The Paper Sword

by Robert Priest

  “You did?” Vallaine looked sideways at him.

  “I did. I looked it in the eye.” A ripple of fear ran through Xemion again at the very thought of that cold dragon gaze.

  “Then you must tell me where it was and after I set you two on the right path I must hurry as fast as I can, for that poor beast is in danger where it is.” In response to Xemion’s querying look, he continued. “As you know, our people always had a mystical bond with the dragon kind, but among the Pathans, the flesh of dragons is considered a delicacy. Now that the dragons are indeed returning to the Phaer Isle, as is increasingly being reported, we must do our best to protect them.”

  When Xemion described where he had seen the dragon, Vallaine said, “I know that valley well. It is not so far beyond the Vale of Two Wells.”

  “Yes, that is the way we came.”

  Vallaine raised his eyebrows in surprise. “The two of you traversed the Vale of Two Wells?” He looked at Saheli for confirmation, but she stared right through him, not hearing.

  “Yes, we did,” Xemion spoke up.

  “But however did you get by?” Vallaine asked, sounding a little alarmed.

  Xemion looked away. “The only way was to drink some of the water.”

  “I see.” Vallaine’s brow creased in concern. “So you had to take a little sip of the memory water?”

  “Well, I did. I drank from the well of remembering and Saheli drank from the well of forgetting.”

  “And?”

  “And we both drank a lot more than a sip, I’d say.”

  Vallaine had that amused or concerned look again. “And?” he asked.

  “And what?”

  Vallaine looked at Saheli until she looked back at him. “And have you forgotten anything, Saheli?” he asked finally.

  Saheli twisted her mouth as though she had just tasted something sour and repulsive. “No,” she said bitterly. “Ever since we stopped in that cabin in the woods, memories — brutal memories — have been returning to me. I wish I could forget them.” By the end of the statement she was gritting her teeth and her fear had developed an edge of anger, but as soon as she stopped speaking the anger melted away.

  “Hmmm. Well, I doubt if you have much to worry about then,” Vallaine said with a glance at Xemion. “Those wells were made by oral spells spoken by the ancient Magi themselves, they say. Before they committed their spoken spells to the text of the Great Kone to make this world, they made those wells. But even those ancient foundational spoken spells have been uncertain since the time of the spellfire. It would likely require a skilled middle mage to initiate their powers over memory.” He grinned at her and made a little bow. “I just hope, fair maid, that the taste of that water won’t make you forget your noble friend with the red hand.” He moved as if to place his hand upon her shoulder, but she flinched away from him.

  “What is a middle mage?” Xemion asked.

  “You’ve heard of a medium? Well a middle mage is a medium — someone who has no spellcraft of his own but carries the thaumatological charge across obstacles. If a spell is initiated, but blocked, a middle mage may sometimes carry it across the void and deliver it to its true intention.”

  “I have never heard of such a thing,” Xemion said.

  “I’m not surprised.” Vallaine smiled. “They were always a secret society little-known outside the circle of the Magi. During the time of the spell kones, the intricacies and instruments of the old oral thaumaturgy seemed no longer necessary. People forgot the mages and their middle mages. The whole complex art was entrusted to the venal machinations of ignorant, untrained spell kone writers. And that’s how you got this mess.” Vallaine gestured at the upside down house.

  “How long must we wait here?” Saheli suddenly asked in her trembling voice.

  Vallaine laughed. “It’s hard to say with any surety. We have to wait until the next house falls. Then there will be time to get you onto the road that leads to the Panthemium. In fact, if all goes well you will even arrive early and be first in line. All of those who came from the other side of the isle are outside the eastern gate waiting to be let into the city. That’s good for you because an enormous number of people — far more than were summoned — have shown up, and we may not have enough housing for everyone.”

  Saheli nodded with a grim smile. But there was no relief inside her.

