Swords, Sorcery, & Self-Rescuing Damsels

by Jody Lynn Nye

  “Not this time. I’ve taken your advice and reduced the thaumaturgical charge, which should decrease the effective range to within three yards of the bottle. I’ve also weaved a minor cantrip into the sleep spell, so in addition to being knocked out, anyone effected will also crap themselves.”

  Pam let out a guffaw, but Purity only sighed. “Really? Why do you do these things?”

  “To drain their morale.”

  “They’ll be asleep!”

  “Yeah but, for, you know, next time. Anyway, it’s too late to take it out.” Zeph scrunched up her lips and ran her eyes over her work table, looking for anything she’d missed. “Ah! Your new magic wand.” She pushed a few scrolls aside and picked up the black, lacquered stick. “Mid-range thaumaturgical focus with a delivery like a brick through a stained glass window. And an underarm holster, for concealment.”

  “Does yer wee plan include time for a meal?” Pam asked. “’Cause, I don’t know if yeh realize, but it takes a good lot a’ energy to fly and breathe fire.”

  “We know!” Zeph said. “You know how we know?”

  “I keep reminding yeh?” Pam said.

  “Yes!” Purity and the witch said, together.

  “Well, I remind yeh about half as much as mah stomach reminds me. Consider yourselves lucky.”

  “There should be time for you to grab a snack while I’m infiltrating the castle,” Purity said. “Satisfied?”

  Pam was not impressed. She eyed Purity, as if assessing her for caloric content. “Aye, we’ll see.”

  Purity only rolled her eyes.

  ~*~

  The moon set shortly after the sun, leaving the world below in near-darkness. The only lights were stars reflected off a stream here and there, and the occasional glow of a farmer’s hearth fire. Purity could imagine those families now, snug and comfortable after a hard day of spring planting.

  Imagining it was all she could do, for she was on the back of a dragon, whipped by freezing winds above her waist and baking from heat below. Pam’s body was warm even at her coldest, but the exertion of flying kicked her internal temperature high enough to bake a scone.

  Purity knew this to be a fact, because Zeph once tried it, “in the interest of natural philosophy.” On that day, natural philosophy claimed three trees blown over by dragon force winds, and the wooden fence which Pam held onto by her claws. It netted two dozen perfectly cooked scones, one satisfied witch, and a dragon so amused by the absurdity that she giggled herself to sleep that night.

  Tonight, however, Purity could tell from the way the muscles moved under her that the dragon was straining her last reserve, after the exertion of her afternoon stage combat. Luckily, the castle was up ahead, the torches on the battlements just becoming visible. Pam stiffened her wings, setting herself on a glide path.

  Purity shouted over the slipstream, into the dragon’s ear, “I need a distraction.”

  “Easily done, Lass.” Just past the wall, Pam pulled her wings in tight, and they dropped like a stone. Fifty feet short of splattering them both onto the castle courtyard, Pam extended her wings. As she swooped low, she loosened a sputter of flame into hay bales stacked outside the stables, then rose into a climb.

  By the time every guard and stable hand was looking at the fire, Pam was near the apex of her rise. Purity was ready. She had her harness unbuckled, and as Pam arced over the parapet, Purity jumped off and landed on her feet atop the wooden roof. Pam wasted no more energy, but nosed into another dive to pick up speed, and disappeared into the night.

  ~*~

  The first thing Purity noticed, inside the castle, was that they’d scrubbed the walls in the time since she lived there. That was good, in the sense that cleanliness is important, but it was very, very bad in the sense that her cloak was too dark to let her blend in.

  It occurred to her that she should have worn armor.

  She skulked down the parapet stairs, looking like nothing so much as an intruder skulking down the parapet stairs, to find two guards at the bottom. She immediately noted that the guards no longer wore the face-obscuring helms she was expecting, and which would have allowed her to move freely if she stole their armor.

  Worse yet, they were no longer arranged on either side of the door, facing out—an arrangement which allowed a silent intruder to approach within a yard without being spotted. They were standing on either side of the corridor, so that one could always see up the parapet steps.

