The Taste of Power

How Orem learned the death that gnawed at the heart of the world.

In the Wizard's House

Like all the wizards of Inwit in that day, Gallowglass lived on Wizard Street. His house looked common enough and modest from the outside. Its only advertisement was a horseshoe on a nail, for it had once been a blacksmith shop. The hinges were in such disarray that doors seemed more to lean than close, and a shutter flapped clumsily in the breeze that sighed up the street. There was dust on the porch that seemed to have been undisturbed for years. Yet the wizard seemed to see nothing amiss as he climbed the step, took hold of a door, and eased it out of the way.

"In in in," he whispered. Orem went in, ducking to avoid a heavily laden spider web whose surly mistress seemed resentful at being disturbed. It was dark inside, and darker yet when the wizard stepped within and pulled the door closed behind him.

"Lamp lamp," he said, searching in the darkness.

"What is this place?"

"The heavenly hearth, the kindly fire, the keeper of the heart, the place of rest and comfort. In a word, my domicile."

Gallowglass found a match. He struck once, twice; it wouldn't light. Matches had spells on them, everyone knew that, and now Orem understood why his mother sent him out of the house whenever she had to relight the kitchen fire. Gallowglass put down the matches. "We must teach you quickly, mustn't we."

He lit a flame the unmagical way. "Flint and steel, stone and ore, yes, yes, here." Gallowglass was much less deft at it than Braisy. At last there came a spark and a small fire, not on wool, but on a piece of paper. Burning paper was something Orem had never seen done before. Paper was far too precious in the House of God in Banningside. Yet it made a light, and Orem looked around the place while Gallowglass lit the lamp.

It was a cramped and crowded room, with things stacked in a hopeless jumble on shelves that sagged along the walls. There were piles on the floor, too, and on the steps of the steep and narrow stair that led to a room above. There were three large barrels against the northern wall, unmarked, yet damp and mossy. And everything was inches thick in dust.

"Is this the best place you could find?" asked Orem.

Gallowglass looked at him in annoyance. "It doesn't look like this usually. But you're here, and so I'll have to forego the normal furnishings for a while." As he spoke the lamp went out again. "Damn, boy, will you get upstairs so I can do this properly?"

Orem stumbled to the stairs in the darkness and clambered up into the cobwebs. Then he listened to Gallowglass wandering around below. A fire soon crackled in the hearth, though there had been no hearth in the room downstairs. And he could hear Gallowglass wander from room to room, opening and closing the doors, though there had been but the one room there before. With magic the place was a palace. With a Sink there, it was a foul place. The wizard had never bothered with housekeeping in reality, when he lived in magic all the time.

Then he heard Gallowglass speaking. "I couldn't help it," Gallowglass said plaintively. Then was there a whisper of an answer? No one had come in with them. Orem waited and tried to listen, and finally, after what seemed hours, he grew impatient.

"Gallowglass!"

"Don't come down the stairs or I'll break your brains!"

"I'm not! I haven't moved!"

"Good! It's the only thing keeping you alive!"

"I'm hungry! It's dark up here!"

Downstairs a barrel lid was tamped into place with a mallet. Soon Orem heard the wizard's footsteps on the stairs. At first the stairs were carpeted, but then, abruptly, the footsteps changed to the smack of leather on bare wood. "May the bones of your ancestors turn to fungus." The voice was soft, but clear because the old wizard's head was now sticking up into the room. He lifted the lamp to illuminate the tiny upstairs room.

"Oh, dismal," said the wizard.

Orem silently agreed. Cluttered, filthy, and reeking of decay, it was not half so nice a place as the rooms at the Spade and Grave.

"Here," said Gallowglass. He handed him a dish of very dry bread.

"This is all I get to eat?"

"It was roast dove when I conjured it downstairs, how can I help what it turns into in your presence."

"I can't help it either," Orem said. "But I can't live on that."

"Then learn quickly," the wizard said. "I was ready for the danger of having you. But the inconvenience!" Gallowglass rummaged through the debris and pulled from it a shabby cot with a tear in the middle of the canvas. "Best I can do," he said. "But there it is. Until you learn."

"My bed?" Orem asked.

"Until you learn, you damnable nuisance! Don't complain when it's your flatulent fault!"

"Then teach me!" Orem retorted.

"I can't teach you, not just like that." Gallowglass snapped his fingers in Orem's face. "I can only suggest, respond, inform—you have to learn. It's inside you, once you learn to recognize and control it. How can I teach you, I've never been a Sink."

"Whatever you mean to do, begin it now," Orem said.

"Imperious little bastard, aren't you."

"Just hungry."

The wizard made him lie upon the floor with a bundle of cloth under his head. And then strange, soft commands: Reach out with your fingers, close your eyes, and tell me the color of the air just over your head. Hear if you can the sound of my beard growing. Yes, listen, reach your fingers; try to taste the taste of your sweat in the insides of your eyes.

Orem understood none of it. "I can't," he muttered.

