Swords & Dark Magic

by Jonathan Strahan; Lou Anders

  “Of course. Eighteen.”

  “Ah. Eighteen.” The Vroon delicately looked away. “And of limited sexual experience, perhaps?—I have no wish to pry, you understand, but in order to calculate—”

  “Yes,” said the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran. “I hold nothing back from you. She is a virgin of the purest purity.”

  “Ah,” said Ghambivole Zwoll.

  “And moves in the highest circles at court. She is in fact the Lady Alesarda of Muldemar, of whose beauty and wit you undoubtedly have heard report.”

  That was jolting news. Ghambivole Zwoll fought to hide any show of the concern that that lady’s name had awakened in him, but he was unable to fight back a complex, anguished writhing of his innumerable tentacles. “The Lady—Alesarda—of Muldemar,” the Vroon said slowly. “Ah. Ah.” His partner was glaring furiously at him now from his station in the corner shadows, the wary left-hand head glowering with wrath and even the normally cheerful right one showing alarm. “I have heard the name—she is, I believe, of royal lineage?”

  “Sixth in descent from the Pontifex Prestimion himself.”

  “Ah. Ah. Ah.” Ghambivole Zwoll saw that they were getting into exceedingly deep waters. He wished the marquis had kept the lady’s identity to himself. But business was business, and the shop’s exchequer was distressingly low. To mask his uncertainties he scribbled notes for quite some time; and then, looking up at last, said with a cheeriness he certainly did not feel, “We will have what you need in one week’s time. The fee will be—ah—”

  Quickly, almost desperately, he reckoned the highest price he thought the traffic would bear, and then doubled it, expecting to be haggled with. “Twenty royals.”

  “Twenty,” said the marquis impassively. “So be it.”

  Ghambivole wondered what the response would have been if he had said thirty. Or fifty. It had been so long since he had had a client of the marquis’s station that he had forgotten that such people were utterly indifferent to cost. Well, too late now.

  “Will a deposit of five cause any difficulties, do you think?”

  “Hardly.” Mirl Meldelleran drew a thick, glossy coin from his purse and dropped it on Ghambivole Zwoll’s desk. The Vroon swept it quickly toward him with a trembling tentacle. “One week,” said the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran. “The results, I assume, are guaranteed?”

  “Of course,” said Ghambivole Zwoll.

  “This is madness,” said Shostik-Willeron, the moment the door of the stall had closed behind the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran and they were alone again. “We will be ruined! A virgin princess of Prestimion’s line, one who moves in the highest circles at court, and you propose to fling her into the bed of the fourth son of a third son?”

  “Twenty royals,” Ghambivole Zwoll said. “Do you know what our gross revenue for the past three months has been? Hardly one third as much. I expected him to bargain me down, and I would have settled for ten, or even five. Or three or two. But twenty—twenty!—”

  “The risk is tremendous. The sellers of the potion will be traced.”

  “What of it? We are not the ones who will debauch the young princess.”

  “But it’s an abomination, Ghambivole!” The words were coming from the right-hand head, and that gave Ghambivole Zwoll pause, for the right-hand head always brimmed with enthusiasm and exuberance, while it was the other, the dominant left head, that was ever urging caution. “We’ll be whipped! We’ll be flayed!”

  “We are only purveyors, nothing more. We are protected by the mercantile laws. What we sell is legal, and what he plans to use it for is legal too, however deplorable. The girl is of age.”

  “So he says.”

  “If he’s lied to me about it, the sin is his. Do you think I would dare to ask the grandson of the Count of Canzilaine for an affidavit?”

  “But even so, Ghambivole—”

  “Twenty royals, Shostik-Willeron.”

  They argued over it another fifteen minutes. But in the end the Vroon won, as he knew he would. He was the senior partner; this was his shop, and had been in his family four generations; and he was the only one of the two who had any real skill at wizardry. Shostik-Willeron’s sole contribution to the partnership had been capital, not any great knowledge of the art; and if the shop failed, the Su-Suheris would lose that capital. They were in no position to turn away such lucrative business, chancy though it might be.

