Sword and Sorceress XXVII (3 page)

Bluejay looked at her with a grave
expression. “This is your last chance to turn back.”

“I have said I will help you,” Moon
retorted with a touch of heat. Did he think her so lacking in honor that she
would take back her word? Then she realized his words came not from any
mistrust of her but from his own fears. He was tall and strong, clearly a
warrior among his own people. Again she wondered what help she could give
against an enemy that such a man as he dared not face.

As if reading her thoughts, he said, “Each
of these wild worlds has its own form of magic. No matter how I appear to you,
I have no prowess with physical fighting. My people’s gift is the ability to
travel between worlds. Yours—” and here he touched her chest over her
fast-beating heart, “yours is courage. And you are the finest of them all. The
only one who answered my call.”

Before Moon could ask what he meant, he
lifted his hand and under their feet stretched a wide path. One moment, it
appeared to her as a beam of shimmering light, the next, a metallic cable, and
still again, a twisted rope as thick as one of Bluejay’s trees. Along this
path, images rippled and flashed, the pale green plains of her own world, then
an ocean of surging tides, beyond that, sweeping sun-kissed meadows, and in the
other direction, row upon row of stone houses with glowing jewel-toned windows.
The richness and beauty of the worlds captured her senses. She longed to visit
them all, to walk those streets and glades and beaches.

“They are worth saving, are they not?”
Bluejay asked.

Moon swallowed her answer, for no words
could convey her emotion. Another breath, and she was able to say, “What
threatens them?”

Bluejay pointed beyond his own world,
where the visions disappeared into mist. “You will see for yourself. There.”

Moon took her bow and strung it on the first
attempt. Hawk had been wrong; it was not a man’s bow or a woman’s bow. It was a
warrior’s
bow. Holding an arrow at ready, she moved toward the distant
mist.

The haze began to flow and darken, like
the storm on the day of the hunt. It curled around her, dampening her skin, and
shutting out all other sight and sound. Something moved within the shifting
currents of air and light and power. She halted, holding herself still against
the hammering of her heart.

A sound reached her, a gnawing, rending
noise, as if the very fibers of the world were being wrenched apart. This was
no bison, no wolf or eagle or emerald-striped viper, but something far more
terrible. She moved closer, step by searching step.

A shape emerged as the mist grew thin
and parted to reveal a beast. It was unlike any she had ever seen, fully as
huge as a bison, but long-bodied and low to the ground. Dull black scales
covered its body, except for the tapering snout and the whip-like tail. A
stench hung about it, the smell of rotten things, of must and slime and places
best forgotten. But worse of all were its eyes, lightless pupils ringed in
blood.

Hooked claws and yellowed teeth sank
deep into the shining rope. The beast twisted its head, snapping threads of
light, then devouring them.

Awareness shifted the beast’s eyes. It
rose up, froth dripping from its jaws. Rumbling sounded in its throat. It
extended its head, slit nostrils flaring wide, and bared its razor teeth.

For an instant, Moon’s nerve almost
failed her. How could she fight such a monster? Yet if she ran away now, as
every instinct urged her, what then? The beast would destroy the paths that
linked the worlds together. She knew, as certainly as if Bluejay had told her
aloud, that all would then fall into darkness, a night without even the Ice
Raven for comfort.

The beast was already moving toward her.
Whip tail lashing, it gathered itself for a leap. Moon drew her bow. Her arrow
sped true, but the beast turned at the last instant. Hissing and thrashing, the
monster caught the shaft between its jaws and snapped it into a dozen
fragments.

Moon slipped another arrow into place.
Before she took aim, however, the monster leapt, quicksilver fast.

She ducked and rolled toward the beast.
The claws of its hind paws raked her as it passed overhead. Something
snapped—the arrow she had drawn, not her precious bow. The creature’s body cast
her into shadow and flooded her nostrils with its rank odor. Then it landed
heavily on the path beyond her.

Moon scrambled to her feet to face the
beast. As her fingers touched her arrow case, she realized that she had only
one arrow left. Only one.

Fitting it to the string, she drew the
bow.

Growling, the creature took a slow,
menacing step toward her. She could not see a vital target, only rows of
overlapping obsidian-dark scales. Its skull was thick and she did not think
even her bow could drive an arrow through its ribs head-on.

She must choose her target. One more
step and the beast would be upon her.

The monster halted, as if daring her to
shoot. Its tail lashed the air. She faced it, unflinching.

One arrow, only one chance.

The beast tensed its muscles for another
leap. Moon crouched down on one knee and shot upwards just as its forequarters
lifted. The arrow buried itself in the thin skin just to one side of the
breastbone.

