“Humankind is incapable of meaning no harm,” it said. Its voice was formed of interruptions in the roar of the water, a kind of subtraction rather than addition of sound. The effect was jarring, and the words raised uneasy chills down Gaunt’s back; at the same time, voice and speech were alluring. Something in her longed to walk into the waterfall, to know the fossegrim’s heart.
“There is less and more harm, surely,” she said. “We mean to find our son and take him away from conflict. That will mean less violence, perhaps for everyone.”
“What does that have to do with me?” said the fossegrim.
“The Chart of Tomorrows shows Klarfoss to be a way into the Straits of Tid. Do you guard that portal?”
“I do. You stand beside one of the cool thoughts of an arkendrake, and I am a watery manifestation of that thought, just as the trolls are mineral manifestations of various obsessions. Beyond me lies the dragon’s mind. Beside any of the great waterfalls of Svardmark, you will find a guardian so similar, we might be the same entity. Behind us lies the same mentality. And whether you dream your way into this gateway or walk forward boldly and bodily, there are but three ways to pass me. First, give yourself to me, woman, body and soul, and dwell with me always.”
“Let’s hear the other two,” Bone said.
“Second, overpower me, a creature of the rushing waters, by force.”
“And the last?” Gaunt said.
“Impress me with your fiddling. The Vestvinden fiddle will do nicely.”
“I don’t have a Vestvinden, or any fiddle,” Gaunt said. “Nor do I know how to play one.”
The fossegrim laughed. “Give me a song I have never heard. Open your thoughts, and I will know if you have one.”
Gaunt closed her eyes and imagined all the lullabies and rhymes of youth, all the lore of the bards, all the strange things she’d heard on the road.
“You have nothing,” the fossegrim sighed. “Kantenings have traveled far, and I know all your songs, skald. But return on Tordensday with a fiddle and a fat lamb, and I may teach you. For I sense tumult in the land, and a spirit of the waterfalls likes tumult.”
“Our ship won’t wait that long,” Gaunt said. “Not when there’s a good wind blowing.”
“That is no matter to me.”
“We’re not letting you go so easily,” Bone said, advancing, making Gaunt wonder what had gotten into him. “I’ve survived a dragon. I can face you, see what’s beyond your gateway.”
“Boastful,” said the fossegrim. “The woman is at least intriguing. You I have no time for.”
Before anyone could react, the water-spirit slapped Bone aside with an arm that seemed a sideways fork of the falls. The fossegrim fiddled as Bone plunged toward his doom.
Gaunt lunged for him, dropping the Chart of Tomorrows on the path. She had him by the arm, but he dangled over the abyss.
“Deserts,” he was saying. “Much better than mountains. Flat . . .”
“Shut up,” she said, pulling, straining, until she saw the brilliant burst of color below him.
“Bone, let go,” Gaunt told him.
“I realize Katta’s religion has been rubbing off on all of us,” Bone said, struggling to get purchase on the cliff, “and I respect the outlook of the Undermined, but I’d rather not be plunging to my doom just yet. . . .”
“You’re not doomed, Bone. Trust me.”
And, closing his eyes, he did.
The flying carpet Deadfall caught him in his plummet.
“I had a premonition we were needed after all,” said Katta, Freidar beside him, as Deadfall rolled Bone off onto a stony ledge beside the waterfall path.
“Be grateful at the risk I take,” said Deadfall, “thief.”
“Very, very, very grateful,” said Bone, hugging the ground.
Freidar stared up at the waterfall in wonder. “The reality of the fossegrim overwhelms the tales.”
As they watched, the misty figure began fading back into the falls.
“Wait!” Gaunt called out, pointing at Katta. “Behold this man. He’s journeyed from hidden lands of the East. Search his mind for new songs, fossegrim.”
The figure’s sharp definitions returned. “I sense this is true. Speak, traveler.”
