Misspelled

by Julie E. Czerneda

  ‘‘A brass chair on a tin floor that’s fixed to a iron-framed house. It’s one big magical focus.’’ He wasn’t upset, but his disappointment was transparent. ‘‘You’ve so much talent, William, but you need to think further ahead than the tip of your nose if you’re ever to become a great wizard.’’

  Which would have been good advice indeed if the ringing in William’s ears hadn’t prevented him from hearing all but the last. He chose to ignore the mixed message of his teacher’s bobbing finger.

  Sensing the lesson was over, William plucked the thimbles off and handled them back to Bartybus. ‘‘Master, is this the spell you’ll use at the bridge in Cay?’’

  With one eye shut and a pinky finger wiggling in his left ear, Bartybus nodded. ‘‘Similar. I’ll have to etch it onto the bridge or in the water. Calling a Kraken requires more than the simple charms we’ve been practicing.’’

  ‘‘And when you come back, you’ll teach me to read Arcaenum?’’

  ‘‘If your studies go well this year. I should come back with enough ink to keep you and Peter busy unloading it for at least an afternoon, which will serve as good lesson on the weight of words.’’

  Bartybus stood up, grabbed William’s head between his hands, and looked through the top of his head. ‘‘Look at the time. Mind you help Peter with the deliveries—he stiffens up more each fall. Look to your studies while I’m gone.’’

  William handed the wizard his tin cap from its peg on the back of the laboratory door. His master jammed it on his head and pressed his bushy, brown, tonsured hair down over his ears. He stuffed his red scarf into his robe, for once making sure the copper beads braided into the fringe were pulled to the front, and grunted with satisfaction as he regarded himself in the long mirror near the door.

  ‘‘Well, that’s it then. I’m off.’’

  William followed him downstairs and to the door, then detoured to the kitchen to get something to eat before returning to the cauldron.

  Sporting several new burns, tired and agitated from scouring, William nonetheless shuffled into the laboratory that night with the intention of completing his lessons. At supper he’d been afraid Mrs. Caudri, the housekeeper, would—as Peter often joked she had done to him—talk him to death. Practically folded flat, his ear bore the weight of her exhaustive critique of his progress as a wizard. She had assured him an unhappy and anonymous tragedy would find him if she did not see him heading toward the laboratory immediately after washing up.

  His hard wooden stool offered no comfort, and he spent the first minute not reading but trying to locate a nice soft, old book to sit on. Bartybus would not have approved, but he would approve of William not reading even less.

  He begin to read from The Vistas and Views of Hell: A Personal Memoir by Domingo Utraski, The only Man to Escape from the Hell that Is Hell, but after a few paragraphs he found its imagery repetitive. He rolled a rusty, pure copper penny across his knuckles. Inevitably, he dropped it and, when he bent to retrieve it, disturbed a bit of dust. He held the penny and conducted all the magic the coin could bear to the dust.

  Up from the dust came a wee soldier in good detail. Only an inch high, but you could easily make out sergeant major chevrons on his shoulder and a large, ridiculous, handlebar mustache.

  As William marched the sergeant major about the room, he found himself at his master’s desk. His hesitation was strictly ceremonial and supplied only a weak defense in light of the unsuppressed grin that covered most of his face, should he be caught and tried. He fell into the brass chair and immediately sensed the broad current of magic that coursed up through the foundation of the house.

  Static jumped on the floor, and a tiny army rose behind the sergeant major, who had now become a general with a suitably large and furry hat.

  ‘‘A mite-y army to be sure.’’ William tittered at his own pun. He eased back in the chair and thought how much better it would be for reading. On the desk were Bartybus’ own books. William flipped through them, hoping to find something more interesting than the endless analogies to fire found in D. Utraski’s book.

  Furnace, Feast, and Fiend: A Definitive History of Home Heating, Dining, and Fighting Borso’s Dragons; Gardening the Ambulatory Dead; Witches and the Men Who Loved Them. William idly thumbed through the book on dragons, but the illustrations were more instructive than heroic.

