Liavek 3

by Will Shetterly

  "Help me stop it! Minstrel, help me stop it!"

  The water was no longer disappearing into the air. It was heading toward the sky and becoming storm clouds. Suddenly, the sky was black, as it might have been for yesterday's storm, and it was raining. I felt a sudden flash of panic.

  "Play it backwards, minstrel! Play it backwards!"

  The rain was falling like no rain I'd ever seen. Lightning flashed, illuminating Liavek like a distant painting. Thunder cracked so loudly I wasn't sure I could hear my cittern. I played it anyway. A minor, E7, D minor—

  "Backwards! Please'"

  A minor, D minor, D, G, C, A minor—

  The storm hadn't stopped, but suddenly the water wasn't shooting up around me any more. I took one sopping step toward Iranda, thinking that she and I together should go looking for shelter. Except all of a sudden she was in my arms, and for at least a minute I didn't think about the rain very much.

  •

  Somehow, we wound up in the shack of an obliging fisherman, squeezed in with the Zhir magician and a burly Zhir in his forties who introduced himself as Velt, son of Famar, the Zhir ambassador to Liavek. The fisherman and his wife found us cane-backed chairs and mugs for tea, and we sat and sipped.

  "I never thought I could do that," said the magician. She leaned back, looking at me. "Minstrel, do you have any idea what you did?"

  "Something magical, I think," I said, still dazed. "Except I don't have any magic."

  "No." she said, "not something magical." Rain battered the roof and the fire flickered; I watched her intently. "You just played. And that was enough."

  "I played," I said, wondering. I certainly had! I'd never felt so musical, so—I had to say it—purposeful, as I had playing "The Dry Well of Dondar."

  "But what difference did it make?"

  "You told me what to do with the water," she said seriously. 'That's the one problem with working spells on the sea, you know. It fights back. It doesn't have luck, the way you and I do, but it has power. The only way you have of fighting it is to find somewhere else for the water to go. Like into the past."

  "Or into the sky," Iranda added.

  "The sky was an accident," admitted the Zhir magician with a laugh. For just an instant she looked ten years younger. "I was trying to send water to Dondar for Navar and his caravan. Dondar is at least eight hundred feet above sea level, but it was so incredibly thirsty that I managed to send the water there anyway. Then it wasn't thirsty any more, and there was no place for the water to go. I didn't know how to stop it."

  "So I played," I said slowly, "and then I played backwards. And that was enough for you to work the spell."

  "You played well," the magician corrected. "If you hadn't been playing marvelous music, I never could have focused my luck the way I did." Thunder rolled, accenting her words. "Have you noticed how some spells use verse? Or that some of the best magicians seem almost as if they're dancing while they're casting spells? Art intensifies magic. It certainly makes it a lot easier for an indifferent wizard like me to focus her energy."

  "I don't really understand what you did, Liramal," said Velt. His voice was guttural, raspy, thickly accented. "But it seems to me that you and the Lady Rakil together"—he gestured toward the Zhir magician—"might be able to keep the sea divided while we send a couple of boatwrights out to work on the Praluna. And then, once we've raised her, you'd be eligible for a large reward."

  The Zhir woman laughed. "Not soon, Excellency. I'm as drained as that dry well must have been." She smiled at me. "Whether you can get more work out of Liramal is up to him."

  Iranda reached out and squeezed my arm. I was beginning to feel a warm glow, and I didn't think it was the tea.

  "And to think," I said reflectively, "I wanted to be a wizard. I guess I still do. But—playing 'The Dry Well of Dondar' with the storm brewing all around me—even as scared as I was, I wouldn't trade that memory for anything."

  "You wanted to be a wizard?" said the magician, eyes wide. "I wanted to be a musician! I studied hammered-harp, baghorn, fiddle, and hand-drums. But I had no ear and no rhythm. I finally invested my luck when I realized I had no talent for anything else."

  "You wanted to be a musician," I said in helpless amazement. Then, suddenly, I began to laugh, quietly at first, then letting it build up like water pouring over falls. After a few seconds Iranda and the magician joined in.

