by Dave Freer
“But I didn’t know it was a mistake,” Alamaya had protested.
“That didn’t stop it being one, did it?”
And the fun was in a very strange place. A place, it was true, that the searchers… and the killers, would not find her. It had its own rules to break, and she’d had to learn just how to break them without unpleasant consequences.
But in her way the witch Emerelda was even more strict that Duke Karst, and certainly more demanding than Duke Karst ever had been. Alamaya spent more time at her books than she ever had before. And the witch was as intolerant of failure as she was of convention.
And there was the witch’s obsession with the family curse. As Alamaya had absolutely no intention of having children, that did not concern her.
“Estethius is a devious bastard.” There was almost admiration in the Witch’s tone.
Alamaya shook her head at her Godmother. “He’s dead. They hammered a stake through his heart, burned the body, and tossed the ashes into an acid-bath.”
“A good cover story.”
“They made absolutely sure it was his body, Godmama.”
“It didn’t fulfil the oracle. The Raven had to kill him for him to be dead.”
Alamaya rolled her eyes. “The raven just means the noble house Corvin, and grandfather’s troops conquered and killed him, even if grandfather was lost in the battle.”
“They did nothing of the kind. That apprentice let them into the tower by the back door.”
CHAPTER 11
IN WHICH THERE ARE HIGHWAYMEN, NEWTS AND DIVINATION
They had to finish the last thirty miles of the journey in a cart, after the carpet refused to fly another inch after crash-landing in a field. Tom was not upset by this, but Master Hargarthius was livid. “Zoranthys’s pustules. Now we will have to walk.” He kicked the carpet and swore, descriptively and furiously.
“Isn’t there any other, um, magical way we could use?” asked Tom, more to distract the old man, than any real desire to try these alternate means.
“Hmph. Many. But it’s not my field and I don’t have the relevant literature with me. I had no idea why we were being summoned to Borbungsburg, but I thought war most likely. So I packed the tomes that related to that. You boys all think I can remember every spell in existence.”
Tom had had no idea that Master Hargarthius couldn’t. Wisely, he said nothing.
“Take the trunk,” said Master Hargarthius, irritably. “You can leave the carpet.”
Tom had thought that walking had to be better than flying on that particular carpet. He quite liked walking. But that had been walking while not carrying a wounded trunk, a trunk that groaned, and was very heavy.
It was a good mile to the first village, and by then Tom was ready to try flying again. The Master spotted a green bush hanging at the door and that cheered him up. It meant ‘Beer’, it turned out.
After the Master had tried the local beer, he turned to Tom. “I might be able to repair the carpet. Go back and fetch it.”
It was at least pleasant to walk without the groaning trunk — without the added weight of the raven, that had not bothered to fly. Tom stopped and had a drink from the stream under the little stone bridge, and eyed the tiny trout in it, thoughtfully. The field, when Tom got there, was not quite so pleasant.
The bull who had been frightened into the far corner by the crash-landing was determined to regain his reputation by charging down this returning invader. Luckily Tom knew about bulls from growing up around the barn, and he and the carpet made it back into the lane. He walked away, whistling, a new human skill he’d seen others do at the village market. He wasn’t sure he was getting it right yet, but it seemed the dimpled young shepherdess thought he was whistling at her.
It turned out she rather liked bold young travelling men, with a carpet, so close to the secluded shady spots by the stream. “We could… take your carpet down there and unroll it,” she said, leaning up against him, and taking his arm.
Tom was more than a little puzzled by this, but the rational part of his mind seemed to have gone for a walk somewhere, because all he managed to say was “Ah…”
“It’s shady down there. You look all flushed. You could… take something off and cool down. I could help you. It looks like a nice soft carpet to lie on.” She stuck the tip of her tongue out and looked at him from under her lashes.
“Er. It might be muddy, and, um, my master’s expecting me.”
“It’s all mossy. And it wouldn’t take that long,” she said, sliding an arm around him.
