Shapers of Worlds Volume II, page 23
“So, you made this?”
“I did.”
Nachecko turned to Baldemar and Oldo with an expression that invited them to admit that he knew his art, then he went back to the ba. “Tell us about it.”
The ba began to speak in a sepulchral voice. “I was a master silversmith in the City of Ambit. I made many a piece of supernal beauty and many that were transferred into objects of great power by the rulers of the city.”
“Tell us of these rulers.”
The tale continued. There were five archmages, each a thaumaturge of surpassing strength. They governed by whim and caprice, oppressing the citizenry, turning an ancient city into a playground for their strange appetites. One of them, Margrippe the Dominance, liked to fill his manse with young women of great beauty, though they were no longer beautiful once he was finished with them.
Margrippe’s desire was piqued by the daughter of a priestess. Her name was Brythe, and she was beyond beauty, with golden eyes and hair as black as midnight. He summoned her. When she felt the irresistible tug, she cried out to her mother. Her mother, in turn, threw herself at the feet of the goddess and begged her to intervene.
But Margrippe’s spell had woven itself deep into the fibres of Brythe’s being. To have vitiated its power would have left the maiden an empty shell. So, the goddess did what she could: she transformed the victim into a new form, one to which the spell’s elements could not cohere.
Nachecko asked the question that was on everyone’s mind. “What new form?”
“It was the talk of the city, that Margrippe had been gainsaid,” the ba said. “He rampaged and caused destruction, demanding that the goddess’s temple be razed. The other wizards of the ruling cabal, alarmed that their sway could be opposed, joined with him, and together they drove the goddess out of Ambit. The transformed maiden went with her.”
The priestesses went with their patron, and so did the transformed young woman.
“But that was not enough for Margrippe the Dominance,” said the former silversmith. “He got the others to help him enslave an imp from the Seventh Plane and force it to keep an eye on the young woman. If ever she came out from the goddess’s protection, the imp would know and would tell him.”
Baldemar and Oldo looked at each other again. “Ask the ba,” Baldemar said, “was it the goddess named Fresscatria?”
Nachecko did, and it was.
“And was the young woman transformed into a cat?”
She was.
“Oh, my,” said Oldo. “We may have a problem.”
The ba continued its tale. Margrippe had ordered him to make what they ironically called in those days a “merrythought”—a charm that could hold a magical action until it was triggered by some specific event.
“Was it in the form of a silver disk?” Nachecko asked.
It was, with an image of Margrippe on one side and the young woman on the other.
Baldemar was looking thoughtful. “What are you thinking?” Oldo asked.
Baldemar asked the necromancer, “How long ago did all this happen?”
Time meant nothing to the ba, but the remnant knew that it had lived during the Twenty-Second Aeon.
Oldo was consulting his own memory. “Ambit was a city at the centre of what is now the wasteland of Barran. A cabal of thaumaturges, led by one called Majestrum, destroyed it at the end of the Twenty-Second Aeon.”
“Thousands of years ago,” Baldemar said.
“Thousands and thousands,” said Oldo.
“Well, then. We may not have a problem after all.”
They paid the ghost-wrangler his fee. Oldo said, “I don’t suppose you’d take the merrythought as sufficient payment.”
“Not a chance,” said Nachecko. He packed up his equipment and let the ba return to its misery, there being nothing else one could do for a remnant of the Second Plane.
“I think,” Oldo said, after he was gone, “I’ll throw the thing into the sea.”
Baldemar rested a hand on the older man’s shoulder. “Probably for the best,” he said.
They were preparing the evening meal when the cat appeared from wherever she had been self-sequestered and wrapped herself around Oldo’s ankles, purring loudly.
“All is forgiven, then,” Baldemar said.
Oldo picked her up and held her to his chest, then at arm’s length to study her. “Do you think? Could it be her?” he asked Baldemar.
