by Janet Morris
That will come, it will come, she told herself fiercely and, very cautiously so that he would not detect her meager ability, cast a spell of twelve coils binding over Marada to protect him from all evils of the night.
“We are almost there,” he said. The tip of his nose hobbled when he spoke. “This is your last opportunity to see back the way you have come. After this, you must look only forward, and forget from where you came.” And he passed his hand over a light: once, twice.
Shebat screamed. She kept on screaming long after the starry night with the bilious, oversized moon was gone from before her. But she saw it, even behind the palms pressed to her eyes: dark, dark, all around, dark.
“Where did you think we were?” she heard him ask, but she could not answer. Black, black night full of evil dreaming filled her sight and heart and her mind. The tales of enchanters’ depravity in the dark night among the stars were true: here she was, carried off ensorceled as children always were. But to what purpose?
It was that bitter curiosity which made her take down her palms from her eyes, saying: “I am not a virgin, you know. Stump only eats virgins.”
Marada had been darkening all his lights, one at a time with a touch. He stopped, straightened and turned to her very slowly, saying: “What did you say?”
“I said, I am not a virgin, and Stump only eats virgins, everyone knows that. So your debt will have to be paid another way.”
“I see,” said the enchanter, leaning back against the console. “Well, why did I go to all the trouble of teaching you Consulese if I was going to do that?”
“Perhaps you are not so great an enchanter as you claim. Perhaps you did not know. Your two friends could not even keep their lives from the crowd’s wrath. And you were looking around in the kitchen for a way out, not trying to save them, or even avenge them.”
“It is not for us to strike down the helpless. I have lived that adage so long it never occurred to me that the helpless might strike first. Now my betrothed is dead.” Marada sighed deeply, then without taking his eyes from her reached behind him and slapped at something. There was a hissing and a light of soft quality flooded the room. “Shebat,” said the man gently, “I should not have teased you, even for a moment. The Stump is an old name for this place like a little Earth, and there is nothing here in the least malevolent, any more than magical. Those objects that caused you to scream when you viewed them were the very Earth, and its moon. Sometimes, long ago, talented children would be taken up to the little world you are about to see. Like you, they must have been frightened at first. But Shebat, none of those who went ever came back down to tell your people where they had gone, because they did not choose to. Because they had no reason to come back. . . .”
“You mean, never?”
“I mean, I doubt if you will want to. If you ever do, just call me, wherever I am, and I will come and take you home. That is my word, given formally. You are my ward, or will be, summarily. Will you accept it, formally?”
“Yes,” she said, stifling the objections that in the case of the enchanters who held the people of Earth in mortal subservience, there was oft-demonstrated malevolence, and mighty spells of example and retribution. There had been the early frost, because a townsman had denied a whim to the Arbiter of Enchantments. . . .
But Marada came and leaned over her, unbuckling her harness, lifting her effortlessly, and she caught her breath and lay her head on his shoulder, moving not a muscle until he put her down before the open port. She saw a dazzle of struts and lights, a cavernous expanse along which a little buglike carriage rolled smoothly without horses. Deceptively slow seemed its approach, but soon she could see the man inside it. Then Marada was urging her down dizzying lattices of stepwork that rang every time his boots struck them. Under her bare feet, they were cold, treacherous. She concentrated on negotiating them.
“They accord us great honor,” he told her under his breath. “The secretary to the proconsul himself drives that lorry.” The partially assimilated lexicon in her mind equated proconsul with governor, but her heart told her this sour man in his sorcerous transport was one of the most vile enchanters who held her people in thrall. She reached out and insinuated her hand into Marada’s. He smiled at her encouragingly, and kissed the top of her head. “Do not worry.”
She clambered up into the magical yellow carriage driven by an auburn, spectral man who managed to glower while not looking at her, settling into the yielding seat with a thrill that made her fingertips and the ends of her toes tingle. It was not a thrill of fear, for the powerful blackbearded enchanter was beside her, his arm thrown casually across the seat behind her head. Craning her neck, she seemed to study the vaulted ceiling with its bright lights and great crossbeams, but in truth she sought the infinite delight of laying her head on his arm. The cart jolted, as if one of its many wheels had struck a rock, and picked up speed. Above, superstructures painted with designs gave way to a tunnel of curved metal, where segmented lights blurred into a steady stream as their conveyance picked up speed.
