Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She hesitated, not knowing what to tell him, for she had no experience of such things beyond Tyramin’s world. “We’ll talk,” she promised, “when I come back. Don’t go outside for any reason. Wait.”

  She turned; he said, as she opened the door, “I don’t know your name.”

  She looked back at him, producing the smile she must wear for the next hour or two, no matter what. “My name is Mistral.”

  He nodded. And that, he standing there surrounded by silk shirts and satin skirts, eddies of finery and feathers on the floor, masks staring at him, tricks of her trade, illusions, was the last she saw of the bewildered gardener.

  Tyramin’s performance was breathtaking, legendary. He painted darkness with such fires, such dazzling apparitions, such brilliant colors that held the crowd motionless at the sight, their upraised faces turning all the various shades of magic. As though he wanted to overshadow his own stunning illusions in the street, he worked complex and elaborate tricks, each more wondrous, more unbelievable than the last. Mistral, her smile so immutably charming that it seemed a piece of the magic, barely had time to notice Arneth’s face among the crowd. He came late, she saw; beyond that she had not a thought to spare for him, nor for any other of the wardens disguised among the crowd. Tyramin ended his performance with a great, colorful fountain of stars, which showered over the upturned faces but never touched them. The last star fell; Tyramin faded away like a dream, left them all in the dark.

  Mistral moved quickly; Arneth was almost as fast. She had turned the key in the door where Tyramin sequestered himself, and was carrying his mask away when she saw the quarter warden edging through the dancers and assistants going this way and that to change out of their costumes, put the props away. She turned instantly, felt his eyes on her back. Good, she thought. Follow me. She led him away from her costume room and the bewildered young man within it. Arneth caught up with her in a turn or three down the hallways, as far as she could get from either Tyramin, and the only one she would permit him to see in her arms.

  Arneth didn’t bother looking at the mask. “Where is he?”

  “Where he always is,” she answered evenly, “after a performance. In solitude. Not to be disturbed.”

  “I have,” he said as evenly, “two dozen armed guards waiting outside the warehouse. They will tear this place apart at a word. Where is the young man who worked the magic tonight?”

  “There is no magic. Only illusion.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. He was a stranger, someone caught up in one of Tyramin’s tricks. Not one of us. He escaped from the crowd as soon as he could.”

  Arneth was silent, still gazing at her as if he were trying to see beneath the paint and glitter on her face to find the true, tired lines beneath. He said, his voice unexpectedly soft, “A street warden saw the entire incident. The dangerous fire that vanished as if by magic, leaving no trace. The king and Lord Pyt are ready to place a guard around the quarter, isolate it from the city, and drag Tyramin out by force if I give them word. There are street wardens waiting outside. If they don’t see me very soon, they will call in the guard. Tyramin has disturbed the king, the High Warden, and the wizards of Kelior, both in the palace and in the school. Which should I call in first to force Tyramin out of his seclusion? Might? Or magic?”

  Mistral looked back at him; behind her golden, unblinking eyes, her thoughts, busy as mice swarming through a maze, bumped into wall after wall. She felt a line seam the paint above her brows.

  “It was never our intention to disturb,” she said helplessly. “Only to entertain.”

  “Then convince me,” he begged her. “Let me speak to Tyramin. Let me see his face.”

  She was silent again; one hand dropped from the mask, felt at the solid wood of the doorway behind her, gripped it. He waited, while she studied his face, the angles of bone, the shape of his mouth, trying to tell her fortune from the lines in it, her future. She had to clear her throat before she spoke again.

  “You have seen it.”

  He blinked, startled. “Who—”

  “You are looking at Tyramin’s face.”

  He stared at her, his lips parting. Then she saw the blood flush into his face and knew his mind had leaped to the only conclusion. “Magic,” he said without sound.

  She brushed her lips with her forefinger, whispered, “We mean no harm. We’ll be out of Kelior by dawn, and out of Numis as soon as—”

  “The fire,” he interrupted. “Was it real? Or—”

  “It was real. An accident; a juggler threw a torch too high.”

