Exiled: Keeper of the City

by Peter Morwood

  “Here’s your chance to legitimize magic forever in this city. Get rid of this thing and no one will say a bad word about it again, not ever. You can practice your trade in the open—”

  “Get rid of it! What do you think this is, some kind of bug I can swat?” Lorin said, nearly laughing with his desperation, and then coughing. “These things ruled the world—”

  “But they don’t any more! Lorin, I mean it—”

  And then they turned the last corner, into the street down which Haven lay....

  The smoke billowed out at them. Trees burned like candles. Stones were blackened with smoke, gates of houses nearer the burning melted. Haven was all one great blaze. The cries of mrem could be heard in the background, but none in that street dared cry out, or make any sound at all.

  She lay there in the middle of the road, in a nest of flame, like one of the fabulous beasts of myth; the stones themselves burned under her. There was no doubt that the creature was female. There was no doubt, either, of its power. Flame wreathed and coiled about her, and left her unhurt. In the heart of it all, her skin, when she moved, glittered dimly as if it were gemmed. Easily eight times the size of a mrem, she was like one of the tiny lizards of the desert, but writ large: Her claws were curved like knives, and as long as knives; the fangs in the jaw she dropped in an awful mockery of a smile gleamed in the light of the fire. Her tail twitched and coiled slowly, thoughtfully, as her eyes rested on them.

  Reswen felt his blood literally running cold as the liskash looked at him and contemplated his death. His fur stood up on end, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he resisted the urge to run right back around that corner again. The thought occurred to him that if he did not do it right away, he might not have the chance. But he was damned if he was going to run from a lizard, from something whose day in the world was over, no matter how many of his people it might kill—

  Laas’s paw crept into his. He gripped it tight and looked the liskash in its terrible eye, and would not look away. He could think of nothing else useful to do. He glanced over at Lorin—

  Lorin took a slow step forward, as if fascinated. And another. Reswen would have put out a paw to stop him, but suddenly found it too much effort to even raise the limb—

  Lorin shook himself all over. “Nay then,” he said, very loud, his voice shaking, “you can do better than that. I challenge you, child of fire.”

  There was a long slow hissing from the liskash. “What sort of challenge do you think to field against me?” she said, and Reswen shuddered all over at the sound of that voice—cold and leisurely and humorous, the hissing wrapped all around each word it spoke, like the hissing of a struck gong. “You are one alone. The Three know nothing of you, and will not help. They cannot. You have forged no links with them before this, preferring to hide, and it is too late for that now. What do you think to do?”

  Lorin said nothing at all, merely walked right forward into the fire.

  Reswen watched him with astonishment. He felt heat, smelled the smoke of burning, but the flames that leaped and curled about the liskash, and flowed down the street, blackening the stones, did not fasten on Lorin. They wreathed about him and did him no harm. Reswen thought he could see Lorin’s mouth moving as he walked, but whatever spell he was saying didn’t carry.

  The liskash watched him, smiling still, a terrible, oblique look. It lifted up its head, and suddenly Reswen found that he couldn’t move. Beside him, he felt Laas’s muscles trembling with the effort to shake off the sudden paralysis. But up there, in the fires, Lorin just shook his head, and paused a moment, and made a gesture like someone scattering something along the ground.

  Reswen never saw how it happened, but suddenly he could move again—and the street was awash in water. A foot deep, it came rushing out at him like a flash flood, and he pulled Laas close to him to brace her against the rush of it. The liskash looked about it in sudden astonishment, its tail lashing; the fangy mouth closed, losing the parody of a smile. The liskash hissed in anger as its fires went out, and the only burning left in the street was that of Haven.

