ʺI suppose I’ve really known all along it was meant for you,ʺ she said. ʺLong before. . . . Anyway, the day I came to look for a slave, there was a beggar outside the school selling trashy little trinkets. Of course I looked his stuff over, the way I do. There was nothing on his tray worth even a glance, except this. I knew at once it had powers, though I’d no idea what they were. Still haven’t. I bought it for a song and put it in my purse, but then . . . I hadn’t actually been meaning to buy a slave that day—just wanted to see what was on offer, then go home and think about it, but the moment I saw you. . . . Anyway, oh, months later, when I was sitting over my bhang one evening, and you’d cleared supper and curled up in your cot and gone to sleep, I was thinking about what a lucky choice I’d made when I found you and fiddling around inside my bag for one of my little combs I’d put in it, but it had slipped down behind the lining, and so had this. I’d completely forgotten about it. I suppose that was why I’d never put it on sale, because it would be a bit like selling a piece of you, and now . . . and now . . . I’m going to lose you anyway, so you may as well take it. . . . Aren’t you even going to look at it?ʺ
Still in his daze of shock and grief, Tib found she’d already put the bag in his hands. He fumbled the cord loose and groped inside. His fingers touched something soft and flexible—a ribbon, he thought, but when he drew it out he found a golden band, not gold thread, but too soft and flexible to be wire. Running it through his fingers, he came to a stiffer part and found himself being stared at by two small purple eyes—jewels of some kind—and now he could see the shape of the head woven into the mesh. The thing was a small golden lizard. A pair of stubby clawed legs dangled beside the body, with another pair beyond. By then the body had begun to narrow towards the tail, but before he came to the tip there was the head again, lying, he now saw, on the hinder end of the body, with the tail itself coiling neatly round the neck.
ʺI think it’s an arm-band,ʺ said Aunt Ellila, and then, as he slipped the band onto his wrist, ʺCareful! Take it off at once if . . .ʺ
The band dangled loose and harmless from Tib’s wrist, so he slipped it up to the thicker muscle above the elbow, where it seemed to fit snugly. The dangling legs spread themselves, and the feet, without actually gripping, seemed to adhere lightly to the skin, like those of a wall-climbing gecko. A faint shimmer ran through the mesh and, without any movement he could sense, it seemed to lose substance and fade until for a moment he could see his skin through it. Then it was gone, melted into the flesh of his upper arm.
Aunt Ellila put out a trembling hand and lightly touched the place, but instantly snatched it back with a cry of pain and sucked at the first three fingers. When she withdrew them from her mouth Tib saw that the fingertips were scorched white, as if she had laid them on a hot roasting pan. But when, gingerly, he held his palm over the place and then himself touched it, he could feel nothing but his own natural warmth.
At that point the magician returned with a clerk wearing the badge of the Slavemaster’s Guild on the shoulder of his long coat and carrying a writing-case and a small parchment roll. Aunt Ellila cleared a space on the counter and the clerk unrolled the parchment, weighting the corners with knick-knacks from the stall. He told Tib to take off his smock and compared the tattoo on his shoulder with the copy on the parchment. By now Aunt Ellila was weeping openly.
ʺIt’s not that uncommon for owners to become over-involved with a slave,ʺ the clerk said chattily, as if neither Aunt Ellila nor Tib was present. ʺWomen with younger men, especially. It’s less offensive the other way round, of course—we’d have broken this relationship if we’d known of it. Come now, madam. . . .ʺ
The magician turned and gazed coldly at him. The clerk doubled in pain, clutching his side. The magician nodded. The clerk straightened, pale and sweating.
ʺYou should see a leech for that problem, my friend,ʺ said the magician, still unsmiling. His glance flicked for a moment to Tib, as if to check that he had seen the episode and understood.
