The Window and the Mirror

by Henry Thomas

  Peasants were not to leave the land without their lord’s permission, for they were inexorably tied to it. As part of his punishment, his lord father had tasked him with rounding up more peasants to work the land and he had found some new ones. There were always lowborn families willing to relocate if one knew where to look and made it sound sweeter than it was; once they were on the land, then of course they would not leave it, dimwits that they were, and it was illegal besides. So Rhael had gone about to his father’s vassals and ordered them to give him enough peasants to work the fields of his holdings and they had complied without question, he remembered smugly. The new peasants were just as tiresome as the old ones had been. He never saw the girl again, but he thought about her often; the way she had cried out when he forced himself upon her all those times before the hangings. She had most likely taken up a life as a harlot; that was all she had been good for in any case. Perhaps she was living still in the lands of one of his family’s rivals, Lord Tartrim’s or Lord Illithane’s old holdings. Those were no more, he thought wickedly; at least his lord father had lived to see that day. He calmed himself as an involuntary spasm wracked his body with shuddering pain and he lay convulsing on the cavern floor. When it had passed through him and he lay gasping there in the black he began to hear the sound of the dripping water again. It was indeed louder, closer than it had been. Joy, was it joy that he felt? There was something else now that he heard; a steady roar, a rushing noise met his ears. He began to crawl again with renewed vigor toward the sound of the water as he had done before, one hand on the wall the other on the floor, but this cavern was narrow and he could feel the ceiling as well as both walls as the dripping steadily grew in volume and the roar filled his ears until at last he felt cool water on his face and hands. He drank his fill as he crawled forward licking the wet cavern floor and then suddenly his whole being was submerged in icy water. A brief moment of panic found Rhael floating beneath the surface without a handhold, completely devoid of light and direction, his senses unable to detect anything but the cold and the wet and the black. But then he was breathing air again and moving in the strong current of what he supposed was an underground tributary of some form, a river in the heart of the stone, his hands stretching out and finding the slick bank. It was cold but the cold had numbed his pain and rushed his blood high into his head and cleared it, and now Rhael felt his thoughts racing. His hands could not grip very well in the wet freezing cold and he felt his tenuous grasp slip free of the river’s smooth stony bank. He was sputtering and gasping as the powerful current swept him along blindly and violently, rolling him and disorienting him. His feet sought for the bed of the river but it was nowhere to be found and he was struck with the realization that it could be an ell away or fathomless and as long as he was rolling beneath it without air it may as well have been a puddle or an ocean that he was submerged inside, and either way would find him drowned. His head broke free of the surface and he gulped down the air greedily and then he was being sucked down and he had the sensation of falling and yet he was completely under the water, spinning and scraping painfully against the riverbed.

  He was being rushed along now in a narrow channel, a tunnel of rock. Rhael could not breathe and the breath that he held in his lungs was expiring, his brain pounding in his head like his heart pounded in his chest. Panicking, he stretched out with his limbs and sought the surface but water surrounded him and he was unsure of any direction except the sinking sensation he had of falling, falling.

  Then all at once he slammed into something hard and unyielding and white pain shot through him like a thunderbolt and the air was violently expelled from his lungs by the force of it. He inhaled water and coughed and choked, but there was no air for him, no escape from the pain and no relief from the inevitability of drowning. He clawed like an animal and suddenly broke the surface choking and retching, but his legs were like lead. He began to sink again and he felt himself being pulled again by a current beneath him. More air, he thought, I need more air. He was so panicked that he could not think clearly. The pulling sensation was drawing him along and he could not fight it with his failing strength. Rhael seriously thought about dying for the first time in his life.

