He could not tell if the words were a threat or a promise.
Indeed when they arrived at the ramshackle gates of Autumn House, he was not even allowed to wash and change his clothing. The moment Kankou had finished speaking to her brother he was summoned into the mansa’s study with its threadbare couch and an old desk whose broken right front leg had been repaired with leather cord and twine. The old man was spinning illusions out of the air, as mages like him could do, a skill Titus had never grown into despite all his studying and practice.
The mansa had created an architectural study like a toy model formed completely of light. He was examining a collection of buildings from all angles, a remarkable feat of shifting perspective that humbled Titus every time he saw him do it. Of course he was proud of his divining skill. But as a boy, when he’d bloomed and been brought to the House, he had hoped for more.
After a moment Titus realized he was looking at an image of a restored and expanded Autumn House, with a second wing built on, new stables, and a larger schoolroom.
Seeing Titus, the mansa smiled. He looked ten years younger.
“Our fortunes have turned, and it is all due to you, Titus!”
“To me?”
“Kankou has relayed to me a letter from the mansa of Four Moons House, penned by his own hand. You may imagine my surprise that such a prestigious House should take an interest in our humble lineage. Something about a village boy in clientage to their House that you tracked down and wanted to steal?”
Titus said nothing, and fortunately the mansa chuckled as if it were the greatest joke imaginable and went on.
“But it turns out the letter is to open negotiations for a marriage. With Serena.”
“Serena? They want Serena to marry an untutored, lowborn village boy?”
“Ha! What a fine dry sense of humor you have, Titus. The mansa himself wishes to marry Serena. Such a man may please himself when it comes to a third wife. It seems he means to do so with our Serena. I cannot decide whether to be displeased with you, Titus, or glad.”
“Displeased with me?” He still felt confused, adrift on a river carrying him into unknown lands.
“I believe Serena will become a powerful diviner. Now we will lose her to Four Moons House. But all is not lost. The mansa tips his hand by describing her too complimentarily. So I will drive a hard bargain. I will demand several young mages from his House in exchange for her going there.”
“Ask for the twins,” Titus said at once. “I suppose you might see if you can get their mother and brothers as well, for the twins will thrive with their family about them, and the older brother can make the djembe speak.”
“I am sure I have no idea what you are talking about, but it sounds sensible. With such a prestigious alliance I can also ask for Four Moons’ help in arranging other marriage alliances. Also, Serena will not forget her home and she will not forget our wives and daughters who aided her when she needed their aid. She’s a good, loyal, and exceedingly clever young woman. She will continue to help us in her new place in the world. So, Titus, while I knew you would train her well, for you are a careful teacher and an excellent diviner in all ways, you have outdone yourself in this matter. We will hold a special feast in your honor in the men’s hall.”
Stunned by these accolades, he went to his suite as in a daze, but the empty rooms troubled him. Orosios was busy unpacking, and for once Titus did not want to be alone. He wandered to the garden with its sparse winter foliage, and at length found himself at the corner where stood the gate to the women’s wing. Where his wife kept her suite of rooms. Where his daughters were growing up.
Of all people it was Serena who caught him lurking, for he had not quite enough nerve to go in at such an unexpected time. She was giggling amid a cluster of girls and young women, but the instant she saw him she broke away and strode over.
“Uncle!” She took his hands in hers, smiling, and it was impossible not to respond to that smile with a softened heart and a sense that anything might happen. “I knew you would trust me, Uncle. And I thank you for it. You’ll see. This will change the fortunes of Autumn House.”
“And your own fortunes.” His tone sounded accusatorial to his own ears, and yet her smile widened as if he had praised her.
“He is a fine man and the most impressive cold mage I have ever encountered, is he not?” She spoke with all the starry glamour of a woman dazzled by masculine power and status.
“He is indeed,” he replied, since it was true, and truth mattered to him.
“Here!” She released his hands and turned him to face the crowd of girls and young women who had been congratulating her. “Here are your daughters, come to greet you.”
It was a lie but so beautifully spoken that he took a step forward as the others cleared thoughtfully away to leave the three of them alone. Fabia and Cassia greeted him with their formal manners and wary gazes, the scars on their faces the visible reminder of what he had lost. And to be fair, of what their mother had lost. The older brother who had loved them and whom they had loved, whom they had also lost, and whose name no one would ever speak again.
It was so cold in the winter garden. Cassia shivered beneath her cloak.
Fabia suddenly said, in a harsh voice that reminded him of his own, “Did you hear? Is that why you came to see us when otherwise you ignore us except at our monthly dinner?”
“Of course I heard about Magister Serena’s possible betrothal. I was there, after all.”
“Of course other people’s business is all you would think about. So you don’t yet know that Cassia bloomed while you were out hunting for something better?” Cassia poked her anxiously, and Fabia’s brilliant, wild expression closed up. “My apologies, Honored Father. I spoke out of turn.”
But the words hung in the air regardless, bright and hard, able to be examined from so many different angles. He grasped for the simplest one first.
“You are a cold mage, Cassia?” he asked, thinking of the wonderful, beautiful day her brother had bloomed.
