Hespira

by Matthew Hughes

  “But still,” I said, “you have penned up a god.”

  “It has no real power while it is within the pen. Do not let the apparent flimsiness of the wire and palings deceive you. The fence is a representation only; I have used a spell called Frenec’s Ineluctable Encirclement, designed to hold full-weight demons of the Ninth Plane. But do not touch the barrier; it is only strong from the inside.”

  I looked at the creature. It did seem happy enough in its enclosure. Still, I was not comfortable with the idea of holding any god—or even any aspect of a god—under duress.

  “Do not fret,” my other self said. “We had a little contest when it first arrived, but after it bit me I soon showed it the size of its hat, as they say.” He paused, thoughtful for a moment, then continued, “The only thing is, I cannot cast any potent spells in its vicinity. It seems to draw strength from the ambience.” He smiled indulgently. “But then, you won’t be doing any spellslinging, will you?”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t.”

  I wanted to discuss the salamander further, our few words not having exhausted my concerns, but Osk Rievor was moving on to fresh fields. It seemed that he had been active in several areas of research and was excited to show me the results. He recommended that we return to the cottage and I allowed myself to be drawn, Hespira following along behind.

  “I believe I can dissipate your client’s amnesia,” he said as we hurried along. I noticed that whenever he wasn’t standing still, he was hurrying. “I found a memory-intensifying cantrip in one of Smiling Bol’s compendia. It allows one to hold four major spells in mind at the same time, which is remarkable. I could try it on her.”

  I told him that she had decided to let her past lie in darkness and start a new and unencumbered life. Then I moved to a subject that his remarks had brought urgently to my mind. “Have you tried many spells upon yourself?” I said.

  “A few.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “Why not?”

  “What are they?” I said.

  He stopped and blinked. I had noticed that he did that frequently, in small bursts of rapid eye-flutters followed by long passages when his eyes opened wider than usual. “Let me see,” he said. “I was tired of wasting time on preparing food, so I used one that predigests nourishment and transfers it directly to my insides—Barzant’s Alimentation, that one is called.

  “Then I saw that I was wasting even more time sleeping, so I employed Wyu-Shyu’s Vivid Wakefulness. Now I sleep for only a few seconds every few minutes, although I have had to add a dream suppressant, lest I begin dreaming while still awake. That can be confusing.”

  “I am sure of it,” I said.

  “Indeed,” he continued, “when the salamander first came, I mistook it for a waking dream. That is when I acquired this.” He showed me his savaged thumb.

  “Any more?”

  “Spells you mean?” He was about to answer but instead went wide-eyed again and was silent for several seconds. “A couple,” he said, as if unaware of the interruption. “I am using Paphrae’s Perk-Up to augment my intellectual vigor, though I find it has a side-effect of making all motions brisk. I found, however, that it drains the resources, so that I had to double the frequency of Barzant’s Alimentation; I was growing faint from hunger.

  “And, I almost forgot…” He paused and looked thoughtful, then said, “Interesting. With the memory intensifier, that shouldn’t happen. Perhaps I need to adjust…” He ceased speaking and again stood staring for several heartbeats, then went on, “the capacity factor again.”

  “You said,” I reminded him, “that you had almost forgotten…” I waited for his train of thought to connect to mine.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, “Irriwad’s Melodics. One hears one’s favorite songs as an accompaniment to the doings of the day. Listen.”

  He spoke two syllables and immediately my ears filled with a vigorous passage of tympani and bohorns. I recognized it at once; apparently my former intuition and I shared the same taste for music, which was not surprising.

  “Very nice,” I said. “But perhaps you could eliminate it while we converse. I find it distracting.”

  “What?” he said, blinking rapidly.

  “The music. Could you make it go away?”

  “Of course, if it bothers you. I find it uplifting.” He took my arm and pulled me toward the cottage. “I want to show you something.”

