The Sword

by Jean Johnson

  Kelly and Saber both raised their brows. Kelly spoke first, addressing both brothers, though it was Dominor’s skill in illusion-casting that earned him a look of respect from her. “You both know this woman? The real one your spell is based upon?”

  Her husband answered her. “I knew her, when I was younger; she would visit our family occasionally while on trips that passed by our home—I sincerely hope she’s an illusion,” Saber added to his brother. “She was one of the women advocating that the royal executioner should take our heads, rather than merely exile us to this isle.”

  Dominor smirked. “Isn’t it wonderful that she’ll be here to help save our lives?”

  “You have a wicked sense of humor, Dominor,” Kelly praised him. She held out her hand hesitantly. “Is she real to the touch?”

  “Quite real,” the older woman asserted on her own volition, and held out her arm. Kelly almost jumped at being addressed by the illusion. A very interactive illusion.

  “They have physical presence,” Dominor informed her as Kelly gingerly touched and explored the flesh of the woman’s bare arm. “They have sight, they have sound, they have smell, and they have touch. Some even have a personality, and many have enough conversational skills to answer a variety of questions. The only sense these illusions do not have is taste, and the smell section of the spell is weak at best, but I figured if we burned incense and aromatic oils, that would take care of the first part, and if we made sure none of the visiting men tried to steal a kiss from anyone, that would take care of the second part.

  “Now, would you like to be introduced to your courtiers? You’ll notice that each one has a piece of embroidery in the trim of their garments that contains the Katani characters for their name, so that even for the ones we’ve cobbled together out of thin air, you’ll know exactly who they are, or who they’re supposed to be.”

  Kelly immediately looked for the name on the woman’s clothes. She found it a few moments later near the armhole of the lavender vest-bodice. “It’s…very subtle.”

  “We cannot know if these Mandarites have an Ultra-Tongue spell of their own, which allows them to read and write as well as hear and speak a given foreign tongue,” Dominor agreed. “Also, each one of these people has a different level of communicativeness. Lady Felisa, because I knew her well, is stronger in the conversational department than most; others mutter pleasantries when spoken to, and seek to go elsewhere if pressed for anything more than their enspelled existence can handle.”

  “How did you anchor these spells?” Saber asked, curious.

  “Anchor?” Kelly echoed, confused by the term. It was kind of like listening to a conversation between computer geeks, listening to the brothers talk about the technical aspects magic. She couldn’t tell a microprocessor from a soundcard, either. She could guess what they meant, but it would be better to know more directly what each said. This was her kingdom now, after all.

  “Unless an illusion is cast by the mage directly, with full concentration, they must be anchored in something,” Dominor explained. He snapped his fingers, muttering yet another of the nonsensical, mystical words her Ultra-Tongue spell didn’t translate, and the woman vanished. Stooping, the mage picked up a clear glass bead, no bigger than a largish marble, and displayed it on his palm. “Koranen usually uses these to create his lightglobes with, but they’re perfect for anchoring the illusions. As are the lightglobes themselves, which cast light to begin with, and are thus easily altered. They’re even enspelled with modest mobility powers, so that some illusory courtiers will move from room to room, while those anchored in a particular light-globe will remain within that room.”

  “What if someone tries to drag them out of range of a lightglobe?” Kelly asked, worried about that aspect as Dominor returned the bead to the floor and restored “Lady Felisa” back into existence.

  “Then they’re enspelled to shout the word ‘bekh!,’ and they vanish,” Dominor stated. “Koranen thought about that one, already. He reasoned that, if our castle could be concealed by illusion-camouflage, then it was likely that our whole “culture” could indeed be based on that sort of thing, as you suggested. For all they know, we could have a whole city on the eastern shore near where the sailors have landed, and the outlanders wouldn’t even know, because it’s hidden. And if we hide our palace and cities, then it would make sense to have the ability to hide our individuals as well.