“As far as I am concerned, her people and ours are conspecific,” Marada was saying deliberately. The word was not among those the talking earmuffs had taught her at the enchanter’s bidding. The jolt of the carriage had caused him to shift closer; his thigh rested against her own. She thought her heart might burst from excitement, and from something else that made her turn her head to the right so that she could watch the way his lips moved in their fringe of hair.
“I am aware of the Consortium’s official position, but you are a long way from civilization, Arbiter, and from the Kerrion platforms where your opinion is of some moment. However, here are your papers and its, er, hers. I still think you should let us test her,” grumbled the spectral man as he handed a package, wrapped in fine paper that seemed never before to have been used, across her to Marada.
But Shebat was not impressed by the virgin paper as she might otherwise have been. Arbiter? Her flesh turned so cold that the arm beneath her head and the thigh meeting hers seemed to scald her. There was no need to consult her new vocabulary for the meaning of that word: every denizen of Bolen’s town cowered before its speaking, so that she had known it from her earliest days.
Marada was saying: “—get those bodies up here, posthaste. Have your ‘enchanters’ retrieve them. By the way, is it really necessary to propagate a reign of terror over a people whose situation could hardly be more abject?”
“Sir, I have a feeling you are going to find your own answer to that question, sooner than you might choose.” He looked meaningfully down at Shebat. “And in a manner more convincing than anything I could say. I will have the proconsul order the retrieval of the bodies of your brother and your betrothed. They will be at your ship by 2400. Until then, I offer you the hospitality of the consulate and the proconsul’s sympathies.”
The magical cart seemed about to crash into a blank wall as tall as her faraway forest’s oldest trees. She tensed, reached out for Marada, then stayed her hand. The arbiter was talking yet to the other man, unconcerned. Then the blank wall spht in half, drawing apart: Shebat gasped as the eye-teasing vista of the Stump opened before her. Above her head the sky rippled, a candent pewter pond. From glaucous downward-curving hills around it shining villages like jasper berries seemed to hang suspended. Before her, a serpentine construction of shimmering glass and enchanted iron glimmering bright as silver crouched above the cinereous roadway, which seemed to disappear within it.
The man who controlled the cart caused it to pull up to a tessellated path that led to trident-blazoned pavonine doors, saying, “Sir, you are from very far away. I suggest you consider yourself lucky. I must remind you that you were granted landfall at your own risk, against our objections; and that you have bent the rules about as far as you can without breaking one, Kerrion or no, in case of which I doubt whether even your esteemed kinship bond group could help you. Keep your pet in sight. Arbiter, lest something happen to it.”
“Let’s
hope nothing does,” drawled Marada, sliding out of the lorry and lifting the girlchild out of her seat. He did not understand why she was suddenly so stiff against him, putting it down to awesome sights and the disorientation of a planetdweller first confronted with an inverted horizon.
It was much later, inside a gaudily threadbare visitors’ suite done in chatoyant taupes that he drew from Shebat her understanding of what an “Arbiter of Enchantments” was and did.
Cracking his knuckles in consternation, he paced before the deep sofa in which the ragged girl was sunk, curled in its corner with her feet drawn up, watching him from leaden, luminous eyes full of resignation.
His disclaimer of the “enchantment” part of the title did not ease her.
Out of the oral tradition which was the only store of lore she possessed, she replied, “Thus it has always been,” incontrovertibly fatalistic.
“Well, it is not like this, everywhere, between the platforms and the planets. Some consular families, mine included, even maintain planetary estates. Shebat, you must trust me, not only half the time, but all of the time, if I am to help you.”
She merely looked askance at him, calmly waiting, her bony shoulders hunched up about her ears.
