The Bard of Sorcery

by Gerard Houarner

  Tralane continued his climb to the top of the tower, pursued by guilt. His examination of Mathi's belongings in the present harkened to childhood pryings among these same possessions. Now, as then, Tralane could not find any evidence revealing a profound understanding of the forces of magic on Mathi's part. All the mechanics of the art were available: spell books, filled with collections of words in known and barely known tongues, which could only harness the power of sorcery through the proper spoken sequence, rhythm and intonation; containers of powders and liquids, easily obtainable if one knew the secrets of picking roots and herbs, grinding them, and giving them the substance or phrase activating their power; and tapestries, statuettes, and seemingly haphazardly put together forms constructed of sticks, whose mazes of lines led to hidden energies. Yet in none of them was there even a hint that Mathi had unveiled a mystery or probed a previously secure meaning to reveal a new and subtler mystery in an effort to penetrate the core of some aspect of existence. And now, with Mathi's sparse words silenced forever, the disillusionment with Mathi's wisdom and abilities, as well as with Tralane's own failures in the art, would never be relieved by the solace of understanding. For a moment, Tralane stopped his advance and considered withdrawing from the tower. To see Mathi dead would be to lock Tralane's emerging self within the walls of his childhood. But he had to see and make certain of Mathi's demise, for only then could he consider that path closed and begin to search for a new direction.

  At last, Tralane stood before the door to the tower's uppermost chamber. He drew a long breath, setting aside his suppositions and preparing to receive reality. When he opened the door, he let the breath go in a long sigh.

  Mathi was laid out on an elevated bed, his eyes and mouth closed, his ears and nostrils sealed with wax. His right hand had not had time to cross his chest after he had sealed shut the last orifice, and the limb rested on his side. The body and the room's contents were in order.

  Tralane walked to the body and crossed the right arm over the left, shaking his head over the fact that his tutor had overlooked the proper placement of his arms in weaving the spell that had closed his eyes and mouth after his death. Perhaps his soul had flown off an instant sooner than expected.

  Mathi was the same as the day Tralane had left him—thick brows, wide nose, thin white hairs falling over his ears and from his chin. The face was slightly emaciated, but not overly angular from the emergence of the bone structure. There was even color in the wizard's cheeks and hands, though the flesh was cold to the touch. The spells of preservation were, in Tralane's uneasy mood, far too efficiently woven. Even the dust had failed to settle on Mathi's white funeral robe.

  With the physical certainty of Mathi's death before him, Tralane was at a loss over what to do next. The emotions he should have felt were still locked away, tangible in his heart and stomach as well as in his trembling hands, but otherwise inexpressible. The things he had wanted to say, explain, and ask were caged within him. It was not so easy to choose another road, when all his energies and hopes had been committed to a final confrontation with Mathi.

  Tralane left the chamber suddenly and descended into the lower rooms. He rummaged among their contents, looking through the volumes on the shelves and strewn over the floors for a particular manual, used by him only once. He searched methodically and energetically, quelling the occasional surge of hysterical terror that threatened to send him fleeing from the tower with cold, savage denials. His shoulder burned with the urgency of his task.

  The manual, a small, black leather volume with pages made from thin foils of metal, was in his hand before he recognized it. He smiled humorlessly, recalling the panic accompanying the theft of Wyden's Eye. He clutched the book in both hands and returned to Mathi's chamber, where he opened the volume and turned the pages until he found the passage he had uttered once before, long ago. The words came to him easily, though his throat was dry and the book shook in his hands. The knowledge of the language in which the passage was written was a product of tedious study, but the manner in which the spell had to be recited was garnered from surreptitious listening through the cracks in locked doors. He repeated his lessons without error, and not even the cold, sharp pain that raked his skin along the length of the throbbing shoulder wound distracted him from the completion of the summoning. And when he was finished, he was not surprised to find Mathi's eyes open and resting on him.

  "My son," the dead man whispered. The familiar, if inappropriate, greeting was barely recognizable in the harsh crackling of a long unused voice.

  "Mathi," Tralane replied simply, not believing what he had done. The manual fell from his hands.

  "Why …" The question remained unfinished as Mathi struggled to become familiar once again with a carcass he had long abandoned.

  Tralane assumed that his tutor wanted a justification for disturbing him from the process of transforming his soul into another form.

  "I have been away, Mathi," Tralane began, repeating a speech formulated since his return to his home world. "I have traveled to the ends of this world's probable existences. I've met myself, as I could have been. I will be remembered where I have passed, for my deeds have been worthy of tale-telling. Yet I have been groping, Mathi. I searched without knowing the object of my quest, and only by surviving my trials did I become aware of things I needed. I've killed with a sword, slain my own flesh, and seen death's shadow cross my journey's road more than once. And all for the question you never answered. Mathi, who bore me? Whose seed am I?"

  Mathi's eyes locked with Tralane's. The life flickering in them was weak, a sign that much of what the wizard had once been was committed to another form. Tralane hoped there was enough left of Mathi's personality, enough of his memory, to recall what he wanted to know.