  ‘‘What’s this?’’ William’s eyes fell on a stack of loose pages with bright fresh ink on them. ‘‘His book or maybe a spell then. In all the rush he must have forgotten to lock it away.’’ He pulled the stack of paper into his lap.

  The tiny general chided him silently, lecturing with the point of his sword. William stuck out his tongue and cut the flow of magic. The neat lines of the diminutive army died melodramatically and dispersed across the floor.

  All in Arcaenum; he had no idea what any of the words meant and guessed at the pronunciation as he read aloud. On the whole page, the one word he did recognize was ‘‘rain’’ so the spell must have something to do with the weather. More than that he couldn’t be sure. Maybe it would make it rain. He could have used that today, cleaning the cauldron. William pulled more magic through chair until it was throwing off red sparks, hoping the spell would do something if he gave it more power.

  Nothing. He reckoned he’d been up in the laboratory long enough to avoid a finger-shaking by Mrs. Caudri, so he left for his bed, repeating a rhyme from his childhood about the rain.

  ‘‘Yahrrr!’’ A scream of terrible fury and outrage pushed William from sleep to the floor and into the gloomy morning light.

  At first he thought it was thunder, and for a moment he was sure he had conjured a storm last night but then the sound came again.

  ‘‘Yahrrr!’’

  The hair on the nape of his neck stood on end, and he knew, for certain, that it was a storm, with Mrs. Caudri at the center of it. Either another of her cakes had fallen or she was being murdered.

  William hesitated a moment to pull a robe over his nightclothes, not wanting to face either Mrs. Caudri or whatever horror had been foolish enough to wander into her kitchen. He rushed downstairs into the empty kitchen. Through the open door, he saw Mrs. Caudri standing in the middle of her garden, surrounded by a horde of great, black rats.

  She held the center of the garden inviolate, her feet planted firmly in the rows, the sleeves of her dress pushed up, displaying the taut muscles of a warrior, with her garden rake held high in white-knuckled rage, protecting the last two remaining cabbages.

  ‘‘Yahrrr!’’ Her battle cry was terrifying. Both the rats and William took a step back. She swung the rake like Death’s own scythe, taking the head clean off a big rodent with the nub of a carrot still clenched between its teeth.

  It was then William saw the corpses. The garden was a killing ground and the ditch a charnel house of rat bodies.

  He watched openmouthed as Mrs. Caudri’s powerful backswing caught another rat and sent it spinning high over the stone wall, a spray of blood following it.

  ‘‘Don’t just stand there gawping, you empty-headed boy. Grab my cabbages.’’

  His body moved forward almost unconsciously, responding to Mrs. Caudri’s barked orders as much out of fear as habit. He threw himself down at her skirts and pulled up the cabbages. He sensed her above him as she shifted her weight and he heard again the pitiable cry of another rat sent to its wormy-tailed reward.

  Together the two of them rushed back into the house, Mrs. Caudri striking here and there as the opportunity to wound or bruise a rat with her rake or a well-aimed kick presented itself.

  Safely behind the locked door, Mrs. Caudri collapsed at the kitchen table to gather herself and her breath. William had always deferred to Mrs. Caudri because everyone else seemed to, and now he understood why. The woman was a merciless killing machine. ‘‘How—Where did you learn to fight like that?’’

  She held out her hands for the two cabbages. ‘‘Peter and I were in the army together before
we came to work for Master Austane.’’ She smiled through new tears as she cradled her cabbages. ‘‘There were already hundreds of them in the garden when I came down to light the stove. Filthy beasts. Come up from their sewers. Oh, Will, they came up to ravage my beautiful garden.’’

  ‘‘But what drove them up? There’s been no rain.’’ But the spell had mentioned rain . . . or had it been water? He couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was the effect of rain without the actual rain. On a hunch, he went to the foyer and opened the front door.

  The cobblestone street and the house opposite swarmed with rats. More were pouring out from the sewer grate, and William had to shut the door quickly to prevent them from flooding into the house.

  ‘‘They’re out front as well. Just as you said, from the sewer.’’

  ‘‘But it hasn’t rained,’’ they whispered together.

  ‘‘And neither the live beggars or the vagrant dead have been pushed out. Of course. It’s magic.’’ Mrs. Caudri had decided.

