"We have all heard of cities in South America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in the greenest corner of England. There are serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and meanwhile the foundation shudders underfoot, the bowels of the mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and tumble man and his merry-making in the dust."
-- Robert Louis Stevenson, "Aes Triplex"
I had worked for the Pyfuna family since I was old enough to follow simple instructions, like my parents before me. Nammoi had worked for them since she married me. But all things come to an end; when the old man died and the heir squandered his estate on drugs and gambling, it was only a matter of time before he had to discharge his servants, beginning with the least senior -- including Nammoi and me.
We went to the service agency and inquired as to who was hiring servants with our skills, what they were paying, what their reputation was, and so forth. We skimmed over a number of listings, copying down the details of the more promising ones, and suddenly stopped when we came to one that seemed too good to be true.
"Eighty lyn a day apiece?" I mused. "That must be a mistake."
"It says 'hazardous duty pay,'" Nammoi noted, "but it doesn't say what the hazard is, just 'inquire for details'."
"If the hazard is hazardous enough, perhaps the eighty lyn a day is justified. Would you be interested in finding out what the risks are?"
"Yes! Qisum, if we work for this person for a year, a few months even, we'll have enough enough to open a shop -- we won't just be servants all our lives."
"If we survive. Well, let's see what the dangers are."
An hour later, we were knocking at the servants' entrance of a big marble-fronted house on Meinin Avenue. The door was answered by a loshai. I had seen them before, running errands in the market for their masters, but had never spoken to one before.
"What is your business with Senqai?" the loshai asked in its incongruously deep voice. Through its lean, translucent body, I could see the lamp on the wall of the vestibule beyond.
"We are here about the listing at the service agency," I said. "We are skilled at cooking, cleaning, mending, marketing, and social filtering."
"Come with me," the loshai said. It closed the door behind us and led us down a short corridor to a simply furnished room with a few chairs, which it offered us -- I'd never seen a loshai sit down, though that wasn't surprising given the number of their legs. It asked us a number of questions about our qualifications and experience, and then asked us to wait while it summoned its master.
"Are you having second thoughts?" I asked Nammoi.
"I suppose the danger must be magical in nature, if this Senqai is a wizard," she said. "But I still want to learn more about it before we decide it's too dangerous to risk."
Senqai arrived some while later; there was no clock in the room, but the beam of sunlight coming in the the high window didn't move more than a couple of inches along the floor while we waited. He seemed to be only a decade older than Nammoi and I, though I supposed, being a wizard, he might be a good bit older than he looked.
"I suppose you're wondering why I need human servants if I can conjure loshai?" he asked.
"That thought had occurred to me, sir," Nammoi said. She was cleverer than me; I hadn't wondered, not knowing enough about loshai to know what their limitations might be.
"I am going on a journey to Eikalu in a few days," he said. "I will stay there just over a month and return. And unfortunately, the magical conditions around Eikalu are deleterious to loshai. To put it bluntly, they have a tendency to swell up and explode, or worse, to develop free will. And because I will be busy all month long casting an enormously complex, demanding spell, I cannot use magic for cooking and cleaning. I will need you, if you are willing to take the job, to travel with me, set up housekeeping in the house I've arranged to rent, and manage the household for me while I devote myself to the spell."
"What is the 'hazardous duty pay' for, sir?" I asked.
"Eikalu is built around a mana-volcano," he said. "The whole region around it is rich with mana, the energy wizards use to cast spells. It is possible to cast spells there which can't be cast anywhere else in the Commonwealth, and to cast spells in a day or a month which would require months or years elsewhere. Unfortunately, there is the risk of eruptions. A couple of times a year, on average, it ejects days' worth of mana in seconds, which can cause spontaneous enchantments. And about once in seven years, it produces months' worth of mana in a few seconds or minutes. These spontaneous enchantments are rarely fatal, but often tricky to remove. I promise, as a condition of your service, that if we experience an eruption during our stay there, I will do my best to remove any unwanted enchantments at the end of the month, after I have completed the major spell we are going there to cast. But I can't interrupt that spell to remove enchantments, whatever might happen to you or me, unless they are immediately life-threatening or absolutely prevent me from continuing the major spell."
