Night's Sorceries

by Tanith Lee

  The slave knew a mighty terror then. For surely the magician would learn of his ward’s escape. The warder would be reprimanded, and at the expectation the brute was convulsed in anxiety.

  Nevertheless, no summons, no reprimand arrived.

  Indeed, the next day, even as the creature lay upon its straw in dread, its dose of bliss crashed upon it and in contrast almost slew it with delight.

  Could it be Rathak was in ignorance?

  As day succeeded day, each one with a period of joy, the creature again became sanguine. It, too, forgot. The fee it accepted as the reward for services past.

  • • •

  And truly, Rathak had by then no space for errant souls or children. Or the curtailment of others’ pleasure.

  Having walled himself in against some inchoate enemy, horror fastened on him at the chinks the earthquake started. Though every slightest crack had healed itself, Rathak guessed his fortress breached. And when he saw the tile on the floor he reckoned it had been flung at him in threat, and when he saw the amulet reversed, he supposed it an omen of destruction.

  And in the midst of his shouting and panting to and fro, he caught a sudden sight in a mirror of bronze.

  It was of an ancient man befouled by crimes, with rusty hair on end, and with mad eyes and a mad panting mouth of bad teeth.

  Then he heard the noise of hounds in his head and felt their hot breath on his bones.

  “Chuz!” howled Rathak. And he recognized himself and believed his enemy had hold of him and he was lost.

  And, since he believed it, so it came to be, and so he was.

  But the house stood many more decades inside its fence of thorns, avoided by all, virtuous and corrupt alike.

  4. The Changeling

  During the day, she lingered in the cave, where the shadows hurt her eyes with their brightness. At some point she sought to go back into the creature’s vault, but that, of course, was gone. And then she was afraid, felt a vague gnawing in her breast which could only have been nostalgia, a sickness for home. But it was so muddled and so flimsily founded, it could not last. And then night came outside, and wandering around in the tunnel, she missed her direction and came up instead onto the surface of the quag.

  The garment of mist was down. In it burned far off eyes of dull silver, so she imagined that the creature was up there after all, peering at her, with others of its kind. But these filmy lights were just the stars in the mist.

  When the phosphorus emerged it was familiar and comforting, though so broadcast it would have seemed, to an observer, the tiny hunched figure of the child straggled through a whole sea of milky liquid. Sometimes clouds rose from the surface like ghostly gigantic moths and fled slowly away into the upper air. Sometimes phosphor stars, fiery as the sky stars did not appear to be, dived through the fog. The child, not fearing them, turned wondering looks after their passage. She did not follow them. And most curiously a kind of animal instinct kept her always from the sinks of the swamp, guiding her small twisted feet aside. She was nearly weightless, also, as the vapors. The quag would have needed its most strenuous tugs to suck and gulp her down.

  And as she went, to one who observed, another odd thing became apparent. For though deformed, scarred, dehumanized, there had been thrown over her a veil of purest silk, which the roaming lamps lit to a selection of elusive colors, though it would need the rise of a sun to uncover its warmth: Poor little child, she had the most beautiful hair.

  “See, see!” sibilated one observer to another.

  “I see. I see!” the other sibilated back.

  For she had her audience, the lost girl.

  Two flits of the quag, free spirits the magician had never inveigled, hung in the mist and stared with their chill mercurial eyes.

  “So scintillant a lining for our sweet nest,” sizzled the first.

  “So soft, our sisters will sleep their best,” sizzled the second.

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  And that decided, they swooped upon the child like wasps. And like wasps they stuck into her the glinting stings under their nails. She was only a degree bigger than they, yet they stung her soundly, and no sooner had her gaze of wonder gone to a thin wail of pain, than she dropped in a daze from the venom.

  Then they attracted others of their tribe, by vocal sigmatics. Presently some thirteen or so hovered there on chitinous wings.