  Which he did. How could he not, when her uncle was so much better at security than her father had been, and she had come disguised as dirty masonry?

  By more reflex than thought, she grabbed the knockout bottle from her belt, pushed the dowel down to prime it, and gave it a wild fling into the corridor. Half a second later, she felt a wave of drowsiness come over her. The feeling passed and was replaced with a brief but uncomfortable urgency.

  The guards, on the other hand, caught the full effect. One of them clattered to the floor, so loud that it seemed every piece of his armor clanked against every other piece on the way down. The other slumped, but his cuirass locked into the steel fauld around his waist, and he remained in precarious balance, on his feet. Purity was nervous that he was only playing possum, but the blurping, bubbling sounds inside his armor indicated that the bottle had done its work.

  As she snuck quietly around the corner, she could hear servants running to see what the noise was, and skidding to a halt when they hit the smell. “Good God,” one of them said. “I didn’t know a person could die of dysentery standing up.”

  She ducked into an unoccupied chamber and waited for the commotion to die down. Soon enough, the stricken guards were dragged off to the infirmary, but they were promptly replaced. The real problem, however, was the curiosity of others. Servants and courtesans trickled in from every corner of the castle to hear what happened. The first servants on the scene described what they’d found over and over, and their account of the smell became longer and more obscene with each retelling.

  By the time the passageways were clear, all hope of using the now-extinguished stable fire as a distraction was gone. It was, however, still the middle of the night, in a castle exhausted by an unexplained fire and stories about pooping.

  Most of the corridors were clear, and she knew them well. The records room was easily accessible, just off the council chambers, but said chambers were guarded at all hours. When she was near, she had to slip out a window and inch from stone to stone, gaining tenuous handhold on the rough, exterior bossage as she went.

  It was not quite as harrowing as all that, however, as the council chambers were only on the second floor and there was a relatively soft, thatched eave projecting out from the first floor, just a few feet below. After many minutes of shuffling sideways, always looking over her shoulder to see if she’d been spotted from the courtyard, she was outside the deserted council chambers.

  A quick peek inside confirmed that the exterior door was closed, and Zeph’s semi-substantial chicken claw made short work of the window latch. It could not overcome the lack of oil on the window hinges, however. Opening the window made a creaking sound that, from Purity’s vulnerable perspective, seemed the loudest noise the world had ever known. She didn’t dare close the window once she was inside but went straight for the records room and shoved the skeleton key into its lock.

  As soon as she had it open, she dashed inside and shut the door behind her. She huddled against it, holding onto the inner handle until she was positive that no one was coming to investigate the sound. Only then did she take out her wand and tap it to generate some light.

  She began to go through the records and was shocked to find that there were thousands upon thousands of them. Where her father had operated with a few ledgers, her uncle seemed to be rebuilding the kingdom out of paperwork. There were entire shelves full of records, and more piled on the floor, whereas a single writing table had served her father’s scribes and accountants. The writing table might still be there, but if so
it was buried under stacks of record books and piles of parchment.

  “Can nothing go right?”

  No sooner had she said it, then she was answered by the door to the council chambers swinging open. She thought of quenching her wand, but if the light really was shining under the records room door, suddenly turning it off might draw more attention than leaving it on.

  One man entered, then another, who chatted with the first, closed the window, and sat down himself. Three more came in over the next quarter of an hour, while she stood perfectly still. And finally, her uncle arrived. She could not make out his words, but she recognized his loud, arrogant voice through the door.

  It was a council meeting. It was a goddamn council meeting, in the middle of the night. Then again, that was the traditional time for corrupt leaders to meet and plan their malfeasance, wasn’t it?

  Whatever embezzlement or misappropriation they were discussing, they seemed to be having a good time with it. There were frequent bouts of laughter, which Purity used as cover to thumb through records. She couldn’t carry the entire room back to Zeph, but she only needed to find some critical documents to expose her uncle’s corruption.

