'It may already be too late, then,' Rebeke muttered to herself. 'And what do they give, Dresh?'
'I'm thirsty.'
Rebeke busied herself with opening the wine and pouring. She rose to set the glass within easy reach of Dresh's hand. He raised the glass and looked at her gravely over its rim in a silent toast. He sipped and went back to his subject. 'Limbreths give anything you ask of them, if they have it. But ask yourself what they are likely to have that you might want? They don't eat or drink as we do, they don't dress or collect jewels, nor hoard precious things of any kind. What would you ask a Limbreth for?'
Rebeke pondered, watching him drink. 'Poetry? Are their songs compelling in any way?'
'Quite the opposite. Obscure to any but another Limbreth - if there are any other Limbreths. I heard one once. Bored me to distraction.'
'Have they any powers? Favors they could do?'
'The favor they do is to remove the unwanted person from our world. It always struck me as insufferably bold to ask them for a gift into the bargain. But some do.'
'But what do the Limbreths give?'
'You guess. It entertains me while I am eating, and it takes longer. I am in no hurry to be back in my pit.'
'Dresh!' Rebeke warned him, taking up the end of the noose.
He sighed. 'The Limbreths give useless things, with good intentions, or so they would have us believe. Example: a draught of their water, supposed to bring sweet dreams and peace and inspiration. It gave an insatiable desire to see the Limbreth in person and be fulfilled in him. It.'
'And what else?'
'My dear Rebeke, you flatter me. Do you suppose I have had any personal dealings with them? That is a bit tawdry, even for me. No, all I can give you is the rumors of them I have gathered. The rumors say that no one ever got anything worth having from a Limbreth. Unless you count getting rid of someone.'
Rebeke pondered. Dresh finished his bread and cheese and nodded toward the basket. 'Is there more?'
'Is there more?' she countered.
'It depends on what you have in the basket.'
'Mushroom and onion pastries.'
'If one must have a worst enemy, it is best to choose a former lover, who will know best how to tempt and torment. Pass them over. The Gate itself. Now there's a tricky thing. The Limbreth creates it,opening a place between the worlds. But it cannot be left open to all passers, for the things of their world and ours cannot be mixed without discretion, which might alert a Gatherer. So the Limbreth puts in the Gate a Keeper, a servant, to prevent unwanted ones from using the Gate, and to keep the Gate from closing before the Limbreth is finished with it.'
'If the Gate is forced?'
'Not likely,' Dresh mumbled around a crumbly mouthful. He was taking his time eating. 'Not likely at all. Even if the Keeper weren't there, you must take into account the differences between the worlds. The light in their world, for instance, is dim and filtered, and the folk of their world are strange and unpredictable; they seem as soft as silk but they can be dangerous. So, to protect both worlds, the Limbreth seals the Gate. It's hard to describe, rather like the membrane on a fish egg. If the Limbreth wills it, it softens to let one through.'
'What if it were ripped, or forced?'
Dresh drained the last of his wine. 'Impossible. While fighting off the Keeper?'
'It's happened.' As soon as Rebeke had revealed it, she regretted it. It had slipped from her as they sat talking as if they were old friends, instead of prisoner and Windmistress. To confide in Dresh gave her some small vulnerability to him; and he seized that bit of power remorselessly.
'Then I think you have a problem. A pity you have no friend to help you with it.'
'Yes. Tell me what happens when a Gate is ripped.'
'It's never happened before. Let me see. There would be a flow, from one world to the other, and who knows what nastiness might pass through. But that is minor. The important thing is that the Gatherers would know of the Gate instantly, and would know that someone had been tinkering where someone had no business.'
'What would they do?'
'Who knows? The ones who make the rules don't have to reveal the punishments. Maybe nothing. Maybe they aren't really that interested in us. But if they did anything, I would say it would be something nasty. Nastier than we can imagine.'
Rebeke was silent, staring off as she tried to picture them. The Gatherers had created this world and peopled it according to their desires, and given them rules for living together. Dresh looked up from picking the last crumbs of cheese from his plate.
