by Andre Norton
“We did not meet”—his tone was close to a snap—“to exchange platitudes about our inner strivings, Gifford. What do you have to tell me, in truth?”
“This.” Gifford raised his left hand and opened fingers which had been clenched in a tight fist to keep what they held safe. He did not glance down at the thing he bore but rather proffered it to Yost.
On the ink-stained palm rested a seal bearing marks from so far in the past that either man, for all his deep learning, would have had trouble extracting from them an intelligible meaning. This was all the more true as the seal had been broken, and its jagged edges were crumbling a little as the protecting flesh was withdrawn.
“Where?” The question came in a single word but one uttered with the force of a war captain’s order.
“At the lowest level, midway among the sealed chambers. And this was not done recently, Yost. As you know, we inspect all seals in order, and have since, by the vote of the entire brotherhood, they were first set. I was last in that passage to check six tens of days ago—just before the testing.”
The sparks that appeared to form the pupils of the archmage’s eyes grew brighter. His thin lips tightened into a straight line before he said colorlessly, “The testing. And before that—a departure.”
Gifford let the seal fall to the surface of a table nearby. “Surely we of the Old Knowledge should beable to judge one of our own kind who has taken the Path of Dark—?”
Yost shook his head. “Not of our kind; white does not brother with black. He is one who early learned to hide his true self and be to all men what each believed him to be, which means he was—and is—far more than we reckoned.”
“Never has there been such treachery before,” the archivist said heavily. “What would lead him to this path? Surely the selectors of the youth would not have sent us any who could not touch the True Flame without hurt!”
“On a journey, a man may choose to change paths. There is this about power: it grows from native talent. But with some—remember the days of the Covenant—it can change a man as a smith shapes iron upon an anvil.”
“His later studies,” Gifford persisted. “How was it he was able to hide for so long where he searched? Did none suspect?”
Again a head shake. “We have grown slack, woefully slack over the years. Sentries forget to faithfully pace boundaries when there is no dispute concerning them. What lies behind that seal?” He nodded at the disc on the table.
“Speculations—largely those of Arbobis.”
“Speculations? Well, then he may have skimmed off a degree of knowledge presently denied us, yes. But he would not have dared to put such discoveries into practice here! Arbobis . . .” The archmage’s eyes flared again. He tensed in his seat, and his tongue swept over his pale lips. “You have the records, brother—see what you can learn from them. Arbobis was one far tooentwined with the search for the forbidden. However, any of his finished spells would be far too intricate to be within the reach of young Irasmus, no matter how eager.”
“That one is clever, though not as much as he believes,” Gifford assented. “But where has he gone, and what lies in his mind to do with what he has stolen?”
Yost was out of his chair with an agility that sent his outer cloak into a swirl.
“He went meekly enough with that trader’s caravan, seeming downcast that he now carries only the right to say he has studied here but attained no mage standing. Yet have we not wrought well in the past? There is the sweeping of the mind as one goes through Claw Pass. Unless—” The archmage strode to the table and thumped its surface until half the broken seal spun to the floor, “—unless we have forgotten something we should have remembered, and that eater of forbidden fruit found the key to it. If so”—the sharp features were bleak—“what has our carelessness unleashed upon the world?”
Irasmus had certainly never impressed any of the inner circle of mages enough that any could bring him readily to mind. He was a thin young man with a taste for drab-colored clothing. From time to time he had played with the melding of scents; which experimentation had earned him nothing but chaffing from the two others who had entered here as students at the same time. Still, his manners had always been above the slightest reproach—too much so at times, thought Gifford,grimacing at the memory. However, the youth had also presented the outward appearance of one who did not follow any study to great depth but rather flittered across surfaces, though he had been very ready with questions.
The archivist pursed his lips. Looking back, he winced. Some of those inquiries had been respectfully directed toward him, and he could not honestly be sure just how discreet he had been in their answering. The lad had seemed so little suited to residence here that the impatience of his tutors may well have been of secret value to him.
Now the old mage hurried along the deepest hall of the record house, his way lit by one of the sparkling balls that any occupant of Valarian could summon without thinking. For all Gifford’s love of ancient lore—its reading being his true inborn talent—this section of his own domain had always cast a shadow upon him when he was forced to enter it.
All knowledge had two sides: one to help and one to harm. Neither could work, save for a man or woman trained to its use. But it was also true that a person born with even a nearly insignificant talent should instinctively shrink from the Dark Path, for he or she would be far too aware of the perils of loosing what could not be readily bound again. That long-ago time of the Covenant, when the Dark had been barely defeated and which had ended in an unspeakable period of chaos during which the whole world had shuddered—that grim history was too well known to any who delved into the Place of Learning.
Yet here and now, in the Hall of the Nine Doors,where the fireball awoke sparks from the protection seals, was much more of evil than a man of the lore-master’s own time could conceive had once existed.
Gifford stopped before the door he sought. Though he had hastened to report his discovery to Yost, he had not left the portal unguarded—two bars of green light crisscrossed the unlocked entryway. He could dismiss those more easily than he had summoned them, but then he must needs step inside, to face—what?
