With a Single Spell

CHAPTER 20

As the two sat glaring at each other, a tray appeared through one of the doorways, wafted into the room as if it weighed nothing and were merely drifting on the wind, like a falling leaf in the autumn. Karanissa, thus distracted from her fury, plucked it out of the air and offered it to Tobas.

It held exactly the food and drink she had requested. After a brief hesitation, Tobas helped himself generously; he was just as hungry in this eerie otherworldly castle as he had been back in the mountains of Dwomor.

The wine was not good at all, very acid and laced with gritty sediment, but after four hundred years that was to be expected. Tobas was too polite, and too unsure of his situation, to complain to his hostess. The bread and apples were fresh and tasty, however, and the cheese only slightly overripe.

When both had eaten their fill and calmed down somewhat, it was decided that Karanissa would first tell her story all the way through, and Tobas would then tell his, rather than both of them asking questions back and forth and confusing matters.

Karanissa maintained that her tale was very short and simple. Not long after she had completed her apprenticeship and been drafted into the army as a military witch, she had met Derithon, then two or three hundred years old and semiretired from his duties, but still on call for special missions and still training new combat wizards. They had, as she put it, become very good friends, but had not considered marriage because of the two-century difference in their ages, the gross disparity in their ranks — Derithon a reserve general, she a mere lieutenant — and the usual difficulties attendant upon marriages between magicians of different schools.

Tobas was not aware of any such difficulties, but said nothing.

The two of them had had good times together, Karanissa went on, and Derithon had her transferred from her reconnaissance post to “special duties” under his own command. He had even put a spell of eternal youth on her.

Startled, Tobas interrupted at that point. “Are you serious?” he said. “About what?” she asked, startled.

“That eternal youth spell. Do you mean that spells like that really exist?”

“Certainly they do! How did you expect me to believe that I’ve been here four hundred years if you didn’t know about youth spells?”

“I don’t know; I thought that maybe time was different here. I was always told that eternal youth spells were just pretty stories for children.”

“No, they’re real, all right, and, so far as I know, there isn’t any difference between time here and anywhere else. Youth spells are a military secret, but I thought just about everyone knew about them, all the same. Haven’t you ever met any powerful wizards who look as if they’ve just finished their apprenticeships? It always seemed to me that the military can’t be very serious about keeping these things secret when they let people like that wander around openly.”

Tobas began to explain that he had never had anything to do with the military or any wizards except Roggit, but decided that could wait. The witch was telling her story. He would hear her out first and then worry about details. “All right,” he said. “He put an eternal youth spell on you. Then what?” He wondered for a moment why, if eternal youth spells really did exist, wizards ever allowed themselves to grow old and die, as Roggit had. He immediately realized the answer, though; not all wizards knew the spells. As he had learned himself, wizards did not share spells. Besides, the secret might well have become lost entirely by the time the Great War was over, as the methods for making flying castles had.

Karanissa shifted on her chair, brushed back her hair, and went on with her tale.

She and Derithon had become very close, and finally, one day, after swearing her to secrecy, he had brought her through the tapestry to this castle, his very special, very private retreat of long standing that no one else knew about, where they could be alone together without worrying about gossiping servants or troublesome officers. These were his most prized personal possessions, the tapestry and its castle, and she had felt honored when he chose to share them with her, as he never had with anyone else.

She was a witch and she knew that he was speaking the truth when he told her that and not just giving her a line. Either that, or he had some spell she had never heard of that let him lie so well even a witch couldn’t detect it.

They had come here three or four times for brief visits, when time permitted, and each time, when they felt they ought to, they had then stepped back through the other tapestry to Derithon’s second castle, the flying one in the ordinary World.

Then, one night, at a most inconvenient time, one of the magical emergency alarms Derithon had set back in the real World had been triggered somehow, she didn’t know how, or what the alarm was, or how Derithon had known, since she had seen and heard nothing. Assuring her that it was probably nothing and he’d be right back, or if it was serious he’d be right back to get her to safety, he had left. She had really not felt like going anywhere just then; neither had Derithon, but he had quickly thrown on a tunic and breeches and gone, all the same, leaving her alone in the castle.

And that was the last time she had seen him, or, for that matter, any human being but herself and Tobas, for what Tobas now told her was a few sixnights less than four hundred and fifty-nine years.

“He tried to get back to you,” Tobas said when she began crying. “He was reaching for the tapestry when he died; that was how we found him.”

