Daughter of Regals (23 page)

The
General
Hospital
was designed just like the
Medical
Building
and the
National Library. He was able to find his way without trouble. Soon he was
among the many rooms of the Emergency Division. He kicked open the doors,
checked the rooms checked room after room. They were full of patients. The
Emergency Division was a busy place. He had not expected to find that so many
people were ill and dangerous. But none of them were what he was looking for.
They were not being transformed. They were dying from physical or mental
sickness. If any people like him had been brought here, they had already been
destroyed.

Red
rage filled his heart. He charged on through the halls.

Then
suddenly he came to the great room where the medicomputers lived. Rank on rank,
they stood before him. Their displays glared evilly at him, and their voices
shouted. He heard several of them shout together, “Absolute emergency!
Atmospheric control, activate all nerve gas’ Saturation gassing, all floors!”

They
were trying to kill him. They were going to kill everybody in the Hospital.

The
medicomputers were made of magnacite and plasmium. Their circuits were
fireproof. But they were not proof against the power of his horn. When he
attacked them, they began to burn in white fire, as incandescent as the sun.

 He
could hear gas hissing into the air. He took a deep breath and ran.

The gas
was hissing into all the corridors of the Hospital. Patients began to die. Men
and women in white coats began to die.
Norman
began to think that he would not be able to get out of the Hospital
before he had to breathe.

A
moment later, the fire in the medicomputers ignited the gas. The gas burned.
Oxygen tanks began to explode. Dispensaries went up in flames. The fire
extinguishers could not stop the intense heat of burning magnacite and
plasmium. When the cylinders of nerve gas burst, they had enough force to
shatter the floors and walls.

Norman
flashed through the doors and galloped into the road with the
General
Hospital
raging behind him like a furnace.

He
breathed the night air deep into his chest and skittered to a stop on the far
side of the road to shake the sparks out of his mane. Then he turned to watch
the Hospital burn.

At
first he was alone in the road. The people who lived nearby did not come to
watch the blaze. They were afraid of it. They did not try to help the people
who escaped the flames.

But
then he saw a young girl come out from between the houses. She went into the
road to look at the fire.

Norman
pranced over to her. He reared in front of her.

She did
not run away.

She had
a lump on her forehead like the base of a horn or the nub of a new antler.
There was a smile on her lips, as if she were looking at something beautiful.

And
there was no fear in her eyes at all.

I AM A SENSIBLE MAN. I HAVE BEEN
BLACKSMITH, wheelwright and ironmonger for this village for seven years; and I
have not seen the need to believe in magic, no matter what that loon, mad
Festil my brother, says. I have not had need of magic. I am a man who does what
he wills without such things—without such nonsense, I might once have said.
This village is small, it’s true, but not so small that Mardik the blacksmith
does not stand as tail as any man here, fletcher or stonemason or vintner. I
have all the work I choose to do, and my asking is fair because I have no need
to ask for more. There is no woman here, widow or maid, who scorns the touch of
my hands, though it’s true my hands have the grime of the smithy in them and
are not like to look clean again. Men listen when I speak; and if they do not
hear me well, they can hear my fist well enough, and better than most. For my
sake they treat mad Festil with respect.

Yet that respect is less
than his desert. Loon that he is, he is wise in his way, though the village
does not see it. He is younger than I, and less of stature by a span of my
hand; but when he smiles the look in his face is stronger than fists, and many
are the angers he has brought to an end by gazing upon them with his blind
eyes. For this I esteem him more than our village can understand. And for one
thing more. Mad Festil my brother came to me when I was in need, brought close to
death by the magic of the Lady in White.

Magic I call it, lacking
another name for the thing I do not understand. Fools speak of magic with glib
tongues that have no knowledge; they seek a respect that they cannot win with
their own hands. Children prate of magic when they have taken fright in the Deep
Forest. Well, the Deep Forest is strange, it’s true. The trees are tall beyond
tallness, and the gloom under them is cunning, and men lose their way easily.
Our village sits with its back to the mighty trees like a man known for
bravery; but oftimes tales are heard of things which befall those who venture
into the Deep Forest; and in storms even the priests gaze upon that tall
darkness with fear. And fools, too, are not always what they seem.

But fools and children
speak only of what they hear from others, who themselves only speak of what
they hear from others. Even the priests can put no face to their fear without consulting
Scripture. I am neither fool nor child. I am not a priest, to shudder at tales
of Lucifer. I am Mardik the blacksmith, wheelwright and ironmonger; and I make
what I will, do what I will, have what I will. I fear not Satan nor storms nor
black trees.

I speak only of what I
have seen with my own eyes; and I was not struck blind by what I saw, as Festil
was. I have kissed the lips of the thing I do not understand and have been left
to die in the vastness of the Deep Forest.

I say I do not believe
in magic; and I hold to what I say. Mayhap for a time I became ill in my mind.
Mayhap all unknowing I ate of the mushroom of madness which grows at night
under the ferns far in the Deep Forest. Mayhap many things, none of them
magical. I do not say them because I cannot say them and be sure. This I do say:
for a time under the spell of the Lady in White, I had need of a thing that was
not in me; and because I had it not, I was left to die. If that thing has
another name than magic, mad Festil knows it, not I. He smiles it to himself in
his blindness and does not speak.

