Hart's Hope (18 page)

“Hartkiller!” Orem cried softly. And in the moment that his name for the crime hung in the stony, silent air, the hart died. Its head went slack, its tongue lolled.

It was a deep voice that rumbled out from under the doe's skin. “A boy,” he said. “And from High Waterswatch, where they keep the memory of the Hart. What have you brought me?”

“His name is—”

But Braisy was silenced by the wave of a hand. The old man's long-fingered hand seemed to have too many knuckles, too many joints. A single finger rose straight into the air, but from the back of the hand, so that the angle grew painful just to watch: all the other fingers straight down, and this single finger pointing upward.

And they waited. The hand did not waver.

The fat woman lumbered forward. The old man dipped a finger of his other hand into the copper pan and touched the bright bloody tip of his finger to her tongue. Braisy also tasted, and Orem, too, found the finger reaching for his tongue, and licked the cooling blood. It was sweet, it was sweet, and it burned all the way into his throat.

Braisy and Segrivaun stared at him with wide and frightened eyes. What was wrong? Orem grew afraid and looked behind him, but there was nothing there. It was he who frightened them. What change had the hart's blood wrought in him, that they should look at him with such horror?

“What is the price?” asked Segrivaun in a high voice. “Oh, God, a pilgrim's trap!”

Braisy giggled nervously. “You didn't tell me, boy. Cheater, cheater, God hates all liars.”

Orem did not understand. What was this talk of God and pilgrims, with a hart bled to death on the floor, with the taste of hart's blood in all heir mouths?

Something hot touched his leg. Orem looked down. It was the wizard's hand, still split wide like a keener's jaws, fastened to him.

“Not a pilgrim, are you?” said the deep voice. It sounded kind. “Not a pilgrim, and yet still we see you, we all see all, when all should have vanished at the taste of hart's blood.”

Vanished. They were supposed to disappear. And blamed the failure of it on him.

“Forgive me, Gallowglass,” Segrivaun began.

“Forgive you? Forgive you a dozen silvers' worth, that's how I forgive you. What woe you've brought me. What trouble is here in this miserable boy. A dozen silvers, Segrivaun. You little know who guided your footsteps through the low way, Braisteneft. You little know who drew you up the spider's line, Segrivaun.”

Gallowglass stood. He was tall for an old man. He faced Orem with gaze level. “And so early, and so young. What haste.”

Orem did not know what the old man meant. He only knew that Gallowglass's eyes were filled with tears, and yet his face looked acquisitive.

“How long will they let you stay, do you think?” he said softly, as if to himself. “Long enough, perhaps. Too long, perhaps. But worth this, yes.
If
you can learn—if
I
can teach—”

Abruptly Gallowglass's hand flew through the air, paused directly in front of Orem's face, and that single upraised finger lowered swiftly and sat upon Orem's eyeball. Rested on the open eye, yet Orem did not blink. He just stared at the pinkish black of the old man's finger, vaguely aware that it was hot. Suddenly the finger came into impossibly clear focus. Every whorl and twist was visible, and in them he could see, as if a hundred yards below, dizzyingly far down into the finger, thousands of people milling about, screaming, reaching upward to him out of the maze of whorls, pleading with him to release them.

“I can't,” he whispered.

“Oh, but you can,” said the wizard. And now his voice was not deep and old. It was adolescent, it was young. It was Orem's own voice, speaking to him out of the wizard's mouth. “You can. It is all I can do with hart's blood to contain you, even that long. What have you stolen from me just by being in the room?”

“Nothing,” Orem said. What could he have stolen, naked as he was? The wizard took his finger from Orem's eye. Now the eye stung bitterly, and Orem clapped his hand there and rubbed as the tears flowed to soothe the parched glass of his vision. “Don't you know, Segrivaun, that a pilgrim would stay visible only himself? Yet you are also visible, and Braisteneft, and I, and the hart. No pilgrim. But something that is mine, surely mine. A full purse of silver, Braisteneft. Ten of silver for you, Lady Segrivaun. Enough? Enough?”

“Oh, enough, Gallowglass!” cried Braisy.

“Enough that there is no memory that such a boy was brought?”

“Already forgot.”

“Enough that there is no memory of a hart whose blood failed when it was hot?”

“Already, my lord, forgot,” said Segrivaun.

Gallowglass laughed. “You're both a hundred times forsworn a day. No, we swear by the Hart, yes? By the Hart.” So they all, even Orem, knelt around the groin of the hart, each plunging a finger into the soft bloody slit of a wound, and all, even Orem, swore. It was a terrible oath, and Orem knew that his thread was cut in that moment. He remembered all his incantation, but there was no returning that way now.

