Points of Departure

by Patricia C. Wrede

  A number of onlookers had made it their business to run into the House of Responsible Life while the healer was shaking her head. Probably as a result of their efforts, three or four of the Serenities in their green robes now came slowly down the steps, carrying green curtains, or perhaps rugs. They spoke to the healer; she didn’t want them to move the bodies but seemed unable to explain why. “The City Guard won’t like it,” said a young woman, rather loudly. This did not impress the Serenities, although it seemed to make the healer happier. It was true that, while the bodies themselves were not blocking the procession, all the spectators were. It was only the followers of Irhan who were being discommoded, but I supposed they deserved their parade too. Granny Carry had always said Irhan was minnow-brained; Verdialos thought this was beside the point. I almost grinned. The Serenities covered Verdialos and Etriae up and lifted them one by one and carried them into the house.

  After a short time, in which the bright winter sun changed the smell of the blood, a City Guard captain arrived, with a lieutenant and another guard whom I recognized. Rusty and Stone; they used to take Deleon and me home when they found us wandering about the city looking for places to kill ourselves. I wondered why Verdialos had not found both of us much earlier; how much easier that would have been for everybody.

  I stood up, and helped Calla stand up. Some of her friends from the House handed her handkerchiefs and took her off somewhere. I went on watching the captain; she was easier to pick out of the crowd than either the red-headed Rusty or the gigantic Stone. Partly this was because she was not moving around so much; and partly it was because she had a stern and splendid face, rather like the statue of the Northern goddess Valerian who had tried and failed to take the Acrivannish from Acrilat; my mother has a miniature of it in her parlor. She had black hair like Valerian’s, and a very definite voice.

  I remembered her. When the Serenity Gorodain was killing wizards and leaving them to glow green, a number of Liavek’s citizens, not altogether unnaturally, I realize now, though I did not think so at the time, came and threw things at the House of Responsible Life. Captain Jemuel had come with the City Guard, sent the rioters smartly away, and spoken pleasantly to Verdialos. She had been brisk and ironic and had generally the air of somebody doing what he knows how to do; like Gillo building a chair for Isobel’s doll.

  She did not look that way now. She looked like Deleon when they made him paint in watercolors, like Livia when they tried to make her knead bread; like me, I expect, when they tried to teach me to dance. She hated what she was doing so much that she knew she could not possibly be quiet enough to do it well. I wondered what it was she was doing, that was not what she did in her work. Perhaps it was just that she knew Verdialos. She ran up the steps and into the House of Responsible Life, and came out again shortly, looking more confounded now than grim.

  “Dialo, you would,” she said to the splashes of blood in the dust of the street. “Pharn take you, right in the middle of Hell Week.” She looked at me. “You’d better sit down,” she said, though I was quite steady. She did not look accustomed to being argued with. I sat down on the wall. The healer and the young woman were having the pleasure of explaining to Rusty why the bodies had been moved. Jemuel watched them for a moment and then said to me, “Lieutenant Jassil says your name’s Nerissa Benedicti? What happened?”

  “I don’t exactly know. Verdialos saw something; he turned and pushed me and said to stay down. Then there was a lot of noise and a great deal of blood.”

  “What sort of noise?”

  “Like the fireworks.”

  “You’d better come along with me; we can’t talk here. Can someone come with you?”

  She dispatched Stone to find Calla, and Rusty to look for something; then we all waited about until three more City Guards appeared and she told them what to do; and the three of us set off walking. Captain Jemuel looked like Aelim in the throes of a grammatical dilemma; Calla was an unlovely yellow color and kept stumbling. Perhaps I should have chosen someone less fond of Verdialos; or perhaps this would prevent her from thinking before she was ready.