  ‘‘Yes,’’ William agreed with a nervous smile. ‘‘I think it might be.’’

  ‘‘I suppose it’s to be expected, what with Master Austane gone to Cay and you being still, mostly, useless.’’

  ‘‘Yes.’’ William thought better of arguing. ‘‘I—I’ll go upstairs and see if I can find out what might have stirred them up.’’

  ‘‘That’s fine, but you won’t do anything, will you?’’ She gave him a stern look.

  ‘‘No, no, of course not.’’ He shrugged as he retreated up the stairs. ‘‘What could I really do anyway? ’’

  William locked the laboratory door before going over to his master’s desk. He picked the pages up again, thumbed through them, stared at the words, willed them to mean something, anything. He threw up his hands in frustration.

  Next, he searched the library and piled all the books that even mentioned weather on the desk and combed through them in an odd meticulous frenzy.

  By noon his head hurt with strain and worry. William put it down on the cold metal desk and rolled his forehead from side to side and thought.

  The air in the room changed; it became heavier, and even through the closed window William could feel a slight chill. He heard the first fall of rain against the roof: a big, heavy drop. He smiled a little and turned to face the window. The rats could have been early, a strange bit of magic that had them flee the sewers before they flooded with rain. The ghosts and the undead beggar masters would follow soon, he was sure.

  Then there a frenzy of scratching. Something orange flashed past the window, and a plaintive yowling followed it down.

  William got up and went to the window. He looked down on the back garden, still teeming with rats. Against the wall, hissing and caterwauling, was a good-sized tabby cat. Outnumbered, it was doing its best to bluff a defense as the rats became more bold and inched forward.

  As the rats pushed in, another cat, a fluffy calico, dropped past his window, hit the ground, bounced lightly, and joined its fellow near the wall of the house.

  The cats flashed their teeth in a Cheshire grin, and the rats, being rats and having no stake in disabusing cats or anyone else of the cowardly nature of rats, backed down gracelessly as they fled from the cats’ line. The tabby had no time to enjoy this reversal of fortune as a large gray hound fell out of the sky, landed nearly on top of them, bounced twice, and began barking, scattering both groups before its huge snapping jaws.

  William chewed his thumbnail and looked down the hill toward the docks. He watched as a wolfhound dropped out of a low hanging cloud and through a ship’s rigging to land on the deck unharmed. With the nail momentarily stuck between his teeth, the apprentice considered what to do. ‘‘Cats,’’ he said to himself. ‘‘The cats will get the rats and the dogs will get the cats. And people like dogs so it’s not a problem really. Not really.’’

  He pulled the nail fragment from his mouth and meant to flick it into a corner but stopped with the finger still curled.

  ‘‘What’s this?’’ A blister was ripening on the back of his hand. William grabbed a magnifying glass from the desk to examine it, only to see another blister pop up beside the first. He dropped the glass, oblivious to the fate of the expensive instrument, and ran downstairs.

  He threw a quick ‘‘please find something to lance a blister’’ over his shoulder to Mrs. Caudri before he heavy-footed it down into the root cellar.

  There was a rusty cowbell on a long braided rope hanging from the low roof of the dark cellar, and William unceremoniously kicked it, sending it flying with a dull clang.

  The ground answered back with a muffled groan.

  ‘‘Get up, please.’’ William dry-washed his face with both hands.

  Clearly annoyed, the ground groaned back again.

  ‘‘Peter!’’ William yelled at the earth, circling the small empty room, hitch-stepping the ground and stamping his foot repeatedly. ‘‘Get up, please get up. Peter!’’

  Very much annoyed, the ground issued a resigned sigh.

  William retreated to the stairs and watched as the cellar floor bulged and cracked. A long-fingered hand pushed through from underneath and began to cast about, searching for something.

  Finally it found the swaying cowbell, took hold of the thick rope, and pulled itself free.

  The zombie woke like an old man from sleep, resting first on his side, an elbow, the wrist, and at last sitting up in his earthen bed. It was nearly as tall seated as William was standing.

