by Diane Duane
“Well enough. Time will come, and then you can come back and tell me.”
“Forgive me,” Herewiss said, “but how did you know who I am?”
“I’ve been in your saddlebag.”
“It had a binding on it.”
The cat smiled, and after a moment Herewiss smiled back at it. Cats, the legend said, had been created second after men, and had a Flame of their own, one which they had never lost.
“The very fact of a binding,” M’ssssai said, “made me slightly suspicious. I could smell it from down here, and know you for its author. And the contents of the bags settled the matter. Only two men alive wear that surcoat, and you’re too young to be one of them, so you must be the other.”
“Granted.”
“What are you doing with those grimoires in your bags?”
Herewiss made a face. “Isn’t it said of my line that there’s no accounting for us? I’m a part-time sorcerer, out seeing the world.”
M’ssssai half-closed his eyes again. “Sorcerers usually stay home unless they have something in hand. And you’re more than just a sorcerer, prince. I know the smell of Flame.”
“I have no focus,” Herewiss said, very softly, “and no control. I can’t use a Rod.”
“The innkeeper’s daughter,” said the cat, “is a dabbler; she has just enough Flame to be able to smell it herself, though she has no control or focus either. But she’s looking for a way to free her Power, and I dare say she’s noticed at least part of what you are. If I were you, I’d keep the shields up around your bags tonight, or else sleep lightly. She’s a brewer of semi-effective love potions, and she throws her curses crooked. She has a most undisciplined mind. Not to mention that she’d probably try to drain you—”
“A vampire?”
“Only between the bedsheets; unfortunately she’s acquired a taste for that kind of thing. I see too many people going out of here looking lost and drained in the morning.”
“M’ssssai, I thank you.” Herewiss scratched behind the cat’s ears. “But why are you telling me all this?”
The cat put its whiskers forward, amused. “You have good hands.”
M’ssssai stood up, stretched, arching his back, his tail straight up in the air. “Mind her, now,” he said, and jumped down from the table, vanishing into the forest of trestles and benches.
Herewiss looked up cautiously. The innkeeper’s daughter had just come down from upstairs, and was going through the kitchen door. He took his opportunity and eased out from behind the table, heading hurriedly for the protection of the shadows of the stairway. He took the stairs two at a time, sloshing ale in all directions, pausing at the top of the stairs to get his bearings; it was dark up there. Then Herewiss headed softly down the hall, trying to keep the floor from creaking under him, his breath going up before him like pale smoke in the chill air.
His room door was ajar. He listened at it, but heard nothing. A swift cold draft was whispering through the crack. Gently he put his weight against the door; it opened with a low tired groan. There was no one inside.
He went in, still moving carefully, and bent down by the window to check his bags. The surcoat was ever so slightly mussed, unfolded just enough to clearly show the Phoenix charged on it; and the lockshield around the bags was parted cleanly in one place, an invisible incision right through the spell, big enough for a cat to put a paw through.
Herewiss laughed and got up. With flint and steel he lit the room’s one candle, a stub of tallow in a smoky, cracked glass by the big four-poster bed. Even in the glass, the flame bent and bobbled wildly until Herewiss closed the shutters at the window. For a few seconds he regarded the worm-holed old door.
“All right,” he said softly. “Let her think I had a bit too much to drink.” He crossed to the door and closed it without shooting the bolt, then flicked a word and a gesture back at the bags and dissolved the lockshield.
Herewiss pulled back the faded, patched coverlet and sat down on the bed. Immediately there was a sudden sharp feeling in the back of his head, a nagging feeling like a splinter, or the dull hurt of a burn. He got up again hurriedly, stripping the covers all the way back and feeling about the sheets. When he lifted up the pillow, there it was—a small muslin bag, with runes of the Nhàiredi sorcerer’s-speech crudely stitched on it, and a brown stain that was probably blood.
