by Lisa Smedman
"Is your home near this side of the city?" the man asked.
Tart of it is," she said. Then she added, "We only have to get through this swamp."
They had been slogging through muck that only loosely fit the definition of land. Early on, the man had lost both boots to the squelching mud. The druid-wizard had removed her own boots long before, to give her druid aspect a little direct contact with the earth-before she must sequester it once more to the backwaters of her mind. The Plane of Shadow felt near, so very near. She wondered if the Shadovar were preparing to bring their enclave over even now.
The man and the druid-wizard finally reached the sewer pipe. The druid-wizard paused, gauging the man's expression. He glanced around, mildly interested in the new surroundings but anxious to reach their destination. The druid-wizard ducked into the pipe.
She glanced back at him. He looked surprised but did not question her, even when the smell of sewage rose to his nostrils. Perhaps he thought she was taking the back way to some sprawling mansion.
When they reached the museum and she stopped to deposit the new denizen into an empty cage, realization dawned.
"This is it?" the man cried. "This is your home? The sewers?"
"I couldn't bring myself to tell you before: people don't take well to magicians in this city," she lied. "I've been forced underground."
"Why'd you lock them in cages like this?" he continued, as though he had not heard her. "You could give them better treatment than this!" He gestured at a random cage, then gasped as he glimpsed the monstrosity inside. "What is this? What's wrong with this turtle?"
It was a giant tortoise, but it had four heads, spaced equally apart around the rim of its shell. The heads, each one independent of the others, could not agree upon the direction in which to travel. It must have managed occasionally to drag itself to a bowl of water near the front of its cage, or it would not have survived in the wizard's absence, but when the original head won out and made for one of the four food dishes in each corner of the cage, the turtle could not reach the food, as the dishes were enclosed behind wire mesh. When the original head made for a different bowl, a head on the side would discover the last bowl and make for it instead. The scene would have been ludicrous had the turtle not been straining so hard against itself, and for so long, that a couple of its legs had scraped themselves raw in its attempts to gain ground.
"I'm trying to cure it," she answered. "I found it like this-"
"Then why not bring its food to it?" The man sprang to do just that but couldn't find a door of any kind in the bars. "Open it!" he commanded.
She did so with a gesture, bemused. The man tore the wire mesh from the food dishes and slid them toward each of the tortoise's four heads. The tortoise choked down the morsels as the man squatted near it, watching.
"I know you can fix this," the man said over his shoulder. "I saw you turn an entire woman into a cow. Why can't you just wave away three of this turtle's… f He stopped. "Unless you did this to it," he whispered. He looked at her. "You didn't find the turtle like this, did you? It was fine when you found it, wasn't it? You took it…"
The druid-wizard didn't like the way this was going. The tortoise was nothing compared to some of her other tenants. She must keep him from seeing the others.
"I did what it's my nature to do," she finished for him, coaxing him to her chambers, holding his eyes with hers. "Surely you knew on some level. The things that give me joy-they aren't joyous things, but I can't help that they bring me joy."
"How could you…? Never mind. What did you really plan to do with the creature we captured? No, never mind that, either."
He paused to think. They had entered her bedchamber, and she eased him down into a chair.
"After your trick with the peddler, I thought…" He trailed off. "But this…"
She let him mull things over without interruption.
After a few moments, he said, "I guess maybe I did know on some level. Maybe that's one of the things that attracted me to you, but that doesn't mean I accept it! I mean, I can find joy in trees, birds, and flowers… Why can't you?"
He had meant the question rhetorically, but she answered anyway. "Because I can't deny what I am."
"But why resign yourself like that? Somehow you had to become what you are. You only need to backtrack to the point where things went wrong…"
She turned his face gently toward her. His eyes ceased wandering about the room and focused on hers.
"It doesn't work that way," she said tenderly.
He looked back into her eyes fully for a moment then wrenched his face from her grasp.
"I have to go," he choked.
He stumbled from the room.
7
"It's inside the walls. It's behind every door until you open it. It's under everything, but, if you look inside everything, you can't see it, because you're always seeing it."
— Chever's last notes
The man fled whence he had come, his vision bleared by tears. When he passed the corridor of horrors, the faces all seemed to rise up in myriad yawning grimaces, crying and moaning, and sometimes screaming.
But the imprisoned creatures made no sound. Those sounds came from him.
He found himself back outside, pant legs splattered in sewage, the light of an overcast afternoon searing his dilated eyes. He jogged blindly, heedless of swamp mud and brambles, until he found himself in a small clearing. The clearing was dead. No water softened its ground, stagnant or otherwise. No grass grew. No swamp insects buzzed. Overhead, where branches protruded, green leaves gave way to bare, dead limbs, almost as if someone had drawn a line: life on one side, death on the other. The man found the absence of all life-all magic-comforting. He sat cross-legged at the edge of the clearing and let the nothing embrace him, soothe him. The emptiness would be complete if only…
He removed his backpack, which he had hoped to remove in a roomy suite in the wizard's nonexistent house. It carried his two treasures. He pulled out Chever's notes, traced the lines of the handwriting with his fingers, then crumpled them and sent them flying. A breeze lifted them, and a couple of pages caught on tree branches. A thin rain had begun to fall; it would mold that parchment to the trees soon enough.
