by Tanith Lee
But the Gargolem strode by, and through a huge doorway Jemhara followed, as she had followed it down the city and in under the river by secret ways.
It had been the Gargolem’s ability to undo all doors that enabled Jemhara to enter here and to proceed.
She was astonished to be helped. But she had not attempted to ask why.
The Insularia was not as once or twice she had heard it described. It was bigger by far. Yet also it was desolate. If any sorcerous vitality remained in these hollow caverns and lightless, untinted, towering rooms, it was not apparent to her sensitivity. All true power seemed to have been leached away.
They were in a tunnel corridor then, and a metal sledge with a vitreous sail stood on the ground.
‘A wind will come,’ said the Gargolem. ‘Call it.’
‘I? Can I, here?’
‘It is a simple thing.’
Jemhara rifled through her witch’s memory. She thought of the song of her Soforan steader childhood, ‘By all the winds that never blew’. It meant all those things one had never been able to achieve, all those opportunities missed and blessings withheld. As a girl she had never known the meaning. Now she knew.
Jemhara whistled.
The wind came bowling along the tunnel. When she and the Gargolem stepped on to the sledge it rose about four feet off the ground, and bore them away.
After a while the sledge sailed through another chamber, where stone heads, none human, gazed into empty air. A pair of gates, high as the high arched roof, leaned wide. On the floor lay a huge inanimate thing, like a snake all made of metal too, silent.
The next chamber was black as pitch.
Intimidated though she was, Jemhara was curious. Curiosity had often led her to knowledge.
‘Did they do this?’ she asked. When the Gargolem did not reply, even when they flew out again into another tunnel, this one twisting and turning, Jemhara said, ‘The Magikoy destroyed their own work here?’
The Gargolem spoke. ‘No, Jemhara. It died when they did.’
This perplexed her. ‘Then even their artefacts – were a part of the Magikoy themselves?’
‘In a way.’
‘But you,’ she said, ‘great Gargo, you persist.’ The Gargolem did not answer. She thought perhaps now this was only because what she had stated was self-evident. ‘Are there others of your kind – other lesser gargolems still active?’
‘They too are gone.’
Just then the tunnel was amplified and they sailed out into an enormous underrock hall, wide as a volcanic caldera and high as twenty or thirty storeys of an average building. Although situated beneath the River Palest, the Insularia complex must extend miles into the city on each side.
Obsidian bridges crossed the cavern. Below ran paved roads lined with plain stone apartment stacks. The scene was both awesome and modest. But the desolate atmosphere that overlaid it now, the absence of any warmth or lighting, gave it too a mood of sinister depression.
Jemhara gripped her hands together. ‘Gargo, will you answer me one more question?’ The Gargolem did not speak. ‘I believe you are taking me to the Magus Thryfe. Is this so?’
‘It is so.’
Jemhara breathed. She said, ‘If they’re dead, and all this is – dead, does Thryfe live? Or are we visiting his grave?’
The Gargolem said, ‘He is not in any grave, except that of his own body.’
‘Tell me plainly, Gargo. You know what I ask you.’
‘He lives.’ The Gargolem added, ‘Yet he is dead too.’
Jemhara’s face flushed with a scared fury. She knew enough to know that the Gargolem did not sadistically tease her. It uttered absolutes. But she could not think how to make it respond directly in the human way, and could not bear any more. She bit her tongue, literally, as sometimes she had when afraid in her youth. That was an inspired precaution. The sledge rode over the cavern, and presently the Gargolem told her what next she must go through, in order to reach her goal.
I am here. I am trapped for eternity. May some god help me. But I believe in no gods, save only those weak entities that assist, superfluously, the vanity of men. And these devils are not mine.
She heard a voice – his? – but only in her head.
Thryfe. It was Thryfe.
Perhaps she imagined his censure and his despair.
The way was unguarded. Jemhara guessed several lesser gargolems had formerly monitored the passage, and who travelled it.
On the walls, emblems demonstrated old questions and answers, the successful circumnavigation of significant tests. But perhaps only she, or one like her, could have read it.
The Gargolem had brought her here. Left her here.
Before her, a shaft plunged into some abyss.
She knew, Jemhara, she must leap. For him. Only for him.
She leapt.
It was a well of black glass, plunging to an unknown depth. Balanced on air she tumbled swiftly and in terror, by means of the shaft’s own surviving mechanism. To the place below.
The Telumultuan Chamber.
As always, to any who fell here, and you could only enter by falling through the shaft, it seemed you were thrown into a narrow cubicle barely big enough to contain a living creature. It was made of stone and blind of windows. It had no door, either in or out. Meanwhile the entry-aperture of the shaft disappeared.
Jemhara saw this, and that she remained alone.
The fall she pushed from her mind. Incarceration she knew from what the Gargolem had said was temporary. Yet this was one of the cardinal sanctums of the Magikoy, the outpost of that terrible chamber of weaponry which had released the White Death. The Gargolem had also notified her that she – untrained and uninitiate of the Magikoy – must undergo here some awful examination of body and will.
