Hart's Hope (19 page)

That night Orem did not sleep long. He awoke disturbed, and on the cot, not in the mahogany room. In his dream the pickled head of the wizard's wife had called to him, and so he went to her, because he could not deny her.

There was a faint light in the library. It came from the green luminescent slime on the barrels. He sat on a pile of rubbish in the cluttered, unmagical room. He watched.

It was the barrel that held the wizard's wife that shuddered first; then the others, as if the bodies inside were having silent convulsions, rocking the kegs, sloshing the water. Then a lid popped up loudly; another split in half; the third was sucked down into the barrel, and the water seeped and flowed over the top of it as it was drawn down.

In the dream there had been no danger, but Orem was afraid. Things that were dead ought to keep still, everyone knew that. But when the dead call, only a fool refuses them. And so he stayed and watched as a hand reached up from one, from two, from all of the barrels, long-fingered hands, with green light dripping slow as caterpillars down to the wrists, into the water.

“Don't hurt me,” Orem whispered.

Abruptly the hands all thrust out toward him. He gasped, reached out with his power of negation to try to stop them; but this was not magic, not the blood-bought magic that a Sink could swallow up. The hands were undisturbed by his strongest effort. They reached over the barrels' lip, and a single finger of each began to write in the slime. Orem could read the dark lines in the green shining, each woman writing her word, each trembling as if an uncontainable power controlled them.

“Sister,” wrote the wife.

“God,” wrote the dark daughter.

“Horn,” wrote the light daughter.

Then faster, as the hands grew more sure.

Then the hands shook violently, flew up in the air and splashed down again, then reached out, but kept getting sucked back in, as if they were struggling to write more, or even to leave the barrels entirely, and something fought as hard to keep them. The will to write was stronger: the fingers traced in barely readable letters words that meant only together.

It was over; the hands splashed back into the water; the lids came quickly into place; the broken one seemed to heal as it closed. The slime began to dim, the last letters of the last words faded into a uniform blackness. Orem fled upstairs.

He understood nothing, and lay halfway between sleep and wakefulness all night, trying to understand, trying not to think at all. If the last message was the wizard's women speaking for themselves, then whose message was the first part? Or was it meaningful at all? Who could lift the hands of the dead even when the power of a Sink had stolen all the magic?

Only in the first light of morning did he think to do that most obvious, most instinctive thing: he summed the words up, he summed them down, conceiving them both as columns and as rows. The upward sum of rows was
Palicrovol
. The downward sum of rows was
Beauty
. And either way the columns were added, they said,
Give all, get nothing
.

P
RANKS

All through the winter and spring Orem learned to use his new senses. He had no language to describe even to himself what he felt, so he adapted what language he had. When he described it to me, it was all a tale of tongues and tasting, pinpricks and bludgeons, though through it all he usually lay still as death on his cot.

In late spring Gallowglass agreed that he was ready to start earning his keep. So he began to reach outward, finding his way along Wizard Street. He found the magics of the other wizards as if they were tiny fires, hot or cooling, depending on their power. And he tasted them or pinched them or some other inadequate word for what he did, and all the blood-purchased power was gone.

From the first the experiment was a success.

“Orem! My Scanthips! You should have heard the woe! All up and down Wizard Street! Two buildings held up by magic collapsed. One old wizard who only kept his horn with spells is so humiliated he won't go back to Whore Street for years. And never knowing when a spell will work or not. The rats and sheep that have spilt their blood in vain these weeks—ah, if only you could hear the cutters complain. In the taverns where we go, I listen, I complain along with them. They think sometimes it must be the God's men found some terrible incantation. And sometimes they think it's the Queen, putting them in their place, though it's been a long time since she worried much about our paltry powers. Some think the Sweet Sisters, and it's time for women to take the place of power in the world. None of them suspects, none of them dreams that here in my miserable filthy blacksmith shop of a mansion I have found and trained a Sink!”

“It worked, then?” Orem asked.

“Somewhat. There was an assassination over in the Great Exchange, a dearly paid-for murder—was it you that snuffed that out?”

“I don't know. There was a far one. I can't tell what they are.”

“It was poison. You killed the power of it, but the taste remained. Luckily the assassin killed himself before letting on who hired him—quite dependable fellow, a rare thing these days—but there was a wizard who stared death in the face, you may be sure, for a few anxious moments.”

“Who was it?”

“Me. This isn't going to work well if you don't learn to differentiate between my magics and theirs.”

And so they talked through everything that Orem had done, and Gallowglass showed him all his spells and powers, and Orem gradually learned to distinguish one wizard's flame from another by taste or texture or color.

That was why he came to know Queen Beauty first by her magic.

