Liavek 5

by Will Shetterly

  Quard nodded. "All right. What's the girl's family like?"

  "She doesn't have one. She was left as an infant at the House of Responsible Life—"

  "The suicides' order?"

  "Yes, of course," Arianai said, startled. "I don't know why. Perhaps the person who left her misunderstood the name of the order, thinking it meant 'those who take responsibility for the living,' or somesuch."

  "That is what the name does mean," Quard said, "in Sylarine…Old S'Rian."

  "There's such a thing as Old S'Rian?"

  "Everything has a past," Quard said softly. "What did the Green priests do with the child?"

  "They thought about taking her in as a novice of the order. But it was decided that if she were raised entirely within the House, she could never come to an unbiased decision about her own death…isn't that odd, that a religion of suicides should be so particular about who actually dies?"

  "Every faith excludes someone from paradise."

  She laughed in the hope it was a joke. "Do you know, I cannot remember ever having heard of a member of the House actually taking his own life?"

  Quard said, "They may not, until they have severed every link of responsibility to the rest of the world. The order isn't about death, really, but breaking links."

  "There's a difference?"

  "Yes, there is. That is another reason they would be unwilling to adopt a child, you know. Someone would have to take responsibility for her, and be bound again to life. To willingly take on such a bond would be practically apostasy."

  Arianai paused. It was so hard to read anything from Quard's tone of voice. "Arc you a member of the House?" she said.

  "I once considered it. But we were discussing the child."

  ·'Yes… They gave her to the Levar's Orphanage. She lived there for five years. Until she began to sleep badly. Could the Green order have been the source of the 'bad green man' in her dreams?"

  "It seems so obvious. But it was five years between the time the Greens had her and this…disturbance? You're certain of that?"

  "Yes, certain."

  "And she was only in the House of Responsible Life for a short time."

  "A few days, I was told."

  "Then…no. Surely that can't be it. Not with the dream so strong."

  "Does it mean something?"

  "No," he said, too quickly.

  "You don't think—"

  "Do you intend to adopt Theleme?"

  "What? Well, I'd thought about it…or find her a foster family—"

  "I think the best thing you can do to protect her from nightmares is to do just that. The Levar's Orphanage is, I'm sure, a fine place, but it surely can't be better than loving parents."

  "I think you're right."

  "Thank you. Now, please, I need to get some work done."

  "All right, Quard." She held his hand: he looked at hers as if he were not certain what it was for.

  •

  When Arianai got home, Jemuel was sitting on the doorstep, in her officer's uniform.

  "You're up early," Arianai said.

  ''I'm up late. I sleep when there's a chance these days."

  Arianai said, ''I've found a cure for—" and shut her mouth.

  "So I hear. What does your gentleman friend do nights, Anni? Beggin' your right to privacy."

  "Jem, do you know how long it's been since I've had a…gentleman friend?" She tried to laugh, but it came out forced and high.

  "Your little patient told Thyan. Thyan's not very good about secrets."

  "Third-hand gossip, Jem? Are you really so short of clues for your two dead wizards?"

  "Yes. And it's three. The Hrothvek dancer, Teyer ais Elenaith, was found last night, in the middle of the Levar's Way." Jemuel reached into the pouch at her belt, put a small cool object into Arianai's hand. "Seen one of these yet?"

  The item was a glass skull, not much bigger than the end of Arianai's thumb, filled with green liquid. The crown of the skull seemed to be threaded in place. "What is it?"

  "Poison. Fast and neat. I'm told it doesn't even taste too bad." Arianai sat down on the step next to Jemuel, with rather a bump. "Where are they coming from?"

  "At last a question I can answer. Remember Old Wheeze the glassblower? His son, Little Wheeze, came up with the first ones. He claims it was his girlfriend's idea. Now there are five glassblowers turning them out so fast that there's a shortage of green poison. They're dyeing white poison…Pharn's fangs, I didn't mean that pun."

  "But what's the idea?"

