The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh

by C. J. Cherryh

  A step creaked on the stairs. He looked about. It was Wllow coming down. He seized up the sword and belted it about him, and looked again, where the Lady stood in Willow's place.

  The outside door gaped; the wood was gone. He ran for it, for the sunlight, around to the pen behind, where his horse cropped the green grass alone in a ramshackle enclosure, and his saddle and gear lay on the dewy ground. He saddled the horse in haste, climbed into the saddle and rode carefully past the keep, hearing the lowing of a cow at his back. That ceased. He blinked and Willow sat on a stone of the ruined wall, swinging her bare feet and waving at him. He spurred the horse past, reined back again with the feeling of something at his back. He looked to the doorway. The Lady stood there. She had a lily in her hair and her feet were bare. "Good journey," she wished him. "Farewell, sir knight."

  He snapped the reins and rode quickly onto the road. A black, bent figure stood among the trees and brush on the far side of it, robed and hooded. The horse shied, trembling. Dubhan could see nothing but the robes, hoped for all the life that was in him that it would not look up, would not fling back the hood.

  "Not yet," the voice came like the sighings of leaves. "You have years yet, sir knight."

  He cracked the reins and rode. The sunlight warmed him finally, and the birds sang, until the chill melted from his gut where it had lain. He looked back, and there was only the forest.

  When he had ridden a day, there was a village. He watered his horse there, and the townsfolk came shyly round him and asked the news. He told them about the war; and the king dead, and the duke; but they had never heard of either, and blinked and wondered among themselves. They gave him bread and ale, and grain for his horse, and he thanked them and rode away.

  On that day he hung the sword from his saddle and carried it no more.

  On the next he took off the armor and stowed it away, let the breeze to his skin, and rode through lands widely farmed, where villages lay across the road, open and unfearing.

  They saw the weapons, the children of these villages, and asked him tales.

  He made up dragons and unicorns. The children smiled.

  In time, so did he.

  1985

  OF LAW AND MAGIC

  Between the Avenue of the Moon and the Avenue of Snow is a way named Fog; and the houses in this district are old and eclectic. The houses span centuries; they come slowly to respectability with the weathering of their brick and beams and their new paint into the brown conservatism and eccentricity of this district. Here is a house a mere three hundred years into its age, with the graceful towers that were the style of its day; here is another with the timbered construction of four hundred years ago; and a house of porches which were fashionable a mere one hundred years ago, pierced-wood lace which has weathered to a comfortable silver-brown; here is yet another of stone and brick, festooned with vines which try yearly to reach out to the wooden lace: but the owner has bought a spell to keep the peace, and the reaching tendrils continually turn back on themselves. The vines bloom in the spring with blue flowers and perfume the air, but a spell is on them, and the blue is silvered and muted and offends none of the neighbors with unseemly levity. The comfortable house next to the vines on the other side has a tiny yard and a little brick wall: children play there and climb the bricks and play mischievous games, tossing stolen flowers at passersby (and wickedly imagining they are poisoned blooms and that they cast spells instead of flowers. The children on this street are few and fey and very, very sly, choosing only strangers for their pranks: to trouble adult neighbors would not be wise.).

  There is a house of muted red brick; a house of river stone; a house of porches and a house of towers; but there is one house the eye tends to miss.

  And near it and across the street by the brick wall the young woman in the cloak fends off a shower of silver-blue blossoms and glances up at the grinning wolf-faced children. Her hand is callused. Her dress is nondescript and plain, and her cloak is brown and shows years of wear. She clutches it together tightly about her skirts and shows the fey children a pinched, pale countenance, tangled brown curls within the hood, a long thin face like theirs, but they are freerunning wolves and she is a town-bred cur with the habit of being kicked. They are wolves and mercy never occurs to them, only prudence, and they plan wickedness and sport; one of them meditates trying a wee small spell.

  But: "The lawyer's house," she says, looking up at them on their wall, all a-row like ornaments, their laps full of stolen vine branches. And their wolfish pupils dilate and contract in perfect time, and one of them bucks his bare knees up and another does, and the third, and the fourth points with a thin, muscled arm.

  The house sits withdrawn from the street, a house of brick age-dulled and dark; a narrow house, a house of windows so old and clouded they drink the light in and cast none back; a house so plain and huge and ugly it might be some warehouse. Little sun gets to it in its slight retreat from the street; the alley beside it is bare dirt and dry dust on the few tilted paving stones. The porch is a mere retreat under the slanting eave of a black slate roof hardly blacker than the aged red brick; the front door is set between two age-hazed windows. This is a house without period, without age, without place among such aged finery, but it is large and (perhaps) very old, but its style is not after all (only perhaps; one could mistake or not remember)—the oldest: though it does suggest that the oldest may be, in comparison to it, far older of their kinds than one has thought. It is in all things vague. And it is a large house and a powerful house, so that in a sudden settling of things into true perspective, one has to realize that the lace-house and the vine-house and the house of the wall and the fey wolfish children are light and this is darkness, this is age, this is the reclusive house of the neighborhood, the silence and the mystery which the witch-children fear, the one house in whose alley they venture only with trepidation. But casual passersby never notice its dreadfulness. Only the neighbors and the children know; and now the woman knows, and clutches her cloak the tighter and leaves the witch-children silent on their wall.

