“That’s another lie!” The smoky red braids swung against her cheeks with the sharp turn of her head.
“How would you know?” he demanded. “What do you think the Great Trial is? What do you think it does? It breaks open the crust we grow over our souls because we can’t stand the sight of what’s down at the bottom. It makes us see and understand.”
“That may be true of your magic, may the Mother help you,” Kaletha said, her voice shaking, “but it isn’t true of mine. Don’t play the wise man with me, giving yourself airs because you thought some barbarian rite of passage would give you all you wanted. You can see it didn’t. You have neither wisdom nor purity—every word you say makes it plainer to me that you should never be allowed to touch the books of power that are in my custody.”
“Who put them into your custody?”
“Fate!” she lashed at him. She strode from him, diagonally away across the small, sparsely furnished stone room, with its virginal bed in its niche and the tall-legged reading desk beside the open window. Beside the desk in the slanting bar of yellow light, she swung passionately back.
“They are mine.” The blaze of her intensity could be almost physically felt where he stood near the door. “Magic has all but died in the hundred years of Altiokis’ tyranny and repression. It has become soiled and filthy with superstition, dirtied from the handling of men like yourself, who see it only as a tool to further their own greeds and lusts.”
Softly, he said, “You’re quick to say what kind of a man I am and what I want.”
“My power has made me quick.” Contempt dripped from her voice like honey from a rotting tree. “And it is up to me to teach magic, to refound it among the worthy and the pure.”
“Like Egaldus?”
Her breath caught, her nostrils flared, and her lips clamped shut as if sealed. For a moment there was no sound in the room but the hiss of her breath in her nostrils. Even the passing tread of feet in the garden outside had ceased.
He went on, “Now, I don’t care if you couple with him in the empty quarter—hell, it wouldn’t matter to me if you had him in the Hall at breakfast time. But don’t try to tell me what I am. Don’t look down on me for loving the Hawk, nor on the Hawk for loving me.”
Stiffly, she said, “That isn’t the same. Your love for her is founded in the flesh alone and debases you both. But mine for Egaldus grew first from our purity, from his admiration and regard. Only later did it...blossom. Though I don’t expect you, or anyone else, would understand that it is different from the loves of other people.”
“So it’s like demons,” Sun Wolf said softly, “that I can see and you can’t. I need to see those books, Kaletha.”
“No.” Her voice was flat as baked clay.
He walked over to the window, to stand near her in the rectangle of the light. “Don’t you understand?” he said, his voice quiet now, without anger. He looked across into those beautiful blue eyes, hard with suspicion beneath the cinnamon lashes. “If the killer was a—a being, a ghost or a devil—” Her lip curved with scorn. “—they might contain some mention of it, some way to track it, to fight it...”
“Something you might believe,” she returned. “They contain the usual superstitions, the interpretations of those ignorant of the true sources of magic.”
“All right,” he said. “If the killer is a wizard, using magic, at least we could trace him or her. Where did you get the books, Kaletha? Who wrote them? What other wizard gave you your knowledge? You can use your power to find the true culprit.”
“You think I haven’t thought of that?” She swung away from him, scorn jeering in her voice. She paced, a restless red eagle caged in the narrow room. “You think just because I’m not a soldier like your precious mistress I have no brains? Yes, I’m going to use my power to find the true culprit—my power, yours, Egaldus—the latent powers hidden deep in the souls of Luatha and Pradborn, ’Shebbeth and Shelaina. Haven’t you, with all your wisdom—” the word rolled caustic from her tongue, “—seen the obvious means of finding the culprit? I’m going to ask the Bishop Galdron.”
Sun Wolf stared at her, shocked and cold as if she had unexpectedly driven a dagger of ice into his heart. For a moment he couldn’t think of anything to say. In the silence, he heard the clink of Starhawk’s spurs on the tiled walk outside, her voice asking some question, and Anshebbeth’s answering.
He finally whispered, “Galdron’s dead.”
