by Ian Irvine
After days of searching, using a variety of spells, Maigraith had located him in the obvious place, his long-abandoned city of Alcifer. She had invented a tiny, undetectable spy portal, directed several of them to the parts of Alcifer he frequented most, and had been spying on him day and night ever since. Feasting her eyes on him, laughing and weeping and making plans for the future. And brooding about her aged face and scrawny figure.
Aviel had never seen Maigraith so emotional, so unlike her cold, controlling herself. She was like a schoolgirl in love. A schoolgirl who looked sixty-five – both ridiculous and pathetic.
If Rulke had found someone else, she would not stand for it, but what would she do? It was bound to involve the dark and perilous spells Maigraith had found in the spell vault. More importantly, what would she require of Aviel?
She climbed off her stool and kneaded her ankle. With all the standing, and constantly carrying buckets of water up four flights of stairs, it never stopped aching. Perhaps she would be better off having her bad foot amputated and getting a wooden one, like Klarm. She imagined the knife hacking through skin and flesh, the saw rasping through bone, leaving behind flecks of bloody sawdust and smears of marrow, and flinched. Be happy with what you have, fool!
Maigraith was seated at her table, staring into a pulsing circular spy portal, no larger than a finger ring, suspended in the air before her. She was banging her clenched fists against her head, and the pentagonal mirror she had spent the past week staring into lay on the floor, smashed to fragments.
‘Something the matter?’ Aviel said from the doorway.
Maigraith sprang up, her eyes blazing and thin mouth twisted in bitterness. She grabbed Aviel’s wrist and hauled her, hopping and dragging her twisted foot, across the room.
‘Sit!’ She forced Aviel into the chair. ‘Look!’ Maigraith shoved Aviel’s face towards the spy portal.
Rulke, bare-chested and hair tangled as if he had come from his bath, was leaning back at one end of a long sofa, smiling. What a specimen of manhood he was; muscular; powerful; vastly competent. Thoughtful at times. Generous, Aviel had been told. Her eyes rested on the pair of purple scars curving across his side. Vulnerable, too, and for a second she felt the lure of him.
She reminded herself that he was a very dangerous man with a dark reputation. A man Maigraith considered her own.
Rulke leaned forwards and spoke to someone. Aviel did not hear what he said; the spy portal did not transmit sound. Maigraith seethed, reached over Aviel’s shoulder to move the spy portal, and a striking woman sprang into view at the other end of the sofa.
She looked about thirty, with flawless creamy skin and remarkable – no, unbelievable – hair. Each thread shimmered in reds and greens and blues as she moved, as if it had been drawn from polished black opal. Aviel had never seen anything like it.
The woman was no taller than Maigraith but extremely curvaceous. A short blouse of grey silk exposed a slender waist; knee-length pants of the same material clung to broad hips and full thighs. Her slim calves and small feet were bare, and she was laughing at whatever Rulke had said.
‘The scheming trollop!’ Maigraith exploded, almost choking on her bile. ‘Prancing around half-naked, flaunting herself. How dare she try to steal my man!’
Aviel thought that was a bit rich, since Rulke probably assumed Maigraith to be a hundred years dead – if he thought about her at all.
‘The bitch must have ensorcelled him! Of himself, Rulke would never go back on his word.’
‘Did he swear to take no woman but you for the rest of his life?’ Aviel said mildly.
Maigraith caught Aviel’s blouse in her left fist and raised the right as if to strike her. ‘We swore to each other, forever!’
‘They may just be friends.’
‘No woman can ever be just friends with Rulke. They always want more, and she isn’t having him.’
‘It looks very much as if she does have him,’ Aviel said, to provoke her.
‘When she’s gone, the ensorcellment will break and he’ll be mine again.’
Aviel shivered. ‘What do you mean, when she’s gone?’
‘Never you mind. How’s the nivol going?’
‘I’ve done as much as I can do without the Archeus. When you get it, I can complete the work in a few days.’
Maigraith grunted. ‘Good, because I’ve got another job for you, and it’s urgent.’
‘What?’
