Aquamancer (mancer series Book 2) (30 page)

He pondered and prepared himself while the Otter slept again, quite soundly. Eventually Douglas, too, rolled over to face away from the ember’s glow and willed himself go to sleep.

He dreamed of Myrn in a rocking manure cart, chained and unable to stand, on the rough pinelands path, rolling toward Coventown.

Chapter Eighteen

Road to Coventown

Willow, as dirty and disheveled as Pfantas itself had been two days earlier, slipped into town by the postern gate in the smallest hours of morning. He made his way up scrubbed-clean streets and past levels so spotless and neat he hardly recognized them.

He supplemented loud pounding on the inn door with a handful of gravel thrown against the innkeeper’s bedroom shutters, finally rousing the sleeping host.

“I just
can’t
wake the lady,” the innkeeper sputtered indignantly when he at last opened the door to admit the rebel. “Can’t it wait ‘til morning?”

“It’s urgent, man!
Urgent!”
Willow shouted. “The Lady Wizard
knows
me! She awaits my news.”

Grumbling testily but prodded on by the ragamuffin, the innkeeper at last climbed the stairs and rapped gently on Myrn’s door.

“Here, old gaffer!” hissed Willow in exasperation, pushing the innkeeper aside. He beat so loud a tattoo on the door panel it made the host wince in pain.

“You just
don’t
rouse important guests in such a manner!”

He remembered that much from the good old days, when his inn was always full of rich and cultured patrons.

Myrn opened her door, greeted the boy and the man sleepily, and said she’d be right down. The messenger and innkeeper retreated to the public room, where they sat glaring at each other in hostile silence from opposite settles before the banked fire.

Five minutes later the Apprentice Aquamancer appeared, looking fresh, rested, and anxious.

 “Good morning, innkeeper! What is it, Willow? Good news or bad?”

“I... I... I’m not sure, Mistress. That there Seacaptain...”

“Pargeot? Yes?”

“He’s went and turned hisself over to the Witchservers!”

Myrn gasped, “I don’t understand...”

“And he said to run fast and tell you what he done,” continued the lad. “So, I did. He said he’d pretend to be the other Wizard, the one you seek, and leave a trail you can follow when they hauled him off to Coventown, too!”

“He didn’t! Well! You did wonderfully well, Willow,” Myrn assured him as understanding dawned. She sent the innkeeper to wake the older Seacaptain and the Choinese gentleman, too, at once.

“Our Pargeot is bound and determined to be a tragic hero as in the old romances,” Myrn told them when they came down. “When he was shown the Witchserver’s camp, he simply walked up to them and told them
he
was Douglas Brightglade!”

“I assume,” said Wong, “that our young Seacaptain hopes the enemy will dash off to their Witch mistress with him.”

“That’s as how I sees it,” agreed Caspar, nodding vigorously.

“He says we should follow him, as Douglas followed Cribblon’s captives. Well, it
may be
a quick way to find the Witch without taking the time to untangle that hex,” Myrn conceded.

She turned away with decision. “I’ll go at once. Willow will guide me.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Caspar, and he wouldn’t hear otherwise. “A sailor always comes in handy, be it fight, flight, or finding safe harbor.”

Wong said he would stay behind in Pfantas.

“A great Choin general once told me, ‘Always have something in reserve,’”he said.

Myrn finished dressing while the innkeeper went to rouse his good wife to make them a hearty breakfast. In less than an hour, with just a hint of dawn in the sky, the Apprentice Wizard and the sun-grizzled Captain followed Willow through the postern, across the creek, and up the path toward Coventown, to Cribblon, to Pargeot, to Douglas and Marbleheart.

****

Shortly after the sun cleared the eastern horizon, Marbleheart and Douglas were again lying on their stomachs under the thornbushes, peering down into Coventown’s vale through the morning’s steams and mists.

“Your invisibility thing seems to me our best bet,” advised Marbleheart. “Although you sounded doubtful of it.”

“Not so much doubtful of the spell,” explained Douglas, “but whether it will work on a watchful Witch. On the rest of Emaldar’s people, I have no doubt it’ll work. But Witches can see the unseen, you know.”

“No, I don’t know much about such creatures,” said the Otter, giving his sleek, brown head a sharp shake. “How about this, then? We go right through town, being invisible, and examine the castle as closely as is safe. A Witch would have to be looking right in our direction to see us, would she not?”

