The Wysard (Waterspell 2) Read online

  WATERSPELL Book 2:

  The Wysard

  Deborah J. Lightfoot

  Copyright © 2011 by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  All rights reserved. This book is protected under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 and all other applicable international, federal, state, and local laws.

  Writing a multilayered, multivolume work of fiction is a big undertaking. By purchasing this book, you’re acknowledging the author’s hard work and years of dedication. Infringements of copyright deprive the author and publisher of their rightful royalties. Please pay for your copy and refrain from unauthorized copying or file-sharing. Thank you.

  Seven Rivers Publishing

  P.O. Box 682

  Crowley, Texas 76036

  www.waterspell.net

  First Paperback Edition: October 2011

  First Electronic Edition: November 2011

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Waterspell Book 2—The Wysard: A Fantasy

  by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  Summary: After blundering into the last stronghold of magic, Carin discovers that she is right to fear the wizard Verek. He is using her to seal the ruptures in the void, and she may be nothing more to him than an expendable weapon. What will he do with her—or to her—when his world is again secure? Or has he erred in believing that the last bridge has been broken? The quest may not, in fact, be over … and Lord Verek may find himself not quite as willing to dispose of his fiery water-sylph, Carin, as he once believed himself to be.

  ISBN 978-0-9728768-5-8 (E-book)

  ISBN 978-0-9728768-6-5 (Paperback)

  This book is available in print at most online retailers.

  The WATERSPELL trilogy begins

  with Book 1: The Warlock.

  For Gene, who gave me the

  gift of time … and never grumbled

  when I asked him to read the

  whole thing “just once more.”

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: The Path Between

  1. Ghostly Reflections

  2. A Droll-Teller’s Tale

  3. Possibilities

  4. The Fiends of Night

  5. A Worthy Heir

  6. An Unpardonable Offense

  7. Vermin in the Vortex

  8. A Water-Sylph

  9. A Talisman

  10. Mysteries

  11. Desires

  12. White Death

  13. A Watcher

  14. Unnatural Things

  15. The Wysard’s Art

  16. Choices

  17. A Realm Beyond

  18. The Master Magician

  19. Ruptures in the Void

  20. A Quickening of Magic

  21. Broken Bridges

  22. Through Eternity

  To have a new vision of

  the future, it has always first

  been necessary to have

  a new vision of the past.

  —Theodore Zeldin

  Prologue

  The Path Between

  The heartbeat couldn’t be hers. She was dead.

  Maddeningly, however, the sound persisted—a strong, steady whump, whump in Carin’s left ear.

  Through the blackness within her mind, half-formed impressions drifted like moonmist. They teased her with sensations to which she struggled to attach meaning. Her body lay sprawled across a surface that was hard enough to bruise her corpse. But her head and one shoulder rested on matter more yielding. Had her drowned remains come to rest on a rocky ledge in a supernatural ocean? Was this a pillow of seaweed cushioning her skull?

  No, a thought whispered from a corner of her torpid brain. Seaweed and rock have no heart beating in them.

  The rhythmic pounding in Carin’s ear hammered at her until a crack opened to admit a sliver of comprehension:

  She lived.

  If the heart-sounds were hers, then she wasn’t dead. If the heart beat in another’s chest and she heard it, then she was not only alive, but also pressing very near some other undead being.

  Her eyes jerked open. They beheld what might have been a rumpled snowdrift bathed in the light of a blood-red sunset.

  She stared.

  Whump, whump in her ear deepened the crack, penetrated to the core of her cold-shocked mind—

  Lucidity flashed through the breach, and abruptly Carin knew: the rumpled whiteness that pressed against her face was Lord Verek’s linen shirt. The reddish tinge on it was no natural light from a setting sun, but the glow from the walls of Verek’s vault of sorcery. The wizard lay on the cavern’s floor of polished stone. Carin lay atop him, her head pillowed on his chest, her ear to his heart, and her slowly focusing eyes inventing wind-drifted snow from the wrinkles of his shirt.

  She gave a violent start, put both hands to the floor, and heaved herself off Verek’s unconscious body—so forcefully that she nearly toppled back into the ensorcelled pool behind her. She teetered on the pool’s rim, waging a brief, desperate struggle for life. To fall again into those glacial depths would kill her. The intense cold had cast her faculties into an abyss that must have no rival but death itself. Without the sorcerer to drag her up from that oblivion, Carin stood no chance of surviving a second dunking.

  And her rescuer was in no condition now to extract her from the unnatural waters of his wizards’ well. Verek lay like a corpse. Carin’s sudden movement hadn’t roused him to consciousness. He appeared as lost in the abyss as she had been.

  She kept her balance. Carin stumbled to safety, treading between Verek’s body and the enchanted pool that imperiled all living flesh, whether mortal or magian. She reached the nearest of the four stone benches that ringed the wizards’ well. Upon that seat carved with the symbol of a fish she collapsed, but she took care to avoid the shape that was cut into the stone.

