Frost and Fire

by Roger Zelazny

  Later, we pulled up in front of the place, parked, and got out. Silently, I deactivated my invisible warden. We advanced, I unlocked the door, I turned on the light.

  “You never have any trouble here, huh?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “People breaking in, messing the place up, ripping you off?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “Why not?”

  “Lucky, I guess.”

  “Really?”

  “Well… it’s protected, in a very special way. That’s a part of the story too. Wait till I get some coffee going.”

  I went out to the kitchen, rinsed out the pot, put things together, and set it over a flame. I moved to open a window, to catch a little breeze.

  Suddenly, my shadow was intense upon the wall.

  I spun about.

  The flame had departed the stove, hovered in the air and begun to grow. Elaine screamed just as I turned, and the thing swelled to fill the room. I saw that it bore the shifting features of a fire elemental, just before it burst apart to swirl tornadolike through the cottage. In a moment, the place was blazing and I heard its crackling laughter.

  “Elaine!” I called, rushing forward, for I had seen her transformed into a torch.

  All of the objects in my pockets plus my belt buckle, I calculated quickly, probably represented a sufficient accumulation of power to banish the thing. Of course the energies were invested, tied up, waiting to be used in different ways. I spoke the words that would rape the power-objects and free the forces. Then I performed the banishment.

  The flames were gone in an instant. But not the smoke, not the smell.

  … And Elaine lay there sobbing, clothing and flesh charred, limbs jerking convulsively. All of her exposed areas were dark and scaly, and blood was beginning to ooze from the cracks in her flesh.

  I cursed as I reset the warden. I had created it to protect the place in my absence. I had never bothered to use it once I was inside. I should have.

  Whoever had done this was still probably near. My cache was located in a vault about twenty feet beneath the cottage—near enough for me to use a number of the power things without even going after them. I could draw out their mana as I just had with those about my person. I could use it against my enemy. Yes. This was the chance I had been waiting for.

  I rushed to my attache case and opened it. I would need power to reach the power and manipulate it. And the mana from the artifacts I had drained was tied up in my own devices. I reached for the rod and the sphere. At last, my enemy, you’ve had it! You should have known better than to attack me here!

  Elaine moaned… .

  I cursed myself for a weakling. If my enemy were testing me to see whether I had grown soft, he would have his answer in the affirmative. She was no stranger, and she had said that she trusted me. I had to do it. I began the spell that would drain most of my power-objects to work her healing.

  It took most of an hour. I put her to sleep. I stopped the bleeding. I watched new tissues form. I bathed her and dressed her in a sport shirt and rolled-up pair of slacks from the bedroom closet, a place the flames had not reached. I left her sleeping a little longer then while I cleaned up, opened the windows and got on with making the coffee.

  At last, I stood beside the old chair—now covered with a blanket—into which I had placed her. If I had just done something decent and noble, why did I feel so stupid about it? Probably because it was out of character. I was reassured, at least, that I had not been totally corrupted to virtue by reason of my feeling resentment at having to use all of that mana on her behalf.

  Well … Put a good face on it now the deed was done.

  How?

  Good question. I could proceed to erase her memories of the event and implant some substitute story—a gas leak, perhaps—as to what had occurred, along with the suggestion that she accept it. I could do that. Probably the easiest course for me.

  My resentment suddenly faded, to be replaced by something else, as I realized that I did not want to do it that way. What I did want was an end to my loneliness. She trusted me. I felt that I could trust her. I wanted someone I could really talk with.

  When she opened her eyes, I put a cup of coffee into her hands.

  “Cheerio,” I said.

  She stared at me, then turned her head slowly and regarded the still-visible ravages about the room. Her hands began to shake. But she put the cup down herself, on the small side table, rather than letting me take it back. She examined her hands and arms. She felt her face.

  “You’re all right,” I said.

  “How?” she asked.

  “That’s the story,” I said. “You’ve got it coming.”

  “What was that thing?”

  “That’s a part of it.”

  “Okay,” she said then, raising the cup more steadily and taking a sip. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Well, I’m a sorcerer,” I said, “a direct descendant of the ancient sorcerers of Atlantis.”

  I paused. I waited for the sigh or the rejoinder. There was none.

  “I learned the business from my parents,” I went on, “a long time ago. The basis of the whole thing is mana, a kind of energy found in various things and places. Once the world was lousy with it. It was the basis of an entire culture. But it was like other natural resources. One day it ran out. Then the magic went away. Most of it. Atlantis sank. The creatures of magic faded, died. The structure of the world itself was altered, causing it to appear much older than it really is. The old gods passed. The sorcerers, the ones who manipulated the mana to produce magic, were pretty much out of business. There followed the real dark ages, before the beginnings of civilization as we know it from the history books.”

  “This mighty civilization left no record of itself?” she asked.

