by Greg Curtis
Then, with a final flourish of his hands and a twist of his head, it was done. Edrick let the last syllable fall from his tongue and then watched the magic flow from him into the tiny dust particles that were all that was left of the gate.
After that he waited a little nervously as he hoped the spell would work as it should. That he'd got it perfectly right.
As before it took time. A distressingly long time as he waited nervously for the magic to begin. And just as he had before, each time, he kept thinking as he waited for something to happen, that he'd got it wrong. That it wouldn't work. But he reminded himself that big things often started slowly and this was no exception to that rule.
And so he waited. Until –.
The magic began with a whisper of wind. The faintest hint of dust sparkling in the air. And he knew that that was the beginning. Instinctively Edrick stepped back a little way. There was no danger as far as he knew, but he didn't like being so close to such powerful magic being released. It was like standing too close to a fire. He liked the warmth, but only so much of it, and he didn't want to get burnt.
The whisper slowly grew and the dust sparkles thickened; Edrick watched as the tiny fragments of the gate started to glow ever so slightly. And then they began to grow. Like trees bursting out of the ground, or fortresses being assembled brick by brick, they started to rise. But in this case the dust he saw moving was in fact part of the actual stone. Now as they came back together it was as if he was watching the explosion of the gate in reverse.
Edrick watched as the gate grew out of the crater, amazed by the very idea of what was happening. He knew how the spell worked, more or less. It was at its heart a simple spell of reconnection, with everything that had once been connected, returning to that connected state after having been blown apart. But in this case it was millions upon millions of grains of stone that were once more finding their way back to the exact same place that they had been in the structure before it had been blown apart. Not even grains – dust!
But this spell wasn't just fixing the terrible damage the explosion had wrought. It was also repairing the damage that time itself had wrought. Thousands of years of wind and rain. When it was done the gate would be exactly as it had been when it was first created, And that he was sure, was impossible.
How did every single speck of dust know exactly where it had been and which other specks it had been connected to? How did the spell even find every speck and mote of dust from where they had been scattered over such a wide distance? Surely some of them had been blown many leagues away by the wind? For a spell to bring them all back together from far and wide – that was magic indeed! Truly great magic!
In time as he stood there the two tiny fragments of stone that had been buried in the crater, grew to form the bases of the standing stones. Seeing that, Edrick felt a surge of hope. It was working! He was actually rebuilding the Faerie gate! Soon he would be able to return to Riverlandia! His heart beat faster at the thought.
Time stretched on as the stones grew. It seemed to be taking much longer than before. Much, much longer. But he figured that that was because the other times he'd used the spell, the items being repaired hadn't been so completely destroyed. Or so old. It presumably took longer to reassemble grains of dust into a structure than solid pieces. Even so, the standing stones continued to grow, and what had been little more than nubs of stone a few inches high, soon became actual standing stones that were one foot tall, then two and three and so on.
And they kept growing!
In time they had grown much larger than he remembered. Was that because they had been buried in the ground whereas now they stood atop the crater? Because now there was no ground remaining, only a crater where it had been. Still, as they started to approach the eight foot mark he started to wonder just how tall they were going to grow. How deeply buried had they been? Certainly more deeply buried than was needed just to make the stones stand up straight. Why? He didn't know. No doubt if one of the ancient faerie had been around he could have asked them. But any hope of that had passed long ago along when the people had left. He would just have to make do with what he could work out from watching.
Ten feet more or less, proved to be the true height of the standing stones. He realised that when he saw the tops of them begin to form and knew that the spell was almost complete. Every mote and speck of dust had been found, brought back to the stones and was finally being returned to its rightful place. Presumably that meant that six feet or so of the stones had been buried. But why would the Fairies have also covered the parts of the stone that were buried in runes and symbols as well? Runes were meant to be read – weren't they? Or had the stones originally stood this tall and it was the passage of time that had caused the stones to be buried so deep? If that was the case then he had to wonder just how long they had been standing there for nature to have had such an impact. It must have been many thousands of years.
There were so many questions Edrick wished he had the answers to. Answers he would probably never learn. But right then he didn’t really care. Because when the magic suddenly faded away, telling him that the spell was complete he knew there was only one thing that mattered: if the gate was working again.
“Sirtis be praised!” He approached the standing stones cautiously, nervous about what he might find, and then reached out to them with his own magic. Just a touch of his will should be enough. The spells were contained within the stones themselves. The merest touch of a wizard's thoughts should activate them.
Nothing happened! The gate did not suddenly come to life. He could feel no magical energy streaming from them. They showed no sign of life at all.
But then even as he thought of trying again, something unexpected happened. One of the stones toppled over in front of him. Then the other followed a few seconds later. And unexpectedly he found himself standing in front of a crater with two toppled standing stones lying in it.