  He did not believe in anything, certainly not an afterlife. He was the master of his world, the manipulator of everything that he saw. He was a highborn Lord who held dominion over all the creatures of the earth, even his lowborn cousins who were little more than animals themselves. That was his birthright. This was not the death he wanted, in fact, he sought through the energies to circumvent death altogether and without a doubt, given enough time, his vast intellect would grant him the answers he sought. He was destined for great things, not to die escaping his unjust imprisonment, a failure; but the air was burning in his lungs and he was broken and weak and betrayed by his own form, panicking in the darkness unable to sense where the surface was or how he could extract himself from the water that was killing him. He flailed and flailed uselessly, but his strength was gone and he could not match the strength of the current. The darkness was taking him, he could not breathe. He could not breathe. How stupid it was that someone as highborn as himself needed air to survive. Rhael curled into a ball and was swept along in the river under a mile of rock. He was sure he was going to drown now and for a glimmer of a second Rhael’s thoughts briefly registered regret; but it was a regret born of longing, longing for greatness.

  Regret that his life had not yet measured up to his own high standards of what he so greatly desired beyond all else, his own personal glory, his own name being regarded with awe among his peers for his outstanding achievements beyond the borders of known magical knowledge and experience.

  His father had been a powerful lord and he always the lesser son. How he craved air, how he wanted to taste the air in his broken mouth; but he was a lung-burned rag doll tossing in the current without a hope of salvation. Things were growing darker in the darkness and his lungs burst, releasing bubbles that blew past his face as he was hurtled along the underground river, as he spasmed and convulsed with the water entering his nose and lungs, the burning pain in his head and body and the panic of death. He was drowning and he was in a fully inescapable situation, he was dying and helpless to avoid death’s certainty. How Lord Uhlmet raged under the mountain at being so commonly dispatched as he gasped and choked and sputtered and struggled to keep his consciousness. The top of his head scraped against the cavernous river passage, and then suddenly he was in the air flying free of the water and puking in the cold. Was he dead? Was this death, he thought? Flying through the air blindly? Coughing and choking and puking, gasping for air, he wondered?

  He was falling and sputtering blindly in the darkness, his ears ringing; but he could breathe, he could breathe the air again! It was wonderful to breathe; the pain in his head and body and his lungs was still there but he was alive! He flew and fell and wondered if death was falling forever, choking until he slammed into something that knocked the newfound air out of his ragged lungs and paralyzed him with pain. Then he was falling but this time he was back under the water gagging again, willing himself to make his arms work and struggling in the cold darkness. Then he slammed against the gravelly cave pool floor and more pain shot through him, but he managed to shove and claw his arms against it. He was moving and lifting freely away from the painful ground and floating again, choking and clawing at the water with his spent arms. Until at last he broke the surface and gasped at the cool air, his ears clearing and filled instead with the deafening roar of the subterranean river. He struggled and slapped at the water with his failing strength until at last he felt his body scraping gravel. He slipped and scrambled his way onto a shore of bedrock and lay there gasping and sobbing and writhing in the shooting pain that coursed through his broken body, elated, for he was alive; he had escaped.

  Nine

  Rhael woke coughing and cold, his entire body screaming with intense pain. He was half submerged in the icy, cool
water and he scrambled with his hands and arms and his one good leg up a gravelly ledge of rock and lie shivering and moaning there on the dry, cold rock. How long he had slept he did not know, he could not know; for it was still an impenetrable darkness that he was trapped in, no matter how free he felt. Yet here it seemed less dark than where he had been before the underground waterway had swallowed him and spat him out. Was there in fact light here, Rhael wondered? He held a hand in front of his face and thought he could make out the vague shape of his fingers, but he could not be sure whether or not his mind was playing tricks on him. He shivered involuntarily as he tried to move, his entire body riddled with pain. Pain seemed to be the only sensation that he could feel without doubting himself.

  Willing himself to move he pushed with his arms and wriggled like a worm along the cavern floor, his ragged right hand following along the edge of the channel that the underground river had made, the sound of the river filling his ears and drowning out everything. Rhael knew that all rivers ran to the seas, besides it was the only path he could follow reliably in the darkness. He moved cautiously, for he did not wish to chance plunging into the cold water again and being spirited along the river’s course without a window into his fate, and there were no windows or light to be found down there in the inky blackness. He slithered his way along until the roaring faded away into a dull background noise humming inside his throbbing head. He rested when he could move no more or overcome the spasms of fiery pain. He was resting when he began to hear other noises besides the dull roar of the river and the steady dripping sound. He thought at first it was the chattering of birds and he summoned his last reserve of energy to renew his slithering until something hit his olfactory senses and raised in him an animalistic fear that paralyzed him into a dead-quiet stillness, pressing his body against the cavern floor.

