Aquamancer (mancer series Book 2)

by Don Callander

  “Nor their intelligence, if those I’ve met are any measure,” agreed the Apprentice. “Thank you, Magister. I feel much more confident, having you here to advise me. You will have to be careful of what you do, however, or it may hamper my Douglas’s efforts to achieve his Mastery.”

  “I shall keep that in mind,” said Wong, nodding his understanding.

  “I’m not particularly worried about Douglas’s handling of this problem,” said Pargeot, expansively, “especially with Mistress Myrn and myself to assist.”

  Featherstone arrived to ask Myrn to address the town meeting, which had convened outside their city hall, the ruin at the top of the hill.

  “Ten good and true men and women have agreed to serve as interim town council,” he explained, proudly. “There’s a new spirit in Pfantas, already. A week ago, none would even have spoken to me about such a move!”

  “I’ll be happy to consult with them,” said Myrn. “Master Wong Tscha San, will you add your wisdom to an Apprentice’s advice? And, Featherstone, perhaps you’d better hear what young Willow just told me of the approaching Witchservers.”

  Myrn and Wong went off, talking earnestly with Featherstone, while Pargeot and Caspar went to the town’s inn to arrange accommodation for the night. Pargeot asked a boy who had followed them to retrieve their kits from across the burn. The lad rushed off, eager to oblige.

  “It seems a small thing,” Pargeot said with an apologetic laugh, “but as it happens, I am now the only man in Pfantas who badly needs a shave!”

  When they were settled at the inn, Pargeot and Caspar sat down to await the return of Myrn and the Choinese Wizard. They were approached by a messenger from the youth Willow, who sent news of the Witchserver band.

  “The scum have stopped three hours’ march away. Camped for the night,” the scout reported. “We’ll watch them still, but it seems they’ll not enter the town until tomorrow sometime.”

  “Hmmmm!” said Pargeot. “I’m a fifth wheel here at the moment. Perhaps I’ll return with this man to help his people on their watch.”

  “A good idea,” agreed Caspar, who understood the impatience of youth, even when that youth was a full-ranked Seacaptain. “I’ll stay and tell the others.”

  Willow’s messenger looked skeptical until he noticed Pargeot’s heavy cutlass and wicked-looking sailor’s dirk.

  “Come and welcome, sir,” he said. “We might need your help, if they get an idea to move in dark of night, after all.”

  Myrn and the Choinese Sage came to the inn after dark, tired and hungry.

  “Good for him!” Myrn sighed when she learned of Pargeot’s departure. “He’s been able to give only small help so far, and I feel sorry for him. Such matters as these are outside his experience.”

  “A good man, however,” noted Caspar. “He has the reputation of being an excellent Seacaptain with a cool head in emergencies.”

  “The trouble is, we haven’t had any real emergency, yet,” said Myrn. “I’m afraid he believes he owes me some sort of knightly service.”

  “There is more to it than that,” put in Wong, softly.

  “Yes, I’m aware of his feelings toward me. He’s hopelessly infatuated, I fear. Does it give him some sort of pleasure to beat his head against my devotion to Douglas, and to my profession?”

  “He will grow out of it,” promised the Sage, “if it is truly just an infatuation.”

  “I may have a stern word with him,” said Caspar. “I know his father and served under his grandfather as well. Perhaps he’ll listen to me.”

  “And what would you tell him? To forsake the lady’s presence, forever and forever?” asked Wong, shaking his white head. “No, my good friend! Such opposition, however well intended and sensible, would only serve to harden his resolve to suffer in a hopeless cause.”

  “A misty-minded romantic!” snorted Caspar. Then he sighed. “Well and well-a-day! I was that way meself once.

  Being at Sea gave young Caspar Marlin a dose of common sense and reality that’s cured him of such foolishness, I guess.”

  “It’s not too late,” chuckled Wong, laying a sympathetic hand on his friend’s arm. “Love has a way of striking when least expected—even the most mature of us.”

  “Personally, I think we should be planning about tomorrow. It’s full night, already,” said Caspar. “How’s the table in this inn?”

