Days of Magic, Nights of War

  “Oh, he’s a clever one. He knows how to use the shadows.” As Filth spoke, his eyes darted in all directions, seeking out the “clever one,” whoever he was. “Will you go?” he said, giving Candy another small push.

  “Which way?”

  “Any which way! Just get going!”

  Candy began to back away from him, but as she did so, out of the corner of her eye she saw somebody starting to move toward her. It was just the briefest of glances. She caught sight of his pale face and the long dark hair surrounding it, but that was all. Then she turned on her heel—“Run!” she heard Filth yelling—and she did just that, following the winding path that had first brought her to the Twilight Palace.

  Her pursuer was fast, however. After ten or twelve strides she heard the sound of his bare feet slapping on the mosaic, getting louder as he gained on her.

  She didn’t like the idea of being struck down from behind. So she came to a halt and spun around to face him. It was worth the risk just to see the look of shock on the young man’s face: his deep-set eyes suddenly grew almost comically big. Then he seemed to recover himself, and he came running at her again, pulling something from his jacket. Thinking it was a knife, she raised her hands to keep the blade away from her body, but he lifted the object—not a knife, a bag!—up over her head and pulled it down.

  She started to yell and thrash around, but there was something in the bag that smelled like the scent of rotted flowers, and its power made her head swim.

  “Just relax . . .” she heard the voice of the young man say. “You’re going to be all right. Just let go, Candy—”

  (“Candy,” she thought. He knows my name! How does he know my name?)

  And then, as she shaped this question in her mind, the perfume played a strange trick. She heard a voice in her head say: “You have to sleep now.”

  “No . . .” she mumbled, her tongue somehow thick and heavy in her mouth.

  “Just for a little while,” the voice replied.

  And the next moment there was no next moment.

  She knew how long she’d been asleep, precisely, because the voice of the perfume was there when she awakened to tell her.

  “It’s been thirty-seven minutes and eleven seconds since you went to sleep. Wake now, if you will.”

  She didn’t need a second invitation. She reached up and fumbled with the drawstring, which had tightened the bag around her neck. Loosening it, she pulled the bag off her head. She was no longer in the Twilight Palace. The sky was dark and full of stars. Indeed, she could not remember a time during her voyages when there had been more stars visible than there were right now. They were so beautiful that it took a great deal of effort to take her eyes from the spectacle overhead and look around at the place where her abductor had brought her.

  She was in a small, single-masted boat, which was bobbing along before a gusting wind. At the other end of the vessel, sitting spread-legged on the floor of the boat and making some conjurations with his hands over a large map of the archipelago, was her abductor: a young man who looked more or less Candy’s age. His hair was a glossy black and hung in greasy ringlets.

  “What are you doing?” Candy said.

  The young man looked up, his expression a little nervous. “I’m . . . conjuring a route for us,” he said.

  “A route to where?”

  “To where we’re going,” he answered with a bright but far from trustworthy smile.

  “Well, wherever you think you’re taking me,” Candy told him, “I demand that you take me back where I came from.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  “Why?”

  Candy looked incredulous. “What do you mean: why? Because you kidnapped me, and I don’t appreciate it.”

  “Oh, come on, you didn’t want to stay in that old place.”

  “No, you come on!” Candy said, getting up from her seat, making the boat rock. His casual attitude made her furious. “You put a bag over my head and kidnapped me!” she reminded him. “You should be put in jail for that!”

  “I’ve been in jail. Plenty of times. It don’t scare me none.” He got to his feet; he was a little bit shorter than she was, Candy noticed. “Anyway, I was just obeying orders,” he said.

  “Oh, very original. Like that’s an excuse nobody has ever used before. All right,” she said. “If that’s where you want to start, let’s start there. Whose orders?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said.

  “Oh, can’t you?” she said, approaching him down the boat. Her sudden movement made it rock even more wildly.

  “Be careful!” he yelled. “You’ll overturn us!”

  “I don’t care. I can swim!”

  “So can I, but these waters are dangerous. So stop it!”

  Mimicking his own irritating tone, she said: “Why?”

  “Because—” He stopped, realizing he’d been set up. “You’re crazy!”

  Candy put on a wild-eyed look. “I’ve been thinking that myself lately,” she said, deliberately making the boat rock even more violently.

  “He didn’t tell me you were crazy!” the youth said, grabbing the sides of the boat so hard his knuckles went white.

  “Who didn’t tell you?” Candy said, threatening with her stance to making the rocking still worse. “Come on, spit it out!”

  “My employer. Mister . . . Mister Masper.”

  “And how much is this Mister Masper paying you to get me on this little boat trip?”

  “Eleven paterzem.”

  Candy looked disappointed. “I’m only worth eleven paterzem?” she said.

  “What do you mean? I’ve never had eleven paterzem in my life. It’s a fortune.”

  “I don’t even know any Mister Masper.”

  “Well, he knows you. He’s a very powerful man. Very influential. And very curious about you. He heard all these rumors about you. And he wants to meet you in the flesh.”

  “So you put a bag over my head and knocked me uncon-scious.”

  “Was the perfume not polite?” the youth said, looking genuinely concerned. “I used it because it’s polite.”

