Magic in Ithkar 3

by Andre Norton

  “You leave him alone!” yelled one of the men in the shadows. He had a braided leather whip in his hand.

  “What are you doing here?” the girl demanded, turning to Melger.

  “This horse is ours, we can do what we want with him,” the saddler told her. Her inborn air of authority made him feel defensive. “We bought the mare who bore him for good money, and we’ve spent a lot more on raising him. He’s the fastest horse in the . . .” Too late he caught himself and bit his tongue.

  “Shut your mouth, you bragging fool!” hissed one of the other men. “Why did you let her come in here and see him? It could ruin everything if she tells.”

  “I didn’t let her do anything,” Melger protested. “She shoved her way in; she’s a trespasser.”

  “A trespasser who will go straight to the stewards!” the other man said.

  And then the girl understood. These men had bred and raised and were concealing this horse so they could enter him in the race that afternoon at the last moment, as an unknown whom no one had even seen. He would leave the post at very long odds and make a fortune for the few who knew enough to bet on him . . . if he was as good as they thought.

  The stallion and the girl looked at each other. I am better than you can possibly imagine, he said to her silently, fighting the drug.

  He always fought. There were too many of them, and they had too many ways of controlling him. But he always fought.

  Someday he would beat them, beat the predators, the eaters of flesh, the cruel men with their cruel whips and their smoke that fogged his mind.

  “We’ll have to keep this girl here until after the Silverlord races,” said the man who had been talking to Melger.

  At the mention of his name, the stallion raised his head higher and shook his heavy mane.

  “How can he run at all when you have drugged him?” the girl could not resist asking.

  “We have done a lot of experimenting on this animal,” Melger told her. He did not want this highborn woman to take him for a fool. “The censers are almost empty now, and the effects will pass off entirely by the time we take the Silverlord to the paddock to be saddled. We’ve had numerous rehearsals for this; we’ve brought the horse here many times to be certain we could keep him concealed and controlled. We’ve planned for everything.”

  “Except me,” the girl said.

  With instincts more sensitive than a human’s, the Silverlord felt menace gather around her as she spoke. The horse flattened his ears against his head and pawed the ground.

  “Watch out,” said one of his captors, suddenly grinning with inspiration. “You are indeed a trespasser, and you could get hurt here. This horse is savage.” He came forward, intending to grab the girl and throw her under the stallion. They all knew the horse would trample her; they had fought with the creature too many times to doubt its strength and anger.

  The girl glared at them all in cold rage. “I am An Serra, daughter of Lord Gaorlain,” she announced. “If any harm of any kind should come to me, my father would spare no effort to find and punish those responsible.”

  The men in the shed froze, exchanging nervous glances. The name and reputation of Lord Gaorlain were indeed well known, especially among people like themselves. He was judge of the court to which condemned criminals applied in their extremity, and from which no mercy had been granted in twenty years.

  The Silverlord sensed a change in the atmosphere. The menace hovering over An Serra lifted slightly. But this was still an unhealthy place for both horse and girl, and the stallion hated it. He had always hated it, since they’d first brought him here hobbled and blindfolded and the doctors had come to inject him with strange compounds to enhance his strength. Experiments. Pain and fear and change, in the filthy shed behind the leathershop.

  And after the doctors there were sorcerers who chanted incantations and poured blood and painted signs on the earth. And then other medicine men and different practitioners of magical sciences and others and others . . . altering the cells of body and spirit, prattling of scientific advancement while they tampered with the destiny of a living creature.

  But their kinds of magic were unstable at best. Its immediate effects might be apparent, but its long-term potentials were unpredictable. The men who worked over the horse did not care; it was only the near future that interested them.

  The superhorse they had sought to create was complete now. He had become whatever they had made him in their greed and ignorance. The chemicals were part of his flesh, and the magic was part of his soul—no known test would reveal either.

  But the Silverlord knew.

  One of the men from the shadows was moving again, quietly circling around the pen toward An Serra. He liked her looks. He ran his tongue over his chapped lips. A soft, silken woman like that might be worth risking the wrath of Lord Gaorlain—and if they were careful, no one would ever know what happened to her. Men who could conceal a huge horse could conceal many other things.

  But as Melger had said, the effects of the drug were wearing off. The stallion was no longer immobilized by it. He flexed his muscles and found he had control of them all. His hearing was acute. His vision was clearing—he saw the man sneaking up on An Serra.

  I will protect you, the Silverlord said, unheard, to the girl.

  The man leaped forward and grabbed her, spreading one callused hand across her face to stifle breath and scream together. And the Silverlord rose onto his hind legs, towering over them, sounding his own scream of defiance. One flinty hoof struck out and sliced the top of the skull from the man holding An Serra almost as cleanly as if a surgeon’s scalpel had done it.

  Blood poured. Yes! thought the Silverlord, remembering.

  He reared even higher, focusing his untested strength. Whatever he had become was gathered and ready. He loomed like a white giant over the men who crouched in fear and the girl who had been thrown to the floor, stunned and startled. The stallion dropped back to earth and nudged her gently, urging her to her feet. He looked past her, and the wall on the far side of the shed . . . shimmered. For a moment he could actually see through it before it solidified again, but now he knew the power he possessed. He concentrated harder, and the wall was nothing more than mist. Beyond lay the roadway and a weed-choked alley running between the nearest booths.

