The Lawrence Watt-Evans Fantasy

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Kiria the Blue etched a pentagram on the throne room floor with blue chalk, and set about raising a few cooperative demons.

  Skellen the Fat began chanting a long, complicated spell intended to draw the floodwaters up from the river and wash the invaders away in a great wave.

  Simon the Foul collected assorted leavings from the kitchen midden and began assembling and animating homunculi, nasty little man-shaped creatures the size of your hand that would sneak out of the castle and torment the enemy with poisoned hatpins and whispered curses.

  All the various others set about their various fearsome sorceries, while the poor little frog wizard just sat there in his corner, looking scared and nervous.

  Amid all that terrible magic, it certainly looked as if the Grand Duke’s army were doomed.

  But then things began to go wrong.

  Skellen’s great wave swept up from the river just as Rudhira’s lightnings spilled out of the castle, and the two collided with a great hissing roar; the water put out the fire, while the fire boiled the water away into steam, steam that drifted harmlessly up into the night sky.

  Kiria’s demons sprang from the pentagram, hungry and ready for the sacrifice they had been promised. The invocation had directed them to devour those who did not belong in the area, and they obeyed that—but instead of the enemy soldiers they snatched up Simon’s homunculi and gobbled them down like squirming candy. Homunculi don’t belong in our world at all, and to a demon that’s far more obvious than a human’s nationality—demons aren’t very bright.

  Their hunger satisfied, the demons then vanished, and could not be conjured again until the next full moon.

  Nor were these the only disasters as the wizards, accustomed to working in solitude, got in each other’s way. Man-eating plants bloomed by moonlight and consumed wizards rather than soldiers; spells of sudden death became entangled with spells designed to send the invaders dancing helplessly and harmlessly away, and wizards died in jigs and gavottes; fearful illusions overlapped each other in grotesque juxtapositions that caused more laughter than fear among the besiegers.

  Wizards were sent flying to the moon. Wizards were swallowed by the earth. Spells backfired, misfired, and crossfired, and the castle filled with smoke and strange light, while unearthly howls echoed from the stone walls.

  Some of the spells worked properly—but not very many.

  By dawn, the castle was still surrounded by about three thousand Darchmontane soldiers, and the wizards were all gone, banished or slain by spells gone wrong.

  All, that is, except the frog wizard, who had stayed crouched in his corner, never even considering any attempt at magic.

  As the sun rose, and the smoke cleared away, and the last eerie echoes faded, the castle’s inhabitants crept out of hiding. The king, still in his regalia, emerged from his chamber and looked over the aftermath. His gaze swept across smeared pentagrams, spilled potions, and scattered scraps of wizards’ robes, and fell at last on the frog wizard, curled up in the corner.

  “You!” he called, “Come here!”

  Reluctantly, the frog wizard got to his feet and came. He bowed deeply, and then knelt before the king.

  “You’re one of the wizards, aren’t you?” King Alfred demanded.

  The frog wizard nodded.

  “You’re really a wizard?”

  “Yes, your Majesty,” the frog wizard replied.

  “You can work real magic?” the king persisted.

  “Yes, your Majesty,” the frog wizard said.

  “Then do something about those soldiers out there!” King Alfred demanded.

  “But, your Majesty…” the frog wizard began.

  “Do something, wizard!” the king shouted, leaning over until he was yelling right in the wizard’s face.

  The frog wizard had never liked being shouted at; it made it hard for him to think.

  “Do something about those soldiers!” the king insisted, pointing out a nearby window.

  Without really meaning to, the frog wizard did something. He worked his one and only spell, directed at the soldiers outside, and all three thousand of them were abruptly transformed into bullfrogs—very large, hungry bullfrogs.

  At first nobody realized what had happened, and the king continued to shout for several minutes before somebody tugged at his sleeve and pointed out that the invaders were gone, and had been replaced by a horde of amphibians that were now hopping about in mad confusion.

  The king stared out the window, and, forgetful of the royal dignity, most of the other people in the room crowded around him and peered out over his shoulders.

  Sure enough, the invading army was gone.

  King Alfred turned to the wizard and demanded, “Did you do that?”

  The wizard, too miserable to speak at the thought of what he had done to all those men, merely nodded.

  “Is it permanent?” the king asked.

  The wizard nodded again.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m afraid so, your Majesty,” the wizard replied.

  The king’s face broke into a broad grin; he whooped with joy, and his crown fell from his head.

  He caught it and tossed it in the air, then danced about with joy in a manner not at all consonant with proper castle protocol, but quite understandable from a human point of view. After all, he had just been saved from certain death.

  The wizard was nowhere near as happy, but he managed a weak smile in response to the king’s obvious delight. And after all, he hadn’t killed anyone, and for all he knew frogs could live long and happy lives, and soldiers faced death regularly as an occupational hazard. He tried to convince himself that it was all for the best.

  And in fact, it did seem to be all for the best, at least from the Batrachian point of view. The war was clearly over, and had ended in an unmistakable Batrachian victory.