“I prefer not to think about old magics,” was the answer. “Except for what comes out of the demon’s satchel, I want no more to do with the ‘scintillating realm.’”
Oldo caught the reference. It had been one of Thelerion’s gaudy descriptions of the life he and his fellow thaumaturges led. “Remember,” he said, “when we were henchmen, and sometimes we felt as if we were just playing pieces on someone else’s great board?”
“Sometimes?” Baldemar said. “It was a rare day when—”
“It’s just that I’m getting that feeling again.”
“Ah,” said Baldemar. “Then we’ll keep a watchful eye.”
The following day, the boatman brought the new craft to the wharf. Summoned to see it, Baldemar and Oldo made a final inspection before paying the last instalment. It was a single-masted sloop, sporting an afterdeck with a tiller to control the rudder and a closed cabin below. The living space was a masterpiece of efficiency of design, with bunks that folded down from the walls and endless cupboards, drawers, and cubbyholes to store gear and provisions.
“But you don’t know how to sail,” Oldo said when they were back on the afterdeck. It was moving up and down as swells came in off the sea and the wind picked up.
“Every dock along the river has its company of idlers with nothing to do but watch the marine traffic and tell lies to each other about their exploits on the briny,” Baldemar said. “I will hire one of those old codwallopers to teach me the ropes.”
“Was that a pun?” Oldo said.
“Not an intentional one,” Baldemar said. “Look at all those pulleys and things.”
So, they would not be sailing out into the Sundering Sea today, and Oldo’s desire to throw the silver medal into its depths would not be realized, unless they rowed out in the skiff. But the sea was getting into one of its temperamental moods, arguing with a stiff and rain-filled north wind over who was in charge. It was not a good argument for two dabblers in a small, flat-bottomed boat to get involved in.
They tied up the sloop, fore and aft, and made sure that the stuffed leather bags hanging from its sides were set to protect its strakes from the wharf timbers. Then they went home to wait out the storm.
The cat welcomed Oldo, ignored Baldemar, but allowed the latter to feed her. Afterward, she sat in a window embrasure, licking her paws and watching the rain-swept street. Her tail flicked without cease.
Nachecko had told them the transformed woman’s name. Oldo stood a few paces from the cat and said, “Brythe?”
The tail stopped moving.
“Are you Brythe?”
The cat looked back over her shoulder at him, but her face was as unreadable as any feline’s. After a moment, she blinked and returned to surveilling the rain bursting on the cobblestones.
The merrythought had been put away in a drawer. Oldo got it out and examined it. Could there be an imp in there? Or worse, could there have been an imp that had now fled to wherever Margrippe had ended up, assuming he was not long since turned to dust? Before it was dismissed, the ba had said the thaumaturge had translated himself to another Plane.
Baldemar said, “If he went to the Overworld, he ended up with all the other unwanted migrants on a barren little island near the south pole. The kas of the Fourth Plane resent intrusions by obstreperous wizards.”
Baldemar did not ascribe much credence to what they had heard during the necromancer’s session. “Bas are not reliable informants. They are the parts of us that lie and deceive and believe self-aggrandizing fictions about ourselves. They carry all that mendacity with them down into the Underworld.”
“Hmm,” Oldo had said. “But still, a watchful eye.”
“What could it hurt?” Baldemar said.
The cat usually slept in the kitchen on a wool blanket, folded several times and laid behind the stove. The hours following the necromancer’s session did not make for a usual night. Oldo, who had become a light sleeper as his age advanced, was awakened by a scratching at his chamber door and a yowl such as he had never heard from the feline.
He got up, wrapped himself in a robe, and opened the door to find the cat already halfway down the hall, pausing briefly to look back at him before tripping down the stairs to the ground floor. He followed her toward the kitchen, whose door was ajar, though only wide enough to have permitted a cat to slip through. A wavering, eerie light, pale as a spring wine, shone through the gap. The cat was sitting just outside the spill of illumination, her tail twitching metronomically. She looked at him again, then returned her gaze to whatever she could see in the kitchen.