  The air reeked with the coppery smell of blood. The horse hated it. His ancestors had been gentle creatures who did not kill, who did not torture and abuse. Gentle . . . like the girl.

  The Silverlord commanded An Serra to grab his mane and swing onto his back, but she did not seem to hear him. Melger the master saddler was squatting on the floor, cradling his head with his arms in case the stallion tried to shatter his skull, too. The other conspirators were scrabbling like ants in a disturbed nest, running over each other in their desperation to escape the enraged animal.

  The girl looked up, staring at the horse.

  One smash of his forelegs was sufficient to destroy the flimsy pen that held him, and then the Silverlord was bending over An Serra, seizing her shoulder with his teeth. He tried not to break the skin, but she gasped and slapped at his muzzle. He shifted his grip slightly without letting go, then pulled her after him as he plunged forward, through the vanished wall to freedom.

  He entered the unknown environment like a newborn bursting into an unfamiliar world. For the first time in his life the choices were his to make, and his brain stalled. Where to go? What to do? And the girl was squirming in his grasp, badly shocked by the sensation of having been pulled through what had been a solid wall.

  She had no way of knowing about atoms of matter that could dissolve, change shape. . . .

  Some of the experiments done on the Silverlord had been magic in its truest sense, the manipulation of matter. Like pebbles thrown into a pond, they set up ripples; they taught the horse’s body techniques no horse had learned before. In his freedom, in his brief disorientation, he too experimented.

  Hard-packed earth could be made y
ielding, enabling him to gallop more effortlessly. The clamp of his teeth on the girl’s flesh could be softened without losing its holding ability, so they fastened on bone yet did not tear flesh. Many things were possible once the matrix of the mind and the cells it controlled were altered.

  The stallion galloped away, away from the brutal men who had thought to dominate and use him.

  He was faster than fast; he could diminish the resistance the air offered and slip through it so his passing was no more than a blur to human vision. The girl felt a terrible burning throughout her body as the friction of their flight overheated her flesh. She thought she was dying and tried to murmur a prayer.

  Then the hoofbeats slowed, and stopped. They were standing beneath a tree on a high hill, looking down at the patchwork colors of the fairgrounds far below. The only sound was the wind in the leaves and the girl’s gasping for breath.

  The stallion released her, and she sagged against his shoulder. We are safe now, he told her. For now, though they will surely look for me when they get over their fright. But all of this is new to me. You must help me decide what to do next.

  She rubbed her shoulder, astonished to find it was not bleeding. Looking up at the massive animal beside her, she saw that his eye was brown and benevolent, free at last of the drugs.

  “What am I going to do with you?” she asked in wonder. “There is no such horse in the world. . . . Have I stolen you? Will Melger dare to send someone after us and reveal their own activities? And if they don’t . . .”

  She thought of her father’s breeding farm and the mares who could be mated to this horse. The foals he could sire! The idea dazzled her.

  The stallion, hearing her thoughts, nickered and rubbed his nose against her.

  But An Serra had been raised by a judge to whom the law was a religion and any tampering with it anathema. She could not take something that did not belong to her.

  I do not belong to anyone but myself, the Silverlord told her. I can go with you if I choose.

  Did she understand? Was she hearing him at all? He spoke with his mind as horses had always spoken to one another, because intuition told him this gentle girl should be responsive to subvocal communication. Her empathy with the animal kingdom radiated from her like light. Yet she was not responding. Was something wrong with her, with the way she was made?

  He studied her intently. Those little round, pink ears—how well could they hear? They were not shaped to detect faint sounds from a far distance. And her nostrils were too tiny to take in much air, so how far could she run? He sent a probing thought directly into the girl’s body and discovered the stiffnesses and limitations of an upright spine. And only two legs! She had hands, of course, those wonderful multifingered hands with their opposed thumbs—but were hands a sufficient asset to outweigh the liabilities of her human form?

  An Serra had a beautiful mind, however; he noticed that much. It lay in her skull like eiderdown, shot through with colors and music and tenderness and the possibility of passion.

  As he examined her, An Serra was shaking off the effects of her shock and trying to decide what to do next. Even if he was not hers, she could not make herself surrender the stallion to men who wanted to exploit him. She would have to take him to her father’s estate and work out the legalities of ownership later.

  The priests of Ithkar may have something to say about that, the Silverlord interjected.

  “What?” An Serra glanced around, thinking someone had spoken. But she was alone except for the horse. Yet the seed lay in her mind. The priests—did they and their avaricious magic have anything to do with this? The stallion was surely a creation exceeding natural law; in him, science and something beyond science had melded to produce a demigod. If his existence and capabilities were made public, the priests of Ithkar would doubtless claim him for their rituals. The authority of Lord Gaorlain might be sufficient for dealing with Melger and his pack, but the strength of the priestly hierarchy existed outside the courts. She might save the Silverlord from Melger only to lose him to an uglier fate.

