by Victor Milán
“Did they say where she’d vanished, or what she was doing at the time?”
“All they knew was that she went abroad on the streets at night upon some errand, and was seen no more.”
“So the darklings enslave their victims somehow?”
“That was no slave I fought. Her thirst for my blood was genuine. Would a slave fight with such will?”
“Enchanted, then. Perhaps.” She shrugged. “Well, we’ve troubles enough of our own. Good night to you, Farlorn, and I’m glad to see you well.”
“Need you rush away?” He took her shoulders in his hands and began to knead her neck muscles with fine, strong fingers. “I was thinking we might share a bottle of wine together. Perhaps I could sing you a song to soothe your cares.”
She disengaged herself deftly from his grasp. “Just now I need a balm more powerful even than your words, and that’s sleep. Good night.” She undid the lock, guided Chen inside, and shut the heavy wooden door on his frustration.
She turned then, slumped against the wall, allowed herself to slide down until her rump touched the rush-strewn floor. “Damn him.”
Chen stood to one side, looking as out of place as a dragon in the tidy if threadbare chamber, with its modest furnishings, its whitewashed walls and dark-stained wood trim. “Why do you curse him?”
Zaranda shook her head. “To keep from cursing myself.” She picked herself up. “Now what we need to do is summon the help and have them bring round a straw pallet and some bedding for you. Also a tub and plenty of hot water.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re long overdue for a bath, my fine young friend.”
Chen straightened and in defiance shook back her clotted strands of hair. When she did that, she looked as if she might conceivably be pretty beneath that coat of grime. “Why should a mage be concerned with such matters?”
“A mage may do whatever she wishes,” Zaranda said. “And so can you. But, if you wish to stay with me—much less become my apprentice—you’ll have to be less a burden on my nose. Farlorn was right about the state of your hygiene.”
Chen scowled thunderously. Angry lights danced at the backs of her amber eyes, and sparks seemed to gather at the roots of her hair. Zaranda felt that ominous force gathering itself again.
She crossed her arms. “Go ahead, strike me to a cinder,” she said. “I won’t stop you. But you’ll never master magic if you can’t first master yourself.”
Chen glared at her with wild fury in her eyes, and for a moment Zaranda thought she had overplayed her hand. What alarmed her most was that she wasn’t alarmed.
Then Chen exhaled explosively, and it seemed her anger passed forth as well as her breath, leaving her small, wilted, and vulnerable. “I’m sorry,” she said, then began to cry.
“Poor dear,” Zaranda said. She opened the door to call for a servant.
Naked but for a skin of sweat, the top sheet discarded on the floor and the bottom rumpled into a damp relief map of the mountainous Starspire Peninsula, which guarded the harbor at Zazesspur from storms—Zaranda Star writhed in the grip of nightmare.
A score and more of hands reached out, it seemed, from the bed itself to seize her, pin her down despite her struggles, and caress her with obscene and unwelcome fervor. From somewhere immeasurably far below, that insidious Whisper came: Surrender, Zaranda. Give in. Your struggles are futile, your quest doomed. Give in, and you will reap greater rewards than that paltry scrap of nothing that you seek—greater than you can imagine.
Zaranda moaned low in her throat. What she found most hateful was that she was responding—not to the hissing insinuations of the Voice, but, in her loneliness and hunger, to the touch of phantom hands.
Hungry. Tired. Alone. Give in to Me, Zaranda Star, and you shall know satiation of every appetite, surcease sweet beyond imagining, and the comfort of Unity with something greater than yourself. Yield to Me, Zaranda; pure pleasure awaits.…
A scratching came at the bars that covered the opened windows; no innkeeper in Zazesspur was ingenuous enough to believe the mere fact that a room lay on an upper story offered any insuperable barrier to the city’s enterprising thieves. Zaranda snapped awake with the jarring suddenness of a catapult arm slamming into the stop. She had a woozy, disoriented moment, and a lingering hallucination of arms and hands, gray-fleshed and black-nailed, withdrawing into the wadded sheet.
