There was deathly silence. Not even insects still lived in this accursed land. “Save my power,” Purple repeated quietly. His hands clamped on my shoulders and he screamed, “Power! In my flashlight! In my flashlight, Lant!”
“Let go, curse it!” He was as strong as an old ram.
“Power, Lant! Power!”
“Don’t get your hopes up, Purple. Wait until you get a response from your mother nest.”
He sobered instantly. “Yes, you’re right, Lant.” There was a scraping sound in the dark as he removed the flashlight’s small battery, another sound as be pulled the calling device from his belt, an incomprehensible curse as he tried to attach the wires in the dark. He worked eagerly, impatiently-I could not blame him.
At last he said, “I’m ready.” There was a click as he switched on the device. A dial on its face gave off a soft glow. Before he even pressed the call button, he peered at this dial. “There is power enough, Lant. More than enough. I can call my mother nest ten times, maybe more, with the power in this battery.”
“Is it enough to recharge the windbags too?” I asked hopefully.
His face was a dark blur. “No, not that much. That requires vast amounts of power, Lant. It needs a heavy-duty battery like my other one-but don’t worry. When my mother egg gets here, I’ll see that you and your sons get safely home.
“Home,” he repeated. “I’m going home. No more double shadows. No more furry women. No more black plants-“
“Green, Purple. Plants are green.”
“Green is a bright color where I come from. No more odd food and foul drink. No more scratchy clothing. No more medicine shows for yokels.” He chanted this litany in man’s tongue and demon’s tongue. It was a homegoing spell and he spoke it intensely. “I’ll have books, music, normal weight-“
“You intend to diet?”
He laughed at that and kept laughing from sheer joy. “I’m going home!” he bellowed into the night.
“Why not try your calling device?” I was getting impatient.
He said, “I’m afraid to.”
“Oh.”
He turned the knob. A yellow eye opened brilliantly.
“Hah!” Purple shouted. “And the red eye means that the mother nest has answered.”
“What red eye?”
Purple twiddled the knob impatiently. “Come on,” he whispered. “Come on.”
Nothing happened.
He shook the device. “Come on, damn you! I want to go home!”
The yellow eye burned steadily. There was no red response light.
“We’re far enough north,” said Purple. “Close enough to the equator. The seeing should be good; the curve of the planet isn’t in the way. What could be wrong? It can’t be sending the wrong frequency,” he mumbled. If he was making magic, it wasn’t working.
“Perhaps it’s your battery,” I suggested.
“It’s not my battery. Why doesn’t it answer? Why doesn’t it answer?” He jumped to his feet and went raging off into the dark. After a moment, I followed him.
I found him sitting in ashes and despair. He had his device on the ground in front of him and was banging on it with a rock.
He hadn’t damaged it though-only pounded it deeper into the soft dead earth.
“Purple, stop,” I said softly. “Stop.”
“Why should IF he said bitterly. “We’ve come all this way for nothing. All of your devices have worked, Lant. None of mine have. Your aircloth got us here, your generators got us here, your airpushers got us here-but my calling device doesn’t work. So why did we bother to come at all? The only one who’s going to get any benefit out of this will be Shoogar.”
“Huh?” Did he know about the duel? Had he realized?
“Yes, Shoogar,” he answered my questioning look. “He needed to know about the moons. He had to come north. The rest of us might as well have stayed home.” He started pounding again.
“Perhaps we have not come far enough north,” I suggested. He made a sound that suggested he thought me a fool.
I was grabbing for ideas now, anything to restore his spirit. “Or perhaps there is still a planet in the way.” Whatever that meant. He had used the word before.
For a moment, there was silence. “What did you say?-“
I opened my mouth to repeat it.
“Never mind, I heard it the first time.” There was a sound of digging in the dirt. A scraping and a crunching. “Damn me. I’m so stupid sometimes-“
“What are you talking about?”
He stood up, a blur in the darkness. He held his device in his hands. “Lant, you are a genius sometimes. And all this time I thought you didn’t understand a thing I was talking about but were only being polite and pretending that you did. Of course there’s a planet in the way,” he stamped his foot. “This one.”
“H’m,” I said, pretending to understand. Who was I to shatter his illusion?
“Don’t you see? My egg hasn’t risen yet. Like the suns, it’s probably on the other side of the world. I will have to wait until it is in sight, before I try calling it again. That’s probably why it didn’t work before.”
When magic doesn’t work, a good magician usually has an explanation ready. Purple was one of the best. I wondered if he understood his own explanation. I asked, “How long will it take before you can call it down?”
“A couple of hours should be all I need. I’ll try calling it every fifteen minutes. Its orbit is only two and a half hours. I couldn’t possibly miss it, no matter how low on the horizon it is.”
I left him mumbling happily to himself, explaining things to no one in particular.
Blue dawn snapped up over the eastern rim, revealing a world even bleaker and drearier than before-if such was possible.
Aching with hunger I stumbled up a black hill to find Shoogar tracing a gigantic pattern in the greasy dust. He was using a brilliant white powder and mixing it with various colored potions as he trickled it into graceful curves. Every so often he stopped to consult a parchment in his hand.
