Sorcerer's Son (43 page)

He curled his fingers loosely around hers and then looked down at the two hands, one broad and hard, the other as fragile as a child’s, with delicate nails and rosy palms. “You

will keep your promise to her?”

“Please,” she said.

“This is madness,” he muttered. “With silence and just a few indirect remarks, but mainly silence, you have led me to a conclusion I can scarcely credit. Do you love my mother, Gildrum? Have you loved her all this time?” To her firmly closed lips and tightly clutching hand, he added, “But no, you will not tell me that. That is part of the secret that Rezhyk has forbidden you to reveal to me. So I shall not know, for certain, until I free you. And even then

how can a demon love a human being?” He covered their two entwined hands with his free hand. “I feel flesh here, but I know you are made of fire. You can appear as you choose, as squirrel or pebble or old man, but still, you are a flame. Gildrum, has demon ever loved a human being before?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think it is not a thing that we would talk about. But it did happen once the other way around, when a master gave a slave a fair form. It was a great joke, for a time, in my world.”

“Do they make many jokes, in your world, about human beings?”

“Some do.”

“Will they laugh at me

when I am there?”

Her unencumbered hand grasped at his tunic. “You will go then?”

He nodded slowly. “I will go, I haven’t much choice, have I? Stay and die or go and learn. I will go, and I will work until I have no need to fear him. And I shall gain your freedom.”

She scrambled to her knees. “Master Cray, I cannot thank you enough.”

“I’m not doing this for you. Just for me. And for her. I trust you will think of a suitable evasion for Lord Rezhyk.”

“I have one already.”

“Very well. When shall we leave?”

“Now.”

“And what of my horse?”

She smiled slightly. “Still thinking of your horse after all these years?”

“I can’t leave him uncared for.”

“I’ll arrange for him to wander back to the lady Helaine and your friend.”

“Will they know where I have gone? Will they read my fate in him?”

“I think not,” said Gildrum. “He saw nothing but the first moments of the fight. Your lives parted then, and a Seer would know no more than that.”

“They will think that something terrible has happened to me.”

“So much the better,” said Gildrum, “in case my lord should make inquiries.”

“Would he doubt your word?”

“I think not, but why take the risk? Now, let us depart so that I may settle you and lay out your further course of study.”

Cray nodded, and before the gesture was complete, the demon turned to flame and engulfed him. This time her fire was not a tenuous veil but an opaque sheet through which he could not even see his own limbs. His eyes closed against the intolerable glare and then he squinted hard at the fierce redness that penetrated his eyelids. A heartbeat later, he lost his balance and tumbled, flailing, into nothingness. There was no ground beneath his feet anymore, no grass, no shrubs, no trees to clutch at. He screamed. He opened his eyes, but the dazzle was too much for him and he had to shut it out again. Then something tugged at his hand, as a dog tugs at the leash, and he felt his body straightening, streaming out behind his fingers like hair in a high wind. He flew.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Gildrum’s crackling demon-voice. “You are safe with me. But you cannot stay here. I will take you to a more suitable place.”

“Where are we?” Cray croaked.

“This is Fire, my home. Without my protection you would char in an instant. But we’ll be out soon; the boundary is quite near.”

Abruptly, the bright light dimmed, and Cray’s eyelids unlocked themselves almost by reflex. Gildrum’s flame was about him still, but faint now, as the first time she had enveloped him, and beyond the pale yellow of her glow he saw that he was surrounded by smoke. Gildrum kept it from him so it did not powder his skin with soot or make him cough or burn his eyes, nor did it roil from his passage through it.

“This is the boundary between Fire and Air,” said Gildrum.

Cray craned his neck to look back the way they had come, toward his feet. Even veiled by smoke, Fire was a terrifying sight. Its beating dazzle was damped, but its violence showed clearly—raging flames of red, orange, yellow, white; nothingness ever burning, never consumed. Cray felt sweat break out on his forehead, though no heat touched him.

“What is it like to live there?” he wondered.

“If your eyes were strong enough to bear the sight,” said Gildrum, “you would see that it has a wild beauty all its own. Rivers of molten lava flowing without banks, without the tug of the earth to restrain them. Demons of every shape and shade of flame, like living jewels. And never darkness. Never.” Even her sigh crackled. “I spend so little time there, it is twice as beautiful to me as to any other native.”

