8

Fishing Etiquette

Here’s a quick story for you, before we go any further:

In the earliest days of the World, Darkness mated with Chaos and produced three daughters. The first was Night, the second was Pain, and the third was Magic. Now Chaos went on and mated with the Sky, producing a son who was Evil. One day, Evil, being jealous of his stepsisters, captured Magic and took her away to his secret fortress beyond the World. But Magic called upon her Mother, Darkness, who heard her cries, and, seeing everything, saw what Evil had done.

Darkness then summoned Chaos and said, “Look what your son has done! He has taken Magic from the World.”

Chaos then turned on his son, Evil, and cast him out, and rescued Magic, restoring her to the World. Then Evil cried out, saying that he repented his act, and praying that his father not abandon him. Chaos could not turn his heart from his only son, so he relented and permitted Evil into the world as well, but from that moment on, Magic has mistrusted Evil, though Evil still pursues Magic; and Darkness watches over them both, so that wherever you find Evil, you will find Darkness there, watching; and Chaos will sometimes be found in the aid of Magic, and sometimes in the aid of Evil.

Do you like it? It is an old story of my people, and there are some who believe it literally. I myself think there are elements of truth in it, because another name for Magic is Verra, the Demon Goddess, and, who knows, perhaps the Jenoine really are Evil. Beyond that, I don’t care to venture; if there is a personification of Darkness, not to mention Chaos, then I don’t want to know about it.

So here we were, maybe in the power of Evil; at least on their world, and maybe Magic would help us, and I was very much afraid that, if the Jenoine didn’t get me, I’d trip over my own metaphors and break my neck.

These were my thoughts, then, as we stepped out of the door, and I don’t know how it was for Teldra, but for me there was a shock: the sudden realization that the entire world was not that one room of that one building.

“Anything or anyone, Loiosh?”

“Not as far as I can tell, Boss.”

We walked twenty-five or thirty feet away from it, and looked back; I was half expecting it to have vanished, but it was still there, the outside looking quite a bit like the inside, except that the surface was rougher—it seemed to be just chunks of rock stuck together. A closer look indicated an odd shape to the structure—it was hard to tell from this close, but it seemed that it had an angle to it; that it wasn’t quite straight up, and there were bits of projections sticking out. Was this significant of anything? Stupid question. What was significant and what wasn’t with these beings?

I turned my attention to the landscape, and eventually thought of Dzur Mountain.

There was nothing there that actually looked like Dzur Mountain, mind you, but—

Okay. A stream, maybe fifty or sixty feet wide, cut across and dominated the landscape, flowing diagonally toward me from my right to my left, about a hundred yards away at its nearest point; a few spindly trees with stubby branches and massive leaves all along their lengths dotted the banks on both sides, and what seemed to be a stonework bridge appeared not far away. To my right were a couple of low hills, all brown and rocky, and to my left the ground was flat but sloping gently down, maybe dipping to meet the stream, maybe not. And above it all (quite literally) was this terrible, bright object burning down on everything. I’m not trying to be mysterious—I had been to the East, and I knew damned well that it was a Furnace, just as we had in the Empire, only here, as out East (and a few places in the far West), it wasn’t hidden by a constant overcast. But I had forgotten how painfully bright it was, and how dark were the shadows it caused when it met anything else. It was low in the sky, a little to my left as I stepped out of the door, and, among other things, it highlighted everything else, including the few white puffy bits of overcast in a sky that was otherwise as blue as the sky above Fenario, giving me a very strange feeling of homesickness that juxtaposed with the harsh certainty that I was in a world that, perhaps, no other human had ever set foot on before.

So Teldra and I studied all of this, and that’s when I thought of Dzur Mountain. It was a very nice mix of natural elements, here, and I’d swear someone had crafted it. I don’t know why—I’m not sure what the indications were; but it looked for all the world like someone had sat down and said, “Okay, the river runs this way, straight, then we’ll put a curve in here. How ’bout a couple of hills?” and like that.

“You’re right,” said Teldra.

I looked at her. “I beg your pardon?”

“Dzur Mountain,” she said.

“Oh. I hadn’t realized I’d spoken out loud.”

“You muttered it under your breath.”

“Hmmm.” I wondered where I’d developed the habit of doing that? Probably from being alone so much of the time. I was going to have to watch out for that; it wasn’t a good habit.

“Nothing lives,” murmured Teldra.

