The Simbul's Gift

by Lynn Abbey

  “A Red Wizard? Are you sure, Mimuay? You began by saying his mother was an elf, now you say a Thayan wizard has tried to kill him. Are you very sure?”

  She hesitated. “I couldn’t understand him, Poppa, not the way I understand Ferrin—”

  Her dear, dead friend Ferrin, for whom Lauzoril had searched without success.

  “I had to fill in the spaces between his thoughts. He thought of his momma and her ears were pointed, like an elf s. I saw them sticking through her brown hair. She has a spear, Poppa. Do elf-mommas always carry spears? When he thinks of her, he thinks of Red Wizards—” Mimuay stared at her hands, nervous and ashamed. “There’s death—ugly death—when he thinks of Red Wizards, Poppa. He’s afraid and he’s angry, too; he hates them … you … us.”

  Lauzoril measured his next words carefully. If Mimuay hadn’t perceived the mongrel’s thoughts, from where was she getting these notions? “Aglarond is Thay’s enemy. Where there are enemies, there is hate and fear; it cannot be avoided. In western Thay, near Aglarond, little girls fear Aglarond and learn to hate the Aglarondan queen.”

  “The Simbul?”

  He swallowed hard. “Where did you learn that name, Mimuay?”

  “From the boy in the mirror, Poppa. In the space between his momma and the Red Wizards is a silver-haired woman he calls the Simbul.”

  “We’ve done enough for today, Mimuay.”

  “I haven’t done anything, Poppa. I’ve just watched. You’re angry with me: you don’t believe me. You think I’m telling stories. I’m not, Poppa; I wouldn’t lie to you, not ever.”

  There was fear in his daughter’s voice. She was too old to become a Red Wizard. By the time he was old enough to wonder about the truth, he’d killed a fellow enchanter outright and driven two others to madness and death. His choices had been made before his eyes had opened. But if he wouldn’t teach Mimuay the way he’d been taught, how would he teach her? Was there any way to keep her fear of him from becoming hate?

  No way, Master, Shazzelurt, Lauzoril’s enchanted knife, sensed his thoughts, offered its advice. Kill her now, Master. Give her to me.

  The zulkir quenched the knife’s spirit and lifted Mimuay down from the stool. He held her in his arms, rocking her gently. Her neck fit easily between the thumb and fingers of his hand. Lauzoril knew ways to kill that owed nothing to spells or magic; she wouldn’t suffer. “I believe you, Mimuay.” He rubbed the hard lump at the base of her neck until her shoulders relaxed. “You’ll become a good wizard.” A bit of irony there: What did a zulkir know about the training of a righteous wizard? “You learn quickly, and I have to think about what I’m going to teach you next.”

  She wriggled in his arms, stared at him with frightening trust. “Can we protect the boy in the mirror from his enemies?”

  Lauzoril thought of Mythrell’aa headed for the Yuirwood and all the stories Thrul’s spy master had told him about massacres and awakening powers. If even half were true … “No, my dear.”

  “Not even with Kemzali? His thoughts are sad, Poppa, like Ferrin’s. I don’t want him to die. He’s not our enemy.”

  Ferrin again. Lauzoril stroked his daughter’s hair and said nothing.

  It was nearing sunset when Lauzoril went to his stable. He sent a straw man walking across the Thazalhar hills. From the stables he went to the hen-coop where he stunned two of the fattest birds and carried them to the crypt.

  The peaceful world the Zulkir of Enchantment had made for himself in Thazalhar had crumbled. Mimuay’s face haunted him. The mongrel haunted him. The damned witch-queen of Aglarond haunted him. His delicately balanced decision to let Mythrell’aa, Aznar Thrul, and Thrul’s spy master play their bloody games without him had shattered into weak-willed excuses.

  For years he’d been subject to fits of melancholy—the enchanter temperament, some called it; this was different. Lauzoril suspected his thoughts were not entirely his own—the enchanter enchanted. He suspected his beloved daughter, Mimuay; he suspected his daughter’s mysterious friend: Ferrin.

  Gweltaz and Chazsinal roused as Lauzoril unlocked the door at the bottom of the crypt stairs. Their bandages shimmered. Dead eyes followed the hens he held upside down.

  “He brings us supper. Living supper,” Chazsinal crooned.

