Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress XXV Read online

  The sorceress's feet, bare as my own, hovered above the surface of the water on a cloud of purple smoke. She had the ugliest toenails I'd ever seen. "Well, Margarey? What's next?"

  I returned to the book and found the spell I'd hoped would banish the spirits in the brooms. I chanted it backward, trying with all my might to reverse my wish that the spirits depart from me. The brooms clustered closer, like gossips with a juicy tale to tell, and doused me with more enthusiasm than ever. I shivered in my drenched smock.

  "Very good," said the sorceress, with altogether too much relish. "What's next?"

  Working backward, it was now time for the broom I'd thrown at the wall with a vulgar exclamation. But how could I unthrow a broom?

  Mistress Lucasta expected me to know. Well, I would know, then, if it killed me. It would have something to do with what I'd been thinking when I threw the broom. Well, that was no secret: I'd been thinking I hated the pestering thing and wished it in Hell. I composed my mind as well as I could under the deluge, and tried my hardest to think kindly thoughts toward the brooms as they bumped my elbows and showered me with cold well water.

  "It's no use! I still want to throw that broom at the wall!"

  With that, one of the brooms began throwing itself against the wall, whack! whack! whack!

  The sorceress looked down from her perch on the mantelpiece, her spotted cat huddled beside her. "They really are very loyal servants."

  It was true: there was something almost touching about the broom flinging itself against the wall in obedience to my whim. Smiling benevolently, I pronounced the rude word backward and held out my hand for the broom. I was scarcely surprised at all when it flew back into my grasp.

  It sank a small sharp tooth into me—a splinter. The wood was rough, crudely chopped off at the end by my ax, crudely split lengthwise where it had spawned new brooms out of its side. How would I put back together what had been violently cut apart? I tried to catch another of the brooms to force them together, but they all dodged away.

  Perhaps I needed to reverse my movements with the ax, instead. I waded across the workshop until I tripped over the haft, but no sooner did I bend to fish the ax out of the water than the broom in my hand writhed and wriggled away. I suppressed the urge to curse again—God only knew what it might do.

  "Do you need a hint?" said the sorceress, paddling past me in her washtub.

  "I can manage," I said sharply.

  "All right, then." The sorceress reached out of her improvised coracle to catch an apple floating on the surface of the water. She crunched it noisily while I tried to think. The brooms sloshed water on my head, then scampered away, making frightened mewing sounds. I was never going to be able to catch two of them and un-chop them at this rate.

  "I think you've gone as far as mere reversals can take you," the sorceress commented between bites. "Cursing backwards won't make whole what you've broken."

  She had given me a hint after all. I didn't want to take it, but it was the only thing that made sense. In the same book as the servant spell, there was one to make whole what was broken. I waded back to the lectern, careful not to stand too close lest the water that showered down on me should drench the pages. Rather than touch it with my wet fingers, I leafed through the book with tongs that Mistress Lucasta used for delicate ingredients like bees' wings or flower stamens. When I found the spell, I read it carefully, then breathed deeply, slowly composing my thoughts. I wanted no mistakes this time that the sorceress could rage at—or worse, smile that mocking smile at. I considered the beauty and integrity of the wood grain that had been broken when I chopped the broom in two. I filled my mind with the sense of the wood's wholeness, and then, slowly and precisely, sang the chant to make it so.

  My body resounded with the forces that moved through me. The splinter flew out of my finger. I looked up from the book and saw a living, growing tree rooted in the workshop floor. As it grew, its thirsty roots drank up the water on the floor, while its branches pushed against the walls and ceiling till the very stones gave way to let the new growths through. At first I thought the house would fall on us, but it too became whole, with the trunk and branches sticking through it like hairs through the pores in your scalp. The cat leapt from the mantelpiece into one of the branches and began sniffing it in great fascination.