  The wolf-eyed girl who thought of the spell sits by her playmates and congratulates herself that she was cautious in her spelling. She is only seven. She knows that she is talented and hopes to live to become a threat. And this woman in her poverty disturbs her, because this must be a witch, and witches ought to be greater and more formidable. The boy beside her is Sighted and feels a dimming of the day; hugs his arms about himself without feeling that he does it; while his brother edges closer to him. And the boy from the towered-house spits at the street below to break the luck when the woman has gone. None of them go back to their game. They sit in their row on their fence and watch, and draw suspicious stares from passing locals who wonder what mayhem the witch-children are contemplating today, legs a-dangle as they sit on the wall, not looking at each other but decidedly looking at something.

  It was the nature of the dark house that it never occurred to the ones who saw the children and looked where they looked, that it was the dark house they wondered about. Those who look at the dark house that way cannot be followed in their thoughts, because they are looking at a different place, an obscure and difficult place. Their sight has gotten into a maze that no eye can follow without entering into it as well. The children's souls have gone colder than they were and they do not feel the daylight on their backs. They do not feel safe anymore, but they do not feel any imminent danger either. The house has been stable for a very long time and time goes out from here in musty stability. It is the scale of things in the neighborhood which has been rearranged. A moment is an hour. A place is the universe. The universe is a street and a dark house with dirty windows; and they contemplate this possibility and do not like being so close to it; but they know it is on every street and that wherever it exists it is always next door or across the street. It is the most dangerous thing in the world to stand in its alley or on its porch and the most fearful thing in the world to think of its door opening.
r />   But it opens for the woman in her shabby cloak. And there is nothing of the ordinary about her any longer.

  The air was musty with the decay of pages and leather. The light shafted through from the two windows danced with dustmotes and picked out the subtle hues of books and yellowed paper in shelves and stacks about the walls, on tables, chairs; towering stacks about the floor which preserved their own precarious equilibrium against all odds: light fell on age-silvered floorboards and on dust; light fell on a narrow carpet runner which might once have been red but which was silvered with the dust of time and neglect, and this carpet marked a trail through the maze of shelves and stacks, this single faded and dusty aisle of carpet alone offered a line of sight that led away into a dark corridor between the stacks of books and between the bookcases and the laden furniture. Ambush might lurk within the stacks. A single step, a single shift of weight made the aged boards of the floor creak and betrayed the visitor. Melot Cassissinin looked about her, her cloak clutched against her and her body yearning back toward the daylight. The door had opened itself. She was not overly surprised. Now, inevitably, it did the other thing and shut itself; and for a moment the air was cold. Magic did that, unattended magic: it got its force from the air and the ground and from whoever was standing by, and Melot shivered: it robbed her as well, leaving her with only the dusty windows-light and that thin red track of carpet, the color of life all faded, leading into the hall.

  "Master Toth," she called out, quaking where she stood. And again: "Master Toth!"—which sound lost itself in the maze and drew neither echo nor answer.

  Flight urged at her. But the carpet-path beguilded the eye with its mazy designs and the fear settled away into a vague and gnawing terror. It seemed logical to go on, since she had come this far; and if there were ambushes they were likeliest ambushes calculated to frighten and not to harm. She walked the carpeted track and steeled her nerves against bogles and icy touches and whatever sort of whimsy an old man might devise for unwelcome intruders. Her business was certain and she was not a woman to turn when she had made up her mind a thing had to be: she simply told her feet they would go on and never back no matter what her mind was doing. And she told her body not to flinch even if something should run icy fingers down her neck: she was not a proud woman, this Melot, but she was a woman in a hurry and the fingers of willywisps and trolls were all the same class of nuisance to a woman in her set of mind as fingers of other unwelcome sorts which she well knew how to deal with. She had tactics, did Melot of the Ram, and a withering look for man or devil who tried her. It masked a habitual dour despair, like the despair of the conscript soldier who knows tomorrow is like today, and all tomorrows like that one, one more walk and one more fight; and the enemy everywhere. Melot was a conscript of life; to be alive was not what she would have chosen, but by the gods all and several she was too stubborn to retreat once launched.

  So she went walking down the dark hall of many doors and called out the name she had called out before, going deeper and deeper into the dark, till the hallway and the carpet ran up against a stack of books and a table with other books and papers. There the carpet and the hall bent to the right with a dim window at the end. This too she followed, past doors and past hanging pictures lost in murk and cobwebs, over the carpet which was her only track and guide, toward what at first seemed only another hall stacked high with books, but which revealed a stairs and an ascent lighted by a dim window up at the landing.

  "Master Toth," she called up; and: Toth, Toth, Toth, the echoes said, but nothing more. So she clenched up her skirts in her fist and climbed, where the faded red carpet led, up and up past the landing to yet another hall all in dark, where crazily leaning stacks of books and papers breathed out a miasma of age and rot. "Master Toth?"