From then on the clerk went efficiently about his business, clearly anxious to get it over. He wrote three lines on a fresh sheet of parchment, which Aunt Ellila and the magician signed. He took Tib’s left hand, pressed the thumb onto an ink-pad and then onto the parchment below the signatures and compared the imprint to the much smaller one on the original deed of sale. As he did so, Tib was able to look briefly at this. His eye was caught by the one almost blank line on the crowded sheet—ʺParentage:ʺ and then, simply, a dash.
Lastly the clerk watched as the magician counted out the payment to Aunt Ellila, made a note of it on the new document and sealed that with the Guild seal and attached it to the original. He accepted his fee and left. Tib hadn’t been surprised to see that his own price was nothing out of the ordinary—the Guild had strict rules—but as soon as the clerk had gone the magician gestured towards the items he’d originally chosen from the stall and counted out more coins from his purse—six of them, gold, and larger than Tib’s thumbnail. Tib knew all Aunt Ellila’s asking prices, as well as what she’d happily settle for. If the coins had been only silver, they’d have bought half her wares. She picked them up as if in a dream, shaking her head and still barely mastering her tears. The magician seemed not to notice.
ʺYou’ll need a man to help you home with your goods,ʺ he said.
ʺI . . . I’ll find somebody,ʺ muttered Aunt Ellila.
The magician crooked a finger as if beckoning somebody from among the passers-by. A wizened little man squirmed his way through. His smile was so wide it seemed to split his face in half. His ears were upside down.
ʺHelp the lady home,ʺ said the magician. ʺStay with her as long as she needs you, and then go back to the place from which you came. No earth-wandering. Now, boy, say your farewell and come with me.ʺ
As Tib was stammering his thanks and good-byes, Aunt Ellila glanced sidelong at the magician.
ʺTib,ʺ she whispered, ʺthat thing you’re wearing—it’s more than a protection, much more. And the man who sold it to me—it’s not the same man, but there was something about him. . . . And this man—those things he bought, he doesn’t need them. And they’re dangerous—in the wrong hands, I mean. But he’s a good man, all the same. I’m sure of it. You’d better go now. . . . You’ve been a good boy. . . . Think of me sometimes.ʺ
Choking, Tib forced himself to turn away. The magician had been waiting for him without apparent impatience, but as soon as he saw Tib moving he turned and strode rapidly off. Anxiously Tib hurried to catch up with him before they were separated by the scrum, but found that he need not have worried because the magical influence now seemed to extend to him, so that no matter how quickly he moved or what path he chose, there was always a pace or two of clear ground immediately ahead of him, though nobody seemed deliberately to move aside to make way for him. All did so for their own reasons.
As they passed the roast-crab stall the magician tossed the little parcel of what he’d bought from Aunt Ellila onto the brazier, which immediately erupted into an amazing flare of coloured lights. Again, nobody seemed to notice. All heads other than Tib’s happened to be turned away.
Yes, Tib thought. Aunt Ellila had been right. The magician had had no need of his purchases, except to be able to make up the slave-price, so he’d deliberately bought stuff that would be dangerous in the wrong hands and then destroyed it. A good magician was said to be rarer than the Phoenix, and there was never more than one of those at a time. But this was a good man.
They reached wider and less crowded streets, through which the magician strode on, not once looking round. Tib was starting to pant with the effort of keeping up by the time they turned from a main thoroughfare into a narrow, windowless alley. The magician strode, unpausing, at a closed door that opened to let him pass and closed as soon as Tib had followed. They crossed a bare courtyard, unswept for a year. Dead leaves and scraps cluttered the paving. They descended a musty-smelling stairway into darkness, but the magician moved in
a mist of pale light that Tib could follow down, and then along a stone corridor. A heavy door swung open, and again shut as soon as Tib too was through.
The magician faced him, smiling for the first time.
ʺHard quarters, I’m afraid,ʺ he said. ʺThere is a reason, you will find. I cannot explain. My time is up. Good—ʺ
With an explosive snap as the air rushed to fill the space where he had been, he was gone, and Tib was left in darkness.
