“Let me remind you of our bargain,” he said, again cupping his hand around the back of her head. “I will attempt to knit the bone. You’ll attend closely to every sensation and tell me all that you feel.”
“Yes, sir.”
Carin fixed her gaze on Verek’s right hand. He pinched together his thumb and forefinger, then eased them apart. A bead of brilliant light the size of a pebble filled the gap. It was far brighter than the witchlight orbs that Verek had previously summoned to his hand. Carin couldn’t look directly at it. Squinting, she shifted her gaze to the sorcerer’s left shoulder. From the corner of her eye she watched him squeeze the brilliant pebble until it was no bigger than a wheat grain but shone with the intensity of the summer sun. Against that glare, she clamped her eyes shut.
Even through closed lids, however, Carin could detect the grain of brilliance nearing her face. It threw off heat as well as light. A candle flame laid to her cheek would not have been hotter. But she felt no pain. This was heat that did not burn. She felt it touch her cheek, then pass through her skin and settle in the cracked bone. There, the heat flashed like a stroke of lightning—an extreme but incalculably brief sensation of pure fire. At no time did Carin feel the slightest discomfort.
The heat and the light were gone. She opened her eyes.
Verek was looking at her. He stood with his right hand resting on the mantelpiece; his left hung at his side.
Carin blinked a few times, feeling as if she were emerging from a vivid daydream. She raised her hand to her face and felt for charred flesh over the cheekbone that the warlock had bespelled. The skin was smooth and supple. There was no burn. She pressed her fingers firmly against the bone and experienced no pain.
“Thank you,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt now.”
As best she could then, Carin fulfilled her half of the bargain. Choosing her words with care to give Verek the truest account that words alone could convey, Carin described the sensations of heat and light and fire that flashed but did not scorch.
Verek nodded.
“You tell me nothing remarkable,” he said, “but that is noteworthy in itself. Perhaps we may yet discover a pattern in this puzzle of what is present to your senses … and what is less to you than nothing.”
He turned to the mantelshelf, picked up the ointment jars, one in each hand, and pressed them into Carin’s hands. “Tomorrow, apply these as I did—the darker salve to your cuts, the lighter to your bruises. For hurts of that sort, the healer’s art serves better than the wysard’s. The apothecary may mix a multitude of remedies for each solitary cure that is worked through magic—and yet retain the strength, at day’s end, to do other than seek his bed.”
The sorcerer turned toward the room’s shadows. Even the light of six glowing lamps could not dispel the gloom that lay like smoke over that section of the library. The stubborn darkness hiding the upper door to the cave of magic was also a product of the wizard’s art, Carin suspected.
“Tell Myra that I wish the evening meal in my quarters,” Verek said. “You’re at liberty this evening. Tomorrow, we will resume the reading. I have decided I must hear more of the odd adventure of this girl ‘Alice’.”
Verek walked into the darkness. The door creaked, and for a moment he was silhouetted against the reddish glow that rose from the depths. Then the door closed behind him, with a solid click that suggested nothing more would be seen of the warlock tonight.
Left standing in the well-lit library, Carin listened to the rain, the crackling fire, and the din of her thoughts. A dozen questions darted through her mind, but she would have to wait to ask them.
She put out the lamps and went to eat supper with Myra. After clearing the dishes, she laid her kirtle full on the kitchen table, shaping the still-damp wool to dry flat before the fire. Then she ascended to her room, and took Verek’s book of woods’ lore to bed with her. But she managed only two pages of it before snuffing her reading lights and surrendering to a deep, dreamless sleep.
* * *
The new day broke in a cloudless sky. The storm was over.
Carin was up with the sun to sit at the dressing table and rub Verek’s salves into cuts and bruises that had faded appreciably overnight. In the sorcerer’s treatments of her latest injuries, she had found a clue to one troubling mystery: whether his medicines were natural compounds of herbs and oils, or unnatural mixtures with magian qualities. Before working magic on her fractured cheekbone, Verek had—astoundingly—asked Carin’s consent. He had never sought her permission before plying her with powders, liquids, and salves. The implication was clear. The warlock didn’t scruple to use such remedies, but he felt some duty to obtain the patient’s consent before working a magical cure. A sort of wizard’s code of conduct? she wondered.
