Mouvar's Magic

by Piers Anthony

  The cairn slipped by and the road came nearer as the familiar monument was left behind. Then, suddenly, a large building not unlike a barracks. Above the door: RECRUITMENT HOUSE.

  "That's Throod, all right," Kelvin's father said.

  As though responding to his voice the scene grew close and narrower. They could see the men in front of the building—battered warriors for the most part, though a few were fresh-faced. Kelvin wondered how many of them had been in Zady's army and run home once they had been accorded the chance. There was fear in these men. They were one and all looking up at the sky. Were these men seeing themselves there? If so, this must be an even weirder vision for them than for everyone else!

  "It's like a zoom lens on a camera," Kelvin's father said. Again he was contrasting a magic that was new to him to the science he had accepted as natural. Kelvin had to wonder once again why his father and his father-in-law thought that putting a name to something and explaining it in nonmagical terms made it manageable.

  A voice came loud and clear from the sky itself: "LOOK, YOU OF THE ALLIANCE! LOOK AND TREMBLE AT ZADY'S POWER!"

  CRRRAAACCCKKK!

  The loud splintering sound, like the voice, came from the sky. The men there trembled and fell down as their ground shook. Recruitment House collapsed from the shaking, its shingled roof coming down as the walls crumbled and split apart.

  "Earthquake," John said, giving it a name.

  "Magic," Helbah corrected.

  The scene moved back, back, leaving prostrate men, some of them screaming and reaching imploringly up as though to touch the sky. Now they were seeing the road and the cairn that had been knocked over after having stood for two centuries of time. Shying horses; running, falling men and women; and—though there were few in this soldier's paradise—lost, crying children. Fear was panicking them, and who could blame them? Great trees were being uprooted and felled. Wild animals were emerging from the jungle. Beautiful orchards and crops of waving grain were dimming along with parade grounds and houses and windmills and all manner of man's conceit; statues and plaques and monuments to those who had died and afterwards been termed great. It was a haze coming between them and the sky.

  It was also one hell of a vision. What could it mean?

  CCCCCRRRRRAAAAACCCCCKKKKK!

  Another horrendous sound from above, and Throod was missing. In its place, and Kelvin had to rub his eyes, the borders of Klingland and Kance and Rud now joined—forest, only forest, spreading far and wide. The scene moved downward, closing with the treetops. Babkeys and other forest dwellers chattered and scattered there. It was like a land reborn, or as Throod might have been before it was a kingdom of mercenaries and had human inhabitants.

  Kelvin swallowed. "What? What? Where?"

  The voice from the sky boomed loud, almost answering him:

  LOOK, PEOPLE OF THE ALLIANCE, AT WHAT ZADY HAS DONE. THROOD IS NO MORE. IT DOESN'T EXIST. IT HAS NEVER EXISTED. ANYTHING YOU HAVE THAT CAME FROM THROOD, WHETHER WEAPONS OR HARNESS OR HUMAN BEINGS, IS NOW GONE, NEVER TO RETURN. ZADY CAN DO THAT WITH ALL YOUR KINGDOMS, ONE BY ONE. ORC OR HUMAN OR BESTIAL HUMAN MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO HER. PEOPLE, BEG YOUR GOVERNMENTS TO SURRENDER NOW TO ZADY AND SUBMIT TO HER OVERWHELMING AND OMNIPOTENT MIGHT. I WANT A DELEGATION FROM THE ALLIANCE TO COME WITH AN OFFICIAL SURRENDER AND I WANT IT WITHIN THREE DAYS. MY NEW HEADQUARTERS FOR POSSIBLE FUTURE DECIMATION OF THE KINGDOMS IS NOW IN DRAGON TERRITORY, ROUGHMAUL MOUNTAIN. SEND YOUR DELEGATION THERE. FAILURE TO DO SO IS UNTHINKABLE AND WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. EACH DAY AFTER THE THIRD DAY ANOTHER KINGDOM WILL DISAPPEAR. UPON SURRENDER, EXECUTION OF MY ENEMIES WILL BEGIN AND END UPON MY DISCRETION. I HEREWITH DECLARE NO MERCY FOR THOSE I HATE AND IMMEDIATE OR EVENTUAL DEATH FOR ALL THOSE WHO DARE TO OPPOSE ME. THINK ABOUT IT, BUT DON'T THINK FOR LONG.

