Half-Witch

by John Schoffstall

  “They call me Lizbet,” Lizbet said.

  “I’m Strix,” Strix said.

  “Hajimemashita! That’s Japanese.” He offered a hairy elbow to each girl. “Shall we be on our way, then? By the way, how do you two intend to lower the drawbridge?”

  Lizbet’s cheeks flushed. “I’m positive I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “But you can’t escape without crossing the drawbridge,” Fudge said. “It’s the only way past the crocodiles. You two are trying to escape, aren’t you?”

  “No!” said Lizbet quickly.

  “Never crossed my mind,” said Strix.

  “What a bitter disappointment!” Fudge exclaimed. He clutched his chest. “My new-born hopes perish upon the Tarpeian rocks! My spirit founders in the storm-wracked seas of expectations dashed. It sinks beneath the waves of despair.” He began to bawl. Tears, faintly green in color, soaked his furry cheeks.

  “Why is your spirit foundering and sinking and so on?” Lizbet asked. She dabbed his tears with her sleeve.

  “I’d hoped to come with you,” Fudge said between sobs.

  “Why can’t you just leave by yourself?” Lizbet said. “Although, I have no idea what you’re doing here in the first place. And how a goblin is able to talk sensibly.”

  “Maybe he swallowed a scholar, and the scholar is inside talking for him,” Strix said. She grabbed Fudge’s jaws in her hands, pulled them wide apart, and yelled into the wet and smelly opening, “Anyone in there?”

  “Umph! Mmmmph! Urrrk!” croaked Fudge. His arms and legs flailed.

  “Strix, stop,” Lizbet said. “I don’t think that’s it. A scholar wouldn’t say that his spirit founders in the storm-wracked seas of something-or-another. Men of learning speak concisely, without overwrought melodrama.”

  Strix released Fudge, who sat down roughly on the floor, rubbing his jaw. “No one answered anyway,” she said.

  “The sad truth is that I am a prisoner like yourselves,” Fudge said. “The Pope of Storms won’t let me depart while I am under suspicion.”

  “Suspicion of what?” Lizbet asked.

  “There have been some, um, disappearances. Missing, ah, things.”

  “This is all very vague,” Lizbet said.

  “Well, books. Or, actually, words. And they blame me. It’s not my fault. Exactly. Or rather, it’s not something I could help—”

  “Books!” Lizbet exclaimed. “Books?”

  “I am the Pope of Storms’ Master of Libraries,” Fudge said.

  Lizbet knelt down, grabbed Fudge by his furry shoulders, and stared him in the eye. “Fudge. Listen to me. I am looking for a book that belonged to the Margrave Hengest Wolftrow of Abalia. He lost it, somewhere, on this side of the Montagnes du Monde, years ago. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Oh, yes,” Fudge said, “that book is in the Great Library. I know it well.”

  “Fudge! I love you!” Lizbet threw her arms around the smelly little goblin and hugged him as hard as she could.

  “Oof!” went Fudge.

  “See?” Strix said. “You never know where passion will strike. Personally, I’d rather have intimate relations with a giant boiled crayfish, but there’s no accounting for taste.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Lizbet said, releasing Fudge. She brushed hair and goblin dander off her clothing. “Fudge, may I see it? Please? The Margrave’s book?”

  “Of course,” Fudge said. “Are you sure you two aren’t trying to escape?”

  “Actually,” Lizbet said, “I’m not sure. We could be. Just a little.”

  “I eagerly await a decisive resolution of the issue,” Fudge said. “Meanwhile, follow me.”

  He waddled out the door, Lizbet and Strix on his heels.

  Fudge led them through halls of stone ribs and struts, and up and down a dozen twisting staircases. They passed no one. Save for their footsteps, the stronghold was silent. Even the whoosh and whisper of the constant winds had subsided. Lizbet asked Fudge, “What if the Pope of Storms discovers we’ve left our room?”

  “The Pope and all his servants take repose at this hour,” Fudge said. “Winds die down at dawn and sunset, you know. It’s all due to the tiny angels who sort Democritus’s atoms of air into piles of warm ones and cool ones. That’s why winds blow. The angels stop for breakfast and supper, of course, and no work gets done at those times.”

