Bradley, Marion Zimmer - SSC 03

  THE MAGICAL ADVENTURES

  OF THE ADEPT OF

  THE BLUE STAR

  Marian Zimmer Bradley

  WITH A GUEST APPEARANCE BY

  VONDA N.McINTYRE

  IN THE DARKNESS, ALL THINGS OF MAGIC WERE LOOSED. . . .

  Suddenly it was there, a great gray shape, leaping high at Lythande's throat. The mage whirled, whipping out the dagger on the right, and thrust, hard, at the bane-wolfs throat.

  It went through the throat as if through air. Not a true beast, then, but a magical one. . . . Lythande dropped the right-hand dagger, and snatched, left-handed, at the other, the dagger intended for righting the powers and beasts of magic; but the delay had been nearly fatal; the teeth of the bane-wolf met, like fiery needles, in Lythande's arm, then in the knee thrust up to ward the beast from the throat.

  The bane-wolfs blazing eyes flashed against the light of the Blue Star, which grew fainter and feebler. As Lythande's struggles weakened, the thought came, unbidden:

  Have I come this far to die in a dark cellar in the maw of a wolf, not even a true wolf, but a thing created by the filthy misuse of sorcery at the hands of a thief?

  MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

  and DAW Books

  present

  the compelling novels of DARKOVER,

  the Planet of the Bloody Sun:

  The Founding DARKOVER LANDFALL

  The Ages of Chaos

  STORMQUEEN! HAWKMISTRESS

  The Hundred Kingdoms TWO TO CONQUER

  The Renunciates (Free Amazons)

  THE SHATTERED CHAIN THENDARA HOUSE CITY OF SORCERY

  Against the Terrans: the First Age

  THE SPELL SWORD THE FORBIDDEN TOWER

  Against the Terrans: the Second Age

  THE HERITAGE OF HASTUR SHARRA'S EXILE

  Lythande

  Marion Zimmer Bradley

  DAW BOOKS, INC.

  DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, PUBLISHER 1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 1986 by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

  All Rights Reserved. Cover art by Walter Velez.

  Acknowledgments:

  The Secret of the Blue Star copyright © 1979 by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

  The Incompetent Magician copyright © 1983 by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

  Somebody Else's Magic copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  Sea Wrack copyright © 1985 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  The Wandering Lute copyright © 1986 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  Looking for Satan copyright © 1981 by Vonda N. Mclntyre.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 686.

  First printing August, 1986

  123456789

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Contents

  Introduction to Secret of the Blue Star:

  THE SECRET OF THE BLUE STAR

  Introduction to The Incompetent Magician

  THE INCOMPETENT MAGICIAN

  Introduction to Somebody Else's Magic

  SOMEBODY ELSE’S MAGIC

  Introduction to Sea Wrack

  SEA WRACK

  Introduction to The Wandering Lute

  THE WANDERING LUTE

  Introduction to Looking for Satan

  LOOKING FOR SATAN

  BY VONDA N. MCINTYRE

  Introduction to Secret of the Blue Star:

  / remember first hearing Bob Asprin talk about a new concept that he referred to as THIEVES WORLD—I think it was at the Brighton Worldcon, which was in 1978 or thereabout. Bob described the concept enthusiastically and it sounded like fun, so I said, "Okay, I'm in," without thinking much about it . . . which is how writers get into trouble. A few months after I got back from England I received in the mail a fascinating packet of stuff from Bob and others who had agreed to join in this business of writing connected stories in a common shared background. There were maps, a basic description of the gods and customs of this place,, and so forth. We were asked to contribute a sketch of our basic character or characters, and I obliged with a few paragraphs about the mysterious Lythande, about whom nothing is known, not even gender. . . .

