The room was not as grubby as she’d feared. The small bed was made and under a bedspread. The microwave was plugged in, though its numbers still flashed 12:00. The water ran in the sink, and the toilet flushed. The first burst from the shower splashed brown on the stained white Fiberglas stall, but ran clear after that. There were computers and books and other odd junk piled up anywhere else piles could happen. The TV might still work, but Vlad had somehow lost the remote and she had forgotten how to control it manually.
Stypek had been dropped in her lap without luggage, which was presumably at AILING or in a room at some Motel 6. Marcella would know. Carolyn thought she might still have a few pair of Brandon’s socks somewhere… She paused, then grinned and shook her head. Yes, Mr. Stypek would last out the night without any further mothering.
She faced him, smiling, her hands held together at her waist. “So! You can stay here until Mr. Romero at Zertek figures out what to do with you. He runs things over there, and he’ll know. Cosmo will probably take you over on Monday morning. In the meantime, study, hack around with your software, or whatever interns do these days. Just don’t wake me up tomorrow morning. I need to sleep in or I’ll get grouchy.” She held out her hand. “I’ll come get you for breakfast.”
Carolyn did not expect what happened next: The peculiar Mr. Stypek went down on one knee and bowed his head. “I am your servant, Chatelaine.”
He had definitely watched The Lord of the Rings one too many times—or a hundred. Carolyn felt a pang of pity for Stypek. Being a geek was bad enough if you were a native. If Stypek were going to get anything but laughed at in America he would need some coaching.
First and foremost, this King Arthur crap would have to stop. She shook her head, grabbed his wrists, and hauled him back to his feet. “No. You work for Mr. Romero. I’m technically your landlady…” She lowered her voice. “…but look, I’ll teach you how things work over here. Just don’t tell Mr. Romero, ok?”
He nodded apprehensively. “I will give your baron your best wishes only, and with discretion.”
Baron? Brandon had retired at the rank of colonel. She wondered if AILING had some inane AI language tutor that had taught the poor man his vocabulary. Whatever it was called, it probably had perfect hair and snazzy tattoos—and didn’t know the difference between the US Army and Camelot.
Carolyn could feel herself growing testy from stress and lack of sleep. She had better shut up before she got rude. How long would it take for those nerdballs at AILING to stop referring to her as “Brandon’s wife?” She looked out the window while she calmed herself.
“He isn’t my ‘baron’ anymore,” she finally said, eyes down. With that she turned and left Stypek in the little room, he still looking wide-eyed and befuddled.
11. Stypek
The horseless chariot was a puzzle for another day. Its door’s handle, by magic or artifice (but there was no magic here!) would not release him until Carolyn squeezed a talisman on a ring with other charms and fetishes. Only then would the silver lever do for him what he had seen it do, obediently, for her.
Stypek clambered from the chariot and stood beside it, bathed in the strange cold light that had appeared unsummoned. He stared first at Carolyn’s very dark hair, and then at her small dwelling. Something was wrong. Several things were wrong. Ever since landing in this peculiar universe, he had had the sense that he was in the middle of a raging thunderstorm. Yet the stars were bright, and the air smelled mainly of autumn decay.
“We have arrived at the Romero Stronghold.”
Spoken as a baroness would speak it—granting that Stypek had met a baroness only once, and then not under the best of circumstances. Her stronghold? The structure before them seemed a little, well, thin to be the manor house of a barony. Thin, and without protection from zombies, peasants, or uppity knights.
“Old was our desire to dwell upon the Peninsula of Fish. When we learned of a barony here with sufficient land, we seized it.”
Stypek sniffed the air again. There was no hint of salt water, nor fish—only the strange, surging crackle of lightning in his snerf-sense. Alas, it was not always obvious when language mapping failed, nor how. He had been in this universe an hour or less. The mapping would improve with time. Stypek wondered what else might have gotten scrambled in its journey across the semantic gulf from Carolyn’s mind to his own.
