Quite suddenly, and without a sound, he began to cry. I am not going to tell you about that.
When Nyateneri and I could look at him again— Lukassa never looked away, but stroked his face and dried his eyes as we would never have dared—he said, “I loved him as myself. That was the mistake. There was no Arshadin to love. There is no Arshadin, only a wondrous gift and a glorious desire. I thought that I could make a real Arshadin grow around those things. That was the vanity—the stupid, awful vanity. Thank you, dear, that will do.” Lukassa was trying to help him blow his nose.
Nyateneri spoke gruffly, which startled me, I remember. It was the first time I had really heard his voice as a man’s voice. “So. He went off to those who would teach him what you would not, and you went back to organizing a proper wizard’s funeral. And in time I came along to distract you again, and what with one thing and another, you forgot all about Arshadin. Except now and then.”
“Except now and then,” my friend agreed softly. “Until the sendings began. They were not so bad, those very first ones—a few nightmares, a bad memory or two made visible, a few rather tremulous midnight scratchings at the door. Nothing you might not take as ordinary, nothing you might recognize as a sending. But I did, and I summoned Arshadin to me. I could do that then.” He sighed, deliberately comical, even rolling his tired eyes. “And he came, and he sat in my house, just as he did at teatime that first day, looking no different, and he told me how truly unhappy he was that it was going to be necessary to destroy me. If there were any other way, but there wasn’t, nothing personal, honestly. And the worst of it was that I believed him.”
The food and wine I had sent for arrived then, brought, not by Marinesha, as I had expected, but by Rosseth. Karsh must have ordered him to do it. He was horrendously ill at ease, stepping around us all with his eyes lowered, once bumping into Nyateneri, once almost tripping over the mattress as he set the trencher down. I felt sorry for him, and irritable as well. I wanted him gone, this clumsy servant, this kind boy who had kissed me and found out my heart, Rosseth. Telling it now, so long after, I still want to ask him to forgive me.
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.