The Complete Lythande

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Through the lid of one of the boxes, Lythande could see, in the magical witchlight which responded only to the things of magical Power, a long narrow shape, wrapped in silks but still glowing with the light that singled out the things of magic. Surely that must be Rastafyre’s wand, unless Roygan the Thief had a collection of such things—and the kind of incompetence which had allowed Roygan to get the wand was uncommon among magicians... praise to Keth’s all-seeing eye!

  Lythande fumbled with the lock. Now that the excitement of the fight with the bane-wolf had subsided, shoulder and arm were aching like half-healed burns where the enchanted teeth had met in Lythande’s flesh. Worse than burns, perhaps, Lythande thought, for they might not yield to ordinary burn remedies! The magician wanted to tear off the tattered tunic where the bane-wolf had torn, but there were reasons not to do this within an enemy’s stronghold! Lythande drew the mage-robe’s folds closer, bitten hands wrenching at the bolts. The Pilgrim Adept was very strong; unlike those magicians who relied always on magic and avoided exertion, Lythande had traveled afoot and alone over all the highroads and by-roads lighted by the Twin Suns, and the wiry arms, the elegant-looking hands, had the strength of the daggers they wielded. After a moment the first hinge of the chest yielded, with a sound as loud, in the darkening cellar, as the explosion of fireworks; Lythande flinched at the sound... surely even Roygan must hear that in his wife’s very chamber! Now for the other hinge. The bitten hands were growing more painful by the moment; Lythande took the right-hand dagger, the one intended for objects which were natural and not magic, and tried to wedge it under the hinge, prying to grim silence without success. Was the damned thing spelled shut? No; for then Lythande’s hands alone could not have budged the first bolt. Blood was dripping from the blistered hand before the second lock gave way, and Lythande reached into the chest, and recoiled as if from the very teeth of the bane-wolf. Howling with rage and pain and frustration, Lythande swept into the chest with the left-hand dagger; there was a small ghastly shrilling and something ugly, horrible and only half visible, writhed and died. But now Lythande held the wand of Rastafyre, triumphant.

  Wincing at the pain, Lythande stripped the concealing cloths from the wand. A grimace of distaste came over the magician’s narrow face as the phallic carvings and shape of the wand were revealed, but after all, this had been fairly obvious—that Rastafyre would arm his wand with his manhood. It was, after all, his own problem; it was not Lythande’s karma to teach other magicians either discretion or manners. A bargain had been made and a service should be performed.

  Hastily wadding the protective silks around the wand—it was easier to handle that way, and Lythande had no wish even to look upon the gross thing—Lythande turned to the business of getting out again. Not through the walls. Darkness had surely fallen by now; though in the windowless treasure-room it was hard to tell, but there must be a door somewhere.

  Lythande had heard nothing; but abruptly, as the witchlight flared, Roygan the Proud stood directly in the center of the room.

  “So, Lythande the Magician is Lythande the Thief! How like you the business of thievery, then, Magician?”

  A trap, then. But Lythande’s mellow, neutral voice was calm.

  “It is written; from the thief all shall be stolen at last. By the ring in your nose, Roygan; you know the truth of what I say.”

  With an inarticulate howl of rage, Roygan hurled himself at Lythande. The magician stepped aside, and Roygan hurtled against a chest, giving a furious yelp of pain as his knees collided with the metalled edge of the chest. He whirled, but Lythande, dagger in hand, stood facing him.

  “Ring of Lythande, ring of Roygan’s shame, be welded to this,” Lythande murmured, and the dagger flung itself against Roygan’s face. Roygan grunted with pain as Lythande’s dagger molded itself against the ring, curling around his face.

  “Ai! Ai! Take it off, damn you by every god and godlet of Gandrin, or I—”

  “You will what?” demanded Lythande, looking with an aloof grin at Roygan’s face, the dagger curled around the end of his nose, and gripping, as if by a powerful magnet, at the metal tips of Roygan’s teeth. Furious, howling, Roygan flung himself again at Lythande, his yell wordless now as the metal of the dagger fastened itself tighter to his teeth. Lythande laughed, stepping free easily from Roygan’s clutching hands; but the thief’s face was alight with sudden triumphant glee.

