Pol had won the course, but only barely and at great cost to his friend Mouseglove. Pol wanted to unmake the statuettes, Spier wanted to make more. If what Pol had learned was true, both of them were doomed to failure, but there was much that each could do with the secrets they now possessed.
The statuettes were Keys to another world, older, wilder, filled with ancient and powerful magic. Pol’s father had created them to open a door between the two. He wanted the other world to flood into this one, remaking it into a place where magic conquered all, and sorcerers stood astride the world with the madwands among them the next thing to gods.
Each of the little figurines held the soul. . .no, was the soul of a powerful sorcerer that Det had defeated in sorcerous combat, madwands all. Somehow, Pol’s father had been able to capture them in the moment of death and condense them down into the shapes they now wore. As part of the process, each was bound to the purpose of increasing the power of magic in the world by opening that Gate or by any other means possible.
It had taken Pol three long years to trace the path Det had taken in learning how to transform a soul, and the knowledge that had come with the years had both stained and strengthened his own. He glanced at the mark on his arm, and wondered if the red dragon there was looking back at him with as much of wonder and worry as he felt. For the secret of chaining a soul lay in his dragon blood and his madwand’s art.
But then Moonbird was landing him in the courtyard, and Pol could no longer focus on anything more than staggering into his bedroom and the long dark that lay in wait for him there.
*
My master called to me as he fell into his bed and ordered that I wake him in a scant six hours. He was asleep before I could respond, so I returned my attention to the injured thief. Mouseglove had deep claw marks scoring his back and right shoulder. A fraction of an inch deeper or farther left and his spine would have been severed—not an insurmountable problem with the right spells, but a much greater challenge than simply maintaining his body and speeding normal healing.
Pol’s spell was a cleverly crafted thing, but I thought I could see ways to increase the pace of healing, so I set about strengthening this strand of magic and sliding that one over a touch. Nothing that would rise to the level of noticeable interference, just the tiniest sorts of tweaks that only a creature of magic like myself might think of.
I was just finishing when I heard the angry buzzing of a frustrated dream-sending trying to find its way through the defenses of Rondoval. Something from Spier most likely, though it might also have come from our “ally” Merson. Both had played that trick on Pol in the past, which was why I had added a tightening of the etheric structure of the castle to my program of restoration.
As the sending slid along the outer edges of the wards looking for entrance, I opened a tiny hole for it congruent to the window in the room where I had placed Mouseglove. The sending slipped inside a moment later. I reached out with what will I could spare from my assigned task and crushed it, releasing a bitter, bright nugget of power that tasted of Spier. Quite delicious, and I amused myself afterward with a meditation on how best to prepare and present the sorcerer himself should I have the opportunity of indulging my taste for my master’s greatest enemy.
*
Despite the destruction of his sending, the shadow of Henry Spier continued to haunt Pol’s dreams. The older madwand was always close to the edge of Pol’s consciousness these days, waking or sleeping—a grim presence that never quite went away. Not even in dreams of his old home in the other world.
Pol woke tired, leaving behind a smoky bar and the even smokier voiced Betty Lewis. As he opened his eyes the details of the dream left him one by one, starting with the song the two of them had performed in duet and ending with Henry Spier carrying away the basket that held all their tips and the only remaining copies of the album they’d recorded together. The latter left him with a sense of loss all out of proportion to the theft.
For a few long beats Pol considered simply going back to sleep, but the Spier of his nightmare quickly shifted into the one that worried at his waking mind and started to gnaw away. With a muttered word and a twisting gesture of his right hand where it lay on the coverlet, Pol spun a rippling orange strand of magic into existence. It reached across the room and lifted the water out the basin on his washstand, forming it into a rough sphere.
Another twist of his hand pulled the ball of water across the room to hover a few inches above his face. With a reluctant sigh, Pol lifted his head and plunged his face into the floating water which moved of its own accord now to scrub away both dirt and sleep. It was brutally cold—another effect of his spell—and he couldn’t bear it for long, but when he finally exhaled and dropped back onto his pillow, he felt much the better for a clean face and a clear head.