Nammoi looked thoughtful. "Then the odds of a small enchantment happening to us during our month-long stay are one in seven, and the odds of a major one are almost one in a hundred. And if it happened, we'd have to endure it for up to a month before you could remove it?"
"Or possibly longer," he warned, "depending on how long it takes to figure out how to reverse it. I would undoubtedly be working together with other wizards resident in Eikalu on that; an eruption tends to affect many people in a similar way. For instance, the last major eruption, four years ago, left everyone within two miles of the volcano and many of those within five miles compelled to speak in verse. It took the wizards eight days to discover a general solution."
"What's the worst enchantment the volcano has ever done to people?" I asked. "You said they were rarely fatal... when was the last time it was fatal and how?"
"Eighteen years ago, a major eruption caused everyone within a few miles of the volcano to transform in various ways -- most just acquired one or two features of an animal or plant or the opposite sex, some changed more drastically. In some cases, the changes resulted in incompatible parts that wouldn't work together -- a heart too small to pump the amount of blood the body needed, or a digestive system that couldn't digest meat, though the person had teeth that were no good for anything else. In a few of those cases, I think four, the person died before the wizards could reverse the changes."
"So the odds of us dying are very slim," Nammoi concluded. "And most likely, whatever might happen can be reversed after the end of the month?"
"In most cases, though sometimes there are lasting side effects."
"I think we should take it," Nammoi said to me.
"I agree," I said. "When shall we start?"
"Today, if possible, though the hazardous duty pay won't begin until we arrive in Eikalu. For the next three days, we will be preparing for the journey."
Eikalu was three hundred miles south, in a high valley far inland from the capital; with the aid of Senqai's magic, we made the journey in a mere two hours. That was, though perfectly safe, as he assured us, far more terrifying than the abstract thought of a possible mana eruption. Being told by someone you trust that you are in no danger of falling does not, somehow, prevent your heart from racing and your mouth from going dry when nothing but a thin layer of something translucent separates you from the dizzying spaces between you and the ground.
The house Senqai had rented was three stories, including the basement, which was to be Senqai's workshop. Apparently, the conditions for the major spell he had to work, which he had never explained, were somewhat better below ground level. The servants' quarters were at the back of the house, and much like what we were used to, but since Senqai had no family and expected no overnight guests, he allowed us to pick any of the guest bedrooms for our own. So not only was the pay generous, our quarters were the most luxurious we had ever known -- or would ever know, probably.
The house was not far from the center of town. I asked Senqai where the mana-volcano itself was; apparently it was invisible to any but wizards, and the town was built around it. It occupied a small park less than three minutes' walk from Senqai's house, and only a small marker-stone between a couple of beech trees indicated the site to ordinary eyes.
Four times a day -- at sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset -- Senqai descended to the basement to work on the spell. At other times, he would pass hours in the library. He had brought an entire crate of books from his house in the capital, which I had unpacked and shelved at his direction. Sometimes he would briefly entertain guests, other wizards resident in the town; on these occasions Nammoi and I exerted our skills to the utmost, but at other times, we had more free time than we were used to, as Senqai was not a demanding master, and only required us to clean the rooms that he and we were using regularly.
In the course of going to market for food, or to the pump for water, we met the servants of the other wizards, and got to know them. To our surprise, we found that some had been living there for years, and had experienced several minor eruptions and even one or two major ones.
"My mistress always undoes the enchantments in just a few days," bragged Nysuna, a woman seemingly no older than us who worked for Kyshtu, apparently the most powerful sorceress in town, and the one who had lived there the longest. "Unless we like them and want to keep them," she added, stroking her cat-ears. "And she casts spells on us every month to keep us young and keep us from getting sick."
"Perhaps we should have negotiated for some beneficial magic in lieu of the high pay Senqai was offering," I said to Nammoi that evening.
"I don't know if it would do any good unless we wanted to live here long-term," Nammoi said. "And we would need to find another wizard-master after Senqai finishes his business here. We can take the money anywhere, but those youth spells only last while one lives near the volcano, I gather."