  All this sort of thing is fun to play with, but when it got down to having to do some serious writing, that was something else. I wasn't the only one who was perfectly willing to share in the planning of the initial stages; but as to actually getting down to the typewriter and turning stories in—well, in his original (the Ace edition of volume one, not the super hardback reprint of the first volumes), Bob tells about his near-nervous-breakdown; because at least half of us, having thought it was a fun idea, proved to think we were too busy to do actual writing. When Bob said he had to have the story, I was about to fly to Phoenix, then New York, and from there to fly to England for research on a project which eventually turned out to be the most lucrative of my life's work; but Bob persuaded me, so I wrote the story on the plane and in my hotel room in Phoenix, borrowed Margaret Hildebrand's little typewriter and typed it, then left it with my secretary to be proofread, corrected, and mailed off to the Asprins. It's the only story I wrote in longhand after my seventeenth year, and 1 hope the last. I gave it to the Phoenix con committee (the original handwritten version, that is) to auction off for the benefit of their convention, and I have no idea who has it or what they did with it. But they have a unique item—the only MZB handwritten manuscript of a professional story ever.

  As for Lythande, she is as much a mystery to me as she is to the inhabitants of Sanctuary/Thieves World. When I first conceived this character, I did not know that she was a woman; I thought her an eccentric male. When I wrote Poul Anderson's Cappen Varra (the only honest man Sanctuary) into my story, it was a simple plot device; but Cappen Varra's saying, "You are like no other man I have ever met," made me wonder: but what about women? From there it was only a little step to saying; of course, Lythande is a woman cursed to conceal her true self forever.

  The antecedents of Lythande are simple—Fritz Leiber's Faihrd, and C.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry—but I also attempted, in making Lythande a musician and magician, to bring out something of Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John, whose silver-stringed guitar is a potent weapon against sorcery. Besides, even in a thieves-world of magic, practicing no art but magic is a thin living, or, as Lythande would say, "puts no beans on the table." A minstrel can always get a good supper for a song.

  All of Lythande's songs in these works are paraphrases of Sappho, a subtle key to a side of her character which I chose not to emphasize overmuch. 1 have no political point to make by Lythande's eccentricities; it is simply, I think, one more stress on a woman whose life must be already overcomplicated. I have often been urged to write about lesbian women; unfortunately, the audience for this kind of thing is usually confined to the unhealthily curious male, and I choose not to cater to this kind of interest. Lythande is as she is, and even the characters in a book deserve some privacy. I wouldn't mind other people writing about Lythande—people who write, and people who read, are my kind of people and they can have anything I have. In any case, here is my Lythande and her world. Welcome to it. For the many people who have asked me: Lythande is pronounced (by me, at least) as Lee THOND.

  THE SECRET OF THE BLUE STAR

  On a night in Sanctuary, when the streets bore a false glamour in the silver glow of full moon, so that every ruin seemed an enchanted tower and every dark street and square an island of mystery, the mercenary-magician Lythande sallied forth to seek adventure.

  Lythande had but recently returned—if the mysterious comings and goings of a magician can be called by so prosaic a name—from guarding a caravan across the Grey Wastes to Twand. Somewhere in the Wastes, a gaggle of desert rats—two-legged rats with poisoned steel teeth—had set upon the car
avan, not knowing it was guarded by magic, and had found themselves fighting skeletons that howled and fought with eyes of flame; and at their center a tall magician with a blue star between blazing eyes, a star that shot lightnings of a cold and paralyzing flame. So the desert rats ran, and never stopped running until they reached Aurvesh, and the tales they told did Lythande no harm except in the ears of the pious.

  And so there was gold in the pockets of the long, dark magician's robe, or perhaps concealed in whatever dwelling sheltered Lythande.

  For at the end, the caravan master had been almost more afraid of Lythande than he was of the bandits, a situation which added to the generosity with which he rewarded the magician. According to custom, Lythande neither smiled nor frowned, but remarked, days later, to Myrtis, the proprietor of the Aphrodisia House in the Street of Red Lanterns, that sorcery, while a useful skill and rilled with many aesthetic delights for the contemplation of the philosopher, in itself puts no beans on the table.