Sighing, he raised his hands from the coverlet and sank them into the water as well before sending it back to the basin. Sliding a hand across his cheek, Pol reinforced the magic that kept the hair of his beard from growing—ironically, a variant of the sleeping spell that Spier had used to bind Merson’s daughter once upon a time.
Moonbird, sent Pol, meet me in the courtyard. Avinconet awaits.
I come.
“Belphanior.”
A curl of green fire shaped itself into a face a few yards from Pol, sliding along ahead of him as he walked. “Master?”
“How fares Mouseglove?”
“He will recover, though not quickly. His hurts are deep and serious.”
“Guard him well. He took those wounds saving my life. . .again.” He frowned and shook his head. “Silly of him, really. I see that Rondoval has largely been returned to its former glory. You have done well. I’m especially pleased that you’ve restored the northwest tower. I’ve need of something in its foundations and I wasn’t looking forward to having to move several tons of masonry. Thank you.”
The face in fire blinked bemusedly and then nodded. “You are welcome, master.”
Pol snapped his fingers and the smoke dispersed. A few minutes later, he was descending a flight of spiral stairs that ended at a small crypt. He touched his dragonmarked forearm to an apparently unmarked spot on the right hand door pillar. In response, the heavy stone slab that sealed the tomb puffed into a thick cloud of purple smoke and rolled out of the way, revealing a small chamber centered by a black marble sarcophagus. Applying the mark to the stone caused the lid to slide silently aside.
A man’s body lay within. Tall, well built, its long white hair centered by a single black streak in a sort of inverted mirror of Pol’s own. He was wearing loose pants of rough silk and a sleeveless shirt that exposed the dragonmark on his right arm, and if Pol hadn’t known better he would have guessed the man only hours dead.
“Dragon blood,” Pol whispered.
“What was that, my master?” a voice whispered in dark.
“I should have known you’d keep an ear out, Belphanior. I said, ‘dragon blood.’ That’s what’s preserved my umpteen times great grandfather so well. Arn is the first of my family to have the blood of the dragon flowing in his veins from birth and the second of the great madwands.”
“I’ve never quite understood how that works,” replied the curse. “Arn’s father didn’t marry a dragon, did he?”
Pol laughed. “No, at least not literally, though Maris was an exceedingly tough old sorceress in her own right. If what I learned in the east is right, Vul exchanged a part of his soul with the dragonlord Firewind, for this mark—” Pol touched his arm “—and the blood that comes with it, ‘unthinning for him and his heirs unto eternity.’”
“Interesting. . .”
“Terrifying is more like it,” Pol mumbled to himself.
But Belphanior didn’t answer and Pol went back to examining the body in the sarcophagus. A dense net of dark threads like the web of some eldritch spider clung to the dragonmark on the dead man’s arm—spellstuff, though not active. Pol stepped around to the far side of the plinth and then leaned down and pl
aced his own dragonmark against his ancestor’s.
Wings in the wind. . .towers of red air like slow burning heat lightning. . .the taste of brimstone and charring meat. . .red eyes in the darkness. . .claws gripping, tails twining, falling together toward the sea and sexual release. . .scales sliding along worn stone at the ancient hatching grounds. . .the shattering of an egg from within!
Pol flicked his wings aside and opened his outer eyelids—no, stretched his shoulders and opened his eyes to meet the concerned gaze of the face in the green fire.
Belphanior blinked at him. “Are you all right, master?”
Pol thought about it for a moment and then nodded. He blinked a couple of times and the world beyond Belphanior’s green fires shifted into focus. He was lying on his back on the flags beside the sarcophagus. It felt strangely comfortable, which he put down to his dragon-tinged perceptions along with a desire to spit fire on Henry Spier and then devour him whole.
“What happened?”
