Sorcerer's Son (37 page)

Her voice was high, light, piercing. “I do his bidding, Master Cray, but I think my own thoughts. You think I love the one who has power over me?”

“Can you speak such words within the very walls of his own fortress?”

“I spy for my lord, Master Cray; he does not spy on me. He trusts me completely. Yet, the slaves may mutter when the master is out of earshot, even though they grovel to kiss his feet when he is near.”

Cray eyed her over one shoulder. “So I should believe you when you say that I am a fellow slave

and nothing more.” He gestured abruptly at the book, his arm rigid, fingers splayed. “What is this then? Nonsense?”

Gildrum said, “What do you think it must be?”

“He wouldn’t dare!” cried Cray. “He wouldn’t dare treat me so shabbily. If my mother found out, she would be furious; and her fury is a force to be reckoned with—he must know that.”

“Your mother’s fury does not concern him.”

“Well, it should! She is no weakling to be disregarded!”

“He does not fear her.” Gildrum straightened up stiffly. “Master Cray, I told you that my lord trusts me, and that is true enough. Yet when it was decided that you come here, he gave me certain instructions

he forbade me to speak of certain matters. One of these matters is a thing which would, I think, prove to you the truth of everything I have said today. If you could only see that thing, you would no longer doubt me.”

“Show it to me then.”

“Ah—that will be no simple task. It will require that you disobey my lord’s command and enter where he has not sent you

where he would never send you.”

“Where?”

“His bedroom.”

“He keeps this

thing there?”

“Sometimes. That is the place where you may see it most readily.”

Cray’s lips tightened. “Do you swear to me, Gildrum, that this thing is proof?”

“I know of no better, Master Cray. Believe me, your eyes and your understanding will open when you see it.”

Beside his thigh, Cray’s right hand clenched into a fist. “Very well. How may I enter his bedroom if he gives me no permission?”

Gildrum smiled slightly. “I can arrange that. But there is a complicating condition.”

“Yes?”

‘The thing to which I refer is only there when my lord is there, and only readily visible when he is about to retire. We must hide you, therefore, somewhere in the room before he enters. You will have to stay the whole night, utterly silent, closed up in one of the cabinets, with only a hinge crack for light and air. I will make certain that the thing will be visible to you from your vantage.“

“A complicating condition indeed,” said Cray. “You ask quite a bit of me. What if I am discovered?”

Gildrum inclined her head. “There is that chance. But the cabinet is the likeliest hiding place—better than under the bed. I will contrive to cover any noises you make, as long as I am there. After I leave

well, he sleeps soundly.”

“You are asking me to risk my apprenticeship, Gildrum. If he discovers me, that will be the end of it.”

She shrugged. “You have nothing now. You risk nothing.”

“So you say.”

“Do you wish to wait until he rejects your latest bar of brass? Will my words seem more likely then?”

Cray glanced toward the oven, where the metal lay cooling, almost cool enough to break out of the mold. “I don’t want to believe you, Gildrum. But

if he rejects this one

Well, I can do no better than it. I would feel obliged to leave anyway; he wouldn’t have to throw me out.” His gaze swerved to her face, so childlike and innocent to belong to an inhuman creature. “And if there is proof—what then? What shall I do?”

“We can discuss that afterward, Master Cray. I have a suggestion for you, when the time comes.”

“You want something from me.”

She nodded. “I only hope it may be within your power.”

“I have no power, and you have said that your lord will give me none.”

She smiled. “Let us discuss that later.”

“I can make no promises, Gildrum; not till I’ve seen what you would show me.”

“Well enough.”

“And I’ll take this brass bar to him myself, if you don’t mind.”

“It will not do!” raged the sorcerer Rezhyk. “Is it that your hand is so unsteady, boy? Or is your eye so blind that you cannot see the scales balance?”

Cray stood quiet under his wrath, his eyes fixed on the brass ingot that lay before the brazier on his master’s workbench. One edge of the bar had been scraped, and the fragments of metal so removed dissolved into tinted liquids in several flasks. Rezhyk clutched one in his hands, his fingers wound so tight about its narrow neck that they seemed likely to snap it any moment.

“Am I close, my lord?” Cray inquired.

“Close? Close will not do, lad! You must learn to be exact! Have you been here so many months and still not learned how to measure?”

