by Jan Siegel
“You have left too many out,” said the Child. “I am also Teagan the Beautiful, and Maharac the Corrupter, and Varli the Slayer. Question me as you wish, but you cannot compel my answer.”
“I do not need to,” I said. “The question is direct but the answer is obscure, and I think you will not know it.”
“Ask,” said Eriost.
“Even the Black Seeress answered me only with riddles and curses. You are too ignorant—”
“Ask!”
“I seek one Fernanda Morcadis, a witch of untried Gift and stolen skills. Yet it seems that her inexpert nets are too subtle for the gaze of the wise and farseeing.”
A frown puckered the creaseless forehead; the knowing eyes glowed like marsh gas. “I feel no subtlety,” he said. “There is something else, something—“ And then he was gone. There was no warning: he disappeared like a light suddenly extinguished, leaving the circle empty. I stared, caught my breath—released it in a torrent of Atlantean. The suspense seemed to endure a long time, but in reality it was only moments. Then he was back, and the glow dimmed in his eyes.
“She has no subtlety,” he repeated, and anger disfigured his innocence. “But she has power—though it may be less than yours—and the courage to use it. She will come to you—she will come soon—and when she does, you must kill her. Don’t hesitate, don’t try to trap her. Kill. Or you will not see another sun.”
“You overestimate her,” I said. “My Gift is greater, my will stronger. No weapon can harm me, not even the guns of the modern world. When I have her, I will snap her like green wood.”
“Green wood bends,” said Eriost. “You called me: heed my words. She has a treasure you have never had. Mortals value it highly.”
“What is that ?”
“Friends.”
I cursed him away, scorning his fears. What need have I for friends, when I can collect souls and imprison them in flagon and jar, when I can whistle the birds from the Eternal Tree and enslave both beast and man to my slightest whim? Friends are a weakness: they drain your emotions, hurt you, betray. I have Nehemet for a companion, and with the head of Sysselore I shall have whatever conversation I require. I wish Morcadis joy in her friendships. They will destroy her.
Nehemet wormed herself between my legs as if in affection, but I need none. Even ordinary cats are not by nature affectionate: they offer caresses and purring to gain the saucer of cream, the plate of fish. And Nehemet is a goblin cat, whose kind love only the hunt. Her gestures are a matter of style, a feline affectation.
She retreated, adopting her usual pose of statuesque immobility, while I invoked some of the lesser spirits who attend the practices of sorcery. If Morcadis had been using her Gift, they should have sensed it. They are akin to the elementals but far stronger, beings who rarely act but merely are. Their coming can bring temperature changes, freaks of weather, moods of oppression and foreboding, sounds and smells from the environment where they first flourished. Some are composites, spirit clusters of a hundred or more united in cloud form. Others make themselves visible with human features, or the masks and limbs of beasts.
They came and went at the hub of the circle in an unholy procession: Boros brought the howling of icy winds, Mallebolg the ogre was mantled in his own gloom, Cthorn appeared as a monstrous blob frilled with lip, Oedaphor bulged with a thousand unmatching eyes. Yet those eyes had seen too little, and the others wailed, or groaned, or slobbered their ignorance.
“I seek a witch with friends,” I told them. “That is rare enough. Who are her friends? I must know.”
But no one could answer me.
There was a girl, I remembered. The wrong girl. My emissary had taken her by accident, finding her in the same house with Morcadis, and I had sent her back without learning her name. She wore her hair very long for these days, and her eyes were dark and frightened, like those of a nervous animal paralyzed by the gaze of a predator. I could not call her, but I searched deep in my memory to find her face, re-creating it diligently in the nucleus of the spell, summoning her with her own image. It takes great strength to perform such a feat, and I felt myself growing faint from the strain of it, striving to flow along the current of the magic, to reach the source of that face and draw it to me. There was an instant when something connected, and the power of the circle redoubled, and lightning stabbed upward from the perimeter, and the invading moonbeams turned red.
And then she was there.
“Concentrate,” said Ragginbone. “You must remain in control, or the results could be fatal.”
