The Book of Atrix Wolfe

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Something appeared in her line of vision: the white lily on the tray. “Take it,” he said. “I want to give it to you.”

  She stared at him. She did not take the flower, but she felt her face rearrange itself in a very strange way and realized, as he smiled, that she was smiling.

  She thought of him all the way back to the kitchens. She found his face at the bottom of every pot she scrubbed, between her eyes and every face she looked at in the kitchens. It was still in her mind after supper, even while she cleaned the great mess of pots and pans and kettles, to clear the cauldron for its nightly dreams. Pausing between pots, she touched her face once, in curiosity, tried to see it in the water. She only saw dark cloud with suds floating around it.

  And then, unexpectedly, Talis’ face formed instead, as if the cauldron had taken the thought out of her head. She blinked, for he no longer looked calm; he was not smiling, as in her memory. He was seeing something, trying to move away from it without moving. She leaned farther into the cauldron, trying to see what he saw. His face grew small then; he acquired a body, surroundings. Fire behind him illumined the tangle of oak boughs above his head. As she stared, a young woman flung herself toward him. Her hair was long and tangled, her face wild in the light, strained with fear. She cried something: Fire flashed out of her mouth, then diamonds, then a small black bird of horror. And then an arrow of white streaked out of nowhere, passed between them and shattered the lens over Talis’ eye.

  Blood spilled across the black moon rising among the oak boughs. The boughs turned into horns, moving slowly into Saro’s vision, lifting the moon higher until its bloody face filled the cauldron. Then it waned upward out of her sight, until she saw the face beneath the moon. The eyes, masked in pelt, moon-black, seemed to stare back at her through the dark water.

  And then it was her own face, a dark, vague cloud, rippling now with her quick, terrified breathing. The tray-mistress, passing behind her, said, “Wake up and finish, girl, before you fall in.”

  She left the pot where it stood.

  This time she saw only one tower, and it was dark and full of owls, questioning her when she disturbed them. She felt her way up with her hands. The steps seemed endless, but she was used to having no end in sight. She could not think; over and over she saw the white fire strike, the prince flinch back as the lens shattered. And then the terrible, inhuman face staring at her through water, as if it were scenting…

  She saw the door finally, impossibly far above her, a blackness outlined in fire. She climbed higher; it jumped closer, closer, the face on it awake and watching.

  She ignored the face, and the guards who were making meaningless noises as she pounded on the door. It opened abruptly. The prince gazed at her, one lens sparking, the other oddly empty, she saw, as if it had already shattered.

  He quieted the guards with a gesture, and asked gently, “How can I help you?”

  She realized then that, with no words and no voice, she could tell him nothing.

  Six

  The White Wolf dreamed.

  He was writing a book in the ancient school at the edge of the forest on the highest peak of Chaumenard. A book of spells, for beginning students. One spell in particular he needed to put into language, clearly and unambiguously, for the student who wore the lenses. He was working in the next room; the door between them stood open. The mage heard a page turn, murmurings, water poured out of a beaker. The spell the student worked was twisted, dangerous; its words would explode in his hands, for they meant other than what they said. The mage, trying desperately, could not remember the true words. Water hissed into fire; gold leaf melted, dropped in tiny, metallic tears onto a mirror. The mage tried to speak; he could not find the word that meant: Stop. Rain, he found, and moon, horns, heart. Hart? Dark. Drawkcab, he heard, very clearly, from the next room. And then there was a sound like air ripping apart.

  He dropped the pen, rising. Steps came toward him from the next room before he could move. Drawkcab, a strange voice said. And the night-hunter of Hunter’s Field stood at the threshold. His face was masked in fur, his mouth black with blood; the dark moon rode through his fiery horns as through cloud. He raised his hand and said:

  Xirta Eflow.

  The mage woke.

  His heart was pounding; even awake, he stared into the dark, listening, trying to separate the Hunter’s face from the night. He was alone in his quiet cottage; the dark hunter had been a dream. Still he lay tensed, incredulous, alarmed without knowing why. Danger, the dream said. Warning. Drawkcab.

  He remembered the spell in the book.

