Science Is Magic Spelled Backwards and Other Stories

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  “Ruella! Ruella-ella-ellaaaaa.” The cry echoed behind her, around her, from all sides.

  Move! she commanded her body. And it did. She felt herself jackknife to a sitting position. At the same time, her body-sense told her she was still lying supine across the rocks.

  She was sitting, and she was lying down at the same time. Sitting, she could clearly see the tall indigo form edged in white before her, standing arms akimbo, an exasperated frown on his face. “Now why did you do that?” his voice came to her but his lips didn’t move, and her ears didn’t hear him. “If you hadn’t levitated, you’d have died!”

  A moment of shock was followed by sheer terror, and within the instant she was supine again, and not only supine, but dizzy as from a spinning fall.

  I was out of my body. I was dead!

  “No,” the sorcerer contradicted her thought judiciously. “You were merely out of your body.” His actual voice came this time from above and behind her.

  “I was merely—merely?—out of my body! That’s dead!”

  Against her better judgment, she had replied to a captor, opening a dialog where there should be none. Now he knew the level of her ignorance. She had handed him an advantage. She tested her body but it still wouldn’t move.

  “Well, no. Actually, that’s awakening.” With a shuffle-crunch, and a softly breathed curse he was kneeling beside her. “You were unconscious for a bit.” He passed his ringed hand over her helpless body. The biggest ring on his middle finger was an Oath signet with so many rank jewels she couldn’t count them. “Your back isn’t broken. Slight concussion. Several cuts. Some bruises, mostly not from this fall.”

  With a mighty effort, she whacked his hand aside. She used the hand holding her knife, and the blade almost sliced into his forearm before his reflexes yanked his arm away.

  “Good!” he said as he grabbed her wrist and twisted the knife from her fingers. Her hand refused to let go, and it took both his hands to wrench the weapon free. “See, you can move again. You’re going to be fine.”

  He actually sounded pleased. He flung the knife off into the darkness, and she heard it land somewhere above her head. Mentally she marked the spot. Her Vision was still working, but she couldn’t get a fix on the knife even though she saw the sorcerer clear as day.

  Before she could regain much movement, he had stripped off her backpack, and had yanked off his belt and a scarf and bound her hands and feet. He trussed her up like a calf to be branded, though she struggled with what might she could summon. He was strong, not like your average scholar, but like a professional swordsman, with forearms to prove it.

  He went through her pockets, confiscated a dozen small items. When he was done handling her like a sack of grain, she ended up half-slouched against a large stone, her feet curled back to where he’d bound them to her hands. He then perched on a nearby stone and watched her expectantly.

  After what seemed a very long time of him staring at her and her glowering back, the cold eating into her already abused muscles, she broke down and asked, “So what next?”

  “I told you. If you want a fire, you’ll have to make one.”

  “But you tied me up and took my flint and steel.”

  “There’s nothing here to use flint and steel on anyway except maybe your clothing, your blanket—or the dispatches you carry.” And he now had the dispatch case beside his boot.

  This man is crazy—absolutely mad. What is going to happen to the Kingdom with a mad Oathsworn attacking the King’s Couriers? Or maybe all the Oathsworn have turned against the King. That wasn’t supposed to be possible. The Oath bound them. Only a Royal command could unleash the power of the Oathsworn.

  He raised one eyebrow as if he’d heard her thought. He seemed totally pleased with himself and absolutely happy to sit in the dark and watch her.

  She knew that she had a small talent for rudimentary Magic. She’d been tested as a child and been told she could have a career as a healer’s assistant, but would never be able to do more than that. That decree had set her apart from her age mates, ostracized by those who had been her friends—viewed with fear and suspicion. Her parents had prepared to send her away to be schooled by the warlocks and mages.

  And then one late autumn day, she’d been fleeing her friends bitter rejection, running fast and wild into the hills where the goatherds drove their flocks in summer. And she’d taken a fall—hit her head hard. The next thing she knew she’d awakened in a healer’s cottage, reeking of goat piss and vomiting every time she tried to move.