  “I’d heard it was done by demons,” Strix said.

  In the silence, Lizbet thought her footsteps sounded as loud as drumbeats, each one announcing: “The prisoners are loose!” “I’m still worried we’ll be caught,” she said. “Strix, can you knit us into the shadows, just in case?”

  “Won’t do any good,” Fudge said. “That only works with mortals. Everyone on this side of the Montagnes can see you plain as day.”

  “So that’s why the goblins could see us,” Lizbet said, “but the sewer people couldn’t. Fudge, you know all sorts of things.”

  Fudge halted. At the end of a hallway, they stood before two high doors of woven twigs. “And here,” Fudge announced, “is the Great Library.” He threw open the doors. Lizbet and Strix drew their breath.

  Great it was. A cathedral of books, fifty feet wide, a hundred long, six stories high. Bookcases covered the floor like standing stones, and climbed the soaring walls. Bookcases made of brass rods like birdcages hung from the ceiling. Thousands of bookcases, hundreds of thousands of books.

  Lizbet walked among the stacks, straining to read the titles in the deepening twilight. Each book had a name on it: Jorge, Louisa, Sven, Chaim, Georgette, Archibald. Some books had titles written in the inscrutable characters of Araby or Siam. Lizbet picked a book from the shelves at random, a volume in an elegant red leather binding, titled Johan. She opened it. No title page, no table of contents, no first chapter . . . She riffed through the pages. Every one was blank.

  Lizbet replaced the volume and picked another, this one with two foreign characters on the spine. It was also filled with blank pages from end to end. A book titled Ysabet was likewise empty. So were Vladimir, and Sylvie, and Kemal.

  “Fudge . . . ,” Lizbet said.

  Fudge was halfway across the library floor. By dint of vigorous jumping, and bouncing like a ball on his round belly, he propelled himself high enough to grab a book from an upper shelf. He waddled back to Lizbet, eagerly holding up the book for her to take. It was bound in black silk, its cover stamped in gold leaf with a design of crossed cannon and furled flags. Its spine read Hengest Wolftrow.

  Lizbet stretched forth her hand to receive it coldly and reluctantly. She should have felt joy, and hope: at last she had found the object of her desire. Her mission was half-accomplished. Her goal was within sight.

  Instead, Lizbet was filled with foreboding. She took the book from Fudge and opened it.

  As she had feared, every page was blank.

  “This is it?” she said doubtfully. “Might there be another book? A book of magic, or something of the sort?”

  Fudge shook his head. “Nope, none other. One book for each person.”

  “But why are they all blank, Fudge?”

  Fudge scratched his belly with one broken, yellow fingernail. He stared upward. “Well, they might not all be blank. Maybe I haven’t investigated every last one, in fact . . .” He snuffled at the air with his wet rumpled wet nose, like a truffle pig scenting out a truffle. “In fact, I think I can smell some words right now, some exciting, savory, magical words.” His tongue darted about his lips, wetting them. “There might be a book I missed. Where could it be?” His voice was suddenly happy and eager.

  Lizbet looked around at the myriad of bookcases. She sniffed the air. What was Fudge talking about? Something poked at her leg. She looked down. Fudge was sticking his wet goblin snout into the pocket of her skirt.

  Lizbet shrank b
ack. “What you doing? Stop that!”

  “It’s a book!” Fudge said. “A book with words in it. I can smell the words. Sumptuous, heady, delicious words! You have a book on your person. Please, please, Lizbet, let me sniff—I mean, let me see it. I love words, surely I do.”

  “Fudge, I don’t have a book,” Lizbet said.

  “You do, you do, I can smell it, ooooo, it smells delicious, I can smell it in your pocket, please, Lizbet, please!”

  Fudge was slobbering in his eagerness. Lizbet said, “Look, Fudge, there’s nothing in my pocket. I’ll show you.” She stuck her hand in her pocket, intending to turn the pocket inside out, to prove it was empty. But her hand touched papers. She pulled them out.

  It was the pages of her father’s grimoire that she had torn out and stuck in her pocket the day she fled from the marshals of the Magisters of Children. She had forgotten she still had them.

  Seeing them, Fudge was in a frenzy. He leaped up and down, he pawed at her, his wet snout went in circles. “Please let me taste them,” he cried. “Please, just a little, just a little taste, please, please, please!”

