Then Whisper turned a sharp curve, clattered up another short incline, and they found themselves outside a massive, closed gate, wooden and iron-barred, set into a thirty-foot-high stone wall barring their way. It was sandy-red, with hardly a join where stone was laid on stone. Two towers flanked the gate, crowned at the top by frowning, gigantic gargoyles carved from the same stone.
“Home,” Nul said again.
Jeremy took a deep breath. The left gargoyle was stirring, stonily. “Who's there?” it asked in a voice like the rattle of pebbles falling down the mountainside.
“Open up,” Nul called. “We tired and hungry.”
“What,” asked the gargoyle, “is the word of passing?”
The other one moved its head to look at its neighbor, its head grating on its neck like a turning millstone. “Oh, it's only Nul,” it said. “Let's open up.”
Stone eyes regarded stone eyes with great hauteur. “I am only following procedure. If you don't like it—”
“Upstart,” the right-hand gargoyle snorted. It leered down in a friendly sort of way at Jeremy. “Fred there was quarried from a late Tertiary deposit,” it confided. “Ah, youth, youth.”
“If you're going to bring our families into it—”
“Open up!” roared Nul.
“Well, you don't have to get snippy,” the first gargoyle sniffed. “Fellow just doing his duty, after all.” The wooden gate groaned open on hinges that seemed to want oil badly.
Jeremy automatically twitched the bridle, and Whisper plodded through. They crossed a narrow courtyard—the gate boomed back closed before they made it all the way across—and paused in front of the great palace itself, a many-turreted fortress of the same stone as the wall and the gargoyles, enormous in the growing twilight, great mullioned windows already aglow. Nul swung off the horse. “This it. Come on. Someone will look after horse for us.”
Jeremy swung his leg over the horse—wonder of wonders, the raw spots on the inside of his thighs seemed healed, and his barked knees, too—and stood beside Nul. In front of them was a door the size of Jeremy's living-room floor. “Nul,” Jeremy whispered, “are there any more, ah, things inside? Like at the wall?”
“Nah, nah,” Nul said, leading the way. “Nothing here to be afraid of.” The sun was down, but in the twilight Nul's backward grin shone startling white and still gap-toothed. “Nothing but Tremien,” he said.
Chapter 7
The enormous door swung open on ponderous hinges, and a woman, diminutive by contrast, welcomed them in. Jeremy shifted the bedrolls that he carried across his shoulder and stepped over the threshold. “Kelada!” he cried in surprise, for the thief wore a long white gown and a tiara of flashing stones.
She scowled at him. “Can I help it if Tremien's taste in clothes is two hundred years out of date? Come in, it's cold.”
They stood in a vast arched entryway, the groined ceiling almost lost overhead in gloom and mystery. Behind them the door closed with hardly a sound. “This way,” Kelada said, lifting the hem of her dress with her left hand.
“I know the way,” Nul grumbled, but he plodded along beside Jeremy nonetheless. At a more human-sized doorway, the pika grunted, “Wait.” He propped his rear against the nearest wall and bent to strip the three layers of stockings from his feet. “Ah,” he sighed, letting the ball of socks drop. “Have somebody burn these.”
Then Kelada opened the door. They walked into a room ablaze with cheery light, hung with thick, rich tapestries in glowing colors. Jeremy saw unicorns, dragons, gryphons, other beasts—imaginary or real in this world?—worked into the wall hangings. One wall, pierced by many arched, leaded windows, looked out eastward into the courtyard. At the center of the room was a great table already set with places for four and piled high with food. Melodia rose from the table as they entered. “So,” she said, “we're all here.”
Nul waddled straight for a specially built chair, its seat considerably higher than those around it, and clambered in. “Starved,” he said. “Where Tremien?”
“He knew you would be hungry. He wants us to eat first. He'll see us all afterward.” Melodia took Jeremy's hand. “Come, sit.”
