The Colors of Magic Anthology (magic: the gathering)

by Richard Lee Byers

  It was madness they saw as they moved to the west wing. Bodies of servants, formerly under control, sprawled over the floors, some in repose of death while others writhed in mindless agony. A young maid, a recent victim grasped within the past month, ran in circles in the center of the sitting room. At the sight of the cousins her orbit contracted, and she moved to the back of the room as if driven by the wind. Her impact with a cabinet smashed wood, and she fell, a broken bag of bones.

  Loria was attacked by a page as they traversed the main hall. The young boy had run at her with his arms flapping, an ungainly bird returning to the falconer. His hands were boneless flippers swatting at Loria while she covered her face with her arms. The boy whistled with relief as Tayva plunged her knife several times into his side.

  Ebnezzer was mumbling and rocking when they forced his inner sanctum. Books and apparatus were piled high on tables throughout the room, and a dissecting tray held a large rat still leaking blood. Ebnezzer had obviously been interrupted in the practice of his craft. The aura of darkness and energy that had pervaded this room was replaced by the sour stench of suffering and death. Both cousins felt disgust that one whose power had so impressed them should be brought so low.

  "What happened, Ebnezzer?" Loria demanded as she grasped the head of the kneeling man. Her hands felt a spark of something, and she shook him harder. "Why did we lose power? Why are the servants free!"

  "Don't know, don't know. Felt some great power, swept me away. Swept it all away!" Ebnezzer tore his head free and began to sob and wail.

  Tayva circled the room, examining what her mentor had brought into the house. Anything that was valuable and easy to sell she fingered with a speculative air. "Ask him if the power will return," she urged her cousin. "Ask him what he can do."

  Loria stooped beside him and spoke with more urgency as she realized that her victims were free and that Uncle Brucius had escaped with his mind nearly intact.

  "Do you have anything left? Any spirit to call on? Will our powers ever reappear?" Each question caused Ebnezzer to shiver, and Loria felt hope slide away.

  "What I knew is gone. I don't know when or if anything will return. I tasted a spirit before it was torn away. I've got it in my mouth, and it sings to me. It's singing now," he muttered and stared blankly at the floor.

  Tayva looked to Loria, crouching with her hands on a madman, and clapped softly to gain her attention.

  "What now?" Tayva asked.

  Loria took only seconds to decide.

  "We can't stay in the city. The family will have to give us up after what Uncle saw. I don't know if we'll ever get back what we lost. Ebnezzer is useless. Something is in him, but we might never extract it." Loria gestured to the contents of the room. "Find whatever is of value. Pack it up quickly. We must be on the road within the hour. I'll return to our rooms and get our valuables and some traveling clothes." Loria rose to her feet and trotted to their quarters.

  Tayva was alone with the madman. She already knew what she would take, but she walked slowly over to the oblivious sorcerer and laid her hand as if in benediction on the brow of her former mentor.

  The cousins fled the city into a sudden thaw. The roads were mud, and their spirits fell even as a few of their victims recovered and roused the city behind them. Tayva and Loria fled north with the head of Ebnezzer rotting in a leather bag at the bottom of their luggage.

  Loria cursed quietly and continually as she knelt in the mire of the lake edge looking for tubers. The lake was clear and sandy bottomed for most of its bank, but into one pocket at the edge glacial action had pushed topsoil. Similar pockets of dirt were deposited all over the country, but most were barren and gullied by spring rains. Plants had grown in this hollow during the late summer and fall. Changed by events that shook the world twenty years before, it had adapted to the inundation of spring. The dense roots and tubers were hard as seasoned wood, and when water came, they protected themselves from rot with the excretion of slime and a network of thin frothy rootlets.

  Standing barelegged in the cold water, Loria was digging tubers that felt like stones and smelled like wet manure.

