The White Road of the Moon

by Rachel Neumeier

  It was all rather nerve-racking. Meridy waited for Niniol, who came up beside her and gave her a reassuring nod, though he also cast a worried look toward Herren, who had already reached the palace gates.

  “I know—I know,” Meridy said. “I’m afraid for him too, but what else can we do?” She pulled Niniol forward.

  Herren did not wait for them at the entrance but passed alone through the gates and then through the doors and so into the High King’s palace, leaving Meridy and the others to hurry in his wake.

  Once inside, she hesitated, but Herren was already heading for a stairway curving up to the right, the steps of white marble threaded with pale gold veins. Meridy followed him, uneasy but committed.

  The great stair proved to lead to a long, vaulted hallway with walls of tawny-gold stone and marble pillars and floors of complicated mosaic. A heavy throne of carved dark wood stood at the opposite end of the hall. When they drew closer, Meridy saw that the sigil of the God was inlaid in pearl on the high back of the throne. And then she saw that Inmanuàr sat upon the throne.

  Inmanuàr’s head was bowed, and Meridy thought for a moment that he might be weeping, but he straightened as they approached and his face was calm. Yet he seemed somehow more deeply grieved than if he had wept. He seemed even less real than before, in this great hall, which had been drowned and destroyed two hundred years before, and yet, like the other quick dead in this place, he was more visible here than he ever had been elsewhere. But Meridy would have known he was a ghost even if she had been seeing him for the very first time. He was too solid, too present, far too old for the boy he seemed to be, and somehow it showed. He looked, despite his youth, like a king. Meridy looked into his face and hardly knew how to speak to him, or what to say.

  Then Iëhiy, unimpressed by kings or princes or the weight of the tragic past, threw himself at Inmanuàr, ears slanted eagerly and tongue lolling, and Inmanuàr braced himself, caught the insubstantial weight of the dog neatly, and ruffled his ears. “Well, dog,” he said, with real affection, “and so you have brought them here for me.”

  Meridy, drawn by an unexpected stab of jealousy, suggested in her most cutting tone, “Perhaps someday you might tell me his true name.”

  “His name was Tai-Ruòl,” said Inmanuàr, looking up again, one hand still resting on the wolfhound’s massive shoulders.

  The name meant King of Hounds. Meridy had to admit the name suited the wolfhound. She was being stupid. Anybody could see the dog was his, really. And it didn’t matter anyway.

  But then Inmanuàr straightened. “Iëhiy is a good name for him,” he said more gently. “The sparks of the fire that lift to the God…a good name. He has guarded you well, my brave dog. But when we finally face Tai-Enchar, he will not be enough.”

  “We know that!” Herren said in his thin, strained voice. “I know that.”

  Inmanuàr inclined his head to the living boy. “Of course you do, little brother. So here you are. You have been very brave.”

  “I had no choice!” Herren was pale, his face stiff. He said again, but more quietly, “I never had a choice.”

  “You have always had a choice. Tai-Enchar never guessed you would come to me. Yet you are braver than he could have imagined, and here you are, in this place where I died.” Inmanuàr’s young face was sober and cold in the pale light; the expression in his eyes was ancient.

  “I know what you plan to do with Herren,” Meridy told him. “I figured it out. You need me to do it, don’t you? It’s why you needed a witch in the first place. But it’s not right.”

  “That’s true,” Inmanuàr agreed somberly. “It is not right. But every other choice is worse. You know that. That is why the God put you in my path and gave you the way to come here.”

  Meridy shook her head, but she couldn’t refute this. She knew it was true.

  “Wait,” said Diöllin. “Wait—”

  Inmanuàr lifted a hand, stopping her. He said, with a distant, reserved kindness, “You, too, shall have your part to play, I believe.” He swept his gaze across them all. Then he set his hands on the arms of the throne and pushed himself to his feet, for all the world as though he were a living boy with weight and heft. He said, “I was my father’s heir. When the half-Southern witch, then called Enchaän, turned against my father in the midst of the sorcerous working, my father could not both defend himself and hold the frame of the sorcery. He chose to hold the sorcery and complete the raising of the Southern Wall, and in that he succeeded. But he still held all the remnants of that working in his hands. He meant to ground the sorcery and let go of that power, but he died too soon and so it came to me.” His light voice seemed almost to echo in the great hall, although it was no louder. “I could not hold it. It was too strong, and I was too young, and I had no time. All I could do was keep it from going to my father’s murderer. And so all that great sorcery shattered in my hands. And the land sank away beneath us, and the sea came in. And we all drowned: my father’s people and I, Enchaän and the witches who were his allies and servants, all of us drowned together. The whole city, and all the lands around.”

