Missing Piece

by Robert Priest

  Seeing him coming, she stepped back into the alleyway and from the shadows watched him pass by on the other side of the street. There was a certain dancing sway in the way he walked — just like he had walked in the old days when he had been in love with Imalgha. This was not the call of duty. Once again as he passed, her delicate nose tried to sense what it was he was carrying in the black leather bag at his side. She had followed him to the wall this morning and seen him enter one of the forbidden markets that occasionally sprang up there. Ever since, the bag had been at his side. She listened carefully when he went by and she thought she heard a strange constrained tweeting sound coming from inside. A bird? Why would Lirodello be taking home a bird?

  Lirodello, unaware of the passionate, yearning eyes watching him, unlocked the door, and bolted up the stairs to his apartment where his new sacred love waited for him in complete darkness.

  She had no memory other than of her emergence from the bog. When she asked Lirodello about it and he told her its macabre history of murder and amputations, she wondered what she had done to be flung there. She could feel something terrible in her hands when she clenched them in the dark. And there was shame in her arms and in her lips. What had she done?

  Whatever her real story might be, Lirodello hardly cared. She told a long, morbid tale about a childhood in Arthenow where her family had for centuries been enslaved as blood fruit to the necromancer. They had fled across the sea and hidden in the far western wildlands of the Phaer Isle, where blood magic couldn’t reach them. It all sounded slightly improbable to Lirodello, but he just took it all in unquestioningly. She feared the sun, she told him. She feared the necromancer of Arthenow hunting her. That is why she had asked him to always keep the curtains closed, to let her hide here with no one knowing. “Anyway, that way I will always be here when you come home,” she added. She also had an unreasonable curiosity about Xemion of Ilde and had extracted a promise from Lirodello to use all resources at his disposal to track him down. Lirodello knew her story wasn’t quite logical, but after a week of kissing her once a night he was far too enchanted with her to worry about it. He wanted more than just to lie beside her in the dark. He wanted to marry her. He wanted physical union. He wanted to never lose her.

  She rose to meet him as he came in. “Oh, Lirodello, my beautiful fellow,” she whispered ecstatically. She always hugged him when he returned, but tonight for the first time she also kissed him. Lirodello was stunned. It wasn’t even time to go to sleep.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “No, no. It’s me. I should know better.”

  “I just slipped,” she said remorsefully. “I’m just getting too used to you.”

  “My fault,” he said.

  Lirodello just stood there wanting another kiss but not knowing what to say.

  “You seem so quiet,” she said, almost sounding genuinely distressed. “I hope I haven’t ruined it.”

  “No. You could never ruin it. I’ve just had a very hard day and I’m very tired.”

  “Would it help to tell me about it?” she cooed.

  Lirodello was used to her hunger for information, but he’d never yet breached his solemn vow to keep the business of the Phaer Council secret. Not its specifics anyway. Tonight though, weakened by that unexpected kiss, he thought it might not be wrong if he spoke in a very general way. It would help to unburden him.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he confessed. “Every day more and more refugees, more and more mouths to feed, but at the same time no wind and the grain ships do not arrive. We have an armada heading for our shores and we have gaps in our seawalls. There are many among the new arrivals with the skills to help us — stonemasons, carpenters — but they have no tools. And the same goes with defending ourselves. We barely have enough weapons for our own small contingent of guards, but there are several thousand able-bodied Thralls out there who surely would be good in a fight. I am using every resource we have. I have them gathering rocks. I have them sharpening whatever kitchen utensils and gardening implements anyone has. I have the smithy going all day and night turning pins and thimbles into daggers and arrowheads, but when the Cyclopes come — presuming we ever have wind again — we will still be mostly unarmed and unprep—”

  She interrupted him. “You say you are using every resource you have but you do not mention the Great Kone.” Lirodello felt a jolt of fear go through him. She continued. “That first night I met you I saw the three one-eyed mages there. I saw them join hands and the one at the front touched the surface of the Great Kone and there was a great power that flowed into him and filled all of them there.”

  Lirodello answered with great certainty. “We would never use or attempt to use the power of the Great Kone. That is the one thing all on the council are unanimous on.”

  “But why?” It was too dark to see her face.

  “You don’t know our history. We have just come through fifty years of slavery because we thought we were masters of the Great Kone. We’re not going to do the same thing—”

  Again she cut in and this time her voice was distinctly angry. “Yes, but if you do not use it and they invade you will be murdered or enslaved anyway, so why wouldn’t you at least—”

  “No,” he dared to interrupt. “It is much more complex than that.”

  She drew away from him. “Is it more complex than you and I losing one another and this treasure that we have?” she asked sharply.

  Lirodello squinted into the darkness shaking, trying to see her. Several times now she had grown angry with him and he feared it.

  “Weren’t there times when the spellcraft was used fruitfully?” she asked, and there was almost a small sob in her voice.

  “Yes, yes, my love,” he assured her. “But that was when there was a council of mages. And by mages I do not mean ones such as those three poor souls who did that mass spell you saw. Those three still lie at death’s door.”