  They were willowy and hollow-boned, these flits, being most like females, but not essentially like either sex, their bodies characterized by omissions. Hands and feet had fingers and toes all of a length, all equipped with indigenous darts. They were clad in wisps of gauze, metal and mist, were themselves hairless, and in their noseless, earless faces, nearly flat as discs of pared white nacre, each had her little pursed mouth and two huge eyes.

  “Let us take it to our sweet nest.”

  “Let us snip and scatter the silky stuff.’”

  “How soft we shall sleep.”

  “But the rest of it? Its frame and skin?”

  “Cast it forth. Let the swamp swimmers feast.”

  “The goddess must speak.”

  “Yes, let the goddess mete out justice.”

  Next, picking up the child between them with kissing sounds of flit curses, they sculled their wings and made off with her to their burrow.

  The goddess was lying well inside, on a divan of mosses and bog-lotus, with pillows of toadhide under her shoulders, to ease her wings. Every flit burrow had some elected deity, as every wasp hive possesses a queen. She was, for a flit, fat and cumbersome, and bowed besides under the heavy royal jewels her court continually brought her, for they were dedicated scavengers. These included such items as the burnished kidney-stone of a dead ox that had foundered in the swamp, a lizard’s nicest teeth, a chip of quartz, a pip of glass, some mummified beetle carapaces of burning mulberry-green, tinsel wire from the lobes and nostrils of travelers who had met ends not unlike that of the ox, rings, pins, and dagger-hilts, ditto, and the whole skeleton of a rat.

  The patrolling flits, entering with the conscious but paralyzed child, dropped her at the feet of the goddess. The burrow had proved only just wide enough to admit the catch, and some damage had happened at the entrance.

  The goddess looked on, impassive.

  “See, see, Serene One!”

  They lifted and flapped about the hair of the child, showing the goddess. They explained how well the material should line the sleeping nest.

  The goddess indicated a slender primal worm with teeth, tethered to her divan. The flits used it vigorously, causing it to bite through the strands of hair, until the child had been completely cropped.

  Much of the hair was then borne into the inner chambers of the burrow. But some was woven in garlands and loaded on to the goddess’s neck, and there secured with a knob of vitreous got earlier.

  The child began to tremble as the venom dissipated from her system. Several flits were close by, ready to sting her again.

  “Shall she go out, goddess?”

  The goddess cogitated. It was difficult and tiring for her to make any movement. Finally she spoke.

  “She shall stay. She shall be my servitor. She shall fetch substances and assist me to lie down and to sit up again. Bind her, so she shall never escape.”

  This was done, the child being tied to the end of the divan opposite to the tethering point of the worm.

  The goddess subsided.

  The remainder of the flits hastened into the nest chamber whence soon issued whooshes of revelry, terminating in this song:

  Sleep, sleep, Serene One,

  See, she is so.

  Sloth—Ah! Solace so,

  Silken sleep.

  But overexhausted by adornment, the goddess did not slumber for many hours, nor the stung child either.

 
• • •

  Accordingly, the magician’s daughter served. She was a curiosity of the burrow, which boasted of owning her elsewhere. She was known, in the flit tongue, as “Child,” an invented, derogatory term, for flits hatched directly from larva to adult, and reckoned any interim a stupidity. Child was taught something of the flit language, too, for convenience’s sake, and that they might insult her better. For, though they boasted of owning her, they were jealous of her attachment by the goddess, and tried constantly to put hardship in her path. Also they would constantly sting Child, as if through carelessness, but it was malice.

  Yet Child was a durable being, hardy in her malformed fragility, graceful in her ugliness. Most of all, her total inexperience of everything had granted her the priceless gift of acceptance. She neither flinched nor strove. She did not lament, and was never the victim of worry, or hope.