‘What?’ she had asked.
The Gargolem did not precisely reply. ‘It is never discussed. But it is demanding. And, too, it may be survived.’
For a while there in the enclosure, nothing else. She waited in trepidation. But, well trained in her own amateur’s ways, her not inconsiderable self-control persisted.
Then from the walls, another gargolem, that of the Telumultuan Chamber – presumably surviving where other lesser servants had not – spoke unseen. The phrases were not specific to her, for it challenged any who ever came into this room. And Jemhara now knew as much.
‘What are you doing here?’
What could she say? She knew at least she must tell the truth.
‘Thryfe,’ she said. ‘I am here for Thryfe, Magikoy Master.’
‘Do you know the price?’
She did not. She replied, truthful, ‘No.’
‘It is high. Will you pay?’
‘For him – I will pay.’
‘Pay then.’
Love secretly rules all worlds. Love is the only element which will do such things, for itself or another.
The chamber being what it was, safeguards had been fixed on it centuries before. No mage could enter there and lightly unlock the weapon store.
From the wall in front of her a sword snaked out. It danced, whippy and silver, and sliced through Jemhara. She screamed again, then shut her lips together. The Gargolem had not instructed her – maybe had trusted her to be, herself, mageia enough to know – she must keep still under this onslaught.
Jemhara kept still as a rock. She knew she could not die for she must find Thryfe.
The sword went into her like a thin knife through snow. The snow turned scarlet. Her blood lay on the walls and floor. The world was red.
When the razorous cuts ended, the walls and floor had analysed all that she was from her blood. Which must have been sufficent.
A door appeared, filled by icy light.
Jemhara crept through and as she did so her lacerations entirely healed.
Beyond the door lay the full scope of the Telumultuan.
Before Lionwolf’s war, no living thing had entered here through countless centuries. Apart from dur
ing nightmares.
Then seven Magikoy had come in, to wake Hell on earth. After them, one other.
Now Jemhara was here.
The space is high and far, and on all sides slides into a misty dimness and an elongated perspective.
Things have stood here, once. Faintly glimmeringly grey and countless, tall as a forest – taller; featureless and unique. They are gone. They have sped upward at one unknowable word, utilized openings made for them in a frozen river, arced invisible and unseen, touched the ground again at the prescribed areas. After which – whiteness, stasis, salt pillars, dust.
Jemhara looks all about. She seems to see the shades of the weapons hanging there yet, ground to air. The sourceless light trembles. The floor of polished granite, if it is, stays pure.
Jemhara walks forward, dwarfed by the expellation of anything else.
The chamber is empty save for its own aura and the ghosts of Death. Jemhara is only … an afterthought.
She moved ahead for perhaps an hour, glancing always about her. Then something twitched in her hair. It was startling, as if a beetle had flown in there, the sort that laired in old wooden furnishing. Jemhara put up her hand, and into it fell the twig the sibull had given her in the village with the hot spring. Jemhara halted, and looked at the twig lying on the palm of her glove. A strange shape it had, rather like a doll’s skinny hand with too many thin fingers.
Then, on her palm the twig shifted. All its fingers pointed now one way, which was across the limitless chamber to Jemhara’s right. Nothing was different there. Everything dwindled in perspective, everything was empty.
A little sharp tapping came from the twig. After a moment it ceased.
Jemhara, beyond thought, fixated solely on one idea, turned herself and walked in the direction the talisman had shown.
Almost instantly a barrier was before her.
It was a sheet of material of such transparency it was like glass. She could see through it, but only now she stood in front of it – before that it had faithfully mirrored the enormous featureless spaces of the chamber. On the far side of the glassy surface Jemhara beheld a place of darkness, full of a kind of smoke. And in the smoke a figure hung suspended. She could not quite make it out. She did not need to, having already looked at this scene when dreaming.
The barrier however must be magical, impenetrable.
Instinctually, nearly tranced, Jemhara put one finger to the wall. It was cold as ice. It was ice.
A low cry came from her.
Since childhood she had had the gift of melting ice to water.
Was it possible such a village witchery could work even in the Insularia of the Magikoy? She stood in doubt, forgetting the hidden aptness of the world, how minor atoms might change monoliths and insignificant events catapult prodigious ones into being. As if the earth, building its own harsh and insurmountable walls, left in them tiny keys, ready for turning.
She had after all melted the ice of Thyrfe’s chastity. She had, after all, melted the ice that had locked her into a vicious, paltry life.
Jemhara made the spell With a neurasthenic calm. Nothing occurred, and then a piece was wept, in a great gush like milk, out of the barrier. As the liquid ran foaming and sparkling along the floor, Jemhara stepped through into the room of smoke and darkness.
Two years, two centuries ago, Thryfe the Magician had driven his sleekar back across the plains where the snow was brown as excrement, and entered dying Ru Karismi. Climbing to the top of the city he had watched the vacancy of gardens and palaces. Below he saw the dead put out for crematory wagons.