  The partners were an oddly assorted pair. Like all the Su-Suheris race, Shostik-Willeron was tall and slender, with a pallid body tapering upward to a narrow forking neck a foot in length, atop which sprouted a pair of hairless, vastly elongated heads, each of which had an independent mind and identity. Ghambivole Zwoll could hardly have looked more different: a tiny person, barely reaching as high as his partner’s shins, fragile and insubstantial of body, with a host of flexible rubbery limbs and a small head, out of which jutted a sharp hook of a beak, above which were two huge yellow eyes with horizontal black stripes to serve as pupils. There were times when the Vroon barely avoided being trampled by Shostik-Willeron as they moved about their cramped little emporium.

  But Ghambivole Zwoll was accustomed to moving in a world of oversized creatures. Vroons were the dominant beings on their own home planet, but giant Majipoor was Ghambivole Zwoll’s native world, his ancestors having arrived in the great wave of Vroon immigration during the reign of Lord Prankipin, and like all his kind, he wove his way easily and lithely through throngs of heedless entities of much greater size than he, three and four and even five times his height, not only humans but also the reptilian Ghayrogs and the lofty Su-Suheris and the various other peoples of Majipoor, going on up to the gigantic shaggy four-armed Skandars, who stood eight feet tall and taller. Not even the presence of the ponderous, slow-witted Skandar cleaning-woman, Hendaya Zanzan, who moved slowly and clumsily about the shop as she dusted and fussed with its displays, intimidated him with her dangerous bulk.

  “A love potion,” Ghambivole Zwoll said, setting about his task. “One that is suitable to win the heart of a highborn maiden, slender, delicate—”

  The job called for no little forethought. At Ghambivole Zwoll’s request, the Su-Suheris began taking books of reference down from the high shelves, the reliable old book of incantations that Ghambivole Zwoll had kept by his side since his student days in the sorcerers’ city of Triggoin, and the ever-useful Great Grimoire of Hadin Vakkimorin, and Thalimiod Gur’s Book of Specifics, and many another volume—more, in fact, than would possibly be needed. Ghambivole Zwoll suspected that he could compound the potion that the marquis had commissioned out of his own fund of accumulated skills, without recourse to any of these books. But he wanted to take no unnecessary risks; he had a whole week to complete what he could probably deal with in a morning, but any miscalculation due to overconfidence would surely have ugly consequences, and that stupefying fee of twenty royals more than amply compensated him for any unnecessary time that he expended on the task. It was not as though he had a great many other things to do this week, after all.

  Besides, he loved to burrow in the great array of wizardly materials with which his forefathers had crammed the small shop. These two centuries of professional magicking had made the place a virtual museum of the magus’s art. It was not an easy shop to find, tucked away as it was in a far back corner of the huge marketplace, but in happier days it had enjoyed great acclaim, and throngs of impatient clients had jostled elbow-to-elbow in the hall just outside, peering in at the racks of arcane powders and oils, bearing the awesome labels Scamion and Thekka Ammoniaca and Elecamp and Golden Rue, and the rows of leather-bound books of great antiquity, and the mysterious devices that sorcerers used, the ammatepilas and rohillas, the ambivials and verilistias, and much more apparatus of that sort, impressive to laymen and useful to practitioners. Even now, in this dreary materialistic era, the patrons of the Midnight Market who had come there to purchase such ordinary things as brooms and baskets, bangles and beads, spices, dried meats, cheese,
and wine and honey, often took the trouble to wend their way this deep into the building—for the Midnight Market was a huge subterranean vault, long and low, divided into a myriad narrow aisles, with the sorcerers’ booths tucked away in the hindmost quarter—to stare through the dusty window of Ghambivole Zwoll’s shop. That was all that most of them did, though: stare. The Marquis Mirl Meldelleran had been the first patron to step through the doorway in many days.

