Jean Johnson - The Sword

The twinge of his own spells sent Saber quickly from Kelly's side. Hurrying out onto the eastern ramparts of the outer wall, he angled toward the section of wards that had been alerted. The illusion-spelled guards, anchored to certain stones at certain distances along the wall, were busy following the parameters of their spell.

The repel-invaders parameter of the spell had triggered the warning, he noted, watching his soldier-illusions as they unhooked a scaling claw from the battlements and tossed it over the side with their hands. Clad in studded midnight blue leather for both armor and clothing, patterned like the guardsmen at Corvis Saber had once known, they looked real enough that he almost started to ask them what had been happening. But they weren't enspelled to be able to actually reply; there hadn't been enough time for enspelling something as complex as verbal reasoning.

Saber peered over the edge between two of the defensive crenellations. A group of about seven sailors stood down there. Two had ropes with hooked claws tied to the ends. One was gathering up his rope into a neat coil, the other was whirling his own in preparation for another attempted throw. The man cast as hard as he could, and the hook sailed up, almost to the top. It fell short by about half a foot. Clearly this was at the edge of the man's throwing ability, with such a long and heavy rope that had to be attached to reach this high. The hook clanged against the stones of the wall, dropping back down in a ripple of rope to the ground.

One of the others, watching the cast, shouted and pointed up at Saber. All of the others looked up and focused where the man was indicating.

Saber leaned his elbows on the broad parapet edge and studied them in return.

"You, up there! How did you get up there?" one of the sailors demanded in his native tongue.

"I was invited up here. You were not," he stated in Ultra-Tongue reply, as the other man with rope and claw finished coiling and started swinging. "Perhaps it is different in your land, but in this one, we believe in being invited first, before attempting to enter another's home."

The one who had spoken gestured for the other one to stop swinging his rope and grappling claw. "Then this road does lead somewhere?"

"All roads lead somewhere."

"So this wall is an illusion?"

"Of course. It is our way. Rather than be rude and needlessly violent when an unwelcomed, uninvited intruder arrives and tries to barge into our home, we simply vanish."

With a flick of his hand, he vanished in a simple illusion. The men down below shouted, calling for him. Saber counted to twenty, then reappeared as the leader ordered his men to scale the "cliff " wall again.

"Are you hard of hearing, man? Or simply lacking in wit? If you ask, and ask politely, then perhaps someone will pay attention to you. I suggest you go back to your ship and think about how you could approach us in polite civility, instead of in rude intrusion. None of us are angry with your foolish attempts. Yet. But I suggest that you do not press your luck."

Flicking his fingers, he vanished yet again from their view. As he watched, unmoving, the men down below argued, then gave up and turned away. They coiled up their ropes and hooks and started marching back down the hill.

"Why are you pacing, Sister?" Morganen asked his eldest brother's wife.

Kelly shook her head, wearing footprints along the red velvet path dissecting the floor of the great hall in five stitched-together stripes. "I can't see a way around those guns."

"How do you mean?" he asked, falling into step beside her. "If perhaps you told me how they are activated, I could counter their activation by bringing out some of my own collection of enchanted weapons, some of which are very powerful indeed."

She shook her head. "You're doing the exact same thing. It's a male flaw in thinking."

"I beg your pardon?" the youngest brother of them all asked, for the first time sounding offended instead of levelheaded.

Kelly lifted her head with a blush. "Sorry. I spoke without thinking. It's a matter of thinking that bigger is better. You think a bigger and better spell will cure everything. But it doesn't, not always. Men are more predisposed than women to think that machinesor spells, in this universewill solve anything if they're just made bigger. Or smaller, or stronger, or faster. They don't think like this always, but admit it: You'd be impressed with me if I could pull off a bigger and more complex spell than you could, wouldn't you?"

"I would be impressed if you could pull off any spell, but yes," Morganen agreed. "But isn't that the way of the world?"

"Not always from a female point of view but they're not female, are they?" she added with a frustrated sigh.

"You've lost me again," he pointed out. She stopped in the center of the hall and did her best to explain.

"Sorry. Here's an analogy: If I came to you with a better spell, a magical item more efficient, more powerful, far easier to cast and to use than the version you had, you would be impressed, right?"

"I thought we agreed on that, already."

"True. Now, if you had a weapon-spell that was pretty effective, if someone else came along with an even better version of that spell, would you be impressed?"

"Of course."

"And more inclined to avoid angering the person wielding it?" she added, lifting her brows. "To behave and do what they say, including and up to going away if they requested you to?"

He began to get her point. "A weapon that, if you are correct, travels faster than sound itself, too fast to be easily stopped by most magical means. In order to impress these men, you would need a bigger and better gun than what they have?"

"Exactly. Because they're men, and they'd be more impressed by such things than a woman wouldthat's not to say women aren't impressed by bigger and better things," she added quickly, as Morganen grinned. She caught his meaning a moment later, a marital joke at her and Saber's expense. Kelly resisted the urge to hit him for it. "We're just focused on other things that are important, too. If they were women, I might have a better chance of finding some other way to impress or otherwise reason with them, but they're men, which means I have to find an appropriately 'male' way of dealing with them.

"Now, the next problem is," Kelly continued briskly, "my old universe is unfortunately teeming with 'bigger and better' guns, but that's there and this is here, and I don't personally know enough about how guns work to come up with a better version in this world than the basic flintlocks those men are carrying around. Not in the little amount of time we have to come up with them from the materials that are to be found here. Ergo, I need a bigger and better gun from my own world. Even though I don't like that idea."

Morganen shrugged. "I can fetch one of these 'better' guns from your realm, any time you wish me to."

"I thought the aether was disturbed too much to risk it in her realm," Saber pointed out, making both of them turn around. He had returned from the parapet in time to catch this very interesting end of their conversation.

"A gun is a nonliving object," Morganen returned blithely. His expression was calm and natural, responding evenly to his brother's half-growled remark. "There is little danger in bringing it across the slowly healing fractures in the aether. At least, I presume they're nonliving," he added, turning politely back to Kelly.

She had a thoughtful frown on her face. "How much can you pull across?"

"A few items. Why do you ask?"

"How much information do you need to be able to locate and fetch specific items?"

The light-brown-haired man shrugged. "You could be there in my workroom with me, and point them out in the mirror"