“They buried it?” Carin gawked at the sprite, grasping the implications. “Beggar all!”
Hastily she took inventory, beginning with her feet. She still wore her leather boots. Her woolen trousers hadn’t been taken, though they bore moist green stains that suggested her landing in this world had not merely crowded, but crushed some of the throng. Her dagger with its gilt haft and steel blade remained stuck in her leather belt. Her pack, sewn of sturdy wool frieze, was with her yet. Also remaining was Verek’s quiver of varnished leather. But the arrows it had held and her treasured bow were gone.
She held up the empty quiver questioningly.
“Shafts of wood, you know,” the sprite mumbled. “They interred your bow also.”
Carin’s quick check of her trousers pockets found the crystal dolphin and her circlet of braided witches’ hair undisturbed. But the linen papers that had held Legary’s narratives were missing.
She dug through her pack and discovered that it, too, had been turned out. The grasping tendrils of the undertakers had not bothered with her spare pair of woolen stockings, her pewter tea mug, or, more importantly, the abysmal talisman of the mantikhora’s world or the water-lily charm. Apparently they hadn’t recognized the latter as floral. Carin’s last pinch of tea, however, and the few bits of dried fruit that had made up her rations were gone to their final rest.
Carin swore again, silently. You haven’t got a prayer of finding what they took, she warned herself, looking around at the entwined mass that surrounded her.
A grumbling rose from it, a legion of voices less shrill than the indignant piping that had greeted her arrival, but perhaps more threatening for being muted. Out in the crowd, a spark flashed, reminiscent of the woodsprite’s way of sparking when it traveled through trees. But here, the flashes were few, low, and brief. None flitted far. The plants seemed too jammed together to have much individual freedom of movement. Bodily, however, the green mass was bunching itself into a wave, the plants piled up, ready to topple, ready to sweep over Carin and bury her along with the boulder she had temporarily taken for herself.
You don’t stand a chance against that lot. Leave your things and get out of here.
Carin pulled the stockings from her pack, knotted them together, and covered her bare breasts with the makeshift bandeau. Then she withdrew the final pair of amulets. The woodsprite was home, as was the talisman of this world. She could do nothing more here, and there was no sense prolonging the good-byes. The mutterings at the edge of her lagoon were sounding ever more hostile. Better to leave at once than to pit the sprite against its countrymen any longer.
“I’m going to miss you,” Carin murmured to the vine that was weaving in front of her. Her tears welled up, and she found it hard to continue. “You’re about the best friend I’ve ever had,” she managed finally, speaking rapidly and trying not to choke up. “I’ll always remember you, and how you saved my skin so often that I lost count. But it’s time I went, sprite. When I’m gone to the next world—”
She broke off, uncomfortable with the sound of that. She held up the water-lily pin and rephrased: “I mean, when I head out on the next leg of this journey, then you can get on with celebrating your homecoming.”
The vine slithered high up the boulder, its clustered leaves coming close like a child nestling up to share a treasure. For Carin’s eyes only, the sprite opened its massed greenery to reveal the spindle of wood that it had taken from Morann’s grove.
“I hid it,” the sprite whispered. “I would not let them bury it. Now I’ll wink back into it and slip into your pocket, and we will leave together.”
“You leave?” Carin demanded in a husky whisper. “Have you lost your mind, sprite? You’re home! For years you’ve struggled and schemed to make your way back to your native world. In the time I’ve known you, that’s practically all you’ve talked about. But now you’re telling me you don’t want to stay?”
“I no longer have a home here, Carin,” the sprite murmured. It wrapped a tendril around her wrist, the same wrist the spiky talisman had bloodied. “Had I known what this world had come to, I never would have wished to return.” The sprite’s vine coiled as if preparing to lash out.
“Look around you!” it demanded. “The weeds have overrun and ravaged this place. There are no trees left. If, as I suspect, the trees have all been strangled, then I will never leap to the sky of this world to see a woodland stretching before me for leagues. I will find no timber here, only soft and yielding stems that revolt me with their flabbiness.” The sprite hissed its disgust. “This is a wilderness of weeds. I have known a world of robust wood. Trees live for centuries. Weeds die in a season. Generations without number have come and gone here on Angwid while I lived in the forests of Ladrehdin.”
