Magicians of Caprona - Diana Wynne Jones [47]
Angelica raised her arms higher for the third verse and changed key for the sixth time. “Turn the spell off, break the spell around—”
“That’s wrong,” said Tonino.
“Don’t you dare put me off!” snapped Angelica, and turned around to say it, which sent the angle of her arms more thoroughly wrong than ever. One hand was now pointing at a window. “I command the unbinding of that which was bound,” she sang, cross and shrill.
Tonino looked quickly down at himself, but he seemed to be still there, and the usual color. He told himself that he had known all along that such a bungled spell could not possibly work.
There came a great creaking from the ceiling, just above the windows. The whole room swayed. Then, to Tonino’s amazement, the entire front wall of the room, windows and all, split away from the side walls and the ceiling, and fell outwards with a soft clatter—a curiously soft sound for the whole side of a house. A draught of musty-smelling air blew in through the open space.
Angelica was quite as astonished as Tonino. But that did not prevent her turning to him with a smug and triumphant smile. “See? My spells always work.”
“Let’s get out,” said Tonino. “Quick. Before somebody comes.”
They ran out across the painted panels between the windows, across the marks Tonino had made with the chair. They stepped down off the surprisingly clean, straight edge, where the wall had joined the ceiling, onto the terrace in front of the house. It appeared to be made of wood, not of stone as Tonino had expected. And beyond that—
They stopped, just in time, at the edge of a huge cliff. Both of them swayed forward, and caught at one another. The cliff went down sheer, into murky darkness. They could not see the bottom. Nor could they see much more when they looked straight ahead. There was a blaze of red-gold sunlight there, dazzling them.
“There’s still a spell on the view,” said Tonino.
“In that case,” said Angelica, “let’s just keep walking. There must be a road or a garden that we can’t see.”
There certainly should have been something of the kind, but it neither felt nor looked like that. Tonino was sure he could sense vast hollow spaces below the cliff. There were no city sounds, and only a strangely musty smell.
“Coward!” said Angelica.
“You go,” said Tonino.
“Only if you go too,” she said.
They hovered, glaring at one another. And, as they hovered, the blaze of sunlight was cut off by an immense black shape. “Naughty!” said a vast voice. “Bad children shall be punished.”
A force almost too strong to feel swept them away onto the fallen wall. The fallen wall rose briskly back into its place, sweeping Angelica and Tonino with it, helplessly sliding and rolling, until they thumped onto the painted carpet. By that time, Tonino was so breathless and dizzy that he hardly heard the wall snap back into place with a click.
After that, the dizziness grew worse. Tonino knew he was in the grip of another spell. He struggled against it furiously, but whoever was casting it was immensely strong. He felt surging and bumping. The light from the windows changed, and changed again. Almost he could have sworn, the room was being carried. It stopped with a jolt. He heard Angelica’s voice gabbling a prayer to Our Lady, and he did not blame her. Then there was a mystifying gap in what Tonino knew.
He came to himself because whoever was casting the spell wanted him to. Tonino was quite sure of that. The punishment would not be so much fun, unless Tonino knew about it.
He was in a confusion of light and noise—there was a huge blur of it to one side—and he was racing up and down a narrow wooden platform, dragging (of all things!) a string of sausages. He was wearing a bright red nightgown and there was a heaviness on the front of his face. Each time he reached one end of the wooden platform, he found a white cardboard dog there, with a frill around its neck. The dog’s cardboard mouth opened and shut. It was making feeble cardboard attempts to get the sausages.
The noise was terrific.