Hespira

by Matthew Hughes

  On the other hand, I had to admit, there might be magic at work. If so, Osk Rievor would know.

  #

  “What is this place?” she said, looking around at the now almost uninhabited estate of the late Blik Arlem, its gardens and arbors left to grow wild, its winding walks and reflecting pools beginning to show the signs of lengthy neglect. “Why have you brought me here, out of sight and hearing of the rest of humanity?”

  I reflected that the genial glow that surrounds the doer of a good deed loses some of its warmth and brightness when the recipient meets every action with the pinched face of suspicion. I sighed. “We have come to consult a colleague of mine. He spends his time in research and prefers solitude.”

  “Which we are interrupting.”

  “Few of us are so fortunate as to see our preferences universally respected,” I said.

  We made our way down the gravel paths that led between several low mounds and broad hummocks, most of the estate having been built underground. I led us away from the main complex toward a free-standing cottage that backed onto a meadow that sloped up to a wood of tall trees. The little house had straight walls, square windows, and rectangular doors beneath a steeply sloped roof. It had been commissioned by Arlem’s third spouse, who had first tired of their subterranean mode of existence before realizing that she was in fact tired of everything associated with her husband, and left him for a man who held high office in the grand bureaucracy of the Archonate. The cottage had then become home to the estate’s head gardener.

  The cottage door had no who’s-there; my former alter ego saw no need to become dependent on mechanisms and devices that would sooner or later cease to function. And, in this location, it would be sooner rather than later: the estate occupied the junction of two ley lines, those ancient lines of arcane force in which I used not to believe. Their intersection helped make the Arlem estate one of those places where the new age was already beginning to make itself felt. The change would not happen everywhere, all at once, nor would it come like a wave sweeping across the universe; rather, it was like a dense liquid seeping through a porous membrane, pooling in “dimples” where the barrier was less resistant. Wherever the channels of arcane force known as ley lines intersected, a dimple could be expected. In this place, magic worked far more powerfully and reliably than in locations far from ley lines. That was why Blik Arlem, a dabbler in the hermetic arts, had built here, and why my former intuition had chosen it for his workshop.

  As we approached the door I lifted my hand to rap on the painted wood, but the portal opened before I could strike. “This is a surprise,” he said, looking with curiosity at Hespira, then back to me. “I expected you to send them on their own.”

  “Send what?” I said.

  “The bees.”

  I had not forgotten. “They are in the ship. But events have moved on. I am going offworld on a case, but wanted to consult you before leaving.”

  He looked more closely at the young woman. “Then you’d better come in.”

  I made the introductions as perfunctory as necessity required. My client’s suspicions would not be dampened if I described Osk Rievor as formerly a part of my own psyche, now resident in the body of a man named Orlo Saviene who had recently disappeared from Old Earth. Saviene would spend the next several centuries in a cavern on a tiny barren world called Bille, happily in thrall to a knowledge-hungry symbiotic fungus that would feed him dreams of perfection while mining his memories, until his spark dwindled and disappeared. Osk Rievor, a magically reified part of me, though without his own physical form, would be drawn across the gulf of time from now until then, and finding Saviene’s mindless hulk still well-tended by the symbiote, would appropriate it for his own. I, too, had been flung through time, into a rude world of magic where I had suffered indignities but had overcome them. Finally we had both come back, courtesy of a deal with a captive demon.

  The episode had defied all logic, but in recent months I had been forced to accept that my well-ordered views of how reality worked were subject to arbitrary revision. I would not, however, expect a suspicious amnesiac to sign on immediately to a truth that I had myself found all too hard to swallow, I simply named Osk Rievor to Hespira and described him as a trusted colleague. Then I sketched what we knew of her situation.

  The conversation took place in the cottage’s study, to which my former intuition had led us. While I spoke, I saw the woman’s eyes flicking from one wall to another, or rather to the shelves and glass-fronted cabinets that lined them from floor to ceiling. Osk Rievor had obviously been busy in the weeks since we had returned from the future. I knew that he had acquired a trove of books and magical paraphernalia from a group of sorcerers who had tried to use us to their own ends; in the end, they had no further need of their possessions, having been devoured in one way or another by forces they could not control.

  But I was sure that there were far more old books and unusual objects here in the cottage than my other self had had when last I had seen him. And some of them were more than passing strange: a scaly, three-toed foot, each digit tipped by a hooked talon; a large glass jar full of swirling motes of light that seemed to move in purposeful patterns; a rod of wood that I could only see from the corner of my vision, because it disappeared when I looked at it directly; and, by contrast, a disembodied eye resting on a high shelf—I had the feeling that whenever I looked away from it, it subjected me to a close scrutiny.

  My client was regarding these objects and the others that crowded the room on all sides with the same expression that would have taken possession of my own face a few short, though eventful, months ago. Then her gaze went to Osk Rievor. She inspected him carefully, and I was glad that he had regrown his hair—it had been absorbed by the fungus during all those years in its cavern—and that his skin had lost the pallor that, with his complete hairlessness, had made him appear more fungoid than human. Still, he remained an unusual-looking man and the surroundings could not help but inspire trepidation.

