“That depends on if it’s juicy enough to be worth getting me out of bed,” she said, ruffling his hair.
The pair slipped into the barn. William’s father was primarily a farmer, but to work the land properly he kept a pair of oxen for plowing and hauling. The family also had a horse and cart for taking the harvest to the market and the family to town when the need arose. Add to that their two cows, the coop of chickens beside the barn, and a few sheep they’d picked up the previous season and Layla had her hands full keeping the animals fed and healthy. She raised the lantern.
“Easy everyone. We’re just visiting,” she cooed to the livestock when their arrival caused the inevitable stir. The animals had all gathered themselves at the far side of the barn for some reason, and her words did little to calm them. “Never seen them do that before,” she mused. “I wonder what’s gotten into them.”
“Over here,” William said, digging into the hay beneath the trough. “Bring the light. And close the door.”
Layla pushed the door shut and crouched down beside her brother as he revealed the treasure he’d unearthed earlier that day. Somehow it looked even more mysterious in the light of the lantern. The flickering flame caused shadows to dance across the designs on the surface, deepening the appearance of the etched lines. Twisting the box made shimmers run along the shapes and sigils, almost seeming to make them pulse with light.
“Ooo,” Layla remarked. “That’s a fancy box. Where’d you find it?”
“It was buried under that tree! What do you think is inside?”
She shrugged. “Well it’s half-open, so probably dirt and bugs now.”
“Well yeah, but what else? I’m going to try to get it the rest of the way open.” He took two of the trowels from their place on the barn wall and wedged them inside the opening the roots had made. He eagerly tugged and twisted them.
“Look at you getting so excited. How come I never see you get so giddy on the farm?”
“Because nothing interesting ever happens on the farm,” he grunted, fighting with the remarkably sturdy little box. “When was the last time anything on the farm was half as amazing as—” He gave one more yank. “—this!”
The box popped open and both siblings leaned close, excited to see their discovery. As expected, a fair amount of soil had found its way inside, along with some withered and blackened bits of root, some dead beetles, and some shriveled worms. He brushed them away with a grimace until he’d cleared off a bundle of grimy fabric. The cloth was strange. It was finely woven, so much so that it was almost as smooth as silk. The surface glittered slightly in the light, even through the layer of dirt. The bundle was almost the same shape as the box, a rough rectangle with an irregular bulge, and there was a black ribbon securing it shut. He tugged at the ends like a child opening a long-awaited present and unwrapped the cloth. Layla’s eyes widened with anticipation…then her shoulders sagged when she saw the contents.
“Congratulations, Willy. You found a book and a stick,” she said flatly.
He didn’t reply. Unlike her, the sight of the book didn’t wipe away his enthusiasm; it set it aflame. He picked up the tome, a thin volume with a strange purple-black leather cover and bound with sinewy twine.
“It’s a book, Layla. A book! I’ve never seen one this close before.”
“Well sure, Willy, but what good is it going to do us? I can’t read and neither can you. I don’t even think Mom and Dad can. The stick is kind of pretty though.”
She reached down and picked it up, turning it in the light of the lantern. It was some sort of silvery wood, as thick as her finger and perhaps a foot long. Like the box, it was covered with fine engravings, but these were far more intricate. It tapered slightly from one end to the other and was perfectly straight. Both ends were rounded.
“I know I can’t read, but with a book, maybe I could learn,” he said. He flipped through the pages. They were covered with shapes far more complex and varied than he’d ever seen written anywhere else…not that he’d seen very much writing.
“Dad will teach you everything you want to know about running a farm. What do you need to learn to read for?”
“To learn everything else,” he said. “Hold the lantern closer.”
Layla looked to the dwindling flame.
“I guess it was low on oil. Come on. Maybe the moon will be enough.”
He gathered the book and hid the cloth and the box while she snuffed out the lantern flame. The moon was low on the horizon. To get the best light, they made their way to the far side of the barn. While William pored hungrily over the pages, Layla continued to inspect the carved wood.
“How do you figure they got the carvings so fine?” she asked. “They’re so intricate, I can’t even make out the smallest ones.”
“I don’t know. Mom said they make fine jewelry in South Crescent. Maybe that’s where it’s from.”
“That’s silly. Why would someone come all the way from across the sea with a carved stick, then bury it in a field?”
“I thought you said I was the one who asked too many questions.”
She shrugged. “It isn’t the first time I’ve picked up a bad habit. Oh, darn it!”
“What is it?”
“There’s a mole. Get out of here, you little pest,” she said, waggling the stick angrily. “If you ruin even one stalk of wheat I’ll—”
There was a sharp crackle and a brilliant flash of violet light. William looked up from the book in time to see a glimmering bolt of black and purple lance through the air and strike the ground, narrowly missing the scurrying mole, and blackening the earth where it had been.
Layla stood perfectly still, eyes as wide as saucers. The artifact was still in her hand, held in precisely the same position. After a few stunned seconds she held it out at arm’s length, then dropped it to the ground.
“What did you do?” William yelped.
“I don’t know! I thought about how I wanted to get rid of the little monster and then, zap!”