The tendril tightened, cutting into Carin’s skin until it threatened to draw new blood. She winced, tried to pull away, and felt the filament dig deeper.
She stiffened as the sprite twined more tendrils around her bare arm.
“You cannot leave me here, my friend,” the creature said, with a chill in its voice that Carin had never heard before. “I would die in a matter of days. Take me back. In the world of the magicians, I am strong. I am as I should be. There, I may live to the age of that ancient oak to which I led you safe from the dogs.”
Carin held still, at pains to give the vine no reason to further constrict around her.
“Everything we’ve been through together!” she murmured. “Is it all for nothing? I have kept my promise and brought you home. Now I must go on with …”
She hesitated, chewing her lip, remembering what Verek had said. Fail in your duty, he’d warned, and horrors may come stalking over those bridges to devastate worlds.
All around Carin writhed the sprite’s countless kindred, choking this world. As she looked from them to her friend, her gut twisted. Strangleweed. What the circlet of witches’ hair had revealed to her: here she was seeing it firsthand, with no intervening magic.
This is what Theil Verek fears, Carin thought. Just such a scourge as this. If he were here now, he would ask you: Why have you come on this journey, if not to break every bridge, if not to sever every remaining connection between the worlds? If you fail, this could be Ladrehdin’s fate—every native life strangled, an entire world choked under a pall of alien weeds.
She had hesitated too long. The woodsprite knew her: it could read her doubts.
“No!” the creature shrieked in a voice so high it hurt her ears. “You will not leave me here to die!” Innumerable tendrils shot forth from the vine, wrapping Carin in such a weight of greenery that it almost yanked her off her boulder.
As if the sprite’s outcry had been the signal to strike, the emerald horde that waited at the edge of Carin’s lagoon raised an answering cry. In one tangled mass the vines splashed through the water toward her. Their onslaught sent waves sloshing over her boulder.
“All right, sprite!” Carin yelled, half crushed in the creature’s grip, trembling under this foretaste of what would happen if the mob fell upon her. “I’ll take you! Now turn me loose.”
The sprite gasped, as if only then realizing how tightly it held Carin. The wiry tendrils released her. As she pulled herself up to the top of her boulder again, her heart pounding wildly, the sprite’s vine uncoiled and slithered around to encircle Carin’s outpost. It raised its leaves in a wall of green.
A span from that wall, the advancing horde stopped. Carin could make out many distinct varieties in the throng: rushes, nettles, thistles, thorns, plants that resembled cattails and arrowleafs and lettuce. But predominant were the twining types: climbers, creepers, bindweed, devil’s-guts. Their voices shrilled with cries that Carin took to be curses. They did not seem to be sparing their fellow, the woodsprite.
“Get ready!” Carin yelled, trying to sound in control, though gooseflesh crawled up her arms. “When I tell you to—not before—jump into your stick and we’ll go.”
“Quickly!” the wood
sprite shouted. “The weeds are apt to strangle us both.”
The sprite was sparing only a few tendrils now to grasp its spindle of Morann’s wood. The rest of its sinews were twined in its defensive shield.
Carin raised the water-lily pin to her eyes and tried to think of nothing else. Surely there was enough potential in this green-clogged sea to excite the magic of a water spell.
But the charm failed. No image rose to point the way to the next stop on this mad journey.
Carin slipped the pin down inside her boot and held up the final talisman: the dark orb that repulsed her. She held it gingerly between her thumb and first two fingers. Under her gaze the ball wavered, as though it didn’t fully occupy the space it was in and kept trying to slip back through the void to the world that had spawned it. Looking at it made Carin sick. Her gorge rose, and she had to shut her eyes.
She needed protection—something to put between herself and whatever this thing was. Carin fingered her braided circlet of magic. Three hands would have served her well just then: one to hold the witches’-hair amulet to her eye, one to grasp the ball at arm’s length … and one to break the bridge.
