by Segoy Sands
“Lord Xander, I don’t believe in borders, either,” Lady Tarin lifted her chin, sipping wine from a long fluted glass, “In the end, we’ll either have to leave Aurland or make it whole.”
Obviously the Grael could not leave Livia, and obviously the Orroch intended to keep fighting until every last one of them did. Intermarriage, so far, had produced little detectable change. Or, rather, intermarriages had tended to be of the dismal, and rather inappropriate, variety. Lady Leir was an exception, but even she had only managed to smuggle one or two, of the litter of daughters she’d given Duenne, into the Spiral before the rest became battle spoils, dead or worse. One had reputedly been Hollens’s toy at court for a time.
“Music,” Xander snapped his fingers.
The lutist, seated in an inconspicuous corner, well away from the table, set fingers to strings. Wan, wasted, with hair like dried straw, but with a mobile and intelligent face, he coaxed forth sound like water in all its protean forms. Closing her eyes, Lady Tarin heard laughing rills, lapping waves, slow tears. Involuntarily, she remembered things, the sea, the children, the loves, the years she’d lost. The man crooned in a soft, clear voice.
Fashion me an instrument,
Quoth the Numbersmith
To the Metalsmith,
To illuminate the ignorant,
And make the blind see,
The lame race,
The lonely love,
The poor prosper
The dreamless dream
The lost come home or
Lose their rutted roads;
A fretted thing with eyes and ears
And mouth without a soul
And let the noble lie be told
To men of iron, brass,
Silver, and gold.
She knew the melody, not the words. Xander altered them to his tastes, insinuating his own verses into Grael forms. In many ways, he was the most dangerous living Orroch, the only one who knew how to play to win.
“The Earle of Bo,” announced Devere.
Another dangerous man, and one she’d expected. News travelled fast. The Libertine would not miss a chance to set eyes on a young woman in bondage, not when his own estate, Strafford, was such a trifling distance by horse. Across the valley, on a rise slightly lower than the commanding height of Tercera, Strafford’s yellow and white flags, emblazoned with the insignia of the swan, flew above limestone and sandstone walls. Proceedings at Strafford were quieter than those at Tercera. None would dispute that the Bootlicker held the place of honor in Ojeida, among so many honored lords - lords that, as everyone knew, Risard wanted a comfortable arm’s length from court. He’d sent many a scion of venerable families here - as if to follow Alcierin precedent and make it an enclave of the elite, or as if to say, let these haughty lords enjoy the rarefied air - and gravely insulted them, one and all, by giving the Bootlicker the highest place, perhaps most especially the House of Bo, who were olive-skinned like the Alcierins but had been loyal to House Ganalon and strong in its defense.
Lord Bo entered, a lean man with dark sensitive eyes and close cropped hair, vibrating at an octave of elegance higher than Xander’s. Certainly he was, of the two, younger by well over a decade, though by no means inexperienced. Highborn, he was surely expert with the sword, but one heard only of his erotic exploits. If the tales were true, he thought all people, low and high, corruptible creatures of desire. A remarkable instinct was said to lead him to the perfect specimens by which to test, or prove, this principle. It was rumored that he had a tattoo on his, evidently voluminous, penis: “Ein holl wybodaeth yn cred.” All our knowledge is belief. He had a blade, too, though he seldom wore it. On it was emblazoned: “Fel mêl ar ymyl y cyllyll yn.” Like honey on the knife’s edge. Or, so it was rumored, and quite possibly the rumors had his penis and his blade confused.
“Lord Xander,” the soft-spoken Libertine bowed deeply, smiling with pleasure, “forgive my intrusion. Word came of my sister’s presence.”
Xander’s eyebrow twitched upward. Glances crossed the table. If he wasn’t joking at their expense, he had to be referring to one of the two young women in the room. He couldn’t mean the country girl, who was known to be a sister of a noted young rebel, so he had to mean the Calyxe. Yes. Lady Tarin reproached herself for not immediately detecting the distinctive family features.
“Dema,” his incorrigible blue eyes sparkled. “You are here.”
