Magic in Ithkar 3

by Andre Norton

  He was not totally convinced he wanted the stallion to live. He had seen the way his daughter’s hand caressed the horse before it was led away. He did not like to think of An Serra being fond of such an animal, such a perverted animal.

  The meal concluded, the judge offered his arm to his daughter when she rose from her chair, but for the first time in her life she shied away from his touch. An Serra noticed, with distaste, that her father’s breath smelled of the flesh he had eaten, and she found it disagreeable, as his heavy clutching hand was disagreeable.

  Yet he was her father, and she must love him.

  In the sleepless night she went to her chamber window and stared out toward the stable, where the Silverlord was.

  While Lord Gaorlain was away, An Serra spent all of her free time in the stable and the paddocks with the huge white horse. She was so preoccupied she did not notice that the servants who had accompanied her to the Fair at Ithkar avoided her now and moved with the careful gait of men who had been badly whipped.

  Gaorlain’s towering anger upon learning that his daughter had slipped away from them and put herself in danger had resulted in a savage whipping for every one of her servants. Before he left, he had assigned new servants to her, giving them strict orders not to let her leave the grounds of the estate.

  “The people who owned that stallion may come looking for her,” Gaorlain had told his guards. “Kill them on sight. We will have to keep a close watch on her from now on. I do not ever want her going off on her own again like that, it is too dangerous.”

  In his absence, Gaorlain’s net closed around his daughter. But she did not notice; she was too entranced by the beautiful horse who was her constant companion now.

  She spent days sitting on his paddock fence, dreaming about the colts he would sire. She was determined to breed him to some mares before her father returned. If the colts produced by such a mating were as exceptional as she knew they would be, surely Gaorlain would soften toward the Silverlord and give him a place of honor in the stables.

  As she watched the stallion, so the Silverlord watched her. He came to understand that she was lonely, had always been lonely, raised without a mother in this distant place, dependent upon servants and her father for what little human contact she had. If such a life was unnatural, she did not yet realize it, but she would someday. She would know she was a prisoner as the horse had known himself to be a prisoner.

  Meanwhile, Gaorlain concluded his business faster than he wanted anyone to knew—especially his daughter, who had a gentle nature and would not approve of his plans. When the routine work was out of the way, he devoted himself, with the relentlessness for which he was notorious, to tracking down everyone who had worked on the secret project to produce a superhorse. He listened with opaque eyes and a stony face as doctors babbled of “incalculable benefits to medical knowledge” and “long-term genetic breakthroughs.” They spoke in a language as cryptic as that of the law, and Gaorlain mistrusted them accordingly. Every priesthood had its code to conceal misdeeds. “You are polluters,” he accused, “and you will suffer.”

  After the scientists had trembled and protested and at-tempted their justifications, Gaorlain found the magicians Melger had hired. He was more careful with them, for magic was as close to a state religion as the land possessed, and the line between charlatan and accredited priest was very thin. But the doctors had already explained to Gaorlain the particularly nasty shape changing they had worked on the white horse, and he knew that sorcerers had played their part. All were guilty; they had forever tarnished something that had been precious to him, the sport of horse racing.

  “Execute them,” he ordered. “Execute every one, but see that no word of it reaches my daughter. I want nothing evil to touch her or trouble her heart any further.”

  Melger and his cronies were the first caught and the last executed. Gaorlain allowed them plenty of time in prison, to be tormented by their fear. And only when all were dead did he intend to return to An Serra and decide what to do about the horse itself.

  An Serra had, of course, made her own plans. She led the stallion to the breeding shed and had the finest of her father’s mares brought to him. But the stallion turned his head away and seemed unwilling to approach them.

  “He’s a freak all right,” the stablemaster commented to An Serra. “What kind of stallion ignores good mares?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with him!” she flashed back indignantly.

