In the stories, kids who go through portals to other worlds need to learn something from it. Maybe there’s something I’m supposed to learn from being a little girl. And there’s definitely got to be something I’m supposed to do here, but I don’t know what yet.”

The Mural and the Cabinet

part 4 of 21

by Trismegistus Shandy

Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

“Do you believe her story?” Nidlaya asked once Devi was gone and the door was shut behind her.

“It sounds far-fetched, but Zindla confirmed it. She saw through the portal for a few moments before it closed. I trust her, anyway.”

“Yes, but... perhaps the portal is real, but she isn’t telling the truth about it, or about her world, or about herself. I find it very odd that there’s no sign of a transformation spell on her, if she’s really a ten-year-old boy. Or a soul-switching spell. Either type of spell should be obvious to the kind of examination I gave her.”

“That’s true — Zindla couldn’t confirm that part, she didn’t see it happen. But she was wearing a shirt and trousers much too big for her, with strange creatures printed on them. I meant to bring them for you to look at, but forgot. And she does act more mature than a five-year-old, and has a larger vocabulary. Ten seems about right.”

“She could just be very smart and imaginative. My little granddaughter Syandi, for instance, started reading when she was just three, and has as large a vocabulary at five as her father had at seven or eight.”

“I don’t know. She seemed genuinely surprised and dismayed when she realized she’d been made shorter and younger by the portal, and then when she realized she’d been transformed into a girl.”

“Well, I’ll come out to your shop and take a look at the cabinet as soon as I can. And those clothes. Let me know if the spellbreaker gets any results.”

“All right.”

Tyemba paid for the consultation, then retrieved Devi from the waiting room and left. He mulled over what Nidlaya had said as they went down the elevator to the Murshan Spellbreaker Agency, on the ground floor of the same building. Devi seemed like an honest and open child, but Nidlaya was right that something was odd about her story — if she’d been transformed by the portal-cabinet, there should have been signs. Signs visible even to him, much less to a more powerful wizard like Nidlaya. Seeds of doubt had been planted in his mind. But there were the clothes, and she didn’t act or talk like a five-year-old. Well...

He cleared his throat and said to the man on duty at the desk, “I need to hire a spellbreaker. Just for a minute.”

“All right,” the man said. “What do you need done? How powerful a spellbreaker do you need?”

“No more than three hours off the equinox, I think.” A spell subtle enough to hide from him and Nidlaya couldn’t be all that powerful, right? Three hours should be fine.

“I can handle it, then; I’m two and a half hours post, myself.”

“Just hold hands with this little girl for a moment.”

Devi looked a little apprehensive as the man came around the desk and knelt down beside her. “Here,” he said, holding out his hand, “take my hand. It probably won’t hurt.”

Devi took his hand and grasped it.

Nothing happened.

Nothing continued to happen.

“There,” the man said, letting go of Devi’s hand. “What was the spell you needed me to break, by the way?”

“I don’t know,” Tyemba said honestly, and paid him for his time.

Zindla was working the counter while her mother took a bathroom break when her father and Devi came back from their prolonged errand. A couple of customers were browsing, but no one had needed her help in a while.

“What did you find out, Father?”

“Not much,” he said. “Nidlaya had never heard of a talisman like that cabinet, and he couldn’t find any signs of a spell on her either. And when I took her to a spellbreaker and he held her hand, nothing happened. Here, why don’t I take over the counter and you take Devi upstairs? I think she’s wilting.”

Devi did look tired and grumpy; she hadn’t said anything. Zindla smiled at her and said, “Come on, Devi. Do you want something to eat?”

“We ate at the wizard’s office,” the little girl said, following Zindla into the back office and up the stairs to their apartment. “But I guess I wouldn’t mind a snack.”

Zindla got some sweetbread out of the cupboard. Her mother came out of the bathroom just as Zindla and Devi sat down at the table.

“Who’s manning the counter?”

“Father. He asked me to take Devi upstairs and let her rest.”

“You do look tired, Devi. You can take a nap on Zindla’s bed.”

“I’m not sleepy,” Devi insisted.

“Very well,” Syuna said, and went downstairs to the shop.

“So how was your trip to see Nidlaya?” Zindla said to Devi.

“His office was interesting, with all the magic stuff on the shelves and the table. But he didn’t know anything about the portal or why it turned me into a little girl. He said he’d never heard of a portal like that before.”

“There are other wizards we can ask about it, I expect,” Zindla said. “Father just goes to him first because he’s our cousin and we get a discount, and he’s good, but he’s not the best in the city.”

“Yeah,” Devi said. “Maybe somebody else can help. I guess I need to think about other stuff in the meantime. Like, in the stories, kids who go through portals to other worlds need to learn something from it. Maybe there’s something I’m supposed to learn from being a little girl. And there’s definitely got to be something I’m supposed to do here, but I don’t know what yet.” She yawned and blinked.

Zindla was impressed. If she hadn’t already been convinced that Devi was really older than she looked, that would prove it. But: “Mother was right, you do look a little sleepy. You probably can’t figure out what you need to do until you get some rest.”

“No,” Devi protested, and took another bite of sweetbread.

“When you were this young the first time around, did you need naps in the middle of the day?” Zindla asked.

“Um — I guess so,” Devi replied after chewing and swallowing.

“Then maybe you need them again now. Being little doesn’t just mean being shorter than everybody else.”

Devi finally agreed to lie down for a while, after she finished eating her sweetbread, and Zindla took her upstairs to her room. “Here you go,” she said. “Take that off and I’ll let it air out while you nap.”