Herewiss took his knife from the sheath at his belt and lifted the little bag on its blade, carrying it over to the table where the candle sat. It took him a while to poke a large enough hole in it without touching it directly, but when he did, and shook out the contents, he nodded. Asafetida; crumbs of choke-pard and wyverns-tooth; a leaf of moonwort, the black-veined kind picked in Moon’s decline; and also a small lump of something soft—a bit of potato from his plate at dinner. He scowled. Elements of sleep-charm and love-charm, mixed together—with the moonwort to befuddle the mind and bind the sleeper to someone else’s wishes.
What does she think I am? She must not know I’m a sorcerer, or she wouldn’t try something so ridiculously simple— Shaking his head, Herewiss laid the steel knife down on the little pile of herbs. “Ehrénie haladh seresh,” he said, and spat on the blade. When he picked it up again, the moonwort had shriveled into a tight black ball, and the warning pain in the back of his head was gone.
He set the cloth bag afire with the candle flame, and carried it still burning to the window, opening the shutter and throwing the bag out along with the bits of herbs. Then he went back and stretched out on the bed, reaching for the mug. The ale was getting warm. Herewiss made a face, put the mug aside, and lay back against the headboard, crossing his arms and sighing. It was going to be a long wait.
***
At sometime past one in the morning Herewiss was listening wearily to the sound of some patron of the inn wobbling about in the courtyard, singing (if that was the word) the old song about the King of Darthen’s lover. The inn’s good ale seemed to have completely removed any fears the drunk had ever had of high notes, and he was squeaking and warbling through the choruses in a falsetto fit to give any listener a headache. Herewiss certainly had one.
The man had just gotten to the verse about the goats when Herewiss heard the door grunt softly, and saw it scrape inward a bit. He lay back quickly, peeking out from beneath lowered lids. There was another soft scraping sound, and in stepped the innkeeper’s daughter, wrapped in a blanket against the cold. She looked long and hard at him, and it was all Herewiss could do to keep from grinning. After a few moments, satisfied that he was asleep, she smiled and crossed the room quietly to where his bags lay.
The one she peered into first was the one with the surcoat. Slowly and carefully she pulled it out and spread it wide to look at the device. There was no light in the room but the pale moonlight seeping in through one half-open shutter, and the dim glow of the torches down in the courtyard. It took her a while to make out the Phoenix in Flames, but when she did she bit her lip, then smiled again, and folded up the surcoat.
Deeper down in the bag she found the book bound in red leather, the unsealed one, and drew it out carefully. The innkeeper’s daughter sat down on her heels and muttered something under her breath. A weak reddish light grew and glowed about her hands, clinging to the book’s pages as she turned them. For a few minutes she went through the book, turning the leaves over in cautious silence. Then suddenly she stopped, and across the room Herewiss could hear her take in breath sharply. He watched her as she traced down one page with a finger, moving her lips slowly as she read.
That’s a bad habit, Herewiss thought. Let’s see if I can’t break you of it.
The girl was holding the book closer to her eyes, and speaking softly. “Neskháired ól jomëire kal stói, arvéya khad—”
Herewiss breathed out in irritation. I might have known. Doesn’t she know it’s all illusion-spells? She can’t know much about what real sorcery is, or what it does. And Goddess knows she would pick that one. She needs a lot more to be beaut
iful on the inside than she does on the outside. …It’s not going to work, of course. She’s not making the required gestures, and she’s set up no framework inside her head. Dark! I’ll teach her to mess with things she doesn’t understand—
Herewiss cleared his mind and began to think of another incantation, on another page. He had long since ceased to need to draw diagrams or make passes while conjuring. Constant practice had taught him to build viable spell-structures in his head, without external aids. He built one now, a fairly simple one that he’d used many times to entertain Halwerd, an illusion-spell that required minimal energy and provided surprisingly sophisticated results. It went up quickly, in large chunks, taking form and bulking huge and restless—it was one of those sorceries that has to be used quickly before it goes stale. He completed the structure, checking once to make sure that it was complete, and thought the word that set it free to work.
