Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  Canny toppled over, hit the boards of the porch hard with her arm and knees and head. Her sight went black, and then filled with silvery sparks. For a time she went away. She was swimming in the dark. Then she was looking at stepping-stones made of patches of moss. The ewe hurried toward her over the moss, her flanks heaving. There was a deep roaring, and the ewe was swallowed by a wall of fire—or perhaps turned into one—flame, blue at its edges, and orange-white at its heart.

  Canny came back to herself and yelled.

  “Go on. Relieve your feelings,” said the man.

  She found herself in the front hallway, lying in a splash of colored light. He was standing over her. He put his fingers in his ears and waited, looking fastidious, while she shouted for help. She gave up only when she finally got hold of herself.

  He unblocked his ears and said, “Finished?”

  Canny nodded.

  “You just lie there,” he said. “I have some work I want to get on with.”

  “I was watching you working before,” she said.

  “I don’t want to have a conversation with you, girlie.”

  He left her. After a time she could hear him in the kitchen. There was the sound of a shovel chopping into a coal bin. The iron doors of the range opened and closed, handles squeaking and locking with a metallic bite. A little later she heard him at the kitchen bench, jointing the rabbit—heard knife, chopping board, gristly resistance. He went outside for a time and then returned. A tap ran. He cut carrots and shelled peas—she could hear the pop and unzip of the pods. He’d switched off the radio in the parlor and switched on another in the kitchen. He was listening to a radio play on the National Program—two fruity-sounding people having a brittle argument.

  Canny rolled over to check something. Yes, all the light fittings on the walls of the house were gas. Brass fittings, with woven asbestos mantles, and a wing nut to raise and lower the flame.

  Canny heard water coming to the boil and then the hollow splash of stuff dropped into a pot. These were all orderly, purposeful, domestic noises. Noises she should have been reassured by. And just because she’d happened on him skinning a rabbit he’d been tenderly feeding a few hours before, that didn’t mean he was dangerous. People raised rabbits to eat. It was a frugal thing to do, particularly for a country person who couldn’t just dash down to the local butcher. He had blood on his hands, but everything else he did was civilized in a countrified way—except tying her up and leaving her lying in the hallway.

  After an hour he reappeared. He asked whether she was comfortable.

  “No.”

  “Good.” He opened the front door. The sun was past the zenith and sinking toward the horizon. It came at an angle into the hall.

  “If there’s no electricity, how do your radios work?” she asked.

  “How indeed,” he said.

  “And there’s no evidence of a gas line up the hill.”

  “There’s a gas house behind the main house. It’s carbide gas, made of carbide and water.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  He looked at her and lifted an eyebrow. “A girl who is good at chemistry,” he said. Then, “Electric light is cold. I prefer gaslight.”

  He had a couple of pencils in his hand. He put one on the floor and straightened to face the wall. He looked at the shape his shadow made, and, with practiced movements, he sketched around its outline. He even drew his drawing hand. Then he sat down and made a beginning at the skirting board. He began to fill in the life-size shape of his shadow, very slowly, with little blocks made of six vertical strokes of the pencil, with a seventh, horizontal, running through them.

  Canny had twisted herself around to watch. She recognized these marks from the movies as a prisoner’s calendar, each block representing a week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday—all crossed by Sunday.

  “Are you doing that for my benefit?” she asked.

  “In what way would it benefit you?”

  “I mean, are you doing it to scare me?”

  “Does it scare you?”

  Canny didn’t answer.

  He was quiet for a time, and then finally said, “I do this every day.”

  Of course he didn’t. The wall showed no sign of having been drawn on before, or painted over. She didn’t believe him but still asked, “Why do you do it?”

  “How about you tell me why the spell on your forehead has such lousy grammar? Is Iris finally going senile?”

  She didn’t know how to answer.

  He went on drawing, his back turned to her, his pencil scratching and scratching. He said softly, “I sketch around my shadow because my shadow tells me I’m still here. I like to keep a count of how long.”

