The Tale of the Five Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  Toward the spot where the road crested, the hedging on either side gave way as the wall began to fall into ruin. He felt vague concern over the state of the wall: weren’t the cattle going to get out? Wouldn’t the goats be into the neighbor’s garden? But there was no sign of cattle or goats, or gardens for that matter. He walked on past where the walls crumbled, and came to the place where the road topped out, on the shoulder of the hill.

  There was a little house built there, fieldstone like the walls, with a slate roof; and off to one side, a small three- sided porch or shed. The smell of hot metal came from it, and the sound of blows. There was a man there, forging something.

  Herewiss knew something of that work. He ambled over to the smithy to watch, and found the smith beating out something with a long thin blade, a scythe or reaping-hook. He was having a hard time of it: something wrong with the pincers, Herewiss thought, but at any rate the blade on the anvil kept slipping, and the smith’s hammerblows kept falling awry.

  “Here, let me help,” Herewiss said, and went into the smithy. The smith, a big, broad-shouldered, grim-looking man, nodded and handed Herewiss the pincers. Herewiss took them two-handed and held the sickle hard and fair in the middle of the anvil, and the smith took his hammer two-handed and began making a fairer job of his forging.

  They were at that work for some while, Herewiss relearning the shudder and jump of one’s muscles when bracing against such heavy work, and the way you braced against them in turn to keep the twitching from ruining the work; and the way you had to pause, every now and then, to let the shuddering do itself and the muscles rest. It came to Herewiss as he looked at the smith during one of these pauses that this was in fact the Goddess in disguise. Well, there was no particular surprise in that: She was disguised so in every human being—the problem being to keep reminding yourself of it.

  The smith, of course, did not react to this discovery of Herewiss’s, but went back to work. “Here,” he said, “turn it over.” Herewiss turned the blade and braced it again, and the smith began to beat out the blind edge.

  “Harvest is coming on,” Herewiss said, by way of making conversation.

  “So it is,” said the smith. He sounded regretful.

  “A lot of work for you, then.”

  “More than I want,” said the smith. “It always is.” He stopped to look at the edge. “Just a bit more. Then we’ll have it in the fire again.”

  Herewiss nodded and braced himself. All his muscles were beginning to complain now, but he kept them still as the smith worked his way down the scythe-blade to the socket end. It was a graceful sweep of metal now, not much like the lumpy thing it had been before he came along, and the much-beaten metal was beginning to shine. “There,” said the smith. “That should do.” He gestured with his head at the firepit.

  Herewiss lifted the blade carefully with the pincers and turned to the pit. He noticed for the first time, now, that the fire in it was blue; but this seemed no surprise either. The smith was scuffling the coals about to make room to bury the scythe-blade in. Herewiss waited until he had a proper spot dug out, then laid the blade where it was wanted. The smith covered the blade over and began pumping at the bellows.

  “You know,” he said between gasps of exertion—it was a large bellows—”how we temper these.”

  “Yes,” Herewiss said. “Through the body, as a rule.”

  “The heart works better,” said the smith, sounding sorrowful again. “The blood leaps harder. And besides, make two of a heart, and strange things happen.” There was just a touch of mirth as he said it.

  The smith worked the bellows until he was right out of breath, and Herewiss took a turn then, spacing his pushes against the lever as he had done in the old days, timing them with his breathing for the maximum effort. Finally, “That’s enough,” said the smith. He was feeling about in the coals with the pincers. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” Herewiss said, and a wash of awful fear went right through him from back to front as he saw that curve of metal come out of the coals, burning white. He braced himself against the frame of the forge as the smith reared back with it; and the smith’s aim was good. Fire like the intensest cold went straight through his heart, so that Herewiss screamed and sagged, but somehow did not fall. The stink of burning flesh and cloth and leather was everywhere, and Herewiss looked down to see the socket-end of the scythe resting cherry-red and dulling above his heart. And then the smith pulled it out. That was worse.

