With a Single Spell loe-2

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  After a time, when he had slept several “nights” in the castle and discovered beyond question that tilting the tapestry to various angles had no effect, he felt sufficiently secure in his surroundings to attempt a few of the spells from Derithon’s compendium. The first interesting and easy one he came across, Tracel’s Levitation, he had to pass by; it called for a raindrop caught in midair, and he could find nothing of the sort anywhere in the castle. If Derithon had had one, it had long since evaporated; Tobas found an empty vial marked “Rain” on one shelf. And of course, it never rained in the void surrounding the castle.

  That started him wondering where the water came from. Karanissa pointed out the well; after a glance into its seemingly bottomless depths, he decided not to enquire further and returned to the study.

  Reminded of the problems of supply, he used Derithon’s big jar of brimstone to replenish the little vial he still kept on his belt.

  The next spell after Tracel’s Levitation was something called the Sanguinary Deception, requiring nothing but his athame and his own blood; a prick on his arm, a few gestures, and his appearance, as confirmed by a glance in a mirror and by Karanissa’s appalled reaction, was that of a bloody, decaying corpse.

  She refused to eat dinner with him while he retained his ghastly aspect, and he could find no countercharm he felt competent to use, but fortunately the spell wore off in time.

  He decided against repeating that spell to get it down pat; once was enough. He could see its usefulness in fooling one’s enemies, but did not care to spend any more time than necessary having Karanissa avoid his company.

  The Spell of Prismatic Pyrotechnics was another matter; he was able to work that one over and over without upsetting anyone, sending showers of colored sparks everywhere, glittering and bursting and whistling and, hissing, without ever even singeing a tablecloth or tapestry. All the ingredients for that were on hand in plentiful amounts.

  He found a recipe for an explosive seal; remembering Roggit’s Book of Spells, he decided against experimenting with that.

  The Polychrome Smoke worked well enough, but the resulting cloud hung around stubbornly until he finally asked Karanissa to herd it out a window into the void; he decided not to repeat that one, either.

  A spell for the removal of blemishes proved untestable when he discovered that neither Karanissa nor he had any blemishes to remove. He had to skip over a series of spells that called for either sunlight or moonlight, since the surrounding void provided neither one.

  Galger’s Lid Remover frightened him out of his wits, despite the laconic warning at the bottom of the page that it was noisy and required a certain amount of working space. He had expected the jar to jump about the room; he had not expected a demonic eight-foot thing, glittering like crystal and ablaze with white fire, with razor-sharp claws and fangs and horns, to appear out of nowhere with a banshee wail, snatch the jar from his hands, twist off the lid with a scream of tortured metal, and then vanish with the sound of shattering glass, leaving jar and lid on the floor at his feet.

  When the performance was over, he stared at the open jar for a long moment, then gathered it up, closed it tightly, and returned it to the shelf where he had found it. That done, he sat and stared at it for a long time, a slow smile working its way onto his features. “Hey, Nuisance,” he called at last, “go find Karanissa for me, would you?”

  His servant chittered, made an obscene slurping noise, and ran out of the room; he listened to the wet patter of its footsteps fading down the hallway, then got the jar down from the shelf again.

  When it returned with the witch, he made a great show of seriousness. “I think,” he said, “that I’ve found what might be a very important spell here. It opens things. I don’t think it will work directly on the tapestry, but I thought you might like to see it.” He picked up his athame, the other ingredients, diamond chip, gold wire, steel rod, and small silver mirror, laid out ready on the table.

  “Do you really think it will do us any good?” she said.

  A moment of guilt at what he planned caught him. “Well, no,” he admitted. “But I thought you might like to see that at least I’m learning something.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, then, what does this spell do?”

  “It opens jars.”

  “Is that all? I can open jars, by hand or by magic.”

  “Not like this; the book says it can open any container a man can carry with one hand, no matter how tightly closed. Watch!” He performed the quick little ritual.

  Her reaction was all he could have asked for; when the thing appeared, she jumped backward with a shriek, knocking her chair to the floor. Even though he knew what to expect this time, Tobas himself was again disconcerted by the suddenness, brightness, and noise of the apparition.

  When the thing had vanished again, Karanissa stared for a long moment, then burst out laughing. “That,” she gasped, “is the silliest thing I ever saw!”

  Tobas smiled. “I hoped you’d like it,” he said.

  “I never saw Derry use that one!” she wheezed, trying to catch her breath.

  “I’m not surprised,” he replied. “According to the book, all this spell does is open jars and bottles and the like, and there are easier, quieter methods.”

  In control of herself once more, the witch asked thoughtfully, “Do you think it might open the tapestry somehow?”

  He considered that seriously, then shook his head. “I don’t think I want to risk it,” he said. “At least, not yet. I’m afraid it would rip the tapestry apart instead, and we’d have to make an entirely new one from scratch. I don’t think I’ll be able to do that for a long, long time, even if we have the materials, and I don’t think we do. I didn’t see any roses or pines in the garden. And, unless there’s a treasury you haven’t mentioned, we can’t get the gold or silver, either, except by melting down the old one.”

