by Tad Williams
I shook my head. “I stayed mostly by Hakatri’s side, as I told you. Many of Queen Utuk’ku’s advisers came to us—they went in and out of my master’s chamber like priests going to prayers. But I understand that Lord Ineluki met with Queen Utuk’ku herself.”
The questions about Nakkiga went on for some time, but at last the Zida’ya allowed me to tell the rest of my tale, ending with our trip across the grasslands and our arrival at Enki-e-Shao’saye’s gate.
After I had finished, we all sat for a while in silence, although it seemed to me that Minasao and his mother were able to come to agreement about something even without speaking. They thanked me, then the young Zida’ya who had brought me led me back to Goldenleaf House.
Lord Hakatri was either asleep or barely awake for several days afterward. The healers bustled in and out of his chamber, dutiful as parents, but one of them confessed quietly to me that they could do little but tend to his comfort, because the curse of dragon’s blood was so seldom seen these days. My explanation of what had happened on Sesuad’ra—leaving out the actual things that Hakatri and the mysterious presence had said to each other, because I would not breach my master’s confidence—only puzzled and disturbed them.
“Sesuad’ra is known as a very dangerous place to use a Witness,” one of the healers told me. “I cannot imagine how much more dangerous for one so badly burned by wormsblood.”
Despite my master’s hopes, what he experienced on the Leavetaking Stone did not seem to have helped him and might even have made his problems worse. I chided myself for standing by and letting him risk such harm, but in all truth, I still cannot imagine what else I could have done, short of trying to drag him away from the place by force, which would likely have ended with one of us badly hurt or even dead. I had never forgotten awakening to find my master caught up in night-visions, swinging his deadly sword at dream-enemies.
When Hakatri finally awakened in full, and had drunk deeply from the water pitcher, like a man who has been crawling through a barren desert for days, I asked him what he remembered of Sesuad’ra.
“Only a little,” he told me, blinking his eyes as though the light in the dim room hurt them. “And much.” I must have frowned, because he said, “Do not look so unhappy, loyal Pamon—I am not playing games with words. I am trying to tell you the truth as I recall it.”
I did my best to clear my face of all expression, as though I were one of my master’s own folk. “I am listening, my lord.”
“When I looked in the Witness, I . . . fell into it, or so it seemed. I saw a hundred Hakatris—a thousand! I saw myself in all directions, a world made only of my own reflections.”
That was nothing like my own vision, and I wondered whether I should tell him about it, but I held my tongue. That was the closest to lying to my master I would ever come, and I still agonize over it. “A thousand Hakatris?” I asked.
“Who knows? Perhaps more! Countless reflections of my own face, but each slightly different. And then a voice spoke to me, a woman’s voice I did not know. It told me that a day was coming—or a time a thousand years in the future, or the time might not come at all—and that in that time to come, I would be forced to a choice. And as it spoke, I saw all those shadows of myself moving, speaking, living—each separate, each with a life of its own, but none of them had anything to do with me, except that somehow they were all me.”
The female voice at least seemed the same as what I had heard, but I still did not tell him my story. I did not want to admit that I had been privy to my master’s innermost thoughts in the Kosa’ajika—it seemed like a breach of his trust at a time of his greatest vulnerability, and I feared he would feel betrayed. “This is very hard to understand, Master.”
“I find it so, too,” he said. “But whoever or whatever spoke to me offered me no cure for my suffering, or even respite. It only told me, ‘suffering is.’ ”
“Then it was a bad oracle, my lord.” About this I felt certain. How could anyone, mortal or immortal, see my master’s torment and ignore it, much less dismiss it so callously?
“No, Pamon, I do not think there is either good or bad to be learned from the wisdom of the Earth-Drake’s Eye.” He winced as he changed position in the bed. “I do not say that its every word must be obeyed or even believed, but I think such a power can only show us truth. What is left is a question of how much truth, and of what truth was not shown.”
