The Oathbound (29 page)

T
he aged, half-blind mage blinked confused, rheumy eyes at his visitor. The man—or was it woman?—looked as awful as the mage felt. Bloodshot and dark-circled eyes glared at him from under the concealing shelter of a moth-eaten hood and several scarves. A straggle of hair that looked first to be dirty mouse-brown, then silver-blond, then brown again, strayed into those staring eyes. Nor did the eyes stay the same from one moment to the next; they turned blue, then hazel, then back to amethyst-blue. Try as he would, the mage could not make his own eyes focus properly, and light from a lanthorn held high in one of the visitor’s hands was doing nothing to alleviate his befuddlement. The mage had never seen a human that presented such a contradictory appearance. She (he?) was a shapeless bundle of filthy, lice-ridden rags; what flesh there was to be seen displayed the yellow-green of healing bruises. Yet he had clearly seen gold pass to the hands of his landlord when that particular piece of human offal had unlocked the mage’s door. Gold didn’t come often to this part of town—and it came far less often borne by a hand clothed in rags.

He (she?) had forced his (her?) way into the verminous garret hole that was all the mage could call home now without so much as a by-your-leave, shouldering the landlord aside and closing the door firmly afterward. So this stranger was far more interested in privacy than in having the landlord there as a possible backup in case the senile wizard proved recalcitrant. That was quite enough to bewilder the mage, but the way his visitor kept shifting from male to female and back again was bidding fair to dizzy what few wits still remained to him and was nearly leaving him too muddled to speak.

Besides that, the shapeshifting was giving him one gods-awful headache.

“Go ‘way—” he groaned feelingly, shadowing his eyes both from the unsettling sight and from the too-bright glare of the lanthorn his visitor still held aloft. “—leave an old man alone! I haven’t got a thing left to steal—”

He was all too aware of his pitiful state; his robe stained and frayed, his long gray beard snarled and unkempt, his eyes so bloodshot and yellowed that no one could tell their color anymore. He was housed in an equally pitiful manner; this garret room had been rejected by everyone, no matter how poor, except himself; it was scarcely better than sleeping in the street. It leaked when it rained, turned into an oven in summer and a meat-locker in winter, and the wind whistled through cracks in the walls big enough to stick a finger in. His only furnishings were a pile of rags that served as a bed, and a rickety stool. Beneath him he could feel the ramshackle building swaying in the wind, and the movement was contributing to his headache. The boards of the walls creaked and complained, each in a different key. He knew he should have been used to it by now, but he wasn’t; the crying wood rasped his nerves raw and added mightily to his disorientation. The mutiple drafts made the lanthorn flame flicker, even inside its glass chimney. The resulting dancing shadows didn’t help his befuddlement.

“I’m not here to
steal,
old fraud.”

Even the voice of the visitor was a confusing amalgam of male and female.

“I’ve brought you something.”

The other hand emerged from the rags, bearing an unmistakable emerald-green bottle. The hand jiggled the bottle a little, and the contents sloshed enticingly. The rags slipped, and a trifle more of his visitor’s face was revealed.

But the mage was only interested now in the bottle. Lethe! He forgot his perplexity, his befogged mind, and his headache as he hunched forward on his pallet of decaying rags, reaching eagerly for the bottle of drug-wine that had been his downfall. Every cell ached for the blessed/damned touch of it—

“Oh, no.” The visitor backed out of reach, and the mage felt the shame of weak tears spilling down his cheeks.
“First
you give me what I want,
then
I give you this.”

The mage sagged back into his pile of rags. “I have nothing.”

“It’s not what you have, old fraud, it’s what you
were.”

“What ... I ...was... ”

“You
were
a mage, and a good one—or so they claim. That was before you let
this
stuff rob you of your wits until they cast you out of the Guild to rot. But there damn well ought to be enough left of you for my purposes.”

By steadfastly looking, not at the visitor, but at the bottle, the mage was managing to collect his scattering thoughts. “What purpose?”

The visitor all but screamed his answer.
“To take off this curse, old fool! Are your wits so far gone you can’t even see what’s in front of you?”

