With a Single Spell

CHAPTER 2

He watched disconsolately as the cottage burned. The entire structure was going up in smoke, its complete contents with it, and he could do nothing but sit and watch.

This, he thought sorrowfully, beyond any possible doubt, beyond any chance of recovery or hope of salvage, marked the end of his apprenticeship, any sort of apprenticeship. As if his master’s death had not been bad enough, taking away the last person in all the World who cared a whit for him, now, just a few hours after the funeral, he had accidentally destroyed everything the old man had left him. His home and all his worldly possessions, save the clothes he wore and the few precious items on his belt, were vanishing before his eyes, being reduced to smoke and ash.

Roggit’s Book of Spells was certainly gone, and just as certainly no other wizard would take him on as an apprentice. He was seventeen, what sort of a wizard would take on a lad of seventeen under any conditions, let alone one who had as yet learned so little of the arcane arts? He had learned the basic secret of wizardry, true — that secret was the nature of the athame, the ritual dagger that each wizard prepared and that held a part of its master’s soul. Beyond that, though, he knew only his single spell. What could a wizard do with a single spell?

He had little chance of finding any other employment in Telven or the surrounding area; even an advantageous marriage was more than he could hope for, since he had no favors to call in, no close relatives who would help in arranging a betrothal, and no prospects for a love match. He was quite sure that nobody who knew anything of his past would want anything to do with him, especially after this latest disaster, for fear his bad luck might be contagious.

He sighed. He hadn’t always been unlucky, or at least he hadn’t thought so, but now, as he mentally reviewed his life, he wasn’t so sure. Certainly it had been a bad sign when his mother died bearing him; that was hardly an auspicious start for any child.

Other than that, however, he had done well enough until he was fifteen. He had been happy with his father’s cousin Indamara and her husband, the two of whom had raised him in his parents’ absence, and he had gotten on well with their children, his second cousins. He had had no more than the usual number of childhood mishaps — falls from trees every so often, almost drowning in a farmer’s pond once, nothing out of the ordinary. He had missed the plague that killed a few of the neighbors when he was eight and had come through a bout of pox unscarred. Life had been good to him throughout those years; he had played in the fields with the other children, taken long walks with his father whenever the ship was in port, and generally lived the normal, happy life of the son of a successful pirate.

Privateer, he corrected himself; his father had been a privateer, defending the Free Lands of the Coasts from the tyranny of the Ethsharites. That was what all the neighbors said.

He had never quite understood how robbing merchant vessels kept the overlords of the Hegemony of Ethshar from reconquering the Free Lands and ruling harshly over them, as they had ruled long ago, but everybody said that it worked, so he had long ago stopped questioning it.

His father had never worried about polite names, never bothered with excuses; to the neighbors’ dismay he had insisted on calling himself Dabran the Pirate, rather than Dabran the Privateer, and had told anyone who asked that he was in business to make money, not for the sake of patriotism.

Dabran had been careful with his money, too. That was a major reason his son Tobas was now penniless. The pirate’s entire fortune had been aboard his ship, Retribution, when he tried to board the wrong vessel and got sent to the bottom of the Southern Sea, along with his whole crew.

From that stroke of monumental bad luck had descended all the rest of Tobas’ misfortune. Who would have expected an ordinary Ethsharitic merchant vessel to be carrying a demonologist capable of summoning such a thing? The witnesses on the shore had agreed on very little in their descriptions, save that the thing that pulled Dabran’s ship under had been huge, black, and tentacular.

Tobas signed again. He missed his father. He had never seen much of the old man, even in the best of times, but at least he had known that Dabran was alive, out there somewhere plundering, until the demonologist had brought that thing up out of nowhere.

He tried to cheer himself up by telling himself that it could have been worse. At least he hadn’t been on board Retribution when she went down. If he had accepted his father’s offer of an apprenticeship, in addition to the eventual inheritance of the ship and money, he would have been with Dabran right now, moldering on the bottom of the ocean. His own laziness had saved him there, he had intended to use his inheritance to set himself up in some comfortable business, which he would let employees run, rather than carrying on in his father’s rather strenuous trade. He had had no interest in going to sea.

He remembered that awful day when the news of his father’s death had arrived. The weather had been horribly inappropriate, a beautiful sunny spring day, the fields warm and green, the sky a perfect blue strewn with fluffy white clouds. He had been lying on the hill behind the house, doing nothing in particular, just lying there enjoying the weather, when his second cousin Peretta had come trudging up looking for him, her hair tangled and her face serious. He had known right away that something was wrong; Peretta was never serious and would leave her hair unbrushed only for the direst of emergencies.

She had wasted no time, but simply announced, “There’s bad news from Shan. Your father’s dead; a demon got his ship and pulled it under. There were no survivors, and no salvage has been found; it’s all gone.”

He had stared at her, he recalled, just stared at her; her words hadn’t seemed real. Not until her parents packed up his meager belongings for him and told him to be out by sundown did he really believe that his father was dead and his old life gone. No one would have dared to offend Dabran while he was alive, but when he was gone and no more support money was to come, they were all too eager to be rid of his lazy, worthless son. Family ties don’t count for much, compared to silver.

