Turning Points (6 page)

The whole proved too much for Dysan. Tears stung his eyes, and he confessed in a whisper, “I live here.” The words raised a power and anger all his own, and he rammed through the pain to make his point. “You’re going to take away my home. My home!” He rolled his gaze to the ceiling, where the boards hung in jagged disarray, revealing the hole that had once served as his bed. Those timbers had remained solid all this time; he tested them daily. Only sorcery could have caused them to fail instantaneously and without a hint of warning. SaVell had made him fall, and Sabellia had granted her the power, had sanctioned that decision.

Before Dysan knew it, he found himself cocooned in warm arms, pressed against an ample bosom, and rocked like an infant. He did not fight, just went limp in the embrace, let her body heat wash over him in a wave of soothing he would not have imagined contact with some stranger might fulfill. She smelled clean and of some sweet spice he could not identify.

The Raivay’s voice shattered the sanctity of the moment, struggling to mimic his coarse Wrigglie dialect. “We are building our Sisterhood here.”

Dysan anticipated a flash of anger that never came. He knew better than to trust himself to make significant decisions when fatigue and pain muffled his thoughts, just as he knew better than to fall asleep in a house with an uncontrolled fire. Yet, tonight, he did both. Adopting the Rankene variation the women had used, he spoke in a perfect rendition of an Imperial accent. “I know Sabellia doesn’t take human sacrifices, and I don’t have parents to which to tell anything.”

Startled, the woman dropped Dysan. He tensed to keep his balance, the abrupt movement driving pain through him. Cold air washed over Dysan, and he realized SaMavis had been the one embracing him.

Even SaVeil’s nostrils flared, though she gave no other sign of her surprise.

“How… ?” SaParnith stammered. “How… ?” When the words still did not follow, she changed the question. “You don’t… look… Rankan.”

Dysan glanced between the women’s shocked faces and wondered if he had made the right decision. “I’m Wrigglie. But I do all right with pretty much any language.” He could tell by the bewilderment still pasted on their faces that his explanation had not wholly satisfied them.

Finally, SaKimarza explained, “But that language belongs to our Sisterhood. Only us and Sabellia—”

SaVell leapt in, as she so often did. “Sabellia picked this city, this building.” Though not a real explanation, it served well enough. Even Dysan understood that she believed Sabellia had cast his lot with theirs on purpose, had filled in any blanks between his natural bent toward languages and the Rankene code-speech that served this order.

Dysan shivered at the loss of control. That anyone might take over his mind and actions chilled him to the marrow, and the understanding that she was a goddess did not make him any more comfortable. He had been so young when the Bloody Hand, and perhaps Dyareela, owned and shaped him; and he had spent the last decade assuring himself that he answered to no one unless he freely chose to do so. He had done some stupid things in the last two days: positioning himself to get crushed by stones, falling asleep near fire, allowing a dream to take over his common sense. Yet, he felt certain all of those mistakes were his own, not attempts by anyone to consume him. The association felt right, secure. Five mothers for the one he had never really known and Grandmother Sabellia. None of these could ever truly take the place of the brother he so desperately missed, but any seemed better than ten more years of loneliness.

“So what do we do?” SaShayka finally said. Though soft and gentle, her voice seemed to boom into the lengthy silence.

They all looked at Dysan.

“I think,” he said carefully, “I could be talked into sharing.” He had no real power in this negotiation. Ten years of living in this ruin meant absolutely nothing compared with the money the women had spent to buy and restore it. Nevertheless, he continued to bargain. “I don’t do heavy labor, but I can crawl into small spaces that need checking or fixing. And I’m very good at listening.”

SaVell smiled. This time, her face opened fully, and her eyes sparkled. Beneath the gruff exterior, apparently, lurked a good heart. “I don’t suppose you could use a few hot meals a day, a home with walls, and a bed without a gaping hole in the bottom.”

“I might find use for such things.” Dysan managed a smile of his own. “Welcome to my home.”

“Our home,” Raivay SaVell corrected as SaKimarza examined Dysan’s wounds. “Our home.”

Andrew Offutt

“Better that all such cocky snotty stealthy arrogant bravos were stillborn.”

