Is it my presence here that drives the warlock underground to face the forces in that cave? Carin wondered. If I hadn’t stumbled onto his property, would he still be the swordsman who used to ride through the woods, and not the sorcerer who’s planning something horrible?
Verek opened his eyes and turned to her.
“You speak of ‘doing good,’” he said. “Tell me: do you believe that the sun does good in its daily arcing through the sky?”
“Yes, of course,” Carin answered without thinking. “If the sun didn’t cross the sky every day, the world would freeze in the dark. The sun is warmth and light. It’s life.”
“Does it not also bring death?” Verek shot back. “Is it not the searing heat of the sun that shrivels the crops in the fields and dries the ponds in midsummer so that beasts lay dying of thirst? Where then, in the sun’s merciless scorching of the land, is the benevolence of which you speak?”
Carin chewed her bottom lip, then took another small sip of her drink so she could hide behind her glass. He was right, of course. The sun was neither good nor bad; it just was. On the world below, living things might feel its glow as benign or destructive, but the sun, in itself, was neither.
Verek seemed to know that Carin had realized her mistake. He continued: “Again it’s necessary to look beyond the immediate and the obvious to see what may lie deeper—as in the matter of Alice and her looking-glass. You think the sun in the sky is unfailingly good, but upon reflection you see that it may cause harm. You believe the dragon you call to the wysards’ well is a thing of evil. But are you so sure of its wickedness that you will say it’s impossible for the creature ever to serve as an instrument for good, in some peculiar instance that you cannot now imagine?”
The warlock was looking steadily at Carin, but he seemed unaware that he had asked her a question.
“Undoubtedly,” he went on, “you think that killing a person is an evil thing. But could you call it a noble act if the killer were reluctant to his very soul, and despite his qualms he did take a life, for no less a purpose than to save the lives of millions? To save life itself, perhaps, on this world and others?”
This time Verek paused, awaiting her answer. But Carin only stared at him, deeply confused. How could the death of one person save lives on such a scale as he described? And where was the Jabberwock’s place in all of this, as “an instrument for good”?
Then she made the connection, and she felt the color leave her face. Two alien invaders—a dragon from the abyss and the girl who conjured it … a girl who “shouldn’t be here.” Use one to kill the other, and be rid of both.
Involuntarily Carin backed away from Verek, moving a step closer to the hall door. Don’t admit to anything! Don’t agree to anything! screamed her instinct for self-preservation.
“‘On this world and others’?” Carin said in a voice far firmer than her jellied insides felt. “There aren’t any ‘other worlds.’ I was born in the south of Ladrehdin to parents I never knew. That place I saw in the pool of magic—the room where the little girl was asleep—that was just a trick.” With every sentence, Carin got louder and angrier. “You tricked me! That wasn’t a vision of my bedroom from childhood. There was never any whirlpool swooshing me from there to here. You’re a sorcerer. You can make me see things that don’t exist. You can twist my mind however you want it to go.
“No!” she fairly screamed at him. “I won’t call the dragon again, for any reason. Whatever your schemes are, you’re not getting any help from me. I’m not daft enough to help you set a trap, and then walk right into it. I haven’t stayed alive this long by being that thick-witted.”
Verek stood looking at Carin, listening, his face an impassive mask. His eyes wore a distant and guarded expression now, as though he strove with conscious effort to avoid any fleeting glance that might betray his thoughts.
He snatched his empty goblet from the desk and spun around. His long strides carried him back to the cabinet in the bookshelves. Verek flung it open and poured himself another bumper of the ruby liquor. He drank a good third of it on the spot. Then he carried his glass—along with the half-full decanter—to his usual seat in front of the fireplace. The hearth was cold; Carin hadn’t needed a fire to work in the library on such a sunny morning.