It felt good to be rid of the magic; he hated it now. Magic meant lies and betrayal. Magic meant loving, then finding that you love a stranger, then discovering that you cannot stop loving even when nothing of the illusion remains.
He touched the rose, whose petals had begun to collect raindrops. It was crying-no. It was only a flower that had collected a little rain. With a tortured cry, he hurled it, too, as far as he could throw it, then broke into wracking sobs.
In her den, the druid-wizard looked up, sensing something amiss. The notes…? She closed her eyes and focused upon them. She saw the swamp… the man, weeping and trudging back toward the sewer… the notes sagging in a drizzle in a clearing he had left behind! She immediately teleported to the clearing and gathered the notes under her robe. As easy as that, they were hers.
8
"We make it little by little, until it's too big and overwhelms… us… then goes away aging."
— Chever's last notes
As the druid-wizard dabbed the notes dry while waiting for the man's return, she could not help but consider his misery. In spite of herself, she wanted to alleviate it. How to accomplish that? Well, what had he loved before she had come along? His rose. Chever's notes. Those were all. The rose was gone, broken in the swamp, its crime its failure to convince the man that it was more than what it seemed. The notes, though…
Perhaps if the man had the time to study them more, he would find the answers he sought, the answers he had felt were just beyond his reach back when he first showed her the notes at his cabin.
Maybe she didn't need the notes for her own purposes just yet. Maybe she would have him study them a while longer. In fact, if he reached a breakthrough, that knowledge might prove invaluable to the Shadovar, put the c
itizens of Shade Enclave in the druid-wizard's debt. Yes…
She couldn't wait long, though. During the last few days, she had begun to hear the Shadovar's call, and it grew louder with each day.
When the man returned, he first paused at the cage of the creature they had brought back from the Deserts-mouth Mountains. He held his hand up to the bars, and the creature mirrored the gesture. Their gazes locked for a moment, then the man tore his away and made his way to the woman's chambers.
She looked up when he entered, and he nodded as though nothing had happened; indeed, as though he had been entering just this way for many years, coming home after a hard day's work. She seemed a little damp, as if she had been out in a mist or sweating over a difficult spell.
She reached out her hand, and in it were Chever's notes. "You shouldn't leave such valuable things lying around," she said.
A few days ago, he might have railed at her, accused her of spying. Instead he just stared dully, waiting for her direction.
"You should keep studying these," she continued. "They may help you find completion."
Back in the world of magic and lies, he could not refuse. He took the notes to the nearest table and began to read over the familiar words for the first time in what seemed like months. The woman left him to his thoughts.
When the druid-wizard peeked in later, she thought that perhaps the intermission had done the man good. He was poring over the notes avidly, as though he had never thrown them away.
The days passed.
The druid-wizard rarely went out. She had skipped the last few archwizard moots.
The man ventured out to obtain food or to wipe his mind clean in one dead clearing or another. Each time he returned, he paused at the same creature's cage, took what silent wisdom he could glean from it, and pushed on.
The man did not know of the floating city. The druid-wizard would not stand for him to accompany her to it. She had watched him grow paler each day, watched his hair turn grayer and lose its luster, watched the dark circles grow under his eyes and his shoulders slump. He would not live long in the darkest catacombs of the city of darkness.
But she would not allow him to live without her, either.
One windy, magic-strewn evening, the woman approached the man.
"I have something to show you," she said.
She clasped his wrist, and they teleported to the edge of a cliff.
Stars sang their distant song, and the waxing moon was bright. The man stood at the edge, cloak whipping about him. He could feel her presence slightly behind him; possibly she had taken on her wolf form, which had become a familiar event to him. When he turned, she was human.
"Why did you bring me here?"
"Have you by chance made any breakthroughs with Chever's notes?"
"What?… Oh. No, nothing significant. Why do you ask?"
"No reason." She sighed and moved up beside him. "I wanted to show you that, because of you, I can take joy in more than pain. The stars…"
She gestured, then turned to him.
"I was a druid once, you know. I still am, in many ways, but I'm a wizard more. When I was only a druid, I loved the stars, but they didn't give me joy as they do now. It's a gift 111 treasure."
She flowed to him, and she kissed him long and hard.
The kiss tasted like poison, and the man quailed, sensing his life spinning out of his control. He broke the kiss with a small cry.
The woman held him at arm's length for a moment, looking into his eyes.
And she was gone.
The man's heart wrenched, grieved and painful. Power left him-something sucked it out. Loss overwhelmed his senses, and he fell to the ground.
