by Sean Wallace
He visited every bookstore in the district, and some outside of it, and his eyes ached abominably by the end. It was the same story at all of them. But he knew where he had to go next.
* * *
Getting into the South Archive meant hiring a thief-errant, whose name was Izeut. Izeut had blinded Seran for the journey, and it was only now, inside one of the reading rooms, that Seran recovered his vision. He suspected he was happier not knowing how they had gotten in. His stomach still felt as though he’d tied it up in knots.
Seran had had no idea what the Archive would look like inside. He had especially not expected the room they had landed in to be welcoming, the kind of place where you could curl up and read a few novels while sipping citron tea. There were couches with pillows, and padded chairs, and the paintings on the walls showed lizards at play.
“All right,” Izeut said. His voice was disapproving, but Seran had almost beggared himself paying him, so the disapproval was very faint. “What now?”
“All the books look like they’re in place here,” Seran said. “I want to make sure there’s nothing obviously missing.”
“That will take a while,” Izeut said. “We’d better get started.”
Not all the rooms were welcoming. Seran’s least favorite was the one from which sickles hung from the ceiling, their tips gleaming viscously. But all the bookcases were full.
Seran still wasn’t satisfied. “I want to look inside a few of the books,” he said.
Izeut shot him a startled glance. “The city’s traditions—”
“The city’s traditions are already dying,” Seran said.
“The occupation is temporary,” Izeut said stoutly. “We just have to do more to drive out the warlord’s people.”
Izeut had no idea. “Humor me,” Seran said. “Haven’t you always wanted to see what’s in those books?” Maybe an appeal to curiosity would work better.
Whether it did or not, Izeut stood silently while Seran pulled one of the books off the shelves. He hesitated, then broke the book’s seal and felt the warden’s black kiss, cold, unsentimental, against his lips. I’m already cursed, he thought, and opened the covers.
The first few pages were fine, written in a neat hand with graceful swells. Seran flipped to the middle, however, and his breath caught. The pages were empty except for a faint dust-trace of distorted graphemes and pixellated stick figures.
He could have opened up more books to check, but he had already found his answer.
“Stop,” Izeut said sharply. “Let me reshelve that.” He took the book from Seran, very tenderly.
“It’s no use,” Seran said.
Izeut didn’t turn around; he was slipping the book into its place. “We can go now.”
It was too late. The general’s soldiers had caught them.
Seran was separated from Izeut and brought before Jaian of the Burning Orb. She regarded him with cool exasperation. “There were two of you,” she said, “but something tells me that you’re the one I should worry about.”
She kicked the table next to her. All of Seran’s surgical tools, which the soldiers had confiscated and laid out in disarray, clattered.
“I have nothing to say to you,” Seran said through his teeth.
“Really,” Jaian said. “You fancy yourself a patriot, then. We may disagree about the petty legal question of who the owner of this city is, but if you are any kind of healer, you ought to agree with me that these constant spasms of destruction are good for no one.”
“You could always leave,” Seran said.
She picked up one of his sets of tweezers and clicked it once, twice. “You will not understand this,” she said, “and it is even right that you will not understand this, given your profession, but I will try to explain. This is what I do. Worlds are made to be pressed for their wine, cities taste of fruit when I bite them open. I cannot let go of my conquests.
“Do you think I am ignorant of the source of the apparitions that leave their smoking shadows in the streets? You’re running out of writings. All I need do is wait, and this city will yield in truth.”
“You’re right,” Seran said. “I don’t understand you at all.”
Jaian’s smile was like knives and nightfall. “I’ll write this in a language you do understand, then. You know something about how this is happening, who’s doing it. Take me to them or I will start killing your people in earnest. Every hour you make me wait, I’ll drop a bomb, or send out tanks, or soldiers with guns. If I get bored I’ll get creative.”
