Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  Gold-Arm had scalded off among his friends like a bull into a thicket.

  The hall hummed, and the curious Thei led us away.

  A room at the Dolphin’s Teeth. Three walls washed dark red and one lavender. Lamps in cages of leaded lavender glass hung up among bronze cages of tweeting pink and white birds, the whole ceiling a riot of light-flicker and bird-flicker. A Masrian fireplace, the length of the second red wall—an odd affair, since worship of Masrimas means a naked flame must not be seen to burn. The faggots were invisibly lighted behind an intricate lattice of iron, which presently altered to the color of the fire, and glowed with a snapping, venomous heat through the cool city nights of early summer. In the lavender wall was a single large window with a parchment blind to let down, thereby turning the room purple. Outside, the view of a small court, orange trees, and a marble basin containing striped fish.

  In this location I sat, and gave myself over to the modish appearance of the city. Aristocrat, merchant, bandit, all looked much the same, providing they could afford it. For it was an expensive thing to be in the mode.

  They chop off the hair at the shoulder and the beard close to the jaw, and curl what remains with reedlike tongs. For the bath, they show you forty essences and recommend forty others they do not have on them. Three tailors come with garments readymade and cloths uncut, and spit and bicker between themselves, and the jeweler slinks up and produces a silver collar, two hands broad and with lion epaulets, which you have reason to suspect has been recently around the neck of some pirate-prince just now sent to be measured for a piece of rope instead.

  At length the noon meal is brought in, and you discover platters full of gilded stewed seafood with raisin stones among quinces, and miniature joints that turn out to be baked shrews and their gods-know-what besides, and tall thimbles of black koois, the rum of the south. Everything, in short, that such luxury-loving sharks as Charpon might desire.

  These novelties so far came as a flamboyant credit, extended to each of Charpon’s officers. Where I was to pay in cash, I borrowed from Kochus, who accepted every fresh excursion into his coffers as insurance against my wrath.

  In the early afternoon Charpon presented himself, having turned meantime into as much of a dandy as I had, and with his cropped pate covered by a wig of blue-black curls.

  “I hear you’re sending my men on your business, sir,” he said. He looked me over, taking in the New World elegance, “And spending freely on my credit.”

  “Lord Vazkor has been using my money, Charpon,” cried Kochus, anxious to show loyalty to both his dangerous superiors.

  “Charpon,” I said, “if you wish to dissociate yourself from me, get out.”

  “You are aware, sir, that I am as much your slave as any of my Hessek rabble. I am only surprised, after your treatment at my hands, that you let me live.”

  “I have no wish to kill a man without cause,” I said. Through his eyes I saw pass, under the layer of caution and unstruggling surrender, the contempt for my supposed ethics and my lack of years, which even my sorcery had not cured him of.

  I had had sixteen days as the Vineyard sailed and I lived gratis in Charpon’s ship-house—sixteen days to formulate my plans. Which were simple enough. If my bitch-dam was here in the south, as my sense of precognition led me to believe, I would need funds and cunning to seek her. For sure she had hidden herself. Talk with the sailors had not revealed any notion of her; clearly she had not elevated herself to a position of influence, as in Ezlann when she was my father’s wife. Supposing her here, she might even have lost herself in some backwater of Bar-Ibithni itself. It seemed to me one way to flush her out was to make a stir, in my father’s name. I meant to become the sorcerer and healer Vazkor, and I meant to amass some wealth, too, putting my alarming gifts to work for me. With sufficient reputation and coin, my investigations could be facile. If she fled, or if I failed to come on her, I must simply cast the net more widely.

  2

  Charpon dismissed, I went out into the dove-wing heat of the city, which in late summer would swelter into a furnace. The Amber Road continues from the Market of the World along the western side of Hragon’s Wall, that bastion which divides the aristocratic portion of the metropolis from the vulgar.

  Bar-Ibithni was four cities. Its hub was the vast commercial area of port, docks, and markets, which clambered into suburbs across the uplands in the south. Beyond Hragon’s inner wall lay the fortified citadel on a natural hill called the Pillar, a military edifice situated within two square miles of bronze-faced outer battlements, and capable of accommodating seventeen jerds, somewhere in the region of seventeen thousand men. Away from the Pillar, to the east, stretched the Palm Quarter, its terraces of gargantuan temples and lotus mansions culminating in the Heavenly City, inaccessible to most—the Emperor’s stronghold.

