Liavek 5

by Will Shetterly

  "And the glowing dead—they're the first light coming through the keyhole?"

  "Spoken like a wizard."

  "But if you know all this—if you've been 'observing the game'—why in all the gods' names haven't you done something?"

  "Because I believe that the play will fail, and by interfering I would do no good and might cause many more deaths."

  "All right! Tell me what I can do."

  "You have already done it," The Magician said tiredly. "You put the key into the lock."

  Arianai stared. "I…what did I…do you mean Theleme?"

  "Imbre fathered Quard to gain access to power. Imbre's successor fathered Theleme to gain access to Quard."

  Arianai's throat clamped shut. The Magician just sat in his darkness, stroking his cat.

  Finally she said, "Theleme…? The…green man is her father?"

  "Planted in her dreams for Quard to find."

  "But you sent me to Quard!"

  "I sent you back to Quard. His sensitivity to dreams is real. Theleme would have died without him, and the unlocking process would still have begun. Now do you start to understand just how complex this game is?"

  "Tell me the rest of it! Please."

  "The rest of it is Quard's story. He will have to tell you."

  "You could tell me more, but you won't."

  The Magician sighed again. "I could tell you to leave Liavek, to have nothing more to do with Quard, but you won't. That is one mistake that I have made, and am bitterly sorry for: I forgot what it meant to be lonely, and not be proud of the fact."

  "At least tell me the name of the green man."

  "If I tell you, you will go to him. If I do not tell you, you will discover it anyway. "

  "Then you might as well tell me."

  "No. I will not. So that I may pretend that my hands are clean. Good day to you, Healer Sheyzu."

  The lamp went out. After a moment of darkness, Arianai found herself standing on Healer's Street, at the intersection with Wizard's Row; but the intersection, and the Row, were gone.

  •

  "I've been to see Trav," was the first thing Arianai said to Quard.

  He did not look up from the piece of wood he was whittling. "On first-name terms with him now? That's good. Did you get your money's worth?"

  "He told me you were involved with…some sort of power."

  "I thought Liavekans always called it luck."

  "Don't be hateful to me, Quard."

  "I'd be glad to do it in your absence."

  Arianai breathed hard. "Forgive me for wearing sandals," she said. "If I'd known the self-pity ran so deep around here, I'd have brought my boots."

  Quard put down the rasp. "That's not a bad line."

  "The Magician said I was learning."

  "How long is your luck time?"

  "What?"

  "I didn't ask your blessed birthday, just the span of luck. How long was your mother in labor?"

  "A little more than three hours."

  "Not long for a Liavekan," Quard said.

  "My family are healers, not magicians," she said. "We don't believe in prolonging pain."

  Quard said, "Then you know that it is done."

  "Of course. A student magician has access to power only for the duration of his mother's labor. I've heard of it being stretched out for forty, fifty hours." She shook her head in disgust. Then she thought of what The Magician had said about Imbre—two days' luck—and shivered.

  "Is labor pain really as terrible as all that?" Quard said, with a sort of distracted curiosity.

  "It is."

  "Then to extend it for…say, twelve days…that would be a very bad thing, wouldn't it."

  She stared. "Twelve days?"

  "It would have been twelve weeks, if they could have done it. Twelve months, if only they could have. Imagine that: an unending luck time. But it does leave the question of one's ill-luck time, at the opposite pole of the year. I think they might have been satisfied with six months and a day…just to see what happened on that day when luck and counter-luck overlapped. An irresistible force and an immovable…" He gave a nasty, barking laugh.

  "But your mother—twelve days? That's impossible!"

  "No. Not impossible. With drugs and magic and clever surgeries, not impossible for the pain to last that long. But impossible to survive, yes." His voice rose. "My father and his little clutch of wizards stretched my mother's pain until there was no more flesh to cover it. And then, as she was dying and I was being born, just when any human being would have thought the obscenity could not be increased, they cast a spell. It took all seven of them, because the luck of a birthing woman is overwhelming—how else do you think the thing happens? These seven people, with enough power between them to have done anything, anything their souls desired, they, they—" He gestured wildly. "—they stopped my birth instant, my mother's death instant, and we hung there, me struggling to be born, she struggling to die, for an hour from midnight—"

  He fell forward on the counter, sobbing without tears. He reached up and clawed at his hair, pulling the wig away, displaying a skull utterly smooth but for a few strands of false hair stuck in spirit gum. He tugged at an eyebrow, and it came away as well.