  She ordered a second assortment of mares brought for the Silverlord, but he seemed indifferent to them as well. When he looked at them, they did not please him. They seemed such limited beings. Neither his altered spirit nor the body that held it responded to the female horses with their dim animal minds. Yet he longed for mates; longed for a herd of his own and colts to race the wind with him.

  An Serra led him in disgrace back to his paddock. She knew the stableboys laughed at him behind their hands. Maybe they laughed at her as well. She was lonely and unmated, as much a freak as the Silverlord.

  “When Gaorlain comes back,” one of the stableboys commented to another within the stallion’s hearing, “he’ll have this beast put down. It’s obviously no good for breeding, and you know he will never race it; that would be unethical.”

  The second stableboy shrugged. “I’m glad I don’t have to make that decision.”

  Make a decision, the Silverlord thought. Yes, I must—her father will be back soon. He keeps her here, and I stay because of her, but this is not a good life for either one of us.

  He felt her loneliness and understood it; it matched his own. Horror swept over him. Perhaps the two of them would always be so, as isolated as the stars through no fault of their. own.

  The next morning, An Serra came to the stallion’s paddock and brought him the customary lump of sugar. “Hello, you,”

  she greeted him tenderly. She reached up and smoothed his forelock between his eyes; she swatted a fly attempting to bite his neck.

  The stallion took the sugar, lipping it delicately off her open palm. She heard the crunching sound of his teeth and wondered again why a being so strong never tried to escape.

  Escape to what? the Silverlord asked, rolling an eye at her.

  “Who spoke?” An Serra whirled and looked around, but they were alone. Yet she could swear she had heard a deep and resonant voice that seemed to hang, not in the air, but inside her own head.

  She looked at the horse and found herself thinking of the forces that had shaped him, creating magnificence from ignoble motives. Could good come from evil, then? And if so, were not the two forces engaged in some symbiotic counterbalance that . . .

  She stopped, biting her lip. An Serra did not think in concepts like symbiotic counterbalance. Where had such an idea come from?

  The Silverlord was watching her.

  I am neither good nor evil, he said. I just am. I have a right to live, to be, to hope for a future. Just as you do.

  An Serra shook her head, thinking she was dreaming.

  You should not have to stay here and conform to a mold designed by someone else, the Silverlord told her.

  I can free you.

  An Serra shrank back from the sudden powerful tug she felt inside her mind.

  We don’t have much time, the Silverlord said. Be brave, just for a heartbeat. I’m sure I know how to do this. . . .

  He planted his hooves and gathered himself as if to jump the paddock fence, but the forces he gathered were not muscular. He recalled, or his cells recalled, how matter had been shaped and twisted, and in some secret compartment of his brain a tiny flood was released like scalding acid, inflaming unused pathways and burning them open.

  “No!” cried An Serra. But once a process is begun it must continue.

  The pain was intense and excruciating. The girl cried out, flinging her hands in the air. Her spine contorted, and she fell from the fence into the paddock. The shadow of the stallion lay across her, cold as death. The animal stood above h
er with all his energies concentrated. You want this, he told her. You are like me—you are different from the cruel people. I know.

  Pain ripped and tore. An Serra shrieked, and the stallion’s eyes fogged with sympathy, but he could not stop; he could not spare her. It will only hurt a little more, he told her, willing it to be true.

  An Serra could feel her spine lengthen. She gasped in disbelief as the relationships of her leg bones and arm bones were altered. The tips of her fingers strained together and bunched, and she could feel the nails harden into one solid mass.

  Like hooves.

  Her neck stretched, the muscles swelling as no woman’s neck muscles had ever swelled before. She tried to call out, but already her throat was different and the sound she made was no longer human.

  I do not want to hurt you, the Silverlord said anxiously, over and over again. But I have a right to live and reproduce my own kind, I have a right to a future. And so do you. So do you.