  Ghambivole Zwoll drew the work out for nearly the full week, sequestered in the constricted little Vroon-sized laboratory behind the main showroom, jotting recipes, calculating quantities, measuring, weighing, mixing: the fine brandy of Gimkandale as a base, and then dried ghumba root, and a pinch of fermented hingamort, and some drops of tincture of vejloo, and just a bit of powdered sea-dragon hide, not strictly necessary, but always useful in speeding the effects of such potions. Allow it all to set a little while; then would come the heating, the cooling, the filtering, the titration, the spectral analysis. Meanwhile Shostik-Willeron remained out front, handling a surprising amount of walk-in trade: a Ghayrog who stopped by for a couple of amulets, two tourists from Ni-moya who came in out of nothing more than curiosity and stayed long enough to purchase a dozen of the black candles of divination, and a grain merchant from one of the downslope cities who sought a spell that would cast a blight on the fields of a supplier whom he had come to loathe. Three sales the same week, and also the potion for the marquis!

  Ghambivole Zwoll allowed himself to think that perhaps a return to the prosperity of old might be in its early stages.

  By the end of the week the job was done. There was one moment of near catastrophe on the evening when Ghambivole Zwoll arrived to begin his night’s work and found the massive Skandar charwoman Hendaya Zanzan bashing around with her mop in his rear workroom, where he had left the vials of ingredients that would go into the marquis’s potion sitting atop his desk in a carefully arranged row. In disbelief, he watched the gigantic woman, who was far too large actually to enter the room, standing at the entrance energetically swinging the mop from side to side and thereby placing everything within in great jeopardy.

  “No!” he cried. “What are you doing, idiot? How many times have I told you—Stop! Stop!”

  She halted and swung about uncertainly, looming above him like a mountain as she shifted the handle of the mop from one to another of her four hands. “But it has been so many weeks, master, since I last cleaned that room—”

  “I’ve told you never to clean that room. Never! Never! And especially not now, when I have work in progress.”

  “Never, master?”

  “Oh, what a great stupid thing you are. Never: it means Not Ever. Not at any time. Keep your big idiotic mop out of there! Do you understand me, Hendaya Zanzan?”

  It seemed to take her quite a while to process the instruction.

  She stood with all four burly arms drooping, the slow workings of her mind manifesting themselves meanwhile by a series of odd twitchings and clampings of her lips. Ghambivole Zwoll waited, struggling with his temper. He knew it did very little good to get angry with Hendaya Zanzan. The woman was a moron, a great furry clod of a moron, a dull-witted shaggy mass of a creature eight feet high and nearly as wide, hardly more than an animal. Not only stupid but ugly besides, even as Skandars went, flat-faced, empty-eyed, slack-jawed, covered from head to toe with a bestial coarse gray pelt that had the stale stink of some dead creature’s hide left too long to fester in the sun. He had no idea why he had hired her—out of pity, probably—nor why he had kept her on so long. The shop did need to be cleaned once in a while, he supposed, but it had been madness to hire anyone as bulky as a Skandar to do the sweeping in such a small, cluttered space, and in any case Shostik-Willeron had little enough to occupy his time and could easily take care of the chore. But for the grace of the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran’s twenty-royal job Ghambivole Zwoll would have let her go in another week or two. Now it seemed that he could afford to keep her on a little longer, and he would, for discharging her would be an unpleasant task and he tended to postpone all such things; but if business were to slacken once again—

  “I am never to go into this little room,” she said finally. “Is that so, master?”

  “Very good, Hendaya Zanzan! Very good. Say it once again! Never. Never.”

  “Never to go into. The little room. Never.”

  “And never means—?”

  “Not ever?”

  He didn’t care for the interrogative tone of her reply; but he saw that it was the best he was going to get out of the poor thing, and, sending her on her way, he went into his workshop and closed the door behind him. It took him no more than an hour to complete the final titration for the marquis’s potion. While he worked he heard the Su-Suheris moving about in the outer room, talking to someone, then pointlessly shifting furniture about, then whistling to himself in that maddening double-headed counterpoint his species so greatly cherished. What a useless fool the man was! Not a dolt like the Skandar woman, of course, but certainly he had little of the clear-eyed wisdom and cunning that the Su-Suheris, with the benefit of their double brain, were reputed to possess. Ghambivole Zwoll had badly needed an injection of fresh capital to meet the ongoing expenses of his shop or he would never have taken him on as a partner, an act that unquestionably would have brought fiery condemnation upon him from his forebears. If only business would pick up a little, he would surely buy Shostik-Willeron out and return to running the place as a sole proprietorship. But he knew what a futile fantasy that was.

