Shadow of the Seer

by Michael Scott Rohan

  Far below him, on the narrow sandbank, he looked for a human figure, and saw none. She was hidden from road and river and sky alike; and for a moment he felt a qualm. Then he left her and all thoughts of her, and turned northward. There was little enough time.

  Down the river he flew, to the place of its branching into many streams, and northward from that along its wider, colder parent, a sheet of black water. He saw with relief the canes fade away, and the wider, greener lands that opened up, with the narrow roads winding between the rolling hills. He gazed in wonder at the vast herds of beasts that roamed the land, and longed to swoop down and explore; but he knew he must not. He might have little enough time; and this, peaceful though it seemed, was the domain of the Ice, and might contain many strange perils.

  He looked down with unaccustomed contempt upon the little farms that huddled at wide intervals throughout the land, starved and shrunken things among the rich fields around them. He remembered how the Citadel’s folk had struggled and toiled for their food in a parched and barren land; even Volmur’s kingdom was poor compared to this. And with those memories stirring he gazed with cold hatred upon the bands of horsemen that made their way north along the roads, like ants toiling back to their nests to serve their bloated queen. Something seemed strange about them, but he was too angry to think, and too impatient. It came almost as a relief when darkness rolled down upon them as the sun sank beneath the rim of the world.

  The hours passed, and he flew easily, without effort, and saw the first long rays creep across a land that was growing flatter, scrubbier, starker. Even the farms were gone, save here and there by the river a village of hovels that evidently struggled to exploit the last lowly scraps of fertile green.

  Beyond the last of these all things grew smaller and meaner. Trees turned to wiry thickets, creeping across low brown grasses. Those in turn gave way to bare patches in the earth, and soon stones, with no more growing things than shrubs and lichen, and mere winding tracks where the roads had been. And beyond them more stones, less soil, grey land and black water, sterile and cold and bleakly ugly. So ugly, that the sudden sprinkling of whiteness seemed like a benison, a glittering, patterned beauty to compensate for the end of life; and along the river margins, instead of reeds, the grey-white crusting of ice.

  Over the snowfields he sped, following the black vein that was the river through the icy whiteness. White as the girl’s skin, he thought once, and as cold. But most often he thought only of his own tiny shadow pacing him, skipping and sailing over the country’s flattened curves. So it was that at first he did not see what lay ahead, but looked up to find it rear in front of him, as it seemed, impossibly vast in his eyes, a glassy blue-white counterpart to the obsidian of the Wall itself.

  From one horizon to the other a mighty range of cliffs stretched across the land; and their name in the tongues of men was glacier. Winter’s coming made bitterly solid they seemed, a winter that would admit no spring. The gold of sunset fell upon their ramparts, and was cast back chilled and drained. But the rising moon, faint against their own grey horizon, took fire from them, as it seemed; for over the unbroken fields of the Ice there were no clouds to hide it. Back they stretched from those outer walls, far back beyond the curve of the world into blackness, as if the glaciers grew out of the cold Void itself.

  So at last Alya the Seer’s son, in a guise he had never dreamed of, set eyes upon the walls of winter, upon the mighty vanguard and fortress of the realm of the Great Ice. And the sight pierced his heart with a splinter of pure chill, for the majesty and grandeur of the force he dared to challenge.

  But its advance was not uniform or even. This was a realm with a coastline, and the snow for beaches beneath. Almost all the land lay obliterated by white, save where here and there black bones of stone, rime-enshrouded, still protruded slightly through the snow-capped glacial bays. Once tall mountains, perhaps, now they were ground down to mere memory, like skeletons scoured by a desert wind.

  Here and there the contours of the land still baulked the glaciers, but past such obstacles they reached out long icy fingers, as if preparing to close and crush them. Elsewhere, for causes no longer visible, they formed bays and peninsulas, and these riven with valleys, crevices, cracks and caves, from whose shadowy depths the black rivers spewed out across the land.

