No Flame But Mine (2 page)

‘See, Highness?' she said to Jemhara.

‘Honey bones,' said the mageia.

Jemhara nodded. ‘And the Kelp liked that?'

‘He
loved
it. So he hid me and fed me, and he brought me green dye. That sallow Rukar skin, he said, that'll pass for Gech, if you change your hair. He said he had met a Gech witch once. She was like that. Then I travelled with Vashdran's army. I soon learned the other languages, Kelp, Vorm, Jafn. I'm quick to learn.'

‘The Gech mageias have magic,' said Jemhara. ‘Were you never asked?'

‘I said my magic was how I could do the things with my body I can do.'

They paused in silence then, each drinking the hot watered wine.

Outside somewhere in the ruin there was shouting, but far away. Dogs barked but left off.

Aglin sat in one chair and Jemhara in the other, and they gazed at Beebit sitting on the ground with her feet on her own shoulders.

‘So then?' said the mageia. It seemed she hadn't heard all yet.

‘Don't you want,' said Beebit, ‘to know if I saw Vashdran?'

‘Did you?' said the mageia.

‘Now and then. Never close. He was very beautiful. He was golden, and his hair was red as sun-up and they said his eyes were blue – but in war they went the red of blood. He could do what I can – I mean he could
walk
straight up the sides of walls and trees, up the hard ice. He'd ridden into a battle standing on the back of a chariot-lion.' Her face was dull again and she said all this impassively. ‘But I never liked men, even gods. Only my father. He was always kind.'

‘He made you a harlot,' said Aglin flatly.

‘Oh, that. He was a harlot too. Since nine years. It's a profession. I'm not ashamed and nor was he.'

‘And the Kelp who saved your life?' asked Jemhara.

Without any expression the girl replied, ‘I swore to myself I'd kill him first chance Fate gave me. But it didn't find me, that happy day. Never mind it. The Magikoy saw to him and all the rest at Ru Karismi, City of Kings. They unleashed the great magic weapons of power and the White Death came. The whole enemy horde – gone to dust and powder. Even the Lionwolf, I think, for no one saw him since.'

‘Someone told you this?' said Jemhara. Her flesh prickled with silver quills under the skin. ‘Because you had got away from the Kelp and so avoided the White Death, which none present escaped.'

‘No, lady,' said Beebit. A tiny and impertinent smile crinkled her mouth. ‘I was
there
. I saw it
happen
. It was like noise without noise and a lightning flash that went on and on. And then – just powder and dust, and me standing in the midst, by the baggage carts where the women were. Only no carts left, no women or beasts. Even the chain he'd put on my ankle and the peg in the ground – not even those. My clothes were all lightninged off me too – but not my hair.'

Jemhara spoke very softly.

‘And the scar on your face?'

‘That? A man threw a knife at me when I was fifteen. The dad killed him. That's all
that
is.'

A second moon rose, but only a thin crescent. The third did not rise and the first was already down. On the nights of strongest triple moonrise – two moons at least at or nearly full and the third not less than half – Kandexa bleakly resembled a scorched skull smouldering fires, where people came and went with rapid unease, like lizards darting over stones. But tonight was not so violently lighted. A lot could go on in the dark.

Beyond the city, the humped old orchards of frozen fruit had been burned down during the war, along with anything else potentially useful to the enemy. Years' snows had covered these places. Now the approach was a sheet of white. Anything which moved
there
even on a night of thin moons showed at once.

It must then be a tall man, tall and lean, casting a lean long shadow.

Behind him his footsteps were imprinted in the softer snow. They stretched off for a vast distance, hours off, before different terrain hid them. Apparently he had walked a great way, which for a man alone was not so usual. Sometimes one noted a slight discrepancy to the left side of the prints – an intermittent halting in the left leg.

Kandexa had no gates. That was, she had no external ones. All her fortifications and barriers were inside. They ringed in the rival zones of the city.

The man who walked passed into the city.

Most of the thoroughfares now wound between the settlements, for most of the larger roads had been blocked off two or three years before.

