Magic in Ithkar 3 Read online

  “He won’t be in. He is very old, you know, even older than I. Eldris suffers from an advanced stage of . . . silliness. He will be hiding from the eclipse. He is afraid of it.”

  They walked on in silence until they reached Aymar’s stall by the fortune-tellers’ sector. On the tent-flap was embroidered a strange device—an open hand with three spheres in its palm. Keri thought the sigil odd for a fortune-teller, and she voiced her opinion.

  “I am not a fortune-teller.” He ushered the others into the wagon proper. “I am an astrologer,” he concluded.

  Keri opened her mouth to speak, but Aymar silenced her. “Questions answered after dinner. Have a seat, and I’ll see about some food.” He disappeared through a curtain.

  Harrel pulled out a chair for Keri, and she began to take her place. Cylute pounced. Keri took an immediate liking to the brazen piglet.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Cylute.”

  “What will Master Dorphus do with him when he’s full grown?”

  “He won’t get any bigger; he’s charmed.”

  “Will the SunDark tomorrow frighten him, do you think?” “No, but it may frighten me.”

  Keri laughed. “You and Eldris Fyrl.”

  Aymar returned to the table. “What’s this about Eldris Fyrl?” he asked, noting the twinkle in Keri’s eye. “You don’t seem to be taking him too seriously.”

  “I had better start taking him seriously, Master Dorphus. He is my mentor now.” She played with Cylute, avoiding Aymar’s eyes. “Master Fyrl was very kind. He gave me money for food and accepted me as apprentice. But you must know all that if you’ve spoken to him. Was it he who told you of my arrest? I did not think he knew of it.”

  “No. Harrel brought me the news . . . but here is our food.”

  Qlik carried a tray of cold meats, cheese, and bread. Keri’s eyes widened when first he appeared, but the dwarf gave her a toothy grin which she returned immediately. She forgot her questions as she dove in to the first full meal she’d had in days. Aymar watched her in amusement, Harrel in awe. She ate twice as much as either man but was finished first.

  Aymar leaned back in his chair. He motioned to Harrel, who went out to check the grounds. Eavesdropping was easily done at Ithkar Fair, tents and wagons being, as they were, far from soundproof. When Harrel returned, Aymar began his tale. He explained about the fog being under Thotharn’s control and about the orator Gaulrue come to Ithkar to sway the faith of the pilgrims. Lastly he told of his need for Keri and her stones. “So you see, my child, we have much work ahead of us this night. And for the beginning, at least, I will need you to practice your magic.”

  Qlik and Harrel went to stand guard outside the wagon. Aymar, with his books, and Keri, with her stones, sat elbow to elbow at the table. Keri cast the stones for different times of day. Aymar made notes and calculations—many of which he explained to Keri. She caught on quickly and began to anticipate his next need. At length they had finished. Aymar was satisfied that he had all he needed. He showed Keri a high bunk in the front of the wagon. She rolled herself in a blanket, warm for the night.

  “Used to sleep there myself,” he said, “before my bones got too old for the climb. Good night, Kefi.”

  “Keridwyn,” she mumbled. “My name is Keridwyn.”

  Keri slept. Aymar went out to speak to the temple acolytes who were scattered throughout the fairgrounds. All had to be in readiness for the morrow.

  Morning found a great crowd of pilgrims, cajoled and threatened by Thotharn’s men, gathered near the docks. More arrived by the moment. Overnight a makeshift stand had been erected, and on it, high above the crowds, stood Gaulrue. Above him, placed so that it would be just below the eclipsing sun, was a silver-hued mask of Thotharn.

  Gaulrue raised his arms in invocation. He did not speak, yet instantly there was a hush over the crowd. Suddenly a great wind swept through the fairgrounds, shaking wagons and loosening tent stakes as it whipped through the lanes, bringing with it all manner of debris. Canopies, torn from their moorings, blew through the crowd and down the piers to the river Ith, and a yowling cacophony issued from the beast-masters’ sector.

  But over the howl of the winds, the cries of the frightened pilgrims, and the doleful bellowing of the captive dorn beasts; over all of this there rose a great sucking sound, as if all the winds in the world converged and were swallowed by an immense vacuum.