“Do you have anything else for me to wear?”

“All those other things we borrowed from my little cousins were too big for you, right? But better than anything of mine, I guess. Don’t worry, we can make you some new clothes soon enough. Now come on. You don’t have anything I don’t have.”

Devi finally took off her two-layered gown and her slippers, put on a nightgown they’d borrowed from Zindla’s cousin Nebya — it was too big, though not as big as those clothes she’d arrived in — and slipped under the covers. She was asleep when Zindla came back from putting a pot of water on to boil.

After talking to Tyemba about what he had learned, Syuna went into the office and looked up some records. She made sure she had the addresses of everyone who’d bought things she’d acquired from Tirishkun’s estate sale, especially Kashpur, who’d bought his research papers, and put those together with the usual list of their best customers — mostly spellcasters who might be able to figure out how the cabinet worked and make it work again to send Devi home, plus some rich talisman collectors who had wizards on their staff to maintain the items in their collection. She got a stack of blank paper and put it in the duplicator talisman, then traced a pattern in the runes on its lid, opened it, and took one sheet out. Closing the lid, she took up her pen and wrote a letter with a generic salutation, telling them about the cabinet, Devi’s arrival, and a little bit of Devi’s account of her world. She didn’t mention Devi’s supposed transformation; she wondered if Nidlaya might be right to doubt her. She wasn’t a wizard, even a low-powered one like her mother and husband, but she wasn’t ready to trust any details of Devi’s story that Zindla couldn’t verify. Tyemba seemed to trust her despite the evidence of his senses seeming to prove she wasn’t under a transformation spell, but Syuna wasn’t sure. She resolved to watch Devi carefully and judge for herself. She did talk more like a ten-year-old than a five-year-old, that was true, but how much of that might be because she was from another country, perhaps even another world, where children might be raised and educated differently? Or because she was smarter than the average child?

The thing to do would be to ask her more questions about her world and herself, and look for inconsistencies. And get more expert opinions.

She invited her customers to come and examine the cabinet at their leisure during the following month, and then, if they liked, place their initial bid. At the end of that time, she would inform everyone of the highest initial bid and auction it off among those willing to bid more, on the condition that the winner of the auction must allow Devi to go home through the cabinet once they figured out how to make it work.

Having finished the letter, she filed the original, took the duplicates out of the talisman-box, folded and sealed them, and addressed them one by one.

When Devi woke up, he looked around Zindla’s room. There were a few books on the shelf, and he looked through them, finding them easier to read than the ones downstairs. There seemed to be a mix of histories and made-up stories, though it was hard to be sure which were which when he didn’t know anything about this world’s history.

He took off the too-big nightgown and put on the other two-layer gown that fit better, and the slippers. He wondered: if they had magic cars and trains, did they have magic washers and dryers and stuff too? He put the book he’d been looking at back on the shelf and walked downstairs.

Pasyala was cooking supper. “Oh, hello, sweetie. I’m going to start making you some new clothes soon. Give me a minute to finish chopping these onions and peppers and I’ll measure you to see what I need to cut.”

“All right. Thanks.”

A few minutes later Pasyala led him into her own bedroom, which was on the same level as the kitchen and living room, at the front of the shop. She told Devi to take off his outer clothes, which he reluctantly did, and then measured him, which was a little embarrassing. Then Devi put the gown on again, and said, “I guess I’ll read for a while. Unless you want me to help you in the kitchen with something?”

“I don’t think I need any help right now,” Pasyala said. “You’re a little too short to reach the stove or counter easily, anyway, and even if you help out with the cooking back home, where you’re older, I’m not sure I trust your little hands with a knife.”

“Oh... all right.”

So Devi went upstairs to Zindla’s bedroom again, picked a book off the shelf, and went down to the living room to read it. The light was better there, and he liked hearing Pasyala bustle around in the kitchen. She reminded him her of his grandma more than Syuna and Tyembla reminded him of his parents, or Zindla reminded him of Amy.

The book was a collection of adventure stories, around ten or twenty pages each, with one or two pictures to each story. The print was a little larger than in the books back home, and the pictures were all black and white. Each one had a little bit at the end where the author said which parts were true and which were made up, which was helpful for figuring out what things were like in this world. In the second story Devi read, the hero got turned into a cat by the villain, but the spell wore off after three days. The author’s note said that transformation spells usually wore off within a few days, and the longest they’d ever been known to last was a month. So even if he stayed in this world more than a month, he’d change back into his old boy self by then. That was reassuring, even though Tyemba had said much the same thing this morning.

But that wizard Nidlaya had said he wasn’t under a transformation spell. What was it, then?

He was halfway through the third story when Syuna, Tyemba and Zindla came upstairs for supper, having closed the shop. They all sat down to eat, and Syuna said, “Nidlaya came by just before closing, and looked over the cabinet —”

“What did he say?” Devi asked eagerly.

“Don’t interrupt, child,” Syuna said, and then continued: “He examined it for about half an hour, and said he thought he might be able to figure out how it worked if he had enough time. I told him he was welcome to come by the shop as often as he liked in the next month to examine it, but so would other wizards, and after that, I’d auction it off.”

Devi was shocked. He knew they were running a shop, and the cabinet had already been for sale when he came through it, but... if somebody bought it, how would he go home when he was done having adventures here? “How am I going to get home?”

“We’ll make that one of the conditions of the sale,” Syuna reassured him. “The buyer has to let you go home once they figure out how to make the cabinet open up a portal.”

That was somewhat comforting, but Devi wasn’t sure how they would make the wizard that bought it do what they said.

If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)

You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here: