by Holly Lisle
Barney disentangled himself from his brother and sister and sat up. He ate the chocolate thoughtfully, then looked at the far wall of the room.
He was pretty sure he could have made the Turtles — if he hadn’t gotten scared. They were pretty big. Maybe he could make a bathroom. He concentrated on it — thought of the upstairs bathroom back home, with its big, shiny sink and his footstool for washing his hands; with its bathtub big as an ocean, that sat up on shiny gold feet with claws on them — and its toilet with the wood seat and the bright blue water. If there were a door in his prison, it would lead to such a bathroom, he decided. The room needed a door anyway. He concentrated, and behind a shimmering square of firefly lights, the bathroom door from home appeared, fancy glass handle and all. It looked, he thought, kind of small. He was not in any mood to be critical, though. As long as there was a potty on the other side, he would be happy.
He opened the door and peeked in. Yep. There it was. He grinned. Mommy and Daddy sure would be surprised when they saw what he could do. He felt really tired all of a sudden. He guessed magic must be hard work, even if it didn’t seem like it. He decided he would take a nap when he was done.
That would really surprise his mom. He hated naps.
His brother and sister were awake when he went back out. They sat there, looking all sad and scared, petting Murp. His brother looked surprised to see him.
“Where were you?”
“Goin’ to the potty.”
“There wasn’t a potty in here last night,” Carol said. “I looked.”
“I know.” Barney smiled. “There’s one now.”
Jamie and Carol looked at each other. For a moment, neither moved. Then both of them leapt to their feet and ran for it — Carol, who’d been sitting closer, arrived first. She darted in and slammed the door in Jamie’s face. Barney heard the lock click.
“Oh, no,” Jamie groaned. “She’ll be in there forever.”
“You take the longest,” Barney said. “You always take books in with you.”
“Well, I don’t have any books, so I can’t take longer — okay?” Jamie turned his back on Barney and pounded on the door. “I gotta go!” he yelled. “Hurry up!”
“I shoulda’ made two,” Barney muttered.
Jamie, catching his breath in between yells, evidently heard him. He turned back and stared at Barney. “You should have done what?”
“Made two. Bathrooms. Then I wouldn’t hafta listen to you yell.”
“You made the bathroom.” Jamie frowned “No. I don’t think so. A little kid like you could not make a bathroom.”
Barney was terribly sleepy. He didn’t want to listen to his brother talk anymore. He made two books appear and carried them over. “Here. Read a book.” He held them out, and when his brother didn’t take them, dropped them at his feet.
Then he went back and curled up on the pile of rags and closed his eyes.
In the background, he heard his brother pounding on the bathroom door, yelling for Carol to get out of the bathroom — that they had an emergency. It sounded just like home, Barney thought.
The last thing he heard before he fell asleep was Jamie squawking, “Hey, these books don’t have any words in ‘em! They just have scribbles.”
Let him make his own books, then, Barney thought.
* * *
Someone was shaking him.
“Quit!” Barney muttered, and rolled away from the hands on his arms and legs.
“Wake up.”
He flailed out, kicking and hitting. His brother’s voice, right in his ear, said, “If you don’t wake up, I’m going to punch your lights out.”
Barney squinted up at Jamie. “I’m sleepy.”
“We figured how to get out of here,” Carol said.
Barney sighed and sat up.
“You really made the bathroom, didn’t you?” Jamie asked.
“Yes.”
Murp yawned.
Barney followed suit.
“Then make us a door that goes out of here.”
Barney looked from his brother to his sister. They were buttheads, he thought — but they were really smart buttheads. “Yes,” he whispered. “I can do that.” He walked to the nearest wall, and thought a door into it.
A very nice wood door just like the first one he’d made appeared in the stone.
Behind him, he heard Jamie and Carol gasp.
“I’ll go first,” Jamie said. He opened the door. He didn’t say anything for an instant. Then he said, “There’s a hall out here.”
Murp brushed past Jamie’s legs and ran out of the room. Jamie shrugged and followed him. Carol went next, and Barney brought up the rear. He was still terribly sleepy. He wanted somebody to carry him — or better yet, he wanted to go back to the rag pile and let his brother and sister come back and get him later. He only walked behind them because he was afraid they wouldn’t.
Murp walked slowly — looking back at Jamie and yowling all the time.
“I’m coming,” Jamie said. “We’re all following you, Murp.”
Murp kept up his chatter.
A cold wind whistled down the long stone hallway and blew past Barney. He shivered and woke up. “Oh, no!” he whispered. He yelled, “Run! Run!”
The children took off — but in front of their eyes, the walls grew together. A stream of gray smoke curled out of the floor and grew into a towering wraith in front of them.
“Going somewhere?” the thing asked in its horrible, whispery voice.
“Go away, Unweebil,” Barney yelled. “We’re going home.”
“Yes. And I must say, I find it very impressive you got this far. I suppose I shall have to make a stronger cage for you.”
He raised his smoky arms upward, and Carol shouted, “You’re evil.”