—Shive the Changer

“Me and my Shadowspawn, skulkin’ down the Serpentine…”

—Bill Sutton

High of ceiling and sparse of furnishings, the room was half again as long as it was wide. Its illumination was provided by a pair of matching oil lamps, each cast in bronze and resting on a three-legged table at an opposite end of the chamber. The failure of the yellowish light they provided to do more than hint at the arcane drawings and runes on the two longer walls seemed a tease. Both were covered with a medley of intricate, often grotesque ornamentation. Included were fanciful fauna and ornately overblown flora, some with elaborately, even impossibly twining foliage; birds real and un-; lewdly Portrayed lovers with bodies and limbs twining but a little less in-tricately than floral vines; serpents’ flowers; medallions and completely untranslatable runic designs. The lamps were fashioned in the likeness of gargoyles so preposterously hideous that no sensible person could believe they were anything but fanciful.

Yet perhaps not, for one of the two men in the room was their owner, and his trade and life’s work was sorcery. Such a one might be capable of summoning up such demons from one of the Seven Hells, might he not? He—Kusharlonikas—was a few months past his one-hundred-first birthday, with a face like a wizened large prune bleached to the color of parchment tastelessly decorated with orangey-brown spots. On the vain side as well as still a sexual being, Kusharlonikas the mage chose, understandably, not to show his true likeness—except when he elected to “wear” the age-overused face as a disguise.

On this auspicious night in his keep of keeps the master mage affected the likeness of a man of forty, neither handsome nor un-, with luxurious and wavy auburn hair above eyes like chips of greenest jade and a bushy, droopy mustache. Yet he wore a long robe, a deep rich green bordered with gold at hem and neck and sleeve-ends, for even an intemperate devotee of the arcane did have the devil’s own time disguising his ancient legs with their knobby knees and varicose veins.

The other man in this, Kusharlonikas’s Chamber of Reflection and Divination, was aware of the mage’s age and appearance, for he was Kusharlonikas’s apprentice. He was a long-faced and lamentably homely fellow with hair the color of straw—old straw, and subjected to dampness—who was close onto but not quite five-and-twenty years of age. His seeming copy-cat robe of lime green did not require much cloth, for he was both short and slight of build. Indeed, the largest thing about him was his name, which was Ko-modoflorensal.

His master stood at one end of a long table of polished hardwood topped with a narrow runner ot olive green cloth, well napped and tasseled in gold at either hanging end. He stood moveless, with his hands behind his back, bony left wrist clasped in a right hand burdened with three rings, one of them outsize. Its large brown set seemed to be, oddly, a buckeye. As if listening intently, he stood gazing down at the table, which bore three objects.

One was a large, two-handled flagon of some greenish metal that appeared to have little worth. Another was a wooden stick not quite the thickness of a little finger and some two feet long. It bore no bark, and yet did not have a peeled appearance. The third object was fashioned in the shape of an hourglass, but it was not; its sand was but a quarter-hour’s worth.

The younger man with the name too long and the robe too bright stood opposite his master, at the opposite end of the table. A film of perspiration glistened on his face and hands. He had been muttering and gesturing arcanely for over a minute. The hand with which he did most of his gesturing bore a ring with a large setting: an object that was at least the color and shape of a buckeye.

“Let us hope no one menaces you when you are at your spelling,” his master said, with no seeming regard for distracting the young man, “for you have given an intruder or foeman plenty of time to lay you low.”

Had a third person been present in the room, the sudden seeming shiver of the wooden stick would surely have attracted his attention, not to have mentioned raised a few nape hairs. Inanimate object or no, it appeared almost to writhe. A moment later the master mage winced, seemingly at one of his apprentice’s gestures or words. At the same time, a drop of sweat fell from the tip of the nose of that effortful mage-to-be. And Komodoflorensal uttered a final word rather explosively, at the same time jerking his gesture-hand, and visibly sagged, as if having exhausted himself.

“Iffets!”

The wooden stick returned to motionlessness, but the quarter-hourglass fell over onto its side.

Komodoflorensal sighed and sagged even more pronouncedly, and watched his master gesture.

“Idiot!” Kusharlonikas said, while in response to his single, almost casual gesture, the wooden stick on the table between them accomplished the fundamentally impossible feat of becoming a slender, yellowish, two-foot snake that wriggled toward him as if dutifully.