Katta did not miss a beat, and Gaunt wanted to hug him. He said, “O spirit of the waterfall, I have come from far lands to tell you the ways of the Undetermined, who broke the chain of causes, and has had great effect. I will sing you a song of his teachings, and then speak of its meaning. For skilled as I am, I cannot match the songs of the Plateau of Geam to the tongue of Kantenjord. You must take sound and meaning as if they were two accounts of a deeper reality, like two blind men trying to deduce the shape of an elephant.”
Katta took a deep breath and intoned low rumbling notes that astonished Gaunt, who hadn’t heard a singing voice so deep since her time in a lamasery of far Xembala. Katta’s words boomed slowly upon the face of the rock, and their strength and inevitability made even the doom-laden song of Wiglaf seem a lighthearted, ephemeral thing. If the Earthe itself had a heartbeat, it might sound like this.
It seemed a thousand years before the booming was done, and yet in its aftermath it felt like an isolated moment, a single thought.
She could see nothing in the waterfall now but sensed a presence there, listening.
Katta said, “That is a song based on a poem of a great teacher of Geam. I will try to render his words in Kantentongue:
Here is my place of meditation
Snowy heights rise high above
Far below, my patron village
Down the snow-edged rippling river.
The eagle soars between
Above the village meadows blooming
Below the wheeling clouds
And shepherds graze their scattered herds
Singing songs and playing reeds.
Yet all of it is as a mirage,
A reflection in the waters.
I am nothing much
Fathered by eagles, birthed by glaciers
I don’t balk at the endless sky
Nor fear the constricted earth
It will all pass away
Like a magic trick, a dream.
How strange the phenomena of this illusory world—
Everything manifested from nothing.
The sky unexpectedly cleared, and sun blazed upon the waterfall. Within the spray the fossegrim’s form had become dark, like a human-shaped portal into the underworld. Within him gleamed tiny lights like distant stars, or flecks of white in onyx, or fireflies of a distant summer land.
The voice of the fossegrim, gentle and sad, resonated like water striking rock. “You have given me a gift with these words, and especially with this song, a music unlike any I’ve ever heard. You have paid the price I demanded of the bard. So, poet of Swanisle, you who would learn the fiddle. Step forward.”
She did so, shivering in the spray.
“Step into the water.”
After a moment’s hesitation she did so.
She should have been drenched, but what she felt instead was a rush of sensations pouring into her mind. Stars whirled, and meteors flashed, and worlds were formed from fire and died in ice. In between came the music, bright, bittersweet, rich with archaic echoes. She knew with sharp clarity how Kantenjord was but one era upon one tiny corner of Earthe, and Earthe was but one world of an unimaginably vast cosmos.
Yet all was connected, worlds linked by one fabric of space and time, landmasses rising from one lithosphere, beneath one atmosphere. She saw the connections could bring pain as well as joy, for she experienced Kantenjord erupting in fire and smoke, and the smoke covering the whole world, choking out light and heat.
The world died in endless winter: Kantenjord, Swanisle, and the Eldshore. Amberhorn, Palmary, and Qushkent. The Karvak Realm, Xembala, Qiangguo. All dead in a grave of frost.
And on went the sound of the Vestvinden fiddle. Even at the end of the world there must b
e music.
“Gaunt? Gaunt. Persimmon.”
Now Bone had his hands on hers, and she realized she was facing away from the waterfall and whistling. She stopped.
“Persimmon?”
“I’m here, Bone.” She met his gaze. She was hardly touched by the water, but the feeling of doom stayed with her. Turning, she saw the fossegrim was gone. Its insights would remain, however. She shivered. “I’ve learned how to play. I just need a fiddle. Imago. I can open the way with this. We find the right waterfall, we can find Innocence through the Straits of Tid. We can find our son.”
“That can wait,” Bone said. “We nearly lost each other, here. Let’s get back to Bison.”
“We should hurry,” Freidar said. “Villagers are streaming into Klarvik from up Garmstad way. Something has happened.”
Despite the news, Deadfall declined to fly them back to Klarvik but instead rustled down the path like a colorful serpent. Freidar and Katta looked thoughtful. Malin walked silently, bearing the Chart of Tomorrows and staring into it now and again. Peik, once voluble, looked lost in worry.