  It covered its mouth with a bony hand, the raggedy flesh a poor barrier as it coughed and spat dry earth and worms.

  ‘‘Peter, I need you to deliver a message for me.’’

  Peter hawked again, raising his chin and waggling his head like a vulture; once more, this time a satisfying, wet sound that seemed to clear his throat. He held up a raggedy finger as he swallowed whatever had been lodged.

  Peter’s voice was a rough whisper, like sandpaper on steel that always seemed to carry an undertone of disdain. ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘I need you—’’

  ‘‘I heard you. I’m dead, not deaf. A message. Why not use the post?’’

  ‘‘Well, it’s literally raining cats and dogs outside. If that isn’t enough, there’s more rats than people on the streets, and I’m collecting blisters at such a rate I might not be able to finish a proper letter. In fact, just please limp across town and bring the Nazz back as fast as you’re able. Tell him it’s an emergency.’’

  ‘‘Right. I suppose I’m up already. Does Fiola have any tea on? I could do with some jam and toast as well.’’

  William was afraid if he protested the cantankerous old corpse would delay further. ‘‘Maybe. Can you take it out with you?’’

  What was left of Peter’s lip curled in a sneer and he rolled his eyes. ‘‘Fine.’’ He dusted his legs off and pushed himself to a crouch, then shambled up the stairs, leaving William to antagonize over the new blister that suddenly popped out on the bridge of his nose.

  William sat nursing the raw sore of the lanced blister on his nose with a potato poultice that Mrs. Caudri had made for him. She sat sipping a cup of tea, succeeding against all reason in ignoring a cluster of ugly swollen blisters encamped on her lip that swayed about in a drunken dance whenever she spoke.

  William knew it was unkind, but he hoped the colony would burst and she would be so preoccupied with dressing it she’d stop berating him for sending for the Nazz.

  ‘‘Everyone knows Melchoir Kant fixed the election,’’ she snapped. ‘‘He’s probably the cause of these plagues.’’

  Peter stumped through the kitchen door and sat down at the table between them. He showed the remains of his yellowed and chipped teeth in a stretched grimace. ‘‘Oooh, it’s horrible out there. Dogs have the good sense to stay away from a body, but those foul rodents have no brains whatsoever.’’ He brought up one leg and laid it on the corner of the table. ‘‘I mean, look at this. It’s gnawed half away.’’

 
; Mrs. Caudri patted Peter’s shoulder affectionately. ‘‘There, dear. Some hot tea will set you right.’’

  William couldn’t see any difference. ‘‘Where’s the Nazz?’’

  Peter looked surprised that anything could be more important than some missing part of his wormy corpse. ‘‘What? Oh, he’s waiting in the foyer. I have to say he wasn’t keen on coming at first, but when I told him it was to Bartybus Austane’s house, he nearly buried me under his feet to get out the door. He’s been going on about how he’s going to get Master Austane to sign a written declaration of his superiority. He even sent for a notary. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was you that summoned him.’’

  William didn’t care. Out from under Mrs. Caudri’s assault, with the possibility of an end to these plagues, he brightened. He patted the crater in his forehead once more before he went to greet their guest.

  Melchoir Kant, the Nazz, the city’s highest magical bureaucrat, elected not appointed—as he reminded anyone who cared to listen even though he had run unopposed after a scandal in which a goat and his only opponents died—stood in the foyer with black smoke pouring from him like an oil fire. He was pulling scorched rats off his robe with two brass-thimbled fingers and flicking them away, paying no mind to where they found rest.

  A polished gold cap adorned his piebald head. With his long, thin neck poking out from a coiled red scarf that he had expertly stuffed into an expensive and slightly charred fur-trimmed robe, he looked so much like a sickly buzzard that William nearly choked.

  ‘‘They’re like sores on a leper out there.’’

  ‘‘Hmmm?’’ William ventured.

  ‘‘The rats.’’ The Nazz pointed behind him to the door. ‘‘Sores. On a leper.’’ He saw that he wasn’t getting through to William. ‘‘The rats,’’ he repeated. ‘‘Manush’s plumb bottom, but Barty really had to scrape the barrel for an apprentice as clever as you.’’