  But the carpet went only up the stairs, while the hall floor was bare boards and littered with paper. The stairs promised light above, where by yet another window, dirty-paned daylight streamed into the dust and the neglect.

  She close the stairs and climbed, hard-breathing now; and gathered her skirts past stacks of books. Another turn: a small slit of a window; and a door at the top of the stairs.

  The air seemed colder here. A prickling ran her nape. She thought if she turned about at this instant there would be something black and small and glitter-eyed staring at her from the landing she had left: that was the thing that built itself in her mind. It would grow brave. It would come up the stairs. If she turned around she would see it baring its needle-sharp teeth; and its kingdom was the dark hallway which she had to pass to go down again.

  "Master Toth!" She let go her skirts and stepped up to the door and hammered with her fist as her nerve began to fail her. "Master—"

  The air chilled and the door opened onto a dusty-windowed loft as mazed with books as all the rest of the house. And before the great windows at the far end of the loft a hunched figure perched on a stool poring over something on a reading stand. This someone turned, a spidery silhouette against the white light; and Melot felt the approach of the black thing at her heels and skipped up that step and inside in haste.

  The door closed behind her. The shadow in front of the windows got off its stool and Melot kept herself close to the door and flight, black thing or no.

  "Master Toth," she said in a voice not as bold as her voice in the halls below.

  The figure beckoned. She came, closer, closer through the tilting maze of books and papers, and her eyes accepted the light enough to make out this figure, which began to have color—the bottle-green coat, and dark hair (white, she had thought) and a lean, smooth face (wrinkled, she had expected) and a fine-boned hand (ink-stained) holding a pair of spectacles. Melot's step failed her and her mouth opened for more breath, because he was none of the things she had expected, no crabbed ancient huddled at his bookstand, but a tall young man with the features of a god, except his nose was a bit hooked and his eyes were set too close, so that they stared with a concentration that seemed to focus somewhere in the center of the subject's heart and not at its surface.

  "Well?" this young man asked. "Well?" This man looked at her and Melot Cassissinin felt naked in a way that had nothing to do with clothes, and burned in a way that had everything to do with his handsomeness and the look of those dark eyes which looked straight into her own. No man who looked like that looked that way at Melot's plain face, and all at once she flushed like a thirteen-year-old and felt the floor about to cave in to swallow herself and her purpose which could not possibly sustain such a stare. The voice so gentle was about to crack like a whip, was about to turn acid with impatience and sting her with wit her wit could not, in its present state, deal with.

  It was in such pinches Melot Cassissinin's mind went blank and the same blind stubbornness which had just driven her legs up the stairs took over her mouth. "Master Toth, would you be Master Toth?"

  "Dr. Toth, yes, I am, madam."

  She flushed again, hotter than before: and part of the heat was shame and part was rage, since he used a lady's word and hid behind that sober, careful fact to laugh at her. "I want a consul-tation." She had practiced this word. She got it out unstammered. She stared him in the eyes and refused to give way an inch, though he seemed taller than before and closer. "I haven't got much money. But it's not like you'd have to do more than tell me what to do." She fished at her collar and started to haul up her purse, never turning her back, and the heat burned her face, not from embarrassment of where the purse was, but from what little sum it held and what it had cost her. It was too little, she knew that it was too little, and she preferred his cold contempt to his laughter. Laughter would cut like a razor. Laughter would kill the rest of her soul and she would go away and kill a wizard or two. Or try. And she held the purse out, hating the way her hand shook; and she turned out the money, which was four large silver coins and three small ones. And two coppers.

  He left them in her hand and walked away from her to draw up another, smaller stool. "Sit down," he said, and
went and pulled his own stool out from the table.

  Melot came and sat, her left hand clenched on her money; her skirts spread about her on the dusty floor. She reached and swept back the hood of her cloak and stared at the doctor as she sat down on his tall stool. Tremors threatened her. She tried to keep her teeth from chattering, her throat from freezing up. This was a dangerous man, this was a man wizards were afraid of; and he sat there like a boy on a stableyard fence, his long arms about his knees, the spectacles in his fine fingers glinting with gold and glass in the dusty daylight from the window, his books abandoned on his desk.

  "I'm listening," he said. "Tell me your name. Tell me anything that seems important. We'll discuss a fee when I know what your case is."

  "My name is Melot Cassissinin." Now, now the stammer threatened in earnest and she fought it back with deliberation. "My brother's Gatan. Same name. He's got this trouble. This wizard got him, this other wizard, well, there's going to be this duel—"

  "Be specific. Tell me all the details."

  "This wizard—he, well, he was always hanging round the tavern, the Ram, over by the Rains—"

  "You're a long way from home."

  "—he, well, I work there; and he was always trouble, I mean, he got drunk and when he got drunk he was trouble, and my brother, well, he'd talk to him sometimes to calm him down, I mean, he was bothering me, he'd try, and my brother, well, he never liked that, but he's got a way about him, my brother does. He can charm the moon out of the sky, and he always knew how to handle this wizard—"

  "Tell me his name. I know a good many."

  "Othis."

  "Ah." The dark, close-set eyes flickered. "That one. Yes, I do know him."