  BBBBBLLLLLIIIIIPPPPP!

  Another horrendous noise and the sky was the sky once more. Kelvin found himself staring at a fluffy white cloud that had somehow assumed an obscene shape. Other clouds were normal and the sky bluer than he remembered.

  "It's a trick, isn't it, Helbah?" he asked the witch, though inside he feared the answer.

  "No trick," Helbah said, looking stricken. "It's just what I would expect her to do if she had unlimited power. She now has such power. I don't know how she obtained it, but she has. Throod is vanished, and according to Zady it's never been."

  "That's nonsense!" Kelvin's father said, obviously annoyed. "We were there. We got mercenaries and weapons to free Rud and then to fight other wars. We saw the Flaw. The Flaw! What can have happened to it? Where—"

  "Come inside and we'll see." Helbah led the way, followed by clearly scared Kildom and Kildee and then by Kelvin's father. Kelvin brought up the rear, fearful that he was going to see that what he had just experienced was no lie.

  Inside her war room Helbah gestured and lighted a crystal. The swirls started inside the square hunk of semitransparent rock, then merged and formed a picture as her hands made passes. In the crystal was jungle, looking as it had in the sky. The jungle grew closer under Helbah's manipulations and a river appeared, but no signs of habitation and no people or livestock. Helbah followed the river and then the river and the jungle ended abruptly. There was a great, open tear or emptiness that extended through the jungle and became lost to sight at either side. No fences surrounding it now, naked stars gleamed in what was permanent, unyielding blackness. The river here, as it did underground in Rud, swirled past the awesomeness, making a bend and sharp turn as if aware of what would confront an unwary traveler. Part of the river did not make the turn but instead fell downward, as a waterfall, into the great emptiness. From their apparent position above the river they could see the falls thin as it dropped and vanished.

  "That's the Flaw, all right," his father said, just as he had commented on the sky scene. "Only it's not as I remember. No barriers. The river wasn't this close to Throod. It's as though the river is misplaced."

  "The river was moved long ago, when Throodians cut a new channel for it," Helbah said. "This is the river in its natural wild state. It will flood from year to year and carry unfortunate trees and creatures into the Flaw with its higher waters."

  Kelvin shivered. The Flaw always had rather scared him. His father and his father's companions in war—or was it maneuvers in practice for an eventual war?—had come to this spot from Earth and impending destruction. Only then there had been barriers along the edge of the Flaw, and tourists gazing through the peepholes, and not too far away Recruitment House and its soldiery. Kelvin often wondered what it was like for his father and those who were soon to perish despite an escape that couldn't be accounted for. They had been in or near an atomic explosion, his father had said, and then something twisted in their minds and bodies and almost instantly, as it seemed, they were at the Flaw's edge outside the barrier. It had been, to Kelvin's knowledge, the only time anyone had traversed the frames without resort to either transporter or opal. He would have thought such a transference impossible, but his father and his men had undoubtedly arrived physically and mentally intact.

  "Seen enough?" Helbah asked.

  Kelvin nodded. His father nodded. It was compelling just to look on that eternal blackness and those distant stars. Somewhere other people might be looking up at those stars, seeing them not in a Flaw but their own sky.

  Helbah snapped her fingers. The awesome scene vanished, and in its place was nothing more than a chunk of very light, pinkish crystal cut into a box shape and now supported by a stout stand. Kelvin's father had remarked on the similarity of a magic viewing crystal to what he called television; however, his descriptions of living and dead people appearing in the entertainment box gave his son—and most sensible people, Kelvin felt certain—a cold fear.

  "Throod really has vanished, hasn't it?" John said. "I don't understand it, but it happened. It's like the atomic bomb all over again."

  "Really, John, you and your comparisons!" Helbah was annoyed with his slowness and his habitual references to things nobody in t
his frame had witnessed or cared about. If he persisted in it he was in for another of her tongue lashings.

  "No, really. St. Helens and I were talking about it. I didn't know what was coming but I remarked that Zady might come up with something overwhelming that no magic could deal with. I was thinking of atomic weaponry, since that's the most overpowering force I ever experienced. When the first two atomic bombs were used they ended immediately what would otherwise have been a much longer war."

