by Brian Daley
For Crassmor was sure that his brother had known as well, as betrothed to Willow, and Combard, too, as Teerse’s best friend. It was clear why Teerse had been one of Ironwicca’s most valued advisors. Crassmor was certain, too, that he knew now how Sandur had made the seemingly miraculously lucky capture of the peace envoys from the broken-cross army to the lizard riders: the Pattern had given Sandur his instructions.
Crassmor saw now why House Comullo had been allowed to sink into supposed neglect and poverty even though it was, as he’d been permitted to understand on his last visit, formidably guarded. The Tapestry was one of the Singularity’s greatest treasures; easier to safeguard it, then, if no one suspected its worth. These facts also added meaning to Combard’s insistence that Crassmor should not have Willow. He would certainly consider Crassmor an unworthy party to such a secret, an unsatisfactory mate for the weaver of the Pattern, and no one to father the next weaver.
The scintillating night sky shone above; the road flew by under his horse’s hooves.
He again hoped that he hadn’t made a dreadful error by not consulting his father or the Grand Master. At the very least, that would have meant delay, and it had been entirely possible that Combard would have forbidden him to go to the Jade Dome. Before all else, Crassmor meant to be at Willow’s side while this danger threatened. He didn’t know how di Cagliostro and the Klybesians had discovered the Tapestry’s secret, but it was plain that they meant to take control of it. But why, why, he kept asking himself, had Willow kept the secret from him?
He was about to demand even more speed from his lathered mount when the horse’s hooves were suddenly yanked from under it.
Crassmor hurtled forward, yelling in surprise, as the animal went down. He was ripped from the saddle and stirrups by his own momentum, up and over his saddle, as the horse pitched over with a piercing whinny of pain and fear. Reflexes learned so well under exacting drill-masters, for the purpose of escaping death or injury beneath a falling horse, took over. Crassmor gathered himself as he fell, rolling, breaking the force of the fall without shattering arms or legs, landing by blind good luck in a bed of pine needles at the roadside.
Nevertheless, the ground smashed against him with tremendous force, stretching him out and threatening to separate his shoulder and snap his ribs. He bounced once like a stone skipped across water and plowed to a stop feet-first, toes up. All breath was gone from him, the spurs ripped from his boots. Shhing was a hard lump under him.
By great fortune, his horse hadn’t landed on top of him. He could hear the poor beast’s agonized complaints as it flailed to rise. The night sky whirled above him.
Horses’ hooves sounded, approaching. Wrenching fear brought him back to his senses. “Is he dead, then?” a vibrant, eloquent voice asked, and Crassmor knew why di Cagliostro hadn’t been at House Tarrant, and what he’d been off arranging. The count obviously wasn’t one to hesitate when moving from subtle ploys to straightforward ones. What Crassmor couldn’t figure out was how di Cagliostro had known where and when to stage the ambush. Then the knight remembered that Furd had been at Gateshield and had seen him leave; the rest wouldn’t be too hard for the abbot to conjecture.
Riders gathered around Crassmor’s supine body, a half dozen or so of them, he thought. “So it appears, lord,” a rider replied. It was all the knight could do to try to hold his breathing to a careful heaving, but the darkness was his ally. “The trip line has downed his horse.”
Di Cagliostro’s tone held irritation, the impatience of a man doing that which he considered shameful. “Well, have a look at him! And if he is not dead, you must… you are to set things aright with your blade.” From the sound of his voice, he had turned aside to address another. “You! Silence that damnable horse!”
There were sounds of weapons sliding free and mounts maneuvering closer to Crassmor’s fallen one. Men dismounted. The meaty chop of a sword stroke brought a brief thrashing from the horse and ended its suffering. At the same time Crassmor heard the creak of stirrup straps and saddle, another man dismounting near him.
The knight lay very still, rehearsing in his mind the moves he must make, fighting to keep his breathing shallow after having had the wind slammed out of him. Boots stopped next to him, and a sword point was put at his throat.
