The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (58 page)

“Nora, we can grieve later,” Hirizjahkinis was saying. “I must go back to this absurd battle. Imagine how annoyed Aruendiel would be if we lost.”

Nora nodded, made herself smile.

“Will you come join the fight? Perin, we could use you, I am sure.”

Perin bowed. “I will be there as soon as I can escort Lady Nora to safety.”

“Hmmf. Not too long, though. Nora is not so helpless.” The pale figure of Hirizjahkinis grew paler, and then it was gone.

There was a long silence in the room. It seemed darker than before. Nora realized that she had forgotten about the light she had conjured; the spell was running down. Dutifully she strengthened it, holding the flame away so that her face would be in shadow.

Perin cleared his throat. “Lady Nora, I honor your gri—”

“That's enough talk,” said the ice demon. It had kept a wary distance during Hirizjahkinis's appearance, but now it came scrabbling across the floor toward Nora. The round mouth was almost as white as the rest of its empty face. It must be very hungry. She had not fed it since early that morning. “Give me my limbs, the rest of my body, now. You promised.”

“Yes, I did,” Nora said vaguely, after a moment. She should have asked Hirizjahkinis about how to defend against ice demons. She glanced at Perin, half-apologetically. “I did promise.”

He looked at her with a question in his raised eyebrows, his sword at the ready.

“No, I have an idea,” she said. “I think it will be all right. Do you want to leave now?”

“Of course not,” Perin said, although his smile was doubtful.

“Now!” the demon said, its mouth contorting.

“All right,” Nora said. She had to pull herself together, shake off the dull heaviness that was dragging at her thoughts. Otherwise there was no chance this would work. She pulled out Dorneng's small glass bottles from inside her cloak. They hardly seemed large enough to hold the rest of the ice demon's body, but presumably there was some magic involved to make the liquid fit inside. Uncorking the first bottle, she poured the contents over the ice demon.

She knew it would be fast—she had seen how quickly the ice demon had reconstituted itself when it attacked Dorneng—but it was still startling to see how rapidly the ice demon's new arm lengthened and solidified. The bottle was hardly empty before the demon was chortling and doing a sort of push-up on its newly matched limbs.

Biting her lip, Nora emptied the other bottles. The ice demon's torso grew back, then its legs, and then—she was surprised to see—its tail. The full-sized demon was also bigger than she had expected, taller than Perin.

“Much better, much better than in those cramped bottles!” the demon said, flexing its arms.

“Good,” Nora said, stepping back. “So we're all even. Right?”

“But I'm still so hungry,” said the demon, its tail lashing. “I'm starving. Oh, it's terrible! I have my body back, but look how thin I am!”

“There's a Faitoren garrison upstairs. How about eating them?” Perin suggested.

“Faitoren—faugh! They're no good. Horrible, chewy things. No,” said the demon decisively, “give me a good, tasty human. Like you.”

Perin grasped Nora's arm. She could sense him measuring the distance to the doorway. “You know, if you eat me, I won't be able to give you any more poems,” Nora said.

The demon paused, as though it were thinking it over. “That's true,” it said. “I could still eat him
and
the other one. I'm so hungry, though. I don't think that will be enough.”

“I'll give you another poem now if you want,” Nora said, racking her brains for verses. “Um, had we but world enough and time—”

“You did that one already.”

“I did, that's right. Let's see, just a moment—”

“Which other one?” Perin asked suddenly.

Another poem, Nora thought, but the demon said: “The other human, so close. I can almost taste it from here. A good one.”

“Another human? Here in the castle?”

“That's what I said,” the demon retorted. “Now, come here, I'm hungry.” It made a grab for Perin.

“No, I don't think so,” Nora said with sudden decisiveness. The ice demon suddenly toppled over, its arm still extended. It fell like a dislodged statue, petrified, static.

A few flakes of snow whirled around the room as they stared down at the unmoving form of the ice demon. Nora smiled, and in her own heart—so much coveted by the ice demon, but still free and unconsumed—she thanked Aruendiel for insisting that she begin the study of water magic, the art of making the most fickle and yet stubborn of the elements do her bidding.