  But when it came out, the pain was all gone. Herewiss looked at the scythe with an obscure satisfaction. There was blood all down its ashy length, but underneath it, the blade was bright, bright. “Am I two of heart now?” he said, feeling shaky but slightly amused.

  The smith shrugged. He turned and went to the back of the smithy and began rummaging around among the staves racked against the wall there. Finally he found one to his liking, and came back and gave Herewiss the scythe, socketed. “Just mind where you reap what you’ve sowed,” he said.Herewiss took the scythe, thanked the smith, and went out, back to the road. He looked down the far side of it, down the other shoulder of the hill. No more walls were to be seen; only a long expanse of poor stony ground, and some ways ahead, forest country. Nor could he see anything that he would be able to reap.

  He turned to wave goodbye to the smith… and saw no house there, no smithy; only the hill, silent.

  ***

  The dream passed into others that he didn’t remember, and then into the sound of someone banging on a pan. Reluctantly, Herewiss opened his eyes.

  It was an inn room—a pleasant change, that, for this was only the second or third room he had slept in for some days. He and Moris had ridden and camped their way right across northern Darthen, passing through hamlets too small to put up even just two passing strangers; or slightly larger places who might have room for the Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Arlen in the stable, or out in one of the barns with the midseason hay. Only in the last couple of days had they come to towns that might be large enough to have inns… only, that is, when they had come to the Kings’ Road.

  Herewiss turned over on the straw-stuffed pillow and sighed to himself. He had been avoiding the Road, even though it would have made his trip and Moris’s that much swifter. This (he had told himself until now) was to give himself time to think, for he was uncertain what he was going to find in Arlen. Keeping them out in the country while they traveled also kept them away from the questions that would be raised any time they went through a town of any size; and Herewiss would have more time to work out what to start doing in Arlen. But all his thinking seemed to have come to little use. Even his dreams had been much less guidance than usual, having more to do with his own anxieties than with the problem at hand.

  But maybe my own anxieties are the problem, he thought then, and sighed again. Plain and simple, he was afraid. The world was shifting around him into patterns not unfamiliar by any means, but most uncomfortable nonetheless. Freelorn was no longer on the run, but moving to take back what was his own. Their roles were changing, had changed. Until now, he had been managing matters, taking care of the less experienced of them, the one who needed the help. But now Lorn was out there starting to manage his own matters, and Herewiss was left to wonder whether he was the one who needed the management.

  Herewiss got up. The room was not a big one; on the sill, chewing idly on one of the shutters, sat a bright bird with feathers like fire. Smoke rose from where it chewed.

  “Stop that,” Herewiss said, more or less automatically.

  “Why?” Sunspark said, even though it stopped. “It’s been days since I burned anything decent. I’m getting hungry.”

  “I noticed. This is a bad time for it, that’s all. People are haying—you can’t just burn up anything you like the look of. Especially houses. Now stop that!”—for Sunspark had started in again.

  It stopped, looking slightly abashed. “I wasn’t even thinking about it that time.”

  “I see th
at.” Herewiss sat down on the bed and started pulling his hose on, wrinkling his nose. He only had a few pair, and this was his last clean one; all the others were foul. He would be glad of a chance to do his washing when they got to town. “Never mind. Look, somewhere south of here they’re bound to be burning off the bracken, to make another crop of it for the sheep. When we get to Prydon, and there’s no more need for riding, you go down there and have yourself a good feed.—Is Moris up yet?”For answer there came a knock on the door: Moris’s usual three-taps-and-two.

  “Come on in,” Herewiss said. Moris entered, yawning, in untucked shirt and breeches and boots. His normally long face was longer than usual this morning, and he was scratching. Herewiss looked at him sympathetically. “Bugs?” he said.

  Moris ran his hands through his dark hair, grimaced, and scratched there too. “This place isn’t as good as it used to be,” he said.

  “Seven years since we were out this way,” Herewiss said. “Bound to be some changes.”

  “For the worse, it looks like.”