So things went for five days, ten, twenty. The twenty-first night of our stay in Eikalu, we retired after serving Senqai a late supper and cleaning up. We enjoyed one another's bodies and fell asleep with our arms entangled. Then, some hours later, we were awakened by strange sensations and loud crashing noises.
I woke to find myself completely covered by the sheet and blanket, though my head and arms had been uncovered when I fell asleep. I reached out, trying to find the edge of the sheet to pull it off of me, and couldn't find it, so I sat up and grasped handfuls of the sheet, pulling it toward my feet. It seemed strangely heavy, and it got more difficult to budge as the handfuls of fabric seemed to grow till they were more than I could hold. There came a noise of splitting wood and I heard a loud, deep voice, deeper than most men's, saying: "Qisum, where are you?"
"I'm right here," I called out. I reached out for Nammoi and couldn't find her at first, but as I crawled through the darkness toward the voice, I put out a hand and felt a vast wall of flesh -- her thigh, as it turned out.
"What's that?" came the deep voice again. Then the sheet and blanket were yanked away, and the moonlight from the window showed me the vast form of my wife, her legs sprawling past the broken footboard. I was hardly bigger than the palm of her hand. She was looking around, and didn't seem to see me until I waved my arms and shouted.
"You're so small!" she marveled.
"And you're bigger than before, too," I pointed out, "which must make me seem even smaller." Comparing her to the damaged furniture and the room as as whole, she seemed to have grown to more than double her original height.
"I think it must be happening to other people, too," she realized. "Listen."
Crashes and booms continued intermittently, with screams and deep rumbling sounds that might have been the screams of giants.
"Here," she said, holding out her hands next to me. "Step into my palm and let me put you somewhere I won't roll over on you accidentally."
"Good idea," I said. She carefully got out of bed and set me on the little table by the window, beside the washbasin, where I could see the street outside illuminated by moonlight. Across the street, I saw the gigantic head and shoulders of a man protruding from the wall of the nearest house; his struggles to free himself were tearing down the house around him. What would befall the other inhabitants of the house, I wondered, if they were shrunken like me?
"It must have been an eruption," Nammoi said, kneeling by the table so she could see out the window. "We should check on Senqai."
"He can't have grown as much as the fellow over there," I pointed out, "or the house would be collapsing around us. He might have grown a little, like you, or shrunk like me...?"
"Let me see what I can do for clothes," Nammoi said. Of course none of her clothes or mine would fit anymore, but after lighting a lamp, she managed to make a toga of sorts from the bedsheet and some pins -- which were tricky for her larger hands to handle. She provided me with a toga made of a handkerchief, picked me up again in one hand and the lamp in the other, and set out cautiously to explore the house, looking for Senqai. Nammoi had to crouch down and sidle through the door, but the ceilings of the house were in the old style, high enough that she wouldn't hit her head.
Most likely Senqai was in his own bed, but if he had been in another room when he shrank, Nammoi did not want to accidentally step on him. She held out the lamp and examined the floor in front of her carefully at each step. Finally she knocked at the door of his bedroom and called out, "Master! There seems to have been an eruption. Have you grown or shrunk?"
There was no answer, and we continued exploring the house -- or rather Nammoi did, while I rode along in the palm of her hand. We did not find him in the dining room, parlor, library, or his workroom -- though if he had shrunk small enough, he could have been anywhere without our noticing him. But there were no lamps lit anywhere, suggesting that he had indeed gone to bed.
"Perhaps he was in bed, but his voice was too small and quiet for us to hear him through the door?" I suggested.
"Let's find out."
She returned to his bedroom and opened the door, examining the floor in front of her before approaching his bed. The sheet and blanket were a bit crumpled, but lay nearly flat. If he had shrunk while sleeping, like us, he was too small to make a noticeable bulge in them.
"Master," Nammoi called out, "are you under the sheets?"
On a hunch, I repeated her question myself, shouting as loud as I could. An answering cry came, sounding as high-pitched to me as my voice undoubtedly sounded to Nammoi.
"Did you hear that?" I asked Nammoi.
"Hear what?"