“Alastor,” she acknowledged him.
As host, Xander was obliged to be cordial. “We rejoice in your meeting here.”
“You were going to come to Strafford?” Lord Bo asked his sister, making a peevish little moue as he slid elegantly into a seat and accepted a glass of Ojeidan claret from the servant. “With your lovely little ward? To tell me all about your errand? It’s not like I can come to you out in your goddess temple in the desert, can I? Can you imagine how bored I am here?” he narrowed his eyes at her before he turning to the rest of the table. “Dema could strike us all dead here and now and not a damn thing we could about it.”
“If you are siblings, in the customary sense,” Vance commented, with a sidelong, nervous glance at Dema, “then...”
“Then, my sister’s a Graelishwoman and in the sisterhood,” Lord Bo nodded, smiling. “Yes, and, need I say, not the only one? No, not at all. These petty provincial ideas, good riddance,” he waved his hand toward Lord Vance, amiably, “good riddance. My sister here may chafe to hear it, or then again,” he smiled, “she may not, but the most harmful thing in this world are barriers, and there are so many unspoken barriers. If someone has a mole on their lip, or a fat nose, or they’ve gotten older than they should have, or lack an appealing physique. Well, those are natural barriers, and we, yes, I’m sure, can overcome them. But then there are the barriers we invent, which seem unconscionable. Like the sexlessness, so far as I’m aware, of the sisters of the Spiral. They act as if they don’t even pleasure each other, though I’m sure they do, and how much more pleasurably! Sometimes I’m quite sure we make rules purely for the excitement of breaking them.” He tilted his glass toward Joggen. “He understands. He likes to dance with other men, with his naked blade, and why not? I tell you all, as intimates, that I will not rest well in my bed until I bed a Spiral sister, or several, though not of course one related to me, because, for now at least, my monstrous deeds are reserved for man-made notions of monstrosity.”
Vance frowned. “I don’t see what this has to do with your sister.”
“Has the Spiral nothing to do with sex?” Lord Bo raised a brow, meaningfully. “Let us admit to ourselves, openly, nakedly, that many of our Graelish girls are in the sisterhood, and quite a few from good families. And the yemes, how do they pick out the little girls to bring home to their ambas? They call it the sweetness.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“We were blessed with a sibling reunion, after all,” Hollens spoke across the table to Lord Xander, “even if not the one expected.” He was neither as pretty as the Libertine, nor as interesting as the Bootlicker, but he had charm enough, with his glossy auburn hair tied back in a queue, his frilled shirt unlaced just low enough to show his golden chest hairs, complemented by his rather youthful goatee. “I fear we’ll have to content ourselves. Cole Dunlan isn’t coming to dinner here tonight.”
“Coming to dinner, though,” Vance winked.
Lady Tarns cleared her throat delicately. “It seems there is some intelligence to which I am not privy,” she asked. “Where is her brother now?”
Hollens gave a casual wave as he masticated a bit of crisp fowl, a thin line of golden brown oil running down his lip to his chin. “Out there. Hunted. Doomed to be devoured.”
“M’lord,” Joggen said quietly. “Is it proper for us to speak so of our guest’s brother when she must be silent?”
A clear broth had been served. A long silver platter of garlic roasted trout was now being brought around to the guests. Lady Tarin selected a beautifully mottled specim
en, and the servant deftly transferred it to her plate.
“Bede Obero,” Xander pointed his long, three-tined fork at the old man beside him. “Why can the girl not speak?”
Trembling with age, the Bede corrected him. “T’is a mere soma-suggestion, m’lord.”
“I see,” Xander said crisply. “Can you un-suggest it?”
“Oh, it is very easy to break a soma-suggestion,” Obero said earnestly. “People often make the mistake of thinking that we of the Aurum are priests and are given to prayer. We are not priests but scholars, and what we do is science.” There was a slight involuntary wobble to his head and his hands as he spoke. “I do not deny that there may be a science to prayer, of course. The mind becomes deeply still, and the brain extraordinarily efficient and active. We call this activity intent, which may after all be a subtle or intensive material process, and which repeated testing has demonstrated to have material effects.”