Kaletha’s nostrils widened a little at the obviousness of the remark. But she only said, “He and Milkom died late in the night, a few hours, at most, before dawn. It has not yet been one full cycle of the sun. When we call his spirit, it will answer.”
“That’s necromancy.” The horror he felt went deeper than his memories of his childhood—of the village shaman making his stinking conjurations with the fetid remains of enemies’ hands and ears—deeper than conscious thought.
Kaletha said calmly, “It has been called so, yes.”
“You tell me I’m an evil magician,” the Wolf said, stunned that Kaletha would contemplate such a thing, “and then you stand there in cold blood and tell me you’re going to conjure the spirits of the dead...”
“Of the Bishop of Pardle,” Kaletha corrected him. “It is not the same thing. I will conjure him because, for all his hypocrisy about magic, he was pure in both mind and body. We should have nothing to fear from the spirits of the pure.”
Sun Wolf’s voice was hoarse. “The dead are dead.”
Her lips pursed up like a nursemaid’s at the stubbornness of a stupid child. “No more than what I would expect,” she said, “of a barbarian. Your superstitious dread of the dead, like these ‘demons’ you claim to see...”
“Would you stop calling me a barbarian?” He took a deep breath. “Yes, I’m a barbarian, and yes, I fear the dead, and yes, I fear demons, and with good reason. They’re things you can’t tamper with.”
“Only if your magic is impure,” Kaletha responded evenly. “You do well to fear, Sun Wolf—it shows prudence. But I assure you it has been done before, safely—even routinely. Men like yourself misunderstood it, fearing and hating. They slandered those who had the power to do it. But those who understood what they were doing came to no harm. Tonight, when we make the conjuration, you will see.”
“I’ll see nothing, Lady.” Sun Wolf stepped back, filled with a loathing fear that a lifetime of bloodshed had never brought to him.
“Don’t be silly,” she snapped. Carnelian glints flickered in her eyebrows as they snapped together. “I need all the power I can raise. There must be seven of us.”
“You can find your seventh elsewhere. And if you don’t, better still.”
“Now who’s obstructing whom in finding the killer?”
“I don’t know.” Sun Wolf backed toward the door, fearing, and not even much caring that she clearly thought it was her that he feared. “But if you summon enough power to call the spirits of the dead, the killer may not be what you find.”
Later, when he went up to the library, Sun Wolf wondered what it was about the idea of summoning the dead that filled with such unreasoning horror. Yirth of Mandrigyn had warned him against it—scarcely necessary, since among her spells and incantations there had been no means of doing so. He could see her stern, narrow face again now, with its jade-cold eyes and the disfiguring birthmark like a smutch of thrown filth over her mouth and chin. Low and soft as a rosewood flute, she had said, As for the calling of the dead, they say that no matter how good the purpose of the callers, nothing but evil has ever come of it...
Behind that memory, the images of his childhood swam—the shaman of his village in the bitter north, Many Voices, laying out by firelight the Circle of Bones to summon the voices of the ancestors. Even then, the hair had prickled on the back of his neck, for fear that he might see pupils gleam once more in the sockets of those dead, smoke-stained skulls.
Of course he hadn’t. Many Voices had been a thoroughgoing charlatan, b
ut the best the village had possessed at the time. The little man had shown signs of living to a ruinous old age—so perhaps he was up there still.
At least, Sun Wolf thought, as he entered the first of the several quiet, shadowy rooms above the solar, with storm shutters folded nearly to and black ranks of books sleeping in the dimness, Many Voices had been harmless. He had made his conjurations against the storms that had regularly soaked the village, cast his curses against cows which had continued to chew untroubled cuds in the meadows which lay like deep pockets of velvet among the rocks of the cold moors, guarded closely the secrets of his ignorance, and never promised to do anything of critical importance. Kaletha...
Sun Wolf frowned into the dimness of the room. Kaletha.
Her books had come from somewhere, he thought. If wizards enjoyed such a foul reputation in Wenshar, it would be no surprise that, Altiokis aside, some earlier mage had kept quiet about his or her power. Even now, that mage’s other pupils might be abroad.