  The castle servants were sent out to investigate and to collect the spoils, and by sunset that day the royal armory was jammed to overflowing with captured weapons. The frogs had been chased away, scattering in all directions, and the entire army’s supply train had thus been abandoned, completely intact, to the victors.

  The king and his councillors had spent the day alternately thinking up insulting terms to impose on the Grand Duke, if it should develop that he had not been among those transformed, and planning for a massive celebration of this miraculous deliverance.

  The frog wizard sat in his corner, listening to all this, with no very clear idea what he was supposed to do.

  Finally, around mid-afternoon, as he was getting very hungry, he got up the nerve to approach the king and ask what was expected of him.

  “Should I go home now?” he inquired.

  “No, of course not!” the king replied. “You’re my honored guest, at least until after the celebration!”

  Servants were called, and the wizard was given a hearty meal and a room for the night, but he still didn’t really know what to do with himself. All his books and belongings were still back in his cave, after all. He spent much of the time sitting on his bed thinking about all those poor frogs, or staring out the castle windows, or aimlessly wandering the castle corridors.

  This went on for the three days it took to organize the victory celebration.

  At the feast, the frog wizard was dragged out in front of the rowdy, half-drunk mob of peasants and petty nobles, and was declared the kingdom’s Royal Sorcerer. He was given the tallest tower in the castle for his own exclusive use, and servants were sent to his cave to fetch back all his belongings.

  Everyone told the wizard that he was a hero. He tried very hard to feel like a hero, and to act like a hero, but he couldn’t quite manage it. Failing that, he at least tried not to dampen anybody else’s enthusiasm, and he had rather more success at this limited goal.

  Indeed, everything in Batrach
ia seemed just fine for a time; the invading army was gone, and there were enough frogs to eat up all the extra flies and mosquitoes around the castle. The floods receded, the army returned to its usual duties, and life went on.

  After awhile, though, unusual things began to happen.

  Frogs began to turn up in odd places.

  The weather was starting to turn colder, and ordinarily all the frogs would be burrowing down into pond-beds for the winter, but this year, instead, frogs were slipping into people’s houses to stay warm. Peasants would come home from a day in the fields and find a couple of huge bullfrogs sitting on the hearth—big, determined bullfrogs that did not flee when chased with a fireplace poker, but merely ducked in a corner and waited for the poker-wielding peasant to give up and go away.

  Frogs even began slipping into the castle.

  And not only were these frogs getting in where they weren’t wanted, but having consumed all the available insects, they were getting into the food, as well. Finding a frog on one’s plate, licking at a pork chop or a leg of mutton, could ruin a man’s appetite, and sent many a woman running for the poker.

  Worst of all, the frogs seemed to recall enough of their human origins to have a rather warped sense of humor. Several people reported finding frogs in their beds and bathtubs, grinning lewdly—until now, nobody had realized that frogs could grin lewdly, but everyone agreed that that was exactly what the transformed Darchmontanes did.

  Even royalty was not spared. Queen Gertrude scandalized the castle by running out into the corridor shrieking and totally nude after discovering a frog crouched between her legs in the bath, grinning up at her and licking about lasciviously.

  The last straw was when the king himself, while dispensing high justice in the throne room, realized that something was wrong. Everyone seemed to be staring at the top of his head.

  Puzzled, he reached up and found a frog, perched atop his crown and leering over the gold and jewels at the gathered courtiers.

  Furious, he flung the crown to the floor and charged from the room, his councillors at his heels. Shouting imprecations, he marched up the stairs to the castle’s highest tower, where he barged into the wizard’s chamber without knocking and demanded, “Do something about these damned frogs!”

  The wizard, startled, looked up from the book he was reading, blinked, and said, “What?”

  King Alfred turned an interesting shade of purple as he stood in the center of the wizard’s chamber, speechless with fury, trying to think of something suitably scathing to say.

  At last he burst out, “These damned frogs are all your fault! You turned those soldiers into frogs! You couldn’t sweep them away with a whirlwind, or make the earth swallow them up, or turn them into something harmless like rocks or daisies, no, you had to turn them into frogs! And now we’ve got frogs coming out of our ears, frogs everywhere!”

  At that moment, the frog that had been on the crown stuck its head out of the back of the king’s collar, where it had fallen when the crown was snatched off, and croaked loudly.

  The king could take no more; he began shrieking wordlessly at the wizard as his councillors watched in horror from the doorway.

  The wizard simply sat on his bed, the book on his lap and a baffled expression on his face, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do.

  At last, the king had to pause for breath, and the wizard asked mildly, “What do you want me to do, your Majesty?”

  “Do your damned magic, wizard! Do something!” the king said, as he marched forward and reached out to grab the wizard by the throat.

  The wizard shrank back on the bed, but to no avail; King Alfred was a big man, with long, strong arms. He closed his hands around the wizard’s neck and shouted, “Do something!”

  The wizard had never liked being shouted at, and he discovered he liked being grabbed by the throat even less. It made thinking very difficult indeed.

  Without thinking, he did something. His hand came up in a magical gesture, and he did it.

  He turned the King into a frog.

  The councillors still stared from the doorway as their sovereign shrank down inside his robes, turned green, and hopped out of his collar as a bullfrog.