9
"And that's how… we… it… all makes sense. I mean, how-we make sense with the things we see. So it really does make sense when you look at it that way."
— Chever's last notes
The man awoke on the cliff top and picked his long way back to the sewers in a daze. The sewers had become home to him so easily…
In the days that followed, the woman did not return. Perhaps her evil deeds had finally caught up with her, or perhaps she had found a more suitable mate. The man made some perfunctory inquires about her in the town, but rarely did anyone know of her. Those who had heard of her grimaced as at a bad taste and would not speak to him. She had wanted to leave, in any case, and who was he to come upon her unwanted? He thought of the peddler-turned-cow and shuddered.
Days poured one into the next with nothing to distinguish them from those gone before or those come after, except that, on some days, he imagined he could sense the woman from whatever place she had gone to. What was he to do now?
He could not open the cages of her museum, since only magic could open them. Rather than leave the prisoners to wither, he slipped all but the newest member of their congregation poison purchased from a street vendor with gold coins he had found in one of the woman's robes. He told himself it was mercy-killing.
He attended to the newest creature's needs better than he attended to his own. He took violently ill, leaving trails of coughed-up blood on the cold floors. His disinterest in his own life might be conspiring to bring about his demise, or perhaps something in her final kiss…
As the lackluster days continued to drag, the stench of the dead in their cells grew thick, until the man thought sometimes that he must have fallen into the Nine Hells in error, the sole living being among the Hordes. Only his creature companion kept him from being alone-and one day it, too, died.
10
"When truth comes, knowledge leaves. Truth is big."
— Chever's last notes
The day the last creature died, the man climbed from the sewers into the city. Twice along the way, he encountered sickly plants that seemed to move of their own accord. He wondered whether they were endowed with sentience as he had once thought his rose was, or if they had once been people who had found themselves on the wrong end of a wizard's spell.
He wandered into a tavern, oblivious of the wrinkled noses and the patrons who got up to move or leave when he sat near them. He stared blankly into a mug of mead for a while, and, following sudden dizziness, the world became blank and utterly white.
11
"… go now. Can't keep holding to this… keeping, I mean, to… together."
— Chever's last notes
When he came to-when the white dimmed to the colors of earth-the man lay curled up in swamp mud. The first thing he saw was the rose-a hallucination. An illusion.
He reached out, palm up. The illusion's head rested softly upon his fingers. He wept.
When the tears ceased, the rose was still there.
He felt something hard beneath his ribs, lodged in the mud, and shifted to push it aside. A rock. A light touch brushed his cheek. When he had shifted, he had come nearer to the rose, and now it touched its face to his.
He pushed himself to a sitting position and cupped the bloom between his palms. It had taken root at a slant; it had fallen on its side when he had thrust it from himself in a time that seemed so long ago. Its stem had curved to enable it to capture what rays of sun it could through the swamp's mossy ceiling.
He gradually became aware of his hands; something about them had nagged at the back of his mind ever since he had awakened.
There: they had begun to rot. He felt no pain, and yet the skin hung from them in tatters. He thought he could see the bone of one of his knuckles.
So this was it. The woman had given him a disease as her parting gift, and he would die soon.
It had been worth it.
Now he would remain here. He would not leave his rose again.
Time passed. He did not count cycles of light and dark. Sometimes he lay on his back and stared through the moss and branches at the sky. At night, he saw the stars and thought of his love on their last night together. During the day, he imagined that certain strands of the whitish green moss overhead might be the remnants of Chever's notes, caught
and molded to the trees in the rain. But no-the woman had brought them back after he had tossed them away.
Why had she done it? Why had she come to his house, lied, stolen his heart, brought him to the sewers, infected him with rot?
His only regret was that he had never reached an epiphany over Chever's notes. He thought longingly of the table in the sewers where he kept them, where they doubtless rested even now. Or… did they?
He strained to see into the blur of days between her disappearance and the present. And… yes, the image came: himself, standing over a table empty of all but a stump of a candle, frowning slightly, thinking vaguely that something was missing but not caring enough to think on it further.
An empty table. No notes.
She had taken them.
Of course. It made sense. What else of value had he to offer her? He had nothing special, no powers or insights. His rose was valuable only to him, but Chever's notes…
He could imagine those would be valuable to many of the woman's kind. He had been so caught up in his little world of garden, studies, and mountain cabin that he had failed to think beyond it. This was the price of that failure. To ensure he would not come after his treasure… a poison kiss.
But why had she not taken the notes sooner? He would never know. Perhaps he had been the one brief flash of light in her otherwise dark existence, her chance to know love before losing her life to whatever pit dark wizards swarmed in. Perhaps, having known love, someday she might also know remorse, penance… and, somewhere beyond that, peace.
Yes… that's what he would believe.
He had propped himself up on one elbow, and now he let his head fall back to his pillow of mud. Leeches clung to his face, and he smiled. Now the end would come.