by Tad Williams
Tiamak looked up and saw the barge-loading dock. He remembered beyond doubt that he had passed it on his way out. Good. He was back on familiar territory.
So here was another mystery—who or what was this silent child? He tried to remember what Morgenes had told him of dreams and the Dream Road and what such an apparition might signify, but he could remember nothing useful. Perhaps she was a messenger from the land of the dead, a spirit sent by his late mother, wordlessly chastising him for his failure....
“The little marsh man!”
Tiamak whirled to see the three Fire Dancers standing on the walkway a few paces behind him. This time, no canal separated them from him.
The leader stepped forward. His white robe was less than pristine, smeared with dirty handprints and splotches of tar, but his eyes were even more frightening than they had been at a distance, bright and burning as if with some inner light. His stare seemed almost to jump out of his face.
“You don’t walk very fast, brown man.” He grinned, showing crooked teeth. “Somebody bend your leg, yes? Bend it bad?”
Tiamak backed up a few steps. The three young men waited until he stopped, then slouched forward, casually regaining their proximity. It was clear that they were not going to let him walk away. Tiamak lowered his hand onto the hilt of his knife. The bright eyes widened, as though the slender marsh man proposed a newer and more interesting game.
“I have done nothing to you,” Tiamak said.
The leader laughed soundlessly, skinning his lips back and showing his red tongue like a dog. “He is coming, you know. You cannot run from Him.”
“Does your Storm King send you to devil innocent strollers?” Tiamak tried to put strength in his voice. “I cannot believe that such a being would stoop so low.” He gently eased the knife loose in its sheath.
The leader made a humorous face as he looked to his fellows. “Ah, he talks good for a little brown man, doesn’t he?” He turned his gleaming eyes back on Tiamak. “The master wants to see who is fit, who is strong. It will go hard on the weak when He comes.”
Tiamak began to walk backward, hoping either to reach a place where there might be others to help him—not very likely in this backwater section of Kwanitupul—or at least to find a spot where his back would be protected by a wall and where these three would not have such freedom of movement on either side of him. He prayed to They Who Watch and Shape that he would not stumble. He would have liked to be able to feel behind him with his hand, but knew he might need that arm to ward off the first blow and give himself a chance to draw his knife.
The three Fire Dancers followed him, each face as innocent of consideration as a crocodile’s. In fact, Tiamak thought, trying to make himself brave, he had fought a crocodile and survived. These beasts were little different, except that the crocodile would at least have eaten him. The youths would kill him for pure pleasure, or for some warped idea of what their Storm King wanted. Even as he walked backward, locked in a strange death-dance with his persecutors, even as he desperately sought some place to make a stand, Tiamka could not help wondering how the name of a little-known demon legend from the North should these days be upon the lips of street bullies in Kwanitupul. Things had changed indeed since he had last left the swamps.
“Careful, little man.” The leader looked past Tiamak. “You will fall in and drown.”
Startled, Tiamak glanced backward over his shoulder, expecting to see the unfenced canal just behind him. When he realized instead that he was at the mouth of a short alleyway, and that he had been tricked, he turned back quickly to his pursuers, just in time to avoid the hurtling downstroke of an iron-tipped cudgel which crashed against the wooden wall beside him. Splinters flew.
Tiamak pulled his knife free of the sheath and slashed at the cudgel-wielding hand, missing but tearing the sleeve of a white robe. Two Fire Dancers, one of them waving a tattered sleeve in mockery, moved to either side of him as the leader took up his own position directly in front. Tiamak backed into the alley, waving his knife in an attempt to keep all three at bay. The leader laughed as he pulled his own cudgel out from beneath his robe. His eyes were full of a terrifying, guiltless glee.
