was the most beautiful of the ladies of power, saving only Beauty herself, my wife was lovely, and her loveliness was not diminished even when divided between my daughters. Look at them!" Gallowglass unlidded the other barrels, and lifted up his daughters, and Orem looked, though he had no wish to see.
Orem could not, but he murmured his assent. To him the daughter was as utterly old as the mother, for what years had not done, brine did.
"Golden hair, and her sister dark, like day and night walking through the city. I touched them with no spell to make them beautiful - it was in them, it was them. And ah, the men who pled with me to give them up. But I was saving them for a better lover than any man." Again the bright tears flowed from the emerald eyes. "I was saving them for Death, who crept in and seduced them as I helplessly looked on. Shriveled them, wasted them under my eyes. But I have enough power to waken them. I can draw them back. You saw it!"
"Yes," Orem said.
"Oh, by the Sisters, by the Hart, by that damnable God who broke our power and penned us in, if only I knew what the masters knew! I slay the hart in the tower, so my competitors will see the corpse and worry that perhaps I have more power than they - but I know nothing to do with that blood except foolish tricks of invisibility, and that can be done with sheep! I draw the hart's blood, and what does it accomplish? It proves to me again my weakness." He closed the barrels, tamped down the lids again. "My life is here, shriveling in brine. But with your gifts I will be the strongest in Hart's Hope, the greatest of them all. And yet." He wandered off to the stairway, intoning to himself. "Strongest of them all, and yet still too weak, still too weak, I couldn't save them."
That night Orem did not sleep long. He awoke disturbed, and on the cot, not in the mahogany room. In his dream the pickled head of the wizard's wife had called to him, and so he went to her, because he could not deny her.
There was a faint light in the library. It came from the green luminescent slime on the barrels. He sat on a pile of rubbish in the cluttered, unmagical room. He watched.
It was the barrel that held the wizard's wife that shuddered first; then the others, as if the bodies inside were having silent convulsions, rocking the kegs, sloshing the water. Then a lid popped up loudly; another split in half; the third was sucked down into the barrel, and the water seeped and flowed over the top of it as it was drawn down.
In the dream there had been no danger, but Orem was afraid. Things that were dead ought to keep still, everyone knew that. But when the dead call, only a fool refuses them. And so he stayed and watched as a hand reached up from one, from two, from all of the barrels, long-fingered hands, with green light dripping slow as caterpillars down to the wrists, into the water.
"Don't hurt me," Orem whispered.
Abruptly the hands all thrust out toward him. He gasped, reached out with his power of negation to try to stop them; but this was not magic, not the blood-bought magic that a Sink could swallow up. The hands were undisturbed by his strongest effort. They reached over the barrels' lip, and a single finger of each began to write in the slime. Orem could read the dark lines in the green shining, each woman writing her word, each trembling as if an uncontainable power controlled them. "Sister," wrote the wife. "God," wrote the dark daughter. "Horn," wrote the light daughter. Then faster, as the hands grew more sure.
woman writing her word, each trembling as if an uncontainable power controlled them. "Sister," wrote the wife. "God," wrote the dark daughter. "Horn," wrote the light daughter. Then faster, as the hands grew more sure. Go Ho ter d rn Slu Sla St t ve one Yo Yo Yo u u u M M M ust ust ust Se Se Sa e rve ve
Then the hands shook violently, flew up in the air and splashed down again, then reached out, but kept getting sucked back in, as if they were struggling to write more, or even to leave the barrels