The Shape-Changer's Wife (2 page)

He had fortified himself with a glass of ale at the tavern, and it was then he learned that Glyrenden had a wife. Aubrey had made friends with the tavernkeeper over his lunch of bread and cheese, and had told the man what he could remember about the condition of the roads between there and Southport. And then he had asked the man for directions to the home of Glyrenden, and he had seen the strangest look cross the fellow's tanned and honest face.

“On the way there, are you,” the man had said, and his voice became flat and distant, the voice of a man talking to a customer to whom he must be civil and not to a man he liked. “Well, you takes this road here, that runs outside me door, and follows it to where it forks left. After that, you'll see three crossroads, and at each you takes the left cross. And when you comes to his house, you'll know it.”

Aubrey gave the man his easy smile. “Veering to the sinister,” he said. “That seems to fit. It should be simple to remember.”

The man's dark eyes gave back no hint of a smile, no hint that he had even comprehended the small joke. “Will you be leaving soon?” he asked politely.

“As soon as my drink is done. Tell me, does Glyrenden come to town often? Or does he move only between his place and the king's castle?”

“He comes,” the barkeeper said coolly, “but not often. She comes even less.”

“She?”

The man lifted his hands involuntarily from the rubbed-wood counter, then deliberately set them down again. Aubrey wondered what gesture he had been going to make; the man's whole body was stiff with distaste. “The wizard's wife.”

“He's married?”

“Aye. Or at least, the woman has lived there any time these three years now.”

“Cyril didn't tell me that.”

“Pardon, sir?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” Aubrey smiled again, laid a gold piece on the counter, and smiled privately once more to see the expression with which the barkeeper regarded the coin. Glyrenden was not much liked in this place, it seemed, and those who trafficked with him fell instantly under the same suspicion. “I hope I will see you again,” he added pleasantly. “This is the closest village, so I understand, to Glyrenden's place.”

“Aye,” the man said somewhat dryly. “It is that.”

“Then no doubt I will be down now and then when I am thirsty for a drop or two.”

“Of course. We'll be looking to see you again, sir,” the tavernkeeper said.

Aubrey grinned. “Well, good. Till then, my man.”

“Till then.”

The walk through the village and up through the forested foothills was a pretty one, the afternoon being cool for summer, and the slanting sun giving to all the late-green trees a luxuriant glow. Aubrey hummed as he walked, and now and then broke out into actual song, and he strode along at a brisk, healthy pace and laughed at his own youth and eagerness. Neither Cyril's dour warnings nor the tavernkeeper's hostility sobered him. It was a fine day and he was in a fine mood and on his way to a place he had never been, to acquire a knowledge he had long coveted; and he could not imagine a time when the world had seemed any better or full of more promise.

As the villager had told him, the house of Glyrenden was impossible to miss. It was separated from the main path by an overgrown track scarcely wide enough to admit a cart to pass, and it was huge: three stories of iron-gray rock piled together in a careless fashion. It was somberly accented at the front entrance and at widely spaced intervals with panels of dark wood which served as doors and window shutters. Dead ivy striped the southernmost turret, and live ivy curled possessively around every other lintel, threshold and outthrust brick. An untended garden ran wild in a border five feet deep as far around the dwelling as Aubrey could see—roses twining with the ivy up the walls, yellow sunflowers heavy with the weight of their powdery brown hearts, hollyhocks opening their lush and vulgar blossoms to catch the last rays of the setting sun. The only sound was that of Aubrey's boots crunching across the gravel, and the bend and sigh of the low-hanging branches and bushes that he pushed aside as he struggled up the path to the house.

When he knocked, his fist created such a small sound against the heavy wood of the door, he doubted it could be heard by anyone inside those tumbled walls. He knocked again three times before he noticed the rusty chain hanging to one side of the door; then he crossed the porch to pull that vigorously. Distantly, he heard the clamor of warning bells inside the fortress and was satisfied that someone would now be alerted to his presence. He hammered on the wood one more time just in case.

