Bradley, Marion Zimmer - SSC 03 Read online

  A common tavern? Some shelter, indeed, she must find before the burning eye of Reth sank below the horizon; she was carrying much gold, and had no wish to defend it in the night-streets of the Thieves' Quarter. She must also replenish her stocks of magical herbs, and also find a place to rest, and eat, and drink, before she set off northward to the shrine of the Goddess as Larith. . . .

  Lythande cursed aloud, so angrily that a passerby in the street turned and stared in protest. Northward to Larith? Was that forever-be-damned sorcerous sword beginning to work on her very thoughts? This was strong magic; but she would not go to Larith, no, by the Final Battle, she would not go northward, but south, and nowhere near that accursed shrine of the Larithae! Not while there is magic left in the arsenal of a Pilgrim Adept, 1 will not!

  In the market, moving noiselessly in the concealment of the mage-robe, she found a stall where magical herbs were for sale, and bartered briefly for them; briefly, because the law of magic states that whatever is wanted for the making of magic must be bought without haggling, gold being no more than dross at the service of magical arts. Yet, Lythande mused darkly, that knowledge had evidently become common among herb-sellers and spell-candlers of the Gandrin market, and as a result their prices had gone from the merely outrageous to the unthinkable. Lythande remonstrated briefly with a woman at one of these stalls.

  "Come, come, four Thirds for a handful of darkleaf?"

  "And how am I to know that when ye give me gold, ye havena' spelled it from copper or worse?" demanded the herb-seller. "Last moon I sold one of your Order a full quartern of dreamroot and bloodleaf, full cured by a fire o' hazel and spellroot, and that defiler of virgin goats paid me wi' two rounds of gold—he said. But when the moon changed, I looked at 'em, and it was no more than a handful of barley stuck together wi' spellroot and smelling worse than the devil's farts! I take that risk into account when I set my prices, magician!"

  "Such folk bring disrepute on the name of the magician," Lythande agreed gravely, but secretly wished she knew that spell. There were dishonest innkeepers who would be better paid in barley grains; in fact, the grain would be worth more than their services! The spell-candler was looking at Lythande as if she had more to say, and Lythande raised inquiring eyebrows.

  "I'd give you the stuff for half if you'd show me a spell to tell true gold from false, magician."

  Lythande looked round, and on a nearby stall saw the crystals she wanted. She picked up one of them.

  "The crystal called blue zeth is a touchstone of magic," Lythande said. "False gold will not have a true gold shimmer; and other things spelled to look like gold will show what they are, but only if you blink thrice and look between the second and third blink. That bracelet on your arm, good woman—"

  The woman slid the bracelet down over her plump hand; Lythande took it up and looked through the blue zeth crystal.

  "As you can clearly see," she said, "this bracelet is—" and to her surprise, concluded—"false gold; pot-metal gilded."

  The woman squinted, blinked at the bracelet. "Why, that defiler of virgin goats," she howled. "I will kick his arse from here to the river! Him and his tales of his uncle the goldsmith—"

  Lythande restrained a smile, though the corners of her lips twitched. "Have I created trouble with husband or lover, O good woman?"

  "Only that he'd like to be, I make no doubt," muttered the woman, throwing the cheap bracelet down with contempt.

  "Look at something I know to be true gold, then," Lythande said, and picked up one of the coins she had given the woman. "True gold will look like this—" And at her wave, the woman bent to look at the golden shimmer of the coin. "What is not gold will take on the blue color of the zeth crystal, or"—she took up a copper, gestured, and the copper shone with a deceptive gold luster; she thrust it under the crystal—"if you blink three times and look between the second and third blink, you can tell what it is really made of."

  Delighted, the stallkeeper bought a handful of blue zeth crystals at the neighboring stall. "Take the herbs, then, gift for gift," she said, then asked suspiciously, "What else will you ask me for this spell? For it is truly priceless—"

  "Priceless, indeed," Lythande agreed. "I ask only that you tell the spell to three other persons, and exact a promise that each person to whom it is told tell three others. Dishonest magicians bring evil repute—and then it is hard for an honest one to make a living."