Her brother had always been able to make little Cassia chortle, but since his death she had become a grave, serious girl. She folded her hands at her waist and nodded solemnly. A terrible thought rose unbidden from the barren fields of his heart.
He thought: I would like my daughters to smile when they see me.
He searched through the rugged terrain that had allowed him to keep his dignity for all these years. Swallowed, and finally found a phrase to speak, the words he would have said to any chance-met person out on his journeys when he sought fresh blooms.
“Can you show me?”
She glanced at Fabia for permission. Her sister made a face of disdain but said, in a tone of deepest affection, “Yes, go ahead, Cassie. You may as well shock him too, you secretive goose. Hiding it from us until you’d mastered the trick!”
The girl held out her hands, palms up. In her low voice she said, “I see it in my mind, as if there is a tiny opening into the spirit world in the center of each palm. Then, if I reach in, I can pull out a thread.”
She touched the tips of the fingers of her right hand to the center of her left palm and, turning the right palm up, drew three woolly threads of shining magic as if out of her palm. After deftly curling the threads into a sphere, she compressed them into a ball of cold fire the size of her small fist. It was a tremulous act of magic and faded two breaths later.
The sight was like a fist to his belly. He could not speak.
Fabia said, “I told you he wouldn’t be interested.”
“No! Quite the opposite!” he cried. “It’s a rare gift for a newly bloomed mage to create cold fire before they master the ability to quench a candle’s flame.”
“It just takes concentration,” said Cassia.
“Can you show me again?”
Fabia’s eyebrows shot up.
&nb
sp; But Cassia smiled. Like her magic, the smile was tremulous, ready to fade, but pride held it fast. “I can do it again. I’ve done it fifty times—”
“At least one hundred,” muttered Fabia with a crooked grin that reminded him of happier days, when the world was still full of promise. But Fabia’s joy was all for Cassia. When she looked at her father, her face closed again as a flower against the dark.
He said, hoarsely, thinking of the blacksmith’s boy who made the djembe speak, a boy who might be looking to get married to a compatible partner when he came to Autumn House, “Do you still sing so sweetly, Fabia? You were always singing, from the moment you had words.”
“She never stops,” said Cassia with the eagerness of a girl who wants her sister to be praised. “She’s singing festival songs tonight, at the masquerade. Because she’s so good.”
“Hush,” Fabia hissed. “He’s not coming. He never does.”
It had been easier to keep them at a distance, like being safely wrapped in gauze. But the journey had rended something in him, not shattered but rather torn to let through a glimpse of light. Through such subtle rips in the veil separating the worlds a cold mage could reach from the bleak realities of the mortal world into the infinitely shifting energies of the linked cosmos. He recalled the day he himself had bloomed, the way the world had cracked around him, leaving him feeling breathless with excitement but also terrified as a wisp of smoke dissolved above a quenched candle’s flame. If he wanted to embrace the power he had to reach out his hand and his heart.
“I would like to come, if you want me there.”
Cassia stared in honest shock, a hand pressed to her chest. Then she looked at her sister to gauge her reaction. Fabia examined him through the shield of distrust he had earned.
“Why?” she demanded. “Why do you want to come, and why should we want you?”
Cassia gasped.
But it was indifference that was barren. Fabia’s anger was water and sunlight.
“I shouldn’t have turned my back on you,” he said slowly, unfurling the words with care. “You girls never deserved that, and I regret it.”
“We miss him too!” Fabia snapped. She grasped Cassia’s hand defiantly, lifted her chin, and in a caustic tone said, “I guess if you wanted to come, we can’t stop you.” Her gaze dipped down to the ground as she struggled with her modesty, and lost. She added, with the tiniest smug smile of satisfaction, “I’m singing three songs.”
“Three!” he exclaimed. “That is an honor, indeed, Fabia.”
She crossed her arms. But she didn’t move away.
They stood in that pause between one transformation and the next, where sunset turns into night, and night into dawn.
Cassia glanced at her sister, then extended a brave, hopeful hand toward her father. Titus stepped forward and grasped it.
◆ ◆ ◆
Fantasy novelist Scott Lynch is best known for his Gentleman Bastard series, about a thief and con man in a dangerous fantasy world, which consists of The Lies of Locke Lamora, which was a finalist for both the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Society Award, Red Suns Under Red Skies, and The Republic of Thieves. He maintains a website at scottlynch.us. He lives with his wife, writer Elizabeth Bear, in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
In the flamboyant, highly imaginative story that follows, he shows us that just because its occupant dies, that doesn’t mean that his house will cease to exist as well…In fact, it may have many years, and a long, strange trip, still in front of it.
◆ ◆ ◆
SCOTT LYNCH
ALL THE DAYS BEFORE
The wizard Malkuril led a quiet early life, as materially successful wizards will, for one cannot otherwise survive long enough to amass the power required to live loudly. Meek and temperate were his first few centuries, but by the age of five hundred he was sleeping inside the fire of stellar coronas, and there were entire continents missing on certain planets to mark the occasional frayings of his temper.