Douglas nodded. “Recall, however, that there’s more than the one Witch over there. ‘Coven’ implies at least two other Witches in addition to Emaldar, banded together. There could be a dozen or even a score!”

“In my considerable experience stealing the wary tern’s eggs or sneaking up on squid in deep water—they’re delicious!—I’ve found you can get amazingly close to anyone who is looking another way. I would guess Emaldar and her sister Witches will be very busy this morning with their new prisoner, wouldn’t you?”

“It’s quite possible. A chance we’ll have to take, I see.”

“A little caution?” Marbleheart waved a casual paw. “Pick our cover before each move?”

“It’s our best idea, anyway,” agreed the Journeyman. “Let’s do it, before I change my mind!”

He drew the Otter close to his side, and invoked Flarman’s Invisibility Incantation Number 7, a series of slow hand passes to a monotone chant in Faerie, followed by certain Power Words merely whispered in their proper order with just the right emphasis.

“Not working” sniffed the Otter in disappointment. He stared at his right forepaw and left hindpaw in turn. “I can still see me.”

“It’s working,” Douglas reassured him. “The spell doesn’t affect you and me, just everyone else—I hope! Go quietly, though, and speak low, for the spell doesn’t keep us from being heard.”

“There’s the easiest part, then,” said Marbleheart. “The Man hasn’t been born who can hear an Otter being quiet. Well, if it’s working as you say, what are we waiting for? Into the heart of Coventown, I say! Crossing that rather dangerous-looking dam might prove risky, however. Let’s look at it more closely.”

They reached the stream bank at the near end of the rough earth dam that backed the mountain stream to form Coventown Pool. The water was high, spilling through widening cracks and between boulders. A treacherous-looking footpath crossed on the top of the dam.

“Something’s shaken the dam up. Close to collapsing, I should think,” Marbleheart said, stroking his whiskers nervously. “Others crossed here, as late as yesterday evening. Watchmen, I would guess. But...”

“We won’t take the chance,” Douglas decided. Taking the Otter’s paw firmly in hand, he sailed them over the stream with a short-hop Levitation Spell.

“Hoo! Whee!” squealed the startled Marbleheart. He clapped a paw over his mouth and whispered, “You didn’t tell me we were going by air.”

“Shush!” warned Douglas. “There are washerwomen ahead.”

A silent crowd of women knelt on flat rocks at the lake’s edge, dousing their laundry in the scummy, opaque waters and beating each piece listlessly on the stones with sticks. They worked without joy—no gossip, no laughter, nor even bickering—as you might expect of folk doing a common household chore together.

“Did you notice what they were washing?” asked Marbleheart once they had passed out of earshot. “Black gowns! Dead black, all of them, from top to toe, even the underneath things! Not a shred of pink or white or...”

“Witches wear black,” Douglas observed with a shrug. “It’s part of their mystique. What’s this?”

They had come to where the town’s sewers emptied, by way of a large open ditch, into the lake. All the stenches of Coventown were concentrated in the sludgy ooze. The travelers held their noses and tried not to breathe too deeply through their mouths until they were well past.

“Depressing as a dying whimper,” muttered the Sea Otter, looking about with curiosity after they’d passed through the town gates. Although the sun shone brightly high above the mountain peaks, the very air here at street level was a gray-brown, eye-watering haze that filtered out most of the sunlight and gave a winter’s-dusk appearance to the scene.

Lanterns flickered feebly at a few street corners, although it was midmorning. The people they saw in this dimness walked like old, blind men, canes tapping, slowly shuffling, eyes ever focused at their feet.

These, Douglas guessed, were the ordinary folk Emaldar had enslaved, stolen from places like Pfantas, to do the hard, dirty work of her Coven. They were terrorized hewers of wood, carriers of water, washers of clothes, the servants who scrubbed the Witches’ floors and prepared their meals.

The weirdest thing about Coventown, Marbleheart noted, was that no one spoke louder than the merest whimper. Not even the pinch-faced little children they saw spoke out loud. Nor did they smile or even play, but stood about, leaning on grimy walls, in the deepest shadows, staring away with haunted eyes at nothing at all.

