Complete Short Fiction, page 5
“I’ll say. I’ve never even heard of them.”
“Then he talked about our light display. He wanted me to do something called the Malabar Pilgrim, and I couldn’t do it, and it hurt, and he got mad, and—”
“What did he say about the display?”
She began to blubber. “Is it my fault I can’t stand on my head? Whoever heard of such a thing?”
“What did he say?” Llobportis repeated.
“He said our display was impossible.”
Ragana gasped in irritation. “I paid the finest light weaver in the city to design that display. Impossible, indeed!”
“He meant really impossible, I think. The light had no source. It was just coming from nowhere. That is impossible, isn’t it?”
“You’re an idiot,” Ragana said.
“I am not! I may not be able to do the Malabar Pilgrim, but I know a logical argument when I hear one.”
“That’s why you’re an idiot, darling. He convinced you that our display was impossible when every house on this street has one?”
The girl looked doubtful. “Well . . . he was very convincing. He said he could work us up another one, the way they do it in Taprobane, using torches.”
Djeenek, with a thoughtful expression, began to pack his equipment back into his bag.
“Did he say anything else?”
“He said he was going to take a walk down the Street of Smiths so he wouldn’t be angry.”
“Angry?” Llobportis said, all at sea.
“Yes. Something about keeping his temper . . . because he was on edge. He was just mad because he tried to shave with his knife and some olive oil and ended up cutting himself.”
“I don’t think you got the point,” Llobportis muttered.
“Then he took his staff, and left.”
Silently, intently, Djeenek gestured Llobportis to follow by jerking his head, and walked toward the door.
“What are you doing?” Ragana demanded.
“I, Madame, am returning to my native village to remove some warts.”
“What?” she shrieked. “Come back here! What about my display?” In sympathy with her mistress’s anguish, the blonde began to cry. Djeenek said nothing, and allowed the door to close shut on Ragana’s frantic, “Shut up. Shut up, damn you! The Prefect’s going to hear about this, never fear.” The resulting silence was blessed.
The Street of Anonymous Assignations was a night-blooming flower and looked, in the morning sun, as hungover as the two men washing themselves in the fountain on the corner, grunting and complaining to each other.
They walked down the street in silence for quite some time, Djeenek in a brown study, Llobportis jumping up and down with ill-concealed impatience. He finally could stand it no longer. “What the hell is going on?”
Djeenek thought a moment. “Don’t you find it strange?”
“Strange? That Djeenek the Prismatic, who sits on the right hand of the Mage and can shuffle the stars and planets in their spheres at will, can’t remove a simple hex from a whorehouse’s shop display? Damn right I find it strange. I’ve heard of magicians who’ve lost their powers but fear to show it, but I never thought . . .”
They paused at a fruit seller’s where, silently, Djeenek purchased a melon. Splitting it in half with his sash knife, he handed part to Llobportis who, realizing that he had not had breakfast, lost no time in scooping out the seeds and tossing them to the ground. As they struck, they flashed in bright primary colors and made the sound of tinkling bells.
Llobportis dodged the flares. “Very impressive—ai!” The half melon he held suddenly grew sharp yellow teeth and swallowed his hand to the wrist. It pulsed, and began to swell, making the sound of a purring kitten. With a shriek, he smashed the carnivorous fruit against a wall. It exploded in a gout of juice and pulp, giggling insanely as it did so.
Checking his fingers to see that they were still attached to his hand, Llobportis stared at Djeenek in horror, entirely speechless.
“Never accuse a magician of having lost his power,” Djeenek said in a flat, deadly tone. “Never. Even in jest, or as a matter of rhetoric. You strike at the heart of his existence.” He passed a shaky hand across his brow. “Try to use your reason. The curse on that display is no simple hex. Far from it. It is one of the most impenetrable shadows of magical suppression I have ever encountered.” He sighed. “We are as the two friends in the tale who take two separate roads to flee from Death, only to find that in reality they are the same one, the one that leads directly into his mouth.”
They passed into the aromatic shadows of a row of lemon trees. Llobportis leaned his back against one, still feeling the joints of one hand with the other. “I’m not sure I follow. Change that: I’m sure I don’t follow.”
