by Tanith Lee
Besotted fool, he thought, amused. Let him be one, then. He must learn these human ways.
They ate and drank and devoured half the apple each. Back under the bowl went the core.
‘What a canny village wife you are.’
‘And you a bad, lazy husband. Get up, Lord Thryfe, or shall I come and bite you?’
‘Bite me.’ Is this myself saying that?
‘No. I will bite you only if you leave the bed.’
‘Here I am.’
‘Perhaps not a bite. Will this do …’
‘You called on God,’ she said afterwards. ‘Which?’
‘There are none. No, not even that live twig over there. I called on something as men always have in joy or anguish. We’re taught these things. They live in us like mice in walls, and mean nothing.’
Soon they would go out and walk through the zone named Paradise. There would be persons to see to, and tasks to accomplish. Paradise was bursting with mad hubris that now it had two Magikoy, and one of them, as most suspected, the famous magus Thryfe. Who always denied he was, as Jemhara always denied herself too. Other sections of Kandexa had grasped the idea jealously. But then they skulked to the gate begging for this or that assistance, and willing to trade sheep, cattle, wine and treasures looted from under the city’s hearthstones. Mage help was never refused but tricks – there had been one or two – were crushed, their authors chastened.
The sky from the attic window looked odd to him. Ribbons of shadow streamed from a dot of glassy emptiness itself like a window of grey sugar. Thryfe stared at it, and for a moment was on the verge of divining something vile.
A faint low cry distracted him.
He sprang back to her across the room. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing at all. I was dizzy.’
‘Sit. Now, look up at me. Yes.’ He gauged her acutely, for a second merciless in his scrutiny. She had gone very pale but her natural colour was returning and she smiled, still fearless before his stern mask, that of a Magikoy healer in mid-diagnosis.
‘You see. It wasn’t anything.’ The eyes of the eagle clouded. Jemhara stiffened. ‘What have you seen?’
‘You,’ he said quietly. ‘And one other.’
‘Which other?’
Thryfe felt a pang, a sort of horror, unjustified maybe, or not. For certainly neither of them had inclined to predict let alone want this. Though it was the one thing any other man or woman might have wanted or predicted.
‘You’re carrying. And by me.’ Her mouth dropped open. He wanted to kiss it and held back. ‘Have I wronged you, doing that to you?’
‘You speak – as if you’d harmed me … a child?’
‘Yes, a child. It’s firmly lodged and has the aura of a male. Do you want this, Jema?’
‘Do I want—’
‘Don’t fog your thoughts with village superstition. There’s no life-force there as yet. That will come later. It’s a seed smaller than a pin’s tip. If you truly desire to bear this thing, we can secure it. But if not—’
‘Wait,’ she said in a very little voice. Suddenly she dipped her face into her hands.
Instantly he knelt beside her. ‘My fault,’ he said. ‘Whatever you decide, blame me for it.’
‘Your fault? Do you think I can’t protect myself in that way?’
‘Yes, yes. But neither you nor I – we took no precaution.’
‘It’s never that, my love. Oh,’ she said, ‘oh, what’s been done?’
He held her, waiting. He felt a huge current like a turning tide far out beyond the ice-locked shore, which shouldered roughly through the room. Dread after all sank its claws in him. Must everything of his be spoiled or spoil? Coldly he thrust off the thought. Here was one lesson he must not relearn, the petty recrimination at an act of mindless fate.
Jemhara sat lost in memory. She saw a treacherous red-haired god who came to her and told her, even if she had denied it to herself, that Thryfe would find her. And Thryfe and she between them would create—
She said, ‘What do you hate most in the world?’
‘Hate?’
‘Say without thinking.’
‘Useless cruelty – wolves—’ Checked, he glanced back at his own words.
She said, ‘I am to bear the reborn Vashdran. Lionwolf. Look into me again and see.’
‘No, Jema. He’s gone, burned away for ever by the White Death. This is some fancy—’
‘Some fancy I was given and made to memorize. I foresaw. He told me you’d come to me. He told me, in obscure ways now made clear, he would be the result. A god, a demon god. Inside me.’