  “There’s no treasury; we never kept any money at all in here. There was never any reason to. The roses died long ago, and we never had any pines.”

  “I thought that might be the case. We can’t make a new tapestry, then; we need to make the old one work again.”

  “And you haven’t figured out what’s wrong with it?”

  “No. I’ve read through the spell a hundred times and I don’t see why it would stop working. I’ve inspected the tapestry as closely as I can. If there’s a cut or a tear or an unraveling anywhere, I can’t find it. I have this feeling I should know what’s wrong, that I’ll feel stupid when I do realize what it is, but I can’t think of what it could be.”

  “Well, I don’t have any idea,” she said. “You keep working on it; I’m sure you’ll get us out of here eventually.” She stood, then impulsively leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “And thank you for trying.”

  “Hey, I’m stuck here, too, remember!”

  “I know, and thank you for coming.” She turned and left before he could think of anything to say in reply.

  He watched her go, unsure of his own feelings toward her, then turned pages to the spell of the Transporting Tapestry and read through it again.

  CHAPTER 23

  Karanissa did not come to the study again for some time after that; she ate her meals with him in one of the lesser halls and spoke civilly when she encountered him here or there about the castle, but she carefully avoided the study and his bedchamber.

  He noticed this quickly enough, but it was several sleeps before he worked up the nerve to ask about it.

  Finally, though, as they ate a meal of baked chicken — picked from the last little bush in the garden and prepared by one of Karanissa’s two airy servants — but indistinguishable from any fowl raised in a barnyard and cooked by an ordinary mortal, he asked, “Have you been avoiding me?”

  She looked down at the table, then paid careful attention to buttering a roll for a moment before answering.

  “Yes, I suppose I have,” she said.

  “Why?” He could think of no tactful way
of phrasing his question.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she replied. “It’s just that I’m afraid I might become too attached to you.”

  He had hoped for that answer. “Why shouldn’t you become attached to me, if you like?”

  “I don’t know,” she repeated. “It’s just that it seems unfair. I’m waiting for Derry; I shouldn’t...” Her voice trailed off. Collecting herself again, she continued, “Besides, it’s not fair to you, either. I’ve been alone here for so long, four hundred years, you tell me, that probably I’d fall half in love with any man who turned up. Once we’re out in the World again, it might not last. You seem wonderful now, brave and sweet and clever, but I’m not sure whether that’s because you really are, or just because you’re here. Besides, you’re just a boy, still in your teens.”

  He nodded. “I think I understand,” he said. “You’ve been avoiding me so you wouldn’t get carried away, then?”

  “Yes, exactly,” she said.

  “Well,” he said after a moment’s hesitation, “I haven’t been alone for four hundred years, and I know that I wouldn’t mind a bit if you were to allow yourself to be carried away, and I’d do my best to keep your interest once we’re out, but if you don’t want to risk it, I understand.”

  “You are sweet,” she said. “You remind me so much of Derry sometimes!”

  He was unsure how to answer that and, following her example, concentrated intently on buttering a roll.

  After the meal, while the servants were clearing away the dishes, he rose and announced, “I’ll go get back to work.”

  “I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I love watching a wizard at work.”

  Surprised, he smiled and said, “I’d be glad of the company.”

  It seemed perfectly natural to both of them when his arm went around her waist as they walked down the corridor. Discussing her reasons for avoiding him seemed almost to negate them.

  When they reached the study, she looked around in surprise. “It’s different,” she said.

  “Well, yes, a little,” he admitted. He had rearranged things somewhat to make room for his experiments and to keep his more frequently used materials close at hand and had cleared out a great many containers that were either empty or held things that had not survived the centuries of neglect unscathed. A distressing variety of common ingredients had suffered, severely limiting what magic he could attempt.

  “What’s this doing here?” she asked, reaching out and lightly tapping an astonishingly ugly statuette that stood on a corner of the worktable. “Wasn’t it down in the green gallery before?”

  Before Tobas could reply the figure began singing, loudly and off-key but in a pleasant enough baritone. “The Sorrows of Sarai the Fickle.”

  Embarrassed, Tobas reached over and tapped it again before it could get past the opening lines. Those lines, describing Sarai’s anatomy with succinct obscenity, were quite enough without letting it go on to detail her nocturnal activities.

  The music stopped the instant his finger touched stone.

  “Galger’s Singing Spell,” he explained sheepishly in the sudden silence. “It works better with rowdy drinking songs.”

  “Oh,” Karanissa said, smothering a smile. “What’s that?” This time she pointed.

  Tobas explained each of the half dozen or so relics of his recent spell-casting.

  “There are some in the book that I’d love to try,” he said when he had finished his explanations. “But even when I have all the ingredients, I don’t always have any way of knowing if a spell actually works when I try it. Some of them need a subject. This one, for example.” He turned to the page he wanted. “It’s called the Lesser Spell of Invaded Dreams. If I could be sure it worked, I might be able to use this to send a message to someone back in the outside world and get him to come help us.”

  She looked at the brief description. “You could try it on me,” she pointed out.

