With A Single Spell

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Tobas was surprised, therefore, to find the witch waiting for them in the suite’s sitting room. “Hello,” he said, confused and embarrassed, unsure whether to keep his arm around Alorria’s waist or not.

  “Hello,” Karanissa said, as she opened the door into bedchamber.

  “What are you doing here?” Alorria demanded, clearly upset by her rival’s presence.

  “I wanted to say goodbye before I left,” the witch replied. “I didn’t want Tobas to worry.”

  “Left? Where?” Tobas asked. His arms dropped away from Alorria as the warm glow of the wine suddenly vanished.

  The three of them had all moved on into the inner room as they spoke. “I think you two should have some time to get to know each other,” Karanissa explained, “so I was planning to leave for awhile. I don’t want to be in the way. Tobas can come and get me in the spring, when the snows melt enough for travel.” She reached for the drawstring to uncover the tapestry.

  “Wait a minute, Kara!” Tobas said.

  “Let her go!” Alorria said, holding him back.

  “Goodbye,” Karanissa said; she picked up a case of wine she had waiting ready by the bed, stepped into the tapestry, and was gone.

  “Oh, no!” Tobas said. “You’re not leaving me here like this!” He pulled free of Alorria’s hands and stumbled through the tapestry after his first wife.

  “Tobas!” Alorria cried. Without having any idea of what she was actually doing, she followed her hero-husband.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Karanissa said, her hands on her hips as she stood on the bridge to the castle gate.

  “You might have warned me what you had in mind,” Tobas retorted from the outer path.

  “Where are we?” Alorria wailed, clutching Tobas’ arm and staring around at the eerie, red-lit void.

  “Calm down,” witch and wizard said in unison. A spriggan giggled from one of the castle windows.

  After a moment, Karanissa shrugged. “Well, we’re all here until spring, so we might as well make the best of it. Come on in.” She turned, and the doors opened before her.

  “Showy witch,” Tobas muttered, annoyed by the entire situation.

  “They were locked from the inside,” Karanissa reminded him. “How else would we get in?”

  “Call the servants,” Tobas replied immediately.

  “But, Tobas...” Alorria began.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Karanissa admitted.

  “Ha! It seems to me that there are a lot of things you didn’t think about!”

  “Tobas...” Alorria said urgently.

  “I hope most of the spriggans are gone,” Karanissa remarked.

  “And I hope I have the ingredients for doing lots of dream messages; I don’t want anyone to worry about us.”

  “Tobas!”

  Tobas turned to Alorria. “I’m sorry, Ali.” He waved an arm at the castle. “This is part of marrying a wizard, I suppose; at least, it’s a part of marrying me. Welcome to your new home!”

  The princess gaped up at the gargoyle-covered ramparts, the batwinged turrets, the forbidding black walls.

  “And,” Karanissa said warmly, “welcome to the family.”

  Hearing that, Tobas glanced at Karanissa and saw she meant it. He smiled. For the first time since he had watched Roggit’s house burning, he felt that he could stop worrying about his future. He had a home, plenty of money, a career as a court wizard, and a family.

  It was like no home he could ever have imagined, this castle hanging in nowhere. His money was a fabulously rich dowry, which was not something he had ever expected. His wizardry was inherited from a man centuries dead, rather than learned as an apprentice, and might almost be considered another dowry. His family consisted of two wives, a witch and a princess. Life had played strange tricks on him, certainly, but nonetheless, he had a home, money, a career, and a family, and he was pleased with them all.

  Any problems that might remain could only be trivial. He felt wonderful. His luck had been good after all.

  Epilogue

  Lador of Sesseran awoke and looked up, startled, as a shadow blocked out the sun. All he could make out was a dark shape, hanging in the sky above him. He stared, unsure whether to get up and run or to stay where he was. Thera, at his side, still slept.

  A head appeared over one edge of the thing.

  “Hello,” a young man’s voice called cheerfully. Lador was slightly relieved to hear the familiar accent of a Freelander, rather than the harsher tones of an Ethsharite, but still wary.

  “I don’t suppose you remember me,” the voice continued. “But no, that’s foolish, of course you do. I’m Tobas of Telven; I stole your boat.”

  Lador gaped, then found his voice. “That was five years ago!”

  “I know, I know,” the apparition said. “I’m sorry it took so long, but I’ve been busy. You wouldn’t believe some of the delays. I hope you’ll accept my apology.” The young man tossed something over the side of the hovering object; it struck the ground with the distinctive clinking sound of coins. Lador stared at the purse, then back up at the thing.

  Two more heads were peering over the side now; his eyes had adjusted somewhat to the bright sun behind them, and these two looked female. Both had dark hair; one wore it loose and flowing, while the other wore hers gathered up by a coronet. The object supporting them seemed to be flapping at the edges, he noticed; it was perhaps two yards wide and three long and seemed to be made of heavy fabric.

  “The money’s my apology,” Tobas said, “and the boat I owe you is down on the beach. It’s not actually the one I stole, but it’s as close as I could make it. The chicken dinner is under the seat, but I substituted white wine; I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Why would he mind?” the woman in the coronet asked derisively. “Who drinks red wine with chicken?”