“You mistake me,” the warlock said, snapping off his words as if they were sticks of dry kindling. “When I speak of taking a life, I have in mind … someone who is a more urgent threat to this world than you are. Cool down. I won’t murder you today. Nor will I ask you again to summon the monster to the vault below. Though the beast does not and will not answer to me, I know its nature now. On that front, my inquiries are ended.”
Verek paused to sip his drink. With a preoccupied wag of his empty hand, he waved Carin to her usual place on the bench opposite.
She delayed long enough to gulp a mouthful from the goblet she clutched. Somewhat steadied by the liquor’s warmth, Carin made her way through the stacked books to settle across from the sorcerer, with the low table reassuringly between them. The Looking-Glass book lay on the bench beside her, where Verek had tossed it on his earlier visit to the liquor cabinet.
“I am much dissatisfied with you,” the warlock growled, riveting Carin to the cushions with his dark gaze. “I had thought you must accept the truth of what you saw in the well of the wysards. If the world you glimpsed is not your true home, then how do you explain the puzzle-book and your ability to read it? How do you explain your lack of childhood memories? How do you account for the wheelwright finding you in a state of shock and unable to speak a word for a year afterward? Doesn’t it occur to you that you could not speak because you did not know the language of Ladrehdin? For a year after you washed up on the shores of this world, you were a child learning to talk. Small wonder that the wright thought you feeble in the head. I begin to think he took your measure truly.”
The warlock paused again, frowning, and sipped his drink.
Carin swallowed more of hers as well, as much to gain time as to draw courage. Verek’s points were difficult to refute. Why she couldn’t remember her childhood and how she’d arrived on the banks of the millpond were baffling questions, but other explanations were possible. The only real evidence that she’d come to this world from another was the Looking-Glass book and her otherwise inexplicable ability to read it. The book was a key to this mystery.
So what was Verek doing with it? If it had been Carin’s on that “other world,” how had he gotten his hands on it?
“Sir,” she said, looking at him askant, “if it’s true that the child’s room that materialized out of the magic pool used to be my room, and if it’s true that this book”—Carin picked up the volume beside her—“is written in the language of that other world and used to belong to me there, then the same whirlpool that brought me to Ladrehdin should have brought the book too. So how come I popped into a pond down south, but my book ended up with you?”
Carin paused, but not long enough to let the warlock answer. Her point was not yet made.
“It’s more likely, isn’t it,” she went on firmly, “that the book is written in some obscure language of Ladrehdin that I learned from my parents before I got separated from them. Your library has lots of examples of old languages that nobody speaks anymore. Maybe this”—Carin hefted the book—“is just a story in a dead language. Maybe it doesn’t prove anything about ‘other worlds,’ or about me coming from one.”
Verek sighed heavily at her. Scowling, he reached for the flagon to refill his goblet.
If he keeps on at this rate, Carin thought, watching him, I’ll soon be sitting here with a sorcerer who’s not only half crazy, but half drunk too.
The warlock did not immediately drink from his refilled glass, however. He leaned back against the cushions of his bench and cradled the goblet in one hand while he ran the fingers of his other through his hair.
“The book came to me on a cold winter’s morning, some five years ago, as I sat reading in
this room,” Verek said in a voice that was strained but quiet. “I felt a great disturbance in the waters of the wysards … as I felt the uproar yesterday when you spoke the incantation that conjured the dragon’s heralds. On that winter’s morning, I hurried to the pool and found the waters wildly agitated. They seethed and foamed like the sea in a mighty storm.
“I called upon the power of that place to show me the cause of the turmoil. It could form no clear likeness upon the pool, such was the fury of the storm of magic that whipped the waters to foam. But the power in the chamber did impress upon my mind images of a vortex spinning through a dark void … bearing near its center a speck: green and blue like a bunch of violets.”
“You saw me!” Carin exclaimed, then clamped her bottom lip in her teeth, threatening to reopen the nearly healed cut. Caught up in Verek’s storytelling, she’d forgotten her professed disbelief of the tale.
