Agyar

by Steven Brust

  I followed the direction of her gaze and said, “That is Jim, a friend of mine.”

  “Oh. Hello, Jim.”

  “Hello, Susan,” he said.

  She studied him a little more, then frowned and closed her eyes. “Am I awake?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “Would you like to be?”

  “I’m not certain. I feel like I’m dreaming.”

  “Then perhaps you are.”

  “Do you love me in my dream?”

  “In your dream, in my dream, and when we are awake, I love you the same.”

  She smiled and pressed my hand once more to her cheek. “Then it doesn’t matter.” She leaned her head back to rest it against the back of the chair, and breathed deeply. I thought she had gone to sleep again, but she opened her eyes and said, “When you leave, I’d like to come with you.”

  “I would like that, too,” I said.

  “I’ve been having such odd dreams, Jonathan.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “I dreamt that you were dead, and that I was dead, only we both lived.”

  “Interesting.” I almost told her then, but I think it will be better to wait until she is at least a little stronger.

  She said, “I dreamt that I was dancing for all eternity, and that the more I danced, the more I lived, and the more I lived, the more I wanted to dance.” She grinned weakly. “Dancing is my life, or something.”

  “Would you like to live forever, to dance forever?”

  She smiled complacently. “If you were there.”

  “I will always be there.”

  “Then I will dance,” she said, and, with a sigh, she relaxed against the chair. Her breathing slowed a little, and presently she was asleep again. I watched for a moment, then placed her hand in her lap and came back upstairs, almost choking with emotion. Jim, bless his heart, didn’t say anything.

  It is almost time. I will go over the steps of the rite once or twice again. I only have another half hour or so to chew my figurative nails. And then …

  SEVENTEEN

  save1 v.—tr. 1. To rescue from harm, danger, or loss; bring to a safe condition. 2. To keep in a safe, intact condition; safeguard. 3. To prevent or reduce the waste, loss, or expenditure of. 4. To keep for future use or enjoyment; store. Often used with up. 5. To treat with care in order to avoid fatigue, wear, or damage; to spare. 6. To make unnecessary, obviate: This will save you an extra trip. 7. Theology. To deliver from sin or the wages of sin; redeem.

  AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY

  Words, as they appear on a piece of typing paper, are flat and lifeless when compared to the sound of a voice, or even words written with a good pen. The only expression of emotion, beyond the words themselves, is in the variation of darkness or lightness of each letter, which might give a clue to the state of mind of the writer. One sees the words, but does not know if they flowed effortlessly from the fingers, or if each was the product of wracking consideration; one has no way of telling, from the evidence before him, that perhaps the writer’s hands twitched back and forth a few times, hesitant, tentative, intimidated by the unmarked paper before him and the weight of experiences behind him.

  Jim keeps coming in, looking at me, saying a few words, and leaving. He did so twice before I started typing, and once since I set down the paragraph engraved above. I have the impression he is worried about me. It is a good feeling to know that someone worries about you. I worry about Susan, but, as I type, she is safe in another room behind thick walls.

  Let us put everything in order, as if the cold, evenly spaced letters were reflections of a calm, well-ordered mind, unmoved by turmoil within or distractions without, and I will note in passing that, were the walls of this house less thick, I might not be able to write at all. And from this, I am given to wonder if it matters, but leave that.

  Let me return my thoughts to midnight, an eternity and a few short hours ago, when Jim and I came down to the parlor. Dust had gathered on the oak coat tree, but the maple floor still shone like new. There were a couple of sheets stuck into a corner, as if someone had used them to cover furniture and then abandoned them when the furniture was moved. The ceiling fixture hung in the center, impotent from lack of gas or bulbs.

  I stood in the middle of the room and picked up the blue yarn. I held it for a moment, caressing it and wondering and thinking about what was to come. If what I was about to do was anything other than nonsense, than it was a skill, and it is the nature of skills that they improve with practice; I was trying something very difficult, and very important, as my first effort in ritual magic.

