The Child Eater

by Rachel Pollack

  “Matyas, they are chanting your name!”

  Matyas could feel his face flush and realized Lukhanan could see it as well. He said, “I don’t know why they would do that.” He tried not to stare at Lahaylla. Soon everyone would know his crime.

  Suddenly Lahaylla’s voice rose above the crowd. “I come in supplication, as one who is desperate. I beg the aid of Great Master Matyas, for he alone can help me.”

  It was the Ancient Formula of Supplication, carved, in fact, above the very gate before her, though long since obscured by decorative flowers, dragons and planetary sigils. Some said it was the very origin of the Academy, a place where the wizards might be gathered for those who might need them. For a moment Matyas thought it a trick, a way to dramatize how Matyas had misused her and the punishment she would demand. But then he realized, belatedly, the desperation that had filled her voice, and it struck him, for the first time, that she might not have come to accuse him at all.

  He strode to the gatekeeper. “Let her in,” he said.

  Lukhanan walked up close to him. “I’m warning you,” he said.

  Nervous, Matyas was about to try to explain when a breeze moved his robe. He felt the tree pulse with his heart, felt the snakes slide along his arms. The planets appeared to move in their orbits through his heart and lungs. He looked at the girl who made this for him, who’d brought the world out of his books and onto his body, and he knew that whatever she wanted, even to accuse him, it was only what he owed her and would always owe her. She’d given him his office. His skin.

  “Open the gate,” he ordered the keeper. Lukhanan looked around to speak but glanced around, first at the Masters and apprentices gathered behind him, then Matyas. Finally, he just stepped away.

  Lahaylla entered as she’d traveled, on her hands and knees, then lay face down on the stone mosaic of the planets in their true and secret order, her arms out to the sides, her legs slightly apart, as if she was not on the ground at all but flying, somewhere above all this human anger and sorrow.

  “Arise and speak,” Matyas said, grateful he remembered the old formula, even as he feared what she might say.

  Lahaylla stood up stiffly and reached behind her to pull away the drawing. “Great Master,” she said, “my brother Rorin has vanished. From his home, from everyone who knows him. Please, Master. Find him. Return him to his home. We beg you.”

  Matyas held the paper. Despite the simple drawing he could feel the boy, even see a glimpse of him as he closed his eyes. Around eleven years old, Rorin liked to run rather than walk, leap rather than step. He laughed often, especially when his sister or his parents tried to limit him in some way. At least, he used to. It took only a moment to realize that all these images were in the past. When he tried to see the boy now there was only a blankness.

  Something was wrong. Even in the worst situation, even in death, something lingered, usually for weeks. He remembered how Medun had told him, all that time ago, that there were no such things as ghosts, only mindless spirits that attached themselves to a dead person’s memories and emotions and believed they were that person. But there still should be traces of Lahaylla’s brother, strong ones if it was only a short time since he’d passed. And that was assuming he’d died. Matyas simply had no idea what had happened to him.

  He looked at Lahaylla. “When did you last see him?” he asked. “You or anyone.”

  Her eyes filled with tears but her voice held steady. “Three days ago. He went to watch the jugglers in the market and never came back.”

  “Did people see him in the market?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  Matyas closed his eyes a moment. Yes, that was the last time he could feel the boy, almost exactly three days ago. He could feel Mercury’s position in the sky, the wizard’s way to give a time signature to an event. He looked again at Lahaylla, her face shadowed by fear, yet still with hope—and faith, he realized. Faith in Matyas, who suddenly wished he could hold her, protect her in the robe she’d made for him. Instead, he tried to make his voice both strong and optimistic as he said, “I will need to cast a spell. It may take some time, an hour or more.” He looked at the crowd. “Can you stay with your friends?”

  She looked back, hesitant, and Matyas realized she feared that if she returned outside the gate it would never open again. He said, “No one will bar the way, I promise you.” He glanced at Lukhanan, who looked away, then at Horekh, who stood at the back of the crowd. Horekh nodded gravely. Matyas looked up at the tower, saw Veil in the window. To Lahaylla he said, “I will be back soon.” As he walked toward the tower door, the robe moved against his body.