  “The high houses are good examples of what happens when spellcraft is handled by ignorant, greedy fools,” Vallaine explained quite jovially as they continued to wait. “The story goes that one day a certain woman of Ulde had a spell kone written so that her new home might be a humble two-storey abode.” He winked at Xemion. “Unknown to her, her husband, had another spell kone written to ensure that it be the highest building in all of Ulde.”

  “A classic cross-spell,” said Xemion, nodding.

  “Exactly,” Vallaine acknowledged. “And, as you probably know, in a cross-spell the magic will always attempt to be Phaer. So when the two kones were spun on the same day they both got their wish. She got her humble two-storey house, but it floated up ten stories above the ground so that he could get his spell too. It was at once the highest and lowest house in all of Ulde.

  “Afterward, of course — you know how the Phaerlanders of that time were — everybody wanted high houses. And they wanted them by spell-crossing. Ridiculous. Fifty years ago the sky here was all but blotted out by high houses. And then came the spell fire and they started to fall, one by one, one after another. Sometimes whole neighbourhoods fell in a single day. All that crystal dust and rubble you came through used to be the high houses of the west city. The lucky ones just slowly drifted down as you have seen, but most dropped like stones. There are still a few way up there, higher than you can see with the naked eye. Those of us who have cause to travel this way try to keep track of them, but nobody knows how many remain, unseen.”

  “But what was that h-huge eye?” Saheli suddenly blurted out.

  “Ah, yes.” Vallaine responded with a grin, but there was concern in his eyes, too, to see Saheli so visibly frightened. “Not everyone can see them. But if you can, you mustn’t. Never look directly at such things, Saheli. It only gives them more power.”

  “I tried not to look. But —”

  “What you saw were trait-wraiths,” Vallaine explained. “Phantom parts of people’s inner beings that have been removed by kone craft. In the days of the spell kones, the authorities often treated criminals by having the criminal part of their nature removed by a spell kone. What you saw was likely part of someone’s spirit that had been excised. Of course it needn’t necessarily have been a criminal. Some people did it to themselves for purposes of purification. They sought to remove all anger, sorrow, or greed from their beings by spellcraft. But those lost parts still wander out here: rage-wraiths, heartbreak-wraiths, and greed-wraiths, forever exiled from their former beings. And so they seek new beings — hosts.”

  Saheli shuddered.

  “But as you saw, on their own they are weak — and they fear the light. That is why I carry magnesium flares such as I used under the houses there to send them running.”

  “You mean — that eye — wanted to enter me and take me over?” Saheli asked, horrified.

  Vallaine nodded. “It wanted to, yes — but it didn’t.”

  “Magic is so utterly evil,” she said.

  “You mean kone craft.” Vallaine frowned, almost indignantly.

  “Magic, kone craft, what’s the difference?” She shrugged, warily watching the sky. “They are all one evil.”

  “No, no, I heartily disagree,” Vallaine asserted stridently. “Magic made the world and the word — and you too. Most people agree that it was all the poorly made spell kones working in opposition to one another just before the spellfire that unbalanced it.”

  As if to illustrate this, the sky was rent by an increasingly louder whistling sound until a large crystal structure hurtled down with a ground-shaking crash, shooting stone fragments and crys
tal shards and fine dust everywhere. This house also contained various skeletons of people who must have died stranded up there in the sky. Once again, the Triplicant Thrall emerged from the shadows with his triangular-faced children and they began catching and stuffing into sacks anything of value that floated up from the ruin.

  “Now we can go,” said Vallaine. With that he led them out from under the houses and they began walking south through a neighbourhood of half-buried very ancient buildings, some of which had been civic offices, art galleries, and libraries in the times of the Elphaereans. The roadways were twice as wide here and often the remains of titanic monuments stood in the midst of their own rubble beside them. Vallaine continued to lecture as he led them forward.

