The Wysard (Waterspell 2)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  She began tearing it anyway, making strips. “The air’s warm here,” she said, and eyed her patient’s tattered attire. “Almost too warm.” Carin shot a glance at Morann’s pool, which continued to fizz and bubble and send up the occasional small jet. Verek’s wizards’ well was colder than ice, but Morann’s looked—and felt—hot. “Maybe I could rip up your shirt. You don’t need it in this heat.”

  Verek shook his head. “My shirt, I must put to a better use than bandages. I fear that I’ve come to this task wholly unprepared and made a proper mess of it. Having won no assurances from you that you would speak the incantation when required, I had assumed that we would both be dead by now and would have no need of linens, or packs … or painkillers.”

  He groaned, then softly added, “I must ask you, therefore, to make do as best we can. Be pleased to help me shed the garment, then listen to all that I say to you.”

  Carin helped him work his shirt over his head. What the effort cost him was clear from his sharply indrawn hisses of pain and the pallor of his skin when the garment was off and she eased his bare, muscular shoulders down to the flagstones.

  He was silent for minutes then, breathing shallowly, his eyes closed. The bruise up Verek’s side stood out like a blot of ink, spreading, streaked with scarlet, and ringed in unhealthy shades of green and yellow.

  Abruptly Carin turned her back to him, pulled off her shirt, shed her chemise—her last—and drew her filthy overblouse on over her bare skin. While the linen was still warm from her body, she ripped the chemise into strips and joined them to the too-short bandage that the first had made.

  It was another ordeal for Verek to sit up while she wrapped his torso. But when it was over he breathed without so much pain, and he managed to make his wishes known: Carin was to tie up in his cast-off shirt all those amulets from the third row of the dais, which Morann had said were yet to be tested for their ability to link Ladrehdin with other worlds.

  “And mind that faithless sprite,” Verek growled. “Take care that the creature doesn’t club you with a tree limb.”

  The sprite. Carin had been keeping one ear and half an eye on the goblin since its failed attempt to rescue the sorceress. The woodsprite remained high in a tree over the bubbling pool, sparking a little, emitting a mournful wail every few minutes.

  Carin called to the creature but got only its loud lamentation in reply. At the dais she worked quickly and looked up often. Morann’s collection stood directly under a thick limb that could crush an ox. The sprite, however, stayed where it was, never shifting from its high perch.

  She knotted the amulets securely within the shirt and started to tote the bundle to Verek.

  “No,” he called, watching her in the still-luminous twilight. “Leave it beside the pool. Bring me instead the talismans that have proved their potency.”

  Handling these more warily, Carin picked up from the second tier the vine brooch, the water-lily pin, and the shred of tree-bark. On her way back to the wizard she scooped the dolphin necklace off the flagstones where Morann’s warning thunderbolt had made Verek drop it.

  The crystal dolphins tickled Carin’s palm—an altogether unnatural sensation to emanate from such sleek, smooth carvings. She tipped the crystals out of her hand and carried the two pendants by their chain to avoid the unnerving touch of their energy.

  Reseated on the flags beside Verek, she spread out the charms.

  “I remember, my lord, what you shouted that night when I journeyed to the child’s bedroom and picked up another one like these.” Carin gestured at the dolphins. “You yelled at me to throw you the crystal. You said you couldn’t withstand the thing’s pull upon me. Now I’m wondering: Were these two dolphins calling to the one that I was carrying and threatening to snatch it—and me—here, to this place? Did I nearly end up back in the power of the sorceress?”

  Verek nodded. “She very nearly had you then, and I doubt she even knew it. I believe the crystals act for themselves and need no magician’s voice to stir in them the power they possess.”

  Carin considered that in silence. Then she left off her study of the dolphins to raise her eyes questioningly to the wizard’s.

  “The last time I saw the one that I brought through the void, it was lying at the foot of the steps that go up from your cave of magic to your library. Where is that dolphin now?”

