Carin stood in the hallway quivering like a taut bowstring. Her fists were clenched. At least, the left one was; her right fist wouldn’t close all the way. At a movement from Verek, she jerked her hand behind her back.
“Is your wrist sprained?” Verek growled. “If it pains you, I will bind it.”
Carin shook her head. She’d rather hurt than have him touch her again.
The warlock studied her for a moment. Then he bent to retrieve the knife he’d made her drop. He used it like a pointer to indicate the invisible doorway.
“Do not tarry here, grieving for your odd friend and plotting its deliverance. You will find my chamber doors proof against your scheming.”
He stalked to the landing above the foyer stairs and gestured down them. “Myra will soon have the kettle on the fire. She’ll be wanting her helper.” Verek stood for another moment scowling at Carin, then descended, saying nothing more about the “difficult task” he planned for her.
She trailed him, straggling along, the weight of her apprehension dragging Carin down the stairs. Did the warlock not mean to usher her immediately underground to meet what awaited her in the cave of magic?
He should, she thought, and get this over with—this “bargain” I’ve struck with the devil.
At the foot of the steps, Verek turned down the hallway toward the library. Carin fled along the passageway in the opposite direction to the kitchen.
“Oh my, dearie! Here you are!” Myra greeted her. Anxiety was written on the woman’s face as she rushed to take Carin’s hands in hers. Perhaps the housekeeper had read enough in Carin’s tears and her master’s gruffness to know that trouble was brewing. Maybe she felt the tension in the air. In any case, the woman did not speak of Verek’s aborted journey to “the ends of Ruain” or of Carin’s sudden need for a knife. Instead, Myra seemed bent on lifting her helper’s spirits with a wordy speech on the merits of using parboiled kidney in any recipe that called for calf innards.
Carin suffered in silence and helped the woman get the evening meal on the table as quickly as possible. Then, excusing herself on the pretext of a vicious headache, she slipped upstairs to her bedroom before Verek called for his meal.
Despite the warlock’s warning, she detoured down the corridor with the intention of trying the invisible door to his sitting room. But the blackheart’s spells held firmly against her. Although Carin knew, from the location of the hallway window opposite, where the door must be, she could feel neither its timbers nor its latch, only the stonework of the wall. Verek’s sorcery now concealed the portal from her touch as wholly as from her sight.
In her room, Carin paced and thought. She threw herself on her bed and agonized. She splashed water on her face and tried to scheme. But she could devise no definite plan for making the warlock, not herself, the dragon’s most probable victim. Inaudibly Carin rehearsed the “Jabberwocky” incantation, over and over, until she could deliver the opening stanza in the space of four heartbeats. Verek would not need more time than that, however, to remove himself from danger. At the first sight of the dragon’s heralds, he would make for the safety of the stairwell. Conjuring the monster quickly enough to catch him unawares did not seem possible.
The answer, Carin decided, would be to keep Verek out of the stairwell, just long enough for one razor-sharp dragon’s talon to lay him open from collarbone to groin. How?
Carin raked through Myra’s multitude, seeking a candlestick that might serve her as a spear. If she could sneak it into the cave of magic … if she could plant herself within the stairwell to wield it even briefly against Verek … if she could keep him at bay until the dragon roared up in answer to her summons …
There was no end of “ifs,” but an end came to Carin’s reprieve. A knock, firm and insistent, sounded at her bedroom door.
When she didn’t answer, there was a moment’s pause. Then the latch was lifted and the door opened wide. Verek stood on the threshold, looking as refreshed as Carin felt expended. The sleep-short warlock, she surmised, had been taking a nap while she’d been walking the floors.
On Verek’s shoulder rested a glowing witchlight orb. In his left hand, he held the puzzle-book.
Why have the book with him? They were done with the second reading of the volume. Over the past week and a half, they had discussed shades of meaning for every word that Carin could not translate with absolute certainty into the Ladrehdinian tongue. She could tell him nothing more about the book. What reason might there be for the warlock to have the volume with him tonight? Carin could think of only one:
He assumes that I don’t remember the incantation that calls the Jabberwock. He believes I will have to read from the book those words that will mean my extinction.
