The Witch Queen

by Jan Siegel

  They? Fern mouthed.

  “His bogeymen,” Ragginbone explained, sotto voce. “Whoever they are. Probably everybody.”

  The safety chain was released; the door opened wider. A hand plucked Ragginbone inside. The others followed.

  They found themselves groping in almost complete blackness. “Mind the furniture,” said the voice of their host, receding ahead of them. With great presence of mind Fern grabbed the skirts of Ragginbone’s jacket, simultaneously reaching behind her for Gaynor’s hand. Will bumped into what might have been a small table, but it sidled away from him. Ragginbone said: “This way,” and presently a dim light appeared at what must have been the far end of the room. They crammed into a narrow passage and descended a twisty stair where all but Fern had to duck under the roof beam, and then they were in the basement.

  Minimal lighting revealed the shop owner, his small round body bundled in peeling layers of cardigan, his spindle legs inadequately trousered, exposing knobbed anklebones above his threadbare slippers. Tufts of hair stood out around his scalp like cloud wisps around a barren hilltop. He carried with him an odor of closed cupboards, stale woolens, things long forgotten left at the back of unopened drawers. His skin was bleached like that of some cave-dwelling creature who had never seen daylight, let alone sun. “You are not,” he began, and then paused, losing the sentence, then finding it again. “Welcome here.”

  “We’re sorry to intrude,” Fern said scrupulously. “We need your help.”

  “You are . . . the witch?”

  “I hope so.” The flicker of a smile did not conceal her apprehension.

  “Too young,” he said. “Too green.”

  “She has the Gift,” said Ragginbone. “I was very little older when I first drew the circle. And I think the power is stronger in her . . .”

  Moonspittle looked unconvinced. “These others,” he said. “You never mentioned any others.”

  “My brother, Will,” said Fern, “and my friend Gaynor. We work together.”

  “The Gifted always stand alone.”

  “That explains a lot,” Will murmured. “Isolation leads to arrogance, alienation from reality . . . No wonder so many of them go insane.”

  Ragginbone shot him a curiously bright look. “Enough talk,” he said. “We have things to do.”

  The basement was unexpectedly large, book walled and low ceilinged, as if the weight of the buildings above had crushed the available space into breadth rather than height, and shelves and volumes were packed together like a many-layered sandwich. At one end was a conspiratorial huddle of chairs and occasional tables; at the other, a wooden bench was cluttered with chipped glass retorts, convoluted tubes, odd-shaped jars, and even a Bunsen burner. The inadequate lighting was further obscured by huge lampshades whose trailing fringes resembled jungle undergrowth. Fern found a fireplace hiding behind a screen and asked for a brush to sweep it out. “We do not need the fire,” said Moonspittle, and he might have paled if he had not been so pale already; but Fern insisted. No brush was forthcoming, so she settled for an old rag that must have been used as a duster for several centuries. The others shifted furniture, rolled back odds and ends of carpet. The shadow of past magics was clear on the bare floor: the circle burned into the boards, and around it the dim tracery of ancient runes. While they prepared the room the ginger cat appeared from somewhere, getting under their feet, rubbing its moth-eaten flank against their ankles. “Mogwit,” said Moonspittle, and picked the cat up, crooning over it. Fern helped herself to fire crystals and silver-gray spellpowder from his store, not wanting to draw on her own limited supplies, but he made no protest. Ragginbone applied a match to various gray-yellow lumps of wax; the electric lamps were extinguished, and in the candlelight the basement seemed to change. Too many sorceries had been performed there, and the fallout had eaten into the walls like dry rot, animating at a whisper. The darkness thickened; the furniture receded, shuffling away from the circle. Fern hissed: “Fiumé!” and the crystals in the grate spat blue flame. New shadows sprang up, leaping toward a ceiling that appeared suddenly higher, lost in gloom.