  The sun coming through the doorway moved onto Canny’s face. She closed her eyes and dozed for a time. When she woke up the sun had set and the gas was lit, giving off a soft yellow-white light. Moths were circling the incandescent mantle. The man was still working on the figure, which was filled in all the way up to its chin. He seemed to sense that Canny was awake. He didn’t look at her, but said, “So they brought you back to the valley to spy on me. Didn’t they tell you what would happen?”

  “That you’d catch me?”

  “I might not have. But you’ve mastered the Alphabet, so you should know as well as they do that since the second Great Spell is theirs, not yours, you’ve no protection against it. The longer you spend here the more likely it is that the spell will suck all your skill out of you—your skill, and your life force, maybe beyond recovery.”

  “They didn’t tell me that,” she said, wondering how she could get him to tell her exactly who “they” were.

  “Whose are you? A niece of Iris’s perhaps?”

  “I don’t exactly know who I am,” she said. “But I have a brother here. Sholto. He’ll be terribly worried about me. You have to let me go.”

  “I don’t have to do anything. My quota of things I have to do is filled up for life. It’s like I’m in a rest home, and incapable. I don’t actually have to do anything else—ever.”

  “You said you had work.”

  He glanced over her shoulder, and Canny shivered at the sight of the white reflected points of light in the center of his black eyes. “I have put on a stew, which you will have none of,” he said. “I’ve performed my little ritual with the shadow calendar.”

  “My brother will be looking for me.”

  The man put down his pencil and sat beside her. He left the figure incompletely filled in. She tilted her head at it and said, “It’s not finished.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not full of days.” Then, in a tone of musing anticipation, “I hope your brother will come looking for you. Then he can join us. It’s nice to have company. And it’s fun to test people’s professed loyalties. It’s a good game, I seem to remember.” He put his head on one side, remembering. His face was blank and innocent as he mused, and more beautiful than ever. He seemed to go away, and come back, and then notice her again. Without ceremony he picked her up and carried her into a dark room and deposited her on a couch. When he turned up the gas and pressed the flint striker that lit the flame, Canny saw that the sofa was made of cow’s hide, with hair still on it. The room was a library. Its shelves had glass doors. The books were old, leather- and cloth-bound, though there were piles of magazines on the short counter where the shelves for large books ended and the smaller shelves went on up the wall.

  The man left the room for a moment and came back with a steaming plate of stew, which he ate, with great enjoyment, in front of her.

  Canny’s stomach rumbled and her mouth filled with saliva.

  He sucked the little rabbit bones, relishing them, then he licked his fingers and leaned back in his chair. He sighed with satisfaction.

  “I don’t suppose you have many guests,” Canny said.

  He laughed. “You’re so funny. Very cool. That was a very polite, prissy question.”

  “I am cool. Quite famousl
y—though, to tell the truth, I haven’t appreciated it before now.” She wriggled, but the nothing visible binding her wouldn’t relent.

  He slid off the couch and shuffled across the floor to her. He bent close and stroked her cheek with a tacky, rabbity finger. “But you are scared?” he said, as if he needed her to reassure him she was.

  “Yes. I’d be stupid not to be. Though mostly I’m worried about Sholto. He’s kind of bossy, but I don’t like to cause him anxiety.”

  “So Iris didn’t tell you not to use names?”

  “Oh,” said Canny.

  “That’s one of the first lessons. No names. I know everything is pared back to basics, but surely they must still teach that?”

  Canny thought. It was hard to think because his stroking finger had moved from her cheek to her mouth. She liked the feeling of his finger passing across her lips—and, at the same time, she wanted to bite him.

  “You don’t look scared,” he said.

  “My face doesn’t move. Bad forceps delivery. Damaged nerves.” Canny silently thanked her lying mother.