“Come,” Verek murmured. “It is time to begin.”
Carin wiped her sleeve across her forehead. Then she followed him out the door without a backward glance at Myra’s multitude, which had yielded nothing she might use against the warlock in the moments before the dragon materialized.
Along the corridor under high, dusk-darkened windows they walked without speaking. Down three long flights of stairs they descended, passing at some unknown point from the surface world to the underground realm of the wizards’ well.
This time, the concealed door to the cave did not swing open. Was the power of that place not expecting them?
Verek reached into the secret opening in the dark paneling, lifted the latch, and pushed the door in upon its unseen hinges. As the cave’s ruddy light spilled into the stairwell, the witchlight orb vanished from the warlock’s shoulder.
Carin trailed her captor into the magical space, feeling as much alarm at her own passivity as at the prospect of facing the dragon. Had she grown resigned to her fate? Or was this what it felt like to be numb with terror?
The door closed behind her. Carin looked over her shoulder at the place where it had been. Nothing met her eyes but a surface of stone.
Across the vault was the opening that gave upon the spiraling steps up to the library. It would be in that stairwell that either Carin or the warlock would find sanctuary from the dragon’s claws.
Verek did not take himself to that refuge. He sat on the nearest bench—that of the carved key—and gestured for Carin to join him.
What’s he waiting for? She studied him through narrowed eyes. Does he enjoy stringing this out?
“Sit,” Verek instructed when Carin ignored his silent gesture. “There are matters we must speak of before the work begins.”
Carin unwillingly obeyed, perching on the bench as far from the warlock as possible. Did he intend to bring up “noble acts” and “reluctant killings”?
The thought of my death must hurt his conscience, if he needs to tell himself again that I have to die for the good of this world.
But when Verek continued, it was not on the subject of the puzzle-book dragon as “an instrument for good.”
“You told me last night—or was it in the small hours of this morning? Night and day lose their meaning when one goes sleepless. You told me that you did not wish to return to that world which is your natural home, a world you do not remember. Tell me now, and speak the plainest truth that lives within you: Is it your definite wish to remain where you are? Or, if you were given the chance to go back to that other world, would you take it?”
Carin stared at the warlock. What did this have to do with her conjuring a killer?
Slowly, she shook her head. “No. I wouldn’t go there even if I could. That other place means nothing to me.” Carin looked up at the cave’s rough, high ceiling, imagining other worlds far beyond. “I would try to help the woodsprite find its ‘homeworld,’ if I knew how to do that.” She glanced back at Verek. “But for me? No. For me, Ladrehdin is ‘home.’”
The warlock nodded. “Good. That will render the task ahead of you less distressing. If you longed for that other world, great would be the temptation to lose yourself in the image of it. But that, you must not do. Though it
will seem as if you tread firmly upon the surface of that world, only an intangible part of you will walk there. Your essence, your being—your life’s breath I’ll call it, for want of better words—will remain here with me, in this cavern, on this world.
“Remember that,” Verek ordered, leaning toward Carin. “Your safety will depend on it. You must not attempt to linger in that other place. You will cross to it; you will lay the looking-glass book upon the desk in the child’s bedchamber; you will take the crystal from the head of the bed and place its chain round your neck. And then you will return here. You will do only these things that I have said—no more and no less.”
Verek put the puzzle-book on the bench between them, then rested his weight on that hand and leaned across the volume, bringing his face to within inches of Carin’s. “Before I relinquish this strange book and send it back with you, back to the world from which it came, there is one thing that I must know. Have you committed to memory the words that call the monster?”
Now we’re getting there! He’s sure taking the long way around to the dragon.
Though she had thought herself prepared for it, Carin felt her mouth go dry at Verek’s question. In reply, she could give only a half nod.
