Magic Casement

by Dave Duncan

  “Rap does?” Dull old Rap? Solid, ordinary Rap?

  He nodded. “To a remarkable degree. That was why Andor went out of his way to befriend him. He must know a word, although he denies it. Either it is a very powerful word, or else—I have been wondering if the words themselves may have different properties, and his happens to fit his native talents particularly well. He has an astounding control over animals and also an astounding farsight. Yet he does not seem to have any foreseeing ability, and certainly his mastery does not work on people, as Andor's does. So he must know only the one word. Interesting! He has probably seen the soldiers coming.”

  Inos had almost forgotten their plight. “That was why we wanted you!” she exclaimed. “How are we going to save Rap and Little Chicken from the imps? What is going to happen when Kalkor gets here? How—”

  Sagorn raised a slender, blue-veined hand. “You forget, child, that I know your problems! Andor and Darad were here, so I know. Don't worry about the imps. Their leader is dead. Tribune Oshinkono is no great warrior. He will have absolutely no desire to tangle with the notorious Kalkor. He and his men will be off down the trail to Pondague long before the jotnar arrive.”

  “How . . .” But of course Sagorn knew all that because Andor had made friends with Yggingi's deputy on the journey north. Andor made it his business to know everyone. What Andor had known, Sagorn knew. Confusing! “But what about Rap? And what about me having to marry Kalkor?”

  “Kalkor I do not recommend!” For the first time the old man looked sympathetic. “Not as bad as Darad, but compared to Kalkor, Yggingi would have made a model husband. He will claim the throne, then force you to marry him to confirm that claim.”

  “Then what?” she asked glumly.

  He pulled a face, twisting the clefts that flanked his mouth. “Krasnegar would not contain Kalkor for long—roistering and pillage are his bent—but he could keep the title and leave a subordinate here to rule for him. He will beat your word out of you, I expect. Then take a son off you, more than likely. Yes, that would be about his program.”

  “And after that?”

  Sagorn did not answer but she could guess the answer.

  “And after that I shall be of no further use to him!”

  The dog came bounding into the room. Inos rose and crossed to the stair, arriving just as Rap came running up, flushed and panting. He slammed the door and shot the bolt. “Should have gone sooner,” he said between puffs. “Only three doors between us and them.”

  “Rap,” she asked softly, “what's this about you having farsight, and magical powers?”

  He flinched as if he were a small boy caught with both hands in the molasses, then nodded guiltily.

  Puzzled by his reaction, Inos said, “Well, that's wonderful!” She smiled encouragingly to put him at ease. “Now I know why we never let you join in the hide-and-seek games! I've always wondered about your knack for horses—and dogs. I'm not surprised to hear that it's occult.”

  He gaped stupidly at her. “You don't mind?”

  “Mind? Of course not! Why should I mind?” What was it to do with her, except that Rap would make a superb palace hostler when he was older? “I'm supposed to have some magic of my own now, although I don't know what sort of powers I'm expected to demonstrate. But magically we're both the same, apparently.”

  His big gray eyes blinked several times, then a scarlet tide flowed into his face, and he looked down at his boots. Of course shyness was quite understandable in a boy of his age, with no schooling or training.

  She took a quick glance to make sure the others could not hear. “Rap, I didn't know that Sir—that Andor had made friends with you when he was here before.”

  “Well, he did! I didn't sell him horses in bars—”

  “I'm sure you didn't.” Even to think of Andor still hurt. “But did he ever speak . . . I mean, you must have talked . . . Did he ever mention Kinvale, or . . .” Deep breath. “Did he ever talk about me?”

  Rap looked blank. “You mean he knew you before? He told me he didn't even know where Kinvale was, exactly! And he certainly never told me he'd met you already!” He seemed to be growing angrier and angrier as he spoke.

  Relieved, Inos gave him another soothing smile. “Come, then, let's see what we can do about these imps.” She led him back to the others. Despicable Andor! Why were men all such liars and cheats? So faithless!