“Yes, I saw you,” the warlock replied, seeming not to notice Carin’s slipup. “Then, of course, I didn’t know the identity of the bright speck, nor fully comprehend the significance of the vortex in the void. I knew only that I witnessed wizardry of an incredibly powerful nature … magic not of my own working.
“I reached to touch it,” Verek went on. “I strove to call forth from the magic itself the name of the master wysard who made it. With all of my powers I probed the secrets of that vortex and its creator.”
He fell silent. Verek’s eyes looked through Carin as if they saw the whirlpool still spinning in the void.
She took a tiny sip of her drink and said nothing. Holding the goblet in front of her, Carin watched the warlock over its rim.
In a moment, Verek shook himself and resumed his story. “Gradually, the magic faded. The images ceased and the waters of the pool stilled. Yet I worked on in the chamber, struggling to lift the curtain of silence. Calling on the forces that are both servant and master to me, I sought their help in discovering the maker of the vortex and learning the nature of such powerful wizardry. But a day spent in hard pursuit of knowledge yielded nothing but speculation … and the book you hold in your hand.”
Verek drank deeply from his goblet, then tilted its rim toward Carin to indicate the puzzle-book she clutched.
“I don’t understand, sir,” she ventured after a moment, when the warlock seemed to need prodding to finish his story. “Did the book just show up in the wizards’ well like a … a ship on the sea?”
“More like driftwood washed up on shore,” Verek replied. “When the waters grew still, I discovered the book on the pool’s rim, as one might find the lost cargo of a wrecked ship heaped onshore after a storm. I don’t doubt that the book was with you in the vortex at the beginning of your journey through the void. What I do not know is how it came to be parted from you. Perhaps my interference, as I strove to touch the magic, so disturbed the vortex that a small part of its ‘cargo’ broke free and floated to me, like flotsam after a storm. Or perhaps my efforts had no effect, and the book was simply a bit of debris washing up where the tides of magic took it.”
Carin examined the volume in her hand. It was undamaged. There were no water stains or wrinkled pages such as a book should have after even a minor wetting, much less the total submersion that Verek described. Still, the lack of water damage was no proof that his story was a lie. She’d seen for herself that the “water” of the magic pool had had no power to dampen the warlock’s hair or clothes, even when he’d nearly drowned in it.
“Strange though the episode was,” Verek went on, “it was not the first time such a thing had happened.”
He’s unusually talkative this morning, Carin thought. Is it the liquor talking?
“Some years before the book washed up in the pool,” the warlock said, “another item—albeit less fascinating—appeared in like manner.”
Verek set his half-empty glass down and went again to the liquor cabinet. From it he removed two clean goblets, which he set on a nearby shelf that Carin’s labors had cleared of books. Then he reached deep into the cabinet and gave a sharp tug. He brought out a narrow slat that looked like it came from the cabinet’s wooden back. Again he reached in, deeper still, accessing what Carin took to be a cavity within the wall-space behind the cabinet. From it, he withdrew a wand of what looked like honey-colored wood.
The wand was the length of Verek’s arm from wrist to elbow and about as big around as his thumb. It was highly polished, either by hand or as if it had been driftwood on the sea, smoothed by the action of winds and waves. In the sunlight that slanted through the library’s windows, the honey tones shone as if waxed.
Verek handed Carin the wand, then resumed his seat.
“I was not at home when this artifact emerged from the pool,” he said. “While out riding, I sensed in the very air the workings of unusually strong magic. I could not reach the cavern in time to discover the wizardry’s nature or source. But I believe the disturbance of the waters then was as violent as it would be later, when I ’scried the vortex that carried you between worlds.
“When I reached the cavern after that first disturbance,” Verek added, “I saw no sign of anything amiss except the wand you now hold. I picked it up from the pool’s rim, marveling at the odd manner of its arrival. I admired its luster but could see nothing of significance in it. Having no clear idea of its importance, I put it away and all but forgot it … until my first meeting with the woodsprite, in the forest near here, a year and a half later.”
