Aquamancer (mancer series Book 2)

by Don Callander

  “He realized at once they were Witches and attendant Warlocks, having seen many such in Grummist’s court toward the end of the war. He sensibly remained hidden. Each night, pouring out the sleeping potion, he watched and listened in growing terror.

  “Eventually the old woman became suspicious. He was ever tired, fell asleep over any task she gave him that allowed him to sit down. Fearing for his very life—or something much worse—he ran away into a heavy snowfall one night.

  “The Warlocks pursued him on foot—disguised as ravening werewolves—and the Witches in the air on their broomsticks until he swam across upper Bloody Brook. Clean, running water they could not easily cross, of course.

  “But just as he waded into the torrent, a Witch threw a magic fireball at him that ignited his clothing and terribly burned one side of his face, his left arm, and upper body.

  “Fortunately, the fire didn’t touch his legs—when it hit him he was already hip deep in the brook. He dived in, smothering the deadly flames before they could kill him. Once across, he was able to run.

  “In terrible and continuous pain and with no help offered by anyone he met, he came at last to my most distant neighbor who told him he might find healing help in my house.

  “Well, I treated his near-fatal burns, which had never healed, although it’d been a year or more since his narrow escape. I kept him in my house. Finally healed, he insisted upon leaving, as he would only bring down the dreaded Searchers on us both if he stayed.

  “I said I was able to protect him from pursuit as I had protected myself for over a century. But he didn’t believe me and slipped away one night, and I never saw him again. His trail led out into Emptylands’ desert. At least I had helped him to become healthy and relatively sane before he left!”

  Cribblon shook his head sadly, remembering. “He told me he’d heard the Witches speak of the old woman’s hut as ‘Coven.’ Knowing something of Witches from Frigeon, who hated them passionately—”

  “Which explains something I’ve always wondered about Frigeon,” interrupted Douglas. “Why did he never seek alliances with Black Witches in his own rise to power?”

  Said Cribblon with a nod, “After the musician—his name was Illycha—left me, I was in a fearsome quandary. I wanted desperately to remain hidden where I had kept myself safe for a hundred and fifty summers. I was afraid that these Witches—this Coven—would, while seeking Illycha, discover me. My powers had been enough to hide from the Searchers, but Witchpower? I feared I would be too weak to avoid their all-seeing.

  “On the other hand, I realized they posed a great danger to World, and especially our much-weakened Fellowship of Wizards.

  “I determined at last to find who remained of my old Fellows and warn them of this Coven. I had to spy a bit on Coven so that I would have firsthand and convincing proof of the danger. I hoped I might be able to assess their strength and purposes from a near distance, then send report to the most powerful of the remaining Wizards.

  “That’s how it came about. I came to Pfantas in disguise three years ago. I saw clearly the danger Coven presented to Wizards and World. After much careful inquiry I sent word to Flarman by way of a Kobold I met in an iron mine under one of the mountains. He agreed to pass the word through a certain Dwarf Prince who had befriended some of the Wizards ...”

  “That would be Bryarmote, I’d guess,” put in Douglas.

  “That was his name. Kobolds, or Knockers as they call them in these parts, are even more secretive than your average Dwarf. I often doubted the message was ever delivered... until this afternoon, when I saw your flags, Douglas Brightglade.”

  “Tell me, what goal do these Witches pursue? If all they do is dance in the snow and throw an occasional fireball at a runaway slave—I know he was not, but they would think of him that way—there are far too many other and much worse things to take up the Wizards’ attention these days,” said the Journeyman. “Frigeon alone was responsible for a thousand unrecorded major enchantments that must be uncovered and undone. You could be helpful to us in that work, Cribblon, unless you really believe these Witches are a real danger!”

  Cribblon thought about this, staring across at the late lights of Pfantas.

  “When I came to this country I found that it had been changed drastically by the Witches. Pfantas was once a lovely and prosperous city on its majestic hill. Some of the Old Kingdom’s finest families lived here. Everyone in those days hoped to earn enough to buy a home in fair Pfantas.

