A Life Less Ordinary by Christopher Nuttall Page B

begin?”
    I hesitated. “You mentioned a number,” I said, slowly. He’d warned me not to mention their name out loud. “What are they and what do they do?”
    “You can speak freely here,” Master Revels said. “The Thirteen...well, as much as anyone is, they’re the rulers of the magical world.”
    I looked up, surprised. “I always had the impression that there weren’t any rulers,” I said, puzzled. “You certainly implied as much.”
    Master Revels sighed heavily. “The Thirteen are the most powerful human magic-users in the world,” he said. “I should add that they’re the most powerful known magic users in the world. They...they generally act to maintain the status quo.”
    He didn’t sound as if he wanted to continue, but he seemed to feel that he had no choice. “The magical world has too many Beings of Power and suchlike – like Circe – for anyone to control them properly. If the Thirteen sought to assert real control, they would find themselves destroyed in short order. As powerful as they are, they are still outgunned by the combined power of every other human mage in existence...and that doesn’t even count the elves, or the Walking Gods, or the hundreds of others who are so much more than human. The Thirteen’s main task is preventing the magical world from bleeding too heavily into the mundane world, hence our assignment to stop Mr Pygmalion.”
    I frowned. “How did they know that a magician was involved?”
    “Trade secret,” Master Revels said. “Let’s just say that a very powerful entity laid down the ground rules over one thousand and five hundred years ago and very few people dare to disobey. The mundane world is to remain...well, mundane. We are not allowed to operate openly in their world.”
    “Oh,” I said. I remembered the slaves and shuddered. “Why don’t they stop the slave trade then?”
    Master Revels winced. “They are limited in what they can do because the last thing they want is their enemies banding together to destroy them,” he admitted. “If Mr Pygmalion had been kidnapping girls into the magical world and leaving them there, or sending them out on the Fairy Roads of Happenstance with no hope of a return to Earth, the Thirteen would probably not have been able to do anything about it – if they cared enough to think that they should do something about it. Controlling humans is quite hard enough; controlling elves or goblins or demons is much harder. A year or so before you met me, I had to hunt down a vampire that had gotten loose into the mundane world and started to prey on ordinary humans. He could have caused a disaster.”
    I stared down at my hands. “But why would that cause a disaster?”
    Master Revels considered it for a long moment. “There is a fundamental issue when it comes to magic, one laid down in the laws of the universe,” he said, finally. “If you are born in the mundane world, you have to have a willingness to accept magic if you want to use it. You cannot just tell yourself that you believe in magic; you have to actually believe in magic. The mundane world doesn’t birth many people who are capable of truly accepting magic into their lives.”
    “But that leaves them helpless against magic,” I protested, remembering Circe and Mr Pygmalion. “They have no defence.”
    “Quite so,” Master Revels agreed. “You can be harmed by magic even if you don’t believe in it. Yet...what would happen if magical events became so common that the mundane world started to accept, en masse , the possibility of magic actually existing? It would completely destroy mundane society and probably ruin ours as well. The Thirteen’s task is to prevent that from happening. Mr Pygmalion’s actions risked exposure.”
    “If one of the girls had somehow escaped from her spell, or if the spell had simply worn off,” I guessed. Master Revels nodded. “What would have happened then?”
    “Like I said, the mundane world is very good at