by Janet Morris
Out behind the little cabin was a gravel "pond," neatly raked but without any artful design. Niko walked barefoot out into its midst. "Please," he said over his shoulder. "See this."
The gravel was a meditation aid; it was nearly sacrilegious for anyone but the cabin's occupant to walk on it. Yet, so bidden, Levitas couldn't refuse. The blankness of the gravel gave him pause and made him worry more.
When the old tutor reached his student, the boy had brushed away enough gravel to reveal what he had buried there: an enameled cuirass of priceless antiquity with snakes and glyphs twining its breastplate; a sword in scabbard and matching dirk with the demons of the elder gods raised on it in a way metal had not been worked for centuries.
"Where did you get these?" Levitas spoke before he thought, and the trembling in his voice reached the boy's ears clearly. Half horrified, half astounded, he knelt down beside Niko on the stones.
"They were inflicted upon me by Aškelon, regent of the seventh sphere, after my left-side leader's death. I tried to offer this," Niko tapped the cuirass, "in sacrifice upon my partner's bier, but it came back to me again. Since I've had it, I've lost a second partner, been possessed by a witch, and shunned by my brothers. The possession, supposedly, is over, but the witch still lives and none of my Sacred Band can believe I'm cleansed of her taint, no matter how they try." Niko sat back on his haunches. "Neither can I. I want to be rid of this accursed gear—" He pulled the sword from its scabbard, held it out by the blade. "Feel it. It's warm. It's from Meridian, the dream lord's realm. He's after me, wants my… wants me."
Touching the hilt, it seemed to the old man that it burned him. Instinct made him drop it.
Niko looked at it, nodded, took it with a mixture of tenderness and revulsion, and put it back in its sheath. "Does that explain your bad dreams and evil omens?"
The teacher nodded, speechless, at a loss as to what he might suggest.
The uncanny youth chuckled then and helped him up. "It's not your fault, Levitas. It's not anybody's fault. Don't look so stricken. I feel better now that I've told someone. I'd thought to give it to the sea or to the coffers, but I can't defile either one. So I'll deal with it. I just need time and peace to think things out."
"You have that. Here. Always." Tears in his eyes, Levitas embraced his former pupil. "I'll go down into the vaults and look through the scrolls, and I'll have my students scour the literature. These weapons may have come to you by way of an archmage, but they were forged in the smithies of the gods. It's Enlil and Kubaba's demons who romp on them, not some godless sorcerer's minions. Take heart, Niko. We'll solve it."
"I don't think so. But I've heart enough, as it is. I told you, I need time."
"Time you shall have," the instructor promised, though his temples throbbed as if a demon squeezed them slowly in a vise and he knew that what Niko had, and didn't have, would be a matter in which the secular adepts of Bandara had little say.
Soon after, they sent the mute girl to spy on him, since she could read and write, and her reports declared that Niko was improving daily. Under the circumstances, they could do little else but respect his wishes and retranslate ancient texts, hoping to establish the provenance of the armaments or fit what was happening to one of the prophecies of old.
* * *
The square-sailed trireme Randal had purchased once the cloud-conveyance deposited him in Caronne was decked fore and aft; amidships, the slanted benches which accommodated twenty-five rowers per side were empty: Randal had no need of muscle.
The galley's lofty prow, gleaming with the polished wood and bronze of its ram, cut westward through the sea, its gold-painted eyes wide and fearless, its rainbow sail full of a conjured wind so fair and constant that the slim little vessel made thrice the four knots her optimistic seller had claimed she might.
Randal was glad to be away from the cozening shipwright who'd lied and chiseled his way to a fine profit on the little warship during protracted haggling. It had been five soldats extra for this sail, three per pair of oars, twenty for the teak decking… If he'd needed to crew her, the ship would have taken all his funds.
As it was, she was barely seaworthy—triremes seldom were. They were too light, too much the instruments of war they'd been designed to be. And no craft built without the benefit of incantations, with a mage at hand from the day her keel was laid to the moment of launch, was meant to course the seas at the speed the Tysian hazard demanded of this one.
