Elemental

by Steven Savile

  “I’m sorry, Ly,” she says, withdrawing the IV from your arm. The tender look in her eyes holds centuries of regret. “Lucius never let a little thing like the law keep him from what he considers his. You’re going to be converted.” She lifts you from the bed as gently as a baby. “Whether you want it or not.” Her small frame is deceptively strong.

  Her lips are centimeters from your ear. “It’s not so bad,” she whispers.

  She’s so intent on being gentle with your delicate body, Alexa doesn’t notice your fumbling fingers locate the brain-capture transmitter at the base of your skull. The producer carefully calibrated the setting for your failing body, and warned you that upping the gain would produce seizures.

  The convulsions alone won’t kill you—it wouldn’t be suicide—tapping the control would only buy enough time to die naturally.

  Alexa is a weapon of destruction, built in a time when it was still possible to kill. She doesn’t have the skill to stop a fit. The doctors who could save you are too far away to intervene.

  Be passive and live forever young and healthy. Or act now, and die as nature intended.

  Your mind races. Alexa lowers you into the conversion tank beside the bed. You have only seconds to choose.

  Seconds that might mean permanent obliteration of all thought and consciousness, the end to the unique point of view that was Lysander Sterling. Death eternal.

  Maria would have chided you for your pride.

  People died for eons. It’s the natural order of things. It used to happen to everyone. One more death: no big deal.

  What if Maria’s religion is right, that something exists after death—what if Maria is there now, hovering near, waiting to claim you? After a lifetime of living for her—without her. You might be reunited. Could you risk losing that?

  And if she was wrong? Can you risk losing everything?

  The viscous fluid swimming with nanology creeps up the side of your body, warm as blood. Already your skin itches as the nanoscale machines burrow in.

  The slightest tap on the transmitter at the base of your skull, and you’ll thrash free of the container.

  Now is the moment you must decide. There’s no time left.

  You choose.

  The Double-Edged Sword

  BY SHARON SHINN

  Sharon Shinn is the acclaimed author of Archangel and four additional novels in the world of Samaria (Jovah’s Angel, The Alleluia Files, Angelica, and Angel Seeker), as well as seven other science fiction and fantasy novels, the latest of which is The Thirteenth House. She has also published two Young Adult novels, The Safe-Keeper’s Secret and The Truth-Teller’s Tale; her third Young Adult book, The Dream-Maker’s Magic, will be released in 2006. She won the William C. Crawford Award for Outstanding New Fantasy Writer for her first book, The Shape-Changer’s Wife, and was twice nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Summers at Castle Auburn and The Safe-Keeper’s Secret have both been named to the ALA’s list of Best Books for Young Adults.

  “‘The Double-Edged Sword’ takes place in a world I created for an unpublished fantasy novel,” Shinn explains. “The fact that the whole world already existed in my head helped me give a certain richness to the details of the story. In particular, I already had designs and explanations for half the cards in the zafo deck. One of my Wiccan friends gave me a blank deck of cards so I could draw the zafo images that were described in the book. I’ve never actually finished the deck, but it was a lot of fun to come up with pictures and interpretations.”

  Sharon Shinn lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

  I sat at the back of the dark tavern at the table that, in the past five years, had come to be known as mine. Even on the days when I did not bother to leave my house or leave my bed, no one sat in this booth except me. The townspeople knew better, and strangers who made the mistake of sitting in my place would be told politely by Samuel that the table was reserved. I was the only one who ever sat there, and Samuel was the only one who would approach me while I was in possession.

  I idly shuffled my zafo cards and began laying out an unspecified fortune. It would be my own, of course; these days, I did not read for anyone except myself. And even then, I was rarely satisfied with the pictures I saw in the cards.

  The swinging door to the back room swept open wide, admitting the appetizing smell of meat and onions as well as Samuel’s tall, spare figure. Catching sight of me in the dim corner, he checked abruptly and came my way.

