Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

“Um,” Canny said. “But it is, though. It’s a fact.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did they choose to make a ‘Repair, Restore’ spell, rather than something else?”

  “I think they hated housework. And their childhood home had been washed away by a flood. They must have wanted something that would last.”

  “It’s not your great-aunties’ spell that’s keeping you prisoner though, is it?”

  “No. My cousins Cyrus and Iris and my brother Lealand made that one.”

  Lealand was his brother. Canny thought of that watchful, saturnine face. Those pouched, faded eyes. “Is he your older brother?”

  “Nine years. Or thirty-nine. Take your pick.”

  “And is the imprisoning spell stronger too?”

  There was a gloating smile in Ghislain’s voice when he answered. “For nearly twenty years Zarenes have had to leave the Valley when they grow into their magic, even if they’ve only a small talent. If they stay, the strong ones lose their magic and get very sick. The weak ones simply fail to thrive. They catch too many colds, or get dental cavities. They lose their hearing and walk with a limp. So, Zarenes come to the valley to learn from Iris and Cyrus and Lealand once they’re school-age, though not all of them; some of their parents hang on and refuse flat-out to send them. Or at least now they do. Now that they’re tired of waiting for a solution to the problem. Iris has been promising a solution for decades, but she hasn’t found one. In fact the problem is worse with each passing year. I ask Cyrus about it when I see him. He hems and haws, but now and then he talks to me.”

  Canny remembered Lonnie Zarene’s miserable hunched figure, standing on the steps of the train. His panic when he realized his tattoo meant nothing to the guard.

  She picked up Ghislain’s right arm, pushed up his sleeve, and turned his tattoo to the candlelight. Lonnie had three ideograms. So did Cyrus. Bonnie had two, the little children only one. Ghislain had four.

  Canny touched the blue-black marks. “Is each of these the name of a form of the Alphabet?”

  “You’re so clever,” Ghislain said, pained, as if she was pinching him. “Where did that come from?”

  “You mean because I’m not a Zarene?”

  “Yes.”

  “What a snob,” she said. Then, “My mother is very clever, but mostly she uses it to manage people. Not nicely either. She is like a big cat with a nest of little mice. The way in which she’s most clever is that she remembers absolutely everything that people say.”

  “What’s that like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it must be tough having a mother like that. Is she scarier than Iris?”

  Canny remembered that Iris Zarene also had four marks on her right arm. “There are four types of the Zarene magic and you’ve only told me about three of them,” she said.

  “I told you about the great-aunties. They had the fourth kind. Found magic.”

  “Yes. But you want to find your Master Rune. You haven’t already found it. And yet you have four marks.”

  Ghislain studied his own arm. “Well,” he said, and then didn’t say anything else.

  “Well, what?”

  He sighed. “I don’t want to tell you. After all, I’m not being kept prisoner just because the rest of my family are brutes.”

  She seized his arm again and held it still, raised between them. “Is the reason you’re being kept prisoner to do with why you have four marks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Iris has four marks.”

  “Yes, she does.”

  “And she’s not being kept prisoner.”

  “No, she isn’t.”

  Canny shook him. “Tell me,” she said.

  “No.” Then, “Don’t grind your teeth, you might chip them.”

  “All right—tell me where the magic comes from.”

  Ghislain reared back to get a better look at her.

  “Don’t look so surprised. It’s not really a surprising question. The magic is a kind of energy. An energy that is systematic. Either that, or it’s a system for controlling energy. It’s like the relationship mathematics has to the rules of the universe—but mathematics is only descriptive, whereas the magic is instructive.”

  “You’re good at mathematics—I remember that.”

  Canny sighed. “I’ve early entry into a postgraduate university mathematics course, though I have to do a degree too, in other things. When I was fifteen I invented a logarithm that people are now using in cartography. I wrote a paper about it with a mathematician from Castlereagh University. Both our names are on the paper. It was published in the Journal of Applied Mathematics. Everybody knows that math is my thing. They’ve built a little fence around me with a label—Genius Mathematicus—and a reminder about not feeding the animals.” She seethed. She was always being made to feel exceptional, and misshapen.

