Go back? How? The scene was completely unfamiliar, the child unknown. How could Carin picture events she hadn’t witnessed?
But even as she started to protest, the mists that drifted above the magic pool began swirling—slowly at first, but then spiraling precipitously downward to turn the image of the millpond into a frothing, howling whirlpool. Before her eyes, the child in blue and green plunged within the whirl, disappearing into the vortex like a nosegay of violets sucked into the eye of a storm.
“No!” Carin shrieked. She sprang up from the bench and reached for the image, as if to pull the child back. But the whirlpool had emptied of everything except hissing, swirling water and the mists that curled into the maw at its center.
“Stop!” Verek shouted over the roar of the vortex. “You can do nothing for the child. The images are from the past. All that you have seen has already happened.”
Carin probed the mists that spun down into the whirlpool’s mouth, searching for a glimpse of color. But she saw only gray vapor and foaming water. The vortex grew steadily larger, tilting toward her until the bottomless opening at its center loomed only inches from her face.
She twisted away from it and tried to run, but something held her. Struggling to free herself, Carin clawed at the restraints and felt cloth ripping.
“Keep still!” Verek shouted in her ear. “It is illusion. It cannot harm you if you stay clear of the pool. Look! The image of the vortex fades, and another scene takes its place. This is a bedchamber—a child’s, by the look of it.”
It was true. The whirlpool had dissolved, leaving behind only wisps of vapor that curled through the small room which now rose in the mists. Furnished with a four-posted bed, a chest of drawers, and tall shelves above a scaled-down desk, the room was clearly meant for a child. Brightly colored fish hung in mobiles from the ceiling and papered the walls. Playthings and books filled the shelves and covered the desk.
Most of the toys were plush likenesses of animals, several of them terrestrial—horses, a lion, a unicorn, an eagle, a clowder of cats. Dominating the collection, however, were salt-water creatures: whales, dolphins, parrotfish, starfish, a green sea turtle and a blue crab.
Looking down on the menagerie from the topmost shelf was a big egg with piglike eyes, a wide mouth, and booted feet. It was the very image of the “Humpty Dumpty” character from the puzzle-book. Hooked over the egg-man’s left foot was a neatly lettered sign that read, in the language of the puzzle-book, Karen’s Zoo.
The words held Carin for a moment. Then her gaze shifted to the cornerpost at the head of the bed, and to a crystal that hung from it on a golden chain. The crystal caught and reflected light from some unseen source. Its winking was, for long moments, the only motion in the room …
Until something stirred under the coverlet on the bed. An arm—sleeved in blue and green—flew up, to come to rest atop the bedcovers. The fitful sleeper rolled over, revealing a head of golden-brown hair before settling again into stillness.
“The child is alive,” Carin whispered. “She wasn’t killed in the whirlpool.”
“She is most certainly alive,” Verek said. “Do you not understand? That child is you, as you were years ago, before the vortex plucked you from your bed and spun you into the void between worlds, finally bearing you up through the waters of the millpond to cast you upon the bank where you were found. What you witnessed moments ago was the journey as it happened—the events depicted backward through time.”
On legs that felt suddenly unsteady, Carin sought the bench behind her. Helping her to the seat was an arm wrapped tightly around her, its white linen sleeve ripped open from elbow to wrist. As she dropped onto the bench, still facing the pool, the arm released her. Its owner sat down beside her, his face turned opposite, toward the wall. Neither of them broke the silence as Carin watched the image of the child’s bedchamber fade and the pool resume its perfect mirror surface.
“Do you remember these events?” Verek asked finally.
Carin shook her head. “Not at all—not the bedroom, or the whirlpool, or the child. You’re telling me that a whirlpool carried me off, and that’s how I ended up nearly drowned in the millpond?” She waved one hand dismissively. “I don’t believe it. That’s completely round the bend. If something like that had happened to me, how could I not remember it?”