  “And you put it out.”

  “Yes.”

  He was silent then, studying her face as she had studied his, searching in it for both their fates. “That’s not what the street warden told me,” he said steadily. “He said that the young stranger worked magic with fire, with water, with a dancer’s sash. What can you expect of me if you lie to me? How can I help you, then?”

  “How can I trust you?” she asked despairingly. “You’re a quarter warden of Kelior; you belong to the king, who fears any magic beyond his control, even the most frivolous and innocent. I shape air into paper flowers; how can that threaten him? Please. Just let us go.”

  Around them, the chambers and hallways were suddenly very quiet, as though all motion had ceased; everyone, frozen in place by a spell, could only listen.

  “How do you do it?” Arneth asked. He had shifted his weight to lean against the other side of the doorway; his voice was very quiet. “While you work the magic, who wears the mask?”

  “No one. Tyramin is my puppet. I am his breath and motion, his voice.” She paused, added, for it might help, “He used to be real. He was my father. A true magician, a master of illusions. Not a bone of magic anywhere in his body. But he could make you see magic, feel it, be charmed, enchanted by it. He loved his work. I grew up assisting him. He taught me many things. One day he realized that our definitions of magic were entirely different. He made paper flowers grow out of his sleeve. I made them out of my thoughts. He tried to learn, but he couldn’t. So he used me to enhance his own illusions. I loved the work, creating the illusions, even the illusions of costumes, traveling to strange lands, sharing wonder everywhere we went. When my father died, I simply kept his name and his mask and continued his performances.

  “Those who knew him gradually left me or died; I continued the illusion of his life because of his name, which became well-known. There was always speculation; I couldn’t make a seamless transition from his death to his seeming agelessness. Too many had known him. Rumors about him blew on the wind: that he was truly a sorcerer, that he was ancient, that his wild powers were dangerous, subversive. None of that was ever true. Nor is it true of me. But rumors, like unhappy children and hungry dogs, follow us from land to land.”

  “Why did you come here?” Arneth asked. “With all those rumors of magic haunting you, how did you dare come to Kelior?”

  She sighed, lines under her eyes hinting of a rueful smile. “They always loved Tyramin in the Twilight Quarter. I have grown tired of traveling. I thought that if we could convince the king that our illusions were simply tricks to charm away an hour, he would ignore us. We would become just one more bit of color in the quarter. But rumor, apparently, played its trick on us.”

  Arneth nodded. “It did precede you.” He hesitated, running fingers through his hair, then added slowly, “I might persuade Lord Pyt that I have spoken to Tyramin and found no harm in him. But there is still the matter of the young man implicated in the magic that put the fire out. Where is he?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Please,” he interrupted wearily. “Where will we get to if you keep lying to me? How can I let you go then? The young man is suspected of being a wizard disguised as a gardener at the School of Magic. Lord Pyt and the king think he might also be Tyramin. Most of the Twilight Quarter certainly thought so tonight. Let me question him. I must give the king something.”
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  “The gardener?” she answered dryly. But she knew that the young man’s power, undefined and unpredictable, would not stay secret long, now that he himself had wakened it. Still, she was reluctant to give him up in exchange for her safety. She had brought him there for his protection; she had made herself responsible. He was the unknown, the wild, lawless magic the kings of Numis forbade within their realm. Must she trade him for herself?

  The answer, she found, was very simple. She was a magician, master of illusions; she would create another one.

  She turned without a word, thinking as she walked, the great head in her arms, her other self, staring down the night before her. Arneth followed. She made things disappear all the time. In a room full of costumes, masks, she could make a young man old, a dancer into a marionette, a gardener disappear. As long as he was clever enough not to give himself away…

  She stopped at the costume room, let Arneth open the closed door for her. Her thoughts slipped in first, busied themselves with fabric and masks, before she realized, stepping across the threshold, that the room was empty.