  “The nature of this place was changed when I returned here. It had become filthy, its good people mean-spirited and quarrelsome, whipped to sniveling submission by Witchservers set to govern them by fear alone. Now Pfantasians are powerless to change their garbage-strewn, sewage-washed, stinking-to-the-high-sky existence!

  “And that was just my first hint that the Witches had been working evil. I very cautiously wound my way to Coventown itself, following the directions given me by poor Illycha. I climbed between the Teeth of the Tiger, got close to where Illycha’s old woman had lived in her mean hut.

  “I saw a hut no longer, but a lurid, seething town, half-buried in blasted rocks, with a castle lifting crooked spires and twisted horn towers into choking smokes, fouled with acid fumes and nauseating vapors that could only mean Black Magic rites. I saw the Witches with my own eyes, stalking on its crooked battlements or flying their broomsticks over its blackened walls.

  “Coven has become a center of Black Magic! Great wickedness is being plotted and practiced there. I could see as well as feel it!

  “I found out two more things before I fled in great fear. First, that I had neither the training nor the power to confront the Witches of Coven alone. Secondly, they had been brought together by a Witch who styled herself Queen, a regal, tall, dark-haired woman they hail as Emaldar the Beautiful, and World Witch! By instinct alone I recognized her as the old crone, but no longer in disguise. I am convinced that her goal is to rule what once had been Kingdom. That, at the very least!”

  “I trust your instincts as I believe your observations,” said Douglas gravely.

  “I fled in terror, as I say, and sent the message to Flarman. I need help! Can he give it to me?”

  For several minutes Douglas was silent, listening to the sounds of drunken cursing coming across the valley from Pfantas.

  A star shot across the sky from east to west, followed by a sound like a single great stroke on a bass viol. Marbleheart and the Air Adept’s former Apprentice sprang to their feet in startled wonder, but Douglas leaned back to watch the shooting star disappear in the west.

  “I was sent to set things right here, if I can,” he said at last. “And I believe with your help, friends, I can do it. We’ll start in the morning by taking the path to Coventown and then we’ll see what must be done.”

  “Thanks be!” breathed Cribblon. “I feared that I had waited too long.”

  “It’s never too early or late to oppose Evil,” said Douglas with a grim smile for his companions. “But a good night’s sleep is our first requirement.”

  “I must return over there,” said Cribblon with a shudder of revulsion. “Goodness knows, I don’t want to go, but there are things I’ve left undone and some good people I should try to warn. Whatever we do in Coventown will affect Pfantas, and they must be ready for it. I’ll be back by dawn.”

  He stood and strode down the hillside to the bridge. The last they saw of him he was a shadow climbing the winding path to the postern gate.

  Chapter Twelve

  Cribblon Lost

  Dawn came—but not Cribblon.

  “Do you trust him?” asked the Otter, uneasily. “He could have tipped off these Witchservers by now, you know.”

  “There’s every reason to trust Cribblon,” Douglas reassured his companion. “If they’d captured him and forced him to tell of us, they would have been here looking for us by now. Such creatures prefer to do their loathsome work by night.”

  They sat together on th
eir lawn under the awning of the brightly embroidered tent. The morning had come up gloomy and damp, with a drizzle of rain intermittently falling. Uncomfortable, but not hard enough to flush Pfantas’s streets, Marbleheart commented. Drops fell noiselessly from the tips of the lowest pine boughs.

  They ate a simple breakfast of Waybread and tea. An hour passed, then a second.

  “I think I’d better go see what happened to him,” the Journeyman said at last.

  “Oh, no, I don’t think you should! If you start asking questions, these Witchservers will know at once who you are seeking, and they might harm Cribblon,” protested the Otter, pushing the other back to a seat on the ground.

  “How are we ...?”

  “Let me go,” insisted Marbleheart. “I can move silently and lie hidden and listen for hours, if need be. I’ll be as invisible as anyone can be without a spell.”

  Douglas sat thinking a few moments, and then nodded his head. “Go, then, and bring me back what news you hear.”