I
only thought of it yesterday,” Nora confessed to Perin as they hurried down the corridor. “I'd been carrying around those little bottles of demon-water, and suddenly it dawned on me—hello, it's water, and I can make water do what I want. Sometimes, anyway.

“I can't hold it forever,” she added. “Sooner or later it will be able to move again.”

“Oh, with luck we'll be far away by then, or maybe the weather will warm up,” Perin said. “Bring your light—here's another door.”

They checked the rooms along the narrow corridor and found nothing but dust and rodent droppings. At the end of the hallway stone stairs spiraled upward; Perin put his ear to the door at the top before pushing it open. They picked their way carefully across a large room filled with debris, trying to make as little noise as possible, but Nora could not help gasping when she saw that the round stone next to her foot was a skull.

“The ice demon's handiwork,” Perin whispered. Nora nodded. The skull and the vertebrae scattered nearby were dry, discolored. This was no new death.

“We don't know for sure that the ice demon was talking about Aruendiel,” she whispered to Perin, for her own benefit as much as his. “That other human, I mean.”

“No, but if there's any human in this fortress besides us, I'd like to try to save him.”

They went through an archway into another corridor. Here there were signs of more recent traffic, a muddle of footprints on the dusty floor. Perin moved cautiously down the hallway, his body tensed. Nora followed a few steps behind, trying to marshal in her mind the spells from Vronicl that seemed most relevant: How to Confuse Your Enemy's Sight; How to Blunt His Sword; How to Make Him Drop His Arms. The corridor turned, then turned again. They passed more empty rooms, then rooms streaked with daylight because the roof had fallen in. The last chamber showed evidence of occupancy and a taste for comfort: embroidered rugs and tapestries; fresh flowers in lacquered vases; a stout, opulent sofa; and a bank of candles left burning although no one was in the room.

“The Faitoren,” Nora mouthed to Perin as they tiptoed past.

A minute later, as the corridor turned again, Perin suddenly pulled Nora against the wall, then put his finger to his lips. “There's a guard ahead,” he breathed in her ear. “You stay here, and I'll take him.”

“Wait.” Hastily she ran through the spell to confuse the enemy's sight—although, never having actually performed it before, she was not sure that it would work. “Good luck.”

Perin slung himself around the corner. She could hear his running footsteps, a cry, and then a sustained metallic clatter.

Flattening herself against the wall, she peered around the corner. Perin and a Faitoren in gold-tinted armor were swinging swords at each other with great concentration. She thought she recognized the Faitoren. Sarcom, his name was. He was bigger than Perin but Perin appeared to be more agile. Whether that was because of the sight-confusing spell, she did not know.

As she watched, the Faitoren suddenly wheeled and ran in the opposite direction. Perin pounded after him. Nora began to follow, but halted where the Faitoren had been standing. He had been guarding something. A smaller corridor led off at an angle. She took it at a run, then pelted down the stairs at the end of it.

This was the place. She knew that, even before she could get her bearings in the new room, which was large and shadowy and seemed to be filled with many small, dark alcoves. The air was dense, tight with powerful magic. A single torch burned at the far end of the room. Starting toward the light, she bumped into something, a wooden bench. It fell over with a noise that made Nora catch her breath in apprehension, but nothing, no one moved in response.

The torch showed her a mess of old clothes bundled into the last alcove.

She came closer. It took her a moment to see the fragile outline of the curled body under the folds of cloth, the long, wasted legs tucked into boots far too heavy for them. A hand like a dried leaf, the long black hair gone white. He lay half-collapsed on his side, his head drooping toward the ground, as though he no longer had strength to turn himself. She knelt and bent her head sideways to try to look directly into his face, searching for his familiar features in the mask of crumpled silk that hung loosely from his skull.

She hoped he hadn't heard her gasp. “Aruendiel?” Nora said, willing her voice to be steady and gentle. “Aruendiel, it's Nora. I'm here.”

A white-lashed eyelid lifted on a stare as worn as an old coin, then closed with weary suddenness. That was all. She reached out to touch his shoulder.