Such fine distinctions were beyond me. “I only want to see you well, Lord Hakatri. I do not think you should brood overlong on this.”
My master smiled, but it was such a sorrowful expression that it made my heart ache. “And what should I brood about instead, good Pamon? The family I cannot touch? The little daughter who fears me? My unending pain?” He shook his head. “That doom the voice foretold, the fate it believes hangs over me, at least has the virtue of waiting for me in some future time. I think I prefer that to anything I am living through now.”
* * *
• • •
Lord Hakatri soon sank into another long fever. I attended him every day, though he seldom realized I was there. But even when I left him to fall into an exhausted sleep of my own, it felt as if I still attended him, so much did my own dreams seem to be ruled by my master’s. Once I even asked one of the Enki-e-Shao’saye healers, a female Zida’ya whose name I no longer remember, whether being so close to Hakatri touched her dreams as well, and she seemed frankly astonished.
“You dream his dreams?” she asked me.
“How should I know? But I never dreamed of burning before the dragon’s blood burned him, and I never wandered so far on the Road of Dreams, either. On Sesuad’ra I heard . . .” I stopped myself then. If I could not admit to my own master that I had overheard his Crossroad visions, how could I share it with a stranger? “In my dreams I shout names I do not know,” I said instead, “as if I have seen old friends who cannot quite hear me, or old enemies I must fight who are always beyond my reach.”
The healer looked puzzled, but said at last, “Perhaps it is in your blood.”
“My blood? But I am not the one who fought the worm. I am not scarred by the black ooze that sprang from its wicked heart when it died.”
“You are Tinukeda’ya, are you not? One of the Vao out of the Garden.”
Again my heritage was thrown at me. “What of it?”
“Your people are strange in that way,” was all she said. “Alive to the Dream Road.”
Because of my master’s slow return to anything like health, we stayed in the Summer City as several moons slipped past. By the time the Fox Moon was waxing, I was beginning to feel that I had been stolen out of my own life. Even as I write this, I am ashamed to have been so selfish, but I must confess that I wondered many times if the folk back at Asu’a still remembered me, or if they thought only of Hakatri. I wondered also if my friends at Ravensperch talked of me from time to time. As the days sped past, I considered the marks my own life had left and was overwhelmed by how little difference I had made in the world, except to my master. I was a nullity, something that only existed where my life touched the lives of more important folk.
With my master being ably cared for in Goldenleaf House, I wandered the Summer City, exploring its ancient gardens and the forest. I talked to some of the folk I encountered, both my master’s kind and my own, and soon learned that I had not been wrong: many of its inhabitants had already left Enki-e-Shao’saye. The trade routes on the eastern side of Oldheart Forest had fallen out of use since Tumet’ai was abandoned, the remaining Zida’ya settlements in that part of the world were too small to make up for the disappearance of that once-great city of the North beneath the encroaching ice. Many I spoke with confessed that they, too, would likely leave soon for Asu’a or Mezutu’a or some other, easier place to live. I had known little of the Summer City before our arrival, but after spending so much time there, I had begun to mourn
it like a beloved elder who was soon to die. Again, Ineluki’s gloomy predictions came to me. If the Zida’ya faded away, I could not help wondering, would my people finally be free, or would we fade with the immortals we served?
On one of the days when I had been out walking in the city, I returned to my master’s chamber to discover he was still sleeping, but the Protector Minasao Redwing was sitting at his bedside. By the reckoning of the Zida’ya, Minasao was young for his responsibilities—he looked to be in the first bloom of youth though, as with my master, I knew he was older than his appearance. But the look on his face as I entered was not that of a carefree youth, but someone bowed beneath worries.
“Hakatri has not awakened in all the time I have waited here today,” he told me.
I gently set my hand against my master’s forehead, which was warm but not fevered. “That is often the case, my lord,” I said. “Sometimes the pain is so grave that he can do nothing but sleep—and in fact, at those times, sleep is a welcome escape.” I hesitated. “But for his dreams.”