‘A rejuvenation potion. It’ll take me back to the age of thirty … thirty-five at most.’
‘Does it work? And is it safe?’
‘That’s for me to worry about. Your job is to make it.’
‘You know how to make potions. Why don’t –?’
‘It’s a scent potion. My nose isn’t keen enough.’
Maigraith handed over two leaves of thick, rose-coloured paper, likely torn from the small book she had found in the spell vault.
Aviel read it. ‘There are dozens of ingredients. I’ll need to find a lot of different scents, odours, stenches and reeks.’
Maigraith wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s not hard to find stenches and reeks in this festering place. Give me a list.’
‘I have to collect each source material and personally extract the scent or odour, before I can blend the potion. The method has to be followed exactly, or …’
‘Your guards will escort you to the sources of the scents and reeks you require. You will begin in the morning.’
The following evening Aviel was still in her workshop, extracting the scent from a barrel of offensively rotten onions, when Maigraith returned bearing a large lead crystal flask containing an oily, yellow-green fluid that wisped up at the wired-on stopper as if to force it out. In an instant, Aviel was hurled back more than two centuries to Rogues Render –
She was trapped in a rendering vat with Lumillal, an all-powerful ghost vampire intent on stealing her life force to bolster his own, and he was reaching out to her.
Your life force is very rich, he said, drooling strands of glowing plasm. It might even be enough to bring me back to life as a real vampire.
Aviel felt an agonising pain in the top of her head and the cast iron vat glowed like a yellow searchlight.
I’m taking my freedom now!
He lunged at her with open hands, ripped bundles of her life force from her and wound them furiously. The strength drained out of her; she staggered and nearly fell. The tip of the sword grounded on the bottom of the vat then jerked back in her hand so hard that she was forced upright. Her back struck the side of the vat and the blade in her hand rose of its own volition.
You can’t touch me, Lumillal said mockingly.
‘Get a grip!’ said Maigraith, setting the flask on the bench and shaking Aviel, and Rogues Render was gone.
The yellow-green fluid attacked the stopper again, forcing it up against the wires. She was shaking so badly she had to sit down. Maigraith snapped a command and the fluid went still.
‘Archeus of Eidolon,’ she said, head tilted to one side. ‘A necromantic fluid of vast potential and a thousand uses.’
‘All dark,’ said Aviel, scrunching herself up and trying not to think of Rogues Render or Lumillal, though she would not be able to escape the memories when she used the Archeus. ‘Where did you get it? No, don’t tell me.’
‘You can get anything in Thurkad if you know who to ask.’
The days dragged by. Aviel carried out the final steps on nivol during the daylight hours; she was not game to work on it at night. In the evenings, with considerable reluctance, she prepared the first scents and reeks for the rejuvenation potion.
Maigraith was deluded in thinking she could get Rulke back. Even if the potion did succeed in making her younger and restoring her fertility, Aviel could not imagine it working on Rulke. Anyone who had come back from the dead, two centuries later, must have moved on.
Though Maigraith knew the stage Aviel was up to, and that it would take more than a month to complet
e the rejuvenation scent potion, she was constantly demanding progress reports, sometimes two and three times in an hour.
The rest of her time she spent her days, and probably her nights, obsessively watching Rulke and the unknown woman through one spy portal or another. Every day Maigraith looked older and more haunted, and in the brief moments when she wasn’t spying, she was scowling at her face in the largest shard of the broken mirror, and wailing.
‘It’s over. I’ve lost him. I want to die.’
It was pitiful, but Aviel was unmoved. Maigraith had destroyed too many lives. And she had never given a damn about anyone else.
One morning Aviel reached her workshop at sunrise, feeling unusually tired, and the grimoire, which she always kept closed, lay open in the final section, the Forbidden Potions. The scent potion she saw there was one of the blackest of all – a potion to turn a clever person into a drooling imbecile. She stared at it, shivering. Surely not even Maigraith would do such a thing?
Yes, she would. Maigraith was looking for ways to get rid of her rival, permanently.