  All of these he noted as he flew towards the Ice, as well as he could hope to. It seemed to him that he flew slowly now, against a headwind. When at last he crossed the awesome battlements, and the white lands spread out beneath him, it came as a shock to see the sun so low. He fought to rise higher and higher, till by virtue of his great wings he soared beyond the height of most birds, and the thin dry air burned his lungs. Yet he soon realised that he sped as before; it was only the vastness he confronted that made him seem so much slower.

  Then the sun sank at last, and the sky around him turned black as the rivers beneath; and the Ice assumed its terrible crown. Far above the whiteness that crown rippled and floated, as if to carry the blazing moon in its corona; and Alya found himself soaring amongst it, the Lights of the Northlands themselves. Towering curtains of light rippled and rained down around him, and the air seemed to shiver with a crackling force. So high was he now that he saw little colour in them; yet below him they turned to greens and pinks and glowing purples, shaking suddenly like a windblown sail and shifting hues. But it was to either flank that their true stature became apparent, shimmering sheets of whiteness filled with a gleaming rain, as if great hands scattered dust of stars and white diamonds down out of the void, like time itself raining down from the eternal stars. Across his very wings cold fires raced, and green flame crackled among his feathers.

  He grew giddy with the sight, and the thin air. It seemed to him that some of the showering gems were piling up in the crevices and the hollows of the bare brown rock beneath, forming gleaming pools of gems, rubies and emeralds, sapphires and pure blazing diamonds.

  As above, so below. The white light was mirrored in the ice. The moon swam in the glaciers, and drew the stars after her in a trail of fire. Somewhere in the depths of his mind he knew he must descend, or plummet from the sky like some dark fragment of the night. With mighty wings outstretched he glided, tasting the chill air with his pinion feathers, feeling the rush and flow of it. Gradually the pain in his gullet eased, the fatal lightness in his head. Yet the giddy bewilderment remained, the sense of dream or nightmare, of sailing through a mad vision; for this was no place meant for life to be, and he saw through an alien shape, and eyes not his own.

  He no longer knew which way he flew. In sudden panic he saw himself speeding on to perish among the lifeless wastes. Frantically he sought a fixed point amid this fleeting icy light, and found it. The stars, shining steady now in the black void above, no longer twinkling, formed the familiar constellations, marking the corners of the world. He found the North Star, for which he was indeed heading. He went wheeling wildly about, careering down the sky with the starsigns cavorting above him. The Sickle, and the Hunter, the Bow – he could guess his heading from them now, he could find the way back without track or signpost. And the wind was changing, a faint cold breeze growing stronger at his back, buoying up his weary wings.

  For a time, resting, he rode it, marking how the angle of the stars changed at the margins of the world. That the world was a sphere in the Void, he had been taught; but that seemed only a philosophical truth, a device of understanding. It was something else, a demented dream still, to see land that seemed so solid actually bent to a curve, and the oppressive Ice that lay upon it. It made even that cold vastness seem smaller, somehow, and more limited. There were realms even the Ice could not conquer, to which it must seem as small as he to it. The Void was vaster yet, and colder; and that thought, bleak as it was, helped pierce the glittering madness in his mind.

  And then he saw the jewels once again, from lower down. It had been no illusion; they were indeed pooled here and there across the glittering expanse, as if the Sm
ith of the Powers had set vast treasures into crystal and white gold. There were not many; one gleaming on the westward horizon, glinting against the night; another eastward, almost behind him now, shining in the lee of bare rock. But ahead, almost in his path lay the largest pool, seething and shimmering in the bitter air. In astonished curiosity, forgetting fear, he swooped down towards it.

  It was further than he expected, quite near the margins of the Ice, cupped within those outstretched fingers. Further and larger, as he skated down the sky; a vale of gems, a deep ring of shining facets, winking blood-red, deep and warm, but shot with gleams of blue and green like frozen memories of hues no longer alive here, skies and trees embalmed from the warm morning of the world. But all their colours were no more than accents to the brilliance at their apex, that gleamed one moment pale and cool, then flashed the sharp-edged blue of lightning, colder and harder even than the moonlit Ice, as it might be a diamond set among pearl. It drew him, and he thrashed the wind with his waning strength, plunging down upon that bright pool in the waste.