Kelada sat across the table from Jeremy. Despite her new clothing she ate in the same old businesslike way, not sloppily, but with no nonsense about extra refinement, either. “How is Whisper?” Melody asked.
“Good horse,” Nul said. He was tucking into a platter of something light blue and lumpy, and licking his nonexistent lips with his black, snaky tongue. “Mare fine. Stable boys see to her now, give her rest.”
“Tell me all about the trip,” Melodia said, and so Jeremy did. He left out one thing—their encounter with the shadow-creature on the hill—when Nul surreptitiously tugged his arm under cover of the table.
“And then,” he finished, “we reached the gate and the ... uh—”
“Keepers,” Nul supplied. “Fred and Busby.”
“The keepers—Busby?”
Nul shrugged. “They pick their own names. Don't blame me.”
“Anyway, they let us in, and here we are.” Jeremy helped himself to another slice of roast turkey breast. “What about Tremien?”
“We've hardly seen him,” Melodia said. “More wine?”
As she poured, Kelada said, “He wants you, Jeremy. Not us. We talked to him once, the day we arrived. Since then we've been prisoners.”
“Hardly that,” Melodia said. “We are guests.”
“Try to leave this wing,” Kelada returned. “Well, we should know all about it after supper.”
“Where is everybody?” Jeremy asked. “This is an awfully big place. Does Tremien live here alone?”
“Nah, nah,” Nui mumbled. He swept a finger around the rim of his plate, capturing the last few drops of blue gravy. After he had sucked his finger clean, he said, “Tremien have family here, retainers. Many, many people. They all in main halls. This guest hall here. You see later.”
“The sooner the better.” Jeremy drained the last of his wine. “Now what?”
“Now you and I clean up. Then Tremien call.”
Nul showed Jeremy to a small room with a single bed and an adjoining bath. “A medieval motel,” Jeremy murmured. “Better with a window, though.” Instead of a window, there were more tapestries, twining vines, prancing stallions, brawny men with swords coming to the aid of distressed young ladies—and in one case, a young lady armed with a glowing wand coming to the aid of a distressed, brawny man.
The bathroom, like Melodia's, boasted running water and another luxury: a shower. True, the shower head, a round-bellied little brass monstrosity with the body of an obese monkey and the cranium of an eagle, perched on the wall and disgorged the water through its mouth, but at least it didn't speak to Jeremy, and the water it provided was hot. He found another surprise on a counter beside the sink (this sink, he noted, was equipped with two hand pumps—one for hot, one for cold, he guessed): a real toothbrush. He had been making do with his finger, and it was a welcome luxury.
Feeling much refreshed, he dressed in his change of clothes. He could have used a razor, for the real whiskers sprouting now tickled him almost as much as his dreamed disguise beard had, but he had none. Still, he felt more confident about meeting Tremien after the shower and change.
Nul knocked on the door almost as soon as Jeremy had finished dressing. The women waited in the corridor with the pika. “Come now,” he said. “Tremien see you in lesser council hall.”
They went west, as far as Jeremy could tell, through a thick door. As soon as they had passed through, the sound of music reached their ears, elaborate string music coming from somewhere ahead. “Have to pass great room,” Nul grunted. “Don't speak to anybody. Follow me.”
Through another door, and into a huge chamber, with perhaps a hundred or more people milling about, speaking together, sipping wine, laughing, listening to the musicians. Jeremy had time only for a quick glance around, at the men wearing gold-braided tunics and trousers an
d carrying swords at their sides, at the women sparkling in bright colors and jewels. Nul kept straight ahead, walking alongside one wall, and out through another door. The crowd had grown a little quieter, Jeremy noticed, as they passed through.
Down another short hall, then a pause as Nul rapped softly at the door.
“Come,” said the deep voice that Jeremy recalled as Tremien's.