The creature lowered its arms and chuckled. “No. Not at all. Being evil is much too much work — especially when all of existence will wind down on its own. It’s quite enough that I’m not good.”
Then smoke billowed around the children, and Barney coughed and choked and his eyes watered. When it cleared Carol, Jamie, and Barney were trapped on the inside of a giant, murky green ball. Murp was gone.
“He’s evil,” Carol repeated “I hope he doesn’t hurt Murp.”
“Murp will be all right,” Jamie said “Us, too. We’ll get out of here and go home. Barney can do some magic—”
Barney settled onto the rounded floor of the ball. It was soft and yielding. He lay back and closed his eyes. He would rescue all of them — he had no doubt about it. But he would do it later.
CHAPTER 7
“Talleos, I need a break.” Minerva couldn’t sit and listen to the cheymat drone on anymore. She stood and stretched, trying to get the kinks out. Sitting on the hardwood floor was killing her back — and her rear end, she suspected, would never be the same.
Talleos looked scandalized. “But you haven’t started into the background for the subclasses of classes of spells based on the first and simplest name of God yet — you should at least get that far on your first day.”
“My eyes are glazing over.” She spread her feet apart and reached down to touch her toes, then pressed the palms of her hands flat against the floor. Minerva heard her vertebrae pop as she did. When she bobbed up, she told the cheymat, “Look, there has to be some other way to learn this stuff. I don’t do well listening to lectures — never have — and having somebody read to me puts me to sleep. I’m a hands-on person.”
“Hands on.” The cheymat stared up and to his right, and his face became thoughtful. “Hands... on.” He looked back at her and propped his elbows on his book and his chin in his cupped hands. “Yes. That we can do. Sex magic is relatively simple to learn and doesn’t require the complex ingredients you appear to find so distasteful. And you don’t have to memorize complicated spells or rules. Besides — it happens to be my specialty.”
“I’m not surprised.”
Talleos flashed a smug little grin. “Well, if
it’s going to be sex magic, I need to bring in the quilts.”
“Don’t bother. It isn’t.”
Minerva wondered if she could kill him and still save her children. Probably not. She paced over to one of the display cases, pretending the cheymat had ceased to exist. She’d spotted some creamy sheets of vellum on one of the shelves. She picked them up, then located a small case filled with charcoal sticks, some chalky crayons, and a few sharpened pencils lacking erasers. She took the case, too.
“Minerva, you’re going to have to be flexible about things if you want your kids back,” Talleos said then noticed what she had in her hands. “What are you going to do with those?” His voice sounded suddenly nervous.
“I’m going to go sit outside in the fresh air and take some notes. I assume all the books are written in some script I can’t read?”
“Absolutely. So there’s no way you can take notes without my help.”
Minerva took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “There certainly is. I can write down what I remember, and then I can think about all this a bit.”
The cheymat cast a covert glance up at a crystal sphere perched atop one of the bookcases. The sphere glowed with a soft, pale pink-white light. Minerva was surprised she hadn’t noticed it before. She was pretty sure the entire room had been dark the first time she’d walked in — she should have seen something that glowed. Then Talleos frowned and quickly turned back to her. “Why don’t you just stay in here and I’ll go over the material again with you — and you can take all the notes you like.”
“I need to get out of this house for a while,” Minerva snarled at him.
He assumed an air of indifference. “Fine. Ignore my help. Go take notes outside with the tourists if you want. It’s your children that are missing, and I’m the only one who can help you get them back.” He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at her. “Don’t let the tourists take your holo, though, or — mind what I say — your presence here will get back to the Weirds. And if they find out you’re here, you’re doomed.” He smiled again, then, tightlipped — as if that idea appealed to him. “Just a thought.”
She clenched her teeth. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
Minerva stomped through the house and out the front door, walking as fast as she could without actually breaking into a run. She wanted to get as far away from the cheymat as she could before she did or said something stupid, and he refused to help her. Still— Sex magic, my ass, she thought, furious. He’s just trying to take advantage of me because I’m desperate to get my kids back. And he’s making up all the rest of this because I won’t bump and grind with him.
At least, she hoped that was the case.
The cheymat’s house was surrounded by old-growth forest. Even in daylight, it was an eerie place. Huge, gnarled trees brooded beside the rustic log cabin, making way in spots for a narrow beam of sunlight to break through. One of the forest giants had fallen nearby. There, late afternoon sunlight streamed to the ground and illuminated the understory plants. Small conifers and frail-looking deciduous trees took advantage of the rare opportunity and grew with urgent profusion. The ground bloomed with a carpet of autumn flowers. Vines clambered up the trunks of the trees nearby, racing for the sun. Minerva knew the plants that reached the upper story first would crowd out the rest and kill them. Hard to think of such a pretty place being the site of life-and-death struggle.
She walked over to the fallen tree, picked up a stick, and smacked it on the trunk a few times. The she ran the stick under the trunk along the part of the tree where she intended to sit. She flushed out a little shiny blue birdlike creature, but no snakes. For Minerva, the snakes were the big thing. She knew intellectually that they weren’t slimy — but they looked slimy — and they made her skin crawl. She didn’t know if this world had snakes, but she didn’t want to discover it did by sitting on one.
