Plague of Spells as-1

by Bruce R Cordell

  When her body was her own again, she sighed and resumed packing.

  If she wished to understand what had happened to her, she must think. What was the significance of her dream?

  Perhaps it had been a one-time event brought on by some unknowable, arcane event beyond her ken. Or a glimpse provided by fate of a pivotal event that was somehow important to her future. Or, when all was said and done, a giant coincidence?

  Anusha wondered if she was spinning fantasies no more likely than her first panicked invention of a soul-stealing stalker.

  The only way to know what afflicted her was to experiment. As her tutor so often tried to instill in her, only repeated observation, study, and questions could uncover real knowledge. She needed to explore the experience again.

  Her heart's pace quickened once more, but now in anticipation.

  Could I, she wondered, walk purposely as a dream in the waking world?

  Anusha dumped all the clothing, shoes, and purses she'd pulled from her closets into the great leather-padded travel chest Behroun had ordered delivered to her room. The chest was so large it reminded her of a coffin.

  Once the bed was cleared, she settled herself on the soft, pink-hued coverlet and closed her eyes. Beneath the coverlet, her costly feather mattress pressed only lightly into her shoulders, calves, and ankles, but her skirts and blouse made her feel uncomfortably warm and confined. Sounds of distant horns, shouts, and braying animals in the market competed for her attention. The nearer clattering chime of servants working at their own tasks in other parts of the manor jangled at discordant intervals.

  Sleep seemed far away.

  She tried to evoke the sensation she'd felt when striding unseen down the streets of New Sarshel. She had been 1 neither cold nor warm despite wearing only her sleeping gown. Not the least breath of wind had caressed her cheek, it; nor had the cobblestones pinched her bare feet. Yes, some-I; "thing like that.

  This is not working!

  She groaned and left the bed, feeling a sudden pinch as she rose.

  "Oh," she exhaled quietly.

  A girl still lay half swaddled in the quilt, fully dressed, eyes closed. It was herself.

  She had dream-skipped out of her body again!

  Anusha gazed down on the sleeping form. Her body breathed in a slow but regular pattern, very much like sleep.

  She glanced away from the sleeping body and instead drew her dream hands up before her face. They looked completely normal, maybe a bit hazy if she squinted.

  Anusha rubbed her hands together. The sensation was exactly what she expected.

  She was further surprised to see her dream self dressed in the very same clothes worn by her sleeping body. Then again, why was she surprised? In a dream, anything was possible, wasn't it? Insofar as her consciousness existed beyond her mind, perhaps dream logic ruled what she could accomplish, just as in regular dreams.

  Turning, she tentatively reached for the closed travel chest. She touched it. She could discern its leathery texture. It was cold, and slightly gritty with dust.

  With a deep breath, she tried to reach through the closed lid.

  She pushed her hand through the top of the travel chest as if it were mere smoke. The sensation was not unlike pushing her hand into a thin stream of falling water.

  Inside the chest, her hand brushed the heel of one of the shoes she'd thrown into the great piece of luggage. She grasped it and pulled it out. Right through the still-fastened chest.

  She could do more than observe the waking world; she could affect it!

  The possibilities of what she might accomplish, why, they were endless!

  What couldn't she do? She giggled as exhilaration burst up through her chest and throat. She dropped the lone shoe on the travel chest's top and strode to her door, just as it banged open.

  Behroun stood there, scowling. Her irritated half brother stood only five feet from her. But he looked right past Anusha as if she weren't there at all. Instead, he fixed his glare on her real, sleeping body.

  Behroun growled. "She sleeps when she should be preparing for her trip. If she weren't essential, I'd kill her myself."

  Anusha gasped and took an inadvertent step backward. Her hand brushed her vanity mirror poised on a small stand. It shifted, wobbled, then fell to the tiled floor. It shattered with a violent, crystalline retort.

  Behroun started. He swiveled his head back and forth, his eyes narrow and searching, his breathing accelerating. He took a half step toward the shattered mirror, then seemed to think better of it. Instead, he spun around to look back into the hallway.