  Three months later, the Oathsworn declared her talent gone, wiped out by the fall. And the town had accepted her again. She’d trained, and worked, and sweated and made it into the Royal Couriers, ignoring and refusing every flash of her talent that tried to re-emerge. And she had never told anyone about those flashes.

  Now, somehow the Kingdom depended on her ability to summon that talent, untrained as it was, and get away from a trained sorcerer, either a renegade or representative of the Oathsworn, a man who had probably crossed the pass with a spell and a casual step and could read her mind at will. The King has to be told the Oathsworn can’t be trusted.

  She let her Vision sharpen and searched the area around her. Meanwhile she grasped a small jagged stone that lay behind her and curled her wrists to bring it against the bonds. She was just barely able to move the stone against the material. Her wrists seemed to be bound with his scarf. Maybe the material would fray. It’ll take hours.

  “So, what’s your name?” she asked, trying to keep her mind off what her hands were doing so he wouldn’t notice.

  “Gwinn of the North Steppe. You’ve heard of me?”

  “No,” she lied. “What have you done that people would gossip about you?”

  Her plan was simple. Keep him talking, keep her plan underneath her mind so he maybe wouldn’t notice until it was too late, get free then run like hell’s beasts were after her. It wasn’t a very bright plan, considering that her feet were already going numb and her hip might not take her weight in a slow walk nevermind a full run.

  “I’m the one who led the King’s men in the final assault on King Forsin’s castle. I levitated two hundred men in full gear over the battlements in the middle of a blizzard—that I had caused. King Gorland awarded me the distinction of being Gwynn of the North Steppe because the Oathsworn can’t accept medals or wealth.”

  Now things began to make sense. Here was an Oathsworn sorcerer bitter for the loss of worldly wealth and power required by the Oath. Thwarted ambition could drive anyone crazy—and the most vulnerable were those with the most talent and intelligence. If not for his Talent, he could have become a great General, been knighted, perhaps even been made a Baron and given lands. Instead he would die in sworn poverty, with nothing to leave to any children he might have. Talent usually wasn’t inherited.

  “I’m afraid I don’t keep up on the war news from the North. My territory is the west coast and the trading routes beyond. So Forsin finally fell? Tell me about it.”

  He began describing the battle campaign that had led to his moment of glory. She gazed up at him in what she hoped passed for adulation instead of the abject terror and creeping dread for the Kingdom that she really felt. The Oath was imposed on the Talented at the first sign of their power for very good reasons. Without that compulsion, they could easily take over the world.

  Meanwhile, the stone she held in her fingers grew warm as she rubbed it against the fabric that held her. I wish it had a sharper edge. Her whole inner world narrowed to the stone, one common stone the hope for saving a Kingdom from a mad sorcerer.

  The palms of her hands tingled where the stone touched. Its surface began to feel almost soft. Then the rough stone surface hardened to a glass-smooth finish, like chipped obsidian. Suddenly the strands of material began to part swiftly with each stroke of the stone’s edge.

  He was describing how he’d gotten the idea for breaking the siege stalemate at Forsin’s castle embellishing
with technical details of how he’d discovered a way to use witchlight to grip minimally talented ordinary soldiers and channel his own power through their minds to levitate them. And then he discussed at length what Forsin’s Oathsworn might have done to counter him.

  She interjected a few encouraging comments, and in a bit he was pacing and gesticulating as he described the military contingencies, and how he’d argued the commanders into going along with his plan. He explained how he’d had to work to attain the Royal command he’d needed to proceed.

  The material around her wrists parted, and it was all she could do to transform her grin of triumph into admiration for his genius. The stone was quite warm in her hands now, creating enough heat to un-cramp her muscles. She teased apart the loop that had bound her wrists to her ankles. It was hard to mask her effort. Then she started on the leather strap binding her ankles. She could barely reach it, but dared not move.

