The White Road of the Moon

by Rachel Neumeier

  This was altogether too optimistic, by Meridy’s estimation. She gave the priest a suspicious look, but he, applying himself to his food with excellent appetite, showed no interest in any of them. Even so, she was glad to finish the last slice of bread and retreat from the common room.

  The private suite was small and sparingly furnished, but pretty and comfortable. There was a narrow sitting room that boasted a couch and two tables, each holding an oil lamp already lit against the gloomy evening. The bedchamber offered a bed big enough for three girls and generous for two. Meridy found, when she touched the thin mattress, that it was stuffed with straw. But the mattress had a linen casing to stop the straw from pricking, the blankets were abundant and clean, and there was no sign of bugs. A large wooden basin took up at least a third of the floor space left by the bed.

  The servant who had showed them to the rooms told Jaift, “Hot bath comes with the room; bathe before you touch the bed and the room’s two pence cheaper. That’s true for every night you spend here, miss. Soap comes with the bath, no extra charge. Laundry is four pence extra, but it’s a good deal, though it’s me as says it: your things will be dry by morning or you get a penny back. No cooking in the rooms, no loud noise after dark, and though you’ll naturally want to bar the door, you’ve no need to worry about thieves. This house is respectable.”

  Meridy revised her estimate of the servant’s rank upward. Maybe she was a member of the owner’s family? She certainly sounded decisive.

  Jaift said gravely, “We are reassured.”

  The servant smiled, as everyone always smiled at Jaift. As she left, she added over her shoulder, “Hot water’ll be up shortly.”

  Hot water was a luxury beyond price, Meridy thought a short while later. She and Jaift had each volunteered to bathe second, but though Meridy had succeeded in making Jaift go first, the water was still warm. The soap was even better, grainy and coarse as it was, and privacy was best of all; Jaift had gone out into the suite’s tiny parlor to investigate the plum tarts the servant had brought. The inn’s laundry provided towels, not only clean but warm from resting near a fire. The faint scent of wood smoke clung to Meridy’s towel. She decided she liked that, too. She hadn’t noticed how tired she had become of the indifferent grime of the public houses.

  Meridy smiled at the ghost dog as Iëhiy rose gracefully to his hind legs and placed his forefeet on the edge of the bath to peer interestedly at the bowl of soap; if he’d still been alive, he would surely have tipped the bath right over, and her with it. She flicked drops of water at his nose, smiling again as he snapped at them.

  Then there was a knock on the door.

  Muttering under her breath, Meridy reached for a towel. But then she paused. It must be Jaift wanting something—to explain the schedule for tomorrow, maybe—but if it was Jaift, why didn’t the other girl simply come in?

  While she hesitated, Iëhiy shouldered between her and the door, head down, an inaudible growl trembling in his chest.

  Clutching the towel around herself, Meridy stepped out of the bath, backed up, and found herself at the window. She fumbled with the shutters. Warm air, moisture laden, rolled in as she flung back the shutters and looked out into the deserted courtyard. The wet cobbles gleamed in the lantern light from the inn. The drop was only one story. But she thought of Jaift—what was happening to her friend? She hesitated, torn.

  Niniol threw himself through the closed door—or was thrown, judging by the helplessly off-balance way he was trying to catch at the walls. He fell heavily, halfway through the floor before he managed to stop himself. Meridy could see no opponent, no enemy, but she knew who, or what, this must be from the frightening urgency with which Niniol scrambled to his feet. His long ethereal sword glowed like blown glass in his hand as he made it upright. There wasn’t nearly enough steam left from the bath for Meridy to pull him into the real—

  Iëhiy vanished through the closed door with a great snarl of rage. Niniol cried, “Get out!” to her over his shoulder, and strode grimly after the dog.

  The door shook in its frame from the force of a soundless blow. A cry of pain, equally without sound, reached Meridy. She could not tell whether it came from Niniol or Iëhiy, or from someone else entirely. Spurred into action by pure fear, Meridy wriggled backward through the window, clung to the sill for an instant, and dropped into the courtyard. The cobbles were wet and slippery under her bare feet, and she realized she was out in the weather with nothing but an extremely inadequate towel. There was no time to worry about it. Clutching the towel to herself, she ducked across the courtyard toward the deep shadows by the stables.

