Night of Madness loe-7

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “I know,” Isia said with another sigh. “You’ve been very sweet, Fari-except for pushing me out of bed just now.”

  “And I’m very sorry about that. Blame whatever ghost or demon sent me that nightmare, and forgive me, please.”

  She bent over and kissed him on the forehead. “Of course,” she said. Then she reached for her shift, and this time pulled it over her head. Faran took a moment to light a bedside lamp-he kept a sorcerous sparker handy, far easier than an ordinary tinderbox and quicker than calling a servant. The wick caught quickly, and he turned it up, filling the room with the yellow glow of burning oil. Then he turned back to Isia. He watched her dress, pretending his attention was entirely on her beauty and his affection for her.

  Now, why did she think he had shoved her? He hadn’t touched her; he was quite sure of it. He had been leaning on one elbow, and his other hand at his throat, trying to control his coughing; he could not possibly have shoved her.

  A kick would have been physically possible, but a look at the bedclothes convinced him that he had not unconsciously kicked her; his feet were still tucked neatly under the snug coverlet.

  Isia was not clumsy, though-at least, he had never seen her do anything else clumsy in the four days he had known her, nor had she seemed inclined to fancies or delusions. On general principles he avoided bedding women whose grasp on reality seemed less than solid, and Isia had shown none of the warning signs he had learned to recognize.

  So perhapssomething had shoved her out of bed. He had already concluded his rapidly fading nightmare had been magical in origin; might there have been other magic at work? A ghost, a demon, a sprite of some kind?

  There had been no other manifestation, though.

  Once Isia had her shift in place she crossed the room to the bench where she had draped her skirt.

  Faran tried to remember exactly what had been happening when Isia found herself propelled from her place. She had been lying on her belly, propped up on her elbows; he had been on his back, on one elbow, his right hand at his throat. He had tried to wave her away with his left hand, as he had not wanted her touching him...

  He remembered his desire to keep her away, and the helplessness of the coughing fit, and the strange images of the dream, and then he remembered something else.

  He had done something, drawn something from the dream. He could recall the sensation, though he could not find words to describe it.

  He looked at Isia as she tugged her skirt into place, and he tried to recapture that sensation while somehow reaching out for the hem of her skirt. He felt the space between them, perceiving it in a way he never had before, saw the nature of the skirt’s shape, and tried to alter it...

  The silk suddenly hitched up over her left knee, exposing a shapely calf. She brushed it back down apparently without noticing anything out of the ordinary.

  Faran tried again, this time lifting the back of the skirt slowly— from across the room, a good ten feet away. He let it drop before she noticed.

  Was it something about Isia, then? He concentrated his attention on one of his own shoes, cast aside in a corner.

  It slid out into the room, then rose into the air. He lifted it to a height of four feet or so, then slowly lowered it back to the floor. Isia, struggling into her satin tunic, didn’t see a thing.

  A moment later Isia blew him a kiss and slipped out of the room, closing the door gently behind her.

  Lord Faran lay in the bed, but did not put out the lamp or go back to sleep. Instead he mostly stared at the ceiling thinking, his thoughts interrupted only by brief experiments with his newfound ability.

  He could lift or slide anything he could see, he discovered, though only up to roughly the size and weight of a grown man— the wardrobe against the far wall did not budge. He could see the shape of the space between himself and the wardrobe, but could not force it to change as he could with smaller objects. He could also, he found, control the size, brightness, and temperature of the lamp’s flame.

  This was magic, beyond question.

  But what kind of magic? And how had he acquired it?

  It wasn’t anything he immediately recognized, and he had been studying magic for years. It bore a resemblance to witchcraft, in that witches could also move small objects without touching them, but it somehow didn’t feel like the witchcraft he had observed in the past.

  The Wizards’ Guild forbade any use of wizardry by any nobleman and frowned upon the idea ofany sort of magic in the hands of nobles-or for that matter, any part of the city government of Ethshar of the Spices or any other government. No ruler or administrator or magistrate, hereditary or otherwise, was permitted to learn magic, and no one who had served an apprenticeship in magic was permitted to hold any governmental position of authority. Magicians hired as magicians were allowed, such as the wizards who purified the canals or the theurgists who made certain that witnesses told the truth in criminal proceedings, but not magicians who made decisions about the city’s workings. The Wizards’ Guild was quite unreasonably insistent on these rules. People who defied the edicts of the Wizards’ Guild had a tendency to die suddenly and horribly. Even if they acquiesced quickly, they suffered lesser, though still unpleasant, fates.

  But what about this magic? Azrad VI, overlord of Ethshar of the Spices and triumvir of the Hegemony of Ethshar, had named Lord Faran as his senior counselor, and as such Faran was forbidden to work any magic himself, and instead hired magicians as he might need them in the course of his duties — but now Faran seemed to have come into possession of a mysterious magical power through no act of his own. How would the Wizards’ Guild react to that? Surely, they could not blame him for this accident!

  It was so very appropriate that he had received this, after all the years of studying magic he was forbidden to use. He had looked for loopholes in the Guild’s rules, and now a loophole had foundhim. The Guild couldn’t blame him for that!