“Don’t sword him unless he still lives!” di Cagliostro ordered. “This thing may yet be reported as an accident. We can find a suitable passerby to report it, and to claim he put the horse out of its anguish.”
Crassmor’s heart had stopped for a moment as he’d thought the point would slide through his throat. During this reprieve, he readied himself. The point moved back; he heard the man grunt in effort as he sank to one knee under the weight of armor.
Battered and in pain, Crassmor sprang into furious action, determined not to die. One hand went to the man’s sword hand, yanking him down. The other went to his own parrying dagger. They grappled; Crassmor plunged the dagger into the man’s chest; there was an outrushing of blood. The man groaned, not with anger or even pain, but with only the shocked, dumb animal recognition that he’d been killed.
Crassmor shoved the dying body off him and rolled clear just in time to keep from being trampled by a horse’s hooves. He had Shhing from its scabbard and swung as the horse came at him again. The animal made the same sort of sound his own had as flesh and bone parted; it dropped, its rider crying out. Crassmor disregarded agony and heavy armor. Two more horsemen rode at him around their fallen comrade.
Then it was all ducking and dodging and the two-handed use of the cavalry rapier—virtually all defense. He fought as he’d been taught, with sudden whirls and split-second drops to one knee to confuse the enemies who crowded after him. One assassin was dead or dying, a second unhorsed and now scrambling to his feet, while a third stayed back charily from the action.
Di Cagliostro, the knight knew. That left only two mounted men against him.
They were not knights, or they’d have ridden him down by now. He parried and ducked, then took a cut on one arm that bit into his mail, registering it. He launched a chop at the rider who’d delivered the cut, working Shhing one-handedly now. Shhing found flesh, and the horseman drew back with a smothered groan.
“Di Cagliostro!” Crassmor railed at the figure who’d dropped back. “Come, face me yourself! Wounded man on foot against a whole one ahorse; surely even you have the stomach for that match!” The other two waited to see what the reply would be, not opposed to having help. Crassmor watched, peering in the darkness, trying to spot the man he’d unhorsed.
“I have no love of killing,” that wonderful voice said. The count was silhouetted against the night sky. “And I take no joy in murder.” To his men, his tone carried the flick of a whip. “Finish him!”
Crassmor heard a creak of leather and the jingle of metal behind him. He waited an extra instant, calculating. Crassmor pivoted and brought Shhing up through a whistling curve, aiming by sound alone. The sword caught one horseman beneath an arm that held a blade aloft, fortune riding Shhing’s point. The man toppled from his saddle. The knight saw a chance to survive. He seized the pommel of the vacant saddle with his left hand and vaulted desperately. He yelled in pain and felt the blood run more quickly from his wound, flesh giving at the strain. Then he was astride a horse once more.
He was still a Knight of the Order of the Circle of Onn, a dangerous man when dismounted and more so in a saddle. Fortunately, his legs were uninjured. Crassmor clamped his knees hard to the beast’s barrel, turned it with pressure, and rode at the remaining assassin. The man swung a determined cut that the knight, dazed by wounds and injuries as he was, still contrived to duck. His return stroke was quick; it occurred to him that he was, in this desperate encounter where his own life and Willow’s were at stake, fighting better than he ever had fought in his life.
The slash opened the man’s chest through the resistance of mail. The assassin drew back, guard faltering. Abruptly, all the energy that Crassmor had f
elt began to ebb. He tried to count his enemies and remember whom else he should be looking out for. Di Cagliostro? Yes, but the count had backed off. There was something else… he warned himself dizzily, his thoughts coming sluggishly now.
Sudden, terrible shock took him in the side; metal grated across bone and tore through organ and muscle. It sent Crassmor smashing against his pommel, trying to draw breath that would not come. His eyes started in the unspeakable awareness that a sword now pierced up through his side and chest—a death wound, dealt by the man he’d unhorsed earlier.
The blade was roughly yanked from him. He lost his grip and nearly fell from the saddle. Somehow the learned response of a knight, to keep his seat with knees clamped tight, remained. Crassmor dug in his heels, letting fall his sword. The animal sprang away like an arrow from a bow before a second stroke could be delivered. He got one arm around the pommel and clung to it. Each stride shot waves of torment through his chest.