  “Aesara. I didn’t know you were here,” he said. “What will you have to drink?”

  “Wine, maybe. Do you have time to drink it with me?”

  “In an hour or so I will.”

  “A glass of ale, then, until you are free,” I said.

  “Will you eat with me?” he asked.

  I squinted up at him in the insufficient light. I had not been awake more than an hour and could not have said with any certainty what time it had been when I rose. “Is it almost dinnertime?” I asked.

  “For you, it is,” he said firmly. I laughed out loud. Samuel was convinced that I never ate unless he fed me. “Of course, I’m always hungry,” he added with a smile.

  This was meant to coax me to eat, for his sake. “I’ll eat with you,” I said. “It smells good.”

  “I’ll get your ale, then.”

  He disappeared, returning in a minute with a glass of cold ale and a plate of bread. The bread made me laugh again. He grinned crookedly. He was sandy-haired and freckle-faced, with weathered skin and an unchanging ruddy coloring that made it hard to place his exact age. I knew it, though. He was fifty-eight, seven years older than I was, and he had been a widower for five years.

  I had laid my zafo cards out in the standard grid—one card in the top row, four cards in each of the next two rows, and a single card in the bottom row—but I had not turned them face-up yet. Now, with the ale and bread arrived as a diversion, I did not feel like reading the cards after all. I swept them back into a pile, reshuffled the deck, and laid the cards aside.

  The activity of the tavern went on quietly around me. I leaned back on my padded bench and watched. Although I talked to no one except Samuel, I knew all the employees and all the habitués by name. Sam’s eldest son Groyce handled most of the up-front business: greeting customers, making sure everyone was attended, watching out for trouble. Groyce’s wife, a small, pretty girl, waited on tables and flirted mildly with the local patrons. Two other young women served customers, and an old man cooked in the back.

  At this early hour, there were only half a dozen people in the bar, talking quietly, playing board games, or teasing the young girls. I had lived in Salla City for five years now, and I could tell you the name of every man and woman who inhabited it, but I had yet to get closer to a single one of them than I was at this exact moment.

  Except for Samuel, of course, and we were close only because of the bargain we had struck one night five years ago. At that, it was not true friendship. He felt grateful and I felt secure; and so he let me stay, and I stayed.

  I sipped at my ale and watched with Samuel confer briefly with Groyce before disappearing again into the back room. This was the table I had taken that night five years ago, when I had just paused in Salla City to break my aimless journey for one night. Samuel had served me then, but absently, with clumsy, choppy motions that irritated me because some of the wine had spilled from his unsteady hands to the table. I was laying out the cards then too, and I had been afraid of staining one of them—although it didn’t matter if the whole deck was ruined, if the whole deck was lost.

  “Could you bring me a cloth, please,” I had said coldly, “so I can wipe this up?”

  He had immediately done so; but instead of handing me the linen, he had stood beside me wrapping the white napkin around and around his hands.

  “You are a halana,” he said, when I finally looked up with a scowl.

  “Yes,” I snapped. “What of it?”

  “I have—my wife is next
door. She is dying. That is—we have a halana in the city who has done what she can. She says my wife is dying.”

  Anger and fear had risen in me, for I knew what was coming next. Knew, and did not want to deal with it. “She is probably right, then,” I said.

  “But you are a halana,” he said almost stupidly.

  Halana. Wise woman; healer. We have varied powers, we who are filled with the magical blood of Leith and Egeva. Some of us are very skilled and some of us are merely well taught, and I had no way of knowing just how good the local practitioner was.

  “There is nothing I can do for you,” I said.

  He went on as if I had not spoken. “She is in such pain. Her head—her lungs—her whole body. She has begged me to take her life because she is in such terrible agony. But I can’t do that.”

  I wanted to put my hands over my ears and shut out the sound of his voice; I also wanted to put them over my eyes to block out the sight of his face. I could not do both.