“If there are refugees . . .” Bone began.
“They are lost,” Peik said. “The army. I know it in my gut.”
“We have to get Innocence out of this,” Bone told Gaunt.
“Yes,” Gaunt said, but it was hard to hear his words over the memory of the music.
When they returned, Bone saw that Klarvik seemed on its way to adding a hundred more people, peasants fleeing word of the sacking of Garmstad Town and the burning or submission of the villages in the Karvaks’ path. Folk were coming here because the Karvaks were ignoring Klarvik. The horde was headed to Svanstad.
Of Ragnar’s army, there was nothing left but a few, many too shamed to speak of it. There was a new prayer in the air: ‘From the fury of the Karvaks, Goddess preserve us.’”
“The wheel turns,” Bone heard Gaunt murmur, as they loaded supplies onto Bison.
A boy approached the ship. It was Peik.
For a moment, Bone thought the lad was going to ask to sail with them. Instead he held out a fiddle, nearly the shape of a violin, with mother-of-pearl inlay.
“This is . . . was . . . my father’s. He is not coming back. You’re on a mission to kill Karvaks, yes? If giving you this fiddle will help you avenge him in any way, I am happy.”
“I am honored to take this,” Gaunt managed to say. “I will find a way to be worthy of the gift.”
“Just kill Karvaks,” the boy said, never leaving the strand. He was still there when Bison rounded the bay’s edge.
CHAPTER 28
SIEGE
Joy was training with Nan when word of the disaster at Garmsmaw Pass came to Svanstad.
“Training” seemed an odd word for it. In the world of A Tumult of Trees on Peculiar Peaks, training had meant pugilism and swordplay, concentration exercises to cultivate chi, endless jogging regimens through mountain paths, and discussions of the body’s energy flow and how to redirect it.
“Training” for Nan seemed to consist of learning strange old stories and a peculiar old writing system.
“I’m just not sure,” Joy said in frustration one day, “how learning about something can teach me to do something.”
“I understand,” the old woman said, not pausing from the work she was performing in the Fortress courtyard, to the consternation of the guards and servants. They stood in a twenty-foot-diameter circle of white, for all the rest of the night’s snowfall had been cleared at dawn. Nan was slowly tracing a pattern in the snow, using a knobbed wooden staff decorated with brass and gems. “The difficulty is, the only people with experience being a Runethane are long dead. I can’t take you to the Great Chain of Unbeing. What I can do is tell you stories of earlier Runethanes, and help you to picture the Great Chain in your mind. It is marked with the elder runes of the Vindir. Know these runes and you can truly envision the Chain. Now then, behold the rune raido, meaning ‘journey.’”
“So . . . you summon the power by tracing a rune?”
“Yes.”
“Couldn’t you save time by making it smaller?”
“Ha! Yes. There are Runewalkers who have spent days tracing out the patterns. Indeed, I suspect there are a few runes now activated in this city, writ in stone, barley, ash, or blood.”
“Is bigger better?”
“A larger pattern carries more influence but is also less specific in intent. The bigger the wish, the more likely the intent will go awry, or succeed in a fraught way.”
“What have you wished?”
“That you might travel mentally. Close your eyes and spread-eagle yourself in the snow. Think of the Chain as I’ve described it.”
She did these things, though she felt foolish.
“Do you see the Chain?”
“I see horses . . . they carry riders . . . they carry riders here!”
Hoofbeats echoed through the courtyard of the Fortress. Joy rose and dusted snow off herself. Ten men rode up to Nan, mistaking her for an authority.
“Well?” Nan said.
They were so distraught they had trouble speaking. A hairy teenaged boy and a bald teenaged boy each began speaking, each failing to get the words out, each vainly encouraging the other to talk. Yet if their tongues were still, their eyes spoke of horrors. At last a burly, florid-looking man spoke up. “I am Huginn Sharpspear, Lady. Kollr here, Rolf, the rest . . . we are nearly all that’s left of Ragnar’s army.”
Protocol was lost. Joy found herself beside Nan and Corinna as the princess spoke with her grandfather upon a balcony, looking north at snowy farmland, blue mountains beyond.