“I see,” Xander said, just as crisply. “Shall you demonstrate for us?”
“We are not priests,” the old man went on, “and we’re also not magicians. On the contrary, we maintain that the use of intent is a completely commonplace phenomenon. We all do it, all the time. Only, often the intent is diluted and confused. A magus believes he can influence the nature of reality, bending the laws of time, space, and matter, but we believe no such thing. Attend to these matters properly, and the reasonable conclusion, for a mind that does not dabble immoderately in metaphysics, is that the world is composed of experience. The flux is never simply bare, but a flux of inherited feelings. I hope I do not speak to dryly if I propose that, allowing for very minimal degrees of relevance, all space is in every space and all times are in every time. All things, in modifying one another, produce a tone of feeling or of value. That being the case, an element of mentality pervades the universe, you see.” Noting the look of painful compaction on Xander’s face, he rapidly concluded, “In brief, the notion of intent is not magic or religion but metaphysics or philosophy.”
“I see,” Xander said, still crisply. “Proceed, without further philosophy.”
“But I must say,” Obero held up a provisional hand, “that, with regard to matters of the supernatural, some of these, yes, even these, belong to science, contrary to common opinion, provided one refrain from an unnecessarily narrow definition of science. To proceed without philosophy is, of course, impossible. If an element of mentality pervades the universe, why may there not indeed be malevolent intents with some degree of endurance? Some of these are fed by our vices; others breed in places too deep for vice. Common folk speak, for instance, of the lord of despair.”
“Thank you,” Xander nodded, genially. “Without further reference to folklore?”
The aged philosopher closed his eyes. A pure and peaceful calm spread over his long, pale features. The silence in the room grew palpable and, suddenly, Obero snapped his fingers.
Lady Tarin was certain such a bit of cheap hocus-pocus would prove barren, but the girl immediately began to shake from head to toe. Even her plate and silverware, untouched before her, began to clatter on the table. Hollens and Vance looked about the room, perplexed and mildly scandalized, but following Xander’s suit, the other guests nodded and politely continued their meal. The Calyxe herself was quietly eating, even as the girl sat trembling, with Joggen beside her looking useless and mortified. The gallant young officer, Dale, was speaking to the Calyxe, apparently recommending the wine, even as he gestured for more trout. The Dunlan girl seemed able to see the people around her now, with quick blue eyes that were by no means those of a simpleton from a crannog.
Bede Obero was the only one to bother to comfort her. “Don’t be afraid of the tremens,” he assured her. “A transient symptom. The etheria and effluvia were blocked, and, shortly now, the streams will resume their regular flow. Try to remember this feeling, for in truth much of what you mistake for your own intent comes through suggestion. Pay attention to all the very subtle differences in how you feel. For if you would be free from suggestion in this present day, you must learn to recognize its faintest insinuation.”
“Thank you, Bede Obero,” Xander said, clapping his hands together with too much gentility for audible sound. “We have learned a rare lesson from a venerable scholar. And,” he raised an eyebrow archly at the Libertine, and then at Hollens, “we’ve had all the spectacle that our simple country constitutions dare risk.”
13 Retrograde
Retrograde he went, through slow black viscous oil, away from sense objects, to a flux that neither existed nor ceased to exist. Child of a broken family and a broken people in a world of broken truths, to what might he cling? He surrendered to the Lady, she who was the very basis of the three-fold realm, though she was ever the wandering and unwanted stranger. She who changes everything she touches.