  We reached the door and he flung it wide and pulled me across the threshold. Beyond lay a blaze of golden light that dazzled me. When my eyes adjusted to the glare I saw that we stood on the edge of a wide, high-ceilinged room, floored in polished tiles of green and amber, the walls hung with alternating tapestries and ornate mirrors, the actual ceiling invisible behind scores of chandeliers that sparkled with crystals and massed lumens. With Osk Rievor still pulling on my arm and Hespira following, we crossed the great expanse to a cluster of divans and sofas set about with small tables on which stood carafes and cups of alabaster.

  “Help yourself,” he said, pouring a golden liquid into one of the cups and draining it. I sniffed the neck of one container, smelled the bouquet of a fine Phalum, and poured for Hespira and myself. I was sure the room was some kind of illusion, but if the wine was also a pretense, it was a trick well done. I relieved my neck and shoulders of the weight of my assistant and stretched it upon an arm of a sofa.

  Osk Rievor was downing a second cup. “Odd,” he said, “despite the alimentation spell, I always seem to be thirsty. I should look for something to deal with that.”

  “No,” I said, “you should not.”

  He paused in the act of pouring. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you have overstrained yourself. You—” I had to pause while he took another of his brief, involuntary naps. “You are not in good order,” I said when he returned to consciousness.

  “I beg to differ,” he said, blinking rapidly.

  “You have taken on too much, too soon,” I said, “piling spells on top of spells without thought for the composite effect. Meanwhile, you have an annoyed deity trapped in the back yard, restrained by nothing more than a wooden fence—”

  “It only appears to be a wooden fence,” he said. “I happened to like the effect.”

  “Be that as it may,” I bored in, “the situation has all the elements of one of those cautionary tales that begin with blithe expectations and end in rout and catastrophe.”

  “It does not.”

  “I must insist that it does.”

  Osk Rievor turned away and poured another cupful. He paused with the vessel halfway to his lips and I thought he must have heard something that commanded his attention. Then I realized that he had merely lost consciousness again. As he came back and drank the wine, every line of his back a reproach to me, my assistant said quietly in my ear, “I have something to report.”

  “Is it urgent?” I said, in our silent mode.

  “I cannot tell.”

  “What is it?”

  “I cannot tell that either.”

  I put down an upsurge of frustration and said, “Then what can you tell me?”

  “A message has been sent.”

  “What kind of message?”

  “I do not know.”

  “To whom has it been sent?”

  Again, the integrator did not know, only that it was sent as a focused beam aimed upward.

  “To an orbital or a spacecraft?” I asked.

  “I would so assume.”

  “Do you know the content of the message?”

  “No, it was well shielded. A very high-order shield. Indeed, I cannot even be entirely certain of the type.”

  “Well,” I said, “Do you know, at least, who sent it?”

  “Yes. Or at least I know from whom it originated.”

  “Then let us have the one fact that is at your command,” I said. “From whom did it originate?”

  “From Hespira.”

  Chapter Ten

  �
�Nothing!” was Hespira’s reply, delivered with a vehemence that was understandable, in that Osk Rievor and I had already each asked her twice, within a matter of seconds, “What are you doing?”

  Indeed, she appeared to be doing nothing except standing before us, her ungainly hands pressed to her too-long cheeks and her eyes wide with consternation—and probably also with fear at the sight of two alarmed men leaning toward her with hands raised and brows compressed.

  “Integrator,” I said, “give me something I can work with!”

  “I cannot give you more,” it said. “A signal of some kind originated from her. It was focused and brief. If I had to guess, I would say it was a means of saying, ‘Here I am,’ to someone who was waiting to receive the news.”

  “A homing beacon?”

  “Probably.”

  “But you cannot identify the medium that carried it?” Focused beams must focus something, after all, and I had built the device to be able to detect, intercept, analyze, and if necessary make free with every known kind of energy.

  “Then,” said my assistant, “this may be a kind of energy we do not know about.”