  "Please give me an answer, Mathi. I'm sorry I left you, but I could not stay with someone who was not of my blood and who hid the nature of my birth from me. I would not be the son you never had, Mathi. You must understand and forgive me, if you can. But most of all, you must tell me who were my parents."

  At first, only the wind, carrying the scent of the ever-blooming flowers and dew-speckled leaves preserved by spells, answered Tralane. Then the wind changed, and stale, cold air from some cul-de-sac was carried out by the new current. The chamber was suddenly transformed into the tomb it had served as, draped in clouds rather than buried in the soil. But the sense of closed portals, of sealed exits, and eternal silence, was the same.

  Mathi answered at last.

  "I waited … for you, Tralane …"

  The bard nodded, prepared to receive condemnation. The possibility of Mathi's anger having fired itself into revenge occurred to him at that moment, though he had never seen his tutor lash out against a living being. Tralane had become accustomed to a harsh, authoritarian hand in his travels, and it was only with great difficulty that he separated the memory of the sometimes brutal and ever-guarded rulers and courtiers in his experience from the gentler, if stoic, image of his guardian. Tralane relaxed, trusting Mathi to be fair.

  "I waited, beyond my death, Tralane. I knew some day you would return. If you lived, if you followed the course you embarked on and survived, there was little else for you to do. You touched my misplaced hand, waking me from my last work in the deepest parts of dreams. I waited for you to summon the courage to call me, and you did. I am here… now…"

  There was laughter from a distant place which chilled Tralane. He had never heard Mathi laugh before.

  "I chased them away. People came and tried to settle. Wizards pried at my spells, seeking to master them and take this place away from me. They came for the peace and stillness of my tower, which belongs only to my child."

  Tralane, startled, asked in a broken voice, "Who is your child? You never told me. Does this child still live?" Unreasonably, he was jealous of this unknown other person in Mathi's life, who perhaps had taken so much from their common guardian that there had been little left for Tralane.

  "Yes," Math
i continued, unperturbed, "I have a son, and he still lives. A goddess bore him and was slain by her father. The gods are vengeful when mortals interfere with their destinies. There are so few gods now. They keep away from the paths of men and from each other. They prefer the quiet contemplation of mysteries to the turmoils of unbound souls, mortal or immortal. But I won a goddess. I sensed her presence when I was a youth. She was warm, and innocent. A young goddess, protected behind impenetrable walls of magic by her elders. She was to be the bearer of a new generation of immortals. She was one of the last they had conceived, and they were careful to shield her from curious sorcerers and godlings for fear she would be led away from the mission they wished to impose on her."

  "The tale of Genjima," Tralane offered.

  "Yes."

  "But the sorcerer's name was not Mathi, nor was he described to be like you."

  "Do you think a sorcerer hated by the gods would keep his true name and form?"

  "No," Tralane replied sheepishly. He was curious to hear what Mathi's unaccustomed frankness would reveal, but impatient that he had allowed himself to be led away from the answer to his question.

  "I won the goddess Genjima," Mathi began again. "I was called Suthra then. I was the outcast son of a Wizard King, hiding in the caves below the ice palaces, studying the art by stealing into my father's fortress and taking what I could from their library. When I finished with the books, I would return them and borrow others. With so many novices and apprentices studying the art under court tutelage, my thefts were assumed to be caused by a student's diligence in study and were quietly ignored."

  "Why were you banished?" Tralane's version of the story did not give Suthra's background, other than that he was a wizard.

  "For not paying proper homage to the gods. The Wizard Kings owed their ascendance to the gods. At one time they were a poor people, small in number and power, until the gods, also dwindling as the aeons passed and the carnage wreaked by CuChani's theft went without healing, broke from their uneasy withdrawal and struck a pact with the north people. In return for power, the Wizard Kings would subjugate the world and bring it once more under the sway of sorcery. The stronger flow of magic was to feed the gods and make the human feats of strength and logic pointless. With the Wizard Kings as their instruments, the gods could rule unchallenged over the destiny of mankind.

  "I was not so eager to sell myself into bondage. The cold wastes seemed a more comfortable haven for my spirit than the stifling ceremonies of obeisance that were performed at my father's court. I should have been killed for blasphemy, but, to save my life, my father gave me the choice of banishment. Yet he feared I would return to cause his downfall by disrupting his court and angering the gods. So he gave me no food or clothing, and threw me naked into the snow. I had seen only seven summers.

  "It was then I discovered Gen-jima. My hands were frozen, yet I dug into the snow, seeking the rocky ground so I could touch it and work a simple warming spell I had by then learned. In my fear, my mind reached farther than it had ever done before and brushed against a wall. Something moved behind the wall, felt my coldness, my pain, and my fear, and answered my call. I was enveloped in heat. My feet melted the snow. I ran from my family's ice palace, knowing I could expect a spear through the heart in place of their mercy. My aunts and uncles, along with my mother, I recall, had petitioned for my death.

