by Jo Clayton
“… “
“Probably asleep. *** says she’s here.” Why can’t I hear that name? That’s the second time it’s blurred out on me. Someone is interfering, someone is working against me. He slapped his hand on the table, calmed abruptly as his heart started bumping irregularly. He closed his fingers about the talisman and squeezed until his body calmed and he could listen again. “… room was. Maybe you better do the talking. Ask about a white-haired woman with two children.’
“… “
“Yes, but I don’t know if she’s using it.-
“… “
“No, don’t talk about it, not now.”
Maksim stopped listening. He stroked the talisman, closed his eyes and reached for her intending to flip her back to the Hostel garden.
He couldn’t get a grip on her. What should have been simple was somehow impossible. He could feel her, he could smell her, he could almost taste the salt sweat on her skin but he couldn’t move her a hair one way or another. His eyes snapped open. “That man. That stinking scurvy scrannel scouring of a leprous dam. That canker, that viper, that concupiscent incontinent defiler of innocence, that eyesore, that offence to heaven and earth…” He blasted out a long sigh that fogged the mirror for an instant until he glared it clear again. Rubbing at his chest, he went back to listening since he couldn’t do anything else.
“.… come from, Daniel, are there girls like that?”
“… “
“What do you do to the ones you catch.”
“… “
She closed her mouth tight and flounced away, heading for the stairs, irritated by whatever it was he said. Maksim gave her a thin angry smile. That’s right, get away from him, girl. He’s not for you. When she’d put some distance between her and the man (he was getting up to go after her), Maksim tried once more to catch hold of her, but he couldn’t get a grip, she slid away as if she were greased. He, sat fuming, breathing hard; he couldn’t remember being so helpless since he was a boy in the pleasurehouse he’d stomped into the ground when he took Silagamatys and Cheonea from crazy old Noshios, His head ached and acid burned in his throat as he watched the girl and the man pass through Ahzurdan’s wards and vanish into that blank he couldn’t penetrate. He spent a few minutes probing at it again, if the man really was an energy sink, he ought to affect Ahzurdan’s work too. Nothing. Not a waver in Baby Dan’s weaving.
Maksim left the image tuned to the tavern and paced about the workroom muttering to himself, glancing occasionally at the mirror where nothing much was happening. He thought about sending his watchers to that room and taking them all, he thought about turning out the barracks, sending every man he had against them until they were drowned in dead men, unable to twitch a finger. N0000, Forty Bloody Mortal Hells, Danny Blue, had found some nerve, the woman of course, and Danny with nerve and resolution was by himself more than an army could handle. Amortis? He fingered BinYAHtii and was tempted but shook his head. Not here. Not in MY city. If he brought Amortis down, Tungjii and the Godalau were likely to join the battle and that would level half of Silagamatys. They’re in the plot on the Drinker’s side, AND WARNING ME, otherwise why show themselves to that man, that MAAAANN. Who was he? What was he? Filthy whiskery caitiff wretch, looked like any drifting layabout, he’d seen a thousand of them rotting slowly into the soil they sprang from. Soil he sprang from? What soil was that? Pulled here from a different reality? Why? What reality?
He stopped pacing and stared at nothing for several minutes, then tapped the mirror off, he didn’t need to see any more and he wanted his strength and total concentration for the next few hours’ work. He swung round to Todichi. Yahzi. “Todich, old friend, you’d best get back to your overseeing. Mmm. Report to me tomorrow after the Lot on the activities of the Council, I’d like your opinion on how well they’re doing and what the weaknesses of the form are, your suggestions on how I can improve it. Don’t let up on them, these next weeks are crucial, Todich. If I can get that council working, if I can craft something that will stand, no matter what the Parastes try…” He sucked in a huge breath, exploded it out. “Ready, Todich? Now!”