That had hurt. One disaster had come right after another.

Well, he told himself as the flames roared loudly up among the overhanging branches of the swamp trees, at least this would be the last disaster. He had nothing more to lose.

Times had been bad at first after the ship went down, after his cousins threw him out, very bad indeed; he had slept in a few doorways and cornfields and gone without several meals. Old friends had quietly ignored him. He had thought it a great stroke of luck when, just sort of resigning himself to a lifetime career of theft or beggary, he had convinced old Roggit to take him on as an apprentice, despite his age.

Tobas was not quite so certain, as he watched the cottage burn and in its burning destroy his second inheritance, that the apprenticeship had been good luck, after all. He was homeless again, older and with fewer prospects than before.

A particularly bright flame rose up for a moment with an intense crackling, followed by a muffled explosion; Tobas caught an odd smell, one he could not place. The flames must have reached more of old Roggit’s combustible supplies, the special sealed boxes he had carefully kept well away from the more ordinary wizardly necessities, such as powdered spider and tannis root.

Tobas frowned slightly. Trivial as such a detail might be in the face of catastrophe, he was irked to realize that now he would never know what all those things had been for.

He heard shouts and rattlings and turned to see the fire brigade from the village finally arriving, far too late to do any good, at least half an hour after he had sent his nearest neighbor calling for help. He recognized most of them: old Clurim, who, with his two wives, was the subject of most of the bawdy jokes told in Telven; Faran, the village’s only blacksmith and expert on fires of all sorts; and Vengar and Zarek, who had been his companions as children but had avoided him since his father’s death. Tobas sighed; they had come too late to do much good. He had long since given up any hope of saving anything beyond the foundation and perhaps the outer walls, and even as he watched the brigade arriving, he could see that the walls were going.

After he had come shouting out the door, had gathered his wits somewhat, and had found that helpful neighbor and sent him puffing off over the hill toward the village, he had struggled briefly with the thoughts of a heroic dash into the inferno. His common sense had quickly prevailed over his daring, however. After all, he told himself, what would he have saved? The Book of Spells would have been almost the first thing to go, since it had been directly beneath where the fire had started, and the only other items whose value he really knew were the athame that hung on his belt and the vial of brimstone in his pouch. Roggit’s semiprecious stones would perhaps have been worth retrieving had Tobas known where they were, but the old man had hidden them well.

It occurred to him now, far too late, that a change of clothing and a pair of boots might have been a good idea. The water pail, too, might have been of service in fighting the blaze.

Tobas had to admit that, once they had arrived, the people of Telven had set to willingly enough, filling their buckets from the swamp and flinging the water onto the flames, where it hissed and sizzled with little visible effect. Those who had no buckets, like himself, stood by and watched, admiring the pretty colors that erupted here and there as the old wizard’s arcane powders, one by one, fell from their heat-shattered jars and burned away, filling the air with a variety of perfumes and stenches.

For the most part the villagers avoided the old man’s unfortunate apprentice, quietly ignoring him. Tobas was not so insensitive as to miss this, or misinterpret it, and he accepted it as the final proof that the time had come to do what he had been resisting for years. The time had come to leave Telven, leave his native village behind forever, and go out into the wide World to seek his fortune.

He shuddered. What an awful thought!

He had never wanted to leave. He was a homebody, happy with the people and places he knew, with no particular desire to see any others. Telven had been his home. He had always chosen to stay in Telven when his father went off to sea, though time after time, before every voyage from infancy on, Dabran had invited Tobas along. He had stayed in Telven when his father had died, lingering in the village even while homeless, struggling to find a way to remain in the only place he really knew. He had had no career, no steady girlfriend or prospects for marriage, and no close friends, but Telven had still been home. He had succeeded in staying by convincing Roggit that he was still young enough to qualify for apprenticeship.

When he had accomplished that bit of deceit, Tobas had thought that his place was secure and that he would live out his life in his native land. Right up until he had opened the Book of Spells, he had thought he would stay.

Who could have known that the old man had put such powerful protective spells on the thing?

He shook his head in dismay. He still didn’t know exactly what he had done wrong or how the protective spell had worked; he had never noticed Roggit speaking any countercharms or doing anything special when he consulted the book. The old man would simply reach over and open it, as he would any other book. Tobas had just tried to do the same.

But the protective spell had obviously been there, and here he was, watching the fire destroy his last link to the village.

All he had ever wanted was a home and a quiet, comfortable life; was that too much to ask of the gods?

The front wall of the house sagged, bent, then crumbled inward with a grinding crash, and Tobas turned away. He had nothing left here, nothing and no one to keep him in Telven, and no way to live if he stayed. It was home no longer. He saw no point in drawing out the ordeal; he trudged off into the gathering twilight, away from the heat and light and sound of the fire, with tears in his eyes that, he told himself firmly, were caused by the smoke.