The beast dropped, but Moon was already
rolling free. The silvery rope shuddered under the impact, then began swaying
and twisting. Clutching her bow, she flattened herself on its surface. Her
vision whirled sickeningly. The entire universe seemed to have come loose from
its moorings, bucking and heaving like a maddened bison. Below it, or perhaps
above, for in Moon’s disordered sight she could not tell, yawned an enormous
whirlpool, an abyss of swirling darkness.

With a great cacophonous screech as if a
thousand rusted bells rang out at once, the body of the beast slid sideways and
disappeared into the void.

Gradually, the path of light grew still.
Moon dared to sit up. Her cheeks were slick with tears, and the air stung her
eyes. She bled from four or five shallow gashes on her arms, most likely from
the beast’s claws, although she could not remember being struck. Her bowstring
had snapped, but the bow itself seemed to be sound.

She clambered unsteadily to her feet and
retraced her steps. The path felt solid, resilient, but she was trembling so
badly that the slightest tremor might topple her over the side. To her
surprise, she saw no sign of the frayed strands from the beast’s devastation.
She hoped this meant the bond between the living worlds had taken no lasting
harm.

The mist closed around her as she went
on, but this time she welcomed it as a friend. It stroked her torn skin,
drawing out the pain. She thanked it silently. After a time, so gradually she
could barely discern the change, the mist lifted. Bluejay stood there, waiting
for her.

Whether the battle with the beast itself
had changed her, or whether it was something in the mist or the vision of
worlds strung together by a rope of light, Moon now looked on the man before
her with new eyes. When she had first met him, Bluejay had appeared as a
warrior, a god. Certainly, the ability to walk the worlds was a magical gift.
Yet he had sought her out to do what he could not.

“It’s time for truth between us,” she
said. “Who are you?”

The air between them wavered like heat
rising from the summer plains. Bluejay’s form shifted and grew more slender. He
was still tall, but his shoulders were narrow, his hands graceful and soft. He
wore a shirt of azure wool, touched here and there with gold, and belted over
narrow leggings. Thongs of dyed leather tied a cluster of blue feathers to one
of several gray braids. His face was angular, with heavy eyebrows and a long,
straight nose, very different from the features of her own people. A band of cloth
covered one eye; the other, golden as a hawk’s, met hers steadily.

“Do you know me now?” Only his voice had
not changed.

Unable to speak, she touched the cloth
over his ruined eye.

“A small enough loss,” he said. “Only
someone brave enough to face down a charging bull, and steadfast enough to
follow an injured animal so far into the wilderness, could cross the wild
worlds without going mad. You see, I was right.” With a small smile, he touched
her cheek. “You were the one.”

Moon dared not speak, dared not breathe.
At first, his true appearance had seemed strange to her. Now she would not have
him any other way.

Which of them, she wondered, had paid
the greater price—he with his eye or she, having left behind her home, her
sister, her clan?

“I will take you back to your plains.”
Bluejay held out his hand, “if you wish it.”

Moon found her voice. “I wish to go with
you, but not to return to the life I had before. I wish—I wish to see all those
other worlds.”

To walk those beaches and meadows, to
explore those cities and forests...

She felt his heart rise in his breast,
even as hers did. Warm fingers closed around her own. Together, they stepped
out on the luminous road.

The Memory Box

by
Patricia B. Cirone

Dozens of men
were trapped in a mine, and it was Amina’s job to get them out. She expected
the task to be difficult, but when she was deep underground, she discover a
complication she had not expected at all.

Patricia
B. Cirone has worked as a scientist, a teacher and a librarian, but her true
love is writing. She has had a number of short stories published, including
several in previous SWORD & SORCERESS anthologies and is currently working
on a book. She receives frequent editorial comments on her writing from one of
her cats, who considers any hand to be better employed in petting her than in
typing.

****

“Can Onia do it?” Amina asked, turning
the mug of tea around and around in her hands, and trying not to sound as if
she was begging—or worse yet, whining. She kept her gaze steadfastly out the
window, as if she could see something in the utter darkness outside. Utter
darkness, as it would be inside the mine.

“You know that wouldn’t work—she has
absolutely no training,” her aunt replied.

“Yes, but she is of the line. She should
be able to access the box...” Amina trailed off, knowing this was all a
pointless argument. It was her nerves talking, throwing up barriers between
herself and what lay ahead.

“Most women of the line cannot even
pluck a memory from the box the first time they try, even with some training in
ordering their thoughts and working in a trance state!”

“I did.” The words slipped out before
she could snatch them back from her teeth.

“Yes, and we all know how well
that
went!” her aunt said acerbically and Amina winced.

