Sarah’s glare could have initiated the next Ice Age.
“I’m NOT a moron. This is my purse. I know damn well it’s not in there. Fine. Here. Don’t believe me??”
Sarah pulled the pack over to her, yanked out her purse, and marched over to Steve. Without moving her eyes from his, she emptied the contents of her purse onto the crate. With a scowl, she reached down to pick up the small change purse.
Even in the diminishing light, Steve could tell that the jorii or the gold grif were not among the contents of the purse. He watched as Sarah started to unzip the small purse when she hefted the purse in her hand, squeezed lightly, and with a small scream, dropped it.
“What’s the matter?” Anger aside, Steve was beside her in a flash. “Did something hurt you?”
“No! It’s there!! I felt it in the purse!” Sarah bent down and retrieved the small pouch. “See? See the bulge? It’s in there!”
She unzipped the purse and held it upside-down over her hand. Sure enough the grif, crystal disc, and the jorii all landed softly in her hand.
“What the hell? There’s no way that guy could have missed that. I watched him go through it, too.”
Sarah was poking and prodding at her change purse. It just wasn’t big enough to hide something that size. Was there a flap or something that might have snagged it and prevented it from falling the first time? She poked several fingers in and felt around. Nope, the coin purse was of a simple design. No inside pockets, just the main zipper to prevent anything from escaping.
Steve was perplexed, and whenever he was presented with a problem that he couldn’t figure out, he would start mumbling to himself.
“Maybe since it’s ours, only we can see it. Maybe that’s how possessions work here.”
Sarah snorted. “If that was true, then Kornal and Nilhanu wouldn’t have been able to see it.”
“Good point. Okay, maybe jorii can only be used, and therefore seen, by people with a good heart.”
“Unlikely, but if that was the case, what about the coin? It’s their currency. He should have been able to see that.”
Steve nodded. “Good point.” He started to pace, another indicator that some serious synaptic misfiring was taking place. “What about protective magic? Maybe there is security-type magic that prevents these things from being stolen.”
“That knew we were about to be robbed? I don’t think so. He clearly said he wanted our money. Seemed very surprised when we didn’t have any.”
“Another good point. Hmmm.”
Sarah watched as Steve continued to pace. She took her husband’s hand as he passed her the next time, pulling him to a stop. “Hon, umm, what if it was us?”
Steve paused in mid-mumble to look at his wife. “Huh?”
“What if it was us? What if we did something to it?”
“Us? Do magic? Yeah, right. Sweetie, we aren’t from around here. I don’t think it’s us.”
“Kornal said that he had never met a human without some type of power.”
“He also said that they didn’t get that many visitors.”
Sarah smiled. “Well played, dear.”
He grinned back at her. “Wouldn’t that be something, though? Having an ability to protect your valuables, without you even knowing we were doing it? If we could market that then our financial difficulties would be over.”
“I think we do need to acknowledge, though, that something did happen to the jorii.”
Steve thought a moment and then smacked his hand on his forehead.
“I’ve got it! What do you want to bet that that jorii thing, being magic, and strong magic at that, has some sort of built-in protection? And since it does, it probably was able to mask the disc and coin as well. Huh? Huh??” He playfully poked his wife in the ribs. “What do you think?”
Sarah considered. That scenario was actually plausible.
“I obviously don’t know for certain if that’s what happened, but I like that idea. A lot. If it can protect itself, then there has to be a way that we can use this thing to get us out of this predicament.”
Steve hefted the jorii in his palm. “Okay, Mr. Marble, do your thing.” He held the jorii up to the closed trapdoor. Nothing happened. He gestured wildly, swinging his arms back and forth across the trapdoor. Nothing.
“Maybe you need to be closer to it,” Sarah suggested. “The door, I mean.”
“Okay, I’ll buy that. Let’s see. I can use some of this stuff to get closer.”
He dragged the moldy bales of straw directly under the door and placed several crates on it. Gently, ever so gently, he stood up on the crate and repeated his movements from before. The door remained fastened, and the jorii was still unchanged in his palm.
Since he was teetering precariously on his makeshift podium, he climbed down and glared at the door. Clenching the jorii tightly in his fist, he raised his arm and asked the door to open.
“Open sesame!”
Sarah burst out laughing.
“Open sesame? You have got to be kidding! Did you really think that would work?”
“Hey, it was worth a shot,” Steve grumbled. Another glare at the door. “Abracadabra! Hocus Pocus!”
“I have an idea.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Maybe it needs a spell.”
“A spell? As in witches and wizards?”
Sarah held up her hands. “Hey, I’m just giving ideas here.”
Steve chuckled to himself. A spell. Great. This ought to be a hoot. That means he needed to come up with some type of rhyme, right? Let’s see. What could he use?
He took a breath and faced the door. With the jorii held tightly in his right hand he intoned:
As visitors to this land, we wish to leave
We don’t know what could be in store
So using the power of this jorii,
Blow away that God Damn Door!
The door was unimpressed. It was still locked, with nothing to even indicate that they were on the right track.
“I’m impressed!” Sarah gave him a high-five. “I thought you weren’t good at rhyming!”