  And, of course, what nine market women knew would soon be known everywhere in the city. The sellers of blue zeth would profit, but not beyond their merits.

  "Yet the magicians of the Blue Star are honest, so far as I've had dealings with 'em," the woman said, putting away the blue zeth crystals into a capacious and not-very-clean pocket. "I got decent gold from the one who bought spellroot from me last New Moon."

  Lythande froze and went very still, but the Blue Star on the browless forehead began to sparkle slightly and glow. "Know you his name? I knew not that a brother of my Order had been within Old Gandrin this season."

  It meant nothing, of course. But, like all Pilgrim Adepts, Lythande was a solitary, and would have preferred that what she did in Old Gandrin should not b« spied on by another. And it lent urgency to her errand; above all, she must not be seen with the larith sword, lest the secret of her sex become known; it was not well known within Gandrin—for the Larithae seldom came so far south—but in the North it was known that only a woman might touch, handle, or wield a larith sword.

  "Upon reflection," she said, "I have done you, as you say, a priceless service; do you one for me in return."

  The woman hesitated for a moment, and Lythande for one did not blame her. It is not, as a general rule, wise to entangle oneself in the private affairs of wizards, and certainly not when that wizard glows with lightning flash of the Blue Star. The woman glowered at the false gold bracelet and muttered, "What is your need?"

  "Direct me to a safe lodging place this night—one where I may make magic, and see to it that I do so unobserved."

  The woman said at last, grudgingly, "I am no tavern, and have no public-room and no great kitchens for roasting meat. Yet now and again I let out my upper chamber, if the tenant is sober and respectable. And my son—he's nineteen and like a bull about the "shoulders—he'll stand below wi' a cudgel and keep away anyone who would spy. I'll gi' you that room for half o' gold."

  A half? That was more outrageous than the price she had set on her baggin of spellroot. But now, of all times, Lythande dared not haggle.

  "Done, but I must have a decent meal served me in privacy."

  The woman considered adding to the charge, but under the glare of the Blue Star, she said quickly, "I'll send out to the cookshop round the corner and get ye roast fowl and a honey-cake."

  Lythande nodded, thinking of the sword of Larith tied under the mage-robe. In privacy, then, she could work her best unbinding-spell, then bury the sword by the riverbank and hasten southward.

  "I shall be here at sunset," she said.

  As the crimson face of Reth faded below the horizon, Lythande locked herself within the upper chamber-She was fiercely hungry and thirsty—among the dozen or more vows that fenced about the power of a Pilgrim Adept, it was forbidden to eat or drink within the sight of any man. The prohibition did not apply to women, but, ever conscious of the possibility of disguise like her own, she had fenced it with unending vigilance and discipline; she could not, now, have forced herself to swallow a morsel of food or drink except in the presence of one or two of her trusted confidantes, and only one of these knew Lythande to be a woman. But that woman was far away, in a city beyond the world's end, and Lythande had no trusted associate nearer than that.

  She had managed, hours ago, a sip of water at a public fountain in a deserted square. She had eaten nothing for several days save for a few bites of dried fruit, taken under cover of darkness, from a small store she kept in pockets of the mage-robe. The rare luxury of a hot meal in assured privacy was almost enough to break he
r control, but before touching anything, checked the locks and searched the walls for unseen spy-holes where she might be overlooked; unlikely, she knew, but Lythande's survival all these years had rested on just such unsparing vigilance.

  Then she drank from the ewer of water, washed herself carefully, and setting a little water to heat by the good fire in the room, carefully shaved her eyebrows, a pretense she had kept up ever since she began to look too old to pass for a beardless boy. She left the razor and soap carefully by the hearth where they could be seen. She could, if she must, briefly create an illusion of beard, and sometimes smeared her face with dirt to add to it, but it was difficult and demanded close concentration, and she dared not rely on it; so she shaved her eyebrows close, with the thought that a man known to shave his eyebrows would probably have to shave his beard as well.

