From Nameless Magery by Delia Marshall Turner
It was winter. I was half-starved and so wet my armpits were starting to mildew. My father's finger bone on a thin metal chain was the only thing left to me of a whole life (all seventeen years of it, but that was forever to me then), and it seemed my future was going to end shortly in a dismal pile of my own bones.
I knelt down in the slush of half-frozen mud. Stretching as far as I could to avoid leaving a scent, I spread my awkwardly constructed snare next to the hole in the tree. I placed the tiny lump of rotting meat that I'd kept back from the last meal in the center of the snare. Paying out the trip-line, I backed up on my knees through the mud until I was out of sight behind a bush. I settled myself to wait. The bush was leafless and gave no shelter from the relentless rain, but I was already so wet and cold it made no difference. Sooner or later the rat-like thing that lived in the tree would let its hunger overcome its caution and come out, and then I would have something to eat for today.
I tried to meditate, but I couldn't separate my mind from the slithery feeling of the wetness between my skin and the tattered old robe I wore. Meditation was meant to be sung aloud, on a sunny day, with friends and family singing with you, and food set out warm and smelling good at the worship table. My Voices, muttering in the caverns at the back of mind, had no prophecies to give and were reduced to nonsense, mostly speculations on the spiritual significance of the number four.
My nose was running, the eye I had injured the week before was beginning to water again, my feet were falling asleep, and the rain felt like it was getting colder, but I didn't move. Food was too hard to get in the cold season, and I was hungry. At least the Enforcers' casual blows had finally taught me what my Guardian couldn't, how to keep quiet when it was necessary. The Living God never had to be cold or hungry or even in pain, except at the end of the year. The rain fell, and I waited, and watched, and listened to the hiss and crash of water on the tree branches.
Later, some time after I lost sensation in the fingers holding the trip-line, I heard a sound that was not caused by the winter rains. Something big was crashing up the hill from the stream, something with four feet, that didn't care about the underbrush. I snatched the snare back to me with a quick motion and rolled it up. There had been no large animals in the forest in the year I had been hiding there. Were there things that ate flesh here? It was very heavy, whatever it was. The ground thumped beneath me to the heavy steps. I peered through the stems of the bush, crouched and ready to run if my numbed limbs would let me.
When the source of the noise surged through the underbrush on the other side of the clearing, it was the last thing I expected to see on this god-lost planet. An ordinary horse, a big bay horse with a whiskered nose and furry fetlocks, and a tall man riding on it. A wet and grouchy man with a dripping nose and sodden leathers, not looking where he was going and not particularly caring. He could have been an ordinary traveler in any back country on Mennenkaltenei, except for the wispy streaks of blue flame I could see trailing from his head and questing about him.
I almost stood, almost ran to intercept his horse as it plodded wearily by me, almost shouted to him to stop and help me. I didn't. I held my breath and stayed crouched behind the bush, watching him go and cursing myself. How many times had I promised myself that if anybody found me I would grab them by the knees and beg them to adopt me? I had thought I would even welcome Enforcers, endure their dead cruelty for the sake of food and warmth and human company, however hateful that company had been. But I couldn't do it.
When the horse had passed behind the nearer trees, and the sound of its steps receded toward the top of the hill and the narrow path there, I stood painfully and trotted after. I had to know where he was going. I had seen no people in the year since I'd sacrilegiously escaped the Enforcers, stranding myself on this strange world. I looked up at the top of the hill, and saw distant flickers of the man's cold flame disappearing into the darkening sky, and found myself hurrying in spite of myself. I moved as silently as I could, though. If he turned out to be an enemy, I could always fade back into the forest. The woods were not always against me, only in winter, and spring might come again.
The walking horse and its weary rider were unaware of me as I stole along, always a few trees behind in the gathering dusk. I watched him as closely as I could. The horse, if shaggy, was well fed, unlike most servants of the Enforcers. The man was not dressed like an Enforcer, either. He had obviously been traveling a long time, for his leathers were well worn and cracked in places, and the boots on his long legs were creased and coming apart at the seams. Though he kept his head down to keep the rain out of his eyes, his shoulders were strong. He was neither a starving ascetic nor an overfed parasite. Nor did he treat the horse badly. He never struck her in the hours that followed, and though she must have been terribly tired and cold, she kept on willingly.
