Stone Unturned: A Legend of Ethshar

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Darissa had been a witch’s apprentice for more than five years, plenty of time to become accustomed to the lack of privacy, so she did not offer any denial, nor even a blush. Instead she smiled, and headed for the door.

  As she opened it, she felt the pleased thoughts of someone outside, but still, she was astonished to find Prince Marek leaning against the big oak beside the front walk. He straightened at the sight of her.

  “Is she all right?” he asked, his expression grim.

  “She lost the child and much blood,” Darissa replied, flustered.

  “But she’ll live?”

  “She should recover, yes, your highness.”

  “Does her husband know anything of this yet?”

  “I…I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Darissa was annoyed to realize she had given the baby’s father no thought at all.

  “Someone should inform him as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, of course,” Darissa agreed. “I’ll see to it.”

  The prince suddenly smiled, the grimness vanishing. “Good!” he said. “Now that that’s out of the way, I’m Prince Marek, third son of King Terren of Melitha. I don’t believe I got your name.” He held out his hand.

  “Uh…” Caught off-guard by the abrupt change in demeanor, Darissa stared stupidly at the hand.

  His smile broadened. “I doubt even the most eccentric parents would name a daughter Uh, and it’s hardly a good name to attract business. I know witches don’t go in for the fancy names wizards prefer, Domididulus the Over-Endowed or whatever, but Uh?”

  “Darissa,” she managed. “I’m Darissa the Witch’s Apprentice, your highness.”

  “And were you on your way to tell the poor thing’s husband what happened? Perhaps I could walk with you.”

  “No,” Darissa admitted. “I don’t even know where he is; I didn’t think to ask.”

  “Then why were you coming out here, when you’re obviously exhausted and in need of rest?”

  Darissa grimaced wryly. “I was going to the castle, to leave you a message.”

  “Me?” The prince looked inordinately pleased. “Were you really?”

  “Yes.”

  “What sort of message?”

  “Just…just a thank you, for your kindness in helping me find Alasha in the crowd.”

  “Oh, that? That was nothing.” He waved it aside.

  “But the money…!”

  “Money? Oh—that’s right! You cost me better than two rounds of silver, didn’t you?” He turned up an empty palm. “That’s nothing. I’ll charge it to the royal treasury.”

  Darissa felt a brief surge of resentment at the idea that two rounds of silver were “nothing.” Spent carefully, that would be enough to feed her for half a year. But Marek was a prince; to him, it was nothing.

  Still, she said, “You didn’t need to give it all out. You could have stopped once we’d found her.”

  “Oh, no—that would hardly be fair!” He appeared genuinely shocked. “I’d promised every expectant mother in the market a silver bit, so every one must have her coin. A prince’s word is good.”

  Darissa stared up at his broad face and saw no hint of sarcasm or dishonesty. He seemed to truly believe what he was saying. If she had not been so very tired, she could have used her magic to verify her impression.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t follow and help with the woman—Alasha, you said? But I had to finish distributing the money. By the time I finished, you were gone. Bergan gave me directions when he returned, but when I got here you were inside with the door closed, and I had no excuse for intruding. So I waited.”

  Tired or not, Darissa had to know whether that was the truth, and stretched out her perceptions enough to see that it was. This man, this prince, had been waiting here for hours.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you wait? You didn’t know Alasha, did you?”

  “No, I regret to say I did not—but I was waiting for you, Darissa.”

  She stared at him and did not need to ask why this time—she could feel his desire, his intense interest in not just her body, but her face, her manner, her desire to help a stranger without any promise of payment. He admired her. A prince admired her—her, Darissa, the long-nosed orphan girl with no patience for primping and posing to please men.

  He was staring at her. “You’re tired,” he said, before she could think of a response. “This isn’t a good time.”

  “No,” she agreed. She was not sure any time would be a good time for this.

  “I could come back tomorrow,” he said.

  She shook her head. “No,” she repeated. “I’m an apprentice. My time is not my own.”

  He frowned. “I could talk to your master, but that wouldn’t be fair. Why don’t you just come to the castle, when you have the time and the inclination? Or rather, if you have them—I don’t mean to assume anything. If you never come, I will deeply regret it, but I will respect your decision. I hope, though, that you will see fit to visit. Or if you prefer, send an invitation for me to join you somewhere. Perhaps meeting on neutral ground would be advisable, until we know each other better.”

  “Perhaps it would,” she agreed.

  “Then I’ll be off and let you rest. Before I go, would you like me to take a message to Alasha’s husband?”

  She shook her head. “She didn’t tell us his name, and she’s asleep—I won’t wake her to ask. I appreciate the offer, though.”

  “You can’t take his name from her sleeping thoughts?”

  Darissa shook her head again. “No, I can’t. There may be witches who can—in fact, I’m sure there are—but I’m only an apprentice.”

  “All right,” he said, nodding. “I do need to go, but may I send a man to serve as your messenger when she wakes?”