  Tayva was visible in the distance as Loria stood erect to throw the roots up on the shore. The older woman was returning with the basket she had hauled to the coal pit. The walk was over broken gullies, but it had the advantage of warming limbs that would be numb with cold from standing in the water. Loria was cold and miserable and hated Tayva with the feeble ferocity that the miserable have. Tayva stumbled and dragged the basket through the dirt, caking the filthy cane-work with more gobs of crumbly mud.

  "Keep it out of the dirt, Tayva." Loria still had the energy to carp at her cousin. "I'm not going to help or wait for you if you muck that up."

  Tayva's response was an obscene gesture that did more to show her lack of energy than her irritation with her cousin.

  Loria stooped down and tried her best to wash her hands and legs clean. At best, she would get most of the muck off, but would soon replace it with dust from the path to the brewing site.

  Tayva arrived and began filling the basket with the nodules. "I'm getting tired of doing this," she remarked and then hurled one root as hard as she could into the basket. The only result was a dull thud. Tayva knotted her fists and then opened them in exaggerated relaxation.

  "We were both meant for better things, but what power we have is here," Loria responded. She kicked the basket in resignation and sighed as it flopped over into the wet soil. She bent over and swore again as her back protested. Tayva tried to rest by levering her arms against her legs, but found no comfort. She watched her cousin pawing at the ground like a tired, ineffectual animal.

  Loria stood up and saw Tayva's look of faint disgust. She also noticed a figure coming along the lakeside trail.

  The cousins straightened and tried to assume a veneer of amity. It was a poor showing, but the quality of their approaching audience alleviated the need for a fine performance.

  Winton was his name. He was hunter of waterfowl, who tramped though the network of lakes and streams that crisscrossed the raw landscape. He had an eager expression on his coarse, full features as he recognized the cousins. Tayva was older, grayer, and filthy in her dress of poorly cured hide. Loria was the better-looking of the pair and well groomed for someone working in the water and the mud. Winton knew them only as the authors of a brew made from the stinking nodules they were gathering, a brew known for its savage potency and almost lethal hangovers. His eagerness faded as he hit the fetid air from the raw roots.

  "Quite a smell, neighbor," he called. "Hard to imagine you make your ambrosia from that refuse." Winton kept his distance but tried to be as friendly as possible. He shifted on his feet, and the two small bolas strung through his belt clacked against each other.

  The man hunted waterfowl for money. He was a dab hand with a sling, but his bolas were surer weapons in uncertain light. He cast them as the birds startled and then sold the ones he caught on the road the next day. The sling and stones at the back of his belt he used against rabbits and targets in trees. He was an old and eager customer for the cousins' brew.

  "I wouldn't mind trading for a pot of comfort, " he said, clasping a hand to the brightly dyed bolas, the stones red, blue, and green. "Three birds or five rabbits, delivered to your door. "

  Tayva drew a breath to bargain, but Loria preempted her. "I hope that you will accept a pot as a gift," she drawled and reached toward Winton with open hands. She tried to sound seductive, but her breathless delivery to one she considered a clod sounded silly to her cousin's ears. "Bring a brace of whatever you have to our hut tonight, and we'll celebrate together. "

  Winton looked puzzled. "What holiday is this?" he asked. Living alone he often lost track of time.

  "We are celebrating being alive," Loria replied. She tried for a sultry air but achieved only petulance. Tayva coughed to cover a mean-spirited sneer.

  But Winton saw everything through a veil of loneliness, and any
indication of interest was enough to set the hook.

  "I will return tonight, my dear, " he said, as he turned and dramatically bounded a few steps before settling into his characteristic slouch. Loria motioned for silence until he was out of hearing. Tayva complied and then policed the area, gathering their rude tools.

  "Cousin, you had better practice deception more often. You were painfully insincere," Tayva chided. She hoisted the basket and motioned with her chin that Loria was to set it on her back.

  "He's coming, isn't he? He'll be panting when he shows up, too." Loria settled the straps to minimize the chance of blisters or welts.

  "So what are we going to do with him?" asked Tayva.

  "Aren't you feeling tired? We're going to kill him, of course." And with that, Loria started out to the hills with her cousin matter-of-factly falling in behind her.