  And though she was necessarily slowed by the need for stealth, she had plenty of time. The meeting must have lasted four hours or more before it finally broke up. By then, she had a stack of documents picked out that just barely fit into her backpack, and another stack that she could cradle in her elbow.

  When she counted as many footsteps leaving as had come in and added an extra ten minutes’ wait for good measure, she slipped her wand back into its holster, pushed the door open, and looked out.

  Her uncle sat at the table exactly opposite her, pointing a crossbow at the records room door. “Ah, Purity,” he said. “Glad you decided to join me. Come out. Come out. Drop those records, please. Hands where I can see them.”

  “Uncle Dundas,” she said, quite politely. She let the papers in her arms drop to the floor. “Wasn’t expecting to see you tonight.”

  “Nor I,” he said, “until something about those dysenteric guards reminded me of the style of your friend. Zelaniah, is it?”

  “Zeph.”

  “Yes, ‘Zeph,’” he said, putting ironic emphasis on the shortened name. “Don’t expect to see her again. After you’ve married my son, I’m sending you both to a remote outpost, up in the mountains.”

  “And you’ll continue as regent, I suppose?”

  “Better for everyone if I do. My son is an idiot.”

  Purity didn’t answer. She only stood, trying to think of a way out of this. But even as she explored options in her mind, they evaporated in the line of pink light that appeared in the window. That was it, then. Pam wouldn’t risk extracting her in daylight, so all hope of escape was gone.

  “What are you looking at?” her uncle asked, wisely choosing to not take his eyes off her.

  “Just the sunrise,” she said, resigned to it.

  His eyes narrowed. “What ruse is this? The sun doesn’t come up for hours.”

  She frowned, but as the light continued to brighten outside, her lips curled into a grin. “Oh, nothing,” she said.

  Still, he didn’t look back. Smart.

  But outside, the fires were growing larger and more numerous. Pam must have gotten worried about how long it was taking and had decided to provide Purity with another distraction. That, or she was just bored.

  A guard rushed into the room, and shouted, “Sire, the outbuildings are all aflame!”

  “‘Sire?’” Purity asked, putting her own ironic emphasis on the honorific address reserved for kings. “Really?”

  Her uncle’s eyes grew anxious. They whipped over to the guard, for the barest instant.

  It was all Purity needed. She pulled her wand from its holster and fired in one fluid motion. Her uncle was not much slower and pulled the trigger on his crossbow. The bolt flew straight and true, right for her heart, but had only sailed a quarter of the way when it impacted the wand’s magical energy. The deadly missile deflected and hit the ceiling, while the magical energy continued on, threw her uncle from his chair, and sent him flying out the window.

  She dashed to the broken glass, glanced down, and found to her disappointment that he’d come to a soft landing on the thatch below. She waved for Pam, who swept in and plucked Purity from the window with one of her great claws, swift as lightning but gentle as a mother cat picking up her favorite kitten.

  “That was’nee yer uncle, was it, Lass?” she asked, when Purity had gained her seat on Pam’s back, and secured herself in the harness.

  “It was,” she answered, and grinned. “But we had a falling out.”

  The dragon giggled all the way home.

  ~*~

  “If that guard hadn’t been there, I could have grabbed the other papers,” Purity said, as she paced in the highest chamber of the tower.

  Zeph was hunched over the documents Purity had managed to recover, sliding an emerald reading stone across them to magnify the tiny columns of figures. “Mmm hmm,” she said.

  “Do you have anything yet?”

  The witch sighed and looked up. “Nothing you’re going to like.”

  Purity narrowed her eyes, in an expression more reminiscent of her uncle than she would ever admit.

  “Everything I’ve read so far suggests that he’s a very clever treasurer. Far superior to...” She noticed the tightening in Purity’s eyes and seemed to think better of her next words. “Some previous kings.”

  “He is not king!”

  “No, but he’s astute. These initiatives are brilliant. He’s obviously studied the economic works of Fan Li, and I thought I had the only copy of his writings in this hemisphere.”

  “But... but...” Purity searched through documents until she found the one she wanted and pointed to the bottom line. “He drained the royal treasury!”