  Matyas was suddenly aware that he had no place of his own to cast a spell. He had performed many actions in the tower, some with Veil’s instructions, more often on his own. But it was still her tower. The only place that in any way belonged to him was his small room in the library, and that only because he went there so often. The library was not a place for spells.

  When he stepped into the room, Veil was standing facing the door, her hands clasped in front of her. It struck him that she looked exactly the same as when he’d first seen her, her body absolutely straight in a gray wool dress, ancient face of a thousand tiny lines, yet smooth and soft and somehow both blank and filled with expression. Her long silver hair moved in the air even without any discernible breeze. He thought of the times she’d made him brush her hair with that rough bristly brush, and of that one time that had changed his life, flooding him with letters and all they could give him. And then there were the eyes, small and sharp and vastly old.

  He said, “I need to do something.”

  “I know. Do you have all you require?”

  “Yes.”

  She closed her eyes a moment, and for some reason such a great sadness flowed from her that Matyas wanted to step up and hold her. But then she sharpened her eyes and nodded. “Very good,” she said. At the door, she hesitated—Veil uncertain!—turned and said, “Be careful, Matyas. When we search for something, we do not always know what we will find.”

  A search spell is not a very complicated thing and it embarrassed Matyas a little that he had wanted Veil to leave. Somehow, around his teacher he always remained a student, despite all his knowledge and skill. Once she was actually gone, however, he shrugged off such thoughts and set out the powders, candles and stones that would mark the “true ground” of his work, a place that existed simultaneously in the world of light and the world of dirt. On this ground he placed stone markers for the four main gates of the city, the royal palace in the center and the Wizards’ Academy in the northeast. Finally, he used a scrap of cloth to represent Lahaylla’s home in the southern quarter, near the Summer Gate, and some pebbles for the market with its jugglers, Rorin’s destination when he’d left his sister.

  Despite his ascendance to Mastery, Matyas kept his tools—his “attributes,” as people called them—in a small oak chest fitted with a simple iron lock. As he lifted the box, he thought how embarrassing it would be if anyone saw him, the great wizard, hiding his magic under a servant’s bed. He knew he should move into his own rooms in the Masters’ Residency (would they take him? Yes, of course they would). And yet he found it hard to leave Veil. Who would buy her cheese from the market, cook her porridge, keep her hearth fire bright? Though he knew, of course, that she’d lived there many years before he’d stumbled his way to her, it was somehow hard to imagine.

  From the bottom of his trunk, he took out a small knife in a black leather sheath. The black blade was double-edged, one too dull to cut bread, the other sharper than the glass scalpels the Academy supplied to the king’s surgeons. The handle was made of some rough black stone veined with gold. Matyas had found it at the edge of the river, hidden among rushes in a place Veil had sent him to find five perfectly white stones. Of course she’d known the blade was there, maybe she’d even hidden it herself, but they never talked about it.

  Matyas stood just outside the marker for the Winter Gat
e and “opened the way” by drawing the sharp edge through the air in front of him. He stepped into the circle, closed his eyes and felt the city all around him. The image came to him and he held it a moment with his fingers spread wide before his face. Energy rippled in them, tingling, eager to do their work. He said, “Unwind from me, my seeker threads, find me the boy, be he living or dead.” Like young snakes the energy shot from his fingers and moved through the city.

  Matyas knew that no one could see it, but anyone with training, even an outsider with talent or sensitivity, would feel them darting in and out of every street, every room, searching for the boy, for traces of him—fingers that might have touched him, ears that might have heard him, eyes that might have spotted him.

  Nothing. The shadowsnakes returned to hover in the air, empty. He could feel their disappointment, even shame, like dogs that have let down their master. Matyas didn’t understand it. Even if Rorin had left the city, the searchers would have found a trail. Even if he was dead . . . And then a thought came to him. He tried to banish it, it was impossible, but he remembered what Veil had said—When we search for something, we do not always know what we will find.