  She found she was shaking with a mixture of fear and excitement, but excitement was the stronger. Now that it had finally begun—now that she was putting her Gift to the test, exercising her power for the first time in the deepest magics—she felt the touch of intoxication, the heady surge of an inner force that seemed to have no limits, no restraints. She moved around the circle, sifting the powder along the rim, chanting softly the words she had been taught. The rumor of the city was silenced; there was no sound but the quiet cadences of her voice murmuring the syllables of power in the tongue of Atlantis, the language of the Stone. When she had completed the circuit the powder ignited at her fingertip, kindling to a glimmer that curved away from her around the perimeter. Within, the space expanded until the straining boundary encased both depth and distance. Gaynor drew close to Will; involuntarily, he put his arm around her. Moonspittle shrank into a chair, clasping the restless cat to his chest. Ragginbone leaned forward; under lowered brows his eyes glinted like diamonds in a mine.

  “She has gone too far,” Moonspittle said with a quaver. “Feel it! Too far—”

  “What does he mean?” Will asked.

  “The circle is a channel,” said Ragginbone. “She has opened it up a long way . . .”

  Fern did not hear them. The magic filled her, absorbing every sense. She was both possessor and possessed. At the hub of the circle a figure took shape, molded in smoke: a woman veiled in red. Her substance appeared unstable, as if several forms were combined within a single outline, and she held in many hands a white marble marked with colored rings, which was the most solid thing about her. She lifted the veil, and bones shone beneath her changing faces, and her eye sockets were empty. She spoke through blurred lips in a distanct chorus.

  “Who are you to summon the sisterhood of seeresses? We do not recognize you.”

  “I am Morcadis,” said Fern. “Surely a seeress would know me.”

  The marble was set in a hollow socket and glowed into life, fixing her with its terrible stare. “One of us has sought for you, but found you not. In future, we will remember you.”

  “I thought seeresses could see the future.”

  “Only our sister Skætha could do that, but the burden was too great, and now she sleeps, never to reawaken.”

  “Then tell me the present. I need to know about Morgus, who anointed herself queen of witches. I thought she died in the fire, but that wasn’t so, was it?”

  “She shriveled into a maggot, and the maggot grew to a fetus, and the fetus became a woman who was born again from the River of the Dead.”

  “Did she return to the Tree?” Fern asked, knowing the answer.

  “The spells that hid it from us have worn thin,” the sisterhood said slowly. “The Cave of Roots is unoccupied, and only the birds fly between the worlds. Yet a thief prowls there even now, one that you knew.”

  “Who?” Fern said quickly.

  “He is horned like a ram and clawed like a lion, and he was named for a king’s sword, but the name was altered and degraded, becoming a byword for a beast.”

  “Kal,” said Fern. She had not thought of him in a long while. “What is he doing there, now Morgus has gone?”

  “He steals a fruit from the Tree.”

  “Who is it?”

  “It is barely ripe; we cannot see. Release us: we have told you all that we can.”

  “Not yet.” Fern made a swift gesture, tightening her grip on the perimeter. “I believe—I am sure—Morgus is at a place called Wrokeby, a country house somewhere. Can you see her?”

  “We will not make the attempt,” the sisterhood responded. “She has always concealed herself in black enchantments that may injure our gaze. We have only one Eye; we do not wish to have it blinded.”

  Fern glanced at Ragginbone, who gave a slight nod.

  “Are there more questions,” the woman asked, “or may we go?
”

  “One more,” said Fern. “Did the River make Morgus invulnerable?”

  “No blade can wound her, no poison choke her. But she is still mortal, and all mortals are vulnerable. Everything that lives must die.”

  “That is no answer,” Fern said.

  “It is all that we know.”

  “Thank you,” Fern sighed, loosing her hold on the magic. The sisterhood removed the Eye and faded into vacancy.

  “None other has ever . . . thanked us. We will remember you . . .”

  In the dimness beyond the circle, Gaynor found she was pinching Will’s arm. She heard Moonspittle mutter: “The Gifted do not need such courtesies.” The cat writhed in his grip, spitting back at the fire.