  “Whether it was polite or not isn’t the point. And stop putting on that big-eyed I’m-so-sorry look, because it doesn’t work. You see, I’ve got two brothers. So I know every trick in the book of boys. He did it. Somebody told me to. I’ll never do it again.”

  “Not impressed, huh?”

  “No. Now turn the boat around and take me back to the Twilight Palace. You can tell Mister Masper he’ll have to be happy with the rumors.”

  “I can’t control the boat. I put this conjuration on it, and now I can’t undo it. I wasn’t really planning the route when you woke up. I was trying to slow us down. You can see how fast we’re moving.”

  Candy had indeed noticed the speed of the little boat. It was fairly racing over the water. But she wasn’t buying his excuse any more than she was the lost-little-boy expression.

  “If you put a conjuration on the boat,” she told him, “then you can take it off again.”

  “I haven’t been taught how to do that yet,” the young man replied.

  For a moment she just looked at her lunatic-conjuror-kidnapper in frustrated silence. Then she said: “Tell me you’re kidding?”

  “No. I swear.”

  “You . . . you fool.”

  “I am not a fool,” the youth protested. “My name’s Letheo.”

  “So, Letheo, if you don’t know how to slow this boat down, what’s going to happen when we reach our destination?”

  “Well . . . uh . . . I was assuming that . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “That is . . . I was . . . hoping . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “. . . that the boat would know.”

  “The boat would know what?”

  “That we were at the end of our journey. Then it would slow down of its own accord. And put us on the beach . . . gently.”

/>   “I don’t know much about magic yet, but what I’ve seen so far has been pretty violent. I don’t think we’re going to be put anywhere gently.”

  “Stop looking at me that way,” Letheo said. “I didn’t think. I just wanted to get there quickly. I thought maybe that way he’d pay me more paterzem. You know, a bonus for quick delivery.”

  “Give me the map, Letheo.”

  “Why?”

  “Because in case you hadn’t noticed, your boat is still picking up speed, and if we don’t figure something out before we reach land, it’s going to be journey’s end in more ways than one.”

  She could see by the way his eyes darted around that he knew she was right.

  “Oh, by the Towers,” he said, half to himself. “What have I done?”

  “Give me the map.”

  Letheo pulled the map from under his foot and handed it over to Candy. The speed of the boat made the map flap around like a panicked bird. She had no choice but to go down on her hands and knees, lay the map on the waterlogged boards at the bottom of the boat and examine it as best she could from there.

  “Where’s it taking us?” she yelled to Letheo.

  He went down on his hands and knees on the other side of the map and jabbed a finger at one of the islands.

  “Efreet!” he said. “It’s one of the Outer Islands!”

  “Yes, I know about Efreet. I met some people who live there. Do you have any way of knowing our exact position?”

  “I’ll show you,” Letheo said. “Here’s a bit of magic I do know. Hold the map down.”

  Candy did her best to oblige, but it was difficult. Even in the belly of the boat, the wind kept getting under the map and making it bow.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Watch.” Letheo grinned. He spat on his hand and rubbed his palms together vigorously. Then he made a crude pipe by making loose fists of his hands; and setting one on top of the other, he blew down them, hard. A mote of red light (the same red as the boat’s hull) sped from his hand and struck the map.

  “That’s where we are,” he said, not without a measure of pride in his achievement.

  Candy peered at the red mote—which was moving over the bucking map rapidly—with a mingling of curiosity and unease. Even at such a reduced size, the boat was closing in on the island of Efreet at an extraordinary rate.

  She looked up over the edge of the boat. It was dark, of course, but she thought she could vaguely see the shape of the island ahead. And there was no sign of the vessel slowing. In fact, it continued to pick up speed, hitting the waves with such violence it seemed only a matter of time before one of the waves simply struck it so hard the boat would come apart at its creaking seams. Were that to happen, they’d be in serious trouble. The spray that was hitting her face was icy cold. If they were dropped in the water, hypothermia would soon take its toll. And if it didn’t, well, there were always the usual predators. The gluttonous mantizacs; the vicious little jigsaw fish, called jiggers by the fishermen.

  “We are in such trouble!” she said, staring at Letheo with a mixture of rage and frustration. “You’re going to get us both killed, just because you wanted a bonus for delivery!”

  He had nothing to say. He looked away from her at the rocks close to the island. “Oh no . . .” he said softly. “Kythrus.” She followed his gaze to see that the rocks were inhabited by some flipper-footed creatures that were watching them with hungry eyes. One by one they slipped off the rocks and into the frigid water, making their way to the boat.

  Candy went back to the map. Was there some conjuration she could do that could get them out of this mess? She scanned the map from left to right and top to bottom. But the signs on the map meant nothing to her. She felt none of the sensations she knew were connected with power. Her tongue failed to summon any magic words; no sudden knowledge leaped into her head.

  “What are you doing?” Letheo yelled over the din of water and wind.

  “I’m trying to figure out some way of using my own magic.”

  “You have magic?”

  “A little.”

  “Then save us! Please!”

  Candy glanced up again. It was snowing on Efreet: the landscape was gray and white. And the wind brought icy flakes against her face.