A curse—of course! No wonder his visitor kept shifting and changing! It wasn’t the person that was shifting, but his
own
sight, switching erratically between normal vision and mage-sight. Normal vision showed him the woman; when the rags slipped a little more, she seemed to be a battered, but still lovely little toy of a creature—amethyst—eyed and platinum-haired—

Mage-sight showed him an equally abused but far from lovely man; sallow and thin, battered, but by no means beaten—a man wearing the kind of smol dering scowl that showed he was holding in rage by the thinnest of bonds.

So the “curse” could only be illusion, but a very powerful and carefully cast illusion. There was something magic-smelling about the man-woman, too; the illusion was linked to and being fueled by that magic. The mage furrowed his brow, then tested the weave of the magic that formed the illusion. It was a more than competent piece of work; and it was complete to all senses. It was far superior to anything the mage had produced even in his best days. In his present condition—to duplicate it so that he could lay new illusion over old would be impossible; to turn it or transfer it beyond even his former level of skill. He never even considered trying to take it off. To break it was beyond the best mage in Oberdorn, much less the broken-down wreck he had become.

Eyeing the bottle with passionate longing and despair, he said as much.

To his surprise the man accepted the bad news with a nod. “That’s what they told me,” he said. “But they told me something else. What a human mage couldn’t break, a demon might.”

“A ... demon?” The mage licked his lips; the bottle of Lethe was again within his grasp. “I used to be able to summon demons. I still could, I think. But it wouldn’t be easy.” That was untrue; the summoning of demons had been one of his lesser skills. It was still easily within his capabilities. But it required specialized tools and ingredients he no longer had the means to procure. And it was proscribed by the Guild....

He’d tried to raise a minor impling to steal him Lethe-wine when his money had run out; that was when the Guild had discovered what he’d fallen prey to. That was the main reason they’d cast him out, destroying his tools and books; a mage brought so low as to use his skills for personal theft was no longer trustworthy. Especially not one that could summon demons. Demons were clever and had the minds of sharp lawyers when it came to wriggling out of the bonds that had been set on them; that was why raising them was proscribed for any single mage of the Guild, and doubly proscribed for one who might have doubts as to his own mental competence at the time of the conjuration.

Of course, he was no longer bound by Guild laws since he was outcaste. And if this stranger could provide the wherewithal, the tools and the supplies, it could be easily done.

“Just tell me what you need, old man—I’ll get it for you.” The haggard, grimy face was avid, eager. “You bring me a demon to break this curse, and the bottle’s yours.”

 

Two days later, they stood in the cellar of the old, rotten mansion whose garret the mage called home. The cellar was in no better repair than the rest of the house; it was moldy and stank, and water-marks on the walls showed why no one cared to live there. Not only did the place flood every time it rained, but moisture was constantly seeping through the walls, and water trickled down from the roof-cisterns to drip from the beams overhead. Bright sparks of light glinted just beyond the circle of illumination cast by the lanthorn, the gleaming eyes of starveling rats and mice, perched curiously on the decaying shelves that clung to the walls. The scratching of their claws seemed to echo the scratching of the mage’s chalks on the cracked slate floor.

The man-woman sat impatiently on the remains of a cask off to one side, careful not to disturb the work at hand. It had already cost him dearly—in gold and blood. Some of the things the mage had demanded had been bought, but most had been stolen. The former owners were often no longer in a condition to object to the disposition of their property.

From time to time the mage would glance search ingly up at him, make a tiny motion with his hand, frown with concentration, then return to his drawing.

After the fourth time this had happened, the stranger wet his lips with a nervous tongue, and asked, “Why do you keep doing that? Looking at me, I mean.”

The mage blinked and stood up slowly, his back aching from the strain of staying bent over for so long. His red-rimmed, teary eyes focused to one side of the man, for he still found it difficult to look directly at him.

“It’s the spell that’s on you,” he replied after a moment to collect his thoughts. “I don’t know of a demon strong enough to break a spell that well made.”