She managed it with two hands, even as badly as both were shaking.
The talisman of the mantikhora, as Carin descried it through the circlet, lost its dizzying, wavering quality but it seemed to tense up, like a balled fist ready to strike. It commanded her attention. At the edges of both her vision and her consciousness as she gave herself to the magic, only traces now remained of the woodsprite’s world. Faintly Carin heard the mob’s shrieks and perceived the shuddering of the woodsprite’s green wall.
“Quickly, Carin!” she heard the sprite scream. “I cannot hold them off!”
“Now!” she yelled.
A noise like the surf pounding a far shore drowned her voice. As if from a distance she saw her hand—the one that gripped the orb—go for the spindle of Morann’s wood, extending the ring and little fingers to snatch it. Carin ripped the spindle from the woodsprite’s hold. A stringy tendril came with it, torn from the creature’s body. And in that same moment she was hurtling off the boulder, into the void between the worlds.
“No!” The woodsprite’s shriek followed her. “Carin! Don’t leave … me …” The cry dwindled into nothingness.
Toward the realm of the mantikhora Carin did not rush, as before, with a feeling of direct movement. This time, she fell. So frightful was the sensation of sliding headlong down a steep slope that she would have screamed, had it been possible. But she could not scream.
Nor could she release the spindle that dangled accusingly between her fingers. She could not hide it in her pack, out of her sight. She could only stare, for what seemed an eternity, at the black ball and at the golden wood that peeked from behind it like the sun returning from an eclipse. Tears blurred her view of talisman and traitor’s token, but she could not blink them away.
Mercifully Carin’s wits dulled, and layered guilt, shame, and horror under a heavy blanket of woolliness. She grew detached. Her existence both inside and out was, for a long time, without meaning.
If she had not been viewing the ball through the magic of the circlet, she might well have missed the danger as it gradually unfolded in front of her. The circlet, however, revealed the orb’s metamorphosis by slow degrees and in sharp detail. What Carin had taken for a clenched fist was, in fact, a curled-up body. Legs—many legs—began to fan out from an expanding central bulk. Eyes glittered at her from shiny blackness. Fangs popped from a newly formed mouth.
Now Carin found that she could scream. And she did so, loudly, as she hurled the fanged thing down to a desert floor that was gradually rising to meet her.
The orb-beast landed atop a creature that was griffin-sized but shaped like the winged fruit of a maple tree. Immediately the beast tore the two wings off its victim and fell to eating.
Carin watched the severed wings flutter over the sand and felt the shock of recognition. They were exactly like the artifact she had picked up from the rim of Verek’s ensorcelled pool on the night the mantikhora came to Ladrehdin. That artifact was no giant dragonfly wing, as she had thought at the time.
Below her, a swarm of the maple-seed creatures filled the air, whirling rapidly on their paired, translucent wings. One of the creatures dropped too low. The orb-beast grabbed it, bit deeply, and sent two more wings drifting over the sand.
The rest of the swarm whirled away, fleeing the danger. Carin alone kept falling toward it. She put out both hands in an attempt to stop.
Only then did she see that her right hand was empty. In ridding herself of the orb-beast, she had also cast away the spindle of Morann’s wood. The spindle was somewhere down below, in the sands of an alien world. And if she did not get it back, that scrap of Ladrehdin could make a new bridge to this place. Over the bridge, the vermin of these desert sands could crawl into her adopted homeland and devour it the way the orb-beast was devouring the winged creatures.
Carin pocketed the circlet of witches’ hair and fished out the crystal dolphin. With her free hand, she began to describe circles in the air while she yelled “Burn!” with every particle of magical conviction she possessed.
She conjured a wall of flame that rose around her, keeping pace with her descent to the desert floor. The sand looked soft but Carin hit it with a bone-jarring jolt. Drawing breath painfully, she sucked in lungfuls of hot air.
