Magic Rises

Consort.” Right now that sounded like pure happiness.
    Astamur smiled. “Down in the cities people fight. I fought too for a while until I got tired of it.” Astamur pulled up his pant leg. An ugly scar punctured his calf. Looked like a knife or a sword thrust. “Russians.”
    He wagged his eyebrows at me and pulled his shirt off his shoulder, exposing an old bullet wound in his chest. “Georgians.” He laughed.
    Atsany rolled his eyes.
    “Does he understand what you say?” I asked.
    “He does. It’s his own kind of magic,” Astamur answered. “If it weren’t for supplies, I’d never go back down to town. But a man has to do what a man has to do. Hard to live like a king without toilet paper.”
    We finished eating. Atsany pulled out a pipe and said something with a solemn expression.
    “He says he owes you a debt. He wants to know what you want.”
    “Tell him no debt. He doesn’t owe me anything.”
    Atsany’s bushy eyebrows came together. He took out his pipe and lectured me in a serious voice, punctuating his words by pointing the pipe at me. I was clearly on the receiving end of a very serious talking-to. Unfortunately for him, he was barely a foot and a half tall. I bit my bottom lip trying not to laugh.
    “Do you want a short version or a long one?” Astamur said.
    “Short one.”
    “You saved his life, he owes you, and you should let him pay it back. That last part is advice from me. It will make him very unhappy to know that he owes someone. So what do you want? Do you want him to show you where there are riches? Do you want a man to fall in love with you?”
    If only love were that easy. I sighed. “No, I don’t want riches and I have a man, thank you. He isn’t exactly a man. And I don’t exactly have him anymore, but that’s neither here nor there.”
    Astamur translated. “Then what do you want?”
    “Nothing.”
    “There has to be something.”
    Fine. “Ask him if he would share the magic word with me.”
    Astamur translated.
    Atsany froze and said something, the words coming fast like rocks falling down the mountain.
    “He says it might kill you.”
    “Tell him I already have some magic words, so I probably won’t die.”
    “Probably?” Astamur raised his eyebrows.
    “A very small chance.”
    Atsany sighed.
    “He says he will, but I can’t look. I’ll check on the sheep.” Astamur got up and went toward the pasture. “Try not to die.”
    “I’ll do my best.”
    Atsany leaned forward, picked up a skewer, and wrote something in the dirt. I looked.
    An avalanche of agony drowned me, exploding into a twisting maelstrom of glowing lines. I rolled inside, each turn hurting more and more, as if my mind were being picked apart, shaved off with some phantom razor blade one tiny, excruciating layer at a time. I turned inside the cascade of pain, faster and faster, trying desperately to hold on to my mind.
    A word surfaced from the glow. I had to make it mine, or it would kill me.
    “Aarh.” Stop.
    The pain vanished. Slowly, the world returned bit by bit: the green grass, the smell of smoke, the distant noises of sheep, and Atsany wiping the dirt with his foot. I’d made it. Once again, I’d made it.
    “You didn’t die,” Astamur said, coming closer. “We are both very glad.”
    Atsany smiled and said something.
    “He wants me to tell you that you are kind. He is glad that you have the word. It will help you in the castle with all those lamassu. He doesn’t know why you have them up there anyway. Don’t you know they eat people?”
    * * *
    My brain screeched to a halt.
    “He thinks we have lamassu at the castle?”
    “He says you do. He says he saw one of them carry off a body and then eat it.”
    “Something is killing people at the castle,” I said. “But I’ve seen pictures of the lamassu statues. They have fur and human faces.”
    Atsany waved his pipe around.
    “He says it’s a, what’s the word . . . allegory. There are no animals with human heads, that’s ridiculous.”
    Look who’s talking. An eighteen-inch-tall magic man in riding boots, werejackals, and sea dragons are all fine, but animals with human faces are ridiculous. Okay, then. Glad we cleared that up.
    Atsany stood up, walked a few feet out into the grass, and started walking, putting one foot in front of the other, as if he were walking a tightrope. He turned sharply, walked five steps, turned again, drawing a complex pattern with his steps.
    “The atsany have long