  She had stiffened and moved away from him. He remained still and listened, then said, “You have a horrible talent.” He sounded more thoughtful than hostile.

  Canny rolled over and curled up, let him have her bony spine. She tried to quell the tremor in her voice. “I know what I’m like. Don’t think you’re telling me something that hasn’t been impressed on me—forcefully—by teachers, and snotty boys, and nasty girls, and even my own mother. I have a great talent with limited usefulness, and it is ‘unbecoming.’” She used one of her mother’s words. Her mother would say, “Don’t interrupt. Don’t talk out of turn. Don’t straddle that chair. Don’t raise your voice. Don’t show off. It’s unbecoming.”

  Ghislain went on being mean, in a musing way. “But you’re generally very clever too, aren’t you? Sly, like your mother?”

  Canny wiped her eyes. She would stop crying. She wanted to shout at a whole lot of people, “See, I can cry!” But more than that she wanted to stop crying.

  Ghislain went on. “You have more rat-cunning than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s a kind of strength. And it makes me hopeful. It is warming somehow. And you keep making me laugh. Your brain is so surprising. I’m talking to you, and walking in step with you, then it’s as if you vanish and reappear several steps ahead of me. It’s exciting!”

  Canny sniffed (unbecomingly) and sat up. She said, “I thought you were being mean to me.”

  He eased up too and took her hands, and they stayed like that for a time, hands twined, leaning on the bed’s carved, be-spelled, headboard.

  Ghislain was so right about her. She was sly. She’d been manipulating Sholto all week, and she should be ashamed. But the more she stood back and studied people’s feelings, and played on them, juggling others’ ideas about how people should behave and feel—understanding the ideas, but not behaving or feeling the way other people did—the more she did that, the stronger she felt. “We’re both bad people,” she said cheerfully.

  He laughed. “I wish you could stay with me so we could be bad people together.”

  “But—” she said.

  “You don’t belong here, Canny. And I’m going to go off on my desperate quest.”

  Canny bent her face into his neck and nuzzled him.

  “I’m afraid for you,” he said. “You need to go.”

  “But I can stay,” she said, then remembered Marli again.

  Ghislain was shaking his head. The sparse two-day-old stubble on the underside of his chin sandpapered her brow. “The longer you stay the deeper in the magic you’ll get; then, when you do have to leave, the more you’ll lose. The magic is fundamental to you. It’s instinctive. It’s tied up with your other talents, like math, and I’m scared that, the longer you stay, when you do finally go and the magic retracts from you and goes back into the imprisonment spell, it’ll pull out some of your strength and vitality.”

  “I want to stay,” she said. “But I have a friend I can’t leave. At least not forever.”

  “Marli.”

  “Yes.” Canny had another sober thought. She’d hoped to use the magic to do something for Marli. But she
couldn’t bring Marli to the Zarene Valley, and the magic couldn’t leave it. “Oh, what’s the use?” she said to herself.

  “Does your friend have family, and other friends?” Ghislain asked.

  “Yes.” Unlike Ghislain, Marli wasn’t wholly alone. Marli would miss Canny, but she had her big brother and little brothers, her mother and father and uncles and aunties and cousins. Canny said, “I should just decide that I’m going to stay with you. But you’re not going to give up your plan to abandon your body, are you?”

  “I could postpone it for as long as you stay,” Ghislain said, tentative.

  “Then I’d always have that hanging over me. I’d know that, as soon as I was gone, you’d climb into your sarcophagus.”

  “That’s another good name for it,” Ghislain said. “My Spell Cage.” He sighed. “I know it’s too much to ask—for you to stay. But you know, Canny, you’re not supposed to think it all through. You’re supposed to be swept away by romance, not coolly examine the problem from all angles.”

  “I can’t help it. And it’s not as if we can just carry on like we’ve never met.”

  “No. That would be irrational,” Ghislain said, straight-faced.