“Our two problems are, in reality, one. You worried about a mysteriously cursed light display. I worried about mysterious men from the east who seek to destroy magic. I have heard of Taprobane: It lies far to the east, beyond Africa. And the common thread of the two stories is—”
“A brown robe and a staff? Be serious, Djeenek. Irrelevant detail added to unsubstantiated rumor.”
“A rumor which, to my mind, gained substance at Ragana’s. This problem is no longer yours alone, my friend. I will now return to the Malachite Tower, while you attend to your routine business, imprisoning debtors, or whatever. There, I will prepare a Spell of Tracing, by which I will scry his path since he arrived here from the sea. Following it back will enable me to follow him forward.”
“Good police procedure. I’ll get some of my boys on it, too.”
Djeenek looked pained. “Such duplication of effort seems to me a needless waste of time. Do you yet doubt—”
“Just to keep them in practice,” Llobportis said soothingly. “Something to keep their minds off torturing prisoners.”
“I cannot argue with such a socially laudable goal.”
They parted at the corner, each striding off on his errand.
“I do not understand it,” Djeenek said. “I cannot understand it. There was no trace of him. None. My speculum remained blank and roiled with smoke. And the actions of a magician are often the easiest to trace.”
“Say what you like about the powers of magic,” Llobportis said. “But good legwork always pays off.” He was unable to keep a bit of smugness out of his voice.
The alleys between the warehouses of the dockyards were dark tunnels, roofs arching overhead. The air was filled with the cries of men sorting cargo. Sweaty, muscular bodies appeared in the dusty beams of sunlight from above, and vanished again, lugging sacks of grain, slabs of copper in the shapes of ox hides, or a caged leopard, its eyes shining in hatred and terror. The atmosphere was thick with the smell of spices. Ahead, through a mass of ostrich plumes, could be sensed the sea.
“Grammadurhu,” Llobportis explained as they walked, “came through the customs gate yesterday morning. No goods to declare, save his ‘knowledge,’ as he put it.”
“Too clever,” Djeenek grunted. “Cleverness, in magic, is a great danger. Spells should be cast for vengeance, for lust, to save a soul, to complete a great work—always for some human passion. Witty magic is a disaster, for the self-directed intellect delights in setting itself paradoxes which, sooner or later, destroy it.”
They emerged on the quayside, into the sun and breeze. Before them stretched the harbor. It contained scores of ships, each with its embroidered square sail billowed out with phantom wind. The surface of the water was roiled and frothed, testifying to the opposed wills of ships’ magicians.
A small granite storehouse with barred windows stood at the foot of the quay. Llobportis poked his head into the black hole of the door and shouted. Despite the fact that he spoke no words, his voice was redolent of threat, of force, of punishment, of pain.
Djeenek looked startled. “What was that?”
“That, my friend, was the Voice of Authority. I got top marks in it at the Academy.”
“I can imagine.”
“I hear, I hear,” a voice said from the darkness. “Shout no more: I emerge.”
A fat, sweaty man, balding, dressed in a white robe, appeared at the door, blinking in the sunlight. “Yes, oh my gentles?”
“I’ve found you out, you old faker,” Llobportis screamed. “Confess now, and you’ll save yourself the strappado.”
The fat man waved his hands childishly in the air. “Oh, good sir. I hardly know where to begin! Perhaps with the pomegranate I thieved from my sister while she admired the butterfly. How she cried upon the discovery, sir, how she cried! I shudder even now to remember it—”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You called upon me to confess, and confess I shall, rest assured, sir. Confession cleanses, and I am grateful. Just the other week I kicked a cur in the street. It whined and yelped most piteously, and—”
“I want real crimes, not these mindless moral irregularities, damn you! I want forged bills of sale, I want unregistered fetishes, I want spells of necrosis and spells of suppression, from Ophir, from Colchis, from Taprobane.”
