'No! They might see us.'
'I can make it one-way.'
'Forget it. I don't want to see what's going on out there.' Melanie took a long, heaving breath. 'What do we do now?'
'Good question,' Jeremy said. 'We're kinda stuck.'
'We wait here till the ruckus is over, I guess,' Melanie said with a shrug.
'When's that gonna be, though?'
'Jeremy, your guess is as good as mine.'
Looking at the control panel, Jeremy scratched his head. 'Luster?'
'Yes. sir?'
'Is this ship in working order?'
'Don't know that.'
'Why not?'
'Ain't tested her.'
'Oh? I thought you-'
'Ain't had a chancet. We worked on fixin' 'er up all day, but ah cain't rightly say she's fixed up.'
'Great.' Jeremy flipped a few switches. Green lights lit up on the instrument panel. 'She looks okay. All systems pretty much in `Go' state.'
Luster said, 'Yup, I'd say.'
The craft lurched again, this time more violently.
'I say we get the heck out of here now,' Melanie voted. Jeremy looked at her. Then he examined the control panel again. 'Well, let's see if the motor turns over.'
He threw a few more switches, pushed some buttons. The craft's engines came alive with a high-pitched whine. 'Yeah, it's running all right. Everything seems to check out.' Jeremy turned his head to fix Melanie with a questioning stare, as if delegating the decision-making to her. 'Do we take her out?'
Melanie blanched. 'Jeez, I don't know. Is this thing safe? Does it work?'
'It usually does. Trouble is, every time I take it out I get into some kind of jam.'
The tiny ship took another heavy assault from outside. It tipped and teetered. Loud clanging and banging commenced.
'We are in a jam,' Melanie said.
'I guess so,' Jeremy said. He reached and threw another switch.
'I'm not guessing.'
'Should we make a run for it?'
It was Jeremy's turn to lift his shoulders. 'We could get killed real easy, maybe.'
Melanie nodded dolefully. 'Maybe. But what other choices have we got? If we stay here…' She looked about the cramped compartment.
'No food, no water,' Jeremy said. 'No bathroom.'
'Funny you should mention that,' Melanie said, curling her lip.
Something thumped against the outside of the craft. Shouts and general commotion were heard.
'What are they doing?' Melanie wondered. 'Uh, they're, like, whacking on the ship.'
'Why?'
'Rowdy bunch.'
More whacks came against the craft's hull, resounding hollowly.
'Like being inside a garbage can when someone's beating it with a sledgehammer.'
'Really,' Jeremy agreed.
The Voyager shook with a heavy impact.
'Whoa!' Melanie looked worried. 'What could they be doing now?'
'Maybe one of those elephants?' was Jeremy's surmise. 'Want to look out?'
'No, forget it. We have to do something.'
'Like?'
Melanie thought, then said, 'Take the ship out.'
'Out where?'
'Wherever it goes when it… you know, goes out.'
'You mean out into the interdimensional thing?'
Melanie nodded emphatically. 'What you said.'
The engine noise increased sharply in pitch, then subsided to a low, steady hum.
'Well, we're out,' Jeremy announced.
'Where are we?'
'Oh, we're floating around in the non-space between the universes.'
'Oh.'
'Just kinda hanging out. You know.'
'Uh, right. Just hanging out.'
A red light blossomed on the instrument panel. 'Uh-oh.'
Melanie swallowed hard. 'What's that?'
'Navigation system.'
'Navigation system?'
'Yeah. We don't have one now.'
Melanie took a breath and held it. Then she let it out. 'And that means… what?'
Jeremy settled back in the tiny pilot's seat.
He said: 'It means we can't get back to the castle.'
LIBRARY
There was chaos amidst the stacks.
Gladiators fought up and down the aisles, whooping battle cries or letting out screams of agony: cases differed. Swords clashed. Bookshelves toppled, sending fine first editions, bound in skins of calf and lamb and kid, crashing to the stone floor, there to be trampled underfoot. Huge folios flew; quartos were drawn and quartered. Octavos lay in tattered shreds.
The place was a shambles.
Osmirik the librarian sat in the midst of it all, sequestered in his protected carrel, his long nose in a book; several, in fact. He was a small man with a sharp face and soft eyes. His expression was perennially sober and serious. He rarely smiled. He favored the simple clothing of a scholar: a long brown cloak with a hood.
As he pored over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, part of his mind harked back to the many times he had sought refuge in this little redoubt, a stone-walled cubicle with a sliding door of stone that served well as a barrier to the chaos without.
He redirected his attention to the task at hand: which was to discover what had gone awry in the castle. Somewhere within, a spell had gone amiss; that was obvious. The solution was to abrogate the spell-cancel it. The person who had cast the spell either could not cancel it or did not wish to do so. In either case it was up to another party to effect a solution to the problem; and in order to cancel someone else's spell, this other party first must know what kind of enchantment it was, what particular brand of magic was being practiced.
That was the immediate task. The table before him was heaped with grimoires, books of magical spells with instructions on how to cast them. He had eschewed the more obvious kinds of magic, bringing to the carrel only those books that smacked of the exotic, the off-beat, the heterodox.
He had not had much luck so far. Page after page bore his weary eye tracks. It had been several hours since he'd started, but he had not hit on anything yet.
He closed one old leatherbound quarto, laid it aside, and chose another.
Well, what have we here? Ah, something called A Book of Eldritch Charms and Divers Enchantments. Not