  The Otter scurried down the slope, staying under the pines. Douglas, even though he knew what to watch for, soon lost sight of him entirely.

  It was nearly full dark when the Otter returned. He threw himself prone across from the Journeyman and sighed mightily.

  “I’m afraid I’ve wasted the whole day, Douglas. Not one word about the missing, dead, or arrested bellows mender! I even made it a point to wallow in the filth to listen in on those Witchservers. What vile creatures! Disgusting habits!”

  “Tell me what you did hear, even the littlest things,” urged Douglas. “Anything at all might help.”

  “Let’s see. I went up to the market and slithered under the fishwives’ counters. Smelled better than most of the town. The fishmongers didn’t say much of anything at all! They snarled prices, shortchanged everybody, complained about the catch, the weather, and their customers. That’s all! No gossip. No banter. No smart remarks behind their customer’s backs. Not even a single curse word! Would you believe it? I’ve tangled with fishwives before, many a time, and you always expect them to use the foulest language.”

  “Hmmm,” said Douglas.

  “Then I listened outside the back door of a barber’s shop. Men in barbershops are always the best talkers, the bad-news spreaders. ‘A little off the bangs,’ these said. ‘Some of your strongest-smelling toilet water,’ they said, and who’s to blame them for that? But not one word about the Witchservers’ capturing a dangerous spy. Drunks and curfew violators, yes, but no Cribblon the bellows mender. Nary a word!”

  He rolled over on his back and stuck his short legs in the air, stretching and arching his back against the shortcut grass.

  “These people, even the Witchservers, are just plain petrified. Afraid to speak the least casual word. Cribblon told us Witchservers watch everyone, didn’t he? I didn’t believe it then, but it’s true!”

  “I’d better go myself,” decided Douglas, rising.

  “They’ll see you!” cried Marbleheart in alarm. “They came very close to catching sight of me!”

  “I can prevent it,” said the Journeyman. “I’ve one man in mind to seek out. He may be willing to break silence enough to help us find what happened to Cribblon.”

  Under a broken arch in the ruin at the top of the town, he found the young man, his no-longer-broken arm still in its dirty sling, sleeping fitfully with his head barely out of the rain.

  “Here!” called Douglas softly, shaking the man’s leg. “Waken, sir! I want to speak with you.”

  “But not I with you,” growled the other, turning further away from the rain.

  “I might be able to give you something that will make your time worthwhile,” said Douglas.

  “Oh, a bribe, eh? How long do you think I’d get to keep the smallest coin? The Witchserver smell small change in a man’s shoe, let alone his pocket.”

  “You’re really in bad shape,” said Douglas, letting his disgust and sarcasm show. “I offer you help and you’ll probably run to the Witchservers yourself as soon as my back is turned, to curry favor by setting them onto me.”

  The man sat up, rain and all, and retorted angrily, “Now, that I would never do! Not even for a meal or three meals or a week of meals would I help the slimy, sneaking scum.”

  “If you really feel that way, why not answer my questions? I am against the Witchservers even more than you are.”

  The man glanced nervously about, studying the shadows under other arches and the dark places in empty doorways.

  “Very well! I’ll answer. What’ve I got to lose? If they take me, I’ll at least not die of hunger. They’ll fix me so that I won’t ever die—of anything, including hunger, hard labor, whippings day and night!”

  He struggled to sit up using just his left hand and arm, taking Douglas’s proffered hand at last.

  “Your right arm is healed. You’ll notice if you try it,” Douglas pointed out. “It happened since we spoke yesterday.”

  “By Hecuba! So it is!” whispered the man in surprised awe. “You did that?”

  “I did that—for you. I did it out of pity and sorrow at the state you and your townspeople are in, not in payment for anything. Not then, or now,” said Douglas, speaking with urgent sincerity. “Now tell me! Have you heard of the man called Cribblon? The bellows mender? You had not heard of him yesterday.”

  “The bellows mender? You didn’t mention his trade before, did you? Yes, I’ve heard of him. There was soft word in the night about him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Gone! Someone saw the Witchservers take him at the postern gate last night, very late.”