  She slid down the bed again and rested her head against his hip. She said, “I just do think. I’m sorry.” She was very tired. She’d be even more tired tomorrow. Then, “But it is tomorrow,” she thought. She closed her eyes and saw the smashed plate come together, then fly apart, as if it were an opening valve. She fell through the space between the jagged white teeth of broken crockery. She landed, and jolted awake. She made a little grunt as if someone had punched her. The candle was an inch shorter. “What time is it?”

  “About three.”

  Sholto had said he’d get her up at seven-thirty. She moaned.

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “I mustn’t.”

  He leaned over her and kissed her hair, and then her mouth. His hand cupped her bent knee, then slid slowly to the back of her thigh. For a moment she was only there in those two places, mouth and thigh, where he was touching. She was there and she wasn’t Canny Mochrie, who was unbecoming. She was alive now. Now, now, now.

  But he stopped caressing her, and when she looked at his troubled, reluctant face she saw he was being sensible and that it was difficult for him. He drew back.

  “No. No,” she said, reaching.

  He caught her hands, and said, “You wanted to know where the magic comes from?”

  She did want that. And she wanted to be kissed. Two very different sorts of satisfaction. She heard raindrops ticking on the window glass, but she didn’t want to listen to that. Didn’t want to imagine the slippery mud of the pig path, or how wet she’d be by the time she got to the foot of the hill.

  Ghislain took a breath and began: “The Zarenes were one of the five Ephrun families who ended their long wandering in Southland. The island of Ephrus was destroyed by a volcanic eruption in—do you know this?”

  “1715.”

  “And the people of Ephrus arrived in Southland?”

  “1730. I’m good at dates too. Sholto is always telling me snootily that history isn’t all dates.”

  “No, it’s currants and raisins too.”

  Canny laughed.

  “I think I’m not going to like your stepbrother.”

  “He’d hate you,” Canny said, with satisfaction.

  “And what did the people of Ephrus bring with them to Southland?”

  “I hope you’re not going to test me all the way through telling me this,” she said, then gave the answer. “The people of Ephrus brought the bones of St. Lazarus. They’re kept in a jeweled casket behind the altar of the temple in Founderston.”

  “They brought the bones of St. Lazarus—and a song the saint heard when he was in his first tomb.”

  Canny stared at Ghislain. He reached out and gently closed her gaping mouth.

  “A song made up of words in demotic Greek, and an unknown tongue.”

  “All right,” said Canny, drawing out the words.

  Ghislain told her that she shouldn’t start from a point of skepticism. Then he turned his head and stared intently at the window. The sash slid smoothly up. The lace curtains stirred inward, and Canny heard the rain falling softly on the veranda’s tile roof. Ghislain turned back to her. “Just to remind you how real the magic is.” Then, “You said it must come from somewhere. Why not from God?”

  Canny frowned.

  “Don’t you believe in God?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “My mother does. I used to go to church with her. Now I go for the Sunday morning services at the hospital. There is one at ten a.m. on Marli’s ward. Marli believes in God, and I’ve prayed for her, many times.”

  “Lazarus heard a song in his tomb. He remembered it in his second life. After the crucifixion, he left Palestine and settled on the island of Ephrus. He married, had a family, and taught his children the song. They taught their children. After fifteen hundred years everyone on the island was a descendant of Lazarus. They all knew about the song, and some had memorized it. Those who could repeat it word perfect could somehow use it. John Hame, who led the survivors from the island after the volcanic eruption, used the song to make a creature out of volcanic ash and mud. Hame’s creature helped him excavate the caves on the island where people had hidden, and the ruined chapel where the bones were.” Ghislain glanced at her. “Do you believe me? You must, after everything you’ve seen with your own eyes.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “A language that doesn’t just describe nature but commands it is one thing, an animated mud man is quite another.”

