The Magician of Karakosk: Tales from the Innkeeper's World

by Peter S. Beagle

  No singing this time, nothing but shuffling iron feet and birds mumbling that it wasn’t time to get up yet. The Thief was taking a risk born of plain irritation, moving in soundlessly so close to the palace that he could see flickering lights in the great kitchens, and the shadows of the cooks already preparing the morning meal. He could hear all manner of snoring behind the tall, narrow windows; and he could even see, when he stood very still, movement on the palace roof, dark against darkness, where the King spied on the stars, though the Thief could not know this. What he did know was that he could not see anything that might mean Tai-sharm: the only feminine movement in the night was the sleepy ripple of a deshi tree’s branch against a high balcony. And still no song. The Thief sighed deeply, squeezing his chin hard in one hand. “Wicked old woman,” he muttered once again to Sharm far away, “I hate this. I hate you, too.”

  And with that he was up the deshi tree as though it had rungs, and pattering along that branch toward the balcony railing, not knowing whether he’d be spied from the ground, find himself facing a barred and bolted window, or just fall out of the tree. But thieves’ luck was at his back: the window was locked, but not seriously, and he was inside before the branch had stopped swaying. He blinked around him in furry darkness, knowing immediately that this room is empty, because the Thief has to know things like that. Carefully, he found his way to the door and peered out into dwindling torchlight. Many other doors, but no guards, nor any sound but the occasional serene snore. Tai-sharm’s, one of them? Only one way to learn.

  Along corridor after corridor the Thief sidled, keeping to doorways and alcoves, turning to ice at every noise, trying each door so graciously that it never knew it was being opened, no more than any sleeper stirred. What a lot of them there were, too: not merely the usual mix of young courtiers and older ministers, but running to pairs—mostly married, by the look of them. Single or coupled, none of the women fit old Sharm’s picture of her daughter. The Thief glided on.

  Twice a brace of guards came tramping toward him, but both times they looked straight at the Thief and never saw him—perhaps because ice is transparent, do you suppose? The second pair were grumbling loudly about standing double watches on little sleep because of tomorrow—today, thought the Thief—being the King’s wedding day. Ah, well, one thing, there’ll be ale and yaru enough to go around for once. A fine king, their master, wouldn’t hear a word against him, but he doesn’t drink enough, and he thinks everyone else drinks too much. And so on and so on, their voices carrying clearly well after they’d turned the corner, and too frigging bad whom they roused. If the King slept at all this night, he wasn’t the man they took him for.

  “The wedding day,” said the Thief quietly to the cold, sleek walls. “Nobody tells me anything.”

  But he knew that this was not true. He’d heard the talk in the town—he’d even overheard the sentinels at the wall joking coarsely about the King’s coming marriage. But he was the Thief, you see, the Thief, and even time knew what that meant. Time slowed down just for the Thief, it always had. There were always stray minutes, hours, even an extra day now and then, lying tidy to hand for when he really needed them. Now time and careless vanity together had undone him; if he failed to bring Tai-sharm home to her mother, it would be as much his fault as the King’s or the Chief Minister’s. What the Thief said aloud to himself in that passage Choushi-wai cannot tell you, but if it went unheard, that was only by grace of so many pillows being pulled up over so many ears after the guards had passed.

  But finally he shrugged and even smiled a little, and said, “Well, what’s a fool to do but push on with his folly? I will yet find old Sharm’s girl, and if I am caught, that will serve me no more than my due.” And on he marched, stamping right down the middle of the corridor now, like a bloody hero come to call on a palace full of wedding guests, instead of easing along the wall in a proper professional manner. Choushi-wai can tell you that never in his long life did the Thief quite forgive himself for carrying on so. “I steal things,” he used to say irritably, “I don’t bring them back. There’s a difference, and I knew it as well then as I do now. Disgraceful, the whole business.”

  And fortunate he was to turn a corner and see six men-at-arms—not mere guards, but real soldiers of the King—pacing sentry-go before one door that looked no different from any other. Fortunate, I say, because his madness departed from him on the instant, and he flattened himself against the first shadow handy, not even thinking, for fear of the noise. By accident and arrogance, if you like, the Thief had found Tai-sharm at last.