  Niniol hurtled through the wall of the inn behind her and hit the cobbles, far too hard. No ghost should be so affected by stones in the real world, but he moved only dazedly to get to his feet. Changing direction, Meridy fell to her knees at his side.

  “Niniol—”

  “Get up,” he said faintly. “Get up and run.”

  “To where? Give me your sword, Niniol—”

  He had not had it when he fell, but his reach after its familiar hilt brought the ethereal weapon glittering to his hand and he pushed it toward her. Meridy looked at it slantwise, looked at the way the rain fell through it and past it and caught gleaming on its faint outline, and pulled it gently into the real. It felt like ice and nothing in her hands as she closed her fingers around its hilt, but she could lift it; it didn’t melt away into the air.

  Meridy turned back to face the inn in time to see a black-eyed sorcerer-witch come silently through the door into the yard—not either of the servitors she had seen before. This was a younger man, handsome except for the stillness of his face and his empty black eyes. He wore quality clothing, like a lord, and his skin was fine and pale like that of a lord, too, but his hands were translucent, as though he existed partly in the ethereal. The breeze that ruffled his light summer cloak smelled not of rain, but of dust and loneliness.

  Through the door, Meridy had a glimpse of firelit normalcy: travelers and inn staff going about their ordinary lives, oblivious to the drama being enacted so little distance away. The contrast with the rain-misted peril of the courtyard made the threat seem so unreal, Meridy had to glance down at Niniol again to prove to herself the events of the past moments had actually occurred. The ghost was trying with fading strength to get to his feet. It was clear he would not succeed. Meridy looked up again.

  During that brief glance away, the servitor had come much closer—covering more ground than ought to have been possible, and more quietly. His eyes were not black all the time, she saw; sometimes they were no color at all, like the eyes of a ghost. Somehow that was worse than the solidity of the other servitors. But half in the realms of dream or not, she was sure she could hear the soft scrape of his boot soles on the cobbles, and where the light of the inn’s lamps fell across him, he cast a shadow like a living man. But just like the others, he cast another shadow as well. The other was an uneasy thing, too big and diffuse and not dark enough, owing nothing to the lamps.

  Meridy held Niniol’s sword in front of her body, awkwardly. It was not heavy—it barely existed—but she feared to close her hands too hard around the hilt, lest it fall out of the real. The towel slipped, and she pulled it back together impatiently. It was ridiculous to die wrapped in nothing but a towel.

  Expecting no answer, she cried aloud, “Inmanuàr! Carad Mereth! Help me! Help us!”

  The man laughed and told her, “The boy’s powerless, and the poet is too fond of his own voice to hear yours now, girl.” He moved forward.

  Meridy braced herself, knowing perfectly well it would do no good.

  Niniol made it to his knees and tried to get up, but the man merely looked at him and he fell back, gasping in what seemed like pain.

  Since the shadowed man seemed distracted, Meridy stepped forward and swung the ethereal sword at him, but he turned smoothly and caught it in his hand. It was like striking iron. Meridy gasped with the shock, and with a ringing ch
ime, the sword shattered as though it were truly fashioned of glass, and the shards of it dissolved into air and light.

  Meridy fell back, shaking a hand gone numb. The man laughed and reached for her, but casually, so she managed to duck away. But in the effort she slipped on the cobbles and sprawled clumsily on the ground; she froze there, in the certainty that she could never make it back onto her feet before he seized her.

  Then Carad Mereth came gravely and easily through the door of the inn, with Iëhiy pacing, barely visible, at his side, a dog of smoke and mist, and the moon rode free from behind the clouds and shone through the rain. Somehow it was a full moon again, though it had passed full and begun waning during the journey from Riam to Cora Talen. The moonlight shone now more coldly than torchlight, but neither did it falter when it fell across the shadowed man; he cast no shadow from its light.