  “I think I’d like to leave here now,” Hespira said.

  A moment of silent communication passed between Osk Rievor and me: I pleaded and he acceded. “Please,” he said to my client, “do not be alarmed at what you see. It is my pastime to study the ways in which the gullible are taken in by mountebanks and fake-artists. These objects are merely some of the cunning devices with which the predators delude their prey.”

  I saw her relax and did the same. I rarely misled a client, and then only temporarily and in the client’s own interest, but I could see no point in trying to steer Hespira into the current as regarded the impending fate of the rational universe. She had quite enough difficulties within her own personal sphere.

  “Well,” I began, and saw her turn to me. As soon as her eyes were off Osk Rievor I saw him make a rippling motion in the air with his fingers, as if he were playing a brief passage on the keys of an invisible instrument. His lips silently formed a few syllables and immediately Hespira stood motionless, frozen in the look of expectation that my “Well” had brought to her face.

  “What have you done to her?” I said.

  “Quieted her,” he said, “so that I can do what you brought her here for me to do.”

  I examined her. She was as still as a portrait. “You’re getting better at these things,” I said to Osk Rievor.

  “It becomes easier as the cusp approaches,” he said, reaching for a small black tube on one of the shelves, “and as I practice what I’ve learned.”

  The black tube was hollow. He looked at Hespira through it, from several angles. Then he rang a tiny silver bell near her ear and listened attentively to its fading reverberations. He drew complex figures around her in chalk on the slate floor, considered her reflection in a dark and ancient mirror edged in tarnished metal, held her ungainly hands between his while peering into her green eyes, and sniffed the air about her ears. He moved his hands in certain patterns and spoke certain words. He lifted a thong from which a coin-sized metal
disk depended and touched it to her forehead. Finally, he turned to me and said, “Not so much as a trace.”

  “You are sure?” I said.

  “As sure as I can be,” he said. “She has less of an aura around her than do you. I would say that until the past few moments she has never been so close to magic as to be in the same street in the same month. She is essentially untouched, at least by any magic I can recognize.”

  I related the circumstances of our meeting and the difficulties I was having with Massim Shar and Irslan Chonder. “Is she in any way connected to them?”

  Osk Rievor consulted his inner processes. “I have no sense of that,” he said, then became definite about it. “No.”

  I knew better than to ask how he knew. He didn’t know how he knew things; that was the nature of an intuitive faculty. “There it is,” I said to my integrator, which was still draped about my shoulders, “neither magic nor any connection to the Shar-Chonder business.”

  “So it would appear,” it said.

  “It would be good if we could communicate more easily,” I said to Osk Rievor.

  “Agreed.”

  “Will you reconsider your views on keeping an integrator?”

  “No,” he said, “but I am working on something that may serve equally well. I will let you know when it is ready. In the meantime, we will have the bees.”

  “But I am going offworld, not just across normal space but through whimsies, probably several of them.”

  “I need to do more research,” he said, “but it may be possible to send a bee so that it will come to you while you are in a whimsy.”

  My mind reeled and I put aside the discussion. I glanced at Hespira. She had now been inert for several minutes. “When you cancel the spell, will she not notice an unaccountable gap in the proceedings?” I said. “She has already had enough problems in that regard. I do not want to alarm her.”

  “It is a gentle spell. I found it in a book of remedies for fretful children. She will not notice.”

  Again, I felt that sense of protectiveness toward her. “Still,” I said, “it is an imposition.”

  He looked at me oddly but did not argue. He raised his hand to undo the children’s spell, then checked himself. The metal disk he had pressed to her forehead lay on his worktable. He picked it up and handed it to me. As I took it, I saw that it was red in color and when he put it in my hand it was warm. But in a moment it turned blue and cool to the touch.

  “It detects the ambience of magic,” Osk Rievor said. “The redder the disk, the stronger the ambience.”

  I strung the thong around my neck. “Thank you,” I said.

  Now he moved his fingers again and spoke softly. I saw awareness come into Hespira’s eyes again. “Well,” I said to her, picking up where I’d left off, “if you find my colleague’s collection of trumperies and gitchygooms disturbing, perhaps you would care to take some fresh air in the grounds while I consult with him.”

  She thought that a good idea and went out into the hallway. I listened to her steps fading and waited until I heard the door open and close before returning to the subject of Irslan Chonder and Massim Shar. I asked Osk Rievor for his sense of how the matter would develop and resolve.

  “It is, to be sure, a problem,” he said, “but a short-lived one. One will soon lay waste the other, then Brustram Warhanny will bundle the survivor off to the contemplarium. You need only to be out of the field of fire until the sparks cease to fly.”

  “My own view, exactly,” I told him, and for a moment we were in perfect accord, as we had so often been when we had inhabited the same cranium, and I had been the dominant actor. Then the interlude passed, and I was once again in the presence of a man whose nature was fundamentally strange to me, and growing stranger.

