The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(35)

“Maybe it was sleight of hand, and maybe it was a spell. Does it matter?” Bentley asked.

I gaped at him. “Of course it matters.”

“Why?”

“Because,” I said with the sort of exasperation only a teenager can muster, “one’s just a trick, and one’s…you know…magic.”

“And yet, the end result is exactly the same: the signed card ended up in your hands. If I need to dig a hole in the ground, does it matter if I use a shovel or my bare hands, as long as the hole gets dug?”

I relented, almost saying no—then I paused. I eagerly brandished the signed card, certain I’d caught my teacher in an obvious blunder.

“It does. Because it’s not just the outcome that matters; one way is a heck of a lot more work than the other way. Why would anyone dig with their hands when they could use a shovel?”

“Precisely.” His sly smile told me I was the one who had just been outmaneuvered. “Now then, observe and learn.”

He took my cards, set the signed one facedown on the counter, and joined the deck back together. He shuffled, cut, and handed me half of the cards, then made sure I was watching as he slipped the signed card back into his half.

“The magician has two considerations in every challenge.” He flipped his half of the deck over and fanned out the cards one by one, showing them to me. “One: what techniques can achieve your desired end? Two: if multiple approaches would work, which one is the most effective tool for the task?”

My card wasn’t in his hands. He nodded at my half. I flipped the top card and stared down at my own signature. Again.

“Now what’s more likely? That I engineered a spell to warp your perception, or that I simply relied”—he passed his open hand over my half of the deck, and my signed card vanished—“on skilled misdirection?”

Bentley held up his hand and snapped his fingers. As he did, the signed card flipped up from the cup of his palm with a flourish, caught between his thumb and forefinger.

I blinked at him. “Is that why you’re making me learn card tricks before you teach me the real stuff? Because it’s easier?”

“Easier, my ass,” Corman grunted, lugging a cardboard box full of books from the back room. “Try doing the oil and water routine one-handed, without using real sorcery to help.”

“Which you will be learning how to do eventually,” Bentley told me.

“You know,” I said, looking between them, “I have seen The Karate Kid. If this is building up to some wax-on, wax-off moment of Zen revelation—”

Bentley tapped one of his temples. “We’re teaching you the most important foundational skill for a sorcerer. How to think like one. At its core, all magic—be it the real thing or stage tricks—is about misdirection.”

“In other words,” Corman said, “it’s all bullshit. And so’s ninety-eight percent of everything else in the world. People try to lie to you twenty times a day. Forty times, if you don’t change the channel when commercials come on. Before you can pull a con on somebody else, you’ve gotta be able to spot when a grifter’s pulling one on you.”

I walked through Bentley’s card trick in my memory, playing it out step by step. I knew I’d held the half deck tight between my fingers. No chance he’d slipped it in under my thumb without me feeling it. Yet I’d seen him, twice now, take my signed card and shuffle it into his—

I paused. Watching his hand in my mind’s eye smoothly slip the card back into his deck. Facedown.

The corners of Bentley’s eyes wrinkled with amusement as he watched me think it through. “What do I keep telling you, Daniel? Always question your assumptions.”

“Every good con,” Corman said, “feeds on the mark’s assumptions. Let him do the hard work for you.”

“My card,” I said slowly, “couldn’t have been slipped into my half of the deck after you gave it to me. Which means…you did it before you gave it to me. I saw you slip a card into your half, facedown, and I just assumed it was the one I signed. But you switched the signed card with a different one while you were cutting the deck, didn’t you?”

Bentley gently applauded. “And the student is learning. This is exactly what I mean, Daniel. People build assumptions about the world around them in countless ways, every single day. It’s a form of mental shorthand, and most of the time, it’s a useful survival mechanism. There’s nothing wrong with assuming, say, that gravity will tether you safely to the Earth, or that fire will burn so you shouldn’t touch it. If you stopped to question everything around you, at every moment, you’d be paralyzed.”

“But those same assumptions can bend you over a barrel.” Corman tugged a couple of hardbound books with staid dustcovers from his carton and hunted for an open spot on the overstuffed shelves. “Especially when real sorcery’s in the mix. Eyes open, kiddo.”

“Which brings us back to the question of tools,” Bentley told me. “Any magician worthy of the name knows three ways, at minimum, to accomplish any given effect. Which methods you use, and in what combination, depend on the needs of the moment. Sometimes the best answer really is to weave an illusion spell. Or sometimes I can get the exact same result by palming a card and letting your imagination do the work for me. Digging with a shovel versus digging by hand.”