“I can’t reach him,” Fern said, and her intensity was almost savage. “I know he’s there—I can feel him—but I can’t reach him.”
“He’s dangerous—unpredictable—half-monster. He may resist your call. Expending your energies for such as he is folly.”
“I swore to be his friend,” Fern said. “It’s too long since I spoke with him.”
“You choose your friends ill,” Ragginbone muttered, but his mouth was wry.
“I know.” She took a slow breath, repeated the summons. “Kaliban, sword child, man-beast, conceived in sorcery from an empty seed, I, Morcadis, call you. Son of the demon, son of the witch, come to me! By your soul I conjure you! Venya! Fiassé!”
A darkness solidified at the circle’s heart, growing horns. Red eyes gleamed in the werelight. A voice that was little more than a growl said: “I have no soul.”
“Yet you came.” Fern was panting from the force she had exerted.
“Your call reached a long way, little witch. Even beyond the world. I wondered . . . what evil have I done to merit so insistent a summons?” He grew more defined as he spoke, and the firegleam lit his face, showing the mark burned deep into his brow.
“What is that?” Fern demanded, and the direction of her gaze made no gesture necessary. “Who—”
But he withdrew back into darkness, shrinking inward upon himself, vanishing as swiftly as a genie into a bottle. “Kal!” Fern cried. “Come back! Kal!”—calling him not as a witch calls a spirit but as a mortal to a long-lost companion.
He did not come. In the circle, there was a blur of glitter and light, and another figure materialized abruptly. A small figure, leaf crowned and dressed in white, with the soft perfect features of a child. Fern had seen it once before, watching another invocation from behind a chair. “—wrong,” it said. Its voice was sexless and pure. “What form of witchery is this? Who called me here?”
“You were not called,” Fern said coldly. “Begone!”
She began the motion of dismissal—and stopped short, arrested by his next words.
“I seek a witch named Morcadis.”
“Why?”
“You are she?”
“Why?”
“Your enemy has found you—”
“Good.” Fern raised her hand. “Tell Morgus, since you have become her page boy, that I have found her. Envarré !”
The Child disappeared instantly. Ragginbone took Fern’s arm, but anger had strengthened her, and she did not need support. “Bravado,” he said. “It sounded well, even if it wasn’t.”
Moonspittle was muttering apprehensively, presumably to his cat. “Who—or what—was that ?” asked Will.
“A spirit,” said Ragginbone. “One of the oldest, despite its appearance.”
“Evil?”
“Neither evil nor good, but, like so many of the old ones, it inclines the more to evil, or at least to mischief. Its preferred apparition is in accordance with its mind-set. It has no known gender, but can assume the semblance of either.” He turned back to Fern. “You should not have admitted it.”
“I didn’t,” said Fern. “It was just there.”
“You must have relaxed your grip.”
“No. I would have sensed that.”
“The circle is too open,” Moonspittle averred. “Anything can get in. Look now!”
Fern had not attempted a further summons, but in the midst of the spellground a gray dimness w
as gathering, coiling in upon itself, changing shape. Fern launched into another incantation, securing the boundary, but whatever was trying to manifest itself came from within, and did not need to violate the perimeter. There was a noise of wind, and the room grew bitterly cold. The liquid froze in the retorts, forcing out stoppers, causing one to burst with a sound like a gunshot; fluid leaking from another dripped into an icicle from the edge of the bench. Frost crackled along the spines of books. Gaynor’s teeth chattered; Fern felt her fingers growing numb. In the circle, a blizzard swirled, and at its heart there were eyes as hard as winter. “Boros,” Ragginbone said, through cold-stiffened lips. Fern croaked a dismissal, and the blizzard seemed to sag, losing momentum, and the eyes blinked and were gone, and warmth seeped back into the basement. The spellfire leaped in the grate, but it gave out little heat, though its core could have melted metal. In the background, Moonspittle could be heard complaining in a routine manner about the damage.
“He’s right,” Ragginbone said. “You appear to be attracting undesirable elementals. This is becoming dangerous. Close the circle.”