His horse pulled up. Through blasts of pain he saw di Cagliostro blocking his way, calling to the wounded assassin and the unhorsed one. “Quickly! We cannot let him—” The count broke off as he grabbed for Crassmor’s reins, but missed as the skittish beast sidestepped. “We must see this thing through now!” The count maneuvered to grab for the reins again.
Crassmor was so tired, so near the utter darkness he’d always feared, that he found himself resigned. He knew vaguely that he’d fought well. Sandur! I wish you’d seen me!
He toppled from the saddle and lay there, waiting for the finish. A new noise rose quickly in his ears. He couldn’t understand why the approach of death should sound like a cavalry charge; surely that ultimate threshold would not involve something so worldly? Far off, it seemed, di Cagliostro pleaded, “No! Do not leave me! Come back!”
Time passed. There were ground-shaking chargers all around, racing by him; one nearly trampled him. He waited for spirit-mounted messengers to pluck him up and bear him away to whatever waited in the afterlife. His body was afire with the wound, and yet he felt cold.
He was surprised to hear a horse stop next to him. A basso voice said, “He is here! Strike a light!” He drifted in a brief delirium, then found himself staring up into the face of Fordall Urth. Other guardsmen of the Jade Dome had gathered around. Fordall was saying, “I shall mount; you men pass him up to me.”
Crassmor wanted to tell him not to bother; this was no wound that could be survived. But before he could do so darkness was all around him.
Chapter 18
RISEN
His half-dreams, hallucinations, the dark images, and the drifting were put aside rudely by sudden, surging awareness.
Crassmor was in a place that he knew but couldn’t identify yet, nor could he tell how he knew it. The blackness and pain had been thrust away; forces he wasn’t able to identify coursed within him, arcane energies. He took it for another illusion, but when he drew a deep, experimental breath, no agony came in response.
Resigned to seeing what the afterlife was like, preparing himself for the worst because he’d always suspected that being dead offered little diversity, he instructed himself to open his eyes. He hesitated. Then, remembering that Sandur had preceded him, he snapped his eyes open, his brother’s name leaping to his lips.
Green. A sky full of such pleasant green light, restful, serene. He felt at once a great calm. It looked so much like something—he saw it all at once—the Jade Dome.
“Rest, dearest, rest,” a voice he adored crooned. It added, “Down, please, Pysthesis.”
Crassmor sat up, though that unsettled his balance a little, then slumped back on one elbow on the thick carpeting of the Dome. Nearby, the cyclops set Willow down with his customary gentleness. Willow hurried to the knight. She was dressed in a crimson skin-suit of such cut and sheen that she might have been a garnet sculpture.
The Tarrant son was examining himself. The wounds were still open in his side and arm, but no blood flowed from them and no ache came when he touched them. His hair stood on end as he felt the bits of ring-mail that lay imbedded in his flesh, broken and driven in by the sword.
Willow knelt by him, her face not the most perfect but the most beautiful in the world. She gently tugged his fingers from the gruesome inspection. “Leave them be; they need not concern you.”
“You’ll have to admit that they’re unsightly,” he declared, shaken. She did not smile. “If this is past-death,” he went on, “it suits me well. But if it isn’t, then how—” He made an unresolved motion with his free hand. “How do I come to be—”
She covered his lips; he was content to be silent. Tears weren’t far from her eyes. Chin up, she repulsed the urge. “The Tapestry is more than you’d guessed, my love. There is that in the Pattern which shows the weaver something of the future, yes.” She smoothed a strand of his hair back from the white brow. “But at times, too, it illuminates the present, or near-present.
“Tonight as I wove, it burst forth to me from the Pattern with terrible clarity that you were in danger nearby. I dispatched Fordall Urth and the others. They brought you back here because—because you were beyond any worldly treatment.”
His skin raised in goosebumps at that word—worldly. His hand almost went back to the death wound; he took her hand instead. “I should be dead!”
