The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  “And having failed to destroy them,” Welwyn whispered at Meg’s elbow, “Lady Carin took them into the void with her? Is that how the wind blows? It occurs to me, don’t you know, that the lass might even be on her way to return those ‘foul Gifts’ to the Strangers who brought them here. What would you think of that?”

  Megella tilted her head. “I think, Master Welwyn, that those dolphyns are obscenely dangerous. And wherever Carin is taking them, she had best be doing all she can to rid herself of them.”

  Chapter 20

  Restoration (Carin’s Evidence)

  Carin was hurtling through layers of images. The crystals—melded now into a hollow-based, three-sided pyramid—seemed to be shedding images, or reflections, that she could not help but see as she rushed through the void, gripping the object in her outstretched hand and staring into it. The pictures, mere impressions, burst from the points of the pyramid and flitted by at a raking clip. But even so, Carin could comprehend them. She could also identify which of the original, individual crystals was shedding which pictures.

  First came images of Earth, with the immediacy of events in the present:

  A prehistoric, seafaring race … its loin-clothed chieftain wears a crystal dolphin on a rawhide lace round his neck. The amulet—prized as a magic charm, bestowing upon its wearer strength and good fortune and heightened senses—passes down through the generations until its wearer loses it in battle on a bloody seashore. An ancient beachcomber picks it out of the sand, and again it is passed down, parent to child, for millennia, often worn as the pendant of a necklace … often, in later times, consigned to a box of family keepsakes and forgotten for a century or more. At last it comes to light in a dusty trunk from an old lady’s attic. It ends up in a flea market and becomes the property of the little girl who begs her parents to buy it for her. The child wears it everywhere, and sleeps with it hanging from the bedpost by her pillow.

  When the last of the images from Earth had snapped past her, when Carin had hurtled through the history of “her” dolphin, she rushed without a pause into the more complex, but again seemingly present-time narrative of Ladrehdin’s crystal:

  Space-farers encounter Ladrehdin’s early, sophisticated civilization of thinkers, philosophers, and scientists. The strangers choose to reveal, in part, the secrets of the crystal—its ability to focus and channel a planet’s raw energy into usable power. Those early wisemen and wisewomen of Ladrehdin learn to use the power, drawing on the natural forces of their world to become, themselves, forces of nature: manipulating mountains and seas, winds and waves, even the sunlight falling upon their world and the fires burning up from deep in its core.

  At this point the images blurred together, overlapping world upon world, still impressing Carin with a sense of “now,” though she knew these were events from the past:

  On a pestilential planet, liver-brown clouds shroud a sweltering, uninhabited landscape. Steam hisses and roars from gaping vents in the ground, reeking of rotten eggs. Slime and mold coat every rock. Red and purple ooze slicken every surface. Wide, simmering, spongy patches of ooze become breeding grounds for disease. Wedged among the rocks, coated with the slime, buried in the ooze, a crystal dolphin lies. Acids pit the rocks around the dolphin, but never the crystal: It, like its two brethren, endures … indestructible, a device purposely planted in that alien place by space faring strangers.

  But then: The crystal is snatched, stolen, spirited out of the slime and into the world of Ladrehdin. After that: Disruption, the balance lost.

  Carin saw the three crystals making a vast triangle in space with Earth, Ladrehdin, and the slimy world at its points. But when the pestilential planet lost its crystal, when that dolphin was made to leap through the void to Ladrehdin, the perfect triangle collapsed.

  With the structure ruined, the power failed to flow properly. The space-farers had designed their space-triangle to focus the natural energy of the three distant worlds and channel the power to their home planet to feed their insatiable demands for it. Carin could see, in the nothingness of the void, in the images that flitted past her, a ray like a sunbeam shooting off into space, a beam on its way to enrich the strangers’ faraway world—at Ladrehdin’s expense.

  The double dolphins channeled exponentially more power than the single one with which Ladrehdin had originally been fitted. The world of the wizards was being drained dry.

