Sagaria (29 page)

“Magic?” whispered Sagandran to Sir Tombin.

“I told you he was a powerful wizard,” the Frogly Knight replied, “and you shouldn’t think otherwise, no matter his appearance or his … ways. Yes, you’re about to see magic at work, my young friend.”

Sagandran found the prospect exciting but, at the same time, rather frightening. Perima, sitting next to him on the overstuffed seat, obviously felt much the same; her eyes were alight, but she also sidled closer to him. He wondered if he dared put his arm around her.

Then the world fell from them – that was the only way Sagandran could later describe it. There was a colossal implosion of multicolored radiance. It seemed more like a blast of sound rather than of light as it punched him in the stomach, doubling him over. Next, there was the scarifying sensation that he was both still seated in the carriage with Perima nestling up to him and near to drowning as he thrashed and flailed at the bottom of some turgid lake of viscous liquid. Where the brilliant light had been, there was now a darkness so profound that he lost even the memory of light. There was nothing at all in the world except the gummy liquid against which he struggled. An instant later and he wasn’t there any more; instead he was spread out into infinite thinness through all three worlds, so that his senses were overwhelmed by a billion billion clashing and colliding colors and sounds and scents and touches. From them, his soul coiled in upon itself, like a snail shrinking from scattered salt. Perima was spread into everywhere as thinly as he was, so that their essences were permeating each other. He could not only think her thoughts, he also experienced her every sensation, but could make no meaning of them, as if they were just beyond his reach. Then there was another sudden change, and he was walking through a field studded with brightly hued, heart-shaped spring flowers. Birds sailed overhead on the wind, but when he looked up at them, he saw that they were not birds, but silver skulls and silver babies screaming and screaming and screaming. He thought the sound of their screaming would drive his mind into the jaws of death, but instead it guided him to a place where, once again, absolute darkness reigned – absolute darkness and the slow, solitary, echoing drip of water to tell him that he was in the middle of a vast space. But even the darkness was now changing, somehow rolling its massiveness until it became …the green face of Sir Tombin, anxiously peering at him.

“Are you all right, Sagandran? What about you, Perima?”

Sagandran raised a sluggish hand, then let it fall again. He felt as if he had been thoroughly beaten all over, but he seemed unbroken. He somehow found the strength to turn his head to Perima, whose face was merely inches from his own. Her eyes were as dazed as he knew his own must be.

“Wow,” he murmured to her. “I don’t think … don’t think I want to go through that again.”

He tried to smile, but that was too huge an effort for him to contemplate. Instead, he just gazed weakly into her slowly focusing gaze.

Sir Tombin sat back, breathing a sigh of relief. “It seems to have affected the humans far more grievously than the rest of us, Flip, old chap.”

Sagandran watched a thought slowly move across the Frogly Knight’s face.

“Samzing. He’s as human as these two are. How did he—”

“Welcome to Spectram,” came the old wizard’s triumphant yell from above them. “No need for that constipation medicine now, eh?”

CHAPTER 1

T
HE
R
AINBOW
C
ITY

o this is Spectram,” said Flip with a certain high-pitched distaste as Samzing drew the carriage up in front of a cozy-looking tavern, hauling on the reins. “It seems a bit—”

“Yes, this is Spectram,” said Sir Tombin hurriedly. “I do assure you that it makes a better impression in daylight.”

Ignoring the wizard’s triumphant cries of
yee-hah
from above, the four climbed out on trembling legs and began to unload their belongings. From somewhere in the gloom, a stable boy appeared and took Snowmane’s reins, rubbing his knuckles reassuringly on the horse’s nose. Samzing clambered wheezily down from his perch, his face still aglow.

“Here,” said Sir Tombin, tossing the lad a silver coin. “Take extra good care of this horse and I’ll give you another.”

“Sir,” said the stable boy smartly. Murmuring reassurances to the stallion, he led Snowmane and the carriage away to the rear of the inn.

“Sounds like they’re having fun in there,” said Sagandran, cocking his head toward the din of music and laughter pouring out through the tavern’s windows. “Sounds like a party.”