The archivist unbuttoned the throat closure of his tunic and drew out an irregular crystal that instantly caught the rays of the fiery sphere and turned them into a blaze. All thoughts or deeds dedicated to the use of power caused energy to gather within such amulets through the years, and every one fed the talisman’s initial hunger. He had worn this crystal through three lifetimes of ordinary mortals, and he hoped now that what it had amassed through his own past actions would be enough to form a shield. The archmage knew where he had gone and would learn instantly if his brother were attacked by a thrust from the Dark; still, Gifford might lose his life in trying to do his duty, though he could not lose that which was in his core to evil.
A quick movement of his fingers, and the bars across the entrance disappeared. The archivist felt more than just the usual dank chill of the passage as he passed through the doorway and stepped into long-forbidden territory.
The light bobbed and wavered back and forth, but it did not pass the threshold. Gifford would have been completely in the dark if it had not been for his crystal, though its glow was now greatly dimmed.
As in any of the storage compartments of the place,the walls here were lined with shelves that seemed to shimmer a little. As with all such repositories, whether of good or ill, the spell of preservation remained.
The record keeper’s attention was directed to the thick dust of years that carpeted the floor, which bore signs of recent disturbance. The mage stood quietly by the door tracing those tracks. There were certainly a number of them, and, while one or two trails led to side shelves, the majority pointed straight ahead.
The chamber was longer than he had expected, and one of the hardest things he had ever forced himself to face made Gifford add his own prints to the betraying spoor and follow its maker.
There came a whiff as if
some unseen monstrosity had puffed out a putrid gust of breath. For putrid it was—so foul that the mage nearly choked, grasping quickly at the crystal to hold it to his nose for relief. Even the light of that amulet flickered; and when it gained full power again, held a dirty reddish tinge. Its wielder had once more to summon up all the courage a quiet scholar could accumulate in a sheltered life to go on.
He had reached the very end of the room, and here the dust on the floor had been overlaid by a dried skim of ichor. Gifford had no desire to look at what lay at stiff angles there; the creature had come to such a death as its kind knew, and not easily. Also, without having to go any closer, he could identify the corpse—not by name (such entities never served within these walls) but by species. It was a gobbe—born of tainted earth and an ancient, now near-forgotten will. So unnatural a being had no place in any dwelling used by humankind. Unless—
But the thing was dead. If it had been summoned to serve, surely it would not have ended thus. The lore-master pressed his crystal to lips suddenly gone dry and repeated within his mind a pattern of words no longer used by any race in his world.
There rose a shimmer, akin to that which curtained the shelves; within it followed the movement of slightly less-opaque substances. Gifford did not need to strain to identify the shadow he had summoned out of the past, which stood spear straight and motionless by the wall. He was only too sure he could give a name to that half-seen stranger: Irasmus.
The murk, which had gradually dulled even his talisman, was hard to pierce for clear sight. At length he touched the crystal against his forehead just above and between his eyes.
There was a sudden intensity in the dead and polluted air of this place. The mage recognized the forerunner of power, and he was forced to abandon his earlier belief that he had come upon the reckless dabbling of some overambitious amateur; Irasmus had known exactly what he had been about.
The outline of a hand arose, in it a rod that glowed with the deadly rotten-red light the crystal had picked up. Now there was no longer a body on the floor; instead, the shadow figure of Irasmus was drawing precise and well-calculated symbols in the dust, in the air above, and then in the dust once again. Over the vision’s shoulder, the archivist could see one of the shelves. Its protective veiling had vanished, revealing an empty space where there must have once been stored the books or tube rolls that were now piled intoan awkward tower that stood nearly knee-high to the illusory youth.
Thus, and thus—and thus! The loremaster knew he could not alter what had already happened here, perhaps days ago; he could only bear witness to these actions from the past.
A whirlpool of dust was rising from the floor, and out of that shambled—a gobbe. It was nearly the height of a tall man, but had the misshapen body, warty skin, and green-stained fangs peculiar to its kind. One taloned paw gripped a war axe, and a light of greedy anticipation shone in its red-lit eyes. The diet preferred by such spawn of evil was no secret, nor could it ever be forgotten that they were constantly on the alert to fill their potbellies.
However, the axe had no time to move. There was a flick of the wand from the shadow Irasmus, and the creature convulsed and collapsed. But already a second of its kind was materializing, and then a third, their ungainly bodies tense as though ready to drag down some prey—until the sight of their fellow on the floor sent them statue still.
Faintly, very faintly, and only through the aid of the crystal, could Gifford catch now and then a word; and some of those made him ill. Irasmus had not been the lightweight failure they had so mistakenly turned away from the Place of Learning!
A dozen of the gobbes were present now, all alike in monstrousness of feature—the Dark personified. Irasmus waved his wand, and one of the gobbes scuttled forward, cringing, to bag and shoulder those tomes of stolen knowledge.
The old scholar dropped the crystal from his forehead. He had seen enough—enough to utterly destroy the complacency of his fellow mages. Nor did he, at that moment, believe the ancient spell of forgetfulness in the Pass of the Claw would work against such hell-drawn might as this.