  Now the Thief had never carried a weapon in his life, not so much as a poacher’s jiyak, not even a little boot-knife. If Tai-sharm was depending on him to spring out upon her jailers and cut them down single-handed, she would be Sharm’s age by the time the last man-at-arms died in bed. The Thief was himself again, snug at home in darkness, coolly considering half a dozen diversions that might leave Tai-sharm’s door unguarded for the half-minute he needed. There was screaming, of course—gibbering, wailing, moaning like the spirits of the foully slain that haunt every castle everywhere, never mind the kingdom or the time; then there was doing voices, the ones that come softly from every corner of the air, mocking and haunting any man who ever dreamed what he shouldn’t. The Thief was good at voices.

  But there was no need for him to trot them out this night, as it befell. The door opened a wee way and out slipped a small old woman, shutting it again quickly on the candlelight behind her. How can we be so sure of her age, muffled as she was in the tentish sals’yaan that marked nurse, witch, and midwife alike in Baraquil? Well, the stoop, for one thing, and the puppety gait that came with it and, of course, all the white hair crowding the edges of the kirtle’s hood. There were orangey-brown spots on the backs of her hands, and her eyes were streaked and rheumy.

  “Overexcited, the child was,” she snickered shrilly to the men-at-arms. “Ai, even a hag like me can remember such eagerness. I’ve given her one of my special possets, she’ll sleep soundly till the time. Now if you handsome gentlemen will excuse me.”

  The men parted to let her by. They did seem a bit startled at her sudden appearance, but not suspicious. The old woman stumped through, grinning and mumbling, and so away down the hall and around the corner. Where a hand promptly covered her mouth, while the long arm it belonged to scooped her neatly into an alcove, and a soft voice tickled her ear. “Well met at last, Sharm’s daughter. Your mother sends her greetings.”

  With which message the Thief released his hold. The old woman whirled to face him, the hood falling back around her shoulders. “Who are you? How do you know my mother?” She forgot to cackle, but she still kept the sense to whisper her demands. “How do you know me?”

  The Thief held her at arm’s-length, thoughtfully studying her. “Oh, the hair is very good,” he said, almost to himself. “The hands, well, that would be plain rishu-tallow, thinned with red ale—good enough in this light, at this hour. And the eyes, that’s cloudflower sap; use it myself. Stings mightily, doesn’t it?” The woman glared red-eyed up at him without replying. “Plenty of cloudflowers on these fine grounds, anywhere you look,” the Thief mused along. “But the hair, the hair—how did you manage that? I’ve tried chena-leaf stain, such as players employ, I’ve used vile messes out of backrooms all thieves know—aye, and I have even attempted my own concoction, mixing powdered bone with different ashes, and just a bit of egg white for the binding. But yours, your hair—no, I never could have come near to such disguising. Tell me, girl, I implore you—”

  “I must find my friend,” said Tai-sharm. She ducked under his arm and off down the corridor—no flatfooted hobble, but the stride of a country girl with some beast in bawling trouble. The Thief followed at his best pace, well content to let her take the lead. Listen—the palace was definitely astir now. The torches in the halls were spluttering out, though the shadows they left behind were yet more black than gray, and there was still no cockcrow. But the Th
ief heard voices behind many a door: drowsy laughter, cursing, groaning, and the familiar music of more than one man vomiting into his chamberpot. What he heard as well was the shivering chime of silver dishes on silver trays—the help were already about their chores, bringing breakfast to this room, doubtless wedding clothes to that one, fresh bath salts to the one beyond. Nowhere to turn, no doubling back; at any moment Tai-sharm and he were bound to be seen and seized, and whatever might become of her, the Thief had no illusions regarding his own fate. “Slowly!” he hisses after Tai-sharm. “Scamper like that and we are lost—walk, walk, as though you had some proper business about this bloody place. Idiot, walk!”

