After that, however, it worked, feebly at first, and then more reliably. He successfully ignited several small shrubs and a patch of moss. Peren grew annoyed at the frequent stops and the need to put out the various fires Tobas started, but made no protest.
As they circled around to the southeast, the spell’s power faded again, so that it elicited only a few sparks by the time they reached the south end of the cliff face, and ceased to work at all as they turned northward again, toward the fallen castle.
Trees blocked their view for almost the entire way, even when they had rounded the mountain, but at last they caught glimpses of their goal through the leaves. As they drew near, it became quite clear that it was, indeed, a fallen castle.
It stood upon a great slab of stone, tilted at what Tobas estimated as a third of a square angle from the natural horizontal and vertical; one tower had apparently crumbled upon impact and lay stretched out across the edge of the slab and into the forest. It was a fair-sized but compact castle, several stories tall but with no outbuildings, no extraneous wings or walls, and no moat or outer defenses at all. It had once had six towers; five still stood. The central structure was rectangular, with a tower at each corner and one at the center of each of the long sides; the main roof was steeply sloped so that the ridgepole was almost even with the tops of the surviving towers. Almost all of the red-tiled roofs were intact, though several were streaked with moss or bird droppings, and dead leaves were packed into corners. The walls were of some unfamiliar smooth, pale stone.
It looked nothing at all like the crudely constructed castles Tobas had seen in the Small Kingdoms, at Morria, Stralya, Kala, Danua, Ekeroa, and Dwomor. The walls were flat and straight, the corners sharp; even in its fallen and filthy state, the roof showed no sag at all.
As they drew nearer, Tobas studied the slab on which the castle stood, growing ever more perplexed. It was immediately obvious from the color of the stone that it was not the same as the cliff from which it had presumably fallen; the slab, like the stone of the castle walls, was almost white, while the cliff had been dark gray granite. Furthermore, the slab seemed to be perfectly circular. The castle was tilted toward them, more or less, allowing them to see the upper surface of the stone, and Tobas could see no sign of where it might have broken loose from the cliff.
When they reached the edge of the stone, Peren quickly circled to the lowest part of the rim and started to climb up onto it, but Tobas reached out and grabbed his arm. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I want to look underneath first.”
Peren looked down in surprise. “How?” he asked. “Do you plan to lift the entire castle?”
“No, I mean I want to look at the other side of this chunk of mountain it’s sitting on.” “Oh. Well, I’ll wait here if you like.”
“All right.” Tobas let go, leaving Peren sitting on the edge of the white stone surface, three feet above the floor of the surrounding forest, his legs dangling down over the side.
Unsure what he expected to see, Tobas worked his way slowly around the rim, which gradually rose up well out of reach as he moved along. He looked up at the great tilted stone, studied the widening gap between the rim and the ground beneath, peered into the shadows under the castle, and finally became absolutely convinced of his theory. The slab was shaped like a slice off the side of a globe; it had never been attached to this cliff or any other.
He made his way back to where Peren sat whistling.
“Well?” Peren said.
“This castle didn’t fall off that cliff,” Tobas said.
“I know it doesn’t look like it, with the different stone, but where else could it have come from?” Peren demanded.
“I think it flew; it flew here and then crashed, maybe because magic doesn’t work here.”
Peren was openly skeptical. “A flying castle? Are you serious? I know that magicians did some amazing things during the war, but a flying castle?”
“You come and take a look at this thing and tell me how it could have gotten here any other way.”
Peren turned and looked thoughtfully up the slope behind him. “You are serious, aren’t you? And I can see why, really. I don’t need to look; I believe you, I guess. But Tobas... a flying castle?”
Tobas nodded. “I’ve heard of them before, though I admit I didn’t really believe in them until now. Roggit — my master — told me about them. He used to brag a lot about how wonderful wizards were, to keep me from asking him to teach me more spells more quickly. He said I had to know all about wizards before I could be one. According to Roggit, the wizards during the war knew how to build flying castles and move them around anywhere they pleased, at least, some of them did, for a while. Roggit said that most of the really big magic got lost long before the war was over, so that people now don’t believe half of it ever existed.”
“So you think this castle flew and then crashed here because wizardry doesn’t work here?”
Tobas nodded. “That would be my guess, yes. Maybe it was a weapon of some kind that was responsible. What if the castle had been attacking that town up there, and they had used some secret emergency weapon that stopped magic from working? After they used it, the enemy castle would be down, but who would want to live in a town where magic doesn’t work? So they left, and that’s why those ruins are the way they are.”
Peren studied the castle thoughtfully. “Maybe,” he agreed. “We don’t know about all magic, though, just wizardry. Something like this castle, and all those wizards who lived up there, maybe they just used up all the wizard-magic around here.”
It was Tobas’ turn to be thoughtful. “Maybe,” he said, “but I didn’t think it worked that way. I don’t think you can use up all the magic in a place. If you could, would magic still work in Ethshar?” Before Peren could reply, he added hastily, “Maybe it would; I don’t know for sure, I’m just guessing.”
“If it was attacking the town,” Peren said uneasily, “then wouldn’t it have been a Northerner castle? I don’t think I like the idea of messing around with anything Northern.”
“It might have been,” Tobas conceded. “But I think it’s more likely that it was a local dispute of some kind, if there was any fighting at all. After all, Old Ethshar broke apart into the Small Kingdoms while the war was still going on. And I never heard of the Northerners getting this far; you said yourself that it doesn’t seem possible.”
“That’s true enough,” Peren admitted.
“We’ll never find out anything by standing out here,” Tobas said. “Do you want to go in?”
Hesitantly, Peren nodded.
Tobas was both frightened and eager. The castle did not look safe, perched on a sliver of stone and tipped at so uncomfortable an angle, and he suspected there was a very real possibility that any disturbance might bring the whole thing crashing down, but this was a wizard’s castle; it could be nothing else. And not just any wizard; this had been the airborne stronghold of a wartime wizard, one of the really powerful ones. No ordinary wizard would have a flying castle. In its prime, the place would have been fraught with wizardry of every sort.
And some of those spells might still be here, in books or scrolls or charms, all of them harmless, their protective spells inoperative in this strange place of no wizardry, but ready to function when he took them back to the normal, everyday world.
Here he might at last find magic that would not only make him a wizard but might make him truly great! What reward would be too great for the Wizards’ Guild to pay the member who rediscovered the lost arts of the ancients? He could be set for life if this castle held such spells!