He found himself at the end of his patience. Doubts he had not had previously crowded in upon him. Had he done the right thing? His professional self said he had not had enough information to make a decision, that he had acted without clarity, out of some murky self-aggrandizement, and that he had better start making sure that when there was enough information by which to make a judgment, that then the judgment would be incontrovertibly in his favor.
By her shrinking away, he realized he was hulking over her, glaring, and he knelt down there, taking her hand. “Little one, I have many problems, of which you are the smallest, but not the least grave. When I was your age, I was taught that no opinion can be held before investigation and meditation on its results, that any opinion formed on conjecture is unworthy of consideration. To that end, on the journey you might study the history of the Consortium, which is your history as well as mine, and you will see better how things developed, and how they have come to be.”
Shebat huddled mute.
“Or, I can still send you back, if you have changed your mind.”
She is just a child, an innocent, he thought, when still she merely regarded him from under her tangled black hair. He would have to get her cleaned up, if indeed this undertaking was not to be more of a disaster than two deaths and an adoption had already made of it. And he must civilize her, somehow, in ten days’ time. Something deep inside him said smugly that he was so concerning himself because he was unable to face his real problem, painful and perhaps insurmountable: Iltani, who had been his to wed from the day of her birth, was dead. His elder brother who would be as much of a loss to their father as the girl would be to him, whenever he felt it. When would that be? When would the bubble burst like a ruptured pressure suit and spill his guts into the vacuum?
He said to Shebat, holding lifeless, cold hands in his:
“Citizenship is a serious matter. Should you not want to be a productive member of the Consortium, I cannot, would not dare to force you. It is a thing men crave, that they strive for, and have been known to kill for. An accident of birth puts me in a position to offer it to you. Do you understand? My adopting you is a matter of influence and its wielding. My family is haughty and powerful and may not be more than superficially gracious. Should you not covet this advantage, my conferring it on you will go hard with me. You asked, or I would not have brought you. Since you are here and I am here, and you have heard what perhaps you should not have heard, and I have done what perhaps I should not have done, let us take this moment to become of one mind: say your choice, citizenship or no; go or stay and be bound by your word to perform whichever without regret or hesitation.” In his beard, only the very corners of his mouth tried to smile. “Say, Shebat.”
Never had anyone consulted her about anything, much less asked her to make a decision. And the arbiter was not just anyone. “Then I will not be your pet?”
“By the Cosmic Jest, you will not.”
“I will stay.”
“And no more talk of the past and its prejudices?”
“I promise.”
“Then let’s get out of here and buy you clothes. Or perhaps you should take a shower first. A clean body goes well in clean clothes.”
“Shower?”
Marada turned his head away in soft laughter. “Come and I will show you the magic of the bath.” But he cautioned himself, seeing something as she stretched out childish limbs gangly in a rush of growing toward womanhood, something he found in her accepting, hungry eyes.
And so Shebat of Bolen’s town became Shebat of the consular house of Kerrion; ward of the consulate Kerrion and the consuls thereof under the aegis of Marada Seleucus Kerrion, second son of the consul general Parma Alexander Kerrion, whose line had not ceded that seat in an election for nearly two hundred years.
All this was learned by Parma Alexander Kerrion, in far Draconis, administrative sphere of Kerrion space, even while Shebat Kerrion learned to make hot water jump from the taps with a touch of her hand.
Had Marada been intended to succeed his father by primogeniture, he would have been an Alexander; all consuls general sprung from the house of Kerrion had always been Whomsoever Alexander Kerrion by reason of their primacy and their founding sire’s historical whimsy.
The news of the death of Marada’s elder brother would put the capital cities of a dozen worlds and the whole of one thousand sixty Kerrion platforms into deep mourning that would be well under way when the second son returned home with his brother’s corpse; the ruination of a capital merger of gargantuan proportions symbolized by the body of his slain bride-to-be; and a girl of undivulgable heritage and questionable humanity. That Marada had unilaterally entered a planetdweller into a family than whom no more elite existed among the habitational platforms of the stars was the final burden which caused the distraught father to seek drink wherewith to steady his buckling knees.
