She had managed, hours ago, a sip of water at a public fountain in a deserted square. She had eaten nothing for several days save for a few bites of dried fruit, taken under cover of darkness, from a small store she kept in pockets of the mage-robe. The rare luxury of a hot meal in assured privacy was almost enough to break her control, but before touching anything, she checked the locks and searched the walls for unseen spy-holes where she might be overlooked, unlikely, she knew, but Lythande’s survival all these years had rested on just such unsparing vigilance.
Then she drank from the ewer of water, washed herself carefully, and setting a little water to heat by the good fire in the room, carefully shaved her eye-brows, a pretense she had kept up ever since she began to look too old to pass for a beardless boy. She left the razor and soap carefully by the hearth where they could be seen. She could, if she must, briefly create an illusion of beard, and sometimes smeared her face with dirt to add to it, but it was difficult and demanded close concentration, and she dared not rely on it; so she shaved her eyebrows close, with the thought that a man known to shave his eyebrows would probably have to shave his beard as well.
Hearing steps on the stair, she drew the mage-robe about her, and the herb-seller puffed up the last steps and into the opened door. She set the smoking tray on the table, murmured, “I’ll empty that for ye,” and took up the bowl of soapy water and the slop jar. “My son’s at the stairway wi’ his cudgel; none will disturb you here, magician.”
Nevertheless, Lythande, alone again, made very sure the bolt was well-drawn and the room still free of spy-eyes or spells; who knew what the herb-seller might have brought with her? Some spell-candlers had pretensions to the arts of sorcery. Moreover, the woman had mentioned that she had seen another Adept of the Blue Star; and Lythande had enemies among them. Suppose the herb-seller were in the pay of Rabben the Half-handed, or Beccolo, or... Lythande dismissed this unprofitable speculation. The room appeared empty and harmless. The smell of roast fowl and the freshly baked loaf was dizzying in her famished condition, but magic could not be made on a fall stomach, so she packed away the smell into a remote corner of her consciousness and drew out the Larith’s sword.
It felt warm to the touch, and there was the small tingling that reminded Lythande that powerful magic resided in it.
She cast a pinch of a certain herb into the fire and, breathing the powerful scent, focused all her powers into one spell. Under her feet, the floor rocked as the Word of Power died, and there was a faint, faraway rumble as of falling walls and towers—or was it only distant summer thunder?
She passed her hand lightly above the sword, careful not to touch it. She was not really familiar with the magic of the Larithae; as Lythande the Pilgrim Adept, she could not be, and while she still lived as a woman, she had never come closer than to know what every passerby knew. But it seemed to her that whatever magic dwelt in the sword was gone; perhaps not banished, but sleeping.
From her pack she sacrificed one of the spare tunics she carried, and carefully wrapped the sword. The tunic was a good one, heavy white silk from the walled and ancient city of Jumathe, where the silkworms were tended by a special caste of women, blinded in childhood so that their fingers would have more sensitivity when the time came to strip the silk from the cocoons, Their songs were legendary, and Lythande had once gone there, dressed as a woman, a cloak hiding the Blue Star, grateful for the women’s blindness so that she could speak in her own voice; she had sung them songs of her own north-country, and heard their songs in return, while they thought her only a wandering minstrel girl. The sighted overseer, however, had been suspicious, and had finally accused her of being a man in disguise—for a man to approach the blind women was a crime punishable by death in a particularly unpleasant fashion—and it had taken all of Lythande’s magic to extricate herself. But that is another story.
Lythande wrapped the sword in the tunic. She regretted the necessity of giving it up—she had had it for a long time; she shrank from thinking how many years ago she had sung her songs within the house of the blind silkworm-tenders in Jumathe! But for such magic a real sacrifice was necessary, and she had nothing else to sacrifice that meant the least thing to her; so she wrapped the sword in it, and bound it with the cord she had passed through the herb-smoke, tying it with the magical ninefold knot.
Then she set it aside and sat down to eat up the roast fowl and the freshly baked bread with the sense of a task well done.
When the house was quiet, and the herb-seller’s son had put his cudgel away and retired to rest, Lythande slipped down the stairs noiselessly as a shadow. She had to spell the lock so that it would not creak, and a somewhat smaller spell would make any passerby think that the drawn-back bolt, open padlock, and open door were firmly shut and bolted. Silken bundle under her arm, she slipped silently to the riverbank and, working by the dim light of the smaller moon, dug a hole and buried the bundle; then, speaking a final spell, strode away without looking back.
Returning to the herb-seller’s house, she thought she saw something following in the street, and turned to look. No, it was only a shadow. She slipped in through the open door—which still looked charmed and locked—locked it tight from within, and regained her room with less sound than a mouse in the walls.
The fire had burned to coals. Lythande sat by the fire and took from her pack a small supply of sweet herbs with no magical properties whatever, rolled them into a narrow tube, and sparked it alight. So relaxed was she that she did not even use her fire-ring, but stooped to light the tube from the last coals of the fire. She leaned back, inhaling the fragrant smoke and letting it trickle out slowly from her nostrils. When she had smoked it down to a small stub, she took off her heavy boots, wrapped herself tightly in the mage-robe and then in the herb-seller’s blanket, and lay down to sleep.
