by Tad Williams
As we journeyed, we met a few of the mortals who lived on that monstrously empty plain, herding folk for the most part, traveling in family groups. The men let their chin whiskers grow long and rode on small, strong ponies. These folk could draw their bows and loose arrows from horseback better than most mortals could manage while standing on firm ground. They roamed from one side of the wide grasslands to the other according to the season, following their cattle and sheep, and though we did not see many of them, those we saw were generally cautious of us, or outright fearful, but did not offer us harm. A few of these mortals even warned us to be wary of any company of solely male riders, since the grasslands were also a refuge for outlaws, thieves, and murderers.
One day early in Renewal we were beset by bandits in truth, although it was not one of my master’s loud nightmares that called them down on us. Nearly a dozen riders spotted us from far away in late afternoon—my master saw them first, of course—and steadily narrowed the distance between us as the sun slipped down the sky. Their first mistake was to attack us as soon as they were close enough, which happened to be just after the sun had set and twilight was fading. I doubt they had ever met any Zida’ya before, and it is likely they did not know how much better my master could see in near-darkness than they could.
Their second mistake was to take my master’s slumped posture and obvious discomfort for the signs of an easy target. In fact, when they closed on us in the darkening evening, it was me that they avoided in order to attack him first, which would have made me laugh when I realized it, had I not been so terrified.
These two errors alone were enough to doom them, but they still might have won the day if they had only used their bows while they were still far away from us. My master had his own bow, but they could have overcome him if they had all shot at once. Instead, one or two loosed their shafts, but those seemed meant only to keep us from escaping as they made a thundering rush in our direction, curved swords slashing the air over their heads.
My master killed three of them with arrows in moments, then he unsheathed his sword and spurred toward them. I kicked my heels against my own horse’s sides and turned back to fight beside him. I took the hand off one of the whiskered attackers—his look of indignant shock was almost comical, as though I had mistaken some kindness he planned—and saw him tumble out of his saddle, but before I could even reach the next bandit my master had killed one of them and wounded another, wielding Thunderstroke as swiftly and devastatingly as the lightning for which it was named. Within moments, as the bloody mist of the last killing still drifted down through the air, the remaining bandits gave up their attack and veered away. They turned in their saddles as they retreated and loosed arrows toward us, but we were lucky or they were too frightened to aim well: none of their bolts came close to us.
I hurried to my master to thank him—I was very certain that if I had been with any less dangerous warrior, I would have been killed—but had a frightening moment as I caught up with him. He was bent low in Gray’s saddle, gasping. It was only as I reached out to him and he violently drew back that I realized he had not been struck by a stray arrow but was overcome entirely by his exertions. It had been a long time since I had seen him so helpless, and as I watched he half-slid, half-tumbled out of the saddle and onto the ground.
I quickly dismounted and pulled the last root paste from my saddlebag. I set a fire and heated a clean stone as quickly as I could. When the stone had begun to crack with the heat, I picked it out of the fire with sticks and dropped it into our cooking pot so the water would boil, then used the hot water to soften the root paste. When it had cooled, I took it to Lord Hakatri. When he finally recognized me, he allowed me to daub the root-salve on his wounds.
The night grew darker as I waited, but my master stayed huddled on the ground. At last, as the moon drifted up into the sky, he stirred and sat up. Even by moonlight, I could see the fear in his eyes.
“I thought that time the wormsblood dream would not end,” he told me. “Faithful Pamon, I thank you. I do not know what I would do without your loyalty and help. I owe you more than I can ever repay.”
I flinched at that. Such talk turned things upside-down. I did not want to live in a world where my master was so weak, so pitiful. It was against the order of everything I had ever known. “I am your servant,” was all I said, but I had become strangely uncertain what serving him truly meant.
* * *
• • •
One night, deep in the unmapped reaches of the Whisperwaste, I dreamt that I was on fire. But it did not feel like a dream.
I woke up, shrieking and squirming, trying with flapping hands to beat out the flames that I could feel running up my limbs, only to realize that those flames were not real. But they had been real, or at least they had truly felt that way. Even as I crouched beneath the stars and the stretching night sky, the pain was still alive in me, an agony like flayed skin, an attack on my wits as terrible as an endless scream. When after a dozen heartbeats or so the torture finally began to ease and I could catch my breath, I saw that my master had sat up and was staring at me with wide eyes.
“What is it, Pamon?”
“I do not know, my lord.” I struggled for air. “It felt as if someone threw boiling oil on my skin. It was only a dream, I suppose, but it seemed to continue even after I woke.”
“I am so sorry.” The look on Hakatri’s face was grim, but at that moment I did not understand it. My heart was beating so fast it made my chest ache, and my lungs were still short of air. It was a long time before I dared to let myself fall sleep again.
