The Simbul's gift - Lynn Abbey [120]
"The Simbul?"
He swallowed hard. "Where did you learn that name, Mimuay?"
"From the boy in the mirror, Poppa. In the space between his momma and the Red Wizards is a silver-haired woman he calls the Simbul."
"We've done enough for today, Mimuay."
"I haven't done anything, Poppa. I've just watched. You're angry with me: you don't believe me. You think I'm telling stories. I'm not, Poppa; I wouldn't lie to you, not ever."
There was fear in his daughter's voice. She was too old to become a Red Wizard. By the time he was old enough to wonder about the truth, he'd killed a fellow enchanter outright and driven two others to madness and death. His choices had been made before his eyes had opened. But if he wouldn't teach Mimuay the way he'd been taught, how would he teach her? Was there any way to keep her fear of him from becoming hate?
No way, Master, Shazzelurt, Lauzoril's enchanted knife, sensed his thoughts, offered its advice. Kill her now, Master. Give her to me.
The zulkir quenched the knife's spirit and lifted Mimuay down from the stool. He held her in his arms, rocking her gently. Her neck fit easily between the thumb and fingers of his hand. Lauzoril knew ways to kill that owed nothing to spells or magic; she wouldn't suffer. "I believe you, Mimuay." He rubbed the hard lump at the base of her neck until her shoulders relaxed. "You'll become a good wizard." A bit of irony there: What did a zulkir know about the training of a righteous wizard? "You learn quickly, and I have to think about what I'm going to teach you next."
She wriggled in his arms, stared at him with frightening trust. "Can we protect the boy in the mirror from his enemies?"
Lauzoril thought of Mythrell'aa headed for the Yuirwood and all the stories Thrul's spy master had told him about massacres and awakening powers. If even half were true… "No, my dear."
"Not even with Kemzali? His thoughts are sad, Poppa, like Ferrin's. I don't want him to die. He's not our enemy."
Ferrin again. Lauzoril stroked his daughter's hair and said nothing.
*****
It was nearing sunset when Lauzoril went to his stable. He sent a straw man walking across the Thazalhar hills. From the stables he went to the hen-coop where he stunned two of the fattest birds and carried them to the crypt.
The peaceful world the Zulkir of Enchantment had made for himself in Thazalhar had crumbled. Mimuay's face haunted him. The mongrel haunted him. The damned witch-queen of Aglarond haunted him. His delicately balanced decision to let Mythrell'aa, Aznar Thrul, and Thrul's spy master play their bloody games without him had shattered into weak-willed excuses.
For years he'd been subject to fits of melancholy-the enchanter temperament, some called it; this was different. Lauzoril suspected his thoughts were not entirely his own-the enchanter enchanted. He suspected his beloved daughter, Mimuay; he suspected his daughter's mysterious friend: Ferrin.
Gweltaz and Chazsinal roused as Lauzoril unlocked the door at the bottom of the crypt stairs. Their bandages shimmered. Dead eyes followed the hens he held upside down.
"He brings us supper. Living supper," Chazsinal crooned.
"Ignore him. He wants something. Birds are not enough when a mighty zulkir wants. Let him bring us red meat. Living meat, dripping with blood." Gweltaz closed his eyes.
"Feed on your dreams, Grandfather," Lauzoril advised.
The hens had recovered their wits-such as hens' wits were-and struggled in his hand. The Zulkir of Enchantment could charm most lesser creatures into obedience, but not hens or sheep. He closed the door and released one hen. Unable to escape, its presence, alive and frantic, would madden Gweltaz. Lauzoril held the other above his father's linen-wrapped head and with a knife-not Shazzelurt-slit the bird's throat. Blood pulsed onto the linen and disappeared. When the bird had bled out, he dropped the carcass in Chazsinal's lap. His father began to feed, the suckling sounds obscured by the other hen's squawks.
"How important can a thing be, Grandson, if you're willing to entrust