“Fear and shock may have entombed the memories so far below the surface of your mind,” Verek said, “that only the methods we have used tonight could have power to uncover them. The void between worlds is a place so alien that the mortal mind must recoil in terror if ever it be exposed, by chance or wizardry, to that dark oblivion. It’s no marvel that a child caught in the vortex would lose all conscious memory of it. The greater wonder is that you did not lose your reason as well, and become a whimpering lunatic.”
Verek stood, signaling an end to the night’s “delving.” With his disfigured left hand, he helped Carin to her feet.
She tested her legs, and finding them strong again, started to walk to the steps that led up to the library. The hand on Carin’s arm, however, guided her around the pool, toward the wall that curved behind the bench of the carved key.
“The hour is late,” Verek said. “This way leads more straightly to your quarters.”
Though no opening was visible in the wall, he ushered her up to it, then pressed the palm of his right hand upon it. When he moved his hand away, a section of the wall swung inward on unseen hinges. The door opened to another stairwell. The reddish light that spilled onto them from the cave showed these stairs to be grander than the steep, winding stairway to the library. These steps were of wood, not stone, and they climbed upward in wide, straight, gradual flights separated by landings.
As Carin and Verek stepped through to begin the ascent, the opening in the wall closed silently behind them. With the light from the cavern cut off, the stairs fell into blackness.
Swallowing a shriek, Carin gasped at the sudden darkness. It weighed on her. It squeezed the breath from her.
An orb of clear white light appeared in the right hand of the warlock at her side. He held it with his fingertips far away from her, where it lit their way up the stairs—and threatened her as little as possible? Carin glanced at him. Could he actually be trying not to unsettle her with sorcery any more than he already had tonight?
Verek noticed her glance. He brought the magical orb a little closer. As they climbed, he twirled it in his fingers. “It’s a light without flame,” he murmured. “Cool as distant starlight … incapable of causing harm.”
Carin did not reply. The orb seemed like an unremarkable bit of magic compared to the other wonders she had witnessed tonight. Her mind raced back over the events and images.
Had the enchanted pool, now two flights of stairs below them, really caught a reflection of the past, of the bedroom she had occupied as a child? Had a frothing whirlpool plucked her from that life and dropped her, stripped of memory and identity, into this one?
If the vision revealed the truth, it suggested that she had once had a home. Carin rolled the word around in her thoughts, trying to make it mean something. But it remained an empty concept. “Home” was not a place she knew. Neither her memories nor her experiences told her what or where it might be.
The stairway’s third and topmost landing opened onto a long corridor. The hall was moonlit through high, round windows at infrequent intervals. As they neared the corridor’s far end, Carin suddenly knew where she was. This was the hallway that opened off the landing which her bedroom door faced.
The evening’s adventures had taken her in a great, multi-storied loop: from her bedroom, puzzle-book in hand, downstairs to the ground-floor hallway and library; from the library down a plunging stairwell to the chamber of the magic pool; and from that cave up three long flights of stairs to this upper corridor that led back to her room.
They were at her door. Verek released the arm that he had lightly held since guiding Carin from the bench at the pool’
s edge. He lifted the latch and pushed the door open. Carin’s bedroom was lit only by the moon shining through the open-curtained window. The doors of the bathing room were shut, preventing the glow of those walls from mingling with the moonlight.
“If Myra has left lamp or candle for you, this will light it,” the sorcerer said. He lobbed the magical orb in his hand toward the ceiling of her bedchamber. The orb shattered, showering the room with sparks. In an instant, the chamber exploded with light to rival the sun’s, blinding in its sudden intensity.
“Drisha!” both swore together, jumping back from the threshold in unison as if joined at the hip like Cethren twins.
The room was awash with light from every possible type of lamp. There were candle lanterns tall and short; shallow saucer lamps with flaming wicks floating in fat; covered oil lamps of every description, some clean-burning, others smoky; and candlesticks single, triple, and branching. One treelike specimen held more than twenty tapers. The flames alight in the bedroom, all ignited at once by Verek’s glowing orb, would have adequately illuminated the great hall of many a manor house. Ablaze in such a confined space, they threw off enough heat to toast the faces of the two astonished onlookers in the doorway.