  "Quard—" She reached around his shoulders.

  'Three of them—" He shuddered, pulled away from her arm. "Three of them were women."

  "Quard. You have a will of your own."

  He straightened up. "A small one…. I destroyed my vessel of luck, years ago. It was almost harder than the investment had been. I did it at the wrong time, though. The luck is only loose, not gone."

  "As long as you use your will, your mind, no one can use you. The Magician told me that."

  "You don't understand. I was created for a purpose."

  "I don't doubt your power. But the power belongs to you. No one else can use it, if you don't let them."

  "No. No. That was the experiment, but not the experiment's purpose. Do you remember when we talked about the Green faith? And I mentioned what its name meant, in the old language?"

  "Yes."

  "When that language was spoken, the Order was different from the one you know. Now they spend their time plotting their own deaths—and rarely succeed. But not so long ago, they contrived the deaths of others, and they did achieve them. Do you see?" He leaned toward her, and his clear light eyes shone feverishly. "Death as an art form. The death of the whole world as their masterwork." He stood up, turned away from her, braced his hands against the wall as if to keep it from collapsing upon him. He took a deep breath. "My father didn't want a powerful magician, you see. He wanted to create a god. To have Death as his own obedient son."

  Arianai went around the counter, put her hands on his knotted shoulders. "But he failed," she said gently.

  "No!" He twisted away from her, pulling the shelf from the wall. A shiribi puzzle and a stack of alphabet blocks crashed to the floor. "No, he didn't! The death is in my soul, just waiting to come out in the world. Don't you see? Don't you know who the rest of my father's gang were? Sen Wuchien. Shiel ola Siska. Teyer ais Elenaith. Prestal Cade. All of them dead, and still they control me. I've killed them, in my midnight dreams, and I'm still the slave of their wish." Quard stared at the shelves of toys, and began to sweep them aside. Puppets were tangled and broken, music boxes spilled their tinkling clockwork, porcelain dolls shattered.

  "Stop it, Quard," Arianai said firmly. "Do you think I haven't seen an unhappy child throw a tantrum before? I said, stop it."

  Quard's shoulders slumped. He looked up. There were tears and dust on his face, and he smiled, a joyless doll's smile. "Tantrum? It's midnight, Mistress Healer. Allow me to show you a tantrum such as gods throw."

  He stretched his hand toward a pile of ceramic bits that had been a doll's head. There was a flicker of green, and a small tornado swept the pieces into his palm. He closed his fingers around them, and squeezed; green light leaked from his fingers, and the bones showed through the skin.
The hand relaxed. He flipped something to Arianai, and she caught it.

  The object was a perfectly formed porcelain skull just smaller than an egg. She threw it down. "Come home with me," she said quietly. "I'll change your dreams."

  "What, in bed?" he said incredulously. "Wrestle and gasp and pledge the world, and then wake up counting the days till the world ends?"

  She was too angry to turn away. "I'm not frightened, Quard."

  "Then you're stark mad." He circled around her. "I can't stay here any longer," he said. "If I can't get away from my destiny, at least I'll be the death of someplace less than Liavek." He went into the back of the shop, paused in the doorway. "The toys are innocent," he said in a hollow voice. "Give them to children who will love them."

  The door closed, the latch clicked. Arianai knocked at it, called to Quard, for half an hour. Then she went home.

  Theleme was sleeping fitfully, tossing and turning. Quard's stuffed toys were beside the bed, apparently knocked aside by Theleme in her sleep. Arianai wound the spring in the flannel cat, listened to the soft beat-beat of its wooden heart, put it carefully against Theleme's chest. Theleme curled her arms and legs around the cat. Her breathing quieted.

  Arianai picked up the camel and rider, carried them from the bedroom into her office. Some of the stitches on the rider's hood had broken, and it was askew; Arianai straightened it, put the toy on her desk. She poured a cup of nearly-cold tea, sat down behind the desk, and looked for a long time at the stuffed beast and its harried driver. As ever, the cloth tableau made her want to laugh out loud.

