Stone Unturned: A Legend of Ethshar

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  The caption at the top of the displayed page read, in large swooping runes, “Zaneyil’s Aerial Servitor.” That was followed by a short list of ingredients and a string of symbols Hakin did not recognize; the fact that they were half-hidden by blood did not help.

  This was obviously Wosten’s book of spells; Hakin had never seen one before, but he had heard that every wizard had one. And the fact that it was lying open on the bench, with no protective spells to keep him from reading it, probably meant that Wosten had been working a spell when he died—probably Zaneyil’s Aerial Servitor, whatever that was.

  “What was he doing before you killed him?” Hakin asked, as he tried to make out more of the text. The spell required powdered dove bone, it seemed, and an eagle’s wing-feather, and something that might have been dragon’s blood—or possibly mandrake blood, or something else entirely; that line was half-hidden by a smear of human blood. There was an annotation in a different handwriting saying that the spell appeared to be a seventh-order binding, whatever that meant.

  “Standing where I slew him, speaking to himself.”

  Hakin skimmed down the page, past various incomprehensible preliminaries, and frowned. The spell appeared to create a creature made out of air. “Are you sure he wasn’t talking to a…a sylph?” He was unsure whether he was pronouncing the word correctly; he had never heard it before, and the runes were ambiguous, if he was even interpreting them correctly through the spots of dried blood.

  “I saw nothing alive but the wizard.”

  “It says here that sylphs are invisible.”

  “I saw nothing.”

  “You wouldn’t have seen a sylph if it was invisible.”

  “I see many things humans do not.”

  “Maybe sylphs aren’t one of the things you can see, though.”

  “I smelled nothing, and heard nothing, beyond the wizard.”

  “What was he saying?”

  “He said, ‘Is it done? Did the powder work?’”

  “I think he was talking to a sylph. To an aerial servitor he had made with this spell.” He pointed at the book.

  Tarker did not answer; it simply stared at Hakin.

  “He was working magic when you killed him,” Hakin explained. “And whatever that magic was, maybe it’s why you can’t find Karitha.”

  Tarker still said nothing.

  Hakin sighed. “We need to find out more about this spell. Maybe he turned Karitha into a toad or something.”

  “I would still smell…” the demon began. Then it stopped, and for the first time since Hakin had met it, it hesitated and looked uncertain. “I think I would still smell her,” it said.

  Well, that answered his earlier unasked question, Hakin thought. “Maybe we can find out, if he did,” Hakin said. “We need to talk to another wizard, one who knows this spell.”

  “Find one.”

  “I will,” Hakin said, “but it may take awhile. I never heard of this spell before; it may not be very common.”

  “Start trying,” the demon growled.

  “Fine!” Hakin said. “I didn’t ask to be your assistant, you know.”

  Tarker just glowered at him.

  Hakin looked around. “Did Wosten live alone?”

  “I smell no one else who spent much time in this place.”

  “What about family?”

  “Wosten of the Red Robe was the son of Dereth the Butcher and Reska of the Curly Hair.”

  Hakin had not expected that specific a response, but then he remembered how Tarker had identified his own ancestry when they first met. “Where are they?” he asked.

  “Dereth the Butcher is dead. Reska of the Curly Hair is about two miles that way.” It raised a claw and gestured in what Hakin thought was a northwesterly direction.

  “Two miles—not in the Wizards’ Quarter, then?”

  “No. Two miles that way.”

  That was a possible lead to finding out more about Wosten, but not a very promising one; Hakin thought they would do better talking to the neighbors here in the Wizards’ Quarter, and it would certainly involve less walking. “No wife or children?”

  “I smell no one else who spent much time in this place,” Tarker said again.

  “Did Wosten have an apprentice?”

  “I smell no one else who spent much time in this place,” the demon repeated.

  Hakin hid any annoyance at the monster’s response and asked, “Maybe a journeyman?” He glanced at the corpse. He had been thinking of Wosten as an old man, but he realized that was just because he was a wizard in a red robe; the body on the floor did not look bent or withered with age, the splayed hands were not lined or bony, and Tarker had said the wizard’s mother was still alive. “Or his former master?” Wizards probably learned most of their spells from their masters, so whoever Wosten had taught, or the person who had taught him, were the most likely to know about these aerial servitor things.

  “I can smell a human’s bonds of blood,” Tarker said, “and the presence of anyone who has been here within the past three days, and traces of anyone who lived here in the past few years, and sometimes other connections, but who served whom, or who taught whom? I have no way to know that.”

  That gave Hakin a better understanding of the demon’s limitations, and let him know that he was going to have to do some things the ordinary human way, rather than relying on demonic magic. He looked around the workbench for more clues.

  There was a green earthenware jar next to the book; a cork blocked its mouth, but appeared loose, slightly crooked, not pushed in tight. Hakin carefully lifted the cork, ready to jam it back in if anything started to emerge.

  Nothing did. He leaned over carefully and peered into the jar. It was mostly full of what appeared to be grayish-brown powder.

  Hakin was not about to touch that, but he wondered whether it had anything to do with the wizard’s last words, as Tarker had reported them. Was this the powder that the wizard asked about? Or was it powdered dove bone for the spell he had been preparing?