  “Ignore him. He wants something. Birds are not enough when a mighty zulkir wants. Let him bring us red meat. Living meat, dripping with blood.” Gweltaz closed his eyes.

  “Feed on your dreams, Grandfather,” Lauzoril advised.

  The hens had recovered their wits—such as hens’ wits were—and struggled in his hand. The Zulkir of Enchantment could charm most lesser creatures into obedience, but not hens or sheep. He closed the door and released one hen. Unable to escape, its presence, alive and frantic, would madden Gweltaz. Lauzoril held the other above his father’s linen-wrapped head and with a knife—not Shazzelurt—slit the bird’s throat. Blood pulsed onto the linen and disappeared. When the bird had bled out, he dropped the carcass in Chazsinal’s lap. His father began to feed, the suckling sounds obscured by the other hen’s squawks.

  “How important can a thing be, Grandson, if you’re willing to entrust it to a fool?”

  Lauzoril settled in his chair behind the table. “Important enough that I will not entrust it to one who opposes me at every turn.”

  “I do not oppose you, Grandson. I test you. What else can a patriarch do?”

  “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Someone dead.”

  “Very dead.”

  “Szass Tam,” Chazsinal hissed, irrelevant as always, now that Lauzoril had Gweltaz’s interest.

  The zulkir pursued the hen into a corner, stunned it as before, and held it above his Grandfather’s chair. A luminous golden stalk rose to Lauzoril’s hand. It engulfed the feebly struggling bird and drew it whole within the linen bandages. Gweltaz was the more potent, more inventive of the pair. The zulkir returned to his chair and waited.

  “Who do you seek?”

  “A name. Ferrin.”

  “One of us?”

  “Possibly. He’s dead, that’s all I know for sure. He might have died when we fought the Mulhorandi. He has achieved influence within the estate.”

  Gweltaz made a sound like a purring cat. “Release me. I will find him and bring him here.”

  Lauzoril made a three-fingered gesture. The golden light around his grandfather’s linen flickered twice and was gone.

  “Send me, too, son. I know where to look for cowards.”

  Another three-fingered gesture and Chazsinal was gone as well. Then Lauzoril waited, alone in the dark crypt, while his hungry ancestors hounded one of their own. He thought about Mimuay, about Wenne and his second daughter, Nyasia. How much longer could he keep them safely hidden in Thazalhar? How much longer should he try? Should he go to Aglarond’s Yuirwood in search of power? In his heart, Lauzoril didn’t believe Mythrell’aa was the Simbul’s equal. Certainly Aznar Thrul’s spies and his spy master were no threat to the witch-queen. The Simbul could take care of herself, her realm, and a mongrel boy, if she chose to.

  So, why did he want to go? Why did he hope his ancestors couldn’t find Ferrin or, in finding Ferrin, proved that the dead spirit had nothing to do with Mimuay’s vision or his own disturbed thinking? In the end, how much was his own curiosity about Aglarond’s mighty, Red-Wizard-killing queen? How much was his own yearning to be the hero for his daughter as he had once been the hero for Wenne?

  The zulkir had not resolved anything in his mind when a glow returned to Chazsinal’s chair.

  “Oh, my son,” the dead necromancer moaned. “Oh, my son, it is a terrible thing that you’ve done.”

  “That I’ve done? To send you off in search of a haunt named Ferrin?”

  “Your daughter, Lauzoril. You’re teaching your daughter and you haven’t set the mark on her heart!”

  Before Lauzoril could extract anything further from his distraught father, light swirled around Gweltaz’s linen a
nd, with it, the pale and shrunken spirit of a man. The zulkir expected the spirit of a man his own age or older, cunning, wise, and cruel who’d sensed Mimuay’s talent, then exploited it for his own purposes. What he got was an apprentice, no older than his daughter, who dropped to his insubstantial knees.

  “Mercy, my lord, mercy, I beg you! I would never harm her or you.”

  “He lies,” Gweltaz hissed. “He spies on us. He pursues your precious daughter, mighty zulkir, and fills her silly head with our secrets.” He spoke a necromantic word and Ferrin’s spirit writhed on the crypt floor.

  “How did you find her?” Lauzoril demanded.

  Locked in Gweltaz’s torment, the spirit couldn’t answer.

  “Release him.”