She glared at him through her tears. “How could you have found him,” she demanded, “if he was dead four hundred years ago?”

“We found his skeleton, at least, somebody’s skeleton, with a silver dagger and several rings, wearing an embroidered tunic. That was him, wasn’t it?”

“Aaagh!” She burst out in renewed weeping, and Tobas realized that he had been tactless. He waited for her hysterics to subside. She seemed to be struggling to control her reactions, and Tobas had enough sense to see that his arrival and the news he brought must have come as quite a shock; after centuries of isolation he could not fault her for her display of emotion. He thought no less of her for it. In fact, he was quite impressed by her; not only was she beautiful, but she spoke well and had already begun adjusting her accent so that it was closer to his own, making her speech more easily understood. Furthermore, if her story was true, and he had no reason to doubt it, she had lived here alone for centuries without losing her sanity or otherwise visibly degenerating. He was unsure he could have done that.

When she had at last regained control of herself, she went on with her story.

At first she had simply stayed in bed, waiting for Derithon to return. When she was quite certain that several hours had passed, she had gotten up, gotten dressed, and puttered about the castle, tidying up and poking around, waiting for Derithon to return.

Eventually she had gotten worried and had tried to use her witchcraft to establish contact with him, but without success. She had put that down to being in an entirely separate reality.

Finally, she had decided to go and see for herself just what had happened and had gone to the tapestry that was supposed to lead back to the flying castle. Then she had discovered that it did not work. She was unable to step through it.

This was something of a shock; up until then, returning to the World had simply been a matter of walking right through the tapestry into the private chamber of Derithon’s flying castle. The thought that she might be trapped in this strange other world had never occurred to her.

However, it became quite clear that she was, indeed, trapped.

Eventually, she had gotten up her nerve to consult Derithon’s great Book of Spells to see if she could get the tapestry to function again. She had found the spell that created it but had been unable to use it to get the tapestry to work. She had then experimented with other spells, right down to the elementary little training exercises for beginners, and had not yet found any that she was sure she could use. There were one or two that might work, but required items she did not have in order to be sure — such as living subjects. A hypnotic spell she had attempted had given her an eerie feeling that something was happening; but without someone to test it on, she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t simply imagining things.

And nothing she had tried with wizardry, witchcraft, or sheer random experimentation had gotten her back to Ethshar. She had simply lived on, waiting, talking to the invisible servants Derithon had left to take care of her, even though they could not speak to answer her, tending the magical garden that provided her food, and trying to keep from going mad with loneliness. She had taken to sleeping for days at a time; she knew spells that allowed her to do that without harming her health. Several times she had tried putting herself in a trance that would last until Derithon returned or until her body needed food desperately, and each time she had awoken on the verge of starvation, with Derithon still absent.

And now, finally, Tobas had come pounding on the door.

“There’s another tapestry?” Tobas asked when it was obvious that she was done.

“Yes, of course,” she answered. “Each one only works one way.”

“Could I see it?”

“First tell me who you are and how you got here.”

Tobas started to explain, describing how his father’s ship had been sunk, and almost immediately Karanissa interrupted.

“Do you mean you’re a Northerner?” she asked, shocked.

“A what?”

“A Northerner? An Imperial?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Tobas answered, confused. He had never considered the matter, since the only Northerners he had ever heard of had supposedly been wiped out to the last man centuries before. Caught off guard, he did not realize at first that Karanissa had been out of touch since before that extinction happened; instead, he thought she was using the word “Northerner” in some unfamiliar way.

“Then why would an Ethsharitic demonologist sink your father’s ship?”

Comprehension dawning, Tobas answered, “Because my father was a pirate, or a privateer. The Great War ended two hundred years ago, my lady; the Northern Empire was completely obliterated. There are no more Northerners, as you mean the term. But Ethshar doesn’t rule everywhere; part of the western coast threw off the overlords’ rule and became the Free Lands of the Coast, or the Pirate Towns, as I believe they’re known in Ethshar and the Small Kingdoms.”

“What are the Small Kingdoms?” she asked, puzzled.

“Oh, well, Old Ethshar fell apart toward the end of the war. The generals set up the new Ethshar, the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, as it’s properly called, and the old Ethshar fell apart into the Small Kingdoms.”

The witch stared at him. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“Of course I’m sure!” Tobas found it difficult to deal with someone who questioned the most elementary historical facts.