Seran closed his eyes and made himself breathe evenly. He didn’t think she was bluffing. Besides, there was a chance – if only a small chance – that the warden could come up with a defense against the general; that the effigies would come to her aid once the general came within reach.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll take you where it began.”
Seran was bound with chains-of-suffocation, and he thought it likely that there were more soldiers watching him than he could actually spot. He led Jaian to the secret library, to the maze-of-mists.
“A warden,” Jaian said. “I knew some of them had escaped.”
They went to the staircase and descended slowly, slowly. The candle-sprites flinched from the general. Their light was almost violet, like dusk.
All the way down the stairs they heard the snick-snick of many scissors.
The downstairs room, when they reached it, was filled with paper. Curling scraps and triangles crowded the floor. It was impossible to step anywhere without crushing some. The crumpling sound put Seran in mind of burnt skin.
Come to that, there was something of that smell in the room, too.
All through the room there were scissors snapping at empty space, wielded by no hand but the hands of the air, shining and precise.
At the far end of the room, behind a table piled high with more paper scraps, was the warden. She was standing sideways, leaning heavily against the table, and her face was averted so that her shoulder-length hair fell around it.
“It’s over,” Jaian called out. “You may as well surrender. It’s folly to let you live, but your death doesn’t have to be one of the ugly ones.”
Seran frowned. Something was wrong with the way the warden was moving, more like paper fluttering than someone breathing. But he kept silent. A trap, he thought, let it be a trap.
Jaian’s soldiers attempted to clear a path through the scissors, but the scissors flew to either side and away, avoiding the force-bolts with uncanny grace.
Jaian’s long strides took her across the room and around the table. She tipped the warden’s face up, forced eye contact. If there had been eyes.
Seran started, felt the chains-of-suffocation clot the breath in his throat. At first he took the marks all over the warden’s skin to be tattoos. Then he saw that they were holes cut into the skin, charred black at the edges. Some of the marks were logo-graphs, and alphabet letters, and punctuation stretched wide.
“Stars and fire ascending,” Jaian breathed, “what is this?”
Too late she backed away. There was a rustling sound, and the warden unfurled, splitting down the middle with a jagged tearing sound, a great irregular sheet punched full of word-holes, completely hollowed out. Her robe crumpled into fine sediment, revealing the cutout in her back in the shape of a serpent-headed youth.
Jaian made a terrible crackling sound, like paper being ripped out of a book. She took one step back toward Seran, then halted. Holes were forming on her face and hands. The scissors closed in on her.
I did this, Seran thought, I should have refused the warden. She must have learned how to call forth effigies on her own, ripping them out of Imulai Mokarengen’s histories and sagas and legends, animating the scissors to make her work easier. But when the scissors ran out of paper, they turned on the warden. Having denuded the city of its past, of its weight of stories, they began cutting effigies from the living stories of its people. And now Jaian was one of those stories, too.
>
Seran left Jaian and her soldiers to their fate and began up the stairs. But some of the scissors had already escaped, and they had left the doors to the library open. They were undoubtedly in the streets right now. Soon the city would be full of holes, and people made of paper slowly burning up, and the hungry sound of scissors.
WEARAWAY AND FLAMBEAU
Matthew Hughes
Raffalon clung to the wall of Hurdevant’s keep, the adhesive on his palms holding him tight to the gray stone. Above him, no more than arm’s reach above his head, the hinges of the small window creaked again. A moment ago, someone had opened the left-side panel; now it was the right’s turn. Logically, the next event would be the poking out of a head. Raffalon would be discovered, if he hadn’t been already, and the consequences would not redound to his credit.
Raffalon’s profession was the transfer of valuables to his possession without consultation or consent of their owners. He’d been practicing it since boyhood and had become quite good at wall-scaling, lock-tickling, and ward-hoodwinking. He was particularly versed in the art of the rapid exit when circumstances turned adverse.
In order to avoid such exits, he preferred to choose his own targets; but he was not averse to hiring out his hard-won skills to others, so long as they met his fee. And provided that the proposed operation’s level of risk fitted the thief’s definition of acceptable.