Before dawn she would arise and vanish as if by magic, leaving the door bolted behind her on the inside—there was no special reason for. this, but a magician must preserve some mystery, and if she left by the stairs in the ordinary way, perhaps the innkeeper would be left with the impression that perhaps magicians were not so extraordinary after all, since they ate good dinners and washed and shaved and filled slop jars like any ordinary mortal. So when Lythande had gone, the room would be set to rights without a wrinkle in the bed-clothes or an ash in the fireplace, the door still bolted on the inside as if no one had left the room at all. And besides, it was more amusing that way.
But for now, she would sleep for a few hours in peace, grateful that the clumsiness that had entangled her in somebody else’s magic had come to a good end. No whisper disturbed her sleep to the effect that it hadn’t really even started yet.
The last of the prowling thieves had slipped away to their holes and corners, and the red eye of Keth was still blinded by night when Lythande slipped out of Old Gandrin by the southern gate. She took the road south for two reasons: there was always work for mercenary or magician in the prosperous seaport of Gwennane, and also she wished to be certain in her own mind that after her drastic unbinding-spell, nothing called her northward to the Larith shrine.
The least of the moons had waned and set, and it was that black-dark hour when dawn is not even a promise in the sky. The gate was locked and barred, and the sleepy watchman, when Lythande asked quietly for the gate to be opened, growled that he wouldn’t open the gate at that hour for the High-Autarch of Gandrin himself, far less for some ne’er-do-well prowling when honest folk and dishonest folk were all sleeping, or ought to be. He remembered afterward that the star between the ridges where Lythande’s brows ought to have been had begun to sparkle and flare blue lightning, and he could never explain why he found himself meekly opening the gate and then doing it up again afterward. “Because,” he said earnestly, “I never saw that fellow in the mage-robe go through the gate, not at all; he turned hisself invisible!” And because Lythande was not all that well known in Old Gandrin, no one ever told him it was merely Lythande’s way.
It certainly was. Keth was rising, which was as it should be, but Keth was rising on her right hand, which was not as it should be; she had taken the southward road out of Old Gandrin, yet here she was, striding northward at a fast pace. To the north. Toward the shrine of Larith.
Yet she could not remember turning round for long enough to become confused and take the wrong direction in the darkness. She must have done so somehow. She stopped in mid-stride, whirled about, and put the sun where it should be, on her left, and began pacing steadily south.
But after a time she felt the prickle in her shins and buttocks and the cold-flame glow of the Blue Star between her brows, which told her that magic was being made somewhere about her. And the sun was shining on her right hand, and she was standing directly outside the gates of Old Gandrin.
Lythande said aloud, “No. Damnation and Chaos!” disturbing a little knot of milkwomen who were driving their cows to market. They stared at the tall, sexless figure and whispered, but Lythande cared nothing for their gossip. She started to turn round again and found herself actually walking through the gates of Old Gandrin again.
Through the south gate. Traveling north.
Now this is ridiculous, Lythande thought. I buried the sword myself, locked there with my strongest unbinding spell! Yet her pack bulged strangely; ripping out a gutter obscenity, Lythande unslung the pack and discovered what she had known she would discover the moment she felt that strange prickling cramp that told her there was magic in use—somebody else’s magic! At the very top of the pack, wedged in awkwardly, was the white silk tunic, draggled with the soil of the riverbank, and thrusting through it—as if, Lythande thought with a shudder, it were trying to get out—was the larith sword.
Lythande had not survived this long under the Twin Suns without becoming oblivious to hysteria. The Adepts of the Blue Star held powerful magic; but every mage knew that sooner or later, everyone would encounter magic stronger yet. Now she felt rage rather than fear. Heartily, Lythande damned the momentary impulse of compassion for a dying woman that led her to reveal herself. Well, done was done. She had the larith sword and seemed likely—Lythande thought with a flicker of irony—to have it until she could devise a strong enough magic to get rid of it again.
Was she fit for a really prolonged magical duel? It would attract attention; and somewhere within the walls of Old Gandrin—or so the herb-seller had told her—there was another Adept of the Blue Star. If she began making really powerful magic—and the unbinding-spell itself had been a risk—sooner or later she would attract the attention of whichever Pilgrim Adept had come here. With the kind of luck that seemed to be dogging her, it would be one of her worst enemies within the Order: Rabben the Half-handed, or Beccolo, or....
Lythande grimaced. Bitter as it was to concede defeat, the safest course seemed to be to go north as the Larith sword wanted. Perhaps, then, when she arrived there, she could somehow contrive to return the sword to Larith’s own shrine. She had resolved to leave Old Gandrin anyway, and one direction was no better than another.