In the library, Carin started her morning’s work by shifting the stacks of books that she’d scattered on the floor. Arranging them in neat rows, she made pathways that would give quick access to the hall door from any spot in the room. If she must again beat a retreat—fleeing the warlock himself, or any monsters that might clamber up from his cave—she wouldn’t again stumble over badly placed cairns of books.
Next, she sorted through the volumes she had piled at random on the desk. These were books she wanted to read, or at least page through more carefully before assigning them their places in the order that was slowly emerging from the room’s disarray.
One volume that Carin had set aside was the book on archery that she’d found during her first exploration of the shelves, on the day Verek put her to work. She settled with it at the sunlit desk and was reading instructions for shaping a bowstave from yew or wild elm, when the hall door burst open and the warlock strode into the room.
He was coatless and wore his shirtsleeves rolled up, as though he’d been at manual labor that morning. In one hand he carried a hemp bag, knotted at the neck. In the other was the puzzle-book, which Carin had last seen concealed in a piece of sacking and slipped under the warlock’s rain-cloak.
“Good,” he greeted her without preliminaries. “You’re here. Come with me.”
Verek tucked the book under his arm and walked into the shadows opposite the desk. By sound alone—he was quite invisible in the library’s depths—Carin knew that he opened the door to the cave of magic. She heard the hinges creak.
She laid her book facedown on the desk. Slowly she rose and stood beside her chair, with her insides kinking.
Not again, Carin thought. What can he want with me down there? Drowned bodies, dark forces, a dragon … With her every descent of those stairs, Carin felt herself being dragged under, deeper into the dangers of the warlock’s world. She half gagged on the intensity of the dread that was welling up in her at the prospect of reentering that realm.
“Come here,” Verek snapped from out of the darkness. “If I have to carry you below, you won’t like it.”
The threat didn’t move her. Carin’s reluctance to descend to the cave was so strong that she couldn’t pry herself from the sunlight that flooded through the windows.
“Please,” she managed to say to the shadows that had swallowed the warlock. But that was all. No other words made it past her constricting throat.
Verek reemerged from the darkness, still carrying his bag and the book. He paused in the edge of the sunlight and looked at her with his usual unreadable expression. Then he dropped the bag, and laid the book on the stack of sorted volumes closest to him. Striding between the now-orderly towers of books, he advanced to the desk and stood over her, his arms folded.
Carin prepared to take what was coming.
But in the warlock’s stance there was nothing—no muscles knotting in his neck, no clenching of the long fingers that rested on his crossed arms—to suggest anger.
“You’re afraid,” he murmured. “Good. Only a fool could enter the chamber below this room and feel no fear. In the work that awaits us, a fool would be worse than useless.”
He cleared his throat, then went on: �
�I will not lie to you, and tell you that the events in which you find yourself entangled will pose you no threat. The time may come when I will ask you to embark with me on an enterprise that will endanger both our lives. But that time is not now. At this point, I require your presence in the vault for a purpose that poses little risk to you, and only slightly more to myself.
“The unfortunates that I have brought for this test”—he tipped his head back to indicate the bag on the floor behind him—“may fare less well than you and I. But they’re fated to be meat for others, whatever the outcome today, so I think we may bear their loss with good heart.”
Verek turned and retraced his steps to retrieve the bag and the puzzle-book.
“Come with me now,” he ordered, speaking over his shoulder. “Save your fear for a day when you may need it.”
Though Verek’s words served only to deepen her uneasiness, Carin pushed away from her bright refuge under the windows. She joined the warlock at the edge of the sunlight, then followed him into the shadows. The open door to the cave of magic showed clearly, a rectangle of red in the darkness. Verek ushered her through it ahead of him. Then he paused inside on the landing to close and latch the door.