By this stage Tom wasn’t thinking at all, so he went down to the stream, under the curtain of willows, and unrolled the carpet. She must have been hot too, because she had taken off her clothes, and before he knew quite what she was doing, started lifting his robe.
Only that was when she saw his poor confined tail and screamed, “Demon!” and ran, scooping her clothes as she did.
Tom called after “I’m not! I’m a cat!”
That didn’t seem to help, because she didn’t come back. So he lay on the carpet himself for a little, and then rolled it up, and went back to the village.
“What took you so long?” said the Master, grumpily. “I’ve eaten, and hired a cart and a driver. Come now. We’ve miles to go.”
Tom wouldn’t have minded the eating himself, but that was not happening. Instead he got to sit on the tail of the cart while his master sat up on the bench with the driver. Master Hargarthius complained about the cost of it — almost as much as he would have if that had been real money he spent, which Tom was sure the cart’s owner would find it was not, the next time he looked in his pouch.
They trundled down the rutted track, across the hills and down along the seaside road, on the way to the village below the Master’s Tower.
The sea was blue and full of waves. It smelled of salt, and other things Tom had never smelled before, not all of them nice. “What is it?” asked Tom looking at what seemed like far too much water to be possible.
The cart-driver looked at him in amusement. “The salty sea, boy. All the way from here to far Rindia, and maybe to the edge of the world beyond that.”
Tom badly wanted to stop and look at it, and perhaps touch what seemed like entirely too much water, and certainly enough yellow sand to make for a lot of extra cleaning for any famulus living with a local magician. But they didn’t stop, and turned inland again, into the steep valleys leading toward the mountains that looked familiar, but small.
They spent the night in flea-pit inn, where Tom got to experience the fleas. There was a bar-maid who gave him an interested look, but he wasn’t too sure how she’d feel about the tail either. Perhaps darkness could work. But then, perhaps it wouldn’t.
Just when things were beginning to look familiar, which apparently — according to the cart-driver — meant they were on the far edge of civilized lands, entering dangerous parts, just short of the lip of a steep hill next to a copse, they had a meeting with a man with a sword and a crossbow, and his friend who had a knobbledy club. The fellow with the club grabbed the horse’s head, and they demanded they halt and hand over all their money and goods.
Master Hargarthius had been grumbling about a flea, and the slowness of the cart. “Go away before I turn you into newts,” he said crossly to the two men.
The highwaymen laughed. “You ain’t no real magician. Them don’t travel by cart,” said the one, holding the horses.
Which, Tom reflected later, was why it was always a good thing to choose your words carefully. It would also probably be a good thing to choose who you turned into a newt first, and that should always be the one with the crossbow. Even if you had no quarrel with him, he’d have a quarrel with you. Or in you, if the raven hadn’t dive-bombed him, and if the cart and Master Hargarthius had stayed still.
The horse, possibly startled by the sudden implosion caused by a newt being a lot smaller than a man, or the fact that he now had a small spotted newt clinging to his harness
, started, and broke into a gallop, where it had been too tired to do more than walk moments before.
As a result the remaining highwayman had only Tom to aim at — on the back of the cart. The quarrel nicked Tom’s ear, more due to the lurching cart and luck than bad aim, and buzzed between the driver and Master Hargarthius. “You didn’t tell me you was a real magician!” yelled the driver.
“What do I look like?” yelled Master Hargarthius, clinging onto the cart.
“I thought you was just one of them fellers who do tricks and conjure for drinks, like you did last night. I don’t want any nasty real magicians in my cart! I wants the rest of me money, and you’re getting off, right now.”
That was also not a clever thing to say.
Newts are just not much good at driving carts, and the horse panicked afresh, but without a skilled driver this time.
As Tom had read in the Weekly Illuminati Age and Magical Advertiser, in Aunty Eden’s agony advice column: Injudiciously applied magic could have undesirable effects. In this case those undesirable effects were that all of them ended up in a wet roadside ditch, underneath an upside down cart. It was fine place for a newt, but muddy and unpleasant for anyone else.