When the batch of nivol was complete Aviel decanted it into the diamond phial with exquisite care and twisted in the stopper. Maigraith took the phial without a word of thanks, sealed it in a small lead cylinder with a ruby set in each end, that in a slightly larger cylinder made of brass and encircled with a pair of silver rings, and that in an unadorned cylinder turned from a piece of red-and-black-streaked ironwood. She cast a series of spells on it, slipped it in a pocket and returned to her spy portal.
‘I thought you’d be off to destroy the summon stone,’ said Aviel, who was looking forward to Maigraith being away.
‘What’s done with it is none of your affair,’ said Maigraith, not looking up.
In the morning she was gone. She returned the evening of the following day and handed back the empty diamond phial. The team she had led to destroy the summon stone had found it almost drained, as if the enemy had drawn most of its power. Maigraith had dissolved it with nivol to make sure it could not vanish and regenerate in another place.
‘That’s that, then,’ said Aviel. ‘I’ll never have to worry about it again.’ It felt as if all her work had been to no purpose.
She washed the diamond phial out seventeen times, to be absolutely sure the last dram of nivol was gone, packed it away and went back to the rejuvenation potion.
And Maigraith to her spying.
That evening, Aviel crept in and peered over Maigraith’s shoulder. The curvaceous woman wore a clinging, powder-blue gown and was brushing her opaline hair. Her fingernails and toenails had the same shimmering play of colours. Aviel did not think it was painted on, though how could her nails be made of real opal? Even more improbably, how could her hair be opal?
‘Who is she?’ Aviel wondered.
‘The bitch’s name is Lirriam,’ Maigraith said bitterly, ‘and I don’t think she comes from Santhenar. But how did she get here?’
Aviel remembered something about Rulke that Maigraith did not know. In Alcifer, after they had freed Rulke from the statue and the stasis spell, he had extracted the first part of Sulien’s lost nightmare.
A child of a lesser race can defeat us if her mighty gift is allowed to develop –
Then Rulke had spun around, staring into nowhere, as if he had seen or heard something they had not.
‘Incarnate?’ he had whispered. ‘Incarnate!’
And he had vanished.
Not even Flydd had known what Incarnate meant, though when Maigraith finally located Rulke in Alcifer he had been alone. Lirriam had not turned up until days later. How had he found her? Or had she found him? If she did not come from Santhenar, where was she from and how had she got here? More importantly, what did she want?
The following morning Aviel woke late and exhausted, though she had gone to bed early and slept soundly. It was a struggle to keep her eyes open … and why did her dreams smell of hoopis?
She checked the little box Klarm had given her, but it had not been opened. The only other place she had smelled hoopis was in the perfume Maigraith wore when she was at her lowest –
Aviel rose hastily, but the moment she stood up her ankle began to ache, as if she had been standing up for hours. An unpleasant suspicion stirred. Had Maigraith cast an enchantment on her when she slept, to compel her to do something Maigraith could not do herself? Perhaps to make a scent potion so dark that Aviel would never agree to it?
A scent potion to rid Maigraith of her rival! And she had to do it secretly; Rulke must never find out.
But if she was compelling Aviel to make such a dreadful scent potion, would it corrupt her too?
She could not allow herself to be dragged down into the dark. She had to break Maigraith’s power over her, forever. But how was she to do that without going further down the dark path she yearned for, yet feared?
28
A Grasping Trollop
Aviel locked her door that night, and it was still locked in the morning, but again she woke exhausted and with her ankle aching.
Then, that afternoon, she realised that more than an hour had passed with no memory of what she had done in that time, though her workshop had a faint smell like rotting meat that she recognised at once – the stench of the stinkhorn fungus. It was a common ingredient in dark scent potions, though she had never used it.
Dare she confront Maigraith? No, she might use a more powerful spell next time, one to permanently rob Aviel of will. She was just a tool to Maigraith, one to be thrown away when it was no further use.
But she had to know what was going on. Secretly, in times when she knew Maigraith would be away for hours, Aviel began to craft a memory-restoring scent potion.