After a time I was following them only by the blue wisps of light, the fire that only some few spirit-born Mennenkalts could see. Lle fluttered and flicked about his face, veining and forking, looping and whirling, never still, always seeking, but he paid ller no mind. If lle was so attached to him, he could only be an Adept himself. Why, then, was he dressed so? My mind was not working very well by now, what with pain and tiredness and water running down my face. I'd forgotten the Adepts were all dead.
Puzzling woodenly over the problem he posed, I nearly ran into the back end of the horse when she came to a halt at a fork in the path. With a gasp of fear, I took a step backward, but the rider wheeled the horse around at the sound and, startled, stared at me in the light of his spirit-fire.
In that moment, before I lurched away, I saw his face clearly. Then I bolted off the path, through the whiplash switchings of the wet bushes, hearing a tired baritone chuckle behind me. I kept running for a long time, longer than I needed to, until the pain in my chest and my hoarse breathing forced me to stop. For the rest of the long cold night, as I crouched inside a rotten stump far from the path, I saw behind my closed eyes the straight nose, the wide arrogant mouth, the high cheekbones, and the dark lock of hair falling slantwise across a high forehead. It would have been an attractive face, that first face I'd seen in two years, if the amused and astonished eyes had not glowed a ghastly, cold, phosphorescent green. I'd only seen the like once before, in the face of a possessed woman being ritually exorcised. Toward dawn, exhausted and half-hallucinating, I fell asleep in a crouching position, braced against the rotting wood.
There were no birds in this winter-shriveled forest to sing the approach of morning, and what insects there were didn't buzz or whine, but crawled about their business silently. The weak winter sun, rising high enough to glance through the top of the hollow trunk, finally woke me from my dismal and uneasy slumber. When I opened my eyes, I could see the sad true sunlight, but in my spirit sight it was drowned out by a sulfurous, pulsating glow. Gentle languid streamers of luminescent yellow, as insubstantial as a rainbow, were slowly circling my shelter, interweaving llerselves in a lattice as though to capture me in a cage of light. More yellow ropes of glowing plasm, insubstantial but lazily purposeful, wound towards me across bushes and around trees like intoxicated snakes.
I scrambled over the top of the stump and dangled myself down to the ground, sliding cautiously between the circling shell of light and the skin of the dead tree. With my back to the stump, sucking at a splinter in the heel of my hand, I considered the opalescent blaze inches from my face.
It was the wrong color for Enforcer fire. The hard sad dead fire the Enforcers used was a metallic blue like reflections in steel. On the Enforcer ship, they hauled themselves through space with claws of glittering cold spirit fire, spreading death in endless fractal patterns, and it had always been blue. Not yellow, not green, but blue. So this was familiar ller, not Enforcer fire. I knew how to deal with ller, though I'd preferred not to since my improper, irregular theft of the lifeboat.
Clasping the finger bone dangling from my neck, I closed my eyes briefly, aimed my will, made my desire clear, then opened my eyes and raised my hands, saying, "May I pass?" As I gestured, the lattice of light unwove itself politely and curled away from me. I stepped composedly through the opening. I jumped and ran like a rabbit, spoiling the effect, when a startled voice cried out from somewhere very near me. As I ran, I heard footsteps behind me and a deep, exasperated voice shouting in a language I didn't know.
My rotting soles picked that particular time to finally rip free of my shoes, and I was running painfully, prancing almost, and flapping my robes like a chicken with the effort of keeping my balance, when I slammed face first into a tree I'd thought I was avoiding. I wasn't sure who I was for a second, and when I finally figured out that, whoever I was, my head hurt, somebody was tying my thumbs together behind my back while I had my nose ground firmly into the tree. As soon as my thumbs were tied, my captor said something incomprehensible in an admirable voice, put his hands on my shoulders, swung me around, and firmly propelled me back the way we'd come. As I staggered ahead of him, guided by brisk but not unkind shoves, I reflected that there was nothing like complete calamity to take one's mind off the daily grind of starving to death in an inadequately rat-infested wilderness.
