With a Tangled Skien

  He nodded, remembering. "He was, indeed. Very well, Mother, I will visit the water oak and Pacian."

  "Promise?"

  "Promise."

  "And soon," she said, and changed into arachnid form and slid up her thread to Purgatory. There was no point in concealing her magic from him anymore.

  The Magician was as good as his word. The following day he phoned Pace, and later that week they had a reunion. In the interim he visited the water oak. The hamadryad was glad to see him, though the passage of years made her diffident. "Mother tells me I should get married," he said, and she nodded agreement. "But where on Earth will I find a mortal woman as beautiful as you?" She shrugged and blushed, forgiving him his five years neglect; even immortals were subject to flattery.

  At the reunion he met Blenda. He had seen her as a baby and occasionally as a child. Now she was twenty-three, the same age as Niobe's body, and she was so beautiful she seemed to light the room she entered. It would have taken an expert to judge between her and the hamadryad—but she was mortal. She smiled shyly at the visiting Magician—and worked on him a magic more fundamental than any he had studied.

  They were married the following year. Niobe attended the wedding, at her son's request, doing it in her own guise, as no one would recognize her now. After all, she was fifty-eight years old, chronologically; who would ever believe she could be the mother of the groom? But Pacian, the father of the bride, gave her a single piercing look, then shrugged, not able to believe the wild thought that had touched his mind.

  It was a lovely wedding. Niobe sat alone in the crowd, in the section reserved for the groom's relatives, and cried. When the two exchanged vows, she could hardly contain herself. "I am losing my son!" she sobbed. More than one head turned to face her, perplexed.

  Between the wedding and the reception, they posed for pictures. The groom could not present any proud parents for this; the family he had known belonged to his cousin, the father of the bride. "Indulge me, dear," he murmured to Blenda, and beckoned to Niobe. She approached uncertainly, stifling tears.

  "This is a blood relative; she can pose in lieu."

  So Niobe stood beside Blenda and smiled, and Blenda smiled—and there was a murmur of awe through the assemblage. "Look at them!" a woman exclaimed. "Like twins in beauty!"

  Niobe realized it was true. She had been said to be the loveliest of her generation, and Blenda of hers. Niobe's hair was dark amber, like buckwheat honey, while Blenda's was light amber, like clover honey; with both, it flowed loose to the slender waist, and both sets of eyes were bright blue. They were a match of feature and figure, like two scintillating gems. It was a remarkable coincidence.

  The photographers went on to other subjects, and Niobe and Blenda had a moment together. "Please," the girl begged. "Tell me who you are! Kaf said he had a beautiful relative, but I never suspected—"

  Niobe had of course checked Blenda's thread of life, and knew she was a fine person all around, as her mother was. She could be trusted, and she deserved to know. "You will find this hard to believe—"

  "After seeing Kafs magic, I can believe much!"

  "I am his mother."

  Blenda's perfect mouth dropped open. She looked across the room at her new husband, who nodded gravely, though he could not have overheard their dialogue. Then she recovered. "Oh—a youth spell! Of course! He said his mother was the most—but you know that, of course!"

  "And his father was as handsome and intelligent as any," Niobe said, feeling the tears begin again. "Like yours. It is not a youth spell, precisely. I never aged. I became an Incarnation. That's why I had to give up my baby."

  "An—?"

  "Fate."

  "Fate!" Blenda's eyes widened in realization. "Did you arrange—?"

  "For my son to marry you? Not in that manner! I simply told him to get back in touch with his closest friend, his cousin Pace, and the rest happened. I confess I wasn't even thinking of you, but I'm glad it happened. You are worthy of him, dear, and it does fill the prophecy."

  "Prophecy?"

  "That my son would possess the most beautiful woman of her generation, and have a daughter who would be the most talented of her type and love an Incarnation."

  "My father mentioned a prophecy," Blenda said. "But he said he foiled it."

