The Dreamer's Curse (Book 2) (11 page)

Sarsen started to laugh and then groaned when it made
already unhappy muscles twinge. “That sounds suspiciously like Sevana-logic.”

“Is there any other kind?” This back-and-forth levity oddly
helped. She didn’t feel like death warmed over anymore. Her status could now be
updated to ‘ineligible for burial within the next twenty-four hours.’ “More
importantly, did we succeed?”

They both timidly raised their heads to look forward.

The fountain looked completely unharmed, not even singed, as
water flowed out of it unimpeded. It looked, actually, as if they hadn’t done a
single thing.

Sevana let her head fall back. “It’s official. It’s evil.”

Sarsen at her side groaned. “Pure evil. Now what?”

“I wish I knew.”

~ ~ ~

 Decker found them ten minutes later, still flat on their
backs in front of the fountain, neither of them anxious to move and test the
limits of throbbing muscles. He called for help, picked Sevana up bodily and
took her straight to the small doctor’s clinic a block away.

She informed him that just because her eyes were spinning
around in her head, that didn’t mean she couldn’t walk.

He ignored her.

It took two men to carry in Sarsen. Sevana sat propped up on
one of the two beds in the room, watching blearily as they carried her friend
in. In this small of a room, they found the walkway too cramped for three men
to really move around in, but they managed to shuffle about and gently set
Sarsen down on the edge of the bed. He collapsed in a controlled fall so that
his head hit the pillow, not bothering to go through the extra effort of
bringing his legs up, which made him look like a deflated balloon.

The doctor, a rather thin man with a beak of a nose and
wispy hair, leaned in front of her, blocking her view of the room completely.
He came so close she could smell his breath, a not entirely pleasant sensation.
“What are you doing?” she grouched.

“Checking for signs of concussion,” he responded without
batting an eyelash. “Your eyes are reacting normally. Good. How do you feel?”

“Like a building fell on top of me.” She knew exactly how
that felt, too. “Will you move?”

“Nothing broken, tender, bleeding?” he persisted, trying to
lift her arms so that he could get a look at her from every angle.

“No, no, and no,” she responded in exasperation. “Decker,
did you have to bring me here? This is pointless, we’re not injured.”

Decker put his shoulders against the wall in a clear sign of
determination to keep her from leaving. In an arch voice he drawled, “Do you
remember what you said to me when I got to you? I asked what happened and you
said, ‘Death to all evil!’”

Alright, out of context, that probably did sound…less than
lucid.

Sarsen let out a pained chuckle. “We’re not injured, Decker.
We were just talking about how the fountain is now officially evil because it’s
thwarting us before you showed up. That’s why she said that.”

He blinked in sudden understanding. “Oh.”

Krause shouldered his way through—no mean feat, considering
how jam-packed the room had become—and demanded, “Then what happened?”

“Our hopeful plan was more hopeful than we’d imagined,”
Sarsen answered wearily. He finally dragged both legs up onto the bed so that people
had more room to walk, although judging from that wince, it hurt to do it. “The
shield slammed up almost before we could get the spell fully released and it
reflected our own attack back at us.”

If not for their personal protection charms, they’d be seriously
burned by now. Not to mention the cracked skulls, bruises and broken bones the
doctor had obviously expected.

Krause’s forehead furrowed into a deep line. “So what now?”

“We don’t know,” Sarsen admitted.

“I want to put gunpowder around the base of the fountain and
blow it up,” Sevana suggested in black humor.

“No, Sev,” Sarsen told her again, patiently. To the room of
alarmed adults he added, “You’re right to look scared, as she’s only
half-kidding. I admit, if we break the fountain free of the square, we could
lift it out entirely and take the problem to a remote region so that we can
slowly figure out a solution elsewhere. It would give the village some peace
again.”

“I’d rather not have a gigantic hole in the middle of town,”
Krause said weakly.

“I reckoned as much.” Sarsen dredged up a half smile.

She’d let Sarsen have his way—for now. But if they didn’t
find another solution within the next week, she’d sneak out in the dead of
night and blow it sky high.

From Sarsen’s pouch came a small, tiny voice calling out, “
Sarsen!
Sarsen! Pick up your Caller!”

They both looked at the bag in dread. “Master,” she sighed.

“Of course he’d call, just to see if it worked or not,”
Sarsen said rhetorically.

“Wait, what are you doing!” she protested as he reached for
his bag.

“Answering him, of course.”

“What do you mean, of course?” she spluttered. “If you do
that, he’ll rush over here in a bout of his parental concern, and then we’ll
never be rid of him!”

Sarsen paused and gave her an odd look. “You sound as if you
don’t want him here.”

“Of course I don’t want him here! He’s insanely expensive!”