  We walked a fair distance, among the celebrations; Calla stopped crying and began to expostulate. Captain Jemuel didn’t answer her. Finally we came to the clutter of buildings around the Levar’s Palace, and went into a room, and sat down. Jemuel gave us some extremely bitter kaf without asking if we wanted it, and went away for some time. The room was very plain and scattered with papers. When she came back, she dropped another pile of papers on the desk and sat down behind it. Then she asked a number of questions about what had happened; and about what might have happened, too, but neither of us was any good to her at all. About halfway through the conversation something Calla said made her face change, and I realized that she had thought one or the other of us might have killed the two of them, and now she did not. At that point she dug a sealed paper out of the new pile on the desk. The seal was an enormous blob of bright green wax with a V and an E in it. It was cracked across the middle.

  Jemuel tapped the paper against her palm. “I asked Dialo to tell me how he planned to die,” she said, “so we wouldn’t have to waste time looking into it, when he finally got around to doing it. He said it was none of my business. But he turned up a few days later with this. He said I could open it after he was dead. And I have, and this is not how he said he planned to do away with himself, or Etriae either.”

  I gaped at her; I remembered Etriae’s pleased and secretive face. Of course, one would not have to write much to show one had not intended to die bloodily at noon in a festival procession. Jemuel did not look either shocked or puzzled. “It appears they meant to die in bed,” she said to me. “Would you know anything about that?”

  “It’s not the sort of thing you tell your novices,” I said tartly. She probably knew more than I did at this point, and in any case I did not propose to discuss the matter with anybody. It would be in the archives, but she could think of that for herself, and battle the Serenities for it, too. Surely she could find out what had happened without knowing anything besides what was in Verdialos’s letter.

  Jemuel looked both impatient and thoughtful, but did not press the issue. After finding out where we would be if she wanted us, she sent us back to the House of Responsible Life in a footcab. Neither of us said anything. The cab’s owner whistled “Eel Island Shoals” off-key all the way there.

  The Serenities of the order were just calling a meeting; they asked for me but not for Calla. Calla, shaking her head and muttering something about Firethorn and Mistletoe, kindly gave me a hug and went away.

  I found the meeting unnerving. Everybody else there had been a member of the House for at least ten years; I couldn’t think what they wanted with me. It became evident eventually that, first of all, nobody else would admit to knowing anything about what Verdialos and Etriae had been doing in their work, and, second, that the two of them had left in the House’s archives a paper disposing of all their possessions, and with the exception of a few books and keepsakes distributed among the older members, everything was mine.

  I had a house. That would set Jemuel off again, I thought, while the Serenities were reading aloud the list of what in the house was mine and what was for each of them. Jemuel was very good at asking questions, and anybody getting a straight account of what went on in my family would not be surprised for a moment at killing two people for a chance to get out of it. I wrote her a note with the news in it, saying she might look for me in the Street of Flowers if I were not at home or at the House of Responsible Life. One of the children could take the message for a copper or two.

  The Serenities talked on. I wanted my cat. I wanted to walk by the Cat River and consider the depth of the water. But I found myself beginning to feel angry. Somebody had killed Verdialos and Etriae, probably with a gun, out of a huge crowd, and Jemuel had not sounded very hopeful of finding out who. Leaving aside Verdialos and Etriae, who were no longer concerned in the matter, it seemed to me tha
t for many reasons I was the one injured here.

  I sat in the large room used for meetings and for entertaining lost children, the Serenities talking around me, and thought. Once I had run to The Magician with my problems, or to Granny Carry; of late, the problems being more interior than otherwise, I had run to Verdialos. It was Festival Week; one would not find Wizard’s Row, and in any case the last time I saw him The Magician had expressed a desire not to see any of my family again, in effect turning our welfare over to Granny. Granny had been dealing with that in her own fashion; but I felt as if my family were on trial and I would do none of us any good by asking her for help. And, again, it was Festival, and she would be occupied.

  Possibly, too, I was being unfair to Jemuel. She had caught Gorodain, after all. I got up suddenly and went out of the room. She had caught Gorodain, and after a considerable uproar and a great many violent headlines in all the half-copper papers, they had taken his luck from him and sent him off to Crab Isle. I still remembered a discussion between my father and Isobel concerning what would have been done to him in Acrivain. So. Nothing I had heard about him from Verdialos or anybody else made me doubt that if he chose to leave Crab Isle and come back to Liavek, he would do it. And having no luck any longer, if he wanted to avenge himself on Verdialos, he would have to use a gun.