“I have heard something about this from the healers,” he said. “Tell me about these dreams.”
“If they can even be called that.” I offered Minasao refreshment and he accepted a cup of wine. As he drank, still watching my master, I described the strange things that Hakatri had seen and felt since the dragon’s death, the bizarre journeys he described to me on waking.
“So these dire dreams began even before you climbed Sesuad’ra?”
“Long before. Almost from the moment my master was first splashed with Hidohebhi’s heart-blood, though they changed after our night on the sea with the false healer, Fen Yona. But they were always more than just dreams. He has sworn to me that he floats helplessly from the past to future days and back again.”
“Not even the wisest of our elders truly understands the Road of Dreams,” Minasao acknowledged. “But what do you mean, past and future?”
“I know only what my master tells me, my lord, but there have been many times when he was certain he witnessed events yet to happen.” I hesitated. “Once he saw ruins where this place, Enki é-Shao’saye, stands—broken stones that the trees and brambles had all but swallowed. Other times he said he spoke to mortals who remembered the Zida’ya people only as an old story. Was that simply fever-madness? How could he speak to people still unborn?”
Minasao shook his head. “If he saw our city in ruins, I fear he saw the future in truth—or at least one likely future. Jakoya herself, the great Gatherer of the Garden, once said that what is to come might extend before us like a road with many branchings, and each time you or I choose one direction, a ghost of ourselves takes the other one.”
“A ghost?” I did not like the sound of that. “A spirit of the dead?” Ghosts were a thing the mortals believed, but I had never heard it from a Zida’ya before.
“Not precisely. I doubt such a twin of ourselves, if Jakoya spoke rightly, thinks of itself as a ghost. That Minasao—or that Hakatri, or even that Armiger Pamon—would be oblivious to its twin. It continues with the only life it has ever known and thinks itself the real one—just as we all do on our own journeys.”
I could make no sense of this. In fact, the idea made me a bit queasy. “So we all have a twin?”
Minasao smiled. “Not merely one. Hundreds, if you take Jakoya’s idea as truth. Thousands. Every time we choose, the other choices are also made, and all those versions—all those twins—go forward from there.”
I could not help recalling my master’s vision of a multitude of Hakatris, each living a life of its own, each separate but nearly the same as every other. That idea led to the sudden thought of thousands of Kes-reflections—an army of them—all scattering in countless directions, choosing different courses and making different lives for themselves. This made my heart clutch in sudden unhappiness, and not only because those shadows would lead lives I could only dream of, lives of choice and freedom. “I do not understand it, my lord. In truth I find it . . . painful to contemplate.”
“Painful?” He stood, perhaps having decided that he could wait no longer for my master to awake.
“Because it suggests there must be a mirror-twin of Lord Hakatri who did not stand against the dragon.” My master had turned in his sleep and sloughed off the bedclothes. I looked down at the terrible scars on his belly and chest. “That twin is hale and whole, without pain,” I said. “Because that twin’s brother did not make a dreadful oath.”
Minasao nodded. “Perhaps that is why your master sleeps so much. Perhaps in dreams he is trying to find another life where Ineluki did not swear that oath, a life where none of this happened.”
It was all too much for me to understand and I told him so.
“Perhaps such thoughts should be left alone,” he said. “We have enough to worry about in our own world and time—and with our own Ineluki, who did swear his oath. And who also seems to grow stranger and more desperate with each passing moon.”
“Why this talk of my master’s brother, Protector? Ineluki escaped without any wounds, unlike my master. In fact, my master and I have not even seen him for more than half a circle of seasons.”
Minasao looked down at sleeping Hakatri. “Perhaps it is only me, Armiger. I have been thinking and worrying much about your lord’s younger brother since the killing of the Blackworm.” Now he turned back to me, startling me with the directness of his stare. “Ineluki is angry. He is angriest with himself, of course, but he is the sort that turns that fury outward as well as inward. I hear from friends in Asu’a that he rages every day about the mortals, though his mother Amerasu has made it clear she wants no threats against the short-lived Hernsmen or any of their kind over Hakatri’s wounding. She does not think what happened is their fault, but Ineluki’s fire burns too hot to be so easily extinguished. And he has looked beyond Asu’a for those who share his anger.”