  Carad Mereth walked forward, murmuring, and as he came closer, Meridy could make out his words. His voice was soft and rich as velvet. “ ‘What shall I say, what words will ever come, when all my words are done, when words have gone astray? What shall I give, what can my need sustain, when nothing else remains, when nothing else shall live? What light is there, what light shines through these years, when, darkened by my fears, there’s no light anywhere?’ ”

  “Poet,” said the shadowed man, “wouldst thou challenge me?” His voice had become strange: it sounded somehow darker and deeper than before. It fell oddly on the ear, grating and somehow discordant, as though it weren’t a proper voice at all but something that tried to imitate a true human voice. There was a dark power in it, but a wariness, too, as though the man took Carad Mereth far more seriously than he took Meridy, which seemed reasonable enough. She backed away to Niniol’s side, watching in hope and terror to see what would happen.

  Carad Mereth laughed. At the sound of his laughter, the rain stopped and the clouds parted. “Look!” he said, raising one hand. “The moon is high. You have missed your chance. Go back! You must wait for the dark or the day.”

  The man tilted his head back and stared into the sky, and, like a blown-out lantern, the moonlight failed. But Carad Mereth held out his hand and the moon was in it, actually cupped in his palm, round and fat and full. Moonlight shone all around him, silvery on the cobbles, which were no longer ordinary cobbles but made of glass or crystal or ice, something that burned coldly underfoot.

  Except then the shadowed man reached out with his own hand, and his hand’s shadow rose up, both shadows, dark fingers weaving together and closing around the little moon. Far above, clouds raced across the sky. He said, “I am here with my servant. But thy master hath abandoned thee, poet. Thou art alone.”

  “Unlikely,” Carad Mereth said, but his voice was strangely muffled, as though Meridy heard it from a great distance. He looked at Meridy and said, his voice still distant but his tone lightly mocking, “Not for you this hither shore of dreams.” She stared at him, and he told her, still in that light, mocking tone, “Fly, little bird, for the near shore and the world of men!”

  They had stepped out of the mortal world, Meridy realized at last; at some moment lost in fear and confusion, she had stepped out of the real and into the ethereal realms that lay beyond. She looked around, searching for the courtyard of the ordinary inn, the ordinary lanterns with their warm yellow light shining by the door and in the windows, the fragrance of the evening loaves and heavy scent of the rain-wet cobbles….

  “She’s not for you,” Carad Mereth said to the shadowed witch. “She’s in the hand of the God. You should know better. Yes, even you.”

  The man said coldly, “All her kind belong to me. Thou art presumptuous. For a man out of his place, thou hast become too bold. There will be a price exacted for thine impudence, poet.”

  “Perhaps,” Carad Mereth answered softly. “But this is neither your time nor your place. Be certain that if you raise your hand against me now, you will pay a price as well. Are you willing to bear that?” Above them, the moon slid from behind clouds or shadows, and Carad Mereth held out his hands, moonlight pooling in his palms.

  But the man did not back away. He stepped forward, saying, “All places and times have become mine now.”

  Once again the moonlight went out. This time the darkness that closed in seemed absolute.

  Carad Mereth made a low sound chillingly like dismay, or fear. Meridy, blind in the dark, heard him, and her whole body clenched up in terror. She tried to run forward, to find the sorcerer, but Niniol caught her and wouldn’t let her go. He gripped her hand so hard it hurt and closed his other hand on her wrist, and Meridy couldn’t break away from him.

  And then Iëhiy came out of the dark, and following the hound, the light came back as well: not moonlight but plain lantern light shining across the wet cobbles, and Niniol’s grip, suddenly insubstantial, had no power to constrain her. But it was too late. Carad Mereth was gone. So was the shadowed sorcerer. The courtyard of the inn was empty, except for the rain, still falling gently. Ordinary sounds came out into the courtyard, the talk of men and the stamp of a horse in the stable. She was alone with Niniol and Iëhiy, and no sign of anything uncanny anywhere.

  “You stopped me!” she said to Niniol. “He took him!”

  Then Iëhiy insinuated his head under her hand, and Meridy turned her face away from Niniol and petted the wolfhound hard, blinking fiercely.

  “I’m sorry,” Niniol said, not arguing.