"I think he's shrunk even smaller than I did. Set me down near his pillow there, please, and light the lamps."
While she lit the lamps, I lifted up the edge of the sheet and blanket with great effort and called out into the cavern below them, "Master, it's Qisum. I've shrunk too, though probably not as much as you."
In answer, a tiny, high-pitched voice came, but I still couldn't quite make out what it was saying. But the voice came clearer a little later, and eventually, Senqai came walking out of the cave, stark naked; he stood about half the height of my knee.
"Qisum," Senqai said, "what is happening? Has Nammoi shrunk as well? More or less than us?"
"No," I said. "Some people have grown. Nammoi seems to be about eleven feet high now -- her head almost reaches the ceiling. And a man in the house across the way is so large that his head and shoulders burst through the outer wall."
"You've found him?" Nammoi asked, approaching the bed and bending over us. "Oh, now I see him. What shall we do for you, Master?"
"Can you understand what she's saying?" Senqai asked me.
"Yes," I said, surprised. "You can't?"
"Her voice is just a rumble like an earthquake to me. Yours is pretty deep, but I can understand you."
"I suppose you'll have to call off the big spell you were working on to undo this," I said.
"Not necessarily. Let's see what we can do at sunrise. If I can cast the next part of that spell with your help, I will continue working on that and put off reversing this shrinking and growing until the end of the month. First, though, let's find out what is happening in the rest of town."
A few minutes later, with me riding in Nammoi's hand and Senqai in my lap, we left the house. In the time since we'd looked out the window of our bedroom, the man whose head and shoulders had burst out of the walls of the house across the street had disentangled himself from the house, and now knelt beside its ruins, naked, taking up most of the street, while he carefully sifted through the rubble. Even with him kneeling, Nammoi only came up to a little above his navel; he might have been forty feet high, standing. Away in the distance, over the roofs of the houses, I could see other giants even taller than him. One was so tall that none of the houses came up to her knees; by her distinctive cat's ears as she passed in front of the moon, I knew it was Nysuna.
"That's Polysi, Imtei's lab assistant," Senqai said, pointing at the smaller, kneeling giant. "Have Nammoi ask him if he knows what has become of his master." I conveyed the message to Nammoi, who shouted to Polysi, who replied in a deep rumble that I could barely make sense of.
"Did you understand him?" Nammoi asked in a lower voice, though still loud to me.
"Not much," I called out.
"He says he's still trying to find his master and the servants," Nammoi translated. "He asks if perhaps I could send you in to help search for them."
I conveyed that to Senqai, who said "Perhaps Nammoi can sift through the ruins with finer care than Polysi. But for you or I to search on foot would take days. Let's look around a little more and see where else our help might be needed."
We did so. There were only a dozen or so people in town who were much taller than Nammoi, but they had all damaged or destroyed the houses they lived in when they grew. Far more seemed to have shrunk, though it was hard to be sure as yet. After reconnoitering, Senqai directed Nammoi to return to his house, set us carefully down on the dining table with bread, cheese, and sliced fruit in reach, and then to go help Polysi search the ruins for his shrunken master and the servants.
"But tell her to return before dawn, without fail," he insisted. "I must cast the next part of the spell then, and I will need her strength."
Senqai and I ate and listened to the noises the giants were making, speculating about who had been affected and how. Even through the walls and windows, we could hear Nammoi and Polysi's conversation as they searched the ruins of Imtei's house.
As dawn approached, Senqai started getting fidgety. "Nammoi had better return soon," he said, "or the last twenty-one days' work will be wasted. I'll have to dock your pay."
The contract we had signed said that if any fault of ours led to the interruption of Senqai's spell, we would forfeit all or part of our pay, depending on how much of the spell had to be repeated and how much of the spell ingredients were wasted.
"You didn't hire us to be lab assistants, Master," I pointed out. "We will do the best we can, but if we are unable to help you cast the spell, it is not our fault if it fails."
"It will be if Nammoi doesn't return before dawn," he grumbled, "and we can't even try."
But she did return, bare minutes after he'd started fretting. She looked exhausted.