  “Hoy,” he mumbled through the edges of the dagger. “Now I have touched Lythande and I know your secret... Lythande, Pilgrim Adept, wearer of the Blue Star, you are—ai! Ai-ya!” With a fearful screech of pain, Roygan fell to the floor, wordless as the dagger curled deeper into his mouth; blood burst from his lip, and in the next moment, Lythande’s other dagger thrust through his heart, in the merciful release from agony.

  Lythande bent, retrieved the dagger which had thrust into Roygan’s heart. Then, Blue Star blazing magic, Lythande reached for the other dagger, which had bitten through Roygan’s lips, tongue, throat. A murmured spell restored it to the shape of a dagger, the metal slowly uncurling under the stroking hands of the owner’s sorcery. Slowly, sighing, Lythande sheathed both daggers.

  I meant not to kill him. But I knew too well what his next words would be; and the magic of a Pilgrim Adept is void if the Secret is spoken aloud. And, knowing, I could not let him live. Why was she so regretful? Roygan was not the first Lythande had killed to keep that Secret, the words actually on Roygan’s mutilated tongue: Lythande, you are a woman.

  A woman. A woman, who in her pride had penetrated the courts of the Pilgrim Adepts in disguise, and when the Blue Star was already between her brows, had been punished and rewarded with the Secret she had kept well enough to deceive even the Great Adept in the Temple of the Blue Star.

  Your Secret, then, shall be forever, for on the day when any man save my self shall speak your secret aloud, your power is void. Be then forever doomed with the Secret you yourself have chosen, and be forever in the eyes of all men what you made us think you.

  Bitterly, Lythande thrust the wand of Rastafyre under the folds of the mage-robe. Now she had leisure to find a way out by the doors. The locks yielded to the touch of magic; but before leaving the cellar, Lythande spoke the spell which would return Roygan’s stolen jewels to their owners.

  A small victory for the cause of Law. And Roygan the thief had met his just fate.

  Stepping out into the fading sunlight, Lythande blinked. It had seemed to take hours, that silent struggle in the darkness of the Treasure-room. Yet the sun still lingered, and a little child played noiselessly, splashing her feet in the fountain, until a chubby young woman came to scold her merrily and tug her within-doors. Listening to the laughter, Lythande sighed. A thousand years, a thousand memories, cut her away from the woman and the child.

  To love no man lest my Secret be known. To love no woman lest she be a target for my enemies in quest of the Secret.

  And she risked exposure and powerlessness, again and again, for such as Rastafyre. Why?

  Because I must. There was no answer other than that, a Pilgrim Adept’s vow to Law against Chaos. Rastafyre should have his wand back. There was no law that all magicians should be competent.

  She laid a narrow hand along the wand, trying not to flinch at the shape, and murmured, “Bring me to your master.”

  Lythande found Rastafyre in a tavern; and, having no wish for any public display of power, beckoned him outside. The tubby little magician stared up in awe at the blazing Blue Star.

  “You have it? Already?”

  Silently, Lythande held out the wrapped wand to Rastafyre. As he touched it, he seemed to grow taller, handsomer, less tubby; even his face fell into lines of strength, and virility.

  “And now my fee,” Lythande reminded him.

  He said sullenly “How know I that Roygan the Proud will not come after me?”

  “I knew not,” said Lythande calmly, “that your magic had power to raise the dead, oh Rastafyre the Incomparabl
e.”

  “You—you—k-k-k—he’s dead?”

  “He lies where his ill-gotten treasures rest, with the ring of Lythande still through his nose,” Lythande said calmly. “Try, now, to keep your magic wand out of the power of other men’s wives.”

  Rastafyre chuckled. He said “But wha-wha—what else would I do w-w-with my p-p-power?”

  Lythande grimaced. “Koira’s lute,” she said, “or you will lie where Roygan lies.”

  Rastafyre the Incomparable raised his hand. “Ca-ca-Carrier,” he intoned, and, flickering in and off in the dullness of the room, the velvet bag winked in, out again, came back, vanished again even as Rastafyre had his hand within it.

