The Lesser Twin     
by Elisabeth Waters
     
     Kiara was just coming upstairs to wash the hall floor when she heard her sister start screaming. For an instant she froze, standing there with the bucket of water in her hand. The wizard Tarnor's instruction, as relayed by Karina, had been clear: they would be working in his temple all afternoon and were not to be disturbed for anything. As if I want to disturb them, Kiara had thought in disgust. She and Karma were twins, and they loved each other, but they were not at all alike. Karina was the elder and the beautiful one, with pale clear skin and glossy black hair that fell to her hips, while Kiara had skin that turned into a splotchy mass of freckles the minute the sun hit it and an unruly mass of very curly red-orange hair. She'd given up on both skin and hair long ago, so her complexion was now almost uniformly brown and her hair, as short as she could persuade Karina to chop it off, stuck out in random directions. The twins also differed in their approach to life: Karina flitted effortlessly from enthusiasm to enthusiasm (and from man to man), while Kiara followed quietly in her wake, picking up the pieces and trying to lend a bit of stability to their vagrant existence. She'd be glad when Karina got over this craziness. Tarnor had met Karina eight months ago, when she was living with a wealthy and generous merchant, a middle-aged widower with two small sons. Kiara had lived with them and helped look after the children, and she still missed them. But Karina had been getting restless and had been easy prey for Tarnor's offer to make her his priestess and a great sorceress. So they had moved into Tarnor's tower; Karina to share his bed and study and Kiara to run the place and feed them at the irregular intervals at which they surfaced. From the variety of different tastes showing in the decor of the place, Kiara suspected that they were only the last in a long series of "priestesses." Fortunately Tarnor didn't seem to notice her much, which was fine with her-Karina could have him, whyever she wanted him.
     
     But she was not going to stand by and see her sister hurt if there was anything she could do to prevent it, and there was both terror and pain in those screams. She hurried down the short stone corridor which separated the temple from the living quarters, shoved open the heavy wooden door with her shoulder, and pushed her way in. A sword, which had apparently been leaning against the door, clattered at her feet, but she stepped over it without seeing it, her attention focused on her sister.
     
     Karina had good reason to be screaming; she appeared to be holding a ball of flame, unable to release it. As Kiara watched in horror, a clump of Karina's hair, tossed about by her struggles, brushed across her hands and flared up as well. Kiara stepped forward and swung the bucket she held; the water arced neatly across the space between them and drenched Karina from eyebrows to knees. The flames went out instantly, with a horrible sizzling noise, which was almost drowned out by Tarnor's yelling in her ear as he grabbed her shoulders from behind.
     
     "You stupid slut! How dare you cross my Wards and profane my Temple! Do you have the slightest idea what you have done?"
     
     Kiara swung an elbow into his fat stomach, broke free, and ran to Karina, who stood unmoving, staring in horror and revulsion at something at her feet. "I think you killed it...." Kiara dropped to knees, wincing slightly as they hit the hard stone floor. "It" was a small amphibianlike creature, a dark muddy-brown-gray-black color, which appeared to be slowly melting onto the floor. She scooped it up into her apron with one hand, grabbed Karina by the upper arm with the other, and towed her toward the kitchen. "You need burn ointment for your hands. What is this thing, anyway?"
     
     "Salamander," Karina replied faintly, staring blankly ahead of her. Oh, Holy Mother, Kiara realized in dismay, she's going into shock. She hastily dragged Karina to the kitchen and shoved her into a horizontal position on the bench next to the fire. The salamander still lay inert in her apron, but she had the feeling it was not quite dead. It was there, in a way that dead things weren't. She untied her apron and lowered it carefully in the fire, putting the salamander into the center of the flames. It was the only thing she could think of to do for it, and maybe it would work. Then she turned away to wrap a blanket around Karina and break off a piece of the plant she used for scrapes and burns. She was carefully squeezing sap over the burned areas on her sister's hands when Tarnor limped wheezing into the kitchen. "Fine priestess you are," he snarled at Karina, "panicking over a little thing like that. How do you expect to get anywhere without learning to embrace the pain? Don't you know that the universe is pain?"
     
     "Save your breath!" Kiara snapped at him. "She can't hear you anyway. And your universe may be pain, but mine certainly isn't-and 1 don't think that Karina's crazy enough to want hers to be."
     
     "She wants what I want." To Tarnor this was obviously Natural Law. "And as for your universe ..." His foot lashed out suddenly, caught her hip, and propelled her into the fire. Dimly she heard him continue, "... that can be changed." The flames hurt excruciatingly for a moment, then all sensation went away. / must be dying, Kiara thought, vaguely remembering having heard that dying of burns didn't hurt once the shock hit. Then there was pain again, sharp teeth digging into the side of her neck. / must have landed on the salamander. Poor creature, what a day it's having.
     
     "Verily," the salamander agreed. "But yours isn't going very smoothly either."
     