  “Oh, come sit down for a moment,” Herewiss said, for Moris’s scratching was making him itch too. Moris sat down on one of the room’s two straw-covered stools, and Herewiss reached over for Khávrinen. He pushed Fire down into the sword and thought hard about making Moris unappetizing to the various forms of wildlife that were biting him. There was a second’s pause, and then Herewiss wasn’t quite sure that he didn’t hear a chorus of tiny shrieks of distaste and annoyance. There was that problem with working with the Fire, Herewiss had found: one kept running into consciousness in aspects of the world that were supposed to be devoid of it. At any rate, a moment later Moris looked suddenly relieved. “Where’d they go?” he said.

  Herewiss was looking at the floor for signs of this himself. “I think I hear them heading for the window,” he said. “Never mind that.”

  He turned and picked up the pitcher of water by the bed, poured some out into the lumpy stoneware cup next to it, and drank hurriedly to hide the other reaction to doing even so small a wreaking. He was shaking. It was a shame to him, and something he was going to have to learn to manage one of these days… if he lived that long.

  For that was the other problem with the Fire. All power was paid for, of course. Herewiss had always known that, from the first time he had started working with sorcery. A sorcerer, doing worldly magics fueled by the strength of the body and mind, paid for his or her work in physical and mental exhaustion. But the Fire came of a nobler source. It was the stuff of life itself; and life itself was the coin in which the price was paid. Body and mind might be tired after a particularly long and complex sorcery, but one who worked with the Fire could instantly feel the other price that was paid—time off the span of his own life. One less second, or minute, or hour, to live. In the first flush of his Power, when he was in the earliest stages of breakthrough, Herewiss had usually been too elated, and too busy, to recognize the feeling for what it was, or if he did, to think about it much. But now he had begun to notice it, and to think. When you didn’t know how much time was allotted you to begin with, the feeling of that little span of time suddenly gone forever missing was horrible. It also started you trying to put a price to a given wreaking. How much life lost, he wondered as he finished the last of the water, for curing a case of lice? An hour? A day? After a lifetime of searching for the Fire, longing for it more than for anything else, Herewiss was coming to understand how some Rodmistresses begged to have it taken from them.

  He put the cup down. “We ought to get going fairly soon,” he said to Moris. “Have you eaten yet?”

  “I didn’t have the appetite for it. I have some chicken left over from dinner last night; I’d sooner have that when we go out on the road.”

  “Right enough. Let’s settle up and go.”

  The inn was in a town called Iriv, and was one of the larger ones Herewiss had ever stayed in, since it was a major staging-point for Prydon, only a day’s ride away, and on the Road. Or rather, as Moris said, it had been an important place once, before money started getting scarce and the relationship between Darthen and Arlen had begun to deteriorate, decreasing the number of travelers who passed that way. At any rate, the inn was big enough that none of the people who ran it were anywhere to be found when you wanted one… though it might seem that the rest of the neighborhood was in the common room, drinking in a silence that indicated they knew one another entirely too well. Herewiss and Moris stood at the bottom of the creaky stairs, looking around slightly helplessly at the muttering locals. There was not a friendly look among them. This was another of the things Herewiss was having trouble getting used to. They had seen the Fire flowing about Khávrinen when he came in last night. He had expected astonishment, pleasure, welcome: not this suspicious hostility. It’s possible, he had begun thinking, and thought again now, that they see me not as a solution, but as another problem…. He wasn’t sure he liked the feeling.

  There was no sign of the innkeeper, a tall thin greying man with a stoop. The only one in the room who paid any attention to them at all was the cat on the courtyard windowsill, a big black creature with white markings like a herald’s tabard, and surprised-looking white patches over its eyes.

  Herewiss sighed and went over to it to try his luck. “Sir,” he said, ignoring the suspicious or amused looks of the people who were sitting around drinking, “have you seen the master of the house?”

  The cat looked sidelong at Herewiss and tucked its paws up, so that it made a black-and-white loaf shape. It said nothing, and Herewiss was turning away when the small raspy voice said, “He was out rating himself for not having stolen your saddle last night.”