Cray hung his head. “I thought I had learned, my lord.”

Rezhyk set the flask down heavily. “I waste materials on you, Cray Ormoru. I might as well be throwing them to the wind.”

“I will try harder, my lord,” Cray whispered.

“You must! Or I shall find myself another apprentice! Out of my sight now! Out!”

As soon as he stepped into his workroom and closed the door, Cray heaved the brass bar the length of the chamber; it struck the far wall, clanging against the bronze like a clapper in a bell, and the whole room reverberated with the note.

“You wanted to see him yourself,” said Gildrum, watching Cray as he stood in the center of the floor, his arms tight against his sides, his fists white-knuckled. “I have not lied to you on that.”

“No,” he replied “—and now I shall see what comes next. When does Lord Rezhyk retire?”

“We have plenty of time. No need to hasten to make yourself uncomfortable.”

“I won’t be uncomfortable,” said Cray.

“Perhaps not at first, but toward dawn you’ll find yourself cramped. And in need of facilities that will not be inside the cabinet.”

“I don’t intend to be inside the cabinet. I don’t like your plan, Gildrum. I have a better one: a little trick my mother taught me.”

“Sorcery?”

“Won’t my mother’s sorcery work inside Ringforge?”

“Of course it will. That is why my lord forbids it.”

“Good. As well disobey one way as another.” Slowly, he turned to look at her. “Unless you choose to expose me.”

“Not I.”

“And you have control over these others, I perceive, or you would never have spoken so freely to me in front of them.” He opened one fist to wave at shoulder level, at the sconces, and on the palm of his hand were the imprints of his fingernails.

“I have a certain hegemony here, Master Cray,” said Gildrum, “when my lord makes no demands. He gave you into my care some time ago, and so what he knows of you is now entirely filtered through me.”

“Well enough. We are conspirators now, Gildrum. You have knowledge of my disobedience, and I have knowledge of yours. I know that discovery means I will be cast out. What will it mean to you?”

Gildrum lowered her eyes. “He will not discover anything

if you are not foolish.”

“But if

”

“There are punishments that I would prefer not to contemplate. Being sealed in solid rock until my lord dies is perhaps the least of them.”

“Yet you dare this punishment.” Cray frowned mightily. “Why?”

She raised her gaze to him, and in the liquid depths of her eyes he saw beyond the guileless youth of her body; he saw a darkness like the still, cold waters of the lady Helaine’s pool, and he shivered with a sudden chill. She seemed to look into his heart with those eyes, into his marrow.

“You are my friend,” she said.

He shook his head. “You told me, once, that we could not be friends if it conflicted with your lord’s commands. Have you changed your mind on that?”

“I told you that I could not be your friend, not that you could not be mine.” She rubbed her palms together, as if human sweat had accumulated there, sweat of nervous anticipation, and Cray found himself wishing to touch her hands to see if it were really there. But he stood where he was, not even reaching out across the small space that separated them,

“I tread a narrow path, Master Cray,” she continued. “Narrower than any demon before me. I have not lied to my master, but I have

avoided speaking of certain matters. So long as he does not ask, I can go on as I have.” Her lips tightened briefly. “You must not cause him to ask, Master Cray. My fate is in your hands. And now we must be on our way. I will guide you to his chamber.”

“Carry me instead,” said Cray. “I’ll hide up your sleeve, and he won’t even see me in a suspicious corridor. You can bring me back here, too, afterward.”

“Up my sleeve?” said Gildrum.

Cray nodded. “I’ll be ready in just a moment.”

Swiftly, he stripped off his clothes and shut them in a drawer. Then, standing naked and pale on the mirrored floor, he bent forward from the waist, slowly, reaching with outstretched fingertips for the reflection beneath his feet. He murmured softly, unintelligibly, and the skin all over his body began to shudder, as if a thousand snakes were crawling just beneath the surface. His paleness flushed and darkened, tanning as under a hundred afternoons of sunshine, and as the pigment intensified, his body contours began to alter. His limbs shortened, his head absorbed his neck and pulled tight against his shoulders, his torso compressed into his abdomen, and all the time his entire frame was shriveling and shrinking, like a wineskin spilling its contents. He sprouted dark hair and strange mandibles, and his fingers and toes turned spindly as straw till they were his legs, eight fragile legs supporting the diminishing weight of his bulbous abdomen and tiny head. Within the space of a score of heartbeats, he had transformed himself into a spider no larger than the last joint of a grown man’s thumb.