  Her thoughts groped, came up empty as well. He had not just hidden himself; he had gone. She put the head down, blinking, relieved yet disturbed. What would he do with himself now? she wondered. Where in Kelior would he go for help?

  “Where is he?” Arneth asked.

  She shook her head, not knowing if he would believe anything she said now. “I left him here while Tyramin performed. I have no idea where he went.” She added uneasily at his silence, “Please. He has nothing to do with us at all. Shouldn’t you go out and tell your street wardens outside that you have nothing to fear from us before they bring the king’s guard in here to search for you?”

  “My—Oh.” His mouth crooked. “Them. You’re not the only one who can lie. There’s nobody waiting for me but the guard outside the Twilight Gate, and they won’t come until I summon them. Either you or that gardener must come with me to the king. I suggest you help me look for him.” He seemed to see through the flash of speculation in her eyes, their sudden flick at the door. “If you lock me in here, I wouldn’t blame you,” he said steadily. “But my father, the High Warden, would be furious with both of us. Don’t make things more tangled than they already are. Help me.”

  It was, she realized, not a demand but a plea. Wordlessly, she waved him out the door, where he waited outside while she changed the illusion she had made of herself into a more mundane mask suitable for the night streets of Kelior.

  FIFTEEN

  Yar, on the track of power, found Brenden Vetch and lost him and found him again. Or thought he had. Since Elver was with him, as cumbersome as a third foot, he couldn’t move as quickly as he wanted. At least the boy was quiet while Yar dragged him ruthlessly along, his eyes always on the hapless, pale-haired figure cresting the roiling current of the crowd. Brenden could not rescue himself, Yar guessed, because he had no idea what he could or could not do, or what terrifying chaos might result from anything he did. Why the raucous crowd had decided he was Tyramin, Yar had no idea.

  He was enlightened later when he saw the enormous painted mask, the bulky costume that concealed the magician within it. He stood at the edge of the throng, casting about for Brenden and wondering what mind possessed that head. The crowd had lost sight of Brenden, but not of Tyramin; it mistook the young man who had put out the fire for the one who wore that mask. But Yar, briefly aware of the mind within the great painted head, swarming with colorful transformations, did not recognize it. The magician’s daughter, with her delicate, painted oval of a face, her amber eyes glittering with fire, he remembered seeing some nights ago as she rode with Tyramin’s company through the Twilight Gate. Again she took on mystery with her serene face that seemed kin to the moon, her endlessly graceful movements, her changeless smile. He had to tear his attention away from that illusion. And then he had to pull the enraptured Elver away, too. It almost required sorcery to break free of the crowd, which had grown behind him in a few brief minutes to spill through the doors and windows of the old warehouse, and out onto the cobbles.

  On the street again, Yar resumed his search. Brenden must have escaped when the real Tyramin caught the crowd’s attention. Beyond the warehouse, the quarter seemed calm, no disturbances, no curiosities, just people going about their business under the chilly stare of the moon.

  Elver spoke. “May I speak now?”

  “No.”

  “I could wait for you in the warehouse. It’s warm in there, and you could do what you want more easily without me.”

  Yar hesitated. The boy was shivering in spite of Yar’s cloak. He couldn’t get into worse trouble watching the magician and his beautiful daughter than he was already in. Yar fixed him with a grim eye.

  “Promise me that you will be there when I come back for you. That you will not follow whatever will-o’-the-wisp beckons you out the door. I won’t look for you.”

  “I promise,” Elver answered meekly. Yar watched him slither back through the crowd as easily as a fish through fingers, toward the music and the thunder of magic. Yar considered the perplexing question of Elver for a moment, then let it go. Finding a way to wriggle Elver out of trouble was moot, considering the trouble he himself was likely to be in if he didn’t return to school and king with Brenden Vetch.

