Jagg, the wizard's servant, stood in the gateway. In one thick arm he held Ghosh, limp as a rag doll.
Kory yelled and ran, drawing his knife. Ghosh's head bobbed up. "Kory, stop," she said.
"Let her go," Kory said.
"Yes, Jagg," Ghosh said. Jagg released her. She stood unsteadily.
Kory moved next to her, holding his knife level on Jagg. "Now, you're going to—"
"No time to argue," Ghosh said, and Kory looked at her just in time to see her fist knock him cold.
•
Thomorin Wiln closed his bag. "That's no substitute for rest," he told Ghosh, "but it should keep you on your feet." He looked at Ciellon, who sat up in bed against pillows. "I've given you the strongest pain medicine I have, if you won't let me put you to sleep—"
"I will be fine, thank you," Ciellon said in a thin voice.
Thomorin Wiln started to speak, then shut his mouth. On his way out of the inn room, he turned to Kory and said, "The next time you decide to go into the apothecary's trade, see me about an apprenticeship."
Kory stared at the floor as the door closed. "I don't understand—the caravan was just leaving; I saw it."
"An illusion, waiting for you to trigger it," Ciellon said. "The real party left early in the morning."
"But I had Reed's letter."
"Show it to me."
Kory unfolded the paper and held it out.
"Ghosh, read it," Ciellon said.
"'My father wishes me to marry against my will. Let us flee.' It isn't Reed's handwriting."
"What do you mean? It says right here—about the Hrothvekan—"
"It doesn't even mention Hrothvek," Ghosh said, and Kory looked shocked at the coldness in her voice.
Ciellon said, "Mirage ink. The writer draws the intent of the message, and the reader's mind creates the text and handwriting. Only wizards can use it, but many chemists can make it. For a high fee. Now, you must go to Hrothvek, and quickly. Reed's life may depend on it. The Regent's certainly does."
Kory was still staring at Ghosh. "I don't know why—I guess I thought that—"
Ghosh turned away from him. She said, "What are they going to do to His Eminence'?"
Ciellon's face was rigid for a few moments. Then he sighed. "Look out the window."
Ghosh opened the curtains. A storm was forming offshore—unnaturally fast, clouds boiling black, stabbing lightning. It was racing toward the shore.
Ciellon said, "Resh—His Scarlet Eminence—has a fear of high places, and of storms. A very strong fear."
Kory said, "Now even I understand. He was a sailor, wasn't he?" He looked outside at the dark mass. "And if he should funk in front of all manner of powerful people—he'd never be able to hold power, once that got about. But what does Reed have to do with it?"
Ciellon was silent for a moment. He put a hand against his abdomen and pressed. Then he said, "What only Resh and a few Hrothvekans know—myself, and apparently this wizard of Dyelam's, among them—is that the storm at sea was the second storm. It was the first storm, when he and I were your ages, that drove him to the sea, and me to the Farlands, and the young woman—her to the Saltmarsh on the last night of Wine, and to wherever the marsh hides its dead."
Ghosh said, "Harmony."
"That was her everyday name, yes." He shut his eyes and breathed shallowly. Tendons bulged in his neck. "And jhi Hisor means to play the tragedy out once again, with Reed in Harmony's part...poor Resh."
Ghosh thought, Now there's a word for His Eminence I'll never hear again.
Ciellon said, "And now you must go. Jagg will drive you. Jagg, if you must kill the horses, then you must."
Kory said, "The landsailer's faster." He pointed at the storm. "Especially running before that."
Ghosh went to Ciellon's side. "The other wizard. You used a name. Do you know him?"
"Phris jhi Hisor. He was only an unkind little boy when I knew him. I would never have believed him determined enough to succeed in investing his luck, but I've learned since.... Oh, I am sorry, Ghologhosh. I removed the spell he laid to bar your memory—you fled before I was quite aware of the second spell beneath it. I was never...a very clever wizard. Go now, quickly." His eyes closed and his back arched with his pain, for which there was no medicine in Liavek—Ghosh knew there had been none since Ciellon had given the last diluted drops of it to Jagg, to give to her.
She said, "Why arc you here? For Harmony? Or the Regent? If you knew about the plan—"
"But I didn't know, Ghosh. Nor was I told. It just happened—things do sometimes. Go. Go, before the wind rises too high."