  “If uncertain or threatened, we simply hide ourselves. If our enemies cannot find us, they cannot strike at us. You will be certain to explain this to our ‘guests’ if they ever ask why our castle wall looks like a rocky cliff at the moment, of course,” Dominor added.

  “Naturally,” Saber agreed. He looked around at the chamber and the seventy or so “people” within it. “You’ve done rather well, in such a short time.”

  “You’ve been gone for almost two hours,” his brother pointed out dryly. “We have been working ourselves to the bone all this time, putting this ‘kingdom’ together.”

  Kelly blushed. “We were in an important royal conference.”

  Dominor arched one of his dark brown brows. “Right.”

  NINETEEN

  The twinge of his own spells sent Saber quickly from Kelly’s side. Hurrying out onto the eastern ramparts of the outer wall, he angled toward the section of wards that had been alerted. The illusion-spelled guards, anchored to certain stones at certain distances along the wall, were busy following the parameters of their spell.

  The repel-invaders parameter of the spell had triggered the warning, he noted, watching his soldier-illusions as they unhooked a scaling claw from the battlements and tossed it over the side with their hands. Clad in studded midnight blue leather for both armor and clothing, patterned like the guardsmen at Corvis Saber had once known, they looked real enough that he almost started to ask them what had been happening. But they weren’t enspelled to be able to actually reply; there hadn’t been enough time for enspelling something as complex as verbal reasoning.

  Saber peered over the edge between two of the defensive crenellations. A group of about seven sailors stood down there. Two had ropes with hooked claws tied to the ends. One was gathering up his rope into a neat coil, the other was whirling his own in preparation for another attempted throw. The man cast as hard as he could, and the hook sailed up, almost to the top. It fell short by about half a foot. Clearly this was at the edge of the man’s throwing ability, with such a long and heavy rope that had to be attached to reach this high. The hook clanged against the stones of the wall, dropping back down in a ripple of rope to the ground.

  One of the others, watching the cast, shouted and pointed up at Saber. All of the others looked up and focused where the man was indicating.

  Saber leaned his elbows on the broad parapet edge and studied them in return.

  “You, up there! How did you get up there?” one of the sailors demanded in his native tongue.

  “I was invited up here. You were not,” he stated in Ultra-Tongue reply, as the other man with rope and claw finished coiling and started swinging. “Perhaps it is different in your land, but in this one, we believe in being invited first, before attempting to enter another’s home.”

  The one who had spoken gestured for the other one to stop swinging his rope and grappling claw. “Then this road does lead somewhere?”

  “All roads lead somewhere.”

  “So this wall is an illusion?”

  “Of course. It is our way. Rather than be rude and needlessly violent when an unwelcomed, uninvited intruder arrives and tries to barge into our home, we simply…vanish.”

  With a flick of his hand, he vanished in a simple illusion. The men down below shouted, calling for him. Saber counted to twenty, then reappeared as the leader ordered his men to scale the “cliff” wall again.

  “Are you hard of hearing, man? Or simply lacking in wit? If you ask, and ask politely, then perhaps someone will pay attention to you. I suggest you go back to your ship and think ab
out how you could approach us in polite civility, instead of in rude intrusion. None of us are angry with your foolish attempts. Yet. But I suggest that you do not press your luck.”

  Flicking his fingers, he vanished yet again from their view. As he watched, unmoving, the men down below argued, then gave up and turned away. They coiled up their ropes and hooks and started marching back down the hill.

  Why are you pacing, Sister?” Morganen asked his eldest brother’s wife.

  Kelly shook her head, wearing footprints along the red velvet path dissecting the floor of the great hall in five stitched-together stripes. “I can’t see a way around those guns.”

  “How do you mean?” he asked, falling into step beside her. “If perhaps you told me how they are activated, I could counter their activation by bringing out some of my own collection of enchanted weapons, some of which are very powerful indeed.”

  She shook her head. “You’re doing the exact same thing. It’s a male flaw in thinking.”