  Hearing steps on the stair, she drew the mage-robe about her, and the herb-seller puffed up the last steps and into the opened door. She set the smoking tray on the table, murmured, "I'll empty that for ye," and took up the bowl of soapy water and the slop jar. "My son's at the stairway wi' his cudgel; none will disturb you here, magician."

  Nevertheless, Lythande, alone again, made very sure the bolt was well-drawn and the room still free of spy-eyes or spells; who knew what the herb-seller might have brought with her? Some spell-candlers had pretensions to the arts of sorcery. Moreover, the woman had mentioned that she had seen another Adept of the Blue Star; and Lythande had enemies among them. Suppose the herb-seller were in the pay of Rabben the Half-handed, or Beccolo, or ... Lythande dismissed this unprofitable speculation. The room appeared empty and harmless. The smell of roast fowl and the freshly baked loaf was dizzying in her famished condition, but magic could not be made on a full stomach, so she packed away the smell into a remote corner of her consciousness and drew out the Larith's sword.

  It felt warm to the touch, and there was the small tingling that reminded Lythande that powerful magic resided in it.

  She cast a pinch of a certain herb into the fire and, breathing the powerful scent, focused all her powers into one spell. Under her feet, the floor rocked as the Word of Power died, and there was a faint, faraway rumble as of falling walls and towers—or was it only distant summer thunder?

  She passed her hand lightly above the sword, careful not to touch it. She was not really familiar with the magic of the Larithae; as Lythande the Pilgrim Adept, she could not be, and while she still lived as a woman, she had never come closer than to know what every passerby knew. But it seemed to her that whatever-magic dwelt in the sword was gone; perhaps not banished, but sleeping.

  From her pack she sacrificed one of the spare tunics she carried, and carefully wrapped the sword. The tunic was a good one, heavy white silk from the walled and ancient city of Jumathe, where the silkworms were tended by a special caste of women, blinded in childhood so that their fingers would have more sensitivity when the time came to strip the silk from the cocoons. Their songs were legendary, and Lythande had once gone there, dressed as a woman, a cloak hiding the Blue Star, grateful for the women's blindness so that she could speak in her own voice; she had sung them songs of her own north-country, and heard their songs in return, while they thought her only a wandering minstrel girl. The sighted overseer, however, had been suspicious, and had finally accused her of being a man in disguise—for a man to approach the blind women was a crime punishable by death in a particularly unpleasant fashion—and it had taken all of Lythande's magic to extricate herself. But that is another story.

  Lythande wrapped the sword in the tunic. She regretted the necessity of giving it up—she had had it for a long time; she shrank from thinking how many years ago she had sung her songs within the house of the blind silkworm-tenders in Jumathe! But for such magic a real sacrifice was necessary, and she had nothing else to sacrifice that meant the least thing to her; so she wrapped the sword in it, and bound it with the cord she had passed through the herb-smoke, tying it with the magical ninefold knot.

  Then she set it aside and sat down to eat up the roast fowl and the freshly baked bread with the sense of a task well done.

  When the house was quiet, and the herb-seller's son had put his cudgel away and retired to rest, Lythande slipped down the stairs noiselessly as a shadow. She had to spell the lock so that it would not creak, and a somewhat smaller spell would make any passerby think that the drawn-back bolt, open padlock, and open door were firmly shut and bolted. Silken bundle under her arm, she slipped silently to the riverbank and, working by the dim light of the smaller moon, dug a hole and buried the bundle; then, speaking a final spell, strode away without looking back.

  Returning to the herb-seller's house, she thought she saw something following in the street, and turned to look. No, it was only a shadow. She slipped in through the open door—which still looked charmed and locked— locked it tight from within, and regained her room with less sound than a mouse in the walls.

  The fire had burned to coals. Lythande sat by the fire and took from her pack a small supply of sweet herbs with no magical properties whatever, rolled them into a narrow tube, and sparked it alight. So relaxed was she that she did not even use her fire-ring, but stooped to light the tube from the last coals of the fire. She leaned back, inhaling the fragrant smoke and letting it trickle out slowly from her nostrils. When she had smoked it down to a small stub, she took off her heavy boots, wrapped herself rightly in the mage-robe and then in the herb-seller's blanket, and lay down to sleep.

