No Flame But Mine by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online

dilapidated crow.
    â€˜Where have you come from, Mother?’
    He was genuinely startled and disbelieving, for she did not belong among the Holas and no other human thing lived in these parts, as they knew very well. Despite leaving your own local demons behind, you often admitted there might still be demons native to the new place.
    â€˜Miles I’ve trudged, over hill and mountain, through ice-wood and ice-jungle,’ grumbled the reedy old voice below. Oddly he could hear every syllable – in Jafn, too.
    â€˜How have you survived then, Gran?’
    â€˜Wise-woman I am,’ she snapped. ‘How the cutch else, you gobbler!’
    The watchman recoiled. Perhaps though she was? But the Holas had five such women in all, plus the grouchy male werloka. Let them see to her then. If left outside she might, as some of them were said to do in legends, fly in over the wall and cause havoc.

THREE
    What came along the alleys, around the outcrops of Kandexa, was a sight to cause sore eyes not cure them. If any did see they made off, banged the shutters, told themselves it was a fluke of the shadow and the last useless bit of moon.
    For a kind of fast-growing vine crawled through the dark, over the snow and the stone.
    Up a wall, across a roof, down an old mashed stair, on through another alley.
    At the end of the wriggling, leafless, woody vine was a thing like a clawing hand, running spiderish on its far-too-many fingers.
    Thryfe, standing in his chimney prison of ice, detected the scratching outside. A rat?
    He had been unable to pierce the confine, let alone thrust it apart. For an hour therefore he had waited, aware of the horror of a gathering cold which seeped even through the psychic bubble that protected him. He had been trying to learn the nature of this sudden sorcery. For sorcery it must be. No everyday avalanche could contain such a magician as Thryfe. Even in his recent humility he knew it.
    The cold laid its own claws on his body, invading blood and muscles, vision, thought; questing. He ignored it. He must find out the motive force of this foe, for only in that way—
    The scrabbling above turned to a mad skittering.
    A tribe of rats were about to burst through the lid of ice above. Could they also break the bubble of defence? Formerly he would never have believed so.
    But formerly he would by now have freed himself. Everything had therefore become doubtful.
    The ice above split. It fell in a cloud of powder. After that another thing fell.
    He saw it dive straight down at him, a spiralling black spider already clutching for his face.
    Like a man ungifted in magic Thryfe, as best he could in the narrow space, stooped quickly away, slinging the edge of his cloak across his head—
    A voice spoke in the air.
    â€˜Greeting, man-mage. It right you bow me.’ Bow ? He had ducked . ‘Ask now, be I get you out?’
    Thryfe pushed off the cloak, then straightened. He had recognized, he thought, the dialect and syntax of the rural eastern Ruk, but with some other essence in it far more sophisticated. Yet as he expected no figure was visible. Only the spider hung dangling, which now he identified as a carved wooden hand, with other hands sprung from it and at least twenty-one fingers. Something tickled in the back of memory.
    â€˜Yes, I should like you to get me out. Is it possible to you?’
    â€˜Why I offer if not?’
    â€˜Reasonable. In exchange, what do you require?’
    â€˜Nothing. Give now.’
    Thryfe acquiesced. ‘You are part of Ranjal then, goddess of wood.’ He had heard of her, seen her temples in the eastern villages. Nothing was what she was always ceremoniously offered.
    Thryfe did not believe in gods. At least, his attitude towards them was ambivalent. Everywhere they reportedly abounded, or if not then one omni-ruling and all-purposeful God. These things to Thryfe were merely magic focuses, or the power surges either of men or of the earth, both