  Above the heads of the terrorized fairgoers the fog swirled forward and swept toward the now glowing mask of Thotharn. Great gobbets of mist flowed through its open mouth and disappeared. Within moments the fog was gone. The winds died as quickly as they had risen, and sunlight streamed again from the heavens. It was as though the fog had never been.

  Just as a mutter began to rise from the crowd, the priest again raised his arms. “Pilgrims,” he said. “Long have you awaited the return of the Three Lordly Ones. Wait no more. The Sky Lords will not return. Thotharn rules Ithkar. The great Thotharn rules the fogs; rules the winds; rules, even, the sun itself. All power lies with Thotharn. Do not doubt. For if only one man doubts the wisdom, the power, the omnipotence of Thotharn; if only one man has doubt, then Thotharn shall cause a great shadow to fall across the sun. Kneel, pilgrims, kneel before the mask of the god of gods. Kneel and be saved lest the light of the sun desert you.”

  Those nearest the baleful eyes of Gaulrue knelt first, followed by ranks of pilgrims farther back. When about half the people had knelt, Aymar Dorphus began to make his way toward the front of the crowd.

  “Unbelievers!” Gaulrue cried. “Thotharn will rule Ithkar. See, even now the shadow begins to eat your sun. Kneel, while there is yet time for the god to revoke his punishment. Kneel and worship Thotharn.”

  The pilgrims looked up. Through blinking, teary eyes they saw a shadow beginning to form at the edge of the sun. The shadow grew, and with it grew the numbers of those who knelt. Gaulrue droned on and on. His hypnotic, singsong voice swayed the people. Pilgrim after pilgrim dropped to his knees. By the time the moons had nearly obliterated the sun, all were kneeling except Aymar. Even Keri, under orders, knelt. Gaulrue pointed to Aymar.

  “There is the man. There is the one man who will not believe what his own eyes tell him. There is the fool for whom we are all being punished. Seize him! Force him to worship Thotharn. Force him to be saved.”

  Aymar had expected such a trick. The twoscore men nearest him at the platform’s base were acolytes, masquerading as fairgoers. In the darkness of the eclipse little could be seen. Even those a dozen strides from Aymar could not see him. He was safe enough, for the moment. He turned to face the crowd.

  “Goodmen,” he began, “you have seen a great wind blow away the fog.”

  “Thotharn’s wind!” Gaulrue shouted.

  “Yes,” Aymar continued, “that indeed was the work of Thotharn. But were there none among you who saw the temple grounds? Who saw that there was no fog near the hallowed place?” A few folk muttered. Gaulrue would have interrupted had not Qlik chosen that moment to clap his hand over the priest’s mouth. Others who served Thotharn, seeing what they believed to be a hideous animal attack their leader, melted into the darkness.

  Aymar went on. “This here”—he raised his arm to indicate the sun—“is but an eclipse. The two moons, Kumeth and Lilith, are crossing the path of the sun. That is all. You have seen eclipses before. Surely a double eclipse is not a magical thing.”

  “This one is,” the disguised voice of Harrel called out. “Thotharn caused the eclipse. Thotharn rules the moons.”

  The crowd muttered its assent. A few single voices were raised, but Aymar had not the time for hecklers. He continued, louder.

  “Not so, goodman. The eclipse is preordained.”

  “So say you now.” Harrel was playing his part well. “It is easy to predict what is already past.”

  “Then I shall predict the future. Watch the skies. In a moment a great white light with flaming tail will cross above the sun and
fall to the west. Like the SunDark, it is a natural thing. But if you wish, take it as a sign—a sign that Thotharn does not rule Ithkar. Watch but a moment. See that I speak truly.”

  It was a long moment. The crowd grew restless. Aymar had begun to think he had misfigured when a shout rose from the pilgrims. A white ball with a long glowing tail streaked across the sky. The people rose as one. As the comet disappeared in the western sky, the edge of the sun peeked out from behind Lilith.

  Within the hour it was over. Fair-wards hustled Gaulrue away from the crowds, who seemed intent on pummeling him to death. The final edge of the sun cleared the moon shadow and shone brightly on the fairgrounds. All was well in Ithkar.

  Keri could not bear to speak to Aymar, for to speak was to say good-bye. She watched him accept the congratulations of the acolytes. He was famous now; he would not have time for her. She set off to find her mentor, Eldris Fyrl.