  Tai-sharm paid him no heed, but sped on ahead, whisking into a side passage at the first sound of approaching footsteps, racing through a vast empty ballroom where their own steps chattered evilly back at them, dodging easily down the half-hidden servants’ tunnel that the Thief had overlooked. That brought them straight into the kitchens, where Tai-sharm did slow her pace, instantly becoming the old witch-woman again, eyes on her shuffling feet, expression about halfway between amiable and senile. The Thief, for his part, took her elbow, bending solicitously over her, and so through the busy, rackety kitchen, no one with a moment free even to glance at them, save for a young pastry apprentice who humbly begged a blessing on his little cakes. He got it, and another for his pretty eyes as well. Tai-sharm was enjoying herself altogether too much.

  “Out of here, Sharm’s daughter,” snarled the Thief sweetly in her ear. “Out of here before I start to scream. You don’t want me to scream, truly.”

  Tai-sharm glanced quickly back at him, and a smile darted across the face of the old woman like a falling star. She cackled, “Bide, little one, all will be well,” and then, lower, in her own voice, “Did my mother really send you to find me? What can she have been thinking?”

  “Rescue,” was the Thief’s dry answer. “Imagine it, she came a long journey to ask if I would kindly rescue you.” But he said it to Tai-sharm’s back: she was tottering on unnoticed, crooning mindlessly to herself as ancients will. The Thief sidestepped a pair of sweating spit-turners, danced backward like a mad zuli-gaji priest to keep from being trampled by a huge cook with steaming tureens balanced on each shoulder, and almost missed seeing Tai-sharm on the far side of the kitchen, as she disappeared through a smoke-blackened door. Through the door himself he found a stair so steep and narrow it might as well be a ladder. Tai-sharm was already a glimmer in the cold murk high above him. The Thief swarmed up after her.

  At the top of the stairway was a tiny cloakroom, hardly more than a cupboard, where the royal cooks and bakers left their good clothes and put on their aprons. Beyond that was one more corridor, this one wider than the road to Tai-sharm’s village—and beyond that, at last, the great postern doors of the palace. Closed and bolted and barred, they were, and no chance at all of Tai-sharm and the Thief possibly getting them open in the bit of time they had. The Thief—whose ears could hear a watchman picking his teeth two houses away—knew from the sounds behind them that the hunt had neared the kitchen. He was neither trembling nor sweating, but his lips were very cold.

  Tai-sharm never hesitated: she flew straight to the farthest, lowest left-hand panel of the left-hand door, her fingers fumbling swiftly and knowingly over it, prodding this carving, twisting that projection, pushing hard on that odd little bump. But nothing happened. She tried it all again, then turned her head to look at the Thief, crying, “It opens, it opens, there is a way, I saw a soldier do it once. Every night I copied what he did, on the wall, so my fingers would not forget. Now I cannot—”

  The Thief nudged her aside, and not as gently as he might, either. Without a word, he crouched before the panel, whistling softly through his teeth, head turned away, his long fingers splaying and scattering over the harsh woodwork. The pursuit had reached the foot of the stair—even Tai-sharm could make out the Chief Minister’s desperate baying, and she is frightened now for the first time. Then the Thief grunted once, down deep. Tai-sharm heard the panel pop open and there, in front of them, is silver morning sunlight and the bright lawns. She is through the gap like a shukri down a hole, and the Thief is right behind her.

  “That way!” he barked, pointing into the sun. “The wall is closest there!” But no, Tai-sharm veered away downslope toward that ruinous old targary maze, which was no place at all to go to ground. The Thief thought she had gone mad with fear. He ran for the wall as hard as he could, shouting that there was no hope, the hedges weren’t tall enough to hide even a small person like her from those who followed. Like the queen she refused to be, Tai-sharm never looked back.

  And since we speak of royalty, here’s a cry from the palace roof. The Thief wheeled to see the King, surely the King, dark against the pale new sky, leaning over a parapet and pointing after Tai-sharm. The Thief could catch only two words, of all those the King was bellowing—“…the fish… the fish!” The men-at-arms were crowding through the little door now, too many at once, stumbling into each other, clowns in chain mail—but they saw him! The Thief turned again and sprinted hopelessly for the maze.