  "Random green death, according to Little Wheeze's girlfriend. If you never know when you're going to suddenly glow green and drop dead, well, why not carry your own?"

  Arianai looked at the skull. "And are they actually using these?"

  "Not yet. I'm not going to worry until they stop shocking the grownups. When that happens, the kids'll need a new shock. And then we might be in trouble."

  "Are you going to do anything about it?"

  Jemuel produced another of the skulls, tossed it in the air and caught it. "Legal age to buy poison in Liavek is fourteen. So far, that's been strictly observed. There's no legal minimum to carry poison, because who would have passed such a dumb law? And if you use the thing, you can't be charged with much, except maybe littering, or blocking a public sidewalk, which come to think of it we're guilty of now. Move along, please, mistress."

  They stood up. "We did," Jemuel added, "put the lid on a fellow who wanted to do them in rock candy and lime."

  Arianai shook her head. "Would you like to come in for tea and a biscuit?"

  "I'd rather come in for tea and a clue…. Anni, I do need help. Is there any chance that this friend of yours knows anything?"

  "I don't think there is."

  "Are you not thinking there is, or can you provide him with an alibi?"

  "Jem, there's a line. Don't cross it."

  "All right," Jemuel said, sounding nearly sorry. "I'll see you around, Anni. Say, what's your luck time?"

  "Three hours. Why?"

  "You might want to study magic. I think there's going to be a shortage." Jemuel went off down the street, juggling a pair of glass skulls and whistling "Positively Cheap Street."

  •

  Prestal Cade thought that her life had a rather marvelous symmetry to it: she had become a magician on her fifteenth birthday, successfully forcing her magic into a wooden doll in one long and nervous night. Then for forty more years she had practiced the mysterious and confusing art, leaving her birthplace in Ka Zhir for some time at sea, a few years in the Farlands, a few more in Tichen, before finally arriving in Liavek to stay as a quiet practitioner of the luck-craft.

  She worked through dolls, composing her spells in carving and painting, dressing and detailing them; as a result, her magic was mostly involved directly with people—cosmetic spells, protection from hazards (while at sea, she had crafted a doll of cork, whose spell preserved absolutely from drowning), and the occasional bodily complaints, though always with the assistance of a healer.

  And of course there had been the special doll, her part of the spell that they had all cast together, that was now coming back to them all and dressing them in green.

  Well, she thought, that completed the symmetry. For after fifteen years without magic, and forty with, she had had fifteen again without. Fifteen years ago there had been a man who was jealous of her luck, her dolls, her craft. Durus had loved her, she still did believe that; she was convinced that it was because he loved her that he found the vessel of her luck and broke it, set her magic free so that all her spells failed at once.

  Prestal Cade had been walking home from the greengrocer's when it happened. She felt her heart squeezed, she fell and was sick into the gutter as fruits and cabbages rolled away from her. So this is it, she thought, the knock at the door and me without my magic to answer it. But the Liavekans on the street, used to the vagaries of luck, knew better than she what was happening; someone, she never knew his name, gathered up he
r groceries and led her home.

  There she found Durus on the floor, a knife in one hand and a small cedarwood doll without its head in the other. Had he only waited a few more months, the break in his heart would have healed, and the patch she had put on could have failed without harming him; but Durus was always impetuous.

  He had not, of course, destroyed her vessel on her ill-luck day; on any given birthday since that night, Prestal Cade could have stuffed her luck into some new vessel, been a practicing magician again. But she had not. She was, she thought (when she thought about it at all) becoming old, and would inevitably start using magic to confuse that inalterable fact. She had seen all the places she had meant to see, except the Dreamsend Hills (and who ever got there?). She would only begin to repeat herself, another this, another that, another Durus.

  Still, there was the one small thing, each night.