  Scowling in annoyance, Ghambivole Zwoll poured his completed potion into an elegant flask worthy of the twenty-royal price, inscribed the accompanying spell on a sheet of vellum. On the appointed day the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran returned, clad even more grandly than before—high-waisted doublet of orange velvet, long-legged golden breeches bedecked with loops of braid and buttons, slender dress sword fastened to a wide silk sash tied in a huge bow. “Is this it?” he asked, holding the flask up to a glowglobe above his head and studying it intently.

  “Be certain that you are the object of her gaze when she drinks it,” said the Vroon. “And here,” he said, handing him the vellum scroll, “are the words you must speak as she consumes the potion.”

  The marquis’s brow furrowed. “Sathis pephoouth mouraph anour? What nonsense is this?”

  “Not nonsense at all. It is a powerful spell. The meaning is, ‘Let her be well disposed to me, let her fall in love with me, let her yield to me.’ And the third word is pronounced mouroph; take care that you get it right, or the effect may be lost. Even worse: you may achieve the opposite of what you desire. Again: Sathis pephoouth mouroph anour.”

  “Sathis pephoouth mouroph anour.”

  “Excellent! But rehearse it many times before you approach her. She will fall helplessly into your arms. I guarantee it, your grace.”

  “Well, then. Sathis pephoouth mouraph anour.”

  “Mouroph, your grace.”

  “Mouroph. Sathis pephoouth mouroph anour.”

  “She is yours, your grace.”

  “Let us hope so. And this is yours.” The marquis produced his bulging purse and casually tossed two coins, a fine fat ten-royal piece and a glossy fiver, onto Ghambivole Zwoll’s desk. “Good day to you. And may the Divine protect you if you have played me false! Sathis pephoouth mouraph anour. Mouroph. Mouroph.” He spun neatly on his heel and was gone.

  Three days passed quietly. Ghambivole Zwoll made two small sales, one for one crown fifty weights, one for slightly less. Otherwise the shop did no business. Creditors devoured most of the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran’s twenty royals almost at once. The Vroon returned to the state of gloom that had occupied him before the arrival of his aristocratic client.

  On the second of those three evenings Shostik-Willeron was late coming to the shop; and when he did, both his long, pallid faces were tightly drawn in the Su-Suheris expression of uneasiness verging on despair.

  “I warn
ed you we were making a great mistake,” he said at once. “And now I’m sure of it!” It was the right-hand head that spoke: the cheerful, optimistic one, usually.

  Ghambivole Zwoll sighed. “What now, Shostik-Willeron?”

  “I have been speaking with my kinsman Sagamorn-Endik, who is in service at the Castle. Do you know that the Lady Alesarda of Muldemar, whom you have delivered so blithely into the clutches of that ridiculous dandy with your drug, is spoken of widely at court as the promised bride of the Coronal’s son? That by interfering in those nuptials, by despoiling this precious princess, your marquis runs perilously close to treason? And you and I, as abettors of his crime—”

  “It is no crime.”

  “To sleep with a simple scullery maid or some illiterate juggler girl, no. But for the fourth son of the third son of a provincial count to seduce a noblewoman destined for a royal marriage, to interpose his sweaty lusts in such high and delicate negotiations, or simply to be the ones who enable him to carry out such a thing, to be the agents who help him to have his way with her—oh, Ghambivole Zwoll, Ghambivole Zwoll, let us hope that that little potion of yours was a worthless draught! Otherwise your marquis is destroyed, and we are destroyed with him.”

  “If the potion worked,” said the Vroon in the calmest tone he was capable of mustering, “there is no certainty that what took place between the marquis and the princess will become known to anyone else. And if it does, the marquis will have to look to the consequences of his deed on his own. We are mere merchants, protected by law. But if the potion has failed—and how can it have failed, unless he blundered with the spell?—we owe him twenty royals, to fulfill my guarantee. Where will we get twenty royals, Shostik-Willeron? Conjure them out of the air? Look here.” He opened the cash drawer of his desk. “This is what’s left of it. Three royals, two crowns, and sixty—no, seventy weights. The rest is gone. Let us pray that the potion has done its work, for our own sakes, if nothing else.”