  In the early morning and the late dusk, the flits would go about the swamp, gathering dews and the plants of the quag, and such reptiles and insects, stung stiff with toxins, as they liked to eat. Their treasure seeking was additionally eternal. In the heat of the day they lounged about the margins of moss-clogged pools, under the shade of broad weeds. At night they might go to dance with the phosphors of the quag, or roister in the burrow, drinking fermented juices and refurbishing their own ornaments of wire and seeds. They were savage, and sometimes went hunting fanged fishes through the shallows, or fought with enormous hornets and winged beetles as large as sparrows. After these forays, one or another of the sisterhood might not return. Then the others held a deathwatch, shrieking and writhing under the moon all night, but not in sorrow—more in anger. When dawn broke and the moon and the mist seeped down, the dead one was forgotten.

  But the goddess never stirred from her divan, except to achieve the purposes of nature, which had themselves become dilatory and uncommon.

  Properly, certain of the flits always guarded the entrance of the burrow, but often they were sidetracked and deserted. The rest arrowed in and out ceaselessly with booty. However, to Child, the goddess’s maid, now fell all the intimate services. These were to bathe the goddess by means of mosses steeped in dews, to assist her in sitting and reclining—and to the holy dungheap, should it be necessary. Child must also tend the cushions of her lady’s couch, correct the balance of her jewels when so instructed, anoint her wings with herbal oils, and endlessly pulp and grind up, on little shards of stone, newly brought eatables. The feeding of the goddess, as her decoration, was ceaseless. Her obesity and flesh were the honor of the burrow. (No goddess lived long. At her demise, a replacement deity was selected, the burrow abandoned, and all the architecture of flit life built up again from scratch.)

  Child, though, knew nothing of that, or of how things had been before. She only did as she was told, and sometimes, when it was demanded, answered in the sounds of the flit tongue. The upsets and stingings she bore with equanimity. The boredom of her task, and of the goddess herself, likewise. Nor did Child remonstrate if the goddess, when they were alone together, wished that this or that ornament should be removed from her, or even hidden, or thrown away, though the flits sometimes noticed an absence and Child was berated. Nor did Child take umbrage that often the goddess did not eat, or spat out mouthfuls, or ordered that Child devour whole dishes—her ordained share was slight—or else bury them in the dungpile.

  Now and then, the goddess sang in a toneless warbling. Her vast eyes gazed myopically into nothing.

  One morning, when a pinkish dawn haze still drifted in the burrow, the goddess spoke to Child.

  “Listen. Something has come to me. Yes.”

  Then she indicated some globules of black silver that were wreathed over her arms and ankles.

  “Off. Yourself shall dress in these.”

  So Child removed from the goddess the globules and put them on herself.

  “It is well. Now this this this.”

  So Child removed from the goddess some seed-pods and carapaces and a large bone. And clad herself in them.

  “It is well. Yes, how well it is. Thus, this.”

  And so it went on for quite an hour, interrupted only by the entry of other flits, who as ever were in such excited hurry they seemed to note nothing unusual.

  Finally, the goddess was bare, but for her wisps of gauze, and so lightened, that she was able to tumble off her couch without aid.

  “Rise up now. Stretch yourself where I have sat. Slide the skull of the rat lower, and the tinsels, so. See! Bow your face. Use only eyes. Do not shift. Or if you must make dung, seek the holy heap. Eat all substances sent. If any ask where is Child? Say them this: She is busy steeping mosses. Or she is searching sweets for me.”

  And the goddess, wheezing and rolling in her fat, expelled herself from the burrow, falling down with an audible plop into some bog-flowers below.

  Child remained on the divan. She was so smothered in the royal jewels that it was true, not much of her was visible. And even though her hair had begun to grow quite lavishly, it did not undeceive, as the flit goddess had long since requested and received a cap woven of Child’s worm-cut tresses.

  The flits, buzzing in and out, continued to leave food and to hang ornaments over the mass on the divan, not hesitating.

  Child prepared the food in the old way, but did not eat much of it. Eventually, the flits began to question her: “Why have you not consumed, Serene One? Where is Child?”

  “Steeping mosses,” said Child in the flit tongue.