‘Never. This isn’t—’
‘Look into me again.’
‘Jema—’
‘I will look too.’
They looked.
Each saw something other, and the same.
To Jemhara it was a citadel, rose-red, holding in it a sapphire that was an embryo. She felt nothing she could analyse let alone comprehend.
To Thryfe came the image of a fiery crimson heart. And inside that a tiny second heart, flaming.
A womb of fire that held – a son. A sun.
When he blinked he saw her eyes were cold with tears and he caught her hands.
‘This means nothing to us. You, or I, can rid you of it.’
She said simply, ‘My love, I doubt even the god you called to can rid me of this.’
Outside snow blurred across the window. But the man and the woman did not see.
‘It’s snowing,’ said Beebit. ‘What a filthy sky. Are you off to Aglin today?’
‘Yes. She said to go back this morning.’
‘Azula,’ said Beebit, ‘it doesn’t matter any if you can’t learn. Aglin’s a fine mageia, but perhaps not so clever a teacher. Now if Lady Jemhara had taken you on—’
The daughter of Beebit and the goddess Chillel continued calmly tying indigo beads into the dark right side of her hair and pale ones into the brown side.
‘I don’t mind, Ma. It’ll come right.’
Beebit sighed. She had had high hopes of her daughter’s latent sorcery. But really it was extremely latent, was it not? Though grown to full womanhood in so short a time, bright, intelligent, lovely, and fast to master the contortionist’s art, Azulamni had never manifested any other magical flair.
And though Aglin was trying every handful of days, as her own duties in Paradise allowed, to teach Azula the basics of witchcraft, it seemed this novice had no talent. The fire, called to light, stayed unlit; the water told to thaw stayed adamant. The small stone that should have scuttled along the ground sat as if glued in place.
Yet how could that be? Azula was herself a wonder. Some great power must be there in her.
While Beebit fretted, and revealed as much by telling Azula not to fret, the girl herself seemed merely vaguely sorry to disappoint.
Her hairdressing complete Azula got up. ‘Where will you go, Ma?’
‘As mostly,’ said Beebit grimly, ‘back into the western ruins. The old house is down, as you’ve seen for yourself, like everything else for a mile around. But people still dig. So do I. My daddy your granda’s there, under the bricks and snow.’
Perhaps with unconscious unkindness Azula said, ‘But will you know him, Mother? Won’t he be a skeleton?’
‘I shall know him. I must know my own.’
‘Shall I come too?’
‘Not today, Azulamni. Off you go to Aglin and have your lesson.’ They had had this conversation many times. The phrases were almost ritual now. ‘After all, when your magic breaks out of you, you’ll be able to help me with more than physical strength.’
‘Wouldn’t Aglin help you?’
‘Shift bricks? Don’t you think she’s got enough to do already? Off now, girlie. Off to school.’
They embraced at the doorway of the hovel, under the roof hole pegged over with an ancient sealskin, mother and daughter who appeared to be sisters, not an inch or an ounce or a year between them.
No
sooner was Azula out on the street, however, than she began to pick up on some other element. This was most like dully hearing something, or mistily seeing it at the back of her brain. Now and then the effect had occurred before. Azula never referred to it, or took much notice. Perhaps she had assumed others experienced similar moments. And perhaps they did, some of them.
Skimming along the alleys, Azula hurried to Aglin’s room. The snowfall grew thicker as she went. It turned both colours of her hair to white. In the background, hundreds of miles away, something jangled dimly above in the sky, and Azula, who had no magic, listened with half her inner ear. Generally she did not think a vast amount. She acted as events happened. When they were over she filed them tidily behind some mental cupboard door.
Running along the passage to Aglin’s apartment, Azula found the mageia awaiting her with a suppressed look of impatience. What could be worse, said the suppressed look, than trying to get blood out of a snowball? Fond mothers, said the look, always reckoned their kidlet was a genius. And if the other parent was a god – well.