  "Prophecies are hard to foil," Niobe said. "Certainly it seems to be coming true for my son, and if the rest follows, your daughter will consort with the Incarnation of Death or Evil. That is not necessarily bad, horrendous as it may sound. But she is also to be the savior of man and to stand athwart a tangled skein. Since there is an entity who objects to the salvation of man, she could be in danger."

  Blenda made a soundless whistle. "I shall do my best to protect her! In fact, I will consider carefully before I bear her. I thank you for telling me of this prophecy. I had not known the full nature of it."

  "No one ever knows the full nature of a prophecy— until it is too late."

  They kissed, then moved on to the reception chamber, where Blenda had to rejoin her husband and cut the monstrous cake. She picked up the knife, and the groom put his hand on hers, and they brought it to the outer layer.

  "Hold!" the Magician exclaimed. "There is evil here!" He drew his bride back and brought out a stone.

  There was a hush. The Magician held the stone high and moved it in a circle. When it approached the cake, it glowed brilliantly. He nodded; there was the focus of evil.

  "Go to your parents," the Magician said tersely. "This may be messy."

  "I knew cake was fattening, but..." Blenda murmured. She went to join Pacian and Blanche, and the three watched anxiously from one side, while Niobe and other guests watched from the front. What was wrong with that cake?

  The Magician brought out another stone and held it carefully before him. Suddenly a beam of light speared out from the stone, into the center of the cake.

  There was a crackle of scorching frosting. Then the cake exploded. Splotches of icing sprayed out, plastering ceiling. Magician, and guests. Someone screamed. From the cake leaped a demon. The thing had red skin, a barbed tail, and a horrendously horned head. With an inchoate roar it leaped at the Magician—and bounced away from an invisible shield. Naturally the adept had seen to his own protection.

  "So you refuse to die. Kaftan!" the demon cried, its voice so guttural that it was barely comprehensible. "But it takes two to make a child!" It whirled on Blenda, making a prodigious leap.

  The Magician threw a stone at his bride. "Catch it!" he cried.

  Blenda, almost frozen in terror, moved automatically to catch the stone just before the demon landed. The demon bounced again, for now she had the protection stone. The monster rolled off the side of the invisible sphere—and came down on Blanche. Its outsized mouth opened, and its terrible fangs closed on the woman's throat. Blood spurted.

  "Mother!" Blenda shrieked in absolute horror.

  Then the Magician brought another stone into play. Blue radiance spread from it to encompass the demon— and the demon screamed and melted into a bubbling puddle.

  But it was too late. The bride's mother was dead. The demon had gotten neither its primary nor its secondary target, but had wrought terrible mischief in its failure.

  Chapter 7 - CHANGES

  Niobe was an Incarnation, but she could not do anything about the tragedy. She had not thought to check Blanche's thread. Satan had scored a partial evil again. As it had been when he tried to strike at Niobe herself, he had been balked, but an innocent party had suffered. "I should have seen it coming," Lachesis said with deep regret. "Perhaps I could have rearranged the threads in that part of the Tapestry—"

  "But I'm the one who cuts the threads," Atropos said. "I've been with you long enough to know—"

  "That thread was cut by your predecessor," Niobe said. "But I'm sure I checked it when Pacian married her, and it was of normal length. When Satan strikes, we all make mistakes. No one was supposed to die at that wedding; Satan interfered by sendi
ng his demon to—" She shrugged and swallowed, then continued. "And now we simply have to patch the Tapestry on a makeshift basis, as we have done before."

  "Still, it could not have happened if I hadn't become careless," Lachesis said. "When Thanatos gets careless, he gets killed by his successor; when I get careless, innocent mortals suffer. It is time for me to retire."

  Naturally Niobe protested. But they all knew it was true: Lachesis, as the measurer of the threads, should have been alert to Satan's interference in her measurement. No Incarnation could successfully interfere with another, if the other was on the job. Satan prospered by deceit—and Lachesis had been deceived. She had erred.