  But she didn't. She put her head down on her arms and cried herself to sleep.

  •

  When Obas came to Liavek from Ombaya, he brought with him six shafts of ebony from the tree behind his house. The tree was old, and strong, and lucky; it had been planted on the grave of Obas's thrice-great-grandfather Udeweyo, a mighty wizard of earth and air, and the black tree's roots and branches kept his luck alive. Obas's mother had gone out into the yard where the tree stood to give birth to him, done the labor that gave Obas his birth luck on the ground that fed the tree, in the shade of its leaves.

  Obas shaped his luck in the making of arrows, and when he left home his mother gave him the blackwood shafts, sealed in a pouch of moleskin, saying, "These are for no ordinary magic, not for wealth and not for power, not for the people of the lands you visit, for their own trees in their own earth will be strong enough for that. Someday, my son, you will need the luck of the house you were born in; these will touch you to Udeweyo's luck."

  That had been fifty years ago; and in that span Obas had been hungry and poor, and he had been afraid, and he had needed luck that had not come to him; but he had not touched the ebony shafts.

  Tonight the moleskin pouch was open and empty, and Obas was crafting the last of the six black arrows.

  Their points were silver, and their flights were from a red flamingo, taken without harming the bird. The smooth black wood was carved with words and symbols, the carvings then rubbed with a mixture of herbs and Obas's blood. Each arrow had a name, and the names were Seeker, Binder, Blaster, Blinder, Flyer, and Slayer. Each arrow had a purpose—and the purpose would come for Obas at midnight, but Obas would meet it armed with ancient luck.

  Just before midnight he put the arrows in a quiver and strapped it to his back. Around his left wrist he tied a band of oxhide. He put on a short cloak of skin, and went out into the Levar's Park in the city's northwest, the place where Sen had died. He did not have to go to the park; he did not have to go to his opponent at all. He knew that he could be found. But he wished to meet the enemy in the open, under the sky, earth under him. Sky and earth might strengthen the gift of Udeweyo's luck; Obas did not know. But if he was to die, let it be in the room he was born in: the room of the world.

  The park was quiet, and bright with the light of the nearly full moon. Obas smelled damp grass and cedarwood, heard a fly buzz past his ear; he turned, but the fly—if fly it had been—was gone. He was alone.

  No, he thought, feeling luck stir in the soles of his feet, not alone.

  Obas drew out the first arrow, the one named Seeker. The vessel of his luck, a broad silver arrowhead on a cord around his neck, was cool against his chest. His heart was slow and his breathing was even. He twirled the shaft in his fingers, filling it with his luck. Little lightnings flashed from the silver head down the shaft, making the carved chants glow, sparking from the red feathers.

  With a snap of his wrist, Obas cast Seeker. It flew from his fingertips, trailing behind it a ribbon of silver light. The ribbon arched, bent, dove. Then Seeker began to whirl, spinning a ring, a braid, a column of light. The arrow struck the ground, its magic spent, and fell apart in black ashes.

  Within Seeker's windings stood a tall warrior with a shield and a spear. He wore a striped skin, and his own dark skin was painted with figures of white and red and yellow.

  In Ombayan the warrior's name was Barah. He was the First Hunter, the one who had learned to use wisdom to overcome prey stronger than himself. Obas felt suddenly old, and weary. and small. At the same time, he had hope: he did not fight an inisha, the wind or the earth, but the Hunter, who though a god had been a man. Barah could fail. A hunter might abandon the kill, if the prey proved too strong.

  Obas raised the arrow Binder, spun it. It flashed and flew. striking the earth between Barah's feet. The shaft swelled, and sprouted branches, growing into a tree with its trunk at Barah's back. The branches reached for Barah's arms, the roots coiling to trap his legs. Barah struggled, but the tree drew luck from earth, and held him.

  Obas drew the next arrow, Blinder, gave it magic, and cast it. It whistled like a diving shrike and flew toward Barah's eyes. The Hunter tried to raise his shield, but the branches pulled his arm aside. Blinder reached his face, and opened into a hood of blackness that tightened over Barah's head, covering his eyes, his ears, his nostrils, his mouth, so that Barah's face was a smooth ebony sculpture, all senseless.