This did not distress Azula. She bowed to the mageia and closed the door. Turning, she listened with her own patience for the umpteenth time to the proper rules and chants, and watched Aglin bring fire from the air. ‘Now you try, Azula.’ And hey presto! Nothing.
Dressed for the outdoors, Thryfe and Jemhara had remained in the attic. She had put on more beer to heat, and poured it for them, but the two cups stood untasted.
Peculiarly, and both noted and thought this, they had begun to reminisce aloud over their pasts, as if they had grown very elderly and had nowhere now to go save backward. She had confessed to him her sins, which he knew of and had already witnessed replayed in the oculum at Stones, when he began to search for her. He talked of his training, of his journey to the Insularia at Ru Karismi, of the eagle familiars of his boyhood – stories already told to her.
Then, step by step, they brought their two histories together. To the capital, to the death of the king Jemhara had murdered at the will of the king’s brother Vuldir, to Thryfe’s tenure of office and his riding away, and the last mission imposed on Jemhara by Vuldir, which had been to pursue Thryfe and somehow ensnare and destroy him.
She had done it too, although she had not meant to. She had never suspected she could.
It was their love they would have spoken of next, and sex and possession, and how time or their grasp of it had frozen the mansion over and caged them, willing and unknowing prisoners, inside an endless night of concupiscence.
Something then suddenly interrupted the mutual narrative. Before they could reach the nostalgic peak of their idyll, a fearful revelation interfered.
Speaking of his sleekar ride from the city to his house, and how the windows had been white with warning, and his gargolem servants out on the snow standing guard against some sorcerous invasion, and how the invasion had been Jemhara’s shape-shift to a hare, Thryfe abruptly grew silent. He was staring at an anomaly never before seen.
Recalling how Vuldir had sent her to Stones and her own comfortless ride to the village, an hour’s journey at least from Thryfe’s mansion; her sulky sojourn there – she too beheld abruptly the same anomaly. It lay like a boulder on their path to meeting.
They sat in the attic, halted by discrepancy.
After some minutes he said to her, ‘You see it too.’
‘I see it. How can it be?’
‘I had left the capital some days before you.’
‘It was because you had gone that Vuldir read such danger in your attitude and forced me to follow.’
‘But that very night I reached the house the windows shone to warn me – and that night too I went out across the snow and found you at the Stones, in your shape of the little hare.’
‘And I had been already at Stones two days and a night. How can I have arrived there days after you yourself, yet been there two days before you, and still you met me, I you, on the first day of your return?
Unlike this discrepancy of a mysterious and awful glitch in time, before them years and spotted only now, neither was aware of the world or the sky outside.
The daylight had flattened and smoked over. For a long while only the brazier had given either light or dimension to the room.
It was as if some perfect scene-stealing effect took place, and no one paid any attention. Of course, whatever had expended such effort out there, up there, might be affronted that the audience ignored it.
Without prelude the bang sounded high above. It shook the house, the built streets beyond. From walls and roofs solid slabs of snow dislodged and crashed in the alleys of Kandexa.
Jemhara and Thryfe, along with some thousands of others, were on their feet.
The noise had been as if the sky itself had blown up, split right across, and might now give way like a damaged ceiling.
There came an immediate gushing rattle.
Past the window flared a sparkling, straight-dropping hail of what seemed tiny embittered glittering stars. As they hit the walls and ground in turn, a million sharp and metallic impacts resounded. Below, out in the alley, a man screamed unpleasantly. Next moment the pane of glass in Jemhara’s window, closed still for the night, was smashed. A cascade of diamonds shot through into the attic.
Thryfe spoke. Another pane, this one of energy, dashed up to fill the window-frame.
Like maddened wasps hatched from some defrosting orchard, colourless gems flew and smacked against the barrier. Splintering appeared in air—
Jemhara flung the wooden shutter closed and fastened it.