“Dung!” Edrick hurried down into the crater and put his hands on the nearest of the stones. But still he felt nothing. It should at least have been warm to the touch. He should be able to feel the magic flowing through it. But there was no magic. No energy. No warmth. There was nothing but stone.
He tried the other one with the same result. And then when he realised the truth, that the gate wasn't going to work again, he collapsed to the ground, knowing only overwhelming despair. The spell had failed.
What had happened? What had gone wrong? Because he knew something had gone wrong. The stones had been rebuilt perfectly and completely. They were exactly as they had been. With every rune, every part of the magic inscribed into them as it should be. There should be magic flowing. And yet there wasn't. All he could think was that he'd made a mistake in his casting. That somehow, he'd got it wrong.
And that mistake had rung the death knell on his hope of getting back to Coldwater through the gate. If there was no magic imbued in the gate then he had no way of recasting that spell on the stones that gave them the magic. He didn't know the spell. No one did. It was another of the many limits of magic that all wizards faced. They could summon and send things between worlds. In theory they could even travel to them, though that was dangerous. But no one since the Faeries had ever known how to build a permanent gate between worlds. It was magic beyond that of the wizards.
Edrick sighed heavily as the implications of his failure washed over him. He had had so much hope that this would work. Now it was gone and he was back to his original plan. Searching for another gate. And he had no idea how long that would take. He had no idea where the nearest gate might be or even in which direction it lay. And unless the path to the next gate was across flat grassy land that was also bone dry, he doubted he would be able to drive the steam wagon to it.
Maybe he should instead go straight to his last plan and begin working once more with the portal spells. But his attempts with them so far had been pitiful. Most of the spells had failed. Some of them had failed spectacularly. So far, the only time he
had managed to open a portal to another world, it had been to a place that was dark and the cold had been so extreme that it had radiated from the open portal and frozen the ground around him causing him to step backwards in a hurry. He didn't want to do that again.
Edrick sighed and let his gaze wander away from the gate's standing stones. It had been such a good plan he'd thought. He’d had such luck with the spell for other things that he had hoped it would work for this too. Had he got the spell wrong? Or had the spell been wrong from the very start? After all, it could be that Wilberton had written down the spell wrong to begin with. Not that there was anything he could say about that. There was no one he could complain to. No one else even knew that the spell existed. But it couldn't have been wrong from the start – could it? It had repaired the shed and the plum tree.
Eventually he stood up again, thinking it was about time to head back to the house and start packing. He should start searching for a gate in the morning. There was no point in simply wasting any more time searching through the wizard’s journals. This spell had been his one shining hope and it had gone. He simply had to accept that and move on.
On the way to the house he stopped by the plum tree, and grabbed a plum from one of the branches.
Perhaps he didn’t need to go so soon? After all, if he left tomorrow or next week it probably wouldn't make a lot of difference. He foresaw many months of bone weary searching ahead of him. Maybe many years. And at least he was comfortable in his home. He also had food and water. A little company – if one could call unicorns or griffins that. And he had beautiful ripe plums. He'd always liked plums.
With great relish, Edrick bit into the plum.
A heartbeat later he spat it out hurriedly and then rushed to the well to pour some water so he could wash the taste out of his mouth. By gods it was foul! Beyond foul! In fact, it was so bad, he thought it was probably poisonous. A mixture of something sour, something bitter and something even worse. Something indescribably awful. It was so bad that he had to keep pouring more water into his hands and once again start washing every bit of the taste out of his mouth. Edrick spent some few minutes gargling and spitting the mouthfuls of water on to the ground. And even after that he still wanted to be ill.
How could a plum be that bad? How could any fresh fruit look so good and yet taste so horrible? It wasn't just tainted or rotten. It was like eating a corpse. A dead thing. And yet when he finally got enough of the taste out his mouth to look back at the tree, it still looked perfect. It looked like a tree in the peak of health. Its fruit was almost bursting off the branches.
“Shite!” Suddenly something inside his brain clicked. Because he realised that he had taken the plum from the tree he'd cast the spell on. The tree that had been snapped in two. He’d used the spell to restore to how it had been. And it had done that. Save for one thing; It was still dead. And that told him what had gone wrong.
It wasn't that he’d miscast the spell. It was a limitation of the spell. Or rather, it was a limitation of all magic. This spell could be used to rebuild something to exactly how it had been. But it couldn't restore either the life or the magic to it. He'd run straight into one of the oldest rules of magic. You couldn't heal death. You could only fan the embers of a fading fire of life back into life. And you couldn't recover dead magic either. If there had been some trace of a spell remaining on the stones, he could have fanned them into life again as well. But it was dead.