  He sat up, murmuring wordlessly, hands pushed against his eyes. The spell…Which was it? Something simple. Repeat these words thrice. Ecirht. Backward. He had buried the spellbook in solid granite beneath the stone cellar under the school.

  Behind every spell, within every word, lay the name of the maker.

  Xirta Eflow.

  What, he wondered suddenly, intensely, had the young man who had climbed the mountain been doing in his dream? He could not possibly have found the book; he could not be awake now, within the dark, sleeping school, trying to work the simple, dangerously twisted spells within the book. It was a dream, he told himself. A nightmare. Nothing. No thing.

  Drawkcab, the strange voice reminded him.

  He rose and dressed.

  As he stepped outside, he smelled stone in the still air, the moon-frosted peaks above him, and the scent of the earth, like some vast, sleeping animal. He yearned to shape the wolf, run across the plane of night beneath the stars. But if the dream was no dream, then he had no time, and if it was nothing but a few random fragments of memory pieced together, then he had no magic for things he had loved.

  He thought of stone, and, for an instant, became stone, crossing distance as if it were not time and place but simply memory. He stepped forward into time, and backward into memory, and stood in the hushed, enclosed blackness beneath the school. He dove into stone as if it were water, seeking what he had hidden twenty years ago, before he had run out of the world.

  The book was gone.

  Stone was stone; it held his name, his words, nowhere. He drew back into his body and grew still, scenting the night again, calming his perturbed thoughts, to find, beneath them, a simple answer. One of the old mages must have noticed the book, a seep of its magic out of the cellar floor, and had brought it up. He would have buried it again in the library where, nameless, it had been ignored for years, until perhaps one of the beginning mages had looked into it for help.

  He had only to find it, bury it again, and go back to bed.

  He searched the sleeping school, silent and invisible, a shadow in the night, looking through dreaming chambers and finding no one awake, looking on shelves, in the library, growing more and more uneasy, until his dream became a subtle heartbeat, a cold rill of blood running through the stones, through someone else’s dream. He saw a star of lamplight move down a long corridor toward him. He grew as still as stone, and as unremarkable. But the bearer of the lamp, hunched and slow, simply stopped in front of the blank stone wall and said, astonished:

  “Atrix Wolfe?”

  He drew himself free, reluctantly, shaping the mage whose name he had not spoken in twenty years. He said, “Hedrix.” The light trembled in the old mage’s hand. Atrix took the lamp from him. “I didn’t want to wake anyone.”

  “I dreamed of you,” Hedrix said, “and woke.” His owl’s tufted brows were lifted as high as they could go. He touched Atrix, held his arm, as if he might vanish back into the dream. “What are you doing here? Have you come back to stay? Why did you come so quietly in the dead of night? Why didn’t you tell me you were here? Have you been with the wolves? Is that why you were reluctant to come among—” Hedrix stopped himself abruptly, studying Atrix, his own face quieting now, in a way that Atrix remembered, as he focused his thoughts. “You’re troubled. How can I help you?”

  Atrix lowered the lamp, sighing noiselessly. “I’m looking
for something. I hoped to come and find it and disappear again, with no one knowing I had ever been here.”

  “But why?” Hedrix breathed. “Is it so terrible for you to be among humans now?”

  “No. Only among mages.” Hedrix was silent, astonished again. Atrix turned restively. Stone walls met his eyes everywhere, and he could not leave in any shape without finding the book. His mouth tightened. He said finally, dream-driven and trying to remember patience, “Let me talk. If I can remember how mages speak to one another.”

  The hand on his arm tightened. “Come with me,” Hedrix said, and led him, with brittle slowness, lest their sorcery disturb more dreams, to his chambers. He sat down; Atrix put the lamp on his work table, and let his mind prowl a moment among Hedrix’s things. The book was not among them.

  He went to the window, drawn to the pale ghost of stones rising up to meet the setting moon behind the thick leaded panes of glass in the window. He let his face fall against the cold glass.

  He said, “Has no one ever guessed that I made that monster on Hunter’s Field that killed the King of Pelucir?”