  “Strix?” Lizbet said.

  Strix shrugged. “Do what you like. I don’t know what to make of this.”

  Lizbet took the spell about how to turn dust motes into gnats and handed it to Fudge. She stuck the others back in her pocket.

  Fudge grasped the piece of paper with reverence. “Thank you, thank you, kind child,” he mumbled. He held the spell to his snout and inhaled from it. Deeply, more deeply. His eyelids fluttered. Fudge was in ecstasy. The paper vibrated madly. Harder and harder Fudge panted, in and out, his belly and chest working.

  As Lizbet watched, something black peeled off the paper and shot into Fudge’s nostril. And again, and again. A steady stream of tiny black curlicues, flying off the paper, into Fudge’s nose. Lizbet realized they were letters, and words. When they finally stopped, Fudge drew a deep sigh of satisfaction and collapsed to the floor, his eyes half-closed. Lizbet took the paper from his limp hand. It was blank.

  Chapter 18

  “Well,” Strix said, “now we know what happened to all the books.”

  “And why Fudge is under suspicion,” Lizbet said. “And rightfully so.”

  “And why a goblin is able to speak sensibly.”

  Lizbet hadn’t gotten that far in her thinking. “Why?”

  “Fudge must have absorbed all the stuff in the books he’s inhaled,” Strix said. “How to talk like people. Things about winds and weather. Terrible purple prose.” She tickled Fudge’s belly with her toe. Fudge sighed happily and fell over on his side.

  Lizbet looked around. “But what was in all the books?” she said. “Why do they all have only a person’s name as their title? Were they all diaries? Or novels? What an odd sort of library. If it were my library, I’d have some histories, some elevating biographies of individuals of virtue and piety, books of self-improvement, the works of Homer, Horace, and Virgil—”

  “Ovid, Juvenal, and Sappho,” Strix suggested.

  “No, because they are indecent. Having a library of nothing but novels seems terribly frivolous, even for a witch lord. Could they be biographies? But why would the Margrave care about losing a biography? Father seemed to think it was a book of magic, or something.”

  Strix nudged Fudge with her toe. “Fudge! Snack’s over. Sit up. Time for some answers.”

  Fudge opened his eyes, rolled over, and trundled himself to his feet. “Thank you, Lizbet! That was delectable.” His nose edged toward her skirt pocket. “I can smell a little more in there too . . .”

  Strix boxed him on the snout. “Not now. Maybe later.”

  “Hunger for knowledge is admirable,” Lizbet said, “but why can’t you just read books like everyone else?”

  “Fudge,” Strix said, “what are all these books about? What was in them? Before you snorted them up your nose?”

  “Oh, they were all sorts of people,” Fudge said. “Explorers and adventurers, mostly, because they’re the ones who cross the Montagnes and get captured by the Pope of Storms. One man from Lombardy came in a lighter-than-air ship. He was a natural philosopher. Some were churchmen, seeking heathens to proselytize. Others were mere brutes, looking for gold, or glory.”

  “You mean these were biographies, then?” Lizbet said, still puzzled. “Or fiction?”

  “Oh, no, not fiction, and not just stories,” Fudge said. “These were real people.”

  Silence.

  “‘Real people’?” Lizbet said at last.

  Fudge nodded. “They were written there by the Pope of Storms himself.”

  “You can’t write a ‘real person’ in a book,” Lizbet said. “Can you?”

  “If you’re the Pope of Storms, you can,” Fudge said. “Do you know that a high wind can blow your soul right out of your body?”

  “Yes,” Lizbet said. “It almost happened to me.”

  “That’s what the Pope of Storms does. Mortals who cross the Montagnes fall into his hands. His winds blow and blow, harder and harder, until a person’s soul rips loose from his flesh. The Pope of Storms catches it, squeezes it into his fountain pen, and writes it out into a book.”

  “And then Fudge snorts it off the page,” Strix said.

  “I don’t think he’s supposed to,” Lizbet said.

  “You inhaled the Margrave Hengest Wolftrow?” Strix said.