  Would he wish to avenge himself on Verdialos? Everybody at the House of Responsible Life was remarkably muddled about what exactly had happened. Verdialos had flatly refused to discuss the matter; I once overheard Etriae telling him in tones of considerable exasperation that, whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be as damaging as the wild tales that were going around among novices and Serenities alike. Verdialos replied dryly that it was pretty to think so, and Etriae threw two folders of letters from the parents of lost children at him, and was obliged to ask me to pick them up and sort them while she went for a walk to cool her temper.

  Gorodain had killed six wizards and made them glow green; everybody agreed about that. It was less generally agreed that it had taken the combined talents of Jemuel, Verdialos, and The Magician to realize what Gorodain had done and to catch him. It was reported variously that Gorodain had been caught trying to kill a healer, or the little girl she had been treating, or a toymaker who lived in the neighborhood of the healer, or The Magician himself—having practiced, as it were, on six lesser wizards first. It was reported also that whichever of these had been his victim had, in fact, been killed and then brought back to life by The Magician, or else by the children’s healer if the victim was reported as The Magician. This last prompted a long and convoluted debate over whether wizards could bring back the dead. Verdialos, appealed to on this point, said in the same flat tone with which he had been refusing to discuss the matter for three months, that bringing back the dead was the prerogative of the gods alone, and not all of them. But of course he would say that, whether it had any bearing on what had happened or not.

  It seemed clear at least that Gorodain, adhering to the tenets of the old Green Faith whose members visited death on others, not themselves, had killed six wizards, and that Verdialos had either helped to catch him or at least not defended him or helped him. I thought of going back to the Guard station; then of sending another message. But as I considered the form it would take, I began to see that there were holes in the fabric of my thought. I was still certain I had discovered the truth, but felt Jemuel would laugh at me. I stopped pacing the halls and went into the nearest room.

  It was Verdialos’s, of course, habit having taken over when thought was elsewhere. I sat down at my own table. I felt extremely tired suddenly; again, I wanted my cat. And then I considered my cat. My cat that was a magical artifact. My cat that had my luck bound into her by The Magician, so that I might die when she did, but neither before nor after. My cat that, because The Magician had refused to make a magical artifact that did nothing, would let me see what she saw but understand it as if I were seeing it with my own eyes. Could she show me what Jemuel was doing or what frame of mind she was in?

  I had not practiced this when there was any distance involved. I did not know where Floradazul was; she might have found it noisy enough outside that she would retire to our garden and sleep under the stone bench, occasionally waking up and smacking a spider for its presumption. I shut my eyes and wandered among the red and green and yellow sparks and the lost lines of what I had seen just before, but that did nothing. I looked at my hands; I looked at Verdialos’s books, at the green and white rag rug, at the scarred wooden leg of his desk. Finally I leaned back and looked at the ceiling and let the focus of my eyes drift, as cats do when you think they are staring you out of countenance, but in fact they don’t see you at all. And that showed me, in a slow and jumbled fashion, the world through Floradazul’s eyes. She was down by the docks, sniffing the fish and eating the fish scraps and being scratched behind the ears by passing children and idle sailors.

  This was all very well as far as it went, but it was a far cry from nudging her in some direction useful to me. She didn’t know I was there, and Acrilat only knew what she would think of it if she did. I tried to remember where the Guard offices were, but I had not paid attention when Calla and I were walking with Jemuel. Near the Levar’s Palace, I thought. I sat staring aslant at the rough plaster ceiling, patterned with thin sunlight through the branches of the tree that grew outside the window, thinking of the smells we had encountered on our way.

  Floradazul suddenly shook herself from the embrace of a small fishy boy and bolted down a narrow alley so fast it made me dizzy. She could climb walls with dispatch, too. Luckily Jemuel’s office was not far from where we had been; I should have hated for us to end up somewhere that just happened to smell like its neighborhood. The Guard offices were in fact in the Levar’s Palace itself, which was only reasonable, and had their own entrance, which was fortunate. Floradazul sat on the steps for a few moments and then slid in when somebody left. He smelled of wool and dog; I don’t know what he looked like. Once inside, Floradazul recognized more smells and tried to trip Lieutenant Rusty up as he leaned against the wall playing with the innards of a shiribi puzzle. Floradazul liked the idea of the string; but Rusty was not interested in playing. He said, “Get that thing out of here!”