  “Still there in the cavern of wysards’ waters, but resting now on the bench of the fish … that emblem you have favored since you first entered the chamber and embarked with me on this quest,” Verek replied quietly, speaking more easily from the small measures of relief that Carin had dealt his injuries. He’d also fortified himself with a long drink of dhera from the flask in his hip pocket—that being the only bit of vital gear he hadn’t left behind.

  Carin’s eyes did not stray from his. “Then … there’s a link—a bridge—from this place to there. The crystals make the connection. Can’t we use that bridge to go home now, tonight?”

  The wizard smiled, a bit crookedly.

  “Indeed, fìleen, it is my fervent hope that you will cross that bridge only a few hours hence. First, however, there is the matter of returning these errant pieces”—he gestured at the charms—“to their proper places in nature’s design. And if you will loosen my boot—not the one that covers the break, thank the powers for small kindnesses, but the other one—within it you will find another lost thing that needs to go home.”

  Carin reached for Verek’s boot-top, undid the braid that secured it just below the knee, and pushed the soft leather down his stockinged shank. Peeking over the cuff of the boot was a stick the color of pale honey and gleaming like waxed wood.

  “Sprite!” she yelled, snatching the stick from Verek’s boot. She sprang to her feet, waving it. “I have it! I have the beautiful wand that must have come to Ladrehdin from your homeworld. And didn’t I tell you I would refuse to return it until you could make the journey with me? Come down and join us, sprite. We have plans to make. There’s no point mourning the death of the ‘master magician.’ She won’t send you home. But I’ll do my best to get you there.”

  The creature did not reply. But its wailing quieted.

  Carin, too, grew silent as she considered what “getting there” might actually mean. She sat down again and twirled the wand through a moment of deep thought. Then she laid it on the flagstones beside the other talismans, reached over and laced up Verek’s boot, and finally raised her eyes again to the wizard’s.

  “I see—only too plainly, I believe—some of what has to happen next,” she murmured. “But maybe I’m guessing wrong. Will you tell me now what you’re thinking?”

  Verek nodded. Quickly and quietly he set forth his scheme, with no apology or expression of regret. Carin’s part in his plan was largely as she’d envisioned it, although he made it sound considerably less frightening than it played out in her mind.

  When he’d also described, briefly, his own intentions once Carin had gone about her task, she sat frowning at him. Then she shook her head.

  “No, sir. This plan of yours won’t do.”

  The wizard stared at her, one arched eyebrow giving him a look more intimidating than questioning. “Oh?”

  How does he manage it, in just one word and it so short? Carin’s skin prickled at the undertones in that brief query, but she resisted the urge to scoot backward on the flagstones to evade his reach. The warlock was hardly in a position to punish her for disobedience. His ‘footboy’ is driving the horses of this coach, advised the voice of reason, and his lordship knows it.

  She shook off the muse and answered him. “In the first place, sir, I’m not at all sure that I can do my part alone, without your help.”

  “You must.” Verek scowled. “You can see that I am unfit for the journey and could be no help to you, only a hindrance. In any case,” he added, his expression turning unreadable, “you are the novice who brought ruin to the most powerful wysard on Ladrehdin, and you spoke with the voice of
one who, in life, was much that woman’s better. I doubt that there is anything you cannot do, if you are strongly minded to accomplish it.”

  Carin mulled that over. After a speechless moment, she moved on to her next objection.

  “Well, the other thing is, I need to know just what you mean when you say you’re ‘going where the tides of magic carry you.’”

  Verek sighed. “I was a great fool,” he muttered, “to let wrath and the lust for vengeance drain me of the last dregs of my strength. I came here not for revenge, but to save uncountable lives. Isn’t that what I have told you? Is that not what I tell myself? And yet, when the daeva stood over me, I squandered myself in unwinnable combat.

  “The keys to many realms awaited me there.” He gestured at the dais, which was empty now of all but the charred rubble at its base. “I had only to sweep to safety these few charms”—his hand waved listlessly over the select pieces that were laid out on the flagstones—“and then obliterate the rest. At one stroke I might have removed the danger to a score of worlds. I threw away the chance. Like the greenest pup I went for the throat when nothing was within my reach but the hock. And like the pup, I got badly gored.”