It took him a little while to realise that he was naked. He knelt and felt around for his clothes, but found nothing but close-fitted paving stones. It was the same when he explored the walls. They were bare masonry, apart from the door through which he had come and a window-opening in the adjacent wall, with a hefty iron grill, its bars as thick as his two thumbs laid together back to back.
A minor strangeness struck him. Why didn’t he feel chilly without his clothes, down in this sunless cell, after hustling through the hot and crowded streets? He didn’t, in fact, feel any sensation of temperature at all, apart, perhaps, from a faint inner glow emanating from his upper right arm and now beginning to spread quietly along his veins and nerves. This, he guessed, must come from the arm-band, and was the now-germinating seed of whatever was coming next.
He felt perfectly calm about it, as if he were merely a spectator, fully aware of what was happening to the young man in the cellar, but at the same time completely inside it. He, Tib, the young slave who had said farewell to his owner with such heartfelt grief less than an hour ago, was now two separate entities: a new, emotionless Tib occupying the body in the cellar, and the old Tib, the real Tib, a disembodied watcher.
He settled down with his back against the wall to wait. Something, obviously, had to happen. Everything so far today, since the arrival of the magician at Aunt Ellila’s stall—no, since long before that, if she was right about the man who had sold her the arm-band the day she went to the slave school to look for him—perhaps further back still—had been part of some purpose. It couldn’t end here.
Perhaps he slept. If so he didn’t dream, but after a while became aware of a smell of burning. He opened his eyes, not having realised that they were shut, and found that he could see. An orange light filled the cellar, coming, he first thought, from nowhere. But when he raised a hand to test his vision, he saw that the whole arm, and the hand too, were glowing like hot coals. The light came from him. Stretched out on the floor in front of him, his legs and feet glowed with fiery currents. The smell of burning came from scorching dust particles on the pavement where he sat and in the crevices of the wall against which he was leaning. The surface of the masonry was turning powdery from the heat. His clothes, if he’d been wearing them, would have been ashes long ago.
But Tib himself felt only his own comfortable warmth. The cell, he realised, was now a furnace. No living thing could have survived more than an instant in it, but he breathed the roasting air as though in the cool of a pleasant evening.
This, no doubt, was why the magician had brought him here. It was a place where he could undergo this transformation without burning the building down, perhaps setting fire to a whole quarter of the city. But still there had to be some purpose beyond this change, and even the magician had been no more than part of that purpose. Despite his obvious powers, he could not have stayed a moment longer than he’d done, but had been whisked away as soon as his task ended.
Without impatience, Tib waited as the heat grew slowly more intense. When the light from his body steadied to a pure, even gold, so pale that it was almost white, he knew that the time had come. His purpose slid into his mind.
He rose to his feet and found that the cell had shrunk. He could now reach up and touch the vault. He strode to the window opening and laid a hand on each end of one of the bars of the grill. The metal melted at his touch, running in rivulets down his forearms but bubbling away in vapour before they reached his elbow. He melted out the remaining bars, lifted the grill clear and climbed through the opening. By his own light he made his way along the passage and up the stairs that he and the magician had descended. He needed to bow his head to pass through the doorway into the courtyard. The leaf-litter around him rippled into flame. The oak of the outer door charred at his approach and burst alight. He crashed through its roaring timbers and strode into the streets of Haballun, a burning giant.
It was past midnight, but the city never slept and the streets were still bright and busy. Screams rose as the giant flared like sunrise into their centre. A section of the night watch was stationed there to deal with riotous drunks. They formed a line, raised their crossbows and loosed a volley of bolts whose shafts and fins were already aflame in mid-flight, and the heavy iron heads melted before they reached their target, spattering the giant with molten drops that he felt no more than flesh feels a sprinkle of warm rain.