She sighed. “I can see you mean it, unless my witchcraft has deserted me completely. But it’s all so hard to believe! The war over? The Empire gone? Ethshar gone? I knew that the civilian government was in disarray, but I didn’t think...” Her voice trailed off into uneasy silence; she shook her head to clear it and said, “Go on with your story.”

Tobas explained how he had talked Roggit into accepting him as apprentice, how the old man had died after teaching him a single spell, and how he had gone off adventuring. He did not bother with any of the sordid details of signing up to kill a dragon; instead, he merely said that he had come to Dwomor hoping he might find himself a place and that he had wandered up into the mountains and found the fallen castle. He mentioned the strange lack of magic and explained how he had been sure the tapestry was valuable and had hauled it back down toward Dwomor.

And finally, he explained, he had taken shelter in a deserted cottage waiting for a dragon to move on and had decided to take a closer look at his prize, and here he was.

“Dwomor is a kingdom now?” Karanissa asked, bemused.

“Yes,” Tobas replied. “One of the Small Kingdoms. There are a lot of them.”

“Dwomor isn’t just a military administrative district under General Debrel?”

“No, it’s a kingdom, ruled by his Majesty Derneth the Second.”

She sighed again. “How very strange.” She stared off into space for a moment, then shook her head and looked at Tobas again. “And you’re a wizard, you say?”

“Well, sort of.”

“Do you know the Guild secrets?”

“Well, not all of them, certainly...” Tobas began cautiously.

“I mean, do you think you might be able to use some of the spells in that book, where I can’t?”

“I don’t know,” Tobas admitted. “I might; I’d have to see it. I don’t know whether wizardry would work the same way here as it does in the World.”

“Do you think you could get the tapestry working again?”

“I don’t know; I’d have to see it and study the spell first.” A horrible thought occurred to him. “For all I know,” he added, “wizardry won’t work here any more than it did in Derithon’s other castle.”

“But some wizardry still works; I’m still young, and the garden still bears its fruit, and the servants still do what I tell them to.”

Tobas nodded, greatly relieved. “You’re right; that shouldn’t be a problem.” He resolved, however, to test his own spell at the first opportunity. “Could you show me this tapestry that’s supposed to take you back?”

“All right.” She stood, and Tobas followed suit.

As she led the way through the castle, he quickly became lost in the maze of rooms and corridors; there was nothing traditional whatsoever about the layout of this fortress, and it was far larger inside than it had appeared from the outside. The walls were all of gray and black stone, some hung with drapes or tapestries, but the majority bare. The carved faces were only in a few passageways, not everywhere. Most of the corridors were dark and gloomy; Karanissa carried a torch so that they could see their way. The windows they passed were not particularly comforting, as the light that poured in was the now-familiar red-purple glow that seemed to have no source, but permeated the void around the castle.

At least the wind could not penetrate; the interior of the castle seemed a trifle warm and dry, but not truly uncomfortable, and a welcome change from the cold and damp of the hills of Dwomor.

Finally, when Tobas had lost all idea of where they were, they arrived in a small room on an upper floor where one wall held a tapestry that was just as odd, in its own way, as the one Tobas had taken from the downed castle.

The scene depicted in this tapestry was so utterly simple as to be almost an abstract design; it was done entirely in black and dark gray and showed a bare stone chamber that Tobas recognized, with a start, as the room where the other tapestry had originally hung, seen from a point two or three feet in front of the tapestry’s wall, looking back toward the passageway that led to the wizard’s study.

Looking closely, Tobas could make out the patterns in the stonework and other details that established it beyond question as the same room. The scene was exactly as he had seen it when taking down the tapestry, save that Derithon’s skeleton was missing.

He reached out and ran a hand over the tapestry and felt only cool, smooth fabric. He had hoped that he might be able to use it, that some protective spell prevented only Karanissa from stepping through, but that was obviously not the case.

After another moment’s study, he shrugged and turned away. He could see nothing odd about the tapestry that might explain why it had stopped functioning.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I’ll need to see that Book of Spells.”

He tried very hard to sound calm, but it was difficult, very difficult, when he realized he might at last be about to achieve his long-sought goal of learning more magic. If he could learn a few of the enchantments from Derithon’s book and somehow return to the World, he would be ready to start a career.

These, however, were no circumstances he had ever imagined that achievement might be made under. He was trapped in an otherworldly castle with a beautiful witch four or five hundred years old, trying to make an unfamiliar spell work in order to return to the real World.

What a strange way he had found finally to see a powerful wizard’s Book of Spells!