  Then he frowned. No, they wouldn’t blame him. They would acknowledge he hadn’t done anything to cause it.

  But they might well kill him anyway.

  The Wizards’ Guild had never shown any great interest in fairness, after all-they wanted their edicts obeyed, and they really weren’t especially interested in equity or justice or motivation, just obedience. Faran knew that well. He had his own theories about what the Wizards’ Guilddid want, but he was quite certain it wasn’t justice. He would keep his abilities secret, then. That would make it more difficult to learn exactly what they were or where they came from...

  Faran had gotten that far in his thoughts when the noises from beyond his window finally penetrated his consciousness-shouting, screaming, thumpings, and hangings.

  It was the middle of the night, he thought; what was going on out there beyond the canal? Curious, he rose and crossed to the window, opened the curtains, and looked out.

  “Gods and demons,” he muttered as he took in the scene.

  His room was on the third floor of the overlord’s Palace, at the east end, with a view across the East Branch of the Grand Canal into the tangled streets of the Old City. Since most of the structures in that ancient warren were only one or two stories, and some were half-sunken into the mud, he could look out across the entire Old City into Fishertown.

  Now, as he looked out at that panorama, he could see a dozen buildings ablaze, scattered across the city. He could see figures in the streets, standing, running-and flying, and the airborne figures were not wearing wizards’ robes, nor carrying any visible magical apparatus, not even the traditional wizard’s dagger.

  Most of the flying shapes seemed to be moving northward, high and very fast, out across the Gulf of the East, but others were down near street level and were going in various directions about the city.

  He could see other things floating or flying as well-wagons, silver plate, gold coins. Broken glass was strewn all over the streets of the Old City.

  And he was fairly certain he saw at least one corpse lying in the street
amid the glass.

  This was unquestionably serious trouble. He would be needed soon in his official capacity; reports would be reaching the Palace. The city guards would want instructions; the overlord would probably be awakened and want an explanation. He had to get downstairs at once.

  And why, he asked himself as he hurried to his dressing room, had he ever thoughtonly he had received this mysterious magical power?

  Chapter Four

  At the same instant that Lord Hanner stumbled on the streets of Newmarket, and the same instant that Lord Faran sat up in bed and began coughing, Varrin the Weaver awoke suddenly in his third-floor bedchamber atop his workshop-home in the Seacorner district of Ethshar of the Spices. He awoke gasping for air. He had dreamed he was wrapped in his own cloth, buried in thick, heavy wool, trapped under tons of material after falling through a hundred miles of impossibly fine lace that had shredded as he fell through it, shredded and burned around him.

  He awoke in darkness as complete and black as in his dream and he pushed out in all directions, with arms and legs-and with something that had never been there before, something that let him see and feel the walls of his little garret despite the darkness, something that let him push at those walls...

  And burst them outward, snapping oaken beams like sticks of kindling, shattering plaster into white powder. Its support removed, the roof fell in on him and his wife.

  And he caught it, before it reached his upraised hands, caught it and held it.

  Then he froze, finally awake enough to realize what was happening. He could feel the night air blowing in where the walls had been; he could hear the distant rattle of wreckage and broken furniture bouncing from the awnings and overhangs and falling to the street. He could hear distant screams. He could feel the mass of the roof, pressing down harmlessly on something he couldn’t describe, and even over the screams and falling debris he could hear his wife’s ragged breathing. She was awake, beside him in the darkness, not moving.

  “Annis?” he said.

  “Varrin?” she replied. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I had a dream that I was being crushed, and... and the walls are gone, and I’m holding up the roof, but I don’t knowhow.”

  “You’reholding it?” Annis rolled out of the bed and fell to the floor, then got to her knees and stared at Varrin. He couldn’t see her clearly in the dark-even with the walls gone, the dim glow of the lesser moon and the city’s fires didn’t provide much light— but he could sense her, just as he could sense the roof hanging over him, pressing into his awareness.

  She was terrified, and part of that terror was directed athim.

  “Go downstairs,” he told her. “Then I can put this down and make a light and see what’s going on.”

  “Yes,” she said, scurrying away from the bed, snatching her robe from the hook on the bedpost. She got to her feet, keeping her head lowered, and ran for the bedroom door.

  The door was gone. The entirewall was gone. She almost fell down the open stairwell before catching herself on the remaining fragment of railing. She half ran, half tumbled down, out of Var-rin’s sight-and out of his strange new awareness of his surroundings, as well.

  Once he was sure she was safe, he looked up at the ruins of the roof and ceiling. Huge cracks ran through the remaining plaster, and chunks had fallen away, exposing the wooden beams. He studied it and saw that he was holding it together as well as holding it up. Keeping the space above him unavailable to the wreckage, he let it go.

  The roof split into two large pieces and a thousand small ones, falling down on either side of the bed. The crash shook the entire house and echoed from the upper stories of the surrounding buildings, and as some of the smaller fragments skittered down the walls to the street Varrin found himself gazing up at the cloudy night sky.

  Dark shapes flew swiftly across his field of vision, headed northward, but before he could recognize what they were, they were gone.

