In Yana, the Touch of Undying

by Michael Shea

  In Yana, the Touch of Undying

  Michael Shea

  1

  Bramt Hex Leaps to a New Life

  “Will you take something with your wine?” the innkeeper asked with feigned offhandedness. Bramt Hex had been frequenting the inn for some weeks. He was always resolved to order wine alone, but the keep knew he could, with the slightest nudge, be stimulated to order a large meal as well.

  “Yes, in fact,” Bramt Hex replied promptly, “since you suggest it. A salad of spindlewort. The broasted homunculus as well, followed immediately by a chilled crab tart.”

  “The domestic or the wild homunculus?”

  “The wild, of course.”

  “We cannot give it to you, sir. The trappers bring none in. The vampires have lately increased in the hills.”

  “Do they feed on homunculi?” Hex asked with surprise.

  The innkeeper shook his head: “Trappers.”

  “Of course. Well, I’ll take the sausage then instead of ’munk.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Settling back, Hex looked out the window at his side.

  He watched the traffic the more closely because he did not wish to think about his studies. The meal he had ordered was costly both in coin and time. He concentrated but poorly with a full stomach, and wouldn’t be able to return to his books for two hours after such a feast as he had just bespoken. And this inn was not his only new-formed habit, now that his Ultimary Examinations drew near. The harbour side in particular abounded with dissolutions he had lately come to relish, and he foresaw this evening’s waste following this afternoon’s. More unread pages to be added to the stack already two months deep.

  Out in the street, three old bread women trudged against the onshore wind of Glorak Harbour’s late afternoon. Hex felt a pang of envy, seeing the crones’ stubborn fight against the backdrag of their black mantles, each hugging her deep basket of loaves. They were free, absorbed in their lives, thinking only of whichever of the dusk bazaars was their destination.

  A wagon of jars, driven at reckless speed, careered round the comer. As it made the turn, a gust caused it to yaw from its course. It skated sideways and almost hit the breadwomen, who fled to the wall before it. The driver reined hard, straightened, flogged his plod anew and sped down the street, his jars bobbling in the cartbed, and his wheels barely skimming the noon-gilt cobbles.

  One of the breadwomen, having spilled three loaves in her flight, gathered up two of them, but Hex could read her soundless curse as she found the third too dirty for salvage. She kicked it away with feeble anger, and turned to follow her companions down the hill. The spurned loaf rolled to the feet of a chained troupe of felons being led past by two Karbies, the giant escorts who took men to the skinfarms. One of the prisoners grabbed up the loaf, while the man behind him jostled his elbow coaxingly. The loaf’s owner hugged the bread with greedy denial, bolting hunks of it as the Karbies led their party down the hill in the direction the breadwomen had taken—doubtless to the Inlet to take ship to the farms. There was a cluster of them just downcoast of Glorak.

  There were some less free than himself, Bramt Hex considered. The breadwomen too, after all, were as much prisoners of their poverty as those men in chains were of the Karbies. Only the rich were free.

  Meanwhile he at twenty-eight lived in the quasi-freedom of the student. He had held the scholar’s midway position all his life: dwelling among the poor, while learning the arts and mysteries enjoyed by the wealthy; receiving simultaneously the proletarian’s ardour and harsh humour, and the magnate’s overview, wealth’s fund of information. He was a man who could sit at ease in an expensive inn like this, and look with understanding on those in the street. The thought was bleached of pleasure. He could not congratulate himself on a role he was growing too paralysed to play. His spindlewort arrived, and he fell to it greedily.

  Bramt Hex assumed that he looked as at home as he felt in both social strata. In fact, he seemed slightly out of place wherever he was. He was a tall, plump man, whose reddish beard and blond moustache contrasted subtly with his brown hair. His tunic and cape of black velour, which he believed to appear as costly as they had once been, looked both quaint and well-worn. He considered himself skilful in dealing with people; the truth was he had the quirkish manner of a solitary. He was both withdrawn and obtrusive, an oblivious and conspicuous man.