  It was the smell of decay, the smell of rotting breath like that of his childhood tutor, Mage Raltet, with his filthy black smile and bloody gums. But this smell of decay was mixed with some other unidentifiable filth that sent a shiver down his spine and froze him with a fear previously unknown to him. Was he just imagining this, he wondered? No, thought Rhael, I can’t move; I can’t actually move from this position, or I’ll be found and that thing with the smell will eat me. He thought how ridiculous this thought sounded to him as it rang out in the last corner of his rational mind. Yet he was immobile and barely breathing as he pondered it. Somewhere in the core of his being he felt an instinctual fear that even his vast incalculable acumen could not deny; for it was the fear prey felt from its predator. Was his mind playing tricks, Rhael asked of himself?

  Voices now, chattering like birds, speaking Oestersh; but speaking in a strange and foreign sounding rhythm pitched high like a child’s cadence with a gravelly aspirate sound to it, a nightmarish rendering of the familiar that sent Rhael’s heart pounding in his chest at an alarmingly fast and frightening beat.

  What were they saying, he wondered? He could not quite make out the words, but they were drawing nearer and he still could not move. He worried that his own heartbeat and ragged breathing would give way his position on the cold cavern floor. A scraping noise and a trundling sound like a cart’s wheels.

  The strange voices were louder now, discernible words met his cringing ears. “I smell it! Do you now, pretty?”

  “Yesss, yesss! Near to us, I taste it!”

  “Where, oh where’s it?”

  “Gold like the forest child? Or brown like a nut?”

  “I think golden like the sun; I hope, I hope! The masters will pay finely if it is!”

  So close now did they sound to Rhael, but he was paralyzed and no matter how he willed himself to flee, he could not.

  “Does it feel us now? Does it know fear?”

  “Yesss, Yesss. It knows it surely.”

  No, thought Rhael, please overlook me, please let my limbs work, please let my eyes see a way clear and my legs hale and whole. Please spirit me away and up into the bright world of sun and green; please let me fly from here as swiftly as a deer!

  Then came the overpowering stench that caused him immediately to vomit and gag. Over his own convulsions he heard peals of shrieking laughter and mad scrambling and scraping noises, and the fear that had paralyzed him before now caused his very breath to catch in his throat as he choked and sputtered. A small, cold, lifeless hand with unbelievable strength closed its three fingered grip around his neck. A pale-blue light flooded his vision, allowing him to see for the first time in weeks the world around him, a world full of terror with a vaguely reptilian visage regarding him with its cold otherworldly eyes.

  “I have it! I have it now! A forest child!” It screamed, the laughter like the shrieking of birds. A forked tongue shot out betwixt the sharply pointed teeth in its stubby snout.

  Rhael screamed a voiceless scream as it shook him like a prize, and then the darkness took him and he lost consciousness.

  Ten

  Won’t be serving you bloody savages nothing!”

  It was the third time that morning that a Borsford innkeeper had turned them away at the courtyard, and Joth had taken his fill and would take no more.

  “I’m a bloody soldier on Magistry business, and you bloody will serve us or I’ll have your head!”

  Eilyth regarded the innkeep cooly, but Joth could detect the tiniest hint of a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

  The innkeep blustered and started up again as if to protest when Joth cut him off. “Two hot meals, proper breakfast! And get our bloody mounts stabled before I hear another word out of you!”

  He had only been back in an Oestern town for two hours and already the glaring rudeness and slanderous attitude toward him and Eilyth because of her hairdressings and their colorful mode of dress was more than Joth could bear. Not only was he angry at being treated like a savage, he found something in it far worse; he was embarrassed for his own people, embarrassed most of all at their treatment of the lady who was under his charge. The innkeep looked as though he had been stricken as Joth spat the vehement Oestern words at him, and he paled and bobbed his head and recoiled slightly when Joth raised his hand to wipe his mouth. The craven man plucked at the reins of the horses, stretching his arm out as far as he could to avoid Joth and the prospect of physical contact between them.