When Bandara's mists came in sight, the shivering, sea-wracked sorcerer spoke an anchoring spell through blue lips and went below the foredeck, where he shut and warded the stout teak door behind him, sank onto a bunk upon which he had not dared to lie once during his three-day journey hither, and fell immediately into a long and dream-studded sleep. He'd never been happier than when he'd left Caronne behind for the open waves; he dreamed he was back there yet, arguing with the seafarers on its busy quayside until his throat was raw. Caronne the seaport was one of four known Caronnes that cartographers had charted. The name itself was unlikely to have originated in any of the six languages of the civilized world. Legend had it that in ancient times a king named Caronne had gone conquering, naming the cities he founded after himself. Another, more arcane tale said that the original Caronne, city of legend, lay beyond a dimensional gate not unlike the one through which gods and demigods and the likes of Tempus and his sorcerer-slaying sister, Cime, gained entry into a world already plagued by a surfeit of gods and their get, a world whose phenomenal base was magic and where gods and wizards unceasingly warred.
Whatever the truth of its origins, this western port of Caronne was the trading center from which drugs and slaves and other contraband issued south and east. No mageguild or civilized government oversaw her mercantile anarchy. Randal had been glad to be quit of Garonne's pernicious carnival; the place had an air of jolly menace about it which made him very conscious that its wicked folk supported neither gods nor archmages. Caronne laughed at heaven and disbelieved in hell; it recognized only the Lord Commerce and the taste of gold between the teeth. Its highest officials kept the Seals of Weights and Measures; before them, priest and mage alike bowed low.
In Randal's dream, a Bursar of the Customs House had discovered the young mage's globe of power and was trying to pry its gemstones loose.
Reality reminded him that he didn't have the globe with him just as he burst out of sleep, bolt upright, in his gently rocking bed. Fumbling with the door jammed by his own forgotten wards of the night before, he stumbled out and up on deck.
Bandara lay ahead, misted and lavender in the pastel morning light. He splashed fresh water on his face from a bucket and set about calming himself. There was no similarity between Caronne and Bandara; the Tysian junior Hazard faced a totally different set of problems here. Mages of the guild, who dealt with demons and took power from the seething magma of the underworld, were anathema to the Bandarans, who aligned themselves with neither gods in their heavens nor sorcerers in their hells, but held man himself to be an expression of universal power. Nascent powers were developed here, true, but only "natural" powers. Randal's sort of alignment with elemental forces was considered by Bandarans a perversion. As he had told Critias, the young mage might be denied admittance if he walked up the steps hewn into the quayside, knocked on the great red door, and announced himself.
Therefore, he wasn't going to knock. He knew they'd know he'd come: the bright-sailed ship— his calling card, his trump—was obvious. Even without it, they'd have sensed him; probably they'd been aware of an "evil" force approaching long before his sail became visible on their horizon. He would let Niko explain to his fellow Bandarans whatever the Stepson thought necessary. They weren't going to like it, but by the time they heard about it, Randal would already have had his say.
And he was curious. This was a potent sect; under less extenuating circumstances, he'd never have had the opportunity—the audacity —to study it close at hand. He'd find out what was fact and what was f
iction among the tales told of the veiled isles. He had more than an excuse—he had a duty to deliver to his left-side leader their task force commander's recall order.
Still, it was an insolent and outrageous thing he had in mind to do. An uninvited guest is never welcome. And his heart was not quiet; the mercantile marauders of Caronne had left him angry enough to put a pox on that town or turn all the precious gold in its underground treasuries to salt.
Wishing he'd brought his globe along—with which he could have accomplished the shape change he had in mind regardless of the intensity of his concentration—he took from his girdle a vial of special salts, and on the deck before him, poured it out into the shape of the closed spiral, each arm of seven spinning outward to join the wheel at its edge from a central sphere. This was his most potent glyph. Staring at it, he muttered his favorite spell as he stripped off his clothing, warding the ship against intruders or capricious Nature, demanding success in his encounters, then changing his shape.
