Changeling (Illustrated) (11 page)

It led him downhill for a time, and a little after sunset he found himself in the midst of a large orchard. He gorged himself and filled his pockets and all the odd nooks in the guitar case.

The guide led him uphill after that, and sometime during the middle of the night the trees grew smaller and he realized—looking back by moonlight—that had it been daytime, he could have seen for a great distance.

Before much longer, the way steepened, but not before he had caught a glimpse of a large building on a crest ahead. It was not illuminated and it appeared to be partly in ruin, but he had a premonition the moment that he saw it, reinforced by the behavior of the dragon-light. For the first time, the light appeared as if it were trying to hurry him along the trail.

He allowed himself to be hurried. An excitement was rising in his breast, accompanied by an unexplainable feeling that ahead lay safety—as well as shelter, food, warmth—and something else, something undefined and possibly more important than any of the others. He shifted his guitar case to his other hand, squared his shoulders and ignored his aching feet. He even forgot to wish again for the coat he had left behind, when a chill wind came down from the height and embraced him.

*  *  *

He would have liked to wander about the wrecked hall, surveying some of the more picturesque destruction, but the light pressed steadily ahead, leading him along a back corridor and into what could only be a pantry. The food stored all about him looked as fresh as if it had just been brought in. He reached immediately toward a loaf of bread and stopped, puzzled, his hand blocked by an invisible barrier.

No . . . Not quite invisible. For as he stared, he slowly became aware of a mesh of softly pulsing blue strands which covered everything edible.

A
preservation spell,
came into his mind, as though he had activated a mental recording.
Use the guide to solve it
—
selectively.

He tried mentally calling upon the hovering image of his mark for assistance. It drifted back and merged with the original one upon his wrist, the light flowing outward, into his hand. Suddenly, he felt a gentle tugging at it and relaxed and let it move through a series of gestures which finally bore it forward into a gap now apparent in the meshing.

He seized the bread; also, some meat and cheese that were within reach. After he had withdrawn his hand for the final time, he felt the tugging again. Again, he let himself be guided, and this time he saw the gap close, returning to its initial state of taut webwork.

On another shelf, he located some wine bottles and repeated the performance to obtain one.

As he gathered together the meal, he felt a strong urge to depart. He released the light and was pleased to see that it had a route mapped out for him. It led him up a flight of stairs and into a chaotic room which once might have been a library.

He cleared a place on the writing desk and set down his supplies. Then, by dint of intense concentration, he was able to cause his drifting light to hover, successively, over the end of each taper in a heavy candelabrum which he had uprighted and repaired, causing each to spring into flame. He seemed to grow better at such heat-thinking with each effort.

When the room was thus more fully illuminated, he retired his pale guide and seated himself to dine. He noted that the chamber had indeed been a library, many of its books now in disarray upon the floor, As he ate, he wondered whether Mor’s language-treatment had extended to the written word.

Finally, unable to contain himself any longer, he rose and retrieved a volume from the clutter, When he got it into the light, he smiled. Yes, he could decipher the runic lettering. This one appeared to be a travel book—though in his world it would have passed for some sort of mythology text. It described the dwellings of harpies and centaurs, salamanders and feathered serpents, it showed pyramids and labyrinths and undersea caverns, accompanied by cautionary notes as to their denizens, natural and otherwise. In the margins were penned an occasional “Very true” or “Hogwash!”

As he read, Dan—Should
he begin thinking of himself as “Pol” now?
he had wondered earlier.
Why not?
he had finally decided. A
new name for a new life . . . .

As he read, Pol felt his attention being constantly drawn toward the middle shelf across the room to his left. At one point, he put down his book and stared at it. There was almost something there . . . 

Finally, when he had finished eating, he rose and moved to inspect the shadowy section of shelving. As he did, three feint, red threads seemed to be fluttering at its rear. They were possessed of the same insubstantial quality as the blue ones in the pantry. Was this land—or this place, in particular—causing him to develop a kind of second sight?

He cleared the remaining books from the shelf and stacked them near his feet. Then, slowly, he extended his hand, waiting for a guiding impulse. His left hand trembled at his side. Two hands seemed required then, or just the left. Very well . . . He raised it and advanced it. Then the middle fingers of his left hand caught the lower thread between them and raised it. The index finger hooked the upper strand and drew it downward, twining the two. His right hand was then drawn forward, all fingers and the thumb bunching to seize the tip of the third thread, to wrap it three times counterclockwise about the twisted pair . . . 

He drew the bunch down, released it and struck it twice with his left fist.

“Open. Open,” he said.

The panel at the rear dropped forward, revealing a hidden compartment. He began to reach and recoiled instantly. There lay another spell, hidden, coiled like a smoky snake, an interesting knot at its tail, designed to trap the unwary. He smiled faintly. It was going to be an intriguing problem. The working out of the previous one had become something of a conscious process as he had labored over it, gaining some small understanding of the thought and effort that had gone into its casting. Moving his left hand cautiously crossbody, two fingers extended, he reached forward . . .  

