks the son of a slave,” said Aathia. “If it wasn’t for my name you would never have made council membership.”

“Shut up.” His expression was vaguely worried, which meant nothing at all. “I can show them. I’m going to show them. You’ll see.”

He hefted the skull in his right hand as if testing the weight of it, reveling in and computing the value of the bone, the jewels, the fine-worked silver. Then he spun around, surprisingly fast for one so big, and threw the skull with all his might at a far pillar, well beyond the field of play. It seemed to hang in the air forever and then, with a painful slowness, it hit the pillar and smashed into a thousand fragments. The almost-musical tinkling sounds it made as it did so were very beautiful.

“I’ll go and change and meet this Glew Croll then,” muttered Carthus. He walked out of the room, carrying the scroll with him. Aathia stared at him as he left, then she clapped her hands, summoning a slave to clear up the mess.

The caves that honeycomb the rock on the north side of the Bay of Dawn, down into the bay, beneath the bridge, are known as the Undercliffs. Carthus took his clothes off at the door, handing them to his slave, and walked down the narrow stone steps. His flesh gave an involuntary shiver as he entered the water (kept a little below blood temperature in the aristocratic manner, but still chill after the heat of the day), and he swam down the corridor into an anteroom. Reflected light glimmered across the walls. On the water floated four other men and two women. They lounged on large wooden floats, elegantly carved into the shapes of waterbirds and fish.

Carthus swam over to an empty float — a dolphin — and hauled his bulk up onto it. Like the other six he wore nothing but the Jewelers’ Guild High Council pendant. All the High Council members, bar one, were there.

“Where’s the president?” he asked of no one in particular.

A skeletal woman with flawless white skin pointed to one of the inner rooms. Then she yawned and twisted her body, a rippling twist, at the end of which she was off the float — hers was carved into the shape of a giant swan — and into the water. Carthus envied and hated her: that twist had been one of the twelve so-called noble dives. He knew that, despite having practiced for years, he could not hope to emulate her.

“Effete bitch,” he muttered beneath his breath. Still, it was reassuring to see other council members here. He wondered if any of them knew anything he didn’t.

There was a splashing behind him, and he turned. Wommet, the council president, was clutching Carthus’s float. They bowed to each other, then Wommet (a small hunchback, whose ever so many times great-grandfather had made his fortune finding for King Emmidus the jewels that had bankrupted Ponti, and had thus laid the foundations for the Ruling Enclave’s two-thousand-year rule) said, “He will speak to you next, Messire Carthus. Down the corridor on the left. It’s the first room you come to.”

The other council members, on their floats, looked at Carthus blankly. They were aristocrats of Ponti, and so they hid their envy and their irritation that Carthus was going in before them, although they did not hide it as well as they thought they did; and, somewhere deep inside, Carthus smiled.

He suppressed the urge to ask the hunchback what this business was all about, and he slipped off his float. The warmed seawater stung his eyes.

The room in which Grew Croll waited was up several rock steps, and was dry and dark and smoky. One lamp burned fitfully on the table in the center of the room. There was a robe on the chair, and Carthus slipped it on. A man stood in the shadows beyond the lamplight, but even in the murk Carthus could see that he was tall and completely bald.

“I bid you good day,” said a cultured voice.

“And on your house and kin also,” responded Carthus.

“Sit down, sit down. As you have undoubtedly inferred from the message I sent you, this is Ruling Enclave business. Now, before another word is said, I must ask you to read and sign this oath of secrecy. Take all the time you need.” He pushed a paper across the table: it was a comprehensive oath, pledging Carthus to secrecy about all matters discussed during their meeting on pain of the Ruling Enclave’s “extreme displeasure”—a polite euphemism for death. Carthus read it over twice. “It — it isn’t anything illegal, is it?”

“Sir?” The cultured voice was offended. Carthus shrugged his great shoulders and signed. The paper was taken from his fingers and placed in a trunk at the far end of the hall. “Very good. We can get down to business then. Something to drink? Smoke? Inhale? No? Very well.”

A pause.