Moments later a seahawk beat with mighty wings from the deck. Spiraling upward, it alighted on the stout pine mast, gave its high-pitched piercing cry, and struck out west, deviating only once from its shoreward course to pluck a young sunfish from the bounteous sea.
* * *
Niko was raking the gravel of his pond into a pleasing design when a hawk's shadow fell over his labors.
Wiping his sweating brow with a bare arm, he paused in his work to watch it soar, master of the air, its wings hardly beating. The day was hot, autumn's last heat wave. The haze had burned off early and the sky was a deep, exhilarating blue against which the hawk was a graceful curve.
Niko thought to take an omen from it: right to left was the best of signs, left to right the worst, and he knew every variation's meaning. But this hawk just circled, as if following the waves and tides Niko's rake made in the gravel under his feet. He'd discarded his chiton and worked now in only a linen loinguard; the sun felt good upon his back and legs and his thoughts were immersed in the pattern he was making in his gravel.
He'd started at the center, working backward, never stepping on the furrows his rake was making once he'd used its toothed side. The flat side he'd long since finished with; the gravel was nearly smooth, even where he'd had to walk. All his training was his to command once more; he could step on nails or crushed glass or wet parchment and leave neither blood nor footprint. When the design he saw in his mind was realized, ordered in the myriad stones, no dissonant irregularity would mar it. He could climb the hill and meditate upon what he'd wrought to his heart's content.
Niko wasn't impatient; he was enjoying the process as much as he would appreciate the result. It was the doing, here, which was important. An ordered mind was already his; its expressions were added joys, benefits he knew were consequences of an accomplished result. With his maat encompassing all that had troubled him and his soul at peace, he merely wished to return some of the pleasure he felt to the natural world from which it emanated. He hoped the hawk liked his pattern. He felt increased by its presence, as if it had purposely come here to float above him while he worked—a harmonic expression that made the pattern of Niko making a pattern, which expressed the pattern he felt within, all the more singular. There was a piece of art in the world now which only the hawk and whatever looked down upon the hawk from even more supernal distances could see: Niko in his gravel pond, behind his cabin on the narrow shelf halfway up Ennina's wildly fertile bluff, making something for the joy of it, something for the gods with which they could do what they willed.
This moment, however, was complete, everlasting, and reasonably perfect. Niko conceived of gods as the spiraling arms connecting the central unity of his mental pattern with the outward, resonant unity of his as-yet-unfinished gravel circle. Gods in the world were angry, jealous, destructive, and mean while being instructive. Niko in the world was no better than the world he was in. Yet when he rejoined it, he would carry back his maat, his unity, and not ask the world to remake itself or meet any elevated expectations. What he brought to life, often enough, was the transformation of death. But he brought also the unity of his perception, the essential calm which allowed him a duality of his own with which to meet Nature's duality. He could endure any amount of hardship, once again, without complaint. He could strive toward perfection without ever being disappointed that he could not attain it. He could excuse the frailty and treachery of his fellows without question or fear. His spirit was once again intact.
Niko knew he was ready, like the hawk wheeling above his head, to venture forth wherever the wind led him, to engage in strife and do battle, as his mystery prepared him to, with the imbalances abroad. He was in no hurry to do so. He was imbued with maat at its purest; he gloried in the restfulness of Ennina and the equilibrium he'd regained here. This was as it should be.
But also he was aware once more of the paradox of the Bandaran schools: what was pure here was sullied beyond, where it was most needed. The test of his mental disciplines lay in how long they were effective against chaotic, hostile forces.
A Bandara-trained fighter must leave the sanctuaries when all elements became equal within him. Here he would waste what he had gained. Should the abstract ever outweigh the world's allure for him, he could enter another mystery, one whose mastery could be claimed in solitude and whose dictates did not send its initiates out to ascend its degrees in the field.
So when the hawk spiraled down and down and came to rest on a cherry tree just beyond the gravel pond's edge, Niko was not surprised.
He'd been drawn to it; he'd even fancied he'd looked down on himself through its eyes.