Drunk as a sorrowing man could manage to remain when so sorely beset with difficulties, Parma sent his bald secretary scurrying out with orders: to inform the other consuls general of the formal day of mourning ten days hence; to send consolation to the dead girl’s kinship bond group and begin joint funeral arrangements, suggesting as a site the Kerrion’s most inner sanctum, Lorelie; to arrange a meeting with the patriarch thereof, that the projected union of Kerrion and Labaya not be stymied and the creation of the greatest bloc in the entire Consortium aborted thereby. And there was a final order, one the glabrous, anile secretary was most pleased to send speeding toward the fringes of civilization, one that called Marada Seleucus Kerrion to audience in Lorelie ten days hence.
The sly old man would have given an outrageous sum to be in Lorelie on the day young master Marada faced Parma’s fabled justice. But in Lorelie, whose hills were said to glow like sapphires and whose winds sang all the day, not even hoary Jebediah, most trusted retainer could venture foot. Only those of Kerrion blood, since its orbit was set about the ringed world that anchored it in the bright sky of Centralia, had ever touched down there. Even the servants were of the Kerrion kinship bond group, had always been. But in ten days that would change, for the Labaya bond would not refuse so grave and prestigious an invitation.
Or would they?
For a moment, wizened Jebediah hesitated at his desk. He had a child or two himself, though no brood like the Consortium masters raised. How would he feel if one of such well-known impetuosity as Marada wooed his daughter to her death? His fingers hesitated, moved to the toggle that would open his master’s channel. It would not have been the first time he had joggled old Parma’s fusty wits. But then, what did he owe the senescent tyrant, after all? His finger retreated, impulse unfulfilled.
Instead, he fed the curt messages into the processing slot, and began closing down his office for th
e night, though there was no night that truly came to the platforms, nor day either. Old ways persist, he thought, and went around to the consul general’s eagle-blazoned doors when all else was done. He knocked softly, received no answer, caused the doors to draw back very slightly. Through the crack came the sound of the stricken father’s broken sobs.
With infinite care, Jebediah closed the doors again and tiptoed through the darkened foyer. Let him weep: he had lost his Perseus, and rash Icarus stood next in line. No wonder Parma was a broken reed. Were Jebediah in his seat, he might have called for a dream dancer to ease his soul. He wheezed a chuckle, thinking about dream dancers. He was feeling a bit in need of consolation himself, and he was not Parma, so he did not need to be so careful. There are some things in life which are worth the risk, he well knew, having often savored the particular one that drew him inexorably down the flights to the lower levels, where the streets were, and such things as dream dancers could be bought.
Chapter Two
The ten days shipboard passed in a quick-drawn breath of excitement for Shebat, though so much had happened to her in such a brief span that her head spun when she considered it and her amazement spoke into that spinning that nothing more wondrous strange could happen than had already befallen her. But happen such things did, crowding in, jostling each other’s dazzling raiment to be the next to astound her.
Previously, there had been the sable “flight satins” and the “shop” where Marada took her to choose them, which were finer than festival garb and more mystifying than even the sky rippling above her head like a puddle perpetually showered with pebbles. Her gaping prompted Marada to tease her about keeping her mouth closed, but despite her wariness each new thing weirder than the last would elicit its tithe of sighs, and when she would remember to check again, she would find her lips parted, the odorless dry air wafting at will between her teeth, and Marada’s ingenuous grin sparkling out from his beard like her last sight of Earth gleaming out from its dark abode. Then she would close her mouth tightly. But the gilded shop and the smoky, soft undergarment called a mil-suit which fit her like a second skin; which covered her from toes to fingertips to neck in cloudy shimmer; which Marada slowly explained would keep her soul within her body (well, he did not say soul, but that was what Shebat thought he meant) and the cold without; which could protect her from harm by any projectile made of metal, or any made of light (this she just accepted: laser was in her vocabulary but out of her experience); but could not—and here Marada’s tone rasped dry and ragged—protect her from a common rock or wooded shaft or any organic attacker that was in the mil-suit’s experience not unfriendly—