If the gate was going to work again, he would need a fresh spell. A new enchantment. And he had no idea where to get one. Or if there even was one.
And yet once he knew the cause of the failure he was suddenly filled with hope. Because it wasn’t his spell casting that had failed. That had been perfect. Which in turn meant he was a better wizard than he had previously thought. Maybe Master Thatchwell had been hard on him. And maybe he had been lazy. Even a dilettante. But he had still grown as a wizard over the last ten years. Now he had learned a spell of perfect physical restoration. No one else had that save for Wilberton. Added to that he had the ability to cast it. Even if others knew the spell, few could do the same. Not young wizards anyway.
Clearly his years of living here in Faerie, learning his spell craft had been worthwhile. And he was in the land where some of the most difficult spells ever conceived had been crafted. Maybe he had been right all along in searching for a spell. It was just that he needed to search the realm not the books. Because if there was such a spell, it wouldn't be found back in Riverlandia or in a book. It would be found right here. Whether he went in search of a gate or a spell, they could both only be found in Faerie.
As unlikely as it seemed he realised, he was exactly where he needed to be.
Chapter Twelve
Carrie felt like she had a lump of coal burning in her stomach as she guided the buggy to the town hall. A lump that was eating away at her with every pace the horses took. By contrast her grandfather seated beside her didn’t appear troubled at all. In fact, he was smiling beatifically as if he was simply out for a ride on a sunny day. Every so often he would wave at people they passed in the street. Some he even called out to with a cheery greeting. He seemed completely unaware that they were going to his trial by the Guild. Or that the people staring at them as they passed them in the streets were keeping their distance because they had no idea if was going quietly, or might suddenly cast another spell of immense destruction. He didn’t seem to be aware that this could be his last day in the land of the living.
Maybe it was better that way, she thought. That he didn't know what was coming. At least he didn't have any worries. It was only she who worried. And she was doing enough of that for both of them.
Her original plan had been to run. To simply load up the buggy and leave town in the middle of the night. She had thought they could ride south for the border and she would do so as if the armies of hell were on her tail. But her grandfather had refused. He didn't understand her fear. Nor did he understand that he had done anything wrong. And he wasn't about to get out of his bed in the middle of the night to join her on a wild ride south. But a drive in the buggy to the town hall sounded like a lovely idea to him. He'd even dressed for the occasion – sort of. At least he'd combed his hair. Actually he'd let her comb it.
He'd thought he was off to tell the world about his great discovery. That he was to receive awards and accolades. That was why they were taking the buggy. It wouldn't have been seemly to arrive on foot! He truly had no understanding of what was actually happening.
Carrie could now only hope that the tribunal would be lenient. That they would find a way to bind his power and grant her grandfather exile somewhere. They clearly had to bind his power, though whether that was even possible she didn’t know. But he had killed someone. A wizard even if Edrick hadn't been a member of the Guild. He had struck him with the intention of killing him. That was murder and it could not be allowed to happen again. But it depended on so many different things. Such as how angry the King's Right Hand was about the attack he'd suffered. And how the Guild felt about the killing of a non-guild wizard. Or whether the Guild Wizards combined had a spell that could do that or sufficient power to bind her grandfather’s powers. Or how angry they were about the trouble he'd caused them – not to mention the injuries. And most of all it depended on how much self-mastery her grandfather could maintain at the trial.
Her grandfather was never going to apologise for what he'd done no matter how many times she tried to explain it to him. She knew that. He was never going to admit that he'd done wrong or made a mistake. In his mind he hadn't. He still couldn’t even recall who Edrick was. But if he could at least be quiet she thought. Calm. Look as though he could be controlled. If he could give them a reason to believe he could be controlled.
“Grandfather –,” she tried again to impress that on him.
“I know child. You want me to be quiet. Not to embarrass you in front of your friends.” He smiled at her as he had when she was a little child. “And
I won't. And besides, you're the granddaughter of one of the greatest wizards of all time. When the King gives me my award, they'll have to see that. You have nothing to worry about!”
“They're not my friends. We’re meeting with the Guild.”
“The Guild?” He frowned. “Why would that bunch of ne'er-do-wells be here? None of them can cast a spell worth a damn. I wouldn’t waste my time with them.”
“Grandfather –.”
“– They're all jealous of me you know. They know I'm close to a major discovery. One that will change magic forever. And they just can't stand that I’m going to discover it and not them!”
Carrie closed her eyes for a moment as she tried to muster all her patience. “They're here to judge you, Grandfather.”
“Judge me?” He turned to stare at her as if she'd said something foolish. “How could they possibly judge me? They don't understand my work! Dullards, the lot of them! I wouldn't take any of them on even as students!”