We came back to the trail, where the shaggy bay horse was calmly scratching her massive side against a young tree. My abductor, when I finally got a look at him, turned out to be the unexpected wraith of the night before, though his eyes were no longer glowing chartreuse. Now they were an ordinary gray. He seemed exhausted, dirty, and irritated, and surprisingly normal. He confirmed that impression by flopping down on the ground with a heartfelt groan. I followed suit, my hands still bound, and we examined each other with suspicion.
Finally, he said something to me with an inquiring lilt, and when I didn't answer, he sighed and dug through his pockets, unearthing some solid and greasy bread which he broke in half and shared with me. It was probably the best meal I'd ever had, hard and chewy and stale as it was, shoved in my mouth piece by piece with his grimy fingers. It had been a long time since I'd had bread of any kind.
Once we were fed, he bundled me unceremoniously onto the back of the horse, swung up in front of me, and continued his interrupted journey southeast on the half-cleared trail. It was a clear pale day in the last dregs of winter. The dead leaves on the forest floor were shabby gray, the hardy scaled beetles had shredded the weedy undergrowth that hung on from last fall, and the endless trees were purple, stark, and sad. But the sun, though pale, filtered through to the ground in delicate patterns, the horse's rolling motion was soothing, and the man's back before me was stolid and warm. Eventually, in spite of the burning in my bound arms, I fell asleep with my cheek between his shoulder blades.
I awoke with a jerk at noonday to find him sliding nimbly off the horse. He hoisted me down, untied my thumbs, spoke to me briefly in his incomprehensible language, and walked aside to relieve himself matter-of-factly against a tree. I stood there in my filthy and tattered robes, with my bony feet sticking gracelessly out at the bottom (absurdly adorned by the remnants of my shoes), and my chopped-off hair matted and greasy, and felt a ridiculous pang of injured vanity. Even though I was supposed to be above such things, I'd always enjoyed the young men's appreciation, but this creature obviously didn't even realize that I was female.
Actually, I hadn't had much occasion lately to think about my gender either, but in spite of the road dirt and worn leather clothing, he was a very attractive man, well put together and supple, with enough heft on his bones to give a woman something to hold on to. I would have crooked my finger at him any day on Mennenkaltenei, and maybe even tumbled him if I were somebody else. He turned, lacing up his flies, saw me watching him like a skinny dog at a duck roast, and grinned one-sidedly, motioning me to sit down and relax. I had no more doubts now. Whatever this weary wayfarer might be, he was no Enforcer slug.
I learned over a dry noon meal that my abductor's name was Simon; I am, as you know, (though I didn't tell him then), called Lisane, meaning "Nameless." It's more of a title than a name, but it's not an appropriate title any more, since I vacated the office it describes. On Mennenkaltenei, if I was named at all, I was called Kaltenhelsterdeimennet, meaning roughly "did a pretty good job of picking her parents." The Enforcers never knew me by any name, but the mages nowadays call me the "damnable foreign witch," which should give an idea of how few real foreigners showed up before this on the planet.
Over the next few days, I kept my mouth shut and never understood a word Simon said. He didn't tie me after the first day, seeming confident that I wouldn't try to get away.
Did he have more up his sleeve than the luminous yellow spirit fire net and the eerie glowing green eyes? If not, he had no reason for confidence. I was more capable than most of playing that kind of trickery, though it was rankest heresy. I wasn't supposed to handle ller that way, but I was less rigid about matters of religion than I'd once been.
Simon showed he was, like me, a pragmatic practitioner of elemental manipulation when the first night of our joint travel he summoned some tendrils of air spirit with a spoken word and a flick of his finger to start a campfire. It seemed presumptuous to me to harness spiritual energy to cook dinner, but a lot more practical and not nearly as heretical as the Enforcers ramming their warships through the universe by killing ller.
I'd always known that lle was good for other things than worship service, anyway. When I'd been a cheeky ten-year-old on Mennenkaltenei, confident that no one would dare scold the Unnamed whelp of the Year-King out of spirit's Mother, I'd called up some elemental energy on my own and found a way to put it to a more prosaic use than the usual ecstatic communal ritual. Before my sister's mother discovered me and (to my injured surprise) whacked me in the head for my perverse materialism, I had managed to conjure disembodied arms to steal fruit-pies from the local harvest-wife.
