Authors: Alice Borchardt
Cateyrin made a terrible sound, but Ilona threw both arms around her and held her back. By then there must have been sufficient blood in the cup to interest the Fand, because she plucked it from her servant’s hand and drank. When she was finished, she handed the cup back to her Fir Blog servant.
“Tonight this darling of mine”—she gestured toward Meth—“will share an intimate little supper with me. But alas, only I will dine. Were he handsome, intelligent, witty, or even modestly amusing, I might allow him to continue to exist for a few weeks. But he is none of those things, so . . .”
She lifted Meth’s hand and placed his smallest finger in her mouth. He reeled slightly, but had no other reaction when his hand fell away from her lips. Where his little finger had been, there remained only a raw, oozing stump.
“Get Cateyrin out of here,” Albe snarled.
“Not so fast,” the Fand said. “Let me make my offer. I will return him to you. My larder is full and I have more slaves than I need. In return, you give me the two women.” She pointed to Albe and me. “And let us say, half the jewels,” she continued. “After all, you deserve a little something for your trouble. Fear not, the fighting women are a valuable commodity to me and will come to no harm at my hands. In return, I will leave my slaves here to protect you from those who might feel cheated by these women’s theft of the mariglobes. Come, think of it. Five strong slaves. He”—she gestured at Meth again—“is only slightly damaged. Half the jewels, a king’s ransom. That many of the marvel stones, glittering wonder workers, all for you.”
“No!” Ilona snapped. “Be gone, you evil thing!”
“Mistress Ilona, you didn’t let me finish. When I show you that I have the means to take what I want, I believe you will have reason to reconsider my generous offer.”
Ilona, Albe, and I backed away, dragging Cateyrin with us. The dress the Fand wore shimmered with a fiery, white light. It grew brighter and brighter until it was almost blinding, and while we watched, the portcullis began to glow a dull red. Then it began seething, sending out the sort of vapor a new sword shows at the forge.
Yes,
I thought.
She can make it red-hot. But even a red-hot bar won’t give until it is stricken by hammer.
But by then, the central bars were turning white and big drops of metal began to rain down from the melting gate to the floor. A hole began to appear in the center of the gate.
We backed deeper into the passage until we reached the central room of the house. The hole in the center of the dully glowing portcullis grew larger and larger.
“Close the wall, Mother,” Cateyrin wailed. “Close the wall!”
She was speaking of the second level of defense, the wall whose dagger-sharp crystals met like a vicious set of teeth and could shred then crush anything between them.
“I can’t!” Ilona screamed. “I can’t! It won’t work!”
“No, it won’t.” The Fand spoke, seemingly unconcerned. “The machines that close the walls are metal, and they are melting also. As are your swords,” she added as an afterthought.
I tossed mine aside. Albe swore and followed my example. I imagine the hilt was heating in her hand, as mine was.
“Cateyrin, run!” Ilona screamed.
The actinic shimmer of the dress the Fand wore grew brighter. The white-hot bubbling of the metal in the door increased, and the hole grew wider.
I had only one idea, and I didn’t think it was a very good one. But it was the only solution that presented itself.
I leaped toward the melting gate. It was only red-hot at the edges, and I knew my armor would protect me for a time. But even with the protection of my armor, I felt a flash of pain when my hand rested on the steel grating. I felt the surge in my chest as I moved the gate just a little from the reality of the city. Then I turned and ran back toward Albe and Ilona.
“Get me some water!” I shouted, and just then Cateyrin returned with a bucket.
I snatched it out of her hand, ran back toward the portcullis, and hurled the contents of the bucket directly at the steel grating. A second later, scalding steam filled the narrow corridor.
I threw the bucket back at Cateyrin. “More water!” I shouted.
The air was clearing as the steam condensed into rivulets of water on the cold, stone walls. I found I could see the Fand again. She looked baffled, gazing at the cooling iron grating.
Then she said, “I see. Here and not here.”
The portcullis thinned to the consistency of smoke and she stepped through the phantom steel. Dress glowing with light and heat, she walked toward me, saying in an oddly bland, conversational tone, “Two can play at that game. You aren’t the only one who knows that trick.”