  Ragginbone said to Fern: “Don’t overreach yourself.” But Fern was already pacing the perimeter again, repeating the liturgy of summoning. This time, the vapor at the center condensed swiftly, darkening and solidifying into the figure of a man almost seven feet tall with the antlers of a stag. A doeskin covered little of a body where the muscles swelled like giant pods and vein stems entwined forearm and calf. His coloring was dark, not African dark or Asian dark, but a dark of the spirit, deeper than a deep tan, green tinted from the shadows of forest and jungle. The matted pelt on his head and chest was bronze-black; the eyes were set aslant under sweeping brows that met unnaturally low. His nostils flared at the unwholesome smells of the stale basement and the traffic-ridden city beyond.

  “Cerne,” Fern said. “I give you greeting.”

  “Greeting, witch. Why do you call on me? I have no love for your kind.”

  “You once did,” said Fern, “if love is the term. That is why I summoned you.”

  “Love was not the term,” Cerne responded. “Love was the sentence. She hungered, and I fed her. She was more beautiful than you, taller, and her hair was midnight-black, and her skin was like cream. I bathed in her skin, and slept in her hair, and filled her with my lifeless seed, and she took it, and performed an abomination. I have no more love for witches.”

  “She plucked a spirit from the dark,” said Fern, “and sealed it in her womb, and gave a life, if not a soul, to your son.”

  “He is not my son. The immortals bear no children: we have no need. Like the mountains we grow, enduring agelong, and like them we are ground into dust. Our life is the world’s life. We may sleep, or sink into Limbo, but we cannot pass the Gate. My—son—is a blasphemy against the Ultimate Law.”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Fern protested, provoked to unplanned indignation. “He had no will in the matter. He was born, and he suffers. You should care.”

  There was a pause, then Cerne threw back his head and laughed. And laughed. The red cavern of his mouth was open wide, and she saw old bloodstains on his teeth, and the steam of his breath in his nostril pits. “Harken to the witch! I am the lord of the wilderness, the hunter in the night, a killer of both the weak and the strong. Men have worshiped me, and set aside for me the best cut of the roast, and sacrificed their own kin on my altars. And I should care? A sorceress stole my spawn and magicked it into existence—and I should care? What folly is this? Did you call me here to plead for the brute beast that is Morgus’s brat? Would you defy the Ultimate Powers?”

  “If they were wrong,” Fern said doggedly. “Everyone has a right to love, or at least compassion, no matter how they were made. But that isn’t why I called you. I have Morgus to deal with. I thought you would know her—her weaknesses.”

  “You are so close to the droppings of her womb—ask her.”

  “We are forever enemies. I burned her with fire crystals by the River of Death, but she crawled into the water, and was restored, and now no weapon can touch her. Yet I must kill her.”

  “You kill her?” She felt the smolder of his gaze probing her body. “The aura of magic is bright around you, but you are still small, and slender as a peeled wand. There is no strength in you for such a contest.”

  “I have strengths you cannot see,” Fern said, hoping it was true. “I have to stop her. There is no one else who can.”

  “Then I wish you good fortune,” said Cerne, with something that might have been a smile or snarl. “When I learned what she had done, I would have spitted her with these—“ he indicated his antlers “—but she slipped from me, and shielded herself with spells, and after the beast squirmed free of her loins I knew I needed no other vengeance. Nonetheless, may the dark powers guide your hand. She has enjoyed life too long.”

  “I doubt if she enjoys it,” said Fern.

  He could tell her no more. She thanked him, as she had the sisterhood, and released the spell. She was beginning to feel drained, and there were still other spirits to summon, and questions to ask, and she seemed to have received no answers, only more questions. Ragginbone poured her something from one of the glass retorts—something that looked ancient and mellow and tasted like cooking brandy.

  Then she resumed the spell.

  The full moon shone straight through the window into my spellchamber. The climate seems to have grown warmer since the old days: I opened the casement, giving the light a clear path, and the air that followed it was mild, smelling of the wood beyond. Then I drew the curtains over the other windows, lit the blue fire. I wanted to open the circle a long way, to reach far and deep, and the spellfire empowers me. Flimsy spirits, primitive and crude, had begun to cluster among the roof beams and under the tiles, sucked in by the vacuum of the ghostless house; I could see some of them seeping through the ceiling like a shadowy stain. They are mere elementals, individually ineffectual, but in swarms they have the insidious strength of massed bacteria. My dark magics attract the most basic type, the sort who are drawn to acts of power and pride. They both feed them and feed off them, surrounding the circle with their miasma. Nehemet saw them, too; I noticed her gazing upward, with the spell glimmer in her eyes.