‘Where is the strumpet from?’ Maigraith was muttering, the next time Aviel passed her salon.
She always called Lirriam a strumpet or trollop or man-stealing bitch, though Aviel had seen no evidence that she and Rulke were more than friends. Maigraith had to demean her rival to make her easier to destroy, in the same way that the Merdrun thought of all other peoples as subhuman.
‘What does he see in the fat cow?’ spat Maigraith.
Aviel wasn’t having that. ‘Lirriam isn’t fat! She’s voluptuous. Bounteous. Any man –’
Maigraith exploded. ‘What would you know about it, you virginal little runt?’
Aviel suppressed the retort, Hag! ‘Every time you demean Lirriam,’ she said pointedly, ‘you also demean the man you love.’
For a moment she thought Maigraith was going to slap her.
After an inner struggle, she said stiffly, ‘I accept the rebuke. But clearly, she’s a grasping trollop, out for what she can get. She cares nothing for the noble purpose of Rulke’s life. Where did she come from, anyway?’
Aviel shrugged. ‘Why don’t you go to Alcifer and find out?’
‘I dare not risk Rulke –’
Aviel could guess why Maigraith had stopped. She dared not risk Rulke seeing her as a haggard old woman. Perhaps she feared that, even if the rejuvenation potion made her young and fertile again, he would always see her as she was now.
Colour rose up her thin face and she cried, ‘I’ll kill the bitch! How dare she rob me of what is mine?’
‘Got to get back to your rejuvenation potion,’ Aviel said hastily, and fled.
Her own memory potion was ready for blending, the numbered scent phials concealed among more than a hundred others in her racks. She wasn’t game to label them with their names; if Maigraith compared the names of the new scents to the methods in Radizer’s grimoire she would soon deduce the name of the potion.
Aviel checked down the corridor. Maigraith was not in sight. Aviel began to blend the twelve individual scents into a tiny bottle, mixing in the scents one by one, and each time shaking the bottle the prescribed number of times. She capped the bottle, turned it up and down seven times, removed the cap and took a deep sniff.
The first memory hit her so fast that she barely had time to cap the
bottle again.
Maigraith at Aviel’s door. Unlocking it in the early hours, touching her on the forehead and whispering a compulsion.
Come. Remember nothing of what we are about to do. Afterwards, never speak of it.
The compulsion began to fog her memories. She took another sniff, which cleared the fog, closed her fist around the bottle and sat down to relive the night.
In Aviel’s workshop, Maigraith had handed her part of a papyrus scroll. ‘Make this!’
‘What is it?’ It was bound to be dark, otherwise why the secrecy?
Maigraith pressed a fingertip to Aviel’s forehead and she felt a dull ache there. ‘Make it!’
She wanted to disobey but had no will of her own.
The top and bottom of the scroll had been torn off. All she saw was a list of scents, odours, reeks and stenches, nineteen of them. Many were horrible, with the smells of stinking corpse flower, cat vomit and rotting toad being the worst.
‘I don’t have any of these,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to find and extract the lot.’
Maigraith looked down at the papyrus. ‘We’ll start with the easiest: blood of a two-century-old virgin.’
‘How is that even possible –?’
Maigraith picked up a small tube and, before Aviel could move, thrust the point of a knife into her bare upper arm and pressed the tube to the flow until it was half full of blood. Maigraith sniffed the tube, capped it and put it in a rack. ‘Next!’
Aviel was too shocked to speak. She stood there, feeling faint as the blood ran down her upper arm and dripped off her elbow.
‘You are a virgin?’ said Maigraith.
‘Of course I am,’ Aviel whispered. ‘But I’m only sixteen …’
‘Surely I don’t have to spell it out.’
Aviel pressed her hand over the wound, which was far more painful than it should have been.
‘Oh, give it here!’ said Maigraith.
She wiped the blood away, pushed the two sides of the wound together and pressed the flap down. Her lips moved as she subvocalised a healing charm and the wound slowly sealed itself, leaving a red-brown scab. But the pain grew steadily worse until Aviel’s head spun; she could barely stand up.
