by Tad Williams
“Master!” I shouted to Hakatri in desperation. “Get out!” I started to scramble down toward him, but my feet slipped on wet stone and went out from under me. I hit the back of my head and for a terribly long moment could only lay stunned on the stony, sloping bank, staring up at the darkening sky.
Ineluki had finally pulled Bronze to a halt and turned him, but the horse caught sight of the worm and reared, forelegs kicking, and Ineluki fell from his saddle. As he and I struggled back to our feet, we lost the moment. Instead of fleeing as the mortals had done, Hakatri plunged into the muddy water and began trying to lift the huge, sharpened trunk by himself. The worm reached the edge of the pond and came at him in a tumult of brackish water and broken trees, hissing like a bellows, its bony, snapping jaws foremost, like the prow of a ship.
“No!” Ineluki shouted. “Hakatri, no!”
I still do not know how my master managed it. In those last instants, he came up beneath a log that a dozen mortal men had struggled to carry in its sling, his teeth bared in a mirthless grin of exertion, the veins beneath his golden skin bulging on his forehead and neck as he lifted the punishing weight of the witchwood. I heard him cry out in pain and desperation—the worst sound, I think, that I have ever heard, and one I will never forget.
As his brother and I watched in helpless horror, my master was able to heave the terrible weight upward until the sharpened tip rose above the pond’s surface. The dragon came down on him like a vast boulder tumbling down a hillside, and for a moment, as the monster came down on him, everything disappeared in the froth. Then the spouting, splashing water turned black, and though the hissing continued, I saw that it came now not from the monster, but from a fountain of black blood splashing out over the pond and the bank. Where it struck, the water boiled, sending up billowing clouds of steam like a bronzesmith quenching a red-hot bar in a bucket. Moments later, as the billows thinned, I saw the bulk of the worm sprawled in twitching coils, half in and half out of the pond, the spatters and gobs of its shiny black blood sizzling where they touched moisture. Then Hakatri began to scream.
I scrambled down the slope and began flailing in the water, blinded by steam, reaching toward my master’s terrible cries as I waded deeper. I had to step over the worm’s gigantic tail. I should have looked first to make certain the beast was truly dead before turning my back on it, but at that moment all I could think of was Hakatri. His cries were terrible beyond describing. There were no words in them, only the raw sound of agony. I found him before I could see him, my hands closing on his arm. Then, as I began to drag him toward the edge of the pond, I felt a fierce burning pain from the smears of dragon’s blood scorching through my gloves. I shucked them and threw them away, then wriggled out of my cloak and wrapped it around Hakatri’s arm. Thus protected for the moment, I was able to ignore the pain of my own burns long enough to drag him toward the shore of the pond. His terrible cries did not abate.
A few moments later Ineluki reached me, and together we pulled Lord Hakatri up the bank so that only his feet were in the water. He was still screaming. Muddy water and black blood covered his face, so I used the cloak to wipe it away, but my master was insensible of anything except the pain. I splashed water on him in a frantic effort to wash off the worst of the worm’s blood—I could see it steaming in spots, as though my master himself had become red-hot metal—but it did not seem to do any good.
“His armor!” Ineluki said, then shoved me roughly to one side and began to cut away the thick leather straps of my master’s witchwood breastplate. In a few moments he was able to pull it away, then we rolled Hakatri off the back plate and into the pond once more, scrubbing him with gobs of mud and my cloak, which was already falling apart simply from touching the dragon’s caustic essence. Doing my best to ignore my master’s dreadful cries, though my eyes were so full of tears I could scarcely see, I helped Ineluki strip his brother naked as we raced to wipe all the scorching blood from his skin. Everywhere we cleaned we found terrible welts, red and rupturing, so that I despaired of my master living out the hour. My own hands, though barely touched by the black blood, hurt so badly I could not even imagine my master’s suffering.
At last Hakatri fell into limp silence. I spread the last clean corner of my cloak across his chest, then laid my head against his scorched and streaming flesh.
