Meeting the Sorcerer: A Name to Conjure With Chapters 3-4
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
Chapter 3: Welcome to Zarathandra
Sandy wakes up on the floor of a sorcerer’s laboratory. His head hurts. His body aches. The last thing he remembers is falling through an elevator shaft that turned out to be a portal between worlds.
Standing over him is Zhadnoboth. The sorcerer is old, irritable, and immediately disappointed. He was trying to summon a demon. Instead he got a damp, confused guy from Baltimore.
Zhadnoboth is not a wise mentor or a powerful archmage. He’s a middling wizard with an enormous ego and barely enough skill to back it up. Think of a mechanic who insists he’s a master engineer while his repairs fall apart behind him.
Sandy takes one look at the sorcerer and his cluttered lab and realizes he’s in serious trouble. He’s actually in another world and the guy who brought him here thinks he’s a demon.
The Companions Nobody Wanted
Sandy meets his other traveling companions and they’re terrifying.
Uskban is small. Wiry. His eyes are wrong. There’s a madness behind them that never fully goes away. Uskban is a killer. Not the glamorous kind from action movies. The real kind. The kind who has nothing left to lose and finds satisfaction in violence.
His backstory is the reason. The Zalkrings destroyed his family. Not quickly. Not cleanly. His sisters were captured, tortured, and killed during Zalkring religious ceremonies. Uskban was forced to witness it. Everything he does in this story flows from that trauma. His rage is bottomless and permanent. He doesn’t want wealth from the Zalkring treasure. He wants to hurt them.
Pognak is a giant. Massive. Silent. Not by choice. The Zalkrings cut out his tongue.
Before the Zalkrings found his village, Pognak was a husband and father. He had a wife, a young son, and a child on the way. The Zalkrings killed them all and left Pognak alive but voiceless. His grief is the quiet kind. The kind that fills a room without a single word being spoken.
So Sandy’s party consists of a greedy incompetent wizard, a revenge-driven murderer, and a mute giant carrying unimaginable grief. Plus Sandy, who until recently was eating wonton soup in Baltimore.
The Name of Power
This is where the story gets really interesting. Zhadnoboth examines Sandy and discovers something unexpected. Sandy has a name of power.
In Zarathandra, names carry weight. Real weight. Some names are connected to the fundamental forces of the world. They can reshape reality when spoken with intention. Sandy’s full name is one of these.
Zhadnoboth asks Sandy to speak his name. Sandy, not understanding what’s about to happen, does it.
The room nearly comes apart. Energy blasts outward. Walls crack. Objects fly. It’s like a bomb went off, but the bomb is just a guy from Baltimore saying his own name out loud.
Zhadnoboth is equal parts terrified and thrilled. He’s stumbled onto something far more powerful than any demon he could have summoned. Sandy is a weapon. An uncontrolled, dangerous, incredibly valuable weapon.
The sorcerer does what any self-interested wizard would do in this situation. He clamps an enchanted silver chain around Sandy’s neck. The chain gives Zhadnoboth control over Sandy. It lets the sorcerer command him, hurt him, and prevent him from using his name without permission.
Sandy goes from confused visitor to enslaved weapon in about ten minutes. Welcome to Zarathandra.
The Plan: Rob the Zalkrings
Zhadnoboth explains the job. The Zalkrings are the fanatical worshippers of Kels Zalkri, the dark god who invaded Zarathandra a thousand years ago. They’ve been hoarding treasure for centuries. Gold, gems, magical artifacts. All of it stored in heavily guarded vaults.
The sorcerer wants to steal it. That’s it. That’s his entire motivation. Greed. Zhadnoboth doesn’t care about defeating evil or saving the world. He wants to be rich.
Uskban doesn’t care about the money. He wants access to the Zalkrings so he can kill as many of them as possible.
Pognak follows Uskban. Their bond runs deep. Two broken men who survived the same evil.
And Sandy has no choice. The chain around his neck makes sure of that.
Chapter 4: The Goddess Checks In
Chapter 4 pulls back to the cosmic view again. The Goddess watches through her magic mirror from her jade and crystal citadel.
She reflects on how destiny has brought these four together. Each of them was shaped by events she either arranged or allowed to happen. Zhadnoboth thinks he’s running his own scheme. He has no idea that he’s the Goddess’s unwitting agent. His greed, his ambition, his mediocre talent. All of it serves her purpose.
The Goddess studies Sandy through his image in the mirror. She examines him carefully. His character. His resilience. His stubbornness. She finds him acceptable.
Not perfect. Not ideal. Acceptable. That’s how a thousand-year-old divine being evaluates a tool. Sandy is good enough to do what she needs done.
There’s something cold about the Goddess in these scenes. She’s not evil. She genuinely wants to free her world from Kels Zalkri. But she’s willing to use people without their knowledge or consent. Sandy didn’t volunteer for this. Neither did Uskban or Pognak. Their suffering serves her plan, and she’s at peace with that.
The Power Dynamic
What Aamodt sets up in these two chapters is a layered power structure. Sandy is controlled by Zhadnoboth through the chain. Zhadnoboth is controlled by the Goddess without knowing it. Everyone is both powerful and powerless at the same time.
Sandy is at the bottom of every hierarchy. But he’s also carrying the most dangerous weapon in the entire world. His name. The person with the least power holds the key to everything.
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