  She went over to Sagorn, who was making polite conversation with Kade.

  “Well,” she demanded. “What are we to do?”

  Sagorn scratched his chin thoughtfully. “We have four ways out of this, I think.”

  “We do?” Inos found that unbelievable, but he seemed confident, so perhaps the celebrated sage was about to justify his reputation.

  “The simplest would require a friendly sorcerer. You don't happen to have one handy, do you?” He chuckled ponderously, like some wise old grandfather teasing children.

  Inos felt a surge of annoyance at the mockery. Rap sensed it, also, and rolled his eyes.

  Sagorn saw that and scowled. “Secondly, then, we could hide in the topmost room and trust the aversion spell, but that seems to have worn thin now. So we only have two choices, wouldn't you say?”

  “The Darad man killed the woman in Fal Dornin to strengthen his power?” Aunt Kade asked, and for a moment Inos was baffled.

  Sagorn, though, had turned to Kade with surprise and perhaps respect. “Yes. To tell a word weakens it.”

  “Halves it?”

  “Not necessarily halves it, apparently. It is a great mystery to me why there should be any weakening at all; if you tell your favorite recipe to a friend, that does not spoil the next cake you bake.” He scowled. “Even the most respected texts do not agree! Perhaps the weakening would be a half if you were the only person who knew the word. Would telling to a third person reduce its power by a third? Then by a fourth when you told another? I don't know, after a lifetime.”

  Kade was still blinking at all that as the old man plunged ahead with his lecture, waving a bony finger to make his points as if he had been bottling up his knowledge inside himself for years and welcomed an audience.

  “So not necessarily a half. After all, the words have been around a long time, so each may already be known by many people, perhaps dozens. One more person may make no difference or a lot. And how could you compare magic, or weigh it? It must be as hard to measure as beauty. Can you say that Jalon is twice as fine a singer as another, or three times? That a poem is twice as lyrical? But a shared word is weakened—until someone who knows it dies. Then the others' power is strengthened again. That is why they are so rarely shared, why they are usually passed on deathbeds—as your father told you his?” He peered from under shaggy white brows at Inos.

  She hesitated and then nodded.

  “You must guard it well! You have been displaying remarkable endurance for your age, child. Andor noticed tonight and so did Yggingi. You are of royal blood, and a very determined young lady, but the words have that effect on people, a sort of armor. Of course neither could be certain, but they both assumed that you had been told the word.”

  “Everyone seems to have known about it but me!”

  “They are always kept secret. I found hints of the Krasnegar word in a very old text. That was why I—actually it was Jalon then, also—why we first came here and met your father. He was still crown prince at the time. He and I became friends and did some journeying together. Knowing that he would inherit a word, I made sure that he met the others, so he would know them if they came after him later. They all felt that I had betrayed them, of course.” He sighed deeply. “It is not only the others' evil memories that are a burden. They have mine, also, and I can keep no secrets from them.”

  Inos thought about that. Perhaps it was not so surprising that this strange group of invisible men would strive to be released from their curse.

  “But this word of power that you—Andor—learned from the woman in Fal Dornin? It did not bre
ak the spell?”

  Sagorn stared at the floor sadly, shaking his head. “No. One is not enough. Probably we need three or maybe even four. And, knowing a word, we dared not then approach a sorcerer, for sorcerers are always on the lookout for more power.” He rose stiffly. “The imps will be fetching axes. I am slow on stairs, so perhaps we should begin?”

  “Begin what?”

  “Begin our climb,” he said. “We must go to the chamber of puissance at the top of the tower.”

  “Why?”

  He bared irregular old teeth in a triumphant grimace. “To consult the magic casement, of course.”

  Faithful found:

  So spake the Seraph Abdiel, faithful found

  Among the faithless, faithful only he:

  Among innumerable false, unmoved,

  Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,

  His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal.