  “Carad Mereth was in the South, wasn’t he? He came back, but too late,” Meridy said softly.

  The High King’s son focused on her again. “He was called Laìdomìdan then. Yes. He had gone south to raise up the Anchor for the Southern Wall and be certain it held. As you say, he came back, but he found nothing here but the bitter waters of the bay. Moran Diorr was gone. But he knew Enchaän was not entirely gone. So he called me by name and bound me not to go to the God. And so I am here, now. I am still the key to my father’s power. While I linger, no one else may seize the rule that should by rights have come to me. Thus, for two hundred years Enchaän has hounded me across the face of the land. But he has never won what he sought.”

  “Until at last he seduced enough living people to his side in Cora Diorr,” said Meridy. “Princess Tiamanaith wasn’t the first, was she? The first to make a bargain with Aseraiëth, I suppose. But not the first to support Tai-Enchar. There were others. For years. The witches who went to Cora Diorr…”

  “Not all of them. Never all of them. But too many. Prince Diöllonuor was warned. He was warned most strictly. But he heeded no warning.”

  Diöllin said bitterly, “My father believed too much in his own cleverness and never enough in the cleverness of anyone else. He let Tai-Enchar into Cora Diorr. He let his ally Aseraiëth take my mother. She was that desperate, and my father never even realized what she’d done. But I didn’t understand either. Not soon enough. Not until it was too late.”

  “I knew it wasn’t her,” Herren said, not looking at any of them. “It used to be. But not since this spring.”

  Diöllin put an arm around her brother’s shoulders. “I should have listened to you.” For a moment, Herren stood stiff. Then he leaned against her, and she bowed her head above his.

  Inmanuàr said, more gently now, “Tai-Enchar gained influence subtly, and by the time any of us understood, it was already too late. But the God’s hand is still lifted over us, and so now we are not without hope.”

  “But Tai-Enchar can’t find you here,” Meridy said. “He can’t find any of us here.” She tried not to let it sound like a question.

  Inmanuàr regarded her steadily. “We have stepped into a lingering moment of memory. But we have not stepped altogether outside time, and, you must understand, our enemy also remembers Moran Diorr. He will come here eventually. Thus we dare not delay overlong.” And Inmanuàr held out his hand to Herren.

  “Wait!” Diöllin snapped. “What are you going to do?” But she knew, Meridy understood, because she added furiously, “It isn’t right!”

  “There’s no better choice,” Herren said, sounding tired and bitter and much older than his years. “Not for any of us. If Inmanuàr doesn’t do it, you know, Tai-Enchar will. And sooner rather than later, probably.”

  Inmanuàr gave the princess a sardonic look. It was not the look of a boy, or even
of a mortal prince. It was the look of an ancient king. “We all must do what is put before us to do.” He turned back to Herren, held out his hand again, and asked steadily, “Shall you do this?”

  “I said I would,” Herren said. “I will. I know I have to. What I want…what I want is for you to save my mother.”

  “That may not be possible,” Inmanuàr warned him. “But I promise you that if she lingers yet, then I shall try.”

  Herren nodded jerkily. He took the one step necessary, past Diöllin, who hovered desperately but could not stop him, and took the hand of the High King’s son. Meridy thought it was the bravest thing she had ever seen.

  Inmanuàr gripped the younger boy’s hand firmly in his. Then he turned, as inevitably as a falling stone, to Meridy. “Later, you may find something else to do,” he told her gravely. “That is in the hand of the God. But we shall hope for that mercy.” Pale light struck through Inmanuàr’s eyes, which in this place were a cold gray-blue like shadowed water. Lifting his hand, he shaped a heavy fragrant rose out of air and nothing, as a ghost might do, and held it out to Meridy.