Gildrum stared down at him. “A wonderful little trick,” she said. “Can you speak?”

Silence answered her question. She scooped him up, and he scuttled into her sleeve, just as his own spiders had done with his own sleeve, so many months before.

As a spider, Cray’s viewpoint was limited. His eyes and ears were sharp, still human, though altered in appearance and proportion to his body and veiled by his dark hair; no natural spider had ever borne the senses with which Cray contemplated his environment, But the world was a vaster place to him in that guise—human works were like nature’s monuments to him, human sounds like nature’s thunder. And, as a spider, he always found himself extraordinarily attracted to flies. He could hear three of them buzzing about the corridors of Ringforge now, as if they were the castle’s only occupants, and he yearned to settle himself in some dark corner and spin a web to catch them. He had never eaten a fly—his mother had frowned upon such indulgence in the course of magic—and he wondered what they tasted like.

Gildrum carried her arm stiffly, unaccustomed to bearing a spider, but to her passenger the ride was a bad voyage through stormy seas, and he was relieved when it ended at last. Peeking out of her cuff, he watched a section of the wall open to her and reveal Rezhyk’s private chamber. It was furnished simply, not unlike his own, except all the furniture was of bronze, with black cushioning. Gildrum set Cray in the shadow beneath a bar of the bedstead and bade him stay there without stirring, Rezhyk, she said, did not like spiders and might do something unpleasant if he noticed one crawling on his bed. Cray laid a tiny ring of sticky web to the underside of the bar and clung there comfortably, dark hidden by dark.

Shortly, Rezhyk retired. He came in with Gildrum, who had gone out of the room as soon as she had seen Cray settled, and now she helped him undress, slipping the mantle from his shoulders and hanging it in the nearest cabinet, pulling off his bronze-studded boots, his silken hose, his linen shirt.

And Cray saw what he was meant to see.

The light from many sconces glinted from the threads of Rezhyk’s cloth-of-gold shirt, and beside the pure glory of that lustrous garment, the bronze walls dimmed to dross. Mirrors they were, only mirrors on every wall, and cold metal, cold as a winter’s night behind the sunny cheer of yellow gold. Cray could make out the delicate weaving that had shaped the garment, the flaws that marred it here and there, betraying an amateur’s hand. And hot fury grew in his frail spider’s body, for he perceived that a garment woven of metal was a trespass upon his mother’s province and an insult to her—all the more so because Rezhyk wore it hidden beneath his other clothing, next to the warm skin that enveloped his heart. He was not at all surprised that he had never seen the shirt before; he understood that Rezhyk would never dare to show it to Delivev Ormoru’s son.

Gildrum slipped a nightshirt over her master’s head, and the gleam of gold disappeared beneath ordinary fabric. Then she stepped back, easing toward the foot of the bed as she bid him good night, and her hands trailed lightly over the bedstead; when they passed Cray’s hiding place, he leaped to her cuff. Rezhyk had already turned over and pulled the blankets up to his chin; he did not bother to watch his oldest slave leave the room.

In his own workshop, Cray regained his human form as easily as he had shed it, and he stretched and flexed his muscles, which had cramped up with the transformation. To Gildrum, who watched him with impassive eyes, he said, “The shirt seems fairly well made. Is it his own work?”

“He is a diligent worker and independent.”

“And what purpose does it serve?”

“Can’t you guess, Master Cray?”

“Armor?” He regarded her skeptically. “How can he need armor when he is surrounded by demons? Surely they are better protection than any golden shirt, no matter what spells are impressed upon it.”

Gildrum shrugged. “He had certain fears, Master Cray, at one time.”

“What did he fear?”

“Not what. Whom.”

“Whom, then?”

“Don’t you know?”

“My mother is not his enemy!” Cray sputtered, “She doesn’t care about him one way or the other!”

“Are you quite sure about that?”

“In all the years I lived with her, I don’t remember her mentioning his name once. If she had had any feelings about him at all, surely I would have heard something.”