If Tobas were unable to find a way back to the World, she hoped he would be able to restore the gardens to their former splendor. Otherwise it was entirely possible that they might eventually starve.
Tobas found the incredible profusion of magic in the castle daunting; Karanissa explained that Derithon had spent most of his free time for a hundred years or so in embellishing the place and that she, with her witchcraft, had added a few touches of her own as well. She had never reached the upper echelons of her craft, however, and witchcraft was always less permanent and less inherently powerful than wizardry, an admission that startled Tobas, so that most of her work was minor by comparison, and she had been unable to maintain some of Derithon’s spells.
“I hadn’t realized that wizardry was necessarily that much more potent,” he remarked, which was polite but not exactly true. He had not known it absolutely, but he had certainly suspected it.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Of course, it’s also much more dangerous. Derry told me once that wizardry somehow taps into the pure chaos underlying our reality, so that the effect can be completely out of proportion to the cause, completely unrelated to what the wizard actually did to bring it about. Witchcraft isn’t like that at all; a witch’s power comes from his or her own body and mind. Oh, it’s free of the limits of space and time and physicality, to some extent, but it’s still human energy. If I tried to work a spell that needed more energy than I have, it would either fail or kill me, but you wizards do things like that all the time without even thinking about it.”
“I don’t,” Tobas said.
“Oh, but you could; you could light a hundred fires and it wouldn’t tire you out at all.”
“My wrists might get sore,” Tobas argued. “From all that gesturing, you know.”
“That’s nothing. If I lit a hundred fires by witchcraft, I’d be exhausted. I could probably do it; lighting a fire with witchcraft takes about as much effort as starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and a hundred of those, have you ever lit a fire by rubbing sticks?”
“No, I haven’t. I’ve heard of it, but never tried it.”
“Well, it works, but it takes about, oh, ten or fifteen minutes, usually, and your arms get tired and sore. A witch can light a fire instantly, and her arms won’t hurt, but she’ll be just as tired as if she’d taken the ten minutes, do you see?”
“I think so.”
“Of course, I don’t need the brimstone and gestures that you use; I don’t need any ingredients or ritual for my spells.”
Tobas nodded. “Only wizards use all that stuff, I guess,” he said. “The warlock on my ship never used any.”
Karanissa stared at him blankly for a moment. “What’s a warlock?” she asked finally.
Embarrassed, Tobas remembered that warlockry hadn’t existed in her day, and tried as best he could to explain the mysterious new magic, but without much success. He knew very little about it, after all.
After a time, when he had slept several “nights” in the castle and discovered beyond question that tilting the tapestry to various angles had no effect, he felt sufficiently secure in his surroundings to attempt a few of the spells from Derithon’s compendium. The first interesting and easy one he came across, Tracel’s Levitation, he had to pass by; it called for a raindrop caught in midair, and he could find nothing of the sort anywhere in the castle. If Derithon had had one, it had long since evaporated; Tobas found an empty vial marked “Rain” on one shelf. And of course, it never rained in the void surrounding the castle.
That started him wondering where the water came from. Karanissa pointed out the well; after a glance into its seemingly bottomless depths, he decided not to enquire further and returned to the study.
Reminded of the problems of supply, he used Derithon’s big jar of brimstone to replenish the little vial he still kept on his belt.
The next spell after Tracel’s Levitation was something called the Sanguinary Deception, requiring nothing but his athame and his own blood; a prick on his arm, a few gestures, and his appearance, as confirmed by a glance in a mirror and by Karanissa’s appalled reaction, was that of a bloody, decaying corpse.
She refused to eat dinner with him while he retained his ghastly aspect, and he could find no countercharm he felt competent to use, but fortunately the spell wore off in time.
He decided against repeating that spell to get it down pat; once was enough. He could see its usefulness in fooling one’s enemies, but did not care to spend any more time than necessary having Karanissa avoid his company.
The Spell of Prismatic Pyrotechnics was another matter; he was able to work that one over and over without upsetting anyone, sending showers of colored sparks everywhere, glittering and bursting and whistling and, hissing, without ever even singeing a tablecloth or tapestry. All the ingredients for that were on hand in plentiful amounts.
He found a recipe for an explosive seal; remembering Roggit’s Book of Spells, he decided against experimenting with that.
The Polychrome Smoke worked well enough, but the resulting cloud hung around stubbornly until he finally asked Karanissa to herd it out a window into the void; he decided not to repeat that one, either.
A spell for the removal of blemishes proved untestable when he discovered that neither Karanissa nor he had any blemishes to remove. He had to skip over a series of spells that called for either sunlight or moonlight, since the surrounding void provided neither one.
Galger’s Lid Remover frightened him out of his wits, despite the laconic warning at the bottom of the page that it was noisy and required a certain amount of working space. He had expected the jar to jump about the room; he had not expected a demonic eight-foot thing, glittering like crystal and ablaze with white fire, with razor-sharp claws and fangs and horns, to appear out of nowhere with a banshee wail, snatch the jar from his hands, twist off the lid with a scream of tortured metal, and then vanish with the sound of shattering glass, leaving jar and lid on the floor at his feet.
When the performance was over, he stared at the open jar for a long moment, then gathered it up, closed it tightly, and returned it to the shelf where he had found it. That done, he sat and stared at it for a long time, a slow smile working its way onto his features. “Hey, Nuisance,” he called at last, “go find Karanissa for me, would you?”
His servant chittered, made an obscene slurping noise, and ran out of the room; he listened to the wet patter of its footsteps fading down the hallway, then got the jar down from the shelf again.
When it returned with the witch, he made a great show of seriousness. “I think,” he said, “that I’ve found what might be a very important spell here. It opens things. I don’t think it will work directly on the tapestry, but I thought you might like to see it.” He picked up his athame, the other ingredients, diamond chip, gold wire, steel rod, and small silver mirror, laid out ready on the table.
“Do you really think it will do us any good?” she said.
A moment of guilt at what he planned caught him. “Well, no,” he admitted. “But I thought you might like to see that at least I’m learning something.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, then, what does this spell do?”
“It opens jars.”
“Is that all? I can open jars, by hand or by magic.”
“Not like this; the book says it can open any container a man can carry with one hand, no matter how tightly closed. Watch!” He performed the quick little ritual.
Her reaction was all he could have asked for; when the thing appeared, she jumped backward with a shriek, knocking her chair to the floor. Even though he knew what to expect this time, Tobas himself was again disconcerted by the suddenness, brightness, and noise of the apparition.