  “That would be found magic. My fourth mark stands for found magic. John Hame called a mighty spirit—he found it—and he put it into an earth puppet and taught that puppet to be human enough to help him. Hame animated the earth. The song is a reanimation spell, but we’ve always thought it works with time too. Our Savior didn’t just recall Lazarus’s soul to his body, he moved Lazarus’s body back to when it was still alive. Or reached back in time and pulled the body’s life forward. It’s impossible to say which. But the song is all ‘hear you me’ and ‘rise up!’ And ‘be as you were.’ Those are the magic’s core utterances, which is why the house’s ‘Be as you were’ is so strong, backed up by Rowan and Joanne’s Master Runes, their never-dying whole selves. But, if you take Lazarus’s song apart, its parts can be used for almost anything. So—that’s where the Zarene magic comes from. Only it isn’t sounds, like the song.”

  * * *

  IN THE EARLY DAYS OF SOUTHLAND—GHISLAIN said—when the people from Ephrus had settled on the damp streets on the east bank of the Sva, there was a woman called Geli Zarene. She was the only daughter of a prosperous baker. Geli Zarene had a strange mind. “I don’t know whether you know this, but there are people in the world with a very odd gift, one that looks like crossed wires. These people firmly believe that every number has a color, and every color has a smell, and every smell has a sound, and every sound a shape. They have strange insights, and strange irritations. They are bedeviled by unintended connections and meanings. Someone tells them a birth date and blue fog bursts around their heads. Most of it is like that—pretty pointless, just unmeant meanings. Imagine a straightforward thing like a price tag coming with lots of sensory information. One dollar fifty equals brown-orange. It’s a silly way to experience the world, and Geli Zarene was having a pretty silly, overstimulated life. Then some elder taught her the Lazarus song. And every sound, every one of those unknown words, came to her as a figure, a glyph. And that’s where the Alphabet came from. It’s Geli Zarene’s alphabet. Everything that entered the magic later was found by twins who could anchor one another and leave their bodies.”

  Canny said, “You mentioned a Hame. The dreamhunter…”

  “Yes. I’m sure none of that was a coincidence. But by the time Tziga Hame came along, the Zarenes had left Founderston and settled here. We made magical wards to keep the
other four families out, or at least warn us if they trespassed. One of the other families was up to something evil, and the Zarenes had packed up and fled. The ward-makers were twins too, by the way, Aron and Elek Zarene. Their headstones are in the graveyard, if you want to verify at least that bit of my story.”

  Canny said she hadn’t looked at the valley’s graveyard.

  “The wards must be pretty weak by now,” Ghislain said, musing.

  “So that’s why Iris asks all her guests questions about their ancestors before she lets them sign the register,” Canny said. “She’s trying to weed out any direct descendants of the other four families. She looked very strict when my brother said his mother was a Tiebold. Iris said, ‘Not those Tiebolds who married Hames?’”

  “So that’s how they do it now. I didn’t know,” Ghislain said. “The wards were still working in 1929.”

  Canny remembered then that she’d seen the Zarene Alphabet melting like fire in the dark air after something had knocked her down in a farm paddock on the far side of the Palisades. She gripped Ghislain’s arm. She told him about that night and what had happened to her. She said, “That means I’m one of them, doesn’t it?”

  “A Hame, Magdolen, Vale, or Eucharis? Possibly. But your name is Mochrie, and your mother is a Shackle Islander.”

  “And my father was American, I believe. A marine who died at Tarawa.”

  “Named?”

  “Creech, I think. He never knew about me.”

  “Having a grandparent who was a Hame, Magdolen, Vale, or Eucharis wouldn’t be enough to get you knocked down.”

  “But, Ghislain, the magic isn’t blood, it’s knowledge. How could the wards know what anyone was?”

  “It’s blood and knowledge. Not because it is in our blood, but because the ward is made out of the magic, and the magic has something to do with time, and the magic recognizes something coming all the way down from Lazarus. A bit of time set aside by the song, or by Our Savior, or by God. The bit where Lazarus was dead. It’s recognizing the four days that were taken back. It’s recognizing the thing that happened and was undone. I’m pretty sure that’s what the ward is made to sense.”