David Drake - Balefires

"Thank you, Mrs. Trader."

"Thank you, sir." She gathered up the part-loaded tray and stepped crisply up the remaining double flight of polished hardwood. Mr. Judson was looking peaked and she did wish he would eat bacon in the morning, but on that score he was more determined than she."Orange juice or bacon, Mrs. Trader, but not both. Male, both of them, and together they would overbalance me hopelessly." Terrible things, queasy stomachs, and the green robe did nothing for his complexion. A pretty thing it was by itself with all the astrology symbols in silver on the hem, but not proper dress for a sickly man in the morning.

She rapped smartly on the door to the third story, squarely in the middle of the great red-lacquer eye Anita had painted there."If Uncle Jud won't let me bolt my door, I at least have to know who's coming, don't I?" the girl had sneered. Mr. Judson never talked very much about his sister, but Mrs. Trader could guess that she had been the wild one of the family. Who could be surprised that the daughter took after the mother when the poor child had not so much as a father's name to bear?

A second knock brought no response. The baleful eye waited, unblinking. Well, this was the first time it had happened, but Mrs. Trader was not slow to act. Mr. Judson insisted the house be run to a schedule so as not to disturb his work. Anita should have learned that in the months she had stayed here. If she hadn't, well… Mrs. Trader swung open the door.

The room within, its walls skewed a little to the shape of the roof, was far different from Rigsbee's own austere sitting room below. The dormers were blacked out by locked shutters; a volcano lamp lighted the rug and brocade chairs, but it had overheated during the night. Its paraffin and oil were in ugly stasis within the red glass base. Mrs. Trader switched it off as she strode past into the middle room.

A pentagram had been freshly chalked on the floor; the candles at its points still stood at half their original lengths, snuffed before they burned out, and the air was heavy with incense. "Anita, it's eight-thirty," Mrs. Trader called. Aping her uncle, she thought as she glanced around the room distastefully. Though in fairness to the girl, that couldn't be true. Mrs. Trader had seen the paraphernalia arrive with the rest of Anita's baggage. Runs in the family, then.

The girl failed to come to the bedroom door either. Mrs. Trader sniffed and unlatched it herself without knocking again.

The window slammed shut in the sudden air current. It left a damp chill in the room. The walls were a brilliant, metallic yellow that matched the spread, now rumpled at the foot of Anita's bed. Anita, too, was rumpled. The coils of hair that lay silken over the sheets beneath her were no blacker than her protruding tongue. The breakfast tray slipped, smearing the golden carpet with strawberry preserve and coffee.

Mrs. Trader turned stiffly and walked toward the stairs. A candle holder smashed unnoticed beneath her foot as she strode through the middle room. "Mis-" she started, but her voice cracked and she had to lick her lips before trying again. "Mr. Judson!"

Rigsbee opened the door just in time to catch the rigid woman as she stumbled on the last step and fell toward him. The unexpected impact drove them back into his sitting room. For once, Mrs. Trader would not meet her employer's eyes as she blurted, "Dead, Mr. Judson, she's dead and murdered. Oh dear God! In her own bed!"

Rigsbee rotated the blonde woman's weight into the room, then disengaged her arms to dart up the stairs. She wept in one of the straight-backed chairs until he returned; and her tears were real, but they were shed for the thing and not the girl herself.

Rigsbee was very quiet when he came back a few minutes later. His slippers rasped a little on the steps, that was all. The skin of his face was almost the color of his neutrally short gray hair. "Look at me, Elinor," he said softly. His fingers, gentle but inexorable, guided her jaw around when she was slow to obey. He was a little man in a comic robe, but his eyes were molten zinc. "You will go home now and forget all that you saw upstairs. When you return tomorrow, you will never have known Anita, there will never have been anyone living on the third floor. Do you understand?"

"Yes." The voice from Mrs. Trader's lips was not her own, but it ruled her.

Alone in the center of his three rooms, Rigsbee changed into white. The symbols worked into the robe's borders were of thread the same shade, differing only in texture from the base cloth.

"Well?" a voice inquired from a corner.

Rigsbee shrugged. His bald spot was more apparent whenever he was depressed. "She was my niece. She was the last of my blood."

"You know what she was," the voice rasped. "She was a slut, a whore-"

"Some things are necessary… "

"Not to her. She was never that deep in-"

"She was my blood!"Rigsbee's voice racketed through the dim room and shook it to silence. He turned toward the outer wall, clasping his hands to keep them from trembling. The windows on that side were blocked by the bookshelves running the length of the long wall. Spines of blue, green, and dull red library tape marched across the polished walnut with no markings beyond a few digits in white ink. He touched one of them.

Each thin volume was a typescript of Rigsbee's own production, bound by him between sheets of gray card. No one had helped during the typing or compilation. Partly Rigsbee's purpose had been to give the volumes the slight added virtue resulting from that close contact with him. More important, however, was another consideration: each typescript was treble-columned with groups of letters and numbers in no order that would have made sense to one not adept. Rigsbee had not intentionally encoded the results of his years of searching, but the form of notation he had come to use was far more specialized than Latin and Arabic symbols could accommodate in their normal values. One trivial error of pagination, one transposition among millions of letters, unnoticed and unnoticeable, would mean instant disaster in the dark moment when the data were used again.

A very few of the cased books were not of Rigsbee's own composition. His hand moved to one of them: squat, age-blackened; its pigskin binding cracking away from the cords. He knew by heart every word of the cryptic Latin text, but he had never before seriously contemplated using it. The pages opened stiffly, parting with difficulty under his fingertips.

"You would go that far?" the voice behind him asked mournfully.

Rigsbee closed the book before answering, "Punishment that stopped with the body would not-would not for me-be enough. The finality of that act, whoever did it, can't be answered by a gas chamber or a motor accident. I'm sorry, Vera; but I have no choice."

And, "No," he said sharply, wheeling with a strand of diamond in his voice before his listener could reply, "don't tell me that I'll have to give up all this, this… " Rigsbee's voice broke but his hand slashed an arc across the room. The books, the retorts joined by crystalline worms of tubing; the charts rolled in one corner beneath the ancient astrolabe."That's already gone, it's dead. If I ignored what has happened… Vera, I wouldn't be the same man, the man who… did the things I have done."

His face was carved from gray steel. If he felt any hesitation, none of it trembled in his throat when he said, "You'll help me, Vera."

"So close," the voice whispered. "In this short time-and you will understand how short it was, some day before you are as old as I-you came closer to unity than I have done in all these ages. And now, nothing."

"Vera. You'll help me?"

"Even to make the responses to you would bring me closer to the Blackness than a thousand cycles of the Fire would erase. Dos Lintros tried to walk that line after he wrote the book you hold. Where is he now, since they came for him?"