He was fey from his earliest youth, like a
boy who knew that when he became a man he would lose his sight. My remembering
of him goes back to the sound of his voice in the darkness of our loftroom.
Though sleep was upon me, he would remain awake, sitting upright
in
the
straw bed we shared, speaking of things that were exciting to him—of dragons
and quests and arcane endeavors, things mysterious and wonderful. He spoke of
them as if they were present to him in the darkness; and the power of his
speaking kept me awake as well. I cuffed him more than once, it’s true, to make
him silent; but more often I listened and let him speak and laughed to myself.

At times when the
excitement was strong, he would say, “Do you believe in magic, my brother? Do
you not believe in magic?” Then I would laugh aloud. And if the excitement was
very strong, he would become stubborn. “Surely,” he would say, “surely you
believe that there is some witchery in the Deep Forest?” Then I would say, “A
tree is a tree, and paths are few. It does not need magic to explain how fools
and children lose their way. And if they come back to the village with strange
tales to excuse their fear and foolishness, that also does not need magic.” And
then if he pressed me further, I would cuff him and go to sleep.

For this reason, I did
not esteem Festil my brother as we grew to manhood. And for other reasons,
also. I have no wife because I have no need of wife. No woman scorns me, and I
take what I will. It pleases me to live my life without the bonds of a wife.
But Festil has no wife because no woman in the village, be she ripe and
maidenly enough to make a man grind his teeth—no woman pleases him. I believe
he is a virgin to this day.

And when our father the
blacksmith before me died, I did not learn to esteem my brother more. He was a
dreamer and a loon and understood less than nothing of the workings of the
smithy. So all the labor came to me, and until I grew strong enough to bear it
I did not take pleasure in it.

Also his speaking of our
father’s death was worse than anile. Our father died from the kick of a horse
whose hooves he was trimming. A placid plowbeast that never gave its master a
moment’s trouble suddenly conceived a desire to see the color of our father’s
brains. To this Festil cried, “Bewitchment!” He took a dagger and spent long
hours in the Deep Forest, seeking to find and slay the caster of the spell. But
I looked upon the beast when it grew calm again and found that our father’s
trimming blade had slipped in his hands and had cut the frog of the hoof.
Bewitchment, forsooth! I saw no need to treat mad Festil with respect.

Yet he was my brother,
kind and gentle, and willing in his way to help me at the forge, though it’s
true his help was often less than a help. And at times he fought the fools in
the village for my sake when he would not tight for his own. I grew to be glad
of his company and tolerant of his talk. And I knew that a matter to be taken
seriously had arisen when he came to me and said that he had seen the Lady in
White.

“The Lady in White!” he
said softly, and his eyes shone, and his face was full of light. I would have
laughed to see any other man act such a calf. But this was Festil my brother,
who had not so much as touched his lips to the breasts of any woman but his
mother. And in past days I had heard talk of this Lady in White—as who had not?
The men who had seen her had told their tales until no ear in the village was
empty of their prattle. For three nights now, every tankard of ale I took at
the Red Horse was flavored with talk of the Lady in White. I cannot say that I
was partial to the taste.

Fimm the fruiterer had
seen her, with Form his son, who was almost a man. Form had gone senseless with
love, said Fimm, and had crept away from his father in the night to follow the
road taken by the Lady—into the Deep Forest, said Fimm. For two nights now Form
had not returned, and no one in the village had seen him.

“Well, lads are wild,”
said I, “and a Lady in White is as good a cure for wildness as any. He will
return when she has taught him to be some little tamer.”

But nay—Fimm would not
agree. And Pandeler the weaver was of the same mind, though Pandeler does not
take kindly to nonsense. He himself bad seen the Lady in White. She had come to
his shop to buy his finest samite, and there his two sons, the twins Paoul and
Pendit, had seen her. They had come to blows over her—they who were as close to
each other as two fingers on the same fist—and Paoul had gone away in search of
her, followed soon afterward by Pendit, though they were both of them under the
banns to be married to the ripe young daughters of Swonsil the fletcher.

Yet that was not the
greatest wonder of it, said Pandeler. Neither of his sons had been seen in the
village for two days—but that also was not the greatest wonder. Nay, the wonder
was that Pandeler himself had near arisen in the black night and followed his
sons into the Deep Forest, hoping to find the Lady in White before them. He had
only refrained, he said, because he was too old to make a fool of himself in
love—and because if the truth were known it would be that he was altogether
fond of Megan his wife.

“What is she like, then,”
I said, “this Lady in White?” It was in my mind that any woman able to lead
Pandeler the weaver by the nose would be worth a look or twain.

But he gave no answer.
His eyes gazed into his tankard, and if he saw the Lady in White there he did
not say what he saw.

Then other men spoke. If
all the tales were true, this Lady had already consumed some half dozen of our
young men; and no one of us knew a thing of her but that she came to the village
from the Deep Forest and that when she left she took herself back into the Deep
Forest.

Well, I thought of all
this often In my smithy—and not with displeasure, it’s true. If our young men
were fool enough to lose themselves in the Deep Forest—why, soon the village
would be full of maidens in need of consolation. And who better to console them
than Mardik the blacksmith?

But that look in Festil
my brother’s face stood the matter on other ground. When he came to me and said
that he had seen the Lady in White, I put down my hammer and considered him
seriously. Then I took a step to bring myself close to him and said, “It’s come
to that, has it? When will you be after her?”