The girl, intent on her reading, did not notice the air behind her thickening and growing dark. Something darker and more tenacious than smoke curled and roiled within a huge man-shaped space in the air, until at last it stood complete behind her—tenuous at the edges, where its stuff wisped and drifted into the still air, but dark as starless midnight at its heart. The innkeeper’s daughter finished reading the spell and raised one hand to feel at her face. In that moment the great dark shape put out a hand and lightly brushed the back of her neck.
She slapped absently at what she thought was an insect, and felt her hand go through something cold and damp. Her eyes went wide with startlement; she turned. She saw, and opened her mouth to scream. But Herewiss was ready. Since freeing the illusion, he had been readying another spell, and as she drew breath he said the word of control and struck her dumb and stiff. There she knelt, her mouth ridiculously open, head turned to look over her shoulder—probably a most uncomfortable position. Herewiss got up out of the bed, praying that the backlash would hold off for a few minutes.
“Do you always go through your guests’ bags at one in the morning?” he said, bending down to take the book away from her and toss it onto the bed. “And do all the rooms come equipped with that charming little addition under the pillow?”
She couldn’t even move her eyes to follow him as he went to open the window wide. “Would you excuse us?” he said to the smoke-creature. There had always been controversy over whether illusion-creatures were alive and thinking in any sense of the words, but Herewiss, being both cautious and courteous by nature, treated his illusions as if they were both. “And while you’re out there, please take that man down there and bed him down in the stable or something. If I hear that part about the goats again, I may turn him into one.”
The dark shape waded slowly through the air, trailing streams of black smoke behind it, and climbed over the windowsill into the night. It drifted down silently into the courtyard.
“Would you like to be a goat?” Herewiss said, going back to look at the girl from behind, so that she could see him. “Or an owl might be better—you seem to like being up in the middle of the night.”
He was bluffing outrageously, for no mere sorcery could do such things. She seemed not to know that, though. She stared at Herewiss wide-eyed, the terror frozen in her face. Outside, a voice broke off its singing. “Boy, izh really dark out here,” it said, woozily surprised.
“Or maybe you’d like to bed down with my friend out there,” Herewiss said, adding another layer of bluff still more outrageous, “since you do seem to be so eager, with that love-charm and all. I should tell you, though, he is a bit cold—and you might have a baby afterwards, and I couldn’t guarantee what it would look like.”
He made a small adjustment in his mind and snapped his fingers, freeing her upper half but keeping her legs bound tight. She sagged and turned her face away from him quickly. “Tell me what you were after,” Herewiss said.
“I—” She shuddered. “I don’t want to share with that—”
“Then be quick and answer me.”
She stared sullenly at the floor. “I smelled the Power,” she said. “You have it. I want to know how. If a man can have it, then there has to be a way for me to bring mine out.” She looked up, glared at him. “How did you do it?” she demanded, bitter. “Who did you pact with?”
“My my,” Herewiss said. “You are a dabbler. Everyone has the Power, dear, didn’t you know that? Men and women both, everyone born has the spark. But all too few have enough to do anything with. And Goddess knows there’s more to it than just having enough Flame. What was the bag for, by the way?”
She scowled at the floor again, and would not answer him.
“A little draining to amuse yourself? The Bride doesn’t look kindly on such things. Draining away your lovers’ potency is likely to make you less of a woman, not more. And anyway, who taught you your Nhàired? Two of the words on the bag were misspelled, and there was too much asafetida. If you’d left that there much longer, it would have recoiled, and half the place would probably have tried to rape you. Try draining that.”
She answered him not a word, and Herewiss sighed. “You’re not being very open with me,” he said. “I’m in a quandary as to what to do with you. Maybe you really do want to be a goat.” He went over to the bag on the floor and took out the other book, the one with the seals on it. Softly he said the word to undo the seals, and the second word that spoke the pages apart, and then went through the book slowly, looking for the right page.
