I shrugged and sat down to watch. Obviously he knew what he was doing.
He sat cross-legged before the door and began chanting, working himself into a trance. He sat motionless on that patch of ground before the door, the only sounds his thin reedy voice and the gushing of the spring.
The suns crept up the sky, Ouells glowing like a blue-white diamond at Virn’s fading edge. So much to do, so little time! How long would Purple be gone? Could we complete the spell in time?
Shoogar sat silent and unmoving. His eyes were glazed. Occasionally he would give a little grunt; but he said nothing. I began to perspire.
Could Purple throw red fire at a man?
At last, when I had begun to fear that Shoogar would never speak again, he rose, stepped to that pattern of bumps, and touched four of them in a particular pattern.
Nothing happened.
Shoogar repeated the touch.
Still nothing happened.
Shoogar shrugged and returned to his place. Again he went into his trance. This time, after an even greater wait, he approached that door even more cautiously. Once more he tapped out a pattern on the nestwall bumps; the same four, but a different order.
Nothing happened again.
Shoogar sighed and returned to his squatting position. I began to fear that we might spend the whole day just gaining entry to Purple’s nest and have no time left for the cursing. Indeed, I had almost given up all hope of ever completing the task before us when Shoogar rose again. He approached the nest slowly, looked at the bumps for a long time, then touched four of them in a carefully precise manner.
And the door to the nest slid open.
Shoogar allowed himself a smile, but only a small one. It was a smile of anticipation: there was still much to do.
Quickly, we gathered up the equipment and moved into Purple’s nest.
The walls themselves glowed with Purple s odd-colored light — bright and yellow, it made my eyes see colors that were not there. Slowly, as my vision sorted itself out, I began to see that this nest was furnished like no other nest I had ever seen. All around were tiny glowing eyes, raised knobs and more bumps like those in the pattern outside the door.
In the center was a zigzagged piece of padded furniture, a fit couch for a demon. Set into the nestwall just ahead of this were a series of flat plates like windows, but infinitely more transparent — like hardened air! Indeed, the whole nest showed workmanship finer than I had ever seen.
Shoogar peered carefully at the flat plates like windows. Some showed images of the areas around the nest Others held odd patterns in colored light, carefully drawn lines and curves — obviously the demon’s runes. Shoogar indicated one of these. “Do you still think he does not use magic? he asked me; then, remembering his own injunction against unnecessary chatter, silenced himself.
Apparently it was not a very strong injunction, for Shoogar had been muttering back and forth all morning. Perhaps he had only warned me against speaking because he feared I would distract him. Well, he need not have worried; I had too much respect for Shoogar’s abilities to question him in the middle of a spell. I opened my mouth to tell him so, but he cut me off.
Next to the padded thing was a plant, a vegetable well suited for the interior of this nest. It too was of a type I had never seen before. It was the shape of a white rose, but its color — could such a color be green? The leaves glowed like an hallucination. Green is a dull color, almost black; but here it seemed to glow as bright as any shade of red or blue. I touched the plant, expecting it to be as delicate as any I was familiar with; but here too, I received a shock: the leaves were as stiff and hard as an uncured hide. What a strange world Purple must come from! I thought — then realized that I was giving the mad magician too much credence. This must be a plant that would ordinarily be familiar to me. Purple had only cursed it.
I turned my attention away, began looking for a door leading to the area above. But there was none. Apparently the nest included only this one compartment. The rest of its huge interior must be all spell devices. Shoogar had been right all along.
But how small the nest was, if this was all there was to it! Barely room for two to stand!
Shoogar had spread his travel kit and his equipment on the floor and was methodically organizing the materials he would use first. It was as if he cursed flying nests every day. He paused, put a finger into the stubble on his chin and scratched. He began to examine a piece of parchment which he took from his robe, a checklist, “Yes…” he decided after a brief pause. He pulled out the metal knife that I had seen before. “We will begin with the defiling of the metal.”
He spat on the knife, then began to carve runes into the surface of the floor. Or tried to. The knife would not penetrate. Frowning, Shoogar pressed harder. The tip of the knife broke. Then the blade snapped in half.
Shoogar returned the pieces of the knife to his travel kit without comment and looked at his checklist again. This time he pulled out a pouch of reddish powder, the dust of rust. He emptied a bit of it into his hands and blew. A smoky red cloud filled the room. I coughed and he threw me an angry glance. .
A whirring sound started somewhere. Then a wind blew through the nest, plucking at my hair and clothing. I looked around in fear — could Purple have trapped the wind god? Even as I looked for traces of such a thing, the reddish dust in the air thinned. Shortly the wind stopped, and the dust was gone with it. There was not even a fine red layer on any of the polished surfaced. Odd.
Still Shoogar was undismayed. He consulted his list again.
Abruptly, he produced a ball of fire from under his robe. Then another and another, throwing them as fast as they came, at the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Where they struck they stuck, sending up acrid sparks and oily smoke.
There was a hissing sound — and jets of water spat from apertures in the ceiling. They aimed themselves straight at the fireballs, drenched them to ash in seconds. And then, as Shoogar produced a last fireball from under his robe, they all turned on Shoogar.
When the water went off, Shoogar turned his hand over, and allowed the drenched fireball to drop stickily to the floor. Dripping, he held up his sodden checklist and consulted it again. Water dripped from it onto the floor, then drained away into places we knew not.
I felt my hopes draining away with the water. Shoogar had begun three separate attempts — and all of them had failed. The stranger’s magic was much too strong. We were doomed even before we had begun.
“Ah, yes —” said Shoogar. “It goes well.”
I doubted my ears. I dared a question, “it goes what?”
“Obviously, Lant, you have not been paying attention. This nest is equipped with very efficient protective spells. I had to find out what they were, so that I could nullify them. Now, let us curse.”
Shoogar began by inscribing runes on all the surfaces of the nest, floors, walls, ceiling, the back of the oddly shaped couch, the panels of knobs, everything. He called upon Fine-line, the god of engineers and architects, to blast this nest with a spell of deformity to make it crack and shatter.
Onto each of the sacred signs, inscribed with chalk instead of knife, he dripped evil-smelling potions. As they combined, they began to smoke and sputter. “Waters of fire, burn and boil,” Shoogar urged them. We watched as the fluid ate holes into the runes and the surface below.
Beautiful. Blasphemy is the heart of a good curse.
Next he began to fill the ship with dust. Apparently he wanted to overload the spell of the protective wind, for he blew great clouds of the red dust of rust. The whirring started up immediately, but Shoogar kept blowing.
“Well, don’t just stand there, you goat — help me!”