  Obas raised Blaster, whispering his luck into it. The silver arrowhead grew warm against his chest. The luck was there, the luck was strong. Hunter and prey had changed their skins. Obas cast the arrow, and it flew for Barah's chest.

  Blaster erupted in fire that flowed down Barah's body, along his pinioned limbs, melting the skin from his bones. Dark flesh fell away, and the bones beneath showed green.

  The fire spread to the binding tree, haloing it in the night. Bark began to slough from the branches, dripping thickly, like black mud.

  Where the molten bark struck the Hunter's bare green bones, it clung, shining red over black over green, clothing the bones, muscling and fleshing them.

  Barah stretched out his new limbs, still held in the tree's branches and roots, and tightened his new muscles. The tree groaned. Barah bent his back, and brought the tree up by its roots.

  Earth fell away from the dead tree's roots, and tangled in them, Obas could see white bones: the skeleton, he knew, of Udeweyo, the breaking of his luck.

  The First Hunter shook off the tree as a man throws off a cloak. Its trunk and Udeweyo's bones crunched together into black and white splinters. Barah struck his spear on his shield and took a step toward Obas.

  Feeling his heart pound, his lungs strain, Obas raised Flyer. He cast the arrow, and as its flights brushed his fingers he grasped the feathers. Flyer lifted Obas, carried him into the sky.

  He was afraid, he was fleeing. Could it be cowardice? The prey was too strong.

  Far below, Obas saw Barah drop his shield to the ground, stand upon it. The wind rose, rippling the grass. Barah's shield rose on the wind, carrying him aloft. Barah raised his spear and flew after Obas. Together they soared above the housetops of Liavek, curving over the shining pan of the sea, riding the wind toward distant Ombaya.

  Barah rose above Obas, stood on air, a dark shape against the moon. His spearpoint flashed in the moonlight. He threw the spear.

  Obas raised his left wrist.
The band of hide around it began to grow, until it was a shield. Obas raised it as the spear flew toward him.

  Barah's spear struck Obas's shield, and pierced it.

  And stopped, the spearhead barely two fingers' breadth from Obas's heart.

  Obas let the shield and spear fall away. They caught fire, a green shooting star toward the roofs of the city. Obas grasped his last arrow, the one named Slayer. He pulled at his magic until his heart burned, and then he cast the spell. Slayer shot burning at Barah's heart, and the First Hunter's shield was between his feet and the wind.

  Barah reached out and plucked Slayer from the air. As he held the arrow, it seemed that neither he nor Obas were flying, but simply standing, two men face to face in the darkness. Obas looked into Barah's eyes. The hunter was mighty. The prey was not.

  "Come," said the voice of Barah, louder than the wind, "if you are coming."

  The moonlight took on a green cast; Obas looked at his open hand, empty of arrows, and saw that the green light came from him.

  Barah cast Slayer back at its maker.

  Obas's vessel of power melted, and the liquid silver trickled down his skin. If he cried out, it was lost on the wind. He lost his grip on the arrow Flyer, and he fell. Below him, the towers of Liavek thrust up like the bones of Udeweyo, and embraced him.

  •

  It was nearly noon when Arianai awoke. She dressed at once and went out to buy a Cat Street Crier; the front page had the news of Obas the Arrowsmith, found dead in the Levar's Park with the ground dented beneath him, though the earth there was not soft and there was no mark on Obas's body. Excepting of course the green glow of his bones.

  Arianai crumpled the paper, shook her head. She carried the sleeping Theleme next door, leaving her in the care of that healer's nurse, and went to the toyshop.

  The sign-puppet showed no more motion than a hanged man. Arianai tried the door, found it unlocked. Quard was not in the front of the shop; quietly, Arianai went around the counter and into the back.

  It was a mess even by young-bachelor standards, shelves and tables and most of the floor haphazardly covered with paint jars and glue pots and tools, partially finished toys and drawings for others, odd books and dirty dishes, with dust and wood shavings filling all the gaps.