Heat seared me as she approached, and the glitter of the stones in her dress was blinding. I cannot think now why I did not run. But in life I have always known it is better to close with the enemy.
She was only a foot or so away when my fire hand shot out toward the only part of her not protected by the glittering garment she wore—her face!
My arm and hand entered the maw of a monster. I felt a half dozen rows of circular, saw-edged teeth spin and try to chew my hand and wrist to bits. A double row of a dozen suction-tipped tentacles rather like a squid’s wrapped themselves around my forearm.
I hurled every ounce of my power into my fire hand and created something like a lightning bolt. The thunderclap echoed deafeningly in the narrow corridor and what had been the Fand burst into flame. Only my armor saved me from the burst of raw, incandescent fury of the fire that consumed her. That and the fact that Cateyrin arrived with another bucket of water. I don’t know if she hurled the contents at me, the gate, or the Fand, but I was the one who got drenched, and that may have saved my life. My armor was so hot, the corridor filled with steam again, and had it been a real metal ring mail, I would have been boiled alive in it like a lobster in its shell. But it was, thank God, a creation of the faery smiths, and it shunted heat, light, and flame away from my body.
Just as well. For a few seconds I stood transfixed in front of the pillar of flame that had been the Fand. Albe had been entirely correct. It was not human, probably not even female in any meaningful sense. If anything, it reminded me of fish we sometimes catch by night in deep drift nets. There is nothing to them but a mouth filled with daggerlike teeth and a lure that rises from the fish’s back and dangles in front of that lethal mouth. On the lure, a light burns, and that lying light calls the prey into its teeth.
The thing I saw in flames before me was mostly mouth. It had, as I have said, a circular maw fitted with rings of teeth. Tentacles equipped with suction cups surrounded the mouth. The body was like a slug’s, dark, wrinkled, and wet, but amazingly ropy, with fat, which fed the roaring blaze. Instead of one lure, as the anglerfish has, it had many, and the lure nodes scattered all over its body still sustained the shadow of a young human woman’s delicate beauty, even amidst the flames. The devouring fire roared within the phantom of female beauty, illuminating and destroying it at the same time.
For perhaps a few seconds more, it continued to move toward me. Then it collapsed into a greasy, blackened but still flaming ball and I heard the golden rings and shimmering jewels of its gown clatter on the floor.
Death! It was smart enough to know death. Regret, not for its actions but for life itself. Then I saw a swamp at the bottom of a triple-canopy rain forest, a swamp created by rains of four or five inches a day. An endless green gloom shadowed by vast trees with trunks thirty to fifty feet thick, twined with vines growing so close together on the bark that the base of even the largest trees could not be seen. In between the trees, ferns ran riot and moss coated every rock and stone. A substrate so damp, so constantly wet that anything falling from above, animal or plant, rotted down to humus in a few weeks. It was filled by deep pools where these creatures took as prey any fallen or abandoned stray from above, and they fed long and well in the dark, stagnant water shaded by the tree ferns that carpeted the forest floor.
All that remained of the Fand by then was something that looked like a shrinking ball of tar with blue flames playing over the surface. With one foot I teased the ring-mail dress from under the small piece of still-simmering detritus. It was unmarked. I touched it with my foot. Not even hot. How? Why?
Knowledge flowed through me at the touch. Had I this power or was it somehow the dress?
The forest was the same one, but it was a bit more open here and the wandlike trees reaching up toward the sky looked far more primitive than the forest giants that surrounded the clearing. Or was it a clearing? The rocks that filled the open space looked like broken, jagged spires. The sky was gray and the omnipresent rain began sheeting down again, turning the moss that thickly coated the broken stone to a brilliant, vivid emerald-green.
Water came cascading down from above and poured into a hollow at my feet. I reached down to pluck something shiny from the mud and saw that the black stone seemed polished and was worked, the bottom recessed as though to form the lintel of a door. The golden rings were tangled with the broken stone and something else caught in the rings: the ribs and backbone of some animal, the brown bone so soft it crumbled at a touch.
The rings clattered then as they clattered now at the touch of my toes.
Use me!