  The wizard held out his right hand, palm up. In the dusk a tiny flicker of white light appeared and then was gone, lasting no longer than a spark struck with flint and steel.

  Verek clenched his hand into a fist and tapped it on the flagstones in quiet frustration. “Not even Ercil’s fire may I conjure now. Those talismans that you have bundled and left for me at the water’s edge will suffer no blow from this hand.” The fist opened. The fingers returned to rest on his bandaged chest.

  “Neither of us,” Verek went on, fixing Carin with a gaze that glittered in the waning light, “must be here tonight to explain to dead things and crawling horrors what has become of their mistress. The only course I may follow, therefore, is as I have told you. When you are safely embarked, I will slip into the pool with that pack of charms and let magian waters have their way. With a little luck and by the mercy of the powers, I may wash up in some wysard’s well—Master Welwyn’s, if I might so dare to hope, or another among the elders of the craft who will not refuse me aid.”

  Carin didn’t bother to ask where Welwyn’s pool of enchanted waters might lie. All these Ladrehdinian wizards seemed to have one. The monk’s might rise in his ornate bathtub, for all she knew or cared.

  “It’s ridiculous,” she snapped. “You’ll drown. I saw how close you came to dying in the magic waters of your own cave. And don’t forget that I took that plunge, too. That water was so cold, it burned.

  “But this stuff”—she pointed at the bubbling liquid of Morann’s pool—“looks like it could peel off your skin, then boil what was left.” Carin shook her head. “No, sir. If you ‘slip into’ that pool, it’s your corpse that will bob up in some other wizard’s well. Unless, of course, the tides of magic just carry you out on a sea of oblivion and leave you to float in darkness for eternity.”

  Verek opened his mouth, looking as if he meant to argue. Carin cut him off.

  “And what about Lanse?” she demanded. “If you go to your death in this pool, what becomes of him? Are you just going to abandon him here? … Lanse, who’s served you faithfully since he was a boy? Drisha knows I don’t much care what happens to him. But it seems cruel to leave him alone in these mountains with his bad arm, almost no food, and no company except for those worn-out deer—

  “Or do you think that ‘dead things and crawling horrors’ will be good company for him,” Carin asked, savage in her worry for Verek, “when they find no one up here on these flagstones to blame for the loss of their mistress? I suspect that Lanse, waiting out there in the forest for you, may not be out of reach of the evils of this place.”

  As she finished speaking, the look on the wizard’s face was so melancholy that Carin felt like crying. Her eyes, however, remained dry.

  “Didn’t I tell you, weeks ago,” Verek whispered, his anguish shadowing his gaze, “that you would put little faith in my conscience if you knew everything that hangs heavy there? I have known, since this journey began, that Lanse’s fate could hardly help but be as you describe it: abandoned at the last, to fend for himself as best he may.”

  The wizard was silent for a moment, his eyes closed, his thoughts turning inward.

  Then he looked sharply at Carin, and his expression hardened.

  “Confession is good for the soul. Do the monks of Drisha not say it?” Verek’s voice was cold. “Let me confess, then. On the day last autumn when I learned that you had defied the spells guarding Ruain’s wellspring of power, to open the eternally hidden door to the cavern and witness my torments, I determined then that you must die.”

  Carin caught her breath with a grunting, throaty sound like she’d been stabbed in the back. Which, in a way, she had.

  Verek half reached his hand to her. But he let it drop and went on speaking in a tight voice.

  “‘The girl grows too powerful, too quickly,’ I told myself. ‘Use her strength to seal the ruptures in the void. Then destroy her. She is a great threat to Ladrehdin. Woe to us all, if ever she fathoms the depths of the potency that surges in her. When mind and magic join within, then she may rise with the virulence of the mythical Ashen Curse that overwhelmed the ancients. No—she must not be allowed to live in this world that is not her own. She must die before the wellspring of her art becomes a torrent that sweeps all before it like pebbles in the flood.’

  “Your execution, I planned from that moment, to be carried out the instant you no longer served my designs.”

