Changer (Athanor)

by Jane Lindskold

  “Pretty,” Lil says. “How does this one work?”

  “By heat and alteration in the hues of the stone,” the Changer answers. “So you will be able to see its assessment.”

  “How nice.” Her tone is almost a sneer. Seeing some tourists gazing through her window, she crosses and with an apologetic smile flips over the “Open” sign to “Closed.” “Make certain your questions are direct, Changer. These stones work best with as few ambiguities as possible.”

  “Yes.” He pauses. “Did you hire a rancher to kill eight coyotes, seven of whom were my get and one my mate?”

  “Non.”

  The stone remains cool, but the red lines brighten.

  “It agrees with you,” the Changer says. “Let us cross check. Were you in the Salinas District eight to ten days ago?”

  “Non.”

  Again coolness and the flash of red.

  “Did you have in your possession a rented Chevy Lumina days ago?”

  “Non.”

  Again, the stone concurs. The Changer frowns. He looks at Lil, who is also frowning.

  “I apologize, Lilith, for my suspicions.”

  “I accept,” the immortal witch says with a graciousness that is only slightly mocking.

  “Has it occurred to you that someone has tried to set us up so that I would kill you?”

  Lil nods. “Oui, I did so wonder.”

  The stone on the Changer’s hand flashes red and stays cool. He chuckles and drops it into his pocket once more.

  “Why would anyone want to do that?” Vera says, breaking the silence she has maintained during the interrogation. “Do you have any enemies in common?”

  “Not that I know,” the Changer says, “but we must.”

  Lil takes a long drag on the cigarette that has been smoldering between her two fingers. “They must have believed that you could be aroused into an insane rage. Lucky for us both that you stopped to see Arthur.”

  The Changer nods. “The killer may have expected me to shift shape and follow the car that came to meet Martinez. They couldn’t know that one of my pups had been missed and that I would stay to care for her.”

  “If you hadn’t,” Vera says slowly, “then you would have followed the car here, encountered Lil, had an argument at cross purposes, and then…”

  “One of us,” Lilith says, arching a stylish brow, “might have slain the other. Let us not give the Changer too much credit for his strength. In my own places, I am formidable.”

  Vera tenses, wondering if the Changer will take offense, but the ancient merely nods.

  “Quite so,” he says. “I respect your power as you do mine. We cannot predict the outcome, only that violent conflict, whether resolved quickly or not, would have been the end result.”

  “An extended conflict,” Vera adds, “would have drawn others in: Arthur in an attempt to mediate, close friends for each of you. It could have grown ugly. I owe your daughter a new chew toy, Changer. Her instinct for self-preservation seems to have prevented at the least murder, at the most, civil war.”

  “And which,” Lilith says slowly, “was intended?”

  The Changer shakes his head, long hair sweeping about his shoulders, fierce yellow-brown eyes lit with fire from within.

  “I don’t know,” he says, “but I most certainly intend to find out, and no one, but no one, not Arthur nor Lovern, nor the strongest among us shall stand between me and that one’s punishment when I find out.”

  Lilith chuckles, a throaty, catlike sound without mirth.

  “Amen to that,” she says, “and pity the poor bastard when you find him.”

  She laughs again. “I might even applaud.”

  In a stone tupa beside the sea in Finland lives a woman of cool beauty. Her long straight hair is the white-blond of winter ice and her eyes are as blue as the center of the sky. She calls herself Louhi, after the Mistress of the far Northland from Finnish legend, but she has had many names.

  She lives in Finland these days, in a stone cottage by the shore, because, despite the modern age and its machines, Finland still has a tradition of superstition and witchcraft. The locals, recalling her name and its dark antecedents, court her and shun her as they might have a witch from the elder days. This pleases Louhi and so for her neighbors she binds winds and looses them, makes love charms and small curses, and otherwise is left alone.

  The omens and auguries that she has been reading in a pool of water, in the dregs of a glass of wine, in the toss of knucklebones, please her less. They speak of delay and disappointment—though ultimately success is still in the stars. She lets this soothe her.

