Riddle-Master

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She was silent a moment, searching the breeze, as for a shadow of dark wings. “She’ll come back,” she said softly. “She has great courage.”

  He dropped his arm around her shoulders, hugged her briefly. “So do you. I wish you would go home.”

  “The Morgol placed her guard in the service of the Lungold merchants, to watch over the welfare of the city.”

  “She didn’t place her land-heir in the service of the merchants. Did she?”

  “Oh, Morgon, stop arguing. Can’t you do something about this wall? It’s useless and dangerous and dropping apart under my feet.”

  “All right. I’m not doing anything else worthwhile.”

  She turned her head, kissed his cheekbone. “Raederle is probably somewhere thinking. She’ll come back to you.” He opened his mouth; she shrugged out of his hold, her face suddenly averted. “Go fix the wall.”

  He spent hours repairing it, trying not to think. Ignoring the traffic passing around him—the farmers and merchants eyeing him uneasily, the traders who recognized him—he stood with his hands and his face against the ancient stones. His mind melded into their ponderous silence until he sensed their sagging, their precarious balance against the buttresses. He built illusions of stone within the archways, buttressing them with his mind. The blocked gates snarled carts and horses, started fights, and sent crowds to the city council chambers to be warned of the impending dangers. The traffic leaving through the main gate increased enormously. Street urchins gathered around him as he circled the city. They watched him work, followed at his heels, delighted, marvelling as non-existent stones built under his hands. In the late afternoon, laying his sweating face against the stones in an archway, he felt the touch of another power. He closed his eyes and traversed a silence he had learned well. For a long time, his mind moving deep into the stones, he heard nothing but the occasional, minute shift of a particle of mortar. Finally, edging onto the sunwarmed surface of the outer wall, he felt wedged against it a buttress of raw power. He touched it tentatively with his thoughts. It was a force pulled from the earth itself, rammed against the weakest point of the stone. He withdrew slowly, awed.

  Someone was standing at his shoulder, saying his name over and over. He turned questioningly, found one of the Morgol’s guards with a red-haired man in leather and mail beside her. The guard’s broad, browned face was sweating, and she looked as tired as Morgon felt. Her gruff voice was patient, oddly pleasant.

  “Lord, my name is Goh. This is Teril Umber, son of the High Lord Rork Umber of Ymris. I took the responsibility of guiding him and his warriors into the city.” There was a faint tension in her voice and in her calm eyes. Morgon looked at the man silently. He was young but battle-hardened and very tired. He bent his head courteously to Morgon, oblivious of his suspicions.

  “Lord, Heureu Ymris sent us out one day before . . . the day before he lost Wind Plain, apparently. We just heard the news from the Morgol’s land-heir.”

  “Was your father at Wind Plain?” Morgon asked suddenly. “I remember him.”

  Teril Umber nodded wearily. “Yes. I have no idea if he survived or not.” Then beneath the drag of his dusty mail, his shoulders straightened. “Well, the king was concerned about the defenselessness of the traders here; he sailed on trade-ships once himself. And of course, he wanted to put as many men as he could spare at your disposal. There are a hundred and fifty of us, to aid the Morgol’s guard in defending the city, if there’s need.”

  Morgon nodded. The lean, sweating face with its uncomfortable fringe of beard seemed beyond suspicion. He said, “I hope there’s no need. It was generous of the king to spare you.”

  “Yes. He did exactly that, sending us out of Wind Plain.”

  “I’m sorry about your father. He was kind to me.”

  “He talked about you. . . .” He shook his head, running his fingers through his flaming hair. “He’s come out of worse,” he said without hope. “Well, I’d better talk to Lyra, get men situated before nightfall.”

  Morgon looked at Goh. The relief in her face told him how worried she had been. He said softly, “Please tell Lyra I’m nearly finished with the wall.”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “Thank you.”

  She gave him a brief, shy nod, smiling suddenly. “Yes, Lord.”