  He heard no sound behind him, not even Hedrix’s breath. He turned, suddenly afraid for the frail old mage, and found Hedrix staring at him, his eyes as wide and luminous as a child’s. Hedrix said, his voice shaking again, “No. Why would we?” He tried to pull himself up then, failed; he still stared. “You?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well.” Hedrix blinked finally. “That explains so many things.” He laid a hand over his heart; Atrix moved toward him quickly. He knelt at Hedrix’s feet, took his other hand, felt the shocked blood pounding through Hedrix, and the pain pushing against his heart.

  He quieted his thoughts, letting the pain flow into his own heart, where it belonged. “It’s over and done with,” he said. “So is my life as mage. Except tonight. I have something simple to do, and then I’ll leave you again. Hedrix. Don’t take it so to heart—”

  “Why—”

  He heard the question struggling out of Hedrix, and tried to answer, speaking slowly, more gently, feeling his blood, or Hedrix’s blood, beating with thin, frantic hummingbird wings. “I wanted to end the siege—”

  “You should not—”

  “I know,” he said. “I should not have acted on that field. But I was afraid for Chaumenard. I lost my temper. I tried to stop a war, and made something more terrible than war. I made death to stop death.” He had trouble finding air, suddenly. He closed his eyes, calming Hedrix’s pain at the word, breathing deeply, evenly. “Hedrix. I need your help.”

  “Yes—”

  “I made a mistake on Hunter’s Field. And, when I came here afterward, I made a second mistake.”

  “You did not speak.”

  Atrix opened his mouth, closed it. He heard Hedrix’s breathing then, harsh, but steadier. “No,” he said finally. “I wrote, instead. That was my second mistake.” Hedrix made a soft noise; Atrix looked at him. “My silence was a lie; the words I wrote were lies. I buried the book.”

  “You should never have gone to Pelucir,” Hedrix whispered.

  “Then that was my first mistake. But in wolf shape, I dreamed of that war. Of danger to Chaumenard. I did not stop to think.”

  “That you could be more dangerous than the army of Kardeth?”

  Atrix bowed his head. “I take the shapes I am drawn to: On that field, the only shape of power I saw was death. I did not stop to think…” The pain they shared lessened, dwindled finally into memory. Atrix rose, went back to the window. Staring at the moonlit peak, he saw only snow and black wind, and the vast raven’s wing of night. “Tonight I dreamed again,” he said. “I dreamed of that book opened, being used. I saw the Hunter’s face. He spoke my name. So I came back here looking for the book.”

  “It was a dream,” Hedrix whispered.

  “Dreams speak, when the language of power remains unspoken. That much I have learned in twenty years.”

  “You did not find the book.”

  He turned, to look at Hedrix. “No.”

  Hedrix breathed quietly now, Atrix saw, though his hands gripped the arms of his chair, and his eyes had lost their bright, innocent pain, had become hooded, opaque. He lifted one hand from the chair arm, laid it across his eyes, as if he saw too many confusions at once.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this twenty years ago, when you came here after the battle?” Hedrix asked. “Why did you let us all think you had been among the wolves until then? We spoke of nothing else, when we heard the news from Pelucir. How could you have stayed silent, while we tried to guess who had done such a terrible piece of sorcery?”

  Atrix shook his head, wordless again. “There seemed no words,” he said finally, “for what I had done. Words were too small, they did not mean…They would crack like glass if I tried to fill them with this. All I could see then was what I had made. I brought the Hunter here with me. I tried to work; I saw him in every spell I wrote. I saw him behind every door I opened, between me and every mage and student I spoke to. You spoke to a mage who no longer existed…So I buried the book with its flawed magic in solid stone beneath the school, and I buried my own magic with it. I could do nothing but that.” He shrugged slightly. “I could have gone to Pelucir, let Burne Pelucir kill me. But this seemed more appropriate and harsher than human justice.”

  “What did?” Hedrix asked uneasily.

  “Relinquishing power. Burying it, as I buried the book. Since I no longer knew my name, it did not matter what I called myself. For twenty years, I have lived without magic. I do not change shape. I move in human time. I am no longer Atrix Wolfe. I am no one.”