  The sorceress raised her eyebrows. "Well! Overdone, but I suppose we'll get used to it." She rose stiffly from her grounded tub, went to the tree, and laid her hand on it thoughtfully. "In fact, I believe I shall become fond of it. Perhaps there's hope for you after all, apprentice. You've elegantly solved two problems at once: the brooms and the water."

  "But they haven't stopped," I protested. "The spirits I summoned. They're still at it, hurrying to and fro, trying to fill the cauldron—only without buckets or brooms or any sort of bodies." I could feel them all around me, spirits without number, restless, relentless. They didn't pour cold water on my head any more, exactly, but they were pouring something on me that made my flesh shiver and my heart sink.

  The sorceress smiled. "You're more observant now than you were this morning."

  "Do you mean they were always like this, tramping to and fro like prisoners, but I didn't see them?"

  "No, of course not. They need to be put back in place. I'm waiting to see how you'll do it."

  Sighing, I opened the book again. No use trying the servant chant backward: the sorceress had said I'd gone as far as I could by reversals. I turned to the "Chant by which the Magus Banishes Unwelcome Spirits." I had tried it before, but maybe it had simply been at the wrong time. Maybe now that most of the damage was undone, I could finally free myself of the spirits. I turned my mind to releasing them from my service, and chanted the spell.

  Before I knew what had happened, I found myself out the door again, sitting on the steps in a state of bewilderment. The spirits fluttered around me, panicked as chickens in a thunderstorm.

  The sorceress stuck her head out the window. "Back here again, are you?"

  "It's no use," I said. "I summoned the spirits, but I can't banish them. They don't obey me."

  The sorceress muttered something like, "incapable of obeying anyone." She waited a moment as if she expected me to arrive at the answer myself, but I still ached from whatever my last spell had done to me. "Well?" she said at last. "Don't you see where you went wrong? What did you command the spirits?"

  "I bade the spirits depart from me, and from this dwelling; to go back to the place from whence they came, and visit me no more."

  "Well, that must have confused them properly," said the sorceress. "This is what I kept trying to tell you. This is why knowledge of the simple things must come before power. You don't have the slightest notion, do you? You thought to send them back to their source. Where do you think you fetched them from?"

  "I don't know," I sighed. "Hell?"

  "From Hell, she says," the sorceress declaimed to an imaginary audience, rolling her eyes.

  "Surely not from Heaven?"

  "No, fool apprentice. Turn back to the spell you first spoke, and translate the title."

  "An invocation by which the magus, um, understanding the hidden powers in common things, makes for himself an untiring servant."

  "WRONG," said the sorceress. "The Magus makes of himself—or in your case, herself—a tireless servant. You invested a part of yourself in the broom. Then you cut that in two, and splintered yourself further—and kept on splintering."

  "So when I banished unwanted spirits—I threw myself out?"

  "Twice," said the sorceress. "You know what to do now, don't you?"

  I sang the chant of wholeness over myself, and to my relief, felt the errant parts of my soul fall back into place. When I was finished, I breathed deeply. "That's done."

  "Huh," said the sorceress. "There's lots more to do. And lots more for you to learn."

  "But—but didn't you want to throw me out?"

  The sorceress shrugged. "I throw most of my apprentices out
at one time or another. The ones worth teaching come back."

  "I just came back to demand the return of my goat," I admitted.

  "Then why didn't you go straight to the goat-shed and take her?"

  "I, um—"

  "You came back to argue with me—no doubt to demand that I finally earn the price of the goat by teaching you something."

  "Well, then, why haven't you been teaching me anything, till today?"

  "But I have," said the sorceress. "You just haven't been paying attention. The spark that makes fire, the stitch that mends, the pliability of water, the insidiousness of dust, the living coldness of the well, the warm life in hippogriff and goat alike, the blending of elements in heat to make tea—a sorceress must understand all these things in their natural state before she can bend nature without breaking it, and chant a spell without banishing herself from herself.