'Who ripped it?' he asked shrewdly.
Rebeke looked at him through narrowed eyes. But what could it hurt? 'Vandien.'
'Vandien?' He was incredulous. Then laughter burst from him, filling the chamber. 'With Ki's help, no doubt! Those two will be the death of us yet!' His voice held the warmth of a doting parent for errant children. Rebeke looked at him in amazement. With a gasp and a sigh, he controlled his laughter and met her eyes. 'Come, you can't be surprised! If you leave sharp tools lying about, someone will get cut. First me, now you. Evens the score a bit, doesn't it?' 'Dresh.' Rebeke cut through his merriment. 'What is it about Ki?'
Dresh smiled at her. 'Don't gull me, Windsinger. We've both used her, haven't we? You know full well, or you wouldn't have put her through a Gate.'
Rebeke stared at him silently. He looked deep into her blue and white eyes, reading her. She let him.
'Oh, ho! So you didn't put her through. This bit of gossip gets juicier all the time. What is it about Ki? I don't think you have anything in that basket that could buy that secret from me.'
'The basket is empty,' Rebeke admitted.
'I've other senses you could indulge,' he suggested lewdly.
'Dresh. Don't push me.'
'I've never cared for scales, but it might be interesting.'
'Don't be snide.'
'I'm not. I have something to sell, and I'll wait for your best offer.'
'Then ask for something I can give you.'
'My freedom.'
'No!'
'Then it appears we cannot bargain.' Dresh shrugged and hugged his knees.
'So it appears.' Rebeke stooped and took up the rope. Almost casually she began to coil it. Dresh's circle shrank.
'That's not sporting!' he hissed when the rope nearly touched him.
Rebeke stopped. 'It's not a game.'
'At least give me something for my secret. How's this? My secret for yours. Tell me what is going on, completely, and I'll tell you what I know of Ki. '
Rebeke glared at him, but she began a terse recounting of her situation. Dresh grinned at first, but then the smile faded. She could almost see his mind begin to work in its old trails of deception and subterfuge. When she finished he was rubbing his hands slowly and staring down the well and the look he flashed on her scared her.
'Now is my time, though it comes in a way I could never have foreseen. I shall bring the High Council down. Oh, it will be your doing; the dress will fit you well, Rebeke, but I shall cut the pattern. They stole you from me and I vowed they would pay. But I never thought you would be my weapon.'
'You are stepping beyond your bounds, wizard,' she warned him in a flat voice. 'Of course I am. And so are you, with your wizard in a well and your Relic to blackmail the High Council with. Fun, isn't it? Now listen to me; I shall have to be brief. Once, long ago, wearing a face you wouldn't know, I spent an evening in a Romni camp. There I heard many Romni songs, but one was very different. It told of a woman who had died in the act of stealing her little girl back from the Windsingers. I asked about the song and a strange thing happened: a whole caravan of Romni had nothing to say. No protestations that the song was true; no knowledge of who first sang it. Intriguing. And, in spite of their silence, the song told me much. The woman's name was Wisteria. The Windsingers' killing tool had been a Harpy. And the baby had survived.'
'Preposterous!'
'The best strokes of luck always are. So
it was possible that somewhere there existed a child that had been Windsingered but then regained by its parents.'
'How long did we have the child?' Anxiety stained Rebeke's voice and lined her face.
'The song didn't say. Listen, and stop asking questions. I pursued a lot of avenues. I spoke to Harpies; I spoke to old Romni who knew the genealogy of the tribes. I followed old scents, and lost them a hundred times. I managed to narrow it to a handful of young Romni women, but the Romni became more jealous of the secret the more I pursued it. Soon I came to realize what they feared; that the Windsingers had not forgotten the child. The Romni are nothing if not thorough and I soon came to believe that the secret was so well kept that not even the girl involved could betray it, for she didn't know either. I was reduced to keeping tabs on the young women; not an easy task. And then luck struck again.