“I’m not. That just came to me. Besides, what are you complimenting me for? It didn’t work. Stupid thing is still closed.”
“Okay, let me try for a while.”
Steve handed her the jorii. “It’s all yours. I hope you have better luck.”
“Maybe it has a mental trigger.” Sarah concentrated on the spherical object in her hand, willing something to happen. Anything. No luck. She drew a picture of a door in her head that led to the outside world and tried to invoke the jorii into making that a reality.
Steve suddenly grabbed her hand. “Umm, I think I know what the problem is here.”
“You do? What is it?”
“I just remembered what Nilhanu said about that thing. Remember? She said that a jorii enhances your jhorun to the point of being on the same level as the wizards. She didn’t say that it created an ability, only that it enhanced what you already have. So if we don’t have magic to begin with, how can it enhance what doesn’t exist?”
Chalk one up to her husband. Now that he had brought it up she did remember Nilhanu mentioning the fact that a jorii only enhances the magic inside you. Well, so much for this thing helping them esca- wait. Then what had happened to the jorii? How did it hide itself from the would-be thief? Was it something that one of them did? Keeping this revelation to herself for the time being, she decided to practice on the marble in silence.
Marble. Sarah chuckled to herself. He has me doing it now. It’s a jorii.
Sarah worked on the jorii well into the night. While Steve slept soundly (how does he do it??) next to her on the floor, she tried everything she could think of to activate her jhorun. Did she really have some magical ability lying dormant inside her? Could she walk through walls here if she tried hard enough?
She concentrated so hard, for so long, that her only accomplishment was to give herself a pounding headache. Admittin
g defeat, she snuggled next to her snoring husband. Being both mentally and physically exhausted, she dropped instantly off to sleep.
She was uncertain how long she slept, but at least she did sleep a few hours. Of that, she was certain. However, she could never sleep once the sun started to shine. She shifted her back a little. Why did her back hurt so much? Did she forget to turn down her Sleep Number bed? Why was there debris on the bed? Did the cats drag something up? Since her left arm felt pinned, she used her right arm to explore her surroundings. Damned if that didn’t feel just like straw.
Her memory of last night came rushing back to her. She groaned. Damn. Not a dream. They were prisoners in some damn cellar with no way out.
The sun! Why was it so bright in here?? Sarah’s eyes snapped open. Sunlight was streaming down from above. The trapdoor was open!
Sarah shook Steve awake. “Honey! Wake up! The door is open! We have to get out of here! The mugger might have come back early!”
“Wha’? Timezit?” Steve rubbed a hand over his face and tried to blink his eyes. They refused to open. “Did the alarm not go off? Damn thing.” He started fumbling for the remote to the TV. In their household television, not coffee, woke them up.
Any other day Sarah might have found this amusing, but not now. She had to get him to wake up. Fast. She hadn’t heard any movement from upstairs, yet, and she didn’t want to take any chances.
“I need you to wake up! The door is open! I swear, if you’re not awake in two seconds you’re gonna get the world’s largest zerbert!!”
“I’m up, I’m up. What’s going on?” Steve used both hands to rub his eyes.
“Look! The door is open!”
He craned his head to look up. Sure enough, the trapdoor was open. In fact, he blinked a few times, the door was gone!
“What happened? When did that disappear?”
“Disappear?”
“That door isn’t open, it’s gone!”
Sarah peered at the opening. No door. She had assumed the door was open, leaning against the wall above, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, by squinting her eyes she could see that the locking bar was still protruding over the sides, securing the nonexistent door in place.
Steve yawned, stretched, and stood up. So what had happened to the door? Maybe one of the attempts to invoke the jorii actually worked! But what? There’s no way his “hocus pocus” attempts could have worked. So what else did they try? The arm gesturing, the scowling, the mental cursing. Hah! The spell! That cheesy rhyme he came up with. That had to be it!
“I think my spell must have worked! It obviously took a bit longer to kick in. That has to be it!”
Sarah was momentarily confused. “You cast a spell? You don’t even know how to cast a spell. Oh, you mean the rhyme you made for the jorii?” She thought a moment. “Usually spells are instantaneous. I’ve never heard of a spell that had a delayed reaction.”
“You’re basing this on, what, Charmed?”
“Don’t be an ass. I clearly don’t know for sure, but all references we’ve ever seen have always led us to believe that when a spell was cast, either it worked or it didn’t. No gray area there.”
Sarah glanced up and listened intently. “I don’t hear him up there. No noise. Let’s get out of here. We’ll try and figure out what happened later. I just want to go.”
“Agreed.” He looked at his rickety platform. “How do you want to do this? I can go up first then pull you up, or I can give you a boost and then come up afterwards?”
“Why don’t you give me a boost up? I’d rather have you helping me up than yanking my arms out of their sockets.”
With Steve’s help, she climbed up onto the platform of wooden crates and bales of straw. If she stretched way up on her tippy-toes, she could just reach the lip of the hole. If only she was a few more inches taller, she thought angrily.
Steve jumped up on the bales of straw. “I don’t dare join you up on the crates. I don’t think they’d hold both of us.” He interlocked his fingers and held them out to his wife. “Put your foot here and get ready.”