  Into his sight swam the vale and its margins, flanked by overhanging ice-falls like embodied menace, the thin line of bare black cliffs beneath, and the steaming vents of the earthfires that kept them thawed. Only then did the size of what he saw there begin to fix itself in his tormented understanding. Out of another life swam the memory of Tseshya’s crudely sketched sheet of paper, the immensity around him insolently marked off by a single line. And within it the circles that stood for the incredible: life within death, the sprawling, seething veins and arteries of a verminous nest, the fires and smokes and squalors of a town of men.

  He could hardly take it in, the size of it, where no such place should be; but he knew he had to fix this place in his mind, everything he could of it. He glided lower, wondering only vaguely what would happen if he were seen, marking out the rambling streets, swimming with meltwater and steam, the myriad and many-hued fires and furnaces, flares and braziers, the endless hordes of ramshackle compounds and tumbledown buildings scattered and tangled across the vale’s wide floor like an uncovered maze of rat burrows.

  Spirals of warm air rising warred with the bitter Ice-wind, rolling and boiling beneath his wings; but they stank, of steam and sulphur and rotten eggs, and above that the crowding of men and beasts and their mingled filth. At the vale’s far end, as the ground lifted towards the cliffs, the ways grew wider, the air cleaner; but the towers, though taller and stronger, were no more than windowless shadows beneath the feet of what arose above. The apex of the jewel, as he had seen it; and this alone still seemed jewel-like as he flew towards it, this alone more terrible and fair. Its pale light blazed across the vale, flashed and flickered against the very Ice above, mirrored and repeated among the cold cliffs.

  That was what drew him! Called him, almost; as if some force worked upon the wearer of the wings. That he must resist; but it was harder than it seemed. Even the warm airs warred against him now, cooling and falling as he bore down upon them. He was falling fast; and he saw the jewel beneath him, the milky jewel with the bright heart. Even wheeling as he plunged, he marvelled at it, like no building he could ever have conceived. Its soft-edged walls might have been formed whole in some mighty shell, so smooth was their opalescent sheen, tinged with rainbows, so seamless their lustre. But they were the setting only for the brighter, hard light of adamant, and he wondered at the pulse and shimmer of it among that mighty colonnade in its front face, in all the shifting shades of sky and forest.

  There were people in the square before the palace, tiny stick-like figures that resolved themselves as he struggled to rise, hurling his wings against the air. He could see them more clearly by the moment, black-clad men standing guard, unloading wagons, hurrying about other business. Women, too; some clad as warriors, some in longer robes. And they could see him, as he sank down the failing wind. Some pointed, gestured, called out; others came running from within. He saw bows, and feared a drift of arrows; but none arose. Instead they were falling, down there, black-clad and robed women all alike, dropping to their knees as he passed above them, like cornstalks scythed by his racing shadow. Kneeling, bending their brows to the ground.

  They were saluting him, revering him almost. He was descending still more steeply now, right towards the steps of the great building, and he no longer struggled to slow himself. Lower still, so low he could see the wide space between the pillars now, and the people who ran to look up, only to fall on their faces. Wavering crazily now, above the blazing roof of the palace, faces – older women, younger – staring up at him from the high gallery that encircled it, as a golden clasp a pearl. Faces …

  He almost plummeted from the sky. Young women, in a group, young and fair, clad richly but too lightly, as it seemed, to stand upon that palatial thing of ice. Some chattered and pointed; but at the rear a tall young woman with a haughty look of command stood aloof, though she too gazed upward in wonder. And beside her …

  He thrashed the air with desperate strokes of those vast wings, till they cracked like thunder in his own ears. He stretched out his neck and shouted aloud; but of course it came out as a wild wordless cry, as lonely as any he had heard across the moors of his earlier life.

  Beside her, wide-eyed, ruddy-skinned, raven hair falling strangely coiffed across strong bare shoulders, yet seen beyond mistaking even with eyes other than his own—

  A face that filled his sight. Eyes that blazed brighter to him than all the palace, brighter than the distant sun itself, scored more deeply in his mind and heart.