  Hedrix stared at him, frozen in his chair; Atrix wondered if he still breathed. Then he saw Hedrix swallow. “What have you done?”

  “I am a healer. I roam the mountains collecting herbs and mushrooms and wildflowers—”

  “Wildflowers.”

  “I heal animals. I use no magic; I do not touch people, who might die if I refuse to use power. I make fire with wood, I move stone with my hands, I live as simply as it is possible to live. I am no longer a mage named Atrix Wolfe. I am a healer, and that is the only name I need—”

  He stopped. Hedrix was rising, with an effort, clinging to the chair. Color had flushed back into his face; his eyes were wide, bright with some sudden, strange emotion.

  “Atrix,” he said, his voice shaking. “What have you done?”

  Atrix was silent a breath, gazing back at him. “What was necessary,” he said at last. “What seemed just. I removed a dangerous mage from the world.”

  “That,” Hedrix said, “was your third mistake.” He moved slowly to a small table, poured wine into a silver cup and took a swallow before he spoke again. Atrix, motionless, waited. “So the Hunter vanished, and Atrix Wolfe vanished, and we are left with you, picking wildflowers on the peaks of Chaumenard. What we do not have is any kind of truth. You are still the Hunter and the Wolf, and how will you be guided when you find yourself once more on a winter battlefield with no temper left and all that enormous power?”

  “It will not happen again,” Atrix said succinctly.

  “How do you know? How can you know that? Only your death would prevent it, because that is all you understand of this—you make death to stop death. So. You used all your power to destroy Atrix Wolfe. You are still your own dark making.”

  Atrix closed his eyes, touched them. “Hedrix. The mage destroyed himself. I am a healer. Nothing more.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  Atrix looked at him. The Hunter seemed to form out of lamplight and shadow between them, loosed from an opened spellbook that had been hidden within stone. “A small thing,” he said patiently, but doubted it, suddenly: that he would find the book and bury it and return to the high cliffs and meadows, nameless and without a past. He moved abruptly, poured wine and drank it. “I must find that book. That’s all. That’s all, at this moment, that I understand.” He turned abruptly, spilling wine; the stiffness i
n his face broke into hair-fine lines. “I should have gone to Burne Pelucir.” he said tightly. “Walked into his court at dawn twenty years ago, and let his warriors kill me.”

  “I don’t think,” Hedrix said, sitting down, “that’s what you should have done to Pelucir.”

  “I was afraid.”

  “Of dying?”

  “That out of fear they would do nothing. What should I have done?”

  “I don’t know,” Hedrix said uneasily. “I only know that power unused is power uncontrolled. You turned away from it, but it did not vanish; you simply do not know, anymore, what you are doing with it. Or what it is doing to you.”

  Atrix sat down. “It makes me dream,” he murmured wearily. “I thought that was harmless enough.”

  “Tell me about the book. What does it look like?”

  “Big. Very plain, bound in undyed leather. There is no name on it.”

  “Why?”

  Atrix shrugged. “The spells were so simple, things any mage could have written, with a little care and patience.” He drank again. “Perhaps I knew the name would be a lie. As the book is.”

  “You looked in the library.”

  “I looked everywhere. It moved itself out of solid stone, or a mage moved it. No one else could have.”

  “No one spoke of finding it…” Hedrix’s voice grew small suddenly, dwindled away. Atrix was silent, very still, watching Hedrix change in front of his eyes, gather himself into himself, it seemed, as if at the threat of a wild, imminent storm.

  He said, his voice inflectionless, “You know where the book is.”

  “One of the younger mages asked me for it. He sensed something in it—”

  “Where did he find it?”

  “In a closet, he said. On a shelf. I had no idea what it was. I let him take it with him out of Chaumenard—”

  “Out of Chaumenard? Where?” Atrix rose suddenly, alarmed at the odd expression on Hedrix’s face. “Who has it?”

  “Talis Pelucir.”

  “Talis—” He stared at Hedrix. Then he heard himself shout. “That book is in Pelucir? With a prince of Pelucir? In the castle on the edge of Hunter’s Field? Hedrix—Does he wear lenses?”