WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  “If I recall aright the story you told of your spying,” he said, growing guarded in his look, “the spell of stone held you from the instant that I was swept into the well. The moment I was free, you were released.”

  Carin only nodded agreement, suspecting that any words of hers might hit him wrong. Her night of spying was, she thought, a sore subject with him.

  “I believe it likely,” Verek went on, “that the well of wysards is not altogether certain what to make of you, or how much trust to place in you. Though I cannot speak for the voice of power, I suspect that the well thought it prudent to turn you to stone, to assure your right behavior in its presence, at a time when I was not in the cavern to govern your conduct.”

  He talks about the mirror pool like it’s alive, Carin thought with a little shiver. He hasn’t mentioned a spirit or a ghost, or a goddess or a demon, that comes up from the well. Is the water itself alive? Is it aware? Does it think?

  Verek stood, signaling his intention to end their conversation. But as his gaze sought the Book of Archamon on the desk where he’d left it yesterday, he paused, and frowned.

  Carin didn’t need to look behind her to know the reason for Verek’s scowl. When he fled the room yesterday in a state bordering on shock, the book lay open to the two facing entries that Lord Legary had penned. Now, its cover was closed. Verek could suspect no hands but Carin’s had dared to touch the book.

  Before she could explain about protecting the volume’s bright inks from sunlight’s ravages, Verek had shot her a look that held her tongue. He resumed his seat opposite.

  “It is past time you understood that names have power,” he said with quiet intensity. “From the looking-glass book, you have conjured a dragon by speaking its name. In the tumult of the well this evening, you have seen the folly of voicing a forbidden name. The lesson you must learn is this: Never utter aloud a name you do not know. Names call those who wear them. If you cannot be certain what being—or manner of being—will answer to your call, do not speak its name.”

  Carin took his meaning even before Verek glanced again at the Book at Archamon. Only one page of that volume had yielded to her scrutiny: the final entry, Legary’s poem, which no spell of concealment kept her from reading. And in that narrative were two names: Alesia, and the mysterious Morann.

  The warlock couldn’t know that Carin had discovered, by uncanny dream and odd luck, the identity of the woman called Alesia. He must think the name was as obscure to her as that of the unknown Morann. Clearly, he was worried that Carin might say aloud one or both of those names. Because she had overheard him speak of his dead Alesia in the garden, Carin was all but certain that it must be the other name—Morann—which the warlock dreaded to hear.

  Speak it aloud, she would not. The name might call an entity that would show her less forbearance than did the spirit—or whatever dwelled there—of the wizards’ well.

  Verek got to his feet. He dismissed her. Carin’s rereading of the puzzle-book’s ninth chapter would await another evening. This instructive day was done.

  * * *

  Carin slept badly and woke with a headache. A thousand dismal fancies had filled her dreams through the night: the heavy, suffocating darkness of a dungeon … a forest of shadows and deathly silence … bones rattling behind the iron door of the Verek family tomb … a pit of icy black mire that turned into the maw of a sea serpent that was half puzzle-book Jabberwock. The monster had called her name and spoke other words she couldn’t make out. The sky outside her bedroom window had barely begun to lighten when Carin threw off the covers and headed for a warm bath, glad to escape the province of nightmare.

  She felt better after a hearty breakfast from the hands of a still-buoyant Myra. The morning passed uneventfully as Carin bent to her task in the library. She made good progress in arranging Verek’s books, and also stole half an hour to decipher, by her laborious cover-and-reveal method, a few words of the ensorcelled page from the Book of Archamon. Evidently Verek trusted the spell of concealment to keep it hidden from her eyes. He didn’t take the book to his private rooms, as Carin had expected he would.

  After lunch, she headed upstairs. She needed a nap, but she wouldn’t waste time catching up on sleep. Making a new bow was more important. She planned to get the archery book from her room, and seek out the woodsprite to find her another limb of yew.