  Herewiss turned back, smiling slightly. “Back soon, do you think?”

  The cat flicked one ear, a sort of shrug, and looked away.

  Herewiss reached into his pouch and came up with a four- penny bit. “This should take care of what we owe,” he said, and slipped it deftly underneath the cat.

  It looked at him and let its eyes half-close in amusement, for it knew as well as he did the proverb about the man who pays the cat, and what he gets for his money. It smiled slightly. “Go well, prince,” it said. “It’s a wicked place you’re going to.”

  “It’s not wicked here, with saddle thieves and all?” Herewiss said. But he smiled too.

  “Go with Her,” the cat said, and closed its eyes, apparently intent on going to sleep.

  “And you,” Herewiss said, and headed out the door. Moris had gone ahead of him, making for the stable, and was busy getting the horses. Herewiss looked around at the scorchmarks on the walls of Sunspark’s stable, and the ashes mixed with the straw on the floor. Sunspark was standing there looking innocent: as innocent, anyway, as something that will counterfeit being the Phoenix when it’s not being a horse, or one of a hundred other things. “Oh, come on, I didn’t burn right through… ”

  “Let’s be away,” Herewiss said, swinging his saddle up onto Sunspark’s back. “We’ll be in Prydon tonight…. ”

  ***

  “Coming and going… ” Herewiss said to Moris, that afternoon, as they rode into the declining light streaming through broken clouds in the west. “I thought I would be coming back here, all right, but not like this.”

  Moris shook his head. “Last time I was glad enough to be going,” he said. “The whole place looked nasty to me. Everybody chasing after Lorn and all… ” He chewed his lip and looked around at the townslands with an expression of profound distrust. “And I doubt it’ll change.”

  “It’ll change,” Herewiss said. “Soon enough.” He let the reins slacken. “Spark,” he said, “see that hill there? Just the other side.”

  Sunspark laughed softly. It had taken to doing that when in horse-form—speaking with a human voice, laughing human laughter, with who knew what throat. But there was always an edge on it, a slight whinny, and also a sense of parody: something pretending it was a horse pretending to talk like a human being, and inside, laughi
ng at both. “Which set of walls?” it said.

  “Pardon?”

  “How many walls will they have gone through?” said Sunspark. “When I was here last, there were only two. The inside one, where the keep was, and the outer one, around the hall and the new palace they were building.”

  Moris stared. Herewiss swallowed. Twelve hundred years and more it had been since Lionhall and Kynall Castle were built by Héalhra’s descendants, to supplement the old inner keep. “You hadn’t mentioned you’d been through here,” Herewiss said, as calmly as he could.

  “You didn’t ask.” Sunspark ambled along, switching its tail at flies, incinerating them with an unsettling fizzing noise when one or another fire-golden hair made contact. “Enough of us who walk the worlds were around,” he said. “Power draws power. There was power here then, fresh and new. Some of us thought we would come test it. Some did.”

  It got silent. “And?” Herewiss said.

  Sunspark flicked its tail again, left scorchmarks on Herewiss’s boot. “Some of us were bound,” it said. “Some got away. Some just watched, and went elsewhere afterwards. There’s always elsewhere.”

  Moris was looking at Sunspark more strangely than usual. “‘Elsewhere’—”

  “It must be odd for you,” Sunspark said, ambling along, musing. “Living under just one sky, on just one earth. Don’t the walls close in, sometimes?… ”

  Herewiss shook his head as Sunspark fell silent. Moris was still staring. “Its people move through worlds that way,” Herewiss said to him, disquieted himself, “the way we move from one room, one house, to another…. Not all moves are possible, all the time. There’s a Pattern, and it shifts, making some rooms accessible, others not. But beings travel through it—they spend all their lives travelling, some of them. They pass through hundreds of worlds, thousands… and sometimes stop in some backwater to look around and see the sights…. ”