“I activated a very old spell, and I was not entirely ready for the consequences. Given my druthers, I’d have constructed a ritual and done it with one of the Keys ready to hand, but I don’t have the time to waste going to Avinconet and coming back here again, so I had to manage it the hard way.” He flicked his tail angrily, pushing himself to—no he didn’t have a tail and hadn’t moved.
With a sigh Pol grabbed the lip of the sarcophagus and pulled himself upright. “And now, on to Avinconet.”
*
I didn’t like the way something seemed to have jumped from the corpse to my master when they made contact, not one little bit. Nor the way that when he first blinked himself awake his eyes had looked like dragon’s eyes, complete with slit pupils, if only for a second.
And I especially didn’t like that it had all happened mere minutes before his departure from Rondoval and my watchful care. But accursed masters will do as they will and there’s nothing a poor bound demon can do to stop them. All I could do was watch him out of sight and then return to tending Mouseglove.
*
Will you not play for me? Moonbird asked, breaking Pol’s reverie.
Absentmindedly, he reached into otherspace and pulled out his guitar, tuning it briefly before starting into one of the pieces he’d written for Betty Lewis. While his hands played the familiar melody his mind wandered forward to his next task, the retrieval of one of the seven Keys. Merson was going to be a problem. He didn’t. . .had never trusted Pol, not even after they had fought together.
Thank you, I haven’t heard that in a very long time. Moonbird’s unvoiced words drew Pol’s attention back to the present.
Seemingly of their own accord, his hands had started a new tune, a gliding, sliding, wild sort of music unlike anything Pol had ever heard before. As soon as he noticed, his fingers lost their way, and the guitar thrummed discordantly as he fumbled to a halt.
What was I just playing? He asked Moonbird.
The great dragon coughed and growled low in his throat. Or, in your tongue, it might be rendered as—
The Flaming Spire, Pol responded, realizing that he had understood Moonbird’s original, dragonish answer without the translation.
Yes, that’s it. The great dragon turned his long neck, looking back and down at Pol. Few of your people understand our tongue. Fewer still learn it late in life and all in one moment. Your father was one such, and. . .
What? asked Pol.
I’m not entirely sure it was a good thing for him. There were other changes in Det at the time. He became crueler and colder, less like one of your people and more like one of mine.
You almost make it sound like you don’t approve of dragons.
Not at all. We are what we are. But we are not human, and Det was, or ought to have been. Which is not to say that he didn’t already possess cruelty and coldness in abundance, just that they became more accentuated at that time. Moonbird tilted his head from side to side in a manner that Pol recognized as a shrug. On the other claw, there are any number of draconic tendencies which he didn’t exhibit either before or after that moment. Perhaps whatever he did simply intensified those bits of his personality that he shared with us.
That’s. . .you’ve given me much to think about, old friend. Now I just need to find the leisure for it.
Pol sighed. He certainly didn’t have it now. With time so short, he’d told Moonbird to take them via the shortcut—a sort of hole in the fabric of the world that would quarter the flight distance at the cost of temporarily turning them inside out. At least, that was how it felt, and it would render Pol mostly useless for a good hour afterward.
That meant that if he was going to contact his brother Laric before his arrival he had to do it now. He turned the idea over once again. Laric really didn’t like him much more than Merson, but their shared blood might count for more in this case, given what Pol had learned in the east. Beside, he couldn’t think of a better plan. So. . .
Pol exchanged his guitar for the shell of a darkwater island clam that he’d fitted with a golden hinge to replace the one nature had originally placed there. Opening it exposed an irregular mirror on one side and a trio of small tools attached to the other, making it look quite like the lady’s compact he’d stolen the idea from.
Using the fine-pointed stylus made from the fang of a manticore, he quickly sketched a series of sigils just above the surface of the mirror, rearranging the tight coil of spell strands that lay within into something much more geometric. Then he very lightly stroked the mirror with the tiny sphinx whisker brush.