  “He lies, Grandson. He has corrupted your innocent. What more do you need? Let me have him.”

  If Gweltaz had been a little less eager. If Gweltaz had not despised Mimuay as female and weak. If Gweltaz hadn’t been known to lie more often than not himself. “Release him, Grandfather, or I’ll do it for you.”

  Tiny flames sprouted from the zulkir’s fingers: unsubtle reminders of the damage fire could do to linen bandages. Gweltaz retreated. Lauzoril repeated his question to Ferrin.

  “My lord, in the spring, Mimuay found my bones, my skull, and called me back—”

  “Lies!” Gweltaz shouted. “We scour the bones Thazalhar heaves up each spring. He is from outside, Lauzoril. He is from Szass Tam! And you teaching her wizardry, Lauzoril? And she will teach your secrets to Szass Tam!”

  The necromancer surged forward, enveloping Ferrin’s far weaker spirit. Again, Lauzoril called on fire to separate them.

  “She has a gift, my lord,” Ferrin said. “She called me, but she could call others.” By which Ferrin clearly meant the likes of Gweltaz and Chazsinal. “I told her to go to you. That is all I did.”

  “Lies! Lies! The child is as foolish as her idiot mother.”

  Lauzoril considered his grandfather, the spirit Mimuay had called out of an ancient grave and the talent still trapped in Wenne’s clever, crippled mind. “How long have you been able to hear her, Grandfather?”

  The zulkir got his answer, but not from the dead. The wards at the top of the crypt stairway rang like bells, then fell ominously silent.

  Ferrin rose from the floor. “Send her away, my lord. You can, my lord. She is still innocent, my lord. Don’t let her come down here!”

  Ferrin saved himself with that plea, but Lauzoril wouldn’t charm his daughter. He dissolved his wards instead before they did the job they were meant to do and destroyed her.

  “Mindless fool!” Gweltaz roared just before Mimuay came through the crypt door.

  In the moment of confusion, Gweltaz surrounded Ferrin, subsuming the apprentice’s essence. Mimuay let out a scream that began as terror and ended as rage. Lauzoril grabbed her as she started for Gweltaz. His daughter called her friend’s name and fought frantically with heels, elbows, and fingernails that raised bloody welts on her father’s arms.

  Then she stopped and became perfectly still. “He’s gone. Ferrin’s gone.”

  Lauzoril said a single word in Mulhorandi, the language of the Red Wizards’ oldest, darkest magic. He held Mimuay tight, but did not cover her eyes, letting her witness the slow gathering of pinpoint sparks in the center of the crypt. The necromancers pleaded; Lauzoril would have saved Chazsinal—he’d done nothing to deserve the final death, but futility and waste had been the hallmarks of his father’s existence; it was appropriate that they were present when the sparks expanded into an ember sphere that descended on the undead necromancers, consuming every part of them before extinguishing themselves.

  “I regret Ferrin,” Lauzoril said when he and Mimuay were together in the dark.

  His hands were shaking as he pushed his daughter away and made light. Despite the shaking, he was strangely calm. Fifteen years ago, before he brought his father and grandfather to Thazalhar, Lauzoril had memorized the ancient spell that could destroy them. He’d kept it primed all these years. The emptiness in his mind, in the crypt, didn’t seem quite real.

  “Who were they?” Mimuay asked, calm and dry-eyed.

  “Your grandfather and great-grandfather—my father and grandfather. Necromancers. I sent them after Ferrin. He hid from me. You hid him from me.”

  “He was afraid of you. I kept him in my room.”

  Lauzoril nodded and rubbed his chin. “Do you understand what happened here? Why your friend is gone?”

  “You destroyed him, Poppa.”

  “No, Mimuay,” Lauzoril’s voice was very soft, very angry. “I did not; I had decided he was no harm to you or me. Gweltaz, my grandfather, destroyed Ferrin—subsumed him because my concentration faltered and he was able to move freely. My concentration faltered because you battered at my wards and I had a choice: to send you away with magic or dissolve the wards. I’d given you my word I would never touch you with magic. You were where you should not have been, doing what you should not have done. But I kept my word to you. Now do you understand what happened?”

  She said nothing, did nothing except return her father’s stare. Lauzoril couldn’t untangle her thoughts—not without resorting to spellcraft. He could scarcely untangle his own, strung as they were between rage and sorrow.