Recovering his composure, Verek snapped his fingers; more than half the flames died as if buckets of water had been thrown into the room. With one eyebrow arched quizzically, he surveyed the numerous fires still burning.
“Pray tell,” he said, turning to Carin. “Are all these here by your design?”
“No,” she said, emphatically. “The last time I saw this room, there was just one candlestick on the dressing table, and the oil lamp that you left here at the door.”
Verek nodded. “This bears Myra’s mark. To ease a child’s fear of the dark, she would burn down the house.” Abruptly he turned back to the hallway. In a voice more annoyed than concerned, he threw a warning over his shoulder: “See that you do not set afire the bedclothes, the curtains, or yourself.” Then he was gone, retracing his steps down the moonlit corridor.
Alone in her room, Carin extinguished all but a pair of lamps—the original left by Verek last night, and one from among Myra’s multitude that cast a similarly steady, clear light. Then, stripped off to bare skin, she crawled into bed. Sleep must come quickly tonight. After her day of courting trouble in Jerold’s enchanted garden and time-traveling through Verek’s pool of magic, she felt thoroughly ground down.
Despite the lateness of the hour, however, Carin’s mind was too agitated to let her sleep. Answers had come tonight like tithes to the temple on Mydrismas Eve: answers to the riddles of an unremembered childhood, of glowing stone walls, of spells that were invisible to her while horrifyingly apparent to others … even a possible explanation for Verek’s hostility toward the runaway he had found hiding in his woods. For a time, he had believed her to be a sorceress—a blackheart powerful enough, maybe, to break his spells and challenge his rule. If only briefly, during those moments when he’d held a sword to her throat, he had supposed himself to be in danger.
The thought provoked one of Carin’s rare smiles. For a little while anyway, the warlock had feared her.
In the vision they had seen tonight, there was also a hint about the puzzle-book’s origins and why Carin knew its language. Many books crowded the shelves of the child’s bedroom that had risen in mists above the mirror pool. Had the puzzle-book once been among them? Had it, in fact, once belonged to her, a companion to the egg-man toy that seemed cut on the pattern of the Humpty Dumpty from the book?
If so, how had the volume come into Verek’s possession? If an unnatural whirlpool had dumped Carin in a millpond on the southern grasslands, then why hadn’t the vortex also borne her book to that pond?
She sighed. It had been the same since her first hour in Verek’s realm: every question answered summoned two more to take its place.
Lying awake, Carin stared into the flame of the short, round oil lamp on the table by the bed. Its steady light filled her mind. She waited for sleep to come.
But what crept over her instead was a growing anxiety. The feeling drew her to her feet to stand at the window, looking for … she didn’t know what … in the moonlight outside. The rocky cliff behind the house dominated the view from this window, which overlooked the corner of her jutting bedroom where it joined the long roofline of the upper-story hallway. A small section of the stone wall surrounding the manor grounds was just visible. Beyond the wall, Verek’s cursed woodland appeared not desolate, but peaceful in the moonlight.
The woodland wasn’t the source of the apprehension that now fell around her like a heavy veil. Carin crossed to her bedroom door, pulled it open a crack, and looked out at the landing, listening for any sound. All was silent. And yet feelings of despair and foreboding drew her gaze to the long, empty corridor that led to the cavern of the enchanted pool.
She closed the door and dressed quickly in only her shift. Then she lit a candle lantern from Myra’s multitude, stepped out onto the landing, and turned to the corridor down which Verek had vanished. He’d left her at her door not an hour ago, to judge by the moonlight through the corridor’s windows. The light seemed little altered since her previous passage.
Gliding silently down the hallway on bare feet, Carin reached the wide staircase that descended to the cave. Beyond the head of the stairs, set into a wall that closed off the corridor at an angle, were large double doors. Carin hadn’t noticed them before. Her thoughts as she passed this way with Verek had been too full of questions and revelations. But beyond those doors must lie the larger, main wing of the house.