     Startled, Kiara twisted her head and opened her eyes. The salamander was next to her, filling most of her field of vision. The only other thing she could see was fire. "Is it because I'm dead that we can hear each other?"
     
     "No." The salamander stretched out all four legs, neck, and tail, obviously reveling in the fire which ran along its body, now a glowing red-orange. "It's because we're in Fire. Earth, Water and Air transmit sound; Fire transmits energy."
     
     Kiara thought about that for a moment. "And emotion is a form of energy, and since ideas can be expressed in either words or emotions ..."
     
     ". . . they can transferred through any of the Elements," the salamander finished for her. "Exactly. Besides, you're not dead."
     
     "I'm not?" Kiara looked down at herself. Her body was the same glowing red-orange as the salamander's, with the same four short legs. She stretched and twisted her head farther around to regard her long tapering tail in disbelief. "Holy Mother of All Living Things!" She went limp again, and discovered that she was floating comfortably in the middle of the fire. It did feel good, but it was going to require a little mental adjustment-to say the least.
     
     "You didn't land on me," the salamander was explaining, "I bit you to transform you-not that I think you couldn't have done it on your own eventually-since the fire didn't kill you, you obviously have magic-but I wanted to get us out of here before the wretched wizard notices and constrains us."
     
     "You mean he hasn't noticed my turning into a salamander? I admit he tends to ignore me, but that seems rather a lot to ignore!"'
     
     "I don't feel him noticing us, but let's get out of here before he does!"
     
     "But my sister ..."
     
     "What can you do for her in this form? Her stupid phobia of salamanders is what got us in this mess-if you can remember that far back!" The salamander was thoroughly im- patient. "You can't help her now, and if we don't get out of here you'll never be able to. Come!" It disappeared from view, but Kiara could feel a faint tugging. She followed it. Kiara spent a period of time (she had no idea how long- salamanders didn't reckon time the way people did) learning how to be a salamander. What salamanders did, apparently, was to understand Fire, to celebrate it, to embody it. In a curious way salamanders were Fire and Fire was Salamander- at least that was as close as she could come to putting it in words. She learned to move through Fire and to go from Fire to individual fires in the realms of men. Occasionally she would be summoned, not by name, but simply as the nearest salamander, by some magician in need of extra heat or illumination, but such terms of service were fixed and short. Apparently there was some sort of Law governing such things, not that it was ever written out or put into words, but some things made sense and worked in practice and others did not. She realized that this was what had been working in her when she put the salamander in the fire-it had made sense to her, and she had done it. Being curious about these matters, she took to hanging around where she would be the one called, and began her somewhat informal study of magic-looking over the shoulders of her unknowing teachers. She discovered that while magic users came in many varieties, there were two basic flavors-those who used magic as a celebration of the beauty of creation, and those who used it for their own selfish ends. She had two personal favorites, both of the first sort: a man who had the most cluttered workroom she had ever seen (or ever expected to see) but always seemed to have exactly the book she needed to read spread open below her, and a woman who always dismissed her with "My thanks for your aid, Essence of Fire." It was comforting to be noticed, even if not named, for being a salamander was lonely for a human-salamanders didn't care about individuality. As a person she had been unique, even as "Karina's ugly twin" she was an individual, but as a salamander, she was just a salamander like every other salamander. Then a summons came, and she discovered to her horror that she was in Tarnor's temple. He didn't notice her, of course; to him she was just a source of light-though she doubted that he needed light for what he and his "priestess" were doing on the black-draped high couch he called an altar. But the girl was not Karina-she was younger and blond.
     
     "Where is Karina-what happened to her-how long have I been a salamander?!?" Kiara hovered in the corner, grimly lighting the ritual, though the amount of power she perceived in it was minimal, and thinking furiously. There wasn't much else she could do at the moment, but she resolved that as soon as she was dismissed she would slip down to the kitchen fire and start searching the place--even if she had to be a flame on every candle in the entire tower.
     
     But she wasn't dismissed. Instead of completing the ritual with the proper dismissals and banishings, Tarnor fell asleep on the altar. The blonde sighed, slipped quietly away from him, and went to the edge of the circle where the sword lay. She picked it up and ran it widdershins around the edge of the circle to make a gap she could pass through, then left the room, leaving the gap in the circle. Kiara, shaking her head at such carelessness, followed her.
     
     The blonde went to the kitchen, where, to Kiara's immense relief, Karina was carving a roast. She looked tired and cross, but at least she was alive and well-even the burns on her hands had healed.
     
     "No rush on dinner," the blonde said, grabbing a slice of meat and chewing on it. "He's asleep."
     
     Karina looked up, saw Kiara, and let out a loud scream. The blonde put a quick hand across her mouth. "Hush! You'll wake the Master." Then she turned to see what Karina was staring at with such terror. "Oh, damn. He forgot to dismiss the salamander-but how did it get across the wards?"
     