  Yet, and it makes me smile ironically to consider it, that was not what nearly prevented me from beginning; nor was it the fear of the consequences from Kellem if I failed; rather it was the thought, as I contemplated the ritual whose steps I had so carefully memorized, that it was an absurd series of things to be doing and saying.

  My conversation with the old woman kept coming back. “The state of your mind will be most important as you perform the ritual,” she had said.

  “But how can I control the state of my mind?”

  “That’s what the ritual is for.”

  “Circular reasoning,” I said.

  “It is not,” she had said, “a reasonable matter.”

  I slowly laid the yarn out in a circle around myself and my tools, walking clockwise and saying, “May flames consume the evil around me, may Mother Earth shield me from evil, may the winds blow evil from me, and the oceans wash the evil away.” I laid three rows of the yarn, repeating this as I went.

  To be perfectly honest, it felt ridiculous, especially with Jim watching, and I kept wondering if the old woman had lied to me; at the same time, I tried to put meaning into the hollow-sounding phrases. But what is “evil”? If there is such a thing, then could it not describe me? Or is it relative and practical—with evil defined as anything the practitioner doesn’t like? I didn’t know and I still don’t; only now I no longer care; then I must have, for such were my thoughts as I walked the fairy ring.

  When it was done, I set the candle in the center, and lit it; the sound of the kitchen match igniting seemed unnaturally loud, as did the sputtering of the wax when the wick caught. The fire danced and flickered, making shadows on the walls—shadows of the coat tree and of the ceiling fixture, from which false crystals hung, throwing shades like a thousand little knives. For just a moment, I thought I saw Jim’s shadow, wavering in and out of existence in time to the dance of the flame, but perhaps not. I sat down on the floor, facing south.

  I picked up needle, thread, and cloth, and began work on the poppet; I found it rather easier to make than I’d expected. I discovered that I ought to have purchased a thimble, but its lack was only an annoyance. And, as I sewed, I thought about Laura Kellem—everything she had done to me and for me, the things we had shared, the hatreds I had accrued. I had no hairs from her head, nor parings of her fingernails, as the recipe called for, but I had a piece of the mountain ash, and shavings of wild rose, and a crude drawing of her that I had made on a small piece of cardboard, and I had memories, and these things went into the poppet of black silk, sewn with black thread.

  It was strange work. I would think of Kellem, perhaps remembering nights spent riding through the London Underground, doing nothing but laughing and joking and watching people, and then I would be distracted by the back of the needle poking into my thumb, and then I would think of Susan, sleeping on the chair in the next room, and then I would remember the hospital room, and I would hate.

  And as I worked, I began to say her name, over and over, until it became a chant; an image of her began to grow in my mind. I held it there, still chanting. My hands went through the sewing motions on their own, and I had no need to concentrate on the chant, either; my only thoughts were of Laura Kellem and the image of her that grew until it seemed almost three-dimensional, hanging in the air before my mind’s eye.

  After a time, the poppet was
finished.

  Then I stopped chanting, held it before me, looked at it, and said, “You are Laura Kellem.” And I meant it. There was no longer any feeling of absurdity to my actions; the rite had taken me, and was working me as I worked it. As the cigàny had said, that must be the purpose of ritual; it guided me into what I must feel, the way an irrigation ditch will guide water; it doesn’t matter if the water doesn’t take the ditch seriously, it still goes where it must.

  I felt as if my actions were those of a weaver and what I was weaving was myself, all my actions, all of my being, all of my desires into a tapestry of hope and will. Yet, at the same time, there was the curious sense of being outside of it all, of standing next to myself watching as I went through these strange motions, said these strange things, and hoped for this impossible and inevitable outcome.

  I set the poppet aside and picked up a piece of white thread, and three knots I made in it, and as I made the knots I said, “So I am bound. So I am bound. So I am bound.” The words echoed in my head as they reverberated through the room, and who knows how much was real, and who cares?