  The Zhir diver showed up at the door just then, drenched in rain water. He bowed to us all and from the waist of his loincloth pulled the biggest diamond I'd ever seen, handing it to Velt. He said a few words in Zhir; probably, "All yours, Excellency," or something like that. Then, to me, in an atrociously accented tongue, "Do you have any friends from Ka Zhir?"

  "No," I said. Except for Iranda, I didn't have any friends at all. I looked at him, puzzled,

  "You do now," said the diver, and clapped me on the shoulder. I watched him open-mouthed as he disappeared back into the rain.

  Iranda and I spent the night snuggled up by the fire, wrapped in the fisherman's best quilt. When morning came, we bade a quiet goodbye to Velt, stepped over the sleeping magician, and tramped through mud and puddles to the dock. Half an hour's wait brought the return of the vessel that had brought us to Eel Island; another half hour brought us back to the Liavek waterfront.

  We climbed a wooden ladder to a different dock, long and solid. "Well, Liramal," Iranda said, "do you feel any more purposeful than you did yesterday?"

  I pulled myself up, stood on splintery wood planks. I couldn't tell if she was teasing me or not. "Maybe. I guess I just wasn't ready to believe that my purpose was to keep on doing what I was doing already."

  She nodded. "When you sing a song, you make it matter, to everyone who hears it. Maybe it just took something really drastic to get you to realize that your music matters to you, too."

  We walked up the dock toward the shore, side by side. "So it was Navar's death His Scarlet Eminence was talking about?" Iranda said. "And why did he want you to write a ballad?"

  "He said he wanted one that made fun of the Zhir," I said, confused. We were almost to the shore. I wanted to stop and look around, breathe the salt air, see the sights of home: the gaily painted warehouses, the Mug and Anchor, the moneychanger's brick house, the camels and pedestrians.

  "Ah," Iranda nodded. "If they succeeded, and returned Calornen's Stone, Ka Zhir would have gotten a lot of sympathy from Liavek's neighbors. I guess His Eminence wanted to undercut that."

  "But why me?"

  "At least," she said, "it's not because he wanted you dead."

  "No," I agreed, "not me." Then it hit me like a toppling statue. "Navar!" I said. "May the Twin Forces preserve me, Iranda—I killed Navar!"

  Her arms were around me again, warm and strong, and I held her close and shook. My cheeks were wet. "No, Liramal," she said softly. "Navar's dead anyway. He's been dead four hundred years. He was dead before you even learned to play his song."

  I had to stop and think about that one. While I was thinking, Iranda continued, "If Navar had cast his spell, and the Zhir sorceress hadn't sent the water in response to his call—if you hadn't helped her—he would have died anyway, and for nothing. The dry well at Dondar would have stayed dry. You saved the caravan, you and Lady Rakil and Navar."

  Still thinking, I let go. Iranda smiled at me. Then a footcab approached, so near us it would have been silly not to hail it. Iranda listened in surprise as I told the driver to take us to the Levar's Park.

  "I thought you'd go to the palace," she said as we rode smoothly up Park Boulevard. "His Scarlet Eminence will want to hear about yesterday's events."

  "If one of his agents hasn't already told him," I said. "But do you think I'd be let into the palace, dressed as I am?"

  Iranda looked me up and down. My blue tunic and white cotton trousers, new two days before, were wrinkled and stained. I continued, "Besides, if His Scarlet Eminence wants to talk to me, don't you think he'll come look for me in the park')"<
br />
  "Sooner or later," Iranda admitted. "All right; the park it is."

  Life and death. His Scarlet Eminence. What did he want?

  I tipped the driver handsomely and we got out. I had walked a bare ten paces into the park when I stopped cold.

  The tree I called home lay split and shattered on the ground. Black burn marks on the stump bore witness to the flash of lightning that had toppled it. The space where I usually stood while performing was buried under the butt of the trunk.

  Iranda said, "He got you out of the park just in time. He saved your life."

  I didn't answer. Instead I took her hand and looked at the ruins of the disaster I'd escaped, wondering what sort of world it is when the fate of Liavek is dependent on such a man as that.