  Joth moved out of the way as the man led the horses across the courtyard toward the row of stables opposite the inn. He shook his head.

  “I apologize, lady.”

  “It matters not, Joth. Let us see if your food is more agreeable to me than your people.” Joth scowled once more in the direction of the stables as he walked up the broad steps and pulled open the heavy oaken door. Eilyth made her way past him and he glanced up and noticed the sign of the inn for the first time, swaying slightly in the breeze; a rectangular carved rendering of a gilded bolt of cloth bound up by a red cord and blue painted letters spelling out “Cloth of Gold” above it. Probably bloody pricy, thought Joth, as he passed through the doorway and shut the door behind him. But he had his pay and Wat’s in his money bag and after the last few weeks of traveling in the inclement weather, he was prepared to sacrifice a bit of thrift for a taste of comfort. All that they had received so far were hard stares and dismissals, but Joth had refused to put his soldier’s clothing back on even after Eilyth had suggested that he do so. For some reason it did not sit right with him, and he had told Eilyth as much. She had simply nodded and gone back to riding.

  They had ridden past a group of laborers in a field who had all stopped their work to gawk at them, and one of them had even thrown a stone their way as they disappeared over a low rise. It should have come as no surprise to Joth, for he had been under the same spell of hatred and ignorance just a few short weeks before, yet it raised an ire in him that he had a hard time swallowing. He knew better than to rise up to every challenge, so he had kept himself in check on the road when he heard the w
hispered words or the cruel jibes, ignoring the stones and the rotten vegetables, the spitting and the cursing. When they were turned away at the inns, Joth felt his temperature rise and it bent him well past his own breaking point when he saw that hatred directed at the gray cloak swaddled girl whom he rode beside. In Oesteria an inn was a place of refuge for all travelers. There was a great tradition of hospitality that extended to all ranks of folk, whatever their station in life. An inn was a place where one could come and sit and have food and drink and a fire and respite from the weather and the worries of the day. It should be bloody hospitable anyway, Joth mused, but these Borsford folk had made a piss-poor showing of it thus far. Eilyth had shaken out her cloak and hung it on a peg near the door, and leaned her staff in the corner.

  It had rained on them earlier, just after they had broken camp in the early first light of dawn. Joth hung his own damp cloak next to hers and took in the great room of the inn. It was a larger establishment than the previous two they had been refused, and the interior was well furnished, its wooden tables and cabinetry polished to a fine lustrous sheen. Broad glazed windows on the eastern and western walls let in the pale daylight and offered views into the courtyard and the ordered garden behind the inn. A stairway rose up to a wooden balcony that wrapped around the room and offered access to the rooms that could be rented there for travelers or anyone wishing to have some dealings in private away from the bustling noise of the great room. For now it was only Joth and Eilyth who peopled the ground floor and the only hints of activity came by way of rattling plates behind a low bar at the back of the room where the kitchen must have been situated. It smelled of food and of wood smoke, and the vinegar that was used to clean the tables, and the smell was the only thing about it that brought any sense of familiarity or comfort to Joth. He knew at the courtyard that this was a rich man’s inn, or at least it was desperately trying to be. Joth preferred smaller establishments without all of the polished wood and rich appointments, a place where a man could go and sit by a roaring fire and put his feet up on a stool without getting a talking to, and a flagon of ale or wine with a cut of meat that came at a reasonable price for folk who worked for their day’s wages. The Innkeeper himself was cut out in fine clothes, far too fine to be working in Joth thought, his doublet a soft lilac and his hosen an expensive shade of green. Green was costly, as it had to be dyed twice—once blue, once yellow. He was thinking those hosen would cost him two month’s pay. He did not even want to guess at the price of the lilac doublet, which was most likely cut from velvet.