  “Damn you, Ca-ca-Carrier! Come or go, but don’t flicker like that! Stay! Stay, I said!” He sounded, Lythande thought, as if he were talking to a reluctant puppy dog.

  Finally, when he got it entirely materialized, he drew forth the lute. With a grave bow, Lythande accepted it, tucking it out of sight under the mage-robe.

  “Health and prosperity to you, O Lythande,” he said—for once without stuttering; perhaps the wand did that for him too?

  “Health and prosperity to you, O Rastafyre the Incom—” Lythande hesitated, laughed aloud and said, “Incomparable.”

  He took himself off then, and Lythande added silently, “And more luck to your adventures,” as she watched Ca-ca-Carrier dimly lumping along like a small surly shadow at his heels, until at last it vanished entirely.

  Alone, Lythande stepped into the dark street, under the cold and moonless sky. With a single gesture the magical circle blotted away all surroundings; there was neither time nor space. Then Lythande began to play the lute softly. There was a little stirring in the silence, and the figure of Koira, slender, delicate, her pale hair shimmering about her face and her body gleaming through wispy veils, appeared before her.

  “Lythande—” she whispered. “It is you!”

  “It is I, Koira. Sing to me,” Lythande commanded. “Sing to me the song you sang when we sat together in the gardens of Hilarion.”

  Lythande’s fingers moved on the lute, and Koira’s soft contralto swelled out into an ancient song from a country half a world away and so many years Lythande feared to remember how many.

  The years shall fall upon you, and the light

  That dwelled in you, go into endless night;

  As wine, poured out and sunk into the ground,

  Even your song shall leave no breath of sound,

  And as the leaves within the forest fall,

  Your memory will not remain at all,

  As a word said, a song sung, and be

  Forever with the memories—

  “Stop,” Lythande said, strangled.

  Koira fell silent, at last whispering, “I sang at your command and now I am still at your command.”

  When Lythande could look up without the agony of despair, Koira too was silent. Lythande said at last, “What binds you to the lute, Koira whom once I loved?”

  “I know not,” Koira said, and it seemed that the ghost or her voice was bitter, “I know only that while this lute survives, I am enslaved to it.”

  “And to my will?”

  “Even so, Lythande.”

  Lythande set her mouth hard. She said, “You would not love me when you might; now shall I have you whether you will or no.”

  “Love—” Koira was silent. “We were maidens then and we loved after the fashion of young maidens; and then you went into a far country where I would not follow, for my heart was a woman’s heart, and you—”

  “What do you know of my heart?” Lythande cried out in despair.

  “I knew that my heart was a woman’s heart and longed for a love other than yours,” Koira said. “What would you, Lythande? You too are a woman; I call that no love...”

  Lythande’s eyes were closed. But at last the voice was stubborn. “Yet you are here and you shall sing forever at my will, and be forever silent about your desire for a man’s love... for you there is none other than I, now!”

  Koira bowed deeply, but it seemed to Lythande that there was mockery in the bow.

  She said sharply “What enslaves you to the lute? Are you bound for a space, or forever?”

  “I know not,” Koira said, “Or if I know I cannot speak it.”

  So it was often with enchantments; Lythande knew... and now she would have all of time before her, and sooner or later, sooner or later, Koira would love her... Koira was her slave, she could bid her come and go with her hands on the lute as once they had sought for more than a shared song and a maiden’s kiss...

  But a slave’s counterfeit of love is not love. Lythande raised the lute to her hands, poising her fingers on the strings; Koira’s form began to waver a little, and then, acting swiftly before she could think better of it, Lythande raised the lute, brought it crashing down and broke it over her knee.

  Koira’s face wavered, between astonishment and sudden delirious happiness. “Free!” she cried, “Free at last—O, Lythande, now do I know you truly loved me...” and a whisper swirled and faded and was still, and there was only the empty bubble of magic, void, silent, without light or sound.

  Lythande stood still, the broken lute in her hands. If Rastafyre could only see. She had risked life, sanity, magic, Secret itself and the Blue Star’s power, for this lute, and within moments she had broken it and set free the one who could, over the years, been drawn to her, captive... unable to refuse, unable to break Lythande’s pride further....

  He would think me, too, an incompetent magician.

  I wonder which of us two would be right?