  "Choice of the Black Goddess" by Gene Wolfe

  TEV NOEN LAY in his bunk, listening to Ler Oeuni's screams. Something was wrong, he was under some spell. No, it was Oeuni who was under the spell—the spell cast by the surgeon who was taking away Oeuni's right hand. Oeuni was watching the saw blade, her face calm, her eyes screaming, following the saw back and forth, back and forth. How was it, then, that he could hear her screaming eyes? How was it Oeuni never wept?

  The surgeon said, "This might have been saved by a spell of healing; healing of a spell might have saved this," and Oeuni screamed again.

  "Too far gone. Can't make something too far gone."

  The final word ended with a thump; Noen sat up, habit keeping his head from the deck beams. There was a knock at the door. Ler Oeuni's scream became only the shrieking of the block that hoisted Windsong's mainsail, the surgeon's voice the creaking of a pump and the shuffle of the steward's feet on the steps descending to his cabin under the quarterdeck.

  No doubt thinking her first knock had gone unheard, she knocked again. "I'm awake," Noen called. "What's the time?"

  "Two bells, sir."

  Noen swore and swung his long legs over the side of his bunk. "I told you to call me at the forenoon watch." He thrust them into ragged canvas trousers.

  "I did, sir," said his steward from the other side of the door. "You said you were awake, sir." She added meaningfully, "Just like now."

  He laughed in spite of his customary resolve to maintain discipline and opened the door. "Well, this time I mean it."

  "You were up so late. sir. It don't hurt to sleep a bit extra." She looked at his trousers. "Why don't you wear the ones I've mended, sir?"

  There was warm seawater in the wide-bottomed pitcher. He poured some into a bowl and splashed his face. "Because I might need them to go ashore." The shah game he and Oeuni had abandoned when the wind rose was still on the table. Despite their weighted bases, some of the pieces had fallen over. "Put these away," he said.

  There was a good breeze, just as he had anticipated from Dinnile's raising the mainsail. Dinnile believed in the slow, implacable heartbeat of the timesman's kettledrums, believed in the sweeps, the enormous oars that could—with the backbreaking labor of four or five sailors at each sweep—send Windsong flying over a calm sea like a skimming gull.

  "Mornin', sir." Dinnile said, and touched his forehead.

  "Good morning, Lieutenant."

  "Leak's no worse, sir. Not since I come on. Oeuni said to look for a place to careen her—we got twenty hands at the pumps—but there hasn't been nothin'. I got the lookout watchin' sharp. And seaward too, sir," Dinnile added hastily, noting the expression on his captain's face.

  Noen extended his hand, received Dinnile's telescope. and studied the coast. It was jungle, a jungle that looked as solid as a wall, green-robed trees higher far than Windsong's mainmast marching down to the water's edge.

  "Deck!" called the lookout at the mainmasthead. "Deck!"

  "What is it?"

  "Looks like a bay, sir. Two points off her bow. I see water past them trees, sir."

  Cursing himself under his breath, Noen raised Dinnile's telescope again. It was a bay with a very narrow mouth perhaps—no, a bay with a large island shielding its mouth.

  "Out oars, sir?" Dinnile asked happily.

  Noen was on the point of saying that he doubted it was worth investigating when the lookout called, "Flag of distress, sir."

  Noen looked from Dinnile to the bay, and finally at the foam blown from the crests of the little waves. Dinnile was probably right; but Dinnile was too anxious to use his oars, and it would be a pleasure (as Noen admitted to himself) to give his second mate a lesson.

  "I don't think so," he said with the calm deliberation suited to a captain who has considered every aspect of the situation. "Strike the mainsail, Lieutenant." He turned to the sailor at the wheel. "See the entrance to that bay, Quartermaster?"

  The woman looked. "No, sir."

  "I can't either, without the glass. Northeast by east then, until you see it."

  With her big mainsail down, Windsong was much slower; but she was much handier as well. The foresail and the small mizzen sail—one at each end of her long hull—gave the rudder enormous leverage.

  "Sir...?"

  Noen nodded reluctantly. "Call gun crews."

  A flag of distress was probably just what it appeared to be, the doleful signal of some stranded ship. Yet it was possible (just possible) that it was the trick of some pirate not watchful enough to haul it down at the sight of a galleass of war. Or even of a pirate ambitious enough to try to seize such a galleass.