  "Who's there?" he demanded, his voice's normally basso rumble rising in pitch.

  Getting no answer, Behroun returned his regard to the broken mirror, then to her sleeping form. His composure was as broken as the glass. He grimaced, then stalked off, rather too quickly for his dignity.

  The scene would have been comical, Anusha thought, if Behroun hadn't just offhandedly revealed his desire to see her dead. He was talking figuratively, right?

  She wondered.

  She'd watched him utter those words, thinking himself unobserved and free to reveal his inner self. Anusha judged he'd meant them.

  "You bastard," she breathed, as fear shivered her own composure.

  She couldn't deny reality any longer. Her half brother was a perfect villain, as she'd always suspected but refused to ponder.

  He was no fitting heir to Marhana.

  "If I help him, am I any better?" Inaction on her part was as good as helping Behroun achieve his ends. His actions threatened to stain her parents' memory, with her as his unwitting accomplice.

  Unless she took a stand.

  A new surety of purpose enveloped Anusha.

  She nodded her head, thinking yes, I will obey Behroun's command to leave the manor. But I'll choose my own destination!

  He wouldn't be able to use her heritage to advance his claims of nobility. As little noble blood as she possessed, less Sowed in his debauched veins.

  And why shouldn't she depart on her own road? Although, her best bet would be to set herself actively against Behroun's — schemes.

  A smile curled across her lips. "You'll see, Brother. Or, actually, you won't!"

  With her dreamer's ability to walk unseen, like a ghost even, dangers she would normally shrink from were transformed in her mind's eye.

  Imagine, she thought, what sights I can witness, safe from all harm, only needing to awake to find myself safe back in bed!

  She could go anywhere from the safety of her room! Except that wasn't right. She recalled the very first time she walked knowingly in a lucid dream. She had dream-stepped down toward the docks, a fair distance from her sleeping body. Only to be yanked up short before she quite made the distance.

  Despite her inexperience with her ability, she thought it likely her dream form could reach only so far. What was the radius she could travel from her sleeping body before her dream self's connection became too attenuated? A mile or two, the dock experience suggested. She needed to experiment to discover her exact range, but it wasn't enough to allow her to stay safe at home.

  If she desired to dream-step into danger, her real body would have to be somewhat close too.

  Later that day, using her dream form, Anusha slipped unseen into Behroun's office and altered a bill of lading for the merchant ship Green Siren to include her travel chest. A travel chest to be delivered straightaway to the docks. A travel chest that would contain more than clothes-it would contain Anusha too! And a tidy sum of water, rations, and perhaps her journal. Once on the ship, safely packed away in the hold, she imagined she'd have the opportunity to physically emerge from her luggage to get occasional exercise and use the lavatory when no one was watching.

  Her plan hadn't quite worked out as she'd hoped.

  The barefoot sailor had proved a little too curious about Anusha's travel chest.

  She'd seen him poking around a couple of days earlier. To distract him, she had cre
ated a ruckus in the aft hold by knocking over a crate half filled with belaying pins. The effort to push over the crate, something her physical body could have accomplished with relative ease, proved almost beyond her, but she'd managed it.

  She theorized her dream body didn't have the strength of reality.

  The interloper, startled at the sound, had relinquished his interest in the travel chest to investigate the spilled belaying pins. By his cussing response, it was obvious he thought they'd merely been poorly packed, not intentionally spilled. After picking up and stowing the crate, this time with ropes to hold the crates in place against accidental shifting, he'd left the hold. Anusha hoped never to see him again. She didn't know what he'd do if he found her sleeping body in the hold.

  It was already disconcerting enough to discover one creature aboard the ship that could see her dream form whenever she drew near it.

  The first time she'd tried to leave her cabin in dream form, via the short hallway that connected several staterooms to the upper deck, she'd come across a black dog. Tied with only enough slack to roam the hallway, the dog was obviously set to guard the approach to the captain's cabin at the end. When she'd dream-stepped toward it, the dog's ears had come up and its tail had gone down. It broke into a low, rumbling growl. It fixed her with its eyes and bared its teeth, warning her to keep her distance. The animal scared her for a moment, before she recalled she didn't possess a physical body the guard dog could bite.