“The woodsprite!” Carin exclaimed, intrigued that the sprite would crop up in the history Verek was relating. She rolled the wand between her hands, feeling its satin smoothness, and wondered: Had the sprite also arrived in this world twirling madly in a whirlpool? Could this wand be a relic of the creature’s home, as the puzzle-book was purported to be a vestige of hers?
“Sir, have you talked to the sprite about this?” Carin asked. “Have you shown it this stick? I’m sure the creature would want to see it. Maybe the sprite can tell whether the wand comes from its home world. If it recognizes the wood, then I’ll have more reason to believe what you say about me being from somewhere else.”
Verek snatched up his goblet so abruptly that some of the liquor sloshed out and splattered.
“You declare the sprite trustworthy and in the same breath accuse me of deceit—is that the way of it?” he snapped, his eyes flashing. “You doubt the proof of your own eyes, calling it a sorcerer’s trick. What all your senses tell you, you deny, for you allege that I conjure it all to lead you astray. But you accept the woodsprite’s claim that it is from elsewhere, and you say you’re ready to believe the same of yourself—if only the sprite shall tell you that it must be so.”
The warlock glowered at her, and Carin paled once more as she realized what she risked to question Lord Verek so brazenly. Doubting a nobleman’s word or calling him a liar outright—it was an offense punishable by drawing and quartering, should the offended noble choose to apply the law’s severest sanctions.
That Verek was thinking along the same lines was obvious when he spoke again.
“As I’ve sworn not to murder you today, I won’t hold you to account for taking the word of a nameless fay over the testimony of a sovereign Ruainian lord,” he said icily. “I know you look upon the creature as a friend, even while you think of me as your enemy. Whether the sprite will prove to be a true friend to you, I cannot say, for the slippery creature has eluded all my attempts to know its nature.
“But you trust the creature,” Verek said. “Then let me use that trust to support my claim. On the night when it helped you escape the dogs, didn’t the fay speak to you of the spells it sees, the things of power curtaining off a forbidden portion of my land? Didn’t the sprite marvel that you passed through the barrier at will, never sensing the magic’s existence?
“And how did the creature explain this uncanny ability of yours?” the warlock asked. “Did it weave fantasies of lost parents who taught a half-grown child an unknown tongue—a tongue that
bears no resemblance to any ancient language of Ladrehdin? Could the sprite say why those same devoted parents would abandon their child dangerously near water in the dead of winter? Did it waste words on such whimsy, or did it tell you plainly that you, like it, are from elsewhere?
“Answer me!” Verek demanded, as though Carin could have slipped in a word before then. “What do you say to the woodsprite’s assertion—which echoes my own—that you are not of this world?”
Carin put the wand down and reached for her goblet. She drained it of the last ruby drops, then twirled its stem in her fingers. Verek had her. The combined weight of his arguments and the woodsprite’s overwhelmed her resistance. She could not hold on to the pretense.
“I know I’m not of this world,” Carin said, rather testily. “I’ve known it since I saw the little girl’s bedroom in the mists of the magic pool. After the image died away and you asked me about it, I told you I didn’t see anything familiar. But actually, there was one thing in the room that I think I recognized. The egg-man toy that was sitting on the top shelf of the bookcase had a little sign hanging from his foot.
“Did you notice it?” she asked. “It had two words on it that were in the same language as the looking-glass book. They said ‘Karen’s Zoo.’ I haven’t been able to get that sign out of my mind. I think I remember writing those words. I didn’t recognize anything else about the room or the other objects in it. But I remember a hand—I think it must have been mine—being so careful to make that sign neat, to print the letters clearly and to fit the short word perfectly under the longer word. The word on top, the longer word … it’s my name. In the language of the puzzle-book, ‘Carin’ is ‘Karen.’” She pronounced the second name with a harder initial sound and without the slight trilling of the middle letter that characterized Ladrehdinian speech.
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock Page 24