He gave her quite the look for that. “Sev, we can obviously
use some experienced help on this one. We tried everything we could think of
and the thing threw us around like a pair of wet dolls. I, for one, want the
man’s devious mind. Not to mention his power. Three Artifactors might well be
able to crack the gadgick.”

He might well be right, and she wouldn’t really be opposed
to another opinion, but she hadn’t been kidding—Master’s fees were no laughing
matter. She’d already invested a lot of time into this problem and she
deserved
the reward that came with it. “If you answer him and he comes, his share is
coming out of yours,” she warned him.

Sarsen didn’t quite roll his eyes as he brought the Caller
out of the bag, letting it rest in his open palm. “Master.”

“There you are!”
She couldn’t see the face of the
tiny Caller from here, as its back was to her, but the tone conveyed enough to
guess at the expression.
“Sarsen, you look like five miles of bad road
during a summer storm. What happened?!”

“Our plan didn’t work. The shield reacted faster than we
could and our own attack was reflected back on us.”

“Tell me you were wearing a shield charm.”

“We both were,” Sevana assured him, feeling like shaking her
head. What did he take his former students for, anyway? Idiots? “We’re fine,
Master. Just a mite sore.”

He spun about in Sarsen’s hand to look at her.
“Oh no,
sweetling, don’t tell me you got hit by this too!”

“Did you forget the part where this is my contracted job?
Why in sweet mercy would I make Sarsen do all the work?”

“Because you’re devious and conniving,” Master and Sarsen
said in unison.

She gave them a lethal glare. “You’re both going to pay for
that later.”

Master waved a hand, dismissing her threat altogether.
“I
don’t want either of you to move or try anything else until I get there.”

“Don’t you dare come!” she objected. “You’re insanely
expensive. I do
not
want to pay you.”

Master gave her his patented, parental, I can’t believe she
just said something so stupid look.
“Sweetling, do you honestly think that I
am just going to sit over here and watch this play out? It’s defeated two of my
best students and is still kicking. Of course I’m coming!”

Decker, still planted near the doorway, cleared his throat.
When he caught her eye, he said mildly, “Didn’t you get permission from the
king to commandeer help as you needed it? And a seal to act as a purse to pay
for it?”

Sevana snapped her fingers as she abruptly remembered.
Actually, in the face of this nearly insurmountable problem, she
had
forgotten that. “Bless your memory, Decker. I can make
Aren
pay for him!
Alright, Master, in that case you can come.”

“Like I was waiting for your permission.”
Master
shook his head in amusement.
“I’ll be there tomorrow. Now, I mean it, you
two. Do. Not. Move.”

“Not a problem,” Sevana assured him sourly.

“Neither of us feel like it at the moment,” Sarsen chimed in,
equally sour.

“Good. Sleep. It’s the best medicine for you at the
moment.”
With that said, the Caller went still and quiet again.

Sevana would absolutely never, ever admit this aloud, but
she felt vastly reassured that her Master was coming. He had never once met a
problem that he couldn’t defeat. Lips curved at the corners, she settled down a
little more into the bed, closed her eyes, and drifted off into a sound sleep.

Sevana had a foot halfway into her boot when a knock sounded
in a loud rap on the door. Through the wood, a very familiar voice called,
“Sweetling!”

Master? She blinked, more than a little taken aback. The
village clock had barely chimed out the eighth hour! Most people had barely
eaten breakfast at this point. For that matter, she’d been awake just barely
long enough to get dressed. How in sweet mercy’s sake had he made it all the
way from the Standor Mountains in a little over sixteen hours?!

“Enter!” she called after several seconds of dumbfounded
surprise.

The door swung sharply open, revealing the form of her aging
master. Joles Tashjian looked as he always did—white hair in a knot on the top
of his head, skin wrinkled and the color of aged bronze, his customary jacket bulging
with multiple pockets filled to the brim. Despite the fact that he ate like a
starving horse, he always looked a tad too thin. He didn’t appear to be at all
tired from travelling throughout the night. In fact, he seemed unfairly spry
and alert, a feeling that Sevana did not share in the least. After yesterday’s
events, her body felt sore and misused, and she had not had the best night’s
sleep because of it.

Hinun padded in behind him, and came directly to her to
greet her with a nose in her ribs. Used to this treatment, she gave him a good
scratch behind the ears in welcome, making his tail wag happily.

Master leaned down in front of her, looking her over with a
paternal/clinical eye. “Sweetling, you look roughed over.”

“I feel it, too,” she responded churlishly. “I think what
really rankles is that even after all that, the fountain doesn’t even look
singed. Have you seen Sarsen yet?”

“He said he’d meet us for breakfast.”

Food sounded like a splendid idea. “How in the world did you
get here so fast?”

“Oh, that?” Master lit up in a smug smile. “It works.”