  “There is nothing I can do for you,” I said again. In the six years that I had been wandering through Sorretis—from the throne room of Verallis to the rocky hills of Limbeth—this was the response I had given to everyone who had asked a favor of me. There had not been many. I did not look, with my grim face and darkling expression, like a woman of kindly disposition.

  “But she is dying,” he said.

  I opened my mouth to refuse him again, but somehow the words went unsaid. Perhaps it was the dazed grief in his gray eyes, or perhaps it was the dormant power in my own body that made me say what I had no intention of saying. “I will look at her,” I said, rising. “But I make no guarantees. I doubt if there is anything I can do.”

  And so I accompanied him to the small house behind the big tavern, the house that, under other circumstances, would have been pervaded with a welcoming charm. But a woman lay dying inside, and so the house was filled with fear instead.

  I knew as soon as I entered the sickroom that the woman was ill beyond my powers of healing. The chamber was shallowly lit by clusters of tapers shielded behind brightly painted screens. Someone had brought in fresh flowers in an attempt to cheer up the sick woman; everywhere were similar evidences of hopeful affection. But there were not enough flowers or candles in Sorretis to bring this woman back to life.

  I did not say so, of course. She was conscious, but barely; she turned uneasily when I entered the room. “Sam?” she said faintly, and the lanky man crossed to her side. He took her hand so gently he could have been imprisoning butterflies. Nonetheless, she had to bite back a cry of pain. The look upon his face was sheer desolation.

  “I’ve brought a halana to look at you, Mari,” he said, in a low voice. I supposed her fever had made her ears sensitive to sound as well. “Can you say hello?”

  “Halana?” she said drowsily and turned her eyes blindly my way. But I could see from the cloudy irises that she could not make out my features—nor, if it came to that, her husband’s. I crossed the room quietly and held my hands on either side of her face. I did not quite touch her skin, and she did not moan aloud. Even without touching her, I could feel the heat from her cheeks burn against my palms.

  I stayed in the room a few moments, trying to determine what her disease was, while Samuel talked nonsense to distract her. A few minutes was all I could stand; I left as soon as I could have been expected to make a diagnosis. Samuel followed me shortly. On his face was a look of fugitive hope.

  “Well?” he said. “Do you think—what do you think?”

  I was wont to be blunt at times like these, but he looked so vulnerable that I tried to temper my words. “There are some diseases that can be cured, and some that cannot,” I said. “Hers is an illness for which there is no remedy.”

  He stared at me steadily, while all the light seemed to die slowly from his plain, good-natured face. I had not meant to add even this much, but his expression of despair moved me more than I wished. “I have something I can give her that will ease her pain,” I said. “It will not make her well, but it will make her dying less terrible.”

  “You are sure she will die?”

  “In less than a week. Yes, I am sure.”

  He had flinched when I named the time, but I saw no reason to spare him from the knowledge. “But you can lessen her suffering? With some potion?”

  It was not a potion, exactly. I would speak a complex spell over a simple glass of water, and its very essence would change. But I did not explain this to him. Those who are not halani prefer to believe in philtres and potions. It makes them uneasy to rely upon incantations. “That is exactly it,” I said. “Wait here, and I will return with the drug.”

  And so I had gone to the bar and requested water, and paused a moment to pour it into one of the small glass vials I always carried. Shortly thereafter, the medicine had been administered. I had not stayed to see the efficacy of my drug. I was hungry, and I had gone back to the tavern to eat my interrupted meal.

  Sam had rejoined me in something less than an hour, his face transformed with wonder. Mari was lucid, she who had been raving before. She had allowed him to take her hand, to kiss her face, without crying out from the agony his lightest touch inflicted. He had told her that she was dying, that this blessed surcease was a gift but not the greatest gift, and even so she had laughed. “I feel so good,” Mari had exclaimed. “Even the gift of my life could not make me so happy.” Sam related this whole conversation to me.