He waited, but there was no response. Impatiently, he stepped off the low, cracked stone porch to look up at what he could see of the face of the building: a few closed windows, and the fluttering ivy. From where he stood, it was impossible to tell if there was any smoke drifting up from the back kitchens or the front parlors, and he had not bothered to look for any as he cleared his way up the front walk. Perhaps no one was home. He stepped back on the porch again and gave the bell chain another hearty pull.

On the instant, the door opened. Aubrey turned quickly toward the sound, his ready smile back on his face. A tall woman stood framed in the doorway, holding the door open with both hands as though it were heavy. Her hair, braided in a coronet around her head, was as dark as the wood of the door, her gown was as gray as the stone, and her eyes were a green so rich they were a startling source of color in this drab place. On her face was an expression of utter indifference.

“What do you want?” she asked. She sounded neither friendly nor unfriendly; she did not even sound curious.

Some of Aubrey's smile had faded to be replaced by a quizzical look. “Hello,” he said, starting with his mildest grade of charm. “I am Aubrey. I was sent here by the magician Cyril of Southport to study with Glyrenden. I believe he is expecting me.”

“Is he?” the woman asked. “I didn't know.”

Aubrey waited a moment, but that seemed to be all she had to say. He turned his charm a fraction of a degree higher. “Perhaps he has forgotten,” he said. “Is he here? May I come in and speak with him?”

She was still holding the door with both hands, but not as though she minded the weight. For a moment, Aubrey thought she would refuse; then she shrugged, and pulled the door wider. He stepped inside. “He's not here,” she said, as he crossed the threshold. “He ought to be back tomorrow or the next day, though.”

Aubrey was looking around him in some astonishment, and so at first did not catch the import of her words. The neglect of the outer grounds had led him to expect some deterioration inside as well, but from what he could see of the front hallway and parlor, the house was in utter disarray. Dust lay inches thick on every surface; his boots had sunk in a pile of it, and the woman's tracks could be plainly seen in this corridor which she had traversed to answer the door. Cobwebs competed with cut glass as the most conspicuous feature of the handsome chandelier hanging over their heads; the iron suit of armor that guarded a niche down the hall was beginning to rust over. A pervasive odor that seemed to rise from the gray bricks themselves was compounded half of dampness and half of dust.

He could not keep the amazement off his face when he turned to look at the woman who had let him in. Her eyes traveled where his had wandered, to see what had caused him to look so. “It is not so bad in the rooms where we mostly live,” she remarked, seemingly unembarrassed. “Arachne does what she can, but the place is too big. No one ever uses this part of the house, anyway.”

It was then that he remembered what she had said when he first stepped inside. “You say Glyrenden is not here?” he repeated. “Is it inconvenient that I stay, then?”

Her eyes came back to him and noticed his travel-stained clothes and the saddlebags he carried over his shoulder. “Oh,” she said. “You were planning to live with us, I take it?”

He felt suddenly awkward and foolish, both rare things for him. “Well, as Glyrenden's pupil—but, after all, it is not far from the village, and I can just as easily return each day—and if he is not here—”

What may have been a smile brushed across her mouth and was gone. “Do not trouble yourself over appearances,” she said. “There are servants here. Of a sort. And none of the villagers is likely to accuse me of entertaining a lover, even if they spoke to my husband, which they don't. You may stay here easily. I just did not know that was what was expected.”

Aubrey's eyes widened a little at this speech. So this was the wife that the barkeeper had mentioned; and no wonder he had looked so odd. She was blunt, graceless and strange, and Aubrey, who could talk to anybody, had no idea what to say to her. “Perhaps once your husband returns. . .” he began tentatively.

“He will be angry with me if he finds you have come and gone again,” she said, although that prospect did not seem to disturb her much. “Stay until he arrives, at least. After that, you may want to leave again.” And she gave him such a brilliant smile, which made her, for a fraction of an instant, so vivid, he again almost missed the sense of her words; and it was not until he had followed her down the dusty corridor to the large and only slightly less dusty kitchen that he realized what she had said.