  They located a suitable prospect, a woman of middling age who had no close family and had a talent for managing things, and approached her. She agreed, and the change was made. This time Niobe, as the senior remaining Aspect, handled it. She took the woman's hand, and the woman's essence entered while Lachesis' essence departed. Again it was done—and they had a new Aspect to break in.

  Unfortunately, the change of Lachesis-identities did not make Fate's job easier. Satan took this opportunity to yank the threads about to his benefit. Once again it was a struggle to stave off disaster, and once again the staving was not complete.

  The political scene was constantly in flux across the world, whatever nominal form of government a country had, and Satan was adept at the corruption of politicians. At any given moment, the representation of good and evil in politics was about even, worldwide. Every time an evil power-wielder was ousted, another developed. It was evident that Satan was really trying to gain a clear political advantage that he could use to gain a social advantage. Nowhere was the war between good and evil shown to better advantage than in politics.

  Quite a number of Niobe's countrymen had emigrated to America, and now they were achieving political representation there. Whether this was good or bad depended on the particular men, but she tended to favor her own. Thus when, in trying to clarify the nature of the job for the new Lachesis, she discovered a Satanistic tangle of threads in the Tapestry, involving one of this lineage in America, she investigated. Satan was certainly up to something; tangles never occurred naturally. But she could not make it out clearly, and Lachesis was as yet too inexperienced to do so.

  "Someone's thread is to be prematurely cut," Atropos said.

  They zeroed in on it. Sure enough, the thread of a potential future candidate for the American presidency was to be artificially cut. That would seriously distort the Tapestry. But they weren't sure how bad it would be.

  Niobe consulted with Chronos, who remembered the future. Her affair with him had proceeded intermittently for thirty-five years, and she was really quite fond of him; he was a decent man. Because the two of them moved temporally opposite, there was always a certain novelty in it, and it was a relationship they found mutually convenient. It was true: it took one Incarnation to truly understand another. But Chronos was unable to help her in this. "As you know, I have only been in office a year, and I have no knowledge of the world's future beyond that."

  "I didn't know!" she said, startled. "I—I suppose I thought you were eternal, though I'm sure you told me at the outset." Indeed, now she remembered the reverse situation, when he had forgotten that her beginning-end was near. It was easy to do, over such a timespan! "Why, that means we'll have to be breaking you in, soon!"

  He smiled. "You have done that very competently, Clotho; I will always be in your debt. I hope someday I can repay the favor."

  "You did, Chronos," she reassured him.

  Lacking the perspective of the future, they could obtain more specific information only by going to Earth to check the living threads. There they discovered that a demon had been dispatched from Hell. It would drive a car to intercept the senator on a back road at night and crash into him. Rather, the demon-spirit was to take over the body of a Satanist—a Satan worshiper—for this mission; naturally the mortal had not been told that he would probably lose his own life. He merely understood that, in return for assisting Satan, he would be richly rewarded.

  The old, experienced Lachesis could have twitched the threads expertly to clear the tangle and prevent Satan from interfering. But what would have been simple for her was complex for the new one. It did take time to gain proficiency. They had to take the direct route: a visit to the senator himself.

  The night the "accident" was scheduled, Niobe took the body and slid a thread to the spiderweb nearest the country house where the senator was having a private party with his workers, volunteers, and friends. There was a lot of liquor going around, and many of the attendees were comely young women. Niobe didn't approve; if this was one of the good politicians, what were the bad ones like? But of course a man could not be judged by his private entertainments; it was his performance in office that counted. Women could not be blamed for being attracted to the focal points of power like bees to flowers; that was their nature. She herself had not loved Cedric until he had shown his power. At least this made it easy for her to infiltrate; she was assumed to be a professional of another type.

  She filled a wineglass with water and carried it about so that no one realized she was not imbibing. She had never imbibed since that night Cedric got sick. She fended off the approaches of interested young men and worked her way to the senator himself. "Senator, your life is in peril," she murmured as she danced with him.