  "But we are wasting daylight. You've filled the cauldron—not by the simplest means!—but not gathered firewood to heat the potion. Only windfall boughs, mind you! Go on, don't make me wait all day. We have much work ahead of us."

  We? Hadn't I just demanded to take my goat and go? "Wait a moment," I said.

  "Yes?" The sorceress waited.

  "Never mind," I said, and went off for broken branches, startlingly aware of the indelible grain of the wood, the hidden wholeness in each one.

  Pantheon Shift Change

  L.M. Townsend-Crow

  I've heard of some strange professions—usually in the list of day jobs in a writer's bio—but "professional sacrifice" is a new one. I'm pretty sure that it falls into the "don't try this at home" category, so I don't expect to see it in a writer's bio, either. Ms. Townsend-Crow says that this story was inspired by a trip to the local convenience store to buy coffee and the 40-minute wait which ensued due to their shift change.

  L. M. Townsend-Crow was born and raised in Michigan, but now lives in California with her partner Crow, their daughter Catherine, their two boys, Eric and David, as well as various and sundry furry folk. Lisa is an ordained Wiccan Priestess and practices a sort of eclectic/Dianic Wicca as a solitary. She has also trained briefly in shamanism. Her writing has appeared in Of a Like Mind, the journal of the Reformed Congregation of the Goddess. She has had three novels published, works part time in her local library, and is attending college full time, working towards her Master's in Library Science, and is always writing some story or another.

  It wasn't easy being a professional sacrifice, Asha thought as the acrid smoke burned her nose and throat and ash drifted down from the sky like poisonous snow. It paid extremely well, but it was usually uncomfortable and sometimes quite painful. For example, at this moment she was hanging over the gaping maw of a volcano which spit hot sparks at her. She could feel her eyebrows singeing and blisters starting to raise on her extremities.

  "Right about now," Asha said through clenched teeth. "Anytime now, guys."

  The villagers to whom she had hired herself were shocked and relieved that they needn't sacrifice one of their own maidens to the dragon god who lived in this volcano. They had happily agreed to her ridiculously high price because they believed they would not have to deliver—what would a fried corpse do with one thousand gold coins? Even paying her in advance was no problem because as everyone knew, you can't take it with you. They would simply collect the coins from her meagre belongings left at the inn where she had been fed and feted the night before her death.

  "Hey," Asha said with a hiss. "Hey, you—Marduk or whatever your name is."

  Asha found that the gods were able to hear those being sacrificed. They always responded when she called to them. The dragon god who lived inside the volcano poked his head up and yawned.

  "Oh, hello," he said.

  Asha could feel the heat from his breath withering the tree to which the rope that held her was tethered. The rope began to smoke and Asha knew she was running out of time.

  "Hey, can you get me out of here?" asked Asha.

  "Oh, yeah, sure," said Marduk. "When will they ever learn, huh?"

  He nodded towards the villagers who stood a safe distance away.

  "Well for the sake of my purse, hopefully never," said Asha as the god loosed her from the bindings.

  "Easy up there you go," he said.

  "Oh, um, open wide, will you?" said Asha, reaching for the straw filled effigy she'd hidden in the blackened brush two days before.

  "Very well," said Marduk. "No sense in letting you go if they're just going to stick you up here again, eh?"

  All the villagers saw from their vantage was a black-haired girl wearing Asha's color clothing, flare brightly and briefly for moment. They bowed their heads, then made their way back to the inn to retrieve "their" money and distribute Asha's meagre belongings amongst themselves.

  Asha jingled the purse as she shouldered her pack, also previously hidden in the brush with the effigy, and whistled on her way to the nearest stream to wash off the soot and cool her burns. One thousand gold pieces would keep her nicely for a while, even after the hundred she dropped in the offering box at the temple of Marduk. It was a good scheme and one in which the gods themselves were complicit since, as the goddess Demeter had said to her on the occasion of her big pig sacrificing festival in Greece, "I am a goddess—what do I need with a bunch of dead pigs? What is wrong with these mortals?" That, and the fact that Asha always left a tithe—a "kickback" if one will—from her earnings in the box designated for the care of the poor which, she had on good authority, was a sacrifice the gods found much more useful than the bloodletting and immolation that took place on the altars.