  Meantime, beyond a tract of marsh far to the west, where it had formed like a scum around the ancient and abandoned docks, was all that remained of Old Hessek Bit-Hessee (popularly known as the Rat-Hole), a warren of slums worse than any that clotted the outskirts of the New Capital. Half underground, frequently fever-ridden, dark as dusk at noon and pitch-black by night, no man, warrior, or imbecile visited there unless it would cost his life to stay away.

  Amber Road ended near Winged Horse Gate, the main entrance through Hragon’s Wall to the Palm Quarter. Here, on the west side of the wall, the fashionable part of the commercial area began, squares with fountains and stucco houses with painted columns, and the Grove of the Hundred Magnolias. To the Grove those with the time to idle come at this hour of the day, to parade up and down the smooth lawns, and breathe in the perfume of dusty, full-blown magnolia blossom, while conjurers performed tricks and caged beasts roared in arbors.

  As Kochus and I, with the usual precautionary band of accompanying roughnecks, strolled up the street to the Grove, Lyo sprang out on us from a shadow.

  “Lord Vazkor,” he said urgently to me, speaking in his own Seemase tongue, which only I could entirely follow, “there shall be three.”

  While I had lounged in the hostelry, Charpon’s Hesseks had been about the town, on my orders, to spread word of the sorcerer. (My dealings with Gold-Arm the pirate had probably found their own voice.) Lyo, however, I had sent with a man who knew the undercurrents of Bar-Ibithni, to inquire after those sick in need of an extravagant cure.

  “Three,” I said. “Good.”

  He grinned; he had been running around on my errands, pleased with the sound chest he now had.

  “It’s to be this way, Lauw-yess. An old woman will approach you on the second lawn, selling sweets from a tray. She will stumble and fall in your path, crying out loudly so everyone can hear. She is well known and has a crippled spine, though she panders to it in order to win sympathy.”

  “Will she, then, not object to being healed?”

  “Ah no, Lauw-yess. She says if you are magician enough to do it, she will be able to exhibit herself as your handiwork, and get more coins than ever. She asks”—he grinned again—“if you could not make her young again, too.”

  “And how much did she cost us?”

  He pursed his mouth.

  “My apologies, Kochus,” I said. “Tell me the rest, Lyo.”

  “Once you have worked the miracle for her, another will come, a young man known to be blind in both eyes—he is the youngest son of the merchant Kecham, but his father cast him off when he would go live with a strumpet, and now the strumpet is the only one who cares for him. She will bring him on the cue, but she is worse than the old sweet-seller, wanted three pieces of silver for it, for she lacks faith. She will see. When that is done and the boy’s eyes healed, Lauw-yess, the crowd should be primed. But to be sure, I have passed the word among the gate porters of Phoonlin’s house—he is rich, half-Masrian, and superstitious, and his wife gossips with the maids and is more superstitious even than he. He has a rock near h
is bladder that is nearly killing him with the pain. He has called on priest-healers before, of the Masrian temples, and of the Old Faith, too, so I hear. If he knows there is a magician in the Magnolia Grove, he will go to discover. Then, after a wonder or two, he will throw himself down before you and beg.”

  “You did well,” I said. My other errand boy had by now come up, and Kochus paid them both without demur. We crossed Winged Horse Square and went through the old wall of the Grove, which had been a Hessek garden a hundred-odd years earlier.

  The lawns rose in four levels, flecked with pink magnolia shade and dotted with pools. A fine spice of dust smoked from the winding paths where the merchants and their like went up and down.

  There were few women on display. It was basic to Hessek morality that the female is a jewel best kept in a box. Ladies might venture out with their husbands only under cover of darkness, and then veiled from the nose to the ankle. Even the poorer women, of necessity abroad, covered half their faces and all their forms in this manner; only the Masrian girls went bare-faced, but they were mostly over in the Palm Quarter. Commercial Bar-Ibithni was a hotbed of mixed blood, Old and New, and though the men put on the draped breeches and the airs of Masrians, they preferred their women in the old style, safely tethered. But there was a predominance of masculine courtesans of Thei’s ilk. More than once, before I grew accustomed to it, my eye was caught by something too much a girl to be one.