  He did not know he was fat. He sometimes glimpsed the fact—when he leaned over the Academy fountain to feed the waterbrats, or when he walked, conversing with Lamkin Bont in the morning on the Academy quay, and saw his thick shadow beside his friend’s narrow one. Large and sturdy of frame, Hex was actually an ace short of full obesity, but even his heaviness, though glanced at, never entered his idea of himself.

  He found scant forgetfulness in his food. The knowledge that he must change his life nagged him. The Ultimaries came in three weeks. It was still just possible to cover two months’ material sufficiently to pass, but it was all too likely he would not summon the will to do so.

  Never in his life had Bramt Hex read so widely as now, when everything depended on his reading narrowly. He found himself fascinated by any topic, so long as it was unrelated to his studies.

  His course as a scholar had never been smooth. It had taken him three years longer than the usual period to earn his First Seal. Only his high achievement had redeemed his slow pace. Now, in the morass of infra-magus scholarship, the pace had become more demanding even as his devotion to his studies had begun to disintegrate.

  He gobbled with diminishing pleasure, and found the sausage fatty. He ordered a double bitters for desert, and stared gloomily out the window. Out in the waning light of the street an elegant coach, bearing a coat of arms on the door, skidded around the corner, caught by a gust as the jar-cart had been. It was fortunate that the street was empty just now, for this high-wheeled vehicle was blown so completely out of control that it slammed sideways to a stop against the opposite wall. The coachman, a small, lithe man, jumped from the box, cringed up to the window of the coach, and spoke to someone within. Bramt Hex sighed.

  Wealth! How utterly it would erase his woes! He had a small stipend, won by his early brilliance. If by a miracle he passed the Ultimaries, his wage as an infra-magus would be perhaps three times as much—still a pittance. For this he was supposed to shackle his mind to some narrow speciality. He loved Lore and Letters. It was the act of specializing in itself he recoiled from—to slink through the wide world down one twisted little path, sneak through one’s life, one’s sole and unrecoverable life, as if it were a shop-boy’s errand, strictly routed to a simple end! Meanwhile mere wealth—brute, meaningless funds—endowed a man with a free sky and all the fair earth’s range of choices.

  Outside the coachman, having remounted and gee’d up the matching pair of Slenders that drew the vehicle, had discovered that it moved with a severe wobble. He leapt down, found the left wheel badly bent, and cringed anew to the coach’s window. He gestured at the inn Hex sat in, bowed at some reply he received, and opened the coach door, releasing a small set of steps hinged to its sill. A lady in a regal gown emerged. Easing a silver prow of multiple petticoats into the gale, she stepped down with a steady foot despite the wind’s tug. Though her coif was also elaborate, she moved through the rushing air with a firm control that seemed to hold the elements of her attire together by a direct exercise of the will. She advanced unruffled while the wind rummaged at her clothes. Her hair was frosted and beaded with pearls, a style typical of the elderly rich, as was the deep black of her quilted sleeves—yet she moved with a vigour that seemed younger than her accoutrements, and the coachman had to spring nimbly to precede her.

  The i
nn door banged open. The coachman strode into the public room and cried with a scowl: “Keep! Hither!”

  Out of the wind which had made his loose and somewhat foppish livery billow and banner, the coachman was rather remarkable. His small frame vibrated with tigerish power; his black eyes, under plucked, arched brows, had a gimlet stare, murderously fixed. He snatched up a chair, set it near the room’s centre and, in the same motion, whirled to bow the entering lady towards this presiding throne he had arranged for her.

  She glided in on a breath of wind. Her face was autumnal, but firm and handsome. She swept the room, politely acknowledging its other occupants, and Hex thrilled at the brief engagement of her eyes with his. The way she sat down made the chair seem a throne. The innkeep hurried to her side and executed a profound and vigorous bow. She murmured, gracious but brief. The innkeep bowed vigorously again, beckoned to the coachman and led him out the side door that opened on the stable-yard. The lady, whose aquiline profile Hex had been admiring, turned and settled her cool gaze in his direction.

  Her gaze was clearly devoted to the window he sat by, yet he felt a second thrill. He asked himself why he should be so impressed with this woman. Though maturity had never been a bar to his lust, he preferred women of his own age. As for her wealth and station, he had always mocked fatuous reverence for the “great”.