Here, two other inmates of the house were present. One was a small, colorless, middle-aged woman, with a thin and scandalized face half-hidden by a fall of stiff albino hair. She bustled about the room working her arms energetically, wiping at grimy surfaces and snatching suddenly and sporadically at insects winging by. If she was supposed to be cleaning the place, Aubrey thought, she had made very little headway; she seemed incensed at something, muttering inaudibly under her breath, but what she railed against he could not say.

The other inhabitant was squatting before the unlit fire when they walked in, but rose to his feet with a slow, unbalanced motion. He was quite six and a half feet tall and covered with dark, rough hair on every visible portion of his body except for the flesh immediately around his eyes and nose. His eyes were a dark, dense brown, just now narrowed with concentration, and his huge hands worked themselves into fists and then opened one joint at a time. His mouth, parted to admit his noisy breath, seemed overfull of teeth.

“Oh, sit down again, Orion. He's obviously harmless,” said the lady of the house. Her voice was not as sharp as her words. “He has come to study with Glyrenden. You must be nice to him.”

The huge man kept his intense gaze on Aubrey's face, but seemed to relax slightly at the woman's words. “Nice,” he repeated, enunciating the word with difficulty. “Must be nice.”

Glyrenden's wife gestured to the little woman still scurrying around the room, head bent over her tasks and indignation drawing her mouth tight. “That is Arachne. She cooks and cleans for us. She fights a losing battle with the dust and dirt, though, and as you can see, it makes her very unhappy. I doubt if she will ever speak to you. She seldom speaks to anyone.”

Aubrey was beginning to feel he had strayed somehow into a madhouse, but he kept a courteous smile upon his face. “And you are? Somehow I never asked your name.”

Again, that curious, brief smile touched her mouth and was gone. “I am called Lilith,” she said. “What are we to call you?”

“Aubrey, of course.”

“Very well, Aubrey of course, I will ask Arachne to prepare a room for you. It will not be much improved over the rest of the house, though, I warn you. But you will not care about that. You have come to study.”

He was not sure if he heard mockery in her voice, and if so, why she should mock him, but he replied at once, “Yes, that is true. A roof and a bed are all I ask for.”

“How fortunate.”

Arachne did indeed show him to his room, scuttling along before him down a dark and dusty hallway with her head bent to mute the sound of her incessant muttering. The chamber she left him in might not have been cleaned since the day the stones of the house were first piled together. Aubrey actually felt the grit of dirt through the soles of his boots as he walked across the floor to his bed. This was a huge, sagging affair covered with a patched and rotting feather quilt; strips of frayed silk hung from the four fat posters which had once supported a canopy. A delicate border of light showed around one solid wood shutter, but none of Aubrey's energetic pounding could get the lock to yield and the window to open. If the room offered any other amenities, he could not see well enough to discover them.

“A strange and wonderful place this is!” he murmured to himself, as he stood in the middle of the shadowy room. He did not know whether to laugh and stay, or despair and make good his escape. “How much of this did Cyril know, I wonder? What a motley collection of disreputable souls are gathered under this dilapidated roof! Can it be any better when Glyrenden returns? And will I have stayed long enough to find out?”

The next day, however, Aubrey woke to find he could not leave if he would. The previous evening's dinner had almost decided him against staying even one night in this house, so bizarre and uncomfortable was it. The food was not unpleasant, but entirely unrecognizable as any stew he had ever tasted. Arachne served it to them, nearly running around the table in her haste to ladle out all the portions at once, but she did not sit down and join the others. Orion immediately lowered his head over his plate and began to shovel spoonfuls into his mouth without speaking one word, eating huge quantities of the foreign stew before the meal was over. Lilith ate sparingly and very daintily, mostly nibbling on apples and bread and drinking from a large goblet of water. Aubrey ate without examining his plate too closely, and made a few desultory attempts at conversation before surrendering to a silence too immense for even his social skills.