  From the other point of the collapsed triangle, however, no power now flowed. Carin remembered what Morann had said about Earth:

  “In that world I could sense the presence of an age-old magic. But the power had long been neglected. It slumbered in deep abeyance.”

  What Morann had actually sensed, Carin now understood, was the Earth’s raw energy. For a time, the strangers had succeeded in tapping that energy and drawing it away to their own world. But then their scheme failed. With Ladrehdin’s theft of the slimy world’s dolphin, the structure buckled, and Earth’s amulet fell dormant.

  But not entirely inactive. A link remained, a tenuous connection with its brethren crystals.

  Through that connection, Morann had found Carin when what the sorceress had actually sought was “a pool of new magic to mix with the ebbing waters of Ladrehdin.” Carin remembered the sorceress laying out her plan, explaining to Verek why she had dared to breach the void and build bridges to other worlds: Morann had been fishing in alien waters, searching for new and potent sources of magic.

  What the sorceress never knew, Carin realized, was that she only stood to make matters worse.

  One of Morann’s ancient predecessors—a Wise One, a wizard from Ladrehdin’s distant past—had also wanted more than his fair share of power when he set out to find a second dolphin. Succeeding in his search, he had fetched that crystal to Ladrehdin and paired it with the one he already had—with disastrous consequences. The subsequent ebbing of magic that had been lamented by every generation of wizards, from that day to the present, was a direct result of that early act of thievery.

  No wonder thieves are punished so severely on Ladrehdin today, Carin mused. Even if the people have forgotten the long-ago theft of another world’s crystal amulet, they seem to know instinctively that bad things come from taking what doesn’t belong to them.

  For Carin also saw, in the panoply of images through which she still hurtled, that the theft of the slime-covered dolphin had produced a second unintended consequence. That crystal had brought to Ladrehdin a plague: the bleeding disease dubbed the Ashen Curse.

  The pestilence destroyed ancient Ladrehdinian civilization. What had been a society of philosophers and scientists regressed into a more primitive culture that was dominated by the surviving wysards—the users of the Power which the crystals tapped: the magic that was already here—always here, in the life of the planet. The strangers had not brought magic to Ladrehdin: they’d brought only the means of working the magic.

  At first, the ability to use Power on at least a limited scale was widespread, even among the common folk who eked out a living in the isolated pockets the pestilence had spared. Many a countrywoman became a water witch, using a forked hazel twig to dowse for underground springs. Farmers could partially control the weather, calling the rain when it was needed and parting the clouds to soak in sun. Every village had its skilled crafters who could shape wood, metal, or stone to any form or purpose.

  Over time, however, as the double-dolphin linkage siphoned off more and more of Ladrehdin’s native energies, the ability to make use of the remaining Power became increasingly rare. And distrust sprang up between those few who could still command the forces of nature, and the many who could not. Eventually a new religion found favor: It condemned the workers of magic as blackhearts, fiends, evil beings who should be destroyed.

  Well, Carin thought, in one small way the superstitious masses were right. Only a wysard could have succeeded in uniting all three crystals into the pyramid of danger that she now held in her hand.

  Oh, she wasn’t takin
g credit for melding the three into one: The crystals had done that themselves, as soon as they were all in the same room together. But she and Theil had made the unification possible. With Verek anchoring her to the wysards’ well in Ruain, Carin had journeyed to Earth to reclaim Earth’s crystal and bring it to the cave of magic. Then the two of them had quested westward, recovered the pair of dolphins from Morann’s mountain eyrie, and—after various detours—rushed that pair into Ruain’s cave to join with the first crystal.

  And when the three became one, the wellspring of Power had shrieked at Carin: “Take it away! Remove it!” For the unification had induced such an enormous drain on the natural energies of Ladrehdin, it could not long be endured. As one of the wysards who were responsible for saddling the planet with a heavier burden than it could bear, Carin now had a responsibility to rid the world of that burden.

  She had ceased to rush through the deep layers of images that had bombarded her since she’d grabbed the pyramid and jumped with it into the void. Now only a few pictures scudded past.

