Woman Who Loved the Moon (2 page)

“I believe so.”

“How can his power reach so far?”

Shea half-smiled, as if in approval of the question. “Some device or tool which he has found or bought or made permits him to extend his will even to the Western Counties. There are tales of such things in the lore books.”

“Can he be stopped?”

“He must be,” said Shea. “But Khelen is dead, and there are few with the power to thwart him. Malice—the will to twist and ruin—drives him now.”

Rhune looked across the bay. “You are Sealord,” he said. “Can you drown his island in ocean?”

“
I
have no device with which to reach across distance. To best him I must go to him.”

Rhune blinked. “Would he not know you?” he said doubtfully.

“I would not go alone, nor as myself. You are right, he will be expecting me, or someone like me. But what if Rhune— friend, servant, and traitor to Shea Sealord—were to be freed by him in a moment of mercy—or weakness?
He
might sail to the Firemountain. And with him, naturally, he would take
his
servant.” Shea folded his hands in his lap, and his gray-green eyes gleamed, unfathomable as ocean.

Rhune closed his own eyes against their power, listening to the lift and fall of the sleepless, ever-patient sea.

I can’t, he thought. I can’t play such a part.

“If I refuse to do this thing,” he said, “will you prison me again?”

“Look at me,” said the Sealord.

Rhune opened his eyes. Shea’s gray glance searched his face. “If in truth,” said the wizard, “the ocean has washed from you your ability to charm, to deceive, and to lie, then I will find some other way to counter Seramir, and you may go from here. But if you say so, be sure you speak truth.” Shea’s voice grew very soft. “It is no longer in your power to lie to me.”

Rhune bowed his head. “Please,” he said, “let me think.”

Shea left him. He sat alone (as he had not been for many months—the ocean is never alone) smelling the salt air. Gulls rode the currents, calling to one another. He tried to picture the harbor at Mantalo as it must look, broken and dark with soot. It made an ugly image.

He dug his bare feet into the sand. His head felt thick and sluggish. The wind ruffled his hair, and he turned his face to the east to watch the rising sun coat the sea with light.

Once he had had guile and treachery aplenty. He remembered Osher, who had thought himself a wizard, and had been only a vicious, flattering fool. But he had not seemed foolish. He had measured his victim well, and his flatteries and baits had worked.

He said, “Without you, Shea is nothing. You build and stock his ships. You choose his captains and crews. You are his fleetmaster, and his chief counselor. Am I right in this? Yet you name him
Lord.
Lands, ships, lordship—it is through your effort that he keeps them. Only in his magic is he your master. Do you not resent it? You ought to. You call him ‘friend,’ but I will give you what he has never deigned or dared to give you—magic. Surely he fears you, and is no true friend, or else he would have offered it to you long ago.”

With these words and others like them Osher fueled Rhune’s ambitions. Two words from Shea would have ended it. But Shea seemed not to notice. One moonless autumn night, Rhune himself had opened the gates of the house, this house, and broken the neck of the guard who tried to shout a warning. Puffed with the desire for magic, he had let Osher and his soldiers in, to capture and dungeon Shea.

But Osher died, and Shea sent the raging sea into his house and tore it to rubble. Frightened, as he had never been before, by that power, Rhune fled, traveling west and north, away from the sea, hoping that Shea’s power would fade. But everywhere he ran streams, rivers, lakes, springs, the very water in the wells rose to bar his passage. Chilled, hungry, refugeless and raging, he surrendered, and Shea bound him with chains cold as ice, and brought him to the bay.

His hands twisted against each other. A year he had rested in it, not eating, not sleeping, part of the ocean and the tides, but conscious, and human, if one can be human and still be ocean. In it his ambitions and his pride had dissolved, washed away by the endless rocking of the earth. He
thought
they had dissolved.

But the anger, like a lump of iron in the earth, remained. (Two words from you, Sealord, and it might never have happened. But you saw nothing, said nothing. Only at the end did you speak.)

