by Jude Fisher
With a gasp, she fell backwards, and felt the cold night claim her.
Twenty-three
The Use of Magic
Exhausted after a long day’s work for his new master, his hands stinking of tin and other cheap alloys, Virelai stood at the window of his room in the High Tower and stared out at the city of Cera. No matter how long he spent here, he thought, he would never get used to the idea of there being so many people in the world. It had become his favourite pastime whenever he was able: watching them scurrying to and fro along the narrow streets with their baskets and carts, their pack-animals and their slaves, all so busy, so preoccupied, each with their own lives, anxieties and dramas. Why did the Master never tell me about all this? he wondered, as he had wondered every day since Lord Tycho Issian had brought him here. But he knew the answer; just as he had known it as soon as he had spied the Rosa Eldi in the Master’s chamber: Rahe kept the world secret from him because he knew Virelai would be tempted by it, that he would be unable to withstand the lure of its secrets. And now he had exchanged one master who sought to keep him cloistered for another. For the view from this elevated window – like the view from an eyrie on an inaccessible peak – was the closest that Virelai had come to the world’s temptations: Tycho had seen to that as soon as he had managed to work the shaping spell on the base metals he had been brought, creating for the Lord of Cantara a fortune in what appeared as perfect silver to all eyes except those of a trained mage. And to begin with, Virelai had hardly cared for the world, so thrilled had he been at the success of his magic. Twenty-nine years he had been apprenticed to a mage; yet in all that time Rahe had taught him only the most rudimentary spellcraft, keeping him ever distant from the magic that changed nature or even the appearance of nature. In truth, his apprenticeship had amounted to little more than slave-work: fetching and carrying, cooking and skivvying. He ground the powders for the Master’s alchemical experiments, heated the crucible and polished the retorts; he cut the hearts from the little birds that Rahe conjured for his darker magic, and burned them with blood from his own finger. He had felt nothing for the tiny fluttering things: for they were spellborn and shortlived, given life only at the Master’s whim; but he was beginning to experience odd pangs of remorse, especially now as he watched the small blue-and-black swallows swooping beneath the eaves of the villas on the hill below the castle. Suddenly he found himself wondering if he had been in some way cruel to deny the tiny magic-made birds the same freedom to find mates and make nests and raise young.
‘Every creature has the right to its own life,’ he said now, aloud, ‘no matter how they come into this world.’ Even as he said it, he knew it to be a deep truth. Behind him on the bed, Bëte the cat stirred and yawned and a moment later he felt a voice tickle the inside of his skull.
At last, it said. At last he wakes.
Two days later, Rui Finco strode down the Amber Parade in Istria’s capital city, hardly noticing how elegant the avenue of poplars looked this year, nor how the fountains played at the intersection with the Great West Road; nor even how the sunlight made a golden curtain of the wall of the Duke’s palace at the top of the hill. A trader carrying a pitcher of wine on his shoulder jostled him as he entered Market Way, but rather than roundly chastise the man as he would usually do, the Lord of Forent hurried on grimly, his handsome face set in a scowl. Ever since the fiasco at the Allfair – when he had lost the northern king, his most useful piece of blackmail evidence, the services of the best shipmaker in the known world (let alone all the funds tied up in their many and various projects) and the trust of the other lords in his cabal, all in the space of a single evening – Rui’s plans had been going further and further awry. He owed money to Lords Prionan and Varyx, and Prionan had been less than understanding about the loss of his investment. Varyx, of course, had been witness to the proceedings; more, it had been through his stupidity that Ravn Asharson had armed himself and escaped; even so, that did not seem to have prevented him treating Rui with unwonted familiarity, where before he had been all suitable deference and submission. Losing face amongst his peers had been the worst of it, he admitted to himself. It would require a bold move to win them back to him; and win them back he must, if he were ever to proceed with his overarching strategy. And so he walked the capital, desperate to escape the stifling confinement of the palace, with its whisperings and snide laughter, the little knots of men who fell silent or broke apart as he entered a room; the sense that he had fallen irrevocably into that social quagmire from which it was impossible to crawl alive.