  Brewing a mug of mulled wine, she recalls how Sven Trout (that a name woven from bitterness, for sure!) had come to her. He had changed his appearance, but she knew him still. Illusion, costuming, even shapechange could not fool her gifts for long. Nor had he insulted her by attempting any deception.

  She had permitted him to flatter her, to make her gifts of jewelry and a kantele made in the old way, but even the richness of his gifts had not warned her what he wanted from her. The amulets and charms he had wanted her to craft—that she had expected. The lust with which he eyed her slender figure beneath its wool skirts and embroidered felt vest—that she had expected. What she had not expected was the offer to help overthrow the reign of King Arthur.

  “I know that you despise him, Louhi,” Sven had said coaxingly. “His policies of concealment and caution constrain your every action. A sorceress of your potency should be praised and feared from horizon to horizon, not isolated in a stone cottage in Finland.”

  Louhi had smiled at him. “Ka! Perhaps I like Finland.”

  “Perhaps you do,” Sven replied agreeably.

  “You may recall that I have often cultivated my solitude.”

  “As on the isle of Aeaea,” he answered, nothing of mockery in his tone.

  “But perhaps I weary of this banter. What do you offer me?”

  “If I succeed, I will make you my partner in ruling our people,” he had said. “Wife, consort, queen, vice president—whatever title you prefer, lady.”

  She had smiled slyly at him. “Yours is not the prettiest proposal I have received in a long life.”

  “I have little sorcery,” he had answered bluntly. “Some small shapeshifting, some few tricks. Most of my gift is for guile. Were I speaking of ruling mere humans, that would be sufficient, but to contest Arthur I must have a sorcerer of Lovern’s ability on my side.”

  Louhi had known flattery when she heard it, but she also knew truth. Lovern had his gifts, but she had her own. She had even been his student once—and had bested him, too, making him her prisoner.

  That they had both enjoyed aspects of his sojourn in her keeping did not change the fact that they remained rivals in the art. To take his place ruling their immortal lot…

  “I am interested,” she had answered. “Speak on. Tell me what advantages you have.”

  Then Sven had told her how he had found his way to contact Lovern’s most potent sorcerous tool—the duplicate head he had grown back when he was Mimir, advisor to Odin. The Head did not have Lovern’s skill in spell-casting, but, implanted with the Eye of Odin, it could see possible futures and—more importantly—the road one must travel to reach them. The Head was also a repository of vast knowledge, knowledge it never forgot.

  “The Head resents its creator,” Sven told her. “I have promised it freedom and, if possible, a body of its own in return for its assistance in overthrowing Arthur. Your skill in shapeshifting others—even against their will—is well-known. Would you be able to give the Head a body?”

  She promised to look into the matter and so, with great ceremony and greater magic, they swore a binding oath.

  Immediately upon Sven’s departure, she began researching how to give the Head the body it (perhaps foolishly) craved. Over time, she devised a complex enchantment that would work, but an essential ingredient was the blood of a natural shapechanger.

&nb
sp; Her own and Sven’s blood, when tried, were not potent enough. Indeed, after experimentation with donors willing, unwilling, and unknowing, she came to the conclusion that only the Changer’s blood would be powerful enough.

  This knowledge does not intimidate her. Indeed, sipping from her mulled wine and looking out over the wind-tossed waves, Louhi reflects that perhaps knowing that the Changer must be drawn into their conflict had been the final point that had soldered her into her peculiar alliance.

  Some legends gave her father as the Sun. Others did not mention her lineage. Her current birth certificate gives a man who died in the Second World War. Her own suspicion, one she has held close and dear, is that her father is the Changer himself.

  She had tried get him to acknowledge her, back when the world was much younger. He had gazed at her from eyes that, then, were emerald green and tossed back hair as golden as light.

  “What purpose would an acknowledgment serve, even if your suspicions are true?” he had said. “Whether or not I am your sire, you have done well with your inherited gifts. Life is a gift freely given. Take it and do well with it.”

