Legends of Australian Fantasy

by Jack

  ‘Staring’ll make you no prettier,’ mocked the wild-bearded man who inhabited the cot across from him. And if the mirror cracks, you’ll be worse off still.’

  Ros ignored the cackling half-wit and resumed his search.

  * * * *

  On the sixth day, he received a note. It was delivered to the doss-house during one of his extended searches and left upon his bedroll to await his return. He unfolded the stiff paper with eager fingers and scanned the single line it contained. A place and a time. No more.

  She had neither addressed it to him nor signed it, but he was sure it was from Adi. Holding the paper to his nose, he imagined that he could detect a faint residue of her scent upon it. His heart beat a little faster at the knowledge that they were one step closer to reunion.

  The rendezvous was scheduled for dawn the next morning. Ros barely slept that night, imagining how his life would change. The stories told about him ended with the defeat of the Scarecrow five years earlier. For him, the real story was about to begin.

  * * * *

  He arrived one quarter of an hour early, and waited exactly where the note had specified. Even at that early hour, the market was busy, and he craned his neck to catch a glimpse as she approached. As the appointed time neared, he could barely keep still. His jostling and pacing attracted the attention of more than one trader, but he rebuffed their sales pitches with steadfast cheer.

  The hour came and went, and Adi did not appear. Ros told himself to be patient, and waited another quarter-hour, then a half.

  A full hour after the time specified in the note, he left, a pale approximation of the man he had been earlier that morning.

  There was another note on his bedroll, equally brief. The second meeting was on the far side of the city with bare minutes to spare. Ros didn’t question the need for haste. Adi must have been delayed, surely, and all explanations would be rendered unnecessary by her presence. Barely stopping to draw breath, he sprinted along the dusty thoroughfares and carriageways, dodging and weaving when crowds failed to part before him.

  He arrived almost punctually, breathing heavily and casting about for her in the halls of the city library. It was cool and quiet within. Too quiet: his urgent calling and searching were not welcome. Undaunted he peered into every nook and cranny and through every door, pushing books aside when faces were obscured. He left only when certain that the chambers were empty of the one he sought. He had missed her.

  Furious at his ill fortune, he hurried back to the doss-house in case another note had arrived.

  It had, but this time he did not immediately open it. He held it gently in his hand. Like a dead moth, it could be crushed in an instant, and for a dozen breaths he was tempted. This insubstantial yet weighty thing could lead him on another fruitless quest. Without proof that it was from Adi, he would be unwise to hurry anywhere.

  With new circumspection, Ros opened the letter. It contained the same as before, only this time there was even less opportunity to make the rendezvous.

  No, he told himself. He was not at anyone’s beck and call. This test of loyalty, if such it was, would be answered by a test of his own.

  Folding the note into halves and slipping it back onto his bedroll, he exited the doss-house and made as if to follow the route required.

  When he was certain he wasn’t being shadowed, he doubled-back and procured a vantage-point atop the building adjacent to the doss-house, from which location he could clearly see the entrance. There he would wait until the next note arrived. When it did, he would follow it back to the source.

  * * * *

  Night fell, and with it his spirits. Master Pukje’s final test — surviving the same, at any rate — had left Ros feeling prepared for anything. There had been no graduation ceremony, just the assumption of knowledge, of responsibility, of adulthood. He was his own man now, or ought to be.

  Not that he hadn’t already experienced a large measure of doubt on his way to the city. He had little experience with women, having met barely a dozen since his apprenticeship began and known none of them intimately. He couldn’t guess what might be going through Adi’s mind, just as he wasn’t entirely sure what was going through his own.

  He didn’t want to think that she was behind this strange sequence of events. After all, hadn’t she encouraged him to come to her the moment his apprenticeship was finished? Why would she take advantage of his gullibility like this? He was sure now that it couldn’t be her. It flew in the face of the memories he had treasured for so long.

  Numerous people passed through the six-sided courtyard off which the doss-house lay. None of them were Adi; none of them came bearing notes or displaying any signs of conspiracy against him. As the night deepened, he began to feel foolish and upbraided himself for his paranoia. Master Pukje would have harsh words to offer if he ever learned of this. And so would Adi. She tolerated neither untimeliness nor inconvenience, and he had offered her nothing but both, so far. He looked forward to the day when they could laugh about this together, as they might many other anecdotes from their long betrothal.

  His back was getting sore and the steady stream of passers-by had slowed, if not ceased entirely. He dropped with light feet into the courtyard and went into the doss-house. Too tired to bathe, he unrolled his bed and flicked out a bug or two that had made a home there during the day. There was no fourth note, of course.

  On the way back from the primitive toilet, he stopped in mid-step, every imaginable sense alert. A certainty that Adi was nearby coursed through him. Without hesitating, he ran to the entrance of the doss-house and peered carefully outside. For all his theories concerning anonymous culprits, part of him remained alert for games of any kind on her part, and he wasn’t about to drive her off by pouncing too soon.