Oldo advanced carefully, listening for any sounds of movement or presence. He heard nothing. He took hold of the door’s handle and slowly drew the portal open. The glow grew brighter, and he could see that it came from around the edges of a closed drawer in the dresser that held the dishware and cutlery.
Oldo stood and watched to see if anything would occur. Nothing did, but he startled as the cat yowled from down beside his feet.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll take a look.”
She followed him into the room as he crossed to the drawer and pulled it open. The silver disk, which had been wrapped in its silk, now lay uncovered. He could scarcely make out the features of the head engraved on its surface, so bright was the light that emanated from the merrythought.
“Oh, ho,” Oldo said.
He had not heard Baldemar come downstairs behind him and jumped again as his friend said, “I was thinking we might put it back inside the demon’s satchel, to contain it.”
“Too late now,” said Oldo.
“We’ll see,” Baldemar said. He crossed the room and reached for the object but had barely lifted it out of the drawer before he swore and tossed it away. It went skittering across the stone-flagged floor. He shook his hand then looked at his palm.
“Burned?” Oldo said.
“No. It was more like deep cold. The bones in my fingers ached.” He reached for a kitchen towel hanging from a bar by the sink. “I’ll try this.”
But he did not get the chance. The glow emanating from the disk now cohered into a column of light rising straight up from the floor, brighter and full of swirling shapes that mutated from one amorphous form into another.
“Time to go, I think,” Baldemar said, cocking his head toward the door. But as Oldo turned to follow the suggestion, the door slammed closed. This time it was the cat that reacted in shock, yowling and scratching at the wood. Baldemar was there in a moment, yanking on the handle, but though the door had no lock on it, it refused to open.
Oldo came and added his strength, but the resistance was complete.
“Uh, oh,” said Baldemar.
Oldo followed his gaze. The pillar of light was now brighter than ever, and the shapeless forms within its column were ceasing their aimless motions. A human figure was emerging from the chaos, corpulent and clad in antique garb, and with a circlet around its brow from which depended two golden horns.
“Margrippe,” Oldo whispered.
“Just so,” Baldemar agreed.
The cat hissed, its spine arched, hair standing straight up, ears flat and teeth bared. It backed up until its twitching tail was against the closed door.
The man in the light was becoming clearer now, details of heavy features and sumptuous attire settling into place. The blank stare of the eyes gave way to a piercing gaze that swept around the kitchen, lingering for but moments on the two men, until it fixed upon the cat.
Margrippe took his first inward breath, held it for a moment, then spoke in a tongue that meant nothing to Oldo and Baldemar. But the spell had an effect on the cat. She froze, one paw still extended to claw at the closed door. Now a tendril of light emanated from the pillar, snaking through the air until it touched the black fur. Then it coiled and entwined around her until she was completely immersed in the pale glow.
The ancient thaumaturge spoke again. The light surrounding the animal seemed to grow somehow denser, as if it were congealing into another kind of substance. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the cat began to grow, and as she grew, she changed. The limbs lengthened, the tail shrank back into the body, the hips and shoulders widened, and the head changed shape profoundly.
The light around the transforming body winked out. And now there was no cat. There was a woman on hands and knees, naked except for a fall of black hair that reached the floor. She pushed herself back onto her haunches and looked behind her, as if to confirm that her tail was gone completely. She turned green eyes on Oldo and Baldemar, and her brief nod made it clear that she recognized them.
Then she rose and looked at the man still enclosed by the pillar of light. Her eyes narrowed, and her jaw set firm. She opened her mouth, but all that emerged was a hiss. Then she appeared to take thought for a moment, and when she opened her mouth again, out came words—but again in a tongue neither man could make sense out of.
Margrippe smiled. A cold smile. A smile of triumph. He said something that had the sound of a long-prepared phrase.