  “How sunken your voice is, Serene One. You are starved!”

  And vowing to sting Child purposely, they crammed food into Child’s mouth, still supposing her their deity.

  The fact was, the symbol was all that mattered to them. A sufficiently large toad would have done, providing it ate, could be decorated, and answered approximately in the right way.

  Days and nights without number passed in this comedy.

  Once or twice, Child beheld the lawful goddess flitting by the burrow. At first she had been heavy and unwieldy and kept mostly from view, but swiftly she shrank and slimmed, and became active, chasing hornets and moths with her sisters, returning with them into the burrow in the dark. Not one of the flits seemed ever to have suspected or challenged her. She herself gave no sign she was any more than a sister of the sisterhood. Presently she was indistinguishable. If Child had wished, she would have been unable to sort the goddess from her subjects. (Although into the mind of Child, of course, such an idea could never have come.)

  On the other hand Child, in the natural way, had grown a little, and nourished on an ever running stream of fairy-food, a fresh bloom of health was added to her oblique graces. There she sat, a mound of ornaments, the most shining credit to the burrow. Nowhere in the world (the quag) was there such a goddess.

  The human thing, the monster they had kept for shearing like a sheep, that they soon unremembered, as was their proclivity. Until one morning, a touch before noon, three flits came home with the most gaudy of all the treasures they had ever found, and brought about deception’s undoing.

  The treasure was a great brazen rattle, so polished—before its castoff in the mud—that it glowed like old gold. When shaken, it made a wild clincketing noise as of many fragments of something or other whirled together. Its stem had been tangled by a strand of mauve lotuses. The whole compendium was conducted to the goddess-who-was-not, and swung over her head, the three flits fizzing with satisfaction.

  But, in going on, the rattle and the strand somehow dislodged some pivot of the adornments. Down they started to slither, to skitter and plonk, in a rain—the rat’s bones and the lizard’s teeth, the seeds and pods and beads and bobbles, the wires and pins and beetle bits—and crashed about the divan.

  The handmaidens sibilantly exclaimed in aggravation. Months of artistic labor were to do again. One hastened to the burrow opening to recall her entire sisterhood to toil.


  The remaining pair bent nearer to their lady.

  “What is this?”

  “Surely it is that snout some call a nose!”

  “And these?”

  “Nostrils! Brows! Ears!”

  “And see! See! Only five fingers, of unequal size!”

  “Our goddess is diseased!”

  “It is not our goddess.”

  “It is some species of beastliness.”

  “It is Child!”

  An explosive uproar then broke out in the burrow, increasing as the residue of the sisterhood returned there.

  Like a colony of wasps disturbed, in and out and round and about, now rushing from the burrow entry effervescing and whirring, now zooming into it again so the whole bank should palpitate.

  Each flit was hysterical. Even the original goddess, having herself forgotten her own antics, had hysterics like the rest.

  In the center of the whirlpool sat the revealed child.

  If she was made afraid, she did not demonstrate. Perhaps, being accustomed to the excesses of the burrow, she did not completely relate the drama to herself.

  But in the end, as the afternoon spread its awning on the swamp (usually the time of ease), the flits flew out of the burrow and swarmed upon a raft of oily lily pads. Here they vibrated like fired arrows, in sudden almost-silence, and took some inner council. The nest must be abandoned, a new goddess created, all redone, starting from scratch. But indeed, the scratch came first.

  Like a spearhead they drove back into their dishonored house, and fell upon Child to sting her to death.

  • • •

  Shortly before sunset, a caravan was crossing one edge of the quag. A causeway ran here. Nevertheless, the travelers had desired to quit the region before nightfall. They were already familiar with tales of the swamp, and did not care for it. The house of the magician had previously been pointed out in the far distance, ringed by darkness and with weird sheens upon its domes of enamel and bronze, and superstitious signs were resorted to. The phosphors of the swamp, which would emerge with the dusk, were accredited with awful talents.