  An Serra’s strength was growing, heartbeat by heartbeat. The womb within her unfolded and expanded to provide room for new, larger life. Her cells observed what was happening to them and memorized the process, storing it for future use as the Silverlord had done.

  He crowded close to her, encouraging her. The worst of the pain was over now. The pale mare who was not quite a horse felt the almost stallion’s teeth close on her withers in the beginning of courtship. She shuddered; her lips were flecked with foam.

  I will never leave you, the Silverlord promised her.

  When Lord Gaorlain returned he found one paddock splintered and all his servants fled. No one had the courage to remain behind and face him, or to tell him that his daughter had gone with the white horse. Wild with grief, Gaorlain searched the entire area but found no trace other than the two sets of equine hoofprints leading away from his estate.

  When other women began to disappear, farther up the valley of the Bear River, a general alarm was raised. But by then it was too late.

  SunDark in Ithkar

  S. Lee Rouland

  Keri did not much like the fog. She had been on the verge of sleep when she had first felt its eerie presence. Long tentacles of bone-chilling mists had crept into her sleeping place beneath a soothsayer’s wagon. The tendrils twisted around her ankles as if seeking to ensnare her in their watery grip. Their touch sent shivers down her spine. She shook off the dimly glowing tongues easily enough, but her hidey-hole was fast becoming deep with the invading dampness.

  In such a weather one would not choose to be alone. Picking up the small sack that held all of her possessions, Keri set off for the most crowded sector of the fair. As she made her way through the nearly empty lanes, the cold, vaguely sentient mists swirled about her, danced at her feet, and moved on.

  There was, strangely, an odor to the fog; a thing she had not encountered in all of her fourteen years. It was the stench of the great eastern swamp, redolent of putrescence and decay. She stopped to watch in amazement as ropes of mist gathered together and rose in unison to slide into the open mouth of a mask of Thotharn. Keri had heard just enough about the strange god to fear him. She moved on hastily.

  As she left the fortune-tellers’ sector the fog diminished. Thin slivers of mist like tiny vipers darted past her, hurrying to catch up with their comrades. She shuddered. She was glad that there was not more of the stuff. But the long, snakelike appendages that had slithered into the tents, enshrouded sleepers, and invaded their very dreams, had been only a precursor—merely the advance guard of the forces to come.

  As Keri watched, a huge wall of fog rolled in from the east. It was neither as icy cold nor as malodorous as the first wispy tendrils had been. It was a far more ordinary fog, yet she felt uneasy with it. She shrugged off her discomfort as being born of weariness and hunger and pushed her way into a crowded beer hall. Threading quietly through the revelers, she slipped, undetected, into a storage room. There, amongst casks of wine and kegs of ale, comforted by the noise of the merrymakers, she settled in for the night.

  Morning found her achy and disgruntled—the first because she had slept wrapped around a wooden keg that had been too heavy to move; the second because she was no nearer her goal than when she had entered Ithkar, only now she was penniless.

  Today she would have to approach Eldris Fyrl. She was not pleased with the prospect. Fyrl was new to the fair. No one could tell her anything about him. She had caught sight of him only once and instantly had put him at the end of her list. Now she had reached the end of that list. He was her last resort.

  Eldris had pitched his multicolored tent in the center of the fortune-tellers’ sector. A wide post stood by the tent’s flap. “Knock here,” it said—in four languages. Keri knocked. A high-pitched, crackling voice answered. She entered.

  Keri suppressed a giggle at the figure of Eldris Fyrl. The man wore motley. He had on a high-peaked, wide-brimmed purple hat encrusted with glittering stars. His overrobe was bright pink, made only marginally drab by lack of washing. It and his long-sleeved green shirt were embroidered in gold and crimson with all manner of arcane runes and symbols. Clearly he was an astrologer.

  Eldris was seated at one of the two chairs that flanked a small table. He rose and with a sweeping flourish bowed deeply, losing his hat in the process. His attempts to catch it as it fell only knocked it farther across the room.