The youth on the left suddenly made a quiet sound and disappeared back around the mouth of the alleyway onto the walkway they had just deserted. Tiamak guessed that he was serving as lookout while his friends finished with their victim. An instant later the vanished youth’s cudgel reappeared without its owner, hurtling into the alleyway and striking the Fire Dancer on Tiamak’s right hand, flinging him against the wall of the alleyway. His head left a red smear down the planking as he crumpled into a white-robed heap. As the shaven-headed leader stood, staring in astonishment, a tall shape stepped into the alley behind him, grasped him firmly around the neck and then whipped him through the air and into the walkway railing, which shattered into flinders as though struck by a catapult stone. The limp body sagged free of the remnants of the walkway and tumbled into the canal; then, within a long, silent moment, it sank out of sight in the oily water.
Tiamak discovered he was trembling uncontrollably with excitement and terror. He looked up into the kind, slightly confused face of Ceallio, the doorkeeper.
Camaris. The duke said he is Camaris, was Tiamak’s dazed thought. A knight. Sworn to, sworn to ... to save the innocent.
The old man laid his hand on Tiamak’s shoulder and led him back out of the alleyway.
That night the Wrannaman dreamed of white-shrouded figures with eyes that were flaming wheels. They. came at him across the water like sails flapping. He was splashing in one of the sidestreams of the Wran, desperate to escape, but something held his leg. The more he struggled, the harder it became to keep afloat.
The little dark-haired girl watched him from the bank, solemn and silent. She seemed so faint this time that he could hardly see her, as though she were made of mist. Eventually, before the dream ended and he woke up gasping, she faded entirely.
Diawen the scryer had made her cave in the mountain’s depths into something very much like the small house she had once inhabited on the outskirts of Hernysadharc, close by the Circoille fringe. The small cavern was closed off from its neighbors by woolen shawls hung across the doorway. When Maegwin gently tugged one of the curtaining shawls aside, a wave of sweetish smoke billowed out.
The dream of flickering lights had been so vivid and so obviously important that Maegwin had found it difficult to go about her business all morning. Although her people’s needs were many, and she had done her best to satisfy them, she had moved all day in a kind of fog, far away in her heart and mind even as she touched the trembling hands of an old person or took one of the children in her arms.
Diawen had been a priestess of Mircha many years ago, but had broken her vows—no one knew why, or at least no one could say for certain, though speculation was constant—then left the Order to live by herself. She had a reputation as a madwoman, but was also known for true-telling, for dream-reading and healing. Many a troubled citizen of Hernysadharc, after leaving a bowl of fruit and a coin for Brynioch or Rhynn, waited until after dark and then went to Diawen for more immediate assistance. Maegwin remembered seeing her once in the market near the Taig, her long, pale brown hair fluttering like a pennant. Maegwin’s nurse had quickly pulled her away, as though even looking at Diawen might be dangerous.
So, faced with a powerful but confusing dream, and having made a grave mistake in her last interpretation, Maegwin had this time decided to seek help. If anyone would understand the things that were happening to her, she felt sure, it was Diawen.
For all the smoky haze that hung thick as Inniscrich fog, the inside of the scryer’s cave was surprisingly neat. She had carefully arranged the few possessions saved from her home in Hernysadharc, a collection of shiny things that might have aroused the envy of a nesting magpie. Dozens of gleaming bead necklaces hung on the cave’s rough walls and caught the light of the fire like dew-spotted spiderwebs. Small mounds of shiny bau
bles—mostly beads of metal and polished stone—were arranged on the flat rock that was Diawen’s table. In various niches around the chamber stood the equally shiny tools of the scryer’s craft, mirrors ranging in size from a serving tray to a thumbnail, made of polished metal or costly glass, some round, some square, some elliptical as a cat’s eye. Maegwin was fascinated to see so many in one place. A child of a rustic court, where a lady’s hand mirror was, after her reputation, perhaps her most cherished possession, she had never seen anything like it.
Diawen had been beautiful once, or so everyone always said. It was hard to tell now. The scryer’s upturned brown eyes and wide mouth were set in a gaunt, weathered face. Her hair, still exceptionally long and full, had turned a very ordinary iron gray. Maegwin thought she looked like nothing more than a thin woman growing old fast.