  "Nonsense!" Helbah snapped. "Such power would be beyond that of any witch or warlock!" Then she became more sober and less certain. Her seamed face worked as though she were about to cry.

  "As is," she finished in a husky voice, "what happened this morning in this frame. You are right, John, Zady really has an overwhelming force. Whatever she has, it violates everything I thought I knew about magic. If there's a defense that's possible I'm sure it's one that has never yet been conjured."

  Jon was flying. The earth wheeled below, looking prettier than it ever had before. She felt exhilarated, freed. But how had she gotten here? When had she again become a bird?

  Oh—she was dreaming! So in a moment she would wake up and be home. Still, she could help the process along, because she remained nervous about being away from her family, even in a dream.

  Home was back the way she had come. She tried turning.

  Her wings beat steadily on, refusing to obey her. This wasn't a nice dream anymore; this was turning ugly.

  "Wake! Wake!" she tried to cry, urging herself to the necessary course. But all that came out were two squaks. This was a nightmare!

  As she thought the word nightmare, a dark shadow passed between her and the overhead sun. She heard a screeching. Turning her head upward on her bird neck she saw it dropping on her: an eagawk with extended talons.

  Nightmare? No, this was worse! This was reality! The evil witch must have left a residual spell on her, so that she had not truly escaped. Now she was being recovered, at the witch's convenience.

  She tried to scream. In this she succeeded, as the cruel talons caught her.

  CHAPTER 24

  Trip to Roughmaul

  Mountain

  Kelvin, Heln, his parents, both his human children, and their respective mates were gathered with Helbah and the nominal kings of Klingland and Kance in Helbah's headquarters. They had done the crystal searchings for an extended length of time, or at least Helbah had, and neither Horace nor his mate had made an appearance. They weren't at the cave where Horace had been told to wait, nor at their retreat where they had sunnymooned. They just weren't anywhere that Helbah could find.

  "Do you think she's got them?" Kelvin asked. After seeing what had happened to an entire kingdom he could well believe that Zady could magic them from existence. It was painful to think about. Horace had seemed a monster to him and his wife, but then Horace had saved the other siblings and stood by him the day Zady lost her head. He, and he thought Heln too, had come to love Horace as a son—a little like a retarded human son—ever since.

  As though thinking the same thing, Heln suddenly buried her face against the brownberry shirt covering his newly muscled chest and began crying. A loss of a kingdom was bad, but the loss of a child and the child's mate was disastrous.

  "I don't know if they exist in our frame anymore," Helbah said. "Any luck yet, Charlain?"

  Charlain looked up from the table where she had spread the cards. "It's always the same, Helbah. All the cards show is danger and uncertainty for anyone I ask about. The death card never shows, but that doesn't mean they're safe."

  John patted Charlain's shoulder. "At least you don't see disaster."

  "I'm not certain, John." She looked with violet eyes from her astonishingly still-beautiful face. Now those eyes were wide and frightened in a way that Kelvin could not remember them ever having been before. He didn't like the tremble on her lips as she whispered, more than spoke, to his father. "The cards are worthless."

  "Darling, you've never said that before!"

  "I've never felt this way before! Maybe it's something Zady's doing—preventing me from reading the future."

  "The future you read always has been ambiguous," John reminded. "That uncertainty card showed up a lot in the past, didn't it?"

  "Yes, but before I could always find the right questions to get around it. Long ago Lester was wounded and the cards wouldn't tell me if he would live or die. But then I asked about specific medicines, and finally I found one that the cards told me would save his life. They had been unable to answer until I made the decision on the right or wrong medicine."

  "Ask them if there are questions that will remove the uncertainty," John suggested.

  Charlain almost absently shuffled and laid out the cards. She closed her eyes in concentration, then raised her hand above their backs. Her fingers made a circle over the cards, her forefinger pointing outward, then down.

  Triumphantly Charlain opened her eyes and picked up the card her pack had chosen. She looked at it, and promptly burst into tears.

  Kelvin didn't need to see the card to know that it was what she called the chaos or uncertainty card. What it meant, or had meant in the past, was that any outcome was possible. The cards had as much as proclaimed their own impotence.

  "Helbah," Kelvin said in agony, "isn't there some magic you can use?"

