Sorcerer's Son (21 page)

The pikemen had watched and made no move to interfere.

The sky grew gray with dawn twilight, and the crowd thickened, pushing from the rear; and the more folk who arrived, the more blows were exchanged among them, until at last dawn came and the guard changed and the pikeman that Cray knew announced that the lord of the East March was ready to receive. Cray’s silver was ready to be given, too, and he was the eighth person admitted to the keep.

The corridor beyond the gate was long and torchlit, for the slit window high above the door admitted but little sunlight at that hour. The way curved before Cray and the scarlet-garbed steward who conducted him, until it gave at last into a small, high-ceilinged room. There, the lord of the East March sat, in a high-backed, intricately carven chair behind a plain bare table. He was a big man, broad of shoulder, thick of arm, and the shaggy hair that spilled over his shoulders was iron-gray. His garment was dark velvet, a silken scarf at the throat against the cool of the stone building, and his hands were ringed in gold and silver. At either of his ears stood a man of his age, well-dressed in light woolens, holding parchment and quills, ink and sand, ready for use.

“Your name, young man,” said the steward.

“I am Cray Ormoru of Castle Spinweb. My father, Mellor, served the lord of the East March before I was born; these are his bearings.” He turned the shield to face the lord. “Three red lances interlocked on a field of white. They are mine now, and I would beg that you take me into your service in his stead, for he is dead.”

The lord leaned forward, one elbow on the table, his fingers playing at his neck below the clean-shaven chin. “Three red lances on a white field, you say? One can hardly see them.”

Cray traced the lines with one hand. “I found this shield on his grave. It has seen much weather, my lord. Fifteen years of weather.”

“Fifteen years dead, hmm? What did you say his name was?”

“Mellor, my lord.”

“I don’t know the name. Or the arms.”

“He had served you a year, my lord, when you sent him to Falconhill with a message for your cousin there. He never delivered that message, for he was killed along the way. Shortly before that, he met my mother and engendered me.”

The lord of the East March shook his head. “I recall no such messenger, nor any such errand from that period.” He glanced to left and right, at the two men who stood near. “Is my memory failing so soon, gentlemen? Do you know the name

Mellor? The arms? The event?”

Both shook their heads.

“He was very young,” said Cray. “Perhaps the least of your knights, my lord.”

“I know every one of my knights, young man, by name and bearings, from the greatest to the least. Your father has never been among them.”

“Are you sure, my lord? He was not with you long.”

“He was not with me at all.” He waved one hand in dismissal. “Next case!”

“My lord!” Cray fell to his knees and raised his hands in supplication. “I beg you to inquire more closely into this matter!”

The lord of the East March looked down at the kneeling youth. “You are not much more than fifteen years old, lad. If your father is fifteen years dead, who told you he was my man?”

“My mother, my lord, who heard it from his own lips.”

“May I suggest, then, that he lied to your mother?”

Cray swallowed with difficulty. “I can’t believe that, my lord,” he said.

“Perhaps you had best discuss it with your mother, then. Steward, show him out.”

The steward hooked a hand under Cray’s armpit and hauled him to his feet. In a daze, Cray allowed himself to be escorted from the room, down another corridor and out into the morning sunlight. Even after the rear gate of the keep had been shut behind him, even after the man who had followed him inside had been dismissed, jostling past him roughly, Cray still stood, leaning on the battered shield as a cripple might lean on a low chair. In the bright morning sunlight, tears coursed down his cheeks.

Sepwin found him there, directed to the rear gate by someone on the fringe of the waiting crowd. When he saw his friend, he said nothing, only took his arm gently and guided him to the alcove where the horses were tied. There, Cray let go the shield, which clattered to the ground, and he swayed against Gallant’s great gray side.

“What shall I do now?” he whispered hoarsely.

“What did he say?” asked Sepwin.

Cray choked the story out, his fingers twining in Gallant’s pale mane. “Never here, Feldar! Never here!” he said at the end. “Why would he have lied so to my mother?”

“He must have had a good reason,” Sepwin said softly.

“A good reason?” Cray closed his eyes. “What reason would be good enough for such a lie? Was he a king-slayer running from justice?”

“Must you think of the worst possible reason first?”