  The jar was not labeled. Hakin looked at the shelves above the workbench and the dozens of jars they held; most of those were labeled, though many of the descriptions were cryptic abbreviations. Half a dozen other jars of various sizes were lined up along the back of the workbench; the smallest, a glass one, was labeled “M Dragon ae. 5.” It held a few drops of dark red fluid.

  There were some small bones, and an assortment of feathers, scattered around the workbench, as well; Hakin could not tell whether any of them were eagle feathers, or whether they came from wings or tails or crests. A tripod held a small cauldron; a brazier underneath it was half-full of fine gray ash.

  None of that told him anything. He looked at the book again, and for the first time noticed a small scrap of paper serving as a bookmark. He reached for it carefully. When his fingers touched the book he froze, waiting for something terrible to happen.

  Nothing did.

  Cautiously, moving very slowly, he lifted the pages to see what the paper had been used to mark.

  The name of this other spell was Illam’s Powder Preparation, described as a fifth-order facilitation. It required a cauldron suspended from an iron tripod, and nothing of the sort was mentioned on the page for Zaneyil’s Aerial Servitor, so Wosten had presumably used this, too. The only other ingredients Hakin could make out in a long jumble of abbreviations and mystic symbols were ground rice and goat’s hoof.

  What the spell actually did was completely unclear.

  They needed to talk to a wizard.

  Hakin let the pages fall back, and turned to Tarker. “Come on,” he said, “we’re going to talk to the neighbors.”

  Tarker growled.

  Hakin took that as assent, and led the way back out to the street.

 
Wosten’s house and shop stood on the south side of Wizard Street, at the north end of Potion Street. That meant the most immediate neighbor was the next house to the east on Wizard Street; west of the house was Potion Street, and the shops across the street would not share a courtyard or alley with Wosten’s.

  Hakin paused; did Wosten’s home have a back door at all? With its corner location it might not.

  But he decided it didn’t matter; his neighbors would still know something about him. Hakin turned east, and found a signboard reading Salda of Deepwater, Master Wizard. He had never heard of Deepwater, and had no idea whether it was a neighborhood in Ethshar, or a village somewhere else in the Hegemony, or one of the Small Kingdoms, or what, but that didn’t matter, either. It was a wizard’s shop, and they needed to talk to a wizard. The door was closed; he shooed away a spriggan and knocked. The spriggan glanced at Tarker, squeaked, and fled.

  The wood twisted under Hakin’s knuckles, and the door opened with a remarkable creak, almost as if it was trying to speak.

  “Hello?” Hakin called.

  “Come on in,” a woman’s voice replied. “I’ll be right with you.”

  Hakin stepped in, and found himself in a small parlor. Four upholstered chairs and half a dozen small tables were arranged around a spiral rag rug. Uncertain, Hakin stood on the rug, not taking a seat.

  Tarker followed him into the room, turning its shoulders sideways to clear the jamb, and ducking to fit under the transom; the front door slammed loudly back against the wall, though Hakin had not seen the demon touch it.

  Three of the little tables skittered away from the demon and huddled in the far corner of the room, startling Hakin. Until then, the youth had not realized they were animate.

  “Well,” the woman’s voice said, as its owner stepped into the room through a door at the back, “what can I do for you?”

  The speaker was a little below average height, a little heavier than ideal, clad in a blue robe with waist-length black hair trailing down her back. She had a little too much nose and chin to be called pretty, but was not really ugly, either. She could have been around thirty.

  Then she caught sight of Tarker, and stopped in her tracks. “Oh,” she said.

  “We were hoping you could answer a few questions about your neighbor, Wosten,” Hakin said.

  She kept staring at Tarker as she said, “What sort of questions?”

  “I should probably tell you that he’s dead,” Hakin said.

  “I tore his throat out,” Tarker said.

  Hakin wished that the demon weren’t quite so fond of telling people that. “Yes,” he said. “It did.”

  “Why?” the wizard asked, taking half a step back toward the door from which she had just emerged. Her eyes stayed fixed on the demon.

  “Because it was ordered to by a demonologist named Karitha,” Hakin explained.

  “Her? I know her.” From her tone of voice, Salda had not liked Karitha.

  “I don’t,” Hakin said. “But she summoned Tarker here, and ordered it to kill Wosten, so it did, but when it went back to be released, she was gone. It can’t find her. And it can’t go home until she either releases it, or dies.”

  The woman considered this for a moment, then asked, “So who are you? What do you have to do with this?”

  “I’m Hakin of the Hundred-Foot Field. I’m trying to help Tarker so it can go home before anyone else gets hurt.”

  “All right,” she said. “That sounds good. What do you want from me?”

  “We’re trying to figure out what happened to Karitha. Tarker says it would know if she were dead, and that it could find her anywhere in the everyday World, but there’s no sign of her anywhere. It looks as if Wosten was in the middle of a spell when he died, so I was thinking that maybe you could tell us something about that—could he have enchanted her somehow so that Tarker can’t find her?”