"We found Imtei and Teish," she said. Teish was one of Imtei's servants, whom we'd chatted with at the water pump several times. "She was badly hurt by the falling beams when Polysi struggled free of the house. Imtei and Polysi are going to try to heal her, but he's not sure he can, with the mess Polysi made of his lab and spell ingredients. Saikun is still missing -- he wasn't in bed, and Teish says he got up to go to the privy just before the eruption."
I swallowed hard. If Saikun had been sitting on the privy when he shrank, and had fallen in...
"Have her bring us down to the basement," Senqai said, when I'd barely begun repeating that for him. "We haven't much time."
So I gathered Senqai up in my arms, and Nammoi picked us up and went downstairs, bending to fit through the doorway.
"Please don't take this the wrong way, Master," Nammoi said as she carefully descended the stairs, "but do you think perhaps it would make sense, under the circumstances, to leave off this spell, whatever it is, and use your magic to find and heal the people who are trapped in the collapsed houses, like Saikun?"
I was horrified at Nammoi's impropriety. I might privately think that Senqai should use his magic to help those who were trapped or injured, despite the disruption of his plans, but I would never criticize my master's priorities like that. But Senqai asked, "What did she say?" and I had to come up with something fast.
"She asked what will happen if we aren't able to help you with this the way you hope," I improvised.
"If this eruption had happened three or four days into the spell, I could have abandoned it with no great consequence except wasting a few dozen lyn worth of spell ingredients, and having to start over at the next new moon. But after twenty-one days, so much mana has built up in the artifact that leaving the spell unfinished will have terrible consequences. Not as bad as this eruption, which seems to be a major one, but possibly as bad as a minor eruption, at least for the people in the immediate vicinity. We're undoubtedly going to have several such accidents, with so many wizards injured or dead, but if we can prevent one, it will help keep this disaster from getting even worse."
I started conveying that to Nammoi, but before I'd repeated half of it, Senqai interrupted me. We'd reached the basement lab, which neither Nammoi nor I had seen since we helped Senqai unpack his potion ingredients and tools. Nammoi had to crouch a little here, because the basement's ceiling wasn't as high as the ceilings upstairs.
"Tell her to light the lamps," Senqai instructed. "Then to light the candles around the spell circle yonder -- the one in the northeast corner. And don't step inside any of the circles!"
As Nammoi lit the lamps, we could see four circles painted in different areas of the floor, each with different symbols painted inside and outside them, and each surrounded by different numbers of unlit candles. Nammoi lit the three candles around the circle Senqai had indicated. Then Senqai instructed her to gently lift the silver tiara off the work-table and set it inside the circle without touching the candles or the painted symbols.
"Now tell her to set us down near that candle there," he said, pointing. "And bring the jars of mandrake root, naga venom, and utoi extract from the shelf there."
Once I'd conveyed his instructions to Nammoi, she set us down, and Senqai told me to carry him while walking quickly around the circle widdershins, being careful not to step on the symbols painted outside the circle. "Keep up a brisk pace," he said. "Your strides are far shorter than my normal ones." And he began chanting in the wizards' language as I did so.
By the time we returned to the candle we'd started at, Nammoi had found the jars Senqai wanted and set them down near the circle.
"Ask Nammoi to hold you up so you can hold me out and I can reach into the jar to pluck out a pinch of mandrake root."
That was awkward, Nammoi holding my waist between her fingers, while I held Senqai in both arms, dangling into the jar, which fortunately was mostly full. Apparently "a pinch" was the mystically significant amount, no matter how large or small the wizard's fingers were. He then had Nammoi dangle us over the candle so he could drop the pinch of mandrake root into the flame, chanting another charm. We then repeated the procedure with different candles and ingredients.
When we'd finished all that, the tiara glowed brightly for a few moments and returned to its normal silver luster.
"It worked!" Senqai squeaked, hopping down from my arms and dancing a delighted jig. "There will be bonus pay for both of you! Assuming we can keep this up for the rest of the month."
"May I go back and help search for Saikun some more, Master?" Nammoi asked.
"Of course," he said when I had repeated it in a voice he could understand. "But she'll need to get some rest before moonset. We all will."
Woah what a mess! I like the telephone game