  On the second lawn a red tiger was pacing about its post in an open enclosure above the path, staring with practiced hatred at the crowd of fools who patronized it. A single weak link in its alcum shackle would have meant a different game.

  Kochus said, “She’s coming, the old woman. Over there. I’ve seen her before, Lellih the crook-back.”

  I turned and looked for her. She would recognize me, from some description Lyo would have given her. Her hair was uncovered, gray and sparse, and her eyes sewed up in snarls of skin, but she also had hidden her lower face with a bit of a veil. She was tiny, shrunk little even for a Hessek, and her back rested over her like a small broken mountain. The wicker tray that she wheeled before her on a solitary wooden wheel was loaded with delicate confectionery that seemed to mock her unsightliness.

  She got within a couple of yards of me, calling in a thin wail for custom. Then I realized why she had demanded money, for part of her act was to be that all her trade of sweets be spilled, for dramatic effect, at my feet. As the sugar gems rolled, Lellih swung herself awkwardly down, flopped over in the grass, and began to shrill with a ghastly, damaged anguish.

  The idling crowd drew aside, alarmed by the proximity of this distress. Kochus, unable to restrain his mirth at the play, had begun to chuckle, till I warned him to be silent.

  A figure ran over, somebody’s drab, thin female servant, who presumably knew the old woman. She crouched down by her, trying to take her arm.

  I walked to where Lellih was folded on the lawn, screaming, and the servant girl stared up from dull eyes, and cried, “Don’t harm her, sir. She can’t help herself. She’ll be better in a moment, see if she isn’t.” She spoke in faulty Masrian for my special benefit, I supposed. I was of Masrian height and tanned very dark, and in my fashionable gear I probably seemed to be of pure conqueror-blood.

  “I don’t intend to harm her, girl. If this is Lellih the sweet-seller, I mean to heal her.”

  The servant gaped; the crowd around us hovered. Only one man laughed, catching my words. Lellih of the crooked back, meanwhile, turned her bird’s head and squinted at me with an eldritch wickedness.

  “How can you heal me?” she asked, having got it pat from Lyo, and managing besides to make her squeaking heard a fair distance. “All my years I have carried the gods’ curse on my shoulders.”

  I bent and lifted her up. She was like a wisp of brittle-dry straw, ready to flare alight in the heat of the day. Her head came no higher than my belt.

  “Don’t mock me, my fine lovely lad,” she shrilled out. “How can you heal a cripple who has been bent in a hoop since she was birthed?” Under her breath she maliciously added for me alone, “And just let’s see you do it, for all your boasting, you devil out of Hessu’s sea.”

  “Hush, granny,” I said softly. I put my right hand flat on her spine and my left under her chin, and I straightened her, as I might straighten a stick of green wood.

  I had felt little or nothing the other times. This time I felt a surge come out of my palms, and she screamed aloud once, in earnest, and her twisted spine crackled like cinders underfoot. Then she was upright, her burden gone and her rags hanging hollow on her back, and now her head reached to my rib cage.

  The crowd made its sound.

  The servant girl hid her already three-quarters-hidden face.

  It was Lellih who turned up her predatory eyes and said, “Is it as it seems? Is it? The pain went through me like red-hot whips, but now I am straight as a maid. Say, handsome priest-fellow, will you make me young, too?” She glinted at me, sly as a gray fox. “I was a fair sight when I was young, saving my hump, truly fair I was. Will you do it?”

  My flesh crept, as it had for a moment when Lyo first told me her words. If I could do that, pare off age, remake youth, that was a vision indeed to catch fame. But I was not sure. It seemed a thing no man, magician or priest, should aim at half unholy. It got me superstitious, where I was not, to think of it I said, nevertheless, and very quietly, “You’ve had your medicine for today; besides, I work no miracles without ultimate profit, granny-girl. If I did what you ask, you’d be my tame monkey thereafter, part of my sorcerer’s credentials, a peepshow; I waste nothing of my work.”

