The River of Shadows

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “You talk to those monsters?” said Pazel, with a violent start. “Why?”

  “Only the elder creatures of this world possess memories to match our own,” said Kirishgán. “We talk to them as we would our peers—as I dare say you would wish to speak to a fellow Ormali, even a dangerous one, if he were to step into this room. But the Ravens imagined that we were plotting their downfall. They could do little against the eguar, but us they have tried to exterminate. They did not quite succeed, but the damage done to our people may never be repaired: not in Alifros at any rate.”

  Pazel did not know what to say. He was ashamed of his earlier words to Kirishgán, and his assumptions. At the same time he felt glad that the other had been willing to tell him of such terrible loss.

  Then he saw the spider.

  It was descending on a bright thread, directly over the candle on the table: a creature of living glass and ruby eyes, twice as large as the one that had bitten him. Kirishgán watched it descend, walking in a slow circle about the table, both hands raised as though in greeting. He was murmuring a chant: “Medet … amir medet … amir kelada medet …” The spider dropped to within a foot of the flame, and its crystalline legs scattered rainbows on the stone.

  “Come here, Pazel!” said Kirishgán in an urgent whisper. “Hold out your hand!”

  Nervously, Pazel approached. He trusted Kirishgán, but did not relish the thought of a second bite. With some trepidation he raised his hand. Kirishgán took his wrist and tugged him closer, and Pazel’s breath caught in his throat. The spider’s head was inches from his fingertips.

  The creature grew quite still. Pazel had the strong feeling that those red eyes were studying him. Two mandibles like slivers of glass reached out cautiously toward his hand. Kirishgán tightened his grip. “Don’t pull away,” he hissed.

  It took a great effort not to do so, but Pazel held still, and felt the brush of those strange organs against his fingers. They were barbed; it would have been easy for the spider to grab him with those mandibles and sink its fangs, hidden in that glass knob of a head, into finger or palm.

  But this time the spider did not bite him. The mandibles withdrew, and Kirishgán released his wrist.

  “Excellent,” he said. “The second stage of your cure has begun.”

  “Has it?” said Pazel, starting. “But nothing happened, it barely touched me.”

  “Only a touch is required. Now watch.”

  The spider turned about on its strand of web, so that its head pointed upward. It remained directly above the candle. As Pazel stared, transfixed, a drop of clear liquid the size of a quail’s egg emerged from its abdomen and descended toward the flame. Though clear, it was thick, and hung suspended like a teardrop. In that moment, Kirishgán reached out and pressed the little square of parchment into the liquid. It passed inside, and the bubble of liquid separated from the spider, and Kirishgán caught it with great care. The spider retreated up its strand and was soon out of sight.

  Kirishgán rolled the droplet from hand to hand, inches above the candleflame. It had become a perfect sphere. It was also expanding, and Pazel realized it was hollow. And very light, now, too, for it moved with the slowness of a feather. Then Kirishgán withdrew his hands. The sphere floated above the candle, motionless, glistening in the yellow light.

  “This is not part of your cure,” he said, “only a gift, from one traveler to another.”

  Kirishgán blew. The sphere drifted toward Pazel; and once away from the candleflame it began a slow descent. “Catch it; it is yours,” said the selk. “But be gentle! The shell is delicate as a prayer.”

  Pazel let the tiny sphere settle onto his palm. It was light as a dragonfly, and its surface was an iridescent marvel: every color he could imagine danced in its curves, only to vanish when he looked directly. “It’s beautiful,” he whispered. “Kirishgán, I don’t know that you should give it to me. How can I keep from breaking it?”

  “You cannot,” said the selk, “but surely you knew that already? We can possess a thing, but not its loveliness—that always escapes. Close your fist, lock your door, imprison the cherished thing in your home or heart. It makes no difference. When next you look, a part of what you cherished will be gone.”

  “I’d like to give it to Thasha,” said Pazel on an impulse.

  “A fine idea,” said Kirishgán. “I will send it to her, while your cure progresses. The message within is for all of you.”

  Pazel carefully rolled the sphere back into his hands. “Thank you,” he said with feeling. “But Kirishgán, I still don’t understand what that spider had to do with my cure.”