  The astrologer was not in his tent. There was nothing to do but wait. She settled down in Eldris’s favorite chair and closed her eyes.

  A second later she was being rudely shaken. It was Fyrl, his hat askew as always.

  “Wake up, girl. What do you mean by sleeping here? Have you no proper bed of your own?”

  Keri thought of the warm bunk in Aymar’s wagon. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry, Master Fyrl. I was waiting for you. I must have dozed off.”

  Fyrl shook his head sadly, then waved a long finger at Keri’s nose.

  “You’re much too young to be tired at this hour. Probably that scoundrel Dorphus had you up all night with his blasted schemes.”

  “His schemes just saved Ithkar’s temple while you were hiding under some bed somewhere. If you were half the astrologer Aymar is, you would have known . . . What?”

  Eldris had begun to laugh. The sound had started deep in his belly and rolled up through his throat. He had lost control. Tears formed in his eyes. He wiped them away with one hand as he pulled off his beard with the other. The hat came off, the mustache, the unruly hair, even the pointed nose.

  “Aymar!” Keri cried. “You . . . how . . . why . . . ?”

  “Oh, by the Lords, my child, the look on your face while you were defending me. It was worth a thousand disguises.”

  “You were Eldris Fyrl all the time.” Keri was too astounded to be angry with him. Anger would come later, much later.

  “Yes. I had need of an apprentice. I never advertise myself as Aymar Dorphus, so I invented Eldris. He was my agent, so to speak. And he did very well, too. Look what an apprentice he brought me.”

  Keri had buried her head in Aymar’s cloak. He could not tell whether she laughed or cried.

  “Come along, my child. We have much to learn—and an entire library in which to learn it.”

  Hair’s Breath

  Susan Shwartz

  “You’ll spoil that baby.” Lounging on cushions in their quarters within the traders’ enclave by. the docks of Ithkar, Vassilika held out her arms for her daughter. “Give her to me, Andriu.”

  “So you can spoil her?” Andriu laughed and handed Demetria over to her mother. She was his now, he thought. Maybe Thotharn—or his agent, Xuthen, who had died three fairs ago—had sired her, but Vassilika had prayed to the Three Lordly Ones, and Andriu had sung; and they had been answered. Three years ago, Father Demetrios had told him that removing Vassilika from Ithkar during her pregnancy might safeguard mother and child. They had waited three more years to be certain. She is innocent, Andriu thought, and smiled at his daughter, whose plump bare foot took aim, then sent Vassilika’s accounts sailing into the air.

  Some innocent! he thought, and bent to retrieve them. He glanced at the satisfying totals and smiled at his wife. She grinned back, an expression as hoydenish as it was welcome. There was no trace of Thotharn’s shadow upon her or upon the child, the old dream-singer had said. Just let anyone call them demon loving, Andriu thought. Three years among the Rhos had taught him well. If he weren’t a master trader or fighter yet, he was no disgrace—and he had a crew to back him up, and the grudging approval of the master traders to call their boat half his.

  He reached for his harp, a wedding gift, and smiled at Vassilika. Autumn sun poured in the skylight and danced on her ruddy hair, tumbling loose over her shoulders. Bored with custom, as usual, she had left off the scarf and loose overtunic worn by Rhos matrons. Her elaborately embroidered blouse was tied loosely at the throat; her shoulders and full breasts seemed to glow through the fabric. Three years ago, Andriu had wanted to crawl back to Ithkar Fair and die amid the shattered crates of its back ways. Then he had met Vassilika. Even afraid as she had been, she had restored his will to live and given him a reason for doing so.

  He plucked out an experimental run on the harp. Its inlay glistened with faint tints of copper. Demetria laughed and waved her hands. Even some of the crew wandered in. Andriu had started to set Rhos poems to music; it had won their hearts even more than a successful trading voyage or a good fight. Their boat’s scrubbed deck had been the battlefield of gods and heroes night after night. Andriu almost wished they were on board right now.

  But one crew member hadn’t come for music. “Mistress, dream-singer, you remember when the White Bird vanished? Well, one of its oarsmen turned up.”