  In them, Carin again recognized Earth, the planet where she had first picked up a crystal dolphin—a shape so pleasing, so friendly and universally appealing that none could view it as a threat. And Carin saw the linkages that ran from that crystal to its brethren amulets on other worlds. She saw their connections, the back-and-forth among them, the transmission of the bleeding disease from the pestilential planet … not only to Ladrehdin, but also to Earth.

  When Morann opened the void, when she channeled Power through the crystal to snatch me from my bed all those years ago, Carin realized, she also let the bleeding disease into my world.

  That explained part of the letter that Carin’s mother had written to her, the part that said, “Right after you left, people began to bleed, and nobody knew how to stop it.”

  Morann had opened the connection. Carin, against her will, had slipped out through it—heading toward Ladrehdin—while the bleeding disease had streamed—gushed—to Earth in her wake.

  But in fact, the germs of the disease must have been seeping in, at low levels, for quite a while, exposing Carin and developing in her an immunity to the illness. And the slow seep had also protected her parents. Said the letter: “Your daddy and I didn’t get sick. We don’t know why we lived and everyone else died.”

  It’s all down to that shiny, pretty dolphin you bought for me, Carin told them silently. If I hadn’t worn it near you all the time, if I hadn’t hung it on the bedpost in our house there on the beach, we wouldn’t have survived when an otherworldly witch opened a gate and let a plague into our world.

  And Carin would not have been exposed to the currents that had built within her a susceptibility to forces which went by the name “magic.”

  She had now come to a dead stop in the void between the worlds. No images drifted past her, and Carin had no sensation of moving through any medium. She hung suspended in nothingness.

  Except: Now that she was looking at the object in her hand without the distraction of all those pictures and impressions flitting past, Carin could just make out the faint, ghostly ribbons or bands that stretched from the points of the pyramid into the blankness. They numbered four.

  Four? At a guess, she would put Earth, Ladrehdin, and the slimy world at the ends of three of those ribbons. The fourth one, Carin was willing to bet, stretched all the way to the planet of the space-faring strangers. But which ribbon went where?

  Experimentally, she tried raising her other hand and discovered, to her surprise, that she could move it. During her previous journeys through the void, she had been immobile, nearly inert. But this time her mind had remained sharp and her muscles still obeyed.

  Moving slowly so as not to disturb the ribbons, Carin gently fingered each of the four bands. She ran her gaze along each as far as she could see. And when she thought she had them sorted, she tested her conclusion by slightly relaxing her grip on the pyramid.

  Yes. As Carin had expected, it showed a marked preference for one of the ribbons. If she simply released the pyramid, it would speed away from her in that direction.

  She had no intention of allowing the object to travel its preferred path, for that way went straight to Ladrehdin. The pyramid was still attempting to do the job for which it had been devised: gather, focus, and transmit a planet’s natural energy, everything from the heat in its molten core to the power of its falling waters and the rush of its daily rotation.

  Not Ladrehdin’s energy, Carin thought. And not Earth’s.

  She twisted in the nothingness, lined herself up with the ribbon that she was certain had its endpoint in simmering patches of slime, and hurled the pyramid down that ribbon as fast and hard as she could throw it.

  “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

  Somewhere in Verek’s books, back in the day when Carin was supposed to be organizing them but had stolen secret hours to read them, she had come across that dictum. She hadn’t really understood what it meant—until now.

  As quickly as the pyramid tumbled down the ribbon in front of her, Carin went flying down the band at her back, tearing along in reverse toward an endpoint she could not see. Instinctively she brought her knees to her chest and hugged them, rounding her body into a shape like a stone cast from a sling.

  She watched until the pyramid winked away through the void, speeding in the direction she’d flung it. Then Carin put her head down. But just before she shut her eyes, she glimpsed the overtaxed ribbons tearing, breaking apart, destroying the links among the four connected worlds.