“Is that the worst? No, I can think of worse yet. I could make you shudder Feldar, with my imaginings.” He looked at his friend, red-eyed. “But I must know. I must.”

Sepwin met his gaze. “Perhaps you are happier not knowing.”

“Never. Whatever he was

I am his son. I must know.”

“But

how will you find out? We’ve come to a dead end here at the East March.”

Cray shook his head. “There is a way, I think. My mother shall advise me.”

“And if he lied,” said Delivev, “does that matter? Will the truth give him life again?” Her fingers moved swiftly, guiding a slender silver needle in embroidery upon white satin. “Since you showed me his grave, he has faded in my memory, like a dream, ill-remembered on waking. A dream is nothing, my son, no matter how lovely. You are my reality now.”

“For my sake, then, Mother, not his, help me.”

“Let him go, Cray. Let him rest in death. If he had wanted me to know the truth, he would have told it.”

“Mother, you may be content with that attitude, but I am not.”

She looked, up at him through the web. “Will you take away the dream, too, Cray? Will you trade me something less for it? Do you think I want to know what crimes he committed?”

He gave her back stare for stare, “I can never hold my head up among other knights if I don’t know who my father was.”

“I loved him,” she said. “Is that not enough?”

“No. Not for me.”

“And will you hold your head up if the truth is something terrible?”

“I will deal with that when the time comes.”

The needle flashed in her fingers, and she bent over the work once more, seeming to be speaking to it rather than to her son, very softly. “If the truth is something terrible

Cray

will you still wish to be a knight like your father? Or

will you come home to sorcery at last?”

He turned his face away from her. “I can’t answer that now.” He crossed his arms over his chest, felt of the hard chain beneath the surcoat. “You think too fast, Mother. You hope too hard. Let me find the truth, and then I will make some decision.” He looked down to his feet, where the battered shield lay, painted side up, its markings barely visible in the dappled, late-afternoon sunlight. Cray’s spiders had spun their web in a copse of trees a day’s ride from the castle of the East March, where no stranger would see it.

Delivev sighed deeply. “There is a Seer,” she said, “not far from you. Bring her the shield, and she will tell you its source. She will send you to your uncles, your grandfather, your cousins—whoever lives now at the home he left. I hope

they will welcome you.”

“That depends on why he left, doesn’t it?”

“The Seer’s dwelling is not marked on the map,” said Delivev, “but if you follow the southward road to the first fork, then bear west, you’ll find it. She lives in a cave, and the entrance is through a great tree growing hard against the hillside. You won’t have to tell her who you are. She will know.”

Enough, thought Gildrum, sitting on the high stool by the brazier. Across the table. Rezhyk pored over the new marvels his demon had fetched from Ushar—stone tablets cracked from the heat, fragments from tombs of that lost civilization, their inscriptions in praise of the dead an aid to translation of the steel sheets. And on a piece of parchment, copies of other carvings, too damaged to remove from the ruins, faithfully reproduced by the demon’s own hand, unto every ornamental serif.

“Ah, here is the word I was seeking, here precisely,” said Rezhyk. “The writer was too careless on some of these sheets, too heavy-handed with the stylus, and the result is that some lines are punched through and those words nearly obliterated.”

“Writing on steel is not so easy, my lord.”

“So I would suppose. Parchment suits me well enough, even if it does burn.”

“Had the folk of Ushar used parchment, my lord, you would not be reading their records now.”

Rezhyk smiled. “How fortunate for me, then, that they did not. And how sad for other sorcerers to come that I have no wish to pass my knowledge on to posterity.” He made a note on the sheet of parchment at his elbow, one of many awaiting his hand. “What flowery sentiments these are; they loved each other well enough, these folk, after death. You know, my Gildrum, I have always thought that their greatest mistake lay in banding together as a city. They should have separated instead. We are so much safer these days, and happier, too, each of us alone in his holding. We don’t rub elbows and we don’t prey upon each other’s nerves.”

“You may be right, my lord. Human beings have always seemed to me to be a source of endless irritation to each other. That is why so many of them make war.”

Rezhyk looked up at his servant “Are demons any better, my Gildrum?”

“We live in greater harmony, I think.”

“Perhaps it only seems greater to you, because you are one of the stronger demons. The others defer to you, so of course there is harmony between you and them.”