Neither condition applied to the present situation, however. The risk of at least one thing going wrong, he had calculated when informed of the nature of the mission, approached near certainty. Worse, he was about to incur the enmity of Hurdevant, whose reputation for stringency had led his fellow magicians to dub him Ironhand – and he wasn’t being paid so much as a bent sequint.
The griptight on Raffalon’s left hand was losing its strength. He pulled it free and spat into the palm, reactivating its adhesive power, then pressed it again to the wall. In a few moments, he would need to do the same to the right hand, unless by then he was already being consumed by a blast of flame from the wizard’s wand, or carried off by a summoned demon to its smoky lair, there to be used for unspeakable purposes.
A thief’s credo is to avoid capture and punishment by any means necessary. But Raffalon had added a corollary to that code: when all is lost, at least go out with a bold face. He now set his features into as intrepid an arrangement as he could manage, and turned his gaze upward. He found himself staring, as expected yet hoped against, into the uncompromising visage of Hurdevant the Stringent.
“And there you are,” said the wizard, as if continuing a conversation.
“Indeed,” said Raffalon, seeing nothing to be gained by dissembling.
“Come up the rest of the way and through the window. I have disabled the spell that guards it.”
Raffalon spat on a hand again and used the griptight to climb another arm’s length. “Was it, by any chance, Bullimar’s Differentiating Portal?”
Hurdevant snorted. “For a small window set high in a tower? Of course not. It was Pilasquo’s Pinch.”
“I don’t know that one,” the thief said, working his way up to the window sill.
The magician explained that, once Raffalon was halfway through the window, its frame would have closed upon his middle, squeezing it so tightly that he would have resembled one of those wasps whose thorax and abdomen are connected by a narrow tube of chitin.
“It won’t do that now?” the thief said, one leg over the sill.
“No, now get in here.”
Raffalon dropped to the stone floor of the tower. He scowled when he saw that the small, circular room was empty – another element of the operation that the one who had sent him into peril had got wrong.
“What made you think I would use the Bullimar?” Hurdevant was saying. “It’s for doors. Especially for hidden trapdoors.”
The thief was too disgusted to answer. A moment later, he realized that Hurdevant was not accustomed to wait for responses to his queries. The soles of his feet became convinced that they were in contact with live coals. Hopping about, though instinctive, brought no relief. “Glabro!” he managed to shout.
The magician made a subtle gesture and the burning stopped. “Glabro Malaprop?” he said, and his grim lips almost achieved a smile. “You’re another one of his?”
“Not by choice, I assure you!” Raffalon scuffed the soles of his climbing boots against the stone floor in an attempt to cool his feet. The action had no great effect, but the burning sensation was gradually subsiding of its own accord.
“But Glabro sent you? And told you that the window would be warded by the Bullimar?” The wizard snorted again; Raffalon was beginning to think it was a characteristic action. “Feckless scantbrain,” Hurdevant concluded. “What made you give credence to . . .”
But then a suspicion further clouded the grim face. He sketched an invisible figure in the air and Raffalon saw an arrangement of lines of green light, some straight, some curved, come to hover before the magician’s eyes. After a moment, the thief realized that he was seeing a schematic of Hurdevant’s estate. His captor studied it a while then wiped it away with a wave of one long-nailed finger.
“It occurred to me,” the wizard said, “that you might be a diversion. But, no, Glabro does not rise even to that lowly rung on the ladder of cunning.” He pulled his nose then stroked its end, apparently as an aid to thought. “I presume you were after the Sphere of Diverse Utility again?”
“I have never been here before,” Raffalon.
“I am lumping you in,” said the wizard, “with all the other thimblewits and donnydunces Glabro has sent since I won the Sphere from him – quite legitimately – in a contest of skill.”
“He seemed to think you had bested him unfairly,” Raffalon said.