  Still, she felt sorry for the dog. She began feeding the guard dog bits of meat she stole from the constantly simmering stewpot in the galley. After only a day, she'd managed to calm the creature so much that her immaterial presence elicited a happy whine and wagging tail instead of vicious growls. Not knowing if it already had a name, Anusha called it Lucky.

  Besides Lucky, she also suspected Japheth might be able to see her, as the Green Siren put out from port. The man's gaze seemed to meet hers. She'd stopped, appalled. But he took no action other than stare at her, his expression somewhat bemused. She immediately forced herself awake back in her travel chest, her breathing suddenly coming too swift for the enclosed space.

  After a few days thinking about those dark, mysterious eyes, she worked up enough courage to seek out the warlock.

  She'd entertained a little fantasy that she would reveal her stowaway status on the ship to the man. Despite knowing nothing of Japheth, she felt a slight twinge of… interest. But his lethal habit! How terrible. She wondered how he was able to control its symptoms. Perhaps she had mistaken what she'd seen in the curio shop in New Sarshel.

  One thing was certain-loneliness weighed upon her like an anvil. After four days of speaking only to Lucky, she yearned for conversation and companionship more than food. Well, the fact that the rations she'd packed with her sleeping body in the travel chest were beginning to taste like chalk wasn't helping her mood.

  She'd been dream-stepping across the upper decks by starlight, looking for Japheth, when dread tingled on her neck. Not knowing from whence it came, she descended to check on her body, only to find the inquisitive sailor had returned. He was hunched over her travel chest once more, this time inserting a pry bar under the travel chest's lid. With him was another sailor, a dark-haired woman with a terrible scar.

  Anusha dashed forward and instinctively reached to grab the man's arm. Unlike all her recent practice with inert objects, her attempt to interact with a living creature failed. Her hand slipped right off the interloper.

  Desperate, she reached for the man with both hands, thinking to grab the too curious investigator by his collar and haul him backward. Instead, her hands "slid" into his back, and she'd touched something slick and warm that had pulsed thub-dub, thub-dub, thub-dub…

  The man screamed with a throaty, awful tone, fell backward onto the floor, and began convulsing.

  The scarred woman looked at Anusha's image in the polished shield and screamed, "Ghost! A ghost is killing Dorian!"

  Anusha took another moment to gaze at her own terrifying image in the polished shield. A ghostlike image stared back, a burning silhouette in a girlish dress. If she didn't know better, she'd scream seeing herself too. Especially if one of Anusha's companions lay insensate upon the floor.

  But Anusha was not a ghost, nor did she mean anyone harm. Normally, Anusha couldn't even bring herself to hurt spiders scuttling around the corners of her suite. Her grazing contact with the sailor's… insides… was an accident. He didn't deserve what she'd done to him, whatever that was.

  Or did he?

  The truth was, both the screaming woman and the convulsing man were pirates, not sailors. She'd overheard both Japheth and Behroun say it, and other evidence she'd found on the ship the last few days confirmed it.

  The man and woman had probably done a lot of terrible things. Perhaps they deserved a little pain, if not something more drastic, in return. Perhaps she should reach up and quiet the woman too, before she drew a response. It wouldn't do to draw more people down here, wondering why one travel chest didn't show up on the hold manifest.

  But she couldn't bring herself to follow through.

  Besides, already voices echoed from the decks above, yelling questions. The ship was alerted that something strange was in the hold. Nothing she could do now would change that; she would only make things worse by attacking the woman.

  A chill of foreboding touched the back of her neck. If her sleeping body was discovered, they'd forcefully wake her. Then what? Would they tie her behind the ship to drag through the cold, shark-filled water until she drowned or died of cold? Did pirates really do that? Yes, of course they did.