  The command he had given was for a creature, something that lived or had lived. There was a much simpler version, one used just for objects. It made no sense, he told himself, and tried to abandon the idea, but he could not go back to Lahaylla and claim he had done his best if he hadn’t tried everything. He thought suddenly of what he’d heard in the wood so long ago, the second half of the prophecy that had promised him he would fly.

  Or will you try as

  Ancients cry, as

  Children die, as

  No one dares to talk?

  So now he held up his hands, as if to order the shadowsnakes not to leave, and did his best to reimagine Rorin, not as a boy but as some kind of lifeless puppet. No, not even that, just some mix of pebbles and dirt that purely by chance had come to resemble a child. Then, without even a chant, he sent the snakes on their way.

  They came back almost immediately. There he was—there it was—a crumpled form against the back wall of some restaurant near the King’s Officers’ barracks. The vision lasted only a second, but it was long enough for Matyas to sense something missing. He concentrated, then gasped and opened wide his eyes. “Oh no,” he said—and at the thought that he would have to show this to Lahaylla, “Oh God.”

  And then a voice floated up from his cellar of memory, icy, amused. “Ah. It’s you.” Matyas just had time to step out of the circle before he threw up on Veil’s ancient wood floor.

  The crowd was small. Only one Master walked with him, Horekh. The others either considered the troubles of common people not their concern or else they saw Matyas’ face and wanted no part of whatever he was about to reveal. Horekh had looked at them all, then at Matyas, and said, “I will walk with you.”

  Matyas had sent away the crowd, told them to go home and not worry. It was the best he could do. He had tried, weakly, to send Lahaylla away as well, but she insisted, and so did a group of five or six, including an older man and woman who held Lahaylla’s arms, either to comfort her or themselves. Parents, he guessed, and when they looked at him, he wondered what she had told them.

  They found the boy—the thing—quickly enough, crumpled up right where the snakes had shown him. At first Lahaylla had thought Matyas was trying to trick her in some way. “What are you showing me?” she demanded. “Do you think this is funny?” The group around her looked angry, while Horekh just watched Matyas’ face.

  “I’m sorry,” Matyas could only say. “I’m sorry.”

  She looked at him again, then back at the crumpled object against the wall. Matyas could see her take it in, maybe the clothing first, a tunic and pants of plain brown wool that she’d probably sewn herself, and then the shape, the thin arms, the narrow chest. “Rorin?” she whispered, for even though she could see, she could not feel. There was nothing left of him, it was as if he’d never existed. But still, she picked up the empty body, expecting to embrace it, hold it against her, and it was only then, when she unfolded the limbs, hoping to find some small remnant of her brother, that she saw, finally, what was not there.

  “His head!” she screamed. “His head! What have you done with his head!”

  “What happened to the head?” Matyas was speaking even before he came fully into the room. Sitting upright in her straight-backed chair, her back to him, Veil didn’t answer. Matyas went on, “How could someone just . . . empty out like that? He wasn’t just dead. He was gone. Completely. What happened to the head?” He’d been walking toward her, and now he spun the chair around, fearful she would just stare coldly at him.

  Instead, her face showed a grief, a brokenness he never would have thought possible in her. He was silent, but only a moment, for then he said, “Why do I keep seeing this? Heads. Bodies. I don’t know. I don’t know what I mean. Why don’t I know what I mean?” Images swirled around him, too fast for him to catch hold of them, Rorin, yes, but dreams, and visions—and someone else, a boy, back at . . . Halewin! Yes, that was his name, the cook’s son, who’d vanished years ago.

  And tunnels, and faces, and pieces of paper—and that voice, that terrible voice. “What’s wrong with me?” Matyas cried.

  She got up and walked to him, but he took a step backward, as if she might hurt him, punish him for something. But no, she only took his hands, her own so small and delicate. Lights appeared between them. The Splendor had come, the first time he’d seen them in months. For him or for her? “Oh, Matyas,” she said, “I am so sorry. All this time I did not tell you—I told myself you needed to discover it for yourself. You needed to overcome the Forgetting. But really, I was hoping it would never happen. Please, come and sit with me. You’ve grown tall, knowledge nourishes you, and my ancient neck hurts from bending.”