Through the blazing curtain that warded them off, Carin gazed at a collection of freaks. The creatures she had named mantikhora—half crocodile, half scorpion, and huge—were in their element here. Several lolled in a wide, sluggish stream that gleamed silver under a glaring sun. The stream flowed, not with water, but with something resembling liquid metal. A mantikhora splashed through the stuff to get away from Carin’s curtain of fire, and the droplets it flung to the streambanks beaded up like molten steel.
The mantikhora paused in its retreat when a second orb-beast scuttled across its path. The newcomer was hurrying toward the beast that had arrived in Carin’s custody. What the two fanged things would have done—fought, or mated, or joined forces—Carin did not discover. The mantikhora grabbed the newcomer with one scorpionlike foreclaw and downed the orb-beast in a bite. Nothing but a leg escaped those crocodilian jaws.
Carin’s beast—the predator she had been carrying around with her from world to world—escaped the fate of its fellow. She’d landed near it, and the fire of her magic curtain proved too hot for the beast. Reluctantly the orb-thing moved away from the stream and away from the remains of the two whirly-winged creatures it had killed.
And as the thing moved, Carin saw the woodsprite’s spindle. The stick of wood was half buried in the sand under a gnawed sliver of flesh. Or maybe that was a fragment of shell. It was hard to know what to call the winged creatures’ remains.
Experimentally she moved toward the carcasses, and her wall of flame moved with her. She took two more steps and the blazing curtain touched the remains. The overheated air became unbreathable then as smoke and fumes rose from the burning shells.
But she needed only another quick step, and her fire-curtain cleared the spindle. Carin fell to her knees and dug the wood from the sand.
Still kneeling, she spared one last glance for “her” orb-beast, the talisman of this world. The creature, obviously hungry after its inert stay atop Morann’s treasure dais, had found its next meal. Its fangs were deep in the throat of an animal that was neither jackal nor buzzard, but combined the worst of both.
You’ve done your duty by the orb-thing, Carin thought. It’s back where it belongs. Now get out of here!
She held up the crystal dolphin and locked her gaze on it. An answering image rose amid the fumes and smoke. Carin saw Verek’s well of enchanted waters, the cave that contained it, the four carved benches arrayed around it like the points of a compass, one of them bearing the outline of a fish. And resting on that bench was the mate to the crystal in her hand.
The flames
died. Around her streamed the coolness of something that was not air. Yet Carin could breathe it, more easily than she had breathed the scorched air of an alien desert.
The stupor came and claimed her. For ages, timeless boundless ages, she could not think. She could barely feel, engulfed in emotions that were impossible to sort through, although she had an eternity in which to try.
* * *
Carin could not say whether her arrival made any splash in the wizards’ well, but the shock of those glacial waters hit her like a sledge. She fought to remain conscious. If she blacked out and sank, she would drown.
“Verek!” she screamed. “Help me!”
He didn’t answer. His cave of magic was empty. The glow of the walls reflected redly from the waters of the pool and from the facets of the stylized dolphin that lay on the bench. But the glow picked out no wizard waiting to pluck Carin from the pool.
By a racking effort of willpower as well as muscle, she got both hands above the ice. She flung the spindle and her crystal onto the cave floor. They clattered noisily across it, the ringing of one as resonant as a brass bell; the chiming of the other, brilliant and high.
Her gasping breaths were also loud as Carin pulled herself through the glacier, almost swimming. Her arms ached from the exertion. Her legs were beyond feeling. They trailed stonily in her wake. Stroke by laborious stroke, she covered the distance to the pool’s rim. Her fingers touched the steps that led up from the depths. She got her knees under her and crawled from the well.
Carin collapsed onto the floor, there to draw deep, tortured breaths and shiver violently. She was deathly cold, but not wet. The liquid glass of the wizards’ well had no power to dampen clothing or hair, although it could drown a swimmer as surely as any ocean of water.
How long she lay on the rim, trembling, Carin couldn’t guess. Too many journeys through the void had hopelessly addled her sense of time. It seemed another eternity, though, before her teeth stopped chattering and sensation returned to her flesh.
The Wysard (Waterspell 2) Page 38