Yes, years of nightmares and waking
dreams. She had not ridden that memory—it had ridden her. She had been a child,
headstrong and determined; her mother vain and unwilling to spend the time to
curb her willful child. Widowed young, her mother had been too busy keeping an
eye out for a likely man and too proud of her ascension to the role of Memory
Keeper upon the misfortune of her older sister. Amina had been jealous of the
beautiful box her mother talked about so often, and was sure
she
could
be just as important if she opened it and brought forth one of the memories.

She had slipped into her mother’s room
and sat cross-legged with the ancient box in her lap, then opened it. Somehow
she had imagined it would be like walking into a fairy world, with beautiful
creatures like the stories told around the fires on festival nights. Or like
instantly becoming someone important, and grown up, and able to order others
around. If it made her mother important simply to be the Keeper, when she hadn’t
actually had to use it yet, surely it would make Amina even more important if
she actually had some of the memories!

Instead she had been sucked into a
maelstrom of darkness pierced by cries, by odd visions floating up and
vanishing before her eyes and then been grabbed and yanked violently into a
world of screams and the thunder of hooves. She had stared helplessly as a
horse the size of a small cabin bore down upon her and a man’s face, livid with
rage, had aimed a lance at her from its back. She had ducked and run, tripping
over bodies of loved ones she somehow knew in this other world, and felt blood
running down her face from a gash that stung and burned on her scalp. And there
had been more pain and screams and people dying and then she had woke screaming
in her bed. The first of many times she would wake screaming in her bed.

Her aunt had been by her bedside, not
her mother. It had been her aunt who had nursed her back to a more precarious
health than the robust spirits she had enjoyed before. It had been her crippled
aunt who had patiently taught her to rein in her will and control her
frustration and learn to separate dream from reality—both the dream that had
escaped the Memory Box and taken over her mind and the dreams and
self-delusions everyone wove around their lives.

A Memory Keeper needed to know herself,
every wart, every failing, every blessing and every strength, before she could
risk knowing others to that depth and keeping their thoughts separate from her
own. Not to do so was madness, and it was only the very strength of her talent,
her aunt had told her, that had preserved her from such insanity.

The strength of her talent, and the
strength of her aunt’s talent as well, Amina knew later. Her aunt had not just
nursed her physical body back to health, but had pulled her mind back from
where it was lost, entangled with the memory of that other woman, long ago.
Using the skills of a Memory Keeper and a Memory Binder, she had sought and
found Amina’s own thoughts and somehow separated them from that other, and
bound them back to her own body and her own time.

Her mother, Amina found, when she was
finally well enough to ask, had left the village, abandoning her own child as
the source of her own fall from grace. Stripped of her right to be the Keeper
of the Memory Box, she had packed up a few belongings and moved to a town some
twenty miles downriver where she took up residence with the local inn keeper
with whom she had been having a mild flirtation with at local festivals and
fairs over the past few years.

“But I was the one who snuck into her
room and opened the box,” Amina, the child, had protested. “I’m the one who
should be punished, not her.”

Her aunt had smiled kindly at her and
stroked back the damp, fever wet hair from her brow. “It’s not punishment,
child, but need. The first duty of
any
Memory Keeper is to never leave a
Memory Box where others can get at it—especially children. Your mother had been
warned already about keeping it out where others could see it, and warned to
keep it locked away from you and any other children who might come into the
house. She treated it as a piece of jewelry, for her own personal adornment,
not as a powerful tool of our people.”

Amina hadn’t understood then, but she
was too sick to protest and when she grew older, she understood what her aunt
had meant, about her mother’s attitude and her carelessness. Now her aunt’s
voice recalled her to the present. “Don’t worry, it won’t be like that time.
You have the training to control a memory now, and just gather what bits you
need to use them.”

“I know,” Amina answered, smiling wryly.
“I’ve certainly worked with enough of them from the training box.” She made
herself sound confident; she was a grown woman now, not a child to be pampered
and protected. Still, she dreaded opening that box, and working with a real
memory. A memory gathered, or possibly torn, from a person who had no control
over their own memories or feelings. It would not be like the training memories
that Memory Keepers carefully stored; memories carefully strained of extra
personal thoughts and emotions—after all, who wanted to let your innermost
private thoughts and emotions be experienced by someone else, especially some
child or youth who you didn’t even know. And often the stored, prepared
memories in the training box were of the most everyday boring events: weaving a
piece of cloth, weeding a garden, cooking a meal. Those were easier to keep
free of stray emotions or thoughts.

No the memories in the true Memory Box
were whole—a defining moment in a person’s life—or death—complete with emotions
and connections and thoughts and terror.

Amina turned the now cold mug of tea
around in her hands again and gazed out the window. Was that a faint bit of
gray she saw lighting the darkness? The other villagers would be working
through the night, trying to dig through the rubble of the cave-in, trying to
free those of their own who were trapped below.