“As you may have already surmised, Glew Croll is not my name. I am a junior administrative member of the Ruling Enclave.” (Carthus grunted, his suspicions confirmed, and he scratched his ear.) “Messire Carthus, what do you know of the Bridge of Ponti?”

“Same as everyone. National landmark. Tourist attraction. Very impressive if you like that sort of thing. Built of jewels and magic. Jewels aren’t all of the highest quality, although there’s a rose diamond at the summit as big as a baby’s fist, and reportedly flawless… ”

“Very good. Have you heard the term ‘magical half-life’?”

Carthus hadn’t. Not that he could recall. “I’ve heard the term,” he said, “but I’m not a magician, obviously, and… ”

“A magical half-life, messire, is the nigromantic term for the length of time a magician, warlock, witch, or whatever’s magic lasts after his or her death. A simple hedge witch’s conjurations and so on will often vanish and be done with on the moment of her death. At the other end of the scale you have such phenomena as the Sea Serpent Sea, in which the purely magical sea serpents still frolic and bask almost nine thousand years after the execution of Cilimwai Lah, their creator.”

“Right. That. Yes, I knew that.”

“Good. Then you will understand the import when I tell you that the half-life of the Ponti Bridge — according to the wisest of our natural philosophers — is little more than two thousand years. Soon, perhaps very soon, messire, it will begin to crumble and collapse.”

The fat jeweler gasped. “But that’s terrible. If the news got around… ” He trailed off, weighing up the implications.

“Precisely. There would be panic. Trouble. Unrest. The news cannot be allowed to leak out until we are ready, hence this secrecy.”

“I think I will have that drink now, please,” said Carthus.

“Very wise.” The bald nobleman unstoppered a crystal flagon and poured clear blue wine into a goblet. He passed it across the table and continued. “Any jeweler — and there are only seven in Ponti and perhaps two others elsewhere who could cope with the volume — who was permitted to demolish and keep the materials of the Ponti Bridge would regain whatever he paid for it in publicity alone, leaving aside the value of the jewels. It is my task to talk to the city’s most prestigious wholesale jewelers about this matter.

“The Ruling Enclave has a number of concerns. As you can imagine, if the jewels were all released at once in Ponti, they would soon be almost worthless. In exchange for entire ownership of the bridge, the jeweler would have to undertake to build a structure beneath it, and as the bridge crumbles he or she would collect the jewels, and would undertake to sell no more than half a percent of them within the city walls. You, as the senior partner in Carthus and Aathia, are one of the people I have been appointed to discuss this matter with.”

The jeweler shook his head. It seemed almost too good to be true — if he could get it. “Anything else?” he asked. His voice was casual. He sounded uninterested.

“I am but a humble servant of the Enclave,” said the bald man. “They, for their part, will wish to make a profit on this. Each of you will submit a tender for the bridge, via myself, to the Ruling Enclave. There is to be no conferring among you jewelers. The Enclave will choose the best offer and then, in open and formal session, the winner will be announced and then — and only then — will the winner pay any money into the city treasury. Most of the winning bid, as I understand things, will go toward the building of another bridge (out of significantly more mundane materials, I suspect) and to paying for a ferry for the citizens while there is no bridge.”

“I see.”

The tall man stared at Carthus. To the jeweler it seemed as if those hard eyes were boring into his soul. “You have exactly five days to submit your tender, Carthus. Let me warn you of two things. Firstly, if there is any indication of collaboration between any of you jewelers, you will earn the Enclave’s extreme displeasure. Secondly, if anybody finds out about the spell fatigue, then we will not waste time in finding out which of you jewelers opened his mouth too wide and not too well. The High Council of the Ponti Jewelers’ Guild will be replaced with another council, and your businesses will be annexed by the city — perhaps to be offered as prizes in the next Autumn Games. Do I make my meaning plain?”

Carthus’s voice was gravel in his throat. “Yes.”

“Go then. Your tender in five days, remember. Send another in.”

Carthus left the room as if in a dream, croaked “He wants you now,” to the nearest High Council member in the anteroom, and was relieved to find himself outside in the sunlight and the fresh air. Far above him the jeweled heights of the Ponti Bridge stood, as they had stood, glinting and twinkling and shining down on the town, for the last two thousand years.