A bag of silver changed hands. Orem knew what was happening. He had been sold. He was owned. He had left Inwit passless because he would not be a servant to a servant. Now he would be—something—to this Gallowglass. And not free.

And yet he did not mind.

The others left, and Gallowglass gave Orem his clothing. They dressed together, Orem in his dirty traveling clothes, Gallowglass in a deep green robe.

“What's happening to me?” Orem asked.

“You've been employed.”

“For how long?”

“For life, I think, however long that is. But don't despair. You'll have the freedom of the city, and the best forged passes that money can buy, since with you I can't use spells to blind the guards. And all you have to do, my boy, is serve me.”

“I only wanted to enter the city.”

Gallowglass tossed him his belt. “And you have. Or will in a moment.”

“What makes you think I
want
to work for you?”

Gallowglass only smiled kindly and patted the circled pattern on the front of his robe. It looked at first like the seven circles of a God's man. But it was eight circles. Two twos of twos. It was a fearsome thing to spell. For up it said, My blood. And down it said, Dry water. And spun down to the two and the two and the two and the two, it said, No hope.

“You're not afraid, are you, boy?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me, how much magic have you seen in your life?”

“Some.”

“But how much of it has actually worked in your sight?”

None. It was why he longed so for it. Magic was something that the others had spoken of, that all had seen from his infancy up, but never in his life had he seen the moment of change. For when he was there it never went right, no matter how hard they tried.

“That's right, boy. None of it. Never in your life. Your mother, did she do magic?”

He nodded.

“But sent you out of the house when she did, yes? When she wove, when she cooked, sent you out of the house.”

He threatened to undam a flood of bitterness. “Yes,” said Orem.

“They always sent you away. Why, boy? Why? When they said the spell of strength on you, it didn't work, did it? Never grew muscled, never grew strong. No village sergeant would have you, would he? For where you are, boy, wherever you are there's a hole in the fabric of the world. You're a Sink, lad. A Sink.”

He had no notion what such a thing might be. Good or evil? If he means to punish me for it, I'll not take it without argument. “I'm Orem Scanthips.”

“What do you think magic is, Scanthips?”

“Power. Bought with blood.”

“Bought. Yes, that's the best you'd be able to know, I suppose. But it isn't buying. Not the way the merchants do, with their money. They separate earning from acquiring, with money in between, so the price can go up and down and lose its tie with the labor. So you can be cheated. But the prices in blood do not change.”

“Earning, then.”

“Not earning either, lad. For you can't
do
more and
get
more. It's there, in you, just there. In every living thing, according to the blood. The blood of life is a web, a net that we draw with us, catching the life of the world in it as we go. All the living blood draws in power, and holds it, so that when one like me, who knows the uses of that power, when I draw the hot blood I can shape, I can build, I can create and kill. But not your blood, Orem Scanthips. Oh, you catch the life as it passes, yes, the power flows into you like anyone else. Better than others, for your web is great, it trails with you, settles out around you, draws life and power from everyone, draws them to you. But do you fill with power? Is there greater strength in you?”

“No?”

“You rob the magic right from the blood, but then it drains from you, drains back into the earth, waiting for the trees and grass to suck it up, waiting for it to melt into the air, to be eaten by the cattle, to settle into the blood of other men again. You can't use it. It just drains through you and it's gone.”

“How much?”

“You drained the blood of a whole hart in an instant, Scanthips. That's power, lad. There's no limit to you. Sisters, Sisters, no limit to you except for the shape of your nets, Lord Fisher, the placement of your web, Master Spider. I will teach you.”

“Teach me?”

“How to place your web. How to swallow power where and when you wish. You will rob for me, undo the magic wherever I tell you. Who can resist me then? Who will compete with Gallowglass? Challenge me, all of you, and my Sink, my Scanthips, he will worm to the heart of your power and drink you dry.”

“Why you?”

“Because you came to me. It was no accident. Power comes to you, and you come to power. I am the greatest of the learned doctors of Wizard Street. You came to
me
for power. Oh, it's a risk I'm taking, a sacrifice I'm making. How quickly will you learn? Until you do, there's no magic in my house. You're a danger to me. If you get too dangerous, of course, I'll kill you. So learn quickly, lad. Learn quickly.”

“I will.”

“All my life I've read the stories of Sinks, but never thought I'd live to see one. Follow me, lad.”

