Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  His smile broadened to touch his eyes. “That sounds fair,” he said, and permitted Gamon to lead him out. When the door closed, she flung the costume down and hurried herself into her own, a confection of froth, and flame, and fool’s gold, and feathers that could have fallen only from birds flying through a dream. In the crowded room where Tyramin’s assistants disguised themselves, she painted her face the color of porcelain, her lips the color of blood. She unbound her hair, brushed it into a great dark cloud and filled it with glittering flecks of gold, jewels, paper rosebuds. In the mirror, the mask seemed flawless: the magician’s daughter gazed back at her, amber eyes luminous, lips and fingertips glowing, her hair scented and filled with treasures.

  Thus disguised, she found their visitor again, sitting atop an empty chest, looking innocent and expectant, like someone waiting for Tyramin to touch him with magic, turn him into a rabbit, or make him disappear entirely. The magician’s daughter, trailing silk and gleaming, smiled her changeless, charming smile.

  “My name is Mistral,” she said in her deep, sultry voice, and he slid promptly to his feet. “I am Tyramin’s daughter. You cannot speak to him now, but I will answer any questions as I take you to the hall. What is your name?”

  “My name is Arneth.”

  “Come with me, Arneth.”

  He followed willingly as she led him through the maze of little rooms and hallways, magic scattered everywhere through them, but nothing recognizable as such. Like puppets of string, cloth, buttons, and paint, such things waited for Tyramin’s hands, his voice, to reveal the magic in them. She watched Arneth’s eyes collect them, put their words to memory: glove, cloak, mirror, jeweled staff, paper snakes, cages of cooing doves. His glance would return to her after he had stored away a word; she felt the little, brief touches of his eyes. She was used to that. Everyone fell in love, if only for a moment, with the magician’s daughter.

  He asked her, while his busy mind worked, “Will Tyramin let me see him after the performance?”

  “He cannot see anyone tonight.”

  “When can I see him?”

  “I will ask him that in a few days. It’s never easy for him to come to a new place, especially a great city like Kelior, where so much is expected, and so much has already been seen. He will be in seclusion until he is satisfied that his illusions will enchant the hearts even of those who think they have seen through every illusion.”

  “Not an easy task,” he conceded, then was silent for a turn or two, while the noises within the warehouse grew more restless and chaotic.

  “Is there nothing else you would like to ask me?” she said, her own attention flicking ahead to an inconspicuous door that led into the streets. He must have come in that way, she realized. The door had been unlocked, and no one was there to stop him.

  He laughed a little, softly, at the question. “Something foolish. I don’t think you’ll answer even that.”

  “Ask me.”

  “Why were you mending a black sleeve with red thread?”

  She gazed at him a moment, feeling suddenly wary, for no stranger had ever seen beneath her mask before. Then she laughed, too, giving him no other answer, and reached out to lock the door as they passed it.

  She escorted him through the curtains, left him at the very front of the crowded hall; the rowdy watchers shook the rafters with their cries and applause as they caught sight of her. And then, for it was time, by the position of the stars, the smell of pitch from torches, the music weaving its own enchantment through the expectant gathering, she summoned Tyramin.

  SEVEN

  In some bleak, moonless hour of the night, Yar was wrenched out of a dream by a cry for help. He lurched to his feet, seeing the image of the labyrinth in his mind before he managed to open his eyes. The school was soundless around him; he heard no doors open, no startled voices in his head or in the halls. No one else seemed to have wakened. Or the teachers were all elsewhere dealing with other disturbances among the newcomers. So he went down alone into the depths of the school, moving quickly, half wizard, half shadow, and both halves wishing they were back in bed.

  The labyrinth, which sat squarely under the library, had been built under Od’s direction a century or so after the first time she disappeared from the school and everyone assumed she had died. It looked small; a strong arm could have pitched a stone across it from the outside. The walls were neatly cut marble blocks, laid upon one another, with a carved latticed opening here and there for those entirely lost to see out. It was a comforting idea, anyway. Yar had never heard of anyone actually seeing the latticework from inside the labyrinth. It was meant as a simple teaching device, Od wrote; she had added a map of it to her writings, so that the lost might be easily found.

  What she did not mention was how the path of the labyrinth changed for everyone who entered it.

  An oversight? Yar wondered dourly as always when he went to rescue someone. Or did Od truly not know her own powers, that she gave such a thing a mind of its own?

  Usually by the time he reached the utter darkness beneath the school, he could feel the lost student’s panic churning through him like high tide. This time, though he still heard the cries from within the walls, the student seemed fairly calm. He didn’t seem to be running headlong down every opening; the voice was staying in one spot. Which meant either that he had more sense than most, or else that his light had burned out.

  Yar didn’t bother with the labyrinth opening, which tended to shift when someone entered it. He insinuated himself into stone, then into space, then again into stone, homing like a pigeon toward the voice he heard. A boy’s thin voice, wavering a little with fear, called to his ears for help. His inner voice, wordless and silently fretting, pleaded just as clearly for help. Yar took the shortest path toward him.

  He got lost.