And then she was sprawled on her back, shaking convulsively, sucking down great gulps of oxygen as though she had been underwater for a long time. She had the feeling that more than a few minutes had passed. There was a pulsing pain on one side of her brain and an unpleasant twitching sensation up and down her spine. She raised her head and saw that she was lying about a dozen feet from where she had been.

Nora got up slowly and went back to the huddled figure in the alcove. She kept a warier distance than before.

“Aruendiel?” No reaction at all this time. Nora was braced for the worst, but to her relief, the black cloth of his tunic rose and fell in a slow but regular motion. He was alive, but it seemed to her that at any sudden movement he might tear like old newspaper.

“What is this?” she asked wildly. “What did they do to you?” An aging spell. No, a spell that made Aruendiel look and feel his real age. No one lived to be that old naturally. He could die of old age at any minute.

“Aruendiel?” she tried again. “Can you hear me? It's Nora—Nora.” He might be senile. He might not even know her now.

It was too hard to look at his wasted face. Ashamed, she let her eyes slide away.

Hirizjahkinis was right to blame me, she thought. If I hadn't been stupid enough to be tricked by Dorneng, if Aruendiel hadn't tried to save me, this would never have happened.

She made herself look back, and she noticed that Aruendiel appeared to be suspended just above the floor—not on it—as though he rested on some invisible support. Under him, there was a circle drawn on the stone flagstones, a yard or more across, its circumference completely girdling Aruendiel's folded body.

She raised her eyes. There were circles on two walls of the alcove—again, each framing Aruendiel.
Weave a circle round him thrice and cross yourself in holy dread.
Together, the three circles defined a rough sphere, a bubble, a prison. That was the force that confined him, that had flung her across the room. She had seen Aruendiel use similar barriers in spell-making, although she had never seen him use more than one circle at a time.

“All right, I see what's holding you,” Nora said aloud. “Now, how do I get through it?”

She tried spells for knocking down walls, for breaking pottery, for opening locked doors, for snapping your opponent's spear like a toothpick, for splitting an object into two smaller, equal-sized versions of itself—any spell that seemed remotely relevant, and some that weren't. Her rainmaking tic was back. Snow filled the air and then covered the floor with a dusting of white.

Yet after she finished every spell Aruendiel was still locked away like a mummy in a museum case.

Was he still breathing? She kept stopping to check. Sometimes it was hard to tell. She was watching him, hardly breathing herself, when she heard footsteps. The white figure of the ice demon, somewhat grimier than before, emerged from the darkness.

“Oh, it's you,” Nora said tiredly. The demon had thrown off her spell, and no doubt it had come to eat her now. The prospect did not seem as terrible as it once had.

The ice demon clumped toward her, then stopped a few feet away. Aruendiel's still form had caught its attention. “That's no good,” the demon said. “I can't eat that one. I can't get to him.”

“I know,” Nora said.

The demon's round mouth curled in frustration. “He's dying. Soon he will be no good to anyone.”

“I know.” Nora clenched her teeth. She added, a little nastily: “But you're a demon. You can't get through a little magical barrier like that?”

“He's locked up the same way I was in the glass bottles,” the demon said. “That is terrible, terrible magic.

“And it wasn't fair, what you did,” it added sulkily. “You made me fall, and I couldn't get up. And the weather is growing dangerously hot. I could have melted.”

“Wait.” Nora looked up, her eyes sharp with dawning comprehension. “You mean this spell here—the one that's keeping him trapped—is the same spell Dorneng used to put you in those bottles?” She remembered how Dorneng had slipped that gelatinous insect-creature into a similar bottle, back in Semr. It must be some kind of impermeability spell that he'd used to store magical specimens, she thought—something that blocks all magic.

“It's terrible to use magic that way. It's a good thing I ate that magician.”

“Well, except that, now that he's dead, he can't undo this spell.” Nora glanced hopelessly at Aruendiel, and then looked away, frowning. “Dorneng didn't need to put an aging spell on Aruendiel,” she said suddenly. “Dorneng just had to somehow catch him in this impermeability spell, and then he was cut off from any source of magic—fire, wood, water, whatever.” Trapped, Aruendiel was helpless, and then he began to grow old. Or, rather, without magic, his true age consumed him.