“Shit!” Komodoflorensal snapped.

Seven blocks away toward the western wall, Fumarilis the Gatho opened his larder to take out the small, precious bag of sugar he had skimped to purchase, and was shocked to find a torn and empty sack. Furthermore he was staring into the eyes of a small, sugar-stuffed honey badger. It did not even snarl before it pounced, and not at his eyes.

The room that Nim rented was in a building three blocks away from the house of Kusharlonikas the mage, in the direction of the north wall. Popular and confident in her voluptuousness, Nim hummed as she prepared. This nocturnal assignation was one of extra importance. She was careful not to spill so much as a drop of the far-too-expensive Lover’s Moon perfume as she opened the vial. She half smiled, and inhaled luxuriously, and gasped at the ghastly odor she had loosed, and with a choked cry fled her home. It remained empty for three days, the inexplicably horrid stench holding at bay anyone and anything so foolish as to enter.

Not too far from that building, Semaj Numisgatt was hand-feeding his beloved blossoms when his favorite orchid, the violet-and-white Aurvestan Autumn Queen, opened wide and nipped off his right index finger to the first knuckle.

Deleteria Palungas was combing her rich mass of midnight-hued hair with the jewel-encrusted comb that dear Shih’med had given her three namedays back when the errant spell of a would-be mage she had never heard of wafted through her modest dwelling on Red Olive Street. Too numb with horror and disbelief to shriek, she watched the flashing comb become laden and then clogged with the gleaming black treasure of her scalp. And then it was piling up on the floor, and her shrieking began.

The tavern named The Bottomless Well—not infrequently fondly referred to as “The Bottomless Cesspool” by regulars—was on Tumult Street, a name that had made all too much sense fifteen or twenty years ago. The staff of The Bottomless Well was, unusually, not from Sanctuary and not conquerors, but a family from Mrse-vada. The Bottomless Well was not a dive and yet more than a watering hole. At the same time, it was not an inn much frequented by the wealthy and/or pretentious. The walls and ceiling of the family-run establishment were not painted dark and yet were only a little darkened by grease and the smoke of lamps and candles. That smoke and the odor of frying fat rode the air; not heavily, but sufficiently to cause this or that patron occasionally to rub an eye or two.

The furniture and surroundings were decent enough, with lots of rounded edges, and rails and legs of blond wood, the ale and wine unwatered except on request, and the food acceptable and sometimes better than that. A modest statue of Rander Rehabilitatis perched on a stoutly braced shelf on the wall behind the proprietor/ counterman. No one had to squint or look too closely to see that it was well tended and kept free of dust and grease.

In a reasonably well-lit area against the back wall, two men of age sat at a three-cornered table. Neither was young. The hawk-nosed one with more lines in his face than his companion wore all black, unrelieved black. That included his eyes and his hair, whose growth started well back of his forehead and was surely too black for a man of his seeming years. On the back of his chair hung a cane of plain hardwood, thicker than a thumb and with a crooked grip. By contrast the hair of his companion—in his forties?—was cloud white. He wore it short, and in short bangs that were trimmed well above dark brown eyebrows. He was decorated with a gold chain and a couple of rings. His imported, brushed-fabric robe of Croyite blue formed a veritable tent about him, for he was passing large of height and chest, and especially belly. His face and hands, however, showed little fat. His goblet was nice enough, and contained thick red wine, while the hand of the man in black surrounded a plain crockery mug of oddly pale beer.

He had requested that it be watered. That raised eyebrows but no one made fun of him, for despite his years and his cane he had the look about him of a man not much given to jocularities, a man who would not take denigration with grace, and perhaps not simple joshing, either. Besides, a few minutes ago everyone’s attention had been
distracted
by an abrupt weirdness: the thick, quality wine in one patron’s chalice-like cup had suddenly burst into flames. They shot up a foot above the table of the worse than startled fat man for several seconds before a young fellow at a nearby table plopped his big personal beer mug down over the offending goblet. With apologies, the proprietor had bustled over to grasp the cup—using a towel to shield his hands—and hurried to the door to sling its contents outside.