She looked toward the window to see a hunched and winged black shadow crouching on the sill.
The great house looked as if it had been assembled out of bits and pieces of many architectural epochs, not all of them of this world. Zaranda paused in the midst of darkened Love Street to admire its many dubious splendors, though she had seen them before. Its facade was a riot of pilasters, friezes, a colonnaded portico with a single sapphire-blue lantern on top, windows wide, windows narrow, windows little more than slits, set without apparent regard for story, some lit, some not. The roof was a composite of planes and angles, chimneys and dormers of sundry styles and shapes; among forests of finials, gargoyles disported with caryatids, or perhaps menaced them.
Perhaps the oddest feature was that, taken whole, the effect was not of chaos—or rather, not pure chaos, but chaos with order imposed upon it, chaos channeled and restrained but not overmastered, leading to an effect both of harmony and tension. It seemed a natural thing, grown not built.
From all around her came rustlings and small murmurs from the shadows, skirting the edge of intelligibility without ever misstepping and falling into it. Zaranda felt no alarm. Wizard’s houses were that way, this one more than most.
Let’s get it done, she told herself. She squared her shoulders and marched up beneath the portico to double doors with stained-glass panels in their upper halves: on the left, the occupant’s rune, on the right a stylized balance scale. The glass doors announced that this was the residence of a powerful mage no less than the rune; no one else would dare offer thieves so alluring a target.
A tug on the golden chain of the bellpull produced not chimes, but a thin eldritch cry, which seemed to echo in distant corridors of time and space rather than the hallways of a house. Then it produced a wait, stretching itself into what seemed to Zaranda’s growing impatience like infinity before the doors were opened by a human footman, yawning and scratching himself through an indigo velvet waistcoat starred with a galaxy of diamond studs.
“Something?” he drawled, all indolence and insolence.
Zaranda set her lips and handed him the object that the winged black faceless being hunkered on her windowsill had pressed into her palm not an hour before—a glazed tile, palm-sized, displaying the selfsame sigil as the left door: a dragon’s eye in black, with what seemed a genuine star sapphire inset as the pupil.
“Huh,” he said, and ushered her in with a perfunctory bow. “Down the hall to the end, then past the stairs to the chamber with the open door. Can’t miss it.” He reseated himself on a stool with a red velour cushion, and subsided instantly to snores.
Entertaining but briefly the notion of kicking the stool from beneath him, Zaranda followed his directions. The hallway was brightly lit, with white walls and gilt trim. Doors opened left and right, giving glimpses of emphatically decorated parlors in which strange and richly clad hunched beings, of a generally humanoid cast, stood with heads together in apparent conversation. Only a few favored Zaranda with so much as a glance as she passed. Nonetheless, she had the sense of eyes following her—given the existence of such creatures as beholders, not a comfortable feeling.
The hallway debouched into an open space or shaft. A quick eye flick showed galleries mounting upward until they blurred into shadow at a seemingly higher level than the house’s highest point visible from without. Stairs from the floor immediately above, balustraded with obsidian, descended to the left and right. Zaranda turned left, availing herself of the chance to peek back the way she had come. As expected, she saw nothing but the dozing doorman.
Proceeding, sh
e came into a chamber. The walls were panels of quartz, milky white, and running through them sparkling veins that might have been gold. A soft, diffuse light shone from them. There was no furniture as such, only stands and cases and pedestals, likewise all of polished stone: jadeite, nephrite, agate, feldspar and onyx, glabrous gray chalcedony. Like the walls, some of them glowed gently. They held gems and semiprecious stones in fabulous array, some polished, some rough, turquoises, amethysts, topazes, rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and everywhere sapphires. There were sapphires of yellow and gray and orange, sour-pallid green and faint pink; sapphires of every hue of blue, from the pale, heartless blue of the sky in the Savage North at high noon on Midwinter Day, to stones of indigo so rich as to appear black.
