Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  “Put it on, dog,” Reyozem Ahon said. “You can make love to yourself later.”

  She wrenched her gaze from the depths of the mirror. On his face she saw both the contempt evident in his voice, and a certain satisfaction.

  She slipped the chain over her head, carefully tucking the mirror between her jacket and her bodice so it did not lie against her skin. Only then did he step aside from the stairs.

  7

  Again she departed Shenna; again she stumbled through the forest on feet numb with fatigue and cold. She began dreaming in snatches of the long-ago summer day when she had first met her husband. When she found herself on the ridge top, struggling up the last rise below the boundary stone, she did try to summon wakefulness, in order to keep watch for the barbarians. But she saw no sign of them.

  Then the high glaciers on the mountains turned blue-silver, and a waning moon welled above the peaks. In the moonlight, the boundary stone cast an inky stripe across the road. She halted, although she told herself her fear of the stone was foolish. Yesterday she had walked inside Leyothan’s borders for at least a little while without coming to harm.

  Then she saw that the rocks at its base were in fact sprawled corpses.

  She edged closer. Their blood stained the snow black. One, naked, might have been yesterday’s sacrifice. The others all wore cuirasses and swords, so Guribast must have escaped the lord of Shenna’s appetite. The horses had probably scattered in terror. She would be pleased if the mage had had to make his escape on foot, and even better pleased if his journey proved long and arduous.

  The black stone loomed over her. At last she made herself step past the stone and the corpses. Strange: The dead men lay scattered on all three sides of the boundary marker. Could Reyozem Ahon cross the border after all?

  She was headed downhill into Leyothan when a spell slammed down on her. “Stop!”

  Guribast’s command gripped her by the bones. This time she could not even turn to face him, could hardly draw breath. She could only listen as his feet clomped toward her across the snow.

  It was not the lord of Shenna who had fattened his power on the dead soldiers, but this loathsome man.

  “Listen you well, revenant,” he said, in front of her now. The rotten taste of his necromancy seeped into the air. “I your master am now, and no other. All those old spell that guard you I have surmount.”

  He took a step closer. “This I upon you place. You, who I awaken, you who I raise so to me to reveal the weapon of Leyothan, you will go search it out. All the snare which your dead lord place when he was alive upon this land, all the illusion of the old Temple, you, dead one, you through it all will pass. You for me will find the treasure and you to me will bring it. Now go!”

  The command struck her like a fist even as the spell locking her in place broke apart. Her feet carried her away from him, down the road into Leyothan.

  The rest of the moonlit night she stumbled along the road, barely able to lift her feet but unable to stop them moving. Reyozem Ahon did not act through the mirror to help her. Perhaps he could no longer do so. She did not look at her hands, but her clothing was in tatters again, and she was certain Guribast had destroyed the illusion of beauty the lord of Shenna had dressed her in.

  She passed the peasant witch’s house as dawn was lighting the sky; crossed a stream, where she drank. On the far side she began to encounter smaller paths feeding into the road. The paving stones grew ever more bare and worn. Then the way split. A muddy track carrying most signs of traffic headed downhill. The old roadbed, however, curved away to vanish into forest. Only a trace of a footpath continued in that direction.

  To find an ancient place, she should follow the old road. She did not want to search for the treasure, but she was too exhausted to fight Guribast’s spells, and her feet carried her onward.

  The path burrowed through a tangle of young trees, then ended abruptly at a hilltop meadow. And there, still shadowed by the eastern mountains, another valley opened up beneath her.

  This valley was not as broad or long as that of Shenna, and was more protected from the weather. It resembled the landscape of her childhood: stubbled fields and muddy fields planted for winter; stone-fenced pastures holding the half-wild flocks brought down from mountain pastures; hamlets of stone-and-timber houses; a mill beside a swift-rushing river.

  And ordinary people lived here. A woman scattered maize for her turkeys beside a dyeing shed. Children chased a dog through an orchard.

  Aleya shivered suddenly. A valley walled in the north and east by mountains, a valley from which all roads headed up toward heaven: This peaceful place had to be the dread and mysterious Leyothan, home of the pitiless Oracle.