  "Stand to quarters, sir?"

  "I said call gun crews, Lieutenant." Oeuni had gotten no more sleep than he had—no, less—and there was a chance, just a chance, that he might be able to get the gun crews to their posts without waking her. If he called all hands to quarters—the order that summoned the entire crew to battle—the midshipman of the watch would pound on the wardroom door to rouse Oeuni and Ranni Rekkue, the third officer.

  "Gun crews ready, sir," Dinnile announced.

  Noen nodded. "Have them load, but not run out." Running out the quarterdeck basilisks would wake up Oeuni as sure as it would have wakened him. Worse, it might frighten the stranded ship into firing at them, provoking a battle both sides could only lose. He told himself that in trying to preserve Oeuni's rest he was merely acting as any good captain would, then remembered that Rekkue had fought the leak as hard as Oeuni; he had not thought of her until this instant.

  It had been useless anyway. There was Oeuni leaping up the companionway with Rekkue, small and dark, at her heels. Noen glanced at the narrow inlet between the island and the mainland, then at Windsong's sails. "Trim up there, foremast!"

  Oeuni was hurrying forward to take command of the gun deck; he could count on her to keep the foremast crew on their toes as well. As he watched, she used the iron hook that had replaced her right hand to pull herself up. Resolutely, he forced his eyes back to the island and the presumably inverted flag that rose above its trees. "I'll have a lead in the bow, Dinnile."

  "Aye aye, sir." Dinnile, still officer of the watch though Oeuni was on deck now, gave the order.

  "Masthead! Are those our colors?"

  There was a pause as the lookout made sure. "Aye aye, sir."

  He had been nearly certain already. Not that it meant anything, he told himself. Any serious enemy of Liavek would surely have its flag in his signal chest.

  The leadsman called, "By the long nine!"

  Plenty of water—water enough for a carrack, and far more than Windsong's skimpy keel drew. Dinnile, sharing his thoughts, grinned and said, "Couldn't improve it without a little brandy."

  "By the mark nine."

  Yet it was shoaling, as was to be expected. Noen studied the entrance to the bay. Shallows often (though not always) revealed themselves by their color in sunlight and the action of their waves; he could see just such shallows on the seaward side of the island, yet the center of that narrow inlet could not have been a darker blue or more uniformly waved had it been in the middle of the Sea of Luck, far from land.

  "By the mark nine!"

  Good. Good. Noen
trained Dinnile's glass on the flag again. It was the Levar's (the lookout had been right), and judging from its height above the trees, it was flying from a mast a good deal more lofty than their own. A ship seeking shelter from a storm might easily have ducked behind that island, he decided, if her captain knew the inlet was deep enough or simply because he thought she had no better chance. And if a ship that big had managed to enter the bay, Windsong should be able to follow with impunity.

  "By the long eight."

  Weary men clambered from the hold and flung themselves on the deck. That was the pump gang, of course, and their presence meant it was two hours into the forenoon watch. He had been too preoccupied to think about the leak, or even to hear the bell. Yet the leak might grow worse at any time, and their need to careen was as urgent as ever.

  "Deck!"

  "What is it?" There was a long pause, so long that at last he called again: "Masthead, what do you see?"

  "Nothin', sir. I thought I saw somethin', sir, but I must a been wrong."

  "What was it?"

  Another pause while the lookout decided that refusing to tell her captain could only land her in troubled waters. "Stone, sir."

  "Stone?"

  "Like a tower or somethin', sir." Unhelpfully, the lookout added, "I don't see it no more, sir."

  Without even considering that the telescope was Dinnile's, Noen thrust it through his belt, jumped down the steps from the quarterdeck to the maindeck, and swarmed up the ratlines to the dizzying crow's nest in the maintop.

  "I seen it again while you were comin' up, sir," the lookout told him, "but it's not there now."

  "Where was it?"

  The lookout hesitated. "Right under the flag, sir."

  Noen trained the telescope, trying to steady it against the heaving of his chest and the swooping circle the crow's nest traced with Windsong's every roll. Belatedly, it struck him that his own glass was somewhat better, and that it waited useless in his cabin.