“Good. I expected as much,” the warlock said as he studied Carin’s face at uncomfortably close range. “One who arms herself with bow and knife would not have overlooked the dragon’s promise as a weapon. I don’t doubt that you learned the rhyme by heart on the day you first contemplated conjuring the beast against me. How many hours have you devoted, I wonder, to seeking a means of calling the creature without first summoning its heralds? It is an inconvenient sort of incantation, is it not, that gives itself away and grants the would-be victim time enough to flee? I am moved to commend you for the restraint you have shown, in attempting to this hour no loosing of the beast against me. Hasty and rash as is your nature, I have looked every day for the dragon’s appearance.”
Carin struggled against the wave of hopelessness that threatened to undo her. So—the warlock was already on his guard. What chance did she have now of denying him the safety of the stairs?
Verek pulled back to his end of the bench. He slid the Looking-Glass book along the seat until it touched Carin’s hand. Hardly aware that she did so, she picked it up.
“There shall come a time, unless I am much mistaken,” the sorcerer said, “when you will have good and urgent cause to conjure your otherworldly dragon against a wysard. That time is not now. The task before us tonight will, however, take us into the realm from which the dragon springs. I strongly counsel you to say nothing that would summon the beast. That it would find you a more tempting morsel than myself, I don’t doubt. Young flesh is the most desired by any eater of meat.”
Verek stood and reached his hand to help Carin to her feet. He escorted her around the mirror pool, in the direction of the bench that bore Carin’s preferred image, that of a fish.
She was unresisting. Outwardly she must appear to him almost dazed. But her thoughts were spinning:
How was this possible? Could she be so wrong, so far off the mark? In a complete reversal of Carin’s expectations, the warlock had ordered her not to summon the dragon of her death. Her mind seemed hardly able to accept this turn of events. Did she understand Verek correctly? She was to enter the dragon’s realm for no reason except to return the puzzle-book and steal a crystal trinket? What was this unpredictable sorcerer thinking?
He guided Carin to a spot midway between the pool and the bench of the fish. Standing behind her, Verek drew Carin’s hair back off her shoulders and put his hands firmly on them. His forefingers pressed against the sides of her neck. Into her right ear, he whispered his commands.
“Gaze into the pool. Breathe deeply and slowly. Clear your mind of all thoughts but for the child’s bedchamber with its many bright-hued fish, its books and playthings on the shelves. Picture it: the desk and the chest of drawers … the bedpost from which a crystal hangs by a golden chain. Think of the room as it appeared when you summoned its image once before from the waters of the wysards.”
Carin stared at the pool’s glassy surface. As she recalled the bedroom in all the detail of its first emergence from the well of magic, the pool lost its mirror sheen and grew transparent. She saw the steps that led down from its rim, down into crystalline water, ever downward into an abyss that seemed eternal.
Then the water fogged. The pool’s surface grew misty. Out of the mist rose the small room with its four-posted bed and the tall shelves above a child-sized desk. The great egg with piglike eyes looked down from the topmost shelf, the sign for “Karen’s Zoo” dangling from its booted foot. The scores of colorful fish that hung from the ceiling swayed gently, as if a breeze wafted through the room from an open window. The crystal suspended from one cornerpost of the bed caught and reflected light, perhaps from that same unseen window.
In only one respect did the room differ from Carin’s first glimpse of it, when a fiercely spinning vortex had retreated through time and space from the millpond of southern Ladrehdin to this bedroom on an unknown world. In that first image, a child wearing blue and green had slept under the bed’s fish-patterned coverlet. Now, the bed was empty. Its linens were in disarray, as if the sleeper had cast them off in a panic.
“Good,” Verek breathed into Carin’s ear. “Now … walk into the room. Place the book upon the desk. Take the trinket from the bedpost and put its chain round your neck. When you have done these acts, return immediately to me. Do not linger, though countless be the things that intrigue your eyes and ears.”