The fat man looked at him with one eye narrowed, calculating, running the possibilities over in his mind. “I assume, sir, that most of your questions are what I was taught as a lad to call ‘rhetorical,’ for effect merely, desiring no answer. Once these are eliminated, but one remains, and I cannot help you with it. The gentleman from Taprobane left yestermorning, has not returned, and did not confide his plans to me.”
“What is your name?” Llobportis barked, disconcerted at having the husk of misdirection winnowed so easily from his kernel of intent, and having no better question available.
“Annom, sir, at your service.” The fat man bowed. “Now, if there are no further matters, I must return to my tasks.”
“Not so fast! Take us to his ship.”
For the first time, Annom was taken aback. “But the way . . . it is not ready, sir. The quay is being repaired, cargo loaded. A carrack from Hyperborea is attached with a remora and cannot move; it must be careened and scraped. In short, good sir, I would oblige—”
Llobportis laughed, a hard laugh, pleased at having regained the initiative. “So not only the pomegranate weighs on your conscience, eh? Missing tax stamps? Forged inspection glyphs? Smuggled basilisks? Fool! I’m after redder meat than that, and I want to see that man’s ship, now. Do you understand?”
So, slowly, reluctantly, like a student dragging his way to his tutor’s house with his lessons unlearned, Annom led them down the quay. They ducked under the complex curves of fishing net hung up for mending, dodged cranes and rolling barrels.
Two ships were tied up next to each other near the end of the quay, one silent and deserted, the other athunder with activity as a dozen roustabouts unloaded a consignment of boxes labelled “Cotton.” Seeing Llobportis and Djeenek, they froze with guilty and worried countenances. At an irritated gesture from Annom, they resumed unloading with an almost burlesque seriousness.
Llobportis glared at him. “You are an idiot.”
The fat man bobbed. “Yes, kind sir, indeed.”
“And your men are idiots.”
“That, I certainly cannot argue with.”
“I’d arrest the lot of you, and confiscate your ‘cotton,’ but you’re such idiots that in order to still be alive, you must be under the protection of some god. And if that god is as much of an idiot as his worshippers, in trying to save you he will trip and knock the world off into the eternal abyss.”
“The gentleman has an interesting theology.”
“This is Grammadurhu’s ship?” Djeenek asked, gesturing at the silent vessel. It was long and low, with posts curving up at both ends, simply carved, with no sign of a guardian figure. The hull was black with a substance that, in the hot sun, revealed itself to the nose as pitch. The sail was an oddly shaped, undecorated piece of graying linen. A rat poked its nose above the gunwale, twitched its whiskers at them, and vanished.
Cautiously, with many warding gestures, Djeenek inched his way onto the Taprobani ship. He hunkered down near the mast and set up his apparatus: a gold tripod, a pendulum of black string with a quartz crystal as weight, an oil lamp in the shape of a spider, and a cast bronze head with the flat face of a tousle-headed boy, mouth open in a scream. He laid the head on the tripod, face up, poured powder into the mouth from a small bag, and lit the lamp underneath. Then, holding the pendulum directly above the mouth, he began to sing the incantations in a low monotone. For a long moment, nothing happened. Like the eruption of a volcano, blue smoke began to pour from the mouth. Despite the fact that it was quite a breezy day, the surface of the harbor choppy, the smoke rose in a perfectly straight column into the sky, puffing out just noticeably around the quartz crystal, but otherwise remaining of constant width.
Djeenek stared up at the smoke in disbelief. “Begone,” he said, and the smoke was just smoke, blowing about in the wind. With the same intentness as before, he collected the equipment, put it back in his bag, and climbed out of the ship. Silence.
He sat down on a stack of aromatic cedar wood and groaned. “This is impossible. That smoke, in the form I produced it, will billow to the site of forces indicating the past or present use of magic. Perform this spell in a freshly opened crypt that has been sealed a thousand years, in an alleyway used by leatherworkers for the sole purpose of relieving themselves, in the center of a field on the Central Plain, and the smoke will twist itself into a dozen tendrils, finding the site of every muttered curse and every dropped and recovered good luck amulet. Magic is everywhere, and that smoke seeks it out. There is none on that boat. None. No water sealing on the hull. No antirodent incantations. No protective cantrips. No orientation spells. The wood comes from unblessed trees, cut with unsanctified tools. No wards protect against intruders. And the damn sail is triangular.”