  Verek eyed her, awaiting her reaction. But Carin had recovered herself. When she gave him nothing but a look that was as steady as his, the wizard tilted his head quizzically and went on. His voice was hardly above a whisper.

  “You were many days under my roof. From the looking-glass book, you read to me. Hardly an evening passed that we did not speak together—to argue, as often as not. But even in your obstinacy I found much in you to …” He paused, choosing his word. “To value. I weakened. Even before we had departed Ruain, I knew I would not find it in myself to slay you, when the time came.”

  Carin leaned toward him. “But you had a stand-in.”

  Verek nodded. “In my cowardice, I appointed Lanse to be your executioner. For months I have felt sick with self-loathing each time I looked that boy in the eye, to know that at the end of this quest I would ask him to kill for me, and afterward abandon him to these haunted wastes.”

  The wizard ran his hand over his face. His skin, in the deepening dusk, was as wan as a ghost’s.

  “You are quite right, fìleen,” he murmured, his voice eerily emotionless. “Almost certainly I will die in the waters of the wysards. And to a terrible grave I will carry the memory of my shameful words to Lanse:

  “‘Kill the girl,’ I told him as we spoke in the fog beyond your hearing. ‘If she returns to you without me at her side, or if you should discover her wandering these barrens alone, then you will know that I am dead and all my plans have come to nothing. Slay her at once. Take care that she does not kill you first,’ I warned him, ‘for if the girl outlives me and wins her freedom from the one we have come here to challenge, then she will have proved herself a more formidable sorceress than ever you suspected.’”

  Verek’s hand shot out; he took Carin by the wrist. His grip betrayed no weakness. “So you see what folly it would be to attempt to fetch Lanse to my aid. The boy would kill you before you spoke a word in my behalf.”

  His fingers slid off Carin’s wrist. He snatched the dolphin necklace from the flagstones and thrust it at her.

  “This alone I can offer to redress the wrongs that I have done you and the boy. Return the other talismans to their natural homes—that is paramount. Against that task, all else pales. But when you have broken the bridges between the worlds, make these”—Verek shook the crystals—“take you to Ruain. Upon your safe arrival tell Master Jerold all that has
happened here. He will know how to contact Welwyn and others of the elders. Together those old worthies may contrive a way to collect Lanse from this desolate place, particularly now that it has no awful mistress to oppose them.”

  Carin sat quietly, taking in the wizard’s litany of revelations, the feverish gleam in his eyes, and the crystal dolphins that dangled from his fingers. Slowly, she reached for the necklace and pulled it from Verek’s grasp.

  As if her action had been their cue to speak, a multitude of voices rose out of the twilight, murmuring distantly, indistinctly, but with a malevolence that twisted Carin’s gut.

  “Go!” Verek shouted. “The horrors of this place would not wait for midnight. They are abroad. Take the talismans and be gone!”

  Carin stuffed the dolphin necklace into her trousers pocket. Then she grabbed her pack and swept into it the vine brooch, the lily pin, and the shred of bark.

  “Sprite!” she yelled, leaping to her feet. “Get ready! We have to go. Break off a sliver or a scrap that I can carry you in.” She slung on her pack, shouldered her bow and Verek’s quiver of arrows, and picked up the honey-colored wand.

  “Come on,” she ordered the wizard in the same unyielding tone that he’d often used with her. “Get up. Prop against me. Or if you’ve got to crawl, then crawl. One way or another, I’m getting you to the pool.”

  “No!” he shouted. “There is no time for me. Go! Now.”

  “Don’t argue,” Carin snapped. “Give me trouble and we’ll both die. I won’t leave you here alone to face whatever is on its way. Get on your feet—or foot.”

  She crouched beside him, offering him her shoulder to brace on. Verek uttered every swearword in the language of Ladrehdin and a good many in tongues Carin had never heard. But together they struggled upright and hobbled three-legged to the pool, their arms around each other, the wizard leaning on her.

  When the toes of their boots overhung the pool’s rim, Carin pulled the necklace out of her pocket. She slipped its chain over Verek’s head and settled its paired pendants on his chest.