  “I wasn’t expecting snow,” Letheo said.

  Suddenly there was a roar from the water, and the next moment the boat struck one of the kythrus, head on. Candy caught a glimpse of the beast’s yellow eye as the boat rolled sideways. She grabbed the seat to stop herself from being thrown out. As she did so, the boat struck another of the animals, which seemed intent on throwing them over, because it lifted itself out of the water beneath the boat’s hull. Letheo let out a howl of terror as the boat flew through the air.

  “Hold on!” Candy yelled.

  She saw his face for a second as they dropped back toward the water, all trace of manipulations scoured from it. He was just a terrified boy—

  Then the boat struck the water, its hull cracking. Sprays of freezing water came up through the cracks. And then they were off again, careering through the kythrus, their speed seeming to increase the closer they got to their destination. Any hope Candy might have had of saving them with magic was forgotten now. The map had gone. She could scarcely keep hold of the boat.

  And then they hit the beach. The bow cracked like an eggshell and snow began to come in as the open end of the little vessel dug into the drifts like a huge shovel. The deep snow was the saving of them. It steadily slowed the boat’s progress, weighing it down with its freight. They were still moving when the boat reached the tree line, but at a fraction of the speed they’d been going when they hit the beach. Candy peered up out of the chaos of splintered timbers, snow and ice shards in which she lay just in time to see a tree dead ahead.

  “This is it!” she yelled to Letheo, though she could no longer be sure he was still in the boat. Then she put her arms around the seat in the middle of the boat and held tight. There was a tremendous crash and the boat broke open, and she was peppered with pieces of wood. Then she felt the boat tip up, and she lost her grip on the seat, sliding down into the snow. She lay there sprawled for a few moments, catching her breath. Then, spitting out particles of ice and pieces of shredded leaf, she reached up and wiped the snow out of her eyes.

  “Lucky, lucky, lucky,” she told herself as she checked her limbs for any sign of broken bones. There was apparently no serious damage done, however, which was a near miracle given the speed at which the boat had been approaching the island. Indeed Letheo’s initial spell had still not deserted a few of the larger boards scattered between the trees. They twitched and rolled as if they were still good to go.

  As for the spell-caster himself, the impact had apparently thrown him a long way clear of the wreckage, because Candy could see no sign of him. What she did see was a path of demolition that led back through the trees and across the beach to the water’s edge. Were there guardian angels in the Abarat? Because surely she had one.

  Her eyes had already become accustomed to the strange light here: starlight off snow. It showed her a forest that stretched off to the limits of her sight. It was odd to see trees that apparently flourished in darkness and bitter cold, as these did. Many were in full blossom, their fat fire-colored flowers undeterred by the snow.

  Then came Letheo’s voice, calling her name.

  “I can hear you,” she called back. “Keep talking.”

  “I’m here!” he yelled, as though she should know exactly where “here” was.

  She followed his frail voice to the limits of the scattered wreckage and found him lying at the bottom of a shallow incline, curled up in a sorrowful bundle.

  “You’re alive,” she said. “I can’t believe that we both came out of this alive.”

  “Well, we haven’t yet,” he said.

  “What do you mean? We’re here, aren’t we? We’re safe.”

  “No, this is Efreet. There are five Beasts on th
is island. Terrible creatures.”

  “Like the kythrus, you mean? They weren’t—”

  “No, not like them. They’re just . . . animals. These are monsters.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said, remembering what Mizzel had told her on Babilonium: We’ve got some fierce beasts live up there, he’d said. “Well, I don’t see anything,” Candy said hopefully. “Maybe we’re on the wrong side of the island?”

  Letheo shook his head. “They’re here,” he said. “They’re just watching from a distance, figuring out who gets to eat who.”

  “Will you shut up?”

  “It’s true!”

  “Well, I don’t want to hear. We need to get moving before we freeze to death.”

  “My ribs ache and my head too.”

  She looked first at his head. He had a large, deep wound above his right ear. “You’re going to have a nice scar.”

  “It won’t be my first,” Letheo replied matter-of-factly. “Anyway, isn’t scar tissue stronger than ordinary skin?”

  “Hmm,” Candy said. “If that’s supposed to be some weird recommendation for getting hurt, I don’t buy it. Now let me look at your ribs.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Yes,” she said forcefully. “Don’t worry, I’ve got brothers. It’s no big deal to me. You’re just another boy.”

  He somewhat reluctantly unbuttoned his shirt, and Candy realized why he was being so coy. There was a strange pulsing coloration on his torso, which was dark turquoise in places and purple in others. With each flush of color his skin turned from smooth to scaly. In addition to the scales he had several crude tattoos on his thin arms. “So now you know,” he said, wincing as his skin twitched and transformed. “I’ve got a bit of beast in me.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  He lightly touched his reptilian belly. “Yes. When it takes me over completely, it’s horrible. See, the thing is, Mister Masper has a medicine that makes this go away.”

  “And he gives it to you—”

  “When I follow orders.”

  “But you don’t always want to?”

  “No,” said Letheo. “Not always.”

  “So when do you need the medicine again?”