  And in black thread I wrapped the poppet, very tight, covering it all, and saying, “You cannot touch me. You cannot see me. You cannot harm me. You cannot touch me. You cannot see me. You cannot harm me. You cannot touch me. You cannot see me. You cannot harm me.”

  And when she was bound so that no trace of her remained uncovered I held her before me and pronounced, with terrible clarity, “You have no power over me.” I wanted to believe that, and I almost did, too; I had a feeling like the twang of a plucked cello string, somewhere below the level of my awareness. But I didn’t know if I heard it inside my head, in the room, or somewhere else entirely, and by this time I couldn’t slow down to consider.

  I cut off the end of the black thread and I tied it into three knots, and I think I said something then, too, but I can no longer remember what it was; I think a verse or two of a poem by Byron.

  I set the poppet down, and I suddenly knew that Kellem was in the room, in the flesh, and she was speaking, powerfully, urgently; I felt her more than heard her, but it seemed to come from a great distance. For an instant the ritual wavered, but my hands knew what to do, even as my nerve faltered. I stuck the white thread into the candle’s flame, and as the three knots burned, I felt my lips move, and I heard myself saying, “So I am free.”

  It was unmistakable now; the rumble of bass strings, a shiver up my spine; the feeling of a weight being suddenly lifted from my shoulders, a weight I had not, until then, known I bore. But now that I felt it, I knew, too, that it had been lightened, not removed entirely, and my determination rose with my hopes.

  Far away, Kellem raged, and she fought for my attention, but I wasn’t really there, or she wasn’t; we were, at that time, inhabitants of different worlds.

  “So I am free.”

  “You are not!” she cried. “You are mine!” but the knots that held me were loosening, and I smiled at the sudden feeling of release, of freedom, of victory.

  “So I am free,” I said.

  “Mine, now and forever,” she said, and I was so startled by the sudden clarity in her voice that I looked at her. She caught my eye, and she nailed me to the spot; it was like the heat when a furnace door is suddenly opened, that blast of will, and in spite of myself I flinched.

  “You are mine,” she repeated, and the words seemed to take life, and strike at my brain like a burrowing animal; to combat them was arduous, to ignore them, impossible. She called on me to surrender myself, and when I refused she struck at me with her rage, the twin to my own, so long ago it now seemed. We held so, energetic in our motionlessness, for a timeless time, but no matter how I fought, I felt myself slipping, as if my fingers had grasped the one rock that could keep me from the abyss, and I just wasn’t strong enough.

  At which point, suddenly, inexplicably, her concentration broke. I don’t know how I could have missed what happened, except I was looking at Kellem as through a narrow tunnel, and everything outside was invisible or irrelevant. When her concentration broke, I had no time to wonder why, but I resumed the ritual with an urgency that seemed to come from the rite itself, rather than from me, and there is no clearer way to put it than that.

  “So I am free,” I said for the fourth, unnecessary time, and I wanted to laugh, for I felt that the weight was gone; I was my own man, and I knew that she could never dominate my will again. I turned my eyes from her and blew out the candle. She leapt at me, but there was something about the circle of thread; she couldn’t get past it. I laughed in her face, at her rage; revenge was mine, for those few sweet seconds. I hold them even now in my mind, and perhaps there has been no greater joy in my life than savoring that eternal instant when I thought I had won fully.

  Then, as I picked up the end of the blue thread and looked at her, and past her, I saw how she had been distracted: Susan was lying like a broken toy against the wall. I stood, and I stared, and I began to tremble.

  She must have woken up and seen what was going on, and, in all ignorance, attacked Kellem from behind. Uselessly, in the sense that Susan could not hurt her, yet it had been exactly what I needed. How much had she known? How much had she understood? It doesn’t matter.

  Was she breathing? Yes, but there was also blood flowing from a wound in her throat, and she couldn’t afford to lose blood. I looked back at Laura, and her hands were stained, blood dripping to the floor from her long, sharp nails.