  A curious remark, that, Myrtis pondered, putting away the ounce of gold Lythande had bestowed upon her in consideration of a secret which lay many years behind them both. Curious that Lythande should speak of beans on the table, when no one but herself had ever seen a bite of food or a drop of drink pass the magician's lips since the blue star had adorned that high and narrow brow. Nor had any woman in the Quarter ever been able to boast that a great magician had paid for her favors, or been able to imagine how such a magician behaved in that situation when all men were alike reduced to flesh and blood.

  Perhaps Myrtis could have told if she would; some of her girls thought so, when, as sometimes happened, Lythande came to the Aphrodisia House and was closeted long with its owner; even, on rare intervals, for an entire night. It was said, of Lythande, that the Aphrodisia House itself had been the magician's gift to Myrtis, after a famous adventure still whispered in the bazaar, involving an evil wizard, two horse-traders, a caravan master, and a few assorted toughs who had prided themselves upon never giving gold for any woman and thought it funny to cheat an honest working woman. None of them had ever showed their faces—what was left of them—in Sanctuary again, and Myrtis boasted that she need never again sweat to earn her living, and never again entertain a man, but would claim her madam's privilege of a solitary bed.

  And then, too, the girls thought, a magician of Lythande's stature could have claimed the most beautiful women from Sanctuary to the mountains beyond Ilsig; not courtesans alone, but princesses and noble women and priestesses would have been for Lythande's taking. Myrtis had doubtless been beautiful in her youth, and certainly she boasted enough of the princes and wizards and travelers who had paid great sums for her love. She was beautiful still (and of course there were those who said that Lythande did not pay her, but that, on the contrary, Myrtis paid the magician great sums to maintain her aging beauty with strong magic) but her hair had gone grey and she no longer troubled to dye it with henna or goldenwash from Tyrisis-beyond-the-sea.

  But if Myrtis were not the woman who knew how Lythande behaved in that most elemental of situations, then there was no woman in Sanctuary who could say. Rumor said also that Lythande called up female demons from the Grey Wastes, to couple in lechery, and certainly Lythande was neither the first nor the last magician of whom that could be said.

  But on this night Lythande sought neither food nor drink nor the delights of amorous entertainment; although Lythande was a great frequenter of taverns, no man had ever yet seen a drop of ale or mead or fire-drink pass the barrier of the magician's lips. Lythande walked along the far edge of the bazaar, skirting the old rim of the governor's palace, keeping to the shadows in defiance of footpads and cutpurses, that love for shadows which made the folk of the city say that Lythande could appear and disappear into thin air.

  Tall and thin, Lythande, above the height of a tall man, lean to emaciation, with the blue star-shaped tattoo of the magician-adept above thin, arching eyebrows; wearing a long, hooded robe which melted into the shadows. Clean-shaven, the face of Lythande, or beardless—none had come close enough, in living memory, to say whether this was the whim of an effeminate or the hairlessness of a freak. The hair, beneath the hood was as long and luxuriant as a woman's, but greying, as no woman in this city of harlots would have allowed it to do.

  Striding quickly along a shadowed wall, Lythande stepped through an open door, over which the sandal of Thufir, god of pilgrims, had been nailed up for luck; but the footsteps were so soft, and the hooded robe blended so well into the shadows, that eyewitnesses would later swear, truthfully, that they had seen Lythande appear from the air, protected by sorceries, or by a cloak of invisibility.

  Around the hearthfire, a group of men were banging their mugs together noisily to the sound of a rowdy drinking-song, strummed on a worn and tinny lute— Lythande knew it belonged to the tavern-keeper, and could be borrowed—by a young man, dressed in fragments of foppish finery, torn and slashed by the chances of the road. He was sitting lazily, with one knee crossed over the^ other; and when the rowdy song died away, the young man drifted into another,-a quiet love song from another time and another country. Lythande had known the song, more years ago than bore remembering, and in those days Lythande the magician had borne another name and had known little of sorcery. When the song died, Lythande had stepped from the shadows, visible, and the firelight glinted on the blue star, mocking at the center of the high forehead.