Carin, stirring from the state of numb confusion that had gripped her, started to turn toward the sorcerer at her back, with a protest on her lips. How could she “walk into” the child’s bedroom? It was an illusion formed of the mists that swirled above the wizards’ well. The room had no substance. Carin’s slight movement as she started to turn to Verek sent one edge of the image shredding off like a wind-tattered cloud. She could have fanned away the vapors with a wave of her hand.
“Stop!” the warlock exclaimed. His hands rose from Carin’s shoulders to pinion her head and keep her gaze directed forward. “Do not look at me. Look only into the child’s room. When you have done as I have said, to replace the book and retrieve the crystal, then you will turn your face to me and rejoin me on this spot.”
At a loss, Carin peered into the mists and through them, and saw the wizards’ well rippling below the image. The ripples, steadily rising higher, gave the pool an upheaved and billowy look, like the surging of a stormy sea. Did Verek expect her to walk on those waters? To step into the floating mists of illusion would be to plummet beneath the waves that were now white-capping the pool—there to drown in depths of liquid glass.
“I have not misled you,” the warlock hissed in Carin’s ear. “I have said that you would wish to refuse me in this. I have spoken of the difficulty of the task. But what I ask is not impossible. Do as I say. Walk into the child’s room …”
… Or the woodsprite dies, Carin finished the thought, feeling her heart flutter in her chest like a trapped sparrow.
Clenching the puzzle-book in both hands, she fixed her gaze on the mist-shrouded surface that was to receive it. Then she gulped a breath … and stepped into the magic. Toward the child’s bedchamber Carin walked as though it were only another room in Verek’s labyrinthine manor house.
“Good!” she heard the warlock call to her. His voice sounded far distant.
Carin did not glance at the waters below, for fear of blinking her destination out of existence. But she heard the whitecaps breaking, with a sound like windowpanes cracking. And with every step, she tensed, steeling herself for the plunge into the pool. Would it be as cold as it looked? Would the sorcerer pluck Carin from the billows? Or would he watch her drown, pleased to finally be rid of his “peculiar guest”?
But step after step, there was no plunge into quicksilver swells. There was no loss of solid floor under her feet. Wh
en Carin stopped walking, she was standing at the desk in the bedroom.
In wonder, she risked a look down at the book in her hands. Gazing past it, Carin saw her feet—in her worn, shabby, square-toed boots—resting on the floor of the child’s bedroom. This floor was as highly polished as the stone of Verek’s great cavern of magic, but it was made of alternating squares of blue and white tiles.
Carin felt estranged from her mind, as if she weren’t quite all there. Prodding herself back into motion, she dropped the Looking-Glass book on the desk. Then she crossed to the bed and lifted the winking crystal from the cornerpost.
The crystal was the pendant of a heavy necklace. Carin slipped the trinket’s chain over her head, then raised the ornament to her eyes for a closer look and saw the sleek, rounded form of a stylized dolphin. The undersea theme of this fish-bedecked room was complete to the smallest detail.
As she started to face away from the bed to return to Verek, she spotted the corner of a book peeking out from under the pillow. The room’s occupant—Carin as a young girl, so she understood but couldn’t really accept—had evidently been in the habit of reading at bedtime.
She drew the book into the light. The title made her gasp. It was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Another puzzle-book? A mate to the volume she’d just returned to this room?
Carin flipped through the book, scanning chapter titles. “‘The Pool of Tears,’” she muttered, drawn to a chapter that seemed appropriately named for her present situation. She read Alice’s thoughts on a saltwater pool into which the girl had fallen, and was brought up short: “I wish I hadn’t cried so much! … I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears!”
Drowned …
Carin jumped, suddenly remembering where she was and what she was engaged in. “Do not linger,” Verek had warned her.
She tossed the book onto the bed and spun on her heel to seek the warlock who had been standing at her back. Nothing was there now but a wall. In it was a large window, open to the salt-scented breeze that teased the dangling fish and admitting the watery sunlight that flickered in Carin’s crystal necklace.
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock Page 35