With a Single Spell

CHAPTER 22

Karanissa gave him the use of a comfortable, richly furnished bedchamber near Derithon’s study and provided him with a few of Derithon’s clothes; these fit loosely, but were far better than the worn and filthy outfit he had been wearing constantly since leaving Dwomor, the only clothes he had owned since Roggit’s hut burned.

The witch also ordered one of the three invisible servants, the least of the three, to wait on him. At first Tobas found the thing unsettling, this one was no mere sentient wind, like the one he had seen her command to bring food, but something small that skittered about, making nasty little squeaking noises and leaving wet spots on the floor. It would, however, fetch him small objects or run to bring Karanissa when he told it to.

He was unsure which spells had created the three servants; there were several in Derithon’s book that seemed as if they might apply, from someone-or-other’s Homuncular Animation to Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm. He wondered whether he might find a way of conjuring up something more agreeable; he did not care for his servant’s way of tittering unexpectedly at odd moments, startling him. One such uncalled-for giggle had caused him to spill a chamber pot, and when he had, in righteous anger, ordered the thing to clean up the mess, he was fairly certain it had licked up most of it, which was downright nauseating.

After that he did not ask it to clean anything.

For some time, he had no way of knowing just how long, he simply rested, eating and sleeping and studying Derithon’s books or talking to Karanissa when he was neither tired nor hungry.

He also took a few hours to acquaint himself with the castle; it was larger and more complex than he had thought. In fact, it was larger and more complex than he had thought possible; it seemed significantly larger inside than out.

Of course, he knew nothing about this alternate reality in which it hung. Perhaps it was larger inside than out.

Karanissa used about a dozen rooms ordinarily, and those were pleasant enough; she had the servants keep them supplied with lamps and candles, and the windows, with their unsettling purplish glow, were kept shuttered. The routes to important areas, gate, kitchen, tapestry room, and garden, were stocked with torches that the servants could light on a moment’s notice when needed. In the gate itself a pair of torches were kept lit at all times; Karanissa explained that she had originally insisted on this as a sign of welcome for Derithon when he returned, and Tobas, seeing her expression, did not point out the obvious fact that Derithon was never coming and that there was, therefore, no more reason to maintain them.

The rest of the huge structure was left unlit and empty, but even the darkest, most obscure little cubbyhole was clean and dust-free; when not waiting on their mistress, the servants spent their time blowing away dust and cobwebs. Since they never slept, and Karanissa slept as much as possible, they had plenty of time for routine maintenance.

Perhaps it was something about the air or the light, but Tobas could find no trace of decay anywhere in the castle proper. Nothing was mildewed or rotting, despite the extreme age of the place, so that it was hard to believe that it was all actually four or five hundred years old.

The entire structure was fraught with magical curiosities, such as the corridor that led to one room if one walked down the center and an entirely different one if one walked along either side, or the tower window that gave an inverted view of the rest of the castle. Tobas wondered whether Derithon had planned any of these quirks or whether they had simply happened as a side effect of the castle’s magical creation; Karanissa had never given the matter any thought and could give him no answer.

He discovered the castle’s vast magical gardens almost by accident in the strange spiral-sloped courtyard behind the kitchens. The outer part, where flowers grew, he found quite pleasant, despite the way the colors were distorted by the unnatural glow of the void and despite the way Karanissa had to warn him away from some of the more poisonous or otherwise dangerous blossoms. The inner part also seemed nice enough at first, the tiny apple trees almost buried beneath their own abundant full-sized fruit, the stalks of corn that threw their own shucked ears into his hand if he held it out, but when he came to the source of the castle’s endless supply of beef, he became quite queasy. The beef plants did not bother to recreate the head, hooves, or hide, but did possess all the other anatomical attributes of the cattle they mimicked, though not necessarily in the same arrangement real cattle used. The sight of beating hearts and breathing lungs atop fleshy purple-green stalks, with rich blood coursing through the arteries that were strung about like vines and the smell of fresh, raw meat billowing forth like perfume, thoroughly unsettled him, especially in the ruddy light.

Tobas spent a few futile hours trying to figure out what combinations of spells had produced the various monstrosities, but eventually gave it up. It sufficed that the garden was there and functioning.