  When they had dined—quite well, as it turned out—they retired to the inn’s common room and after three hours of discussion around the coal grate they all went off to their beds.

  There had been no further word from the scouts or Pargeot.

  ****

  Douglas and the Sea Otter had spent the whole of that day clambering about on the rugged mountainside, taking as many close looks at Coventown and its castle as the barren rock landscape allowed. They returned to their cave at dark, tired but little satisfied with their small gains in information.

  “Cribblon is well and unhurt, as yet. He’s uncomfortable, cold, and wet,” declared Douglas after studying the embers of the fire for a while. “He’s in a rock cavern beneath the castle. A dungeon, rather. I feel locked doors, heavy chains, and bars. But at least until this moment Emaldar hasn’t harmed him. Maybe...”

  “She’s softening him up for later?” yawned Marbleheart. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound flippant. Do you foresee any action in the next four hours or so, Wizard?”

  “No, none. Even Emaldar is asleep just now.”

  “Then I’ll bathe my poor, rock-ravaged paw pads in the stream for a while, then get some sleep.”

  “I’ll be before you,” said Douglas, yawning in turn. “However, I’ll sleep with an ear to the ground, in case the Witch takes it into her head to question Cribblon under cover of night.”

  He awoke to listen with Wizard-sharp senses several times during the chill night but it was not until false dawn that he sensed a commotion in the castle in the deep canyon.

  “Something’s afoot,” he said to himself and, so as not to disturb the sleeping Otter, crept silently from the cave and made his way to the top of the ridge, where he might have line-of-sight contact with Emaldar’s stronghold.

  “We’ve captured another man who says he’s Brightglade!” reported the breathless Warlock officer to Emaldar. He’d ridden a rawboned nightmare since before midnight to bring the news. “He came to us out of the night, demanding that we bring him to you, Your Magnificence!”

  “Describe this man who claims to be Douglas the Fire Wizard,” demanded Emaldar, pulling her thin dressing gown closer about her.

  “My Queen, he is not yet in his middle years...I’d say, maybe twenty and eight or so. He carries himself easily and with grave authority. He is sandy of hair and blue of eye. He stands just under six feet tall.”

  “That could be a third of all Men in World,” snapped the Witch Queen. “Now, why should he say he is Douglas Brightglade, in the circumstances, if he is not? In which case...where is this newly taken prisoner now?”

  “My men bring him to you as fast as they can, Most Foul, Most Wise Witch. They will be here later today.”

  Emaldar sent her breathless and painfully saddle-sore minion away and hurriedly dressed, not neglecting to arm herself with certain Witches’ amulets and dire charms. She went down by secret, dim, and winding stairways, below the cellars of her castle to the deepest and wettest of her dungeons.

  “Waken the prisoner!” she barked at Cribblon’s guards. They hastened to do her bidding, cruelly yanking on his chains to disturb the first slumber Cribblon had gained in more than three days.

  “Waken, lowest of the low!” She herself prodded him with a sharp heel until he groaned in his misery and turned his head to look up at her, eyes still muzzy with exhaustion.

  “Who in the name of Lady Beelzebub herself are you, really?” she asked at once.

  “Why ... why ... you said I was Douglas Brightglade,” answered the other.

  Witches school themselves in reading th
e outer signs of men’s inner thoughts, of course. A look of surprised concern had crossed Cribblon’s sleep-loosened face for just a second. It told her the truth more surely than any words he might utter.

  “No, you’re not Brightglade!” she shrilled at the top of her voice. “The real Brightglade has now been captured. You’re only a stinking flunky of some sort, even if you do know a smidgen of magic. He’s being brought to me, even now. And you, my lad, are in deep, deep trouble!”

  She turned abruptly and stalked off down the wet dungeon corridor almost at a run, forgetting, in her anger, to order the prisoner slain at once, as she had intended.

  Cribblon was grateful for small blessings.

  “Oh my, Douglas!” he murmured almost silently in the blackness of his cell, “I trust you know just what you’re doing. What was that spell for rusting chains? I almost had it when I fell asleep.”