  There was a woman in the courtyard, hurrying his way. She wasn’t Adi; no Sabatino would dress that way. His eyes were instead drawn into the shadows. Through the Change he detected several rats and one alert cat, but no humans. If she was there, she was artfully concealed.

  And so she was. Her skin was black against black, but the whites of her eyes stood out — one of them, anyway, around the edge of a ragged brick wall. Their stares locked for an instant, and in that instant he saw her pull back, realising that she had been spotted. The eye winked out, and he set off in pursuit.

  Later he would remember the wild fever of those hopeful moments as he shouldered past anyone in his way, calling Adi’s name and imploring her to reveal herself. He glimpsed her many times, stepping out into darkness from under streetlamps, through archways, down alleyways that would inevitably turn out to be empty when he arrived. How she did it, he didn’t know, but his darkest, most convoluted fears were confirmed. It was her, and she wasn’t as he remembered.

  All night he chased her, across all quarters of the city.

  ‘Don’t do this, Adi,’ he called. ‘I came for you like I promised. Show yourself, please!’

  She offered him nothing in reply.

  * * * *

  It came to him eventually that he wasn’t thinking clearly. He was chasing phantoms and they weren’t leading him anywhere. He needed to be calm and find another solution. Adi was somewhere in the city. He could find her if he tried.

  He returned to the doss-house only to discover that his property had been stolen. That didn’t improve his mood. The wild-bearded man and his foolish collaborators professed no knowledge of the theft, but Ros could see more than the usual fogginess to their eyes. Sold for ale, he presumed. Everything he owned was drunk and gone.

  There was no point railing against it. Stalking back out into the streets, he found the closest thing to a quiet corner in Ulum and scrawled complex charms about it, cocooning it and himself in silence. He closed his eyes and sought the vital heart of himself, as his master had taught him to do. That was all he had left. Every other certainty had evaporated.

  In that tiny island of calm, he viewed his emotions with something approaching objectivity, and was even able
to shed them for a moment. Anger, fear, embarrassment, and loss were the least of his problems now. He was the victim of an elaborate prank, and the first step to rising above it was to regard it from the outside.

  Almost immediately he realised something that should have been obvious all along. Adi’s prank relied on talents Adi herself didn’t possess. Not that she wasn’t talented in her own ways; Ros was sanguine about the fact that she was certainly smarter than he was, and cunning with it. But she lacked any kind of predilection for the Change, and to his knowledge had never pursued an understanding of it. How, then, could she be cloaking her presence so effectively and running him in such ever-widening circles?

  There were two possible answers: one, that it wasn’t her at all; and two, that she had hired someone to do the work for her.

  The first possibility was attractive because it absolved her of all responsibility, but offered no hint as to the identity of his antagonist. He decided to pursue the second possibility simply because it gave him something to do, and offered a small chance of success. Finding Adi’s Change-worker-for-hire might prove easier than finding her, if only because Ros might approach the prank sideways rather than head-on.

  Although his direction was now clear, he stayed within his bubble of silence a while longer, to double-check his thoughts, in case he had missed something else equally obvious, and to establish an appropriate emotional balance. The decision to be with Adi had been an easy one five years earlier. To dishonour it now would be cowardice of the highest order. He would see it through if he was allowed to, and he would do his best to keep hope alive.

  * * * *

  In theory, the Stone Mages had the city stitched up. Every child with the slightest whiff of the Change about them was sent off to be trained and ultimately inducted into the country’s elite, from which few ever emerged into independent practice. Ros’s utter unencumbrance was frowned upon and, in some quarters considered actually dangerous to society at large.

  Master Pukje had been quick to instil in Ros the understanding of the true purpose of theory, which was simply to be tested, and so he went with confidence into the city once more, sure that he would find an exception before long.

  And so he did. First one, then another — both Change-workers known for shoddy work, but at least acting independently of the country’s masters. They were jealous types, reluctant to let a potential customer fall into a competitor’s orbit, but Ros had mastered more techniques for extracting the truth than they had ever forgotten. Not effortlessly, but at least painlessly, he learned what he needed to and moved on.

  The black market for Change-working grew in extent the more he picked at it, like a loose thread pulled from an expensive rug. With keener eyes than he had had before, he saw charms that bore no relation to any grammatical system he had studied. He found dealers in potions using ingredients unknown to anyone but their discoverers. He studied significant tattoos in books whose reason he could not tell from madness. All of it was wonderful and strange, and utterly incapable of catching him in any kind of web. The prankster, whoever he or she was, had attained a higher degree of mastery than these crazed dabblers.

