by Rich Horton
“Yes.” His sharp pointed tongue licked cream from the core of his pastry.
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“That is never a reason,” I said.
“You may be right. In any case, we soon found another.”
He was smiling, waiting for me to ask. I obliged him. “What did you find?”
“We discovered that we could ‘re-order’ animals from one species to another, though they were never happy in their new skins. So then we tried ‘editing’ them, again with interesting results. We produced several disparate versions from the same template: one would be ferocious, another painfully meek; one would have an overpowering urge to explore its territory, while the next iteration would not stir from its den.” He drank from his cup of punge. “Do you understand what we had achieved?”
He was waiting again. “I am sure you would enjoy telling me,” I said.
“We kept the shape, but discarded the contents, so to speak.”
I had an insight. “You found you could work with form while discarding essence.”
“Exactly. And, of course, once we had done it with beasts we had to try it with people.”
“It is monstrous,” I said.
“An entirely accurate description, at first. They were indeed monsters. We turned them loose to bellow and rampage on the moor, where the neropts found them and carried them off.”
“But then?” I asked.
He wriggled with self-satisfaction. “But then we refined the process and began striking multiples from the originals. They are short-lived but they serve their purposes.”
I understood. “The footmen,” I said. “They are copies.”
“And not just the footmen,” he said, an insinuating smile squirming across his plump lips.
I was horrified. “Yzmirl,” I whispered, then put iron in my voice. “Where is she?”
“Nowhere,” he said. “She was, now she is not. Though Gevallion can whip up another at any time. That one was specifically designed to appeal to your tastes and petty vanities.”
I did not trust myself to stand over him. I sat and turned my vision inward, encountering images of deep and tender pathos. After a while he spoke, dragging my attention back to his now repulsive face.
“You haven’t asked about the second reason,” he said.
My mind had wandered far from the discussion. I indicated that I was not following.
“The disappeared,” he said, speaking as if I were a particularly slow child, “went into Gevallion’s vats. Then there was the Allers girl. She was the template for your companion of last night, by the way.”
I took a labored breath. It was as if his evil thickened the air. “All right,” I said. “Why did you let the girl be found?”
“Because that would bring Warhanny. And Warhanny would bring you.”
“And why must you bring me?”
“Because by being here, you were not there.”
“And where is ‘there?’”
He smiled. “At your rooms, of course. Where there were items I wished to acquire.”
I allowed anger to take me. I kicked the low table at his legs and sprang to overpower him. But he was ready. An object appeared in his hand. At its center was a small black spot. As I leapt toward him the circle abruptly expanded and rushed out to encompass me in nothingness.
* * * *
Mitric Gevallion’s laboratory was an unprepossessing place, dimly lit and woefully untidy. It featured a long work bench crowded with apparatus and a large display board on which a meandering set of equations and formulae had been scrawled. The vats in which the gist hunter brewed his creations loomed to one side of the wide, low ceilinged room. Against the opposite wall was a sturdy cage and it was within its confines that I regained consciousness.
“Ah,” said Gevallion, when Gharst, who had been sucking at a wound on one thick thumb, drew his attention to my blinking and pate, rubbing. Therobar’s shocker had left me muzzified and aching, but I was now recovering as the academician crossed the cluttered floor to regard me through the bars. “Ah, there you are, back with us,” he said.
I saw no need to join him in assertions of the obvious, and fixed him instead with a disdainful stare. I might as well have struck him with a cobweb for all the impact I achieved.
He rubbed his thin, pale hands together. “We’re just waiting for our host to join us, then we’ll begin,” he said.
I knew he wanted me to ask what was to ensue, but I denied him that satisfaction. After a moment, his eyes moved from my face to focus on a point to one side of it. “That is a most curious creature,” he said. “We tried to examine it while you were…resting, but it shrieked and bit Gharst quite viciously. What is it?”
When I did not answer, he made a moue with his thin lips and said, “It does not signify. I will dissect the beast at leisure after you are…shall we say, through with it.”
It was another attempt to elicit a response from me, and I ignored it like the others. My mind was now concentrated on the display board and I was following the calculations thereon. The mathematics were abstruse but familiar, until they reached the third sequence. There I saw that Gevallion’s extrapolation of Balmerion’s premises had taken a sudden and entirely unexpected departure. He had achieved a complete overturning of the ancient premises and yet as I proceeded to examine each step in his logic, I saw that it all held together.
“You’re looking for the flaw,” he said, now sounding the way a bone flute would sound if it could experience complacent triumph.
I said nothing, but the answer he sought must have been unmistakable in my expression. I ran my eyes over the calculations again, looking for the weakness, the false syllogism, the unjustified leap. There was none.
Finally, I could not deny my curiosity. “How?” I said.
“Simple,” was his answer, “yet achingly difficult. Although it went against everything we are taught, I consciously accepted the gnosis that magic and rationalism alternate in a vast cycle, and that whenever the change comes the new regime obliterates all memory of the other’s prior ascendancy. I then asked myself, ‘If it were so, what would be the mechanism of change?’ And the answer came: there is gist, it exists in this half of the cycle; the other half is opposite, therefore it must contain opposite gist. I thereby conceived the concept of negative gist.”