  The symbol, precisely centered and deeply carved, might be nothing but decoration. Like its fellows on the other benches in the cave—the image of a key chiseled into the seat across the pool from this one, a radiant sun on the bench to Carin’s left, a crescent moon to her right—the fish might be only a token of magical art. Maybe the four symbols were a wizard’s badge of office, as a king’s crown and scepter were emblems of his royal authority.

  Or, Carin thought, maybe there’s magic in every line and curve. The events of her three weeks’ imprisonment in Lord Verek’s house had led her to suspect sorcery in all elements of his domain. She distrusted the blighted woodland outside his manor walls and the shape-shifting books in his library. But here in the cave below the library rose the undoubted wellspring of magic. Power flowed in the waters of the enchanted pool and in the lifeblood of the sorcerer who had submitted himself to it.

  From her uneasy perch, Carin studied the blacked-out wizard at her feet. Verek’s shirt, though white enough that her addled wits had mistaken it for snow, was sweat-stained down the front and under the armpits. His blue wool vest lay crumpled on the floor where he’d thrown it.

  Half rising from her seat, Carin bent to pick up the vest. The garment, previously soaked through with Verek’s perspiration, wasn’t even damp now. She and the wizard, one as near-dead as the other, had lain together on the floor long enough for the sweat to dry on Verek’s clothes and hair.

  The wizard’s black hair, falling around his ashen face, set off features that Carin had never seen so still and so unguarded. The jaw with its close-cropped beard was slack. The parted lips, so pale, were framed by a thin mustache that met the beard below the corners of the mouth. Closed lids hid the fierce, dark-flaring eyes that had excited terror in Carin’s soul since her first meeting with the wi
zard. Only the slow rise and fall of his chest showed that his body held life.

  The glossy blackness of Verek’s hair, graying nowhere but at the temples, suggested a man of fewer years than forty-four. How bizarre, Carin mused as she looked at him, that I know more about this warlock’s life than I know of my own. Between his housekeeper’s yarns and Carin’s own discoveries in the wizard’s library, she’d pieced together Verek’s life story enough to know that her captor was almost thirty years her senior—in mortal terms. But wizards live long. When his age was calculated by the standards of his kind, the gap between them narrowed considerably.

  And what are the odds, Carin wondered, that in just three weeks I would discover more of Verek’s secrets than he’s revealed to most people in a lifetime? In the brief period since her blundering across a boundary that should have repelled her, Carin had learned more than even Verek’s fellow wizard, the venerable Jerold, could know. Certainly that old elf was unaware of tonight’s events, which had dropped Carin into the lethally enchanted pool and sent Verek diving after her.

  Why had he done it?

  Done which? interjected another thought, spilling in on the first.

  It was a measure of her bewilderment that Carin was almost as unsure of her question as of its answer. Which of Verek’s actions was, in fact, the most inexplicable? That he would send her on a magical errand to steal a trinket from another world, and nearly kill her doing it? Or that he’d risk his own life to save a serving-girl who dreamed of destroying him?

  The wizard’s right hand twitched.

  The sudden movement brought Carin out of her reverie as if an arrow had whizzed past. She sprang to her feet and stared at the warlock, searching for signs of returning consciousness. There were none.

  But though it wasn’t repeated, the spasm in the hand that Verek commonly used to raise his enchantments was a warning Carin could hardly miss. Fate had given her an opportunity that wouldn’t likely come again.

  Do I want the warlock dead? she demanded of her tattered courage. Did I mean it today when I offered to knife him through his heart? Now’s my chance. If she acted quickly, before the wizard came to, she could rid herself of this enemy who was otherwise invincible.

  Carin dropped the crumpled vest and darted behind the fourth bench, that of the crescent moon. She raced for the stairs that spiraled steeply to the library.

  But at the foot of the steps lay an object that brought her up short. It was the crystal trinket on a golden chain that Verek had sent her to fetch—first casting her on the surface of his wizards’ well as though she were a wraith who could walk on water, then dropping her through into frozen nothingness.

  What was the crystal doing here, lodged against the bottom step, its chain loose beside it? Before lobbing the trinket to Verek’s waiting hands, Carin had snugged the chain around the pendant, making a tidy package that had reached him intact. The moment he’d got his hands on it, he’d let her fall into oblivion.

  From the depths of that void, Carin had had no glimpse of what he did next. But the evidence at her feet—the pendant and its now untidy heap of chain—suggested that the wizard had flung his treasure away, with force. Crystal and chain had piled up against the bottommost step like a runaway comet with its tail crashing into it.

  Carin was bending to pick up the trinket when a whisper of apprehension stopped her. Just before Verek had let her fall, he’d shouted: “I cannot withstand its pull on you!” And in fact, she had seen in his grimacing, sweat-streaked face the strain of something, some invisible force that opposed him as he drew her back from her raid on an unknown world.

  Had the crystal been pulling Carin away while the wizard fought to return her to his domain? If the trinket at her feet was imbued with such supernatural power, then she would be a fool to touch the thing again.

  She snatched her hand back and glanced over her shoulder for reassurance that Verek still slept. Then Carin stepped over the crystal and hurried up the stairs, trying not to think about her plans for the wizard.