“Well, that’s precisely the problem with the poor dolt: he only seems to think.” The wizard clapped his hands to signal that a new chapter was about to open. “Now, what to do with you?”
“May I suggest—”
“You may not.” Hurdevant spoke a syllable and moved three fingers in an unusual way. Raffalon’s power of speech deserted him. “I sent back the last one inverted, wearing his innards on his outside. It doesn’t seem to have made a useful impression.”
The captive waggled eyebrows and pointed fingers at his mouth to signal that he had a suggestion. The wizard gave him back control of his tongue and Raffalon said, “Perhaps I could bear him a verbal message? A stern lecture and an unambiguous warning not to test your patience in future?”
“I have,” said the wizard, “no patience. If I did have any, I would not waste a scrap of it on Glabro.” He thought again then raised both eyebrows and a finger. “Do you know, you present me with an opportunity. I’ve been experimenting with a synthesis of Ixtlix’s Sprightly Wearaway and Chunt’s Descending Flambeau.”
“I’m not familiar with either,” said Raffalon. “I would be delighted to hear about them. Especially from one with such a fine speaking voice.”
Hurdevant returned the thief a dry look. “You seek to delay the moment. Also you offer flattery, to which, unfortunately for you, I am immune.” He gathered up the skirts of his robe and said, “I will need to refresh my memory. We will go to my library.”
He crooked a finger and said an obscure syllable. Immediately, Raffalon’s feet followed Hurdevant out of the door. The two men descended a spiral of stone steps to another level of the manse, then wove their way through a maze of corridors until they came to a strongly barred door carved to resemble the face of a fierce creature with inset ivory fangs. It was only when the wizard set his hand to the portal’s latch, causing the thing’s nose to twitch, that Raffalon realized this was no carving; it was an actual boldruk, enslaved and dragged up from the second plane, compressed into the dimensions of a door. Had the thief approached it without Hurdevant’s protection, the fiend would even now be digesting his bones.
Beyond the boldruk was a high-ceilinged room, the walls lined with shelved boo
ks of many shapes and sizes, bound in a plethora of materials, from cloth of gold to dragonhide. Some of their spines were lettered in scripts Raffalon could identify only as ancient.
Hurdevant crossed to a high shelf and took down a small libram bound in yellow chamois, then stooped to lift a large folio of parchment sheets clapped between wooden boards. He carried them to a lamplit table and opened both, flicking through pages until he found what he sought. As he set himself to memorizing the words and gestures of power, the lamp dimmed and shadows encroached. Raffalon smelled a sharp tang of ozone and saw the wizard’s hair lift slightly from his head while his eyes changed color several times.
“There,” said Hurdevant, closing the books. He looked at the captive and rubbed his palms together. “Once both spells are operating, I’ll have to send you to Glabro. That means a third cantrip, but I’ll just use a simple sending spell. The fluxions should adjust themselves.”
The wizard turned to a mirror hanging between two bookcases and touched its frame here, there and a third place. “Now to find out where Glabro is.” A moment later, he said, “Ahah, there he is, in his pitiful excuse for a garden.”
“What will happen to me?” said Raffalon.
“Ixtlix’s Sprightly Wearaway causes you to dance a comical jig until you expire of exhaustion. Chunt’s Descending Flambeau consumes you in a brightly burning flame, from the top down. Together, they should make quite a spectacle. And the sight of two spells in combination must remind Glabro that I will always be one too many for the likes of him.”
He ordered Raffalon to step away from an armchair upholstered in pale leather – “It was my father’s,” he said. “Literally. I don’t want him scorched.” – and mused aloud that the thief had done him a favor by appearing just when he was ready to test the conjoined spell. He had been planning to use a reanimated corpse, but said that their lack of ardor vita meant they never burned as hotly as did a living man.
And, as a bonus, the circumstances allowed the wizard to put an elbow in Glabro’s eye – an activity in which he delighted.