  The labyrinth tangled around him like a fistful of string. The center, which he should have reached easily, cutting a line as straight as a knife through a pie, eluded him. Walls kept rising in front of him. Some even showed him the latticework that should have been along the outside wall. He tried walking the path instead of passing through stone. He met more walls, rising up at every step, while the student’s voice, which sometimes dipped low, sometimes squeaked as he called, kept changing position around Yar. Exasperated, the wizard stopped, stared, brooding at the endless, curving walls.

  Where are you? he thought, and knew instantly that he had asked the question the labyrinth was asking him.

  His mouth crooked. He felt stone and space untangle around him again. A moot point at best, he thought, crossing the final wall into the center. The labyrinth only raised questions; it never answered them.

  The student was sitting on the center stone, a broad, flat circle with a map of the labyrinth carved into it. He was a slight, very young man, with tangled curly brown hair, a downy upper lip, and wide dark eyes. A stubby candle flickered beside his knee. He had just drawn breath to shout again; Yar’s appearance out of stone made him loose it in a hiccup.

  “You heard me—”

  “You woke me,” Yar said tartly, “out of a sound sleep. Who are you? I don’t recognize you.”

  “I was late getting here.”

  “And have already found your way into trouble. You hardly look old enough to be a student.”

  “I’m considered highly intelligent,” the young man said, his teeth chattering with nerves and early-morning chill. He rolled his eyes at the stones around him, and added before Yar could comment, “It was a bet. Sometimes I’m too impulsive.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Elver.”

  “Elver. An elver is an eel.”

  The young man nodded. “And Od’s name is odd. I know; I’ve heard all the jokes. Can you teach me how to walk through stone like that?”

  “Yes. You will be taught—”

  “I mean now.”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Well, then, how will we get back out?”

  Yar wa
s silent. The young man whose name was an eel had actually found his way to the center of the labyrinth. By accident? But nothing was accidental in that place. Yar regarded him with slightly more curiosity.

  “Why don’t you tell me?” he suggested. “How were you planning to find your way back out in the first place? And, having reached the center, what made you think you were lost?”

  Elver looked around him uncertainly. “Is this the center?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t—I didn’t know.” Then his thin face brightened. “I’ve won the bet!”

  “Good. You’ve won. Now how are you going to get out and tell everyone before your candle burns out?” He paused, sighed. “Nobody ever thinks of that.”

  “You’re here,” Elver answered. “So I won’t need a candle, will I?”

  “Well, how am I supposed to get you out?”

  “You know the way.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, then. Well.” He blinked down at the center stone, oblivious of the very precise and detailed map chiseled into the face of it. “What,” he asked finally, “do you usually do when people get lost here?”

  “Go back to bed and leave them until morning.”

  “No. Really.”

  Yar, debating with his curiosity, nearly relented. But curiosity got the upper hand. He melted away into air and dark, leaving the boy alone with his candle, his back to the map, looking everywhere for the wizard, who seemed to have done exactly what he said he would.

  Elver made a small sound in his throat, the beginning of an argument perhaps. But there was no one to listen to him. He picked up the candle stub, which was about as high as his thumb. Circling the inner walls, he came to an opening and went through it, his steps very quiet, as though he were trying to find his way through a wild wood while not attracting the attention of its inhabitants.

  Yar followed him.

  Elver, clutching his candle, his eyes wide, his breathing soft, made one error, heading down a blind passage, which he corrected immediately. Whether the labyrinth had simply released the boy, or something in him was drawn by the continual flow of power and freedom, Yar could not guess. Elver heaved a great sigh when he slipped out and saw the stairs that led out of the depths to the taper-lit halls above. He blew out his candle and ran up. He had more problems finding his bed than he had finding his way out of the maze. But Yar did not have to intervene, and it was with an unaccustomed sense of interest that he finally made his way back to his own.

  Everyone looked a trifle haggard that morning; it had been a rough night for more than one, and one was enough to awaken the entire school sometimes. Yar made the students tell their fears, their dreams. Some had been genuinely disturbed by others’ dreams as they slept, which they recognized when such images were brought up into the light of day. Others, inspired by their surroundings, had tapped unexpected powers. They woke floating above their beds, or pondering if they had truly broken a library window with a thought, and if they should go and look. The students who had sent Elver into the labyrinth scoffed at his obstinate assertion that yes, he had won their wager, yes, he had reached the center. Yar cut short their derision.

  “He found the center. And what’s more, he found his way back by himself. I know. I watched him. And if anyone else thinks of trying to do the same, I warn you, I am not getting out of bed to rescue you.”

  Elver was staring at him. “I thought that’s where you went when you left me.”

  “I wanted to see what you would do to rescue yourself. You will all have to do that many times in your lives, for power needs to be tested, as an edge needs to be honed, and we don’t always choose wisely the predicaments we get ourselves into.”

  “You did,” Elver said. “You rescued the entire city of Kelior on your way through the gates.”

  Yar was caught wordless. The boy’s thin, heavy-eyed face was eager, hopeful; in spite of his mop of dark hair and his weariness he seemed to gleam a bit like the creature, Yar thought grumpily, after which he had been named.

  “Yes,” he said dampeningly. “That’s a tale for another day.”