“Life is different among us, my lord. Our passions are not yours. Our desires are not as human desires.”

‘That is well,“ Rezhyk said, nodding, ”else you would have stolen our world from us long ago.“

Gildrum fingered one blond braid, remembering the texture of other hair, soft, brown, like a crown of downy feathers. Our passions are not yours, she thought, except for mine. She slipped off the stool and paced the length of the workshop.

“Gildrum?” said Rezhyk, glancing up from his work.

“Here, my lord. Just restless.”

“I would think you’d want a bit of quiet after all your labors.”

“No, my lord, for I feel that there is more yet to be done.”

“I have all I can manage here; bring me no more for now, or I shall feel myself drowning.”

“As you wish, my lord.” She gazed at her image in the polished wall—small, slight, insignificant. He liked her thus near him, she thought, because the form befit a slave. “Shall I fetch some wine, my lord?”

“An excellent suggestion, my Gildrum. You know my mind well. Wine, indeed”

“I return in a moment, my lord.”

Enough, she told herself, descending the bronze staircase to the cellar, where the wine lay cool and mellow in oaken casks. In an ordinary mortal’s castle, bronze stairs would be long since corroded from the damp, but in Ringforge they were clean and smooth and shining; three of the rings on Rezhyk’s hands called forth demons whose only task was the maintenance of the bright metal in its unblemished state. Rezhyk’s own steps would have rung on this stairway, but Gildrum’s were silent, her feet bare. The stairs were warm and dry beneath her tread, though she would not have cared if they were made of ice and slippery with slime. Ringforge awaited Rezhyk’s pleasure, every room, every corner, ready for his visitation. Save for a special antechamber at the front gate, reserved for strangers, no other human being had ever been inside the castle. Only demons.

Would I have loved her if she had come here as the mistress of Ringforge?

Gildrum knew the answer was yes.

“Enough!” she shouted to the silent cellar, and her voice echoed off the metal walls and ceiling. In the cellar, with no one to see, Gildrum changed shape, became the dark-haired young knight and the bearded old man and the full-bodied landlord and the other shapes that Rezhyk’s hands had formed—animal, plant, whatever had suited his purposes through the years. And when all had come and gone, the living flame was left in their place, cold now, dancing among the casks and never scorching any, growing, shrinking, dividing into a hundred flamelets and coalescing into a spark, a brilliant spark as blue as a young knight’s eyes. Then, from the spark, there bloomed a body, tiny as a flea at first, but expanding like rising dough. It was black as coal and many-limbed, hairy, grotesque. It opened a dozen eyes and saw itself reflected in the ceiling, though there was no light for any human eye to see by.

This is myself, Gildrum thought. This is my earthly form. A shudder passed through it, and it remembered the other time it had used this body, so long ago in the woodland glade. Rezhyk had made the small blond girl that very day, while the flame of Gildrum hovered over his shoulder; Gildrum could not blame him for wanting something less horrible as his servant. I am not human. I never was human, I can love no human woman. I can have no human son.

The many-limbed body burst into clean, bright flame.

Enough, thought Gildrum. I must leave them alone.

The flame dimmed, became the blond servant girl once more. With shaking hands she filled a carafe at the nearest cask. Resolve had left her weak, despite her demon strength, and she felt a great need to sink down on the floor beside the cask, to rest in the cool cellar another moment before returning to her master. She thought of Cray, seeking the heritage that did not exist, anguished, thwarted. She had tortured herself with watching him; she would watch no more. He was a resourceful lad. He would find his own destiny. A demon slave had none to give him.

And the branches outside Spinweb’s walls would never again bear the weight of a particular gray squirrel.

After all, she thought, closing her eyes and leaning her face against the cool cask. It ended long ago.

The Seer’s home was easy to find. Not only was it marked by the tallest, broadest tree that Cray had ever seen, a great arching hole cut through its heart to form the entrance, but the Seer herself was waiting for him by the side of the road. She was a very tall, thin woman, straight of bearing, wearing a long black robe. Her skin was pale, and her hair was white as new-fallen snow, worn in a single braid that hung over her left shoulder, sweeping down the length of her body to brush the ground. She lifted a hand in greeting as Cray pulled Gallant up before her.