“His heart still beats,” I said.
“We must find healers,” cried Ineluki. “Snowdrift—that is the closest house.” Beneath the horror that was plain on his face and in his voice, I heard something else: an unimaginable anger, although in that moment I took little notice. I was still lost in a dream—a terrible, almost unbelievable dream—and I could barely keep my thoughts in order from one instant to the next.
There was no time to make a litter or anything else to carry Hakatri. When we had washed all the black blood away, Ineluki heaved his brother’s burned, naked body up onto his saddle and clambered up behind him; then, without another word to me, he spurred away toward Birch Hill.
Numb, feeling as blackly dazzled as if I had been struck by a thunderbolt out of a bright and cloudless sky, I watched him ride off at tremendous speed, Bronze’s hooves barely touching the ground. Realizing an instant later that I had been left by myself, the mortals and my Zida’ya masters all gone, I had a fearful thought and turned to see if Hidohebhi was truly dead.
Even though it lay before me in a pile of massive coils, dark tongue lolling and gold-shot eyes already filming, it was hard to believe that such a creature had truly lived. The Blackworm had been pierced through its breast by the tree-spear just a little to one side of center. My master had managed an astounding feat, and I could only pray he would not pay for it with his life. Later, though, I had cause to wonder whether it might have been better if he had not survived.
The dragon’s head was almost as long as I was tall, a great, blunt thing so thickly armored it looked as though it had been carved out of black stone. I spat on it, then turned away.
My hands still stung me bitterly, but I had been fortunate, and though I felt the pain of those burns a long time after, I did not suffer a hundredth of what my master did. For long moments after silence fell, I could only stare at the ruination of our plans—the discarded, torn rope harness, the great, scraping tracks of the monster’s approach, and the crushed, lifeless body of poor Seafoam. With no one else to help me, I could not even make a grave for my master’s horse. Though the fault was not hers, and though she bravely did her rider’s bidding to the end, I had to leave her body for the wolves and other scavenging creatures.
This hurt me more than my scorched hands did. I had tended the swift mare for years, and now I had to leave her where she lay, like a discarded apple core or a broken wheel. But the dragon was dead. Who could I hate?
At last, still feeling as though I had awakened to find the world empty of everyone but myself, I gathered up my master’s belongings. His clothes were ruined, but his armor, though stained and burned in spots, was still an ancient family treasure. I found his sword Indreju still in its scabbard, the belt burned through in the first moments of the dragon’s thrashing death, and I took that too. I wrapped them all in my tattered, wet cape, then climbed onto the saddle of Hakatri’s war horse, wincing as I took the reins. Frostmane started a little as I mounted, though I had cared for him for years.
“I know,” I said, as he paced in a restive circle. “The world has turned upside-down.” I pointed his nose toward Birch Hill, then took one last look at the place where everything had changed so suddenly and so dreadfully. The evening light was almost completely gone; the great, sprawling corpse of the dragon might have been a pile of rocks or a huge fallen tree. I turned away from the scene of devastation and gave Frostmane my heels. The world was growing dark around me. It did not feel as though the sun would ever rise again.
Part Three
The White Walls
We did not learn of it for some t
ime, but the mortal prince Cormach survived that dreadful day. He was badly hurt, with broken legs and other injuries, but he lived on to a good old age and led his people well, although after Serpent’s Vale he always walked with a limp.
Ineluki carried the mortally injured Hakatri as swiftly as he could out of Serpent’s Vale and back to Birch Hill, the closest settlement of my master’s people.