  “With the passing of the magic, there were transformations. The record was rewritten into natural-seeming stone and fossil-bed, was dissipated, underwent a sea change.”

  “Granting all that for a moment,” she said, sipping the coffee, “if the power is gone, if there’s nothing left to do it with, how can you be a sorcerer?”

  “Well, it’s not all gone,” I said. “There are small surviving sources, there are some new sources, and—”

  “—and you fight over them? Those of you who remain?”

  “No … not exactly,” I said. “You see, there are not that many of us. We intentionally keep our numbers small, so that no one goes hungry.”

  ” ‘Hungry’?”

  “A figure of speech we use. Meaning to get enough mana to keep body and soul together, to stave off aging, keep healthy and enjoy the good things.”

  “You can rejuvenate yourselves with it? How old are you?”

  “Don’t ask embarrassing questions. If my spells ran out and there was no more mana, I’d go fast. But we can trap the stuff, lock it up, hold it, whenever we come across a power-source. It can be stored in certain objects—or, better yet, tied up in partial spells, like dialing all but the final digit in a phone number. The spells that maintain one’s existence always get primary consideration.”

  She smiled.

  “You must have used a lot of it on me.”

  I looked away.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So you couldn’t just drop out and be a normal person and continue to live?”

  “No.”

  “So what was that thing?” she asked. “What happened here?”

  “An enemy attacked me. We survived.”

  She took a big gulp of the coffee and leaned back and closed her eyes.

  Then, “Will it happen again?” she asked.

  “Probably. If I let it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This was more of a challenge than an all-out attack. My enemy is finally getting tired of playing games and wants to finish things off.”

  “And you are going to accept the challenge?”

  “I have no choice. Unless you’d cons
ider waiting around for something like this to happen again, with more finality.”

  She shuddered slightly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’ve a feeling I may be too,” she stated, finishing her coffee and rising, crossing to the window, looking out, “before this is over.

  “What do we do next?” she asked, turning and staring at me.

  “I’m going to take you to a safe place and go away,” I said, “for a time.” It seemed a decent thing to add those last words, though I doubted I would ever see her again.

  “The hell you are,” she said.

  “Huh? What do you mean? You want to be safe, don’t you?”

  “If your enemy thinks I mean something to you, I’m vulnerable—the way I see it,” she told me.

  “Maybe …”

  The answer, of course, was to put her into a week-long trance and secure her down in the vault, with strong wards and the door openable from the inside. Since my magic had not all gone away, I raised one hand and sought her eyes with my own.

  What tipped her off, I’m not certain. She looked away, though, and suddenly lunged for the bookcase. When she turned again, she held an old bone flute that had long lain there.

  I restrained myself in mid-mutter. It was a power-object that she held, one of several lying about the room, and one of the few that had not been drained during my recent workings. I couldn’t really think of much that a nonsorcerer could do with it, but my curiosity restrained me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “But I’m not going to let you put me away with one of your spells.”

  “Who said anything about doing that?”

  “I can tell.”

  “How?”

  “Just a feeling.”

  “Well, damn it, you’re right. We’ve been together too long. You can psych me. Okay, put it down and I won’t do anything to you.”

  “Is that a promise, Dave?”

  “Yeah. I guess it is.”

  “I suppose you could rat on it and erase my memory.”

  “I keep my promises.”

  “Okay.” She put it back on the shelf. “What are we going to do now?”

  “I’d still like to put you someplace safe.”

  “No way.”

  I sighed.

  “I have to go where that volcano is blowing.”

  “Buy two tickets,” she said.

  It wasn’t really necessary. I have my own plane and I’m licensed to fly the thing. In fact, I have several located in different parts of the world. Boats, too.

  “There is mana in clouds and in fogbanks,” I explained to her. “In a real pinch, I use my vehicles to go chasing after them.”

  We moved slowly through the clouds. I had detoured a good distance, but it was necessary. Even after we had driven up to my apartment and collected everything I’d had on hand, I was still too mana-impoverished for the necessary initial shielding and a few strikes. I needed to collect a little more for this. After that it wouldn’t matter, the way I saw things. My enemy and I would be plugged into the same source. All we had to do was reach it.

  So I circled in the fog for a long while, collecting. It was a protection spell into which I concentrated the mana.

  “What happens when it’s all gone?” she asked, as I banked and climbed for a final pass before continuing to the southeast.

  “What?” I said.

  “The mana. Will you all fade away?”

  I chuckled.

  “It can’t,” I said. “Not with so few of us using it. How many tons of meteoric material do you think have fallen to earth today? They raise the background level almost imperceptibly—constantly. And much of it falls into the oceans. The beaches are thereby enriched. That’s why I like to be near the sea. Mist-shrouded mountaintops gradually accumulate it. They’re good places for collecting too. And new clouds are always forming. Our grand plan is more than simple survival. We’re waiting for the day when it reaches a level where it will react and establish fields over large areas. Then we won’t have to rely on accumulators and partial spells for its containment. The magic will be available everywhere again.”