So be it. She would take the damned thing north to the Forbidden Shrine, and there she would leave it. Somehow she would manage to plant it on someone who could enter the shrine where she could not enter... rather, the worst was that she could enter but dared not be known to do so. Northward, then, to Larith’s shrine—
But within the hour, though Lythande had been in Old Gandrin for a score of sunrises and should have known her way, the Adept was hopelessly lost. Whatever path Lythande found through marketplace or square, thieves’ market or red-lamp quarter, however she tried to keep the sun on her right hand, within minutes she was hopelessly turned round. Four separate times she inquired for the north gate, and once it was actually within sight, when it seemed as if the cobbled street would shake itself and give itself a little twist, and Lythande would discover she was lost in the labyrinthine old Streets again. Finally, exhausted, furiously hungry and thirsty, and without a chance of finding a moment to eat or drink in privacy now that the sun was high and the streets thronged, she dropped grimly on the edge of a fountain in a public square, maddened by the splashing of the water she dared not drink, and sat there to think it over.
What did the damned thing want, anyway? She was bound north to the Forbidden Shrine as she thought she was commanded to go, yet she was prevented by the sword, or by the magic in the sword, from finding the northern gate, as she had been prevented from taking the road south. Was she to stay in Old Gandrin indefinitely? That did not seem reasonable, but then, there was nothing reasonable about this business.
At least this will teach me to mind my own business in the future!
Grimly, Lythande considered what alternatives were open. To try and find the burial place of the ravished Laritha and bury the sword with a binding-spell stronger yet? Even if she could find the place, she had no assurance that the sword would stay buried, and all kinds of assurances that it would not. The chances now seemed that all the power of the Blue Star would be expended in vain, unless Lythande wished to expend that kind of power that would in turn leave her powerless for days.
To seek safety in the Place Which Is Not, outside the boundaries of the world, and there attempt to find out what the sword really wanted and why it would not allow her to leave the city? For that, the cover of darkness was needful; was she to spend this day aimlessly wandering the streets of Old Gandrin? The smell of food from a nearby cookshop tantalized her, but she was accustomed to that and resolutely ignored it. Later, in some deserted street or alley, some of the dried fruit in the pockets of the mage-robe might find their way into her mouth, but not, now.
At least she could enjoy a moment’s rest here on the fountain. But even as that thought crossed her mind, she discovered she was on her feet and moving restlessly across the square, thrusting the little packet of smoking-herbs back into the pocket.
She wondered angrily where in the hells she was going now. Her hand was lightly on the hilt of the larith sword, and she could only hope that none of the bystanders in the street could see it or would know what it meant if they did. She bashed into someone who snarled at her and accused her in a surly tone of some perversion involving being a rapist of immature nanny goats. The profanity of Old Gandrin, she concluded, was no more imaginative, and just as repetitive, as it was anywhere beneath the blinded eye of Keth-Ketha.
Across the fountain square, then, and into a narrow, winding street that emerged, a good half hour’s walk later, into another square, this one facing a long, narrow barracks. Lythande was in a curiously dreamy state that she recognized, later, as almost hypnotic; she watched herself from inside, walking purposefully across the square, quite as if she knew where she was going and why, feeling that at any time, if she wished, she could resist this eerie compulsion—but that was simply too much trouble; why not go along and see what the larith wanted?
Four men were sloshing their faces in the great water trough before the barracks, their riding animals snorting in the water beside them. The Larith’s sword was in her hand, and one man’s head was bobbing like an apple in the water trough before Lythande knew what she—or rather, the sword—was doing. A second went down, spitted, before the other two had their swords out. The larith sword had lost its compulsion and was slack in her hand as she heard their outraged shouts, thinking ironically that she was as bewildered by the whole thing as they were, or maybe more so. She scrambled to get control of the sword, for now she was fighting for her life. There was no way these men were going to let her escape, now that she had slai
n two of their companions unprovoked. She managed to disarm one man, but the second drove her back and back, holding her ground as best she could; thrust, parry, recover, lunge—her foot slipped in something slick on the ground, and she went down, staggering for the support of the wall; somehow got the sword up and saw it go into the man’s breast; he groaned and fell across the bodies of his companions, two dead and one sorely wounded.
Lythande started to turn away, sickened and outraged—at least the fifth man need not be murdered in cold blood—then realized she had no choice. That survivor could testify to a magician with the Blue Star blazing between hairless brows, bearing the larith sword, and any Pilgrim Adept who might ever hear the story would know that Lythande had borne the larith unscathed. As only a woman could do. She whipped out the sword again. The man shouted, “Help! Murder! Don’t kill me, I have no quarrel with you—” and took to his heels, but Lythande strode swiftly after him, like a relentless avenging angel, and ran him through, grimacing in sick self-disgust. Then she ran, seeing other men flooding out of the barracks at their comrades’ death cries, losing herself in the tangle of streets again.
Eventually, she had to stop to recover her breath. Why had the sword demanded those deaths? Immediately the answer came, imprinting the faces of the first two men she had killed—or the sword had killed almost without her help or knowledge—on her mind; they had been in the jeering circle of men who had ravished the dying priestess-swordswoman. So among other powers, the larith sword was spelled to vengeance on its own.
But she, Lythande, had not even stopped with killing the men the sword wished to kill. She had killed the other two men in cold blood to protect the secret of her sex and her magic.
Now the damned thing has entangled me not only in someone else’s magic but in someone else’s revenge!
The Complete Lythande Page 7