The silvery surface fogged for perhaps a ten count then cleared again, though it no longer reflected Pol’s face. Instead it gave a bird’s eye view on a window in the western tower of Avinconet. Pol took the third tool from his clamshell, a thin tube of bone from the wing of a harpy, and raised it to his lips. Taking careful aim, he pointed it through the mirror and blew sharply. A tiny ball of onyx like a black pea shot out to lightly strike the window.
A moment later the window opened and Pol’s point of view zoomed in, passing through the window and finding another mirror waiting on his brother’s desk where Laric now sat, waiting. He looked very like his brother, complete with a white streak running front to back through his thick dark hair.
“What do you want?” he asked Pol, his voice gruff and distant.
“I need to collect one of the Keys.”
“That’s impossible. Merson would never consent to any of them being removed from the matrix that holds them trapped now, especially not by you. I agree with him, madwand. We can’t trust you or any of your kind.”
“Yeah, I kind of figured that would be your initial answer.”
“It’s my final one too, Pol. Just because you’re my brother doesn’t mean I have to like you.” He reached for the mirror.
“Hold on, I’m not terribly fond of you either, but you’re going to want to hear this. I think that I know how to re-key the Keys if you will, and I’m probably the only one who can do it.”
“Probably?”
“Probably. It’s possible you might be able to do it too, and if I die trying you’ll get your chance, but there’s nobody else alive who’s got any hope of managing it. And if one of us doesn’t do it, this whole world is going to be devoured when the Gate finally opens.”
Laric blinked several times. “But we’ve got the Keys contained.”
“For now, perhaps. But they cannot be destroyed, only remade, and even if Spier doesn’t break them free, someone else will eventually, or they will do it themselves.”
“And only you or I can remake them?”
“Yes.”
“Is that because we are Det’s sons and he made them in the first place?”
“Sort of, it’s got much more to do with how they were made and that we both descend from a very clever madwand named Vul Iverson.” Pol raised his forearm to the mirror. “He’s where we got this.”
“I’m listening.”
“Good, let me tell
you a story about dragons. . .”
When Pol finished Laric shook his head. “I just don’t know. You’re sure the Keys can’t be destroyed?”
“Positive. The dragon scrolls were very clear, souls can never be destroyed, only transformed. Even a soul devoured by one of the great demons isn’t truly unmade, it is simply subsumed into the substance of the demon until such time as the demon itself dies or is devoured. That’s why Det made the Keys the way that he did, to take advantage of that principle. They’re essentially crystallized souls tempered in the fires of magic.”
There was a long silence until, finally, Laric’s shoulders sagged. “Merson will fight to prevent you removing any of the statues from the ward matrix, and you can’t afford what that will cost you, not even if you win. Let me talk to Taisa. Between the two of us we should be able to keep him distracted long enough for you to slip in and steal one. I think I can convince her of the necessity. Wait till one hour after the sun goes down and then go in through the catacombs.”
Before Pol could thank him, Laric waved a hand across the mirror and severed the link between them. A few minutes later, Moonbird found his hole in the sky, and after that Pol was too busy losing his breakfast to worry about his brother any more.
*
Pol brushed dust off of his shoulder as he closed the tomb’s door behind. “Damned mummies. I don’t know why anyone wants to keep the things around.”
Merson’s would not be bothering anyone again soon, not till they’d gotten themselves untangled at least. Somehow, Pol didn’t think they’d be very good at untying knots. Another hundred yards and two turns put him in the room where the Keys stood in the midst of a gigantic interlaced pattern of ward spells.
Pol sighed when he saw it. His memory of the structure hadn’t failed, alas. Having read his father’s notes, and the dragon scrolls on which the spells had been built, Pol knew which figure he most wanted to start his gambit with, but that wasn’t going to be possible. The etheric structure of the spell was built in an interdependent spiral working outward from the innermost ward and figure to the outermost.
Shadows & Reflections: A Roger Zelazny Tribute Anthology Page 5