  He sat up and looked around at a landscape that no longer made sense. He was still in his bed, his familiar feather pillow at the head, the quilt Annis had made from factory scraps bunched at the foot-but his bedroom was gone, reduced to a pile of rubble lying all around the bed, atop the still-solid lower floors. The broad rooftop that had extended out behind the bedroom was intact, though the ruins of the back wall were strewn across it; the clothesline where Annis hung their laundry was undamaged, the last batch of washing still swaying gently in the breeze.

  The houses on either side still stood; the one to the south, on the other side of the tiny alley between street and courtyard, was untouched, while Kelder the Felter’s roof, to the north, was now strewn with broken planking and bits of shattered roofing tile.

  That view to the north was oddly fascinating; he stared at it for a moment before tearing his gaze away and looking at his own house again.

  Only the one room and its adjoining hallway, the little wooden addition he had built atop the original structure so that more room below could be used to store fabrics, had been damaged-but that one room had been not just damaged, but obliterated.

  “Gods,” he said. “What happened?”

  No one answered.

  He swung his feet over the side of the bed, kicking aside a chunk of ceiling, and stood up-and realized he was naked. He looked for the wardrobe, but it had plunged into the alley.

  He had clothes on the line, though. He pushed himself upward, thinking he would climb across the wreckage.

  Instead he found himself floatingabove the wreckage.

  “Gods!” he said again.

  This was magic, of course-but what kind of magic? Who was doing it? Had he managed to offend a wizard or sorcerer without knowing it?

  He moved himself eastward over the broken roof and fetched girdle, tunic, and breeches from the line. He dressed hastily and looked out over the city to the west.

  A building was on fire somewhere-he could see leaping flames and a bright orange glow. The screaming had stopped, but there were voices in the street, shouting at one another. Who was up at this hour? Had the destruction of his home woken the whole neighborhood?

  He made his way to the stairwell and hurried downstairs.

  He found Annis in the front showroom on the ground floor; she was staring out the front window at the street.

  “What’s happened?” he asked her.

  She whirled and stared at him. “Don’tyou know?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, puzzled. “It’s some sort of magic that smashed our room, obviously, but I don’t know why or who did it.”

  “Youdid it, somehow!”

  “But...” Varrin stopped, remembering.

  Yes, hehad done it. He didn’t know how or exactly why— something to do with a nightmare of being smothered-but yes, he had done it.

  And he had held up the roof, which must have weighed hundreds or thousands of pounds, and he had flown across the wreckage like a wizard with a levitation spell.

  “How did you do that?” Annis demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Varrin said. “You mean you can’t? I assumed that whatever it was happened toboth of us.”

  She waved that idea away. “It’s justyou” she said. “At least, in here. There are others out there.” She pointed at the window.

  “There are?” Varrin glanced at the window.

  “Yes,” Annis said. “I saw them.”

  “Maybe I had better go talk to them,” Varrin said. “They might know what’s happening.”

  “Yes,” she said, stepping backward, away from him. “You do that.”

  “Annis, don’t be frightened,” he said as the firelight from outside spilled across her face and let him see her eyes. “Especially don’t be frightened ofme.”

  “But I’m not sure itis you!” she wailed. “What if you’re some demon that took my husband’s form?”

  “Annis, I’m me. I’m Varrin.” He stepped toward her. “We’ve been married for thirty-one years-you know
me!”

  She squealed and backed away again. “Go away!” she said. “If you’re really Varrin, go find out what happened to you!” He stopped, baffled.

  “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll go see what I can find out.” He turned away.

  A moment later he was out on the street, looking around in confusion.

  Something in him wanted to go north, but that was absurd; he lived and worked just three blocks from the beaches along the eastern shoals and four blocks from the city’s eastern wall. Almost the entirety of the city of Ethshar lay south and west of Seacorner.

  He could hear voices shouting to the south; he turned and headed toward them, and found his feet leaving the ground. At first he fought it, but then he turned up a palm, lifted his feet, and flew.

  At the same time as the others, Kirsha the Younger dreamed of fire and falling and then entombment somewhere deep beneath the earth, dreamed she was fighting her way upward through unyielding soil, and then awoke to find herself floating a foot or so above her bed. She stared up at the too-close canopy of her bed in astonishment, awash in unreasoning panic.

  Then the panic popped like a soap bubble, and she smiled as understanding dawned.

  “I’m still dreaming,” she said.

  She rolled over in mid air and pushed herself toward the bedroom window.

  It worked, just like in so many other dreams-she could fly, swim through the air like a fish through water. She didn’t even have to wriggle like a fish; thought alone was enough to propel her.

  Kirsha felt the cool night air on her bare skin as her bedsheet slipped free and fell away, could hear voices in the street outside— and some of them were screaming.

  She wondered why, but then dismissed the question. This was adream; it didn’t need to make sense.

  It was the oddest flying dream she had ever had, though, starting with a vague nightmare like that and then turning so intensely real. Still, she was enjoying it.

  She reached the window and fumbled with the latch, then opened the shutters-or rather she made the shutters fling themselves open, she didn’t use her hands. She looked out at the night.