  As Carin topped the stairs, however, the sight that met her eyes banished all thought of handcrafting another weapon. Leaning against the door of her bedroom was a bow, beautifully lacquered in indigo blue. The elegant curves at the ends of its limbs declared this weapon’s superiority over the simple straight-limbed bow that Carin had fashioned from unseasoned wood. She knew, from studying the archery book, how the curves at the bow’s tips would open with the draw, then spring back when the string was released, casting an arrow with great speed and power.

  I find myself indebted to you. Verek’s remark from last evening jumped to Carin’s mind. Was this the warlock’s way of repaying a debt? If so, she was pleased to accept it.

  Elation turned to displeasure, however, as Carin checked the landing outside her bedroom door and confirmed her first impression: her new bow had no arrows. For all its smooth, sinuous beauty, the weapon was useless without missiles.

  But arrows she could make, in less time than it would have taken to craft a bow. With almost the speed of the thought, Carin was down the corridor, through the double doors, and into the dusty master wing, all her sleepiness forgotten. She slowed only when she stood on the balcony above the great hall.

  Standing below looking up at her, his bow in one hand and a quiver of arrows in the other, was Verek.

  Carin’s excitement died.

  “Good. You’re here,” he said gruffly. “Come outside.”

  “Beggar it all,” Carin swore under her breath. She gritted her teeth and scuffed her way down the steps. Until now, the great hall had been hers in privacy. Verek might own it, but he was not welcome in it.

  Two paces outside the rowan door, Carin stopped and stared. In the wooded wilds behind the hall and its kitchens, half hidden in the trees, waited the outline of a deer. Though realistic, it was easily recognizable as a wooden practice target. What the warlock had lured her to, Carin realized in astonishment, was archery practice.

  Verek handed her the first of many arrows from his quiver, and proved himself to be a demanding and impatient teacher. Carin’s numerous errors of technique, her every break in form, and all her misses earned biting criticism. But at the end of three exhausting hours, she had a greater mastery of the weapon than many days of self-study had given her.

  When the warlock called a halt, he collected her bow and all of his razor-sharp, jasper-tipped arrows. Carin gave them up reluctantly, expressing her wish to keep the weapons and train on her own.

  Verek wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Those who school alone,” he said, “school their mistakes. Errors become so deeply ingrained that no amount of correction can remedy them.

  “Besides,” he added, scowling at her, “I do not wish to feel my own arrow in my back, or see the boy Lanse fall victim to you. Knowing how you detest us both, I would show myself to be a greater fool than I am, to permit your going armed about these premises.”

  Carin didn’t argue further. She couldn’t fault the warlock’s reasoning. It had never been her intention, were she to master the weapon, to limit her shooting strictly to deer.

  In the late afternoon, finding that neither Verek nor Myra required her for an hour, Carin had her much-needed nap and awoke refreshed. After supper, she reread the last four chapters of the Looking-Glass book to Verek, and with him worked out the closing moves of the chess game that took Alice from pawn to queen. “Peaceful” was a word Carin could seldom apply to time spent with the warlock, but this evening was as tranquil as any she had known under Verek’s roof. Dismissed from her reading, she went straight to bed and fell soundly asleep.

  Hours later, far
into the night, something jolted her awake. Carin sat up in bed, her heart pounding. What had roused her? Another nightmare? Or the force that she felt reaching for her from the landing outside her door.

  Carin’s feet hit the floor. From Myra’s multitude she grabbed a heavy candlestick in each hand. She was rushing to try to position herself beside the entrance, hoping to surprise the intruder, when the door burst open and a gust of wind hit her in the face. The blast brought tears to her eyes.

  “Come,” chimed a tinkling, silvery, seashell voice. “The wysard needs you.”

  Chapter 21

  The Trap

  If the iridescent colors of mother-of-pearl could make a sound, it would be the shimmery sound of that voice. In it, Carin heard the play of the colors of polished shells, of sunlight flashing on ocean waves, and silvered, jewel-like fish. She heard the glittering liquid glass of the mirror pool in the cave of magic.

  It was the voice of the wizards’ well that she heard, the voice of power, and she knew it at once.