  “Then you will exhaust it all and be back where you started again.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “If we’ve learned nothing, that may be the case. We’ll enter a new golden age, become dependent upon it, forget our other skills, exhaust it again and head for another dark age. Unless …”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless those of us who have been living with it have also learned something. We’d need to figure the rate of mana exhaustion and budget ourselves. We’d need to preserve technology for things on which mana had been used the last time around. Our experience in this century with physical resources may be useful. Also, there is the hope that some areas of space may be richer in cosmic dust or possess some other factor that will increase the accumulation. Then, too, we are waiting for the full development of the space program—to reach other worlds rich in what we need.”

  “Sounds as if you have it all worked out.”

  “We’ve had a lot of time to think about it.”

  “But what would be your relationship with those of us who are not versed in magic?”

  “Beneficent. We all stand to benefit that way.”

  “Are you speaking for yourself or for the lot of you?”

  “Well, most of the others must feel the same way. I just want to putter around museums. …”

  “You said that you had been out of touch with the others for some time.”

  “Yes, but—”

  She shook her head and turned to look out at the fog.

  “Something else to worry about,” she said.

  I couldn’t get a landing clearance, so I just found a flat place and put it down and left it. I could deal later with any problems this caused.

  I unstowed our gear; we hefted it and began walking toward that ragged, smoky quarter of the horizon.

  “We’ll never reach it on foot,” she said.

  “You’re right,” I answered. “I wasn’t planning to, though. When the time is right, something else will present itself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Wait and see.”

  We hiked for several miles, encountering no one. The way was warm and dusty, with occasional tremors of the earth. Shortly, I felt the rush of mana, and I drew upon it.

  “Take my hand,” I said.

  I spoke the words necessary to levitate us a few feet above the rocky terrain. We glided forward then, and the power about us increased as we advanced upon our goal. I worked with more of it, spelling to increase our pace, to work protective shields around us, guarding us from the heat, from flying debris.

  The sky grew darker, from ash, from smoke, long before we commenced the ascent. The rise was gradual at first but steepened steadily as we raced onward. I worked a variety of partial spells, offensive and defensive, tying up quantities of mana just a word, just a fingertip gesture away.

  “Reach out, reach out and touch someone,” I hummed as the visible world came and went with the passage of roiling clouds.

  We sped into a belt where we would probably have been asphyxiated but for the shield. The noises had grown louder by then. It must have been pretty hot out there too. When we finally reached the rim, dark shapes fled upward past us and lightning stalked the clouds. Forward and below, a glowing, seething mass shifted constantly amid explosions.

  “All right!” I shouted. “I’m going to charge up everything I brought with me and tie up some more mana in a whole library of spells! Make yourself comfortable!”

  “Yeah,” she said, licking her lips and staring downward. “I’ll do that. But what about your enemy?”

  “Haven’t seen anybody so far—and there’s too much free mana around for me to pick up vibes. I’m going to keep an eye peeled and take advantage of the situation. You watch too.”

  “Right,” she said. “T
his is perfectly safe, huh?”

  “As safe as L.A. traffic.”

  “Great. Real comforting,” she observed as a huge rocky mass flew past us.

  We separated later. I left her within her own protective spell, leaning against a craggy prominence, and I moved off to the right to perform a ritual that required greater freedom of movement.

  Then a shower of sparks rose into the air before me. Nothing especially untoward about that, until I realized that it was hovering for an unusually long while. After a time, it seemed that it should have begun dispersing… .

  “Phoenix, Phoenix, burning bright!” The words boomed about me, rising above the noises of the inferno itself.

  “Who calls me?” I asked.

  “Who has the strongest reason to do you harm?”

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t ask.”

  “Then seek the answer in hell!”

  A wall of flame rushed toward me. I spoke the words that strengthened my shield. Even so, I was rocked within my protective bubble when it hit. Striking back was going to be tricky, I could see, with my enemy in a less-than-material form.

  “All right, to the death!” I cried, calling for a lightning stroke through the space where the sparks spun.

  I turned away and covered my eyes against the brilliance, but I still felt its presence through my skin.

  My bubble of forces continued to rock as I blinked and looked forward. The air before me had momentarily cleared, but everything seemed somehow darker, and—

  A being—a crudely man-shaped form of semisolid lava—had wrapped its arms as far as they would go about me and was squeezing. My spell held, but I was raised above the crater’s rim.

  “It won’t work!” I said, trying to dissolve the being.

  “The hell you say!” came a voice from high overhead.

  I learned quickly that the lava-thing was protected against the simple workings I threw at it. All right, then hurl me down. I would levitate out. The Phoenix would rise again. I—

  I passed over the rim and was falling. But there was a problem. A heavy one.