What had they loosed on the world—or, at least, on a part of it? Power—even though Irasmus had been only an illusion, Gifford had felt the crackle of released power, strong enough that its emanations still lingered days later.
The slain gobbe was undoubtedly a warning—one that such creatures could readily understand. But that their summoner would restrain them from their nauseating food quest in the future he did not believe.
The loremaster took cautious steps to avoid the rotting carcass on the floor. Gobbes were of the Dark; some said they were the offspring of Vastor the Ghoul. This time, at least, that paramount demon had done nothing to save one of them; they were, instead, now plainly bound to Irasmus. And there were very few in this world who could withstand their attacks.
Gifford looked at the plundered shelf. There would be, of course, some reference in the general files—probably very slight—to what had stood there. He could only search that out and report to the assembly. However, this was no news any of the human kind could receive without a foreshadowing of fear.
4
THE FOREST WAS AWAKENING TO SPRING. SOME OF THE flowers that gave the first announcement of the season were, indeed, already faded, busy with building a new seed, while the green lace of first leaf buds was afroth on trees so huge they had nearly outlasted Time itself.
Over all sang the Wind. Deep within, at one end of its scale of song, rang the speech of stones and earth; at the other lilted the twitter of birds and the faint, ephemeral patter of flower thought. For the Wind was the keeper and the sharer; and every life that dwelt within reach of its inner voice knew—even as the Wind itself learned—what passed in the world.
Perhaps the Forest was not the “world” as most men would reckon it. However, it kept secret its own mysteries and those of its children; and there had been no intruder within for many seasons. Men forgot, but the Wind and the trees and the earth did not.
That vast tract of woods had its heart. This was notemple raised by those unaware of the singing of the Wind; though there were places where giant blocks of moss-garnished stone lay to mark the dire days when the Dark had massed its battalions, the Light had gathered its forces, and warfare had been waged of a sort no creature now living would give credence to.
That heart was a single Stone, rooted as deeply as any of the trees which ringed the glade that held it and nearly as tall. The Stone bore none of the lichenous blotching that defiled the dead and forgotten shrines; instead, it appeared, at first regard, to be an unbroken dull gray. However, sparks of light flowed over its surface. These followed no pattern, save at intervals, when they ringed themselves about a perfectly rounded hole in its middle. The core of that hole held the utter gray of thick fog, and through it the Wind sang. Sometimes other beings of the Forest gathered to learn what it was needful that they should know.
Once the Wind had ranged far more widely. At a time of great peril, it had been loosed to its full strength, and parts of the earth had been swept clear of that which should not exist. Then the Covenant had been sworn, and the Wind was bound, in its uttermost might, to keep within the borders of the Forest. Yet such force could not be wholly subdued.
There was also the valley. Styrmir was its ancient name, one without meaning now. It sheltered its own people, many of whom, at the swearing of the Covenant, had stood aside, not because of any allegiance to the Dark but rather because their sufferings during the days of the war had been such that they never again wished to use any power.
Though the folk of Styrmir were of mankind, theycould not root out of themselves the talent. Ever and again, the Wind sent its questing breath to them; and then, like their ancestors, they would become for a space at one with all that was good in the life of the world. Yet still they held stubbornly apart, forgoing all chance of honing their gifts into tools or weapons, but living perhaps more content than any of their ancestors had done. Here, now, w
as neither lord nor serf. All shared in the common good; and none ever visited the roofless tower that had once been their rallying place in times of danger.
The inhabitants of the Valley saw very few from the lands beyond the Forest, though remnants survived of a road leading down from a pass in the heights above. Several times in the year, those of Styrmir might be visited by wandering merchants to exchange the clippings from their flocks and other common things the outsiders found interesting enough to acquire. For the most part, however, these people of determined peace took no interest in anything beyond their sheltered vale.
Yet there was one clan that still kept the records. Such accounts had become monotonous over the years and contained little to stir the blood, but the lines of family births must be honorably preserved. This kindred were also rumored to have dealings with the Wind, whenever it came visiting, and to treasure scraps of ancient learning about which none of them ever spoke.
Thus was Styrmir, defenseless, yet even so long past the days of the Covenant giving root to talents that could be used if a man were clever—or vicious—enough to try.
***
It was the quiet harmony of Styrmir that those of the Valarian looked upon on this spring morning. Of the twelve chairs, only eight were occupied—that was another matter wherein they had been lax, as Yost was now forced to make himself face. Few entered as novices these days, for the focus of interest in the wide world had moved on to other ways. Now only those young people, whose thoughts were made restless by too generous a gift of the talent, sought out what was certainly an ambience lacking in action, as far as those still favored by the strength of youth were concerned.
Many beginning students also split away before they finished learning. The last full brother the mages had welcomed among them was just now hurrying into the council chamber, his cloak, splotched with dabs of color, bundled awkwardly about his shoulders. Pausing just within the doorway, he smoothed one of the wall banners into more even folds. Harwice’s talent used tools: his large, long-fingered hands were always itching for a brush. For it was he who could bring into mind a picture and then transfer it to just such a background as he wished to illuminate. Yet it had been twenty-five seasons since the artist had taken the Covenant oath to don his cloak, Gifford recalled.