Those elongated arms had shone eerily, just the same as Simon's conjurations, only half visible to me as if shining with something other than light. My sister's mother couldn't see them at all, but she could see the pies floating, so she smacked me again and took me to my tutor Jenneservet for extra training. Jenneservet got the petty vandalism out of my system fast, but I tucked away the information that elemental energy was good for more mundane purposes than the glory of the spirit. It had come in handy when I'd escaped the Enforcer, though I still felt guilty about that.
Now I was glad of the fire at night, however it was started, and of the fat tree-rats and swamp-swimmers he caught and cooked over his fires during the next few evenings. I would sit picking the last shreds of meat off fragile bones in the warmth of the campfire, and he would sit with his long arms around his knees in the uneasy firelight, contemplating me seriously. He was growing more and more puzzled by me. He'd obviously made some kind of assumption originally about who I was and where I'd come from, because he'd been more amused than dismayed by my sudden appearance in the middle of wilderness where there had been no other human for over a year. I'd given him pause when I broke free of his yellow spirit-net so swiftly, but he didn't stop to marvel at my skill, just took advantage of my clumsiness, whomped me, and cheerfully dragged me along on his trip.
Now, though, something was beginning to itch at him. For one thing, I wouldn't talk to him and I obviously didn't take in a word he said. He tried all kinds of conversation on me, from lectures to questions, to creeping up on me and yelling, but nothing he did got through. Well, it did get through in one way; he had a lovely deep voice with an agreeable huskiness to it, and if he'd offered me barley-sugar with that voice, I would have sat on his knee (or any other part of his body) any time. He didn't offer, though, not that I could tell.
For another thing, I was dressed funny and I acted funny. He couldn't place the once-orange draperies that were my legacy from the Enforcer life-boat, and he couldn't fathom why, every break I got, I wandered off into the underbrush and squatted down with my robe spread out around me, staring into space. He was beginning to act as if he thought I had severe brain damage, and for myself I was beginning to wonder if this delectable creature had ever watched any woman pee, including his mother, from a distance of closer than a mile.
The only thing that kept me from opening my mouth and shattering his illusions was that I didn't know where he was taking me, and I didn't know if I was going to like his friends nearly as much as I did him. It went against my grain to mistrust him. On Mennenkaltenei, we welcomed strangers as much as friends. But when the Enforcers came along, and we welcomed them as amiably as any other tourist group, they disemboweled us. They killed the Year-King before the spring had even started, they incinerated my Mother, they murdered my sisters, they slew the Year-King's postulants, and they killed any Elders and Adepts they could identify. They would have killed me too if they'd known what I was, future llerKalten, earth's blood, and Mother's mouth to the whole planet. Jenneservet told me to lie to them when they came, but I never lie. I just didn't say anything. They shoved my tutor and me in with the rest of the hostages they took until that greasy dolt took a liking to me.
So now I sat enigmatically by the fire by night, keeping my counsel and picking my teeth while Simon puzzled away at the conundrum I posed. By day I rode behind him on the tree-legged horse, trying not to press my chest too firmly against Simon's back (although at my age and weight my feminine attributes there weren't too evident), and enjoying the ride. Until the day we emerged from the forest to find ourselves at the foot of a steep precipice topped by an appalling erection of masonry and rock, as huge as a minor mountain, riddled with windows and bedizened with architectural embellishments like a hat with fruit.
Simon dropped the reins, raised his cupped hands, and shouted something up at the top of the cliff. From above, a disembodied voice intoned a substantial and sonorous incantation. Thick cords of half-visible spirit plasma writhed down to wrap around and beneath us. The horse, the man, and I began to float grandly up the cliff-face. It was certainly an elevating spiritual experience, but I couldn't help thinking, as we rose amidst evanescent fields of force, that it was missing some kind of point to harness fire elements for a job that could be done just as well and more permanently with stout rope and some lumber. Or even, in a pinch, with some of those little tools it wasn't polite to use.