Forcing his busy mind to quietude, he made his way through the early afternoon traders and customers, stooping beneath awnings and stepping around crates of oranges and limes, in and out of great skeins of herbs, ropes of garlic and hot peppers, bundles of wind-dried chickens and Jetra ducks, between stalls selling confectionery in the most lurid hues, jars of spice, silver jewellery, gemstones and tapestries; rolls of silk and lace from Galia; rugs and carpets and huge bronze vases; ornamental braziers, censers and garlands of safflower; flasks of wine and araque and the bitter, resinous spirits of the deep south; he passed them all with barely a look, beyond registering a slight surprise that it seemed easier to make his way through the market than it usually did at this hour of Fifthday.
Emerging from the agora into the backstreets beyond, he found the city even more deserted. Two bony, striped cats lying in a pool of sunlight between the fish shop and the grain store darted away so swiftly at his approach that all he saw was a movement in his peripheral vision; and a moment later he was out into the wide avenue bordering the gardens below Speaker’s Mount.
Here – where there was usually only sporadic traffic and the occasional recitation of self-penned verses – the place was heaving with humanity and a great hubbub of noise. Hundreds upon hundreds of folk seemed to have gravitated towards the Mount and were surrounding it for fifty yards in all directions. Rui Finco stopped still on the outside of the crowd in amazement. It was not like the citizens of Cera to gather for any reason other than to celebrate feast-times and fire festivals; but this, this sounded like some religious ranter holding forth at the top of his voice, and religious fervour was a rare thing indeed in the decadent Istrian capital, where everyone made dutiful but unen-thusiastic obeisance to the Goddess and went on with their usual business of fleecing their neighbours and visiting the bordellos without a qualm; or turned the very worship into a public ostentation, to score social points and win political favour.
He craned his neck to view the man who had generated such interest, and was horrified to find that he knew the speaker.
It was Tycho Issian, the Lord of Cantara.
Behind him, standing slightly to one side, and taller by a head, stood the pale man Rui had seen accompanying the Lord of Cantara to the Gathering; and curled in his arms there appeared to be a small black cat all tricked out in a fancy red harness and muzzle. Rui frowned. What bizarre entertainment was this? He pushed his way into the crowd until he could better hear the proceedings; which proved easier than he had expected, for the assembled crowd was as rapt and silent as if held under a powerful spell, hanging – against all likelihood, for, even if he had suddenly come into some huge and extravagant fortune which he was spending left, right and centre, was the man not a low-born upstart? – on every word that Tycho Issian uttered.
‘They are not like us!’ he was crying now, his hands striking the air as if it were a solid mass. ‘They are an abomination! They treat their women like the cheapest Footloose whores, exposing their most intimate features to the lascivious gaze of every man who has the shame to look upon them, unveiled as they are. Any man who has visited the Allfair can vouch for the truth of this – you can see every detail of their faces, and sometimes their bare arms and breasts—’
The crowd sighed as one.
‘You could brush a woman’s cheek or touch her hair; you could even stare into the very pupils of their eyes, these women have been raised to be so braze
n, and to have so little knowledge of the true way of the Goddess.’
‘Shame!’ someone cried, and others echoed the sentiment.
‘And rather than cherish them in the safety of fine houses, keeping them away from temptation and trouble as we do with Falla’s own, they have no care for their charges at all – they let them walk where they will; they allow them to work in the fields, on ships or even – and I find this the most shocking evidence of their barbarism of all – to go as warriors and fight alongside men in conflicts all over the world.’
Rui was granted a sudden vision of Mam – that most delicate of Eyran ladies – in her boiled leather and scars, spitting into her fist and grabbing his hand, and missed the next pronouncement; which was unfortunate, since it had raised a great cry of outrage.
‘Yes, the Swan of Jetra!’ Tycho roared, leaving the Lord of Forent in no doubt as to the current subject of discussion. ‘When she had offered herself as the ultimate sacrifice of our people, the very symbol of the hand of friendship we had extended across the Northern Ocean; the Swan of Jetra was left weeping in the care of her family, while the filthy barbarian king chose himself a Footloose woman as his bride!