  “Don’t confuse spellcraft with magic itself,” he insisted, looking at Saheli. “Spellcraft just begs at magic. It tugs at its hem. Before our people came to this isle during the time of the ancient Elphaereans there were very few mages. They were instructed by the Magi and charged mainly with the upkeep of the Great Kone. In that time they only spelled for small, necessary things — like a change in the weather. A spell could not just be spun off a spell kone by anyone who could turn a handle. It had to be spoken aloud by a learned mage who had studied that spell for a lifetime and knew all its implications. They never had problems with spellcraft when they did it that way. Not one catastrophe in thousands of years.”

  “You think the magic was ended by too much spell-crossing?” Xemion asked.

  “You keep saying magic, Xemion, when you mean spellcraft. Magic will never end. It is in the essence of the universe. No one knows what really happened fifty years ago or even what is happening right now for that matter. Some claim that everything in our world is and always was spell-crossed; that in every spell there is some cross-spell working contrary to the original will — billions of contesting wills and underwills and overwills and spells and vows in every move we make. Others say that the spellcraft is not over, just blocked, stalled — crossed. They believe the Great Kone will turn again and spellcraft will be renewed.”

  “Who says that?”

  “Well … many people do. Haven’t you heard that? Why do you think the Pathans were so intent on murdering all the old mages and spellbinders and burning all the books and exterminating the singers of songs and even the riddle-crafters? To stop the magic from ever rising again.”

  “Riddle craft?” Xemion asked.

  “You don’t know about riddle spells?”

  “No.”

  “We’re used to thinking of the invocation of a spell as being some kind of statement or imperative. But a spell can be asked as well. This is called riddle casting. A riddle may be cast upon someone simply by having them start to consider the question posed. The spell will then take hold until the riddle is solved.”

  This alarmed Xemion. His hand rose to the middle of his chest. Under his shirt he felt the bulge of the locket library.

  “The old woman who raised me told me a riddle, but she died before she could tell me the answer.” Xemion didn’t know why he lied about where he’d heard the riddle. All he knew was that Saheli had trusted him with the locket library, and if he told Vallaine about it, Vallaine would ask to look at it, and Xemion wasn’t ready to surrender it to anyone.

  “Tell me the riddle. I know many riddles. If I don’t know the answer, I can probably figure it out.”

  Under Saheli’s nervous gaze, Xemion recited from memory the rhyme the locket library had posed.

  Who’ll be gouged

  And who’ll be gored

  By the sword

  Within the sword

  Will its power

  Be ignored

  O who will wield

  The paper sword

  Vallaine shook his head. “I confess I haven’t heard that one. But when there are layers in a riddle as there are in this one, you can expect it must be spelling for some kind of multilayered results. There’s even something a little cross-spelled about it. But don’t worry, Xemion, even if the old lady was trying to cast a riddle spell upon you there is no chance in these blocked times that such a thing could ever take effect over anything more than your curiosity.”

  “Do you have any guesses?” Xemion smiled.

  “In one of the stories there’s an old Elphaerean emperor and he always threatened his subjects with an army and incredible weapons he didn’t really have. When they found out and finally rebelled against him, they called him the Paper Tyrant. I imagine it’s something like that.”

  “That’s exactly why I thought it must have something to do with this sword that I made. But I made it only as a prop, as something to perform a salutation with.”

  “Let me see it again. Hold it up to the light so I can look at it.”

  Xemion reached into his cloak and slowly withdrew the painted sword. He had not been holding it in the sun very much during the last day, but it still held a slight spectral glow that startled Vallaine. He drew back from it, a look of fear on his face.

  “It’s just silver paint for stars,” Xemion assured him. “It was left behind by the astrologers who used to live in my home. So there really is a sword within the sword. And I have used it as a paper sword in the sense you mean. When the examiner tried to kill our swan I could see he had a sword with him and that he was dying to use it. And I had nothing but this accursed toy. So I drew it anyway and it was somehow convincing enough that he completely surrendered.”

  “And that’s why you think it is in some sense a paper sword?”