Well, all of them, except for the raven. The bird took off at the last moment. When Tom crawled out from under the remains of the cart, it was sitting on a broken shaft, looking at the one surviving still slowly turning wheel. Unsurprisingly, it said “Nevermore,” something Tom could agree with.
They cut the horse free with the idea that it could carry the trunk. It decided that it was going home, before that happened, so Tom and Master Hargarthius had to walk, carrying the trunk, the carpet, and, when it got tired of flying, the raven.
Still, they were close now, and by evening Tom was back at the magician’s tower, enjoying the shrill tones of Mrs Drellson’s skull shouting at him.
It was quite welcoming after the outside world.
Familiarity, even horrid familiarity, or the demon, was comforting. The cheese in the pantry was pleased to see him too. It was distinctly purring when Tom gave it some milk.
Master Hargarthius had set up a vast apparatus, with the help of half-a-dozen grimoires, and a great deal of chalk and even a few small demons that Prince Hariselden sneered at, to divine where exactly the owner of the jewelled slipper was.
The slipper hung in a shimmering crystal orb hovering above the complex map of the known lands on a large sheet of wood that had been a hellish task for Tom to carry up to the laboratory. Several benches had been pushed aside to allow space for the construct. The air was thick with the ozone smell of the lightning discharges from the surface of the orb. They ran down it and trickled off the silver spike at the bottom of the orb jaggedly dancing to various places on the map. A strange and eldritch moaning droned steadily through the room, only interrupted by Master Hargarthius’s swearing or muttering more spells. “It is easier to magically hide, than to magically find,” the master informed him, when he asked why it had to be so complicated.
“Why?” asked Tom.
Master Hargarthius shrugged. “I don’t know. But empirically we prove this, because if it were not so, everything would be found. Including my eye-glasses.”
“They’re on the tip of your nose, Master.”
“Aha.” He pushed them back. “You see, boy, those involved in magical kidnapping will be hiding her. Those not involved in this will all be searching, but I, Hargarthius, have the advantage over all of them. Besides the fact that that they are stupid, that is.”
Tom wondered if any of the others had poor-quality flying carpets. Master Hargarthius was something of a puzzle to Tom: in some aspects he seemed competent and powerful. In others… well. “Er. What advantage, master?”
Master Hargarthius drew himself up, proudly. “I have more Grimoires. And I would bet they are trying what they have sequentially, because that’s what they do. They are narrow, experts in little fields at best. I have developed a grand unified pasture theory to work within. Now, get me some more dragon-wing, Boy.” He sighed. “I wish the writing in Halamathus’s Universal Augurial Techniques was clearer. I wonder if rat entrails are an adequate substitute for gerbil?”
It took several exhausting days of fetching, carrying, running around, changing things, changing them back, ordering various magical supplies and getting less magical ones in from the village to get the construct ready for use. Of course it had to be done at midnight, when the moon was full.
Tom who was by nature a little suspicious sometimes wondered if it had to be so complex. Based on his experience so far with ‘Elementary spell-craft for ye dunderheads’ Tom had the feeling that a lot the books were just making it up to make it sound good, and to be so complicated that you either wouldn’t try or couldn’t get it right.
He had no great expectations of this experiment, either, when the hour came, and he had to spend his time walking widdershins with a branch of multi-colored candles, chanting words from a tattered parchment scroll and waving a censer of unpleasant incense. The master splayed out the rat-entrails… and the suspended globe began to spin, and sway, while keeping up the lightnings. Then it shrieked and zoomed across the wooden map, hovered briefly over the island that was Borbungsburg, and then, with blurring speed whizzed off to the Lamdark mountains in Novaria… and then zig-zagged back to Borbungsburg, and then Lamdark… and then whizzed sideways across the Sunder Sea to spike itself, in a shattering of crystal… into the very edge of the wood.