Fern gave a quick shake of her head. “I am not done yet.”
Nor was the spell. The last of the snowflakes were sucked into a blackness that bulged and grew, straining this way and that as if something with too many body parts was smothered in the gloom and struggling to escape. It did not want to be dismissed, grunting and bellowing with several voices. “Mallebolg the ogre,” Ragginbone said helpfully. “He has three heads and a number of different personalities, none of them pleasant. God knows where he came from.”
It took Fern some minutes to dispose of him, and even then the blackness did not disperse, merely turning paler and brown around the edges, settling into a featureless mass that simply sat there, pulsating very slightly like an animated blancmange. Gradually, some of it extruded into a species of double frill, fat and fleshy, which spread until it encircled over half the blancmange. Then it spoke.
“I am Cthorn,” it said. “I have come. Feed me.”
Fern uttered the familiar words of dismissal, but she was growing weary again and desperate, and they seemed to hold less force. A section of the lips extrapolated, shaping themselves into a tube—there was a sucking noise, a gulp—and her spell was swallowed up. The blancmange grew a little, ominously.
It said: “More.”
For a second or two, Fern felt the upsurge of panic.
“Try fire,” Will suggested.
This time, when Fern hurled her order, there was raw authority in her tone. The tube of lip shot outward, and Fern threw in the final “Fiumé!” even as it devoured the spell. Flame seared through the soft mouth parts; the lips crumpled and turned black; the whole blancmange began to shudder. Then it imploded, engulfed in its own substance, eviscerating the very core of the magic. Gaps appeared in the circle as the spellpowder was whipped into the vortex. Fern picked up the wrong jar, swore, swapped it, tried to fill in the chinks. The magic was flowing back now, leaking out into the room. The bookshelves heaved in a solid, moving wave. The ceiling arched upward until the distended plaster began to split and fragments floated down like leaves. The floor shifted uneasily beneath their feet. The cat had turned into a ball of madness: both Ragginbone and Moonspittle struggled to restrain him, flayed by whirling claws. Will threw his arms around Gaynor just as she reached to brush the plaster from her hair, inadvertently knocking him in the eye. Both of them gasped out breathless apologies. Something with too many eyes materialized in several parts of the room at once, staring out from chair back and book-spine, from grimy lithograph and splintered bell jar. Fern had abandoned the spellpowder and was fighting to regain control, ignoring a growing sense of helplessness.
“Orcalé nef-heleix . . . Vardé nessantor . . . Ai Morcadis thinéfissé . . . vardé!”
The eyes winked out. The perimeter was still broken, but the magic seemed to be contained, held within a boundary of pure will. The spellfire flared, blue flames licking around the pelmet, and in its livid glare Fern’s face, too, looked blue, pinched with effort. “End it!” cried Ragginbone, but she rushed on, babbling the new summons in a frenzy of haste, before her strength failed altogether. “Dana!” she called, into the night, into the void. “Prisoner or wanderer, come to me!”
And for a few moments she was there—not the well-tended body in the hospital bed but as she must have looked at the party, with a swirl of hair not her own and the chiffon tatters of her costume. Under the makeup her eyes were frightened; her hands seemed to push at an invisible wall. At first she did not appear to see her summoner, but then her gaze focused on Fern, and she grew still, and the tip of her nose flattened as if pressed against a glass. Her lips moved soundlessly, but they could all read the words. Help me . . .
She vanished without dismissal into a surge of darkness. The epicenter of the circle grew storm-black. An image developed in the murk: a girl’s face, transparent as a hologram, shining faintly. Fern murmured, bemused: “Gaynor?” Ragginbone’s shout of warning came too late. Gaynor had slipped from Will’s grasp, stepped through a break in the perimeter. There was a second when her features melded with those in the circle, then she, too, vanished.