At last, with memories crowding his mind, he rose, and went to look for Shea.

He found him in the library, holding a rolled scroll.

“I will do it,” he said.

Shea nodded. Gently he fingered open the brittle paper. “I thought you would.” His face was unreadable, but his voice held a subtle mingling of sadness and relief.

* * *

It took Shea some three weeks to make preparation for the journey. Some of his tasks were practical and some were magical.

During that time, Rhune stayed near the house. Shea had asked him to, saying, “It will be best if your coming is a surprise to Seramir, if he does not even know that you are free. If you go into the city there will be talk, and he has agents in the city.”

Rhune agreed. There was no one he wished to see in Skyeggo. The terms of his old life had been washed out of him. By day he walked in the sunlight, or swam in the bay, delighting in the feel of the sun and water on his skin. In the afternoons, he practised weaponry and combat with the house guards.

In the evenings, he sat with Shea in the library, listening to the magician speak about the Firelord. “The island is his domain,” Shea said, “and all that lives on it is his. Trust no one. The most guileless-seeming scullion may be a spy, or worse, a creature made by Seramir out of fire. He has that skill, as do all the element-lords.” He spoke casually, as if he were not one himself. “Eat no food that has been prepared with fire unless you see others eating it. The fire-folk do not eat. Any food made with fire may be spelled to trap you.”

“But you will be with me,” said Rhune. “Can I not watch what you eat?”

“We may not always be together,” said Shea.

The last few days before the journey, Birne, the fleetmaster, came to the house. Rhune spent most of those days on the beach. One morning he was walking when Shea called to him. Rhune went to the Sealord’s side. “Walk with me,” said the wizard.

Obediently, Rhune followed him into the meadow west of the bay. The grass was lush, well-watered, as all Shea’s lands were. Once more, the wizard began to speak of the Firelord.

“I desire him to trust you,” he said. “If he trusts you, he will boast to you of his powers. He may even tell you about the device with which he wreaks such destruction upon Ryoka. But I do not think he will tell you where it can be found. I shall have to search his rooms for it. If I cannot find it there”— Shea paused, and with a deliberate, studied gesture, snapped the head from a daisy—”I will have to make him tell me where it is.” A yellow bee buzzed up angrily from his fingers, circled him once, and flew away.

Rhune said, “Can you not destroy this device at a distance, from the harbor?”

Shea shook his head. “Seramir guards his mountain well,” he said. “Once he is bound and weakened, it would be possible. But I cannot bind him from a distance. Even face to face, the task is difficult. It is not easy to capture a wizard in his own domain.”

Rhune said, “I know.”

Shea half-smiled. “You are a strong man,” he said. “But the chain with which I bound you was common steel, locked with a binding spell. It would not hold Seramir. Anything made with fire is subject to his command.”

They continued to walk across the meadow. Finally Shea halted, beside a bare circle, brown and hard and strange amid the luxurious grass. “Therefore we will forge a chain,” said Shea. Again he looked at Rhune. “You wished once to do magic, did you not?”

Rhune set his teeth. “I did.”

Shea knelt by—not on—the bare spot. Rhune copied him. “You shall. Hold one hand out to the center of the circle, and wait.”

Rhune obeyed. Soon he felt a vibration, as if the earth itself were soundlessly humming. The sensation was unpleasant, though not painful, and it was weakening. “Pull back!” said Shea.

Rhune pulled his arm back. It trembled with tension, as if he had been holding a heavy weight. “What is it?” he asked.

Shea said, “A place of power. They are sometimes called witch’s circles. As a lens can focus sunlight, so this spot can focus the power of mind that we call magic.”

Rhune rubbed his arm. “I don’t understand.”

“As a volcano is a pool of the earth’s unseen fires, and a spring the release of underground waters, so this circle is a pool, a well, a spring—whatever image suits your mind—for magic. They can be used, by those who know how to use them.”

As I do not, Rhune thought. He gazed with some trepidation at the circle of power.