  Quite suddenly the liskash was not there. Reswen staggered to one side of the street through the water, pulling Laas with him out of the flow of it. Over its rushing he could hear Lorin shouting, “You make light work of controlling those who don’t know about you, snake, but when someone faces you down, you run and hide! You can’t bear direct opposition, can you! We’re all supposed to just fall over and shake at the sight of you—or walk into your mouth like frightened birds—”

  He just managed to jump aside from the gigantic clawed foot that came slamming down into the stones. The water went away as suddenly as the fire had. Lorin scrambled to one side of the street on paws and knees as the huge fanged maw came down, hunting him along the cobbles. “Two can play at that,” he gasped, packing himself up—and suddenly a titan reared up over the little street, sidestepping the trees, stepping over walls as if over curbs: a mrem a hundred feet high, glowing faintly as if lit from within, feinting with bared claws at a liskash that could have eaten all of Haven at one gulp. Jaws snapped and the huge golden eyes glinted, terrible with rage, but Lorin in his ragged clothes leapt and swiped and batted, and the liskash jerked its head back as he struck with his claws at the hypnotic eyes, and they grew translucent with fear.

  The liskash was cursing in words that hurt Reswen’s ears. “Barbarian,” it shrieked, finally, “vermin, unsubtle insect—”

  “Not subtle, no,” Lorin said, striking at her eyes again. “But direct. You can’t cope, can you, snake? One ‘vermin’ wizard is enough for you, in the body! Oh, out of the body you’re big stuff indeed—walk the overworld, make yourself cleverer and prettier and stronger than you really are—but in the body, where real magic is done, where it counts, you can’t do it! You daren’t!”

  “Liar!” The liskash shrieked, and two more houses down the street exploded into flame. “Vermin liar!”

  “Ah, there we see how strong you are,” Lorin said, striking at the liskash’s eyes again, and again she pulled back. “Very brave you are at burning poor mrem in their beds that can’t fight with you. But you can’t do anything about me, can you! You dare not meet me in the body; just as you won’t come to grips with me here—”

  She snapped at him, a snap that should have taken Lorin’s arm off, and instead mostly got his sleeve. Like a gutter scavenger the liskash worried the giant sleeve until it tore, and flung it away, and still Lorin laughed. “You don’t dare!” he cried. “Lizard! Lizard!”

  And suddenly the giant shapes were gone, and there were just Lorin and the liskash, circling one another in the street. He’s going to die, Reswen thought, terrified. And I drove him to this— “Lorin!” he shouted, and as Lorin turned, he threw him the rose-and-gold knife. Maybe it’ll do some good—

  Lorin turned, caught it out of the air with the practiced motion of someone used to catching thrown money at the fighting pits, and turned back to the liskash, all in one fluid motion. The liskash had no more glow about it; its magic was confined for the moment, from anger or perhaps exhaustion. Its sides were heaving. Its jaws were open, no more in a smile. It circled Lorin, and he it, and Reswen mourned at the sight. The thing was eight times Lorin’s size, and the knife, glinting in the light of Haven burning, looked like a silly pin—

  “Come on then, lizard,” Lorin was saying. “Come find out why your kind died out. Come find out why you live in damp caves now, when your kind once lived in cities and ruled the world. Come find out about mrem!”

  The liskash was beginning to hiss again, a sound like water pouring onto fire. “Come find out,” Lorin said, as they circled closer. The thing was three times his height. It could surely fall on him and crush him, but it did no such thing. “Come find out what we have that leaves us free to let magic be for the most part!” The rose-and-gold knife glinted. “I feel you feeling for my mind; but maybe Th
e Three know more about me than you think, eh? Maybe you’re trying to get out of yourself even now, into the overworld, but you find the way is blocked! Maybe you’re stuck in your poor body, and you’re going to have to discover that we’re better at living in our bodies than you are—!”

  He slipped in and struck—to slash, not to stab; the rose-and-gold knife went black along that vicious edge. Reswen held onto Laas for all he was worth, hearing, with one ear, the sound of the fire brigades coming—the rumbling of their big water carts along the cobbles a couple of blocks away. Lorin was shouting again, now, but this time shouting words that Reswen couldn’t understand, another spell, Reswen thought. Next to him, he felt Laas shuddering. He pulled her closer. To his surprise, she pushed him away.