“You will not claim the throne, Grandfather?”
“It belongs to the young. Our people will need your straight back and shining face. Ah, Corinna. How is it that Ragnar died?”
“Bravely.”
“Do not humor me. How did his army, on which we’ve spent so much effort, perish so utterly?”
“By the Oxilander Huginn’s report, the Karvaks are a force unlike any ever seen. Now our whole country lies open to them. We must assume Garmstad Town lost.”
“They will come here. They must. To Svanstad. The walls must be our mountain now. And there may yet be time for alliances. Send to the Five Fjords.”
“They have already stabbed us in the back,” Corinna said.
“There’s Swanisle, and the Eldshore. Mirabad. Kpalamaa.”
Corinna nodded. “Haytham says he’s completed a small balloon for us, one fit for two or perhaps three. I’ll send him to King Rainjoy in Swanisle. Nan . . . you go with him. You’re the best Runewalker we have now. He’ll need you to command the winds.”
“But Joy—” Nan objected.
“She may go with you, and you may instruct her as you fly.”
Joy could not believe it. “Again you try to send me away when a fight is coming. Why, Corinna? Are you afraid of me?”
It was an ill-chosen word, but Joy saw it struck home. There was indeed a wariness in Corinna’s eyes as her grandfather said, “You are an old power, Joy . . . your mother is Snow Pine, yes? Joy Snøsdatter, then. You are alien to our land, but you have power, and courage. Corinna has always liked being the toughest person in the room.”
“Grandfather . . .” Corinna said, in a warning tone. “Joy, if you don’t wish to go, by all means stay. We’ll send one of those two Oxiland boys who survived, the hairy one or the bald one. They want to do me service, but I am tired of putting children at risk.”
For the next few days Joy threw herself into her “training,” trying to visualize the Great Chain of Unbeing as the Karvaks grew ever closer. She sparred with Walking Stick and attempted the visualizations of Nan. But Walking Stick was, it seemed, everywhere at once and only sometimes able to help her. And after the breakthrough that let her perceive the approaching riders the visions again eluded her.
Now she stood upon a turreted tower of the Fortress. From here she could look south down the fjord and
to the sea, wondering when Haytham would return from Swanisle. And she could look north past the city walls and the wooden outer district, across the farmlands and woods, whence swift riders arrived from inland, crying woe.
In the afternoon light she saw why. The dark mass of the invading army filled the land to the northeast.
As the minutes passed she saw something she didn’t understand. She’d been given to believe the Karvak army was a mounted force, but there were throngs of footmen. She slowly realized the mob in front of the horsemen were no warriors but rather captive villagers, prodded along by the Karvaks as living shields.
Rage filled Joy. She shut her eyes, shaking with it.
She saw the Great Chain, its vast metal links, its huge runes. She saw the island it wrapped around.
Upon that island stood Innocence Gaunt, and she sensed at once he was engaged in much the same project as herself. She saw him glance upward, left, right, as though hearing distant music.
A voice murmured in Joy’s ear, though no one stood there. A cold, tight sensation tickled her spine. The voice was a woman’s and young, but it was not her own, nor anyone’s she knew.
Call to him, the voice said. Let him know your anger, dragon-touched one.
The voice worried her, but she decided to trust its advice.
Innocence, she thought. Innocence Gaunt! My friend! How can you tolerate this? How can you work with Karvaks and trolls?
What? came his voice, as the vision of him frowned. Joy? Could it be?
Your parents do not want this. Walking Stick does not want this. I do not want this. Leave that place, my dear friend! Come back to us!
You . . . Disbelief fled his face, anger taking its place. You don’t own me, Joy! None of them do. Not Walking Stick, not the Karvaks, not the trolls. But I’ve seen what endless fighting does to people. It warps them. It turns even wise men into traitorous bastards. It kills ten-year-old kids. The Karvaks didn’t bring war to these islands; it’s been going on for ages. The Karvaks just have a chance to stop it. For good. That’s a cause worth fighting for.
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