They passed into a study. Three walls of it were shelves, running from floor to ceiling and crammed with ponderous books, leather-backed and smelling of libraries. The third wall was curtained, but through a part in the center of the curtains Jeremy could see a tall, leaded window. The light in the room was soft and subdued, and he could not fully make out the figure seated behind the desk, its back to the windows. He could see a nimbus of white hair. “So,” the figure said, “you are Jeremy Sebastian Moon.”
“Tremien?”
The shadowed head bowed. “I am. More light?”
“Perhaps a little.”
Tremien raised one hand, and the light intensified. He was an old man, stooped, with skin the color of saddle leather. His white hair bushed out around a bald pate on top, and he wore a beard even longer than Sebastian's had been. His face was lined with age and care, but determination showed in his carriage, and his eyes were sharp and knowing. He wore a loose, simple robe, faded purple. For a long moment he inspected Jeremy with a close, critical scrutiny. “The resemblance is remarkable,” he said at last. “You might almost be Sebastian.”
Nul padded around the desk and held something out. “Better take a look.”
Absently Tremien took the leather case from Nul, extracted the spectacles, and put them on. “Astonishing,” he said.
“Mage,” Nul murmured, “shadow-man attack us. His magic not work on Jeremy.”
“I am not surprised.” Tremien gazed at Jeremy over the tops of the spectacles. “Young man, you have a great deal of mana about you—of a type I have never seen before. I daresay no one else in Thaumia has, either.”
Kelada, standing between Jeremy and Melodia, fidgeted. “You said you would decide what to do about us as soon as he got here,” she said.
Tremien's eyes did not leave Jeremy, but he nodded. “Patience,” he said. “I have to know all about Jeremy first. Nul, have someone bring chairs in. Bring one for yourself, as well.”
Nul hurried away. Jeremy took a step forward. “Sebastian took my place in the real world—”
The wizard smiled and took off the spectacles. As he folded them he murmured, “Real world? This world is as real as yours, Jeremy Sebastian Moon, and as real as billions upon billions of other realities, in other universes. Pray don't insult us with unreality.”
“Sorry,” Jeremy said. “But the point is, he's in my place, doing God knows what. I have to get back there.”
“Hmm. Yes. If that can be managed. Ah, here are the chairs.”
A young man, taller than Jeremy but thinner, brought them in, two at a time. He gave them a curious glance, but did not speak as he arranged the four chairs in a semicircle before Tremien's desk. He left, still without having spoken. Nul climbed into one of the chairs and sat with feet dangling.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” Tremien said, waving the others into their seats. “This may be a long evening.”
It turned out to be very long. Tremien, all patience, insisted on hearing the entire story from the beginning, and each of them had a part of it to tell. Jeremy went all the way back to his nightmares, to the time of the exchange—Tremien, thumb and forefinger pressed against his eyelids, nodded at that and murmured, “The time of exaltations. That tells us when the transfer took place: six weeks and three days ago now. Continue.”
Kelada took up the thread then and spoke of Niklas File's exile, and her own, and of how they met Sebastian in the Between. At one point, as she spoke of Niklas and how he had changed, Tremien frowned. “I thought his exile was a hasty decision,” he told her. “True, he had murdered in the course of his thievery, and his victim was the son of a mage. Still, this wanton shuffling of people into the Between—it has to stop.” Kelada continued the story, telling of Sebastian's disappearance with the mirror he had created, of Jeremy's coming.
And then Jeremy had to tell of the death of Niklas File. He did it levelly, with no adornment. A silence fell as he reached that point. Tremien stirred. “If it is consolation to you, Niklas File was a man already condemned. And if what I suspect happened to him in the Between did in fact happen, his death was a release, not a tragedy.” The long old fingers waved. “However, that is nothing to you. You must work out your own remorse. Pray continue.”
Jeremy and Kelada together told of their attempt to travel to Thaumia, of the mirror in Melodia's bedchamber, and of their final success. Melodia joined the tale then, explaining the way that Sebastian had brought the mirror to her and the way he had used it in the two years before his exile. The wizard listened quietly, and when she had finished, he said only, “Do you still love the renegade, my dear?”