In near total darkness – the brazier fire had sunk down like a frightened dog – they stood listening to the arrows of ice striking on every outer surface over and over. There was distant shouting too and wailing cries.
Another roaring bang bisected the sky overhead. It had seemed impossible the concussion could be repeated. The house shook again. In one wall a hair-fine crack undid itself and powder sprayed across the room.
Jemhara smote the brazier. The fire regained its courage, jumped up. Across the floor white wasps of ice sizzled malignly, not melting.
In the alley outside a man, arms and back broken, was calling, his howl weakening, lost too in the rattle of the hail. He had attempted to crawl to shelter. His track had been like that of a snake, but was already obliterated, and his body half covered by prisms of ice. Jemhara had seen this in the instant she slammed the shutter. She had not been able to help the man. She said nothing.
Above, a low grunting complaint stirred from the roof.
A beam twisted a little, over their heads.
The shutter too had been dislodged. They watched as it slid sideways like a turning page and thudded in on the floor.
‘We must go down,’ he said.
She snatched her cloak, a handful of things from the table and Ranjal’s twig off the peg. They went towards the door.
A new note sounded – a whistling tearing screech—
Everything flamed white.
Jemhara saw something like a gigantic blazing spear cast from the sky, parting the jewelry hail – it fell to earth perhaps half a mile away. Where it hit home white fire and blue detonated outward from whatever it had struck. A barking explosion followed, unlike the vast noises of the sky.
Despite the danger, Jemhara had looked back at the window, transfixed, staring. Now a second blazing shaft lit the gloom – now another – and another—Scores of these things tore through the hail, rushing from the sky each with its shrilling note and blank white flash of light. Wherever any struck anything below there was the yap of explosion and blast of harsh iced fire.
‘Jema—’ He pulled her from the room and out on to the stair beyond. The stairwell was very dark but neither of them conjured a lamp.
The stair kept creaking, swaying a little.
Thunder-stones – these were the things that fell, a sort of lightning. He had read of them in old manuscripts, never entirely assured of their nature.
Visible through a freshly made aperture in the wall by the stair, another shaft shrieked by. It had a broken and terrible shape, all angles. Now the strike was only a street or two away. Their own building recoiled at the blast, and he heard some other neighbouring architecture sharply snap, the crush and push of stones plummeting.
Down the shuddering stair they eased. This house could offer no refuge. But where they went to next he had no idea. He had cast a cordon of force about them, which to some extent held, but loose plaster and chips of brick pierced it nevertheless. As with the ice-avalanche that had encased him here something in this weather shorted out other powers, considerable though they might be. In all his life he had never witnessed a storm of this character, and only the sheet lightning of a brief thaw, or the flicker of northland lights reported to him, at all resembled thunder-stones.
Reaching the house doorway they lingered. A curtain of vicious hail deterred them from any further step.
The other occupants of the house he supposed were out. In the alley Thryfe detected a dead man under the glistening heaps of hail, a dead animal and a smashed cart.
A woman was leaning from a window across the alley, waving her arms and whimpering in panic. It was this property they had heard crumble; part of the lower storey had collapsed, only a stair and wall holding up the higher rooms.
Jemhara called to the woman above the drizzling spat of the hail. ‘Come down. Throw yourself out – I can guide you to the ground. You won’t be harmed—’
‘I’m afraid—’
‘Do you know me? I’m Jemhara the mageia, Aglin’s friend. Trust me – I will guide you down.’
Thryfe thought perhaps she could not. Her powers too might be impaired. He put his hand on her shoulder to warn her of this, but in that instant the sky directly over them opened a violet seam. He saw it descend then, a solitary thunderbolt, its evil zigzag of frozen brilliance and the blind white revelation thrown out all about it. It dropped towards them single-purposed on a tail of frayed splitting silver.
Thryfe hurled Jemhara back into the well of the stair, and from his guts drove out a shield of energy that seemed to rip his bones and blood out with it. The doorway and frontage of their shelter turned opaque – but exactly then the lightning bolt met the street.