But come dawn, it would be nearly two
days. Days in which any food or water the miners might have had with them would
have been used up. Days in which air might be getting scarce. Days in which
bodies, young and old, would have gotten weaker, injuries left unhealed, minds
grown fearful with the dark and despair.

Come dawn, it would be Amina’s turn to
open the Memory Box and pluck a memory from it. The memory of one who had
traveled the fey way into the heart of the mine and lived to tell of it. And it
would be Amina’s turn to try to travel that same route and hope it would
connect to the trapped villagers, and lead them out.

All too soon, the knock came on the
door. Since it wasn’t accompanied by the sounds of rejoicing, Amina knew the
attempt to dig through to the trapped miners had been unsuccessful. Not that
the villagers would stop trying, but it was time for her to begin her attempt.

She went to the door and nodded her
acknowledgement to the solemn faced headman. “I’ll go ahead then.”

“Thank you, Amina. May the Goddess be
with you.” He turned and walked back toward the mine entrance through the pearl
grey pre-dawn light.

Amina turned toward her aunt. “Well,”
she said. Her aunt opened her mouth as if to speak again, then silently lifted
the Memory Box to hand it to her. Amina stared at it in silence for a moment,
then moved forward and took it. She refused to let her hands shake.

The last time she had held this, she had
been a child. Its ornate designs and the patina of old wood still drew her, and
she wondered if it was merely the beauty of its design that attracted her, or
if it was somehow the memories within that were calling out to her.

Enough. She took a deep breath and
slowly opened its lid, quieting her mind and seeking for the one memory she
needed. The years of training, both with the quieting exercises her aunt had
taught her and with the practice she had done with the training box helped, but
still she felt buffeted by the voices and snatches of sight and sound that
swirled around her. She mentally drew her veil across her “self” more firmly
and let the memories slide past and coil back into the box until she had
found... that one. She grasped it firmly and closed the box with a snap, then
put it down on the table, for her aunt to put safely away.

She walked out the door and headed for
the hills, letting the memory only lightly touch the surface of her mind—enough
to follow it but not enough to absorb it into her being. She could follow it
this way, step by step, as the memory itself had been formed, not knowing the
end but only the moment. It was safer that way.

Amina found herself walking higher up
into the hills than she had anticipated, but let her steps carry her, seeing
differences between her sight and how things had looked to that other woman
long ago—a rock grown mossy here, a thick tree that had been a sapling, a
scoured fall of rock where there had been a grassy bank.

She entered a small copse of trees,
their shadows deep in the now brightening skies. The air was chill here and
Amina shivered. There—there at the base of a huge oak tree was a shadow darker
yet. Amina pushed aside the accumulation of leaves and twigs and found a narrow
twisting stairway made of roots and bits of stones descending into the
darkness. She could feel the excitement flooding through the memory of the one
she carried—an excitement that did not match at all the dread Amina felt. She
had never liked darkness, nor small enclosed spaces. The thought of descending
into that stygian blackness filled
her
with dread.

Still, taking a deep breath, she
cautiously took the first step down, following the other’s memory. It was too
close here for the small lantern she held to do more than shine against the
damp earth walls and she nearly lost her footing trying to peer down and see
the next step let alone the one after that. She gave up looking down and used
the other’s memory to light her way. Either the stairway had been wider a
century or so ago, or the other woman merely a girl and Amina felt with each
footstep to find the stairs that were little more than niches.

Finally she reached flat ground and
started to lift her lantern up to light her way a bit.

She stopped, astounded. Around her was a
small chamber of rock, with glittering crystals growing down from the roof.
Light from some crack far up above filtered down, bathing the entire chamber in
a soft radiant glow. The stillness was broken by the soft sound of water trickling
over stones the hues of the reds and golds of sunset.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” a bright voice
enquired.

Amina spun around, startled.

No, it couldn’t be. She knew it was
called the fey way, but there were no such things as fairies. They were tales,
spun to entertain children by the fireside.

Yet there, perched on one of the
multi-hued rocks was a small figure, its skin an impossible shade of silver,
with small transparent wings growing from its back. Yet for all its delicate
looks, something about the face warned Amina that this small being was not of a
delicate nature. Indeed, the eyes assessed her coolly, with a hint of steely
determination.

“Indeed,” Amina replied politely,
jerking herself free of the shrouds of the memory she had been riding, and wondering
which was real, the dark earthen walls of the other’s memory or this place of
beauty. Had she truly gone mad this time? But it made no sense; Memory madness
consisted of being lost in one, not seeing something totally different!

“Looking for treasure?” the fey creature
asked, her pointed chin lifting a bit, challenging Amina with her gaze.