Pausing, Carin closed her eyes and opened her other senses to the feeling that had drawn her to this spot. It beckoned, not from behind the closed, latched doors, but from the great stone vault at the foot of the stairs.
Am I a moth drawn to candlelight? she wondered uneasily. Am I going to my doom like an insect that flies into the flame and gets burnt up?
Slowly, with many pauses that brought nothing to her ears but silence, Carin descended the three flights, passing from the moonlit world of the upper stories into the dark depths below ground. It was impossible to know the exact moment of transition, as the walls of the stairwell were paneled from top to bottom in some dark wood that absorbed light from her lantern as wheat boiled in milk soaks up the liquid. At the bottom of the stairs nothing met her eyes but dark paneling. The door to the cave was well concealed.
Lightly brushing her fingertips over the paneling, Carin felt for any break. On the third pass, her fingers found a gap in the wall a handbreadth wide. She raised the lantern to the opening and stared, dumbfounded. Her eyes could detect no break in the smooth surface. Yet her fingers were up to their second joints in the paneling, as though stuck into soft rye bread. She felt nothing; her fingers met no resistance. She wiggled them. Their movement was apparent up to the knuckles but invisible beyond.
More fascinated than afraid—was this how Alice had passed through the unresisting looking-glass?—Carin thrust her hand into the gap until her wrist and lower arm disappeared. Her fingers felt a metal bar: a latch. She lifted it and pushed. A section of the paneling yielded the merest bit, moving silently away from her. She had found the door to the cave of magic.
Setting the lantern down, Carin closed and fastened its curved visor to darken without extinguishing it. Then she put both hands to the paneled door and pressed gently, moving it by fractions until a sliver of reddish light shone through a crack. Also slicing through was a voice, the words distinct and brittle like shards of glass.
“Show me the past, Amangêda! I beseech you: take me through time. Return me to days of happiness, before this ghastly scene. You have shown only this brutal image in answer to my every plea. It is burned into my brain. I see it waking and sleeping. Blot out this image, wretch, and grant me respite! Show me my lady and the child as they were in life—not as they linger in my nightmares, in this scene that repeats endlessly in a tortured mind.”
; For a moment, silence leaked from the cave. Then the voice—barely recognizable as Verek’s—cried out in anguish: “Amangêda! Have pity! Would you show the mortal fìleen the dark magic that bore her between worlds, yet deny your servant the slightest glimpse of light or beauty, love or laughter? You are a monster!”
These final words were screamed in a rage that upended the hairs at the nape of Carin’s neck. The voice conveyed a fury beyond any human capacity to feel or to express.
She pushed the door open far enough to get her head through the crack, just in time to see the image against which Verek railed. Rising from the surface of the enchanted pool was the scene that Myra had described to Carin on her second morning under Verek’s roof: a tangle of water-lilies, a woman and a child caught in the twining stems, their drowned bodies hideously bloated. The skirts of the woman’s gown and the tendrils of her long hair floated up like smoke.
So vivid was the image that, for an instant, its strange perspective escaped Carin’s notice. She—and the sorcerer who was standing on the lip of the pool—did not look down on the scene, as they would view it from a lake’s shore. They looked up through the image as though they stood on the lake bottom. The stalks of the water-lilies reached from the pool’s misty surface to sway above Verek’s head like a forest of slender, interlaced tree trunks. The bodies of the woman and child hung high in the stems, both face-down, suspended more than an arm’s length above him. He looked directly up into their dead eyes.
Screaming with pain and rage, the sorcerer swept his arm like a scythe through the lilies’ stems. The slim, translucent rods shattered glasslike, sending drops bright as diamonds raining down into the pool. The illusion, destroyed, returned instantly to the water from which it had been formed. The images of water-lilies and two drowned bodies roiled together as water crashed down into the pool with the force of the sea through a burst dike. The deluge caught Verek. It knocked him into the pool and swept him under as the flood poured over him.
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock Page 16