  “I beg your pardon?” the youngest brother of them all asked, for the first time sounding offended instead of levelheaded.

  Kelly lifted her head with a blush. “Sorry. I spoke without thinking. It’s…a matter of thinking that bigger is better. You think a bigger and better spell will cure everything. But it doesn’t, not always. Men are more predisposed than women to think that machines—or spells, in this universe—will solve anything if they’re just made bigger. Or smaller, or stronger, or faster. They don’t think like this always, but admit it: You’d be impressed with me if I could pull off a bigger and more complex spell than you could, wouldn’t you?”

  “I would be impressed if you could pull off any spell, but yes,” Morganen agreed. “But isn’t that the way of the world?”

  “Not always from a female point of view…but they’re not female, are they?” she added with a frustrated sigh.

  “You’ve lost me again,” he pointed out. She stopped in the center of the hall and did her best to explain.

  “Sorry. Here’s an analogy: If I came to you with a better spell, a magical item more efficient, more powerful, far easier to cast and to use than the version you had, you would be impressed, right?”

  “I thought we agreed on that, already.”

  “True. Now, if you had a weapon-spell that was pretty effective, if someone else came along with an even better version of that spell, would you be impressed?”

  “Of course.”

  “And more inclined to avoid angering the person wielding it?” she added, lifting her brows. “To behave and do what they say, including and up to going away if they requested you to?”

  He began to get her point. “A weapon that, if you are correct, travels faster than sound itself, too fast to be easily stopped by most magical means. In order to impress these men, you would need a bigger and better gun than what they have?”

  “Exactly. Because they’re men, and they’d be more impressed by such things than a woman would—that’s not to say women aren’t impressed by bigger and better things,” she added quickly, as Morganen grinned. She caught his meaning a moment later, a marital joke at her and Saber’s expense. Kelly resisted the urge to hit him for it. “We’re just focused on other things that are important, too. If they were women, I might have a better chance of finding some other way to impress or otherwise reason with them, but they’re men, which means I have to find an appropriately ‘male’ way of dealing with them.

  “Now, the next problem is,” Kelly continued briskly, “my old universe is unfortunately teeming with ‘bigger and better’ guns, but that’s there and this is here, and I don’t personally know enough about how guns work to come up with a better version in this world than the basic flintlocks those men are carrying around. Not in the little amount of time we have to come up with them from the materials that are to be found here. Ergo, I need a bigger and better gun from my own world. Even though I don’t like that idea.”

  Morganen shrugged. “I can fetch one of these ‘better’ guns from your realm, any time you wish me to.”

  “I thought the aether was disturbed too much to risk it in her realm,” Saber pointed out, making both of them turn around. He had returned from the parapet in time to catch this very interesting end of their conversation.

  “A gun is a nonliving object,” Morganen returned blithely. His expression was calm and natural, responding evenly to his brother’s half-growled remark. “There is little danger in bringing it across the slowly healing fractures in the aether. At least, I presume they’re nonliving,” he added, turning politely back to Kelly.

  She had a thoughtful frown on her face. “How much can you pull across?”

  “A few items. Why do you ask?”

  “How much information do you need to be able to locate and fetch specific items?”

  The light-brown-haired man shrugged. “You could be there in my workroom with me, and point them out in the mirror…”

  “You may do that in a moment, Kelly,” Saber said, closing the distance between him and his youngest brother. He clamped a hand down on Morganen’s shoulder. “I must speak with my brother about something, first. Please excuse us.”

  Steering Morganen aside, he stopped when they were far enough away for an argument. Which meant into the east wing a short ways. Tightening his grip, he narrowed his eyes, pinning the youngest of the twins in place physically and visually.

  “You lied about not being able to send her back, didn’t you, Morg?”

  Aquamarine eyes, close in shade to Kelly’s own, stared guilelessly back at his brother’s gray. “Why would I lie about that?”