"Why did you come back, Ciellon?"
"You know that already, Ghosh. Kory, take her and go. I can't concentrate enough to stop the storm."
Kory put his hand on Ghosh's arm. She shoved him away. She looked at Jagg, pointed at the storm clouds, which seemed about to crowd through the window into the room. "You see he doesn't try to stop it, understand? See that he's quiet, if you have to sit on him! We'll be back."
•
On the Hrothvek road, night had come hours too early, and the sky howled, and the lightning tore down the black walls of air with ragged-nailed hands, showing the Saltmarsh blue-white and the sea blue-black. Wind threw gravel across the road like grapeshot, and the first cold rain was falling hard.
In the landsailer, which was built for pleasure cruises on fair days, Kory held the sail, Ghosh the tiller and wheelbrakes, pumping them, with showers of sparks from the pads every time the car began to slew in the wind.
Ghosh knew that Kory kept snatching glances at her, his eyes wide, as if he were trying to decide what she was, what she had become.
No wonder he didn't know; she didn't know herself. Reed had been saying for a long time that Ghosh didn't understand love. She had a sickening feeling that Reed might have been right after all.
"Look!" Kory shouted. There was a line of wavering lights ahead. A lightning stroke showed them as pavilions set up on the Saltmarsh edge. Dyelam ais Ariom's party. See the End of Wine out with ais Ariom, Ghosh thought coldly. See His Scarlet Eminence the Regent out on his ear. But you never thought to see your only daughter out in the storm, eh. Master Dyelam?
If only she were weaker in the arms. If only she had drowned in the sea. She had taken the first false letter to Kory, and then, at total war in her mind with the unhardened magics, staggered to the docks and jumped in. But she was a strong swimmer. She could swim in her sleep. If she had drowned that night, not washed up alive on Ciellon's beach, this all might still have happened, but safe in hell she would never have seen it....Make me a plum tree for ten thousand years, and all my plums will be poison.
"Hold on!" Kory shouted as a sheet of rain hit the 'sailer. Ghosh leaned on the tiller and the brakes, and the car flexed and skidded off the road. Ghosh rolled into soft wet coldness, tasting salt that might have been marshwater or blood.
"Kory?" she yelled.
"Here—here, Ghosh." He had gotten a lantern alight somehow. "I'm all right. You?"
"That letter of yours—did you tell Reed to meet you in the city, or just to meet you?"
"I—just to meet me. She set the place—I mean, the letter I got said—"
Ghosh pointed marshward of the pavilion, to seaward. "Then Dyelam's sure to have seen your note. If you don't find her, you'd better just keep going."
"Ghosh—" He stared at her. The rain swept his black curls down his forehead. "Luck, Ghosh," he said, and turned his lantern and headed into the darkness.
"Damn luck," she said, and hoped her god was stronger for it. She started for the pavilion.
There were guards at the entrance to the huge tent, but they looked at Ghosh, stamping in from the storm, and made no move to bar her way. She looked around. The whole scene within was frozen into tableau, all the elaborately dressed guests staring at an open flap that looked out on the Saltmarsh. Staring, Ghosh knew, after Cadie ais Ariom. Ghosh wondered what the wizard had put in Reed's mind, to
send her walking into the storm; Kory, probably.
Dyelam ais Ariom was dripping jewelry and sweat, biting his knuckles. You should have stayed in your warehouse, merchant, she thought. You didn't know the price of doing assassin's business.
She saw the red-robed figure of His Scarlet Eminence the Regent of Liavek, his hands loose at his sides, staring out into the night. He was taut as a bowstring, ready to snap.
We need a diversion, Ghosh thought. Thieves and pickpockets know all about that. Basic street work.
"Hey-yo!" she shouted. Heads turned. "Hey-yo, hey-yo, my masters and mistresses, why so mum? 'Tis time for merry mischief! Ring bells! Sing songs! For is this not the last night of Wine, and we'd better celebrate before the Wine runs out?"
She did a handspring past the Regent, coming up right under his mustache. "Your Eminence! Oh, excuse me." She knelt at his feet, looked up at him. "Now I see what they mean by eminence."
