My friend touched his arm and thanked him, waiting until he had stumbled from the room before he spoke again. “What Arshadin wanted to learn did not come cheaply or simply. There were powers to be supplicated, principalities to be appeased, there were certain unpleasant advance payments to be endured. But he felt that it was all well worth the price, and who am I, even now, to deny that? I have paid my own fees in my time, negotiated across fire with faces I would rather not have seen, voices that I still hear. Magic has no color, only uses.”
How often had I heard him say that, whenever I or another of his ragbag of student-children voiced a question about the inherent nature of wizardry? Some of us, I know, left him convinced that he had no sense of morality whatever, and perhaps they were right. He said, “But then again, I have never before been a payment myself. It makes a difference.”
He ignored the meal, but gestured for me to pour him a little wine, which I did according to the old ritual he taught us, in which the student sips from the cup before the master. The wine was better than Dragon’s Daughter, but not much better. He took the cup from me and passed it on to Lukassa, smiling at me as he did so. He was accepting her as a student before she ever asked to be received, as he had done with me. I smiled back, trembling with remembrance.
“The true price of Arshadin’s education is my lamisetha,” he said. There was no expression at all in his voice. “Arshadin is to make certain that I die, when I die, such a troubled, peaceless death that I become a griga’ath. What is that, Nyateneri—a griga’ath?”
The shock of the question—no, of that word—actually made Nyateneri grunt softly and take a step backward. He answered after a time, his voice gone as pallid as his face. “A wandering spirit of malice and wickedness, without a home, without a body, without rest or ending.” I had never seen him look as he looked then, and I never did again, except once. He said, a bit more boldly, “But there is a charm against the griga’ath. You taught it to me.”
“So I did,” my friend said, suddenly cheerful, “but it doesn’t work. I only made it up for you because you were always so frightened of those bloody creatures. Not that you had ever seen one, nor could I imagine that you ever would.” He paused, and then added in a very different voice, “But I have, and you yet may.”
Nyateneri could not speak. I knelt down by the mattress. I said, “It will not happen. We will not let it happen.”
He touched me then, drew his finger lightly down my forehead and across my cheek, for the first time since he bade me farewell and closed the door, all that world ago. “There’s my Lal,” he said again. “My chamata, who trusts only her will, whose true sword is her stubbornness. What is a griga’ath, after all, but one more enemy captain, one more desert in which to survive, one more nightmare to fight off until morning? Only a little extra determination, another snarl of refusal—Lal will not allow this! Lal exists, and Lal will not have it so! What’s a griga’ath to that?”
The words were mocking, but the light, dry touch on my cheek was love. I answered him, saying, “I have seen one of them, a long time past. It was very terrible, but here I am.” I was lying, and he knew it, but Nyateneri did not, and it seemed to help. My friend said, “A rogue griga’ath is one thing; that fate sometimes befalls a poor soul who has died with no one to think kindly of him in this world or to call to him from another. But far worse than that is a griga’ath under the control of a powerful wizard—I saw that tried once.” He fell silent, staring away past us, seeing it again in a dusty corner of the room. Or was that storytelling, too? I think not, but I do not know.
“And the most dreadful of all would be a griga’ath that had been a magician itself during its life. There would be nothing, nothing that such a spirit could not do, and no defense against it, whether it came to the call of an Arshadin or those whom Arshadin imagines he is using.” He gave an odd, papery giggle, a sound he never used to make before. “My poor Arshadin, he has absolutely no sense of irony. It is his only weakness, poor Arshadin.”
Something at the door. Not a footstep, not a scratch, not the least rustle of breath or murmur of clothing—just something crouching at the door. Nyateneri looked at me. I stood up very slowly, turning the handle of my sword-cane until I felt the lock slip open. It is a well-made cane. The lock made no more sound than whoever was out there in the corridor.
TIKAT
I do not know why she did not see me. Perhaps it was simply that she knew the doorways on this floor are all too shallow even to conceal a child. Anyone but a desperate weaver caught completely by surprise would certainly have gone to earth in the alcove under the stairway. She looked only briefly to either side, then advanced very slowly toward the stair, her swordcane no more than a glint out of its case. I will never like her, and I still despise her condescending kindness to me in front of Lukassa; but I never felt more the bumpkin I am than when I watched her moving across the corridor. I had no business in the same world with people who moved like that, nor did my love. I pressed myself back against someone’s door, held my breath, and tried not to think of anything at all. Thoughts cast shadows and make noises, in that world.
Having assured herself that no one was hiding in the alcove or the stairwell, she backed away into her own doorway, one silent, careful step at a time. The sword was out now, needle-thin, the least bit curved toward the tip, in the same way that her neck and shoulders were bending very slightly forward. One last long stare—not to her left, where I huddled only a few feet away, but to the right and the stair again, plainly expecting to see someone approaching, not escaping. Whoever she was waiting for, it was not me, not dungbooted riverbank Tikat. The needle-sword flicked this way, that way, like a snake’s tongue, and there was honest fear in the wide golden eyes. Then the door closed.
I stayed where I was a little longer; then crept from my doorway to listen again, as I had been when my breathing or my heartbeat alerted them inside. The old man was saying, “He knew me so well—he took advantage of my arrogance as no one ever has. I warded off his absurd little sendings as I cooked my dinner, his annoying night visitations without bothering to awaken. To my own old sense of loss there was added a great sadness for him—for my true son—never to know the true depths of his gift before he betrayed it so foolishly. There was nothing I could do for him now, but I did try not to humiliate him any further.”
He laughed then, and for a moment I heard nothing else, because it sounded so like the laughter of my little brother, who died in the plague-wind. When I could listen to words again, they were in the brusque voice of Nyateneri, the tall one. “But they got worse, the sendings, a little at a time?”
“A little at a time,” the old man whispered. “He was so patient, so patient. Not for years—not until the night when I found myself at last at bay in evil dreams and unable to awaken, did I understand how he had used me to ensnare myself. He knew me, he knew what my body and mind love most and what my spirit fears in its deepest places. Neither of you, nor anyone else, ever came near that knowledge. Only Arshadin.”
“And bloody good use he made of it, too.” Nyateneri again, a snort like an angry horse. “What happened then? He came to you again?”
I had to press my ear hard against the door to hear the answer. “I went to him. It took the best part of my strength, but I went to him in his own house. He did not expect me. We came to no agreement, and he tried to prevent my leaving. I left all the same.” Lukassa must have been close on the other side, for I could smell her new-bread sweetness as I knelt there. The old man mumbled on. “I fled back to the red tower and reinforced it against him as best I knew how. He followed, first in the spirit, with sendings that now strode through my counterspells like wind through spiderwebs—then in the body.” I lost some words when a sudden coughing fit took him, and only made out, “The rest you know. Or Lukassa knows.”