The innkeeper’s daughter was beginning to worry now. “Please,” she said, “please, no—I’ll do anything—”
She squirmed her torso at him, and Herewiss shook his head in mild amazement. “I’m not interested in that kind of anything,” he said. “I might consider information, though. —Tonight at dinner some people were talking, and someone mentioned a place called the ‘hold in the Waste,’ and everyone else hushed them up. What is that? Why won’t they talk about it?”
Fresh fear went across the girl’s face like a shadow. “I don’t know—”
Herewiss’s underhearing jabbed him hard under one rib, like the pain one gets from running too hard, and he knew she was lying. “Then I guess I’ll have to turn you into a goat,” he said, wondering how in the world he was going to make the bluff good, and turned his attention to the page before him. “Faslie anrástüw oi velien—”
“No, no, wait!” She looked around fearfully. “It’s unlucky even to talk about it—”
“Being a goat isn’t unlucky?”
“Uh—well. Out in the Waste Unclaimed, about forty miles or so into the desert, there’s an Old Place—they say it’s the oldest of all the Old Places in the world.” She gulped. “It’s full of the ancient kind of wreaking, and ghosts and monsters walk there. Sometimes the desert around it— changes somehow, and becomes other places. I don’t know how…”
“Go on.”
“They say that the rocks roll uphill, and water flows sideways along the hills there, or up the sides of valleys—and it rains scorpions and stones instead of water. Even the Dragons won’t go near it; they say it’s too dangerous. There are doors into Otherwheres—”
“Doors?” Herewiss echoed.
“That’s all I know,” the girl said. “It’s not lucky to talk about it. It’s a cursed place.”
“No,” Herewiss said, “just Old, I would imagine. We don’t know enough about the Old people’s wreaking to know their curses from their blessings. Forty miles into the desert. Near where?”
“North of the pass above Dra’Mincarrath,” she said, “about sixty miles or so, they say. But it really is cursed—”
Herewiss stood there silently for a long few moments, holding the backlash away while reading the spell in the book, readying it. “That’ll do, I think,” he said. “But one thing only.”
She looked at him in fear. “I don’t trust any promises you might make about your future behavior,” he said. “So I’m going to give you a conscience of sorts.”
He spoke the last word o
f the spell under his breath, and immediately the girl groaned and doubled over, clutching at her stomach. “The next time you sleep with a man or woman for whom you don’t care, that will take you,” Herewiss said. “Don’t bother trying to rid yourself of it; if you meddle, you may find that particular avenue of pleasure permanently closed. And let me give you advice—don’t play around with sorcery. It shortens the life.”
He cut the air with one hand in a short quick motion, and the girl staggered to her feet and lurched without another word out the door.
Herewiss closed and sealed his book, fetched the other one from the bed, and put them back in his bag again. His head was aching violently, and his stomach churned, threatening to reject the steak pie.
Suddenly a dark shape loomed at the window. It was the smoke-creature, peering in curiously.
“Oh Dark, I forgot,” Herewiss said. He gestured at the window, the same quick cutting motion. “Go free! And thank you.”
The creature bent sideways in a passing breeze, and dissipated silently.
“Oh, my head,” Herewiss groaned as he headed back to bed. “Shortens the life indeed. I wish I were dead.”
He pulled the covers up around him again, and laid his throbbing head down on the lumpy pillow as tenderly as he could. The darkness was almost peaceful for a few moments—until the sound of a drunken countertenor began to float up from the stable, half a tone flat, singing of what the King of Darthen did with the shepherdess and her brother.
“Oh Goddess,” Herewiss moaned, and buried his face in the pillow.
THREE
Opening Night is not so much a time of year as it is a state of mind. It can be invited, by no more difficult a measure than keeping one’s eyes and heart open all the time. There are Rodmistresses who could not share in the Opening if they stood at the Heart of the World on Nineteen-Years’ Night; and there are children, and the eager of heart, who can break the walls between the Worlds in broad day, and call the wonders through. Those who do not close their hearts to Possibility soon find their lives full of it.