“No,” Melodia said. “At least—no, I don't think so.”
The old eyes were penetrating. “But you are not certain.” Tremien stroked his white beard. “The ways of the heart are hidden even to a wizard's eye,” he murmured. After a short silence he added: “I sensed a change in the magic of Thaumia that night. I sent Nul to find out what was afoot—as you know, my first thought was that Sebastian Magister had somehow returned—and he brought you all here.”
“There is something else,” Nul said. “Something that happened on the way here.” He explained about his and Jeremy's feelings of being watched, pursued, and about the shadow on the road.
Tremien picked up the spectacles in their case and toyed with them. “I feared as much. I am not the only one who felt the change in the lines of force. Someone else pursues our friend.”
“Who?” Jeremy asked.
“That I cannot tell you. But it is bound to be a servant of the Great Dark One, for no one else would send such a messenger.” Tremien slowly pushed up from his chair. He was stooped and slight, and his head would barely come up to Jeremy's shoulder. With hands clasped behind him, the magician turned to look through the barely parted curtains. “Monstrous evil is shaping,” he said. “The dark is growing stronger. I wondered about the source of that strength.” He turned slowly, as if bearing a weight on his shoulders. “I think,” he said, “it may be in your world now. One end of it, at any rate.”
“What is that?” Jeremy asked.
Tremien pushed a curtain aside, looked out into dark night, and let the curtain fall back into place. “The others on the council will be here tomorrow. I fear we can do nothing more tonight, except try to sleep.” Turning away from the window, Tremien permitted himself the suggestion of a smile. “I have not answered your question. You wanted to know the source of magic that is in your world. Have you not guessed? Sebastian was always reckless. And always fascinated by duplications and reflections. He seems to have made a hobby of creating mirrors.” The old wizard came around the desk, his faded robe billowing around his legs, and stood over Melodia. “He left one with you, my dear. I know of at least two others now, and I suspect a third. One, of course, he carried into Jeremy's world. That, I think, is somehow increasing the power of our enemies. Another mirror is in the hands of the Hidden Hag of Illsmere.”
Into a silence deep as dark water, Nul dropped words like four heavy stones: “Where is the third?”
Tremien sighed and leaned back against the desk. “I fear,” he said, “it is in the hands of the Great Dark One. And if it is"—the old eyes suddenly seemed haunted and weary—"if it is, God help us all.”
Jeremy was full of questions, but Tremien dismissed them all. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I can do nothing without the council, anyway. Jeremy, I am sorry to have to isolate you tonight, and you, my dears, but that is an unpleasant necessity. Go now. I promise that your curiosity will be satisfied.”
Nul escorted them back—in the Great Ha
ll, only a few men were left awake, standing in front of a low fire and chatting, and they gave the newcomers sharp glances as they passed—but the pika stopped at the doorway that led to their hall. “Go now,” he told Jeremy. “Rest and sleep.”
“How did I do?” Jeremy asked.
With a frown Nul said, “Hard to tell. Think he liked you, though. You not a frog, anyway.”
Jeremy stared at the closing door until Melodia said, “It was only Nul's joke.”
Melodia had the first room on the hall, Kelada the second, and Jeremy the third. The black-haired sorceress entered her room without saying more than “good night,” but Kelada paused outside her door. “I have to get out of here,” she muttered. “This is no place for a thief.”
“Especially one,” Jeremy said, “who faces possible banishment.”
Kelada's smile was rueful. “True. But I fear that less than I did. Tremien speaks in the council with the loudest voice, they say, and he at least is not in favor of exiling me again.” She rustled the white gown around her. “These clothes are driving me insane. I must look a fool.”
“No. You look—you are very attractive.”
“With this face?”
“There's nothing much wrong with your face,” Jeremy said. “Only in how you think about it, that's all.”
Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1) Page 13