  "Kill him. Yes. But where and how to use the death?" Tayva inquired, but she stumbled and caught her balance with difficulty, then continued, "Destroy his mind and use him up here? Corrupt his spirit and send him out for revenge?"

  The path was broader now and showed hard work on the part of someone. Rock steps had been built on a few of the steeper parts of the trail with bushes planted strategically to cover the improvements. The path dropped through a cut to screen walkers from observation.

  The cousins arrived at the brewing pits, depressions backed to a hillside. Surrounded by brush, the place was distant from their hut but close to a seam of dirty brown coal that broke to the surface like a great whale. Tayva levered chunks and slabs into a basket. Then, with Loria at the other side, she walked it to the fire where rocks heaped in the coals served as heating stones.

  Loria gestured around the site as Tayva threw more coal onto the fire. "That tinker from the road, we got three weeks of labor out of him."

  The improvements on the path, the deeper pits that held the brewing equipment, had all been done by a traveler the pair had caught on the main road.

  "We could use Winton to expand here. Maybe he could drive the well deeper. We had to bury the tinker too soon to do a decent job."

  Tayva was now moving more rocks into the pit to heat. The tinker's corpse lay buried under the fire pit and was baked by the flames above. Tayva used a great pair of tongs to lift rocks already heated into one of a trio of dug-out logs hauled a long distance from their felling place. The heat was boiling the collected roots to remove the watertight covering of slime. That covering, besides being unpalatable, was poisonous and would kill the customers too fast if allowed to remain. Loria went to the shallow well and drew a bucket of water. She dumped it into the log and watched the run-off of poison flow down a sandy ditch the tinker had dug.

  Tayva had finished transferring the heated stones and stood leaning on the tongs. "It would be nice to have someone else to do the scut work up here. Our energy is low, and there are my flocks of birds to sustain. Each bird I make takes more power, and the rush is less. We feed the water, or we'll have trouble."

  When they had arrived years before, Ebnezzer's head had gone into the water behind the hut. Rotting away, the head had released the spirit that gave them a taste of true power and glory again. But the harder they worked the spirit, the more it demanded. Settling waterfowl were sucked beneath the waters, even though the cousins did nothing. Better prey was required on occasion.

  "We need a death, but how to kill him?" Tayva asked as she went to the second dug-out log. It was empty, a basket of roots beside it. The roots had been steeped and heated so long they were comparatively soft. A tall, hollow stump wrapped in wire served the companions as a mortar as they ground the root to pulp.

  "Knifing him is too messy," Loria stated as she motioned Tayva to help her lift a metal-tipped section of log. The dead tinker had molded the metal to the wood. The metal had come from one of the killing machines of Mishra, and Loria found it ironic that such a piece of dark history should continue to be used in the creation of death and deception. The log was their pestle, and both gripped the handle pegs in unison, lofting it and letting its weight and narrow point crush the roots inside the hollow stump.

  "Beating him to death is too much like work," Tayva voiced in time to their work.

  "We could smother him when he's drunk," Loria replied as she bent to remove pulp and add more roots. The toxic brew not only made murder easier, but its trade brought needed money as well as the joy of knowing that people were dying from its cumulatively lethal effects.

  "Tedious waiting for him to pass out. Besides, we need him in the water," Tayva said. "I'm not going to carry him." She threw dead flowers into the second log; their decay and seeds would start the brewing process and add a narcotic kick.

  "It is accidental drowning while drunk then." Loria crossed to the third log and examined the mixture. It was nearing completion. Just one more step before straining and bottling. "It's ready for the special spice."

  Tayva chuckled in amusement as she walked to the sealed pot she had brought from home. Opening it, she looked down at a rotted bird. Its eyes were fallen in, and its feathers and flesh were tattered shreds. The bottom of the pot was swimming in preserving oil, but the blast of odor was a wet slap in the face, even in the already choked and polluted air. The bird twisted and tried to stand but could not on its broken legs; it was one of Tayva's spies who had decayed too much to be of any use. Tayva took the body in her hands and shuffled back to the third log. She knelt in the mud, squelching in the foul overflow from the brewing process. Her hands slowly juggled the pigeon as its liquefying flesh threatened to come apart in her hand. She cleared her mind and focused on the dank water behind their hut. She could feel its uncertain currents and taste it in her mind. The real world faded into her vision as her hands contracted into fists with a wet pop. She breathed foulness and dreamed.