I started to ask what she meant—I mean, there was grass, and there were trees and such. Then realized: I saw no birds in the air, no small animals hopping around, much less big ones; looking at my feet, I didn’t even see any insects. “You’re right,” I said. “We seem to be the only living things here.”

“Oh,” she said, smiling. “That time I did it.”

My hand strayed to my rapier, and I suddenly had the feeling that this entire world—everything that had happened since walking through Morrolan’s window—was a massive illusion; was one of those elaborate living dreams, such as I had encountered in the Paths of the Dead.

“It’s real enough, Boss.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. If there is a glamour, it’s to conceal something, not to alter the appearance of what we’re seeing.”

“That’s sort of a fine distinction, chum.”

“I know,” he told me.

Well, that was part of Loiosh’s job, so I had to trust him. Besides: if he was wrong, and it was all an elaborate dream like the ones in the Paths, well, there had been no way out of those except to treat them as real and work through them.

But the lack of critters was hard to get used to.

“What do you think, Teldra? Was this whole area fabricated?”

“Maybe, Vlad. Maybe the whole world.”

“No,” I said. “I know it wasn’t the whole world.”

“Oh?” she said. “How can you tell?”

“Because if they can do that, we don’t have a chance against them.”

She laughed. “Ah. I see. I’m not familiar with that logic.”

I shrugged. “Actually, I’m not kidding. That’s one thing I learned in the course of my long and checkered career. If your only chance of living through something is if your enemy isn’t a sorcerer, or doesn’t have a spare dagger, or can’t jump an eleven-foot crevasse, then you assume your enemy isn’t a sorcerer, or doesn’t have a spare dagger, or can’t jump an eleven-foot crevasse.”

“Hmmmm,” said Teldra. “I see. It makes a very practical sort of sense.”

“Yes,” I said, involuntarily remembering the guy who could jump an eleven-foot crevasse, much to my disgust—but I survived that one anyway, because he turned out to be wearing the wrong kind of boots. Long story; never mind.

There was a bit of a breeze coming from my left; not too strong, just enough to tickle the back of the neck. It brought no smells except the sort of sweet scent that seemed to be part of the air here. This reminded me, again, to keep my breathing even and shallow.

“Well,” I said, “Teldra, you must have studied all the old songs and stories, and you must be better read in history than I am, and since I almost never attend the theater, you must attend more often than I do.”

“Perhaps,” she said.

“Well then? What does one typically do in a situation like this?”

Teldra looked at me.

“I mean, usually when one finds oneself on an entirely different world, barely able to breathe, surrounded by a bizarre environment, beset with enemies with the strength of gods, and with no way home—what are the usual steps?”

She barely cracked a smile.

“Usually,” she said, “one calls for help of one’s patron god, who then assigns one an impossible task in exchange for minimal aid, which aid turns out to be ironically fatal. Or else one discovers a powerful artifact of unknown properties, which, upon use, proves to take over one’s soul, so that, after the rescue, one kills one’s beloved.”

“I see. Well, now you know why I almost never attend the theater.”

Teldra supplied the obligatory chuckle and I looked out once more at the world around us—suddenly taken by the fear that Morrolan and Aliera would not come, and the Jenoine would not come, and we would find no way out; that we would remain here for the rest of our days. Which days, now that I thought of it, wouldn’t be long if we didn’t figure out how we were going to eat. But I knew this fear was groundless. Whatever Morrolan had done in the past, I knew that he would never stop trying to rescue us as long as he was alive. And, of course, things being as they were, death might not manage to stop him either.

I sighed.

“You know, Loiosh, if anyone had told me yesterday at this time that thirty hours later I would have rescued Morrolan and Aliera, nearly killed the Demon Goddess, and found myself trapped in a prison the size of the world, unable to decide if I was hoping to be saved or was hoping not to be saved, I’d have said, ‘Yeah, sounds about right.’”

“You probably would have, Boss.”

“I think this says something about my life choices.”

“Uh huh.”

I looked around at the world, noticing the perfection of the stream, the hills, the mountains—the general sense that everything had been planned and crafted. I had the sudden irrational (and, I’m sure, wrong) notion that this little part of the world was all there was—that everywhere out of sight was just sort of grey and unfinished; and I was also again reminded of the Paths of the Dead, though I’m not sure why.

Teldra and I began walking. The ground was soft and springy, and we soon reached the banks of the stream, which were only two or three feet above the flow. I leaned over and stared into it, watching it. It hardly seemed to be moving, yet occasionally the crests would break into diminutive whitecaps. It was neither blue nor green nor red, as is most of the water I’ve seen, but sort of an olive; I could not imagine what accounted for this. I couldn’t see the bottom, but it seemed neither shallow nor dirty.