Then he stepped out of the column and onto the stone floor, his flesh solid, his garments fluttering as he moved. The woman raised a hand in seeming warning as he took a second step toward her, his smile still in place.
And then the smile became less certain. Now it was Margrippe’s turn to freeze. He raised the hand that had directed the beam of light at the cat and turned it over to look at the palm. He brought up the other hand and studied it. The mask of triumph had become a picture of first confusion, then a dreadful, dawning realization.
He turned back toward the column of light. But Oldo stepped forward and kicked the merrythought across the floor. The thaumaturge turned his head toward him, and Oldo saw the mouth turn down at the corners, in a frown that continued to deepen until it became as stretched out of shape as the grimace on a tragedian’s masquerade.
“Ho, ho,” said Baldemar. “They always overreach, don’t they? What’s it been, twenty thousand years in another Plane? Thirty? Time enough for his enslaved imp to plot its revenge.”
Oldo didn’t get to answer. The woman moved, crossed the floor in three quick steps, raised both hands, clasped them together, and brought them down on Margrippe’s head. The horned headdress split apart and crumbled. Then, from the top down, like a cake decoration made of spun sugar, the thaumaturge broke apart, his pieces tumbling to the floor, where they burst into flakes and powder.
In a moment, he was no more than a heap of desiccated flesh and loose fibres.
The woman said something in her unknown language, but Oldo could guess the meaning from the tone and circumstances.
“That’s you settled and sorted,” he translated.
The door opened easily when Baldemar pulled on it. “I’ll get her a robe from the closet in the foyer,” he said.
Oldo looked at Brythe now and realized that though she had been a young woman when Fresscatria transformed her, the goddess had not been able to keep the millennia entirely at bay. He saw some streaks of grey in the fall of black hair and a few lines and creases around the eyes and lips.
He also saw that she was smiling at him. He smiled back. He touched his chest and said, “Oldo,” then pointed to Baldemar as his friend came into the room and named him as well.
Her quick nod told him that she already knew who they were. She let Baldemar slip the robe over her shoulders, put her arms through the sleeves, and belted it closed. Then she touched herself and said, very carefully, as if not sure of the effort’s outcome, “Brythe.”
“Brythe,” Oldo said. He performed the formal gesture appropriate to a first encounter. “How do you do?”
Baldemar did the same, but she gave him only a passing glance and a brief thank-you smile before turning again to Oldo. She beckoned him to approach her, and when he did, she put her arms around him and nuzzled his neck, much as she had done when she had been a cat.
She even purred a little.
“Well,” said Baldemar, “this ought to be interesting.”
Oldo did not reply. He was otherwise engaged.
Anamnesis in Ruins
By Heli Kennedy
My sister had promised to write me. A week had gone by, and no message came.
It wasn’t like her. Özge never broke promises. She had also never been away from home this long. Something was wrong. I could feel it. If Ma was being honest, she’d admit to feeling the same way. But she and Father were too stubborn to admit anything. They went about their business like nothing had changed. I didn’t press them about Özge. Ma’s shaking had gotten worse, and I had already caused too much pain.
I needed to fix it. Take matters into my own hands.
Özge said she might go to the city. Where, exactly? I had no idea. But if I was there, I just knew I could find her. Something inside would direct me to her, like a compass. It had to. We had lived together our whole lives. Surely, we had a connection. Not by magic. That wouldn’t be real or trustworthy. No, our connection was by blood.
I snuck out of the house at dawn. Walking in the damp air, I wished my sister would appear, so I could go back home and curl up in my woollen blanket. I sniffed the wind, trying to pick up her scent like a dog. All I smelled were cowpies. Eventually, I reached the edge of the village. Here, the caravan collected city-bound goods and passengers. It was too early for the carts. No one was there, except for a very wrinkled woman on a log, clutching prayer beads.
“How much is it to the city?” I asked, hoping my handful of copper was enough.
“They charge four pecks,” said the old woman.