When it alighted on the ground and disappeared behind the tree's trunk, Niko began to feel a certain suspicion. A bit of his placidity ebbed.
Not even an archmage, he thought to himself, would dare to send someone after him, not here. But his inner sight detected a bluish tinge, in retrospect, to the hawk—more than its sea-roving plumage would warrant. Blue was for magic, the kind made in witches' scrying bowls and mageguild crypts.
He didn't stop raking immediately, but he was suddenly cold though the sun was at midheaven. He finished the spiral he was working on and stepped carefully back out of the gravel pond to retrieve his chiton.
When he'd slipped it over his head and secured his belt with its utility knife on his hips, Niko was certain he had a visitor. Whether it was friendly remained to be determined. He recalled old Levi-tas's reports of disturbed oracles and portentous dreams, then his mouth twitched. He let the rake fall and strode toward the thick, ancient tree determinedly. "Whoever you are, show your—Randal! I own you gave me a turn." Hands on his hips, Niko regarded Randal critically. The mageling Tern-pus had forced on Niko as a right-side partner was still slim, long-necked, big-eared, and fey. But Randal's auburn hair had grown over his ears now and the clothing he'd doubtless materialized while out of sight behind the tree consisted of the mottled gauze tunic and tight-ankled trousers Nisibisi guerrillas wore in summer.
"Life to you, left-side leader," Randal said, his freckled nose wrinkling as he grinned and stepped forward, arms outstretched in greeting.
"And everlasting glory, rightman." Niko completed the ritual salutation, endured Randal's comradely hug and, stepping back a pace, squatted down. "Do you approve of my pattern?" He didn't care. He was wondering how long it was going to take for the school to be alerted and send initiates or masters to deal with this travesty; whether he would be blamed if Ennina was judged befouled and in need of purification; whether he could chance secreting Randal in his cabin; or even if he would protect the mageling, should push come to shove, from harm. Niko had taken an oath to do so, but his ties to Bandara were more profound.
"Pattern? You mean the power glyph?" Randal knelt down also, excitement obvious on his peeling, wind-burned face. "I knew we had things in common, Stealth, but I never dreamed you Ban-darans and we mages were so closely—"
"Randal, it's a sacrilege, you being here. Don't say thin
gs like that. You'd better have a good reason for putting me in this position…"
"Position? It's your position I'm here about. You are recalled to active duty. Critias sent me to fetch you back. Immediately." Crestfallen at being reproached, Randal was now peevish. "If I get you back to Critias within ten days from when he dispatched me, he'll give me the stand for the globe— the stand I need to wrest from it the finest of its secrets. So come along now. I'm under orders, you see, from Critias, as to just how this is to be handled. I had to stop in Caronne and buy a ship to give the Bandarans—it's anchored offshore—as a gift from the Stepsons. All they have to do is send someone with us as far as Caronne… but it took three days to sail it here, and longer than I anticipated to buy it—"
"Just three days? What did you do, hitch it to oceangoing demons?" Disgust and wariness wound around Niko's words. "No master will set foot on it. An initiate who's ready, perhaps, might join us, but not if you tell them your rate of sail. And what's the hurry? Surely we've a few days left. Can't you get us there with your magic—by cloud-conveyance, whatever? Snap your fingers and—"
"Our task force leader has given specific orders, Stepson. You still are one, aren't you?"
That was insupportable insolence. Niko got to his feet. "Randal, don't try me. What are you hiding?" Though Niko's right-side partner had saved his life on Wizardwall, Randal was still a mage: untrustworthy, a trickster.
"We're to take one Bandaran as far as Caronne, where you are to complete negotiations with your uncle for the drugs Madame Bomba wants. Now can we gather up one of your brethren and leave?" Randal, rising, brushed off his seat, then his knees, fastidiously, complaining. "You should be glad to see me. I admit my feelings are hurt, but they'll mend if you'll show me around…"
"No chance. If I take you inside my cabin we'll probably have to burn it afterward." Niko, who had been heading toward the rake he'd dropped, stopped still.