  “A great deal,” said Kirishgán. “Pazel, the medets exist in this world the way murths and spirits do: here and elsewhere at once, and detecting us as much by our spirits as our bodies. There was a reason for that bite, and you must seek it on the Floor of Echoes, or there can be no cure. The Actors will help you if they can—but the help of the medets is more important. They are expecting you, though you may not see them.”

  He gestured at the door. “You may enter as soon as you like. Leave your boots; they will be returned to you when you exit Vasparhaven. And do not speak on the Floor of Echoes unless bidden to do so: that is essential.”

  Pazel looked at him steadily. “This is a sort of test, isn’t it?”

  “What isn’t, Pazel?”

  “And does everyone who visits the Floor of Echoes take this test?”

  Kirishgán nodded. “In one form or another. Tomorrow it will be my turn.” He gripped Pazel’s arm. “I must bid you farewell, sudden friend. Do not forget the heavens: that is what my people say. We are all young beneath the watchful stars. They will wait out our ignorance and errors, and perhaps even forgive them.”

  Cradling the glass orb, he descended the stair. Pazel listened to his footsteps fade. It felt strange to be alone in this temple, inside a mountain, on the far side of the world from Ormael. Strange, and eerily peaceful. But he could not linger, he knew. Lifting the candle from the table, he walked to the door and swung it wide.

  Another staircase rose before him. It was steep and built of ancient stone, and candles burned in puddles of wax on the crumbling steps, dwindling into the darkness above. Pazel tugged off his boots and set them outside the door.

  The stones were wet and cold against his feet. The staircase curved and twisted, and soon Pazel knew that he had climbed the height of several additional floors. He glanced back, and saw to his great surprise that every candle he had passed was extinguished. He cupped his hand protectively around the one he bore.

  The staircase ended, as it had begun, with a door, but this one stood open a few inches, and a brighter light was shining through the gap. Pazel crept forward and glimpsed a small fire crackling in a ring of stones. Figures crouched around it, and through their shoulders Pazel caught the flash of a crystal abdomen, the flicker of a ruby eye. Then the door creaked, and the figures leaped up and scattered into the darkness.

  All but one. A young dlömic woman remained by the fire, wearing a pale peach-colored wrap that left her black arms bare to the shoulders, and a dark mask on the upper part of her face. She was holding a wide stone bowl over the flames. Of the spider Pazel saw no trace.

  The woman beckoned him in, her silver eyes gleaming. Pazel stepped through the doorway, and found that he could see neither the ceiling nor any wall save that behind him. A strong draft, almost a wind, blew about them, making the fire dance and flare and shrink by turns. If he had not known better, Pazel would have thought that they were meeting not underground but on some desolate plain.

  His candle went out. The woman held the bowl in one hand and with the other took his own, drawing him down to kneel across from her. As he did so a flute began to play in the darkness: a melancholy tune, full of loss and yearning; but somehow thankful all the same, as though there were gifts the music remembered. Pazel closed his eyes, and it seemed to him that the song drained some of the road-weariness from his body. Th
ere were other sounds from the shadows, now: a voice softly matching the flute, a repeated note from the quietest imaginable drum. The woman moved the bowl close to his chin.

  “Breathe,” she said.

  The bowl held a colorless liquid. He gave it an uncertain sniff, and the woman shook her head. She drew a deep breath, demonstrating, and rather stiffly Pazel imitated her. Whatever was in the bowl had no scent.

  “Again,” said the woman; and, “Again,” once more. Still Pazel could not smell a thing, but all at once he realized that his eyes were watering—streaming, in fact. The woman leaned closer, her masked face glowing; Pazel blinked and scattered tears.

  It was then that her eyes changed. Silver darkened suddenly to glossy black, and the pupils vanished altogether. The woman’s mouth opened, as though she were as startled as Pazel himself. “Nuhzat!” she said, and emptied the bowl into the fire.

  The sudden steam burned Pazel’s eyes. He surged to his feet. It was pitch black, and hands were gripping him on all sides. The dlömic woman was standing before him, her bare feet atop his own. Then a hand daubed something cold and sticky on his eyelids, and Pazel found he could not open them. He wanted to shout aloud, tell them to stop—but Kirishgán had warned him to be silent, and he knew somehow that he must obey.