Sir Tombin looked at him sternly. “A revelry in which we must not permit ourselves to join. We have to keep our heads clear for the morrow. Sleep is our duty this night.”

Perima pulled a face.

“You too,” said Sir Tombin, turning toward the inn’s entrance.

The noise hit them like a gale as he tugged the door open. It took a moment or two for them to adjust their eyes to the brightness. Oil lamps hung everywhere along the walls and flickered among the glasses and tankards that crowded the inn’s small round tables, about which sweaty-faced revelers clustered on crudely fashioned wooden chairs. The place didn’t look especially clean (the floor in particular was perhaps best not contemplated) but it didn’t look especially
dirty either, and at its far end a big fireplace, at least as tall as Sagandran, cast a welcoming blaze. As the new arrivals jostled through the door with their luggage, the din of conversation ebbed. Every eye turned their way, some only briefly but others with a more interested stare. Sagandran was relieved to see that most of the faces were smiling.

A little while later, the five were gathered around the fireplace. Their bags had been taken by a serving boy who promised to deliver everything safely to the upstairs room Sir Tombin had booked following a brief negotiation with the innkeeper.

The chairs proved to be as uncomfortable as they looked. Even so, Samzing seemed to be on the verge of dropping off to sleep; Sir Tombin kept nudging his old friend back to wakefulness when he thought that none of the others were looking. Sagandran found Samzing’s drowsiness infectious and, glancing at Perima’s face, which was flushed by the warmth of the fire, he could see that she felt the same.

A rather comely girl, only a little older than Sagandran and Perima, arrived beside them. “Will you be wanting dinner?”

“Yes, ahem, indeed we shall,” began Sir Tombin. “Do you perchance have a menu?”

Samzing, who’d been leaning his elbows on the table and propping his face in his hands, pushed himself into a semblance of alertness and darted an angry glare at the Frogly Knight. “There’s no time for niceties, you fool,” he fussed. “Not unless you want to try eating in your sleep.” Then he addressed the girl. “Bring us four platefuls of the best on offer,” he said, “and a handful of nuts for my diminutive friend here.”

“Hazelnuts, if possible,” piped Flip earnestly. “Nothing like hazelnuts to drive out the cold, I always say.”

“Hazelnuts it shall be, sir,” said the girl, her face dimpling prettily in a smile.

She really is rather attractive,
thought Sagandran. He glanced at Perima again, and saw that she was watching him gravely.
But not nearly as attractive as Perima,
he added quickly, as if Perima could hear his thoughts.

Not long after, the food arrived. Sagandran didn’t have enough energy left to decide what he was eating, but it was warm and substantial and tasted good. The terrifying beauty of the Shadow Knight began to fade from his mind’s eye. As he stared at his plate, now empty except for a few gravy drips, he wondered if he was going to have nightmares about the fair face of evil they’d seen today and evil’s glib, alluring voice.

Sir Tombin rapped his hand on the table in front of him, rousing all of them except Flip, who’d fallen asleep in front of the oil lamp with a corkscrew of
chewed hazelnut dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Time for bed,” said the Frogly Knight firmly.

They made it upstairs somehow, the rotund innkeeper bustling ahead of them and describing the establishment’s various amenities. Sagandran’s ears pricked up when the man announced the location of the bathrooms; it was the solitary amenity in which he had any interest at the moment, but aside from that he let the babble pass over his head.

The room they were shown into contained three broad beds. Without any debate, Sir Tombin and Samzing fell onto one of them, and the two old friends started snoring almost before their heads hit the pillows. Sagandran pulled Flip out of his pocket, lowered him gently onto one of the other beds and sat down beside him. Perima, who’d detoured via a bathroom on her way here, came in shortly afterward, looking as if she’d swallowed some vinegar.

“Like that, hm?” said Sagandran. He could hear the weariness in his own voice.

“Like that,” she confirmed. “This mattress is lumpy,” she added a few moments later, after she’d kicked off her shoes and curled up on her own bed, “but the blissful thing is, Sagandran, that I don’t …”

Sagandran assumed her final word would have been “care,” but sleep had stolen it.