  Her pausing, though, to mull over the evidence of the crystal, had given doubt a chance to undermine resolve. It would seem simplicity itself to kill Verek where he lay. But would the presence which haunted that cavern of sorcery—be it ghost, water-spirit, or other sort of disembodied intelligence—allow Carin to harm the wizard, its servant? The power that had once summoned her into its company might turn on her in Verek’s defense, were she to enter the cave armed with a knife.

  The dragon, Carin reminded herself. I have the puzzle-book dragon.

  If she spoke the incantation that conjured the Jabberwock, those fangs and claws might rise from wizards’ waters. But the presence that seemed part and parcel of those waters might rise, too.

  Maybe she was deluding herself, to think that she—an inept mortal, and no sorceress—could successfully wield her own magical being against wizardry as powerful as Verek’s. In spellcraft, he was the master, and she not so much as an apprentice.

  Carin reached the top of the winding stone stairs and let herself into the library where she had labored to bring order to the wizard’s disarrayed books. Through hours of stolen study, she’d also gained a knowledge of everything from archery and alchemy to Ladrehdinian geography.

  And haven’t I also learned, she reminded herself, to draw her thoughts back from the direction they appeared to be heading, that the House of Verek has been badly served by its current master? Didn’t Verek’s own grandfather describe him as “the tainted seed”? And didn’t Lord Legary hide his words on a high, dark shelf as though he never wanted his grandson to find them?

  Carin almost regretted her discovery of the Book of Archamon. On the day she tugged the ancient book into the light, she thwarted the wishes of the long-dead Legary and abetted Verek’s own designs. By delivering the volume into her captor’s hands, Carin had—she suspected—accomplished Verek’s true purpose in setting her to work in his library. He must have hoped she would find the words that were lost to him for twenty years.

  The library, as Carin entered it now, was a black pit in the night. The lamps of evening had been put out hours ago, and the hearth-fire had dwindled to a few glowing coals.

  She felt the darkness, felt her fear of it, in the prickling along her spine. But she ignored the sensation, long enough to grope her way to the nearest of the two high-backed benches that faced one another before the fireplace. This was the seat that Verek always took when he interviewed—or interrogated or upbraided—her in this room.

  Carin rounded the end nearest the hearth and felt for the low table between the benches. Her searching fingers closed on a candle. She put the wick to an ember on the hearth, and with that new-kindled flame she touched off two oil lamps.

  Feeling safer in the light, with her breath coming easier, she settled on the bench across from Verek’s and returned to pondering his fate. Could she kill him? If she didn’t do it now while he lay bereft of his senses in the cave below, she might never get another chance. But would she be permitted to harm him?

  Perhaps the real question was: Would Carin’s sense of justice allow it? Verek, after all, had extracted her from his wizards’ well—evidently damaging himself while saving her life. He should have recovered his wits by now, unless the shock had injured him worse than it had hurt her. Certainly he’d gone in knowing how painful it would be to submerge his living flesh in that glacial liquid. His distress had been obvious on that other occasion, weeks ago, when Carin had seen him swept into the pool and hadn’t been sure he would survive.

  As her eyes adjusted to the oddly cheerless light of lamp and candle flame, Carin detected a dark blanket opposite. It lay draped over the cushions of Verek’s bench, a vestige of a late-afternoon nap.

  I was right about one thing, anyway. Her face warmed at the realization. That warlock was dozing in here, all cozy and snug, while he had me scared out of my mind.

  Carin’s gaze roved from the blanket back to the table between the benches and found
the kitchen knife she’d tried to use on Verek before tonight’s adventures began. The sight of it irritated her—to know that the wizard, after easily disarming her, had brought the knife in here and tossed it on the table. Then he’d stretched out on his bench, blanketed and peaceful for an hour’s nap. Carin had spent that same hour in an agony of fear, expecting it to be the last of her life.

  But as she studied the weapon, no new impulse urged her to pick it up. The hot anger that had once fueled her had cooled. In fury’s wake, reason and—could she admit it?—principle now prevailed over emotion. Try as she might … and try, she did … Carin couldn’t picture herself stabbing the narrow blade into Verek’s heart, stilling the beat that had roused her from the blackness.

  “Good work,” she muttered aloud so she would hear and fully appreciate the contempt in her voice. “You’ve talked yourself out of it.”

  She wouldn’t try to kill the warlock, and everything about her decision smacked of cowardice. She was afraid of angering the specter in Verek’s cave of magic by going there armed, and in any case she didn’t have the guts to drive the blade home.

  Couldn’t she come up with a reason that suggested wisdom, not just weakness?

  Yes, she could. There was the captive woodsprite to consider. Verek had promised to release the creature when Carin had done his bidding to return the Looking-Glass book to … wherever she’d been tonight … and bring him the crystal trinket. The trade had been accomplished—at less cost to herself, it would seem, than to the wizard who had threatened to destroy the sprite if she failed.

  Now that Verek had what he wanted, he must keep his promise to free the woodsprite. If Carin were to kill the wizard, the spells imprisoning the sprite might become unbreakable, assuring the creature’s death.