Tib, filled with purposes not his, but for which he had been brought to the slave school and bought and raised by Aunt Ellila, equally unknowing, moved through the maze of the city, his giant stride carrying him faster than any news of his coming. He stopped in front of a building. With his remaining human awareness he recognised it as the house of Dr. Cacada, the minor but still powerful magician with whom Aunt Ellila had maintained an uneasy relationship, giving him first choice of her latest purchases, and in exchange asking his advice on items that she felt might be tricky to handle. Sometimes she had sent Tib here on errands, and then he had seen it as a shabby little house squeezed in between two much grander ones. Now the blaze of his eyesight melted the illusion and he saw it as it was, fully as handsome as its neighbours but shielded with symbols of power that created between them a network of magical protection, glittering and pulsing.
The giant strode forward and grasped the network with both hands. Instantly it reacted, reaching out and flowing round his body like a many-tentacled sea-thing engulfing its prey. He ignored the pressure and ripped the whole net from the building. It shrivelled into squirming tatters round his feet. He kicked in the main door, grasped the door-posts, tore out the whole front wall and walked through. At once the building burst into flame, and in a few moments more was a furnace.
He stood at its heart and rested, drinking in the heat, much as an old woman, sitting in her porch on a summer morning, drinks in the sunlight, remembering under its caress what it was to have been young and strong. Invisible in the glare, a small lizard, white-golden like the giant with its own inward heat, came scuttling through the embers, up over the giant’s foot to his calf. It hung there for a moment, moulding itself to the shape of his fiery flesh, then sank through the skin and disappeared. The giant emerged from the ruins of Dr. Cacada’s house, taller by the height of a man than when he had come.
By now the remaining twenty-six magicians of the city knew of the giant’s existence, and if they had been capable of cooperation, they might have combined to stop him. But all the magicians were, effectively, enemies of each other. Hatred, fear and distrust were the only relationships they knew. At first each simply assumed that one of the more powerful of them must have conjured the giant into existence in order to destroy a lesser one and used time he could not spare trying to elucidate how the thing was done and how the event might be turned to his advantage. By the time they realised that the giant was something new, a manifestation of a previously unknown force, he had destroyed the houses of three more magicians. He had grown in stature each time one of the little lizards crept into his body and added its powers to those already there, and was now as tall as the houses between which he strode and filled with the energies that fuel the stars.
The magicians were masters of their art, but its prisoners too, because it was the only art they knew. It made little difference what defences they built around themselves, what weapons they deployed against the giant, walls of brass, ramparts of ice, downpours that turned the streets to raging torrents, thunderbolts and shafts of lightning, monstrous beasts and demons, spells of utter destruction, spells of stillness and of bind
ing, mailed legions of dead men—nothing delayed his march. A canyon opened at his feet. He spanned it with a bridge of fire and strode across. As he reached each magical household, the spells of its owner lost their power and the unhappy creatures that for centuries had been bound there to serve his will were freed and fled away.
Such was the giant’s power that he could control the fires he set. Though the buildings nearest them might char, they did not catch, nor the flames spread, so individual column after column of smoke rose above the moonlit roofs to mark his progress. By the time twenty-seven such columns were in being, he was taller than the tallest tower of the Great East Gate.
Those fires were still raging when dawn whitened beyond it, but by then the giant was gone. Sentries on the wall had watched him dwindle to a distant spark, and by daylight they could see his track spearing northwestwards, a ruler-straight line of burnt crops, grassland and scrub that vanished as it crossed the ridge of hills that rimmed the northern desert.
They turned and looked back over the city. The smoke of twenty-seven fires still floated up and drifted away on the wind, but that was not what struck them most strongly. Seeing it even from here, they could tell at once that Haballun had become changed overnight. Both for good and ill, it had overnight been stripped of all its high magic.
Meanwhile the giant who had been Tib was striding down into the desert. His huge paces carried him through the roasting heat of its day and the bitter chill of its night. Soon after the next daybreak, a mile-wide canyon barred his path. He climbed down the nearer cliff and walked along the canyon’s floor until he came to a place where the canyon narrowed to a deep slit that he could span with his arms, resting one hand on either cliff.
He gathered his giant strength and pushed. The whole wide desert groaned, and distant cities trembled as he ruptured the rind of the world and gazed down into its roiling central fires.
Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits Page 17