  Matyas realized, with a slight shock, that he did indeed tower over her. When he’d first come, they were nearly eye to eye. He noticed, as he sat in the carved red chair opposite her plain white one, that the Splendor followed him. Despite everything, he had to make sure not to smile.

  “Matyas,” Veil said, “do you know the story of the Five Creations?”

  “Yes, of course. The Creator tried four times to make the world and failed. She made a world of Fire and it burned itself up. Then She tried Water and all the creatures drowned. Next came Air, but everything fell apart and all the pieces drifted away from each other. So then it was Earth, but nothing moved. The Creator wept—frustration, the books say—and discovered She could use Her tears to bind everything together. That was the Fifth Creation, the world we live in.”

  Veil nodded. “Yes. That is what the books say. And no doubt there are many who believe it. Lukhanan, I suspect, has never questioned it. Nevertheless, the story is a lie.”

  Matyas stared at her. It had never occurred to him that the old books could lie. And yet, when he’d read that tale, hadn’t he thought there was something wrong with it? How could the Creator stumble like that?

  Veil went on, “When the Creator, blessed be Her face, began Her Great Work, it seemed a simple task. She created a world and beheld it, and it appeared good in all things. And then She discovered a flaw. There was something terrible in this bright world made from the Fire of Her passion. She could not simply erase it, for it appeared to be woven into the very fabric, and so She destroyed it, and started again. Now She acted with great care and compassion, and created a world of Water. And yet here, too, the flaw remained. So She destroyed this one as well. Now She planned and analyzed and measured before every step. Thus She created a world of Air, for Air is mind, as of course you know. And still there was the same terrible flaw. So She made an Earth world, heavy and dull, but it was still the same. Her tears, Matyas, were not of frustration, but a terrible grief.”

  For some reason, Matyas thought of Royja, but he pushed it away. He needed to concentrate.

  “Finally,” Veil said, “the Creator accepted wh
at She could not change. She created a world of balance, and set within it two great trees. One was the Tree of Life, also known as Constancy, which grew into the light and brought forth all the creatures, animal as well as plant. The other, the Tree of Knowledge, known also as Variance, She made to grow down, taking the flaw into dark, hidden places where She hoped no one would ever discover it.”

  “What is it?” Matyas burst out. “This flaw—is it what happened to that boy?”

  “Please,” she said, and held up a hand. “Let me do this—” She took a breath. “The flaw is a spell. It’s called the Spell of Extension, and with it a Master can live forever. This is what the Creator discovered—that it was not possible to create a living world that would not contain, deep within it, the Spell of Extension. She could not grow a Tree of Life without a Tree of Knowledge. The best She could do was hide the Knowledge in darkness.”

  Matyas thought of his dreams of tunnels. He remembered the dark places that time he’d stolen Veil’s red box, thinking it held the secret of how to fly. For wasn’t there a young man about to step off a cliff, without a care, as if the wind would carry him? Instead, he’d found himself in the dark tunnel. With bodies. With heads. With him. Now Matyas wanted to make Veil stop, before it was too late. Before he remembered. But it was already too late. He said, “The Tree of Knowledge. It’s the Tarot of Eternity, isn’t it?” The Splendor flared so brightly he had to squint, then it dwindled and went out.

  “You must understand, Matyas. Joachim—”

  “The Brilliant?” Bitterness sharpened his voice.

  She nodded. “Joachim the Brilliant. Joachim the Blessed. He did not know of the flaw.”

  “Then what about the Kallistocha? The one who taught him? Did he know?”

  For once, for just a moment, Veil was speechless. Despite everything, despite his desire to run, Matyas nearly smiled. Veil said, “Well, you have delved far. You are right, of course. Yes. Joachim did not just create the Tarot of Eternity. He was guided by a High Prince of the Kallistochoi.”