  If nothing else, the gardener had learned how to disappear quickly enough. He was probably hiding from himself, fiercely blocking any hint of magic from his thoughts with whatever was in front of his nose: a stone wall, a solid slab of locked door, the impenetrable dark at the end of an alley. If that was how he looked at himself, that was all Yar could see of him as he made his way through the streets, casting thought everywhere. He moved a little more slowly than his thoughts, only barely visible, searching faces and shadows as well as minds for the errant gardener. The moon, a drooping eye that night, was moving to meet the river mist, the crowds from the warehouse had scattered through the streets again, exclaiming vividly and hoarsely about marvels Tyramin had shown them, when Yar finally stopped his search, stood staring blankly at a stall full of gaudy puppets.

  Maybe, he thought, Brenden had simply gone back to the school. Frightened by the crowds, bewildered by his powers, he had gone where he would be safe and where such mysteries could be explained. Yar could sense him nowhere in the quarter. Wye could tell him then and there if Brenden had returned. But no, he amended quickly, pulling thought away from her. If Valoren was still waiting with her, and Brenden was not, the king’s wizard would join Yar in a breath to help him search. Brenden’s first glimpse of the true face of power in Kelior might well be disastrous, considering his own incomprehensible state of mind.

  Yar took a step toward the Twilight Gate, remembered Elver, and turned back toward the river. In that moment, as though something had leaped out of the dark water into the silvery light of the moon, he glimpsed the flow of an unusual power. It drew him, this vague glittering that might be Brenden’s mind. He moved more quickly than he had all night, through the labyrinth of streets, until he felt the complex and lovely flow of power quite close to him. He stopped, seeing its source. But it was not the face he had expected.

  Two people stood in a torchlit conjunction of streets. He recognized the quarter warden, Lord Pyt’s son Arneth. The woman, slight, dark-haired, plainly dressed, he didn’t know at all until she turned her face for a glance into the dark, as though she sensed someone’s attention. The amber eyes, fire melting through them, made Yar blink. In an instant, as though Tyramin had struck the cobbles with his staff and spoken, she was transformed. This was Yar’s smiling vision, the daughter of the moon, who juggled bits of colored fire and turned herself amiably into doves or butterflies at her father’s command. She wasn’t smiling now, nor was she trailing swaths of silk; her hair was bundled at her neck, all the stars fallen out of it.

  Her mind, Yar realized, was a firestorm of magic. Was she the force behind Tyramin’s powers? he wondered. Or was she simply heir to it? Either
way, such true magic made them both dangerous and endangered on the streets of Kelior.

  The golden eyes searched the dark in which he hid himself, trying to see him, failing. Yar stood very quietly, listening while she spoke to the quarter warden.

  “I can’t find him. He must have gone back to his plants. He was terrified by the crowd.”

  Arneth Pyt looked at her narrowly, not trusting that. “Are you sure?”

  The quarter warden was also searching for Brenden, Yar realized with a touch of apprehension. The ambiguities of the fire and the missing gardener must have been brought to Murat Pyt’s attention.

  The magician’s daughter cast a glance across the dark again. “I don’t know where to look. He could be anywhere in Kelior.”

  “He didn’t tell you—”

  “I asked him to wait for me. He didn’t know where to go anymore, what to do with himself. I think he must have gone to whatever place he thought he would be safe. The school, maybe.”

  The last place he will be safe, Yar thought grimly.

  Arneth refused to yield Brenden to the night. “Nothing won’t satisfy the king,” he warned. “Or the king’s wizard Valoren. If I go back to the school and the gardener isn’t there, I’ll be forced to come back here, and I will be in the company of wizards.”

  She inclined her head. “I understand.”

  “Nor will I take the guard from the Twilight Gate if I go back now.”

  “I understand,” she answered again, in her low, silky murmur.

  “So. It would be better for everyone if we found him now. I would be justified then in taking the guard from the quarter in order to escort him back to the school. Do you understand that?”

  Yar did, suddenly illuminated. The gate will be unguarded, Arneth Pyt was telling her; all attention will be on the gardener. It will be safe for Tyramin to leave then.

  Magic, the wizard marveled. She has enchanted the quarter warden.