  As his work around the wall progressed and the day burned toward a fiery end, he began to feel enclosed by power. The wizard working with him silently on the other side of the wall strengthened stones before he touched them, sealed broken places with grey, grainy illusions, balanced cracked walls against a weight of power. The walls lost their look of having grown battered by sunlight and hunched under winter winds. They stood firm again, patched, buttressed, rolling without a break around the city, challenging entrance.

  Morgon wove a force from stone to stone to seal one last crack in some ancient mortar, then leaned against the wall wearily, his face in his arms. He could smell the twilight riding over the fields. The stillness of the last moments of the sunset, the peaceful, sleepy bird songs made him think for a moment of Hed. A distant crow call kept him from falling asleep against the wall. He roused himself and stepped into one of the two front gates he had left open. A man stood in the archway at the other end, with a crow on his shoulder.

  He was a tall old man, with short grey hair and a battered, craggy face. He was talking in crow-language to the crow; Morgon understood some of it. As the crow answered, a hard fist of worry around Morgon’s heart eased until his heart seemed to rest on some warm place, on the hand of the ancient wizard, perhaps, scarred as it was with vesta-horns. He went towards them quietly, his mind lulled by the sense of the wizard’s great power, and by his kindness to Raederle.

  But before he reached them, he saw the wizard break off mid-sentence and toss the crow into the air. He cried something at it that Morgon did not understand. Then he vanished. Morgon, his breathing dry, quick, saw the twilight moving down Trader’s Road, surely, soundlessly; a wave of horsemen the color of the evening sky. Before he could move, a light the color of molten gold lit the archway around him. The wall lurched; stones, murmuring, undulating, shrugged off a blast of power into the street that exploded the cobblestones and slammed Morgon to his knees. He pulled himself up and turned.

  The heart of the city was in flames.

  TWO OF THE Ymris warriors were already struggling to close the main gates as he slipped back into the city. The hinges groaned, flaking rust as the slabs of oak shuddered, rising out of the ruts they had rested in for centuries. Morgon slapped them shut with a thought that nearly cost him his life. A mind, familiar, deadly, groped at the flash of power, gripped him across the distance. The dark air in front of him tore apart with a blue-white seam, so quick and strangely beautiful that he could only stand and watch it. Then his bones seemed to fly piecemeal in all directions, while his brain burned like a star. He felt stone behind him, dimly, and let his mind flow into it, grow blank, motionless. The power slid away. He gathered his bones back out of the night and realized vaguely that he was still alive. One of the warriors, his face bleeding, pulled him off the ground. The other man was dead.

  “Lord—”

  “I’m all right.” He flung his thoughts out of the fraction of time he stood in. When the next flare of energy raked across the night, he stepped away from it, into another moment near the burning school. People were running down the street toward the main gates: guards, armed Ymris warriors, traders, merchants, and fishermen carrying their swords with a fierce, clumsy determination. Children stood at the edge of the school grounds, transfixed in the play of light, their faces turning red, gold, purple. Then the wall of a house behind them shattered, swept an arc of fiery stones toward them. They scattered, screaming.

  Morgon gathered a memory of the fabric of energy out of his thoughts, fed it with a power he had never tapped before. He let it build through him eating at all his thoughts and inner movements until it spat away from him, humming a high, dangerous
language. It crackled luminously toward the source of power within the walls, disappeared within them, but it did not detonate. It reappeared before it struck, shooting back at Morgon with the same deadly intensity. He stared at it incredulously for a split second, then opened his mind to absorb it back. It imploded into darkness within him. It was followed, before he could even blink, by a blast of light and fire that jarred to the ground floor of his defenseless mind. It flung him flat on the cobblestones, blinded, gasping for air, while another surge of energy pounded into him. He let his awareness flow away from it, down into the cracks between the stones, into the dark, silent earth beneath them. A fragment of stone blasted to pieces near him, split his cheek, but he did not feel it. His body anchored to earth, he began to draw out of the mute, eyeless living things in it a silence that would shelter him. From moles and earthworms and tiny snakes, from the pale roots of grass, he wove a stillness into his mind. When he rose finally, the world seemed dark around him, flecked by minute, soundless flashes of light. He moved with an earthworm’s blind instinct into darkness.