  From one he learned a name that he mentally filed away for later pursuit. The name was repeated two interviews later, as a person Ros should contact should he wish to procure the expertise he required. The person thus identified was not a Change-worker herself, but a business-woman from the quieter side of town. Her customers resided outside the populous caverns, so she did not advertise locally. Word inevitably spread, though, and Ros was keen to follow it. Through this woman Adi might have hired someone from outside the city, and therefore someone more difficult to trace.

  Twice Ros caught glimpses of Adi in the crowds of the marketplace. Once he saw a jewel she had worn hanging around the neck of another woman. Ros ignored all such instances of recognition for fear of being entangled again. He had to focus on the trail he had found for himself and not be led aside, no matter where it led him.

  * * * *

  ‘Explain to me again, young man,’ said Jenfi Mierlo, ‘exactly what kind of charm you think this might be.’

  Ros did his best, although their surroundings discomfited him to an extreme. He felt utterly out of place among such finery. There were books and relics from ancient times, and works of art so delicately formed that light itself seemed gentle with them. Everything about him — his shabbiness, his demeanour, his smell — was alien to this world. There was no denying it, and little that could be done about it.

  The hard, keen gaze of a man’kin on a plinth didn’t help much, either.

  ‘What do you think, Mawson?’ the mistress of the house asked it when Ros had finished. ‘Does this sound like the work of anyone we know?’

  The man’kin didn’t reply, but she nodded as though it had.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think so either. In fact — in fact —’

  She broke into a series of deep, hacking coughs that turned her glassy skin purple and bent her almost double.

  Jenfi Mierlo was a woman old enough to be Ros’s grandmother, but as slender as a teenager. She wore a silk gown, dyed black and white in geometric patters, from which her wrists and throat emerged like fragile stalks. Her hair was steel-grey, and her eyes deep-set. The line of her jaw stood out like a knife, almost as sharp as her fingernails.

  Ros half-rose to offer her assistance, but she waved him away. The house-boy rushed into the room with a glass of water, which she accepted with gratitude and sipped from as the fit subsided.

  ‘Please pardon me,’ she said, returning to something approaching a healthy colour. ‘The trials of age are as vexatious as the trials of youth. I was about to announce that your predicament, this glamour or spell or whatever you wish to call it, seems more like hallucination to me than conspiracy — for after all, where is the evidence? You can’t produce a single note you said you received. And as for either mechanism or motive, both remain obscure to me. But it is foolish ever to write off the inventiveness of people, particularly where torture is involved. And you do seem tortured, young man, if you don’t mind me saying so. Would that be a fair observation?’

  Ros allowed that it was.

  ‘Tell me more about the woman you suspect to be the mastermind.’ Jenfi Mierlo folded her wrists in her lap and leaned forward. ‘I am unfamiliar with your Lady Hakamu.’

  ‘I cannot,’ he said, unwilling to reveal anything that might identify either of them. ‘She is unknown to me, except by name.’

  ‘It seems odd to me that she would thrust her illusory form upon you yet remain herself in the shadows. Are you sure there could be no other agent at work here?’

  The phrasing of her observation —’in the shadows’ — reminded Ros of the moment he had first seen Adi’s face. There had indeed been another woman present at the time. It wasn’t inconceivable that she had triggered the charm then, although he remembered no such thing. He could barely recall her at all. Had she said something as he hurried past her? Had he bumped into her, perhaps?

  ‘I’m as sure as I can be,’ he said.

  ‘And you feel that you have done nothing to earn such a plight?’

  ‘That is the case, yes.’

  ‘You don’t surprise me there,’ Jenfi Mierlo said. ‘Young men rarely do.’ She leaned back. ‘I fear that I have little help to offer — except for the prospect of employment. You’re new to the city, clearly, and in need of friends. I could make an introduction or two, if you liked.’

  There was a predatory cast to her face. Ros had seen such before, on traders who recognised a bargain and sought to claim it before its true price became known. Clearly his imposture as a victim of a Change-worker, rather than a practitioner himself, was thinner than he had hoped.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep that thought in mind.’

  ‘You’ll do better than that,’ she said, rising suddenly from her chair. ‘Wait here. I’ll be back in a moment.’

  He stood, wishin
g now that he had never come. Instead of rescue, he had found himself swept out to deeper water still. One of the many reasons for studying under Master Pukje had been to defer the attention of sharks who, like Jenfi Mierlo, were drawn to his talent. Many times in his childhood he had been exploited, unknowingly and cruelly, and he would not suffer such again.

  ‘You will go to Madam Van Haasteren.’

  He glanced around in surprise. The man’kin had spoken.

  ‘I know that name,’ he said. ‘Magda Van Haasteren, the seer?’

  ‘You will go to her.’

  ‘Why?’ He frowned. ‘Can she tell me where Adi is?’

  The man’kin didn’t answer.

  At the sound of Jenfi Mierlo’s heels clicking in the hallway outside, Ros turned. She was holding a trinket that was part charm, part business card, which she pressed upon him with irresistible insistence.