  Of course, Asha had been under the influence of the hallucinogenic kykeon at the time, so she polled all the gods to whom she was offered, and discovered that, except for a few evil dark god exceptions (and what pantheon doesn't have at least one of those?), none of the gods really cared for the taste of human flesh.

  Of course, rather than doing the noble thing and telling people that gods really didn't care for sacrifice, Asha chose to profit from her secret. She did not recommend her chosen profession to others. Not only did she not need the competition—or her secret becoming common knowledge—but not everyone could do it. Asha had the unique distinction of being daughter to a priestess of the Fates. One day, as a young girl, she had stumbled into their realm and had seen her thread being woven. She was shooed out before she saw very much, but one thing she knew was that it was not her fate to die on the altar of any god.

  Asha arrived at a small stream a safe distance from Marduk's realm. She set down her pack and bent to wash up. The next thing she knew, she was waking up and she was bound to what felt like a stone altar. She was blindfolded, but Asha had felt enough of those altars to be pretty certain that was exactly what it was underneath her partially clad body.

  "Hey, no freebies," she muttered, trying to shimmy out of the bonds. Sometimes she could do that, but these were far too tight.

  "Oh, good, you're awake," said a woman's voice.

  "Why is that good?" asked Asha.

  "It's much more satisfactory to my patron," said the woman. "Trang hates it when they're drugged or unconscious."

  "Trang? That's a new one," said Asha, frowning under her blindfold.

  "On the contrary, he's very, very old and he's been waiting for this," said the woman. "You are the thirteenth maiden on this altar and your death will usher in a whole new era. Trang will come into his power—"

  "And rule the world," Asha finished for her. She would have rolled her eyes, but they were covered anyway. "The newly empowered ones always want to rule the world. Then they get over it when they figure out just what a pain all that responsibility is."

  "No, not just the world," said the woman and Asha could almost hear the grin in her voice.

  Asha could hear the scraping of some sort of blade on stone.

  "Hey, you know, I think you're going to have to find someone else for this," she said.

  Even if this wasn'
t how she died, she didn't especially want the pain or the scars from being cut.

  "No, you're perfect," said the woman.

  Suddenly, Asha felt fear. She had been uncomfortable before, but this woman was a master of creating pain. Asha felt it. Her body was a living harp. Each string plucked brought a new note of pain. Chords of agony played by the skilled hands of her torturer made symphony by the contrapuntal screams of not only pain, but outrage as well. She had not consented to this, nor would she be compensated, she suspected. Some crazy priestess of some obscure, petty god was inflicting some pretty significant pain on Asha.

  The torture went on for what seemed like days, but Asha was pretty sure it had only been a few hours. Still, it was long enough... gods, too long... and she wanted it to stop.

  Okay, just relax—remember, this isn't how you die... Asha thought to herself. Oh, gods, it is not how I die!

  The prospect of an eternity of the agony she was feeling created a whole new form of torture, but one she inflicted upon herself. Soon, her torturer stopped, presumably for a break.

  "Well, you're certainly hardier than the others, I'll give you that," said the woman, a little out of breath.

  "Hey, I told you that you were going to have find someone else," said Asha, somewhat breathless—and hoarse—herself. "You can't kill me here—uh, my father is, um, the local god and he protects me here. As long as I stay within his borders, I am immortal."

  The lie came easily since she'd been rehearsing it throughout the long hours of pain. It was all she had, except for her secret and she wasn't about to let that out—not yet, though it was all she could do to not scream it at the top of her lungs just to make the pain stop.

  "Well, then, we shall just have to leave these boundaries," said the woman.

  "Yeah, only I think you've broken the bones in both of my legs, so that's not gonna happen," said Asha.