Cold Magic

The old man looked at me, looked at the personage, and heaved a sigh as of grief. He saw the mirror at once, of course, but the mirror did not see him. Bards and djeliw had the ability to manipulate and respect the essence that flows through the spirit world. For them, so scholars believed, mirrors were a conduit into the spirit world that lies intertwined with our own. I was shocked at his lack of vitality and the poorness of his clothing. Bards and djeliw were often feared and sometimes only grudgingly tolerated, but it never paid to scant on the offerings you made to a person who could mock you in the street for your miserliness.



“You can use that mirror,” said the personage.



“It will do, Magister,” said the old man, “for you can be sure I can make use of any mirror. Naturally a man of your exalted inheritance—child of Four Moons House, descendant of the sorcerers and their warriors who crossed the desert in the storm, those from whom Maa Ngala, Lord of All, removed all fear so they could guide and protect the weak and the helpless—knows what he is about, and he has decided already what it is he means to do. Is this the one?”



“Heard you a lie in what they said?” demanded the personage with an edge to his voice that made me shudder.



The old man merely shrugged as he looked at me and then away. “I heard no lie.”



“Then do what you were hired to do. Certainly you’ve been recompensed handsomely enough.”



“So I have, Magister.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a ball of yarn.



Once or twice in your life the iron stone of evil tidings passes from its exile in Sheol into that place just under your ribs that makes it hard to breathe. That makes you think you’re going to die, or that you’re dead already, or that the bad thing you thought might happen is actually far worse than you had ever dreamed and that even if you wake up, it won’t go away.



Uncle trudged down the stairs with shoulders bowed. He wouldn’t look at me. Aunt sailed down in his wake with her head high and her expression so drawn I knew she was trying not to cry. Shiffa halted at the top of the stairs beside a trunk.



In the mirror, the humble ball of yarn appeared not as yarn but as a glimmering and supple chain of gold. Now I was shaking. Aunt walked up to me and embraced me tightly, pressing her lips to my ear and mouthing words in an unvoiced voice I alone could hear.



“For now, you must endure this. Speak no word of the family. Say only that you are eldest. Give away nothing that might give them a further hold on us.” She drew back, kissed me on each cheek, and said audibly, her voice a tremolo, “My dear girl.”



“You’ll stand as witnesses for her,” the magister said to Aunt and Uncle.



“Legally, you are required to provide two competent witnesses as well,” said Aunt, her expression sharpening as with hope of a reprieve. Uncle said nothing. He would not even raise his head to look at me. “As you have no witnesses, the ceremony cannot proceed tonight. Very well, feel free to return tomorrow—”



He rapped his cane on the floor three times. An echo resounded, the house throwing the spell back at him, but it wasn’t any use. We heard a tramping and stamping before the door burst open and slammed against the wall.



“Gracious Melqart protect us!” Evved croaked from below.



Up they thumped as my heart galloped until I became dizzy with dread. And just as quickly I was crackling with indignation, for he had summoned his coachman and his footman to be his witnesses. The coachman was a burly fellow with white skin and spiky white hair, and the footman, who rode in the back and opened the door for his master, was a perfectly ordinary man of Afric origins.



Then I looked in the mirror, and all my indignation vanished, even my dread. I was simply too stunned to feel anything.



There stood the coachman, exactly the same. But the footman was not a man at all, not when you could see what I could see in the mirror. He was a woman, first of all, so tall and broad-shouldered and powerfully built that a glamor disguising her as a man would be easy to bind. In the mirror, she was limned by a phosphorescent glow, bright orange and flaring blue, and she had a third eye, a mystic eye of light in the center of her forehead, that allowed her to see from this world into the spirit world.



An eru she was, for the evidence in the mirror told me she could be nothing else.



My father had transcribed in his journals the tales old people told him in their villages. He recorded the words of scholars as they debated what they knew and did not know. He observed; he described; he speculated. The eru were servants of the long-vanished Ancestors. They were powerful spirits that could cross from the spirit world into this world and back again. They were born out of the ice and, like winter, were too potently magical for any mere human to control. The eru were masters of storm and wind; they need bow before no mere earthly creature.