  “Oh, dear, oh, dear. Will I never learn?” He retrieved the headpiece, reached into its crown, and pulled out an elastic band. Replacing the hat, he snapped the band around his chin.

  “Do it again,” he said, waving her out the doorway. “Again?”

  “Yes. Come in again.”

  Keri frowned as the astrologer closed the tent-flap behind her. This was ridiculous. The man was a fool. But he was her last chance. Her absolute last. She knocked.

  The scene repeated, but this time the hat stayed put. Eldris sat in the more comfortable of the two chairs and motioned Keri to take the other.

  “You are quite young to be wanting advice,” he said.

  “I’m not wanting advice, Master Fyrl. Or rather, perhaps I am, but not in the usual way. I’m seeking an apprenticeship.”

  Eldris was looking at her intently. Keri was acutely aware of her disheveled appearance. The last three days with no warm bed and little food had left their impression. She tried to slip down farther in the chair so that less of her could be seen. Eldris laughed. The ploy had been too obvious. She tried a different tack. Drawing herself to full height, she began to adopt her most regal air. But this was no time for pride. Finally she let all attitude slip from her and relied on simple truth.

  “In exchange for your tutelage I can, of course, offer something in return.”

  “Oh?”

  “I have a very special set of magical stones. They show the position of the sun, moons, and planets.”

  Eldris guffawed. “I have a very special set of magical books. They show me the position of the sun, moons, planets, and the stars. My ephemerides took me a lifetime to develop. What makes you think your stones would interest me?”

  Keri shifted in her chair. She had met with this response before. “I cannot say for sure, Master Fyrl. But there is something about the stones that I do not, myself, understand. Perhaps your knowledge will make them more useful.”

  “And the something is?”

  “Let me show you.” From a pouch hung around her neck Keri produced ten small, quite ordinary-looking pebbles. She shook them in her hand like dice and threw them on the table.

  “Today,” she cried. As the stones landed they arranged themselves in a pattern.

  “See? This is the pattern of the heavens today.” She pointed to each stone in its turn. “Here we are with our two moons close to one another. Both are near the sun. They will cover it tomorrow. Here are Sam, Junis, and Sagret.”

  “What is this pebble here?” Eldris pointed to a small white stone that, of its own volition, had been moving steadily across the table.

  “That
is the mystery. Now watch again.”

  She threw the stones once more, this time calling, “To-morrow,” as she threw. The stones formed a similar pattern, but the small white pebble was closer to the moons and was moving faster.

  Eldris watched the pebble, which gained speed as it passed above the moons. Keri watched Eldris. He seemed mystified.

  The astrologer tugged gently at his beard. “Hmm. Interesting.” He looked up at her. “What is your name, child?”

  “Keri.” She did not say, “Short for Keridwyn.” She felt there was something magical about a name so never gave hers away easily.

  “You are from?”

  “Abearl. In the north.”

  “Have you no kin?”

  “My kin are dead. My father left me the stones. His last wish was that I learn the language of the stars. Ithkar seemed a likely place to find a tutor.”

  “Well, Keri, there is more to astrology than throwing pebbles at a table.” He rose abruptly.

  She must not let it end this way. “I know that, good sir, but I thought the use of the stones could pay my way whilst I learned the trade.” She had used that reasoning before. None had seemed interested.

  Fyn was pacing. He circled the table, doing a little jig now and again for interest.

  “It may well do,” he said. “It may well do.” He spun suddenly to glare at her. “You would not be averse to casting your lot with a man as old as I?”

  She squinted at him. Was he going to offer her the position? His face was shadowed by the brim of his hat. “You do not seem so old to me. Besides . . .” She caught herself.

  “Besides, all others have turned you down,” he finished for her. “I’m old enough to be your great-grandfather. I can tell you, my dear, I am at an age where I no longer buy green bananas.” He paused, thinking. “You will work for room and board—no payment?”