* * *
• • •
That was not the last time I seemed to partake of one of my master’s dreams. Often in the days that followed I would awaken from fearful visions to discover Lord Hakatri writhing in nightmares of his own, and I became more and more convinced that I was sharing something of his night-torments, though I could not understand how. But it was not only those terrible dreams of burning that plagued me. Sometimes, especially on the edges of sleep, I seemed not to be dreaming at all, but to have slipped past the veil that surrounds all our lives and into something quite different—something eternal and unknowable. It was a fearful thing indeed to sense how little separated our waking selves from unknown gulfs of madness.
I awakened early one morning to find Hakatri up and moving around our camp. He was packing up our possessions in a sort of fever, as though preparing to flee some danger, but he seemed more excited than worried.
“Up, Pamon, up!” he said as I sat rubbing my eyes. “I know our direction at last. I know what the White Phantom is!”
“And will you tell me, my lord?” I asked.
“I will do better—I will show you! To horse! It waits for me.”
I dutifully gathered up the remains of my cooking tools and the few other things I had taken from my saddlebags and prepared to ride. I had no sooner climbed into my saddle than Hakatri put heels to his mount and was off, and I had to ride Boots hard to keep my master in sight. The morning mists swirled between us as we rode, and at times I felt as though I rode alone, chasing something far less substantial than a lord of Asu’a.
The sun had almost reached noon and the mist had burned away when Hakatri reached the top of a low hill and reined up, calling back to me, “There, Pamon! Did I not tell you?” His voice was full of joy, so much so that it troubled me. Whatever he had found had been leading us on for many days, and I felt only apprehension as I hurried to catch up, a feeling that increased when I reached his side.
The meadowland stretched before us like a serving platter, but for the first time I could make out the dim shadow of the great Oldheart forest that girdled the grassland’s northern edge, and I was surprised by how far we had come in just the last few days’ riding. But I was even more astonished by the angular shape that loomed far above the swaying grasses—a slender hillock of rock and earth that
did indeed look a little like a figure dressed in pale robes. But no person, giant, or even dragon had ever stood so tall: the tor jutted high into the sky before us, an angular prominence jutting from the earth like the lower half of a column, though its sides and crest were shrouded in grass and thick with trees. It rose out of a shallow lake that surrounded it like a moat, but it was no castle, and no mortal or immortal hands had shaped it. In truth, the hilly spire before us looked more than anything else to me like the blunt end of a massive skeletal finger, and I shuddered to see it.
“What is this place?” I cried.
“Sesuad’ra!” called my master. “The Leavetaking Stone.”
I had never seen that hill before, but I knew its story as well as I knew of the Flight from the Garden or the death of Nenais’u. Many, many Great Years before, the two clans of my master’s people, Zida’ya and Hikeda’ya, had met atop the Leavetaking Stone to arrange their separation, a moment known ever since as the Parting. Afterward Utuk’ku had led her people back to Nakkiga to shelter in the mountain’s fastness, declaring they would never live with Jenjiyana and her clansfolk again. After Sesuad’ra, nothing had ever been the same for the immortals who came from the Garden.
“But why are we here, Master?” I asked. “Surely the place is empty.”
“Of people, yes,” he said, spurring his horse down the slope toward the great pillar of stone and earth. “But it was always alive—and it calls to me.”
And with that he gave Gray his heels again, forcing me to drive my own horse to a gallop simply to keep him in sight.
* * *
• • •
Our mounts picked their way through the shallow water at the base of Sesuad’ra with exaggerated caution. It did not take my years of experience in Asu’a’s stables to see that these horses reared in mortal lands did not like the Leavetaking Stone: they took every step as though under the eye of a large and lightly sleeping beast of prey. Nor did I think much of the place, either. The tales of the Parting do not speak often of Sesuad’ra itself, but it is unlike any other spot I have visited in my life, huge but deserted, its very size making it seem like something unnatural that had been set down in that empty land and then forgotten.
“I see the remains of the causeway,” Hakatri called to me. “This way, Pamon. We can follow it to the stone itself and our horses will barely get their bellies damp.” His good humor worried me as much as his bad dreams and pained suffering had in the days before, and I could not help wondering aloud why this place had become so important to him.
“Because I have seen it in so many dreams,” he told me. “The very dreams that are part of my affliction.”
“But is that not a reason to stay away?” I asked. “We are but a day’s ride west from the walls of Enki-e-Shao’saye. We have been in the saddle for almost two moons. You have suffered so much, my lord, and we are both weary. Hungry, too, and the roots Hurma gave us to soothe your wounds are all used up. Let us turn toward home instead, or toward Enki-e-Shao’saye—in the Summer City we can rest and strengthen ourselves. Then if you still wish it, we can come here again on our way back to Asu’a.”
Poor, foolish Kes! I still believed at that point that after many moons of travel, we would be home within a few days.
Hakatri only shook his head, as though I failed to understand some elementary fact. “But we are here, Pamon. The Leavetaking Stone has called to me in my cursed dreams for so long—how could I turn away now?”
The spiral track that wound upward around the great stony hill was wide enough for two wagons to pass each other. As we rode, Hakatri told me more of the place. I cannot say it made me any less uneasy.
“This hill itself is a kind of Witness,” he said. “There is power here—a power that even the wisest of my people have never entirely understood.”