‘Shall we stand idle and watch heresy and sacrilege committed before our eyes? Shall we shrug and walk away as the flower of Istrian womanhood is spurned in favour of a foreign whore? Shall we merely pray that Falla will bring them gently to their senses in time? Rather I say we should offer ourselves as her messengers, the bearers of her fire! I say that we should carry a holy war against these worshippers of false gods – these monsters who treat civilised peoples with such contempt that they will even abduct noble women at a peaceful assembly and carry them away for their vile pleasure—’
A murmur of consternation rose in the gathered men.
‘My daughter!’ Tycho shrieked. ‘My beautiful, devout daughter Selen, stolen by northern brigands and rapists from my own tent at the Allfair, and never seen again. She may even now be stripped naked amid a baying pack of northern wolves, her face and body bared to their greedy eyes, her tongue ripped away so she may not even speak Falla’s name, her back bloody with welts—’
Rui felt himself swaying like one intoxicated, felt his mouth open to echo the horrified shout of the crowd, and wondered, with the small piece of his mind that remained unaffected by the man’s strange tirade, what on Elda was happening here.
‘She may be thrown to the ground and pawed over by these beasts, with their feathers and shells and their braided beards. She may be set upon by a dozen of them at once; she may be impregnated! Forced to bear the child of monsters! Imagine: a noble Istrian woman treated so; as they treat all their women; as they would have treated the Swan!
‘Shall we allow this foul behaviour to go unpunished? Shall we not rather take Falla’s fire to them, and cleanse them of their sins? Shall we not rescue their women and put their men to the sword? Shall we not expunge their kind from Elda?’
‘We shall!’ shrieked the crowd.
‘Falla’s fire!’
‘Put them to the sword!’
‘Save the women!’
‘Cleanse the world!’
Rui felt the words buzz in his head and began to shake it rapidly from side to side as if to dislodge a wasp that had become trapped there. He took a step backwards, then another and another, and with each step the buzzing receded, until he found himself once more beyond the crowd, in the cool eaves of the chestnut trees, an area that seemed to be untouched by whatever spell the man’s words had cast. From the safety of the shadows there he watched for another ten minutes with interest as Tycho Issian whipped a crowd of upstanding Istrian citizens into a crazed rabble, baying for the blood of the old enemy. He listened carefully, and as he did so the suspicion that had first come to him at the Gathering hardened into a belief, and he felt a plan of his own beginning to form.
‘My Lord of Forent.’
‘Lord Issian, a pleasure,’ Rui Finco returned, lying through his grin-bared teeth. ‘I am delighted that you acceded to my invitation.’
The southern lord entered the Lord of Forent’s luxurious chambers (Rui liked to live well whenever he was in the capital, and although he did not much himself care for ostentation, it impressed others no end) as wary as a cat entering another’s territory. Rui watched with satisfaction as Tycho took in the carved and gem-encrusted settles; the silver-framed mirrors and lush Circesian carpets, the expensive Santorinvan candles, the beautifully decorated shrine to the Goddess, all wound around with gold-and-red silk to look like sacred flames; and the priceless wall-hanging depicting the Battle of Sestria Bay (chosen most carefully from his small private collection this very afternoon for a most specific purpose). At least, Rui found himself thinking, he has not brought the pale servant with him, and felt a considerable relief.
Tycho crossed the room and arranged himself with fastidious care on the finest settle beneath the ornate candelabrum, spreading his robe around him to show it in its best light and to ensure that the Lord of Forent was made well aware of its fantastic cost. That it was a most expensive garment was in truth hard to ignore, for despite the conservative cut and sober midnight blue of the cloth, the candlelight picked out every silver thread in its facing, every bit of hem and cuff and collar, and played off the tiny, intricately-worked silver buttons adorning the breast of the tunic in numbers too great for pure functionality. It was a robe that had surely set the southern lord back by several hundred cantari, Rui thought, and it was designed to speak its message: the Lord of Cantara is a man of both excessive wealth and fine taste; in the right cause, he will spend his money generously, and be trusted to keep a secret close. It did not encourage the Lord of Forent to trust him any the more; but trust was hardly the issue here.