Later, he sat back at the desk, reading a history of the Castle Rondoval and its illustrious if somewhat eccentric inhabitants. Several volumes of personal observations on the Art were stacked before him, along with his father’s journals and notebooks on sundry matters. He read through the entire night, however, before he realized his own connection with the inhabitants of the place. Light had already spilled into the world when he came across a reference to the dragon-shaped birthmark inside the right wrists of the children of Rondoval.

But this excitement spent the balance of his energy. Shortly, he began to yawn and could not stop. His garments became a heavy weight upon him. He cleared a couch at the room’s far end, curled up upon it and was soon asleep, to dream that he wandered these halls in a state of full repair and more than a little glory.

*  *  *

During the next afternoon, he ate a large meal and later solved the spell for a sunken tub on the ground floor, bringing him water for a bath (diverted, it seemed, from a nearby river, though he could not understand the twistings of the yellow and orange threads which appeared to govern its temperature). He committed these things to memory as he filled and drained the pool repeatedly, scouring it for his use. Then he luxuriated for a long while, wondering how Rondoval had come to achieve its present state of decay, and what had become of the rest of the family.

As he wandered later, uprighting furniture, tossing trash out of windows, unscrambling and memorizing a number of minor spells, he decided to return to the library for one of the secret books he had thumbed, which had partly mapped the place.

The books now returned to their shelves, the room dusted after a fashion, he poured a glass of wine and studied the materials before him. Yes, there were many drawings, a number of floor plans, sketches of the place at various moments in its history and one rough outline of a vast series of caverns below, across which someone had penned “The Beasts.” He did not know whether to chuckle or shudder. Instead, in response to an unvoiced desire, a blue-green thread came drifting by him. He hooked it with the first joint of the little finger of his right hand, twined it three times about his glass, tugged upon it twice with his middle finger accompanied by the appropriate image-commands, untwined it and dismissed it. Yes, now it was properly chilled.

Rising he placed the book in the pocket of the dark jacket he had found in a wardrobe earlier and dusted thoroughly when he saw that it fit him so well. He carried the wineglass with him as he walked out and descended the stair to the main floor. “Beasts,” he said aloud, and smiled . . . Images of the villagers hurling stones through the night returned to him. “Beasts,” he repeated, making his way to a small storeroom where he had discovered lanterns and fuel earlier.

Walking the dim tunnels, occasionally consulting his guidebook, the lantern in his left hand casting sharp-edged shadows upon the rough walls, he could almost smell the concentration of power ahead. Whenever he looked in that certain way, he could see great multicolored bunches of streamers in the air. Nowhere else had he yet witnessed signs of such massive workings. He had no idea what it represented, other than that it must be something of great importance. Nor had he any notion whether his newly awakened powers could have any effect whatsoever upon it. As he brushed his fingertips against the strands, it seemed almost as if he could feel the mumble of mighty words, echoing infinitely, slowly, along a vast convoluted circuit. If he tried very hard . . . 

Several minutes later, he found his way barred by a huge slab of stone. Strands led around it, wrapped it, crisscrossed it. There had to be a spell involved, but he wondered whether he would also need a dozen men with pry bars to dislodge it, once any magical booby traps had been defused. He moved nearer, studying the pattern of the strands. There did seem something of a method to their positioning . . . 

The strands faded as his eyes slipped back into more normal channels of perception. Then he saw what it was that had distracted him. He raised the lantern and moved nearer, to read the inscription he now beheld:

PASS AT YOUR PERIL. HERE SLEEP THE HORRORS OF RONDOVAL.

He chuckled. They may be horrors, he thought, but I’m going to need a little muscle in this world. So, by God! now they’re
my
horrors!

He set down the lantern and shifted his attention back to the colored strands.

Just like unwrapping a very peculiar present, he thought, reaching forward with both hands.

He felt the tangles of power and began the motions that would unlock them. As he worked, the subaural mumbling returned, growing, intensifying, until words burst into his consciousness and he cried them out at the same time, whipping his hands back from the final threads and taking three timed paces backwards: “Kwathad! . . . Melairt! . . . Deystard!”

The slab shuddered and began to topple away from him. He realized then that the spell must have been infinitely more difficult to lay than it had been to raise. All of that power had had to be channeled from somewhere and bound up here. His own work had been more on the order of figuring out how to pull a plug.

The crash that followed echoed and reechoed until he could not help but be impressed by the enormity of the cavern that must lie behind.

He had snatched up the lantern, covered half his face with his sleeve and squinted until the reverberations and the hail of stone chips had settled. Then he moved cautiously forward, crossing the cracked monolith he had toppled.

He was about to raise the lantern to look around the vast hall, when his new key of vision registered an enormous collection of filaments, like a multicolored ball of string larger than himself, resting just off to his left. Individual strands departed it in all directions before him. He realized that it would have taken ages to work each separate spell and then, in some fashion, join them at this common center. No . . . It had to have been done the other way around . . . He could not yet conceive of the manner of its laying but he’d a sudden flash of insight into its undoing. It, too, could fall like the door before his new skill.