After alerting the guardians of that sealed cube of a room (sealed against magic, not air; like everyone else, sorcerors had to breathe), Maksim toed up the brake levers on the wheels of his tiltchair and rolled it to the center of his largest pentacle. When he had it oriented the way he wanted, he heeled the levers down again, stood rubbing thoughtfully at his chest and stared at nothing for a moment. With a grunt and a grimace he crossed to a wallchest, filled a cordial glass with a thick bitter syrup and choked it down, washed the taste away with a gulp of brandy. For several breaths he stood with his head against the door of the cabinet, his hands grasping the edge of the shelf below it, his powerful massive arms stiff, supporting most of the weight of his upper body, trembling now and then. Finally, he sighed and pushed away from the wall. There was no time. No time. He brushed his hand across his face, felt the end of his plait tickle his fingers. He pulled the skewers out, shook his head, looked down at himself and smiled. Not the way to confront the visitor he expected to have.
He slipped out of the workrobe, tossed it onto the tiltchair and padded across the cold stone floor to the place where he kept spare clothing. He drew a simple white linen robe over his head, smoothed it down and with a flick of his fingertips banished the creases from its long folding. There were no ties or fastenings, the wide flat collar fell softly about the column of his neck, the front opening spread in a narrow vee, showing glimpses of the heavy gold chain and a segment of the pendant BinYAHtii. He drew his hand across his face, wiping away the signs of weariness and the few straggles of whisker, smoothed straying hairs into place, pulled the black workrobe about him and dug out his rowan staff; he’d made it nearly a century ago, when he was out of his apprenticeship a mere two years, tough ancient wood polished with much handling, inlaid with silver wire in the private symbols that he alone could read. He laid it across the arms of the tiltchair, then went for a broom standing in the corner. There were four smaller pentacles at irregular intervals about the large one, marked out with fine silver wire laid into the stone; stepping into the pentacle the chair faced, Maksim swept it very clean, ran the broom over it one last time, then tapped the circled star into glowing life with the end of his staff. He swept off the larger pentacle until he was satisfied, put the broom back in the corner and crossed the silver wire to stand beside the chair. His massive chest rose and fell in an exaggerated sigh, then he tapped this pentacle into life, settled himself on the cushions and laid his staff once more across the arms. Reaching down past it, he pumped the lever until the chair was laid out under him, his back at a thirty degree angle to the floor. He closed his hands about the staff, closed his eyes and began assembling his arsenal of chants and gestures.
Aboard the JIVA MARISH, this is what Ahzurdan said to Brann: Magic words, magic chants, magic gestures, oh Brann, these are part of the storyteller’s trade, they’ve got nothing to do with what a sorceror is or does. Look at me, I say: JIIH JAAH JAH and move my hands so and so, and lo, I give you a rosebud wet with morning dew. Yes, it’s real, perfume and all. Yes, I merely transported it from a garden some way west of here where the sun’s not shining yet, I didn’t create it from nothing. I could teach you to mimic my voice, there’s not that great a difference between our ranges, I could teach you to ape my gestures to perfection, and do you know what you’d have? Nothing.
A sorceror works by will alone, or rather by will and word and gesture. The words and gestures are meaningless, developed by each student from his own private set of symbols, sounds and movements that evoke in him the particular mindstate and pattern of will he needs to perform specific acts of power. What you learn when you’re an apprentice is how to find these things and how to control the results. Then you learn how to use them to impress the clients. Among ourselves, we know that none of the words and gestures belonging to one of us could be used by another, at least not
to produce the same effect. There is no power inherent in any word or sequence of words, in any sound or sequence of sounds, in any gesture or sequence of gestures; they are only self-made keys to areas of the will.
