Tales of Ethshar

and slogged back toward the plaza.

At least Tintallion of the Coast wasn’t big enough to get really lost in, as she had on her one visit to Ethshar of the Rocks — she could catch a glimpse of the castle’s central tower from almost any intersection, and use that as a guide. She arrived safely back at the square without incident.

Four big men were tearing down the scaffold; if she had waited any longer than she had she would never have been able to get a piece of it. She let her breath out in a cloud at the sight.

Then she looked at the castle, trying to imagine how she might get in. The gates, twenty feet to the right of the vanishing scaffold, were closed, the portcullis down. The walls were cold, featureless stone, thirty feet high, topped with elaborate battlements...

And on those battlements two soldiers were setting a pike into place, with Therindallo’s head impaled upon the pike.

Irillon had heard of people putting heads on pikes as a warning to others, but she had never seen it done before; she blinked, and swallowed bile.

It was truly disgusting. Therindallo’s mouth hung hideously open, and something dark was oozing down the pikeshaft.

On the other hand, now she knew where she could get the hair she needed. She even knew how. The pike was set leaning out over the castle wall, for better display — all she needed to do was stand directly below it, then use Tracel’s Levitation to rise straight up until she could reach out and cut a lock of hair.

But she would, of course, have to wait until the guards left. She leaned back against the wooden corner of a nearby shop, rubbing her hands together to warm them, and watched.

The pike was in place and left unattended within a minute or two; the scaffold was cleared away in perhaps a quarter of an hour. The guards ambled away — except for one, who stood by the gate, looking bored.

Irillon frowned, shuffling her feet to warm them and clear away the slush; was he going to stay there?

Apparently he was. She watched, shivering, hoping he would doze off, or step away for a moment.

If he did step away, she realized, he might not be gone for long. She would need to act quickly when the opportunity arose. Tracel’s Levitation took four or five minutes to prepare — she couldn’t afford to waste a second.

She opened her pouch and rummaged through it. She had brought the ingredients for all the spells she knew — tannis root for the Dismal Itch, dust for Felshen’s First Hypnotic Spell, a whistle and tiny tray for the Spell of Prismatic Pyrotechnics, and so on. For the Levitation she needed a rooster’s toe, an empty vial, a raindrop caught in mid-air, and her athame. She found them all, then stuffed everything else back.

Someone brushed past her, bundled up against the cold, and hurried across the plaza. That reminded her that it wasn’t just the guard she needed to avoid; it was anyone in this hostile town. Fortunately, the gloomy cold and damp seemed to be keeping almost everyone inside.

With the ingredients in her hand she watched the guard; he didn’t seem to have noticed her presence at all. He was staring dully straight ahead, at the next street over from the corner where she stood.

All the same, she decided she had stood in one place long enough; it might be suspicious, and besides, the cold wasn’t as bad when she was moving. She began strolling along, looking in the shop windows, as if she were simply bored.

She was actually watching the reflections in the windows more than looking at the goods displayed, but she hoped no one would notice.

She had been wandering aimlessly back and forth, staying always in sight of the gate and its guard, for what seemed like hours, when at last the guard shifted uneasily, turned, and trotted out of sight down an alley, one hand tugging at his kilt.

Irillon dashed across the square, her hands already busy with the spell’s preparatory gestures. She mumbled the incantation quickly as she ran.

She came to a stop with her nose to the castle wall, beside the gate and below the pike, still chanting. She dipped the raindrop up with the cock’s toe, performed the necessary ritual gestures, transferred the drop to the empty vial, then closed the vial and tapped it with her athame.

At that tap she felt suddenly light; she tucked everything but her knife away and spoke the final word, and rose from the muddy ground.

A moment later she stopped herself, hanging unsupported thirty feet in the air, just a foot or two from poor Therindallo’s ruined face. He looked much worse close up, but she refused to let herself think about that as she grabbed a hank of his hair and began sawing it free.

Seconds later, with her knife sheathed and the hair safely stuffed into yet another vial, she spoke the word that would trigger her descent.

Only then did she remember to look down.

The guard was back at his post, but now he had his sword drawn and was staring up at her.

There was nothing she could do, though; she was sinking slowly downward, like a pebble in oil, and there was no way to restore the spell before she touched ground.

Desperately, she drew her knife again and tried to think what she could do.

She was a girl of fourteen, not large for her age, armed with a belt-knife; he was a burly guardsman with a sword. She couldn’t fight him fairly.

She was a wizard’s apprentice, and knew just seven spells. She couldn’t use Tracel’s Levitation again in time to be any help; the Dismal Itch would just annoy him; and Fendel’s Elementary Protection wouldn’t stop cold iron, such as a sword. The Spell of Prismatic Pyrotechnics or the Sanguinary Deception or the Spell of the Spinning Coin wouldn’t do any good here at all.

That left Felshen’s First Hypnotic as her only chance; if she could daze the guard with it she might be able to escape before he recovered. She reached for her pouch...

But not in time; the guardsman stepped forward and grabbed her ankle before she could get the flap open. She yelped, startled, and tried to wrench free, but could not escape, and as the Levitation continued to fade she tumbled backward until she was lying on her back in the snow, one leg raised, the guardsman gripping the ankle tightly with one hand, and pointing his sword at her chest with the other.

“I think you need to speak to the Captain,” the guard said, not unkindly.

Irillon, flustered but not so distraught as to forget her Islander accent, didn’t reply at all.

A few moments later she was inside the castle, being escorted into a small, wonderfully warm room; guardsmen gripped both her arms, and her knife had been carefully taken away. A fire burned cheerily on the hearth at one end of the room, while armor and weapons adorned the other walls. Much of the floorspace was taken up by a heavy wooden table, its surface strewn with rolls of paper; on the far side of that table sat another guardsman, but this one was older and more elegantly attired, with rings on his fingers and a golden band about his right arm.

He looked up. “What’s this?” he asked.

The right-hand guard explained, “She was stealing hair from the piked head over the gate. She flew up there and back.”

The seated guardsman leaned back in his chair. “Flew?”

“Yes, sir,” the guard replied.

“Just the hair? Not the whole head?”

“Just hair.”

“Then she’s not a relative trying to give it a proper pyre.”

The guard shrugged.

The seated man looked Irillon in the eye. “I’m Captain Alderamon,” he said. “Who are you?”

Irillon swallowed and said nothing.

Alderamon waited a moment, giving her time to change her mind, then sighed.

“You’re a thief,” he said. “Thieves we punish. If you flew, though, you might be a magician, and magicians we treat more respectfully. Now, thieves might be mute, I suppose, or deaf, but a wizard or a theurgist or a demonologist can’t be, because then he couldn’t recite incantations. I don’t know for certain about witches or warlocks, or all the other sorts of magician, but I never met one who couldn’t speak. Let me ask again — who are you?”