She regarded him blankly, beyond confused by what he meant.
It works? What did? He pointed toward the window and she finished shoving her
foot into her boot, tied it, and went to see what he seemed so pleased about.
Through the small window, she could see a contraption sitting just outside the
building’s main door. It looked like nothing more than a wooden box with four
ordinary wooden wheels. But she recognized it instantly. “You finally got that
contraption to work?!”

“I did,” he responded, smile growing, chest puffing out a
little with pride.

“But you swore you wouldn’t use it at all until it became
self-navigating!” she protested. Master had built it a good three years ago,
intending to make a vehicle that would travel without conscious direction from
its owner and could go anywhere on land. Travelling on land had been the
easiest part of the design. It was the
without human control
that had
stumped him for the past three years.

“I had a breakthrough last fall,” Master admitted. “All I
had to do was create a trainable map that would be inscribed into the vehicle
itself. So I drove to every major city in Kindin and Windamere, letting the
route record itself, and then all I had to do was add some necessary safety
precautions to the design.” He rubbed at his chin and grimaced. “Incantation is
still hideously complex, though.”

She didn’t even want to try and imagine it. It hurt her head
just thinking about it. “There’s no way that Chastain was on your map, though!”

“Well, no, but Winfield is. And it’s only a few hours from
Winfield to here. I slept on the way to Winfield, and when I got to the city, I
drove it myself from there on. Worked beautifully.” Blinking at her, he offered
ingeniously, “Want one?”

“Master, don’t ask stupid questions. Of course I want a
vehicle I don’t have to drive!”

He patted her on the shoulder and laughed, the sound rich
and deep. “I’ll teach you how to make your own after this job is finished,
then.”

“Yes, please, let’s not handle two impossible jobs at once,”
she responded, only half-joking. “For now, breakfast? And we’ll try and catch
you up as we eat.”

He nodded in agreement and gestured for her to take the lead,
which she did. As she made her way through the hallway, something moved in the
bag at her waist and a distant sounding male voice said something that was so
muffled she couldn’t make it out. Eyebrow quirked—who would try to contact her
at this hour of the morning?—she reached in and pulled her Caller free. “Yes?”

The Caller formed into the features of Pierpoint, arms
crossed over his chest in a clear gesture of forced patience.
“Sevana. Did
it occur to you at any point that we would like an update?”

Actually…no, it hadn’t.

Master leaned around her shoulder and greeted Pierpoint with
a cordial, “Hello, Pierpoint.”

“Well hello, Tashjian!”
Pierpoint seemed both
surprised and pleased.
“I’m glad to see you in Chastain, but is the problem
truly that serious that she had to call for your help?”

“Serious isn’t the word I’d use,” Master refuted with a
slight shake of the head. “It’s more complicated than anything.”

“How so?”

Sevana, in the interest of getting food into her stomach,
decided to sum it up in short sentences. “The artifact is annoying, upsetting,
and downright evil, but it’s not destructive. It is, in fact, doing what it was
designed to do—transport people. So there’s no need to be worried about it
destroying half the countryside.” Pierpoint let out a breath of relief over
that, looking as if a hundred-pound weight had just fallen from his shoulders.
“It is, however, thwarting our best efforts in shutting it off. We tried
getting past its basic shield yesterday and have the bruises to show for our
efforts.”

“Hence why it’s now considered evil and you called in
your master for help,”
Pierpoint summed up wryly.
“I think I see the
full picture. Is there anything that you need? Any help that we can send your
way?”

“You can warn Aren that he’s going to pay for Master’s fees,”
Sevana said with a heartless smile.

“That I’ll do. Anything else?”

“At this point, we don’t know,” Master admitted. “I only
just arrived and neither Sevana nor Sarsen has been able to fill me in yet.
We’ll get back to you once we have a better idea of how to approach the
problem.”

“Well enough. I’ll pass along what you’ve told me for
now. Oh, and Sevana—Morgan is very upset with you about that note you left
behind. He said it was depressingly short on details and that he’s quite cross
with you right now.”

“He’ll live.” She shoved the Caller back into her bag and
continued toward the dining room.

“Sevana,” Master scolded.

Without turning to see his expression, she responded calmly,
“I told him what he needed to know. He’s just being a worrywart.”

From behind her there came a long, drawn-out sigh.

Sarsen, obviously anticipating them, had already ordered
breakfast and it sat on the table like a lure, tempting the hungry with
enticing smells. He’d even ordered a plate for Hinun, which sat on the floor at
his feet. The wolf went directly there and started inhaling food. Sevana gave
nothing more than a hello grunt to Sarsen before sitting down at the table and
eating everything in sight.