She perched on the rough trunk and looked around her. No tourists anywhere that she could see. Fine. So most likely Talleos was exaggerating the problem. She couldn’t imagine tourists coming to such an out-of-the-way place, anyhow. She spread out a piece of the vellum, and one of the pencils, and started to take notes.
It seemed a shame to waste the smooth, creamy vellum on anything as dreary as notes. The material cried out for calligraphy, or an egg tempera illumination, or even a sketch of the woods. Not scrawled notes on the position in which one had to hold one’s hands when invoking the first name of God.
Could all of that complicated rigmarole be necessary? And if it was, how could anyone have expected her to come across it herself? It wasn’t the sort of thing that just sprang to mind fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus.
She wrote, Magic Using The First Name Of God.
She stared at the white sheet for a moment, then underlined her header.
Number 1 — The first name of God is...
What was the first name of God? She couldn’t remember. Something long and complicated—
She doodled along the edge of the paper, trying to think of it. Oh, well — on to the next point.
Ritual for invoking the name of God.
She could remember a bit more of that one. Something about Face in the first direction, which is east, and cleanse the first direction—
And then, she recalled, there had been some phrase in a foreign language, that had to be said exactly right — she couldn’t remember it at all.
And after that, hadn’t Talleos said something about doing a separate ritual for each of the four directions?
She doodled some more. She sketched one of the little flowers in front of her, filling in the delicate curves of the five petals with light strokes from a chalky, rust-colored crayon. She did an overlay of pink, then smudged the petals with her finger to try to match the texture. The vellum made a perfect surface; and under her steady hand the flower seemed to burst into life on the page. Delighted, she laid down the background lines of the rest of the plant with nearly invisible pencil strokes, and sketched in some of the fallen leaves that formed its foreground She didn’t have any green with her — just the pink and the rust and a few other shades of browns and black. She chose a limited-palette approach. She’d always liked the feel of the world seen through a filtered lens — and to her, the limited palette created that effect.
The sunshine beat down on her shoulders, a delicious hot contrast to the cool breeze. The air smelled rich and pungent, redolent of rotting wood and leaves and fertile, dark, damp earth. She breathed deeply, and let the wind rustling through the forest canopy and the distant sounds of running water soothe her.
As the sketch progressed, she felt herself recapturing some of her self-confidence. Drawing had always done that for her. Her area of expertise, she thought, and grinned. The cheymat and his attempts to lure her into sex magic seemed less threatening at that moment. He was alone — the last of his kind unless he should somehow find another cheymat. She tried to imagine being the last human — and decided if she found herself in such an awful predicament, she might be just as pushy and obnoxious and desperate as he was.
Not that she had any intention of doing what he hoped she would. She was willing to be understanding. And she would go a long way out of pity — but not that far.
Minerva kept drawing; and while she sketched she considered what she knew of the nature of magic. Magic wasn’t impossible. That she was in this bizarre situation was proof of that. Since it was possible, she would learn to use it. She would find a way to understand the forces she needed to control — if moving galaxies was what she had to do to save her children and get back home, then she would learn how to move galaxies. With a grin, Minerva reflected that she’d always believed she could do anything she put her mind to — the time had come to put her faith to the test. But no more letting Talleos upset her — no letting him get her goat, she thought, and giggled. She decided she’d use the “get her goat” line on him. That ought to annoy him.
The drawing seemed to take on form and
design without conscious effort on her part. For her, artwork had always been like that — a sort of communion between her and her materials; a joint effort to bring forth out of wood pulp and ground pigments and wax a new entity; an object able to convey an emotion, or a concept — or a sense of passion.
Minerva noted a space in the background of her picture that seemed to cry out for more detail. She studied the shadows and shapes already there, then sketched in a cat peering from beneath the vines — and wistfully, she made the cat into Murp. Broad-faced, round-eyed, and orange tabby-striped, with a white blaze down his nose, white bib and white feet, Barney’s cat grew out of her memory until he stared back at her from the page.
She got a lump in her throat, and closed her eyes, and gripped the crayon so hard it snapped in her hand. She could see that horrible blue light again, and Barney with Murp tucked under his arm, running toward her — toward what he thought was safety. I should have been able to save him, she thought. Hot tears rolled down her cheeks. A mom should be able to save her children, dammit. The universe shouldn’t give you kids and then take them away. She dropped the crayon fragments and her drawing and sobbed, burying her face in her hands.
“Mrrrrrrrp?”
A furry head shoved against the back of her arm and rubbed along her back. Her eyes flew open. A cat, she thought, while her heart raced. Jesus Christ, what a weird coincidence.
“Mrrrrrrrp?”
She turned around, and when she saw the cat on the log, began to shiver. Bizarre coincidence. It was a big orange beast with white markings — and bright yellow eyes...
...just like Murp.
Can’t be. Murp vanished with Barney.