  “And when the dragon might have burned me, I raised it again and for some reason the dragon let me go.”

  “As I said, there are bound to be more layers to this or you would not be asking me now.”

  “But you said there is very little chance of a riddle spell having any effect,” Saheli said with concern.

  “That’s true.”

  “So is there any chance?”

  “As I said, there are those who believe that some spells work sometimes.”

  “Who? Who says that?” Saheli demanded, her fear now edging on anger.

  “They say that the magic never did entirely stop responding to proper spells. It just became inconstant. Uncertain. Sometimes it would respond and sometimes it wouldn’t. Sometimes it would run one way and sometimes another.”

  “But how do you know all this?” Xemion asked incredulously.

  “A long line of mothers taught my mother who taught me,” he said with a wink. “And I have always learned as much as possible from first-hand experience, which is an opportunity, by the way, that the two of you are now going to have yourselves.”

  They had been ascending a small slope in the road and now that they had reached its crest the landscape of the western side of the city centre opened before them in a panoramic view.

  To Xemion it was an awe-inspiring sight, but when he turned to Saheli he could see that she was barely aware of it. She seemed elsewhere. Before them, long lines of ruined lapis lazuli domes stood among wrecked green pavilions. Once made from slender sheets of jade, these structures now lay collapsed and scattered like windblown cards, their green sheets leaning haphazardly against the bases of broken white towers that, even in their shattered state, still suggested the beauty they once had. And here and there among them were other buildings whose curious, hybrid constructions seemed to be the result of strangely melded architectures.

  “We are coming now into the most unsettled area of Ulde. This is the heart of a spell-knot. Nothing is resolved here. Thousands of wishes and spells still contend for dominance. And now, since they began the cleanup on the East side, they’re dumping all the spell-crossed animals from there onto this side to die or de-spell, whichever comes first.”

  As he led them on, they began to see the melded animals everywhere: camelphants, dogcats, hideous hogtoads. Xemion almost stepped on a snakemouse. It had the head of a viper but on its other end was a terrified rodent’s body. The snake-part, hungry for its mouse part, kept lun
ging at its own tail, while the horribly squeaking mouse kept fleeing and dodging those terrible fangs. Then there were unrecognizable creatures — “omnimals” as Vallaine called them. They were made of thousands of bits of other creatures which writhed and wriggled and hopped and flapped all about, apparently in their death throes. They, Vallaine explained, were thought to be the cruel handiwork of schoolchildren who had learned to insert new words or syllables into the spell kones that had created them.

  For Saheli, all of this was accompanied by the melody running through her mind. Neither her will nor her terror could stop it. And it seemed to be dragging her awareness away from here, back to those eyes, back to other eyes; the eyes of that ghoul by the wells, hateful eyes; her mother’s eyes. An old man’s eyes. Saheli almost remembered something. She almost saw a scene with an old man turning a large upright spell kone. She almost looked again into his ancient face, but suddenly red fingers snapped before her eyes.

  “Are you there, Saheli?”

  For a second the song and the scene were gone. For a second she had no memory at all and she stood there in the present moment gazing down a long avenue that ran through the verdant remains of a huge circular park. Its greenery had obviously been left untended for many years so that most of it was overgrown with dense thorn bushes and large, looming oaks with misshapen trunks that bent over almost sideways. Beyond them was a great curved wall crudely made of red bricks. The recent earthquake had destabilized it so that parts of it were now riddled with large cracks. Through these fissures a beautiful green light glowed.

  The Great Kone.

  21

  Middle Magic

  A decade ago, when Pathan scientists first became interested in retrieving and reverse-engineering old spellworks, they ordered this massive brick wall built about the Great Kone so that none of the Phaerlanders whose forced labours they required could see the text. The great curve of brickwork Saheli and Xemion now beheld was easily twenty feet high and a hundred yards long, but it covered only the upper rim of one side of the Great Kone. If its point lay beneath it, it must be buried many leagues deep in the earth.