The travelers climbed the steep streets to the castle—it seemed to Douglas he had spent an inordinate amount of energy lately climbing up and down. When they reached the uneven stone paving of the castle foregate, they sheltered under a blind archway, away from a hot, sulfurous wind that whipped about them from the mountain heights.

Marbleheart gazed with grave interest at the castle. He’d never seen a structure so large and lofty.

“Carved right out of solid rock, it is! Not cut pieces of stone, like Summer Palace or Westongue Quay,” whispered the Otter. “Take some of your best fireworks to break them down.”

“The place is big,” Douglas whispered back. “We can go in and explore as long as we avoid the Witches!”

“How do I tell Witch from Witchpeople?”

“That’s easy. Witches’ll be dressed all in black and they’ll wear tall, pointed hats. A Black Witch stores part of her witching powers in her hat.”

“Well, let’s go in and see,” sighed the Otter. “Here comes a pack train. Supplies for the castle, I’d guess. If we walk along right behind them the clatter they make on the drawbridge will cover our own.”

“You’re the expert stalker,” agreed the Journeyman, gesturing for him to lead the way.

They hurriedly crossed the sagging, swaying draw-span over a noxious-smelling moat, in the wake of a gang of almost-naked men carrying huge bundles and heavy boxes.

The slaves were driven by a brace of most villainous-looking Witchservers, as twisted and cruel as the long black-snake whips they flourished and cracked, applying them with wicked glee to the slaves’ backs, bottoms, and legs.

Once out of the dark gate tunnel through the thick outer wall, the invisible companions emerged into a cramped, crowded, flagged courtyard surrounded by twenty-foot walls. The interior was broken only by the heavy doors and tiny arrow-slit windows in the gray stone inner keep itself. The keep seemed to lean backward and merged into the cliff behind. Cornices under frowning, overhanging eaves were evilly decorated with ugly, wicked-looking serpents, scowling demons, and long-fanged gargoyles.

Douglas stopped to study these and saw that they weren’t stone at all, but living monsters the same dark color of the surrounding stone. They clung, perfectly still to the edges of the castle’s roofs, their tiny, dull eyes alone moving, restlessly scanning the courtyard and everything in it in slow, sweeping glances.

“‘Ware the Griffins,” he breathed in the Otter’s ear. “They’re Watchworms.”

“Can they see us?”

“No, I think. They’re stone deaf, fortunately. But let’s get under cover somewhere. That small door—there, next to the stable archway.”

They slipped quickly but quietly across the rough and stained flags, until they could edge through the half-ajar door and plunge into the welcome darkness of the passage on the other side.

“So far, so good!” breathed the Journeyman Wizard. “Look for a way leading down.”

After several minutes of exploring, they found a stairway at the far end of a side corridor, blocked by a massive fence of tarnished brass bars.

“Why brass?” wondered Marbleheart.

“Witches fear the touch of iron,” the Journeyman murmured back.

As Douglas started a subtle unlocking spell that would spring the lock without calling the magic to anyone’s attention, the heavily burdened slaves and their whip-cracking overseers burst noisily into the corridor. Stepping right past the invisible pair, one of the Witchservers coiled his whip about his forearm and fumbled a large key from his belt. He unlocked the brass gate, flung it wide, and growled to the panting slaves to carry their heavy burdens down the steep, uneven stairs.

The Wizard and the Otter followed, again letting the sounds of the shuffling and groaning captives cover their own footsteps.

“Move it along, damn you!” growled both guards in bored monotones. They were as thick as they were tall, which wasn’t very tall, and wore wide, spiked collars like those given hunting dogs to protect them from wild bears’ bites. “No talking, there! Faster, faster, faster!”

Urged by the whips and the words, the slaves rushed headlong down the steps. One stumbled and fell. Several tripped over his sprawled body before they could stop, their burdens tumbling ahead of them down the stairs.

The guards roared in anger and raged impatiently, lashing out at bare backs, until the poor bearers sorted themselves painfully out, gathered their burdens once more, and fled on.

“Good thing for you there’s naught breakable in these bales,” screamed one of the Witchservers. He cracked his twelve-foot whip viciously after the last of them.

The train descended into a vast, low-arched cellar at the very bottom of the castle. Here were stacked, binned, hung, and piled all sizes of boxes, barrels, and bales, some spilling over with half-rotten carrots, spoiled, reeking cabbages, and limp, blackened greens. The cellar had the heavy stench of a rotting compost heap.