  “True, but he spent it on roads, a postal service, mercantile development, agricultural improvements. Did you realize that four fifths of farms in this kingdom were still using light turnplows? In soil as rocky as ours! Unbelievable! So, your uncle started a program to help them buy heavy plows.”

  “With borrowed money!”

  “Yes, but, with usury rates as low as they are, it only makes sense. In the current slack mercantile climate, and with so much farmable land going unused for lack of proper tools, thrift will only reduce future grain levies. Whereas, the heavy plow project alone will boost levies by, I’m just estimating here, but something like a third over the next fifty years.”

  “But he’s bankrupting us!”

  “That’s a common misconception. Kings will only go bankrupt if their usurers lose faith in the ability of future levies to match projected outlays.” Zeph was about to go on, before she was interrupted by shouting outside the tower.

  They went to the window, to find the valiant knight from the day before. He was not gleaming in the morning light, because he’d come back without his heavy armor, and had traded his sword for a long spear. “What?” Purity asked, cupping a hand to her ear. And then she said to Zeph, “Better wake Pam.”

  “She’s not going to be happy. She just went to bed.”

  The knight came closer and shouted up, “As I love you, so will I set you free!”

  “Are you sure you’re in love with me, valiant sir knight?” Purity shouted back. “For lo, I worry you may only be in love with the idea of me.”

  He called back, “What?” But before he could get an answer, his eyes were drawn to Pam, coming around the side of the tower. She did not swoop up and over it, as she had the previous day, nor did she breathe fire as a demonstration of her power. She only walked—shuffled, really—out to meet the knight, yawning several times on the way.

  She shot a look back at the tower—one that mixed molten grumpiness with a promise that, the next time this jackass showed up, Purity would have to entertain him by herself. She turned back just in time to dodge the knight’s charging spear thrust
, and just stopped herself from squashing him under her foot.

  “I think we should cancel tonight’s operation,” the witch said, coming back up the stairs, out of breath.

  “Pam needs the rest, yeah,” Purity said.

  “That and, well, maybe we ought to re-evaluate our entire plan to overthrow the regent?”

  This was too much. Purity put her hands on her hips and looked hard at Zeph. “He killed my father!”

  Outside, a paltry sputter of flame shot past the window.

  “I know, I know. So... maybe we can lock him in a dungeon instead of whipping up a homicidal frenzy in the populous? That way we can, you know, still get his advice. From time to time.” When she saw that Purity wasn’t buying it, she added, “With the encouragement of a hot poker, if necessary.”

  “You mean, you want to torture him for economic policies?”

  The witch shrugged. “Yeah?”

  Purity considered it, while the sounds of battle floated in through the window—roars and grunts and stomps. Finally, Purity threw her arms in the air and said, “I’ll think about it.”

  There was a great yelp, and they again ran to the window. Outside, Pam flopped around, legs flailing and wings kicking up gusts as she writhed on the ground. Twenty yards from her, the knight stood next to a ballista, concealed in the bushes.

  Purity rushed downstairs. By the time she left the tower’s hidden entrance, Pam was over on her side, breathing heavily, a ballista bolt in her chest. Purity leapt onto the dragon’s ribs and wrapped her hands around the missile.

  “Don’t pull it out!” Zeph called, coming behind her. She carried the bag she used for midwifery and had a long strip of clean linen over her shoulder. She handed a glass bottle and the end of the linen to Purity. “Dump this on the wound, then wrap the opening up tight.”

  The knight ran to them, complete bafflement showing not just in his eyes, and on his face, but infused throughout this entire body. “What’s going on here?”

  ~*~

  By the time Purity stopped hitting him, Zeph was ready to take the bolt out. The knight only wobbled on his feet, bleeding from a broken nose and split lip. He was developing some pretty nasty bruises, what with being at a complete loss for how to stop a lady from punching him. If Purity considered this unfair, then it only underlined the fact that he should have given up his antiquated views of womanhood before he shot her friend in the lung.