  The woman removed her feet from atop his own; the hands abruptly withdrew. Pazel reached out, trying to find what had become of them. His hands met with nothing at all.

  He groped forward, one step, then another. The stone floor pitched like a boat in a gale, and wild thoughts raced through his head. Nuhzat. The dlömic dream-state, the trance. Pazel was frightened, and furious—what was being done to him this time? Why didn’t anyone, ever, ask his consent?

  I did, Pazel.

  He whirled. That voice! Didn’t he know it? Had it really spoken aloud, or was it an echo in his mind? Whatever it was, it suffused him instantly with an almost unbearable mixture of sadness and hope. He walked forward, blind. Ramachni! he wanted to scream. Where are you?

  Afterward it felt as if he wandered for an age on the Floor of Echoes. The mage’s voice called to him again, but now it was one among many: some kind, some desperate, some chuckling with hate. There were heady scents, frigid drafts. There were rough rock walls that ended suddenly in yawning spaces, and tight little rooms with strange objects that he explored with his fingers: tables, statues, a mute piano, an unstrung harp. He found a wooden box with hinges and a padlock, and from within it came a desperate thumping. He brought it close to his ear, and to his horror it was Chadfallow, Ignus Chadfallow, crying from within: Let me out! Let me out!

  Time became slippery. One moment he would be creeping along with moss beneath his feet; the next he would find himself rushing headlong, with the sound of a panting animal close on his heels. He was often frightened. And yet in the worst moments, when he was close to falling or giving way to panic, he found the webbed hand of the dlömic woman in his own, and a little peace returned to him, and he went on.

  Then all at once a different hand touched his shoulder, and his head was suddenly, perfectly clear. The hand moved to his face, and a warm, wet cloth rubbed his eyes. The sticky resin melted away. Pazel blinked, and found himself facing the Master Teller.

  “Welcome back from blindness,” said the old dlömu. “Now I know that I was right to send you here, for the purpose I could not see before is revealed. You needed practice with the dark.”

  Pazel shook his head.

  “You don’t understand, of course,” said the Teller, smiling. “Never mind: you will.”

  They were in a large, lavish, forbidding chamber, like the hall of some subterranean king. There was a stone table, a barren hearth, some hulking cabinets stuffed with books and scrolls. But dominating the chamber was a round pool. It was about a dozen feet wide, with a ring of stairs descending some five or six feet to the bottom, and the palest imaginable blue light that seemed to come from the water itself.

  “You stand in the Ara Nyth, the ancient heart of Vasparhaven, and its most sacred chamber,” said the Master. “It is with the water of this pool that I bathed your eyes, and drew the last of the medet’s serum. The pool is fed by a spring deep beneath the lake: a spring fed in turn by the Nythrung, which some call the River of Shadows. Through blindness you have come here, protected by our Actors, but guided by your spirit alone. Therefore you may drink from the pool if you like, and become the first human to do so in a great many years. Or you may depart: turn your back, walk directly away, and leave Vasparhaven by the stairway ahead. Do you know your wish? You may speak now, but softly.”

  Pazel realized he was blinking over and over. Nuhzat. The dream that was not a dream. He was trapped in it; he did not know whether to be honored or appalled. “Did it work, Father?” he asked. “Am I cured?”

  “You are cured,” said the old dlömu, “but do not imagine that you are leaving the darkness behind. Not yet, at any rate.”

  “What happens if I drink from the pool?”

  The Master Teller looked at him piercingly. “I can read the possible fates of Alifros, in a tremor, or the twisting of a spider’s thread. But I do not know what the pool would offer you. And I would not tell you, even if I did: that would be to spoil the wine before you drank it.”

  “The glass spiders come from here, don’t they?”

  The Teller looked pleased. “That was shrewd, my boy. Yes, they enter Vasparhaven by this pool, and it is said that when they no longer come we must abandon the temple forever. That day will certainly come, for I see it in every version of our future. A few years from now, it may be, or when my novices grow old, or perhaps when Alifros itself falls to ruin. But of that darkest future you know more than I do myself. You have borne the agent of that future, the black orb you call the Nilstone. And you have seen the Swarm of Night.”