The wizard paid him no attention, just went on. You are asleep as you lie there, listening to me, asleep as long as you think you are awake, awake only when you discover your sleep. Feel how the air gets hotter, feel it at the back of your neck, look at the sun shining, look at it through the soft place behind your knees, yes, you have secret eyes there, look how white it is there.

There was something compelling in the rhythm of the old man's speech, the cadences of it, at times sounding like prayer, at times like song, at times like the bark of an angry dog. Orem's senses became confused. He ceased seeing through his eyes, and yet was still aware of vision, or something akin to it. A grey around him, like the fog of the day before. He could hear the rush of time. He no longer felt inside him where his fingers were, but rather tasted them, and his tongue burned in his mouth, then went cold, then wilted and shrank until he lost track of what was mouth, what was tongue, and even what was Orem.

Orem tried to speak and his knee flexed, and yet he felt it as a burst of light within his chest.

Orem tried to move his hand and a high hum came from his throat, but he perceived it as a great weight crushing his testicles and he wept from the pain of it.

Then something, some command he gave without knowing, caused all the grey fog around him to flex. A quick contraction. He did not know what it was he did, but there! there it was again, yes, and again. Like spasms, but he learned to flex the grey again, again, drew it in, pulled it to him, sustained the pressure. It slipped, it lapsed, he grew tired and felt the weariness as a deep green in his thighs, but this he knew was what was wanted of him. Hold this, draw it in, hold it and hold it and hold it and now he could open his eyes and see, not an old man holding a feeble lamp in a dingy upstairs room, but a young man, blond and beautiful, the man that Orem's father had wished him to be, tall and strong, and it was not a lamp in his hands but a tiny star shining. The room was not filthy and small, either; he was lying in a bed in a room dark with heavily engraved mahogany and brown brocade tapestries, and the young and beautiful man was looking at him with diamonds at the pupils of his eyes.

"This is my home, Orem, when you let it be," said the starholder, said the jewel-eyed lover.

And then it was all too strong for him, and Orem felt something break inside him, and the grey erupted from him and his senses flew madly about the room, about the inside of his head. He writhed on his miserable cot, until at last he fell like a spider gently back into himself, exhausted, surrounded again by the filth. The old man nodded. "Not bad for a first lesson. You'll get better at it as time goes on. If you live through it."

He did get better and stronger, until within weeks he was able to hold the fog just within his skin all his waking hours, much to the wizard's relief. They could take meals together now. And in two months it was such a reflex that he controlled his power even in his sleep. Except now and then, when it slipped away from him, and he awoke again on the cot instead of his soft bed. He told Gallowglass of the lapses. The wizard shrugged and flashed his diamond eyes. "You were probably a bedwetter, too."

The Wizard's Women

"My pickle barrels seem to have caught your eye," said Gallowglass as they read books in his library one night.

"You must be—very fond of pickles," said Orem tentatively.

Gallowglass smiled his bright and beautiful smile. Then he pried open a lid with the crow that lay on the leftmost keg. "What I love best in all the world," said the wizard. "And not held by magic, no, not at all. That's why it wasn't undone when you came in so clumsily and wrecked the place. It's just what it seems to be." The lid came off with a sloshing of water. Orem stood to see. It was not hoarmelon floating in the water, nor onions, nor even a single cabbage as, for a moment, it seemed.

For the wizard reached down with his hand, seized a loose handful of hair, and pulled up the shriveled head of a woman.

Head, neck, and naked shoulders. The eyelids hung slack, the mouth drooped open, the skin was wrinkled like a hundred-year-old raisin, and white. Bleached white as a dart's egg, white as the eye of a blindfish from the caves of Watermount.

"My love, my life, my paramour, my wife. Best beloved of all women. The dust of the pouch at my belt, the dust of her blood, here—a shake of it, not much, just a shake, and look, look." The blackish dust settled from Gallowglass's fingers, and Orem saw the body shudder under Gallowglass's hand. The eyes trembled and slackly opened.

"Nn," said the corpse.

"My lady," said Gallowglass.

"Nnnn."

"I have a prentice now, who wants to see you."

"Nnnn."

"He's a smart lad, in his way. Has no manners, eats like a pig and smells worse, and there's no help for it but bathing, since he shuns spells like grease sheds rainwater. But ah, he has a compassionate heart. Do you think he'd be touched at your tale, my love?"

The voice was still a moan, but now Orem realized that the sluggish tongue was articulating; there were words. "Let me sleep," she might have said. Or "Dead so deep." Hard to hear it. And Gallowglass only nodded.

"Come so far, such a long and weary way, yes my love? And yet though the journey is long, still you know I love you. That must be a comfort to you in your death, as it is a comfort to me to have your company."

"Nnnn," said the pickled head. A spurt of bile came from the mouth, and then all went slack again. Gently the wizard lowered the head again. When he turned to Orem, his eyes were emeralds, green as the growth on the barrels.