  Anusha moved until she stood just a few feet from the polished shields. With the new angle, she could no longer see the screaming woman's distorted image in any of the shields; hopefully, neither could the woman see her. Just to be safe, Anusha reached out and struck all three shields to the floor. They clattered loudly, and the pirate screamed the louder.

  Bobbing shapes, visible around the edges of the hold opening, resolved as the heads of watchful, muttering pirates. They gazed down at their crewmates with varying degrees of surprise, humor, and real fear. None of them had seen Anusha's reflection.

  A new voice blared down, "What's all this then, Brida? What's wrong with Dorian? I wager you stuck him, but are trying to claim it's spirits that done it. Am I right?"

  Anusha saw the speaker peering down from the top deck, the toes of his boots overhanging the square opening. The elaborate hat revealed the man as Captain Thoster.

  The woman on the ladder, apparently named Brida, kept her eyes fixed on the fallen shield in which she'd glimpsed Anusha's dream image. Brida exclaimed in a fear-coarsened voice, "No, sir! It was a ghost! I saw it myself, right after it got Dorlan right there!" She pointed. Her arm shook as she tried to indicate where she'd seen the "ghost."

  Anusha took a few more steps away from the fallen shields, then paused. What would Captain Thoster make of the claim?

  The captain turned his head and spoke to someone standing just back from the opening, his voice not loud enough for Anusha to hear his words. It sounded like a question.

  Then a cloaked shape appeared at the edge of the hold access. Her breath caught slightly. It was Japheth!

  Even from two decks below, Anusha could see Japheth's eyes gleamed red. His gaze locked with her own. Fear thrilled down her spine and her stomach tightened.

  A third shape appeared next to Thoster, a woman dressed in a bone white sari wielding a scarlet-glyphed wand.

  It was Seren, the Green Siren's mercenary wizard.

  Thoster complained to Japheth and Seren, "I don't see anything."

  Japheth looked up at the captain and the wizard, then back down into her eyes, still silent. Could he see her, or was she imagining it?

  Seren traced symbols in the air with her free hand. Where her fingers passed, lines of magical energy persisted moments before fading. Syllables of pure arcane magic tumbled from Seren's lips. Her eyes flashed
with a glint of citrine light.

  "There!" said Seren, gesturing with her wand down at Anusha. "I see it now-an apparition! The spirit of a drowned woman, perhaps, lingers in your hold, Captain."

  Anusha cursed. She nearly woke herself… but then thought, I've got to lead them away from my travel chest!

  Instead of retreating, Anusha ran to the steps of the ladder and climbed. She slipped past the still petrified Brida on the broad rope rungs without touching her.

  Seren cried, "It ascends; it attacks!"

  Seren backed out of Anusha's view, as did Thoster, his features betraying bafflement and a hint of concern. Japheth merely cocked his head and observed. There was no doubt he saw her; his eyes didn't leave her as she climbed, and she ascended quickly. Without any real weight, rising required hardly any effort. She wondered, even as she clambered onto the top deck, apparently in full sight of Japheth, if she needed a ladder to ascend at all. She'd had dreams of flying when she was younger. Maybe if-

  Seren hadn't run away; she'd merely retreated a few steps to cast another spell. The war wizard threw out her free hand, and from her fingertips sprang a tremendous stroke of blinding purple-white lightning.

  Anusha screamed as obliterating, mind-shattering pain coursed through her naked, unprotected soul.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) City of Nathlekh

  A remarkable bridge provided access to Nathlekh. Not long ago, no such bridge had been required.

  A decade earlier, a slow but inexorable earth movement thrust a majority of the city's Shou ward several hundred feet higher than the rest of the city. Hundreds of structures along the edges of the fault were destroyed. By chance, the destroyed structures were mostly the homes of non-Shou, though the Shou faced their own share of loss. When the earth stopped moving, the survivors slowly forgot their fear, especially those whose homes, mansions, and businesses remained. As many pointed out too, the new city heights provided an unexpected but welcome defensive stance against a landscape suddenly more dangerous than ever before.