‘In Falla’s faith I serve your lordship,’ he now said: the traditional greeting between peers of similar rank, and thus a blatant flattery, since little was known of the southern lord’s heritage, where Rui’s noble lineage was impeccable.
Tycho smiled, a small, tight smile that barely twitched the polished muscles of his face and made no attempt to reach his eyes. ‘You should ask rather how I may serve you, my lord.’
This was neither a traditional nor a polite response. Rui bit back the retort that sprang too easily to his tongue, and returned the cold smile. ‘You must think me remarkably inhospitable,’ he said with chilly grace, and clapped his hands.
An instant later a pair of willowy serving girls in identical sabatkas of such a sheer, pale pink gauze that it made a mockery of the very concept of the veiling nature of such garments, wafted into the chamber bearing a flask of araque spiced with attar and ginger, another of springwater, beakers of expensive frosted glass and a dish of sweetsmoke. With some satisfaction, Rui watched his guest’s avid eyes scour the women as they set each item down on the low table, bending almost double before the Lord of Cantara’s face. He could smell the rosewater and musk they had bathed in from nigh on twenty paces away. It was the closest concoction he had been able find to the perfume with which the Rosa Eldi had filled his pavilion at the Allfair on that fateful night before he had – by immense effort of will – sent her away with the mercenary, and it was clearly having the desired effect on the southern lord, for Tycho’s eyes – usually so black and fierce – had gone wide and dreamy, and his mouth had fallen open like a tomcat’s tasting a scent. It was all the Lord of Forent needed to prove his theory.
The women bowed low, white hands fluttering in gestures of extreme politesse, and made their exit. The second girl, unseen by the visitor, made a pout of her mouth as she passed her lord, the very tip of her tongue protruding for an instant to leave a small bubble of saliva on her full lower lip; then she too was gone. With effort, Rui kept the smile he felt from his face. Maria: she was a provocative imp. He would look forward to enjoying that mouth later.
While the Lord of Cantara was still flustered, Rui poured out a tall beaker of araque, barely drizzled a few drops of diluting water into i
t and handed the beaker to him. Tycho took it from him mutely and drained off a good half of the pure spirit before coming fully to his senses. With a start he stared at the glass in his hand and in that second Rui knew his thoughts.
‘I would never stoop to poison, my Lord Tycho; besides, as you say, we may be of assistance to one another. And what man does not need an ally in these turbulent times?’
Tycho replaced the glass carefully on the table and wiped his mouth. He was not used to araque; he could already feel it going to his head. Taking up another of the beakers, he poured a long measure of water into it and drank it down quickly.
‘Allies, yes.’ He glanced quickly at the door, which was closed; and then back at the Lord of Forent where he had sat down opposite him, thinking even as he did so in this strangely heightened state how very like the northern king this smoothfaced eastern lord suddenly appeared, despite the discrepancy in their ages and races. He found himself staring for a moment, taking in the high planes of the cheeks, the bone that shelved so close to the eye and hollowed itself out so elegantly beneath, the long, straight nose and powerful, dented chin, which in the northerner was obscured by the close dark beard; the lupine jaw and sharp teeth . . . It was a disconcerting comparison, since whenever he thought of the barbarian who had carried off his love a red tide of hatred swept through his heart. ‘You would welcome war in the north, then, my lord?’
Rui raised an eyebrow. He did not usually encourage such a direct approach. However, the man was from the deep south of the continent and little was known of his heritage; he had much to learn of the ways of court intrigue. ‘There are . . . certain advantages to be gained,’ he said carefully. ‘But of course to wage such a war is an expensive affair, what with ships to be built and mercenaries to be paid, let alone the cost of arming ourselves against our enemy, and the disruption to trade . . .’