“A terrible beauty,” said Cray.

“Well, we will come upon a different sort presently.”

The smoke thinned until Cray thought he could see a trace of blue in the direction they traveled. Then they emerged from the last wisps, and he saw that it was blue, blue everywhere, as far as the eye could see, the deep azure of a cloudless summer sky. There was no sun visible, yet there was light; the very air seemed luminous. Gildrum withdrew from him, to a ball of pale yellow near his elbow, leaving him to float, perfectly warm and comfortable, in the vast blue. A light breeze played about him, ruffling his hair as his mother had ruffled it when he was a small child; he breathed deep, expecting some scent to be borne upon the wind, but there was neither the green perfume of vegetation nor the heartier smell of animals, nor even the taint of the smoke that lay behind him. The air was odorless, flat, as it brushed his nostrils.

He heard laughter, soft, breathy laughter just behind is right ear. He turned his head sharply to find the face, and his body tumbled toward the flame that was Gildrum. The demon flowed toward him, wrapped about his arm to steady him.

“You must learn to move more slowly in this world,” she said

“Who laughed?” said Cray.

“An air demon, of course,” said Gildrum. “Behind you. No, don’t turn. You can’t see it just now. I’ll ask it to come around to your face and show itself.”

Some silent message must have passed between the demons, for in the emptiness before Cray’s eyes a dark cloud began to coalesce, like a man-sized thunderhead, laughed, the same laugh as before, and filaments of mirth broke free from the main body with that laughter, floated around it like honeybees around a flower, and settled back into the mass.

“Accept my greeting,” said the cloud, “O human being. You are a silly sight indeed, in Air.”

“I’m sure I must be,” said Cray. “Please accept my greeting in return, O cloud. I am Cray Ormoru.”

The cloud laughed again. “Will you call us all ‘O cloud,’ young Cray? I’ll wager he doesn’t call you ‘O flame’, Gildrum.”

“I haven’t told him your name. Cray, this is Elrelet, an old friend of mine.”

“An old fellow slave is what you mean, Gildrum. Shall I take my true form and shake your hand, young Cray, following human custom?”

“If you wish,” said Cray, extending his own hand.

Elrelet laughed once more, and the cloud collapsed to a ball no larger than a fist; it sprouted two long, ropy tentacles, smooth on the upper side, exuding slime on the lower. It thrust one of them toward Cray, grasped his hand like a snake constricting its prey, and pumped so vigorously that his, whole body bounced back and forth, as if it were a dusty rag being shaken out.

“Enough,” said Gildrum, and she flowed about Cray’s body just long enough to damp out the wild motion.

Elrelet withdrew the tentacle. “He has some courage,” it said, absorbing the tentacles into its spherical body and then expanding once more to the thunderhead. “Another human would have shied away from me.”

“I was raised with snakes,” said Cray. “Things that resemble them do not repel me.”

“Well, we have things here,” said Elrelet, “that by human standards are even uglier in their true forms than I am. Don’t be surprised if some of the Free try to startle you with them.”

“Elrelet will look after you while I am back at Ringforge,” Gildrum said to Cray. “If you trust me, you can trust Elrelet. Ask for whatever you need—food, clothing, advice; Elrelet will provide them.”

“Advice especially,” said Elrelet.

“I must return now. My lord will be wondering why I have taken so long; he will call soon and perhaps alter the command, and I must forestall that. I’ll return whenever I can. Here are duplicates of your books.” Several thick notebooks floated from the depths of her flame, arrayed themselves before Cray’s eyes. “You will find that I have written your next few lessons in the latest of them. Study hard, Cray. Farewell to both of you.” She streaked past Cray’s shoulder, and he turned his head very slowly to watch her dwindle toward the smoke. She entered the grayness that extended as far as the eye could see in the directions that Cray arbitrarily designated as up and down, left and right, a curtain across the whole sky. Swiftly, her flame vanished. Yet beyond the curtain, tingeing it with a ruddy glow, Fire was still faintly visible, a conflagration beyond human imagination.