Ah yes, I know, claimants to mystical power have roamed the world from the time the moon was whole to this very day selling books of such spells and chants and sacred dances and charms and potions and all that nonsense, making far more gold from talentless gullibles than they’d ever gain from their own gifts, there’s always someone fool enough to want a shortcut to wealth and power, or even to a woman he has no chance of getting at, someone who’d never believe the truth, that everything a sorceror does is won out of self by talent and arduous study and ferocious discipline. That’s the truth, Brann, almost all the truth. I say almost, because there are the talismans. No one knows what they really are, only what they look like and how they might be used. There’s Shaddalakh which is said to be something like a spotted sanddollar made of porcelain; there’s Klukesharna which was melted off a meteor and cooled in the shape of a clumsy key; there’s Frunzacoache which looks exactly like a leaf off a berryvine, but it never withers; there’s BinYAHtii which looks like a rough circle of the darkest red sandstone; there’s Churrikyoo which looks like a small glass frog, rather battered and chipped and filled with thready cracks. There are more, said to be an even dozen of them, but I don’t know the rest. All of them mean power to their holder, you notice I don’t say owner, it takes a strong will to wield them and not be destroyed, they’re as dangerous as they are tempting. No, I don’t have a talisman and I don’t want one. I don’t want power over other men, I simply want to be left alone so I can earn a living doing things I enjoy doing. There’s intense satisfaction in using one’s talents, Brann. (He looked startled, as if he hadn’t connected his skills with her potting before this moment.) Was it that way with you, making your um pots?
Before Maksim began calling up consultants, he focused his will on the little he could make out of the man, two arms, two legs, a common sort of face, two blurs for eyes, a smear for a mouth and some sort of nose, a darkness about the lower face that looked like beard stubble, reddish brown skin, at least where the sun had touched him, though he showed a bit of paler skin when his shirt had moved aside, that time he slapped down the drunks attacking the girl. Looked bald on top, though that was more a guess than something Maksim saw clearly. He wore trousers and a shirt and a long sleeveless vest with many pockets that looked like they were sewn shut with heavy metallic thread, it didn’t seem logical but he kept the impression, it was a detail and every detail helped. Sandals, not boots. Maksim smiled to himself, the odd man had risked his toes, kicking the fundament of that chunky drunk; for an instant he lost some of his rancor toward him. But that was very much beside the point, a distraction, so he put emotion and image aside and focused more intently on the man himself, assembling a schematic of him he could used to direct his search through his index of realities.
He triggered the flow and the images began flipping before his mind’s eye. The world of the tigermen, hot steamy deeply unstable; the place (one couldn’t call it a world in almost any sense of that word) where the ariels swam along currents of not-air swirling about not-suns; the tangle of roots and branches that filled the whole of a pocket reality where he’d plucked forth the treeish and sent them after Brann, one immense plant with its attendant parasites and detachable branches; reality after reality, all different yet all the same in the power that thrummed through them, all these demon realities passed by without stopping, identified by the symbols he’d given them when he’d discovered them and explored their possibilities. A dance of shifting symbols, one flowing into the other, the whole dazzle a key to HIM; if an outsider could read them and follow their shifts he would know him to the marrow of his bones. That outsider would have to BE Settsimaksimin to read the symbols, and being him would not need to read them.
The demon worlds passed swiftly because they had no affinity with the pattern Maksim presented as key, but there were other realities he’d discovered, other realities he could reach into, one of them that busy place he’d snatched Todichi Yahzi from. Realities without magic in them, or at least without the kind of magic he could tap into, and therefore of no interest to him. Three of that sort of reality resonated with the oddman’s pattern; he tagged these and went on searching the index until he reached the limits of his explorations. He hadn’t sent his shamruz body searching for decades, it took too much energy, too much time, it was a luxury he couldn’t afford when he already had more power sources and demon pits that he needed. When he had to acknowledge that his body and the energy it contained, out of which he worked, was slowly and inexorably failing. So he left off searching and did not bother exploring the non-magical realities since there was nothing for him there. More than that, unlike the demon realities, those were immense beyond even his ability to comprehend. Immense in size and immensely various in their parts. He was uncomfortable there, reduced to a mote of spectacular unimportance; which was hardly an inducement to spend what he could no longer replace unless he had a need no other sort of reality would or could fill, Todichi Yahzi being one example of such a need.