“What is it, Boss?”

“This water.”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know. It’s no more natural than the rest of this place, but … it isn’t perfect.”

He said nothing; I continued studying it. Teldra remained a foot or two behind me, silent, the soul of patience. I stooped, then knelt. I reached out toward the water, then changed my mind, holding my hand motionless. Then I—how shall I put this—extended my senses. It’s hard to describe; it’s sort of like the difference between hearing something and intensive listening; or between resting your hand on velvet, and closing your eyes and luxuriating in the feel of it; only with a sense that … oh, forget it. It’s a witch thing.

In any case, I reached out, for the water, and—

“Yes,” I said aloud.

“Yes?” echoed Lady Teldra.

“Yes,” I agreed.

She waited.

I turned to her. “The water,” I said. “It isn’t water.”

She waited.

“Boss—”

“I don’t know, Loiosh; I’m working on it.”

Aloud I said, “The water isn’t like the rest of the place. Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s—I don’t know. I want to follow it.”

“All right, Vlad. Upstream or down?”

“Uh … you ask good questions.”

The source or the result; the theoretical or the practical; find out what it all means, or go straight for where something can be done about it. A moment of sublime indecision, with a chance to learn something deep and important about myself. Or perhaps not; I know that by inclination I’m a source man; I like to understand things as completely as possible, but if I was to do something before things were done to me, I couldn’t take the time.

“Downstream,” I said. “Let’s see where this goes.”

She nodded, Loiosh mumbled an agreement into my mind, and we set off. The stream meandered gently, the ground underfoot was soft and springy if uneven; the air still had that sweetness. I was getting used to taking shallow breaths. The scenery didn’t change much, and the water was quieter than the forest streams I’d become used to finding by sound and smell.

After most of a mile, I realized that I was hearing something—a low sort of rumble. It was oddly difficult to localize, but seemed to come from ahead of us.

“Loiosh, you said you couldn’t fly, but—”

“No, I can do it, I think.”

“Then—”

“I’m on my way, Boss.”

He left my shoulder and flew off ahead of me, his flight strong and smooth, mostly gliding, wings flapping now and then, smoothly; quite graceful, actually.

“Gee, thanks, Boss.”

“Oh, shut up. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I can manage. I just have to glide a lot, and I won’t be able to keep this up very long.”

“You won’t have to. What do you see?”

“I’d say water, only you claim it isn’t water, so … wait a minute. It’s getting louder. It’s—”

“Yes?

“Well, it’s safe enough. Come ahead.”

“All right.”

The ground rose a little, leaving the water—or whatever it was—about twenty feet below us in a sort of cleft, like a scale model of a river valley, all green and stuff. Loiosh returned to my shoulder as I took the last few steps. The roaring became louder—like, each step noticeably increased the volume; soon we’d have had to shout to be heard, and at about that time we came over a rise and saw it—a waterfall, or it would have been a waterfall if whatever was falling had been water. Certainly, it behaved like water as it went over the lip and struck the bottom, about a hundred or a hundred and twenty feet below; complete with what seemed to be mist springing up from it. The lip was narrower than the stream, I’d say about thirty-five feet. The “water,” for lack of a better word, rushed over it in a tremendous hurry to reach the bottom. I watched, fascinated the way one sometimes is by nature, though I hesitate to call it “nature”—I didn’t believe this was any more natural than anything else I’d seen since I got here.

It fell majestically. It foamed and swirled in the pool at the bottom, before heading off downstream; I picked out particles and watched them plummet; I watched the mist rise and curl. I wondered what it was.

On my arm, I felt Spellbreaker stir. Just a little; a sort of twitch that could almost have been my imagination, but no, it wasn’t.

And then I knew.

Of course, you—who have heard all of my story to this point, and are now sitting back drinking your favorite wine and listening to my voice pour out—you had it figured a long time ago. And, I suppose, I ought to have too. But it is one thing to hear about it, and quite another to be there with it, watching it, hearing it, and not really wanting to believe that you’re looking at what you think you’re looking at.

“Amorphia,” I said aloud, naming it, making it real. According to some of the beliefs surrounding the practice of witchcraft, to name it was to give it power; according to others, to name it was to give myself power over it. This felt like the former.

“What?” shouted Teldra.

I leaned over until I was talking into her ear. “Amorphia,” I repeated, making my voice calm, as if I were announcing nothing of any importance. “The stuff of chaos.”