Shea said, “It will not hurt you.”

The reassurance stung. Rhune said, “What do I do?”

“Put both hands in the circle.” Shea put his own hands forward as he spoke. “Choose from one of those pictures, pool or well or spring, or make another in your mind from what I told you. Make the picture clear and strong, and then see yourself as drawing substance out of it.”

Rhune extended both hands into the barren place. For a moment he was at a loss. Finally he visualized beneath the bare earth a huge magnet. It was old, brown, heavy rock, and it pulled as the pole pulls at the compass. Rhune felt the pull. “I thought it would be easy,” he said.

“No,” Shea said, “it isn’t easy. Don’t stop.”

Rhune clenched his eyelids shut and pulled against the rock. It dragged back at him, pulling strength from him, pulling thoughts, loves, fears, hopes, pulling senses and nerves, pulling heart and lungs—his breath burned in his throat—pulling legs and arms and fingers, pulling blood and bone and brain... “Feel,” said Shea. He guided Rhune’s shaking hands to something so fine it felt no thicker than an eyelash. “Do you feel it? That is our chain.”

“I feel it,” said Rhune. The words came in grunts. He opened his eyes. Shea’s fingers were shaking, too, and his arms and shoulders were trembling. His face was streaked with sweat.

Rhune’s fingers crooked. He felt as if he were being drawn into the earth. The top of his head was white-hot.

“Take your hands from the circle!” snapped Shea.

Rhune withdrew his hands. Lying back in the cool grass, he crossed his arm over his stinging eyes, and waited for the world to cease spinning like a manic top.

“Good,” said Shea.

Rhune struggled up. “Show me.”

Shea held out his palms. They looked empty. “Extend your hands,” he said. Rhune held his hands out, palm up. Shea laid—something—over them: four strands, as light as gossamer. Rhune stroked them. They were fine as human hair.

“This is all?” he said.

“Try to break them,” said Shea.

Rhune felt along the length. They were long enough to tie a man down, provided there was something to tie him to. Wrapping them around his hands, he braced and pulled, until the muscles stood out in his throat. His shoulders and wrists knotted and cracked. Blood roared in his ears.

The invisible chains did not break.

“They—they’re strong,” he said.

Shea took them, with a gesture that seemed to sling them around his neck. “They cannot be cut, and they cannot melt. The only thing which will undo them once tied, is our thought, woven in the breaking as it was in the making.’’ He smiled. “Thus Seramir, once bound, is unlikely to attempt to harm us, because he will never then be free.”

“I hope he knows that,” Rhune said.

“He will,” Shea said. Standing, he held out his hands and walked once around the bare spot, singing.

“What is that?” Rhune asked when he had done.

“I laid a warding spell on the circle. There is power in it now deadly enough to kill any unwary animal or a child. The spell will keep anyone from blundering into it until the effect fades.”

They returned to the house. At the door to the library. Shea said, “Will you be practicing in the pavilion this afternoon?”

Few magicians are warriors. But, watching Rhune break up a sailors’ fight on the docks, Shea had grown intrigued with the arts of weaponry and wrestling. He had asked Rhune to show him what he knew, and over the years it had become a pastime between the two men. At Rhune’s suggestion Shea had had a practice pavilion built near the house on Kameni Bay. It was in the garden, and was not, strictly speaking, a pavilion, but a square of lawn protected by a light awning, and walled on three sides with trellises. Flowers dangled from the trellis rungs, so that the smells of sweat and oil mingled with the scent of roses.

“I had thought to,” said Rhune.

“I should like to join you,” said the wizard. “I have neglected it, in the past year.”

Something bitter twisted inside Rhune’s mind. He bowed. “As you will, lord,” he said.

* * *

Crouching, right hand knife-edge out to protect his face and throat, Rhune circled. His feet shifted in tight short steps. His body was slick with oil. Two arms’ lengths from him, Shea matched his movements, gray eyes watchful. This was their fourth encounter.