  He shivered and gasped as the cold rain suddenly increased. Douglas gave him a strong dose of Flarman’s favorite Warming Spell and his quaking subsided.

  “The slime eaters held him overnight in the town gaol,” the man went on at last. “This morning they put him in a trash cart and hauled him off.”

  “Where would they take him?”

  “Only one place. Coventown!”

  Douglas hunched down under the driving rain, thinking swiftly. Why take Cribblon to Coven?

  “Did they question him? What happened overnight in the gaol?”

  “Being in that foul place is torture enough for most men,” sighed his informant “I don’t know what they did to him. I’m sure, from experience, that they made his life miserable.”

  Douglas was silent again. No one, not even a Witchserver, would see or hear them in this downpour. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “Kill them all, the Witchservers and the Witches and the Warlocks! Clear them out of our once-beautiful city! Out of our lives!”

  “You’ll just have to believe I’m working at that,” said Douglas. “But what can I do for you right now?”

  “You’ve healed my arm. Now perhaps I can get some kind of work on the docks or in the fisheries, enough to eat. My father’s business is gone, along with my father and my brothers, taken as slaves by the Witches. We were leather merchants. The Witchservers came and just took over everything; the city, the businesses, everything!”

  His voice was rising toward hysteria. Douglas laid a calming hand on his arm. “Tell me more,” he said, “but quietly, please.”

  “You can tell by just looking at Pfantas. They stopped all self-governing. They took all profits, and then they took our capital and our savings. They reduced every merchant, every shop owner, every craftsman to as near despair as the mind can stand. They came one night and carted off every scrap of leather in my father’s warehouse. And they took my father and my two brothers, too. I’ve neither seen nor heard of them since!”

  “Took them to Coven, you believe?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard the Witchservers say. To be slaves.”

  He was calmer now but tears of hopeless frustration mingled with the rain on his face.

  “Something is about to be done about all this.” Douglas said. “I have power to see to it these Witches don’t create any more havoc. I p
romise you the wrongs they’ve done shall be righted.”

  “I-I-I almost believe you! If what you say is true, it’s all I want. All I would ask of anyone.”

  “Well, look at this, anyway,” said the Journeyman, and he showed the wretch the four-leafed clover picked on the night of the Barrow Wights’ attack on Marbleheart. “Carry it on your person. It’s powerful protection against all sorts of enchantments.”

  The man brightened at the sight and scent of the limp clover leaves. Both could smell the sweet aroma of the tiny green plant, even over the stench of Pfantas in the rain.

  “A Witch or any kind of enchanter will have to call on extraordinary powers to harm you if you carry a clover with four leaves, believe me! And it won’t call their attention to you, either, as most other amulets would.”

  “I think I know where to find this growing, although it’s been scarce of late,” said the man. “Can you tell me your name?”

  “I always tell my true name,” replied the Journeyman. “I am Douglas Brightglade. I have no other names, but the title Journeyman Wizard.”

  “And I am called Featherstone,” his informant said. “It’s been a proud name in Pfantas for at least six generations.”

  They shook hands formally and Douglas smiled at his new friend. “What road would the Witchservers take?”

  “There is only one road a carter can take to that cursed place,” Featherstone said, and spat in the mud. “It runs first norm, men west, then northwest up a deep cleft in the side of Blueye Mountain. Midway to the top lies Coventown, I’ve been told. I’ve never seen it. Those who do—return as Witchservers, if they return at all.”

  “I intend to go up that mountain, and I’ll come back unchanged. In the meantime, I must do something about the Witchservers. If you’ve clover growing in these parts, quietly tell your friends and neighbors about its charm. It would help confound these servants of Emaldar.”

  “I’ll begin at once,” said Featherstone eagerly. “In a few days, you’ll see them become confused, anyway, when I distract their attention to their stronghold. Watch your chance, then overpower them. Without the constant, close attention of their Queen, the Witchservers will become powerless. Ordinary Men again.”