  There was a little muttering in the tavern, but they were not unaccustomed to Lythande's invisible comings and goings. The young man raised eyes which were surprisingly blue beneath the black hair elaborately curled above his brow. He was slender and agile, and Lythande marked the rapier at his side, which looked well handled, and the amulet, in the form of a coiled snake, at his throat. The young man said, "Who are you, who has the habit of coming and going into thin air like that?"

  "One who compliments your skill at song." Lythande flung a coin to the tapster's boy. "Will you drink?"

  "A minstrel never refuses such an invitation. Singing is dry work." But when the drink was brought, he said, "Not drinking with me, then?"

  "No man has ever seen Lythande eat or drink," muttered one of the men in the circle round them.

  "Why, then, I hold that unfriendly," cried the young minstrel. "A friendly drink between comrades shared is one thing; but I am no servant to sing for pay or to drink except as a friendly gesture!"

  Lythande shrugged, and the blue star above the high brow began to shimmer and give forth blue light. The onlookers slowly edged backward, for when a wizard who wore the blue star was angered, bystanders did well to be out of the way. The minstrel set down the lute, so it would be well out of range if he must leap to his feet. Lythande knew, by the excruciating slowness of his movements and great care, that he had already shared a good many drinks with chance-met comrades. But the minstrel's hand did not go to his sword hilt but instead closed like a fist over the amulet in the form of a snake.

  "You are like no man I have ever met before," he observed mildly, and Lythande, feeling inside the little ripple, nerve-long, that told a magician he was in the presence of spellcasting, hazarded quickly that the amulet was one of those which would not protect its master unless the wearer first stated a set number of truths—usually three or five—about the owner's attacker or foe. Wary, but amused, Lythande said, "A true word. Nor am I like any man you will ever meet, live you never so long, minstrel."

  The minstrel saw, beyond the angry blue glare of the star, a curl of friendly mockery in Lythande's mouth. He said, letting the amulet go, "And I wish you no ill; and you wish me none, and those are true sayings too, wizard, hey? And there's an end of that. But although perhaps you are like to no other, you are not the only wizard I have seen in Sanctuary who bears a blue star about his forehead."

  Now the blue star blazed rage, but not for the minstrel. They both knew it. The crowd around them had all mysteriously discovered that they had business elsewhere. The minstrel looked at the
empty benches.

  "I must go elsewhere to sing for my supper, it seems."

  "I meant you no offense when I refused to share a drink," said Lythande. "A magician's vow is not as lightly overset as a lute. Yet I may guest-gift you with dinner and drink in plenty without loss of dignity, and in return ask a service of a friend, may I not?"

  "Such is the custom of my country. Cappen Varra thanks you, magician."

  "Tapster! Your best dinner for my guest, and all he can drink tonight!"

  "For such liberal guesting I'll not haggle about the service," Cappen Varra said, and set to the smoking dishes brought before him. As he ate, Lythande drew from the folds of his robe a small pouch containing a quantity of sweet-smelling herbs, rolled them into a blue-grey leaf, and touched his ring to spark the roll alight. He drew on the smoke, which drifted up sweet and greyish.

  "As for the service, it is nothing so great; tell me all you know of this other wizard who wears the blue star. I know of none other of my order south of Azehur, and I .would be certain you did not see me, nor my wraith."

  Cappen Varra sucked at a marrow-bone and wiped his fingers fastidiously on the tray-cloth beneath the meats. He bit into a ginger-fruit before replying.

  "Not you, wizard, nor your fetch or doppelganger; this one had shoulders brawnier by half, and he wore no sword, but two daggers cross-girt astride his hips.

  His beard was black; and his left hand missing three fingers."

  "Us of the Thousand Eyes! Rabben the Half-handed, here in Sanctuary! Where did you see him, minstrel?"

  "I saw him crossing the bazaar; but he bought nothing that I saw. And I saw him in the Street of Red Lanterns, talking to a woman. What service am I to do for you, magician?"