  Before dawn she would arise and vanish as if by magic, leaving the door bolted behind her on the inside— there was no special reason for this, but a magician must preserve some mystery, and if she left by the stairs in the ordinary way, perhaps the innkeeper would be left with the impression that perhaps magicians were not so extraordinary after all, since they ate good dinners and washed and shaved and filled slop jars like any ordinary mortal. So when Lythande had gone, the room would be set to rights without a wrinkle in the bedclothes or an ash in the fireplace, the door still bolted on the inside as if no one had left the room at all.

  And besidesr it was more amusing that way.

  But for now, she would sleep for a few hours in peace, grateful that the clumsiness that had entangled her in somebody else's magic had come to a good end. No whisper disturbed her sleep to the effect that it hadn't really even started yet.

  The last of the prowling thieves had slipped away to their holes and corners, and the red eye of Keth was still blinded by night when Lythande slipped out of Old Gandrin by the southern gate. She took the road south for two reasons: there was always work for mercenary or magician in the prosperous seaport of Gwennane, and also she wished to be certain in her own mind that after her drastic unbinding-spell, nothing called her northward to the Larith shrine.

  The least of the moons had waned and set, and it was that black-dark hour when dawn is not even a promise in the sky. The gate was locked and barred, and the sleepy watchman, when Lythande asked quietly for the gate to be opened, growled that he wouldn't open the gate at that hour for the High Autarch of Gandrin himself, far less for some ne'er-do-well prowling when honest folk and dishonest folk were all sleeping, or ought to be. He remembered afterward that the star between the ridges where Lythande's brows ought to have been had begun to sparkle and flare blue lightning, and he could never explain why he found himself meekly opening the gate and then doing it up again afterward. "Because," he said earnestly, "I never saw that fellow in the mage-robe go through the gate, not at all; he turned hisself invisible!" And because Lythande was not all that well known in Old Gandrin, no one ever told him it was merely Lythande's way.

  Lythande breathed a sigh of relief when the gate was shut behind her, and began to walk swiftly in the dark, striding long and full and silent. At that pace, the Pilgrim Adept covered several leagues before a faint flush in the sky told where the eye of Keth would stare through the dawn clouds. Reth would follow some hours later. Lythande continued, covering ground at
a rate, then was vaguely troubled by something she could not quite identify. Yes, something was wrong. . . .

  ... It certainly was. Keth was rising, which was as it should be, but Keth was rising on her right hand, which was not as it should be; she had taken the southward road out of Old Gandrin, yet here she was, striding northward at a fast pace. To the north. Toward the shrine of Larith.

  Yet she could not remember turning round for long enough to become confused and take the wrong direction in the darkness. She must have done so somehow. She stopped in mid-stride, whirled about, and put the sun where it should be, on her left, and began pacing steadily south.

  But after a time she felt the prickle in her shins and buttocks and the cold-flame glow of the Blue Star between her brows, which told her that magic was being made somewhere about her. And the sun was shining on her right hand, and she was standing directly outside the gates of Old Gandrin.

  Lythande said aloud, "No. Damnation and Chaos!" disturbing a little knot of milkwomen who were driving their cows to market. They stared at the tall, sexless figure and whispered, but Lythande cared nothing for their gossip. She started to turn round again and found herself actually walking through the gates of Old Gandrin again.

  Through the south gate. Traveling north.

  Now this is ridiculous, Lythande thought. I buried the sword myself, locked there with my strongest unbinding spell! Yet her pack bulged strangely; ripping out a gutter obscenity, Lythande unslung the pack and discovered what she had known she would discover the moment she felt that strange prickling cramp that told her there was magic in use—somebody else's magic! At the very top of the pack, wedged in awkwardly, was the white silk tunic, draggled with the soil of the riverbank, and thrusting through it—as if, Lythande thought with a shudder, it were trying to get out—was the larith sword.