Someone giggled. The Regent looked down, his face rigid.
Ghosh said, "Don't you get scared of heights, with all that eminence?" She nodded, winked. The Regent nodded slowly.
Thomorin Wiln's drugs singing in her blood, her heart screaming on the edge of despair, she danced around the pavilion, tugging beards, punching playfully at bulging bellies, sipping at guests' drinks. "Whooo! What is that, shrimp cocktail?"
She looked back at His Scarlet Eminence, who had a small smile. Ghosh wondered how much he knew about this. Well, he would know a lot more very soon.
Ghosh pirouetted over to a table loaded with pastry. "And now, the centerpiece of tonight's entertainment, a masterwork of mystery, a syllabus of surprises, an astonishment of artifice—but first, I need a volunteer from the audience. Would that prince of conjurors, that most eminent sorcerer, that offspring of a Ka Zhir camel, Phris jhi Hisor, please show his owl-dropping of a face?"
It wasn't hard to spot him. She just watched for the blush. Ghosh took a cream pie in each hand and flung them, and that was easy, too—she pretended they were knives.
Jhi Hisor gaped and grabbed instinctively for a silver button on his gown. The pies struck him in eruptions of berries and cream. Ghosh cartwheeled toward him, slamming both feet into his breastbone. He groaned and went down against a side table, which buried him under an avalanche of sliced fruit.
Ghosh tore the silver button from jhi Hisor's coat, pulled his jaw down, and rammed the button down his throat. He swallowed involuntarily, and his face went slack as his luck went free.
"That was one of Kory's best ideas," Ghosh said. "If you've any luck left, you'll choke to death."
There was a disturbance at the other side of the tent. Ghosh looked up. It was Kory. He was carrying Reed. They were both soaked, but they were both alive. Dyelam ais Ariom went running to his daughter and inevitable son-in-law.
And the rain had stopped.
Ghosh stood up slowly and went to the tent flap. The storm mass was splitting in two, peeling back from a cut as straight as a knife could make, exposing blue-black sky specked with a few hard stars.
"No," she said in a small voice. "Ciellon, no, you don't have to, we're all right—"
"The wizard," Dyelam ais Ariom said. "She freed the wizard's luck, and the storm broke." Dyelam beamed at Ghosh. "My dear young woman, I—" He stopped when he saw Ghosh's face, and he took a step backwards, and another. Ghosh looked at him for a long moment, thinking any number of things, which all boiled down to one.
"No," she said, "you live, to pay."
She turned and went to His Scarlet Eminence, who looked so stately and reserved that no one could have imagined him any other way. Ghosh spoke a name, and His Eminence gave her his hand, and in a moment they were aboard his coach and away up the road toward Liavek, as fast as horses could run.
•
Zal najhi Zal was just about to hand over the desk to her night clerk when there was the screech of a wagon braking, and the front doors of the Sea Eagle were thrown open by two men of the Levar's Guard. She promptly spoke the First Prayer to Bree Amal. Then there entered His Scarlet Eminence himself, and with him the short dark woman that the wizard had entertained the night before; he looked terrifying and she looked like a drowned rat. Zal spoke the Second Prayer.
The Regent and the soggy girl were met on the stairs by the wizard's ghastly blue servant, who actually looked like he might send His Scarlet Eminence away, though he led the pair upstairs instead. Zal najhi Zal stood at the desk for the next three hours, staring at the immobile guards by her still-open doors, being fed kaf and dry toast by the night clerk, until the Regent and the blue man came downstairs again and the blue man really did seem to send the Red priest away. The guardsmen shut the doors, and the blue man went upstairs, and only then did Zal najhi Zal utter the Third Prayer to Bree Amal, which is May These Events Leave No Trace of Themselves in Thy Servant's Memory.
•
"Prop me a little higher, Jagg," Ciellon said. "So I can see the Saltmarsh. I'm not going to have my last sight on earth be a plaster ceiling."
Jagg adjusted the pillows and said, "I believe the master intended to tour the Dreamsend Hills before his death."
"Did I? If a road were paved with intentions, Jagg, where would it lead? Come closer, Ghologhosh. I want to see you, too."
"Damn you," she said.
"Stop praying and come closer."