'The Windsingers hadn't forgotten. Or so I guessed when the husband and two young children of one Romni woman were murdered by Harpies, apparently for sport. It was a tenuous premise, of course. But add up my facts. The father of this girl, one Aethan by name, had never permitted her to take any of the young Romni to husband, although by their standards she was more than old enough. And, after the father died, no young Romni approached her for an agreement, even though she was a likely enough girl, with a wagon and team of her own. What made her untouchable? She did take a man, but he was not Romni, and she did have two children by him, normal as far as anything I could hear. Then the Harpies widow her and kill her children. Coincidence? Perhaps. But what followed was not. Ki took her vengeance against the Harpies, resisting not only their physical violence, but proving strong against their other powers as well. I became convinced she was the one.'
'It well explains a lot of strange things,' Rebeke cut in with a dreamy look on her face. 'You need tell me no more. You disguised yourself by merging your aura with hers, when she shouldn't even have had one. When she swept your runes away that night in the inn and set me free of your power: that should have killed her, or at least crippled her. It but stunned her for a moment.'
Dresh nodded, a bitter look on his face. 'My carelessness; I left a sharp tool lying about. I know more of her than I can tell in one night, for I made quite a study of her. I have ridden on her wagon more times than she knows of, for she has a habit of picking up weary strangers.
'So there you have it. Ki is a Windsinger that was never shaped. She's ingested your potions, but hasn't changed physically. Some in the High Council must have known of her, but only watched her, removing her mate and children when it seemed expedient, lest the children have some inherited tendencies the Council couldn't control. But Ki? All she seems to have is a predilection for evading magic. Not a power; more an immunity. When I found her and used her, I suppose it scared the Council. So they decided to put her out of the way. A Gate.' 'Why didn't they just murder her outright?'
'I suspect that for a long time even the Windsingers weren't certain just what baby they needed to kill; and by the time they knew, the also saw the possibilities. They hoped she would be useful, in time.'
'What have we sunk to?'
'You could answer that better than I. Come, now, Rebeke. Plot with me how best to turn this to our advantage.'
Rebeke shook her head absently. She sat silently staring at the black floor in front of her, her mind ranging over the possibilities.
'You're finished with me, aren't you?'
Rebeke came out of her reverie to find his grey eyes looking up at her pleadingly. He did not wait for her reply.
'Please, Rebeke. Not the void again. Anything else, for, like you, I can imagine nothing worse. Chain me, cut off my hands and silence my tongue, take my sight and hearing, and still it would be better than the void, for I would be real!
Rebeke picked up the line, trying not to hear him, for she dared to do nothing else with him. He was treacherous, she reminded herself, a man who stored little hurts for years, a wizard who would never forget that she had mastered him once.
'I loved you!' He flung the words at her like stones. 'I loved you and you turned from me to the Windsingers, with never a word of explanation. How could you expect me to feel anything for them but hate? Yes, I plotted against them, I did them all the damage I could! But it was against them I acted, not against you. You were what they had stolen from me, the Rebeke I loved.'
She burst out: 'You didn't love me, Dresh; you deceive yourself. You loved mastering me. You bent my young powers to your hands, and it satisfied you. You loved me like you loved a fine hawk on your wrist; I was a tool, as sharp as Ki. But you no more loved Rebeke than you loved a wild hawk sailing down the wind.'
'Damn you! That's not true! I would have taught you things, made you my equal as soon as you were ready. You were impatient, like a child clutching at a flame. I kept from you only the things that could hurt you, and punished you only as a parent would punish a child that put herself into danger.'
Rebeke was not listening; she forbade her ears to hear. Slowly she drew up the rope, the blue circle shrinking. He rose to his feet, still talking, as it crept toward him. He balanced on the edge of the well, arms windmilling as he shrieked at her: 'You hate me because I mastered you and commanded you! But what do you do to me now? If commanding another is such a grave fault, how will you atone for it?'
He did not scream as he fell; the void took him too quickly for that. He drifted away like an autumn leaf falling, and Rebeke watched him go, coiling the rope to replace it in her sleeve.
'I am a Windsinger,' she reminded herself. 'What was is no more.' She rubbed grudgingly at the eyes that ached because they were no longer structured for tears.