  What affected him so strongly, he realized, was a sense of portent. A moment before he had wondered how he might change his life. Now this Embodiment, this mute sphinx of Wealth and Power, sat not five strides distant and practically solicited his eye!

  With the suspended feeling of a man who makes a great first step, Hex rose in his place and made the lady a courtly gesture welcoming her to the view out the window. Almost imperceptibly she acknowledged him. Hex resumed his seat with a pounding heart. He noticed that the crest on the coach door outside had a black quarterbar, denoting recent widowhood. Unmistakably, he was beckoned!

  He must do something, make some further communication with this august Visitant—Hex felt this, yet dared not seem to solicit the lady’s attention like a scheming commoner. He turned, and saw that the lady had already risen.

  The coachman opened the inn’s door and stood flanking it. His pose combined with the woman’s strong presence to transform the public room into a rapt court viewing its sovereign’s departure. Bramt Hex stood up and cried with feeling: “Farewell rare lady! Your presence honoured us too briefly.”

  The dowager paused as she stepped over the threshold. She looked at Hex an instant, then nodded graciously. In an instant she was gone.

  So much from so little! The thought reverberated in him as he stared again at the street’s traffic. The smile and nod were mere nothings. But seen another way, he had seen an omen, greeted it, and it had smiled back at him. His fate had invited him. Filled with this sudden, sensual tonic, he realized just how large a plan had been born within him in these last moments: to woo this dowager—win her and possess her, body and fortune. So much from so little!

  He recognized his confusion of greed with desire, yet it thrilled him no less. Was she not a woman—strong-natured and probably fully awakened by marriage to sexual ardour? Was he himself not a handsome and cultured man? The annals of love had a thousand chapters about passions born from one glance, while convention permitted a poor scholar’s acceptance as a suitor to one of the great, where it would forbid a man who was merely poor.

  Luck was precisely in such moments of inspiration made real by daring. If—right now, tonight—he converted all his texts to cash, bought fine clothes and assailed the dowager with hot avowals—if he threw all his poetry and persuasion at her, he could quite possibly, by force and charm, fan the lady’s benign, brief attention into a fire.

  Of course he had long deplored the evils of wealth. It would be more consistent of him to hatch plans to sabotage the skinfarms, and free such men as he had seen pass in chains, than to chase after the titled oppressors.

  But wasn’t he debating a total change of his life? Let his leap be a great one, then! Let him try on a new way of thinking. To hell with altruism—it had been a mere habit, more talk than action. Let him now take up an unsentimental realism. He would go forth, keep his own counsel, devise his own stratagems, and win what could be won of the world. This had been the way of many great men.

  “Innkeep!” The keep appeared at Hex’s table, and delivered the less athletic bow he reserved for customers who were not dowagers.

  “That lady, innkeep. I had the impression you knew her, knew of her, I mean.”

  “That is correct, sire.”

  “Well then. You see, I am curious to know her name, her residence.”

  “Indeed? I see, sire.”

  “You say you see, and you tell me nothing.”

  “Perhaps there is a reason for that, sire.”

  Sourly, Hex counted one and a half times the meal’s cost on to the table. The keep bowed with more energy. “She is the dowager Poon, widow of Orgle Poon, the homunculus magnate. Her house is a prominent one in the Scarp Heights quarter.”

  When Hex subsequently stepped out under the first stars, he could see Scarp Heights from where he stood. It was in the arc of hills that protected the half-basin of Glorak Harbour from the open sea. The inn stood in the well-to-do footslopes of this range; Scarp Heights lay among its exclusive crests. A fang of rock, the Scarp, protruding from a line of more rounded summits, marked its centre among the sparse window lights of wealth’s well-spaced properties.

  Below on the shoreside flatlands where he must now go—the bottom of Glorak’s broken bowl—the lights lay thicker. Torch yellows and the red of braziers freckled the square zones that Hex knew were the dusk bazaars; the taverns had their oil-lamp clusters of whiter light, and also white were the quayside lamps that fringed the Inlet, a black swordblade of sea thrust deep into the city’s flank. The Academy’s Great Mamble Beacon burned orange at the inlet’s mouth.