So that no monsters could escape? Carin’s breathing quickened.
The stairs were too narrow to let Verek squeeze around her, burdened as he was with the bag. Carin was forced to lead the way down. But the moment she emerged from the stairwell, she stepped aside. And when Verek strode past her with the bag, she retreated to the foot of the steps. From there, she watched the warlock take the sack to a spot less than halfway between the stairwell and the pool. When he dropped it on the floor, the bag moved. It held something living.
Verek joined Carin at the foot of the stairs and handed her the Looking-Glass book.
“Summon the dragon,” he said. “Call only its name. Let us determine if that is sufficient when you stand so close to the waters of the wysards.” Verek stationed himself between Carin and the pool, then added over his shoulder: “Be ready to take to your heels. I believe the thing has intelligence, and memory. If it remembers its first summons to this chamber, then it may lunge for us at once—to catch its prey, if it can, before we withdraw up the stairs.”
Prey?
Carin planted a foot on the bottom step, prepared to fly upward with the speed of smoke up a flue. Speaking around Verek’s back, she threw the alien name into the cavern like a gauntlet:
“Jabberwock!”
Nothing happened. The pool’s perfect surface did not flicker.
“Speak the line that contains the creature’s name,” Verek instructed.
Carin called it out: “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!”
This time, the pool reacted. A ripple moved over it as if a strong breeze gusted through the cave. A heartbeat later, however, the waters had resumed their unbroken, mirror smoothness.
“It is as I thought,” Verek said. “The incantation must be spoken in its entirety. Open the book and read the words for which the language of Ladrehdin has no equals.”
She didn’t need to consult the puzzle-book, Carin realized. She knew the words by heart. Taking a breath to steady nerves that were as taut as bowstrings, she recited the opening stanza of “Jabberwocky.”
On cue, the magic pool misted over. From it rose the badgerlike “toves” to bore holes in a water-sculpted hillside. After the “toves” came the unhappy “borogoves” like wingless parrots, and the piggish “raths” squeaking in protest at the destruction of their homes.
“Good!” Verek flung approval over his shoulder. “Now—summon the monster.”
Carin’s muscles tensed. She recited the line: “Beware the Jabberwock!”
Instantly the images of the hillside creatures collapsed in a flood, to be replaced by a bat-winged, scimitar-clawed dragon that reared from the pool, howling like the supernatural thing it was.
Carin sprang up the steps as quickly as Verek flung himself backward to take her place at the foot of them. Just above his head she stopped and crouched, to gaze down at the unreal scene below.
The warlock, in his study of the creature yesterday afternoon, had taken the measure of the beast with life-saving exactness. The monster’s talons reached to the opening of the stairwell, but no farther. They slashed at the stonework with such viciousness that chunks of rock clattered to the floor. The claws’ razor tips flailed only inches from Verek’s face. But the dragon could not reach him. The pool held it back.
With a frustrated roar, the monster gathered itself and pounced on the bag that Verek had left for it. One swipe of a talon laid the bag open, slicing cleanly through the heavy hemp. Three terrified chickens fluttered up, right into the dragon’s jaws. Fangs closed on one bird, then another, snapping with a sharp crack like a tree breaking. No drop of blood escaped that maw.
Carin watched, morbidly fascinated, as a single brown feather drifted down to settle on the cave’s floor.
“Excellent!” Verek exclaimed, tilting his head back to peer up at her. “If proof were needed, this has provided it. The dragon transcends illusion. It is—as I hoped and did suspect—a killer.”
As he hoped? Surprised into meeting the eyes that were turned up to hers, Carin recoiled in horror. About them was a preternatural brilliance that expressed excitement barely contained—or madness barely controlled.
Chapter 16
Promises
The warlock gave no sign that he saw the revulsion in Carin’s face. He held his hand up to her, demanding the puzzle-book. Then he bade her return to the library.