The only item in the room not stone was its occupant. A woman stood with her back to Zaranda Star. She was a few fingers shorter than Zaranda and slender as a kobold’s hope of redemption. Raven hair hung straight down the back of a gown of velvet the same shade as the midnight-blue star sapphire globe, as large as an orange, which she held contemplatively in one slim-fingered hand.
“You did not come to see me,” the woman said, replacing the sapphire sphere in its holder, carved from onyx in the shape of a claw, which stood atop a pedestal of self-luminous quartz. “That’s why I had to summon you thus, in the midst of night.”
She turned. Her face was as pale as marble and shaped like an idealized heart; her hair grew down in a widow’s peak. Her eyes matched her gown and the globe in her hand. Her nose was thin, and so were her lips, features so perfect that the first impression was that she was plain. In fact she was beautiful, but her beauty was not the sort to inspire passion, nor the kind to haunt dreams, such as was often found in elvish folk. Rather it was the kind of beauty to inspire awe.
As to her age, Zaranda would have said she looked mature, but could have hazarded no further guess. Certainly the flawless features showed no wrinkles nor sign of drying on the high slanted cheekbones. She seemed ageless and precise as a drawn blade.
“I didn’t have that which you bade me bring you,” Zaranda said with a shrug. She did not bother mentioning that the sorceress might as easily have summoned her in the daytime. Nyadnar had small patience with complaint, and heard no irony but her own. “There seemed small point in paying a social call.”
“You were wise to forbear to waste my time. What do you plan now?”
Zaranda set her lips against her reflexive reply, which was to ask what business the sorceress had with hers. Unlike her wealth and age, Nyadnar’s patience wasn’t legendary. Rumor in Zazesspur, where she had allegedly dwelt, off and on, for centuries, held that she was as powerful as Elminster. Zaranda doubted that, but she was sorceress enough herself to sense that Nyadnar’s power was great indeed; in the crawling of her skin she could sense enormous dweomer seeming to hover about the sorceress, as when Chen’s emotions threatened to run away with her. Zaranda feared her, and for that reason had to guard against her own first reflex, which was defiance. The mage was not such to be either truly a friend or truly a foe of anyone, but her goodwill was much more to be coveted than her displeasure.
“At the moment I have few plans, but many possibilities,” Zaranda said.
“You are too scattershot in your approach to life, child. Too given to disorder. You never truly had the discipline to be a mage.”
“I lacked the patience, perhaps,” Zaranda said tartly. “But I managed to advance so long as I stayed with it. And then I became a warrior, and had a certain amount of success at that. That’s two careers I’ve made for myself—not bad for someone so disorderly.”
“And now you’ve gone and wandered into a third profession,” Nyadnar said imperturbably. “One in which you’ve not been thriving of late.”
“I got your cursed head for you!” Zaranda flared, feeling cheeks grow hot. “I winkled it away from the Red Wizards of Thay and brought it safely all the way here—listening to its sophomoric suggestions and innuendo every step of the way, I might add.” She made herself inhale deeply and struggled to be calm.
“Where is it now?”
“It seems that Baron Hardisty and his advisor Armenides have taken a personal interest in it. It is in their possession now, in the Palace of Governance.” Zaranda tried not to slump. “I suppose you’ll talk to them of buying it?”
“No such thing. You display again your propensity for irrationality. I do not wish my interest in the artifact advertised. Why else do you think I waited to summon you until such a time as it would seem nothing more than my well-known attention to all that goes on within the city walls?”
That was the way of Nyadnar: her eyes and spies were everywhere, but her actions, if any, she kept well hidden. As far as anyone could tell she hoarded facts for their own sake, as she did gems.
She asked for Zaranda’s own account of what had happened to her recently. Zaranda gave it succinctly. Then she hesitated, and biting at a ragged scrap of cuticle on her thumb, said, “If the council won’t give it back—”
“They won’t.”
“—then I could take it back. I stole it from the Red Wizards; I can steal it again.”