  Fudge looked guilty. “He was unusually tasty. A powerful personality. A paradox of a man. Ferocious in war, ferocious in love, both egoistic and self-sacrificing. A brilliant mind, driven by the crudest of desires. Gentle and ruthless at the same time.”

  “Like a witch?” Lizbet said.

  “Should I be pleased or insulted by that?” Strix said. “Pleased, I think. Except for the ‘self-sacrificing’ part.”

  “Not really like a witch,” Fudge said. “Witches are mercurial creatures, of capricious and unpredictable impulse. Hengest Wolftrow doesn’t have a shred of whimsy in him. All business, that one. No witch will ever conquer the world. She’ll get halfway prepared to do it, then suddenly develop an interest in making marmalade out of porcupines, and spend a century honing her skills, until she makes the best darned porcupine marmalade in the universe. Meanwhile, the world rolls on, unconquered as before. Wolftrow, though . . .” He looked wistful. “Wolftrow might have done it. General Wolftrow is a man of indomitable will.”

  “‘Was’ a man of indomitable will,” Lizbet said. She remembered the hollow man of shadows in his palace in Abalia, compulsively collecting books, but never finding the one book he truly needed. “You needn’t speak of him in the present tense after you’ve snuffled him up your nose. He might as well be dead.”

  “But he’s not dead,” Fudge said, tapping his round belly with a fingernail. “He’s right here.”

  Lizbet crossed her arms. “Are you sure?”

  “I contain multitudes,” Fudge said. “Adventurers and rapscallions, bluestockings and churchmen, their boyhoods and girlhoods, their dreams, their sins, and what they ate for breakfast on the twenty-third of June.”

  Lizbet thought about this. An idea began to take form. “Fudge,” Lizbet said, “If I gave you pen and ink, could you write out Margrave Hengest Wolftrow’s book, as it was before?”

  “Of course!” Fudge said. He looked sad. “Although I’d probably sniff it up again, as fast as I wrote it down. I can’t help myself! Everyone is so delicious. Oh, would that I were tied to the mast, like wily Odysseus, to protect me from my own unquenchable desires!”

  “Suppose we just tied your nose to a mast, and left your hand free to write?” Strix said. “Come to think of it, suppose we trussed up all of you and presented you as a prisoner to the Pope of Storms, with the story of your guilt? He’d be delighted that we’d caught the person who made his library vanish. In return, maybe he’d forgive us
for the stuff we did at the goblin town and let Lizbet go. I like that idea.”

  “Oh no!” Fudge cried. “Who knows what the Pope of Storms would do to me for my crimes! Have mercy!”

  “You’ll have to speak to Lizbet about that,” Strix said coldly. “I am a witch! ‘Mercy’ is not a word I know.”

  “Suppose we don’t report you to the Pope of Storms,” Lizbet said, “and in return, you help us escape, and come back with us to Abalia? I need to return the Margrave’s book. Now we have both the book and its contents. That is, you. Maybe that will be good enough.”

  But once they had escaped from the Pope of Storms, what was to prevent Fudge from just wandering off?

  “Fudge, you’re all out of books,” Lizbet said. “You’ve inhaled all the words in all the books in this library. But I know where there’s a lot more. A huge library of books. A palace jam-packed with tens of thousands of books from all over the world.”

  “That would be heaven!” Fudge exclaimed. “Where, oh, tell me where!”

  “It’s in Abalia. It belongs to the Margrave. I’ll bet he’d let you sniff up a book or two from his library if you wrote his soul back into his book for him.”

  “He might even tie you to a mast while you did it,” Strix said. “Or maybe a chair.”

  “Do you think?” Fudge hopped up and down in eagerness. His wet snout wiggled back and forth. “Oh, let me come to Abalia with you! Please, please, please!”

  “Good work,” Strix said to Lizbet.

  “But first,” Lizbet said, “we have to escape.”

  “Fudge,” Strix said, “there’s no way to lower the drawbridge?”

  The little goblin shook his head dolefully. “I’d hoped you knew how. It won’t obey me. It only obeys the commands of Griffon or Cupido. They will not help us. They were made by the Pope of Storms, and their souls are in thrall to him.”

  The library was entirely dark by now. Through the fretwork walls of the stronghold, the moon could be glimpsed as it rose over the eastern horizon. A breeze blew through the library stacks.