“Negative gist,” I repeated, and could not keep the wonder from my voice.
“And negative gist, viewed from our side of the dichotomy, is susceptible to definition. Define it, then reverse it, and you have a definition of positive gist. Although it is hard to remember. It slides easily out of understanding.”
Negative gist, I thought. Why had I not seen it?
He knew what I was thinking. “You were not supposed to,” he said. “None of us are. Even with it written on the board I had trouble keeping it in mind. I kept wanting to erase the equations. Then I relocated to Wan Water where conditions are more accommodating.”
“How so?”
“The transition from rationalism to sympathy does not cross our universe in a wavefront, as dawn sweeps across a planet. It occurs almost everywhere at once, like seepage through a porous membrane, but there are discrete locations—dimples, I call them—where the earliest seepage pools. Here the effects are intensified.”
“And Wan Water is such a place,” I said.
“Indeed. That is why our host chose to build here.”
“It seems to be a time for surprises,” I said. There was something more that needed to be said. “I am not often wrong, but in this matter of gist I assuredly was. I offer you my apologies and my congratulations.”
“Graciously done,” he said. “Both are accepted.” He added a formal salute appropriate to academic equals.
I returned it and said, “Since we are on good terms, perhaps you would unlock the cage.”
His expression of regret seemed sincere. “I’m afraid Turgut Therobar has other plans. More to the point, he has the o
nly key.”
At that moment, Gharst called to say that something on the bench had reached a critical point of development. Gevallion rushed to his side. They busied themselves with an apparatus constructed of intricately connected rods and coils, then Gevallion made a last adjustment and the two stood back in postures of expectation. In the air a colorless spot had appeared, a globular shape no larger than my smallest fingernail, connected to the apparatus by a filament as thin as a gossamer. Gevallion nudged a part of the contraption on the bench and the spot grew larger and darker while the connector thickened. I saw motion seemingly within the sphere, a slow roiling as of indistinct shapes turning over and about each other.
The room was also charged with strange energies. My inner discomforts now increased. I felt as if both flesh and being were penetrated by vital forces, causing an itching of my bones and sense of some impending revelation, though I could not tell if it would burst upon me or from me.
Gevallion said something to Gharst and the assistant gingerly touched the apparatus. The academician pushed him aside and made a more determined adjustment. The globe rapidly expanded until it was perhaps three times the diameter of Gharst’s outsized head, then quickly shimmered and redoubled in size. The connecting conduit grew as thick as my wrist. Now the apparition seemed to become stable. I fought the intense irritation the device was causing in my innermost parts and studied the globe closely. I saw that the shifting colors and indeterminate shapes that moved within it were familiar, and began to plan a surprise.
“That is as much as we can achieve at this point,” Gevallion told Gharst. “Advise Turgut Therobar that we are ready for his contribution.”
The assistant spoke into a communications nexus beside the bench. I heard a muffled response.
The dim room became silent and still. The two experimenters stood by the bench, the globe swirled placidly in the air and a small voice mumbled in my ear. For the moment, I ignored it.
If I had any doubts on the matter they were soon resolved. The door opened and in strode Turgut Therobar, swathed in the multihued robes and lap-eared cap of a thaumaturge. The costume should have appeared comical, yet did not. His face bore an expression of fevered anticipation and his hands clasped another disconcertingly familiar object: Bristall Baxandell’s leatherbound tome, last seen in my workroom.
I could feel my assistant’s fur standing up and tickling the side of my neck. The murmuring in my ear grew more insistent.
I whispered back, “Don’t worry.”
Therobar inspected the swirling globe and beamed at Gevallion and Gharst, then shot me a look that contained a mixture of sentiments. He placed the great book on the work bench and opened it, ran his finger down a page and his tongue across his ripe lips. “The Chrescharrie, first, don’t you think?” he said to Gevallion, who nodded nervous agreement.
I recognized the name as that of a minor deity worshipped long ago by a people almost now forgotten. I heard more mumblings in my ear. “Shush,” I said, under my breath.
Therobar removed his cap and I saw that his hairless scalp was densely tattooed with figures and symbols such as I had seen in books of magic lore. He rubbed one hand over the smooth skin of his pate then took a deep breath and intoned a set of syllables. Something pulsed along the cable that connected sphere to apparatus. He spoke again, and again the connector palpitated as if something traversed along its length. The colors in the sphere flashed and fluoresced. There was a crackling sound and the air of the room suddenly smelled sharply of ozone. My internal organs felt as if they were seeking to trade places with each other and there was a pulsing pressure at the back of my head. My integrator abandoned my shoulder with a squawk, dropping to the floor where it grumbled and chittered in an agitated manner.
Therobar spoke again and made a calculated gesture. The sphere shimmered and flickered, there came a loud crack of energy and a fountain of blue sparks cascaded from the globe. The swirl coalesced and cohered at its center, becoming a six-armed homunculus, red of skin and cobalt of eye—there was only one, in the middle of its forehead—seated crosslegged on black nothingness that now otherwise filled the orb. Meanwhile a sensation like a hot scouring wind shot through me.