He entered the first of these universes, set his construct of the oddman before him and swooped between the stars following the guide on a twisty path that set his immaterial head spinning. He visited one world after another, watched folk going about their business, they looked very much like the peasants and shopkeepers and traders in Cheonea and sometimes he understood what they were doing, the goods they were selling but not often, mostly their deeds were as incomprehensible as their words; even though he knew what the words were supposed to mean, he didn’t have the referents to make sense of what those folk found perfectly sensible. The guide construct was wobbling uncertainly with no evident goal, he wasn’t learning anything and he felt himself tiring, so he withdrew, rested a moment, then visited the second of the realities. Here the guide construct waffled aimlessly about with even less direction than before. Angry and weary, Maksim broke off the search and tried the third.
This time the pull was galvanic; the construct whipped immediately to a world swimming in the light of a greenish sun; it hovered over a stretch of what looked like seamless dusty granite spread over an area twice the size of Silagamatys. There were the mosquitolike machines on one part of it; on another, one of the metal pods these folk drove somehow between worlds, a huge hole gaping in its side. A tall bony blond woman with a set angry face snapped out orders to a collection of four-armed reptilians using peculiar motorized assists to load crates and bundles on noisy carts that went by themselves up long latticed ramps and vanished inside the, pod; now and then she muttered furious asides to the short man beside her.
“No, no, not that one, the numbers are on them, you can read, can’t you?” Aside to her companion, “If that scroov shows his face round my ship again, I’ll skin him an inch at a time and feed it to him broiled.”
The bony little man scratched his three fingers through a spongy growth that covered most of his upper body; he blinked several times, shrugged and said nothing.
“Sssaah!” She darted to the loaders, cursed in half a dozen languages, waved her arms, made the workers reload the last cart. Still furious, she stalked back to where she’d been standing. “Danny Blue, you miserable druuj, I’ll pull your masters rating this time, I swear I will, this is the last time you walk out on me or anyone else.”
“Blue wants, Blue walks,” the man murmured. “Done it before, ‘11 do ‘t again.”
“Hah! Mouse, if you’re so happy with him, you go help Sandy stow the cargo.”
“I don’t do boxes.”
She glared at him, but throttled back the words that bulged in her throat, stalked off and spent the rest of the time Maksim watched inspecting the carts as they rolled past her and rushing over to the loaders to stop and reorder what they were doing.
Maksim opened his eyes, ran his tongue along his lips;
for several moments he lay relaxed in the chair breathing slowly and steadily; he licked his lips again and managed a smile. “Danny Blue. An analog with you, Baby Dan? Odder and odder.” He stroked long tapering fingers over the staff, knowing every bump and hollow and nailmark, taking comfort in that ancient familiarity. “If she was a shipmaster here, I’d say Danny Two was cargomaster and she’s fussing about him going off and leaving her to do the stowing. Sounds like he makes a habit of it, disappearing on his obligations to go off and do what he wants. A pillar of milk pudding when it comes to providing support. Why him? Who’d be such a fool as to bring THAT MAN here? Forty Mortal Hells, what good is a twitchy cargomaster to the Drinker of Souls? Who’s in this idiotic conspiracy?” A quick unhappy halfsmile, then he pushed himself up and levered the chair to vertical so it supported his back and head and his feet were planted firmly on the footboard. He was wearier than he’d expected to be and that worried him. The Lot’s tomorrow, he thought, just as well. His stomach knotted, but he forced the misery away. Children die; children always die, they starved by the hundreds when the Parastes and their puppet king ran Cheonea, they died of filth and overwork, they died in the pleasurehouses and under the whips of those fine lords. What’s the death of one child compared to the hundreds I’ve made healthier and happier? It was an old argument, he felt deeply that it was a true argument, but when he took the child who drew the gold lot to Deadfire Island, the child who was miserable at leaving his parents and excited about seeing the marvels of the Grand Yron in the holy city Havi Kudush deep in the heart of Phras, when he took that child and fed his life (or hers) to BinYAHtii, he found his rationalizations hard to remember.