  "I wandered for days, going down the mountainside, avoiding the roads, the outposts, and the patrols. I found a cave used by a pair of maullcens as their lair. I killed them, blinding them first with a flare spell, then crashing a rock onto their heads. Their fur hides warmed me as the heat surrounding my body faded. I fed on their meat and slept in the cave.

  "Then I searched for my benefactor, but my mind was not strong nor disciplined enough to retrace the route it had taken. So I returned secretly to my father's palace and learned what would have been my birthright. I watched the court sorcerers perform secret rites, listened as the gods spoke through a seer and instructed the wizards on new avenues to the tapping of elemental power. I read and followed behind the minds of the sorcerers as they journeyed into dimensions only the spirit could enter. I saw where the gods allowed them to go and where they were forbidden to wander. I was crafty and I was small. I hid myself in my smallness. When the gods and wizards looked behind them, they saw only the fluttering of a bird-soul or the dim sparkle of a tree-spirit. Thus I escaped notice and learned. I knew the path I had taken as a child was a forbidden one, so I could only find my benefactor by exploring what the gods feared to be known. This was to take time and power.

  "Hidden in my cave, fed by kitchen-looted delicacies and the yield of my hunts, I practiced my art. I was not encumbered by the restraints and supervision of my elders, nor was I limited in the paths I could explore, as were the southern sorcerer-rivals of the Wizard Kings, who lacked immortal guidance. For ten years I labored. As my body grew, my spirit strengthened and expanded to powerful proportions. At last, I found what I had been seeking. The wall, a resilient blankness immune to probing, brushed against me one night. A voice whispered, and heat embraced me. I whispered my gratitude in return, and promised the gift of freedom. Then I waited and thought, but I did not have too long to wait.

  "The fires of battle came. The Karthasian Empire turned to the north, to strike at the corrupting machinations of the Wizard Kings. The armies of the warm countries, backed by sorcerers wielding the primitive energies of the earth, faced the encroaching coldness of the north and the distant, frigid powers of the sky and stars. The war shook loose the stones buried beneath the ice, and warm blood dissipated the snow into a perpetual crimson fog. I was for neither side; their conceits did not concern me. I watched, biding my time until the gods were too distracted to guard the realms of sorcery. When I sensed the moment had come, I hurled myself against the wall, calling for the creature on the other side to join me.

  "Even the gods cannot fight two death struggles at the same time, and I had chosen my time well. Fearing they would lose all on earth, they had weakened their defenses around the prisoner. I attacked again and again, raking and clawing, setting a fire behind the gods as they tried to hold back the Karthasian sorcerers. At last the wall fell, and I found before me a goddess. She gave me her name —Gen-jima—and I gave her mine, and then I led her away from the dimension of the spirit and abstraction and into the world of the physical. She took on a form that made my heart beat wildly, and I too seemed to please her. While mortals slew each other and immortal powers vied for supremacy, we held each other in a lover's embrace and let our races follow their desires, as we followed ours.

  "We taught each other many things, in both the realms of feeling and of the mind. We were slow and languorous at first, but our fear grew as the war reached a climax. Whoever won would not let a goddess and a mortal stay together in peace. So we planned an escape together. We were to slay our mortal bodies and release our spirits. The ties to corporeal life would not bind me to the limits of time, and without the captivity of immortality, Gen-jima would be similarly free. The strength of our beings, our essences, would transform us into entities beyond the reach of time and space. We were to merge with the fabric of existence, retaining our individuality, yet surrendering our capacity to act for the opportunity of becoming a part of the whole. This was to be no mere transformation into spirit, or into another mortal form. We were to escape completely the barriers to our love. We would join, mingle, serve, and be served by being.

  "Such was our plan, but it was not allowed to pass. Pichen-ma-thele, lord of all gods and father to this goddess, found her on the eve of the last battle in the north. He must have known what was to come, for he did not even allow his daughter to plead her case. Rather than leave behind one of his kind, Pichen-ma-thele slew his daughter before she could even speak. I saw. I became small. I wept. I was helpless.

  "The god did not see me, nor did he have time to search. The call to battle drew him away, since he was bound to support my family
and the other Wizard Kings against the Karthasian Empire. But I heard his pledge to destroy the mortal who had won from him the hope of the gods, Gen-jima, before he sealed the cave to make it his daughter's tomb. The ice and rock fell, but I did not grow large again. I wanted to remain small, forever, in the airless darkness, in the silence, in the netherworld of unfeelingness.

  "But my senses would not be denied. I could hear the battle rage above, and when the din subsided, there was nothing left but the frail cry of a child. I made light shine from my hand and saw the unblemished body of Gen-jima give birth to an infant. I drew the child out from the corpse. I grew, filling myself with some spark of power, and nurtured the young one as best I could. The luxury of death had been taken away from me. The responsibility of life, the child's and my own, was forced upon me.

  "I kissed Gen-jima one last time and stroked the hand that had given me comfort and wisdom. I did not weep, for I knew the mere taking of her life was not the signal for the end of our happiness. I had risen from the ashes of my sorrow. Gen-jima had merely taken a path we were to have taken together. I had found her before, I would find her again.