  He had always loved the Academy’s position on its corner of land, with the sea to one side and on the other, the inlet, down whose corridor incessant ships took the somnolent last steps of voyages from worlds that were bare names to him. He realized as he stood staring that he was summing up, taking a kind of leave of the years he had lived there.

  Did he expect so much to flow from this slight thing? A pang of fear told him that he did. This, if he made it so, was a real turning, a real end of a life, whatever might happen with the dowager. If he went down there now to his quarters, and sold his books and his chamber-right, he would be shutting himself out of his present existence as effectively as if he had had himself transported by a wizard to another land.

  However it was precisely in the completeness of the risk that his luck lay—he felt sure of it. The alchemy of daring could convert this fantasy to glittering fortune. Failure would merely be a harsher brand of success, leaving him to find some new life, will he, nill he.

  For that was where salvation lay—in the leap more than the landing! He shivered to see this so clearly now. Like a sleepwalker waked at a chasm’s edge, he looked down upon his twenty-eight years of habit and routine. If he turned twenty-nine in that gulf of lassitude, his soul would surely die.

  He felt welling in him precisely the recklessness and humour with which his court must be paid to the dowager. That he laid his life at her feet would be the simple truth, and he knew exactly how he would say it. He moved forward, and the wind’s rush felt like the sky’s assistance to his steps. “But such a scheme!” he muttered, grinning. His heart stretched in him like young wings flexing away sleep. “Madness!” He began to stride.

  2

  A Misadventure with a Melancholy Melodeon

  Lamkin Bont sat hunched on his pallet, the scroll he had been reading laid by on the blanket. “It does not sound very passionate, Bramt Hex. I mean, you all but decided to desire her…” He raised his faint eyebrows only slightly enlarging his habitually squinted eyes. The rest of his narrow, lantern-jawed face was i
nert—as usual. Hex laughed, more at the thought of Lamkin, at his stolid sunniness through all the years they had been friends, than at the accusation.

  “It’s true, I did decide, in a way. It’s such a mix of lust and greed and ambition. Shameless! But I’ve got to get out of this narrow little life. My soul depends on it.”

  Lamkin looked at his nails, an expressive trait; Hex saw he had been offended. He added, “Narrow for me I mean, naturally. I’m just hiding out here. I don’t want to work on pandects or master text analysis! I love my books, but I could read them anywhere! I’m playing it safe here and I’ve got to stop.”

  “It’s only a narrow little life to those who let it become so,” the myopic scholar said, only now looking at Hex again with relenting humour. “Well then. Bramt Hex is now at large in the World. That honest, tumultuous man! If the near-sighted Lamkin Bont could do it, he would willingly shower good luck on the head of Bramt Hex, with both hands.” Bont squinted at Hex and wagged his head slightly, solemnly. “Blessings will have to do. Who knows what things Bramt Hex, that large-witted, touchy, stubborn man, is going to see in his new life?”

  “Maybe one of them,” Hex replied, “will be Lamkin Bont, that redoubtable scholar. After all, maybe I’ll succeed, and live in Scarp Heights.”

  “And maybe you’ll end up with nothing but a suit of expensive clothes.”

  “Then I’ll sell them for a staff, sword, boots and steerage to the farthest large city I can afford to get to. It’s got to be all-or-naught. But if you could only feel my sense of luck, Lamkin! I hardly feel like I’m taking leave of you at all.”

  “Still, different lives, different paths, as Nab the Trickster says. Shall I sell your chamber-right for you, and give you the money for it myself?”

  “Bless you. Here’s my token. Now I’m taking these”—he pointed to the bundle of his texts—“to Rouchernod’s. Thanks.” Hex pocketed the fifty lictors Lamkin gave him. They shook hands. Hex felt sadness as he flipped up with his toe the trap in the floor. Voices, and the clatter of rune-bones on playing boards rose into the room from the scholars’ refectory downstairs. Hex paused before walking straight out of Lamkin’s life but, dreading to show his doubt, he climbed hastily down the ladder.