  “There were no survivors!” Vassilika sat up and plumped her daughter onto a cushion.

  “He has part of the logbook,” said the steersman. “And he insists on speaking to you.”

  Andriu laid the harp aside again. “Why us? Surely the master traders could do more in the way of indemnities. . . .”

  “They sent him to us,” said the steersman. Andriu felt warmed by the “us” before wondering why they bothered. Other junior traders specialized in salvage operations, not they.

  He glanced at Vassilika. “Have him come in,” she decided. She was more experienced in trade and made such decisions. “You can be captain,” he always told her. “Just so long as I’m first—and only—mate.”

  The crewman who bowed his way in looked hungry enough and ragged enough to be a castaway. And the logbook looked real; Andriu recognized the captain’s hand and signature. What drew everyone’s attention, however, was the metal plaque he drew from his tattered overtunic. It glittered in the sunlight, and its curves and angles were wrought with more care than any Ithkar smith could manage. On it were etched . . . “Not runes,” Andriu told his wife and the steersman. “Those are a very, very old form of the dream tongue.”

  The language spoken by the Three Lordly Ones, and still preserved in fragmented, barely understood form by men like Father Demetrios! If this plaque were written in that tongue, then it must be . . . “Where did you find this?” asked Vassilika

  Andriu opened the boat’s log, its leather pages stained and crumbling at the edges. He pointed to a scrawl of blotches and lines that a skilled sailor might be able to follow. “There,” he said.

  * * *

  In the end, leaving the castaway in the custody of their clan, they went: Vassilika for hope of trade and her usual curiosity; Demetria, because the child could not leave her mother; Andriu, in the hope of proving himself—and to find other artifacts for the temple. The crew went, Andriu was convinced, for two reasons besides the chance to make a killing in trade that would let them swagger around the fair as if they owned it, too. The first reason was that they thought he was crazy and needed to be looked after before he scuttled their boat. The second was that Demetria was on board. Andriu had a good idea that if Demetria took a notion to sail off the rim of the world, the crew would take her there.

  Besides, even Andriu was tired of land, of the crowded fair, of beds, not bunks, that didn’t rock comfortingly beneath one with the rise and fall of the river. So they rowed upriver. Gjellandi and its portages were but three days’ journey away when they weighed anchor.

  Vassilika glanced from scribbled map to the shores.

  “I don’t want to pull in closer,” she said. “Look at the rocks, well out away from the
shore. Could be risky.”

  “People used to live here,” Andriu observed. “That one pile could have been a mill.”

  “Send out a party?” asked Hjordis, the steersman.

  “Aye,” said Vassilika.

  When the sailors found no one living—or dead—on either shore, Ingvarth, one of the ablest of the younger crew members, came up.

  “Do you want me to dive here, mistress?” Vassilika nodded.

  Idly, Andriu admired the clean line of his dive, the splashing rainbows of his entrance into the water, the shape of Vassilika’s hair on her shoulders. Demetria crooned and kicked; quickly Andriu moved his harp out of the child’s way.

  “Do you think he’ll find anything?” he asked.

  “Oh, I hope so,” Vassilika said. “If he doesn’t, there’s those among the masters will say we were too blind to see gems heaped up in front of us for the taking.”

  It wasn’t just the desire to make a killing at the fair, or even to make Father Demetrios smile with wonder. Vassilika and Andriu were half-blood and outsiders, with a daughter (even more suspect) to provide for: among the master traders,. some—mostly old unfriends of Vassilika’s father—opposed their claim to being true Rhos traders.

  He bent over Vassilika in a way that made the crew grin. But what he whispered wasn’t love. “You’re aware that if Ingvarth finds something that once had life, Father Demetrios might sing it into manifestation?” Vassilika widened her eyes and nodded, storing the fact against future profit.

  Ingvarth’s red mane splashed through the river’s gleaming surface. He waved an arm that dripped with water and weed. Light splintered up like a flare from what he held in his hand; his shipmates glanced away as it spurted over their faces. “Hoist me up, brothers!” he shouted in triumph.

  He heaved himself over the rail and laid another piece of metal at Vassilika’s feet. “Like the other one.” Vassilika touched it. “See, it’s lain at the bottom of the river . . . who can say how long? Yet there’s no rust, no pitting.”