  For a moment she thought she detected a look of delicate sympathy on his face. That made her wonder whether some of his craziness was put on. He had her tied up and wouldn’t feed her, but was sorry to hear she had damaged facial nerves. “Um,” she said stupidly, “about the names—they do rhyme. That’s a kind of camouflage, isn’t it?”

  “It makes it hard to address ill will to any one person if there’s several of them with same-sounding names. Curses are dim-witted and have a poor sense of direction. So—I suppose if there is a Sholto, there’s a Waldo?”

  Canny snorted.

  He frowned at her and said, “Having several names is better, but it isn’t something anyone can arrange. You can’t deliberately change your name. The differences have to evolve naturally, so that they represent slightly different identities.”

  Canny thought of her own names. She was Akanesi Afa as a child. Then Agnes Mochrie when she came to Castlereagh and the Professor adopted her. Her teachers called her either Akanesi or Agnes. Her classmates and Sholto called her Canny. Marli called her Canny or Akanesi. If anyone wanted to address something malicious to her, the names probably would serve as a baffle.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “I don’t know your name,” she told him.

  “Of course you do.” He looked scornful, as if he didn’t know why she’d bother to lie.

  “I know some things about you, but not your name.”

  He linked his fingers, wrapped them around his knee and leaned back. He looked like someone waiting to be entertained. “Do tell.”

  “I know you’re pretending to be crazy to scare me. And I know you’re a prisoner. There’s a spell on Fort Rock that makes people unable to tear their eyes from it so that they won’t look at the view of the Zarene Valley. Because Fort Rock is the only place from which it’s possible to see this house.”

  He took a deep breath and said, “That last part—everyone knows that.”

  “By ‘everyone’ you mean Zarenes?”

  “Only Zarenes count.”

  “Naturally.” Canny was disgusted.

  “As for the first part. I have been crazy. I could easily be crazy again. In fact, once you’ve been crazy the possibility of slippage feels like the only real certainty. The odds are short.”

  “Do I get any credit for having worked it out?”

  “Even Iris wouldn’t keep her creatures in such dark ignorance. I’m sure you were briefed.”

  “I’m not Iris’s creature.”

  This time he didn’t jab her forehead, only pressed a fingertip there. “Iris’s spell equals Iris’s creature.”

  Canny decided to start telling the truth—or at least some of it. She was hesitant, particularly since he’d made that remark about only Zarenes counting. She had felt that already about those Zarenes she’d met—their exclusivity. Bonnie was curious, but Canny had felt when she was talking to the girl that she was being taken not as herself but as representative, and what she represented to Bonnie was other people. People who weren’t quite as good as the Zarenes. Lonnie had given her a headache, and then smirked at her in an unpleasant anticipatory way, as if she were a frog and he had just poked a firecracker into her backside. She was sure her headache was supposed to get much worse, only she’d thrown it off. Iris was superior, and had played games with Sholto when he was upset. Lealand was frosty. In fact only Cyrus Zarene seemed okay. So the Zarenes were insular, and tribal, and in possession of great power, and only they counted. She got that. And that was why she’d only tell some of the truth.

  “I copied part of one of Iris’s spells and added it to part of another. It was the ‘Look at me’ spell from Fort Rock with a kind of ‘Don’t’ added to it.”

  “You can’t copy part of one of Iris’s spells. They don’t come in parts,” he said, disbelieving.

  “I did though,” she said. “Everything is divisible.”

  “Except zero.”

  “Well—yes,” Canny muttered, surprised to encounter someone who spoke mathematics.

  He regarded her for a time. Then he made a little gesture, and the soft nothingness that had held her melted away.

  She sat up and rubbed her wrists like some movie heroine who had just been untied, though the bonds hadn’t constrained her wrists or ankles, or chafed her skin.

  He looked at this playacting and raised an eyebrow. Then he got up and helped her to her feet. He pushed the swiveling wall lamp beside the fireplace so that instead of shining out of the big mirror above the mantelpiece it shone hard on the decorative molding of the mantelpiece itself. “All right,” he said. “Make something different out of some of that.”