Sarah took a deep breath and steadied herself. She put her right foot into the basket Steve’s hands had formed and braced herself. “Ready!”
Steve lifted, propelling Sarah straight up about four feet. It was more than enough to get leverage to brace herself and look around.
“Watch out for that bar!” Steve cautioned. The locking bar was still extended, presenting an unwelcome obstacle.
“Can you brace me for another couple of seconds?” Sarah asked.
“Sure. What’re you doing?”
With Steve bracing her legs, she risked moving her right hand over to push the bar back out of the way.
“Good one!” Steve was grinning. “That would have left a mark, no doubt about it.”
With Steve’s help from below, and straining every muscle in her body, Sarah was able to pull herself up out of the cellar.
“You okay?” Steve called from below.
“Yeah, just trying to catch my breath.”
“Here, take this!” Steve hoisted the pack up into the opening. Sarah took it and placed it next to her.
From below, Steve clambered onto the top of the wooden crates. Being a full ten inches taller than Sarah, he was easily able to grab the edge of the opening. However, upper-body strength was not one of his strong suits. With arms shaking more than saplings swaying in a hurricane, Steve finally pulled himself out of the cellar to lie next to Sarah.
“I swear, when we finally do make it home, I’m joining a damn gym.”
Sarah laughed and sat up. “C’mon, let’s get going. I want to get out of this place.”
They both scrambled to their feet and made for the door. The sun was shining brightly outside, only a few wispy clouds were visible just above the western horizon. Now that they were not prisoners, they took a little time to look around.
The cottage was sitting in a small clearing with the forest surrounding them on all sides. A small fire pit had been dug about ten feet from the house. Used regularly, from the looks of the refuse scattered about. Several recent kills were still hanging upside down from a branch from the closest tree. Looks like large squirrels, Steve thought.
“We came from that direction, right?” He pointed to the northwest. A tiny, overgrown footpath ambled off in that general direction. “Do we head off that way and risk running into that guy on his way back? Or should we head in a different direction altogether?”
“Well, as much as I don’t want to take the same path as that other guy did, I really don’t want to go wandering through the forest blindly. It took us several hours to get from where we were captured to get here, and we’re still ahead of when he told us he’d be back. I say we take this same path back and hope we can find the enchanted road.”
“I’ll go along with that. At any rate, we need to hurry and we need to be quiet. If for some reason he decides to come back early, I don’t want him catching us off guard.”
Steve opened the pack, took out several strips of dried meat, and handed one to Sarah. He bit off nearly half of the strip, hoisted the pack back onto his shoulder, grabbed Sarah’s hand, and took off down the path at a healthy clip. It wasn’t until they were well away from that run-down cottage that both of them were able to relax.
“I am SO glad to be out of that house!” Sarah bit off a piece of her meat. “I was starting to have serious doubts that we were not going to find a way out of that mess.”
Steve had finally slowed their pace. A little. He wanted to put as much distance as possible between the house and themselves. Did Sarah just say something? She hated it when he didn’t pay attention. Something about doubts and messes. Doubts about getting out of the mess they were in? Well, Steve thought, I have a fifty-fifty shot at this.
“Yeah, me too. I’m so glad we’re out of there.” He waited, watching Sarah for the imminent danger signs.
“So what do you think happened in there? Where’d the
trapdoor go to?”
Oh, thank God. Got it right for once.
“I still think that something we did, whether intentionally or unintentionally, made that door go away.”
“Okay, but what?”
Steve shook his head. “I wish I knew. ‘Cause whatever we apparently did, I’d like to learn how to do it again. That will definitely come in handy.”
“I’m impressed! This coming from someone who had difficulty believing in magic yesterday. What convinced you?”
“Well, think about it, babe.” Steve counted off on his fingers. “First, the jorii, the crystal disc, and the coin that were in your purse up and vanished when the thief wanted to steal it. Second, all three items were back safely in your purse when you checked. And thirdly, that trapdoor flat-out disappeared. I think we would have heard someone remove it in the middle of the night.”
“I was thinking that, too. I think one of our jhoruns manifested itself last night. I just don’t know if it was yours or mine.”
“Okay, let’s find out. I tried using the jorii for a little bit. You took it so that you could try. I fell asleep. Honestly now, how long did you work on it?”
“Ummm, well, most the night if you want to know.”
Steve stared at his wife in shock. “All night? You were up for practically the entire night trying to get that door open?”
Sarah grinned guiltily. “I really thought I could do it.”
Steve had stopped walking and was holding his wife by the shoulders.
“Then it has to be you! You did something to that door. You made it go away. What did you do?”
“Clearly, if I knew that, then we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”
“The jorii disappeared from your purse. The door vanished as well.”
“But the jorii came back! You’re telling me that I’m responsible for making the jorii disappear so it wouldn’t be discovered, then reappear when the coast is clear? Not to mention making that trapdoor completely disappear?”
Steve snapped his fingers. “I got it. It’s triggered by fear, or maybe by some intense emotions. Has to be. That’s the only common denominator I can think of in the two situations we’ve seen it work.”
Bakkian Chronicles, Book I - The Prophecy Page 8