  Prestal Cade stood in the largest room in her not-large house, as she did every night just before midnight. The only furnishings were a chair just big enough for her, and a table just large enough for a teacup and a cake plate. The rest of the room was filled with dolls, more than three hundred of them, tiny dolls made from a single piece of wood and some as high as her waist, with jointed limbs and eyes that moved; dolls clothed as kings and jesters, sailors and fops, heroes out of legend and beggars from the Two Copper Bazaar. Some of them had been spell dolls, a luck-twisting purpose in their every feature, but most of them came after that. If not for those she had sold or given away, there would be twice as many of them in the room.

  For most of those in Liavek who knew Prestal Cade, she was the Doll Lady, had never been the Doll Witch. It was, she thought (and this she thought rather often) a satisfactory name to depart with.

  She looked among the dolls on their shelves, took one down. It was a little lady as tall as Prestal Cade's forearm, with a porcelain head and arms and a cloth-stuffed body, under a long, full gown of blue velvet. It had been the style of court ball dresses two centuries ago, preserved in children's stories. Prestal Cade adjusted the hem of the gown, saw that the tiny fur slippers were securely in place. She stood the doll on the floor, and waited for midnight to strike.

  A wizard who could invest, but did not, had one trick left: on the minutes of each day corresponding to the moment of birth, the power flashed by. Only a little luck, the most immediate of all the instant magics, but sufficient, perhaps, to hold the line between power and the void.

  The hour came by. Prestal Cade felt her luck rise. She reached out with it.

  The blue velvet doll straightened up, began walking in stately fashion toward the door. When she reached it, she raised a porcelain hand, and the door swung open. The doll curtsied to the figure beyond the door; Prestal Cade bowed.

  The doll did not rise. The moment was gone. Prestal Cade looked up, smiling. The room was already suffused with green light.

  •

  "Verdialos, you're crying."

  "Oh. Am I?" His eyes went wide, which stopped his tears. He was sitting in the dining hall of the House of Responsible Life, over a cup of cold breakfast tea and a half-eaten slice of melon. "I'm sorry, Serenity." The title did not mean a great deal; the hierarchy of the Green Order was loose at best. It just was necessary to have something to call the people with more authority than others.

  "Don't be sorry. Do you mind telling me what the matter is?"

  "I was just told that Prestal Cade had died. Did you know her?"

  "I don't believe so."

  "She was a dollmaker."

  "A wizard?"

  Verdialos smiled slightly. "She had been. But her vessel was destroyed. "

  "Oh."

  "Well, no, not like that, not quite like that, Serenity. Her luck was just freed, not lost. She could have reinvested, but she didn't. "

  "Do you know why?"

  "Not so well that I would be comfortable saying so." He picked up his piece of melon. "I was there the night her luck was freed, you see. It was fifteen years ago, and I was just barely a novice of the Order, and I saw this woman fall down…. " He examined the melon rind. "She had a bag of groceries."

  "Groceries. "

  "I picked them up for her. I remember thinking, as soon as I'd sorted out what had happened, that I should convert this woman to the faith, that I should at least preach the truth to her…"

  "But you didn't?"

  "No, I didn't. There was so much going on at the time, you see."

  "And now the woman is dead, and it's too late to preach to her. You shouldn't cry over what can't be mended, Dialo."

  ''I'm not," Verdialos said plainly. 'Tm sad because I've lost something, and I can't decide whether it's a reason to live, or to die." He shook his head. "One would think after fifteen years as a priest I'd be beyond such ambiguities."

  ''I've been a priest rather longer than you," the Serenity said. "If it weren't for ambiguity, what need would we have for faith?"

  Verdialos nodded. "Thank you, Gorodain."

  "That's what I'm here for," the Serenity said, and started up the stairs to his attic room. "That's what we are all here for."

  •

  Arianai went looking for Wizard's Row, and was rather surprised to find it present.

  Present, but scarcely all there: in place of the usual outlandishly styled houses. there were plain stones, shuttered windows, and silence, except for a raw wind blowing dust and trash up the street.

  Number 17 was on this day a modest stone dwelling with lead-paned windows that admitted no view. A small enameled sign by the doorway arch carried the street number. The knocker on the heavy oak door was of black iron, and as Arianai reached for it, it rattled of itself and the door swung open.