He squinted: Was it his imagination, or were the jewels less bright, the structure less permanent, the whole glorious bridge subtly less magnificent than before? Was the air of permanence that hung about the bridge beginning to fade away?

Carthus began to calculate the value of the bridge in terms of jewel weight and volume. He wondered how Aathia would treat him if he presented her with the rose diamond from the summit; and the High Council would not view him as a nouveau riche upstart, not him, not if he was the man who bought the Ponti Bridge.

Oh, they would all treat him better. There was no doubt of that.

One by one, the man who called himself Glew Croll saw the jewel merchants. Each reacted in his or her own way — shock or laughter, sorrow or gloom — at the news of the spell fatigue in the binding of the Ponti Bridge. And, beneath the sneers or the dismay, each of them began to judge profits and balance sheets, mentally judge and guess possible tenders, activate spies in rival jewelers’ houses.

Carthus himself told no one anything, not even his beloved, unattainable Aathia. He locked himself in his study and wrote tenders, tore them up, wrote tenders once again. The rest of the jewelers were similarly occupied.

The fire had burned out in the Rogues’ Club, leaving only a few red embers in a bed of gray ash, and dawn was painting the sky silver. Gloathis, Redcap, and I had listened to the man called Stoat all night. It was at this point in his narrative that he leaned back on his cushion, and he grinned.

“So there you have it, friends,” he said. “A perfect scam. Eh?”

I glanced at Gloathis and Redcap, and was relieved to see that they looked as blank as I felt.

“I’m sorry,” said Redcap. “I just don’t see… ”

“You don’t see, eh? And what about you, Gloathis? Do you see? Or are your eyes covered with mud?”

Gloathis looked serious. She said, “Well… you obviously convinced them all that you were a representative of the Ruling Enclave — and having them all meet in the anteroom was an inspired idea. But I fail to see the profit in this for you. You’ve said that you need a million, but none of them is going to pay anything to you. They are waiting for a public announcement that will never come, and then the chance to pay their money into the public treasury… ”

“You think like a mug,” said Stoat. He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I shook my head. “And you call yourself rogues.”

Redcap looked exasperated. “I just don’t see the profit in it! You’ve spent your thirty gold coins on renting the offices and sending the messages. You’ve told them you’re working for the Enclave, and they will pay everything to the Enclave… ”

It was hearing Redcap spell it out that did it. I saw it all, and I understood, and as I understood I could feel the laughter welling up inside me. I tried to keep it inside, and the effort almost choked me. “Oh, priceless, priceless,” was all I could say for some moments. My friends stared at me, irritated. Stoat said nothing, but he waited.

I got up, leaned in to Stoat, and whispered in his ear. He nodded once, and I began to chortle once again.

“At least one of you has some potential,” said Stoat. Then he stood up. He drew his robes around him and swept off down the torch-lined corridors of the Lost Carnadine Rogues’ Club, vanishing into the shadows. I stared after him as he left. The other two were looking at me.

“I don’t understand,” said Redcap.

“What did he do?” begged Gloathis.

“Call yourself rogues?” I asked. “I worked it out for myself. Why can’t you two simply… Oh, very well. After the jewelers left his office he let them stew for a few days, letting the tension build and build. Then, secretly, he arranged to see each of the jewelers at different times and in different places — probably lowlife taverns.

“And in each tavern he would greet the jeweler and point out the one thing that he — or they — had overlooked. The tenders would be submitted to the Enclave through my friend. He could arrange for the jeweler he was talking to — Carthus, say — to put in the winning tender.

“For of course, he was open to bribery.”

Gloathis slapped her forehead. “I’m such an oaf! I should have seen it! He could easily have raked in a million gold coins’ worth of bribes from that lot. And once the last jeweler paid him, he’d vanish. The jewelers couldn’t complain — if the Enclave thought they’d tried to bribe someone they thought to be an Enclave official, they’d be lucky to keep their right arms, let alone their lives and businesses. What a perfect con.”

And there was silence in the Hall of the Lost Carnadine Rogues’ Club. We were lost in contemplation of the brilliance of the man who sold the Ponti Bridge.