  Emaldar, returning to her quarters, sent for the weary Warlock officer and ordered him to ride back at once to his Witchserver constables. They were to keep their prisoner very carefully and rush him to Coven Castle as fast as possible, stopping neither to rest nor eat on the road.

  “Not too gently, this time,” she snapped at him. “I’m tired of these people playing games with me! When he gets here, it’s the Chamber of Pain for him, at once! What are you standing around for, vile varlet! Be off with you at once. Fetch me my enemy!”

  On his ridgetop Douglas couldn’t hear or see these events, but he sensed them in ways learned from Flarman after long, hard study and practice. Emaldar now knew her first prisoner was not Douglas Brightglade. Someone else, unknown, had been taken by the Witchservers.

  “Who can this one be, I wonder?”

  He slid down the gravelly grade to the hidden cave mouth. “Certainly not Flarman. I would be able to sense his nearness. I’ve given him no reason to come to my aid, and he knows I must do this on my own.”

  “What’ll we do?” asked Marbleheart when Douglas awakened him and told him of his discoveries.

  “Emaldar’s attention is diverted from Cribblon to this new captive,” said the Journeyman. “We’ve got to get inside the castle and get Cribblon out, first of all. We’ll rescue the other when he gets here. Only then can I confront Emaldar, when she has no hostage to hold against me.”

  He sat staring into the fire, reading what the flames had to say.

  “Could it be...” He hesitated, examining this new intuition again. “Could it be Myrn? I sense her presence at a distance and in that direction, too.”

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” said Marbleheart calmly. “She would seem, from all you’ve said, the kind to come to your side in trouble.”

  “Not too hard to believe she would come after me,” agreed Douglas. “And I can believe she would allow herself to be captured, just to reach Coven, as Cribblon did, intentionally or otherwise.”

  He continued to gaze into the embers and the Otter watched in silence.

  “It can’t make any difference in our plans. If we go off to rescue this new prisoner, whoever he or she is, the Witch will be warned of us, making it extremely difficult to rescue Cribblon.”

  “Nice lady, that!” snorted the Otter. He rolled over on his back and stuck his short legs in the air. “Are we going to go or not?”

  “Not, although it galls me to say stay put.” Douglas sighed, reaching for his blanket. “Try to get some more sleep. It’s still too dark and the castle people are astir now with the bringing of news. While Emaldar’s distracted, perhaps I could use a spell of invisibility...”

  He pondered and prepared himself while the Otter slept again, quite soundly. Eventually Douglas, too, rolled over to face away from the ember’s glow and willed himself go to sleep.

  He dreamed of Myrn in a rocking manure cart, chained and unable to stand, on the rough pinelands path, rolling toward Coventown.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Road to Coventown

  Willow, as dirty and disheveled as Pfantas itself had been two days earlier, slipped into town by the postern gate in the smallest hours of morning. He made his way up scrubbed-clean streets and past levels so spotless and neat he hardly recognized them.

  He supplemented loud pounding on the inn door with a handful of gravel thrown against the innkeeper’s bedroom shutters, finally rousing the sleeping host.

  “I just can’t wake the lady,” the innkeeper sputtered indignantly when he at last opened the door to admit the rebel. “Can’t it wait ‘til morning?”

  “It’s urgent, man! Urgent!” Willow shouted. “The Lady Wizard knows me! She awaits my news.”

  Grumbling testily but prodded on by the ragamuffin, the innkeeper at last climbed the stairs and rapped gently on Myrn’s door.

  “Here, old gaffer!” hissed Willow in exasperation, pushing the innkeeper aside. He beat so loud a tattoo on the door panel it made the host wince in pain.

  “You just don’t rouse important guests in such a manner!”

  He remembered that much from the good old days, when his inn was always full of rich and cultured patrons.

  Myrn opened her door, greeted the boy and the man sleepily, and said she’d be right down. The messenger and innkeeper retreated to the public room, where they sat glaring at each other in hostile silence from opposite settles before the banked fire.

  Five minutes later the Apprentice Aquamancer appeared, looking fresh, rested, and anxious.

  “Good morning, innkeeper! What is it, Willow? Good news or bad?”