To help? he wondered. Or is it one of them whom we’re looking for, casting this magic at us from afar? Or...What?
He remembered the demons in Wenshar, the blue-white gleam of their skeletal light, and the sense of terror, of danger. Danger of what? No one had ever heard of demons physically harming a man, and Milkom and the Bishop had been literally ripped to pieces.
Without any real hope of finding anything, he began to walk along the doorless cabinets of blackened oak, looking at the books within. By the shape of the cabinets he guessed that this room had been the original library and archive of the Fortress. The chamber beyond, with its wide, south-facing windows looking out over the desert, had clearly always been a scriptorium. The books had undoubtedly been mostly ledgers then, paybooks and quartermasters’ reports, stacked on their sides behind locked cabinet doors, along with paper and ink. He could see the holes in the oak cabinet fronts where the doors had been removed and the marks where the height of shelves had been altered, to stand the books upright in the new fashion; he saw also where new shelves had been added to accommodate acquisitions over the years, first here and then in the scriptorium and the other small room to his left. There were both new and old books there—enormous tomes of yellowed parchment, reeking of dust and lanolin, their crackling leaves scattered with illuminated capitals, as if someone had spilled a flower basket over them—and dense, cramped volumes of paper, printed on smudgy new presses like the ones they had in the universities of Kwest Mralwe and the Gwarl Peninsula.
He took one of the old books off the shelf and opened its worn and dirty red leather covers. It was a treatise upon the divine interrelationships between the Three Gods, at unnecessary length, in the queer, intricately inflected dialect of the realms of the eastern steppes beyond the Tchard Mountains. Further along he found a romance in the florid old style of the Megantic Bight. Sun Wolf could read most permutations of the old language of Gwenth, though he could write only the choppy book hand of the north and the runes of his own childhood tongue. He replaced the romance, after running a quick, critical eye over its pages:
So evil was the countenance of the creature that Wintessa did faint, and Grovand held her in his arms and, despite the danger of the monster leaping at them, was lost in the beauty of her curls that lay like a river of spun gold upon his breast, and her lips pale as sea shells in the shining moon of her face...
I’d have dropped the silly bint, spun-gold curls and all, Sun Wolf thought dourly, moving on. He tried to picture Starhawk fainting in his arms at the sight of a monster leaping at them, no matter how evil its countenance. She’d probably have grabbed a broom handle and tripped the thing while he, Sun Wolf, was still unsheathing his sword.
He picked up a small, black-bound book from a table and found it in a tongue unknown to him—even the letters like nothing of the alphabet of Gwenth.
“That’s in the shirdane.”
Turning sharply, he saw Jeryn leaning in the doorway of the smaller room to his left. He tried to remember when he’d seen the boy last—a glimpse of him, slouched in his chair at the High Table at breakfast that morning, when Sun Wolf had broken the news of the Bishop’s and Milkom’s deaths.
“The shirdar were never in the Empire, so they never read and wrote the way everyone else does. People talk about them as if they were barbarians, but they’re not, you know.” The boy hesitated in the doorway, a fat book tucked under one scrawny arm, as if unsure of his welcome.
Sun Wolf folded his book shut. “I know,” he said. He looked around him at the dark ranks of silent knowledge. “These seem to be from all corners of the world.”
Jeryn nodded, his dark eyes looking wide in his pinched, thin face above its formal little ruff. “I didn’t know you could read, Chief.”
“Well, people talk about me as if I was a barbarian, too.”
The boy grinned, a little embarrassed, and ducked his head.
Sun Wolf leaned back against a corner of the shelves, turning the volume over in his big, scarred hands. “How well do you know the books in this place?”