  This was no ordinary, placid frog, either. This was a very angry frog. It let out a loud croak.

  The other frog, the one that had been sitting at the back of the king’s collar, croaked as well, and seemed to smirk.

  The wizard looked at the two frogs, at the half-dozen courtiers jammed into his doorway, at the book on his lap, and then back at the two frogs sitting on the king’s empty robes.

  This, he saw, had gotten totally out of hand.

  The wizard didn’t think it would be a good idea to stay around. In fact, he thought that a quick departure would be a very good idea indeed. He closed the book and put it aside, then got to his feet and raised a hand threateningly.

  “Step aside,” he said, “Or I’ll do the same to you!”

  The king’s councillors immediately stepped back, squeezing against both sides of the narrow hallway as the wizard marched past them and down the stairs.

  Once he was out of sight he began running, because he knew that the councillors would not stay cowed for long. Sooner or later they would come after him, and the wizard did not want to know whether he really would turn more people into frogs if threatened with capture. He hoped he would not, but he wasn’t sure.

  He was safely across the drawbridge and out of the castle before he saw any signs of pursuit. Some simple sleight-of-hand sent most of the hunters off in the wrong direction, and he was able to slip safely away through the forest.

  He made his way down to the sea, eventually, where he took ship aboard a sloop headed south. At a small island port he left his ship and stole a small lateen-rigged fishing boat, and sailed until he reached a small, uncharted island that he had heard spoken of, where he lived in peace thereafter.

  With little else to do, he practiced his spell constantly, until he could do it perfectly without thinking about it at all—but of course, with no one there to trouble him, he never needed it.

  Which is just as well, as he had no wish to have any more transformations on his conscience.

  “…And that’s the tale,” the stranger told the officers of Glory of Summer Dawn.

  Kwan and the others laughed politely, not believing a word of it. Captain Kai nodded his acceptance of the story, and then waved for a tray of after-dinner sweets.

  Just then the ship lurched as a wave tugged it against its anchor chain. The cabin servant, a younger man not yet fully accustomed to the sea, stumbled; he fell against the stranger, and the entire tray of confections spilled into the old man’s beard, leaving it awash in cream and honey and fruited syrups.

  The stranger leapt to his feet, a hand raised in a peculiar gesture. Kwan looked up, startled, and saw the confusion in the white man’s eyes—he had acted without thinking, from reflex, surprising even himself, Kwan was certain.

  When Kwan looked down, the servant was gone, and a large frog blinked up at him from the cabin’s carpet.

  Kwan stared for a long moment; beside him, the white man let out a long, low sigh.

  Across the table, Captain Kai whispered, “And he can defeat whole armies thus! What a weapon this could be, in the Emperor’s service!”

  “I knew it,” the old man said, in the most miserable voice Kwan had ever heard. “Even here. I’ll never be safe as long as I…”

  Kwan looked up as the words stopped, just in time to see the old man gesture again—at himself.

  Then there were two fat frogs on the carpet.

  Kwan and the Captain stared at one another.

  “I think,” Kai told his lieutenant after a long silence, “that if we can’t provide the Emperor with a mighty wizard to transform his foes, at least we might enrich his menagerie by an amp
hibian or two.”

  Kwan nodded. “And,” he said, “it will give the Emperor’s own magicians something to do—to attempt the restoration of these two unfortunates.”

  Thus it was that two ordinary frogs came to be the most pampered creatures in all the Emperor’s collection—two, because the sailors had lost track, before reaching port, of which frog was which. Both seemed quite content with their lot.

  And that was why, for years thereafter, every new magician to arrive at the imperial court was required to spend a day in fruitless experimentation at the frog pond.

  HORSING AROUND

  It isn’t every day you meet a witch at the 7-Eleven. Jason thought it was a gag—right up until she tried to turn him into a horse.

  He and Gus had been arguing about what seventh grade was going to be like, and whether the teachers were all geeks the way Gus’ older sister Susannah said they were. They had been so busy arguing, in fact, that Jason had pushed through the door of the 7-Eleven without looking where he was going, and almost walked right into the witch.

  She was standing at the magazine rack by the door, browsing through stuff like COSMOPOLITAN and VOGUE. She was dressed in a ratty floor-length black gown that would need cleaning to qualify as “filthy.” Her greasy, waist-length black hair was unbelievably tangled, and her pointed black hat was so tall that she’d have to duck to get through the door. Her nose was spectacularly long and crooked.

  “Hey,” Jason said when he’d stopped just short of her and gotten a good look, “isn’t it a little early for Hallowe’en?”

  “Ha ha,” she said, looking him in the eye. She turned back to the magazines.

  Ordinarily Jason would have dropped it right there, but Gus said, “Wow, Jase, killer dialogue you’ve got there.”

  That was a challenge.

  “So, guess you read those magazines for beauty tips?” Jason said. “Witch ones?”

  The witch stared at him silently.

  Jason desperately wanted to come up with something really clever, but with those dark eyes looking right at him his brain seemed to stop working. “Hey, Horseface,” he began, planning a remark about using a currycomb instead of a hairbrush.