As he moved through a narrow alley then, that once had been part of Kandexa's Royal Road, he was spied from two storeys above.

‘Who's
he
?'

‘Some fool.'

‘His garments are good; look at that cloak.'

‘He strides as if proud of himself.'

‘Too big for his boots to carry.'

The low voices sizzled like ice-snakes.

Certainly the stranger could not have heard them …

Nor the sudden twang of a dart-bow.

The dart, of ice-hardened black flint, speared down and caught the stranger between his shoulder blades. The three men rose to their feet on the roof, waiting for the idiot to topple over.

But he did not.

‘You mucked your shot.'

‘Never –
never
! You saw – it hit him square—'

‘Well, he's seen us now – Hey!' one of them shouted over into the alley. ‘Fancy us, do you? Then we'll come down and join you.'

They swarmed along a rope kept ready and landed in the compressed space. The stranger had not moved. He stood there, and the dart lay on the street. It had struck him – yet missed?

The biggest man, first to reach the ground, slung his knife with all his weight behind it. It too struck the tall man, this time in the heart. Then like the flint it shivered and let go, dropping back to earth with a
thunk
. Bloodless.

‘He's mage-spelled.'

Yes, it seemed he must be. There had been the faintest gilded quiver over the air as the blade touched him. Except, sensibly, they had put that down to a trick of the limited moonlight.

‘What do you want?' he said. The voice was compact, and primed with power.

They faltered. Only the big one said, ‘Don't try to lord it over
us
. No lords
here
. They died when the scum-horde came.'

‘I know.'

‘Then know
this
: whatever you are, we can take you.'

The stranger turned and walked away from them.

That was all.

Each of the three men stood dumbfounded. Then the big one threw the paralysis off. He charged after the tall stranger and, from a few feet behind him, lion-like leapt up on his back.

It was as if he had jumped on to a disc of cold fire that spun him and whirled him down, and as he met the hard ice of the street it seemed softer and far sweeter than the wide shoulders of the one he had attacked. Through a pair of just-broken teeth the big man mourned, ‘He is a mage.'

The other two faltered – then ran away.

The mage, if so he was, walked on. No limp was obvious now. He turned out of the alley that had been part of Royal Road, and moved between crushed buildings. Here and there a stray cat, by now adapted to the outdoor cold, its fur long and abrasive as wire, glared with glacial eyes. They had been beloved, silk-coated pets only three years before. But the walking man knew very well how quickly all things were by now educated to adapt. Five centuries of Winter had seen to it.

Beyond a kind of tunnel of collapsed masonry he found himself at the gate of one of the several zones of Kandexa. Inside the ill-formed walls, lamps showed in darkness much as the eyes of the cats had done.

Five men now came out from a house and frowned at him. They wore the mail of Ru Karismi, the deceased capital of the Ruk. And over the gate drooped a stained banner once the crimson and silver of Ru Karismi's colours.

‘This is Wise-Home,' said one of the men. ‘We don't welcome aliens.'

They had been drinking, something never brewed in a still. The walker looked at them, and through the muffle of his hooded garment they glimpsed a pair of eyes.

‘Shush,' said one of the five to the other four. ‘Can't you see?'

‘What's to see?'

‘Highness,' said the fifth man, ‘my father was from the capital. I believe—' The stranger did not speak. The fifth man asked in crumbled tones, ‘You are Magikoy?'

‘No.'

‘But sir –
sir
– I've heard of you – my father, he sent me away just before the Vashdran horde besieged Ru Karismi, before the White Death brought down plague into the city—But I'd heard him talk of you, though never myself had I seen you—He would say, If Thryfe had been here none of this—'

‘I am not Thryfe,' said the stranger at the gate of Wise-Home to the refugee from Ru Karismi.

‘Forgive me, sir.'

‘My forgiveness is only a question.'

The men muttered. The fifth man said, ‘Ask it.'

‘You mistook me for one of the Magikoy. Perhaps others of the order are here in Kandexa?'

All five stared at him.