  “What of Xemion of Ilde? I would wager he knows what to do with the power of the Great Kone.” Lirodello flinched slightly at this mention of Xemion.

  “As you know I’m doing my utmost to find him, but even if we do find him he certainly cannot be trusted. Also, there are grave doubts as to whether he does indeed have any spellbinding talent at all. Even if he did, we would never use it. Never.”

  She drew away from him. “You fool!”

  A chill of alarm went through Lirodello. “Sorry?”

  “You are telling me that you are too cowardly to use the one advantage you have. You think your magic has a price? My kind have died for ten thousand years in the blood mills of the necromancers. That is paying a price.”

  He had never heard such vehemence from her. She was almost hissing.

  “I don’t think you understand—”

  “What I do understand is that you must not be the man I believed you to be.”

  Lirodello’s pulse quickened. “Well, I am not talking personally. I’m not speaking on my own behalf I’m speaking on behalf of the Council. I’m just telling you that it is going to be hard to convince them.” She continued to glower at him. Her anger and the thought of losing her chilled him to the bone. When she got like this it usually lasted hours but tonight he had a way out.

  There was another flap from the inside of the black leather bag as Lirodello lifted it from the floor and placed it on the table and lit the candle. She didn’t at first look at it. But then a muffled tweet came from within. Her eyes darted toward it excitedly and then back to him. He nodded and undid the drawstring. As he opened the top of the bag there was a renewed flurry of flaps and tweets. “Oh, Lirodello,” she cooed, “you didn’t!”

  Lirodello nodded as she bowed her head to peek inside long enough to catch the crimson flicker within. If she’d been looking at him she would have seen that Lirodello looked ashamed.

  “I did,” he said.<
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  28

  Icrix Becalmed

  It was not a good position for an impatient person to be in. Icrix, Prince of the Cyclopes, was waiting for the wind to pick up. Here he was becalmed a mere fifty miles offshore. If the wind had kept up, he and all his fleet would have been swept into Phaer Bay two days ago and it would all be over by now. The climbers would have been up the cliffs and into the city before dawn. They would’ve had the murderer and she would be in a net watching what he did to her Phaer city. He cursed the wind and took another measurement with his instruments.

  If it took much longer, the extended ebb tides would be over. Then the costs would be much higher. He stared at the moon. The way the sea so still and green and glassy reflected it back with hardly a ripple. Two moons.

  That must be how the butchers of Ulde saw the world all the time. Doubled up. If the wind would only pick up again, quite a number of them would be spared having to bear their curious bi-sightedness for much longer. But there would not likely be enough of them in all of the city of Ulde to fill the blood quota set by his father and his advisers. He hoped he wouldn’t have to return yet again to finish the job.

  The prince didn’t notice the small, dark craft approaching off the starboard bow. If its steersman had been some secretly deployed enemy intent on murder, Icrix would have been in grave danger, but this was no enemy. This was Noli, the admiral’s best boy and keeper of the manifest for the fleet. He hailed the prince from below in the darkness and saw Icrix at last take the telescope from his eye. “I knew you saw me there, sir,” Noli called up jovially. The prince threw down his ladder and Noli slowly climbed up the side of the ship. He had brought the manifest for the entire fleet and the captain’s log. These he unstrapped from his chest and with a nod he placed the box on the table. Thus far the prince had ignored him entirely.

  Finally he asked, “What are the men saying?”

  “Oh, they don’t tell me what they thinks.”

  “But they tell each other and you listen.”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “Well then, you’re not doing your job, are you?”

  “I don’t actively listen, sir, but when I’m standing so close …”

  “What do they say when you’re standing so close?”

  “There’s some as says that these doldrums is not natural.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Yes, sir. They say that there’s only one thing that can make a wind go from forty knots to nothing in a moment, and that’s spellcraft.”

  The prince snorted. “Superstitious fools.”

  “It’s because it’s the Phaer Isle, sir. Some of them thinks there’s powerful wizards there protecting them.”

  “Well, I hope they will all stop believing in wizards tomorrow when the wind picks up.”

  “You think it will, sir?”

  “I’ve taken pressure readings with my instruments and I can assure you, and I hope you will assure anyone you happen to talk to, that the wind is almost upon us.”

  “I will, sir.”

  Icrix took the log into his cabin, dipped his quill in the inkwell, looked up to the ceiling of his cabin, looked right through Noli as though he weren’t there, and began to write.

  29

  Spell-Crossed Behaviours

  When Tharfen could pay attention well enough to really examine herself, she was shocked at the swelling. Her ankle was twice its normal size, the skin all shining and purple and stretched. Most of the time Mr. Stilpkin kept the heel elevated in a kind of sling. He also saw to it that she consumed liberal amounts of star borage, iomine, and comfrey tea. But the ankle remained swollen into the second week. And all the while, with her system growing more and more irritated by the abrasive herbs and tinctures Stilpkin had been administering, Tharfen grew angrier.