  When she came to herself, Loria was straining the now loathsome contents of the third log into a series of cheap pots. Tayva's arms were black with gore to the elbows, and she was lying in mud and toxic runoff. The roots, in their various stages of brewing, smelled like a rendering plant, and a haze of choking smoke from the burning coal settled over everything. It was beautiful.

  Winton whistled as he picked his way to the cousins' house. He had slept through the late afternoon, as was his habit, and hunted birds in the early evening since the birds settled and were easier targets in early morning and at twilight. He had caught two waterfowl in quick succession. His casts had startled the birds in shallow water, and he had wrapped up a pair of birds in the small bolas. The third bird was a large crane of some sort. That one had almost flown away with his bola before Winton crashed through the reeds and wrung its neck. It was large and beautiful, and Winton believed he was carrying good luck to Tayva and Loria's hut.

  The only sour note of the day had been his last cast. He had missed the bird completely and heard a loud crack immediately thereafter. He had searched through the water for the bright color of the bolas. One weight had broken on a lake rock and was throwing the balance of the weapon off.

  That stroke of bad luck was lost in the canvas of fantasy he painted in his mind: the mighty hunter returning to his adoring women, the meat he had brought down buying their adulation and respect. It was such a pretty picture that he imagined Loria's poor acting as merely barely suppressed passion.

  "Yes, " he said aloud to the world. "That one is yours for the taking. Just a dash of charm and then Tayva will love you as well. " He distracted himself with romantic delusions as he tramped through the twilight and saw the full moon rising over the horizon.

  He could see the hut and the flickering light of a candle through the open door, a good trade candle instead of firelight or homemade fat lamps. He felt himself a noble guest at the sight of this extravagance.

  He announced his arrival with a shout and strode to the door. "Here I am, ladies. With this feast and my company, we'll have fine dining." He stood proud in his stained and odorous clothes. His legs from the knees down were spattered
with mud, and his shirt was wet with sweat and water from the birds he had killed. He hauled his catch over his shoulder and handed it to Tayva, looking past her to find Loria.

  Loria was dressed in her best. Her clothes were patched with cloth of nearly the same color as the original fabric. Loria had groomed carefully. Her hair was the cleanest thing in the room.

  "Thank you for your contribution, sir. Come have a cup, and tell us the news," Loria replied grandly.

  Meanwhile Tayva was examining Winton's prize crane. She saw a bird with mud in its feathers and malformed legs.

  She plucked it and sectioned it, placing gobs of meat on a skewer over the fire. Her dress, irregularly patched but well-fitting, was dyed carefully and was of one color. Unfortunately, that color was a muddy gray-green that vanished into the background. Each time she returned to the conversation, she noticed Winton was more puffed up and boastful than before.

  Winton was perched on a stool and hunched over the table. The poor state of the furniture gave his self-important dialog a nervous edge as he tried surreptitiously to keep weight off the stool. When his elbows left the table in an extravagant gesture he hurriedly put them back down.

  "The mayor of Cade himself asked me for news of the road. Wanted to know if I'd heard anything about the unrest down south. I get all the news on the road," Winton said as he picked at the gob of meat Tayva had placed before him. Cade was the smallest settlement Tayva knew of that actually had a name. Only one ignorant of the world found it of any note.

  "And what did you tell him?" Loria asked as she gave him another full glass of brew and a wink. She was stoking him as she would stoke the dinner fire, slowly feeding it until it was just right. Winton took a large gulp of brew. It was rough as a cob and strong as a winter storm, but the best that he had ever tasted.

  "I told him of troubles all through the south. All you hear are tales of marching and treasure."