  Meridy shook her head, not looking at him. She admitted much more shakily, “I couldn’t have helped him. You were right to stop me from trying.” Realizing suddenly that she still wore nothing more adequate than a towel, she straightened, clutching it. She wanted to ask Niniol about Jaift, but she was afraid that if she opened her mouth, she might burst into tears or start screaming. “I—” she managed. “Jaift?”

  “She’s too sensible to pitch into a battle between ghosts and sorcerers.” Niniol gave Meridy a look that was hard to read, but not unsympathetic. “Next time, you might follow her example. For now…are they gone? Gone altogether out of this world? Can you tell?”

  “I think so. I’m not sure. I think so. I don’t—I don’t think Carad Mereth was lying about the other one also—also paying a price.” Meridy meant to speak firmly, but all this came out barely above a whisper. She was trembling, she discovered, and couldn’t stop.

  Niniol shook his head. But he only said kindly, “Let’s get you back inside where it’s warm and dry, and have some tea, and decide what to do next.”

  —

  The tea was hot and sweet, and it came with honey cakes, brown bread, and salted butter. Meridy, dressed once more and prepared to pretend the towel had never been a problem, sat on the bed with her legs tucked up, wrapped her hands around the mug, and breathed the warm steam gratefully. Jaift sat in a chair beside the bed. Whatever she had seen or experienced during the recent alarm, she now looked somehow perfectly comfortable and unshaken. Meridy wished she knew how the other girl did it.

  Niniol sat on the floor and leaned against the wall near Meridy, gripping a mug Meridy had tipped into the ethereal. Iëhiy rested his great head on the mattress next to Meridy’s thigh, accepting bits of cake from her hand with featherlike delicacy. Meridy tried to pay attention to what she did as she passed the fragments of cake from the real into the ethereal, but it seemed like just a normal thing to her, and not very important anyway considering everything else that was happening all around them.

  Jaift buttered a slice of bread and frowned at Meridy. “I want to know more about this blue-eyed sorcerer, Carad Mereth. You’ve said he’s Inmanuàr’s real anchor, assuming the ghost boy is Inmanuàr, but who is he and what does he want?”

  “What I want to know,” Niniol said, firmly practical, “is how our enemy found us here. Inmanuàr, or whoever he may be, hasn’t come for a visit, so I don’t see how he’d have drawn the shadowed sorcerer here to us. Nor Princess Diöllin, either. This other one, the poet, who knows what he might have done, or why? B
ut he came after our enemy, not before him.”

  Meridy shook her head because she didn’t know and couldn’t guess. “Carad Mereth…he is a sorcerer, I’m almost sure. Or maybe a priest. Or I think maybe both. He is Tai-Enchar’s enemy. That, I’m sure of.”

  “So that makes him our friend, I suppose,” Jaift said doubtfully.

  Niniol snorted. “The enemy of our enemy may be pleased to have found a tool apt for his battle. His, mark you, and a fight that should be none of ours, save by his doing, making you that boy’s anchor, Mery, and likely sending the princess your way as well, or why else would you be at the center of all this, eh?”

  This was all true and reasonable, but Meridy didn’t think it was quite right, either. Diöllin hadn’t said anything about Carad Mereth. But besides that…She said, “Except if Carad Mereth’s enemy is Tai-Enchar, then the fight belongs to everyone. Doesn’t it? Because the witch-king is everyone’s enemy.”

  “Huh,” muttered Niniol, not sounding convinced. “Sounds to me like this Carad Mereth went out of his way to make him your enemy in particular.”

  Jaift took a bite of bread and chewed thoughtfully. Finally she said, “Yet it seems to me we can be sure this Carad Mereth is the God’s servant, whether he’s a priest or not. There’s all this with the moon, you say, so that right there tells us something, doesn’t it, because after all the moon belongs to the God. Whatever else, we can be sure Carad Mereth truly is Tai-Enchar’s enemy. If that’s so, then his fight belongs to everyone, just as Mery says. It might have been nothing but ill chance that brought us here to find the shadowed sorcerer waiting for us, but ill chance can make a way for good, my uncle says. So maybe we’re supposed to be here.”

  “We can hope so,” Meridy agreed, relieved at this support.

  Before she could say anything else, Diöllin flicked into existence and cried, “He’s here!”