The road out was as difficult as the road in, but now Orem did not bother trying to memorize the path. He had come to the Inwit that he had dreamed of, the Inwit of old magic from the time before God.

At last they stood in a darkened house, and saw the silhouette of the two towers far away. “West Gate,” said Gallowglass. “Beauty closed it only a year after Palicrovol left the city. But West Gate wasn't its true name even then. Before Palicrovol, it was the main gate of the city. Hind's Trace, that was its name, and the ancient city wasn't Inwit, but Hart's Hope. Hart's Hope, for long before the seven circles were carved on God's Gate they lit the hundred-pointed candlestick in the halls of the great houses. And they didn't go to Great Temple then. The pilgrims came to Shrine Street, to the little broken tree that will not die. Even Palicrovol, who thinks he's a Godsman,
he
even knows the truth. Do you think that in three hundred years he has forgotten that he forsook the Hart?”

Then the wizard sent him out into the street while he magically hid the entrance to the passageway. Sent him with a warning: You have no pass, don't try to escape. But Orem did not want to escape. As he stood in the dusky street he was joyful. Hart's Hope. Hind's Trace. The broken tree that would not die. Shrine Street. The city that was before God came. It was the city Orem had come to find.

How Orem learned the death that gnawed at the heart of the world.

I
N THE
W
IZARD'S
H
OUSE

Like all the wizards of Inwit in that day, Gallowglass lived on Wizard Street. His house looked common enough and modest from the outside. Its only advertisement was a horseshoe on a nail, for it had once been a blacksmith shop. The hinges were in such disarray that doors seemed more to lean than close, and a shutter flapped clumsily in the breeze that sighed up the street. There was dust on the porch that seemed to have been undisturbed for years. Yet the wizard seemed to see nothing amiss as he climbed the step, took hold of a door, and eased it out of the way.

“In in in,” he whispered. Orem went in, ducking to avoid a heavily laden spider web whose surly mistress seemed resentful at being disturbed. It was dark inside, and darker yet when the wizard stepped within and pulled the door closed behind him.

“Lamp lamp,” he said, searching in the darkness.

“What
is
this place?”

“The heavenly hearth, the kindly fire, the keeper of the heart, the place of rest and comfort. In a word, my domicile.”

Gallowglass found a match. He struck once, twice; it wouldn't light. Matches had spells on them, everyone knew that, and now Orem understood why his mother sent him out of the house whenever she had to relight the kitchen fire. Gallowglass put down the matches. “We must teach you quickly, mustn't we.”

He lit a flame the unmagical way. “Flint and steel, stone and ore, yes, yes, here.” Gallowglass was much less deft at it than Braisy. At last there came a spark and a small fire, not on wool, but on a piece of paper. Burning paper was something Orem had never seen done before. Paper was far too precious in the House of God in Banningside. Yet it made a light, and Orem looked around the place while Gallowglass lit the lamp.

It was a cramped and crowded room, with things stacked in a hopeless jumble on shelves that sagged along the walls. There were piles on the floor, too, and on the steps of the steep and narrow stair that led to a room above. There were three large barrels against the northern wall, unmarked, yet damp and mossy. And everything was inches thick in dust.

“Is this the best place you could find?” asked Orem.

Gallowglass looked at him in annoyance. “It doesn't look like this usually. But
you're
here, and so I'll have to forego the normal furnishings for a while.” As he spoke the lamp went out again. “Damn, boy, will you get upstairs so I can do this properly?”

Orem stumbled to the stairs in the darkness and clambered up into the cobwebs. Then he listened to Gallowglass wandering around below. A fire soon crackled in the hearth, though there had been no hearth in the room downstairs. And he could hear Gallowglass wander from room to room, opening and closing the doors, though there had been but the one room there before. With magic the place was a palace. With a Sink there, it was a foul place. The wizard had never bothered with housekeeping in reality, when he lived in magic all the time.

Then he heard Gallowglass speaking. “I couldn't help it,” Gallowglass said plaintively. Then was there a whisper of an answer? No one had come in with them. Orem waited and tried to listen, and finally, after what seemed hours, he grew impatient.

“Gallowglass!”

“Don't come down the stairs or I'll break your brains!”

“I'm not! I haven't moved!”

“Good! It's the only thing keeping you alive!”

“I'm hungry! It's dark up here!”

Downstairs a barrel lid was tamped into place with a mallet. Soon Orem heard the wizard's footsteps on the stairs. At first the stairs were carpeted, but then, abruptly, the footsteps changed to the smack of leather on bare wood. “May the bones of your ancestors turn to fungus.” The voice was soft, but clear because the old wizard's head was now sticking up into the room. He lifted the lamp to illuminate the tiny upstairs room.