“Wait for me there. When I join you, I will wish to hear more from the pages of this bewitching book. But first I must see to our otherworldly guest.” Verek jerked his head to indicate the screaming monster that, inches behind his back, was slicing the hemp bag to ribbons.
Carin raced upward, her skin damp with sweat, the air in the stairwell chilling her. Whether she fled the Jabberwock or the sorcerer, however, she could hardly say. What was in Verek’s mind? What evil did he think to do with the dragon she had conjured?
She flung open the door at the head of the stairs. From the unnatural shadows which cloaked that section of the library in endless night, Carin plunged into the sunlight streaming through the windows. She threw herself against the desk, fighting for breath and for mastery of her fear.
To stand against the sorcerer and whatever he planned for “her” monster seemed worse than foolhardy. Verek might feed her to the thing. But she couldn’t sit idly while he used the dragon for some terrible purpose she could only imagine.
The warlock lingered long underground. By the time the creaking of the hidden door told her he had returned to the library, Carin was ready—though nervous to the degree of misery—to say what she had to.
“Lord Verek,” she snapped the moment he emerged from the shadows. “I don’t know what you think you’re up to with that dragon I accidentally brought here from the puzzle-book. Feeding it those birds was a creepy thing to do. But the look on your face when you saw the Jabberwock kill them—that was even worse.” Carin wiped her palms on her breeches and shook her head. “I’m done. That’s it. I won’t call the monster back, ever. If you intended to set the thing free, or use it as some kind of weapon, you can just forget it. I don’t care if you torture me, or you lock me in the dungeon, or you throw me into the wizards’ well to drown. It doesn’t matter what you do. I won’t summon the dragon to serve you.”
Verek heard her out without moving another step into the room. When Carin’s words had died away, he stood another moment in silence, eyeing her. Then he walked to the cabinet from which he’d poured himself a drink on the day they first talked in this library. As he passed the bench Carin had occupied then—the same bench she’d taken at every meeting in this room since—he tossed the puzzle-book onto its seat, not breaking stride.
At the cabinet Verek tipped out a ruby liquid from a glass flagon, filling two goblets to the brim. He carried both to the desk w
here Carin stood.
“Drink this,” he said, handing her a goblet. “It will aid the recovery of wits you seem to have lost.”
Carin accepted the drink but did not taste it. Her full attention was on the warlock. She studied his face, especially his darkly flickering eyes. Their elusive manic quality remained, but the terrifying brilliance no longer shone in them. Any outward expression of Verek’s madness—if madness it was—had been replaced by a circumspect look of surprise.
The warlock returned her gaze, watching her over the rim of his glass as he sipped his drink. He lowered it and asked: “Of what do you suspect me? Upon whom shall I unleash the monster, do you think? Might I loose it on the countryside to murder my tenants?”
Carin shook her head. “I don’t know what to think, sir. I can’t guess your secrets. But when you act happy about the dragon being a killer, I have to assume that you’re not planning to use the Jabberwock for anything good.”
“Drink,” Verek said again, gesturing at the glass Carin hardly knew she held. “You will find the elixir calms the nerves and quiets the mind.”
As he raised his own glass to his lips, Carin took a hesitant sip from hers. The liquor was warm on her tongue and in her throat. It tasted of currants, slightly sweet with a tartness.
For a long moment, the warlock said no more. He drained his goblet, then set it on the desk and raised his face to the sunlight that poured over them through the tall windows above. With his eyes closed, he soaked it up like a lizard sunning on a rock.
As Carin studied Verek’s profile with its straight nose and firm jaw, she had the startling idea that this warlock might long for sunshine and open spaces, the same way she did. She thought of him as a creature of night and darkness, closeted deep with his spells, working wizardry until all hours. But what had Myra said? She’d mentioned that Verek and Lanse used to pass their days outdoors. Before Carin arrived on the scene, the two of them had ridden together almost daily to sharpen their skills with horse, sword, and bow.
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock Page 23