H
OW
O
REM
F
IRST
E
NGAGED THE
Q
UEEN IN
B
ATTLE

It was late in autumn, and Orem ranged far and wide, following all his senses where they led him. He knew by then which points of light were men, and which were women; he had already learned the difference between the whiteness of a man who is awake and the bright silver of a soul asleep. He had learned also that the things done in a place lingered there even when the men were gone, so that he could taste a long and passionate love affair and tell when the coupling was only bought, could smell the difference between a house with love in it and a house with hate, could feel in the ground what sort of man had passed through a certain door. There were the fires of wizards, whose works he recognized now easily; there were the pools of bitter water where the Godsmen made islands in the surrounding sweetness. Orem could follow the life of the world as if it were a map spread before him. He vanquished the other wizards so easily that it wasn't sport anymore. It was boredom in the cold of an autumn afternoon that led him to search for King Palicrovol. It was a game, to see if he could match, in his small way, the Queen's Searching Eye.

He began by finding the river and following it up its course, searching for each little dot of mind that was some farmer coming down. He searched a long time before he came to the first town. Only then did he realize how wide a land Burland was. He had lived too long in Inwit, had come to feel, as so many of its citizens felt, that Inwit was fully half the world, and everything else outside was small and near. Instead it was far, and if he kept searching up the river in this lazy way he'd be a week getting to Banningside.

So he rose into the air, to see if he could perceive as a bird did, from high above. As he ascended, the sea of sweetness in which he had always moved suddenly ceased, and instead of the dark seeing and faint smelling he had been able to do, he felt as though he could sense all things forever. Except that wherever he dipped downward, there was the sweetness again like the fog of the city, slowing him and obscuring wherever he looked.

He tried to think what it could be, wondered if there were some layer in the air, or if where the clouds began, his magic vision improved. But the sweetness hung too low, never rising much above the height of the tallest buildings—and suddenly Orem understood. The sweet sea of fog was not natural at all. It was Queen Beauty's Searching Eye. It was her magic, pervading everything. Of course she did not bother to maintain it much above the level where a man was likely to climb. It was men she meant to spy on.

Does she see me? Or does a Sink devour the magic of Queen Beauty? Daringly he dipped down into the sweet fog and, instead of moving through it, he tasted it the way he tasted the fires of the wizards. It had no center to it, no potent place to snuff out, but he found that he could easily erase wide patches of it like clearing chalk from a slate, with no effort at all, and what he cleared stayed cleared.

At first he was alarmed at what he had done. Surely Queen Beauty would notice the gap in her vision, would come searching for him. But as he lay on his bed, feeling a little sick with fear, he realized that if he could block her Searching Eye miles from Inwit, he could block it here as well. And so he did, clearing her vision out of Wizard Street, away from the edges of the bitter island of the Great Temple, and from other places, too, so that she could not pinpoint one gap as the source of her enemy.

Enemy? Am I Queen Beauty's enemy?

He remembered Palicrovol, looking up at him with golden eyes at the House of God in Banningside. Had he, or perhaps some god, called to Orem then so he would do this very work, blinding Queen Beauty? He had never heard of a wizard daring to challenge her Searching Eye; he had never heard of a wizard who even understood how she did it. For the first time it occurred to Orem that his power as a Sink might have been given him, not to play pranks on the other wizards of Inwit, but to challenge Beauty herself. His father had found him soldiering in the dirt, childish games—but could he not now serve King Palicrovol as no other could serve him? Could he not, in fact, block Queen Beauty's power to make cowards of his men, and let his army come against an undefended city?

Now Orem searched for Palicrovol earnestly, ranging above Queen Beauty's cloud until he found a place where her sweet magic brightened and dazzled. It was here where she assailed the wizards of the King, topped their defenses, sieved through them, battered and broke them, playfully as a cat tearing at a thin paper held taut. And there was the King, a single wakeful point of lonely light within a sea of priestly bitterness, within the circle of elegant but impotent walls erected by the King's wizards. Palicrovol, the good King, still punished for a centuries-old sin, who had never passed his own suffering on to his people. I can give you ease, at least for a single hour of a single night, said Orem silently.

But before he acted, he remembered the Queen. She was the unspoken breath at the back of every speaker who fell silent, every lover who looked over his shoulder, every thinker who hummed to take a dangerous thought from his mind. He remembered that she was the helpless child raped on the back of the hart. Who was he to judge that her vengeance should be interrupted, that it was time to break her power?

You know what Orem decided, Palicrovol. You remember the night. Suddenly a wizard came in, his face white with terror, to say that the Queen had destroyed all their spells; then another came to say that the Queen's power, too, was gone. You did not dare believe that magic was so perfectly undone, until the itching at your groin let up for a few hours, your long-stopped bowels flowed normally, painlessly for a few hours, and you were able to sleep dreamlessly for the first night in three hundred years. Then you believed.

But why did Orem decide to do battle with the Queen? He did not suspect he was your son. You had done him no kindness. The Queen had done him no especial harm. It was simply this: If Orem had been alive when you ravished Asineth upon the hart's back, and he had had the power to stop you, he would have done it. He was one who instinctively fought against the strong, to help the helpless. It was his way, born into him. He hadn't the heart for necessary cruelty, the way you had. And so he challenged Queen Beauty, in part because he was brave and she was his only interesting adversary, but mostly out of pity for his weak and beaten King. Do not discount that when you judge him. There was a time when you were helpless, and he helped you.