Quieting the knower, with its names, images, identities, and appropriations, awareness might unfold in occasions of nonhuman experience. The Lady was not light but darkness, mother of wisdom. She was liberation from self. For a moment, he felt, overpoweringly, the possibility of liberation. Her whiteness was compassion, unlimited by grasping, and yet merely a garment. The irri were her entourage, the Elkirri her jewels. She was where no one is and therefore everyone can be. But he must be careful even of such thoughts. The three shades were pulling him ever deeper into the Ignis and the Entuthon, and he must guard his mind and not let it bleed. One could easily become a demon here. One’s experience might seem to flow from a self-grasping essence. One might feel thrillingly powerful or knowing, with fiendish wrath and pride. The moment a thought form began, it might become intoxicatingly real, a compulsion. The only antidote to craving was at the humming, furious threshold of nonbeing, where no experiencer could enter. How he knew these things he could not say. As he travelled la narañanye down into the Entuthon, it seemed he became ever more the wraith and shade. He could still see through the eyes of clay on the bridge above the purling brook: the clay boy’s body, the cobbled together bridge, the irri-filled woods, the wonderously assembled sticks and stones of the crannog in those homeless foothills, amid mountains that to sharp eyes were a ceaseless interchange of elements, in the fluid space of the void. He could see his brothers and his sister and how the pattern that connected them also separated them.
Again the three shades gave him a push, as they had done he could not say how many times. Before his disseminated mind could dwell on any thought, they pushed him. This last push brought him into sight of the dark pyramid of the Telesterion. A sea of fire raged against the planar faces of that black diamond. Into the nine-fold temple they ushered him, to a place where eight facets met in a single point and the walls formed an eight pointed star. At the center of the octagram, naked save for the a luminous river of hair that flowed like starlight down her back, floated a girl, slender, diminutive, olive skinned, radiant, as if moonlit from within. Beneath her left breast glowed a hexagon, six triangles pointing inward and upward toward a single vertex. Each of the triangles flashed a different color, leaving the after-traces of two blue trefoils.
The three shades were again women of flesh, naked and more beautiful than a king’s courtesans, as he had seen them once before, fleetingly on the bridge above the creek. The middle woman was tall, dark, and shapely. At her left stood a woman white as milk with fiery hair. The other was copper-skinned with dark copper hair. In the fires of the Ignis, he watched the demons roar against the diamond walls, eyes of incarnadine fury, with ravenous mouths and cataclysmic hands. Just beyond the flames, he sensed the magic of innumerable irri. Closer, he felt the gathered shades, those sisters of the Spiral who had dared the full renunciation. Some had been here since the making of the temple. Others were younger by centuries. The Spiral had forgotten the Telesterion. Its high sisters wasted the energy of absorption in vying among themselves. They treated Tel and her secrets as something forbidden, and warned each other against the allure of an abandon that would one day undo the Spiral. Above all, t
hey warned against the Ignis. The warmth of the demons was a thousandfold the lust of man. The sister that yielded would become a demon lover.
All this Wren saw, as the middle woman flowed toward him, dark hair swaying over an ample bosom and across dark hips. He could not suppress the image of the secret flower that could teach him great bliss. It filled his mind, a flower unfolding without end, without limit, without division. It was a flower opening into a thousand times a thousand flowers. Yet it was darkness, and the darkness was a maw, a black skull with teeth and eyes more lustrous than polished obsidian. Death was approaching from the dark recesses of a sacred cave. It wore nine aurochs heads, the greatest one blue-black, and the others in many hues, with flaming nostrils and burning horns, and dozens of dark blue human arms and legs brandishing a panoply of instruments and weapons.
“First let’s remove that seal,” the tall one said, putting her knowing hands on his kidneys. He looked on as she drew forth from his sides two smooth-polished black turtles with roving malevolent eyes and hooked, snapping snouts. She set them down, where they sank and vanished into the floor, and then tenderly stroked his face. She knelt down to him, guiding his hands to her breasts.
“Secrets will fill you,” she told him softly. He felt her soft mouth on his lips, her warm breath in his ear. “Bliss will bring you into union with your wives, your consorts.”
14 Heartbreak
“Come embrace me,” the sweet girl said, bringing her lissome body against him, so that his mind melted and his inhibitions dissolved. He felt warmly gratified that she was choosing him over the other three men. He was younger than they, more charming. She lusted for him, because like him she too was beautiful and perfect and whole, in the glory of youth. The separation between two such attractive forms was an illusion. She was the fire of his senses burning, and he the fire of hers. Her soft silken hand glided up and down his chest. “You first, my darling,” she breathed against his lips, giggling, offering him her body.