  She stared at him. “You’re a prince,” she said. “You can do anything you want.”

  He smiled crookedly. “Ha! Haven’t known many princes, have you? But I can send a messenger.” He bowed. “Get your rest, dear apprentice, and I hope I will see you again soon.”

  With that he turned, waved to her, and strode off toward the castle.

  She watched him go, unsure what to make of him. In truth, she had never known any princes before; yes, the Small Kingdoms were awash in petty royalty, but she was a peasant farmer’s daughter and a witch’s apprentice, not someone who had business with kings or princes.

  At last, as he vanished around the corner of the tavern at the top of the street, she turned and went back inside, where she fell into her bed.

  * * * *

  When she awoke the next morning, the whole encounter seemed almost like a dream. She was surprised to look out front and see an older man in royal livery waiting by the oak—obviously the promised messenger.

  Not long after that, Alasha stirred. Soon Darissa and Nondel were able to ask her what family she had, and who they should inform of her condition. Nondel wrote up a note, and Darissa took it to the messenger with instructions.

  He nodded and accepted the folded paper. “And you, Mistress,” he said. “Do you have a message for his highness, Prince Marek?”

  “What?” She stared blankly at him.

  “I was ordered to ask, Mistress. Do you have a message for the prince?”

  She blinked, considered for a moment, then said, “Not yet. But stop by on your way back to the castle, and I may have something for you.”

  He bowed. “As you please, Mistress.” Then he turned and trotted off, Nondel’s note in his hand.

  Darissa watched him go. What might she want to say in her letter to the prince?

  Chapter Three

  Morvash of the Shadows

  23rd of Greengrowth, YS 5238

&nb
sp; Morvash did not bother with any of the sculptures other than the more or less life-sized humans. He knew people could be transformed into pretty much anything, but why do that and then petrify someone? It didn’t seem reasonable. Wizards were perfectly capable of being unreasonable, of course, but Morvash felt he had to draw the line somewhere. Lord Landessin’s collection was simply too vast and varied to inspect every single item.

  Even with that limitation, it took almost an entire day to locate every such statue, and to check each one for residual magic. It did not help that Uncle Gror did not actually use all of the estate he rented, so that there were rooms, passages, and even outbuildings about which he could tell Morvash nothing.

  In the end, Morvash counted thirty-two sculptures, representing thirty-three individuals, that caused his athame, his wizard’s dagger, to glow, including the granite magician and two of the four women in the entry hall. To his relief, about two hundred other life-sized statues on the property did not show any sign of having ever been alive—figures of stone, wood, metal, and pottery that his dagger indicated were no more than they appeared.

  Still, it was disturbing to realize that thirty-three people were on display, trapped in stone. The most disturbing of them, the one that was responsible for the uneven count, was hidden away in a sort of marble grotto in the garden behind the house, and depicted a young man and a young woman in what might politely be called an intimate embrace, or a compromising position. They were not in the sort of elegant pose that artists use for erotica, with graceful lines displaying the female’s curves and the male’s muscles. They were in an earthier position. The woman—a girl, really—was on her back, with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head raised as her blank stone eyes stared perpetually at the man’s belly. Her mouth was open as if panting. Her partner was kneeling between her legs, leaning forward over her, one hand grabbing her shoulder, the other occupied elsewhere. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was also open; Morvash thought it was more of a moan than a pant. He could almost smell the sweat. Neither wore any clothing whatsoever, nor were there any artfully-placed draperies or fig leaves to obscure the details.

  Had the wizard responsible for this petrifaction timed it deliberately, or had he caught them in this position by accident?

  Assuming, of course, that it was a wizard. Morvash didn’t know of any other sort of magic that could turn people to stone, but he couldn’t rule out the possibility that demons or other magical beings might be capable of it. He was no expert on petrifaction—in fact, he didn’t know how to cast any spells that would turn anything to stone, nor any spells to undo a petrifaction. Until arriving at Lord Landessin’s mansion the day before, he had never seen a statue he knew to have once been alive. He had no way of knowing which of the thirty-three victims were truly dead, and which might be revived. He did know that both reversible petrifactions and irreversible ones existed, but he was not entirely clear whether those categories corresponded exactly with fatal and non-fatal.

  He couldn’t be sure his athame’s reaction would be the same with both living and dead victims; it might be that some of those two hundred that showed no evidence of magic had been living people once, and the lack of reaction simply meant they could not be saved. In any case, he had thirty-three people who might be restored by the appropriate spell.

  In addition to the lovers, the beauties from the entry, and the probably-a-demonologist, there were assorted men and women ranging in age from a boy who could scarcely have been old enough for apprenticeship to a gaunt old man with a waist-length beard—seventeen more boys and men, eleven more women and girls. Except for the lovers, all were at least partially clothed, allowing Morvash to guess at their occupations, stations in life, and how long they had been stone. Most appeared to have been wealthy, but not all; Morvash suspected one oddly-garbed young woman had been a burglar who broke into the wrong house.

