“Didn’t have to burn down the whole forest,” Gub said. “Nice of you to get rid of the spiders an’ all, yah, yah. Never knew there was more than one of ’em. Heh. But we liked them trees there. Came in handy if we ever needed to build a fire.”
“Old habits die hard,” I said, looking at Gub. Most fur-feet adored trees, and wouldn’t think of cutting one down. “I’ve never been good when I’m surrounded. I tend to go with the first really powerful spell I learned. Fireballs.”
Gub and I hiked—uphill, of course—to the ridge that overlooked the dragon’s distant lair. At the summit, I found myself feeling uncommonly exhausted. Which was ridiculous, of course. I was young and full of energy. Why should a few silly little tasks for the Madfoots—Madfeet—have worn me out so?
I certainly hoped the Guildmaster was keeping track of my labors here today. I glanced at my crystal of power, which had gone dark again. I knew Vardamann like to use these crystals to keep his eye on me and the other fledgling wizards.
You’d better be watching, old man, I thought. I doubt even Greybeard would have agreed to do all that I’ve done today.
Next to me in the fading red light, Gub was looking up, mouth dropping open to reveal teeth yellower than his eyes. From off to the west, I heard a distant hissing sound, barely louder than an exhalation. I blinked and Gub was gone from my side faster than a shadow in a lightning strike. No surprise there.
The dragon was coming, right at sunset, and right on schedule. The hissing sound continued, growing with each passing heartbeat. It was the movement of giant wings, approaching fast.
And here I stood, in the middle of a platform like some sort of sacrificial lamb. I fumbled with my broken half-staff and tried to focus my fatigue-addled brain. I couldn’t even ignite my crystal of power.
Now what was the pronunciation for that fireball spell?
Then the sun disappeared, replaced by a flying beast bigger than all the giant spiders of the forest. All I could see were wings that blotted out the night and huge white fangs.
The dragon fell on me, and I knew no more.
I woke in the Far Havens, the otherworld of heroes and wizards after they died. Harps played, the fresh aroma of warm bread filled the air, and soft feathers cradled my old body. My mind was blessedly clear, and the fatigue and aches had been wiped from my limbs. I was at rest, at last. An elven woman in white robes tended to me, and her touch was heavenly.
Then I opened my eyes and saw I was indeed lying on my back, but I was still in the Brown Hills. Under them, apparently. I was gagged, robeless, and chained to the floor, with my broken staff sitting perilously close to a small fire in the corner of the cave. The crystal embedded in my staff was glowing a sickly blue color, illuminating piles of jewels, gold and silver coins, and countless other baubles and trinkets.
The woman in white robes was still here, to my surprise. She sat cross-legged next to the fire, cradling her burned right hand. When she saw me, her face hardened in anger.
I blinked and felt a sudden movement around me, as if a tiny tempest had formed in the cave. Another blink of my eyes and I saw the dragon, sitting on its massive haunches in front of me. The woman was gone. I’d run into a shape-shifting dragon.
She was a magnificent creature, delicate wings folded tight against her red-scaled back. Ivory horns jutted from her forehead, and the dragon still favored its injured right forepaw. A trickle of steam escaped her fanged mouth, which looked large enough to snatch up one of the Madfeet goats.
The Madfeet! Traitorous little fur-feet! I’d slay them all.
“Calm yourself, spellweaver,” the dragon said in a surprisingly soft voice. “I shall remove your gag if you promise not to try your Magic on me. If you attempt to do so, I will have no choice but to ignite you.”
I nodded, and she clawed off my gag.
“So you have your wizard trophy,” I said. “Is that why you made this deal with the hair-footed vermin outside?”
I’d never heard a dragon laugh before, and if this was what it sounded like, I didn’t want to hear it again. It was so low and insidious it made my beard want to fall off.
“Dragons don’t make deals with anyone, luv,” she said. “We just allow others to convince themselves they’re getting the best of us. Remember, we’re dragons. Nobody can best us. I say that as a statement of fact, not a boast. I mean, look at your predicament, master wizard.”
Long-winded as usual. I preferred the great eagles and their long silences. This conversation could take all night. I’d have to be direct, even if it got me burned to a crisp.