  Barely had the echo of its chimes died away when Carin felt a great disturbance that rolled in through her open bedroom door like an invisible flood of seawater. This flood threatened not to sweep her away, but to pull her with it back to its source. It had the same compelling, inexorable quality of the summons that had drawn her to the cavern of the enchanted pool to witness Verek’s travails.

  Do not heed the summons, the warlock had warned her after that episode. Resist those unfathomable feelings that call you to the chamber of magic.

  But Carin could not resist the voice of the wizards’ well. She would have had an easier time stopping her own heartbeat. There was no holding back.

  She put down the candlesticks and got dressed, hardly knowing that she did so. Her hand closed on the bail of a candle lantern. Lighting it from one of Myra’s multitude that always burned in her room at night, Carin steadied her courage. She stepped out into the corridor and walked down it toward the three long flights of stairs, toward the hidden door in the dark paneling that opened to the cave.

  What I do or see in that chamber does not concern you, Verek had cautioned her. If ever I require your presence in that vault, I will summon you by means unmistakable.

  Whether this was his summons or the mystic well’s alone, it was unmistakably meant for her. This time Carin had not caught an echo of a distant conjuring, as when Verek invoked his intimate visions from the wizards’ waters and she had felt the force of his appeal. This time the voice of power had itself bespoke her, and she must answer, though it lead straight to ruin.

  At the foot of the wide, dark stairway, Carin did not need to risk a hand to the guard-spells of the door’s concealed latch. The portal opened silently at her approach, and swung closed behind her as she stepped into the redly glowing vault of magic.

  Verek was there, standing near the backless bench that was carved with a crescent moon. He stared steadily at the mirror pool. He seemed not to notice Carin’s arrival. But then, without taking his gaze from the pool, he reached his hand toward her. The gesture was more an invitation than a command.

  Warily, slowly, Carin set her lantern down and crossed the smooth expanse of floor to stand at the warlock’s side. Still he didn’t look at her, but kept his eyes on the pool.

  Carin, following his gaze, inhaled sharply. An image seemed to hang, or float, just under the pool’s surface—an image of a swiftly spinning whirlpool. And as she watched, it grew vastly larger and nearer.

  Abruptly the vortex broke through, shattering the pool’s glassy surface. It whirled in midair above the wizards’ well. With its ascent came thunderous noise.

  Carin clapped her hands over her ears and backed away, but she kept her eyes glued to the vision. Near the whirlpool’s center were two black forms, so large that she could make out details despite the speed of their swirling around the vortex’s eye. These were not mere specks, as the child in blue and green had been only a spot of color in the first whirlpool that Carin had witnessed in this cave. The black figures rode the frothing waters like warships on a tempest-tossed sea.

  But ships, they only resembled. Wonderingly, Carin picked out stumpy, muscle-bound legs, splayed to the sides and sharply bent at the middle joint. All the legs—four on a side—were clawed, but the forelegs ended in swollen, heavy claws like lobsters’ pincers. The creatures’ bodies were long and low; their snouts, long and pointed. The powerful tail that curved like a misplaced ship’s prow over each scaly back was tipped by a stinger. Though she could scarcely credit the thought, Carin could only conclude, as she stood staring at black forms against gray water, that the vermin in the vortex were part crocodile, part scorpion, and as long as two-masted schooners.

  The whirlpool spun ever faster and larger, hissing and churning with such violence that Verek joined Carin in backing away, until they both ran up against a cave wall that halted their retreat. The image then broke up in a wave of white-capped water that swept over it from the wizards’ well below. As it drowned the image, the magic pool seemed to acquire the vortex’s fury. The usually glassy waters roiled and tumbled, like seawater in a hurricane.

  Now Carin understood what Verek had meant when he’d talked about a “storm of magic” whipping the well’s waters to foam. He had witnessed such a storm once before—five years ago. Then, the enchanted pool had been so fiercely agitated that it could form no clear likeness of the vortex which had swept Carin between worlds. Yet, the power in the cave—the power named Amangêda?—had been able to impress upon Verek’s mind, or so he’d said, images of the whirlpool that bore the green-and-blue speck.