“That would not be acceptable. First, I do not deal in stolen goods; despite your flippant reference, you considered your removal of it from the Wizards as a legitimate act of war against long-standing foes, and so do I. Second, while the baron and Armenides may not be as potent as the Zulkir Baastat, neither are they as complacent. You lack the ability to recover it by stealth or force. If you failed and were compelled to talk, it would inconvenience me.”
She turned away, and her attention seemed to travel off among her treasures. Zaranda stood for a while, feeling a certain sardonic amusement at the blithe way Nyadnar talked about the possibility of her being put to torture. Eventually she turned to go. Nyadnar had no more use for the formalities of greeting and leave-taking than a cat.
“A moment.” The sorceress’s dry, husky voice stopped Zaranda at the door. “You recently acquired a new follower. The foundling girl from the stable. Why did you take her in?”
“Perhaps because I was a starveling orphan myself, once upon a time.”
“And what will you do with her?”
A shrug. “I’ve cleaned her up, which was a necessary first step. If she’ll let me, I’ll civilize her. And then—who knows?”
“Will you teach her magic?” She was gazing at Zaranda again, eyes huge and bottomless as midnight seas.
“Perhaps. If she learns some kind of self-control. The powers she has already could do real hurt to her or others. Maybe if she studies a bit of formal magic she’ll calm down. Why the interest?”
“These wild talents of hers, this innate ability to gather and—however ineptly—manipulate raw dweomer …” Nyadnar picked up the sapphire sphere and held it forth. “Our world is a system in dynamic equilibrium, in which opposing forces strive against each other without one or another gaining the upper hand. Someone with such attributes as you describe might have the potential to throw the system badly out of balance, to destroy, perhaps, that equilibrium. Should that occur, the results would be—”
She let the globe fall. Zaranda gasped and took a step forward. Just before it hit the floor, the great gem seemed to dissolve into a cloud of dark mist.
“—unimaginable.” The mist swirled briefly around the sorceress’s feet, hidden by the hem of her gown, and then began to twine upward about the glowing quartz pedestal to the top, where it coalesced slowly back into a flawless sapphire sphere.
“You have any advice you’d like to share with me about how to deal with her?” Zaranda asked, a little unsteadily. “I mean, so I don’t inadvertently help her blow up the universe or anything?”
“You must find your own way,” Nyadnar said serenely, stroking the now-intact gem like a favored pet.
“I appreciate the implicit vote of confidence,” Zaranda said. “But there’s something you should know.”
“Which is?”
&n
bsp; “Before all this is over I may do a little unbalancing of my own. And while I think the universe is pretty safe from my efforts, I may just destroy an equilibrium or two.”
“Perhaps,” the sorceress said.
“You have been told your case would be handled via the proper procedures, Countess Morninggold,” Duke Hembreon, the most powerful member of the city council, told Zaranda as they stood in morning sunlight in his garden. He spoke the title as he might the words spoiled meat or gangrenous limb, as it were describing a state he found distasteful but was powerless to affect. “I hardly see what you expect of me.”
In his day the duke had been a puissant warrior. But age had caught him up. His once-powerful frame was shrunken and stooped, his hair and immaculately trimmed beard were white as a gull’s wing, and his blue eyes were red-rimmed and prone to prolonged bouts of blinking. Nonetheless, his gaze was clear, and his voice firm. He wore a simple cerulean gown and a soft bladder hat of the same color.
“Perhaps a measure of mercy, Your Grace,” Zaranda said. “I stand to lose everything, and have committed no crime.”
“Ah, but that remains to be seen, pending the appropriate hearings and investigations.” He held up a long, liver-spotted finger. “Mercy is admirable, but must not be allowed to hamper justice.”
The duke’s palace was of modest size, showing four blank whitewashed walls to the world, though a pitched roof of gray slates saved it from being as slablike as the much larger Palace of Governance that loomed not far to the west. The garden occupied a courtyard in the very center. It was quite cozy with greenery, the smells of leaves and early spring flowers and the water bubbling from a small fountain in the middle. Such a plan got one looked down upon by the neighbors, regardless of one’s rank or pretension, for not sharing one’s garden with others, though doubtless it had come in handy during the troubles.