  “Speculate,” I said.

  “You will not like it.”

  I was finding less and less to like as the day wore on. I turned to Osk Rievor but had to wait a few seconds because he was again briefly asleep. The intervals between seemed to be shorter and the naps longer, but I couldn’t take time to measure them. When I saw him blink and come back to us, I said, “Is this magic?”

  He turned his head and snapped a word over his shoulder. It sounded like “Grishant.” Across the improbable width of the room, in a patch of bare wall between two arrases, a door opened. It was a narrow door, not much higher than my knee, and beyond it lay a miniature room furnished in dark plush fabric. The floor was uneven and littered with odd, light-colored shapes that at first I could not identify. Then I saw that the door had been kicked open by a small foot, fur-covered and long-toed, belonging to the diminutive creature that now raised itself up from a small divan on which it had been reclining. The unrecognizable shapes resolved themselves into fruit peelings falling away from the rounded belly. The creature got its feet beneath it and rose, to stand in the little doorway, blinking lambent eyes that dominated a face that combined the attributes of ape and cat.

  “What?” it said.

  “Bring my spectrice and the intrometrant,” my other self may have said. I was not registering his words closely because my attention was fixed on the recipient of his orders, which was now slouching toward a cabinet some distance off, exhibiting the kind of begrudged compliance to be found in overindulged adolescents who have been made to abandon their preferred distractions.

  “That is my grinnet,” I said.

  Osk Rievor blinked. “Not actually,” he said.

  “You dug it up, from where I had buried it.”

  “No, it…” He would have said more but another period of slumber intervened. I was sure that this one was longer than the first, though that may have been because I was anxious to hear him complete the sentence. Then he blinked and said, “…came back on its own.”

  The familiar had finished collecting objects from the cabinet and now came trudging toward us over the bicolored floor.

  “I heard a scratching at the door one morning. When I opened, there it was, picking clods of dirt from its pelt, looking up at me. It could not speak at first. I had to teach it the most basic skills.”

  “It has come a long way since,” I said.

  “I found part of an old text on their care and maintenance. Apparently they are very hard to kill. Also, they have to be handled appropriately. I fear I made some early errors that are proving hard to undo.”

  The creature arrived at our feet where it let its burdens fall to the floor. I recognized the dark mirror and the black tube with which my former intuition had examined Hespira on our first visit.

  “You have forgotten the Bell of True Resonance,” Osk Rievor said.

  “You didn’t ask for it,” said the grinnet.

  “Of course I…”—another sleep, this one definitely longer than the first—“…did.”

  “If you’d asked for it, I would’ve brought it,” said the creature.

  “Go and get it.” Osk Rievor took up the tube and examined Hespira, then consulted the mirror from several angles. By the time he was finished, the bell had arrived and he rang it near her and listened to its reverberations.

  “It is not her,” he said, “but…”—again we waited—“…the dress.” Or, more specifically, he confirmed, when he had studied and napped a little more, one of the ribbons attached to the shoulder. He called the grinnet to take part in the examination. Grumbling, it scaled him, hand over hand, until it sat upon one shoulder, then sniffed at the end of the piece of fabric.

  “It must be a subtle spell,” it said, “imbued into a single thread that was woven through the cloth, but left to lie dormant until it was surrounded by sufficient ambience. Once it was impinged upon by active magic, the thread absorbed stray minims of potentiality that were too tiny to be noticed; when it had fed enough to revivify the spell, it did so automatically.”

  “Fascinating,” said Osk Rievor, fingering the ribbon. “But you do not recognize it?”

  “Not even its type. It must be an unknown form of magic.”

  Osk Rievor said nothing.

  “Are we done?” said the grinnet, turning its head toward its lair. “I haven’t finished my second lunch.”

  I put down an urge to slap my former intuition back to wakefulness. Instead I waited for him to revive from another brief slumber. Meanwhile, his familiar was down on the floor and scuttling toward its refuge. “Come back!” he called. “Where did the signal go?”