It was the most appalling building I'd ever seen, and it kept getting uglier the closer I got. Warty towers stuck up chirpily everywhere, balconies sprouted on blind walls, gargoyles belched rudely under and over and behind every arbitrary outgrowth of builder's whimsy, and none of the hundreds of windows was the same shape. Fat brown birds fluttered and squawked on the highest ledges, dropping the occasional bomb on the vast array of shabby laundry that draped various window-sills. I don't like big buildings on principle. They just put a lot of people in one big box and make them useless. You have to haul food in to feed them, pipe the sewage out, you have to hire middlemen to deal with the rest of the world, and before you know it you have to have money and accounting and bureaucracy, and you don't know what's real any more. The only thing a big building is good for is a temple or a jail, in both cases because it keeps troublemakers out of circulation. It turned out that this pile of building was both of those things, as well as an exclusive boys' school and one of the seats of planetary government.
Once we reached the top of the cliff, Simon sketched a salute to the stolid individual who'd apparently brought us up, and led the horse and me through a dismal dripping archway leading to a courtyard and stables. The horse stalls, at least, were well kept. Simon shouted out, and a wary teenaged boy trotted out to take the horse. Without looking back at me, Simon headed briskly for a broad stair. I swung hastily off the horse and trotted after him, clutching my disintegrating robes. The seams were almost completely gone by now.
Simon was looking for somebody. He stopped and questioned a heavy-browed boy of eight or so, who pointed, gave him brief directions, and shot me a poisonous look after Simon passed him. I smirked back. He spat venomously at my feet. I stuck closer to Simon after that.
After several more inquiries from equally surly male people under the age of seventeen, Simon finally tracked down his quarry, a gray-haired, broad-chested man in scarlet knee pants, who had cornered two twelve-year-olds at the end of a corridor and was cursing them with his hands on his hips. I wished I spoke the language, because he sounded brilliant, never repeating himself once. His words leapt out like hammer blows, sharp and bright and perfectly placed. The two boys were backed up against the wall, still and expressionless, until he finished in a blaze of vituperation and turned his back on them. Then they split up and dashed past him on either side, yammering unrepentantly.
The gray-haired man ignored them, looking astonished and pleased to see Simon. They embraced each other and spoke for a moment, and then Simon turned and gestured me forward, gripping my shoulder sharply as I came to stand beside him. The man examined me with puzzled protruding blue eyes, and shook his head "no" to Simon. I wasn't sure what was happening, but from their expressions, they weren't sure either. Simon began to argue, the gray-headed one kept shaking his head, and finally Simon hauled me around to face him. He demanded something in a pleading tone, and since he was turning out to be a lot nicer than anybody else I'd seen so far, I nearly talked to him.
Before I could open my mouth, he blew his breath out in exasperation, stepped back from me, pointed at me and shouted something dire. A hideous pink not-really-there blast of spirit fire streamed slowly from his fingertip toward me. I wasn't about to hang around and find out if lle smelled as bad as lle looked, so I dropped and rolled under the stream, losing the rest of the rags of my robe in the process. The elongated blob of fire flowed around in a curve, following me. I panicked, rose to my knees, pointed my own finger at it, and yelled, "Aspect of ller! Lose this form and go back where you came from!"
Now, that was an unpardonable contraction of a simple but elegant exorcism ritual I'd learned as a child, and in its extended form it was designed to reduce a curse to infinitely small particles of ectoplasm and send ller spiraling back in a flaming cloud to purify the soul of the misguided one who'd set the spell in the first place. The Adept who had taught it to me would have slapped me silly and made me perform it all over again if I'd tried to cut corners like that on Mennenkaltenei. Sloppy as it was, it worked, though not the way it was usually supposed to. The pink plasma snapped into a nervous glob, quivered in the air, and rushed back into Simon's fingertip. He jumped as if he'd been bitten, and snapped out something that made the glob disappear before it ate his finger.
Then the two of them just stood there gawking at me like cornered rabbits at a weasel. I looked down and realized I'd blown my cover in every possible way, down to and including my so-called clothes. I sat back on my naked (if scrawny) haunches, laced my hands demurely in my lap, smiled at them innocently, and said, "Well, boys, great party so far. You want to dance now or shall we get something to eat?" When I spoke, they flinched. I'm lucky they didn't understand Wirdenish, because it turned out later their idea of a party with girls resembled my idea of guerrilla warfare. (Of course, my idea of guerrilla warfare hadn't worked very well against the Enforcers. Sarcasm and sullenness have their limits as weapons when the opposition has flamethrowers and disruptors.)