  From somewhere else in the room, Stone’s voice said, “Aw, Rusty. It’s that ghost kid’s cat. And there’s nothing to do.”

  “There will be. All right, but whatever she pisses on and whatever she claws up, you can explain to the Captain.”

  Rusty had always asked kindly after Floradazul, and even once spoken of getting a cat after he retired. He was either a consummate hypocrite or in a foul mood. Probably the latter, if he had to work during Festival. That might account, too, for the change in Jemuel.

  Jemuel came in, looking enormous from a cat’s-eye view. “Is Lani still around?” She sounded harried, and smelled extremely interesting.

  “Not a chance,” said Rusty, aggrievedly.

  “Well, send somebody after him. And you might as well read this. Stone, if that cat—”

  “It won’t,” said Stone, also aggrievedly.

  “Nothing new here,” said Rusty, reading.

  “The pig’s blood is new,” said Jemuel. “You couldn’t tell that just by looking, could you, Lieutenant?”

  “We knew it wasn’t theirs, anyway,” said Stone; he had understood that she was displeased without precisely knowing what she was displeased about. “Not a mark on them.”

  I tried very hard to be just a cat sniffing an old but interesting spot on the floor; there was no need for thought in that.

  Rusty, still reading, said nothing; Jemuel said, “Lani says it was pig’s blood. He says further that neither of them should be dead at all as far as he can see; and he’s gone out to celebrate, the son of a camel, because, he says, obviously, given what they were, they did it on purpose.”

  “That’s the first thing you thought, too,” said Stone helpfully.

  Jemuel breathed out
violently through her nose and said, “That’s not the point. If they killed themselves, we still need to know how, or we won’t know for certain that they did.” She rubbed her hand across her forehead and added, “At least they weren’t glowing green.”

  Rusty stood up and tossed the sheaf of papers onto the table. “Come on, Stone,” he said. “I know where Lani will go first.”

  “Take that cat when you go,” said Jemuel.

  Stone knew how to hold a cat; and the leather vest he wore over his uniform made a comfortable station for claws. Floradazul rode happily with him through the bright crowded streets of Liavek; and I went with them, feeling slightly seasick. They came to a narrow stucco building front crammed in between a brick one and one of smooth pink plaster. Its ornate sign said simply, “Ale,” and that appeared to be all they served you inside. If, that is, one can get ale tinged purple, or greeny-yellow, or reddish-gold. Lani turned out to be a thin dark boy with very short hair, sitting alone in a corner with a glass of the greeny-yellow stuff. He was younger than I am, probably, but whatever life he led had made him both more tired and more assured than I ever fear or hope to be.

  He received Rusty’s admonishments and Stone’s insults with perfect good humor, scratched Floradazul behind the ears, and reiterated that the blood in question was pig’s blood, concealed in several bags under clothing. Verdialos’s clothes always looked too big for him, but I remembered Etriae looking rather bulkier than usual. I thought she had just put on more clothes against the cold. No, said Lani, patiently, nothing was in the least wrong with either of them except that they were dead. No, not poison; no, not disease; no, not magic either. He finally snapped at them to go and vex Mistress Govan, who had taught him all he knew, with his deficiencies, supposing he really had any, which he begged leave to doubt. He then drained his glass, rubbed Floradazul’s head again, and walked out. Stone and Rusty, arguing, sat down and had some of the purple ale. They didn’t seem to like it. Stone spilled a puddle of it on the table and offered it to Floradazul. She didn’t like it either, and sneezed so violently that I jerked suddenly back to my stiff neck and one foot asleep, in a green room full of shadows. I had found out rather more than I bargained for; and if nobody had shot them at all, then Gorodain had not shot them.