  I shook my head in denial, which turned to rage. But the ritual was not yet over, and I knew, then, how to change the program. I said, “You want to get to me, Laura? I’ll help.” I took up the circle, walking widdershins, very quickly, and I said, “The oceans have washed you from me, Laura; the four winds have swept you from my life; my mother, the Earth, has sheltered me; the fire is in my hand, and now—” I picked up the kitchen knife, and suddenly yanked the rest of the thread away. “And now may you burn in Hell.”

  She leapt at me, I suspect too full of hate to even notice that I was armed. I raised the knife, and struck, and she impaled herself on the weapon. Even as the shock traveled up my arm, I drove it into her so that it was buried almost to the hilt in her heart, and, looking into her eyes, I turned the handle a half turn, adjusting my grip, then held the knife in place, her body almost touching mine, my elbow against her sternum, blood washing over my wrist.

  For a moment she held perfectly still, her eyes wide, then a scream issued from her lips that probably woke up old Bill across the street, and alerted every cop in the neighborhood, not that I gave a tinker’s dam.

  I let go of her and she stumbled away, blood erupting as if growing from the pale blue of her dress, visible beneath her open wool coat.

  She found the door and staggered outside; I stayed with her to see that she did not remove the knife; she fell on her side and stained the snow, twitching. I stood there staring at her body, and I might be there still if I hadn’t suddenly seen figures racing from across the street, and a few in the yard inside the fence. Some of them were holding pistols, and there were one or two rifles or shotguns.

  I don’t like shotguns.

  Spotlights blasted their way to me as I stood by the door, and to Kellem, stretched out on the melting snow and mud of the lawn.

  I slammed the door and shot the bolt, where I stood for just a moment, then I heard, distorted by distance, wood, and some sort of amplifier, “You in there. This is the police. The house is surrounded. Come out slowly with your hands empty.”

  Crap.

  I yelled back. “The first cop through this door gets his head blown off,” then I tried not to laugh. You’ll never take me alive, coppers. Just call me Jimmy Cagney.

  Jim said, “Why did you say that?”

  “They think I’m armed and dangerous,” I said. “Let them assume I have a gun.”

  “Why?”

  “So they’ll keep their distance while I figure out what to do.”

  I remembered then that
I did, in fact, have a gun. Where was it? In the attic, next to the signboard with the red “R” on it. I could use the sign, too.

  They called a few more ultimatums at me, but I was no longer listening. I turned to Susan, and yes, she was still breathing, and she was looking at me. Blood flowed from a wound in her throat, as if it had been ripped open by some sort of claw. Her left arm lay across her body at an unusual angle, and there seemed to be something wrong with the left side of her face. As I watched, she held out her right hand.

  I took it, kissed her palm, and saw that she was dying. I think she knew it, too. She tried to speak, failed. I said, “It’s all right, my love; I won’t let them win. We will laugh at them all.”

  She tried to say something else, but didn’t manage. She was going fast. I knew what I was going to have to do, and there was no point in waiting. I kissed her forehead, then her lips, then her eyes; and then I held her close and did what was necessary.

  As I laid her down on the floor, Jim was standing there. “What now?” he said.

  “Now? I don’t know.”

  “You’d better get out of here,” he said. “The police—”

  “If they find Susan, they’ll have her embalmed.”

  “So? Oh. I understand. Do you think she’d want—” He broke off, seeing my face, then he looked away.

  I studied her still form. “I do not want her to die,” I said.

  “What will you do?”

  “Hide her, the same place I’ve been hiding.”

  “If they search—”

  “Why should they? They don’t know she’s here.”

  “But they know you’re in here.”

  “I won’t be,” I said.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “It might work,” he said slowly. “You’ll have to let them see you leave.”

  “I know.”

  “You should hurry. The sun—”

  “I know.”

  He frowned. “What bothers me,” he said, “is that, if they haven’t caught you, if they know you’re at large, they’re likely to search the house anyway.”