  But the big temple compounds in Shenna had been the size of small villages. Leyothan lay spread out before her, and she could not see so much as a roadside shrine. The largest building was an elegant stone manor about a mile away.

  Another cold shiver crawled over Aleya’s scalp. The priestesses of the Oracle of Maro were not, from all she had heard, given to public displays of magic other than prophecy, but their power to wall out the lord of Shenna told its own story. Aleya did not doubt that priestesses who could see every path into the future, and perhaps had foreseen her coming for years, would be able to conceal their entire compound in broad daylight if they chose.

  She was so tired it took a moment to realize that her feet had stopped walking. The spell, it seemed, could not force her to move if she did not know which way to go.

  But the valley of Leyothan drew her. War and suffering seemed never to have come here. Perhaps that was evidence of the Temple’s weapon of invincibility. Or perhaps it was merely the Abbess’ illusion: another dream like the ghost-city of Shenna, also meant to ensnare her.

  8

  Then the sun finally peered over the mountains. Its light threw the landscape into relief, casting a shadow from the road that wound up from the valley entrance. Now Aleya could see that the road had once aimed straight toward the hillside on which she stood, although what remained of it above the manor was grassy and neglected.

  Aleya crossed the meadow to look down on the road and discovered an overgrown stairway climbing toward her. At the top of the hill, the stairs vanished under grass and fallen leaves. But a path continued into the heart of the meadow, across sunny stretches or through patches where trees and brush grew wild.

  The great temple in ruins like Shenna? Another illusion of the Abbess?

  There was magic of a sort here, now that she paid attention. It tingled faintly under her feet, but it also extended beyond the hilltop, a crystalline web of spells woven into the very soil of this valley. It no more resembled the temple magic of her experience than a feather did a longsword.

  And then Aleya noticed something else. A woman had recently walked this way, pressing new-fallen leaves into the mud. Her feet, shod in heavy brogues, were no larger than Aleya’s.

  She did not know how she could be mistaken about any woman’s shoes. These were the very footprints she had followed out of Shenna two days ago.

  Aleya’s heart began to pound violently. An intuition she could not name brought Guribast’s spells to life again, and her aching feet began to stumble after those tracks.

  Then she heard singing from deeper in the meadow. Aleya followed the prints past a maple shedding flame-red leaves, over a mound of stones. On the far side she found a girl cutting seed-heads into a basket. The girl did not look older than sixteen.

  When she saw Aleya, she stopped singing and set her gardening knife in the basket. “There you are,” she said.

  Aleya could only blurt out, “You were in Shenna!”

  “Yes,” said the girl, as if there were nothing remarkable about the fact. She was gazing calmly at Aleya. “The garden needs tending. Medicines grow there that won’t root any place else.”

  “But how do you go there and, and leave?”

  The girl shrugged. “The priestesses of Mercy got the lord of Shenna to
promise that he wouldn’t interfere in their affairs if they cared for his wounded soldiers. His promise won’t let him touch the person who tends the garden.”

  Then, before Aleya could say or do anything more, the girl pressed her palms together in front of her and began to pray.

  Her voice was clear, but not loud and penetrating like the singing of temple officiants. Still, the prayer sank into Aleya’s chest like water into dry soil, like molten gold spilling on straw, like a knife ripping rotten fabric to shreds.

  Shocked to her core, Aleya could not move. This country girl with twigs in her hair was more unlikely as one of the terrible priestesses of Leyothan than the peasant witch. Even as the girl’s prayer tore her apart, Aleya heard the words: O Queen of Heaven, whose breath creates our souls, unbind what is bound, restore rightness to the world, give life to what is living; what has passed out of nature, give to him who guards the Gate …

  How dare this muddy girl cast into the void the beautiful and highborn Aleya, whom everyone, lords and ladies together, had desired? How dare she be young and, o gods and goddesses, beautiful herself; or at least she would be if she spent an hour of her day on it. She did not deserve that transparent, milk-white complexion, not when she let it freckle so carelessly, nor that hair, near-black where shadow fell on it, dark red where the sunlight dappled it, which she hid in an ugly braid as if she were a temple novice.