She understood power, and was unafraid to use it. Her command to board her chariot had been clear. Much else remained ambiguous. Was he her guest or her prisoner? Misunderstandings with the aristocracy could be deadly. He scratched his head, sure that he was missing something. Better to probe politely and indirectly acknowledge her rank than to insult unawares.
“Excellent, Chatelaine. Now, where do your servants live?”
She laughed imperiously. “Servants? What need have I of servants? Note well: I yet have the power to command the void between worlds.”
Stypek gasped. At once it all fell into place. Not even Adamant-class magicians could manipulate the starless void. Carolyn was a sorceress.
That would explain a great deal: The fawning of a potent alchemist, her dwelling in a humble cottage, even her hair color. Attackers, living or dead, would fall to ash at her glance. To take on the appearance of a baroness would remind the aristocracy that though she might bow to a king and listen to a duke, all lower ranks would best avoid her.
It would also explain why she had said nothing of her baron.
“Come,” she commanded. “You must retire to your own quarters, for I desire the silence of the void.”
Yes, a sorceress. Stypek followed Carolyn to the building that he assumed held her sanctorum. He watched as she revealed the words and gestures of the entry spell to him. The grating howl from the large door while it drew up was echoed in his snerf sense by a buzzing roar of raw power, power with no least hint of magic in it.
This universe’s prime mover remained hidden, the echoes of its presence filling his snerf-sense to numbness. If it turned out to be sorcery in the absence of magic, he had little hope of using it himself—and all the more reason to declare fealty to Carolyn and serve her.
The sanctorum beyond was filled with silent, arcane devices that were ominous in their utter inscrutability. Carolyn passed them without a look. They ascended a wooden stairway in the rear wall of the sanctorum. Through a door was a small, dark room. With one minuscule gesture of her index finger, the room exploded in more cold light. Oddly, it was neither a prison cell nor a guest’s nook, but appeared to be a sorcerer’s sanctorum in miniature. Everywhere amidst the furnishings were devices like those in her own sanctorum. A particularly ominous one blinked a pattern of glyphs in searing blue light.
“Attend: These are your quarters, and will remain your quarters until Baron Romero, Lord of Zertek—” The name and title stuttered in his ears, suggesting imprecision in the mapping. “—requires you. At that time Cosmo will take you to him.” She waved her right hand around the room. “Until then, study, practice your skills with soft wear—“ Stuttering again. “—and do what a chela must do in my service.”
A chela! Stypek heard his own breath whisk in. So he was neither prisoner nor guest, but student. Carolyn had chosen him as her apprentice.
Egad.
Stypek looked at the silent machinery everywhere around them and tried not to smile too broadly. Studying sorcery would be fun if it didn’t kill him first. Still, Carolyn’s situation was now clear: She was both baroness and sorceress, the bride of a lord but still master of the four elements of physical creation.
It was far too much power to reside in one manor. He was not surprised that they lived apart.
Carolyn’s next words brought him back to the moment, and chilled him to the bone. “Do not disturb my meditation in the hours to come, or risk my wrath. You will be summoned for the morning meal.”
Stypek fell to one knee and bowed his head. “I am your servant, Chatelaine.”
Carolyn did not seem pleased. She
gripped his wrists with both hands and pulled him roughly back to his feet. “You are Lord Romero’s servant. I merely own the manor where you will live.” Her voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper. “Nonetheless, I will teach you my skills. Do not reveal to Lord Romero that I am doing so.”
Stypek suppressed a gulp. The second or third bestselling magical amulet in the realm of Trynng protected against sexual sorcery, rare though it was. Could hiding from a cuckolded baron be any easier than hiding from a swindled magician? Tuggurr would have been the one to ask…
He tried to smile. “I will give your baron your best wishes only, and with discretion.”
Carolyn said nothing for several heartbeats. Stypek saw her look briefly through the room’s one small window. He thought he sensed both anger and sadness in her reply. “He is no longer my baron.”
Without another word she was gone, and the door closed behind her.