Lord Dunyadi’s house Snowdrift did not have the array of healers that lived in Asu’a, but it would have taken days of riding to reach them. As luck would have it, though, one very wise healer lived at Snowdrift. His name was Geniki, and he was old enough to have treated the terrible burns caused by dragon’s blood before—although, as he himself admitted upon seeing my master, never with such dreadful injuries. By the time I arrived Geniki had already put Hakatri to sleep with a powerful draught of kei-vishaa and called for some of Dunyadi’s retainers to make their way into the mountain heights nearby in search of snow. Frantic and unable to do anything else to help his brother, Ineluki rode with them, and by nightfall they had brought back several washing tubs packed with the year’s last snow. Lord Dunyadi gave up his own bath so that my master could lie in it while the healer packed the snow around him. Lord Hakatri still breathed, but I could guess nothing else about his condition.
I sat with him that way for two days. I could not even hold his hand or touch him, though I ached to, because even the lightest brush of fingers on his skin—even those places that showed no mark of being burned—made him moan and writhe. He did not speak, except for once when he suddenly awakened, tried to sit up but could not, and said very clearly, “Again and again she peers behind the veil. The cold ones outside are taking notice.” He mumbled a few more words after that but I could make nothing of them, then he lapsed back into insensibility again.
I have never wept so much, not even when I was a child. I was certain it was only a matter of hours, days at the most, before my master died.
On the third day after Hakatri had been put into his snow-bath, Lord Dunyadi’s daughter Himuna came to my master’s bedside. Her manner was calm and her words measured, but her sadness at Hakatri’s suffering was evident. “How fares your lord today, Armiger Pamon?” she asked me.
“I wish I could tell you he seemed better, my lady, but I see no improvement,” I admitted. Himuna was Birch Hill’s chief celebrant—not the sort who wanted foolish optimism. “He cries out in his sleep betimes, as though he dreamed the worm’s attack again, but he says many other things that make no sense at all.”
“None of us can guess what your master might be seeing,” she told me. “The touch of dragon’s blood brings the Dream Road close, but that road is always full of phantoms.” Himuna shook her head. “In any case, it is not Lord Hakatri I have come for, but you.”
“Me?” I was more than surprised. “Why, S’huesa?”
“Because Lady Amerasu wishes to speak with you.”
I leaped up, startled but also relieved. Surely Amerasu would know what to do. Surely the Sa’onsera would put things to right—or at least as much as could be put right after such a terrible tragedy. “First Grandmother is here?”
“No, no. I have spoken to her through a Witness. Now she wishes to have words with you.”
“But why?”
“That is not for me to say, Armiger. But you should not keep her waiting. Follow me.”
I had scarcely left my master’s side since we had come to Snowdrift, terrified that his last moments might occur while I was away. Still, I could not imagine turning down Amerasu, even were she not the oldest and greatest of my master’s folk. Above all else, she was Hakatri’s mother, and I knew her heart must be aching. When I was young, I was felled with a wasting illness and my mother Enla did not leave my side, even when the fever took her as well. I lived. My mother did not. My father barely spoke for months afterward and was never the same. From the day she was buried on the headland he all but made the stables his home, and because of that, I did too.
I followed Himuna through the bright hallways, blind to the beauty of Snowdrift’s decoration as I was blind to everything but my master’s suffering. She led me into Lord Dunyadi’s residence. His wife Uzu’una had died many years before, but none of her things had been removed: a delicate robe the color of a summer sky still hung on a peg on the wall, as if she might return at any moment and wish to put it on. A polished, intricately carved table still held Uzu’una’s jewel box and mirror, and for a moment I thought the mirror might be the Witness that Himuna had mentioned—it was very old, and its frame was beautifully ornamented—but she led me through the apartment without pausing, then slid aside a panel to reveal another room.
Much of the center of the room belonged to a living birch tree, which stood in an open space in the middle of the floor, rooted directly into the hill beneath Snowdrift. The roof was open just like the floor, and though the tree’s branches did not reach past the ceiling, nothing stood between them and the sky, sun, and rainclouds.
“This ancient birch came from the Lost Garden as a seed,” Himuna told me. “While others hoarded witchwood to bring to the new lands, my forebears wanted something that spoke to them of their old home.” It was a beautiful tree, resplendent in that moment with green spring leaves, the bark so white that it looked as though it had been washed and polished within the last hour. (Perhaps it had been. I never asked.)