She stared at it, then nodded slowly, leaned over, and spoke into my ear. “Yes,” she said. “You’re right. It is amorphia. Only controlled. Going where the Jenoine wish it to go, and doing what they wish it to do.”

I nodded, and led us back from the brink, just a score or so of paces over the hill so we could speak in normal tones. I said, “I didn’t think amorphia occurred anywhere except at home.”

“Neither did I,” she said.

I grunted. “So, which is scarier—that they have created a river of amorphia, or that they are able to create a river of amorphia? Or, for that matter, the fact that the Jenoine have permitted us to see all of this?”

“I begin to believe,” she said, “that the reason we haven’t been molested is that, quite simply, we are too insignificant to worry about.”

“Insulting,” I said, “but it could be true. It would explain why we’ve been permitted to see this, too—we just don’t matter.”

Teldra exhaled briefly through her nose and watched the scene. I watched with her. She said, “And we were wondering if there was any magic here.”

I listened to chaos splash over the cliff. From where we stood, we could see the rush of the gathered amorphia about to plunge over the falls. Now that I knew—or, perhaps, now that I had admitted to myself what it was—it looked even less like water; the color changed as you tried to focus on it, but now appeared mostly to fluctuate between steely grey and a dark, unhealthy green. And while it almost behaved as water should, it didn’t quite do that, either.

“Well, we’ve certainly learned something,” I remarked into the air.

Amorphia. The stuff of chaos. According to some, the stuff of life; according to others, the basic building block of all matter and energy. I didn’t know; I wasn’t a magical philosopher, and I’d certainly never studied the ancient, illegal, and frightening branch of sorcery devoted to such things.

I’d used amorphia once, and since then had skimmed a couple of Morrolan’s books to pick up useful-looking spells, but I’d never studied it.

I had used it once.

A long time ago, in the heart of the city, trying to save the life of Morrolan (who was dead at the time; don’t ask), faced by several sorceresses of the Bitch Patrol—the Left Hand of the Jhereg—I had called upon abilities I didn’t know I had, I had hurled something at them they could not have anticipated any more than they could counter it.

Yes, I had done it once.

I let that memory play around in my head, remembering the feel of a tavern floor against my face, and a sense of desperation; a desire to do something, anything, and the explosive release of a power I had inherited because, once, my soul had been close kin to the soul of some idiots who played around with that power. That day, I had been an idiot, too, and had been rescued by Aliera before I dissolved myself and a section of Adrilankha into the basic component of all matter and energy, or whatever it was.

I remembered that day, years ago, and separated from me by so many experiences that it might as well have happened to a different person.

Only I wasn’t, really, a different person. And, try as I might, I couldn’t shy away from the implications of that.

“Boss—”

“Not now, Loiosh. Let me work it through on my own; there are too many angles to this thing.”

“All right.”

If anyone asked me if I knew the Elder Sorcery, I could say no with a clear conscience. I didn’t know it, in any meaningful way.

But—

The Elder Sorcery is, perhaps, the most difficult branch of magic, at least until you try to throw them all together and tie them up in some object where you also keep your soul so you get to call yourself a “wizard” for whatever satisfaction that will bring you. I had once harbored illusions about learning sorcery as it was practiced before the Empire, before the Orb, before what I’d call civilization. I had a sort of start, owing to an accidental relationship in my past life. I abandoned the study early on, because not only was it difficult, and scary, but I just had too damned much else going on in my life at the time.

But I did have a pretty good memory of step one—that is, the first and easiest spell, the one necessary to continue on to the more difficult spells. And this spell, if I could pull it off, just might prove useful.

My brain raced, and worked at a few of the angles until it ran down, by which time I had already opened up my small pouch of witchcraft supplies, and dug around for a bit. I didn’t have a lot of stuff with me, and everything I did have was valuable, but what can you do? I picked out the ceramic bottle of dira juice because it wasn’t too hard to come by, and the main use it had was treating a particular jungle fever that I’d so far managed to avoid. I poured the contents on the ground. I noticed Teldra looking a question at me. I shook my head.

I found a loop of leather and hung it around the neck of the bottle; then I walked over to the bank where the amorphia flowed like water.

Teldra cleared her throat. “I was just wondering,” she said, “how you’re going to keep the bottle from dissolving in the amorphia you’re trying to capture.”

“Oh,” I said. “You’ve known Morrolan a great deal longer than I have; haven’t you read any of his books?”

“Not on the Elder Sorcery. Have you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Oh.” She considered. “And you learned how to do whatever it is you’re doing?”