Simon particularly was staring at me in complete horror. I was certainly not in the best shape to be flaunting my body, a diet of roots and rats and very little of both having made me bumpy where I should have been bouncy, but I didn't think quite that appalled a look was called for.
The gray-haired man turned to Simon. Simon wrenched his gaze from my anatomy, and they conferred worriedly. With nothing else to occupy my attention, I noticed that Simon's friend wore a necklace made of two cords wrapped in a spiral, one black like his shirt and one the same cherry red as his knickers. Where he showed skin, it was thatched with thick gray hair, so the costume jewelry had a jarringly juvenile effect. Simon wore a coffee-brown choker that matched his leather and homespun just as neatly. His was less affected-looking, though.
They came to some decision and I found myself being rushed down the hall between them, Simon snatching the rags of my robe up from the floor and flinging them over my shoulders. I was getting hungry, and I hoped there was some food where we were going.
Up stairs and down ramps, around curving corridors and through connecting rooms, we scurried past the occasional slovenly boy, until we arrived at a set of ornately carved wooden doors. Gray-hair gabbled an incantation, the doors swung open of themselves, and we entered a dim, cool library. At the other end, a dark man, perhaps fifty years old, sat casually on a low stool reading a leather-bound book. He paid no attention to us until he finished the page he was reading, though we stood before him panting and fidgeting.
Then he closed the book, sliding a silken marker neatly into it. He leaned gracefully and placed it where it belonged on the shelf. His square hands were strong, sure, and swift. Though he was tonsured, his neatly turned skull made me wonder why other men bothered having hair. He wore a neck-ring like the other two, though his had three cords which were black on black on black, and the plain shirt and loose trousers on his pared-down body were black as wet trees in winter at home. Then he looked up, and looked at me, and all I could see were his black, glittering, fathomless eyes. He was a well of power, dark, deep, utterly controlled but with wildness in the depths.
He held me transfixed like that for a long moment. Then Simon at my side jerked my tattered covering away again. The dark man raised his eyebrows, turned up the corners of his generous mouth, and surveyed my naked body minutely, with amusement, before turning to Simon to ask him a question. Even his voice was black and smooth as funeral velvet. It made all my exposed skin tingle.
He listened at length to the explanations of my two companions, then sat gravely thinking, his knuckle to his lips. We were silent, waiting. The room creaked occasionally with footsteps from beyond the walls, and a breeze scurried in and scurried out. Then he dropped his fist, extended the fingers of his hand to me, and spoke one word. I heard only the beginning of the word, and then the room, all the books, the air, the sky outside, and the earth itself drowned him out, roaring, "Understand..." and I understood.
For at least a minute I had a working knowledge of the secret of the universe (of which I only remember that it was hilarious). Then enlightenment fled, but I had voices in my head, talking very fast and with great detail, even more insistent than my own Voices. I put my hands to my temples and bent over in pain.
Dimly, below the shrill gabble in my brain, I heard him saying, "No, she's real enough, even if she is female; and she's very strong, or what I just did would have killed her. I'm afraid she'll be quite vivid when she's healthy. Look at those green eyes and the black hair, and I believe the skin would be particularly fine if it wasn't so grubby." He hesitated. "No, there's no help for it, and she's strong enough to defend herself. Put her with the older students. If she survives for a year, Council will figure out what to do with her then. She's your responsibility, boy," he added to Simon. "You will have to teach her as well as teaching the student you've already been assigned. I don't want to see her, I don't even want to hear about her again until Council judges her." He turned away from us, looking out the window as if we no longer existed.
Simon and the gray-head said, "Sir," gravely and in unison, and led me, still naked and doubled over, my head spinning, out of the room. Simon paused outside the door to fling those wretched rags over me again, and I looked dizzily under my arm to find the man in black looking back at me past the slowly closing door. That was how I first met Kaihan, King and Wizard, Eldest and Master.
This page last updated July 11, 2000