Beneath the tree and set on an otherwise empty table stood an upright mirror. It was the size of my two palms side by side and its frame was almost the opposite of Lady Uzu’una’s dressing mirror, an undecorated black oval with a stand to hold it upright.
“I will leave you alone,” said Himuna, showing me a deference that confused me: I was nobody. Was she honoring the mere fact that Amerasu wished to speak with me?
“I have never used a Witness, my lady. I have seen my master use one, but it is mysterious to me.”
“All you need to do is sit before it—here.” She took a stool from against one wall of the room. “If the Sa’onsera wishes to speak to you—and she said that she did—she will do the rest. Just sit and look at your reflection.”
The celebrant went out then, leaving me alone beneath the tree and the patch of open sky. A cloud passed over the house, momentarily darkening the room, and a fine mist of rain floated down onto the leaves and my face and hands as I sat looking at my reflection. It was not an edifying sight, nor an entirely familiar one. It has never been my practice to stare at myself in a glass, though of course I knew how I looked, and the face that gazed back at me seemed even less interesting than usual. Back in Asu’a there were always many other Tinukeda’ya to see, but except for the two ladies of Ravensperch, I had been in the company of only mortals and my master’s folk for more than a moon’s waxing and waning; it was hard to believe the unexceptional being looking dully back at me had lived through so much in such a short time.
As one of the Ocean Children, I do not have the shaggy animality of the mortals—for which I am very grateful—but neither do I have the gemlike, near-perfection of the Zida’ya, who even in great age retain all their grace and most of their youthful beauty. Instead, I was then—and remain—something in between, neither one nor the other, and I felt it sorely. We Tinukeda’ya, at least those of us who still live among the Zida’ya, have something of their slenderness, something of their fine features, but to my own eye I seemed a poor imitation of my master’s kind: shapeless, imprecise, a copy made by a less competent artist. My hands are long like those of the Zida’ya, but my fingers are wider and flatter, and though my eyes do not have the muddy color of most mortal eyes—and they are certainly not the near-black of the Hikeda’ya—they do not have the compelling golden hue of the Zida’ya either. As if arranged by compromise, mine are merely yellow, the eyes of some dumb beast like a goat or a fowl of the air.
As I stared in dissatisfaction, the image of my own features seemed to shimmer, as
if the mirror’s polished surface was water rippled by a passing breeze. Then I felt her, and although her presence was calm and even warm, the strength of it—the sheer force of her thoughts—shocked me, like reaching out in the dark and finding a wall where an opening was expected.
Pamon Kes, greetings. Her words were in my head, not my ears, as plain to me as if I rehearsed something that I wished to say before saying it.
“S’huesa!” I said, then realized I had clumsily spoken the word aloud. I tried again, trying to keep my mouth closed and my tongue stilled as I dutifully began the Six Songs of Respectful Request: Lady Amerasu, revered Sa’onsera, I give you my most humble greetings and pray that I find you hale in heart and hale in body—
Even at a less fearful time, you need not stand on ceremony with me, young one, she said, silencing my greeting. I was astonished at her lack of formality. I was her eldest son’s squire, of course, and thus had spoken to her many times, but only to answer questions that she asked, almost always about Hakatri when she wished to know something of his plans. In fact, though she had never been anything other than correct and even kind with me, I was more than a little frightened of her. And if the power of her immense age and wisdom had been daunting in those other circumstances, how much more so when I could sense her power not just reaching out to me but surrounding me and all my thoughts? I felt like an infant held by a gentle giant.
You are too generous, my lady.
Let us not waste time debating my generosity, she told me, and for the first time I sensed a current of fear beneath the strength. My eldest son is terribly wounded. My other son will not speak to me. Dunyadi has told me what he knows, but he was not present when Hakatri fell. Tell me. Tell me what happened to my son—to both my sons.