Malkuril never revealed whether his habit of drifting in repose somewhere inside the hottest portion of the atmosphere of a star was private whim or grand statement. Either way, it did much to protect him from the random insolence of other hazard-class sorcerers, though as a lifestyle choice it was inconvenient for the amassing of monuments, collections, and artifacts. As he aged, Malkuril came to feel this lack as a heavy weight upon his self-regard.
In time, he claimed a temperate out-of-the-way planet, Vespertine, and evicted the hundred million or so thinking creatures already living there. From high orbit he drove a spear of sky-iron into the planetary crust, then directed an army of bound spirits to mold and shape it, until it was a fortress sufficiently grand for the ego with which Malkuril intended to furnish it. In this house he puttered contentedly, sealing up servant populations of useful and sinister beings. He acquired the treasures of a thousand worlds, several million volumes of sorcerous lore, and the most comfortable pair of slippers he had ever owned, with a loose fit that was just right for the wide splay of his crooked toes. He wore them constantly at home and rarely bothered to lace them.
In his eight hundred and nineteenth year, in his private apartments, the wizard Malkuril slipped on an untied lace and tumbled down a flight of thirty-seven stone stairs. The first twenty were merely painful and the last sixteen were entirely superfluous, as it was the twenty-first that broke his neck and killed him instantly.
DAY 1
“Tea for Master?”
The kobold peered at the scarlet-robed form sprawled at the foot of the executive staircase, blinked, and waited.
Master took tea at the eighth morning chime. Fetchwell son of Fetchwell, luckiest, most honored of the high house kobolds, always poured the tea into Master’s favorite cup, carved from the polished kidney stone of a dragon. Then Fetchwell carried the teacup on a tray of pure iridium—(once, Fetchwell had thought that was all one word, puriridium, and been very proud of himself until the housemind found out and corrected him, banished him for months to the low house kobolds, banished him to work the wine cellar, and took all the luck and most-honor away, so now Fetchwell was careful to split the words right when speaking)—on a tray of pure PAUSE FOR BREATH iridium. So respectable, luckiest, most honored Fetchwell, so debonair (he never said that word out loud; he did not want to see the wine cellar again) for Master.
Here was Master, here was Fetchwell, here was tea, but Master was not taking it. Master was not even moving.
Well, the Master had Master reasons. Fetchwell could wait. Master had done a magic to the cup so the tea would never get cold.
Eventually, the ninth hour chimed. Fetchwell had to admit the tray was getting heavy; never had he stood with it for so long. He made a small noise, a cough that apologized for itself.
“Tea for Master?”
Again no response. By the chiming of the tenth hour Fetchwell was trembling with fatigue. Clearly Master did not want tea, or at least not from Fetchwell. Sometimes Master withdrew, did strange Master things, did not speak to the staff for weeks, not the kobolds or sandestins or even the housemind itself. This must be one of those times. Best not to annoy Master.
Fetchwell bowed stiffly and departed. It was seventy-three floors back down to the kitchens. The tiny lift rattled all the way, and Fetchwell kept the tray above his shoulders though his arms shook and felt pierced with spikes of cold fire. Luckiest, most honored, he carried the tea on the pure iridium, and no kobold high or low would ever see him stumble.
DAY 2
“Tea for Master?”
Master had not moved since the previous day. Whatever Master was doing continued to involve remaining perfectly still at the foot of the staircase. Fetchwell would have thought that the polished stone floor was too cold and hard for this sort of thing, but then Fetchwell was a tea kobold and Master was a great wizard, and perhaps there were secrets i
n floors only Master’s brain was suited to.
Twice more Fetchwell offered tea, and was ignored, and with arms knotted and sore, he slunk nervously away. He hoped Master would remember to like tea again soon. He hoped this was not somehow his own fault. He did not want to ever go back to the wine cellars.
DAY 3
“Tea for Master?”
The housemind had senses, after a fashion, and it used them to observe as the cat-size creature again approached Master Malkuril with its tray. Even in his unusual repose, the Master was much larger than Fetchwell and lay before the tea kobold like a tumbledown hill covered in red fabric.
The housemind was not actually permitted to be alarmed, but in some cool, dark, hermetic sub-realm of logic it was contemplating a hypothetical model of itself experiencing the sensation.
Master Malkuril was behaving out of character. Indeed, there were salient indications that Master Malkuril might in fact have died from cervical trauma. This observation did a lively dance with the counterpoint that Master Malkuril was extremely powerful and his eccentric habits were not for the housemind to judge. In the time it took for a wisp of steam to rise one inch from the contents of the draconic nephrolith teacup, the housemind bounced these concepts off one another several hundred thousand times, while also monitoring the tectonic activity of Vespertine’s crust plates, searching local interplanetary space for signs of intruders, and issuing instructions to the wine cellar kobolds one hundred and ninety-three floors below to turn certain casks that had reached the halfway point of their aging process.
Primary Conclusion: Master Malkuril was great and inscrutable, and if he chose to lay himself on the floor in a semblance of death, it was not the housemind’s place to presume that anything resembling death had actually occurred.
Guardedly Respectful Corollary: Master Malkuril’s problems, if such things might exist, must also logically be great and inscrutable, and as such it was the housemind’s duty to intervene if Master Malkuril appeared to require it.
The Book of Magic Page 57