The siblings looked at the stick. Its tip still glowed faintly, and the engravings had an undeniable shimmer to them now.
“It’s a…it’s a magic wand. Willy, you found a magic wand!”
For a moment they both kept a cautious distance. Then at the same instant, they dove for it.
“Give it to me! I found it! You already had a turn!” William whined.
“Oh no, Willy,” she said, planting a hand on his forehead to hold him at bay. “You picked the book, you stick with the book.” She snagged the wand. “Go get our boots. We’ll go out in the field. I want to see what sort of tricks this thing can do.”
#
After a clumsy fumble through the darkened house that made it clear his parents were harder to disturb than he’d ever imagined, William returned, and they went on their way toward the stump. Layla reasoned that since William was already digging there, anything that needed covering up could get a few scoops of loose soil over it, and no one would be the wiser. Considering how little interest she seemed to have in learning, Layla could be fiendishly clever when it came to getting away with things. As they walked, though, William became increasingly uneasy.
“I don’t know, Layla,” he said, face uneasy. “The more I think about it, the more I feel like this is a bad idea.”
“That’s why thinking is bad sometimes, Willy. Dad says if you want to start doing something, the best way to start doing it is to start doing it.”
William considered the words for a moment. “Sometimes Father’s sayings don’t make much sense.”
“Makes plenty of sense to me. Just play with your book.”
“The moon’s behind clouds now. I can’t even see it.”
“Hmm. Well, let’s try this.”
She raised the wand and swirled it in the air. A thin streamer of blue-white light began to trail behind it. A few more twirls conjured a sort of wreath of light, more than enough to illuminate the page.
“Wow. How did you do that
?”
“I just thought about doing it and it happened.”
“I wonder if that means I can do the same thing with this.”
He looked at the book’s unfamiliar symbols and imagined being able to read them. At first nothing happened. Then he felt something in his mind start to stir. First one at a time, then in whole lines, the shapes on the page changed. They didn’t look any different, but now a sequence of squiggles and runes seemed to have meaning. Each represented a word or a thought.
“It’s working. It’s working! This says ‘The Ways and Workings of the First Wave Casting Wand.’”
“And you said Dad’s sayings don’t make sense,” Layla said. She collected a few medium-sized stones and set them on top of the stump. “I’ll bet you I can hit these from over by the fence.”
For a few minutes, Layla took crackling potshots at the stones while William flipped through the pages of the book, ravenously consuming the contents of each one.
“This thing is hard to aim,” she remarked as a third blast in a row went lancing into sky. She squinted and lined the wand up carefully, then gave it a flick. A bolt of energy struck one of the stones, shattering it. “Ha! Those moles had better watch out now! Did you find anything good in there?”
“I think this book is written to tell you all of the things the wand can do.” He glanced behind him. The spot along the fence that Layla had chosen to stand for target practice was a stone’s throw away from the region’s namesake spire. He eyed it in its place on the other side of the fence, then turned to her. “Let me try it for a second.”
“In a bit. I’m just getting the hang of it.”
“Come on, I’ll give it right back.”
Reluctantly, Layla handed him the wand. He steadied the book in one hand and held the wand in the other. After a few moments of looking at the page he closed his eyes, then opened them again and waved the wand at the spire. There was no immediate effect.
“What was supposed to happen?”
“It says I should be able to ‘reveal all that needs to be known’ about the spire.”
“Leave it to you to pick something boring. Give me the wand back, I—”
The air around them shuddered, then the world seemed to vanish into darkness. In front of them, where the spire had been, there was only a long and irregular stone. Along the surface, the stone began to spark and flash, falling away in tiny chips. The chips fell faster and faster, eventually revealing the rough shape of the spire. As it became more detailed and refined, the world around it began to fade back into place, but it wasn’t the farm. It was a city, ancient and primitive. The chips falling away to give the spire ever-greater detail were now falling under the expert bite of an artisan’s chisel. The artist moved so swiftly that he was little more than a shimmering blur. Above them the sun streaked from day to night and back again with such velocity that there seemed to be perpetual twilight. In no time the spire stood in all of its freshly crafted glory. Next the whole world around them began to shift and slide, whisking by while the spire remained stationary. It was as though its position and angle were locked in place with respect to its observers. The work of art was slung with ropes, heaved onto a boat, then dangled from scaffolds and affixed atop a castle. For a few glorious moments William and Layla were drifting in the sky beside a magnificent tower while below them a city began to assemble itself. It should have been terrifying to be hanging in the air high over the ground, but the awe of the sight washed the fear away.
“What is this place?” Layla asked breathlessly.
“It looks like New Kenvard…only different. I think…I think it might be old Kenvard.”