  Pazel shuddered. He did not want to think about the Swarm. “Father, how can I be in nuhzat? I’m not a dlömu.” He looked up at the old seer, pondering. “Unless … Prince Olik said that some humans could go into nuhzat, if they’d been close to dlömu, in the old days before the plague. And my mother came from that time. And Rin knows she has a lot of fits. Could she have been with a dlömu, Father, before she crossed the Ruling Sea? Was she slipping into nuhzat, all those times we thought she was mad?”

  The old Teller smiled inscrutably. “Knowledge, Pazel Pathkendle. Hasn’t that been your desire from the start?”

  Pazel leaned over the edge of the pool. The bottom was a mosaic of fine blue tiles. “I’m not going to drink,” he said. “Don’t take it the wrong way, Father, but I’ve had quite enough of—”

  He stopped. The Master Teller was gone without a trace. He stood alone in the chamber, facing the dimly glowing pool.

  Alarmed, he turned in a circle. Behind him was a dark doorway, and a staircase leading down. He felt the temptation sharply … but there lay the pool. He bent down and dipped his hand into the water. It was icy cold.

  Knowledge. What good did it do? Was he happier for knowing the mind-bruising languages of murths and eguar? The tortured life of Sandor Ott? The fact that something as ghastly as the Swarm lurked just outside Alifros, pressing in, like an ogre’s face at the window? What would he learn this time? Something even more terrible, probably.

  He cupped some water in his hand, and winced: even that little puddle on his palm burned with cold. He brought it close to his mouth. No, by the Pits. He did not want any more visions. He deserved not to see.

  He drank.

  At first the cold all but scalded his lips, but when he swallowed it was mere water he tasted, cool but pleasant. He dipped his hand and drank again, his fear abruptly gone. It was too late anyway, and despite the earlier wine and tea, he was thirsty.

  After his fourth drink something made him look up. Directly across the pool a figure crouched, in almost the same posture as Pazel himself. A woman. She was no more than a silhouette above the pale blue light.

  Was she the one who had met him i
n the first chamber, the one whose hand had always been there to catch him? He blinked. Something was still wrong with his eyes, or his mind. For although there was enough light to see her, he could not decide if she were young or old, human or dlömu. “Who are you?” he whispered.

  The woman shook her head: speaking, apparently, was once more forbidden. Her very silence, however, woke a sudden and almost overpowering desire in Pazel: a desire to see her clearly, to know her, touch her. More than anything, to speak her name.

  He rose and started around the pool—and the woman, quick and agile, jumped up and moved in the opposite direction, keeping the water between them. Pazel changed directions: she did the same. Heart hammering, he feinted one way, then dashed another. She mirrored him perfectly. She could not be fooled.

  He stopped dead. Their eyes met; he had a vague idea that she was teasing him. Fine, he thought obstinately, you win. He stepped down into the pool, and the cold closed like teeth upon his ankles.

  The woman gazed at him, standing very still. Pazel gritted his teeth and stepped down again, and then again. The water was now above his waist, and the cold was a shout of pain that would not stop. Two more steps to the bottom. There were deep cracks in the floor, some wide enough to put his foot in, and an idea came to him that the cracks led down infinitely far, into a dark turbulence beyond the bounds of Alifros. He descended another step, and then the woman put out her hand.

  Stop. The command was as plain as if she had spoken aloud. She crouched again, lowering both hands into the pool, and when she lifted them he saw that they held something beautiful.

  It was a transparent sphere, very much like the one Kirishgán had formed with the spider’s liquid, but this one was as wide as a bushel basket, and growing even as he watched. Like the other sphere it seemed light in her hands, and very fragile. Colors and whorls and tiny translucent shapes danced over its surface, racing like clouds. Like a soap bubble, it rested on the surface of the pool, and very soon it had grown so large that Pazel had to retreat one step, and then another, until he was back upon the pool’s rim, watching her distorted features through that sleek, uncanny shape.