  “No,” she said. “He’s going to die, Reswen! He’s binding the thing with his spell, it’s a death spell, he’s going to let it kill him, and his death will seal its own—!” The tears were rolling down her face. “We have to stop him—”

  Reswen held her regardless, and his face grew hard, though his heart cried out in him. “No, we don’t,” he said. “If he can kill it that way, let him—it’s more than we can do. He’s got it bound into its body now. Don’t distract him—if it gets loose again it’ll burn all Niau.” And the tears ran down his face too, but he dared pay no attention to them. “Let him do what he’s doing. It’s his choice—”

  Lorin kept chanting, backing away from the liskash. It followed him, its eyes always on him, hateful, waiting its moment. And then he stopped, and looked up at the liskash, and opened his arms, the knife in one paw, and held quite still.

  Slowly it reared up on its hind legs before him, the huge tail bracing it, the great jaws opening, the terrible front claws outstretched—

  The bolt thudded into its back with a wet thick sound almost too large to believe, and then another, and another. A cranking, ratcheting sound came from down the street, by Haven, as the Iiskash screamed and rose up and up on its hind legs, and then turned to face what had struck it—turned into the teeth of the repeating “stinger” catapult set up at the end of the street. Two more bolts hit the liskash in the gut in the time it might take a mrem to breathe, and then three more, one through the chest and two through the head. The liskash fell down, writhing, and kept writhing for a long time after it should have been dead.

  Lorin dropped the knife and simply sat down on the wet cobbles and started to cry.

  Reswen and Laas went to him, bent over him. “I’m all right,” he said, sobbing, and wiping his nose on his sleeve. “I’m all right.” And he cried harder.

  Reswen patted him, leaving Laas with him for the moment, and picked up the knife. Then he went off slowly down the street to where the repeating catapult stood, with the mrem who had armed it and fired it, and the beasts who had drawn its big cart down the little streets in such haste, and Sachath, leaning on the frame of the thing, and smiling at Reswen.

  “Been waiting to use this thing ever since we bought it,” Sachath said. And he poked Reswen good-naturedly in the arm with his baton. “So much for the Arpekh,” he added. “Let ‘em tell us any thing about defense spending, eh?”

  Reswen smiled and went back to Lorin, and Laas.

  THE EXPLANATIONS naturally were not over in a day, or ten days. Reswen began to think he should simply move into the Arpekh—put a bedroll on the floor of the council chamber perhaps.

  They were outraged with him at first, especially Mraal, and on the day immediately after the explosion, Reswen thought he might be in for that famous view from over the city gates. The evidence was, he had to admit, a little damning. The Lloahairi Ambassador assaulted, the embassy broken into, and then blown up by means no one understood— Theories for this among the Arpekh ranged from the opinion that Reswen had gone mad, to the rather more cockeyed idea that he was himself some kind of wizard who had been planted in the Niauhu police force by the Easterners.

  But Reswen produced his evidence slowly, carefully, and in good order, and slowly the Arpekh began to realize that they were not going to get to spike him up, that they in fact had a hero on their hands. About the first thing he had said when getting back to the constabulary in the middle of the night was, “Go arrest Choikea.” His people had done that, and had been delighted to find the mrem in the process of packing to flee the city by night. His papers indicated he was heading to Zashikeh, where (as intelligence had recently reported) there was another Eastern group requesting stone and water of that city. Choikea had proven most amenable to questioning; he was the sort of mrem to whom you merely show the knives and irons, and all sorts of fascinating things start coming out. He confessed immediately to Shalav’s killing—for his memory of it was much more complete than the liskash had suspected—and also to having set up the previous ones to cover himself, since it had been his intention (and mission) to murder various Niauhu mrem anyway. The liskash had merely made use of what was already fertile ground. Choikea independently confirmed that by this and other means, the Easterners had long been intending to set the Lloahairi and the Niauhu at one another’s ears. With the two of them warring, their lands would be easy pickings for an expeditionary force.