  The grinnet sighed and made an unwilling return. “It had pulsed before I was aware of it. We will have to wait until it has built up enough force for another discharge. Or you could increase its rate of absorption by increasing the ambience.”

  “All right,” Osk Rievor said. He raised his hands and positioned his fingers at odd angles.

  “Wait!” I said. “What about the salamander? It also grows through absorbing this ‘ambience.’ ”

  My other self showed no concern. “That is why I placed its pen well away from the cottage. It will enlarge another minim or two. No more. Besides, I have now replaced all its missing scales and given it scores more. It will remain content while the jewels and coins keep coming. Once they stop, I will speak the last line of the ritual and it will depart.”

  “You are certain of that?”

  “What is there to keep it here?”

  “From tales I have read, I have formed the view that deities confined against their will tend to insist on dealing out retribution. The impact is often memorable.”

  He waved away the point as not worth responding to. I had another objection: should we not avoid sending a signal of our whereabouts before we knew who would receive it and why they might wish to? But Osk Rievor had already set his hands again, and before I could stop him he uttered three croaking syllables while touching one thumb to an elbow. “There,” he said.

  I looked about, noticed nothing different. Then I caught a motion from the corner of my eye, but when I turned my gaze that way nothing moved. “What have you done?” I said. “All seems as before.”

  “The tapestries,” he said. “The figures in them move when you are not looking at them.”

  I turned and regarded one of the larger hangings. The persons depicted in them might have changed their positions, but I could not tell. “What is the point of that?” I said.

  Again, I had to wait for Osk Rievor to reawaken, then repeated the question. “I have not yet discovered the purpose,” he said. “It may have been someone’s idea of a prank to play upon one’s guests.”

  “The signal has been sent again,” said my assistant.

  “There it goes,” said the grinnet, almost at the same time.

  �
��Where?” Osk Rievor and I said together, while Hespira plucked at the ribbon as if to tear it loose from her seam. But it was solidly stitched in. Whoever had invested so much in a piece of cloth must have intended for it to remain fixed in place.

  “Almost straight up again,” said my assistant, but my other self’s familiar was better able to descry and follow magical forces. “To a reflector high above the atmosphere,” it said, “whence it is beamed toward a stream of objects that circle the world.”

  “Could you ascertain its content?” I asked the grinnet. It was strange to be speaking to a creature I had buried and even mourned, but I pushed aside the emotion. This was not, I told myself, the same creature I had known.

  “I can infer. In words, it would be ‘Here I am.’ In images, a pinpoint of light in blackness. In sounds, a piercing beep.” It looked away toward its den, then said to my other self, “Now, are we done?”

  But Osk Rievor’s small spellcasting must have dug deep into his remaining resources. His eyes had closed. I heard a noise that began deep in his chest and emerged from his lips as a rubbery snore. I shook him gently but the exercise only served to make him unsteady on his feet. He began to topple forward and I had to move quickly to catch him. I turned to speak to the grinnet, but it was already in motion toward its plush retreat.

  “Wait,” I said, but the creature was not bound to heed me. It strode away, making considerably more speed than it had shown before.

  “I cannot stay with him,” I called after it. “But if I leave him, I fear he will do himself an injury.”

  The grinnet sighed, a sound that I remembered hearing, when its body had housed my own assistant. It stopped and turned back, wearing a look on its surprisingly communicative face that bespoke great patience under equally great imposition. “This has happened before. He will be useless for at least an hour, but Zhan’s Motilator will move him to safety, if you do not care to bear his weight.”

  “I do not know Zhan’s Motilator,” I said.

  Again, the small sigh filled the silence. The creature stalked away toward my alter ego’s study and returned dragging a weighty tome. Its hairy paw flicked through the pages, while its triangular pink tongue took up a position in a corner of its mouth. Then it found what it was looking for and indicated a page to me.