  The piece! She should have been captaining a ship through the dim seas of the underworld right now. It had all been ruined by the piece. And it was still there shooting around inside her, bouncing off the inside of her skin till it made her feel like screaming. It had been the piece that had caused this infection. The same piece that had made her miss her shot at the bog creature. She would do anything now to get it out of her. She would cut anywhere it lodged. She would eat emetics and vomit herself inside out. She would feast only on diuretics until there was nothing left inside her at all. But she still hadn’t told Mr. Stilpkin about it. Something prevented her.

  “Tharfen, your face and heel will soon return to their normal size, I promise you. But is there something more involved bothering you?”

  “What do you mean, more involved?” she asked a little nastily.

  He tapped the side of his round, half-bald head. “Some things I know because I see facts and I am able to deduce further facts from them, but other things …” He lifted up his green hand — it was green like grass or an oak leaf. “Other things I know because I feel them. Especially in my hand. And I feel something that makes me think there might be spell-crossing at work here.”

  Tharfen shook her head impatiently. “It’s nothing to do with spell-crossing or blood magic,” she assured him.

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “Are you bound by an oath of privacy, Mr. Stilpkin?”

  “I am. I would never talk about any of the private dealings with any of my patients.”

  “There is a boy who I’ve known ever since I was a child.” As she grew more confidential, she heard the old Tharfen — the thirteen-year-old Tharfen — in her voice.

  “When we came to Ulde, he and I had an accident in Shissillil.”

  Stilpkin nodded, his brow creasing with concern. “Tharfen, have you missed your moon time?”

  “No,” she shot back sharply despite her fatigue. “Have you?” She snorted.

  “I’m sorry, Tharfen, I have to ask these questions.”

  “Well, I keep myself to myself.… I have never even so much as kissed a boy, so I don’t think I can get pregnant from my sling and stones, do you?”

  “Quite a thought.”

  “We didn’t know about there being no friction in Shissillil, and we got upended and slid along. Somehow he was going one way and I was going the other and we crashed through each other.”

  “What do you mean you crashed through each other?”

  “It was as though the collision exploded the two of us into billions of tiny little pieces and we went through each other like one school of fish goes through another, but then when we got through there was a piece of me that didn’t come back together and in its place there was a piece of him that didn’t go back to him because it got trapped inside me. And I hate it.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “When I was at sea it bothered me so little I hardly thought of it. And the farther I got away from here the more it seemed … dissolved almost, like some bit of mist dissipated into a great fog. Ever since I’ve been back here, though, it’s been condensing back into an actual physical piece-like thing and it’s been driving me unhinged. It’s been affecting my mind. It’s been affecting my aim.”

  “And that is why you bled your heel?”

  “I thought the blood would wash it out. But it’s stuck there.”

  “But don’t you see, Tharfen, this is classic spell-crossing material. Whenever we see things locked, blocked, and turning back on themselves, we have to consider that possibility because that is the very essence of a crossed spell. Two or more contrary spells acting on one thing, each one blocking or skewing the other.”

  “Yes,” she said irritably. “Except it was an accident not a spell.”

  “But you crashed right through him. Think of it. You should have both been pulped by the impact. There has to have been some spellcraft involved. Think of how much crash and cross sound the same. Crash-spell, cross-spell. No, this is definitely spell-crossing, Tharfen.”

  �
��But the spell wasn’t on me. The spell was on Shissillil.”

  “Whether you fall into a spell or slip into a spell or are summoned into a spell, a spell is upon you.”

  “I don’t accept that.”

  “Yet it is so.”

  “Well, even if you do count such a thing as a spell, that’s only one spell. What’s the other spell?”

  “The Spell of General Return, for one.”

  “You’re saying I’m being affected by the same spell as all those corpse legs?”

  “Yes, and lots of other things, as well. All manner of things are returning, whether to the Phaer Isle or to some other larger thing or state they were once part of. The spell or thaumatological charge on you and on that piece of him in you is to get as far away from him as possible. Isn’t that just what you did? Didn’t you leave just a few days after the battle?”

  She nodded.

  “But the Spell of General Return is tugging the piece in you in the opposite direction, back to where it came from. Back here. You may think you were driven here by a typhoon, but my guess is that the Spell of General Return is behind it. Whatever else you’ve done here, you’ve been silently drawn back to him, and him to you. You’re both being drawn back to the intersection where your two spells crisscrossed. You must’ve been deeply entangled in some other existence, Tharfen.”

  “Can’t you just cut it out of me, Mr. Stilpkin?”

  “Well, you saw what happened when you tried. A serious infection might have taken your life.”

  “But I didn’t sterilize the bloody tool. I was a fool. That was why.”

  “There’s always something. There’s always some good reason. A typhoon. The way you spin the tell kone. Surely if you were dashed right through him, shattered into minute pieces and put back together again, there has to have been some magic involved. You say the piece has become more and more solid. When did you first realize that it was solid?”