  He had shifted then, becoming a boar with golden bristles, and had departed. Later, she heard that he was living as an eagle in some isolated part of Asia.

  She had moved to an island in the Aegean, resolving that if her father could treat her that way, then all men were pigs. For a long time after that, most of the men she met were pigs.

  Or at least they became so.

  Seated on a bench alongside the Santa Fe River, Vera and the Changer recover from their visit with Lil Prima.

  “Do you have any idea what you would like to do next?” Vera asks.

  “Actually, I do,” the Changer says. “I’ve been thinking about the person or persons who set me on Lil’s trail. Perhaps they were too clever for themselves. Perhaps we can learn something from the trail they did leave.”

  “Trail?” Vera asks.

  “Someone rented the car,” the Changer says. “Maybe the agent recalls who.”

  “That’s a long shot,” Vera says doubtfully.

  “Do you have any better idea?” the Changer asks.

  “No.”

  The Lumina had been rented from an Avis counter out at the small Santa Fe Municipal Airport. The car-rental desks are to the far left, just beyond a coffee machine offering complimentary coffee for travelers on Mesa Air.

  A brown-haired woman in a tan suit that seems to have been coordinated with the building, right down to the stylized cloud pin on her lapel, sits behind the Avis counter. Her name tag reads Hazel Dunn.

  When they approach, she sets down the novel, (Honor Among Enemies, the Changer notes in passing, by someone named David Weber), with which she had been filling the slow time until the next flight.

  “May I help you?” Her accent is Californian, her smile brightly professional.

  “Yes,” Vera says, efficiency incarnate. “We’re trying to find out who rented a Chevy Lumina from Avis last week.”

  The woman frowns. “May I ask why?”

  “The driver,” Vera improvises facilely, “may have been a witness to a hit-and-run my brother here was in. We were hoping to track her down and see if she remembered anything.”

  Reassured that they were not trying cause trouble for Avis or Avis’ former client, Ms. Dunn taps some instructions into her computer. Perusing the information, she smiles.

  “Yes, here it is. An ‘L. Prima.’”

  Vera makes a note. “Did she give an address?”

  Ms. Dunn nods. “It’s a gallery on San Francisco Street here in town. There’s a phone number, too.”

  When these are duly recorded, the Changer steps forward.

  “Tell me, were you the one who rented the car to Miss Prima? Do you remember anything about her?” He smiles charmingly. “I’m rather worried about approaching a perfect stranger, you see.”

  Ms. Dunn looks thoughtful. “I was the one who rented her the car. I remember being surprised that she wanted such a big car for just a drive into town. In fact, I offered to call a taxi for her. She told me that she was planning on taking some clients on a drive and needed a bigger car—her own was something small and sporty, a vintage Jaguar, I think.”

  “Rich then,” the Changer says, probing.

  “Very,” Ms. Dunn agrees. “We ask for a credit card for security. Ms. Prima wanted to pay cash in advance for a week’s rental.”

  “A week?” The Changer’s tone holds just the right amount of awe and astonishment to promote confidences.

  “A week,” Ms. Dunn confirms. “She paid it, too.”

  “So you didn’t ask for a credit card?” Vera says.

  “Had to,” Ms. Dunn shrugs. “Company policy.”

  At this point, the Changer gently nudges a holder, spilling brochures all around. In the confusion, Vera tilts the computer screen toward herself and makes a few quick notes.

  When the mess is picked up, the Changer and Vera make their exit, apologizing for the trouble and promising to let Ms. Dunn know how the investigation into the hit-and-run turns out.

  “Did you get what you wanted?” the Changer asks when they have left the airport.

  “What I wanted?” Vera asks.

  “I could tell that you wanted something from the woman’s computer screen,” the Changer says, “but I wasn’t sure what. That’s why I pushed over the brochures.”

  “Oh,” Vera says. “Yes, I did. I wanted ‘L. Prima’s’ credit card number.”

  “Will that help us?”