The man jumped to his feet, reaching for a sword he had left back in the mage’s room because the old man had warned him against bearing cold steel into a demon’s presence. “You old bastard!” he snarled. “You told me—”

“I told you I could call one—and I can. I just don’t
know
one. Your best chance is if I can call a demon with a specific grudge against the maker of the spell—”

“What if there isn’t one?”

“There will be,” the mage shrugged. “Anyone who goes about laying curses like yours and leaving justice-glyphs behind to seal them is bound to have angered either a demon or someone who commands one. At any rate, since you want to know, I’ve been testing the edges of your curse to make the mage rune appear. I’m working that into the summoning. Since I don’t know
which
demon to call, the summoning will take longer than usual to bear fruit, but the results will be the same. The demon will appear, one with a reason to help you, and you’ll bargain with it for the breaking of your curse.”

“Me?” The stranger was briefly taken aback. “Why me? Why not you?”

“Because it isn’t my curse. I don’t give a damn whether it’s broken or not. I told you I’d summon a demon—I didn’t say I’d bind him. That takes more skill—and certainly more
wil
—than I possess anymore. My bargain with you was simple—one demon, one bottle of Lethe. Once it’s here, you can do your own haggling.”

The man smiled; it was far more of a grimace than an expression of pleasure. “All right, old fraud. Work your spell. I’d sooner trust
my
wits than yours anyway.”

The mage returned to his scribbling, filling the entire area lit by the lanthorn suspended overhead with odd little drawings and scrawls that first pulled, then repelled the eyes. Finally he seemed satisfied, gathered his stained, ragged robes about him with care, and picked a dainty path through the maze of chalk. He stood up straight just on the border of the inscriptions, raised his arms high, and intoned a peculiarly resonant chant.

At that moment, he bordered on the impressive—though the effect was somewhat spoiled by the water dripping off the beams of the ceiling, falling onto his balding head and running off the end of his long nose.

The last syllable echoed from the dank walls. The man-woman waited in anticipation.

Nothing happened.

“Well?” the stranger said with slipping patience, “Is that all there is to it?”

“I told you it would take time—perhaps as much as an hour. Don’t fret yourself, you’ll have your demon.”

The mage cast longing glances at the shadow-shrouded bottle on the floor beside his visitor as he mopped his head with one begrimed, stained sleeve.

The woman-man noted the direction his attention was laid, thought for a moment, weighing the mage’s efforts, and smiled mirthlessly. “All right, old fraud—I guess you’ve earned it. Come and get it.”

The mage didn’t wait for a second invitation, or give the man-woman a chance to take the reluctant consent back. He scrambled forward, tripping over the tattered edges of his robes, and sagged to his knees as he snatched the bottle greedily.

He had it open in a trice, and began sucking at the neck like a calf at the udder, eyes closing and face slackening in mindless ecstacy. Within moments he was near-collapsing to the floor, half-empty bottle cradled in his arms, oblivion in his eyes.

His visitor walked over with a softly sinister tread and prodded him with a toe. “You’d better have worked this right, you old bastard,” he muttered, “Or you won’t be waking—”

His last words were swallowed in the sudden roar, like the howl of a tornado, that rose without warning behind him. As he spun to face the area of inscriptions, that whole section of floor burst into sickening blood-red and hellish green flame; flame that scorched his face, though it did nothing to harm the beams of the ceiling. He jumped back, frightened in spite of his bold resolutions to fear nothing.

But before he touched the ground again, a monstrous, clawed hand formed itself out of the flame and slapped him back against the rear wall of the cellar. A second hand, the color of molten bronze, reached for the oblivious mage.

A face worse than anything from the realm of nightmare materialized from the flame between the two hands. A neck, arms, and torso followed. The hands brought the mage within the fire—the visitor coughed on the stench of the old man’s robes and beard scorching. There was no doubt that the fire was
real,
no matter that it left the ceiling intact. The mage woke from his drugged trance, screaming in mindless pain and terror. The smell of his flesh and garments burning was spreading through the cellar, and reached even to where the man-woman lay huddled against the dank wall; he choked and gagged at the horrible reek.