  “I am glad to hear it,” I had said somewhat sourly, trying to finish my meal.

  “How can I thank you?” he demanded. “Such a wondrous thing you’ve done—”

  “I have not saved her,” I warned him. “Don’t be deceived. Her body is careening headlong toward death, and I can do nothing to arrest that journey.”

  He watched me steadily again with those gray eyes. I thought somewhat irrelevantly that this man was nobody’s fool. “I understand that,” he said almost patiently. “But you don’t understand. She was in such pain and now she is at peace. There is nothing I would not do to thank you.”

  “Let me finish my dinner in solitude,” I said. “And tell no one what I have done for you tonight.”

  “But—”

  “No one,” I interrupted. “If you want to thank me, leave me alone. I am not much interested in interfering in the lives of others. And I do not want them interfering in mine.”

  He had continued to watch me with that narrowed, intelligent gaze, and I had the sudden feeling that I had told him, in a few simple sentences, the whole story of my tangled life. But all he said was, “I understand. I will say nothing to anyone. You will be free from importunity as long as you stay.”

  Mari had died six nights later. I did not attend the funeral services; Samuel did not ask me to. He did not ask me how long I planned to stay in Salla City. He never asked me to intercede for the life or health of any other citizen, and I was relatively certain that he knew of others, over the years, who could have used my help. He did ask me, the day after Mari died, what my name was. Aesara, I said. If he recognized it, he gave no sign.

  Samuel himself brought two steaming plates of food to the table about an hour later. Groyce’s pretty wife followed with a bottle of wine and two glasses. She smiled at me shyly but said nothing, and fled as soon as she had set the pieces upon the table. Samuel decanted and poured.

  “She’s afraid of me,” I observed.

  He looked after his daughter-in-law. “Who, Lina? She thinks you’re a crazy old woman. Everyone does.”

  “I’m not that old,” I said.

  “But crazy?”

  I shrugged. “Who isn’t?”

  The food was delicious, as always. After Lina had cleared our dishes away, Sam leaned back and stretched his arms. Out of habit, I pulled out my zafo cards again and began shuffling. Sam and I never talked much during meals or after them, but our silences were filled with a wordless companionship.

  Now he spoke, surprising me. “Do you ever look at them?” he
said.

  I glanced up. “What?”

  He gestured to the cards that I had laid out again, absent-mindedly, in the standard grid. “Your cards. You always place them on the table this way, but you never turn them over and look at them.”

  I made a wry face. “Sometimes I do. I don’t like the pictures I see.”

  “What pictures do you see?”

  “What pictures does one ever see in a zafo deck?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen one.”

  Now I was amused. “You’ve never had your fortune told? Not even once, just for fun?”

  “No, never. I have too much respect for the powers of the halani to approach one lightly.”

  “Now you do, perhaps,” I scoffed. “Since you have such high respect for me.”

  He grinned. “So do you want to read my fortune?”

  I shook my head. “I never read for anyone but myself.”

  He motioned at the cards again. “Then read one for yourself. I would like to see the pictures.”

  I hesitated a moment. He caught my reluctance. “Then don’t,” he said swiftly.

  I shrugged and smiled. “Why not? They can’t tell me anything I don’t know already. But if you have never seen this done, I will have to explain everything.”

  I turned over the top card, alone in the upper row. “This is called the primary significator,” I told him. “It represents me as I am or as I was.”

  No surprise, the top card was the black queen. I was dark-eyed and dark-haired, but the card meant more than that; it spoke of a somber personality weighted with heavy cares. The brooding queen invariably turned up in my fortune, either as my present or my future.

  “Now, most halani read the cards in the order in which they are laid out, but I like to skip around,” I told him, reaching for the last card, the single one in the fourth row. “This card will tell us who I will become.”

  The image revealed was not one I was expecting. It was the hooded figure, a dark, faceless form with its hands outstretched.

  “It looks somewhat threatening,” Samuel observed.