  “Shut up, Ali,” the other woman said. “Let Tobas finish.”

  “He was finished!” the first woman retorted.

  “No, he wasn’t,” the second insisted.

  “This is all silly, anyway.”

  “Will you two shut up?” Tobas roared, to no effect, as his wives bickered.

  Lador simply stared for a long moment, but as the argument continued he first smiled, and then laughed aloud. The world was full of wonders, and this wizard who called himself Tobas of Telven was one of them.

  Tobas looked down once more, shrugged and smiled, as if to say, “What can I do?,” then turned back to his women.

  The three on the flying carpet paid no further attention to the couple in the dunes; they were far too busy with their own little family squabble. After a few minutes of bemused listening, Lador woke Thera, who had somehow slept through it all. Together, the two of them went down to the beach together to see their new boat.

  Notes on

  With A Single Spell:

  In Y.S. 5226, when the noted wizard Tobas of Telven consulted an oracular priest in Ethshar of the Spices, his primary purpose was to locate two people he felt he owed an unpaid debt. However, he took the opportunity to obtain answers to certain other questions as well. Those answers are provided here for any readers of this chronicle who might be interested.

  Roggit knew perfectly well that Tobas had lied about his age; he was not as far gone as his apprentice believed. He was, however, a very lonely old man, and took pity on the boy. Only after accepting him as an apprentice did he have misgivings, which were responsible for the delays in teaching Tobas anything useful.

  The area in the mountains between Dwomor and Aigoa where wizardry would not function resulted from the second use of the spell Ellran’s Dissipation. This incredibly powerful but very simple first-order spell was discovered quite by accident in Y.S. 4680 by the little-known research wizard Ellran the Unfortunate; it renders an area of indeterminate size “dead” to wizardry, permanently. Since the military government of Old Ethshar relied heavily on wizardry, while their Northern enemi
es did not, the spell was deemed to be not only useless, militarily speaking, but exceedingly dangerous, and accordingly it was vigorously suppressed. It was only performed twice; once in 4680, when Ellran discovered it, and again in 4762, when Captain Seth Thorun’s son, a bitter and inept former apprentice of Kalirin the Clever, himself an apprentice of Ellran’s, used it to end a pointless feud with his rival, Derithon the Mage. Derithon’s home was destroyed, and Derithon himself was presumably killed. Seth Thorun’s son was tried for treason by a proper military tribunal, found guilty, and hanged on the sixth day of Rains, 4763, and his book of spells burned, putting an end to the line of apprentices passing down Ellran’s Dissipation.

  Captain Istram of the Golden Gull could not be bothered to locate the rightful owners of the boat Tobas had left in his care, but did not feel justified in keeping it. Accordingly, he sold the boat and donated the proceeds to a theurgical hospital for injured or aged sailors.

  Prince Heremin of Teth-Korun did not actually speak Quorulian as his native tongue at all; he spoke Teth-Korunese. His interpreter spoke Quorulian, and was unaware of the distinction between the two tongues. Other than differences in the use of the subjunctive and in the genitive-case endings of proper nouns, the two languages are, in fact, indistinguishable.

  Dragons were endemic to the hills of Dwomor for centuries, but none caused serious problems before Y.S. 5220 or so because until then none ever lived long enough to grow to a formidable size. The dragon Tobas killed had resorted to eating livestock and people only when it had devoured everything else big enough for it to catch; if it had been just a little smarter it would have moved on to a different area, instead, and gone on eating deer. Dragons have no known limit to their growth, but since young ones tend to be quite stupid and easy to capture or kill, very few ever exceed what humans consider a manageable size. They reach reproductive maturity at about six or seven feet in length, so that the tendency to get killed off when they reach ten feet or so has not seriously endangered the species. The linguistic centers of the draconic brain usually develop around the twenty-foot size, but of course, like a human infant, a dragon cannot learn to talk without someone to teach it.

  The illegible page in the front of Derithon’s book of spells had once held his notes on the making of an athame; they were rendered illegible when his master found them and impressed on his apprentice with a willow switch that the athame was a secret. The lesson took, and the little code symbol Derithon used thereafter was the result.

  The thing that sank Dabran the Pirate’s ship Retribution was Degorran, a little-known sea-demon of the Fifth Circle. Shemder the Lame, the demonologist aboard the Ethsharitic trader Behemoth who was responsible for summoning Degorran, had been attempting to contact the much less formidable second-circle demon Spesforis the Hunter when he got lucky and brought up Degorran instead.

  The invisible servant Tobas called “Nuisance” was in the castle in the void when Derithon first created it; in fact, it was arguably the castle’s rightful owner until Derithon placed it under several assorted spells of constraint and compulsion, and its abuse of Tobas was as close as it could come to wreaking vengeance for its enslavement on all wizardkind.

  And finally, spriggans really are harmless, except in large numbers, but not quite as stupid as Tobas hoped; it took them three years to figure out that the mirror wouldn’t work in the fallen castle, and another year after that to drag it somewhere that it would work, unleashing the steady supply of spriggans that continued to plague Ethshar from then on.

  About the Author

  Lawrence Watt-Evans is the author of more than two dozen novels, and more than a hundred short stories. Further information can be found on his webpage at http://www.watt-evans.com/.