  I moved around the periphery, chanting the ancient words. In the center, moonlight met firelight, silver mingling with blue. There was a mistiness at that point that grew slowly denser; too slowly. Vague shapes interlocked, failing to materialize. I saw the veil of the seeress, and phantom fingers clasping the Eye, but they were too many, a whole sisterhood in a single entity. Their voices sounded somehow remote, as if echoing from within the Wrokewood, or floating down a moonbeam. “We are weary. Do not call us now. We will not speak again.”

  “Then go,” I said. “All save one. I summon Léopana Pthaia. Let her come before me!”

  The multiple figure dwindled into a solitary shape squat and rounded like the idols of the Mother, with the claws of an animal dangling between her bare breasts and a scarlet cloth over her sable features. The Black Seeress. She removed the cloth, showing the nose spread wide across her face, and the unsmiling curve of protuberant lips. Her bones were not visible, for she is the most powerful of the remaining seeresses, and the closest to mortal flesh, and it is not for her complexion that she is called the Black. She fixed the Eye in her left socket, and the ring of the iris darkened against its sudden glow.

  “I am the Pthaia,” she said. “What do you want of me?”

  “I did not summon the sisterhood. Why did you not come alone?”

  “We were bound together. There is too much magic in the night. Question me, and be done.”

  “There is one that I must find. She was named Fernanda, but I rechristened her Morcadis, in honor of her Gift. I would have made her my coven sister and mixed my blood with hers, but she betrayed me and fled, seeking my death. But I live, and have returned to the world, and will take back my kingdom! Yet first I must have my revenge. Where is she?”

  “Neither too far, nor too near. Look for her, and you waste your sight.”

  “Why is that?” I demanded. Léopana was not usually so cryptic.

  “She will find you. Have patience, and she will come. She is only a circle away.”

  “What do you mean? Speak more plainly!”

  “I have spoken. You are clever, Morgus,
and you rank high among the Gifted, and you think yourself beautiful. The River of Death has sealed your flesh against all weapons that bite, so you are as untouchable as a god. Yet I say to you, beware! You are too proud, daughter of the north, too greedy, too vengeful; but there are those who are prouder and hungrier, and whose enmity runs deeper. Do not measure yourself against the greater foe, or overlook the lesser.”

  I felt her anger, and I knew her words sprang from that source, and were not a warning but a curse. The Eye smoldered but could not pierce. “I did not summon you for advice,” I said. “Damn me with visions, or be silent. Have you nothing more to tell me?”

  “Everything that lives . . . must die . . .” Her voice grew faint, and she plucked out the Eye, pulling the veil over her face and vanishing without dismissal. My grip on the magic seemed to be erratic, though I did not know why, and I poured my will back into the circle, drawing taut the perimeter, reaching out beyond the boundaries of the night. An old, old crone appeared briefly at the heart of the spell, half bald and dressed in corpse clothes, mumbling to herself. I knew her, of course: Hexaté, who had made herself a goddess among witches, and drunk the blood of a thousand sacrifices, and grown fat on human flesh; but she was nothing now. A senile hag who gibbered and cackled, sinking toward a sleep from which she might never awaken. For the immortals, senility can last a long time, and the sleep must be profound indeed that can carry them into Limbo. I banished her without questions, though she remembered my name, and I called on another of the old ones, the first spirits who have remained to consort with Men. He was manifest as a slight figure scarcely four feet high, his anatomy undeveloped, his face infantine and pure, save for the eyes. I say he as a matter of convenience and custom, but in fact the sex of the Child is not known, and his androgynous features may look sometimes more feminine, sometimes closer to those of a boy. He wore a tunic of white samite and a wreath of leaves on moon-gilded curls.

  “Eriost,” I greeted him, “who is also called Vallorn, Idunor, Sifril the Ever Young, by your names I bind you. Answer my questions.”