  When he paced away, for a moment his body turned away from her and she used the opportunity to shift and squirm until she could reach the leather strap with the stone.

  “And it turned out that you were right and the commanders were wrong,” she offered ingenuously.

  “Yes, and it wasn’t the first time I’d been right, though it was the first time I’d managed to gain the audience I needed to get my plan accepted.”

  “And then you won the battle.”

  “Well, not single handedly. Nineteen good volunteers died in that assault. They were brave men to submit themselves to my manipulation. You see, to levitate them like that I had to get into their minds and use some of their own latent powers for them. And those who survived were never the same again.”

  And he got Royal authorization for that?

  She felt a groove forming in the leather strap where she sawed at it. “They were changed? How?” She had not heard anything about that. Rumor had it that Forsin fell to Gorland’s forces after a duel between two Oathsworn.

  “Their powers were awakened and they were sent to be trained as warlocks.”

  They would be dead to their families. They’d lost everything they held dear.

  “But it wasn’t just my method of levitating them that did it. After they got me into Forsin’s castle, everything went wrong. In moments I was faced off against Ian of Lessing in Forsin’s courtyard while the battle raged around us. The truth is Lessing had me overmatched. I had to kill him or die trying.”

  He stopped his pacing and turned to inspect her. She held very still, focusing her whole attention on him and his tale. She held the stone pressed against the leather strap still.

  “I was too frightened to consider the side-effects of what I did—I simply acted reflexively. I brought down power and blasted Lessing with everything I could muster. I didn’t expect it to be enough. I thought I would die there, but maybe the men would be able to finish him off if I managed to do enough damage.

  “I was wrong. When I hit him, Lessing died instantly. He’d been gathering energy to fling at me—and what he’d gathered went wild. Contained by the bespelled courtyard walls, the energy penetrated every soldier there. They seemed to turn transparent—I saw their bones through armor and flesh. When it was over, some had died and some … had to be trained as warlocks to gain control of their new power.”

  What to say to a madman who confesses weakness? She gulped and scrabbled in her mind for words of praise. “But we now own Forsin’s lands, and his eastern border which is defensible. The Kingdom will be safe for generations because of what you did.”

  He stared at her, her Vision showing him limed in a shredded aura of rose and gold. He turned his back and kicked hard at a rock, sending it across the open space. “Yes, it will be. But at a terrible cost.”

  At that moment, the leather strip parted beneath the stone blade. Without thinking, she stripped the bindings away, scrambled to her feet, grabbed up her backpack and sprinted for a dark opening far to her right that she had studiously ignored while she sawed at her bonds. Pain flared in every joint, her stomach revolted, her head pounded, but she drove her feet forward by an act of sheer willpower.

  She heard him start after her with a shouted, “Ruella! No!”

  Then she was into the side tunnel running like the wind. She took another branching tunnel with chiseled walls that slanted down. Veering left then right along the twisting way, she lost her bearings, no longer having any sense of where the tunnel that led through the mountain would be.

  She heard water dripping somewhere. The air had become very still, heavy with an unscented dankness only found in the depths of caves. She was trapped down here with a madman who had persuaded a Royal to back his harebrained plan, killed a fellow Oathsworn instead of merely defeating him, been dissatisfied by the King’s reward, and now was attacking Royal Couriers.

  I have to get out and warn the King. I have to.

  She paused at an intersection, sides heaving. Considering which way to go, she slipped into her backpack straps, feeling the weight of the dispatch case and her blanket against her shoulder blades. Distant echoes from every direction indicated he was still pounding after her, shouting her name as if pleading with her. She’d never dealt with a true madman before.

  He had waylaid her, taken her dispatch case, then told her the tale of his greatness. Had he intended to rape her eventually? Or just murder her? He considered himself a tactical genius. He must have some plan for bringing down the Kingdom. If she could thwart that plan by making sure he never found the dispatch case, she would—even if it cost her life. If the Oathsworn—or even just this one—have broken free of Royal command, we are all doomed.