  She did not deserve to live when Aleya could not. This girl could have everything: a husband whom bloody steel would never take from her, children to run laughing through her house—

  She would have no war, no grief, no lord whose ambition would drag her and everyone she loved into ruin. She could have this peaceful valley lying at the foot of heaven.

  Sharp hatred surged through Aleya. This girl she could eat. She took a step forward through the pain of dissolution. The girl hadn’t even put a word on her to keep her still!

  She reached toward the girl’s neck where her blood pulsed, and the warmth of life rose up like perfume. Then she saw her dead hand against the girl’s smooth skin.

  She yanked it away in horror. She tried to stumble back, to run away so she could hide in darkness, but Guribast’s spells would not let her.

  The girl just went on singing. Her prayer was like a hard, swift current that tugged at Aleya until the very foundation of her soul seemed to crumble, and she toppled into the flood. The current rushing her along tore her apart, piece by piece, and every break in her soul hurt so much. Aleya knew where the prayer was sweeping her: toward the Gate of the world.

  This time she could not fight it. She was so hungry, so thirsty, so weary and steeped in despair. The air was darkening fast, and a fierce pain burned in her chest. Maybe she should go. She was a monster, and nothing could redeem that but a true death.

  The burning in Aleya’s chest turned to white-hot fire. In the deepening shadows between her and the girl, a hole ripped open like the one Aleya had glimpsed in the mirror, and out of it, on the wings of an icy wind, rushed a void both bright and dark.

  The Gate of the world. Except—all around the void hung sigils and gods’ names, exactly like the ones on the mirror—

  And suddenly Reyozem Ahon stood beside Aleya. The girl inhaled sharply, and her song faltered.

  “You barking, mangy cur,” Reyozem Ahon said to Aleya. “Couldn’t you keep from stirring up the priestesses for even an hour?” He stepped forward.

  But it wasn’t Aleya he reached for. It was the girl.

  In that eyeblink something twisted inside Aleya. O gods and goddesses, how she hated him. His works had made her heartsick beyond heartsick. The thought of Reyozem Ahon bringing his ruin to this valley, of him so much as touching that girl, filled her with more loathing and rage than she could endure.

  And she had opened the way for him. She had carried the mirror here.

  Twisting the fabric of the world through the mirror was a feat of magic so great that it made Guribast’s spells look like a child poking in the mud. But Aleya knew how to stop it.

  She walked toward the Gate, bearing the mirror and Reyozem Ahon’s spells with her. She was so tired, she had walked so far, she did not know how she could take these last few steps out of the world. But she had to do it. The god-names ringed her now. As Aleya whispered them, they brightened, vanished. And then she crossed the threshold of the void. Darkness like ink poured on all her senses. Time and space dropped away—

  She wished she could have said her own prayers before dying, said goodbye to everything she had ever had to leave behind: her mother and father, her sisters and childhood home, all left smoking under the winter sky by enemy raiders. Her husband, whose face she could no longer remember—dark hair, his eyes had been dark, but his face … She never had his portrait painted because it had not been possible that he would lie dead on the battlefield six months after their wedding.

  Goodbye to the children she had never borne, because she could not stand to bring them into the world made by the lord of Shenna.

  Goodbye to every lover who had ridden out to die—at this moment, she knew she had not caused their deaths. She only saw in a man’s face when he was going to die and could not help but want to comfort him. The God of the Gate’s breath had always been so cold on her soul.

  And now the vast swelling presence of that god approached her. The cold sword of Judgement swept down, for her —

  But lightning pierced her instead, and the darkness shattered around her like breaking glass.

  And then, inexplicably, she was back in the sunlit garden. The lord of Shenna had vanished, and the girl was singing as if he had never interrupted her.