“Oh, dismal,” said the wizard.

Orem silently agreed. Cluttered, filthy, and reeking of decay, it was not half so nice a place as the rooms at the Spade and Grave.

“Here,” said Gallowglass. He handed him a dish of very dry bread.

“This is all I get to eat?”

“It was roast dove when I conjured it downstairs, how can I help what it turns into in your presence.”

“I can't help it either,” Orem said. “But I can't live on that.”

“Then learn quickly,” the wizard said. “I was ready for the danger of having you. But the inconvenience!” Gallowglass rummaged through the debris and pulled from it a shabby cot with a tear in the middle of the canvas. “Best I can do,” he said. “But there it is. Until you learn.”

“
My
bed?” Orem asked.

“Until you learn, you damnable nuisance! Don't complain when it's your flatulent fault!”

“Then teach me!” Orem retorted.

“I can't
teach
you, not just like
that
.” Gallowglass snapped his fingers in Orem's face. “I can only suggest, respond, inform—you have to
learn
. It's inside you, once you learn to recognize and control it. How can I
teach
you, I've never been a Sink.”

“Whatever you mean to do, begin it now,” Orem said.

“Imperious little bastard, aren't you.”

“Just hungry.”

The wizard made him lie upon the floor with a bundle of cloth under his head. And then strange, soft commands: Reach out with your fingers, close your eyes, and tell me the color of the air just over your head. Hear if you can the sound of my beard growing. Yes, listen, reach your fingers; try to taste the taste of your sweat in the insides of your eyes.

Orem understood none of it. “I can't,” he muttered.

The wizard paid him no attention, just went on. You are asleep as you lie there, listening to me, asleep as long as you think you are awake, awake only when you discover your sleep. Feel how the air gets hotter, feel it at the back of your neck, look at the sun shining, look at it through the soft place behind your knees, yes, you have secret eyes there, look how white it is there.

There was something compelling in the rhythm of the old man's speech, the cadences of it, at times sounding like prayer, at times like song, at times like the bark of an angry dog. Orem's senses became confused. He ceased seeing through his eyes, and yet was still aware of vision, or something akin to it. A grey around him, like the fog of the day before. He could hear the rush of time. He no longer felt inside him where his fingers were, but rather tasted them, and his tongue burned in his mouth, then went cold, then wilted and shrank until he lost track of what was mouth, what was tongue, and even what was Orem.

Orem tried to speak and his knee flexed, and yet he felt it as a burst of light within his chest. Orem tried to move his hand and a high hum came from his throat, but he perceived it as a great weight crushing his testicles and he wept from the pain of it.

Then something, some command he gave without knowing, caused all the grey fog around him to flex. A quick contraction. He did not know what it was he did, but there! there it was again, yes, and again. Like spasms, but he learned to flex the grey again, again, drew it in, pulled it to him, sustained the pressure. It slipped, it lapsed, he grew tired and felt the weariness as a deep green in his thighs, but this he knew was what was wanted of him. Hold this, draw it in, hold it and hold it and hold it.

And now he could open his eyes and see, not an old man holding a feeble lamp in a dingy upstairs room, but a young man, blond and beautiful, the man that Orem's father had wished him to be, tall and strong, and it was not a lamp in his hands but a tiny star shining. The room was not filthy and small, either; he was lying in a bed in a room dark with heavily engraved mahogany and brown brocade tapestries, and the young and beautiful man was looking at him with diamonds at the pupils of his eyes.

“This is my home, Orem, when you let it be,” said the starholder, said the jewel-eyed lover.

And then it was all too strong for him, and Orem felt something break inside him, and the grey erupted from him and his senses flew madly about the room, about the inside of his head. He writhed on his miserable cot, until at last he fell like a spider gently back into himself, exhausted, surrounded again by the filth. The old man nodded. “Not bad for a first lesson. You'll get better at it as time goes on. If you live through it.”

He did get better and stronger, until within weeks he was able to hold the fog just within his skin all his waking hours, much to the wizard's relief. They could take meals together now. And in two months it was such a reflex that he controlled his power even in his sleep. Except now and then, when it slipped away from him, and he awoke again on the cot instead of his soft bed. He told Gallowglass of the lapses. The wizard shrugged and flashed his diamond eyes. “You were probably a bedwetter, too.”

T
HE
W
IZARD'S
W
OMEN

“My pickle barrels seem to have caught your eye,” said Gallowglass as they read books in his library one night.