The command was stark, clear, urgent in my brain.
Use me!
I felt the repulsion generated by the fragmentary bones to the mind of the woman I was inhabiting.
No!
A reaction from her.
Folly!
A scream from the singing rings.
I/she pulled off my pack, ready to stuff the dress into it, when something broke the surface of the water beside her/me. I glanced to my right. Nothing, only a long-dead tree, twisted branches sticking up from a rain pool. My hands were shaking with both cold and terror. Though the air was thick as a blanket around me, the endless, driving rain was cold. I shoved harder, pushing the metallic, wildly jingling things down with the rest of my plunder.
Back! Back! I had to get back!
The suction cups on the tentacles pulled me upright. My back was seared by the most terrible pain I ever felt. Then . . . nothing.
I came to myself standing, holding the ring-mail dress in my hand. One of the women who ate the dreaming jewels must have gone to whatever lost world the Fand inhabited. That jumble of moss and broken stone had been a city once, probably so long ago it gave me chills to contemplate so vast a span of time. Its ruins lay under the endless monsoon, chewed by the burrowing tree roots, stone walls undermined by rain, splintered by choking humidity and suffocating heat by day and cold by night. Everything organic in the vast refuse pile long rotted away to feed the slender whiplike trees that crowned the mound and the thick moss that coated the few indestructible artifacts imbedded in the soaking soil.
She found it and failed. Despite the warning given her by the singing rings, she failed to put it on and was taken by the Fand.
The rings gave no warning. The Fand was dead.
Ilona drenched the smear of grease with some sort of cooking oil, and it flared anew. I looked up and saw Meth lying on his back near the portcullis. The chain had dropped off his neck and lay on the floor. The Fir Blog were huddled in a fearful group near the entrance to the passage. Their chains lay on the floor, also.
Meth moaned. “No!” he shouted. “No! You killed her!”
“Yes!” I told him. “I got lucky.”
“No! No! No! No! She was the purest, most beautiful angel I’ve ever met. Oh ye Gods! How could you allow this?” He rolled over and buried his face in his crossed arms. Then he pounded his fist on the floor. “She’s dead! My only love is lost to me.”
Then he rose to his feet and I was glad he was on the other side of the portcullis. The fine wild light of madness was in his eyes. True, there was a rather large hole in the center of the iron grating where metal had melted and run, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t big enough for him to crawl through.
He seized the iron gate and shook it violently. Then he turned to the four Fir Blog crowded near the entrance to the tunnel.
“You! You were her servants. Avenge her!”
The Fir Blog had lots better sense than that—they stared at Meth, obviously completely convinced that he had gone insane.
Cateyrin screamed at him, “Are you out of your mind? She was going to eat you! She did eat your finger. Look at your right hand!”
Albe strolled casually toward the portcullis. Meth shoved one arm through one of the square openings and clutched at her throat. She kicked him rather expertly in the balls. His eyes rolled back in his head until the whites showed. He slowly fell to his knees and then, more quickly, slid to the floor and curled up.
Tuau began making odd noises. I was about to ask Ilona to get him some water, then I realized the cat was laughing. He slapped one paw on the floor, then rolled over on his back and yielded to feline mirth.
Ilona said, apropos of nothing, “I wonder if the portcullis will come up?”
Three of the Fir Blog fled, but the fourth stood his ground, frowning at us from under his heavy brow ridges. Then he spoke. His accent was so strong that even when I recognized the language, I couldn’t understand the words. Later, Ilona told me he said, “We are grateful. She was a . . . horror. Her kind are never very comfortable to serve, but this particular one . . . well, let me say only that many of us slit their own throats or hanged themselves rather than endure her . . . habits. Will we be pursued?”
“No,” Ilona said flatly.
He turned his gaze to me. I had garnered the gist of his remarks. I seconded Ilona. “No,” I said.
He turned, ducked down, and vanished into the street.
“Mother!” Cateyrin said reprovingly. “By rights they belong to you. Are you sure they can get along by themselves? After all, they’re little better than animals.”
“Not everyone agrees with your low opinion of our brethren, my dear,” Ilona said. “I believe they do well as free men.”