  “That’s what you said last time,” another student reminded him: a shy girl who rarely spoke. “Master Yar, this is another day.”

  They all pleaded, with words or without. They simply wanted a story, Yar realized, to take their minds off the harrowing night. Something that ended well, with a walk under the cobbler’s shoe into the school as the reward for power used wisely. Something to remind them that despite their nightmares they, too, had chosen wisely in being there.

  He sighed. “It was hardly my intention, when I woke up that morning, to do anything remotely heroic. For one thing, I was sleeping in a haystack, and just moving out of the warm hay into the chilly air seemed like the most difficult thing anyone should be required to do. And then I had to find breakfast, which seemed even more difficult. I was hardly older than most of you. I had walked for days to get to Kelior because I had heard of the magic in it, and I hadn’t a coin left to my name. In other words, I was poor and unknown and very hungry. I am sorry to have to admit to you that I stole my breakfast off a tree in a farmer’s apple orchard.”

  He paused. Some looked at him with wonder, as though he must have walked out of a tale instead of an obscure village in western Numis. Others seemed skeptical, unable to imagine either hunger or a hero who had not been brought up to become one.

  “I was so close to Kelior then that I could see the walls of the city across the river and the banner on the king’s great tower as I walked along the road eating my purloined apples. You may wonder why someone with enough magic in him to save a city could not have conjured up a better breakfast. But that is exactly why I wanted to learn more magic. The powers I had were random, chaotic, and what control I had over them was very hard-won. I could see in the dark, but I had only learned that as an act of desperation, once when I was in such grave danger that if I did not see, I would die. Then, by dire necessity, I came to understand darkness, to make it a part of myself. I could use complex powers, but I didn’t know rules or simple things. How to will an apple to descend from a tree, for example. I knew there must be a way, but in that case, my desperation was such that I used the easiest method, which had nothing to do with magic. I climbed the tree.

  “Midway through my second apple, I saw something so terrible, so astonishing, above the city of Kelior that I sucked in a bite of apple and had to spend a precious moment or two settling it before I could wipe my streaming eyes and see if I had truly seen what I thought.

  “It looked like some legendary, fabulous monster circling the air above the city. It was so huge that its shadow darkened part of the river and the entire heart of the city around the castle. It shone like a king’s crown, like cloth of gold.”

  “Dragon,” someone whispered.

  “Maybe. To this day I’m uncertain. It made no fire. It had an extremely long neck, with a big, blunt head and a pair of wings that seemed to billow like sails. As I stood there, too stunned to take another step, it swooped around the highest tower, then angled down over the river, dipped its head down, and raised it again with what looked like a fishing boat between its teeth. This it carried back to the castle and dropped, for unfathomable reasons, into what I later learned was the royal rose garden.

  “I saw an ephemeral glittering in the air above the tower, like cobweb makes in sunlight, and realized that the king’s guards were shooting arrows at it. The arrows struck it and promptly fell again into the gardens. The monster finished its turn around the tower and headed back down toward the river.

  “I started running.

  “I had nothing much in mind at that point, except that I had made an arduous journey across Numis to get to Kelior, and I didn’t want the monster to destroy the School of Magic before I could even set foot in the door. Assuming, of course, which I didn’t, that anyone would let me in. I reached the river’s edge just as the monster dropped its third boat into the king
’s yard. They fell from the height of the highest tower; it seemed doubtful to me that the fishers raining down among the roses would live to tell about it. Fragments of their boats are still unearthed by the gardeners, I’m told, as well as the stray fishhook.

  “I hit the water running, swam to the nearest boat paddling hastily to shore, and pulled myself into it. Then I did something to attract the monster’s attention. I shouted, or flashed some fire at it—some such. Whatever it was inspired the men in the boat to dive out of it promptly. The monster’s head descended toward me. I threw myself flat among the fish, and its teeth, which were enormous, stubby, and stank ferociously, closed about the boat. It swung into the air; I stood up unsteadily in the dim cavern of the creature’s mouth and tried to think what to do next.”

  Yar heard a click of teeth, a quick, loosed breath. He shrugged slightly. “As you see, we make our choices and must act upon them.”

  “What did you do?” Elver asked. His voice squeaked.

  “Before I could come up with an idea, I felt my thoughts pulled into the furious and very powerful current of the monster’s mind. I could see out of its eyes, suddenly, as well as out of my own. I could feel the rhythmic surge of its heart. I knew that it intended to batter the city of Kelior with anything it could drop—boats, stones from the walls, roof rafters, trees—without stopping, until either the city was a pile of rubble or else it got what it wanted.

  “So I asked it what it wanted.

  “It was so astonished it nearly swallowed me. I had to fling myself in the crevice between two teeth and hang on to the great splinter of boat stuck there to keep from washing down its long gullet into its belly. It did not understand words, of course. But it did seem to understand the unthreatening insertion of another’s thoughts into its own. It dropped the boat immediately, which landed in the Twilight Quarter, I heard later, crushing a cloth merchant’s shop and scattering fish and tackle all over the goods. The monster answered me without words. It slipped an image into my head that looked very much like itself chained by its neck and legs in a garden.