Another of them said, ‘
Here
? Do you think we'd live like this, like frozen rats, if we had Magikoy to help us? They're dead. They died too in the White Death. Serve them right. It was their fault, their filthy weapons—
Curse them
.'

The stranger appeared unimpressed. He said, ‘You know of none, then.'

The fifth man, he who had been tender almost with admiring love, spat on the snow. ‘Get on your way, whoever – whatever – in Hell you are.'

Shadows moved, refolded.

The stranger was gone.

Jemhara had been for a moment distracted. She had felt something like a bird's great wing brush coldly over her hair, the shoulders of her cloak.

She did not turn to see. The sensation might indicate several events, perhaps ominous, but none of them occurred inside the room. Instead the scene there had turned to stone, the contortionist girl seated on the floor, Aglin sitting forward, eyes wide.

To Beebit Jemhara said, ‘Do you know then how it was you survived at Ru Karismi?'

‘No, Highness.'

‘Had you had some dealings with the Magikoy beforehand?'

‘No. How would I? I was the Kelp's slave and trech, and chained up otherwise. Even when I had to walk behind the army – their precious Gullahammer – I was on a chain with one or two others. Not every woman wanted to keep the army company.'

‘A mystery then,' said Jemhara silkenly. ‘Or else you're lying.'

Beebit did not react.

‘Or
else
,' said Aglin, ‘something proofed her against death. I heard a story that some of the men survived too – a handful compared to the whole huge horde of them – thirty, fifty, sixty men. Some witch had done it. That's all I ever heard.'

Beebit finished her drink and put the cup down. She swung her feet careless from her shoulders, stood up on her hands and walked round the fire-basket. From this position she said, ‘I came back to Kandexa to find my father's bones, if I can. Bury them nicely. Then I'll work at my trade.'

‘Your whoring,' nodded the mageia.

‘Just so. All places need a good whore.'

Jemhara, despite herself, gave a low laugh. Aglin joined her. ‘She's got the right of it there.'

Jemhara said, ‘But why then did you seek my friend the mageia?'

‘Because of my daughter,' said Beebit, lilting over to her feet. ‘You see, ladies, I thought she might have the magic power.'

‘Oh, why's that?' crisply asked Aglin. ‘What can she do?'

‘Nothing, yet.'

‘I suppose she is still young,' said Jemhara.

‘About two years.'

‘Two years,' snapped Aglin. ‘What can they do at that age but squeak and shriek and fall over?'

Beebit smiled her impertinent smile. ‘Shall I call her in? I left her in the street—'

‘You unfeeling cow!' yelled Aglin, darting up. ‘A kitty of two years left in the cold alley – the gods know what'll have happened—'

‘Oh, it's fine as sunlight, lady. Just you see.'

Beebit flowed to the window, lifted aside the heavy leather hanging, and sent out a fluting whistle.

‘Calls her like a dog too—'

‘Gently, Aglin. Wait and see.' Jemhara had also got to her feet.

The three women stood, once more in silence, and there came the light patter of feet running along the passage beyond the room. The door opened and through it stepped another young girl, about the same age as Beebit, although her colouring was, or had been made to be, rather different. Her skin was a light smoky fawn, while from a central parting her long thick curling hair was, on her left side, pale brown, on the right side black as coal. Jemhara noted that her eyes too were unalike, which must surely be natural. Her
left
eye however was the dark one, shining black, the right eye a pale clear hazel.

‘This isn't any daughter of yours,' said Aglin. ‘Unless you're a great deal older than you look.'

‘It's that
she
is a great deal
younger
than
she
looks,' said Beebit.

Aglin fizzled on the boil and Jemhara held up her hand to quieten her.

‘What is your name, little girl?' said Jemhara to the newcomer.

‘Azulamni,' she said. She had a very beautiful voice. Indeed, apart from her weird colours, she was strikingly beautiful.

‘Your mother's previous name.'

‘She named me for her past,' said the girl.

Jemhara said, ‘And who was your father? Was it the Kelpish man?'

Beebit threw back her head and wailed with laughter.

‘
Him
? He fired his bow without arrows. Most of them do. Or, to be fair, maybe I have no target.'