A few days after, the dead were simply tossed from doors and windows, down on the fine streets. By then he was helping to collect and burn them. And, too, he went into the city’s homes. He held the hands of dying women and children and men of all ages, told-them they would live beyond the body’s end. He believed not a word of it. But where life betrayed, only an afterlife could offer recompense. Most of the priests were also dead. Someone had to do it.
Later he told himself he should not have lied. This was when he realized he, very likely, would not die himself. He had thought he must, coming back among the poisons and the sorrow. Just as he knew – or reckoned that he knew – the brown sandy snow that ran for miles beyond the walls would harden with cold and finally return as a bleached, sere-grained ice, also like sand – as had the ice desert of the Great Uaarb of northernmost Gech, where, the books said, a test of similar weaponry had once been played out before.
When he did not die Thryfe felt a new disgust. He had prevented nothing. He had helped not at all. Useless, into the dustbin of the world he should go. But instead golden children went there, and innocent kind old men. And here he was, this apostate of magecraft, moving and breathing and mouthing commonplace reassurance.
One girl died in his arms.
She was herself nearly a Magikoy, one of the apprentices who had reached the Maxamitan Level. He had never really noticed her – as he had failed to see so much, even the danger of the mindless bitch who came to him in her glowing magic and wound him in her web – Jemhara.
The dying girl though, in her dirty smelly dress, her hands worn from tending the dying, the dead and their fires, had turned her head on his arm and gazed long at him from over-bright dark eyes. Some went mad from the poison and she was somewhat like that, if not very much.
Outside the windows of the well-to-do house that had been hers before she became a Magikoy apprentice, pyre-smokes still rose like a black-trunked forest. The air was murky ochre. The stench of roast meat and bone would make you choke if, by now, you had not become so accustomed that it was the only atmosphere you could recall.
‘I shan’t live,’ she told him. A decision – as if she alone had made up her mind.
‘No.’
‘What lies beyond … here?’
He had said so often to others that something much better did. Now the phrases stuck in his gullet as the smoke and stink of the city did not. She was only fifteen. ‘What would you like to find there?’
‘Oh,’ she said. She smiled sleepily. ‘Vengeance.’
Mechanical he said, ‘But you’re Magikoy. There’s no teaching which—’
‘Revenge,’ she said, her smile and sleepiness gone. ‘I know who caused this.’
‘There were many causes.’
‘Hush,’ she said gently, as if comforting a younger child, ‘don’t concern yourself. Whatever is there, I’ll meet him there.’
‘Who?’
‘Vashdran,’ she said.
Thryfe felt the Rukarian version of the name of that super-being, half god, half mortal, and having the worst of both, strike through his ribs like a spear. When he had cleansed his brain enough to speak, and turned to look back into her eyes, he saw they had fixed for ever.
Then her parents cornered him. It had been the way of it: sometimes the older ones or the less strong survived, while the fresh and fit and young died in droves.
‘We had four sons,’ said the woman. She still wore her jewels, or had put them on to show him her prestige. ‘All dead,’ she announced. It was the husband who began to sob. ‘But our daughter, she was Magikoy.’
‘I know she was.’
‘Yes, Highness Thryfe, of course you do. Please – take her down to the burial yard under the River Palest. Where you Magikoy lay your own dead. Other apprentices of High Level were taken there – Flazis was, and he was only from the minor city of Or Tash. But our Ruxendra, she was by us much loved, and talented in magery. And we – why, my husband has a distant relationship to the royal family.’ The woman’s face clouded. She added quickly, ‘I mean to the last king, Sallusdon. Not – not that other, Vuldir.’
What did it matter and what was there to lose? Most of the Magikoy had perished too.
Thryfe said, ‘Wash and dress your daughter in her best. I’ll take her down and myself see to her interment.’
Their profusion of thanks embarrassed him, humiliated and horrified him.
But he said nothing against it, and did not inform them that the only means by which their girl would now get into an Insularian grave was with Thryfe himself wielding hack-blade and spade.
He carried her there in his arms. She was light, and no other suitable transport was available.
For a while he had stood looking at the river, the huge fissures which had been created in the ice to let out the weapons as they flew.
Once through the esoteric entrances, which still responded to passwords, rather surprising him, Thryfe was in the Insularia. Reaching the yard of tombs he broke the paving in a spare position and lowered the girl into her bed. Her mother had put on her a dress of scarlet velvet trimmed with silver, for the colours of Ru Karismi. Also she wore a pearl necklace he had seen the mother wearing, and gold rings obviously kept for Ruxendra alone – they would have been too small for her mother. Stitched into the skirt of the dress – he had heard them rustling as he carried her – were wishes for happiness, benign mantras and, so he reasoned, a page or two of Magikoy sayings.
When she was in the grave he threw a swath of silk her parents also supplied over her face. Then he flung in the earth and laid back the stones. Fusing them with his power, he also cut an inscription there. They had begged him for one. It told any who might ever find her that she had been of good family and loved, talented with the magic of mages. ‘Say too,’ had whispered her father, ‘she is in Paradise.’ Thryfe did so.