  Arianai entered a narrow corridor with a worn red carpet, hazy light filtering through small windows high up. The passage led to a room with one small lamp on a table: it was otherwise so dark that the objects on the walls, the walls themselves, were uncertain.

  In a large leather chair next to the lamp sat The Magician. He wore a long red gown with brocade trim, black leather slippers. His face was difficult to see in the glare of the lamp, but his hands were as youthful as always. His small silver-blue cat was in his lap, the fat black one curled up at his feet.

  "Arianai," he said, and that was all.

  "Magician. "

  When he did not answer, she said, "Your hospitality is usually better than this."

  "Times are usually better than this."

  "What's the matter with the times? It doesn't seem to me to be a bad time at all. Unless of course you're a wizard."

  "You are acquiring a bitter humor, Arianai. I wonder from where." His voice was that of a very young man, but it was shot through with ancient weariness, so terrible that she had to pause before answering him.

  "You sent me to Quard."

  "I referred Theleme's case to him. There is a difference."

  "I'm tired of hearing about all these subtle differences! Is Quard involved with the dead wizards?"

  The Magician was silent.

  "You want a fee?" She threw a handful of silver on the floor.

  The sleeping cat jumped up and ran away into the darkness. She took a step forward. "I think you're scared. You're afraid you're going to die, too."

  "Young lady," The Magician said firmly, "I know that I am going to die. It taunts me every year with its presence. I ceased to be afraid of it before your several-great-grandparents were conceived." He stroked his cat. "That is why these…colleagues of mine are dead: because they had no fear."

  More quietly, Arianai said, "Is Quard a murderer?"

  "No."

  She licked her lips. "But is he the wizard-killer?"

  "There is no way to answer that question in a way you will understand. "

  "Then tell me enough to understand! Please, Magician…Quard said your name was Trav."

  "I've thought about changing it." He sighed. "What you are seeing now are the last in a long series of actions. Call them moves in a g
ame. The object of the game is power…a power as much greater than our magic as the sun exceeds this lamp."

  "Are you playing the game?"

  "At present, only observing it."

  "So who are the players?"

  "Originally—thirty years ago—there were seven. Their leader's name was Imbre. He was an extremely powerful wizard, with a luck time of almost two full days. There was, in fact, a time when he might have become The Magician of Liavek in my place. But he had an obsessive streak in his nature that led him into…experiments. And not long after the start of the one that interests you, he died."

  "Did you kill him?"

  "Thank you for your confidence. His closest associate in the seven killed him, fairly or not, I've no idea."

  "And took over."

  "There was nothing for him to take over."

  "But you said the power—"

  "It is not that kind of power. Not something that any of Imbre's group—or all of them together—could use or control to their own ends. All they could do was release it on the world."

  "And if they did?"

  The Magician said nothing.

  "And if they did?"

  "Do you pray to a god, Healer?"

  "I…pray. Healers do that quite a bit."

  "And what happens when you pray to whatever god it is? Does some actual being use its power to touch you back? Or does your own wish, your own prayer, give shape to some abstract power?"

  "What difference does it make?"

  The Magician made a gesture over the cat in his lap. It began to rise, levitating almost in front of The Magician's face. The cat seemed to enjoy it, curling and stretching in midair. "I reach into myself and do this," he said, "but I am not a god."

  "How do you know?"

  The cat sank back into The Magician's lap, presented its belly for scratching, and was rewarded. The Magician said, "Because I look back and regret my wasted efforts. Only mortals look back."

  "Is Quard mortal?"

  "If you cut him, he will bleed. But Quard is also a gateway to the power that Imbre's seven reached for."

  "He has the power?"

  "No one has the power!" The Magician's voice softened. "Because Quard has a mind and a will, he may not simply be walked over. Think of his will as being a lock on the gate. Imbre's successor has spent thirty years assembling the key to that lock."