Stypek stood in the little room for a long time, snerfing. There was a prime mover somewhere. All universes had one, of course. Without a prime mover, civilization was impossible, and men were reduced to throwing spears at megatheria. Magic was the only prime mover he knew. Thus far he had snerfed no trace of it.
Still, the prime mover was there. Something had made the chariot roll. Something had summoned light from darkness. Something was clattering, crackling, and buzzing so hard in his snerf-sense that his head was beginning to hurt. If it were not in fact magic, it was an extremely reasonable facsimile.
Carolyn had filled the room with light using the barest flick of her index finger. Walking the scene back in his memory, he came upon a tiny cream-colored lever just to one side of the door. Had she simply touched it? Or moved it? Stypek touched the lever. Nothing happened. He was no sorcerer, of course. He stroked the lever lightly with one finger, considering. Bending magic was dangerous enough, and he had studied it for years. Sorcery, by contrast, was magic without the middleman. Magicians spun spells of Third Eye magic to command the Four Elements of Creation. Sorcerers controlled the physical world with nothing more than force of will. Sorcerers could light fires without magic to trigger a flame. Sorcerers could turn a puddle of water to ice in midsummer with a single focused glance. Stypek had seen it done. In ancient myths the most powerful sorcerers could draw lightning down from the sky and reduce their enemies to smoking ash.
Lightning! That was certainly what the racket in his head reminded him of. And what better place to reduce himself to smoking ash than a sorceress’ sanctorum? Stypek grit his teeth, closed his eyes, and pushed the lever down.
The light vanished.
He opened his eyes. A rising moon cast enough light through the window to prove that he was still alive, still there in the room, his finger still on the little lever. The light was gone…and the cacophony in his head had subsided significantly.
He pushed the lever upward. With his snerf-sense he could feel a momentary gathering of power, while above him four long glass tubes set into the ceiling stuttered and sizzled for a few seconds before releasing their cold light. By flipping the lever up and down he could repeat the effect, light or darkness as desired, with no sorcery at all.
The realization came slowly: The power that created the light snerfed like lightning because it was lightning, lightning somehow trapped in the very walls. The lever was like the stopcock on a barrel of ale. Twist the stopcock’s oak lever, and ale would obediently flow into your mug. Twist it back, and the ale would remain in the barrel. It was as simple as that. Yet…how do you trap lightning in a barrel?
Indeed. Stypek snorted. There was a way. He flashed to very old memories of a man from whom he had taken lute lessons as a boy, well before he even knew what spellbending was. The cave of Byggryn the Luthier looked and smelled like the cave of an alchemist, but through his bushy whiskers he vehemently denied any knowledge of alchemy. He made lutes and tabors but also jewelry, melting metal in crucibles in a forge and casting it into rings and bracelets and tiaras.
Byggryn had shown Stypek something that certainly seemed like alchemy: On a cluttered stone bench he took a cheap tin brooch tied to a wire and dunked it in a glass bowl full of fluid like blue-green water. He moved a lever, and Stypek could recall sensing an odd, garlicky snap as the lever closed and released a scattering of little sparks. Stypek and Byggryn sat like stones for many long minutes. All the time that the brooch lay in the glass vessel, Stypek could feel a sort of searing, sizzling emanation from the apparatus. When Byggryn again moved the lever, the emanation ceased. When he pulled the brooch from the fluid, it was no longer tin but copper.
Byggryn must have seen Stypek’s wide eyes, for he laughed and took a stout snips from a drawer. He cut the brooch in half, and pointed out that it was still tin, but now bore a thin coating of copper. He claimed that he could do the same with gold, and pointed to a row of six glass jars perched on a stone shelf. The jars contained the raw stuff of lightning, he said, tamed and under his command. It was not magic nor alchemy nor sorcery, but simply the way the physical world worked. Byggryn showed Stypek several large parchment books in which the man had recorded his knowledge of such things, the collective workings of the physical for which he used the word physics.
Byggryn had pointed to the books with one fat finger for emphasis, and told him: Everything that is not magic is physics, known or unknown. After that, Stypek’s lute lessons were followed by a second hour of tricks that looked like magic and alchemy but were not.