Tom and Master Hargarthius slowly straightened up from having instinctively ducked. It was an instinct one soon developed around magic, or at least Master Hargarthius’s magic. The magician, followed by Tom at a safe distance, went to look.
“Bring those candles closer, boy” said Master Hargarthius. “And snuff that incense. It’s going to make me sneeze.”
So Tom followed both instructions and asked: “Did it work, Master?”
“The silver needle should be exactly where she is. Some magician must have a secret island lair out there, out on edge of the Sunder Sea.”
Tom peered at the wood — it was made of several layers of wood, actually, glued together in transverse grain to give it strength despite being thin. “Can’t see the needle, Master. Just a hole.”
“Hmm.” The master adjusted his eye-glasses, and peered at the edge of the wooden map. Pushed the glass away with his sleeve, and looked again, nearly putting his long nose to the floor. Then he nodded. “So that’s how they’ve fooled the court mages. They’ve taken her to another plane, such as the one you can see in the third mirror. She’s alive, but they can’t find her anywhere in the world… because she’s not here. Well, well, well! Get me some beer, boy. I need to think about this. And then you can clear this lot up, and pack it away.”
Being Master Hargathius’s famulus was definitely not all joy, thought Tom bitterly, as he did all this, yawning.
The next day, when the Master got up, which was long after Tom had finished the morning chores and indeed, the lunchtime chores, the master wanted the slipper. So Tom had to find it. It was pure luck he had rather liked the blue stones —sapphires he was told they were called — and had kept it instead of tossing it out with the rat-entrails. After all what use was one slipper?
Plenty, as Tom discovered, when he was foolish enough to say so. Besides the value of the jewels and the pearls, the stuff of the owner was within it. “I can link it to a hyper-dimensional fluid that will take me to the right dimension and then a mere divining spell, something like Adubussion’s Natural divination vortex, and we’ll have her and be able to rescue her. Though why Karst wants to find the poor cursed girl is beyond me. Now, I’ll need you to learn Borthius’s magical flame spell. We’ll have to condense some Gadderson’s fluid with Mermaid tears, and that can’t abide mere flame.”
So Tom got to learn another spell, a minor summonsing of fire elementals. It was a problematic working, in that the magic was not sustained. It was a good way of starting fires,
the Master said, but terrible for keeping them going without fuel.
“So why do we use salamanders, Master, for lighting lamps and candles and the fire?” asked Tom, when he’d mastered the magic.
He ducked the cuff. “You ask too many questions, boy. Because it is poorly contained, that’s why.”
Tom thought this sounded a poor reason, but when his entire candle caught fire and not just the wick, he saw it was more sensible than he’d realized. He was glad he’d been taught the quelling spell to banish the elementals. The reason for using salamanders instead, he now grasped entirely.
Which was more than Master Hargarthius seemed to do with the recipe for Hyper-dimensional fluid.
That didn’t work.
And, as always, it was Tom’s fault.
Emerelda had wasted no time getting the girl back. Not that the family there were precisely ideal, or the location perfect, but some of the magic workers summonsed to Borbungsburg were, in their way, dangerously competent. She admitted that to herself, even if she’d never dream of telling any of them. The Duke’s staff of royal mages was an entirely different matter. Inevitably the stupid, lame and lazy ended up in government service, where they could make everyone else’s life a misery. It was unlikely that Alamaya would get up to more mischief than was perfectly healthy for a young woman, or that the cousins would not step in to help, if she got into really serious problems. The girl knew enough magic to deal with minor trouble. And a bit of adventuring would do her good. She was getting a life, having some fun and enjoying a few parties. Athena would probably have been less of tramp if she had been allowed to get it out her system before being married to King Uther.
Emerelda ran every magical divination she knew of to make sure that Alamaya wasn’t findable by any of them, so that at least was taken care of. Now all she had to do was to work out who wanted the girl dead, and just how to break the curse on her.
Of course, short of knowing exactly what the curse was, that would be difficult. But at least, thanks to the demon’s loose talk, she had some idea what she was looking for.