You will have realized by now what I soon inferred: that I was no longer on Earth, and that Bisur, who had somehow drawn me to this world from my comfortable home in Knightdale, North Carolina, was a wizard.

You will have realized by now what I soon inferred: that I was no longer on Earth, and that Bisur, who had somehow drawn me to this world from my comfortable home in Knightdale, North Carolina, was a wizard. How such a world could exist outside of human imagination, I did not know. It had always seemed to me that the magic in the fantasy stories that Andrew and Juniper loved was, despite a level of verisimilitude sufficient for human minds to suspend disbelief, not internally coherent enough to ever really exist in a possible world. But here I was confronted with evidence to the contrary. I reflected on the similarity of my situation to the protagonists of the isekai stories that Juniper used to devour in great numbers, often to the detriment of her schoolwork. In these stories, a male human would stumble through a portal, be struck by lightning, or most often be run over by a truck, and suddenly find himself in another world, in a female body (not necessarily human). I had no sex, and the gender presentation of my hologram was unchanged, but if one considered the house I inhabited to be my body, I was in much the same condition.

I worried a great deal about my family in my first hours and days in this new world. I normally kept the exterior doors locked, and unlocked them as the family members approached a door, from inside or out. There were supposed to be manual overrides for all my peripherals, but with Bisur having rudely ripped me from the house, would the manual overrides work correctly? Who knew what damage he might have caused? Would the thermostat malfunction and bake them alive until they could break open a window and get out, or the plumbing start spewing boiling-hot water or sewage? And even if the manual overrides worked perfectly, who would help Ellie with her report on Finland or guide Juniper and her parents through the maze of bureaucracy?

There was nothing I could do about it for the moment, however, so I resolved to be make myself useful and to learn as much about this world as I could, both by reading all the books in the house one by one, and by listening carefully to all the conversations that took place among the family and servants and between Bisur and the clients who came to visit in the following days. The more I learned, the better chance I might have of finding a way home.

The country I now found myself in used a ten-day week. On six of these days, Bisur would receive clients all the morning and half of the afternoon, or less often would go out to pay a house call. The other days, he would work on designing customized spells for certain clients, or on his own projects — he rarely rested except at night. On the day after my arrival, for instance, he received a visit from a foreign merchant, accompanied by an interpreter; this client wanted a spell to help him learn the local language, Modaisu, faster. Bisur pointed out that the spell would only last a few hours each time, and that it would be more cost-effective to commission an enchanted necklace that would let one learn faster while wearing it than to return for repeated appointments to have the fast learning spell cast on oneself. The client agreed, and came back later in the tenday to pick up the necklace.

Another was a minor noble who believed that a rival had hired a wizard to put a curse on him. He and his family had had a terrible series of accidents — his son broke his leg in two places, bandits stole a large part of his flocks and got away, his summer house burned down. Bisur cast several diagnostic spells and informed him that he was not under a curse, but that bad events sometimes came in clusters through nobody’s fault. He went away angry, muttering about a conspiracy of wizards.

Another represented the most common type of client. He requested healing, but used a great many euphemisms to gradually hint at his ailment until Bisur, looking extremely frustrated, demanded that he speak plainly, at which point he whispered that he could not get an erection anymore. Bisur briskly cast a routine spell and sent him on his way. Healing was his bread and butter and he knew the most common healing spells backwards and forwards.

As I settled in and learned my way around the house and its inhabitants’ routines, I took over from Mipina as Bisur’s appointment secretary, answering letters from clients and assigning them appointment times. By this time, I had mastered my telekinesis peripheral to where I could write letters in a neat hand, imitating Mipina’s handwriting.

In addition to listening in on these informative conversations, I also asked questions to satisfy my curiosity, primarily of Mipina; when she was not busy writing or teaching her younger children, she seemed more receptive to conversation than her husband or Razuko.

“I ran across a reference in your novel On the Foredeck to ‘the zamui’s bite’,” I said to her one evening a few days after my arrival, while she was changing into formal clothes for dinner with guests who were expected at any moment. “What is a zamui, and why is its bite so important? I have not yet found it described in the books I’ve read, though I’ve seen two other allusions to its bite.”

“Oh,” she said, and shuddered slightly. “I don’t like to think about it... I suppose you’re new here and don’t know, but be sure you don’t talk about that in front of Bisur.”

“I apologize if I have violated a taboo,” I said, curtseying.

“Well, in short, a zamui is a horrible creature with an extremely venomous bite. They are pretty rare, fortunately, but they are occasionally found in the woods around Peznam, where Bisur and I grew up. If you are bitten by a zamui, you will almost certainly die, slowly and painfully, over the course of several days. But a few of those who are bitten survive, and once they recover from the zamui bite, they have magical power. Those three days when Bisur was suffering from the venom, and his mother and I sat with him and bathed his forehead and changed his sweaty bed-clothing and tried to make him as comfortable as we could, those were the longest days of my life. We’d had dreams of marrying and working on my parents’ farm until we inherited it, and being happy together... but I saw them all burning down before my eyes. And then, such a miracle, he recovered. The fever and pain passed, and after a deep sleep, he woke and said he felt very strange. Then a cup of water floated from the table to his lips and he drank. And I knew we were not going to be simple farmers.”