  With a long sigh, Lythande drew the mage-robe about her thin shoulders, made sure the two daggers were secure in their sheaths—for at this hour, in the moonless streets of Old Gandrin there were many dangers, real and magical—and went on her solitary way, stepping over the fragments of the broken lute.

  Somebody Else’s Magic

  In a place like the Thieves’ Quarter of Old Gandrin, there is no survival skill more important than the ability to mind your own business. Come robbery, rape, arson, blood feud, or the strange doings of wizards, a carefully cultivated deaf ear for other people’s problems—not to mention a blind eye, or better, two, for anything that is not your affair—is the best way, maybe the only way, to keep out of trouble.

  It is no accident that everywhere in Old Gandrin, and everywhere else under the Twin Suns, they speak of the blinded eye of Keth-Ketha. A god knows better than to watch the doings of his creatures too carefully.

  Lythande, the mercenary-magician, knew this perfectly well. When the first scream rang down the quarter, despite an involuntary shoulder twitch, Lythande knew that the proper thing was to look straight ahead and keep right on walking in the same direction. It was one of the reasons why Lythande had survived this long; through cultivating superb skill at own-business-minding in a place where there were a variety of strange businesses to be minded.

  Yet there was a certain note to the screams—

  Ordinary robbery or even rape might not have penetrated that carefully cultivated shell of blindness, deafness, looking straight into the thick of it. Lythande’s hand gripped almost without thought at the hilt of the right-hand knife, the black-handled one that hung from the red girdle knotted over the mage-robe, flipped it out, and ran straight into trouble.

  The woman was lying on the ground now, and there had been at least a dozen of them, long odds even for the Thieves Quarter. Somehow, before they had gotten her down, she had managed to kill at least four of them, but there were others, standing around and cheering the survivors on. The Blue Star between Lythande’s brows, the mark of a Pilgrim Adept, had begun to glow and flicker with blue lightnings, in time with the in-and-out flicker of the blade. Two, then three went down before they knew what had hit them, and a fourth was spitted in the middle of his foul work, ejaculating and dying with a single cry. Two more fell, spouting blood, one from a headless neck, the other falling
sidewise, unbalanced by an arm lopped away at the shoulder, bled out before he hit the ground. The rest took to their heels, shrieking. Lythande wiped the blade on the cloak of one of the dead men and bent over the dying woman.

  She was small and frail to have done so much damage to her assailants; and they had made her pay for it. She wore the leather garments of a swordsman; they had been ripped off her, and she was bleeding everywhere, but she was not defeated—even now she made a feeble gesture toward her sword and snarled, her bitten lips drawn back over bared teeth, “Wait ten minutes, animal, and I will be beyond caring; then you may take your pleasure from my corpse and be damned to you!”

  A swift look round showed Lythande that nothing human was alive within hearing. It was nowhere within the bounds of possibility that this woman could live and betray her. Lythande knelt, crushing the woman’s head gently against her breast.

  “Hush, hush, my sister. I will not harm you.”

  The woman looked up at her in wonder, and a smile spread over the dying face. She whispered, “I thought I had betrayed my last trust—I was sworn to die first; but there were too many for me. The Goddess does not forgive—those who submit—”

  She was slipping away. Lythande whispered, “Be at peace, child. The Goddess does not condemn....” And thought: I would not give a fart in sulphurous hell for a goddess who would.

  “My sword—” the woman groped; already she found it hard to see. Lythande put the hilt into her fingers.

  “My sword—dishonored—” she whispered. “I am Larith. The sword must go—back to her shrine. Take it. Swear—”

  Larithae! Lythande knew of the shrine of that hidden goddess and of the vow her women made. She could now understand, though never excuse, the thugs who had attacked and killed the woman. Larithae were fair game everywhere from the Southern Waste to Falthot in the Ice Hills. The shrine of the Goddess as Larith lay at the end of the longest and most dangerous road in the Forbidden Country, and it was a road Lythande had no reason nor wish to tread. A road, moreover, that by her own oath she was forbidden, for she might never reveal herself as a woman, at the cost of the Power that had set the Blue Star between her brows. And only women sought, or could come to, the shrine of Larith.