“You must be—very fond of pickles,” said Orem tentatively.

Gallowglass smiled his bright and beautiful smile. Then he pried open a lid with the crow that lay on the leftmost keg. “What I love best in all the world,” said the wizard. “And not held by magic, no, not at all. That's why it wasn't undone when you came in so clumsily and wrecked the place. It's just what it seems to be.” The lid came off with a sloshing of water. Orem stood to see. It was not hoarmelon floating in the water, nor onions, nor even a single cabbage as, for a moment, it seemed. For the wizard reached down with his hand, seized a loose handful of hair, and pulled up the shriveled head of a woman.

Head, neck, and naked shoulders. The eyelids hung slack, the mouth drooped open, the skin was wrinkled like a hundred-year-old raisin, and white. Bleached white as a dart's egg, white as the eye of a blindfish from the caves of Watermount.

“My love, my life, my paramour, my wife. Best beloved of all women. The dust of the pouch at my belt, the dust of her blood, here—a shake of it, not much, just a shake, and look, look.” The blackish dust settled from Gallowglass's fingers, and Orem saw the body shudder under Gallowglass's hand. The eyes trembled and slackly opened.

“Nn,” said the corpse.

“My lady,” said Gallowglass.

“Nnnn.”

“I have a prentice now, who wants to see you.”

“Nnnn.”

“He's a smart lad, in his way. Has no manners, eats like a pig and smells worse, and there's no help for it but bathing, since he shuns spells like grease sheds rainwater. But ah, he has a compassionate heart. Do you think he'd be touched at your tale, my love?”

The voice was still a moan, but now Orem realized that the sluggish tongue was articulating; there were words. “Let me sleep,” she might have said. Or “Dead so deep.” Hard to hear it. And Gallowglass only nodded.

“Come so far, such a long and weary way, yes my love? And yet though the journey is long, still you know I love you. That must be a comfort to you in your death, as it is a comfort to me to have your company.”

“Nnnn,” said the pickled head. A spurt of bile came from the mouth, and then all went slack again. Gently the wizard lowered the head again. When he turned to Orem, his eyes were emeralds, green as the growth on the barrels.

“Did I tell you that I'm the greatest of the wizards of Inwit? It's true, but small honor, small honor. Do you think Queen Beauty would let me stay, if I were strong? A strong wizard doesn't have to let his wife and daughters die of some ridiculous disease. Doesn't have to watch them waste away to nothing. A strong wizard isn't so fainthearted that he lets them die with their blood. Sleeve wouldn't have done it, you know. Sleeve would have seen their deaths, and calmly drawn their blood alive, with the power hot in it. But like a witch I waited, and took it cool, took it dead, found blood. Powdered here, with only enough power in it to bring them back now and then for conversation.” The tears flowed down his cheeks. “I grow maudlin, but I will not hide my heart from my disciple. Oh, Scanthips, my lad, my boy, my wife was the most beautiful of the ladies of power, saving only Beauty herself, my wife was lovely, and her loveliness was not diminished even when divided between my daughters. Look at them!”

Gallowglass unlidded the other barrels, and lifted up his daughters, and Orem looked, though he had no wish to see.

“Look at the curve of the breast—sagging now, but you can imagine it!”

Orem could not, but he murmured his assent. To him the daughter was as utterly old as the mother, for what years had not done, brine did.

“Golden hair, and her sister dark, like day and night walking through the city. I touched them with no spell to make them beautiful—it was in them, it
was
them. And ah, the men who pled with me to give them up. But I was saving them for a better lover than any man.” Again the bright tears flowed from the emerald eyes. “I was saving them for Death, who crept in and seduced them as I helplessly looked on. Shriveled them, wasted them under my eyes. But I have enough power to waken them. I can draw them back. You saw it!”

“Yes,” Orem said.

“Oh, by the Sisters, by the Hart, by that damnable God who broke our power and penned us in, if only I knew what the masters knew! I slay the hart in the tower, so my competitors will see the corpse and worry that perhaps I have more power than they—but I know nothing to do with that blood except foolish tricks of invisibility, and that can be done with sheep! I draw the hart's blood, and what does it accomplish? It proves to me again my weakness.” He closed the barrels, tamped down the lids again. “My life is here, shriveling in brine. But with your gifts I will be the strongest in Hart's Hope, the greatest of them all. And yet.” He wandered off to the stairway, intoning to himself. “Strongest of them all, and yet still too weak, still too weak, I couldn't save them.”