“Could you tell me why you haven’t killed me already, ma’am? Don’t like the taste of roasted young wizard?”
She seemed to like the direct approach. Either that, or I was mistaking her hungry look for a smile.
“Call me ma’am again and I will roast you. I’m Brigga.” She heaved a sigh that singed my eyebrows. “I want your crystal,” she said. “The cursed thing won’t let me touch it.”
Everything came clear to me then, as clear as things could get when you are sprawled on your back, naked and chained to the floor, with a dragon hovering over you. I remembered seeing her burned hand while she was still in human form.
She’d tried to steal my crystal. Bad idea.
“Well,” I began, “it’s not that easy. You see, that crystal is bonded to me by Magic. I’d have to give it to you of my free will, and I’m not sure I could do that. I don’t think it’s in your best interest.”
I had to keep my head clear; I knew she could read my thoughts if she tried hard enough.
“You see,” I added, “it’s quite powerful.”
Brigga’s laughter was gone, replaced by a greedy snarl.
“You know nothing of power, human. Give it to me. Now!”
“Let me free first,” I said. “I have to actually hand it to you. And you must give me your word that you’ll not kill me after I give it to you.”
“Sure, sure,” she said, snapping the chains one by one that held my arms and legs. “I made the same deal with the goblins.”
I was so busy rubbing my sore arms that I almost missed it.
“Did you say . . . goblins?”
“Fooled you, didn’t we?” Brigga’s smile was wide as the entrance to a Madfeet hole as she recalled her trickery. “The goblins dearly want to take over the lands to the east, and they came to me with their plan to bring you here. It was simple to conceal their identity from you with a few words of enchantment. Everyone wins—the goblins get new land, and I get your crystal of power to add to my collection here. And, best of all, I don’t have to eat goblin any longer.”
If I wasn’t already sitting down, I would’ve fallen over.
“What about the real Madfoots? Madfeets. Madfeet. Whoever they are—were.” I caught myself. “Not that I really care, of course.”
“They’re still around here . . . somewhere. My goblin friends chased most of them out of the Hills. Wretched little fur-feet.”
I felt a twinge of defensiveness. How dare she talk poorly of the fur-feet? That was my specialization.
Brigga arched her long neck down over me until her nostrils were touching my chest. She pushed me across the crowded cave full of glittering jewels and gold, back to where my staff lay.
“Now, enough talking. Hand over the crystal and you can leave here, alive.”
In the instant before I reached out my hand to remove the crystal from my ruined staff, I found myself thinking of Gub. Gammergub the goblin. I’d been played by him like a cheap fiddle. Some wizard I was. I didn’t deserve to follow in Greybeard’s footsteps—I was not cut out for the Guild.
The realization was more painful than a fireball spell.
“Go on,” Brigga breathed from behind me. “Quit stalling.”
Oh, this was going to hurt, I thought, and then I ripped the crystal from my staff.
But it was going to feel so good, too.
I looked up at Brigga, keeping my thoug
hts focused on my anger at Gub’s betrayal. It wasn’t a difficult task at all.
“Are you sure you won’t change your mind?”
Brigga held out the paw she’d injured when she’d tried to steal the crystal that bound me to the wizardly world.
“Not a chance,” she said, smiling already. “Release it to me, and if I am burned again, you will begin your new life as my personal torch.”
“All right,” I said. “As you wish.”
I could see myself already, walking the unexplored lands to the north, practicing my own brand of Magic and working as a rogue spirit, just like I’d always dreamed about.
“Brigga the Dragon,” I said, placing the glowing white crystal into her paw, “I endow upon you the Crystal of Power.”
As my Magical connection to the Guild was broken, a tiny explosion flared inside my head, nearly making me fall.
And then . . . and then I felt like myself again.
Even better than that, I realized. I felt free.
“Ah,” I said as soon as the crystal was safely in Brigga’s paw, “one more thing I forgot to add. You’ll need to report in to Vardamann immediately. He likes to greet his newest recruits personally. And you may want to use your human form—Vardamann the Voluminous does have a reputation as a dragon-hater.”
Brigga sputtered and tried to laugh, but the only sound coming from her was a squeaking sound. Her dragon form was already shrinking back into her smaller, frailer human shape.