  An Serra sighed. She was young and suddenly faced with a responsibility she did not know how to meet. One step at a time, then. She stooped and began plucking the long grass that crowned the hill. She wove it into a halter, a flimsy grass halter to control a horse who could disembody solid walls.

  When she held the halter toward the Silverlord, she could have sworn she heard a sound of laughter in her own mind. But he lowered his great head and let her put the halter on him. When she tugged at it he followed willingly, making no effort to break away.

  His docility surprised her, reminding her of something . . . of her own father, and the way she surrendered to his will, staying with him when she could have married some likely lad and been away in a home of her own, leading her own life. That was what she wanted most in the world, yet she had always surrendered to the will of Lord Gaorlain, subduing her own proud spirit and obeying him as the stallion now obeyed her.

  An Serra shook her head to clear it of the thoughts that buzzed around it like flies. “I will take you home now,” she said aloud to the horse. She took a deep breath and caught hold of his mane. With one lithe leap she swung onto his back. She expected him to rear and buck, but the stallion only trembled slightly beneath her, then stood still. When her legs squeezed him he moved forward willingly.

  Her legs were warm, and their embrace was pleasant to him. Uncertain what to do himself, he gladly allowed her to guide him, though with every step he took he was aware of his strength and his power. The obedience he gave her was a gift, easily taken back if necessary.

  They rode in harmony for a long time, until the steel-and-crystal towers of Gaorlain’s fortress caught the sun on the horizon and hurled it toward them in blinding spears. On the back of the Silverlord, An Serra had reached her home sooner than she expected. The valley of the Bear River spread before her, lush and green, and her heart warmed at the familiar sight of brood mares grazing in its pastures.

  The stallion saw the mares, too, and caught their scent on the wind. He lifted his proud head and whinnied to them.

  In his office in the tallest tower of his castle, Lord Gaorlain heard that commanding whinny.

  For the first time in years, the judge had been unable to go with his racing stable to the fair due to the demands of his profession. He was frustrated and angry at being denied the one pleasure he allowed himself, aside from the company of his daughter. His daughter, his only daughter. His, his.

  Slamming shut the law book on his desk, Gaorlain hurried to the window and saw An Serra riding down the road toward the castle astride a huge white horse, a horse not from his stable. She rode alone and unaccompanied upon an animal that was almost free except for a silly grass halter on his head.

  Lord Gaorlain whirled and ran down the stairs to meet his daughter.

  The judge was a square-bodied man with a broad forehead and permanent frown lines carved deeply into his skin. His normal expression was a scowl; his normal gesture was a clenched fist. What he held, he held tightly. He was not happy to see his daughter return unaccompanied. It was a cruel world, as he, a cruel man, knew very well. Anything might have happened to her.

  He hurried toward her with a sour grimace instead of a welcoming smile, but An Serra knew her father too well to expect a smile. She saw him as a gloomy man made gloomier by his exposure to the meanest side of the law, and her love was mingled with pity. Or perhaps it was pity—she had never tried to sort it out before.

  Now she saw him for the first time as the Silverlord was also seeing him: an irritable, grasping man.

  The stallion shied backward.

  Lord Gaorlain’s scowl deepened. “Someone take this animal and put it into the stable,” he barked to the nearest servant. “Come inside and explain all this to me,” he continued to An Serra in a tone hardly gentler. But there was a spark in his eyes that was only there in her presence. He, who would never show it, was glad to have her home.

 
; Over dinner that night, An Serra told her father of her discovery of the Silverlord. Gaorlain heard the tale with mounting anger. “Horse racing is one of the few things in the world that has been kept relatively clear of a criminal element,” he said, “but now that too is being corrupted. Is nothing pure to be left in this world?” He reached across the table and put one heavy hand on his daughter’s shoulder. His pure daughter, his only daughter.

  She could feel the anger in him. She had little appetite in spite of her adventure. She was nibbling at a salad, but she just pushed her poached fish around on her plate. The main course did not appeal to her. She could not eat it without thinking of the living creature whose life had been sacrificed to make her meal, so she contented herself with vegetables and a goblet of wine.

  Lord Gaorlain fussed and fumed over his own meal, growing angrier every time he thought of the abnormal beast that had been created to perpetrate a fraud in his chosen sport.

  Abnormal.

  He did not want the animal kept in his stables. But neither did he want it to go back to those who had bred it. “The . creature should be destroyed,” he told An Serra.

  The girl jumped to her feet. There were tears in her eyes. “You mustn’t do that, Father! Oh, he is splendid! It isn’t his fault, he is only what they made him. But he is so beautiful and so good . . . you don’t know. He could have hurt me, but he didn’t; he saved me from them. I think they would have killed me otherwise, to protect themselves. Now I must protect him, don’t you understand?”

  Gaorlain did understand, though he did not like it. “We will stable and feed him, then,” he decided. “After all, the animal will be evidence against Melger and the others when they are caught and brought to trial for attempted fraud, as I mean them to be. I would see to it myself, but I have to go away for a few weeks on business. When I return, I promise you the matter of that white horse will be my first concern, An Serra. Justice will be served on those men, and . . . and then we will determine what disposition to make of their horse.”