TWELVE
'Ican go no farther.' Hollyika abruptly dropped down on the road. She settled on her haunches, her massive head drooping onto her bent knees. Ki halted in surprise, for the Brurjan-Human mule had shown no signs of weariness before this. Their pace had been steady, the lights drawing them on as smoothly as line run over a pulley.
'Do you need water?' Ki asked. She sloshed the jug she was carrying. In tacit consent they had been drinking sparingly, for they knew they had a dry way to go. But Hollyika shook her head slowly.
'It would help,' she admitted. 'It would ease me. But it would be an easing only, not a cure. I am weak. It is my own foul nature that dooms me, that makes me unfit to tread this road and drives me to my knees. I have tried, Ki. Since I drank of these waters and my mind was cleared, I have taken no creature that breathes to be my food. Water only have I drunk, no rich warm blood. Grass I have eaten, to be as innocent as the horse I once enslaved, though it caught between my teeth and strangled me as it went longways down my throat. My body betrays me; it was never designed for this life, but for a life of baseness on the far side of the Gate. My strength came from my evil ways and now that I have forsaken them, my body will not carry me to the Limbreth. The better path is denied me.'
A terrible sympathy welled up in Ki. She wanted to comfort her, but had no words, for the truth could not be compromised. Slowly she sank down beside her. 'Drink then, and be eased.'
Hollyika reached for the jug, then slowly put her hands back on her knees. 'No. You will need it to reach the Limbreth. If I drink now, we shall both be lost. I am going to die here, Ki, on this road, and I will never see the Jewels of the Limbreth. The doing of any great deed is denied me, but I am left the chance of not doing a foul one. I will not drink and by not drinking, I shall be sending you on the Limbreth. Whatever peace you gain when you reach the Limbreth, think of me.'
'I shall.' Ki did not try to sway her. The longer she was in this land, the more often she drank its water, the clearer her path became. Old patterns of thought and behavior were sloughing from her like outgrown skins and in their stead she was finding wisdom that welled up in her as effortlessly as the silver waters welled up from the land. Decisions no longer troubled her, she did not seesaw at crossroads, nor torment herself with wondering. The better way, the right way, was clear before her like
a shining silver thread to be followed. Hollyika was doing the right thing in denying herself that Ki might go on. In any other place and time, Ki would have tried her best to dissuade her, would have felt by friendship bound to do so. But her new wisdom taught her better. Hollyika was not designed to live in this land, and for Ki to force her to strive on would be a cruelty, a giving of false hope. Both of them had grown beyond that.
'I will stay with you,' she said softly, 'for a while, that your candle will not burn out alone. Then I shall go on to the Limbreth and the Jewels, and in their peace I shall hold your memory.'
Hollyika looked up at her with great brown eyes full of wisdom and sorrow. She knew, in the same way Ki did, that her decision was correct. She nodded slowly. 'I shall not keep you long,' she promised. 'My strength was ebbing before I met you by the river. Since then I have traveled on the reserves of my flesh, burning what the Brurjans call the oil of the last lantern. My body follows most closely the way of that folk; to be strong and to strive, until the very last moments when there is no strength left. Death, now, is not far off.' She lowered her head slowly until her broad forehead rested again on her knees. Ki sat beside her in the midst of the strange land they had traveled together. The air was keen, but the chill no longer troubled her body. The water had seen to that.
The wide lustrous fields of the farmers had been left behind as the road climbed straight and true, and now it threaded hilly country, ungrazed by any save wild flocks. Small yellow and white flowers shone out in the grasses like stars come to earth; and even the bare bones of this place, where the rocks thrust suddenly from the verdant hillside, seemed to scintillate coldly with a light of their own. Hollyika alone was a dark and huddled thing, a lightless lump in a place of glowing life. To be so strange and alien in this comforting place was lonesome enough; but Hollyika was dying in a world where living was peace. Ki reached over and took her hand, holding it loosely and companionably in her own. She stroked the downy fur on the back of the hand and looked down on the clean black nails that thickened like claws.
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