"You're a magician. Magicians live for centuries."
"Some of them do."
"Why not you?"
Ciellon gasped, exhaled slowly. "Because..." he said faintly, then coughed and said in a stronger voice, "Because of birthdays. Do you know what every magician must do on his birthday?"
"He has to reinvest his magic, in his luck-charm."
"And has no use of it 'til he does. That's why, yes, some of us last for a long time, but not forever. Because on your birthday, you revert to your actual age. Investiture is very trying, without the added burden of being three hundred years old when you try it...."
"But aren't there charms—bound things—"
"Yes. But another must make them, and they cost the binder his or her entire luck, all magic for the rest of the maker's life. And I was offered it—I think we all are, at some time. A reflection of our power. A test of what that power has done to us. I found the cost much too high.
"It is the nature of my disease—which is itself partly magical—that a spell can repress it, but not destroy it. So I could live without pain—until my next birthday, when the pain would arrive so suddenly and in such great measure that I would never be able to reinvest. So there was the choice: one year free from pain, or several with it. The choice is straightforward, but not, I assure you, simple. In the event, it has been about eight years. I went many places in those extra seven years, saw many things. I think I did some good. I think I chose..." His face tightened and he twisted against the pillows.
Ghosh said, "But last night you did the magic. You took away the pain. So you could stop a storm you didn't have to stop, so..." She clenched and unclenched her hands. "And now you're hurting again. That means today's your...birthday."
"I was born on the first day of Fog, a little after dawn. My mother was in labor some four hours. I am told that is a very bad pain, to have suffered with for four hours."
"Then you did come back just to die."
"I had to die somewhere," Ciellon said patiently. "Not in Hrothvek—you can't really go home, not that way—but in sight of the Saltmarsh." He looked at the closed window. "Though I've been struggling all night with the question of purpose. Was I brought here? What a grand thought, to be needed, and a terrifying one, to be summoned.... Well. I was here to do the good thing, and now it's done."
"Done? And nothing else matters, not me, not Jagg—"
"Please. My precious Ghosh. Don't break my heart."
"Why not?" She put her hands to her eyes, but she did not cry; she really did not know how.
"Jagg," Ciellon said, "open the windows."
"It is cold out, ma
ster."
"Of course; that's the marshmist. I want to smell it. Open them, Jagg."
Jagg did so. Streaks of dawnlight ran across the Saltmarsh, turning it the color of iron in the forge. The mist was rising, smelling of reeds and salt. There might have been no storm at all. Jagg stood by the window, in the cold marsh breeze, as still as a cedar tree.
Ciellon said, "The girl's name was Seva sei Varun, but she was called Harmony. Resh didn't think I would remember. He told me, before we both went away, that I would forget. But I didn't forget. I never forget names. The girl's name was Seva sei Varun, and things went so terribly wrong, and she never came back. Resh and I thought we'd never come back either...but we did. And..." Ciellon turned his cloudy blue eyes on Ghosh. "You see, Harmony, I did remember. And I heard you call, and I came."
Ghosh said, "Will you have tea with me, Ciellon? Worrynot tea?"
Ciellon smiled. "So you learned what it—" His body went rigid. He made a strangling noise. Ghosh leaned over him, put her hands on his shoulders. "Fight, why won't you fight? What do you want dignity for, without any life to—no life—" She felt the breath leave him. She let him go, took a step backwards and bumped into the door, sagged against it. Outside the window there was a flutter of white wings, and Ghosh turned her head and stared—but it was only a white heron, only a cadie flying; and then a golden cormorant was flying with the heron; and then both birds were gone.
Jagg closed the window. He went to Ciellon's side, reached into his collar, and drew out a small pendant on a cord. He put the luck-piece on Ciellon's chest and folded the wizard's hands over it. He looked at Ghologhosh.
She said, "He didn't babble at the end. He didn't think I was anyone else. There was never one moment when he wasn't sane and wise and—Isn't that right?"
Jagg nodded silently.
"He just wanted me to know he was happy. I wish to Ghol-whose-curse-doesn't-count he hadn't been so happy."
Jagg said, "I must wait now with him 'til midday. So no other spirit can enter his body. It is my land's custom."
"That's a good custom. Show me where to wait with you."
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