Diawen smiled mockingly. “Ah, little Maegwin. Come for a love dram, have you? If it’s the count you’re after, you’ll have to heat his blood first or the charm won’t take. He’s a careful one, he is.”
Maegwin’s initial surprise was quickly overtaken by shock and rage. How could this woman know of her feelings for Eolair? Did everyone know? Was she the object of laughter at every cookfire? For a moment, her deep sense of responsibility for her father’s subjects evaporated. Why should she fight to save such a pack of sniggering ingrates?
“Why do you say that?” she snapped. “What makes you think I love anyone?”
Diawen laughed, untouched by Maegwin’s anger. “I am the one who knows. That is what I do, king’s daughter.”
For a long moment, her eyes smarting from the clinging smoke and her pride stinging from Diawen’s bold assessment, Maegwin wanted only to turn and leave. At last, her sensible side took charge. There might be loose talk about Lluth’s daughter, certainly—as Old Craobhan had pointed out, there always was. And Diawen was just the type to prowl about listening for valuable castoffs—useful little facts that, when polished up and then cunningly disclosed, would make her prophesying seem more uncanny. But if Diawen was the type to rely on such trickery, would she be any use to Maegwin’s current need?
As if sensing her thoughts, Diawen gestured for her to take a seat on a smooth lump of stone covered with a shawl and said: “I have heard talk, it’s true. No magical arts were needed to reveal your feelings for Count Eclair—just seeing you together once taught me all I needed to know. But there is more to Diawen than keen ears and sharp eyes.” She poked at the fire and set sparks to hopping, unleashing another billow of yellowish smoke, then turned a calculating look upon Maegwin. “What do you want, then?”
When Maegwin told her that she wished the scryer’s help interpreting a dream, Diawen became quite business-like. She refused Maegwin’s offers of food or clothing. “No, king’s daughter,” she said with a hard smile, “I will help you now and you will owe me a favor. That will suit me better. Agreed?”
After being assured that the favor was not to be repaid with her firstborn son, or with her shadow, or soul, or voice, or any other such thing, she consented.
“Do not fret,” Diawen chuckled. “This is no fireplace tale. No, someday I will simply want help ... and you will give it. You are a child of Hern’s House and I am only a poor scryer, yes? That is my reason.”
Maegwin told Diawen the substance of the dream, and of the other strange things she had dreamed in the months before, as well as what had happened when she let the visions lead her down into the earth with Eolair.
The smoke in the little chamber was so thick that when she finished telling of Mezutu’a and its denizens, she had to step out past the hanging for a while to breathe. Her head had begun to feel very strange, as if it were floating free of her body, but a few moments out in the main cavern restored her to clear-mindedness.
“That story is almost payment enough, king’s daughter,” the scryer said when Maegwin returned. “I had heard the rumors, but did not know whether to believe them. The dwarrow-folk alive in the earth below us!” She made a strange hooking gesture with her fingers. “Of course, I have always thought there was something more to the Grianspog tunnels than just the dead past.”
Maegwin frowned. “But what about my dream? About the ‘high place’—about how the time has come.”
Diawen nodded. The scryer crawled to the wall on her hands and knees. She ran her fingers over several of the mirrors, then at last selected one and brought it back to the fireside. It was small, set in a wooden frame gone nearly black from untold years of handling.
“My grandmother used to call this a ‘wormglass,’ ” Diawen said, holding it out for Maegwin’s inspection. It looked like a very ordinary mirror, the carving worn down until it was almost completely smooth.
“A wormglass? Why?”
The scryer shrugged her bony shoulders. “Perhaps in the days of Drochnathair and the other great worms, it was used to watch for their approach. Or perhaps it was made from the claws or the teeth of a worm.” She grinned, as though to show that she herself, despite her livelihood, did not hold with such superstition. “Most likely the frame was once carved to look like a dragon. Still, it is a good tool.”