  “Make me a girl, and you can have me for whatever purpose you like,” and she plucked my sleeve and cackled and said, “Make me a virgin, too; seal me up again. And then break the seal yourself. Will you, will you, eh, handsome?”

  Kochus took her sticklike wrist and began to move her on. I said, “Gently.” She looked sufficiently fragile to break in his paws. She flashed her eyes at me for that, turned suddenly and started off over the lawn, trampling her sweets, leaving the wheeled tray and the servant who had run to help her, and the whole crowd gazing, crying out like a child as she went by, “See me, how straight I am, and how tall!”

  I had considered that the blind boy and his prostitute might prove reticent, having taken the money and disbelieved the promise, but they had come to taste the water, and finding it sweet, were ready to drink. Two or three seconds after, Lellih was gone, Kecham’s son was pulled forward by his doxy—not female, despite Lyo’s use of “she,” but another Thei, and not so winning. Kecham’s son had a conjunctival disease a good doctor could have cured, if he had been set to it in time, but I guess the girl-boy did not have the riches that buy physicians. It was an easy matter for me, nevertheless, and with no particular sense of passage. Yet when the boy found himself blind no longer, he started to weep, and his lover fell on his neck and wept too, which made a pleasant show.

  However, if I expected next some sight of the wealthy Phoonlin, with his kidney stone, I was to be disappointed. In fact, I had no need of him. The idlers in the Grove of a Hundred Magnolias, whispering and screeching, had bethought themselves of their own personal ailments, and were rushing on me from every side, kissing my boots and kneeling in Lellih’s ruined confectionery.

  I stood my ground and worked my magic. I must have saved three score lives at least in those hours, and stemmed a host of minor troubles, and still the crowd swelled and implored me. Word had spread thoroughly at last. Men came running, the well-to-do with the poverty-stricken, up Amber Road, through Winged Horse Square, and into the Grove.

  Kochus stood in a static green-faced panic at my side, protesting that we should be mashed beneath a berserk mob.

  My strength, greater it seemed than at any moment in my life before, buoyed me with a kind of cold exhilaration that had little to connect it
with the marvels I was performing. I had no unease at the size of my clamoring audience, nor any compassion. If anything, it was a variety of scorn that kept me there to lay my hands on them. Their miseries were like black worms wriggling at the bottom of some enormous depth, clearly perceived, far removed, valueless. Till I grew bored with the phenomena, I should remain.

  How I proposed to make my escape, I have no idea. Perhaps I would have metamorphosed suddenly from savior to destroyer, and struck a path for myself with killing energies. Instead, another authority resolved the puzzle.

  There came a yelling and thrusting from the edge of the mob nearest to the square and the Winged Horse Gate. Shortly, over this hubbub rang the commotion of iron hooves and a bellowing of horns.

  Near me, one of the Hessek crew who had remained at his post began to shout, “Jerdat! Jerdat!”

  Kochus gibbered, “Someone’s told the Citadel. They’ve smelled riot and turned out the garrison.”

  The crowd, no doubt aware of what was good for it, was parting down its center, and through this parting came galloping some two hundred mounted soldiers, the fifth portion of a jerd.

  The horses were all salt-white, one or two with a freckle of chestnut or black, and trapped in white. The jerdiers were dressed in the way of the Masrimas statue in the bay: boots, wide trousers, and pleated kilt of white leather, the latter reinforced by strips of white metal. Above the belt, their color changed. Red leather chest harness with pectoral plate of bronze, collar and shoulder-pieces of bronze, bronze sleeves to the elbow, and gauntlets of red kidskin. The spired bronze helmets were grafted onto a wig of brass mesh like the hair of some curious clockwork man-doll, and striking, mated to black beards. It was well known from the annals of the Masrians that their first military advantages were won its horseless lands because of this mode of kitting the cavalry. Each white to the waist and showy red and gold above and mounted on a white horse, they blended into the animal and looked, from a very slight way off, to be a race of four-legged equine monsters. Such days of glory, however, were gone.