     Something snapped in Kiara; she thought it must be her temper. While she had been a salamander nothing had touched her nearly enough to get her angry, but this was her sister, her other self, reduced to a servant for Tamor and his incompetent new mistress. She transformed to human form, retaining enough fire about her to substitute for the clothes that had burned away that day in the kitchen fire. The stone floor was very cold under her feet. "You opened the circle, fool-and left it open! Doesn't Tarnor train his 'priestesses' at all?"
     
     "Of course he does!" the blonde replied indignantly. "He's a great wizard!"
     
     "Not as great a wizard as you are a fool-both of you!" She slapped the girl's hand away from Karina's mouth. "Being good in bed is not the major qualification for a priestess." Her old clothes chest still sat in the corner, and she grabbed the first dress to hand, doused the rest of her fire, and hastily dressed, hoping not to freeze to death in the process. "And I suppose being a good housekeeper is?" Karina, apparently unable to cope with questions like "why were you a salamander?" was falling back on their old sibling rivalry. "You're always right, always perfect-but you can't even get a man!"
     
     "Why would I want to? You've always had plenty for both of us!" Kiara snapped back, and looked at her sister critically. "But you won't be able to much longer if you hang around here being a drudge-already your hands are rough, and your hair looks dreadful, when did you last brush it?" Karina burst into tears, the blonde stared from one to the other in total incomprehension, and Tarnor limped heavily into the room. "What's this noise? I told both of you that I expect my priestesses to get along with one another-how am I supposed to do Great Magick with the pair of you acting like common scolds? Magick requires sacrifice, concentration, and discipline."
     
     "None of which you possess," Kiara said coldly, drawing herself to her full height and slowly advancing on him. "You're not fit to scrub a hearth-witch's cauldron."
     
     "I don't know who you are, girl, or what you're doing in my Tower, but obviously you know nothing of Magick." Tarnor's voice was low and sonorous, but to Kiara he was so obviously bluffing that she couldn't understand why the other girls couldn't hear it. She didn't bother to answer in words; she simply stretched both arms out at shoulder height, pointing toward him. She noticed that they were pale and smooth (being a salamander seemed to have done wonders for her complexion), before she started the flames running down them and shooting out from her fingertips. It was a ridiculously simple trick, using virtually no energy, and not dangerous to anyone in the room; but it had most satisfying results. Tarnor fled screaming, the blonde sank to her knees in a small cowering heap, and Karina fainted.
     
     Kiara lowered her arms, stopping the flames, stepped over her sister's body, and began to pack her clothes. After a moment Karina moaned softly, and the blonde, with a fearful glance at Kiara, fled the room. Kiara finished packing her things, then turned to her sister.
     
     "I'm leaving this place, Karina. If you care to accompany me, pack your things."
     
     "But Tarnor-"
     
     "He's not going to stop us," Kiara pointed out.
     
     "But I can't abandon him! He needs me to save him."
     
     "Save him from what?" Kiara inquired. "That blonde girl-or his own incompetence?"
     
     "You don't understand," Karina said. "He's really a good person underneath, but he needs my love to manifest it."
     
     "Oh, I think I understand," Kiara said slowly. "You think that if you love him enough and stick with him, you can change him into what you think he should be. Just as I always thought that if I stuck with you long enough, you'd turn out like me."
     
     "But I am like you, aren't I? We're twins."
     
     "Yes, but I don't know that we're any more alike in essence than we are in looks." Kiara shrugged. "In any case, I'm going. If you want to come with me, come. If you want to stay here, stay."
     
     "I can't leave him," Karina repeated.
     
     "Then stay with him." Kiara sighed and picked up her pack. "Be happy, Karina." She hugged her sister, then turned and walked out the door, no longer half a pair of twins, but an individual in her own right.



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About Elisabeth Waters and "The Lesser Twin"
     
     Elisabeth Waters is my cousin and has been my live-in secretary/office manager/computer programmer/etc, for sixteen years now. Her "job description" here defies analysis, but seems to boil down to making order out of the chaos of my life, which can be very chaotic indeed. She is a superb short-story writer (this story took second place in the Cauldron vote out of the thirty-nine stories in issue 9). Although she is prone from time to time to throw herself down in a tantrum, declaring that she doesn't want to be a writer at all, she is one of the better writers of short stories I know. Her first novel, Changing Fate, will be published by DAW Books in April 1994, which means it should be available when this anthology is published. When you read it, tell me if I'm not right in saying she's a superb writer. Although she declared from the beginning that she wanted nothing to do with the magazine, my relative inability to cope with prosaic matters has forced her to have a great deal to do with it-which she does as superbly as she does everything else. Our first issue featured one of her better short stories-the illustration for which, as ill luck would have it, happened to be the only time I ever encountered an art plagiarist in the fifty years of my career. Fortunately her other contributions to us have had better luck. She is currently applying to law school at the University of California; but she's done so well handling my complicated legal affairs without a law degree that I hope her legal career turns out to be purely recreational.