  Milton, Paradise Lost

  TEN

  Insubstantial pageant

  1

  Rap could tell that Inos had not expected the suggestion, for she colored angrily. He was managing not to stare at her, for when he did, and their eyes met, he was sure he started blushing at once, and certainly he felt as if he were all hands and feet and worried if his hair was a mess—it always was, of course . . . So he was pretending not to look.

  But he could not keep his farsight off her. She was wonderful!

  What fools they were, all those stupid old men! Why had they not seen what a marvelous queen she would be? She was a queen to her fingertips, noble and regal even in those bedraggled old clothes. He had been amazed by her beauty in the forest and he was still in awe of that, but now he could sense her grace, her royal bearing, her majesty. Her father's death had not broken her spirit, nor the horrible fright and disappointment he, Rap, had been forced to inflict on her to unmask Andor.

  Any lesser woman would have blamed him for that, would have cursed him and spurned him. But not Inos! She had royal courage. She was not afraid of his farsight, like all his other friends had been.

  Kinvale had changed her. She was no longer the girl he had grown up with, the playmate of his childhood. He felt a little sad about that.

  But he had always known that she would be his queen, not . . . not anything else. He had said he would serve her, and so he would, and be proud to. And right now he was proud of the way she was standing up to that stringy old doctor with his sneering manner and stupid jokes about sorcerers.

  “My father wouldn't let you do that!” she said angrily.

  “Ah, yes, the spy,” Sagorn said unpleasantly. “You heard more than you admitted that day, then?”

  Inos blushed harder and looked furious. Rap felt himself bristle, wishing he could stop this sinister old scholar from insulting his queen. Whatever the king had said about him being trustworthy, he had obviously betrayed Rap to Andor.

  He began moving toward the door. “Your father, child, did not have an army of impish cutthroats coming up the tower after him at the time. Now, did you or did you not seek my counsel?”

  Inos set her teeth, but obviously she was going to give in and let Sagorn go up the tower. There was a dead body upstairs, and she had suffered quite enough already without having to look at that. Rap moved quickly, to reach the doorway first, and Little Chicken scrambled up and followed.

  The room one floor up was very gloomy, filled with gigantic shadows cast by a single small candle flame. Rap hurried across to where Yggingi lay, just inside the other stairwell. The goblin would always extend trash's duties to include anything that let him show off his strength, and as soon as Rap took hold of Yggingi's ankles. Little Chicken shoved him aside. “Out window?”

  That gruesome thought had not even occurred to Rap. “Ugh! No. In that closet.”

  The goblin dragged the corpse across the room and tucked it away among the king's robes, while Rap dragged a rug over and covered the puddle of blood. He hoped Inos would not wonder why it was there, and that the blood would not soak through. By the time he had done, the other three had arrived.

  Sagorn stood a moment, breathing hard. “But you must understand,” he was saying, “that we have no common purpose except to be released from the curse, and therefore to seek out more of the words. Otherwise we all go our own ways.

  “Jalon soon got lost in the forest, and he called Andor. Andor did not have my scruples toward your father, and hence his daughter.” He made a small bow to Inos and then headed for the couch. “So Andor went to Kinvale to make your acquaintance. He even dreamed of becoming a king, I regret to say.”

  “When he told us that he brought you back to Krasnegar afterward,” Inos asked, “then he was sort of telling the truth?”

  The old man leaned back, chuckling breathlessly. “Yes, he was, for once. Here he had two words to chase: yours, when you got it; and Master Rap's. By the sort of improbable chance that the words produce, he arrived at Krasnegar just as Rap was revealed as a seer.”

  Rap closed the down door and bolted it. Little Chicken started playing with the bolt, flicking it back and forth, showing childish curiosity and delight. Rap listened to Sagorn's story with half his head. The other half was sighting. The imps had already found axes and were breaking down the door into the robing room. He should be flattered that they were sending a hundred men after him, he supposed.

  “Your father sank faster than I had expected,” Sagorn continued. “So Andor decided to go south and fetch you. He was annoyed that he could not charm Master Rap's word out of him. Nor would he give it when threatened by the goblins. How did you escape, young man?”