Except, Karanissa pointed out, it was not functioning perfectly; here time had taken some slight toll, and some of the plants had died, withered, or become diseased, so that over the years her diet had become less varied. She had beef, corn, apples, and a variety of other grains and fruits, as well as an assortment of vegetables and cheeses; but except for one small and not very productive chicken bush, the fowl were all long since vanished; the lamb, mutton, and pork had become inedible, and the candies and cordials that had once been her special delight were dead and gone. Any sort of food or drink not provided by the garden had run out long ago, save for the vast wine cellars, and those were reduced to half a dozen bottles of ancient, barely potable stuff that she saved for special occasions.

If Tobas were unable to find a way back to the World, she hoped he would be able to restore the gardens to their former splendor. Otherwise it was entirely possible that they might eventually starve.

Tobas found the incredible profusion of magic in the castle daunting; Karanissa explained that Derithon had spent most of his free time for a hundred years or so in embellishing the place and that she, with her witchcraft, had added a few touches of her own as well. She had never reached the upper echelons of her craft, however, and witchcraft was always less permanent and less inherently powerful than wizardry, an admission that startled Tobas, so that most of her work was minor by comparison, and she had been unable to maintain some of Derithon’s spells.

“I hadn’t realized that wizardry was necessarily that much more potent,” he remarked, which was polite but not exactly true. He had not known it absolutely, but he had certainly suspected it.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Of course, it’s also much more dangerous. Derry told me once that wizardry somehow taps into the pure chaos underlying our reality, so that the effect can be completely out of proportion to the cause, completely unrelated to what the wizard actually did to bring it about. Witchcraft isn’t like that at all; a witch’s power comes from his or her own body and mind. Oh, it’s free of the limits of space and time and physicality, to some extent, but it’s still human energy. If I tried to work a spell that needed more energy than I have, it would either fail or kill me, but you wizards do things like that all the time without even thinking about it.”

“I don’t,” Tobas said.

“Oh, but you could; you could light a hundred fires and it wouldn’t tire you out at all.”

“My wrists might get sore,” Tobas argued. “From all that gesturing, you know.”

“That’s nothing. If I lit a hundred fires by witchcraft, I’d be exhausted. I could probably do it; lighting a fire with witchcraft takes about as much effort as starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and a hundred of those, have you ever lit a fire by rubbing sticks?”

“No, I haven’t. I’ve heard of it, but never tried it.”

“Well, it works, but it takes about, oh, ten or fifteen minutes, usually, and your arms get tired and sore. A witch can light a fire instantly, and her arms won’t hurt, but she’ll be just as tired as if she’d taken the ten minutes, do you see?”

“I think so.”

“Of course, I don’t need the brimstone and gestures that you use; I don’t need any ingredients or ritual for my spells.”

Tobas nodded. “Only wizards use all that stuff, I guess,” he said. “The warlock on my ship never used any.”

Karanissa stared at him blankly for a moment. “What’s a warlock?” she asked finally.

Embarrassed, Tobas remembered that warlockry hadn’t existed in her day, and tried as best he could to explain the mysterious new magic, but without much success. He knew very little about it, after all.

After a time, when he had slept several “nights” in the castle and discovered beyond question that tilting the tapestry to various angles had no effect, he felt sufficiently secure in his surroundings to attempt a few of the spells from Derithon’s compendium. The first interesting and easy one he came across, Tracel’s Levitation, he had to pass by; it called for a raindrop caught in midair, and he could find nothing of the sort anywhere in the castle. If Derithon had had one, it had long since evaporated; Tobas found an empty vial marked “Rain” on one shelf. And of course, it never rained in the void surrounding the castle.

That started him wondering where the water came from. Karanissa pointed out the well; after a glance into its seemingly bottomless depths, he decided not to enquire further and returned to the study.

Reminded of the problems of supply, he used Derithon’s big jar of brimstone to replenish the little vial he still kept on his belt.

The next spell after Tracel’s Levitation was something called the Sanguinary Deception, requiring nothing but his athame and his own blood; a prick on his arm, a few gestures, and his appearance, as confirmed by a glance in a mirror and by Karanissa’s appalled reaction, was that of a bloody, decaying corpse.

She refused to eat dinner with him while he retained his ghastly aspect, and he could find no countercharm he felt competent to use, but fortunately the spell wore off in time.

He decided against repeating that spell to get it down pat; once was enough. He could see its usefulness in fooling one’s enemies, but did not care to spend any more time than necessary having Karanissa avoid his company.

The Spell of Prismatic Pyrotechnics was another matter; he was able to work that one over and over without upsetting anyone, sending showers of colored sparks everywhere, glittering and bursting and whistling and, hissing, without ever even singeing a tablecloth or tapestry. All the ingredients for that were on hand in plentiful amounts.