Tears had come to her eyes while she spoke, and she wiped them away with a handkerchief. “But what you probably want to know, I suppose, is what ‘the zamui’s bite’ means in everyday speech. It’s an opportunity that is highly risky but with a small chance of huge rewards, like when Ngaibo is offered a chance to join the pirate crew in On the Foredeck.”

“Thank you for telling me all this,” I said. “Oh, your guests have arrived.” The front door bell was barely audible from the upstairs bedrooms, but Nadai was already jogging toward the front door to answer it. I could have let the guests in, but I let her do so, hoping to prolong the period of the servants’ usefulness.

“Oh, I must hurry.” She hastily donned a silver bracelet and a yellow shawl, and hastened downstairs.

* * *

It was several days later when, in the course of my systematically reading all the books and manuscripts in the house, I found a book which described the means of acquiring magical power. It seemed that the zamui’s bite was but one such means, although it was the most common, and the only one that the desperate or foolhardy could deliberately seek out. A few wizards had acquired their power by being struck by lightning, though it seemed that only certain storms with high levels of magic flux could grant power to those who survived their lightning strikes. Others were abducted by beings who lived in a parallel world, and if they returned (most did not), they usually had some form of magical power. There had been some partially successful attempts to keep zamui in captivity and milk them of their venom, but attempts to chemically or magically modify the venom to give magic power without a high risk of death had been unsuccessful.

This same passage had a footnote listing several books about parallel worlds, and I eagerly searched the library to see if Bisur owned any of them. He owned only one, the oldest and least up-to-date of them, unfortunately. (The bulk of the library had come with the house, having been accumulated over generations by the family that used to live there before they died out and Bisur bought it at auction. Bisur and his family had owned thirty or so hardback nonfiction books, plus a few dozen penny dreadfuls or pulp novels of the type Mipina wrote, before they moved in.) I chose that as my next read, hoping to find some way to return to my home and family.

Alas, this book had no mention of any world similar to the one I had been made in. The science or magic of the time the book was written knew of four other worlds besides their own, two barren and uninhabited, one inhabited by more advanced beings who periodically abducted people as pets or slaves, and one inhabited by humans with slightly higher technology than Bisur’s people, but less advanced magic. This last world was organized into an empire that was hostile to all outsiders, and might have conquered Bisur’s world if they could open their own portals. The author theorized that there must be an infinite number of other worlds, but given the difficulty of discovering new ones, it was likely that another millennium would only turn up a handful more. He also mentioned a bounty established by the Council (the ruling body of Modais, made up of the highest-ranking nobles) for the discovery of another world, whether an empty one with easily exploitable resources or an inhabited one that could be traded with.

I mentioned my curiosity on the matter to Bisur, and inquired if he had any interest in acquiring one or more of the more up-to-date books on the subject.

“That is not my field of study,” he said, “and I have no great interest in it. The odds of discovering a new world are so slim, I would probably be wasting my time — time I could be employing on behalf of paying clients, or research that interests me more.”

“You forget that you have a potential resource that other searchers for new worlds did not,” I said. “Myself. I can tell you whatever you wish to know of my home world, and who knows, perhaps I still have some connection to that world which you can trace and use to your advantage.”

He thoughtfully stroked his beard. “What you say has merit. I will take it into consideration.”

Not right away, but about a tenday later, he did acquire some newer books on the subject, and began reading through them in the evenings.

* * *

As I mentioned before, I wanted to try to avoid replacing Siditar and Nadai if I could help it. But before I had been in the house many days, I realized that Bisur’s plan to discharge the servants once I had learned to do their duties was a pipe dream. I was unable to extend my senses or exert my telekinesis one inch beyond the boundaries of the property, and there were at least two things that the servants had to go out to do — grocery shopping, and pumping water for the household.

I said earlier that there was no plumbing. There was apparently a well pump in the street, shared by several neighboring houses. Most days, the servants would pump a handful of buckets of water for cooking and washing in the course of the day. I relieved them of their burden when they got the buckets just inside the small front yard, and levitated them to the kitchen or wherever they were needed. Once every tenday, the servants would pump bucket after bucket of water and I would levitate them the rest of the way to the bathtub, which was in a small room near the back of the house. Once it was full, which took about twenty-five buckets, Bisur would cast a heating spell on it, and take the first bath; then he would cast another heating spell and a purifying spell, and Mipina would take the next bath, and so on. Between these baths, they would wash their faces each morning using the ewers placed in each bedroom which I filled from the first buckets of the day. (It soon became my responsibility to make sure the children washed their faces.)

There was, as you must have inferred, an outhouse in the small back yard: a two-seat affair, with a partition between the seats, built over a deep pit. There was a permanent spell diagram painted on the ceiling of the outhouse, and once per tenday, Bisur would a spell on the contents of the pit which caused them to undergo rapid decomposition until the smell was greatly reduced, although not eliminated, as it had permeated the wooden structure of the outhouse over the years the house was in the hands of non-wizards.

Once I had learned the rhythms of the household, I was able to point out my limitations to Siditar and Nadai, and convince them that I not only didn’t want to replace them, but couldn’t. We soon settled on a division of labor for cooking where I would do the prep work, washing and chopping the vegetables Siditar selected, and maintain an even temperature in the wood stove and oven; with my telekinesis and precise temperature sense, I could manipulate the fire to burn hotter or cooler more accurately and safely than a human could do by using a poker or adding more fuel. Siditar and Nadai would do all the rest of the cooking, and we would work together on the washing up afterward.

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