“What did you do to me?” she cried out.
“Just gave you what you wanted, Brigga. The crystal is given to all wizards when they join the Guild. That’s how they track our actions and make sure we toe the line. It’s a source of power, but it’s also a means to control us.”
“But, but that can’t be . . . I’m a dragon!”
“Doesn’t mean anything now, my lady. The crystal uses ancient Magic, from long before the time of dragons. I’m afraid being a dragon won’t help you much if Vardamann wants to—”
Before I could finish, Brigga’s female form shifted and blurred, and she disappeared from her cave with a tiny pop.
“If Vardamann wants to summon you, that is.” Having been the unhappy recipient of numerous summonings from the Guildmaster, I felt a touch of sympathy for the dragon. Just a touch, though.
I stood there in the middle of Brigga’s cave for a few long moments, just listening to my own breathing and shivering. Somehow I was still alive. I may not have access to all the amenities of the Guild any longer, but who needed all that bureaucracy and politics? I had my spells and my brains. That’s all a real wizard needs.
I found my robes outside her chamber, and I left the piles of precious metals and jewels behind. I walked up and out of a side tunnel into a misty, golden dawn outside. The unexplored lands awaited me.
But first, now that I’d recovered my precious energy, I had some goblins to deal with before I left to begin my new life. I owed the fur-feet—the real fur-feet—that much. Yah, yah.
FINDER’S KEEPER
Janny Wurts
Through her combined career as an established professional novelist and her background in the trade as a cover artist, Janny Wurts has immersed herself in a lifelong ambition: to create a seamless interface between words and pictures that explore imaginative realms beyond the world we know. She has authored seventeen books, a hardbound collection of short stories, and numerous contributions to fantasy and science fiction anthologies. Novels and stories have been translated worldwide, with most editions in the U.S. and abroad bearing her own jacket and interior art.
THE WIZARD’S RAT WAS missing. At least yesterday Taffire had worn a rat’s shape. He did that on days when he meant to cause mischief. Or else when his master dropped items that rolled into the cob-web-choked crannies beneath the tower room’s furniture. Usually the runt wyvern looked like a large cat, asleep in the library’s sun-washed window seat.
But this morning there was no cat to be found, and no wee, slinking rat trying to pilfer cheese from the pantry.
For an hour the Wizard poked through his things. Toppled books out of cupboards, dumped crocks of quill pens, and riffled through drawers jammed with packets of sea salt and cured toadstools stuffed into bottles. He rattled the shelves with their jars of lizard bones, grumbling and cursing the bother. He had always been a poor housekeeper. The clouds of raised dust left stirred in his wake folded him double with sneezes. He moped for the indignity. The Wizard was never accustomed to searching for anything that was lost.
That singular misery was Taffire’s job, and now the irritating creature seemed to have misplaced himself.
“Runt wyverns!” the Wizard harrumphed, slit eyes watering.
A fool nuisance, if out of malicious whimsy, Taffire had chosen to hide as a scuttling insect. The Wizard chased down a few suspect silverfish. He clapped three beetles under an upended bowl—they proved innocent—then inspected the foraging ants that dismantled the crumbs on his unwashed plates. For all of his prodding, and through fifteen different spells of unmasking, they kept their six legs and antennae.
None proved to be Taffire.
“Idiot Wyrm!” huffed the Wizard, flopping down in a chair. He eased his narrow feet on a cushion. There he pondered, perplexed, tugging snags from his beard. How did one search for a finder who’d vanished? A dratted problem, since such drake born talent was fed and kept housed to resolve such mistakes in the first place! The Wizard lamented his plight, discontent. His morning tea had gone cold in his cup, with nothing left but to wait till his skinny apprentice woke herself up.
“Broomshanks!” he barked, as the unkempt girl stumbled in, yawning and rubbing puffed eyes. “Taffire’s hiding, or stolen, or lost. Before breakfast, your task is to find him!”
“But he could be anywhere, anything!” Broomshanks protested, dismayed. Never mind the bad turn, that she and the runt wyvern had never gotten along. She had scars on her ankles. Countless marks left by nips, scalds, and blisters, for each of the times she had carelessly stepped on his tail. “Why not use your mighty spell of ‘come hither’?”