  He smiled in that vote-getting way he had. "You are a Russian agent?"

  "Just a friend of the status quo. There is a car ready to crash yours. Do not go driving tonight. Senator."

  He smiled again, but this time there was a certain masked malice behind it; he did not like to have anyone tell him what not to do. Politically he stood for the right things, and more often than not did the right things, but that did not make him a perfect man. There was, she had long since learned, a mixture of good and evil in every thread of life—which was the point of life, if Satan was to be believed. She had never been satisfied that that was the whole of it, but it was at least a half-truth. So he was annoyed at her warning—but she was physically the type of woman the senator did not openly affront. That was why she had approached him in her own form, in a revealing gown. In a moment he would make a pass at her.

  "You have something better to offer?" he asked.

  "Your life," she replied evenly. "This house is protected; the assassin will not enter. It must catch you on the road, tonight. Remain here; by morning the threat will abate." For they had ascertained that this particular demon-spirit could not survive away from Hell for more than a few hours.

  "Remain here—with you?"

  "No, Senator. I am here merely to warn you, not to entertain you. Heed my warning, and all will be well." She turned and walked away.

  When she was out of his sight, she changed to Lachesis, so that the senator could not recognize her, and moved on out of the house. Outside, she shifted to spider form and sat on the branch of a tree, watching.

  Sure enough, her warning had not sufficed. Once a thread was positioned, it was hard to reposition, and this one was locked in a tangle. The senator emerged with a young woman; he was going to take her for a ride. He was married, but such men did not take such things too seriously.

  Niobe, uncertain what to do, slid down a line to land on the senator's shoulder. She would just have to go along and hope she could enable him to avoid the assassination. Maybe if he saw the assassin-car approaching, he would take heed and get off the road in time. Of course, then the demon might come after him afoot, but perhaps she could balk it. Certainly she had to try. How she wished that this tangle hadn't occurred just now, when Lachesis was inexperienced—but of course that was why it had occurred. Satan never passed up a chance!

  The senator got into a small car, and the girl took the passenger seat. He drove out the back way, avoiding the guard at the front; he evidently didn't care to be recognized and have news of this tryst relayed to his wife. The fool!

  Niobe
knew the assassin was lurking out there, waiting to spy the senator's car. There would be little chance to escape once that happened.

  It was difficult to talk while in spider form, but possible. "Senator!" Niobe said near his left ear.

  He glanced at the girl to his right. "Yes?"

  "What?" the girl asked.

  "She didn't speak," Niobe said. "I spoke. I'm the spider on your shoulder."

  The senator looked left, startled. "What sorcery is this?"

  "Just a little shape-changing. I'm the woman who warned you before."

  "The lovely one!" he said. "I didn't know you were magical!"

  "What is this?" the girl on the other side demanded.

  "There is a spider talking to me," the senator explained.

  "A lovely spider? I don't believe it!"

  "Take warning!" Niobe cried. "Get off the road before the assassin spies you!"

  Now the senator was doubtful. "I thought it was a ploy for attention. But you disappeared. Now I learn you're a shape-changer. But why should you care about me?"

  "I don't care much about you personally," Niobe said. "If I did, I'd probably tell your wife what you're up to tonight. But you are one of the better men in the bad mess that politics is today and you may have a considerable future, so I don't want an evil force to take you out. Please, Senator—turn about, get back to your party. Save your little dalliance for some other night."

  "Now I hear it!" the girl exclaimed. "How can a spider talk?"

  "I'm not sure," the senator said, and Niobe knew he meant about the situation, not about talking spiders. That was one of his weaknesses: the inability to make a firm decision on short notice. Normally he had advisers and scriptwriters to put words in his mouth; perhaps he depended on them too much. When caught unprepared, he could seem positively tongue-tied.

  "Then play it safe!" Niobe urged. "The most you can lose is one tryst! The alternative will cost you your life!"

  Still he hedged. "You may be magical, but I don't really know your motive. There may be danger at the party."