The flickering of day/night slowed until the scene was moving slowly enough for them to make out individual people going about their lives. In the distance, beyond the walls, a force of red-clad soldiers gathered. Arrows were launched, fires were started, and then the soldiers broke through the walls, washing over the city like a tide. When the soldiers receded, the city was in ruins. Without so much as a moment’s pause in respect for the fallen, the day/night returned to its blinding speed. Though they passed in seconds, what must have been years of time rolled by with few changes to the scene below. New buildings appeared, and a steady stream of soldiers flowed from them, but little else seemed to occur. Then the sun slowed once more, and in the distance a form in the sky revealed itself, a dragon with a woman on its back. It whisked through the city and darted into the doors at the base of the tower beneath them. A heartbeat later the dragon erupted from within, now with a strange looking creature as its second passenger. Next a blinding flash of blue light blotted out the landscape for an instant. The world twirled around them, and finally the spire came to rest in its current location. The scene flickered with day and night for a few moments more. A tree sprouted, grew, withered, and died. The farmhouse and the fence appeared. Finally the sun set one final time and the ghostly images of William and Layla themselves appeared, played with the wand, then stepped into their present positions.
A full minute passed before either of the children could coax their minds into producing words. Layla was the first to speak, her eyes fixed in wonder upon the wand.
“What else does the book say this can do...?”
#
The hours of the night seemed to sweep by as swiftly as they had in the visions the spell had shown them. One by one they worked their way through the pages of the book, testing spells that seemed interesting. Knowing what the shapes on the page meant, it turned out, wasn’t quite enough. Many of the spells contained words of which they had no clue of the meaning, or sequences of words they knew, but which didn’t make sense when put together. After a few spells, Layla began to understand that the wand wasn’t simply doing whatever she wanted it to do. It could do a variety of things and was selecting the one closest to what she had in mind. Some of the more abstract spells took a few tries to cast, but before long they had nearly reached the last page.
“Try this one. It says it will ‘produce from raw material a temporary, simplified, dragon-type puppet under the caster’s permanent control,’ whatever that means,” William said.
“A puppet? Why would there be a spell for making a puppet?” she wondered.
“Maybe the wand was supposed to be used for entertainment. That’s what we’re using it for.”
She shrugged and tried to conjure to mind a reasonable approximation of a “dragon-type puppet,” then flicked the wand. The bolt of magic sparkled toward the mound of earth William had created through days of digging. They waited a few seconds, but nothing seemed to happen.
“That one was another fizzle. What’s left?” she asked.
“Just one more,” he said. “It just says, ‘The most important of spells. The beginning, the entrance, the keyhole. A door large enough for four.’ What could that be?”
“Only one way to find out.”
“Are you sure we should? The sun’s almost up. We’ve been doing this all night.”
“As long as we’ve already lost a whole night’s sleep, we might as well finish things,” she said.
Layla pictured a keyhole in her mind, then waved the wand vaguely toward the stump. A slow wave of black wafted along in the path behind the wand’s motion. The wispy darkness drifted like a ribbon of gossamer caught in the wind, then began to coil in on itself above the stump. The wand shook lightly, then tugged itself from Layla’s fingers, floating forward until it hung in the air just below the coil of black. A filament of brilliant blue light burst from the tip, feeding the coil and causing it to tighten and swirl.
“Oh. This might be a good one,” Layla said, crossing her arms and waiting for the spell to run its course.
For a time the coil merely swirled with steadily increasing speed.
“I wonder how long it will take,” William said.
“Hopefully not too long. I don’t want it to still be going when Mom and Dad wake up.” At the sound of tumbling soil, she looked at William, then at the mo
und beside the hole. At first she gasped, but then a smirk came to her face. “Oh, look, the puppet spell did work.”
Emerging from the pile of dirt was a creature that at a glance certainly seemed to be “dragon-type.” It didn’t look exactly like a dragon. For one thing, it was tiny, perhaps the size of a cat. For another thing, it looked almost like it had been chiseled from stone. Its long neck and tail had a segmented look to them, and except for the wings, the features were all very rough and crude, formed from a purple-black hide similar to the book’s cover. There were no eyes, only sockets that had an ember-orange glow to them. Its mouth was a jagged beak hanging slightly open. After stepping free of the now greatly reduced mound of soil, it stood motionless, staring at them.
“Ugh. It’s an ugly little thing,” Layla remarked. She furrowed her brow. “Why does it seem familiar?”
She turned to her brother, who was staring with eyes wide with fear.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s a dragoyle,” he said with a frightened hush.
She looked back at it, then back to her brother. “The monster things? The ones Dad always told scary stories about? Yeah, I suppose it does look a bit like one of them.”
“Did you picture one when you cast the spell?”
“Not even close. I pictured a dragon made of wood with strings on it. Why would the wand make a dragoyle?” Her mind churned for a moment, sifting through the stories that the dragoyle brought to mind. Then the answer struck her, and her eyes widened as much as her brother’s. “You don’t think...what if...what if that is a D’Karon wand?! The D’Karon were the wizards who made those things, right? Why would a wand make a dragoyle if it wasn’t one of theirs?”
“The D’Karon are wizards who came here from another world...and we just cast a spell that said it was a door...” he said.
She looked back to the wand. It was crackling with energy. “We need to stop the spell!”
Layla rushed toward the wand and tried to reach for it, but a spark of energy leaped out from it and struck her hand, causing her to recoil in pain. William flipped madly through the book.
The Book of Deacon Anthology Page 205