  “Oh,” Tobas said, feeling foolish. “Yes, I could, couldn’t I? I hadn’t thought of that, since we usually sleep at the same time.”

  “I don’t know what good it would be though,” she said. “What could someone outside do?”

  “I don’t really know,” Tobas confessed. “I was thinking that perhaps a rope could be thrown through the tapestry that still works, so that we could be pulled out.”

  Karanissa frowned. “I don’t think that would work,” she said. “Would it? It sounds too easy.”

  “Easy!” “Well, not really easy, maybe. But I know that whenever I came through that tapestry with Derry, we couldn’t turn back, no matter how quickly we tried. I couldn’t just put one foot through and step back.”

  “You couldn’t?” Tobas asked, disappointed. He had hoped that his own abrupt entrance had been somehow exceptional.

  “No, I couldn’t. As soon as even a finger went into the tapestry, I was all the way through.”

  “Oh.” He had to admit that accorded closely with his own experience. Dismayed, he stared at the book for a moment. “Oh, well. Maybe we can try it eventually, anyway, if we can’t come up with anything better.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed.

  Both stood silently for a moment, Tobas staring at the book, Karanissa watching him.

  “What are you going to try next?” she asked at last.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve been working my way up; they aren’t marked, but I believe I’m working on second-or maybe even third-order spells now. I wish I knew what I was looking for, though. I’ve been here at least a couple of sixnights now, maybe more, maybe months, and I still don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m learning more magic, certainly — and I’m glad of that — but I’m no closer to finding a way out of here than I was a day or so after you let me in.”

  “There’s no hurry, really,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m not sure about that. The wine is running out, and the food supply deteriorating, after all. Besides, you may have eternal youth, but I don’t. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life here. Oh, it’s not you, the company couldn’t be better, but living here doing nothing isn’t what I had in mind for a career, if you see what I mean. And I’d like to get you out, too, show you the World the way it is now. You deserve better than being cooped up here forever. I don’t know what the chances of someone else finding that tapestry before it’s destroyed are, but they probably aren’t very good; for all I know the dragon’s already burned it up. If I don’t get us out, no one will. And I haven’t got the faintest idea of how to do it.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” she said confidently. “I’m sure you will.”

  “Not by sitting here practicing singing spells I won’t!”

  “Maybe you should try some of the more advanced spells,” she suggested thoughtfully, “instead of working your way up so slowly. Derry’s eternal youth spell should be in there somewhere, shouldn’t it? You could use that on yourself, and then you wouldn’t have to worry about time at all.”

  “Oh, it’s here,” Tobas replied. “But I won’t dare use it for years yet; it’s really high-order. I’d probably turn myself into an embryo or something.” He laughed derisively.

  “I think you’ve been working too hard at your wizardry,” Karanissa announced. “Stop thinking about it. Why don’t we just go for a walk around the castle?”

  “All right,” Tobas agreed. He picked up the candle-holder from the table.

  Again, as they left the study, his arm fell naturally around her slim waist, and again she made no protest. In fact, this time she snuggled closer.

  Together they strolled down the corridor, leaning against each other, admiring the now-familiar tapestries on the walls and the statuary in the niches. Tobas heard a familiar slobbering behind them and called, “Go away, Nuisance.”

  Damp footsteps scampered off, and the two ambled on.

  After a considerable time and only a few trivial words exchanged, they came near the room where the dysfunctional tap
estry hung. “I want to take another look at it,” Tobas announced.

  “All right,” Karanissa said, disengaging herself from his encircling arm.

  He tried to replace his hand, but she stepped away. “I’ll wait here,” she said.

  “No, come with me,” he said. “Maybe we’ll come up with an idea together that I wouldn’t have by myself.” She hesitated, but finally accepted.

  Side by side, but not touching, the two entered the little room with their candle held high, and stared at the dark, empty scene the tapestry depicted. Karanissa shuddered slightly. Tobas stepped nearer, intending to comfort her, but she stepped away again.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “It’s Derry,” she said. “I can’t help thinking about him when I look at that. You said you found his bones lying there in that room; I can’t bear that. I feel as if I ought to be able to see him through the tapestry, somehow, or that he can see us, that he’s watching us.”

  “No, Derry, Derithon, is dead,” Tobas said. “He’s been dead for centuries. You’ve mourned him long enough, even if you didn’t know he was really dead. His spirit must be long gone by now.”

  “But his bones are still there, in that room...”

  Tobas looked at the tapestry. “Yes,” he agreed. “They are, right there...” He started to point to the spot where Derithon’s skull lay, but stopped, his hand raised, as a sudden realization hit him.

  The scene in the tapestry had to match the scene in reality exactly, in every detail; this tapestry showed an empty room, while in reality Derithon’s skeleton lay in the corner, half in the room and half around the corner in the hallway.

  That was why the tapestry wouldn’t work!

  CHAPTER 24

  “This is fascinating,” Tobas said as he lay back on the velvet-covered couch in one of Karanissa’s favorite, sitting rooms. “That must be why that room doesn’t have any windows; the angle of the sunlight would have to match exactly. And a rainy day might be a real problem. These tapestries aren’t as clever as I thought.”