  Vera pauses, remembering that the Changer has been out of human society long enough that he may have missed the gradual dominance of the credit card over cash and checks.

  “It will indeed,” she says. “The impostor may have been lucky enough to disguise herself as Lil, may have done her research into phone numbers and addresses, but it would have been a lot harder for her to have Lil’s credit card.”

  The Changer nods. “I was wondering about the car Miss Dunn mentioned, the Jaguar. I wonder if Lil actually has a car like that or if it might be a slip on our quarry’s part.”

  “Interesting,” Vera says. “We can call and ask her.”

  “Can’t we just drive back and ask now?” the Changer says. “I don’t want to wait until we’re near a phone and this is a bit sensitive to discuss over a pay phone.”

  Vera grins at him. She’s having a surprising amount of fun indoctrinating the ancient into the latter twentieth century.

  “There’s a phone in the car,” she says. “I guess you didn’t notice. We can call from there.”

  The Changer shakes his head at this and shakes it once more as he sees the slim, relatively inconspicuous receiver Vera removes from its holder on the dashboard. His gaze on the puppy, who is enthusiastically digging beneath an ornamental desert willow, he listens as Vera punches buttons and then to the faint series of beeps and rings that follow.

  “May I speak with Lil Prima?” Vera says. She pauses, evidently while Lilith is brought to the phone. “Lil, this is Vera. We’ve done some further checking and have a couple of questions for you.”

  A pause. The Changer can just hear Lil’s confident, “Shoot.”

  “Do you have a vintage Jaguar?”

  “The car? No. I drive a Porsche. Tommy has a van and a motorcycle.”

  “Okay. How about a Bank America Visa, Platinum.” She rattles off a string of numbers.

  “That’ll take me a minute to check.” Lil gives a sardonic chuckle. “I have lots of plastic.”

  “Check away,” Vera says.

  Lil comes back after a moment. “No, I don’t. My Visa’s from Bank of New Mexico. My MasterCard’s Bank of America. Have you got a lead on the bitch who tried to set the Changer on me?”

  “We might,” Vera says, choosing not to correct Lil’s terminology. “I’ll let you know when I know more.”

  “Good. If someone wants my round little ass, I want to know who it is.”

  “I under
stand.”

  A few more caustic pleasantries and the call ends. The Changer whistles for his daughter and turns to Vera.

  “So the trip wasn’t a complete waste of time, even if Lil wasn’t my target. Ah, well. I don’t know why I ever thought that the job would be that easy. Things rarely are.”

  The coyote puppy lopes up and puts her dirty paws against her father’s pant leg. Her protest at being returned to the car is ignored, and she rolls into a ball to sulk. Before they are out of the parking lot, she is asleep.

  “We’ll head back to Arthur’s,” Vera says, “and see what we can do about chasing down this credit-card number. The Jaguar is a more distant lead. We don’t have our people register their cars with us. Still, if the credit card doesn’t work out…”

  “It’s something,” the Changer sighs. “And it might have been nothing substantial, just a small deception, like our story about the brother and the hit-and-run accident.”

  “I know,” Vera says. “I hate admitting that we may need to give up.”

  The Changer’s expression shifts to something dark and angry. “I won’t give up. In any case, I don’t think that whoever did this is going to stop with one failure. We’ll hear from them again. We just need to be alert for the marks of their work.”

  “And then…” Vera begins.

  “And then,” the Changer interrupts, “I go after them. What else is immortality good for if it isn’t for doing a job right?”

  “First step,” Vera says, seeking to chase the anger from his yellow-brown eyes, “is getting back to Arthur’s and checking this number.”

  “With a stop for puppy chow along the way,” the Changer adds. “We can’t forget the really important things.”

  The sleepy wheeze of the puppy agrees with him.

  Late that evening, Arthur comes out into the Changer’s courtyard, where most of the household is gathered eating a snack of sopaipillas and honey left over from dinner. The Changer’s daughter alternates between munching on bites of her new puppy food and begging for sopas, having already begun to suspect that what is good for her might not be as much fun as what the rest are eating.