Alas, Byggryn was hanged the next year for selling gold jewelry that was mostly tin. Not long after, his mother apprenticed him to a local tradesman. Phyl Yzyptlekk, of course, had not been a tradesman at all, but one of the most potent spellbenders abroad at the time. He had sensed Stypek’s half-developed Third Eye in the marketplace, where Phyl sold used spells without mentioning that they were bent and sometimes stolen. Stypek’s education in “physics” gave way to a far better education in magic, and the secret lore of how a magician’s spells could be turned to a spellbender’s own and far different purposes.
Stypek held his cupped hand over the little cream-colored lever by the door, and felt beneath it the grumbling power of lightning held at bay. He flipped the lever, and felt trapped lightning suddenly spring into motion, dancing for a moment along the glass tubes in the ceiling before making them blaze with light.
Yes! Lightning, everywhere! Stypek held his hand again over the black cabinet where blue numeric glyphs flashed their warning. Lightning was within them as well. He edged around the room, hovering his hands over one sorcerer’s machine after another, to feel the same lightning trapped inside each.
Perhaps, in this universe, there was no sorcery either. Perhaps sorcery here just meant learning what the unfortunate Byggryn had learned: to master the ordinary properties of the physical world.
Stypek shook his head in amazement as the full force of the insight struck him: “Good God! These people use physics as alternative magic!”
The waning moon outside the room’s little window continued to mount the sky. Now, what role could a creature constructed of magic play in a universe lacking magic? Stypek slapped the large inside pocket of his vest, where Cosmo’s mysterious slab rested quietly. He pulled it out and rested it on his lap. The front of the slab was dark, but his snerf sense told him that inside the slab, countless minuscule points of lightning danced as though they were a trillion stars in a midnight sky. If his gomog still existed, it would be there, among those trillion stars.
He addressed the slab. “Gomog! Appear and speak!”
The slab remained dark.
Stypek looked around the room. Cosmo had plugged the slab into the dead machine before commanding it; perhaps the trick lay in the plugging, and not the commanding.
There! On the desk, amidst books and papers and other sorcerous machinery, was a black block the size of a small brick. In the top of the brick was a slot about as long as the slab was wide. With great care, Stypek hovered the slab over the slot, and slowly pressed it down
into place. Then, as Cosmo had done, he touched the face of the slab with one finger.
The front of the slab turned the striated cream-white of spoilt milk in a bucket, and then cleared. The ugly green gnome Daley stared at him, its face bruised and its arms scratched. Its hat was gone, its red hair wild and matted. One eye was swollen almost shut. “A heedless and tricksy fighter it was, Leige, but I prevailed.”
Stypek gulped. He didn’t have to be a master of this world’s magic to know which “it” the gnome spoke of. “Where did it go?”
The gnome shrugged. “It would neither flee nor die, so by force I placed it into the…” Words he could not make out stuttered from the slab. “…Plasmanet queue. When the petcock opened a moment ago, poof!”
Poof. The stuttering didn’t impede his understanding. The context was clear: That simply meant “gone.”
“Daley, retire to your chamber and rest,” Stypek said, as Cosmo had.
The gnome nodded, and raised its knuckles to the inner surface of the slab. Stypek made a fist and gently touched it to the image of the gnome’s fingers to complete the ritual. Clink! The slab went black.
So his gomog had fled a battle with Cosmo’s familiar. Would it return? Stypek did not remove the slab from its slot, in the hope that the petcock, whatever its nature, would remain open. In the short term, its absence might be a small relief. For now, he would just as soon attract no further attention. There were stronger and darker things than gomogs in the far astrals, as his brief visit on his way to the lychfield had shown…
Bartholomew Stypek shivered, and reclined on the shadowed bed. Out of old habit he absently reached into a pocket for a familiar (if stolen) night-protection spell, and was halfway through the invocation before he realized that what he held was in fact a butterknife.
12: Carolyn
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 8