She held the mirror above the flames, moving it in slow circles for a long while. When at last she turned it upright once more, a thin film of soot covered its surface. Diawen held it up before Maegwin’s face; the reflection was obscured, as though by fog. “Think of your dream, then blow.”
Maegwin tried to fix in her mind the strange procession, the beautiful but alien figures. A tiny cloud of soot puffed from the mirror’s face.
Diawen turned the glass around and studied it, biting her lower lip as she concentrated. With the firelight directly below her, her face seemed even thinner, almost skeletal. “It is strange,” the scryer said finally. “I can see patterns, but they are all unfamiliar to me. It is as though someone is speaking loudly in a house nearby, but in a tongue I have never heard before.” Her eyes narrowed. “Something is wrong, here, king’s daughter. Are you sure this was your own dream and not one that someone told to you?” When Maegwin angrily reaffirmed her ownership, Diawen frowned. “I can tell you little, and nothing from the mirror.”
“What does that mean?”
“The mirror is as good as silent. It is speaking, but I do not understand. So, then, I will release you from your promise to me, but I will also tell you something—give you my own advice.” Her voice implied that this would be just as good as whatever the mirror might have told them. “If the gods truly mean for this to be made clear to you, do what they say.” She briskly wiped the mirror clean with a white cloth and set it back into its niche in the cavern wall.
“What is that?”
Diawen pointed up, as though at the ceiling of the cave. “Go to the high place.”
Maegwin felt her boots sliding on snow-slicked rock and flung out a gloved hand to catch a prong of stone beside the steep path. She bent her knees and edged her feet under her body until she had regained her balance, then stood straight once more, looking back down the white hillside at the dangerous distance she had already climbed. A slip here could easily topple her off the narrow path; after that, nothing would stop her tumble down the slope but the tree trunks that would dash out her brains long before she reached the bottom.
She stood panting, and found to her mild surprise that she was not very frightened. Such a fall would certainly end in death one way or another—either immediately, or by leaving her crippled on a snowy mountain in the Grianspog—but Maegwin was giving her life back into the hands of the gods: what difference could it make if they decided to take her now rather than later? Besides, it was glorious to be out beneath the sky again, no matter how cold and grim it might be.
She shuffled a little farther toward the outside edge of the trail and turned her gaze upward. Almost half the height of the hill still loomed between Maegwin and her destination—Bradach Tor, which jutted from the pinnacle like the prow of a stone ship, its underside blackly naked of the snow that blanketed
the slopes. If she went hard at it, she should reach the summit before the weak morning sun, which now shone full in her face, had climbed far past noon.
Maegwin shouldered her pack and turned her attention back to the path, noting with satisfaction that the fluttering snow had already erased most of the marks of her recent passage. At the base of the hill where she had begun, the tracks had no doubt been completely obliterated. If any of Skali’s Rimmersmen came sniffing around this part of the Grianspog, there would be no sign she had been here. The gods were doing their share. That was a good sign.
The steep path forced her to make most of the ascent leaning forward, grasping at the handholds that presented themselves. She felt a small, sour pride at the strength of her body, at the way her muscles stretched and knotted, pulling her up the slope just as swiftly as most men could climb. Maegwin’s height and strength had always been more of a curse to her than a blessing. She knew how unwomanly most thought her, and had spent most of her life pretending not to care. But still, it was somehow very satisfying to feel her capable limbs work for her. Sadly, it was her body itself that was the greatest impediment to her given task. Maegwin felt sure she would be able to let it go if she had to, although it would not be easy, but it had been even harder to turn against Eolair, to pretend a contempt for him that was the opposite of her feelings. Still, she had done it, however sick it made her feel. Sometimes doing the gods’ bidding required a hardened heart.
The climb did not get easier. The snowy path that she followed was really little more than an animal track. In many places it vanished altogether, forcing her to make her way awkwardly over outcroppings of stone, trusting tangles of leafless heather or the branches of wind-twisted trees to hold her weight until she could haul herself up to another area of relative safety.