I recognized the skin, with its circles and ellipses looping around a central dot-then I recognized the larger pattern. “Shoogar! What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m casting a spell!”
“And your oath of fealty?”
“You know perfectly well that I swore by the local gods. Different territories imply different gods and different oaths. Now we’re on my home territory. Here, I painted the runes of the duel against Purple. Here, that duel is still in progress!”
“But so much has changed-” I stopped, for he was right. “And you stole his map of the moonpaths.”
“No. He gave it to me, the fool. I’ll use his own magic against him. And his own name-his real name! Of course, he wasn’t worried before. He knew I couldn’t hurt him because his speakerspell hadn’t told his true name. But this time-“
“Maybe he was lying,” I said quickly.
Shoogar gave me a contemptuous look. “Lant,” he explained patiently, “the act of saying `my real name is’ is a consecration spell. Even if he was lying when he said it, the act of saying it made it as good as his real name. And it can be used against him! If this were not so, a magician would have no power at all. People would change names at will to avoid local spells.”
“But why the moonpaths?” I said. Then it dawned on me. “No-you can’t!”
“I can-and I will. I’m going to drop a moon on his head.” I felt a strong urge to laugh. It was insane. Wildly, incredibly insane.
And he meant every word of it.
“Shoogar,” I said. “A moon did fall once. Do you know what the results were?”
“I have seen the Circle Sea.”
“Circle Sea was once a rich farming area. Now the sea rolls in a circular depression of blasted stone, where nothing grows at all.”
Shoogar shrugged unconcernedly. “This place is already accursed, Lant. What harm can a falling moon do here?”
/> “It can kill us!” I almost shouted.
“I’ll pick one of the little ones-“
“Even a little one can kill us-they say that the Circle Sea was a ring of molten rock for many years, before the sea stopped boiling and moved in to cover it.”
“Probably, they exaggerate.”
“But-“
“Lant,” he said, “I can do no less. Consider: Purple has insulted the Gods themselves. He has claimed repeatedly that they do not exist at all-and he has had the incredible effrontery to build a flying machine that proves it! In his violations of reason, such as his games with the ballast concept, he mocks the laws that even the gods obey.”
Shoogar paced furiously as he spoke, red-eyed and wild. “He has insulted custom, Lant. He has given names to women and taught them the trades of men! He has interrupted housetree consecrations, and turned housetrees into prickly plants. He has reduced our village life to chaos. Some of our traditional trades no longer exist, while others, like coppersmithery, have swollen monstrously in importance.”
He stopped pacing and looked at me. “He has introduced new concepts to us, Lant. He has taught us evil things that lessen the value of life and increase the importance of things!
“But most of all,” he said, “he has insulted me. He would not teach me to fly, until he needed to fly himself; and he still has not taught me the spells that make electrissy. We depend on his charity for his lightning boxes and airmakers! He has undermined my authority with his spurious cures, so that they trade my spells for his at ten to one!
“I was bound to him by an oath of servitude, but he never asked for my help in anything. Never, not once. He even threw my sails overboard!
“No little death spell would retrieve my honor,” Shoogar screamed. “I will bring a moon down upon his head! This one last time I must show my might, before he escapes me forever!”
“I won’t help you,” I said feebly.
“You don’t have to, Lant. I’m sure it was your help last time that yngvied me up.”
“How long will this take?”
“Not long. I will finish this soon and then I will chant. I will chant until the red sun is high in the west. Then we will move off and wait.”
“I would rather you do something about finding us some food,” I grumbled.
“Forget your stomach for once, Lant. Before the blue sun rises again, Purple will be destroyed.”
urple tried his calling thing three more times. On the third try the red light flashed. It began winking steadily.
Purple screamed with delight and threw the device joyously into the air. He capered about wildly, singing and dancing. “I’m going home, I’m going home-I’m going home.”
He flung himself on the ground and rolled and kicked. He jumped up with a holler and ran furiously in all directions. Back and forth, in a great circle about me, he pranced and yelled.
At last-it seemed like days-he tired and came gasping up to me. “Lant, I can hardly believe it. It has been so long,” he panted. “But it’s true. It’s happening. My mother egg has heard.”
I glanced nervously at the hill where Shoogar still worked. He was sitting and chanting now. “Uh, how long will it take before your egg gets here, Purple?”
He frowned. “Who cares? It’s coming-that’s all.”
“I care!” I almost screamed.
He gave me a peculiar look. “I hadn’t realized this meant so much to you.”
“Well, it does,” I said, in a slightly quieter tone. “How long will it take?”
“Maybe a day,” he said. “Maybe a little longer. The egg was on standby. It will have to activate itself, come to full power, take bearings, check its systems, plot a course, make an approach-it will take time, Lant. The egg could not possibly be here before blue sunset.”
I groaned.
“I know how it must pain you, my friend. But fear not. I have waited this long. I can wait a little longer.”
I groaned and trudged away, clutching at the ache in my stomach.
I went down to the shore. The sea surged restlessly at the slope where Wilville and Orbur worked.
“Father, you look ill,” said one.