  Helbah looked around at them, her eyes lingering longest on the two unmatured kings whom she had nourished and trained over a span of time equal to Kelvin's own life.

  "You know, hero, that there isn't. I've told you before—the magic Zady is now using is beyond my ability. I don't comprehend it in terms of magic any more than your father comprehends it in terms of science. The power Zady's displaying isn't comprehensible."

  "Then it comes from beyond the stars?"

  "Kelvin, the questions you can ask! You're as bad as Kildom and Kildee. Do you really know what you just asked?"

  "No," Kelvin admitted. He had just asked the first question that occurred to him.

  "I will tell you, then. The answer is I don't know. There is power all witches tap or harness, but we don't think of it as other than magic. Whether what we do or command comes from the planet or the stars or somewhere else is of no consequence. Your father's science worries about things like that, not practitioners of magic. Zady may have found a new and more powerful source than that from which is derived either benign or ordinary magic. But if she has, does its origin matter?"

  "If we could find the source we might destroy it," Kelvin's father said.

  "Oh, John, John!" Helbah chided him. "You're thinking science. If a source exists it probably isn't in our frame and there's no way of locating it. On Earth could you locate and destroy the source of electricity?"

  Kelvin's father hung his head. Charlain held him close, trying to comfort him. He had said a foolish thing and Helbah's words made him realize it. To not believe in magic was bad, but to be forced to believe in it and then to have to acknowledge to yourself that you had no idea how it worked was demoralizing. As always, Kelvin sympathized with his father. It was all the consequence of his miseducation—an overemphasis on cause and effect and denial of even the possibility of magic.

  "Are we going to go to war again?" one of the royal twins asked in a squeaky little voice. They had been sitting there so quietly, so well behaved, that that alone seemed magic.

  Helbah said, "I don't know." She didn't bother to box their royal ears. It was a defeated witch standing in this palace room, not a disciplinarian.

  Suddenly the largest, most impressive crystal Helbah owned flared, and then the lesser crystals brightened as their inner markings swirled. When the swirling stopped Zady's ugly face, which seemed to have grown even more warts, looked out at them and around the room.

  "All my enemies together!" Zady enthused in her crackly voice. "Kelvin of the round ears, father of the Roundear, Mama, and the two who were born with the help of a chimaera!"

  "We're here too!" one of the king
lets said.

  "Yeah, we're your enemy too!" his brother echoed him. Katbah, perched familiarly on Helbah's shoulder, as befitted a familiar, spat.

  "Yes, all my enemies," Zady reiterated. "And now I have some orders for you. But first, would you like to see your sister, Kelvin?"

  Before he could answer the scene changed in the big crystal. It showed Jon, apparently unharmed and by herself. Behind her was a stone wall. Overhead, open sky with dark clouds scuttling through it.

  "Come closer, dearie. Come look in my crystal."

  Jon stepped closer, moving as one drowned and dead. "Kelvin!" she said, bumping into something invisible. "Kelvin, don't come here! Stay away from her! Stay away!"

  Jon vanished from the crystal and Zady's warty face reappeared. She began a cackling laugh and continued it far longer than seemed possible. Finally her eyes fixed on Kelvin, chilling him to his depths.

  "Kelvin, I want you in dragon territory with the Alliance's official surrender and I want you here in three days. Failure to arrive will cost the Alliance a kingdom. With you I want"—her eyes roved the room—"your father, your two grown-up brats, and of course your dragon brat. Incidentally, your sister will suffer what will be your future punishment until you arrive."

  The searing eyes turned away from them. Zady spoke and apparently gestured at an unseen Jon.

  "Dearie, a spear up your derriere, perhaps?"

  Jon began screaming. She screamed loudly and piercingly in a way Kelvin had never heard her or any woman scream.

  "Stop it, Zady! Stop it!" he pleaded and ordered in the same breath.

  "Why, what do you want to do about it, little boy?"

  Jon's voice broke in over Zady's, though she hardly stopped screaming. "It's not real! It's not real! Kelvin, it hurts! It hurts!"

  "Yes, dearie, the spear isn't real but it hurts anyway, doesn't it? The pain is excruciating for you, just as it was for that war-horse. After I tire of this one, I'll cut your breasts off again. Then you'll be stepped on by an orc and squashed but still conscious. After that—"