  Our recent adventures on Bille and in the future Old Earth where magic ruled had been, for me, a distasteful experience that I was glad to be done with. I had no doubt, however, that Osk Rievor’s appreciation of those events was at variance with my own. He had come out of it with his own body, after all. He had also garnered a huge trove of magical lore and practical advice on spellcasting that had previously been the closely held possessions of the five magicians who had also come to Bille but who had fared less well than Osk Rievor.

  He was now encamped in this cottage on what had been the estate of the late Blik Arlem, deceased collector of items associated with sympathetic association, most of them shams and counterfeits. Rievor, grown rich in the real thing, was studying his finds and seeking to master them. Judging by the wealth of items on display, he was still acquiring fresh sources of knowledge and new instruments of power. When the great change came, and rationality was overthrown by magic, my former intuition would stand far above the chaos of the transition.

  “Your researches go well, then?” I said.

  “Wonderfully, just wonderfully.”

  “How pleasant for you.”

  My tone caused him to regard me with a mildly quizzical expression that soon broke into one of understanding, then of regret. “Ah,” he said, “of course. I will ask you to forgive me. I have been swinking away so furiously these past few weeks that I fear I have lost my perspective.”

  I moved a hand in a way that invited him to give the matter no further consideration. “No,” I said, “it is I who should ask your pardon. It is not your fault that that which will bring me misery will cause you joy.”

  “I can assure you,” he said, “that when the time comes, you will have a safe haven with me.”

  I knew he meant it kindly, but I told him not to concern himself. “I have been giving it much thought,” I said, “and have almost decided that I would prefer to go into the shadows with all the things I have loved, rather than live on in the miserable wreckage.”

  Hespira appeared in the doorway. She had not gone out but had opened and closed the door to mislead us, then crept back down the hall to hear what we said. I could not really blame her; under similar circumstances, I would have wanted to know what strangers might be saying about me.

  Now she looked anxiously from one to the other of us. “Shadows and wreckage,” she said, “that seems a very dark remark. Do you face ruin? I do not wish to be a further burden to you when you have difficulties of your own.”

  I showed her a composed aspect. “I spoke in metaphor,” I said. “It can be fairly said that sometimes my speech wanders into the realm of the bombastic. You need not be concerned.” I gave Osk Rievor a meaningful look; we had decided, when we returned to Old Earth from Bille, that there was no point in advertising the impending disaster, there being nothing that could be done to prevent it, and precious little even to soften its impact.

  My reassurances were only half effective. Hespira’s face still reflected a concern for me that, in light of her circumstances, I found touching. The emotion did her credit. It bespoke an empathetic nature in her and, though it was not a clue to her identity, it was an indication of her underlying character. But she presented, to the trained eye, other clues that said that a primal generous nature might have been overlaid by experiences. The tiny lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth said that she had encountered more cause to frown than to smile. The grooves between her brows were those of a woman who had had to make hard choices between unpleasant alternatives. She had known troubles and had worked at solving them.

  Somewhere, before this, she must have had a life, with her own constellation of family and friends, pursuits and pastimes, perhaps even a relationship of significance to her. I could not believe that she had voluntarily removed all that from her awareness. Whatever had taken her memory, I was sure it had come upon her from outside. It might have been through some natural cause—which I doubted, for my assistant would have detected any signs of organic disorder—but I thought it far more likely that her life had been stolen from her by some agency that had acted knowingly, and probably out of malice. Hespira’s amnesia had not just happened; it had been done to her.

  It was th
erefore natural that I would respond to her as I did. I saw in her a microcosm of the awful fate that lay in wait for the worlds I knew and loved; she had been deprived of everything that gave her existence meaning. But there was a difference between the micro and the macro: I could do nothing to stop the Wheel’s inexorable turning, but I had all the skills and wherewithal of a first class discriminator—I could give Hespira back what had been robbed from her. And perhaps deliver to the robber a punishment commensurate to the crime.

  “I believe I am in need of a small vacation offworld,” I told her, “but I am not much good at lying on sun-warmed beaches or gaping at monuments and mausoleums. My profession is the unpicking of other people’s mysteries, but it is not by accident that I have taken up the discriminator’s craft. I will admit that if I did not have to get a living, I would still go out in pursuit of puzzles and perplexities. It is who I am. So it would please me to spend a little time finding out who you are. And who knows what interesting landscapes and experiences we might find along the way.”

  “I doubt that I can pay you what the effort is worth,” she said. “I do not feel that I have come from wealth.”

  I had long since perfected the gesture of airy unconcern, as any good discriminator must. I performed it now, the effect only slightly diminished by Osk Rievor’s cheerful interjection, which drew Hespira’s attention his way.

  “As to the matter of wealth,” he was saying, “I believe I owe you a certain amount.”

  “Do you?” I said, this time affecting the disavowal of being bothered in either direction with a languorous ease. “I don’t recall.”

  He burbled on enthusiastically. “All the books,” he said, “and other items. The leasehold on this cottage, and a great number of odds and ends.”

  I put up a hand to restrain him. I was enjoying striking the pose of magnanimity under Hespira’s wide-eyed gaze. There was something about her that made me want to appear at my best, though the truth was that Osk Rievor’s study of magic, both before and after he acquired his own corporeal existence, had cost me a goodly portion of what little wealth I had amassed.