The questions were a bit intrusive for Teldra, but I couldn’t blame her; hanging around while an incompetent plays around with amorphia is worth at least a couple of innocent questions.

“More or less,” I told her.

She bit her lip and didn’t ask anything else, for which she ought to have received whatever sorts of medals her House gives out.

I started the bottle spinning in a wide, slow loop, directly in front of me, about a foot over the stream. “It really isn’t that difficult,” I said, “if all you want to do is capture some of it. It’s just a question of speed.” As I spoke, I started spinning the bottle a little faster—not much. “Amorphia will take, uh, some measurable fraction of a second before it begins to operate on matter that comes in contact with it. The trick is just to get it before it destroys or alters whatever vessel you’re using to capture it.” I glanced at her. “Move a couple of steps to the right, please.”

She did so, silent.

The other trick is the little matter of the spell.

There isn’t a lot to say about it. It’s a pretty simple spell, really—well described by the book. You just draw the power through your link to the Orb.…

Yeah.

There’s the catch. The whole “link to the Orb” problem. I was currently missing one of those.

To the left, however, there were alternatives, if you were willing to risk interaction with unfettered, raw amorphia. I happened to have a supply of that near to hand.

I stared at the stream.

Do you know how hard it is to look at water? To see it, when it’s flowing past you? You see foam, or swirls, or crests, or whitewaters, or maybe the streambed, or maybe the reflection off the surface, but it is very hard to actually see the water. It is even harder when it isn’t actually water, but amorphia, the quintessence of formlessness; it is hard to see formlessness, because what we see is form. Try it sometime, if you have any raw chaos lying about; it is simultaneously too much and too little to grasp.

But I kept trying, staring at and then past the subtle color shifts, rigorously refusing to believe in the shapes my mind tried to impose on the shapelessness. And at length—I don’t know how long it was—I began to seep into it. Those sorcerers who spend a lot of time working with amorphia say that every such experience is a step closer to madness. Judging from Aliera and Morrolan, I think that is probably true. But fortunately, I didn’t have to go too far, just enough contact for one little spell.

I felt a response within me; something like and yet unlike the first feelings that a spell is working. To the right, I felt as if I were secure and comfortable and relaxed, and to the left I felt as if I were on the edge of a precipice and one small step, or the loss of my balance, would send me hurtling over into insanity.

The balance issue was a good metaphor, and also quite real, because, as I readied the spell, I leaned over the stream. Should I slip in, it would be a quicker death than many that I’ve come near, but it isn’t how I choose to spend my last measurable fraction of a second.

I changed the angle, so instead of spinning parallel to the stream, it was almost perpendicular. I timed the spin—it was just over a second for a full loop. I wished I remembered just what the measurement on that measurable fraction of a second was; at the time, that hadn’t been the sort of detail I was interested in, not being able to imagine being in this situation. Was it around half a second? A little less? I sped up the spin just a trifle, then let my breath out slowly.

“Here we go,” I said aloud. “Keep your eye on this thing; there should be something flying out onto the shore behind me.” I executed, or perhaps I should say released the spell as I lowered my arm so the bottle splashed into the stream.

The first good news was that I didn’t fall in; but I hadn’t really expected to.

The second good news was that the stream didn’t splash on me; I’d been afraid of that, but couldn’t think of a good way to avoid it.

The third good news was that the leather suddenly felt lighter in my hand, and a glance told me that there was nothing hanging on the end.

But the real good news was that Teldra cried out, “I saw it! Something flashed. It went off that way.”

I followed her pointing finger, dropping the leather just in case there were unpleasant things clinging to the end of it.

The grass here wasn’t terribly long; it only took five minutes or so before I found it. I reached down and picked it up, just as if doing so didn’t scare me.

It took the form of a small stone, perfectly round and about an inch in diameter; it was very heavy for its size, and had a sort of milky hue somewhere in between blue and purple.

“Got it,” I said, holding it up.

She came over and inspected it, Loiosh doing the same from my shoulder.

“Pure amorphia,” I said, “but in a form that can be worked with.”

“If you say so,” said Teldra.

“I say so.”

I slipped it into my pouch as if it were no big deal.

Teldra nodded as if it were no big deal, and said, “All right, then, Vlad, what next?”

That was a good question. But I now had Spellbreaker, a powerful Morganti dagger, a chunk of amorphia, my training as a witch, and my native wit. Might as well use them for something.

I said aloud, “Patience my ass; I’m going to go out and kill something.”