Willow’s face was a study in varied emotions. She pointed to the Tapestry. “If not for that, you would be.”
Radiant sparks raced intermittently at great speeds along individual strands of the great Pattern. She went behind him, kneeling, helping him sit up, holding him so with hands on his shoulders. For a moment their pose reminded him of his initiation into the Knights of the Circle.
“The Pattern can do more than record what has gone before, more than show what is or predict what is to come,” she whispered into his ear. “Its most powerful office is to alter what already is. Thus, you are not dead because I have reworked that in the Pattern which is Crassmor. I have managed to keep you within the Tapestry. For now, your death is in abeyance.”
Willow moved around to kneel before him once more, as Pysthesis watched the two with his one huge eye. The enormity of it all swung Crassmor between disbelief and awe, fear and amazement.
“But that will not last for long,” she warned. “To prolong your life, I shall have to alter the Pattern. Then you will be set on a new course, one you dare not defy. It isn’t without its cost; your thread could be tied in—”
“But I would live?” he interrupted. The slightest tilt of her head flooded him with relief. He laughed. “Weave away! You should be wearing my favor, not I yours!”
Willow held his head in her hands, searching his eyes as she searched meanings from the Pattern. After the briefest indecision, she kissed him, then crossed back to the Tapestry. The cyclops lifted her up to hold her before the coursing lights. Willow went back to her work.
Crassmor stared up as her, watching from the side as her hands flew over the glowing weft. The entire Tapestry rippled with brilliancies, individual streaks shooting back and forth along the threads. Willow’s weaving changed the Pattern with shifts and new implications. Crassmor couldn’t quite see how she accomplished it. Her fingers blurred; effulgences jumped around them. The threads were filaments that blazed in changing colors, curling and intertwining like living things moving, it seemed to the knight, more by their own will than by her manipulations. The effect was mesmerizing. Before long, Crassmor found himself unable to look away from Willow. The light-dance emanated from her, out across the Pattern.
The knight no longer had any feeling, unable to sense the carpet under him or the weight of his mail. He could see nothing but Willow and the cyclops in reflected glare and the blindingly bright Tapestry. Crassmor had a sense of changes taking place within and all around him, though. How long it went on, he couldn’t tell with any perceptivity at his command.
The Pattern became a pane of resplendence, pure and terrible. It filled his universe. Time stood still, but some inner part of
Crassmor was waiting.
Then the brilliance went away, between one second and the next. The knight lay on the carpet, blinking, mouthing like a fish out of water. No afterimages remained on his eyes; he knew instinctively that he’d seen no normal light. Pysthesis was lowering Willow to the floor again. The Pattern had reverted to its muted flickering. Crassmor rose and went to join her as she stepped from the cyclops’ palms.
Then the knight remembered that he’d been dying. He groped for his wounds. He was whole, and could find no scar or seam in his flesh where the fatal wound had been, or where he’d suffered any lesser cut that night. His mail was closed up once more, bearing old repairs but no new ones.
He threw himself at Willow with a whoop of joy and hugged her to him; she suffered herself to be embraced but didn’t return it. He queried her with a look.
She was both sad and elated. “There is a cost; I told you there would be.” She put her head on his chest. “The Tapestry is unyielding in that; each change has its new, inescapable result. The Pattern moves you toward a confrontation with the Klybesians.”
He strove to make his reaction lighthearted. “Well-a-day! They have enmity for me already; they were bound to plague me again in any event. What of it?”
Her face was creased, tight-strung with emphasis. “They’re your enemies! And you theirs! The confrontation comes now!”
“So be it,” he got out at last. “Er, nothing hasty, of course.”
“Yes, yes, haste.’” she shot back. “If you do not move at once, you will be denying the dictates of the Pattern. My new configuration will slip away; the old one will apply once more.” Her hand touched his side, where the wound had been. “Former conditions will prevail. Your life will be forfeit.”
He drew her down to the carpet. They sat, he cross-legged and she in his lap. “You must go among them,” she said. “That is the mandate of the Tapestry. Learn their plots; fight them. Do otherwise and you die.”
