QUICKSILVER DREAMS by Diana L. Paxson
"Aglon! I thought they'd killed you!"
He stands in her doorway, a pale figure in the moonlight that filters through the gauzy curtains, but no other man she knows has such fine shoulders or such a head of dark curly hai-r
"I'm surprised they let you come up to me at this hour-were you off on some mission? Why did they tell me you were dead?" Joia sits up in bed, throwing the covers aside in welcome. It must be late indeed, for the Aphrodisia House is silent.
He does not answer. Shadow veils him as he comes towards her. Then he's by the bed and once more the lightIalls across him. She sees him pale as a marble statue of a god-all except for the black gash in his throat where the blade went in ... She opens her lips to scream, but his touch freezes her.
Cold! He is so cold ...
"Eshi's tits! Joia, you gone crazy?"
The sharp slap was muffled by bed-curtains. Still whimpering, the girl fell back against the silk cushions. A dark figure moved; light sparked from the flints and a wavering spark of lamplight firmed and grew.
"You're not Aglon!"
"Aglon's dead! You little bitch, have you had so many men you can't even remember?"
"Ricio ..." The name ended in a little catch of the breath. The girl pushed herself onto one elbow, brushing tumbled auburn curls away from her eyes. "Thank the gods! I thought Aglon's ghost was ... after me! I was so afraid."
She reached out to him, but he shrugged away her hand. He was very young, and the welts where she had scratched him were already rising red on his chest.
"Ricio, sweetest," whispered Joia. "You're not going to get mad just because I had a little nightmare? Look, I'm awake now. Don't want to waste the rest of the night, do you?"
"What's the use, if every time I touch you, you think I'm Aglon! I suppose all us garrison men are alike to you!" He sounded sullen, and she hid a smile.
"Oh, Ricio, it was a nightmare! He didn't mean anything to me once I met you!" This time he did not brush away her caress, but he was still frowning. "Look-this is the only thing he ever gave me-" Lamplight played like quicksilver on the glimmering surface of the ball the girl took from the night table. His belt pouch was hanging on the bedpost, and she dropped it in. "You take it, Ricio. I don't need it .anymore!"
Despite his pique his body was responding. Joia's hands grew bolder.
"You scratched me ..." he said hoarsely, turning at last.
"I'll kiss it better, so?"
The guardsman groaned and eased back against the cushions as she bent over him.
"He came to me-last night. It was terrible ..." Joia took a very small sip from the porcelain teacup that Valira pressed into her hand, then set it down again. Valira sighed. She was only twenty-two; even at the Aphrodisia House that was not yet old. The careful bleaching that lightened her Ilsigi-dark hair into something nearer gold hid no grey. Perhaps it was having a little daughter of her own that had made the other girls think of her as motherly.
"You were with Ricio?"
"He paid for the whole night," explained Joia. "In my nightmare I thought he was Aglon and I woke up fighting. And then he got jealous when I told him what was wrong."
"Puppy-" said Valira, resting her elbows on the inlaid wood of the table- It was new, like most of the furnishings, like most of the facade of Sanctuary-a glossy surface to hide the fact that underneath, not that much had changed. "You'd think he would sympathize. Aglon was his comrade."
Joia shook her head. "Ricio is very young." Her hennaed curls hung limp, and the violet shadows around her eyes owed nothing to the paint pot. "I told Ricio that I never loved Aglon, but it wasn't true. Oh, Valira, I fought him, but I wanted him. He was like ice inside me, and ne just kept on. And now I can't seem to get warm."
Joia was wrapped in a fluffy shawl of silk and wool which had probably been looted from some northern valley, and Valira felt the smooth skin of her own forearms pebble with chill despite the sultry heat of the day. One of the new girls came into the breakfast room, heavy-eyed and abstracted, nursing her own cup of tea.
"I wanted him," said Joia, "and now I'm afraid." "Did you have a nightmare?" asked the other girl. Flaine was new, and pretty in a kittenish sort of way, another escapee from the streets of Sanctuary.
"I hope that's all it was!" muttered Joia,
"I had bad dreams too-" said Flaine. "They must have been dreams ... he promised me-" Her pouting lips closed tightly.
"Something pinched me all night!" said another girl. "Couldn't sleep a wink, an' when I woke I felt all black-an'-blue!"
Valira raised one eyebrow. The child looked hagged, but she could see no marks on the dark skin.
"We seem to have an epidemic-"
"If Lythande were still in town I'd ask Myrtis to talk to him," Joia said suddenly. "Do you know anyone in the Mageguild who'd take out the price of his help in trade?"
Valira laughed. "When a wizard gets homy all he has to do is summon up a few succubi! Anyway, I've never seen any of that crowd here."
"But you grew up in Sanctuary!" said Joia. "You must know someone!"
Valira frowned, remembering a little man with ginger hair whose painting had shown her her soul. He had recommended her to Myrtis, had taught her that even a half-penny whore from Sanctuary's waterfront could have a future. And when his wife, Gilla, stayed here during the False Plague Riots a few seasons back, she had been kind.
"You do know a mage!" exclaimed Joia, watching her. "Please help me, Valira-I'm afraid!"
"Lalo is not exactly a wizard - . . and his wife is more than enough woman for him," Valira said slowly. "I don't know if he can help. But I'll take you to see."
"Go back to the Mageguild if you want formulae'" Lalo exclaimed. "I've told you-I don't work that way!" He pushed the diagram back across the worktable to Darios. His easel was waiting beside the window with the finest imported paints beside it. Why was he wasting the moming light talking?
"All arts have rules. Can it hurt you to try and think systematically?" the young man asked patiently, "Why do you think the gateway you visualized to reach my spirit when my body was walled up in that vault worked so well?"
"Because I'd painted the thing in the first place-" Lalo began.
"You didn't make up the design!" Darios shook his head. "The details you remembered so clearly came from S'danzo tradition. Without those symbols the Otherworld would be impossible for the human mind to comprehend. The images let us focus our perception of reality, just as we control our emotions through words." The young mage paused for breath. "Look-here is the first plane-that's the world around us, the world you know-" He tapped the crudely drawn diagram.
Lalo glared at him. The boy was unnatural. Lalo was the one who should have been making the careful explanations, complaining about hotheaded youth when his apprentice protested as his own master used to do. But it was only a fluke of fate that had made the mageling his student at all.
"You're wasting your time, Darios. Why don't you go back to the Mageguild? Now that things have settled down, they're trying to rebuild the school," Lalo exclaimed. It was not yet noon, but the day was hot already. He could feel perspiration adhering his thin tunic to his skin like one of Cholly's glues. "What in the name of Us do you think you can leam from me?"
"The things that no one at the Mageguild knows." Darios combed his fingers through his curly black beard. Young as he was, it flowed across his chest like a master's. Gilla's feeding had filled him out. He took refuge sometimes in a dignity that gave him the air of a much older man.