  “It’s late,” he said when she had said nothing for longer than he could bear listening. He cast the light as a sphere and sent it toward the door. “We’ll talk again later. Not tomorrow or the day after. I’m leaving Thazalhar, Mimuay.”

  “I understand, Poppa.”

  And she might, but Lauzoril didn’t understand her. “I’ll be back, Mimuay. I’m going to the Yuirwood, in Aglarond.”

  24

  The Yuirwood, in Aglarond

  Afternoon and evening, the twenty-third day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)

  With Rizcarn’s return, word had spread among the Cha’Tel’Quessir that they’d be walking tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that. Daytime rest would be infrequent. Nighttime camp would be late and cold. If folk wanted journey bread, they had the rest of day and a night to grind their flour and bake it. A lucky few, the men and women who’d known Rizcarn from before, gathered in the center of the camp to mourn Shali of MightyTree, the mother of Rizcarn’s son. Everyone else, including Chayan of SilverBranch, found a flatish stone and a roundish one, then got down on their knees and began to grind.

  Grinding took the most strength, and the least talent. Mixing flour, leavening, and water, while not unlike combining the reagents for a spell, required a better understanding of cookery than Alassra had bothered to acquire over the centuries, and kneading dough was a mystery she’d never unravelled. So she ground grain throughout the afternoon: wheat and oats from the packs of Cha’Tel’Quessir who traded with farmers beyond the Yuirwood, wild rice and millet other families grew in forest clearings, and ripe nuts that could be knocked loose from nearby trees.

  The Simbul ground whatever they set in front of her until her back muscles screamed. In private, she healed herself, then she ground more, wondering how the men and women who didn’t have a pouchful of magic kept themselves fed. Her hands were another matter. Scraping them bloody as she ground the grain between her two stones was inevitable, and healing them was impossible if she wanted to maintain her disguise.

  By sundown, when the grinding ceased, there was a little bit of Aglarond’s queen in every loaf. She ate her supper—passing on the fresh bread—alone at the edge of the camp, nursing sore fingers, and in a foul mood. Her frayed temper owed more to the weather than her raw knuckles. The wind had shifted to the east—from Thay—hot, heavy, and thick, plastering Alassra’s sweaty skin with bitter dust. It did take a weather-witch to know a storm was coming.

  The moon and stars hid behind a stifling cloud blanket. A few Cha’Tel’Quessir kept their fires burning. The rest let the embers die once the bread was baked. Like Alassra, they sat, alone and still, watching the mourners at the center of t
he camp.

  The Simbul pricked her finger with her drow sister’s knife, adding elven sight to her mage senses. She didn’t like what the night revealed. A silver-green aura flickered around Bro’s father. She expected to see that aura around the ancient trees and mossy menhirs that were the source of the Yuirwood’s protection. She’d never seen it cast by a man—if Rizcarn was a man. Short of seizing him by the shoulders and subjecting him to a wizard’s interrogation, the Simbul couldn’t decide what manner of creature Bro’s father had become.

  He was alive. She’d ascertained that with spells from a distance and by subjecting Bro to an examination of his healed wounds that, not coincidentally, allowed her to get close to Rizcarn. If the man had ever been dead, he’d been brought back a long time ago and brought back by a master. Still, Rizcarn wasn’t like any other living man she’d met. Their eyes had met and, fearing he had the power to see through her Cha’Tel’Quessir disguise, the Simbul had looked away first.

  Alassra couldn’t describe what she’d seen and felt without resorting to the word Stiwelen had used in Everlund: wild. The longer she watched from her safe distance at the camp perimeter, the more she appreciated the Moon elf’s judgment. There was a wildness in the Yuirwood, a wildness in Rizcarn himself, a quality that couldn’t be measured by the civilized words for right or wrong, good or evil.

  As the defender of a small pocket of civilization, Alassra considered putting a stop to Rizcarn and his Cha’Tel’Quessir, but as the Simbul she nurtured a similar wildness close to her heart; she waited and watched.

  Rizcarn’s arms wove the air as he sang a courtship song he must have once sung to Shali. The other Cha’Tel’Quessir in the circle around him couldn’t see the silver-green aura, but they felt the magic—especially Bro, oblivious to the sweat streaming down his face, swaying in rhythm with his father’s arms as he sang the chorus.