“Has all the earmarks of a swindle,” Llobportis said, “although who’s being swindled, and for what, I have no idea.” He leaped aboard the boat and began to search it, overturning baskets and feeling the hidden bottoms of clay pots with one arm.
“Kind sir, do not the Taprobani keep venomous snakes as pets, as a means of insuring good fortune?”
“Aaargh!” Llobportis fell backwards, breaking the pot he was in the process of examining, scattering grain over the boat.
“Or, oh dear, was it Egypt where they did that?”
“You imbecile!”
Annom shrugged. “I was always a fool at geography. I was often soundly beaten for it.”
The crew at the next berth, having unloaded their cargo with admirable speed, climbed aboard their boat and prepared to leave. A short man with a mass of curly hair and a gold earring, dressed in the robes of a maritime magician, released a dove as a token of safe passage, undid the mouth of an embroidered sack, and chanted the wind invocation. There was no response. He mixed two powders together and tossed them into the air, where they vanished in a sickly flash, and again chanted. Still the sail remained limp. A taller man wearing leather cuirass and greaves with a short skirt, apparently an authority figure, shouted at the magician, who shouted back. An argument developed. The rest of the crew shouted helpful suggestions.
Llobportis and Djeenek exchanged a glance and sauntered over to the other ship, which grew silent.
“May we be of some assistance?” Djeenek said.
No one responded. The nautical magician turned his back and muttered desperately, shaking the bag as if suspecting the wind had simply gotten stuck sideways, or something.
“This vessel must be moved immediately,” Llobportis said, in a brassy official voice. The crew stared at him with popping eyes. “This end of the quay will be cleared and the foreign magician’s ship placed under seal of interdict.” There was a brief shuffle, but no concerted action. “If you do not move your boat, or give me a good reason why you cannot, I will be forced, reluctantly, to place your vessel, its crew, and its contents under seal as well.”
The crew’s countenances grew mournful. Still, no one moved.
“Speak, curse you all!” Annom shouted.
The tall man in the leather armor shoved the curly-headed magician forward, obviously using some degree of force. “This son of a worm claims to be a magician.” The other’s face grew red. “But he cannot raise even a simple phantom wind. Why am I cursed with this incompetence?”
The magician waved his arms. “As the Mage is my witness, I have never failed you before. Do you not remember, when the serpent stalked us in the Propontis—”
“That was then. This is now.”
The magician shrugged at Djeenek, recognizing a fellow practitioner. “Is that not ever the tale? Labor through the watches of the night. . . .”
The two climbed aboard, followed by a nervous Annom, and the sea magician consented to explain his predicament.
“It was that confounded whale’s pizzle Grammaticus, or Graminivorous, or whatever. The foreigner from the east. He’s gimmicked my spell.” The captain snorted. “By the Mage’s twisted staff, it’s true enough. That wart on a boar’s behind was here just the other morning, may his sister bear a dozen cannibal imps. He’s cursed me, and stopped my wind!”
“No such luck,” one of the crewmen said, holding his nose. The others laughed. The magician whirled, ready to cast a curse, but was swung back around by his captain.
“Grammadurhu of Taprobane?” Llobportis said. “A man with a brown robe and a staff?”
“I believe that was the infected tapeworm’s name. I hope his liver shrivels up like a raisin and the bile pours into his heart, that—”
“What did he do?”
“He came and spoke to me, one ship mover to another. He has no crew on that boat, and directs it himself. Even coasting, that is no mean feat. I was friendly with him. The serpent that strikes is always the one we have pressed to our bosom! He asked me how we ‘tacked’ against the wind, as he put it, using its force to go in a direction other than the way it blew. What nonsense! I told him we raised our own wind, like anyone else. He laughed. I should have caused his rectum to contract, so that he swelled like a pufferfish. He told me that raising a wind is impossible, that one had either to use the wind that blew from the skies, or row. Row! Like ignorant marsh dwellers. A simple spell would have turned his nostrils into nests for hornets, yet I did nothing.”
