Дэйв Дункан - Magic Casement

Rap told them briefly. Fleabag thumped his tail on the floor at the sound of his name. Little Chicken scowled, so he must be picking up impish as fast as Rap had picked up goblin. It would be harder for him, though, for impish was a more complex dialect.

“Darad is a fool,” Sagorn said. “I despise his murdering ways, but he is not even efficient in them. He should have asked the goblins to extract the word from you. They would have been happy to demonstrate their skills.”

Except that Rap knew no word of power to tell; he shivered. “The imps are almost through into the robing room, your Majesty.”

Sagorn sighed and rose from the couch. “Next floor, then.”

“You chased me down these stairs once, Doctor,” Inos said. “I thought at the time that you were remarkably unwinded.”

“No. Thinal did the running for me. The curse does have its uses, I admit.”

Rap called to Little Chicken for help and began pushing one of the big cupboards over to the door. Then they fetched another. Those might gain a few minutes—for what, though? When he crossed to the stairs, Inos’s voice came echoing eerily down from above.

“… exactly does it do?”

“It is a last relic of Inisso’s works.” The old man’s voice came in bursts, now, as if he were very short of breath. “Magic casements—like talking statues and preflecting pools—are a supreme test of a sorcerer. They will show the future… and give advice. That is… the scene they show… is a hint… of the best course to take… a view down the best path… as it were.”

“Why would my father not let you try it, then?”

Sagorn had reached the bedroom door and stopped again, wheezing. “If he had, it might have warned him not to send you to Kinvale, and then this trouble might have been averted.”

“How could it have done that? A window do that?”

“It might have shown you here at Winterfest, perhaps? I admit that it is dangerous. It drove your great-grandfather mad.”

Rap did not like the sound of that, remembering the awesome glow he had provoked in the casement when he went near it—and remembering, also, the strange apparition who might have been Bright Water, witch of the north. She had gabbled something about foresight. She had accused Rap of blocking her foresight. Could there be a connection there?

Inos hurried across the bedroom, the death chamber. “Let us go straight up,” she said, and her voice almost cracked.

Rap felt a mad impulse to run after her and take her in his arms to comfort. He wanted that so badly that he trembled. He kept remembering how she had kissed him good-bye, almost a whole year ago now. But queens did not kiss factors' clerks—or horse thieves.

All the rest of Krasnegar had spurned him, and she had not. He had never doubted that she would remain his friend, once she was free of Andor’s witchery. It was very difficult to remember that she was his queen. If she were wearing a royal robe and a crown it might be possible, but despite her royal bearing in that shabby leather riding outfit, with her gold hair flying loose halfway down her back, she was still too much the companion of his childhood—on horses, clambering over cliffs…

Sagorn was still catching his breath.

“You know I have only been up there once in my life?” Princess Kadolan said. She was puffing, also, but perhaps that was only from politeness. “My grandfather died in a fire, I thought.”

The bedroom was brighter, with more candles still burning in the sconces. Sagorn went to study the two portraits over the mantel. “Yes, but he was mad before that.”

“Oh, dear! You think he saw his death through the casement and the sight drove him insane?”

The old man shrugged. “That is what your brother thought, and your father before him. It is an interesting paradox. The prophecy drove him mad, but had he not been mad, then he would not have been locked up, so he could have escaped the flames. Curious, isn’t it?”

Deciding again that he did not like this sinister, cold-blooded old man, Rap began heaving a dresser toward the door, and the goblin came to help.

The imps were into the robing room now, crossing to the stairs that led up to the antechamber. Once Rap reached the uppermost room, he would be unable to watch what they were doing. He hoped Inos was right to trust Sagorn, but it was not his place to advise her, and he had no advice to offer anyway. The situation looked hopeless, once the proconsul’s body was discovered, the culprits would be lucky if they were just thrown in the dungeon and not beheaded out of hand.

With the goblin at his heels, he followed the others, climbing the last flight unwillingly, sensing the blankness above him. When his head broke through that invisible barrier, he felt like a worm coming out of the ground. Again he was seized by a giddy excitement, an exhilaration stemming from the combination of great height and occult farsight, producing a divine—a detestable—ability to spy on everyone in Krasnegar outside the castle.

Sagorn was leaning one hand against the wall and breathing hard. Inos held a candle, standing with her aunt close to the doorway, staring across the empty chamber at the magic casement. It was dark and seemed no different from the other windows, except for its greater size. One of the others was rattling in the wind. Princess Kadolan shivered and hugged herself in the cold. Fleabag was wagging his tail, sniffing at the bedding and the rest of the two fugitives' camping equipment, lying in untidy disorder.

Little Chicken jostled past Rap, saying, “See!” He strode toward the south window. As before, it reacted to his approach by starting to glow, shimmering with a reddish-yellow light, and the multitude of many-colored symbols became visible in its panes. He stopped a few paces away from it, studying the imperceptible shifting.

“Curious!” Sagorn said. “Firelight?”

“And watch what happens when I go near, sir.” Rap called Little Chicken back, and the casement became dark. Then Rap moved slowly forward, and the pulsating, hard white glare came again, the feverish changing of the bright-colored emblems. He turned around and saw the others illuminated by it, flecks of rainbow appearing and disappearing on their faces. They all looked worried, even the old man.

“I am no sorcerer,” Sagorn said uneasily. “I have read of these, but never seen one demonstrated.” He paused. “There is another way of escape for us, you know.”

Rap could guess what was coming, but Inos asked eagerly, “What’s that?”

“I have a word of power. So do you now, ma’am, and so does Master Rap. Three words will make a mage, a sorcerer—a minor sorcerer, but even a mage would be strong enough to handle a band of stupid imps, I fancy. We can share.”

Rap saw Inos bite her lip. “Even Andor told me not to.”

“He expected to get it out of you, though. When you were alone together.”

“Are you suggesting that that was the only reason he proposed to me?” she shouted furiously.

“I know that was the only reason,” he snapped back. “I have his memories. Andor uses people like spoons or forks—women for pleasure, men for profit. He is the ultimate cynic.”

“And I do not know any word,” Rap said. “So I cannot share.”

Sagorn studied him, raising a hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the casement at his back. “Jalon did not believe you when you told him that. Nor did I. Nor did Andor. Nor Darad. Now your life is again in danger, and this may be the only way to put Inosolan on her throne. Yet you still maintain that you do not know a word?”

“I do.”

With a sigh the old man said, “Then I think perhaps I do believe you, this time.”

“I will tell Rap mine if you will!” Inos said.