Gillian looked, where something like a rope of darkness twisted among the columns, above the blood that spattered the altar; a trick of the wind and the lamps, perhaps. But it crossed the sky, where the stars paled to day, and moved against the ceiling. Her right hand was suddenly cold. She snatched Jensy's arm and ran, weaving in and out of the columns the way Jisan had gone, out, out into the day, where an old man huddled on the steps, rocking to and fro and moaning.
" Nessim!" she cried. He rose and cast something that whipped away even as he collapsed in a knot of tatters and misery. A serpent-shape writhed across the cobbles in the beginning of day. .
.
. . . and shriveled, a dry stick.
She clutched Jensy's hand and ran to him, her knees shaking under her, bent down and raised the dry old frame by the arms, expecting death; but a blistered face gazed back at her with a fanatic's look of triumph. Nessim's thin hand reached for Jensy, touched her face.
"All right, mousekin?"
"Old man," Gillian muttered, perceiving something she had found only in Jensy; he would have, she vowed, whatever comfort gold could buy, food? and a bed to sleep in. A mage; he was that. And a man.
Gold, she thought suddenly, recalling the coin in her purse; and the purse she had buried off across the canals.
And one who had dogged her tracks most of the night.
She spat an oath by another god and sprang up, blind with rage.
"Take her to the Wyvern," she bade Nessim and started off without a backward glance, reckoning ways she knew that an Assassin might not, reckoning on throat-cutting, on revenge in a dozen colors.
She took to the alleys and began to run by alleys a big man could never use, cracks and crevices and ledges and canal verges.
And made it. She worked into the dark, dislodged the stone, took back the purse and climbed catwise to the ledges to lurk and watch.
He was not far behind to work his big frame into the narrow space that took hers so easily, to work loose the self-same stone.
Upon her rooftop perch she stood, gave a low whistle. . . shook out a pair of golden coins and dropped them ringing at his feet, a grand generosity, like the prince's.
"For your trouble," she bade him, and was away.
V
We've gone for jump now. You wobble back to the lounge, a little frayed about the edges. So have I come, some minutes before. Perhaps we both want to be sure the stars are still there. Or that we are.
"Looking for something?" I ask as you lean against the glass.
"The Sun."
"Wrong direction." I point aft.
"I know that. I just prefer this window."
Jump is the kind of experience that makes philosophers—of some people. It's certain that no other passengers venture here this soon.
"Tell me. What do you think of?"
"In transit? It varies. You?"
"Earth. Home."
I smile. "That, most often. Sea-anchor."
"What?"
"When a ship needed stability at sea, it flung out a sea-anchor. Home-thoughts are like that. And this is a big ocean."
"I thought you might think—" you say, and give something up unasked. Eventually I say: "You were about to ask me where I get my ideas. You haven't yet. Go on. I've been wondering when you'd get around to it."
"That wasn't what I was going to ask."
"What, then?"
"I thought—you might think—you know, somehow different."
"That's the idea-question, all right. I thought I heard it coming."
"You're laughing at me."
"No. I know exactly what you want to know. You want to know wherein I'm different, wherein a writer's mindis different. I've told you. It's because I'm here." I gesture at the windows. "It's a strange sensation— when the ship turns loose of space. You want a sea-anchor. It takes nerve to let go and fly with the wind. I confess I won't jump in parachutes. But I will sometimes think of alien worlds when I slide into hyperspace. Or of falling when I'm flying. I let go of homely things at uncertain moments—just to test my nerve. You want the terrible truth? You have that kind of mind too."
"Me?"
"You're here, aren't you? You came to look out the windows."
"I don't know why I came."
"Just the same as I don't know where I get my ideas. They just are."
"Any time you want them?"
"Once upon a time," I say, "I had twenty-four hours and a postcard, and a challenge to come up with a story that would fit it."
"Did you?"
"I sat down at supper and wrote the start. I wrote a snatch at a cocktail party, another at breakfast. And yes, twenty-four hours later I stood up to read to a convention full of people from a rather densely written postcard. Used a micropoint." I look out at changed stars and remember a smallish meeting hall, in Columbia, Missouri, and an audience the members of which had had about as much sleep as I had. "Two hours' sleep. Two thousand words."
"Did it work?"
"I read it the close way you have to read letters that small—never dared look at my audience; I just hoped to get through it without faltering, blind tired as I was. The time went in that kind of fog time gets to when you're in a story; and it was over, and I looked up. Nobody moved. I was kind of disappointed, I mean, when you write what you think is a nice little story and you don't get any reaction at all, you feel worse than if people walked out. I thought they were asleep.
"Then the audience stirred and some wiped eyes and others, I think, got to their feet and cheered, and I just stood there in one of those moments that come to a storyteller a few times in a lifetime—I don't know, maybe we all were tired." I smile, seeing those faces reflected out of nowhere in the glass. "But spare me that. I wrote it to read aloud. It was a special moment. That's all. It doesn't come twice."
1982
THE LAST TOWER
The old man climbed the stairs slowly, stopping sometimes to let his heart recover and the teapot settle on the tray, while the dormouse would pop out of his sleeve or his beard and steal a nibble at the teacakes he brought up from the kitchen. It was an old tower on the edge of faery, on the edge of the Empire of Man. Between. Uncertain who had built it—men or elves. It was long before the old man's time, at least, and before the empire in the east. There was magic in its making. . . so they used to say. Now there was only the old man and the dormouse and a sleepy hedgehog, and a bird or two or three, which came for the grain at the windows. That was his real talent, the wild things, the gentle things. A real magician now, would not be making tea himself, in the kitchen, and wasting his breath on stairs. A real magician would have been more— awesome. Kept some state. Inspired some fear.
He stopped at the halfway turning. Pushed his sliding spectacles up his nose and balanced tray, tea, cakes and dormouse against the window-ledge. The land was black in the east. Black all about the tower. Burned. On some days he could see the glitter of arms in the distance where men fought. He could see the flutter of banners on the horizon as they rode. Could hear the sound of the horses and the horns.
Now the dust and soot of a group of riders showed against the darkening east. He waited there, not to have the weary stairs again—waited while the dormouse nibbled a cake, and in his pocket the hedgehog squirmed about, comfortable in the stillness.
The riders came. The prince—it was he—sent the herald forward to ring at the gate. "Open in the king's name," the herald cried, and spying him in the window: "Old man—open your gates. Surrender the tower. No more warnings."