Cray shuddered once, at the thought of himself in the midst of that vast furnace, then he looked back at the dark thunderhead. “Friend Elrelet,” he said, “I have my first request of you.”

“Yes?”

“Supper.”

Rezhyk sat crouched over his notebook, meticulously inscribing the details of his most recent incantations on a blank page. He did not look up as Gildrum appeared in the workshop, shedding yellow light upon his ring-laden hands before coalescing into the shape of the young girl.

“The deed is done,” she said. “I met him on the road as a knight, and we fought. Though he wore no armor and begged me to cease, I would not let him yield. The death blow was a sure one.”

“Quite sure?” murmured Rezhyk, his eyes still on the page before him.

“Quite sure,” said Gildrum, remembering the cool slice of steel through her inhuman head. Never before had she allowed her fleshly form to seem vulnerable, and the memory of it was strange and lingering, like the flavor of an unusual spice.

“Very well, my Gildrum. I worried this day past, but now you have set my mind at rest. Lean close here look at this new figure I have devised. I think I shall need a carbuncle for this one, deep, blood-red, perhaps the size of my thumbnail. And you shall find it for me in the East, my Gildrum. Yes.”

Gildrum leaned close and looked at the words in that familiar cramped script and nodded to the rhythm of Rezhyk’s voice. As he spoke, she wondered at his coolness and his easy displacement of interest. Already, the murder of his son was unimportant to him. There was not a touch of remorse in his demeanor.

Gildrum focused her eyes on the back of his neck for a moment, at the white linen collar of the shirt he wore over the cloth-of-gold. Between the collar and the base of his skull, the thick hair parted, exposing skin that had never seen sunlight.

I would stab you there, she thought, if I were not a slave. And I would feel no more sorrow than you do at this moment.

Ť ^ ť

From nothingness, Elrelet had produced a roast fowl, and Cray ate it, floating. “Is there nothing more in Air,” he said between bites, “but empty space? No vegetation, no buildings, nothing solid?”

“There are buildings,” said Elrelet. “You are within one now—my home.”

Cray looked about, frowning perplexedly, as if doubting the evidence of his senses. “I see nothing.”

“That’s because it’s made of air. Your eyes are not good enough to see that air can be as solid as many other things. For example, there is a wall behind you. Reach back and touch it. Careful, though; remember you’re not accustomed to moving in this world.”

Cray stretched out a tentative hand and encountered a surface before his arm had straightened entirely. Invisible, the wall seemed to roil and bubble beneath his fingers, like a spring gushing forth from a mountainside. He pushed against the pressure and could not penetrate it; instead, his own body moved backward as his elbow stiffened.

“How, then, did we get in?” he asked.

“I seem to recall that you have doors in the human world,” said Elrelet

“But I can’t see it. How shall I get out?”

“Follow the breeze,” replied the demon. “It enters at one door and exits at the other—surely that won’t be too difficult for you. But you shall not be going out much at first, not until you’ve learned how to travel among us. A pity you have no wings.”

“Few humans do.”

“Well,” said Elrelet, “then you shall have to swim. I hope you’re acquainted with swimming.”

“Not really. I’ve splashed through a river or two in my travels, but my horse always swam better than I did.”

“A pity again. Well, you’ll learn here, or you’ll be very frustrated. At least you don’t thrash wildly about; you have a fine talent for keeping still.”

“I learn quickly, I hope.”

“If you’re quite finished with that poor bird, I’ll give you some instructions in swimming.”

“I’m finished.” The bones disappeared.

“You must think of the air as a tangible thing, as tangible as water,” said the demon. “Your arms are your oars. Your feet, too, for that matter. You can just move the feet to give yourself a bit of forward motion, and the arms control your direction. Try it.”

Awkwardly, Cray scissored his legs, and his body began to tumble.

“You have to straighten yourself out,” said Elrelet. “Your head is the prow of your ship; it has to face toward your destination.”

Cray straightened out and bumped into the invisible wall. He pushed away from it with one hand, stroked actively with the other, and soared with some grace till he struck another wall and rebounded in a flurry of limbs. “At least the walls aren’t hard,” he muttered, reflexively grasping for support but finding none and continuing to tumble in a slow arc.

“Stretch all your arms and legs out as far as you can,” said Elrelet.