“Beyond Asu’a?” I was puzzled. “Do you mean Lord Enazashi of Silverhome? His grudge against the mortal Hernsmen is ancient, but surely he and Ineluki—”
“No, I do not mean Enazashi. I mean Nakkiga. I mean Utuk’ku Silvermask, who calls herself the queen of the Hikeda’ya.”
I was startled, but Minasao’s words made new sense out of Ineluki’s long absences when we guested in the deeps of Ur-Nakkiga. “But Lord Ineluki must know that the Queen of the North cannot be trusted,” I said. “His own mother and father have contested with her since long before he was born!”
“Still, a fanatic heart will ignore what it does not want to know,” said Minasao. “It will excuse even that which cannot be excused in the need to find someone to share its bitterness.”
“No—he is good,” said a weak, raw voice. My master had awakened. “Ineluki’s spirit is good. Do not misjudge his hurt.”
Minasao kneeled beside the bed. “It is good to hear you, Hakatri. Do not tire yourself.”
“My brother loves me.”
“Yes,” said Minasao. “Yes, he does. And that is one reason why he is so fierce, so desperate.”
“Water, Pamon,” said my master. I hurried to bring him a cup. He tried to take it from me, but his hands were trembling too badly, and he spilled more than he drank. “I dreamed just now that time turned widdershins,” he said as he wiped his chin with the back of a trembling hand. “The sun rolled backward across the sky, west to east, and the years drained away. And all the time, I thought I heard my brother crying out, ‘The three! The three will avenge us!’ ”
Minasao was shaking his head. “Leave these dreams behind, Hakatri, so that you may attend my words. It is time for you to go back to Asu’a.”
My master looked at the Summer City’s Protector as though he had never seen him before. “What does this mean, Minasao? I can barely move. The dragon’s blood still scourges my flesh every moment. I do not blame you for being tired of my useless presence—”
“No, Hakatri.
You mistake me. It is not that we wish you gone. Rather, my mother and I fear what your brother may do in your absence.”
This angered my master so that he tried to sit up, his face contorting with the anguish of his movements. I dared not touch him, but I wanted to hold him down, because I knew that he would pay a steep price later for trying to raise himself now. “Even you must be careful how you speak of my brother, Minasao,” Hakatri said through pain-clamped teeth. “You are my friend and kinsman, and your mother is beloved of my mother, but I cannot hear you speak about Ineluki this way.”
Minasao remained silent until my master gave up his futile attempt to rise and fell back, gasping with discomfort. “I am sorry, Hakatri,” he said at last. “But truth, even a fearful truth, must be told. I have waited until you were better to speak to you about it, but I can wait no longer. Your brother has become very close to Utuk’ku’s folk since your fight with the worm. Do you remember blind Jikkyo, the Hikeda’ya cleric who attended you when you first came back to Asu’a?”
My master shook his head. “I remember little of that time.”
“He is one of the highest of the mountain queen’s Lords of Song, a magician of great skill.”
Hakatri gave out a strangled laugh. “Then his powers failed him, for he certainly brought me no cure.”
“If that was his intent he surely failed, yes. But perhaps he had other goals. As it is, I have learned that Jikkyo has gone back to Nakkiga—alone.”
My master was grimacing with another tidal rush of pain, leaving it to me to ask the question. “Alone? What does that signify, Lord Protector?”
“The other high master of Utuk’ku’s Order of Song did not return with him but remains in Asu’a and is constantly with Ineluki,” Minasao said. “Her name is Ommu. She is only a little less than Jikkyo in her abilities, but no less in her pride or ambition.”
“I saw her,” I said. “Many times. But she never speaks.”