  Canny peered at the long line of symbols, of sign overlapping sign. She said, “It’s like Chinese writing.”

  “It’s like everything of Iris’s—ideogrammatic.”

  “Yes,” said Canny, who hadn’t remembered the word but knew that was right, that Chinese was in ideograms.

  “Yes what?” he said. Then, very exasperated, “I can’t tell whether you’re pretending to know more than you do, or less than you do.”

  Canny laughed.

  His jaw dropped slightly. He was still for a moment, then said in a very different tone from any he’d used so far, “Your face moves. Do you really think it doesn’t?”

  Her face heated up. She put her hands on her cheeks to cool them. Perhaps it looked to him as if she was feeling for movement—surprised by it herself.

  “Maybe you’re getting better,” he said.

  Canny felt awkward and embarrassed, so returned her attention to the carvings. She felt as if she was peeling them apart layer by layer to study their component parts. The young man kept quiet and let her look.

  “Is this Iris’s?” she asked.

  “Hardly,” he said, dismissive.

  Canny touched the carvings, followed them with her eyes and finger. She followed them along the mantel, and onto the wall, and along the carved strip at the top of the panel. The big shouting syllables of the stained-glass window were part of it too. It wove around the room and out the door. It wound through the house, putting a mark on every immovable surface, and some movable—like doors and windows. Finally, as she followed it, it seemed to leave the walls and swim before her, like whitebait in a river at dawn—alive, transparent, multitudinous.

  Once she lost it, as if the river had vanished underground, but it was only because she’d lost the light when she walked crabwise into a dark room. Then he was there, behind her with a candle, lighting her way.

  Canny read on. Her ears began to ring—and then all the signs were melting, and coming apart, and flying upward like sparks. She closed her eyes and watched them, tearing at the inside of her eyelids, burning, ceaselessly moving, and ceaselessly meaning something she couldn’t understand.

  She cried out and fell. He caught her. He held her and she heard him saying, “Sorry. I’m sorry.”
Then her brain mercifully shut down into nothing more than the pain and nausea and animal misery of the worst migraine of her life.

  * * *

  HE SEEMED TO UNDERSTAND HER PLIGHT. He got her into a dark room, and lying down. The bed was fresh and sweet and comfortable—not unused or stale. Maybe it was his room, but it didn’t smell occupied either. He put a shaded candle on a table on the far side of the room and a bowl by the bed, and a cold cloth on her head.

  She managed to tell him to go away. She didn’t want him to see her vomiting.

  He did leave her, and she was alone with it—the horrible sensation that someone had washed her face and scalp in hot water, and both were drying, shrinking, and tightening around her skull. If she didn’t move, not even her eyelids, the pain was almost bearable.

  She was grieving too. She’d seen something, but hadn’t been able to hold it in her head long enough for a recognition—the kind of recognition that wasn’t just her understanding something, but the something coming to life when she looked at it and looking back at her. Very complicated equations did that when she solved them. They came to life. The universe came to life and looked back at her.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE WOKE UP THERE WAS SUNLIGHT filtering through the curtains. The bowl by the bed had been emptied and rinsed. The door was open, and the air smelled of beeswax.

  How could someone hope to pass as a madman when they were such an accomplished housekeeper? Canny would have laughed if she’d dared move her jaw. She lay still for a long time, drifting, exhausted, and simply grateful that the pain had gone. She was finally roused by the sound of voices. The young man’s first. From his tone he was asking a question, though she didn’t hear what. Then someone else answered, tersely. “I think the customary greeting is ‘Hello,’ Ghislain. You’re supposed to say, ‘Hello, how are you?’”

  “Come on—two visits in one week? Of course I’m surprised,” said the young man, whose name was Ghislain.

  Canny sat bolt upright. She swung her legs out of bed. Her scalp felt threateningly tender, but she persisted. She glanced out the window.