We woke up still in the darkness, retrieved Ysabel’s keys from the strongroom, and went to see her house.

It was a lovely, newly built home on the bank of the river, at the edge of the town. There was a carefully tended garden around the main building, a tall and spacious construction.

The insides were similarly pleasant. Comfortable furniture, clean floor, freshly whitened walls. And, to our considerable annoyance, nothing suspicious. Well, besides the missing monocle of Schultheiß that was below the sizeable bed in the bedroom. But that was shaky evidence for infidelity at best, and adultery in itself was no proof for Ysabel being the witch.

We spent two hours ruffling through each and every one of the rooms, and it was almost time to go back now, as we took a break in the library. Jim was eating. I was putting the finishing touches on my carving.

Beldrak was fiddling with the books.

“This library is undiluted mediocrity,” he fumed. “This house is not even worth breaking into to steal books if you can imagine that! Take this book, for example!” He took the said volume and turned towards us.

“The Enigmatic Principia of Cumulative Prosperity in Relation to Pragmatic Incrementalism!” he spat out. “This title doesn’t even make sense! I happened to come across it before, and the contents are even worse if you can believe it! It’s just words thrown on each other! Who would even touch this book, let alone read it?”

We patiently waited, and when he stopped for breath, Jim interjected.

“You seem to have read it. And it’s good you did; otherwise, you might not have found the secret door.”

“The secret what?” fumbled Beldrak, losing his balance. He looked back over his shoulder to see the shelves parted, letting us glimpse a hole in the wall. “I take back everything. I am sorry for doubting for a moment. It seems every book has a use, after all.”

There was a spiral staircase leading downwards behind the wall. Thankfully, Jim had his halberd with him and could beat the stairs before us to trigger mechanical traps. There weren’t any, but we were coming around to Beldrak’s thinking after so much time spent together. Why take the risk?

Trueanvil had detected no magic before us, and when we reached the base of the staircase, he sent in his tiny spider.

“That’s a nice spacious cellar we have here,” he mused. “The ceiling is thirty feet high; I can barely see it with these eyes. There are five pillars, I think. It seems there is a giant cauldron in the middle. There are bookshelves at the walls and alchemical supplies. This cellar is a well-equipped laboratory. But nothing overly worrying. You can go in, Arnold.”

I walked in, slowly and cautiously, my candle illuminating the picture Trueanvil described. There was a great cauldron indeed, in the middle of five pillars. But something was off. Four of the columns formed a rectangle, but the fifth did not fit into the symmetry of the room. It was as if…

“I can’t believe it,” I whispered. “It’s a bloody roper!”

Hearing my utterance, Jim and Beldrak started casting their respective spells, while I took aim with a javelin. Then the monster struck. It must have realised we have discovered it, because the tentacles parted from the great body, and squirmed towards us with great alacrity.

I let my spear fly, shortly followed by a great ball of fire, and a clawed, spectral hand. Then I had to defend myself, using my shield and sword to keep away the feelers.

It was nothing like our previous fight with the other roper in Durgeddin’s fort. That creature was healthy and ferocious, but this critter very obviously was not. There were scars all over its main body; chunks were even missing as if a greater predator would have taken a few bites of the animal.

The other roper also had an inexhaustible supply of tentacles, and it even seemed to be able to form new ones, using the material of its main body. This creature had ten tentacles altogether and could not replenish the lost ones. I cut, smashed, and strained against the feelers, while Beldrak and Jim were raining spells on the critter. It was just as one-sided a battle as our previous one against this kind of monster. But this time the fight was rigged in our favour.

The roper screeched, tried to squirm away, but Beldrak mercilessly rammed a flaming ball in it again and again. The screech became a low whimper; then the creature went silent. To be on the safe side, I cut down the remaining tentacles and stabbed the critter where we suspected its brain might be. Now we could examine the room in detail.

“So that’s how she did it,” said Beldrak after he took a good look around. “The curse was never on the toys; she used object sympathy. It’s quite clever to be fair. I wonder if she came up with it, or she learnt it from someone.”

“What did she do? Are these the same toys she gave to the children, or what?”

“No these are the twins of the toys, if you will. Our Ysabel made two from everything, probably from the same piece of material, and by the same toy-maker. That in itself creates sympathy between objects, but it seems she went further. The shrewd witch kept the toys together, and probably reinforced the sympathy with rituals. After that, she gave out the presents and waited for the children to form sympathetic bonds with the toys. Thus, she could place curses on them indirectly, using the toys as a bridge for her magic.”

I paled.

“You mean if someone got ahold of my old dagger, which I sold in Trapper’s Port where I bought a new one, they could place a curse on me through the dagger?”

“If that someone would be an accomplished witch or warlock, yes. However, sympathy will fade away with time. And if you were willing to part with that knife so easily, it must not have been too strong in the first place.”

“You still should have told me about this possibility!”

“Or you could learn the laws governing magic yourself, and see that you can avoid these pitfalls. Generally, it is not worth worrying about sympathetic magic. To effectively defend yourself against all possibilities, you should collect the hair you lose every day, the nails when you clip them, that sort of thing. Some mages do it, but it requires too much effort for too little gain even in my opinion. The best defence against curses is to have a strong mind and body so that you can survive an attempt. Then, all you need is a batch of divinations to track down the offender and explain them not to screw with you.”

I was still reeling with all these ominous revelations when Jim cried.

“Hey, Trueanvil, take a look at this!”

There were potions on a shelf in neat little vials, dozens of them. All of them were labelled as “Elixir of Health” in Common.

“I suspected she wanted the kid’s life-force for something like this,” the wizard shook his head. “But damn, that’s a lot! She would have made a fortune with this many.”

“I take it this will be enough evidence?”

“Yes! Now we better loot the place quickly and go back.”