  He could not see Tai-sharm for a moment, nor anything else, for the maze still held a bit of last night at its parched heart. Then there she was, kneeling by a tiny leaf-choked pool, her face almost touching the water, her lips moving. The Thief paid no mind to whatever she was saying—what he heard was that voice again, that not-man, not-woman voice singing that same not-quite-tune:

  Deeper down than you may dream,

  down where morning sends no gleam,

  where sun and shadow never fall,

  yet I answer when you call….

  A sluggish eddy—the heavy slap of a tail—and it is was a fish, after all, and ugly as you like, to boot. The Singing Fish said to Tai-sharm, “Child, what will you have of me?”

  And our Tai-sharm answered, calm as though they were alone and the King’s men-at-arms weren’t tramping and roaring just outside the maze, “Once I besought you to help me escape from this place. You said it was not yet time.”

  “So I did,” agreed the Singing Fish. The Thief shook Tai-sharm’s shoulder, growling, “Girl, get in the water—we’ll break off reeds and breathe through them.” Tai-sharm paid no more heed to him than she did to the racket of the King’s men, almost as near as he.

  “And in a while I asked your help again,” said Tai-sharm, “and again you told me that the time was not right.”

  “So you did, and so I did,” the Singing Fish replied. The Thief himself was speechless. He could see two or three helmeted heads above the dried-up targary hedges, and he wished for the first time that he carried at least a little knife with him, if only to cut his own throat. Beside him, Tai-sharm went on talking to the ugly fish, asking most politely, “I thought, perhaps now would be the right time, do you suppose?”

  “I think so myself,” said the Singing Fish.

  And with those words, everything changed. Tai-sharm flashed out of the Thief’s sight—there one minute, swoosh the next, as though some fisherman in another world had hooked her right away from him. Then—without any splash, mind you, without any sound—he was head-down in the mucky pool and not feeling it mucky at all, nor even wet. And he wasn’t drowning, strangling on water: no, no, no, believe Choushi-wai, she says that he felt himself truly flying, soaring into light as though he were a bird, and not a little fish of some kind, as he already knew he was. He could just see a bit of his own tail, pale-green as the newest spring grass, if he angled his eye and body rightly. Beside him, below him, another fish, the color of the sea in sunlight, nudged impudently at his flank, and he realized that this was Tai-sharm.

  There were voices now, a lot of them, but so far away. The Thief couldn’t make the sounds into words, but he could feel them, a sort of muffled jarring inside himself, dreamily alarming. Then he did hear real words, in his mind he heard them, the calm voice of Tai-sharm’s ugly fish friend, saying, “Dive down, dive down. The King
is here.”

  Even in this new shape, the Thief’s first, best trick was to hide. The fish-body obeyed him, no thought, wonderfully quick, slanting straight down toward depths much darker than he ever imagined that dirty washtub of a pool could hold. But when he cast an eye back for Tai-sharm—think what it would be like to have your eyes on the sides of your head, hey?—she was not following, not to be seen at all. The Thief swore fishily and turned again.

  She was trembling just below the surface, staring up as well as she could at the faces gaping back down through the dead leaves. Most of them were topped by steel or leather, but one only by a shock of stone-gray hair, and the Thief understood that this was the King at last. The King’s eyes were as deep as the pool with loss as they met the eyes of the small sea-colored fish. He put his hand out slowly, as though to grab at her—and likely he could catch her, too, for plainly Tai-sharm could not move. But the King drew his hand back and went on looking at her.

  “Tai-sharm,” said the Thief, hearing his own voice bubble in his head. “Tai-sharm, your mother is waiting.”

  At that Tai-sharm spun right round and was out of sight with one flick of her tail. The Thief himself was drawn to take a last look at the King who had thought to wed her that very morning. The King’s face showed no sorrow now, and the Thief could not see his eyes at all.

  Again the Thief heard the voice of the Singing Fish. “Down. Dive down.”

  The Thief dove then, once more chasing the tiny glint of Tai-sharm. No bottom to this pool? No end to its darkness? He had not been a fish very long, and everything in him wanted to swim back up toward light and sky and floating targary twigs. But behind him he could feel the Singing Fish, driving them both on, deeper still, deeper and farther. And even here, even here, that song.