The Wizard frowned. “I tried that already. It brought no results.” He had spider silk stuck to his cuffs, and sore knees from groping beneath the lion claw legs of the ar moires. That, and the strayed brace of dried toads’ feet snagged in his hem, left him grumpy. “You can start,” he told Broomshanks, “by sweeping and cleaning this tower from top to bottom!”
The apprentice scowled. She had let the dirty dishes pile up. Unwashed pots, fusty laundry, and dust mice went flying as she set to work at the wizard’s request. No shadowed cranny would be overlooked. Wherever a shape-shifting wyvern might lurk, she’d scour him out, or chase him to light with her dust rag.
And so she would have, had Taffire been hiding, or playing a prank with his usual caprice. In fact, standing guard through the past moonless night, the small wyvern had singed a trespassing imp. The demonly thing had tried to break in with determined intent to steal valuables. Taffire had smoked it out by the bookcase and sent it off squalling, a scorched tail streaming sparks from its flaming rump. His intervention had foiled the malicious invasion, but not without a baleful mishap. The imp had struck back with a spell, as he chased it. When the sun rose, Taffire did not cast a shadow: every beautiful, glittering scale, claw, and wing had become invisible.
However he roared and spat flame, nothing burned. No one heard him. When he tried biting ankles to draw Broomshanks’s attention, his jaws closed without causing harm. Beyond simply vanished, he was also in limbo, unable to make himself known to cry foul, or warn that an imp had fixed a plaguing curse on a wizard’s familiar.
Tired of dodging furniture, dust cloths, and wet mops, Taffire crouched, curled up on a rafter, fuming over his horrid predicament. No one noticed the brimstone smell of his breath. His angry sparks scoured no holes in the carpet. All day Broomshanks cleaned, beat the blankets, and scrubbed pots, while the Wizard bungled most of his spells, not hav
ing a faithful finder at hand to track down his mislaid ingredients.
Worse, after sundown, the imp came back. It had wheedled a djinn to avenge its blistered tail, and since Taffire had tired himself sulking, the burgling pair clapped his sleeping form into a sack, along with a spell book most enviously coveted by the imp’s master. Tied up and bagged, the runt wyvern was dragged along with the loot through the crack in the earth to the Netherworld. There, he found himself locked in a windowless cell with a half-dozen captive ghosts.
The imp flaunted his singed rump and laughed, while the djinn remarked with smug glee that the unredeemed shades at least had the substance of smoke, and were the more likely to win their release.
Taffire settled his chin on crossed talons, dejected enough to think that he might be abandoned to rot for eternity.
And so he may have, except for the smallest of truths: that imps are not neat, and that djinns possess execrable manners as unwanted visitors. The former, unwisely, had spat in contempt on the wizard’s rug. Its brute-fisted henchman also left marks where its claws had gouged open the sash on the window frame. Broomshanks noticed these offensive details as she completed her cleaning.
“Look here,” she snapped, her nose wrinkled over the sulfurous gob on the carpet. The same brimstone reek wafted off the scraped wood and the splinters raked up in her dustpan. “I think we’ve had an intruder from hell. Supposing that volume of spells that’s gone missing wasn’t ever mislaid?”
The Wizard bestirred himself from his armchair. He scratched his white head, frowned over his stained rug, then examined the marks carved into his casement molding. Outside he discovered some ripped fronds of ivy, then the muddy footprints the thieving culprits had tromped through the rows in his garden.
“Dear me,” he told Broomshanks. “I fear you’re right.”
Since his finder was missing, he sat down forthwith, and set about conjuring remedies.
Later that day the stolen book sprouted legs. It clapped itself shut, stumped about on the desk where the imp’s master stacked his ill-gotten goods, with the black gri moires kept at hand for quick reference. The book blundered a bit, dodging skulls used as candlesticks, until, being eyeless, it tripped and fell in a heap on the floor. The imp heard the noise, but reacted too late. It pounced once, missed, and banged its head on a chair strut. While it lay moaning, the terrified spell book took to its heels and scuttled into the shadows.
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