  They wouldn’t have broken, Carin thought, if I hadn’t weakened them with all the tugging I gave them during my travels. First she’d brought Earth’s crystal to Ladrehdin and left it in Verek’s cave of magic. Then she’d separated the paired dolphins in Morann’s possession and sent one of that pair to Earth with Verek while she carted the other with her on her grand tour of distant worlds.

  What a twisting she must have given the ribbons that stretched between the crystals. All unawares, she’d tangled and knotted them, doing such damage that now they’d finally snapped and freed Earth and Ladrehdin from their destructive shackles.

  Like Alice’s kitten romping with the yarn, Carin thought, remembering the opening scene of the puzzle-book, Through the Looking-Glass. The playful black kitten had undone the ball of worsted Alice had tried to wind up, leaving the strands raveled over the hearth-rug, “all knots and tangles, with the kitten running after its own tail in the middle.”

  Carin was smiling at the picture in her mind and enjoying a sense of accomplishment, when she got a sudden cold, hollow feeling.

  Beggar all! she thought, and wondered: Had she also brought the bleeding disease to each alien world she’d visited? Rolling sheep-stones and hairy hummers, magnificent white-furred snow cats, murderous weeds, and scorpion-clawed mantikhora: they might all have succumbed by now to a lethal plague, if she’d done to their worlds what Morann did to Earth.

  The possibility gnawed at her. But she let herself hope the exposure had been so brief, during her fleeting stops on each world, that no harm could have come to the native denizens. Maybe I gave them immunity, Carin thought. They may all be better off for me having dropped by.

  And here she was wayfaring again, traveling the void. And again, time lost its meaning. Carin had no idea how long she flew through nothingness. She felt no hunger or fatigue, nor any sensation that would serve as a point of reference.

  But eventually she smelled the sea, its sharp, salty tang. And then Carin cannonballed with a stinging splash into a deep body of water. She sank—deeply.

  In the dark ocean, she straightened and stretched for the sunlight that glinted off the surface far above her. On her way up, Carin was joined by a pod of dolphins—of the flesh and blood variety. The animals wheeled and twisted around her, lightly nudging her, helping her to rise.

  As she burst into the air, the first thing Carin saw was a sun-drenched shoreline clad in flowers
, and a bay winding deep into the land. On one side of that inlet, a wall of rock rose steeply to a height of at least a thousand feet. But on the other side, a low, flat, parklike ground, grass covered and tree-ringed, beckoned her to come ashore.

  She swam for it strongly, and wasn’t even particularly out of breath when she waded out of the warm water, past a tumble of glistening rocks in which a sea urchin bristled from hiding, its red spines poking from a narrow crack. Across coral sands, Carin ran straight to a wide-spreading tree, tugging the wooden bead from her sopping-wet pocket as she went.

  “Sprite!” she cried. “Drisha’s teeth! Are you all right? Sweet mercy, I hope you haven’t drowned.”

  Carin pressed the bead against the tree’s furrowed trunk. She put her lips to it and puffed warm breaths over it. She squashed her cheek against the bead, trying to feel the shivering that had made the bead tremble in her pocket when she’d first discovered that the sprite had ensconced itself within the little lump of wood.

  There—maybe …

  She seemed to detect a slight quivering. Carin stood awhile with her face mashed against the bead, unsure whether she felt the woodsprite’s movements or only her anxiety for the creature.

  “Come on, sprite!” she called. “Here’s a fresh tree for you. Get moving!”

  She shook the bead, then jammed it tight against the trunk and rolled it up and down with the flat of her hand. Still there was no spark nor whimper.

  At Carin’s feet lay a chunk of lava rock, rough as a wood rasp. She rubbed the bead with it, grating off fine particles.

  The bead, however, emitted nothing: not a reedy voice, not a flicker of light.

  Carin groaned.

  “I’ve finally done it,” she muttered to the deserted landscape, where nothing could hear her but the birds that sang far and near in the trees. “I’ve killed the woodsprite. But why, why,” she wailed, “did the creature jump into my pocket when it could have retreated to any tree in Ruain? Oh, woodsprite! What did you do? What have I done?”