  She picked a direction she only hoped might be toward the exit she sought and plunged on down into the mountain. Down and further down she went. The only warmth in the miserable damp came from the stone in her hand. Now that she could see the stone, she noted that it glowed right through her flesh.

  It was a beautiful amber where it protruded between her fingers, polished and faceted like amber colored obsidian. And as she gripped it, her body was warm enough, her pain bearable. And she could see though only with Vision, sans color. She could see better than if she’d carried a torch.

  She spotted a narrow slit to her left. It didn’t look like a mining tunnel, but just a flaw in the rock structure. What was left of her sense of direction hinted that maybe that slit would connect to the shaft that led through the mountain.

  Behind and echoing all around her, footsteps and panting, cries and imprecations made it clear the madman was gaining on her. He would be much too big to fit into that slit in the rock.

  She took her backpack off and turned sideways, taking a deep breath to hold her stomach in, scraping her already torn riding leathers as she squeezed through the slit. Her right breast screamed where she scraped the nipple.

  Then she was through and sidling down the narrow crack. She pushed herself to the fastest pace she could manage, not allowing herself a second to rest. With a sorcerer’s magic, he could pry her out of here—or levitate the dispatch case out and leave her to die, trapped. He’d need time to do that though. He’d have to conjure help—or maybe his witchlight could do the job.

  At one point the crack widened and she began to hope. But she reached a spot where the ceiling had fallen. A wall of rocks cut off further progress. Above her the natural crack stretched beyond her Vision into a tall chimney. Could that be light at the top? It was night outside, maybe not quite pre-dawn on a moonless night—but lighter than in here. Her Vision showed her nothing in the darkness above.

  She considered retreating the way she’d come. But then she caught a glimmering of witchlight behind her, a pale blue ball of cold fire—had sent a search-ball after her. It mustn’t find her. There was no telling what it might do to her mind.

  She tucked the beautiful glowing stone into her bosom, braced her back against one side of the crack and the soles of her boots against the other side and inched upwards. The backpack protected her shoulders somewhat,
and she was able to make it well up into the vertical chimney before her thighs were trembling too much to continue.

  She stopped to rest and realized she had come so far that if she fell, it would probably kill her even if she cushioned her fall by levitating again. And maybe I can’t do that again! If she fell and died, it would leave the dispatch case to the King’s enemy.

  Far below, she could see the ball of witchlight searching for her.

  She wasn’t sure where she was, but she knew exactly where she needed to be—where she’d expected to come out when she’d entered this cave—lower down, on the other side of Smuggler’s Run, not far from the fort that guarded the road, though the pass was no longer a border.

  While she tried to pant silently, she imagined where she thought she was, and where she wanted to be. Could she hold herself up here until the witchlight died then get down and sidle back through the crack? If she could, would she be able to find the way through the mountain and out the other side?

  She had done it once, and she knew how she’d gotten here from the main entrance. The only trick would be climbing the cliff she’d fallen down. She could find her knife, slice the blanket into strips, make a rope. She could do it.

  Back near the entry, where he’d first spoken to her, if she’d gone straight ahead, right through him, she’d be on the trail to the exit right now. Or she’d be dead.

  Don’t even think that! she scolded herself. A Royal Courier does not fail merely because she got lost. On the other hand, a Royal Courier trains long and hard so as never to get lost.

  Below her, the blue witchlight flared brightly, and flickered as if signaling its master.

  She began to inch upwards again searching above for any sign of an opening or ledge where she could rest or hide.

  In the distance, she heard a rumbling crunch, and the soles of her feet and her flanks vibrated with some catastrophe. It happened again, and then again. She started to slip downwards as the rock vibrated and seemed to separate a little. Her thighs were aching ominously, her calves trembling. Her palms sweated, slipping a little more.