He crept off to find the bathroom.

Within minutes, Flip snuggling comfortably against his stomach, Sagandran, too, was slumbering.

“It looks like a rainbow.”

Perima was standing by the window, the curtains drawn back to reveal bright sparkly sunshine.

Sir Tombin joined her. “Yes, now you can see Spectram as it should be seen. By darkness, it’s just like any other city, scruffier than many, but by the light of the morning sun, it’s, well, Spectram.”

Sagandran’s eyes popped open. He’d been awake a little while and had been luxuriating in the sensation of utter restfulness. His sleep had been mercifully dreamless – with not so much as a glimmer of the nightmares he’d dreaded he might have – and he would gladly have continued it a while longer. But Perima had spurred his interest with her comment. Being careful not to dislodge Flip, he swung his legs off the bed.

Standing beside Perima, he looked out over the cityscape of Spectram.
The inn was on a slight hill, so the view was over the rooftops of most of the city’s low-slung houses; only a few rose higher than a single story. The rooftops were every conceivable color – far more than could ever be packed into a single rainbow. The colors seemed to be changing constantly, flowing from one hue to the next with a randomness that appeared, at the same time, to be an elaborately choreographed dance. The effect was, Sagandran thought, as if the whole city were a single vast diamond cut to show a million different facets to the sun. It was breathtakingly beautiful, and for long moments he stood there drinking in the sight, his hand resting on the shoulder of an equally motionless Perima.

There was so much about Sagaria that was not dissimilar from parts of the Earthworld. To be sure, the Earthworld did not feature man-sized talking frogs and so on, but a tree was a tree and a horse was a horse. Sometimes, Sagandran had to pinch himself to remember that this was a world alien to his own. He was so far from home, from everything he’d ever known, that the distance couldn’t be measured. He really was a stranger in a strange land – the only one of his kind in this particular strange land.

Yet, surely Perima, her dark eyes alight with the glitter of more colors than could be counted, was of his own kind as well? Her lips, parted in wonder, were surely human lips. The warmth of her shoulder through its thin covering against his palm was surely human warmth. It was impossible to reconcile these two knowledges he had: that she was someone born of an entirely separate world, and that she was his very human friend.

He shrugged, dropping the hand to his side.
I guess I’d should just accept both things at once, and not worry that, if one of them’s true, the other can’t be. Maybe the way I’m looking at them is wrong.

“I’m hungry,” said a familiar voice behind him. Flip had finally woken.

“Yes,” said Sir Tombin, “we must eat. Then it will be time to go to the castle.”

The flickering colors of Spectram’s roofs were stilling as the sun rose higher in the sky, but even so, it was with great difficulty that Sagandran pulled away from the window. He and Perima followed the others down the creaking stairs to the inn’s main room, where the tables were now, as if by magic, polished, shining and laden with dishes of meats, breads and fruits. Helping themselves to platefuls of muffins, they sat down to either side of Sir Tombin, who was tucking into tea and richly, drippingly buttered toast.

“How long are we going to stay in Spectram?” asked Sagandran through a mouthful of raspberry muffin – at least, it tasted like raspberry. Who knew what fruit it might actually be, here in Sagaria?

“Well,” said the Frogly Knight, putting down his empty teacup and looking
around for the pot, “that depends to a large extent on what Queen Mirabella tells us to do; but I should think an hour or so spent exploring the place on our way to the castle wouldn’t jeopardize our mission.”

Again Sagandran was filled with that same two-ness. Everything in him was clamoring to press ahead (Grandpa Melwin’s very life might depend on their haste) and yet he could hardly ignore the clamor of his desire to see a little more of this magical city before they left it.

His thoughts were interrupted by Samzing, who produced his pipe from somewhere within the many folds of his robe. Ignoring the glowers directed toward him by the others, the wizard snapped his fingers to kindle the foul-smelling weed in the pipe’s bowl. In a moment, there was a pall of pungent black smoke around their table.

Sagandran’s muffin suddenly stopped tasting as good as it had.

“I think it’s time for that stroll,” he said, pushing back his chair as he stood.