  ‘Savi!’ screamed the wild swan, in unbearable joy and anguish. ‘Savi!’

  Almost the name took shape within the cry, and he saw a momentary look of puzzlement cross her face. Seizing the very air, he swooped upon the roof, cursing that he did not wear the guise of so great a bird of prey. Then he might have scooped her up in flight, borne her off dangling to some remote eyrie. But he had no talons. He would land, though, and somehow make her understand, change back if he had to. Could he bear her away, on his back even, beyond the walls of the Ice, to a new life? Could even the fires hurl such force into his wings? They would. That was the utmost deed he had dreamed of, to fulfil his quest and oath himself with the gift given him. He wheeled about and back, sending the women shrieking and scattering below his thrashing pinions, gliding down in strength over the tessellated pavement of the gallery.

  Upon the steps he saw her standing, her face alight with anxious wonder and what seemed a joy half formed, not wholly understood, as if his frantic thoughts already touched her. Closer yet – then he might make her understand! He would! He reached out.

  And saw, behind her, behind the taller girl, another taller still. Her face of milk and ivory might have made her the swan-girl’s sister, save that the fall of hair which framed it was a whiter, ashen hue. And proud though the swan-girl seemed, this one stood higher and prouder yet, wide of shoulder, imperious and keen, with a hard set to the full lips and the wide blue eyes alight with freezing fire. One hand she rested upon Saviyal’s bare shoulder, as if to steady herself; but the other she raised a little in a gesture of command. For all her manner there was uncertainty, as if she doubted at whom she aimed her order. That, and that he had not already alighted, were what saved him then.

  It snatched him, the command; it drew him hard – to come, to land, to fall at her feet and acknowledge her. He fought it, and it tore at him; in that guise he could hardly have withstood it an instant. But he was still in the air, unable now to shape his wings to brake himself. His momentum carried him soaring across the gallery, no higher than their heads, and his shadow swept across them. Savi and the other girl ducked; even the ivory woman flinched and threw up her hands.

  And he was past, away, free of the awful summons that had locked his muscles and his mind in helpless spasm, riding another spiral of warmer air up the barren flank of the vale and higher, into the rushing Ice-wind and the bitter Northlights once again.

  At his back, as he wh
eeled and flapped for height, he still felt the summons in another fashion now, insistent, angry; but the palace was already a distant pearl, and he could ignore it. What truly called him back was stronger still; but in his heart he knew that it would be useless and worse. And as he wheeled around once more he saw other wings glide across the moon, three or four vaster even than his own. Again his whole being thrilled to a call; and he knew who they were, and why they had been summoned. Yet they were not in swan guise now. The wings were curving, broader, with pinions spread like great fingers. These were raptors, sea-eagles perhaps, shapes of beak and talon, speeding to an urgent alarm. But he laughed, for they were far behind, still circling the fiery vale; they had not seen him, not yet. He hurled himself away down the wind, speeding to the southward, seeking among all the threads of the outflowing rivers the one he had followed.

  He found it, black as it was, pouring out of a high shattered glacial wall, among great banks of mist. Its wide waters glittered beneath the sinking moon, with long keen shadows gliding across them. He did not dare stoop in his rush to look; from the mind he touched, he guessed what they must be. So there were sentinels down here also, and already alerted! And across the snowfields beneath the glittering cliffs thin harsh trumpets echoed, and horsemen were starting out. No doubt other less visible sentinels were also stirring, around and within the Ice, seeking out the unknown intruder. So swiftly! As swift as thought, the alert had passed. And as thorough. It augured ill for any road in he could imagine, to that awful fortress and its jewelled heart.

  All the same, that hardly seemed to matter against the greater joy that came thrilling up from beneath, like the first warmth of sunrise. The only jewel that place held for him was alive and well, even safe, by the look of it, for now. He had seen her, all but touched her. He would dearly have done more, but that was only a matter of time and perseverance. He would come back for her; surely she would understand. He was happy. He had only to find out how.