  The mind-disguise took him safely across the grounds into the school. Fire had kindled the ancient power still locked within the stones; cold, brilliant flames swarmed across the broken walls, eating at the energy in the heart of them. Morgon, his mind still tapping the slow, languageless world beneath his feet, did not feel the dangerous wash of fire around him. A wall crumbled as he passed it; the stones scattered like coals across his shadow. He felt only a distant perturbation in the earth, as if it had shifted slightly in some point deep in its core. Then an odd, gentle touch in his mind brought his thoughts out of the earth to follow it curiously. He broke his own binding, stood blinking in the tumult of sound and fire. The unexpected touch turned imperative, and he realized that the room he had walked into was sliding into itself. He had no time to move; he shaped his mind to the fiery stones thundering toward him, became part of their bulky flow, broke with them and crashed into a fuming stillness. He dragged his shape out of them after a moment, pieced his thoughts back together. He saw Nun, then, elusive in the shimmering air, watching him. She said nothing, vanishing almost as he saw her, the fiery bowl of her pipe lingering a moment alone in the air.

  The battle raging in the heart of the school was rocking the ground. He picked his way carefully toward it. From the flare of light through the jagged, beautiful windows, he knew that it was centered where it had begun: in the great circular hall that still echoed the cry of the Founder’s name. He sensed suddenly, from the ease with which power was deflected away from the hall, that the battle was one-sided as yet. The Founder was toying with the wizards, using their lives as bait to lure Morgon to him. The next moment gave Morgon proof of that. He felt the Founder’s mind sweep across the flames like a black beacon, searching. He touched Morgon’s mind briefly: a familiar sense of dangerous, immense power yawned before him. But he did not try to hold Morgon. His mind withdrew, and Morgon heard a scream that made his blood run cold.

  Aloil was being wrestled out of air into shape not far from him. He fought the dark pull over his mind with a desperate, furious intensity, but he could not free himself. His shape changed again, slowly. Great wind-twisted limbs pulled from his shoulders; his desperate face blurred behind oak bark, a dark hollow splitting the trunk where his mouth had been. Roots forked into the dead ground; his hair tangled into leafless twigs. A living oak stood on the grounds where nothing had grown for seven centuries. A lightning bolt of power seared toward it, to sunder it to the roots.

  Morgon flung his mind open, encompassed it before it struck the tree. He threw it back at Ghistelwchlohm, heard one of the walls explode. Then, reaching ruthlessly into the Founder’s stronghold, he joined their minds, as they had been joined before in the blackness of Erlenstar Mountain.

  He absorbed the power that battered across his thoughts, letting it burn away at the bottom of his mind. Slowly his hold strengthened, until the Founder’s mind was familiar to him once more, as if it lay behind his own eyes. He ignored experiences, impulses, the long mysterious history of the Founder’s life, concentrating only on the source of his power, to drain it to exhaustion. He sensed the moment when Ghisteslwchlohm realized what he was doing, in the raw, frantic pulses of energy that nearly shook him loose again and again, until he forgot he possessed anything but a will and a mind at war with itself. The power-play stopped finally. He drew deeper, ferreting power and drawing it into himself, until the Founder yielded something to him unexpectedly: he found himself absorbing once more the knowledge of the land-law of Hed.

  His hold faltered, broke in a wave of fury and revulsion at the irony. A chaotic flare of rage slapped him across the ground. He groped dizzily for shelter, but his mind could shape nothing but fire. The power broke through him again, sent him sprawling across burning rock. Someone pulled him off; the wizards, surrounding him, drew Ghisteslwchlohm’s attention with a swift, fierce barrage that shook the inner buildings. Talies, beating at his smoldering tunic, said tersely, “Just kill him.”

  “No.”

  “You stubborn farmer from Hed, if I survive this battle I am going to study riddlery.” His head turned suddenly. “There is fighting in the city. I hear death cries.”

  “There’s an army of shape-changers. They came in the front gate while we were watching the back. I saw . . . I think I saw Yrth. Can he talk to crows?”