  It was very like the rose he had given her, on their first meeting in the ghost town of Tikiy. Ordinarily if one touched such an ethereal creation, one’s living touch would send it dissolving back into the dreams from which it had been formed. But in this place…Meridy reached out and lifted the rose delicately from his hand. It was heavy in her hand, and its thorns pricked her fingers exactly like the thorns of a real rose. She frowned at Inmanuàr.

  “It is not true sleep that the prick of a rose may grant,” the High King’s son told her, his tone somber. “It is not true life that the fragrance of a rose may recall. Such sorcery belongs to tales and memories and dreams.”

  “I know,” said Meridy. She did. She thought perhaps Ambica had told her that, or her mother. Or maybe she had always known it.

  “Of course you do,” Inmanuàr said. “Yet I think you will find a use for at least one rose before the end.” He looked around at them all. “From this place, there is no retreat. From this lingering moment, we must step into time and face Tai-Enchar in the world of men. If we fail, we will fail entirely and Tai-Enchar will take every realm for his own and make wastelands of them all. If we succeed, who knows what may come of it?”

  Niniol hooked his thumbs in his belt and gave an abrupt nod. Diöllin’s lips were pressed thin, but at last she, too, nodded. Meridy took a breath and threaded the rose stem into her hair, tucking the heavy flower behind her ear.

  She was just in time, for as she did so, the light in the hall folded back and opened up, and it was too late to argue or question or try to think of something better.

  The witch-king came in Jaift’s body. Meridy had expected that, of course she had, but it was still a shock. It was her friend’s face, Jaift’s flaxen hair and fair skin and high cheekbones; but those were not her eyes. Or maybe they were, if Jaift’s uncle had never fixed the color of her eyes, but their black seemed endlessly deep now, and the disinterested contempt in them was nothing like Jaift. The witch-king in her body looked past Meridy, past them all, seeming aware only of Inmanuàr; and he studied the High King’s son not with anything so personal as hatred, but only with a distant, empty satisfaction.

  “My little enemy,” murmured Tai-Enchar. The witch-king’s gaze shifted from Inmanuàr to Herren, and Jaift’s mouth curved in an expression that owed nothing to Jaift’s generosity and kindness. The witch-king said, “Thou hast brought me a gift, I perceive.” His voice, coming from Jaift’s lips, thin and cold and terrible, was not the bodiless voice of a ghost. But it was nothing like Jaift’s own voice, either. Meridy had heard Jaift when she was uncertain and when she was confident, when she was irritated and when she was angry. But she had never heard her friend sound cruel, and satisfied to be so.

  “If you will act, act now!” commanded Inmanuàr.

  “I know!” snapped Meridy, furious and terrified, and she lifted Herren’s soul directly out of his body, exactly the way everyone always feared a witch might do. She took his soul out of his body and made him into a ghost and bound his ghost to herself, exactly the way everyone had always told her witches would do. It wasn’t even hard.

  Herren’s eyes rolled up, and his body collapsed. Diöllin cried out as her brother’s ghost wavered into visibility and then, as Meridy called out, “Herren! By your name I bind you to the world!” he gained definition and an appearance of solidity. Meridy dropped the hand of Herren’s physical body and backed away, putting her arms around the boy’s ghost instead.

  “No!” cried Diöllin, hopelessly. “No!”

  “It was the only way,” Herren told her. “It had to be the High King’s living heir, and it had to be someone uncorrupted by Tai-Enchar. I was as close as anyone else living, so it had to be me.” In this place he still sounded almost like a living boy, though far more patient than any normal boy his age.

  Ignoring both of them, Inmanuàr stooped over the young prince’s abandoned body, his face intent.

  Tai-Enchar lifted one hand, and dust seemed to rise up and whirl around them. The witch-king was trying to take them all into his own realm, Meridy realized—or else he was trying to make this echo of Moran Diorr into a part of his own realm. In the next instant she feared she would glimpse endless wastelands stretching out around them. But then Inmanuàr said sharply, “He is not for you!” And he vanished.