Therobar consulted the book once more and spoke three guttural sounds, meanwhile moving hands and fingers in precise motions. The figure in the globe started as if struck. Its eye narrowed and its gash of a mouth turned downward in a frown. Its several arms flexed and writhed while it seemed to be attempting to rise to its split-hoofed feet. Therobar spoke and gestured again, a long string of syllables, and the homunculus subsided, though with a patent show of anger in its face.
Now the thaumaturge took another deep breath and barked a harsh phrase. There was a reek of raw power in the air and a thrumming sound just at the limits of perception. My bones were rattling against each other at the joints.
Therobar raised one hand, the index finger extended, then swiftly jabbed it into his forehead. The figure in the globe did likewise with one of its upper limbs, though its sharp nailed digit struck not flesh and bone but its own protruding eye. It gave a squeal of pain and frustrated rage.
Therobar’s eyes widened and I saw a gleam of triumph in them. For a moment I thought he might voice some untoward cry of victory, which would have put us all in deadly peril, but he mastered the impulse and instead chanted a lengthy phrase. The glowering deity in the sphere shimmered and dissolved into fragments of light, and once again the orb contained only shifting shapes and mutating colors.
The thaumaturge let out a sigh of happy relief. Gevallion and Gharst came from the other side of the work bench and there followed a few moments of back slapping, hand gripping, and—on Therobar’s part—a curious little dance that I took to express unalloyed joy.
When the demonstration was over, he looked my way and with an expression of satiated pleasure said, “Allow me to explain what you just saw.”
“No need,” I said. “You have accessed a continuum in which there is no distinction between symbol and referent. You have encapsulated a small segment of that realm and used it as a secure enclosure in which you could summon up a minor deity and bend it to your will. After animals and humans it is the next natural step. Now I suppose you’ll want to call up something more potent so that you can use it to rule the world.”
Therobar’s face took on an aggrieved pout and he regarded me without favor for a long moment.
I shrugged my itching shoulders. “Your ambitions are as banal as your taste in decor,” I said.
I thought he would strike me, but he put down the impulse and sneered. “Do you know why I brought you here?” he said.
“So that you could steal Baxandell’s book from my library.”
“That was but the proximate cause,” he said, and I detected a deeper animosity in the squinting of his eyes and the writhing of his mouth as he approached the cage. “Do you recall an evening at Dame Obrosz’s salon several years ago?”
“There were many such occasions,” I said. “One tends not to retain details.”
“You were holding forth on the bankruptcy of magic.”
“I am sure I have done so often.”
“Yes.” The syllable extended into a hiss. “But on that occasion, your arguments had a profound effect on me.”
“That seems odd, since the evidence of the past few minutes indicates that you have spent years studying and mastering the magical lore that I inveighed against. Obviously I did not convince you.”
“On the contrary, you convinced me utterly,” he said. “But I was so offended by your strutting arrogance and insouciant contempt for all contrary opinion that I resolved then and there to devote my life to disproving your claims, and forcing you to acknowledge utter defeat.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “You have achieved the goal of your existence. I am glad to have been of such great use to you, but pray tell me, what will you do to fill the remaining years?”
“Perhaps I will spend th
em tormenting you,” he said. “And acquainting you with the depths of animosity you are capable of summoning up in otherwise placid souls.”
“I think not.” It seemed time to act. I did my best to ignore my peculiar inner sensations, though they had not diminished after Therobar dismissed the Chrescharrie. Focusing my will, I spoke certain words while making the usual accompanying gestures. Therobar stepped back, his face filling with a mingling of confusion and curiosity. The colors in the globe swirled anew, then I saw the familiar pattern of my demonic friend.
“I am beset,” I called. “Please aid me.”
The demon manifested a limb: thick, bristling with spines and tipped with a broad pincer-like claw. It reached out to Turgut Therobar as I had seen it do before to two other unfortunates. But the thaumaturge had already recovered his equilibrium. He stepped back, out of range, while shouting Gevallion’s name.
The academician also overcame his surprise. He did something to the apparatus on the bench and the globe constricted sharply, trapping my friend’s spiked appendage as if it were a noose that had tightened around the limb. I heard muffled sounds and saw the claw opening and closing in frustration, its pincers clicking as they seized only thin air.
Therobar was flipping through the book. He stopped at a page and from the way his eyes flashed I knew that it boded ill for my friend and me. “Ghoroz ebror fareshti!” he shouted. The orb shivered then contracted further, to the size of a fist, then to a pinpoint, and finally it popped out of existence altogether. The demon’s arm, severed neatly, flopped to the floor where it glowed and smoked for a moment before disappearing.
“Oh, dear,” said Turgut Therobar. “I hope you weren’t counting on that as your last resort.”
“It would be premature to say,” I said, but I heard little conviction in my own voice.
The thaumaturge rubbed his hands in a manner that implied both satisfaction with what had transpired and happy anticipation of further delights to come. “Shall I tell you what happens next?” he said.
I was casting about for a some stratagem by which I might escape or turn the tables, but nothing was coming to mind. I sought insight from the intuitive part of me that so often came to my aid, but received no sense of impending revelation. It was as if he was otherwise occupied.