  “Jinga’s Knees! To keep her here long enough for me to fall in love with her!” Saber exclaimed, tightening his grip.

  Morganen winced and pried his brother’s hand from his shoulder. “You’re welcome.”

  Saber shook his hand free and pointed a finger at his brother. “You manipulated me!”

  “It could have just as easily been any one of us,” his youngest sibling pointed out, folding his arms across his chest.

  “No, it wouldn’t have been! I’m first in the Song, the first to fall—was she even burning to death in her bed, Morganen?” Saber demanded. “Was that just another ruse, created by you?”

  The paling of the other man’s skin was accompanied by the darkening of his eyes…and by a perceptible crackling of power, eerily reminiscent of their brother Rydan whenever a storm came. Saber, realizing suddenly that he had gone a little too far with his youngest brother, fell back a step. Morganen closed his eyes and visibly mastered his rage at the accusation, quelling the disturbances in the aether. Opening his eyes again, he gave his brother a cold look.

  “I will forget you ever suggested that, Brother. Unlike you, I like women. I like the idea of having them around, of talking with them, seeing them, and otherwise enjoying their company. I do not deliberately harm them. Not the innocent ones. Ever.”

  “I apologize,” Saber offered gruffly. “I spoke without thinking. But, you still manipulated me—and Kelly, even if you did save her life. No more, Morg. Do you understand that?”

  “I understand,” he returned calmly. Without any sign that he would obey his eldest brother.

  Saber thought about pressing the matter, but decided against it. Morg was Morg, and no power on this planet short of the Gods themselves could probably stop him. The eldest of them could only be deeply grateful that the youngest was too good a man to take advantage of that fact. Most of the time.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Saber, I promised your wife I’d help her come up with a way or two to impress our ‘guests.’”

  Saber had to ask it. Even if it angered the most powerful mage on Nightfall or even the whole of Katan. “Morg—did you have anything to do with these outlander men arriving here?”

  Morganen faced him again. A glance told him that only his sister-in-law was close enough to hear them. It was time these two, at least, knew what he could do, and what he had done. “No. B
ut I did see them preparing to leave their homeland, while scrying long and far in my more idle moments. I knew they were determined to head west across the ocean in search of more land,” he admitted coolly. “And I did then look more closely at the five women I had seen already in my scryings who might make you a true-love wife. Finding Kelly being burned alive simply solved the choice of which one to bring here to you. Then I sent a few storms across the sea to delay these men from arriving until it was time for them to appear, the only source of the Prophesied Disaster possible that I could foresee.”

  “You were watching me before you saved me?” Kelly demanded. Curious to hear their conversation, she had followed the two men at a discreet, quiet distance. “Just how much did you see of me, Morganen?”

  “Enough to know your character would suit his, and that you would be able to fall in love with each other.”

  “I already figured that much. I meant, how much did you see of me?” she demanded, folding her arms defensively across her currently decently clad chest, remembering any number of times when she had been less than decently clad in her old life.

  “I would like to know that as well, Brother,” Saber added, shifting to join her in glaring at his kin.

  “My scrying mirror is enspelled to blank out the impolite bits, and that is the truth. Regardless of your belief or disbelief in it, it is the truth,” Morganen added with a hint of primness. “I suggest we return to the topic of fetching what you think you might need from your realm, Sister—and then you can see for yourself what I can and cannot scry with my mirror.”

  Kelly didn’t know what to think. She retired early after dinner came and went, leaving the others to explain everything to Rydan when he joined them. The night-loving one of the brothers had absorbed their information, arching one of his blue black brows at all of the changes in the great hall and the shift of the table to a room in the north wing. But that was earlier. Far overhead, above the curve of the vaulted hall that the others were still working on to transform into a place of impressive power and splendor, Kelly sat bent over a embroidery frame dug out from some storage room, “painting” with thin thread and careful stitches the details of Saber’s face, in the promised embroidered portrait.