  The blue sky arched over them. A bumblebee, heavy with pollen and slowed by the autumn chill, lit on the girl’s green jacket. The last of Aleya’s bitterness dissolved into longing, and she began to weep. The stinging in her dry sockets felt like acid.

  After a while she became aware that the girl had stopped her prayer. Aleya wiped her face. She was surprised to touch real moisture. “Where did he go?” she asked.

  The girl shrugged, but she was watching Aleya with that sharp dispassion. “Back to Shenna. Could I see how he came here?”

  Aleya pulled the chain over her head and handed it over. Broken glass rained to the ground.

  “A Temple mirror!” the girl exclaimed. “They used them for prophecy. I’ve never seen one with the glass still in.”

  But she turned the mirror away from her and knocked out the remaining shards before she inspected the inscription on the front. “There was a mirror they sent to Shenna,” she said, “long ago, to bring a prophetess to them. It never came back. This must be the one. It’s too bad it’s ruined.”

  Sent to bring a prophetess from Shenna? A shiver crawled over Aleya’s scalp. “I broke it because—he was trying—you—”

  “Oh, he couldn’t touch me because of his promise about the garden of Mercy. But you did the right thing. What I meant was that he was the one who ruined it.” The girl laid the frame in her basket among the seed-heads and sticks. “So why did he send you?”

  Her accent was much easier to understand than the peasants’. Now Aleya saw the gold in the girl’s ears and the embroidery on her jacket and skirt, but how could her maids allow her to go around with that dreadful braid and those ugly, muddy, heavy shoes—

  The girl waited on her answer, her gray-green stare piercing Aleya through and through. No sixteen-year-old girl, Aleya thought, should look on the world from such a distance and at the same time as if everything was naked.

  “I came to steal your treasure,” Aleya admitted.

  The girl frowned. “Treasure?”

  “A barbarian sorcerer raised me out of the crypt and spelled me to find it. The lord of Shenna also wants the treasure. I offered to bring it to him, you see, in exchange for a semblance of life—”

  “A semblance —!” the girl said. “You’re not dead and he knows it. He was the one who disguised you!”

  Aleya gap
ed at her. “Not dead?”

  “Someone might have thought so at first glance. He put many spells on you. But I’ve untied them all. Come with me.”

  The girl was already walking away. Aleya limped after her as quickly as she could, across another grassy stretch and into a stand of immense old pines.

  Here there were no fallen walls. Instead, a part of the mountain, a sheer mossy outcropping untouched by stonecutters’ chisels, rose up through the forest canopy. A spring burbled out of a crack in the cliff to run into a stone-lined pool.

  Power shivered over Aleya’s skin as she stepped toward the pool. This must be the inner sanctuary of the old Temple. The sanctuary of Maro has no roof or walls: not philosophy, but plain description.

  Aleya expected the girl to genuflect and pray, but she merely crouched down and drank from cupped palms. Then the girl surprised her once more by taking Aleya’s hands in her own cold wet grasp, plunging them into the basin, and lifting them to Aleya’s mouth. Aleya averted her gaze and tried to twist away from her corpse-fingers, but the girl insisted, “Drink.”

  The water, heavy with the power of the sanctuary, was bitterly cold and burned all the way down. Aleya’s gut cramped and for a moment she thought she might expel the water the way it had come. But after a moment the pain eased.

  “Look with me into the water,” the girl said.

  “Please,” said Aleya, more tears spilling down her cheeks. “Don’t be cruel.”

  The girl just repeated, “Look!”

  Her clear-eyed gaze did not waver from Aleya’s corpse-face. By her tone the girl might be urging her to try a gown of a color she usually shunned … a sister’s voice, a lover’s voice, a daughter’s voice. Longing rose up in Aleya again, and grief she could not bear. She squeezed her eyes shut. It was so quiet in that place that she heard her tears plinking one by one into the basin.

  The girl’s hands did not release her own, and finally Aleya dared open her eyes again.

  A stranger leaned over the glass-smooth water of the basin. The woman was gaunt, lined, worn down by years, and grey streaked her black hair. Her dark eyes glittered with tears. She had no beauty, but she was—