  The natural result was that the signed agreement was torn and torn again, ceremonially, in the presence of the merchant Rirhath, now senior surviving member of the Eastern delegation, and he and his (those that were left; some had died in the burning of Haven) were told to be out of the city walls within five days. All the Easterners became quite quiet, especially when Rirhath inquired about Hiriv, and was presented pointedly with the several scraps of slashed and singed fur that were apparently all that remained of him. Reswen discussed the plot rather scathingly with the Arpekh, and got many sheepish looks and a commitment to a much stronger armed stance. “There’s no chance they’re going to stop this kind of thing,” he said. “Sooner or later, they or the liskash will try it again—if not through magic, then by war. I would prefer to be ready, my lords. I wouldn’t want to see what happened to the Lloahairi Embassy happen to the Arpekh....”

  The matter of the Lloahairi was also on their minds, and Reswen’s. Their soldiers were packed up and sent home, with messages for the Lloahairi government that implied they had better look to their relations with the East—some cities apparently thought of Lloahai as nothing better than a pawn to be used in their expansionist schemes. There was also a polite request for another ambassador, since the old one seemed to have been lost in the explosion that the Easterners had engineered.

  Reswen sighed over that, late one night some time afterwards. “We may have another war on our hands,” he said to Laas. “They may not believe us.” He toyed with his cup of sherbet, and sipped a little. “But we’ll deal with it when it happens.”

  They sat in the Green Square together again. It was evening, and they had just finished a small haunch of ennath, one of the little desert beasts, with a sauce so hot it had practically paralyzed their mouths. Laas drank a little of her sherbet, put the cup down, and looked at it wistfully. “I’m going to miss this,” she said.

  Reswen’s heart ached inside him. It had been aching for days now, and all the business and bustle hadn’t distracted him from it. “There must be some way I can change your mind,” he said softly.

  She shook her head. “I have to go with them,” she said. “Reswen, what would I be here but a housecat? This is no place for a magic-worker to live.”

  “No one would bother you, not after—”

  “Ah, but they would, specifically because the chief of the police, not to mention the H’satei, can’t be married to an Easterner, who might be a spy, or something worse ... like a charismatic. No one here is going to give up their prejudices against magic so quickly, no matter what Lorin did the other night. Otherwise you’d have called him up before the Arpekh to be rewarded by now—isn’t that so? But you’ve been playing it quiet so far. Sooner or later the truth about me would get out, and
then mrem would start saying that you were using my talent to influence people on your behalf—or even that I was doing it without consulting you.” She shook her head sadly, squeezed his paw. “Darling one, no. I have to go.”

  Reswen held silent for the moment.

  “Besides,” she said, “the Easterners are still going to try this kind of thing, with other cities. You know it as well as I do. Someone has to be in a position to stop them, to keep it from working. My people think I was out messing around, that night. No one but the Arpekh knows I was there, or what I was doing, and they certainly won’t tell. I’m in a perfect position to foul the works for a long time to come.” She sipped her sherbet again. “No more starving,” she said. “No indeed. Someone has to keep it from happening. “

  Reswen felt like shouting, Fine for them not to starve, but what about how I feel about you? Aloud, he said nothing for a moment, then nodded. “I suppose I see your point,” he said. “But Laas ... I still don’t like it. I want you to stay here and be my mate.”

  “I know,” she said. “I want to stay and be your mate, too. But what I want and what I need to do seem to be two different things at the moment ....”

  He stared at the cup, looked up again. “Stay with me tonight?”

  “Of course.”

  And she did.

  I’ve got to stop this crying, he thought at one point. I’m the Chief of Police, for the gods’ sake. But somehow he couldn’t seem to stop. The feeling of her in his arms clashed so horribly with the knowledge that tomorrow, his arms would be empty, and probably forever. Oh, she might visit. But how often? Who could tell whether she would be spared more than once every couple of years? And what if some accident happened, what if she died—

  Oh, stop it. You’ll get over her. But it was a lie. He never would. Nor would he find anyone else, he knew. Reswen was stubborn that way. He was not one to find a jewel and thenceforth make do with glass. He would sooner go through the rest of his life with empty paws.