  Then Inmanuàr opened the eyes of Herren’s body, and rose to his feet, and held out his borrowed hands. Light, opaque and sharp-edged, struck through the dust and emptiness, and the witch-king’s empty realm shattered all around them into shards of light and shadow and re-formed again into the memory of the High King’s palace.

  In this violent moment, they all fell deeper into memory—Inmanuàr’s memory, or perhaps the memory of the city itself. Meridy saw richly clad noblemen and white-robed priests; she saw soldiers in the High King’s livery, bearing the badge of the vermillion fire horse, rampant on a sable ground: an emblem that no living man had raised up since the High King’s fall. She saw half a dozen men and one woman of obvious part-Southern blood standing close by a wide, low table; and on the table a map drawn in colored sand, greens and browns and the long blue lines of the rivers, and in the south, sand rising up into sharp peaks too high and jagged for any mortal person to pass, whether of pure Kingdom blood or Southerner, whether sorcerer or witch.

  And there, close by the map, she also saw a tall man with eyes of an unusual light brown, and golden skin that suggested a dash of Southern blood. His face was thin, with prominent cheekbones and a bold curving nose. He wore a long tawny-colored jacket over dark green trousers, with the sleeves slashed to show a paler green shirt. He was not young, but not nearly as old as Meridy had expected. He was, of course, High King Miranuanol, the last of the High Kings. He was a memory of an earlier age, and he stood amid memory and dreams and imaginings, and turned his head, and saw them all.

  Meridy saw how the High King’s gaze caught first on Tai-Enchar in Jaift’s body, and narrowed with recognition. Then the High King looked past Tai-Enchar and gazed upon his son—on Herren-Inmanuàr, the ancient ghost of his son overlaid on the body of his distant heir. He recognized him immediately, and without hesitation stretched out his hand toward him, and said in a voice both deep and soundless, “My son, I see this has become the hall of the dead. Take my strength, then, and do as you must to redeem my Kingdom.”

  “Not even this will avail thee,” said Tai-Enchar, his voice cold and empty. “My servitor is stronger than thine, as I am stronger than thou.” And Jaift’s hands lifted and a wind rose up, hissing with dust and loneliness.

  And then all the High King’s power, all the gathered magic of the sorcery he and his allies had been working in their own place and time, the memory of all the strength of the sorcery that had long ago shattered, fell again from the High King’s hands as though from that long-vanished moment, as though from a tremendous height, and smashed into his so
n.

  It had happened before. In an earlier age, it had crushed Inmanuàr; he had not been able to hold it. This time it was different. This time Inmanuàr expected that wild torrent of magic and power. He had had centuries to prepare, and Carad Mereth for a teacher, and now he stood, embodied within a new living body, in this place of his father’s power and his own death. This time he rode the torrent of magic and took it for his own, and all around them he built a clear and solid memory of Moran Diorr as it had been. Inmanuàr raised the city up: white towers and sweeping galleries, graceful avenues and wide gardens, flowers and fountains and deep, still pools, and everywhere the sound of bells. And in this memory, he left no room at all for Tai-Enchar.

  Meridy had half expected Inmanuàr to fling Tai-Enchar out of Moran Diorr, but the witch-king was flung out of Jaift’s body as well, and she was not quite fast enough to break her friend’s fall. And Jaift fell as bonelessly as the dead, with no effort to catch herself. A second after Jaift crumpled, Meridy skidded to her knees beside her on the polished floor, laying her fingertips against Jaift’s throat to see if she could find a pulse. She almost thought she felt a flutter, but it was featherlight and fading. She wasn’t even surprised, though grief rose up into her throat. She had known the moment Jaift fell that it was already too late.

  Inmanuàr did not even glance in their direction. Jaift might have fallen, but Tai-Enchar, though disembodied once more and cast out of this memory of Moran Diorr, was not gone. The witch-king had only fled back to the new seat of his power in Cora Diorr, so of course Inmanuàr had no time for anyone now save his enemy. He shouted, with joy as well as rage, and put out his hand, and the fire horse stallion was there, as he had been in life, a glorious blood bay with an elegant head and gleaming tusks, a flying black mane and thick black feathering on his feet that did not quite hide his savage claws.