Master had more manners, exchanging cordial words as he and
Sarsen tucked in. Or he tried to, at least. She and Sarsen had both taken
potions and applied poultices yesterday that helped them to heal faster—they
wouldn’t be moving at all today if they hadn’t. But the side effect of
accelerated healing was extreme hunger. Master spoke of things that didn’t
require a response and let them consume to their heart’s content.

After two plates, Sevana felt deliciously stuffed to the
gills and finally relaxed back into the wooden chair with a sigh of
satisfaction. Looking about, she belatedly noticed that the room had the usual
hustle and bustle of the morning with people coming and going for breakfast as
they started their day. Something about the way they kept glancing at her
table, and the lower pitch in conversation, caught her attention. Oh? “Are they
talking about us?”

“All sorts of rumors are flying about what happened
yesterday,” Sarsen informed her, still eating although at a much slower rate.
He actually seemed to chew now instead of just inhaling. “I’ve had several
people come by and ask if it was safe to go near the fountain.”

After seeing what happened yesterday, she supposed she
didn’t blame their caution. “What did you tell them?”

“To avoid it for now. I don’t think it’ll cause anyone
injury—after all, they interacted with it for months without ill effect—but
we’re going to be working in that area for the next few days. We’ll need plenty
of space around us as we try things.”

Master nodded in satisfaction. “Good. You’re right, we don’t
want to be tripping over anyone while working. Now, sweetling, you’ve more or
less told me the basics but I need more than that. Start from the beginning and
leave nothing out.”

She did just that, the routine of explaining the complexity
of the problem and the solutions she had tried so ingrained in her that it felt
like an odd sort of homecoming. She’d been reporting and explaining to this man
for nearly a decade. To see his patience, his sharp attention trained on her, felt
wonderfully familiar and reassuring.

When she’d finished, he sat there for several seconds, just
pondering, before he spoke slowly. “There are several questions I have that are
in want of answers. You said Jacen believed that this gadgick was in fact
designed to transport not just people, but objects? Then why hasn’t it been
doing so?”

“There’s some other feature, some piece of the gadgick’s
design that we’re missing,” she admitted frankly. “They must have had a way of
signaling what inanimate objects needed to be transported. I’m just not sure of
how they did it.”

“I’d like to get an answer to this riddle. I have a feeling
it would help us if we knew more of how this thing worked.” Master sat back and
looked up blindly at the ceiling, mind clearly whirling at high speeds. “I’d
also like to know what the original site looked like. You said they’ve been
harvesting stones from the ruins for generations, correct? But all of this
trouble only started up in the past several months. So it had to have been
recent that the right stone, or element, was moved. Surely there’s someone here
that would be able to describe to us what the ruins originally looked like six
months ago.”

A good thought that she hadn’t tracked down. She’d been so
busy trying to find a magical solution to the problem that she hadn’t thought
to ask some of the more obvious solutions. “I’ll ask Decker. He might not know,
but I’m sure he can tell us who would.”

“Please do so.” He rubbed at his chin, making a rasping
sound against the stubble. “After what happened to the two of you yesterday, I
don’t believe that doing another frontal attack against the gadgick is the
right approach. Trying to overwhelm power with more power would no doubt work,
but it would take considerable manpower and some rather dangerous elemental
combinations to pull it off. Not that I blame either of you for trying it—I
certainly would have in your shoes.”

“It would, after all, be the easiest solution,” Sarsen
sighed. “If it had worked, that is. So, you think we should do an indirect
approach. How?”

“Robbing it of its power source.” Master finally dropped his
eyes to give them a wry smile and shrug of the shoulders. “But that begs the
question, which one? There are several elements powering the gadgick right now.
Which one would be the safest to remove from the equation? Or the easiest? Is
there an easy one to choose? I can’t know at this point without a better grasp
of how exactly the gadgick works.”

Sevana frowned as she followed along with his train of
thought. “I would think the water element would be the easiest to remove.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” Master admitted. “But how to do so
is the question. Is this something we can achieve by dismantling the water
fountain itself? Or do we need to go even farther away from it so as to not set
the shield off?”

All very good questions. She wished she had an answer. “Let
me track down Decker and get some answers as to where this thing was. Surely
that will help us figure at least part of it out.”

“I certainly hope so,” Sarsen muttered under his breath.

“I also want something else explained.” Master braced his
forearms against the table and leaned forward slightly. “You said that Jacen
believed this gadgick was made for non-magical people to use to transport
themselves long distance. Correct? And that he also said it was made to
transport luggage and things of that sort as well.”

She had a feeling he was leading up to something but simply
nodded confirmation and let him continue.

“Now, your working theory at the moment is that the reason
why it is transporting people in their sleep is because that is the only time
they picture an image in their head of where to go. Is that right? But there’s
something that doesn’t connect with this idea.”