Another piece clicked into place: “That's why Hirizjahkinis didn't know Aruendiel was here! She couldn't sense his magic.”

“If you could undo that bad magic and let him out, I could eat him,” the ice demon pointed out.

“If I could undo the bad magic, you certainly could not eat him,” Nora retorted.
If
she could undo the magic. Her elation at figuring out Dorneng's stratagem faded. She knew nothing about impermeability spells; she was no closer to freeing Aruendiel.

“I'm hungry,” the demon said.

“Oh,” she said, finally realizing what the demon was getting at. “You want more poetry.”

There was not much left on memory's shelves to feed the demon. The only verses that came floating out of the darkness were the lines that some kid in her section always insisted were not a real poem, they weren't about anything.

“‘So much depends'—” she began.

When she finished, the ice demon had not moved. Nora watched it with some apprehension, waiting for it to demand more. But the demon sat down heavily, leaning against the wall with the calm deliberation of someone who is occupied entirely with internal matters of digestion and happy to have it that way. “Oh,” it said, and for the first time Nora thought she could hear something like contentment in its voice.

So it took William Carlos Williams to satiate an ice demon's ravenous appetite for human feeling. That fact would be an interesting addition to a classroom discussion—but looking back at Aruendiel, Nora felt black and empty, almost as though her soul had indeed been consumed. The thing that everyone remembered about that poem was that Williams had written it while watching at the bedside of a sick child. What Nora could not recall now—if she had ever known—was whether the patient had ever recovered.

Aruendiel's bony hand twitched spasmodically. A sign of returning vitality? She watched closely for a time, she called his name, but the hand did not move again.

“I'm sorry, Aruendiel,” Nora said helplessly. “I just don't know what to do.” She worked another few spells at random, trying anything. Nothing changed. Aruendiel's lank, white-haired body still hung motionless in its invisible prison. The curved lines that bound him still marked the floor and walls, roughly outlined in black charcoal.

Those circles. She had not really considered them before. The burned stick that Dorneng must have used to draw them still lay on the floor.

Maybe the answer was very simple. “What happens if I just erase the circles?” Nora asked aloud, her hand already reaching toward the circle on the floor. But she pulled back, warned by a fiery prickling in her fingertips. If she wasn't careful, she'd be blasted across the room again.

Perhaps the circle could be magically persuaded to erase itself. She tried a spell to command the streak of charcoal on the floor, and found the material impervious to her suggestion. She stared at the three circles, unwilling to admit defeat. They reminded her of something. For some reason, she was thinking of her parents' driveway in New Jersey. The smooth, gray cement right in front of the garage.

If you could make the circles invisible—no, that wouldn't work.

Now it came to her why she was thinking of her parents' driveway. EJ drawing a circle in yellow chalk on the cement, tracing the bottom of a garbage can.

What on earth had he been doing? He wanted her to calculate pi, that was it. He was supposed to be helping her with a couple of geometry problems, and instead he made her calculate pi from scratch. Typical. It didn't help her grade. That was just a week before he died.

Nora forced her thoughts back to the situation at hand. What about just blasting the floor into bits? Again, a solution beyond her powers. She glanced up to make sure that Aruendiel was breathing.

In her mind's eye, EJ was still bending over, chalk in hand, to write on the driveway. He was writing formulas, including some that she hadn't had yet in school. He liked to do that sort of thing. He was showing off, but he also thought she'd get something out of the advanced stuff.

“This is what you need to know about circles and spheres, Nora,” he'd said.

What I need to know.
She sat very still, as though by listening hard she could remember what he had said next.

x
²
+ y
²
+ z
²
= r
²

The alien symbols swam lazily out of the depths. Dimly she recognized them: It was the Cartesian formula for a sphere. You plug in the coordinates from the x-axis, the y-axis, and the z-axis. Add up the squares, and the number on the other side of the equals sign, the r
²
, is the square of the sphere's radius.