  And one of them, a fine figure in gleaming yellowish alabaster, had unquestionably been either a wizard or someone pretending to be one. He was tall and thin, with a face that Morvash judged to have seen at least half a century, and he wore elegant robes that had been frozen forever as they swirled about his ankles—he appeared to have been turning quickly, as if to face his attacker. His expression, beneath the brim of his pointed hat, was one of angry disdain, as if he had been interrupted by someone unworthy of his attention.

  Morvash carefully catalogued all thirty-two statues, noting what kind of stone each one was, what clothing each wore, and each one’s apparent age at the time of enchantment. He tried to estimate how long each one might have been petrified from the styles they wore, though in several instances their attire simply didn’t have enough detail to judge. In any case, Morvash was no expert on the history of fashion. There were a few where he could not place the victim’s garb in any familiar realm or century.

  He also recorded how brightly his athame responded to each victim, and whether the glow was some color other than the usual blue. He did not really know what this information might signify, but he thought it might eventually prove useful.

  When he finished, he joined his uncle in the dining hall, where Gror chastised him mildly for missing supper. The remaining soup and meat had gone cold, but Morvash ate some anyway, filling out his meal with bread, cheese, and honeyed pears.

  “What have you been doing all day?” Gror asked, as Morvash ate.

  Morvash swallowed the bread he had been chewing. “Studying Lord Landessin’s collection. Uncle, did you know that several of those statues were once living people?”

  Gror had been sipping wine, and almost choked. “They what?”

  “More than thirty of them are people who were turned to stone,” Morvash said.

  Gror set down his glass. “How can you tell?”

  “I’m a wizard, Uncle. I can tell. And magic aside, some of them are simply beyond the skills of any ordinary sculptor. Surely you must have suspected that?”

  “I…oh, very well, I admit I wondered about some of them. I suspected. Though I found it hard to believe that anyone would have sold them to Lord Landessin in such a case—wouldn’t they be selling their own friends or family?”

  “Or their victims,” Morvash suggested. “He may have bought them from the magicians who enchanted them.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Gror admitted. “That’s…rather unpleasant. But it isn’t as if there’s anything to be done about it.”

  “Well, that’s the thing, Uncle—there might be a way to turn some of them back.”

  Gror had started to reach for his glass again, but now his hand fell away. “There might?”

  Morvash nodded. “It depends which spells were used on them.”

  “That’s…that’s very interesting.”

  “I intend to revive them, Uncle—at least, the ones I can.”

  Gror frowned. “Are you sure that’s wise?”

  Morvash was startled. “How could it not be?”

  “Well, some of them may have been turned to stone for a reason.”

  “What reason?” Morvash demanded. “Uncle, the magistrates don’t turn people to stone; these people were enchanted by their enemies, not because they had committed any crimes.” Even as the words left his lips, Morvash remembered the badly-dressed girl he thought might have been a burglar, but he thrust that thought aside. The penalty for housebreaking was twenty lashes, not petrifaction!

  “Well, maybe they never got to the magistrates—maybe the Wizards’ Guild got to them first.”

  Morvash shook his head. “The Guild doesn’t petrify people who break its rules; we just kill them.”

  The directness of that reply seemed to startle Gror. He hesitated for a second or two before saying, “Still, someone turned these people to stone, and whoever it was must have had some reason. That must be a difficult spell, I would think.”

&
nbsp; “There are several spells they could have used, Uncle, but all of them are fairly difficult, yes.”

  “Well, do you really think it’s safe to bring back to life people some wizard thought deserved such a fate?”

  “I think it’s entirely possible they were all simply innocents who were in the wrong place at the wrong time when some wizard decided to try out his latest spell.”

  Gror frowned as he thought about that. He picked up his wine again, turned the glass so that it caught the candlelight, then lifted it and drained it in one long, slow drink. Then he set the glass down and looked at Morvash.

  “You said you’re going to turn them back?”

  Morvash nodded. “I have to, Uncle. I can’t leave them petrified.”

  “Oh, you could,” Gror said. “But I can’t convince you to leave well enough alone?”

  “I don’t think so, Uncle. I’m sorry.”

  “So you know the spell to revive them? I suppose it involves a bunch of exotic ingredients…”

  “I don’t know it, Uncle. I’ll need to do some research.”

  “You will?” Gror frowned, toying with his empty wineglass. “What kind of research?”

  “I’ll need to learn the spells that can reverse petrifaction,” Morvash replied.

  “Spells? Plural?”

  “I’m not certain, but I believe so.”

  “I suppose they’re difficult, too?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Is that safe?”

  “No.”

  Gror stared at his nephew for a moment, considering this blunt reply. Finally he asked, “Why can’t you just hire a wizard who already knows the spell you want, and have him turn them back?”

  Morvash let out a long breath and looked down at his plate before answering, “Professional pride, mostly. Cost, too, though.”

  “It’s cheaper to learn it yourself?”