  Rap told them briefly. Fleabag thumped his tail on the floor at the sound of his name. Little Chicken scowled, so he must be picking up impish as fast as Rap had picked up goblin. It would be harder for him, though, for impish was a more complex dialect.

  “Darad is a fool,” Sagorn said. “I despise his murdering ways, but he is not even efficient in them. He should have asked the goblins to extract the word from you. They would have been happy to demonstrate their skills.”

  Except that Rap knew no word of power to tell; he shivered. “The imps are almost through into the robing room, your Majesty.”

  Sagorn sighed and rose from the couch. “Next floor, then.”

  “You chased me down these stairs once, Doctor,” Inos said. “I thought at the time that you were remarkably unwinded.”

  “No. Thinal did the running for me. The curse does have its uses, I admit.”

  Rap called to Little Chicken for help and began pushing one of the big cupboards over to the door. Then they fetched another. Those might gain a few minutes—for what, though? When he crossed to the stairs, Inos's voice came echoing eerily down from above.

  “. . . exactly does it do?”

  “It is a last relic of Inisso's works.” The old man's voice came in bursts, now, as if he were very short of breath. “Magic casements—like talking statues and preflecting pools—are a supreme test of a sorcerer. They will show the future . . . and give advice. That is . . . the scene they show . . . is a hint . . . of the best course to take . . . a view down the best path . . . as it were.”

  “Why would my father not let you try it, then?”

  Sagorn had reached the bedroom door and stopped again, wheezing. “If he had, it might have warned him not to send you to Kinvale, and then this trouble might have been averted.”

  “How could it have done that? A window do that?”

  “It might have shown you here at Winterfest, perhaps? I admit that it is dangerous. It drove your great-grandfather mad.”

  Rap did not like the sound of that, remembering the awesome glow he had provoked in the casement when he went near it—and remembering, also, the strange apparition who might have been Bright Water, witch of the north. She had gabbled something about foresight. She had accused Rap of blocking her foresight. Could there be a connection there?

  Inos hurried across the bedroom, the death chamber. “Let us go st
raight up,” she said, and her voice almost cracked.

  Rap felt a mad impulse to run after her and take her in his arms to comfort. He wanted that so badly that he trembled. He kept remembering how she had kissed him good-bye, almost a whole year ago now. But queens did not kiss factors' clerks—or horse thieves.

  All the rest of Krasnegar had spurned him, and she had not. He had never doubted that she would remain his friend, once she was free of Andor's witchery. It was very difficult to remember that she was his queen. If she were wearing a royal robe and a crown it might be possible, but despite her royal bearing in that shabby leather riding outfit, with her gold hair flying loose halfway down her back, she was still too much the companion of his childhood—on horses, clambering over cliffs . . .

  Sagorn was still catching his breath.

  “You know I have only been up there once in my life?” Princess Kadolan said. She was puffing, also, but perhaps that was only from politeness. “My grandfather died in a fire, I thought.”

  The bedroom was brighter, with more candles still burning in the sconces. Sagorn went to study the two portraits over the mantel. “Yes, but he was mad before that.”

  “Oh, dear! You think he saw his death through the casement and the sight drove him insane?”

  The old man shrugged. “That is what your brother thought, and your father before him. It is an interesting paradox. The prophecy drove him mad, but had he not been mad, then he would not have been locked up, so he could have escaped the flames. Curious, isn't it?”

  Deciding again that he did not like this sinister, cold-blooded old man, Rap began heaving a dresser toward the door, and the goblin came to help.

  The imps were into the robing room now, crossing to the stairs that led up to the antechamber. Once Rap reached the uppermost room, he would be unable to watch what they were doing. He hoped Inos was right to trust Sagorn, but it was not his place to advise her, and he had no advice to offer anyway. The situation looked hopeless, once the proconsul's body was discovered, the culprits would be lucky if they were just thrown in the dungeon and not beheaded out of hand.