“Do you mean this great rock is a Master Witness? I thought there were only nine of those all told, one for each of the great cities, like the Pool of Three Depths at home in Asu’a.” The word “home” was beginning to have an ashy taste on my lips. Many times since we had set out to travel to Nakkiga I had feared my master would never see his family again, that I would have to bear the news of his death back to his mother Amerasu and his wife Briseyu. More recently I had begun to hope that my fears had been wrong, that we might actually find our way back, but now, suddenly, things had changed again.
“You already know there is more than one kind of Witness,” Hakatri told me as our horses leaned forward into the steep track. “Those like the one I carry”—he reached into his tunic and produced the mirror he had acquired after losing his first in Serpent’s Vale—“and the Master Witnesses you have seen, like Asu’a’s Pool or Mezutu’a’s Shard, which can command the lesser Witnesses or speak to many Witnesses at once. But another sort of Master Witness also exists, and one of them is here at Sesuad’ra. It is in the stone itself, or perhaps even deep in the earth beneath it. No one knows. Its full strength cannot be mastered even by the adepts of my people, but it enhances the power of other Witnesses, sometimes in ways even the other Master Witnesses cannot match. The thing hidden beneath us is called Rhao iye-Sama’an—the Earth-Drake’s Eye. Its power is why this place was chosen for the ritual of the Parting, to bind the fateful agreement with Words of Power. All the other Master Witnesses have long been claimed by Zida’ya or Hikeda’ya, but the Witness buried here belongs to no one.”
Listening, I struggled with worry and even a little anger. “But that still does not explain why we are here and why you are so determined to ride to the top of this stony hill, my lord. Can you tell me that?”
“No, Pamon, I cannot, because I do not know. But I do know that I was summoned—I was meant to come here.” He said it as though that should lay my fears to rest.
But who or what is summoning you? I wondered. I had not believed things could be worse for my master than what he had already suffered, but in that isolated, eerie place, with the wind moaning through the empty grasslands below and rippling the shallow waters around the base of the great stone, I feared for the first time that the worst might be ahead of us.
* * *
• • •
My master’s people have a favored saying, part of a long poem by Benhaya of Kementari.
First the ocean, then the island
First the forest, then the tree
First the tree, then the branch, then the nightingale
But in the nightingale’s song is everything
I will tell the truth: I do not well understand what it signifies. The Zida’ya often recite it when they mean to say that some things cannot be understood in part, but only as a piece of a greater whole. But “nightingale” was also the name my master’s folk called Jenjiyana, the most beloved of all the Sa’onserei who came to this land after the flight from the Garden, still remembered long after her death for her beauty and goodness. Jenjiyana, or so it is said, was born with hair that was not white, as with the rest of her kind, but black as a starless night, and instead of the warm golden skin most of her people had, Jenjiyana’s was a pale, buttery shade like the blossom of a spring primrose. The tallest tower in Asu’a is topped with a statue of her staring back toward the east, some say toward the Garden itself, others say to the city of Tumet’ai, which was swallowed by ice during Jenjiyana’s long lifetime. In many ways, that statue is the symbol of the Zida’ya in this land, so I know the nightingale is more than just a bird for my master’s people.
I was still pondering Benhaya’s poem as we reached the top of the Leavetaking Stone. What had at first seemed merely a huge outcrop in the middle of the grasslands had become a steep, spiraling slope, but as the track broadened at the top and we rode out onto Sesuad’ra’s heights, the place appeared to be something else entirely—an island floating in the sky.
The ruins atop the great stone were now revealed to us in all their forgotten splendor. My first impr
ession was of an entire deserted city, with roofless buildings and open stretches of tile that had sunk into the soil in some spots but had been thrown down in others by the vegetation growing up through it. After a few moments of open-mouthed staring, though, I could see that the deserted site was too small to be a true city, but that its buildings were too large to belong to some lesser settlement. The realization settled on me that all this must have been built simply for the great and terrible ceremony of Parting, then abandoned once more.
“Yes, Pamon,” my master said, misreading me for once. “Your people labored hard to build all this. No one else could be trusted to do so in a place of such power, but the Garden is strong in the blood of your folk.”
I was so busy looking around me that I did not really grasp what he said, but later I wished I had asked him what he meant. Even now, I wonder how many things that are still great mysteries to me are known and barely considered by my master’s people?
“I do not much like this place, my lord,” I said.
“You can feel it is alive, that is all.” His feverish mood seemed to be returning. “Or at least that something is waiting here to be awakened.”
“You make me dislike it even more, my lord.”
Hakatri was scarcely paying attention to me now. His eyes had lit on the largest building on the promontory, less decrepit than most of the others. It was round as a barrel’s lid and a furlong or more across, with an odd, shallow dome.
“That is the Kosa’ajika,” he said, “the Crossroad, as my ancestors named it.”
I stared at the weird structure. “Crossroad? Why should it be called such a thing, my lord? I do not see even one road, let alone a crossing.”