  Did he still see, in mental image, the vortex that carried the vermin? Carin looked up at him and couldn’t help flinching as she glimpsed the warlock’s eyes. They burned with an inner and unworldly luminosity. Though they stared toward the pool, it wasn’t the seething waters they saw. Verek’s eyes were fixed on something only they could perceive. He held himself perfectly still, a mooring post that was lashed by a hurricane but would not yield. All of his senses, magian and mortal, seemed trained on an image that was as lost to Carin as a paper kite in a gale-force wind.

  After what felt like hours but might have been minutes, the storm subsided. The stock-still warlock at her side roused from his vision. He turned to her.

  “I asked that you be brought here,” he said, looking at Carin gravely, with his eyes now subdued, “so that you might witness the vortex before it drew so near to this world that the waters of the wysards could no longer contain the image of it. Tell me: what did you make of the shapes that were darkly paired in the midst of the whirl?”

  Carin shook her head. “I didn’t know what to make of them,” she whispered. “They seemed to be half reptile and half scorpion. But they were huge.” She tilted her head to one side, reminded of something. “I heard a story once—a man was telling it to my master, the wheelwright. He talked about monsters he called mantikhora. They’re fairy-tale creatures that have the feet and tails of scorpions. Maybe those things in the whirlpool were the real mantikhora.”

  Verek’s eyes bored into Carin’s. Though they no longer burned with magian fire, their steady gaze made her uneasy. When the warlock looked at her with such intensity, some part of Carin’s inner resolve failed, leaving her submissive to his will. Her breath came short. If he were to fix her with such a gaze as this, then order her to conjure the dragon of the puzzle-book, would she find the strength to refuse? Or would she obey him, as she had heeded the summons that he’d conveyed to her tonight though the voice of the wizards’ well?

  “Think carefully,” Verek said. “Seek to remember. Strive to picture that world which is your natural home. My charge to you is more urgent than you now realize. Though you trust me in no other matter, trust me in this and give me the truest answer that it is in your power to give. Do such monstrous creatures as you have seen here tonight live on that world from which you sprang?”

  Carin could only shrug. “I don’t know. I really c
an’t say. When I try to remember ‘my world,’ I get nothing. It’s a blank. That place you call my ‘natural home’ is a mystery to me.

  “The woodsprite,” she added, “is desperate to get back to its ‘homeworld.’ That’s almost all the sprite talks about. But since I don’t remember ever living anywhere except Ladrehdin, I really wouldn’t want to leave here. This is my home.” Carin was surprised to hear herself say that. She hurried to add, in case Verek thought she’d meant his house: “Ladrehdin is, I mean. It’s the only place I can call ‘home’ … even if other people don’t think I belong here.”

  Why she told the warlock about her and the woodsprite’s conflicting goals, Carin couldn’t say. Something in the perfect stillness of the wizards’ well after its raging of moments ago, and something in Verek’s own manner made her speak more openly than might be wise.

  “But getting back to your question,” she said, realizing how far she’d strayed from the subject, “I can’t tell you anything about those mantikhora monsters in the whirlpool. Maybe they do come from the same world I do. Or maybe they exist only in fairy tales—or magical visions. They might be demons from hell, for all I know. I just can’t say.”

  Verek nodded, looking more resigned than displeased.

  “It is as I thought. What memories you may possess are buried so deeply that even the power of this place cannot recover them.” He gestured toward the concealed doorway by which Carin had entered the cave. “The day will soon break. Seek your bed while night still reigns.”

  Glad out of measure, this time, to do as she was told, Carin wheeled and headed for the door. It was only as she walked away from the warlock that she realized how tautly strung she was. Her hands shook and her legs quivered. As she skirted the well of magic, she minded each unsteady footstep, taking pains to avoid tottering into the liquid glass.

  Only by paying such close attention to what lay under her feet did Carin notice the artifact. It rested on the pool’s rim, so perfectly flush with the smooth stone floor as to be nearly invisible, like a sheet of paper-thin, translucent glass.