  The wizard nodded. “Good. He must be fighting with the traders.” He helped Morgon to his feet. The earth rocked beneath them, sent him sprawling to the ground on top of Morgon. He shifted to his knees. Morgon rolled wearily to his feet and stood gazing at the shell of the hall. “He’s weakening in there.”

  “He is?”

  “I’m going in.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll walk. But I have to distract his attention . . .” He thought a moment, rubbing a burn on his wrist. His mind, scanning the grounds carefully, came to rest in the ancient, ruined library, with its hundreds of books of wizardry. The half-charred pages were still charged with power: with bindings woven into their locks, with unspoken names, with the energy of the minds that had scrawled all their experiences of power onto the pages. He woke that dormant power, gathered threads of it into his mind. Its chaos nearly overwhelmed him for a moment. Speaking aloud, he spun a weird fabric of names, words, scraps of students’ grotesque spells, a tumult of knowledge and power that formed strange shapes in the flaring lights. Shadows, stones that moved and spoke, eyeless birds with wings the colors of wizards’ fire, shambling forms that built themselves out of the scorched earth, he sent marching toward Ghisteslwchlohm. He woke the wraiths of animals killed during the destruction: bats, crows, weasels, ferrets, foxes, shadowy white wolves; they swarmed through the night around him, seeking their lives from him until he sent them to the source of power. He had begun to work the roots of dead trees out of the earth when the vanguard of his army struck the Founder’s stronghold. The onslaught of fragments of power, clumsy, nearly harmless, yet too complex to ignore, drew the Founder’s attention. For a moment there was another lull, during which the wraith of a wolf whined an eerie death song. Morgon ran noiselessly toward the hall. He was nearly there when his own army fled back out of the hall, running around him and over him, scattering into the night toward the city.

  Morgon flung his thoughts outward, herding the strange, misshapen creatures he had made back into oblivion before they terrorized Lungold. The effort of finding bats’ wraiths and shapes made out of clods of earth drained all his attention. When he finished finally, his mind spun again with names and words he had had to take back into himself. He filled his mind with fire, dissolving the remnants of power in it, drawing from its strength and clarity. He realized then, his heart jumping, that he stood in near-darkness.

  An eerie silence lay over the grounds. Piles of broken wall still blazed red-hot from within, but the night was undisturbed over the school, and he could see stars. He stood listening, but the only fighting he heard c
ame from the streets. He moved again, soundlessly, entered the hall.

  It was black and silent as the caves of Erlenstar Mountain. He made one futile attempt to batter against the darkness and gave up. On impulse, he shaped the sword at his side and drew it. He held it by the blade, turned the eye of the stars to the darkness. He drew fire out of the night behind him, kindled it in the stars. A red light split across the dark, showed him Ghisteslwchlohm.

  They looked at one another silently. The Founder seemed gaunt under the strange light, the bones pushing out under his skin. His voice sounded tired, neither threatening nor defeated. He said curiously, “You still can’t see in the dark.”

  “I’ll learn.”

  “You must eat darkness. . . . You are a riddle, Morgon. You track a harpist all the way across the realm to kill him because you hated his harping, but you won’t kill me. You could have, while you held my mind, but you didn’t. You should try now. But you won’t. Why?”

  “You don’t want me dead. Why?”

  The wizard grunted. “A riddle-game . . . I might have known. How did you survive to escape from me that day on Trader’s Road? I barely escaped, myself.”

  Morgon was silent. He lowered the sword, let the tip rest on the ground. “What are they? The shape-changers? You are the High One. You should know.”

  “They were a legend here and there, a fragment of poetry, a bit of wet kelp and broken shell . . . a strange accusation made by a Ymris prince, until you left your land to find me. Now . . . they are becoming a nightmare. What do you know about them?”

  “They’re ancient. They can be killed. They have enormous power, but they rarely use it. They’re killing traders and warriors in the streets of Lungold. I don’t know what in Hel’s name they are.”

  “What do they see in you?”

  “Whatever you see, I assume. You will answer that one for me.”