What happened next was something Fern would never remember very clearly: Will’s panic, Ragginbone’s harsh admonition, Moonspittle’s squeak of protest. She was unable to think anymore and ceased to try; instinct took over. “You’ll have to maintain the circle,” she found herself saying, probably to Moonspittle. “Seal the boundary. Don’t let anything through. If you can hold the spell, I’ll be back.” She didn’t wait for objection or restraint. Her will was firm, her mind empty. She had no plan of action, no doubt, and in that instant, no fear.
She stepped into the circle, spoke one word. “Envardo!” I follow.
She followed.
At first, Gaynor thought she hadn’t moved. She couldn’t recall entering the circle, only being there. There was a brief uprush of light, a sensation of falling—and then the spinning tunnel of radiance slowed, subsided, and she was left standing as before, except that now the perimeter was unbroken. She looked up, and saw the full moon streaming through an open window, its light blending with the werelight so that she had to narrow her eyes against the brightness. The only window in the basement had been small and high up, screened with cloth or brown paper. She began to be frightened—not very frightened, not yet, but frightened enough. She stared around her, trying to see beyond the circle, but all she could make out was a soaring darkness of vast black drapes depending from some vault far above. Then she saw the woman. A tall woman in a pale dress that glittered when she moved. Her hair hung down her back in a thick clotted mass; her bare arms were as white as the dress. The fire glow limned her figure with blue. Long afterward, Gaynor said: “Her face was beautiful, but it was like something in a surrealist painting. If you looked at it from a different angle, you knew it would be utterly horrible.”
The woman asked: “What is your name?” Her voice was soft and sweet as the smell of decay.
Gaynor did not want to reply, but she knew she must. “Gaynor.”
“That sounds like a modern contraction. The name I knew was Gwennifer. How interesting. So you are Gwennifer.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Playing the idiot, is that it? It makes no difference. I used you before; I shall use you again. You were always invaluable to my plans. I gather you have befriended Morcadis now. Your folly—or hers. Where is she?”
“I think—outside the circle . . .”
“That’s no answer. Tell me the truth: the magic binds you. Where is she?”
The pressure of her insistence was almost suffocating Gaynor; she struggled to breathe. Half choking, she could manage no other response. “Outside . . . the circle . . .”
And then Morgus realized what had happened. Two circles, two spells, drawn together in a single magical bond . . . “Uvalé!” she screamed, and a gap appeared along the rim where the flame fli
cker went out. She raised her hand. “Come to me!”
Gaynor felt herself impelled toward the break in the circle. She knew that to leave the spellground would be disastrous, but she could not seem to resist. Outside the perimeter, the dark shrank to normal proportions, becoming sweeping curtains against a paneled wall. A cat waited there, stone still, its hairless body blotched black and white. She thought the expression on its wizened face was one of total malevolence. Unable to stop herself, she set foot out of the magic, into the room.
The sudden cry behind her snapped the compulsion like overstrained elastic. “Xiss! Stop! I command you!” A hand seized her wrist, wrenching her back into the circle with such violence that she stumbled and fell. She tried to rise, clutching her rescuer. Outside the perimeter, Morgus was swaying from side to side like a cobra about to strike. Her eyes slitted; her mouth widened into a smile without laughter, all hunger and teeth. In front of her, the goblin cat began to prowl to and fro along the edge of the break, as though searching for that weakening in the barrier that would allow ingress.
“Morcadis,” said the witch, very quietly, and “Fernanda Morcadis,” louder now and clear as a chime.
“You were looking for me,” said Fern. “I have come.” She was breathless from the abrupt translocation, thrown off balance by Gaynor’s desperate grip.
“I like your friend,” Morgus went on, her manner lightening deceptively. “I knew her of old: she was always venial in sin, soft-hearted and soft-headed. A liability to all who stood by her. I shall enjoy questioning her again.”
“She is young,” said Fern, puzzled. “You have met before only briefly, in a dream.”
“Youth!” Morgus said scornfully. “An illusion. Do I not look young to you? Everything is reborn, recycled, remade, even the spirit. She is Gwennifer the adulteress, though she has grown very plain. She cannot change.”
“The world of Time has made you mad,” said Fern. “You are seeing old enemies in new faces. I thought I was the one you feared.”