Jeryn shrugged. “Pretty well.” Finding his ease again, he came in and took a tall-legged, spindly stool from a writing desk to climb up and unerringly replace the tome he carried on a high shelf. “I can read most of them, but some of them are hard—the writing’s little, and they talk about things I don’t understand. But this one’s one of the good ones,” he added, holding up the volume before he slid it back into place. “It’s about rocks and jewels and smelting gold. Did you know that, instead of breaking up the silver rock with hammers, they could probably make a machine to do it, and run it off a mule-treadmill?”
“And to think they want to waste your brains turning you into a dumb warrior.” The Wolf sighed. “Is there any other place in the Fortress where somebody could hide books?”
The boy thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know. In their rooms, maybe. How many books?”
Sun Wolf glanced at the shelf near him. The smallest volumes would have hidden under his hand, the bigger ones were longer than his forearm. He had taken a quick glance around Kaletha’s cell-like room—it had been bare as a nun’s. “I don’t know.”
“I bet we could find out.” Jeryn climbed down from the stool again and pulled ineffectually at his black hose where they twisted around his skinny calves. Sun Wolf estimated it was the time when the boy should have been at afternoon sword practice, but didn’t say so. He was no longer a teacher, so it wasn’t his business. Besides, from what he’d seen of Nanciormis’ teaching, he guessed the boy was better off as he was. Having no talent for dealing with children, the Wolf simply treated Jeryn as he would have treated another man—in this case a man who had knowledge of the libraries of the Fortress.
“They have a record of the books here.” The boy led him into the small chamber from which he’d come—like the original library, dim, close, and smelling of paper, ink, and the dust of storms, which had been left to accumulate on the thick granite of the window sills around the joints of the shutters. “They write everything down. They have to,” he added, pulling the fat ledger from the shelf and glancing back at Sun Wolf. “If you don’t write everything down, you’ll never know if it disappears.”
Sun Wolf grinned. “You should try keeping track of a troop of mercenaries during the winter, if you want practice writing things down so they don’t disappear.” He set his book on the corner of the table as Jeryn opened the ledger, and leaned over the boy’s shoulder to look. “We want books of magic—books of power. I don’t know where they came from, how many of them there were, or when they came in, but it was at least a couple of years ago, probably more. But they came in from somewhere, and I think Kaletha got her hands on them and stashed them someplace.”
“The empty quarter of the Palace?” Jeryn suggested promptly, keeping his place in the long, cramped columns of titles with one delicate forefinger as he glanced up.
“I would have thought so,” the Wolf said, after a moment’s con
sideration. “But most of those buildings are pretty unprotected. The ones with the roofs off are decaying badly already. And people go there sometimes, looking for lost chickens or a quiet place to fornicate...” Oh, well, he thought a half second later, as the dark eyes flicked up to him and then away, suddenly a boy’s again and startled to hear a grownup just come out and say it. “I don’t think she’d risk it.”
“There are cellars under the empty quarter, you know,” Jeryn said after a moment. “Cut down into the rock, some of them. They used to store grain and things down there during the season of storms, back when this was the Fortress and they were under siege all the time. Most of ’em are real dirty,” he added fastidiously, and went back to perusing the cramped columns of book hand before them.
“Black Book of Wenshar?” Sun Wolf squinted down at the unfamiliar handwriting. “Sounds promising.”
“They only call it that because it’s got a black cover,” Jeryn supplied. “It’s a big book with the family trees of the Ancient House of Wenshar, one of the books Mother brought with her in her dowry. It says here, ‘Writ in the shirdane.’”
“Well, that won’t do us much good.”
“Oh, I can read the shirdane,” said Jeryn. “Kaletha taught me, back before she became a wizard and started teaching magic. Later some of the scribes helped me. That book there...” He pointed to the little black-bound volume Sun Wolf had set down, ruinously old with its crumbling pages in slanting, flowing characters, their ink faded almost to nothing, “It starts out...” He opened it, studied the last page for a moment, then explained, “The shirdar do their books wrong way ’round. This says, A Treatise on the Use of Cactus and...and...” He struggled with the word, then said, “I don’t know this one. Cactus and something, anyway, in Healing.”
The Witches of Wenshar Page 16