  “I have no idea,” the woman replied, still warily eyeing Tarker. “I don’t know anything about demons, and I don’t know what Wosten was up to.”

  “Is there maybe some divination you could do?”

  She shook her head, one quick jerk. “I do animations and love spells, not divinations.”

  Hakin sighed. “His book of spells was open to something called Zaya…no, Zaneyil. Zaneyil’s Aerial Servitor.”

  “Oh, I know that one! It’s an animation, sort of. I was the one who taught it to Wosten.”

  “Is it something that could hide Karitha from her demons?”

  The wizard’s mouth opened, then closed again. She frowned. “Well, not obviously,” she said. “It brings a piece of air to life—a sort of living wind—and the creature it makes then has to obey three commands. After that it’s free and can’t be controlled anymore; usually they just vanish, but sometimes they decide to explore a little before they fade away, and go around blowing people’s hats off and that sort of thing. They’re pretty harmless—just a breeze, really. But if Wosten gave it the right commands, it could have done something to Karitha.”

  “Like what?”

  The wizard turned up an empty palm. “Like anything. The sylph—that’s what the air creature is called, a sylph—can’t carry more than a few ounces, so it couldn’t have carried Karitha off or anything, but if Wosten got clever, I don’t know what it might do.”

  “There was another spell bookmarked,” Hakin said. “Illam’s Powder Preparation.”

  The wizard blinked, and for the first time she looked directly at Hakin, rather than Tarker. “Really? That’s pretty smart; I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Thought of what?”

  “Using a sylph to carry Illam’s Powder. Of course, I can’t work Illam’s myself, I’ve never learned it—it’s common for animators, but I couldn’t get it to work.”

  “What are you talking about?” Tarker growled.

  The wizard cast the demon a startled glance, then explained, “Illam’s Powder Preparation lets you put a spell into a magical powder. Then when you want to use the spell, you sprinkle the powder on whatever you want to enchant and say a magic word—that’s one of the reasons I can’t use it, I can’t pronounce the confounded word. It isn’t any language I know. Anyway, when you say the word, whatever spell you put in it is instantly cast on whatever you sprinkled the powder on. That can be very handy, much faster than making a spell from scratch, but you need to have the powder ready beforehand, and it takes days to make the stuff. But you can make enough in a batch to cast the spell maybe a dozen times, if you’re careful. And lucky.”

  “So…what does this have to do with the aerial servitor thing?”

  “Well, I’m just guessing, really, but I think Wosten might have made up a batch of powder, and then ordered the sylph to go sprinkle it on Karitha, and then say the magic word—sylphs can’t talk above a whisper, but it wouldn’t need to, the magic word doesn’t have to be loud, a whisper is plenty. So that let him cast a spell on Karitha without going anywhere near her, and she wouldn’t have seen the sylph coming, and it could probably have gotten past any protections she had in place—I mean, a sylph is just air, and the powder is a pretty fine dust, so it would go right through most defenses. That would take up two of the three commands—I wonder what he did with the third one?”

  “I don’t know,” Hakin said. “So you think Wosten cast a spell that way, and the sylph used it on Karitha while Tarker was on its way to kill Wosten?”

  “That would be my guess, but it’s just a guess.”

  “It sounds like a good one to me,” Hakin said, giving Tarker a glance. He could not read the demon’s expressions; its emotional gamut seemed to range from annoyed to furious, without many other options. “So what spell would have been in the powder?”

  “Oh, it could be anything—literally anything,” the wizard said. “Any spell Wos
ten knew, from setting her on fire to making her fall in love to turning her into a tree squid. He could have cast her into another universe, or sent her to the lesser moon, or stood her on her head and set her spinning. Any spell he knew, any spell at all, could be in that powder.”

  “Anything?”

  The wizard nodded. “Is there any of the powder left to test? Or was there another bookmark?”

  “I didn’t see any more bookmarks,” Hakin said. “There was a jar of powder, but I don’t know whether it was the magical one or some other ingredient.” He looked at Tarker for confirmation.

  The demon growled.

  Hakin hesitated, thinking. He did not really want to go back into Wosten’s blood-spattered workroom, where the wizard’s corpse still lay, to check for bookmarks or magical powders, especially since the powder might still be active and might do to him whatever it had done to Karitha. “Did Wosten have any family?” he asked. “Any former apprentices? A former master?”

  “Oh, yes, of course! They should be notified.” She bustled into the room, apparently over her wariness of Tarker’s presence. “I think his master is dead, but a year or two back he had an apprentice named Inza, and his mother lives over in Spicetown somewhere.” She pointed in about the same direction Tarker had. “And the magistrate should be informed—I know they don’t like to get involved in magical feuds, and no one’s stupid enough to try to arrest the demon here, but they’ll want to know.” She opened a cabinet Hakin had not noticed. “You take your demon back to Wosten’s place and see what you can find, and I’ll see about telling the proper authorities.”

  Hakin opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again.

  “Come on,” he told Tarker. “Let’s see if we missed any powders or bookmarks.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Darissa the Witch’s Apprentice

  21st of Harvest, YS 5199

  The war would not end. King Abran would not surrender.