"Did I tell you that I'm the greatest of the wizards of Inwit? It's true, but small honor, small honor. Do you think Queen Beauty would let me stay, if I were strong? A strong wizard doesn't have to let his wife and daughters die of some ridiculous disease. Doesn't have to watch them waste away to nothing. A strong wizard isn't so fainthearted that he lets them die with their blood. Sleeve wouldn't have done it, you know. Sleeve would have seen their deaths, and calmly drawn their blood alive, with the power hot in it. But like a witch I waited, and took it cool, took it dead, found blood.

Powdered here, with only enough power in it to bring them back now and then for conversation." The tears flowed down his cheeks. "I grow maudlin, but I will not hide my heart from my disciple. Oh, Scanthips, my lad, my boy, my wife was the most beautiful of the ladies of power, saving only Beauty herself, my wife was lovely, and her loveliness was not diminished even when divided between my daughters. Look at them!"

Gallowglass unlidded the other barrels, and lifted up his daughters, and Orem looked, though he had no wish to see.

"Look at the curve of the breast—sagging now, but you can imagine it!"

Orem could not, but he murmured his assent. To him the daughter was as utterly old as the mother, for what years had not done, brine did.

"Golden hair, and her sister dark, like day and night walking through the city. I touched them with no spell to make them beautiful—it was in them, it was them. And ah, the men who pled with me to give them up. But I was saving them for a better lover than any man." Again the bright tears flowed from the emerald eyes. "I was saving them for Death, who crept in and seduced them as I helplessly looked on. Shriveled them, wasted them under my eyes. But I have enough power to waken them. I can draw them back. You saw it!"

"Yes," Orem said.

"Oh, by the Sisters, by the Hart, by that damnable God who broke our power and penned us in, if only I knew what the masters knew! I slay the hart in the tower, so my competitors will see the corpse and worry that perhaps I have more power than they—but I know nothing to do with that blood except foolish tricks of invisibility, and that can be done with sheep! I draw the hart's blood, and what does it accomplish? It proves to me again my weakness." He closed the barrels, tamped down the lids again. "My life is here, shriveling in brine. But with your gifts I will be the strongest in Hart's Hope, the greatest of them all. And yet." He wandered off to the stairway, intoning to himself.

"Strongest of them all, and yet still too weak, still too weak, I couldn't save them."

That night Orem did not sleep long. He awoke disturbed, and on the cot, not in the mahogany room. In his dream the pickled head of the wizard's wife had called to him, and so he went to her, because he could not deny her.

There was a faint light in the library. It came from the green luminescent slime on the barrels. He sat on a pile of rubbish in the cluttered, unmagical room. He watched.

It was the barrel that held the wizard's wife that shuddered first; then the others, as if the bodies inside were having silent convulsions, rocking the kegs, sloshing the water. Then a lid popped up loudly; another split in half; the third was sucked down into the barrel, and the water seeped and flowed over the top of it as it was drawn down.

In the dream there had been no danger, but Orem was afraid. Things that were dead ought to keep still, everyone knew that. But when the dead call, only a fool refuses them. And so he stayed and watched as a hand reached up from one, from two, from all of the barrels, long-fingered hands, with green light dripping slow as caterpillars down to the wrists, into the water.

"Don't hurt me," Orem whispered.

Abruptly the hands all thrust out toward him. He gasped, reached out with his power of negation to try to stop them; but this was not magic, not the blood-bought magic that a Sink could swallow up.

The hands were undisturbed by his strongest effort. They reached over the barrels' lip, and a single finger of each began to write in the slime. Orem could read the dark lines in the green shining, each woman writing her word, each trembling as if an uncontainable power controlled them.

"Sister," wrote the wife.

"God," wrote the dark daughter.

"Horn," wrote the light daughter.

Then faster, as the hands grew more sure.

Sis

Go

Ho

ter

d

rn

Slu

Sla

St

t

ve

one

Yo

Yo

Yo

u

u

u

M

M

M

ust

ust

ust

Se

Se

Sa

e

rve

ve

Then the hands shook violently, flew up in the air and splashed down again, then reached out, but kept getting sucked back in, as if they were struggling to write more, or even to leave the barrels entirely, and something fought as hard to keep them. The will to write was stronger: the fingers traced in barely readable letters words that meant only together.

Le

Di

Me

t

e

It was over, the hands splashed back into the water; the lids came quickly into place; the broken one seemed to heal as it closed. The slime began to dim, the last letters of the last words faded into a uniform blackness. Orem fled upstairs.

Sister slut you must see.

God slave you must serve.

Horn stone you must save.

Let me die.

He understood nothing, and lay halfway between sleep and wakefulness all night, trying to understand, trying not to think at all. If the last message was the wizard's women speaking for themselves, then whose message was the first part? Or was it meaningful at all? Who could lift the hands of the dead even when the power of a Sink had stolen all the magic?

Only in the first light of morning did he think to do that most obvious, most instinctive thing: he summed the words up, he summed them down, conceiving them both as columns and as rows. The upward sum of rows was Palicrovol. The downward sum of rows was Beauty. And either way the columns were added, they said, Give all, get nothing.