  “I... I... I’m not sure, Mistress. That there Seacaptain...”

  “Pargeot? Yes?”

  “He’s went and turned hisself over to the Witchservers!”

  Myrn gasped, “I don’t understand...”

  “And he said to run fast and tell you what he done,” continued the lad. “So, I did. He said he’d pretend to be the other Wizard, the one you seek, and leave a trail you can follow when they hauled him off to Coventown, too!”

  “He didn’t! Well! You did wonderfully well, Willow,” Myrn assured him as understanding dawned. She sent the innkeeper to wake the older Seacaptain and the Choinese gentleman, too, at once.

  “Our Pargeot is bound and determined to be a tragic hero as in the old romances,” Myrn told them when they came down. “When he was shown the Witchserver’s camp, he simply walked up to them and told them he was Douglas Brightglade!”

  “I assume,” said Wong, “that our young Seacaptain hopes the enemy will dash off to their Witch mistress with him.”

  “That’s as how I sees it,” agreed Caspar, nodding vigorously.

  “He says we should follow him, as Douglas followed Cribblon’s captives. Well, it may be a quick way to find the Witch without taking the time to untangle that hex,” Myrn conceded.

  She turned away with decision. “I’ll go at once. Willow will guide me.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said Caspar, and he wouldn’t hear otherwise. “A sailor always comes in handy, be it fight, flight, or finding safe harbor.”

  Wong said he would stay behind in Pfantas.

  “A great Choin general once told me, ‘Always have something in reserve,’”he said.

  Myrn finished dressing while the innkeeper went to rouse his good wife to make them a hearty breakfast. In less than an hour, with just a hint of dawn in the sky, the Apprentice Wizard and the sun-grizzled Captain followed Willow through the postern, across the creek, and up the path toward Coventown, to Cribblon, to Pargeot, to Douglas and Marbleheart.

  ****

  Shortly after the sun cleared the eastern horizon, Marbleheart and Douglas were again lying on their stomachs under the thornbushes, peering down into Coventown’s vale through the morning’s steams and mists.

  “Your invisibility thing seems to me our best bet,” advised Marbleheart. “Although you sounded doubtful of it.”

  “Not so much doubtful of the spell,” explained Douglas, “but whether it will work on a watchful Witch. On the rest of Emaldar’s people, I
have no doubt it’ll work. But Witches can see the unseen, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know much about such creatures,” said the Otter, giving his sleek, brown head a sharp shake. “How about this, then? We go right through town, being invisible, and examine the castle as closely as is safe. A Witch would have to be looking right in our direction to see us, would she not?”

  Douglas nodded. “Recall, however, that there’s more than the one Witch over there. ‘Coven’ implies at least two other Witches in addition to Emaldar, banded together. There could be a dozen or even a score!”

  “In my considerable experience stealing the wary tern’s eggs or sneaking up on squid in deep water—they’re delicious!—I’ve found you can get amazingly close to anyone who is looking another way. I would guess Emaldar and her sister Witches will be very busy this morning with their new prisoner, wouldn’t you?”

  “It’s quite possible. A chance we’ll have to take, I see.”

  “A little caution?” Marbleheart waved a casual paw. “Pick our cover before each move?”

  “It’s our best idea, anyway,” agreed the Journeyman. “Let’s do it, before I change my mind!”

  He drew the Otter close to his side, and invoked Flarman’s Invisibility Incantation Number 7, a series of slow hand passes to a monotone chant in Faerie, followed by certain Power Words merely whispered in their proper order with just the right emphasis.

  “Not working” sniffed the Otter in disappointment. He stared at his right forepaw and left hindpaw in turn. “I can still see me.”

  “It’s working,” Douglas reassured him. “The spell doesn’t affect you and me, just everyone else—I hope! Go quietly, though, and speak low, for the spell doesn’t keep us from being heard.”

  “There’s the easiest part, then,” said Marbleheart. “The Man hasn’t been born who can hear an Otter being quiet. Well, if it’s working as you say, what are we waiting for? Into the heart of Coventown, I say! Crossing that rather dangerous-looking dam might prove risky, however. Let’s look at it more closely.”