“I am,” I said. “I am tired and hungry and I hurt all over. I long for a decent bed and a decent meal-“
“Wilville has found some cavernmouth eggs,” said Orbur. “Do you want one?”
I groaned. But it was better than nothing. I took the heavy sphere and bit at its rind. A salty-sweet taste flowed into my mouth. “Oh, that’s awful,” I said. I took a drink of water from a ballast sack.
“Don’t let Shoogar see you doing that.”
“Curse Shoogar-” I said. “Do you know what he’s doing? He’s trying to call down a moon!”
Orbur snorted. Wilville didn’t say anything. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”
“We heard you,” said Wilville. “Shoogar is trying to call down a moon. At least it will keep him out of our way.”
“Oh,” I said. Apparently they were so intent on what they were doing, they were oblivious to what was going on around them. “What are you working on?” I asked. I squatted down on my haunches to look.
They explained. One of the pulleys had worked loose from a bicycle frame. But they had almost no tools at all to work with. Purple had thrown them all overboard. They were working now with rocks and sticks and shreds of aircloth. “If we can get this working again, we can use the boat to get away from here, whether we have windbags or not.”
I nodded and offered my help, but Orbur said I would only be in the way. I gathered up the cavernmouth eggs and took them off a ways. I found some driftwood and made a small file to roast them. They were still awful, but they were food.
I took one up to Purple, but he had spread out a piece of aircloth from the ripped balloon and was snoring blissfully and peacefully; it was the first time that I had seen him completely relaxed since I had known him.
I let him sleep and trudged across the slope to Shoogar. He shook his head at the sight of the egg. “I will have it later, when I finish my chant.”
I looked at his gigantic spell pattern. “Why don’t you draw it around Purple?” I asked.
“Why bother? If a moon falls on him, it won’t matter if it hits him directly or not-it’s going to make another Circle Sea.”
“Oh,” I said. I went back to my sons and watched them work.
They worked for most of the day, stopping only to chew on a piece of roast cavernmouth egg or to swill down some water. By the time night had fallen and the red sun was seeping into the west, the bicycle pulley was working again as well as it would ever be.
The day was rapidly nearing its end. Purple’s egg had still not arrived, and Shoogar was still on the hill chanting.
My sons stretched out tiredly on their blankets and chewed gratefully on the rubbery eggmeat. Had they had their tools, they might have finished the job in less than an hour, but encumbered as they were, it took nearly all day. They were exhausted from the frustrations involved.
I lay on my back and stared into the sky. Already one of the moons had emerged in the darkening east, and others would join it shortly. I watched with a helpless feeling. I had been unable to dissuade Shoogar in his spellmaking. Warning Purple would do no good; I knew what he thought of Shoogar’s magic.
I tried to guess what pattern the moons had assumed. Two of the three big ones made a diagonal across a line of four small ones, so tiny they barely showed their colors.
The sign of the Bent Cross?
No matter. Whatever sign it was, Shoogar would think of a way to use itHe came running over the hill then. He pulled me roughly to my feet. “Come on, Lant. It’s time to retreat.”
“Huh?” I said sleepily. “What-?”
“I’ve finished my spell. All we have to do now is wait.” He pulled at my arm.
I followed him down to the boat. He was grabbing things at random and throwing them into the craft where they splashed into the water. “Come on,
Lant, come on-we haven’t got any time.”
I woke my sons. They were just as confused and upset as I-and twice as grumpy. “If Shoogar’s spell really does work,” I insisted, “this is no place we want to be.” They allowed themselves to be pushed down the slope, Wilville pulled the plug to drain the water from the boat-it was no longer needed-the airbags were so limp they could no longer hold up even the rigging.
Orbur gathered the last of the aircloth shreds we had been using as blankets, and the remaining cavernmouth eggs. We pounded the plug back into the hole, and shoved the boat roughly into the water.
“Hurry, hurry,” snapped Shoogar. “The moon will be falling soon!”
“Does Purple know?” asked Orbur.
“Of course not. Why should I tell Purple?”
“Oh, no reason,” Orbur said as he pulled himself out of the water and onto his outrigger. “Except that he might have died of fright, and then you wouldn’t have needed to go through with the spell.”
Shoogar snorted and climbed into the boat. I followed. Our robes were wet from our thighs down. We had had to push the boat out past the breakers before we could climb in. Wilville was the last to mount. He swung the boat around so that its stern was toward the sea-it would have taken too long to try to turn it the other way.
He swung himself up on the bike frame, and the two boys unslung their airpushers and began backpedaling furiously. Within moments we were moving away from the shore. Purple, up there in the dark with his many-eyed calling device, did not notice at first. But by and by he came strolling across the sand to call, “What are you doing?”
“Testing the boat!” Shoogar called across the black water.
“Good idea,” Purple called back. He went back up the hill. There was sufficient light from the moons and the still westering sun to see him as a puffy form on the crest of the slope.
Wilville kept backpedaling then, while Orbur began pedaling forward. The boat swung around to head away from the Teeth of Despair. Bow forward, we moved across the water.
We made little progress though. The wind was headed shoreward and hampered our efforts.
The Flying Sorcerers Page 33