He found a recipe for an explosive seal; remembering Roggit’s Book of Spells, he decided against experimenting with that.

The Polychrome Smoke worked well enough, but the resulting cloud hung around stubbornly until he finally asked Karanissa to herd it out a window into the void; he decided not to repeat that one, either.

A spell for the removal of blemishes proved untestable when he discovered that neither Karanissa nor he had any blemishes to remove. He had to skip over a series of spells that called for either sunlight or moonlight, since the surrounding void provided neither one.

Galger’s Lid Remover frightened him out of his wits, despite the laconic warning at the bottom of the page that it was noisy and required a certain amount of working space. He had expected the jar to jump about the room; he had not expected a demonic eight-foot thing, glittering like crystal and ablaze with white fire, with razor-sharp claws and fangs and horns, to appear out of nowhere with a banshee wail, snatch the jar from his hands, twist off the lid with a scream of tortured metal, and then vanish with the sound of shattering glass, leaving jar and lid on the floor at his feet.

When the performance was over, he stared at the open jar for a long moment, then gathered it up, closed it tightly, and returned it to the shelf where he had found it. That done, he sat and stared at it for a long time, a slow smile working its way onto his features. “Hey, Nuisance,” he called at last, “go find Karanissa for me, would you?”

His servant chittered, made an obscene slurping noise, and ran out of the room; he listened to the wet patter of its footsteps fading down the hallway, then got the jar down from the shelf again.

When it returned with the witch, he made a great show of seriousness. “I think,” he said, “that I’ve found what might be a very important spell here. It opens things. I don’t think it will work directly on the tapestry, but I thought you might like to see it.” He picked up his athame, the other ingredients, diamond chip, gold wire, steel rod, and small silver mirror, laid out ready on the table.

“Do you really think it will do us any good?” she said.

A moment of guilt at what he planned caught him. “Well, no,” he admitted. “But I thought you might like to see that at least I’m learning something.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, then, what does this spell do?”

“It opens jars.”

“Is that all? I can open jars, by hand or by magic.”

“Not like this; the book says it can open any container a man can carry with one hand, no matter how tightly closed. Watch!” He performed the quick little ritual.

Her reaction was all he could have asked for; when the thing appeared, she jumped backward with a shriek, knocking her chair to the floor. Even though he knew what to expect this time, Tobas himself was again disconcerted by the suddenness, brightness, and noise of the apparition.

When the thing had vanished again, Karanissa stared for a long moment, then burst out laughing. “That,” she gasped, “is the silliest thing I ever saw!”

Tobas smiled. “I hoped you’d like it,” he said.

“I never saw Derry use that one!” she wheezed, trying to catch her breath.

“I’m not surprised,” he replied. “According to the book, all this spell does is open jars and bottles and the like, and there are easier, quieter methods.”

In control of herself once more, the witch asked thoughtfully, “Do you think it might open the tapestry somehow?”

He considered that seriously, then shook his head. “I don’t think I want to risk it,” he said. “At least, not yet. I’m afraid it would rip the tapestry apart instead, and we’d have to make an entirely new one from scratch. I don’t think I’ll be able to do that for a long, long time, even if we have the materials, and I don’t think we do. I didn’t see any roses or pines in the garden. And, unless there’s a treasury you haven’t mentioned, we can’t get the gold or silver, either, except by melting down the old one.”

“There’s no treasury; we never kept any money at all in here. There was never any reason to. The roses died long ago, and we never had any pines.”

“I thought that might be the case. We can’t make a new tapestry, then; we need to make the old one work again.”

“And you haven’t figured out what’s wrong with it?”

“No. I’ve read through the spell a hundred times and I don’t see why it would stop working. I’ve inspected the tapestry as closely as I can. If there’s a cut or a tear or an unraveling anywhere, I can’t find it. I have this feeling I should know what’s wrong, that I’ll feel stupid when I do realize what it is, but I can’t think of what it could be.”

“Well, I don’t have any idea,” she said. “You keep working on it; I’m sure you’ll get us out of here eventually.” She stood, then impulsively leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “And thank you for trying.”

“Hey, I’m stuck here, too, remember!”

“I know, and thank you for coming.” She turned and left before he could think of anything to say in reply.

He watched her go, unsure of his own feelings toward her, then turned pages to the spell of the Transporting Tapestry and read through it again.