Ashling

by Isobelle Carmody

  Something in his description bothered me but I could not pinpoint it. I sat up, wincing as a bolt of pain struck my temples. Instinctively, I set a mental net to capture any hurt. It was a useful measure which enabled me to put off enduring pain. It was dangerous, however, if too much were allowed to build up.

  "Is the gypsy all right?" I asked as the Healer guild-master entered the chamber.

  "It is difficult to tell," Roland answered gravely. "Because she lost so much blood she is weak, but the problem is more that her body appears resistant to healing."

  I frowned. "How long have I been asleep?"

  "Only a night. But you slept like the dead, if you will forgive the expression," the Healer guildmaster added dryly. "Obviously the blow concussed you, for there is only a slight abrasion at your temple. But you always did heal fast." He let a little pointed silence form, reminding me that he still believed there was more to the healing of my scarred legs the previous year than I had told.

  "Fortunately it was not a serious wound," he went on, "since your mind will not allow healing access. But I suppose you know that well enough."

  I hadn't known. It must be some sort of instinctive reflex. Roland shrugged. "Speaking of healing, you should be resting now." He looked around at the others.

  "I'm goin'," the Farseeker ward said, rising. He looked down at me. "I'll tell Alad yer awake. Gahltha is madder'n hell that he was nowt with ye. He's convinced ye'd nowt have been hurt if he were."

  "I hope he hasn't blamed Zade for what happened," I worried as the farseeker departed.

  Dameon came to the bedside and as he bent to touch my hand I kept a tight hold on my emotional shield, wary of the empath's phenomenal Talent.

  "I am glad you are safe, Elspeth," he said in his soft tones.

  I nodded, forgetting he could not see, but he did not wait for an answer, gliding from the room with the slow grace that was caution, but which sometimes appeared to be instinct guiding him in compensation for his blindness.

  Roland glared at Rushton.

  "A moment," the Master of Obernewtyn said.

  The Healer guildmaster shook his head in exasperation and moved away.

  "You seem to go out of your way to try to get yourself killed," Rushton admonished gently, pulling a chair to sit by the bed.

  From this angle, a lantern on the far wall cast enough light to show me the craggy plains of his face, but it was not possible to make out his expression. Nevertheless there was an intimacy in the moment that filled me with discomfort.

  Maruman snorted derisively and curled back to sleep, for human emotions irritated his senses.

  "I had no choice," I told Rushton awkwardly, wishing Roland had not left us alone.

  Rushton's feelings for me had been distorted during a partial mindbond we had undergone during the battle for Obernewtyn. Once, injured and delirious, he had called me his love. To my relief, he had not spoken of it since. Rush-ton had Misfit Talent but it was latent, and I reasoned that his feelings for me were the same. Nearly suffocated already by his solicitude, I had no desire to face the restrictions I felt sure would arise from waking his overt affections. Besides, there was no room in my life for such things.

  "You know you talked in your sleep," Rushton said unexpectedly.

  My heart beat faster at the thought of what I might have said. "I dreamed. It made no sense."

  "You called out Ariel's name."

  I heard again the dream—Ariel's promise to kill me— and felt chilled. "He can't hurt us while he is locked up in the Herder cloisters as an acolyte," Rushton said, guessing accurately at my thoughts.

  If he is in a cloister, I thought. That was what we had heard, but I could not believe that Ariel would have tied himself up to an organization weakened by its estrangement from the Council. Ariel had always sought power, and a Herder acolyte would be little more than a lowly servitor for his masters.

  "You said Jik's name too," Rushton went on.

  I felt abruptly depressed. "I dream of Jik often. I wonder what it means."

  "Too much death is all it means," Rushton said sharply. "That is the way of the world and you have to accept it. What happened to Jik was not your fault, Elspeth. No one could stop a firestorm. You should not judge yourself so harshly."

  "I don't," I snapped. "My dreams judge me."

  "Well, what are dreams but tricks of the mind?"

  "Are they?" I asked coolly. I was less convinced of that. Sometimes dreams were gateways through which messages might come. Beasts called them ashlings: dreams that called.

  Thunder rumbled again and Rushton glanced back over his shoulder at the sky, just as a distant flash of lightning illuminated the clouds, and the slanting gush of the rain. "The storm is getting closer," he murmured.

  I took advantage of his inattention to think of a subject that would turn the conversation to less personal matters. "Did Matthew make sure he wasn't followed when he brought me back here from Guanette?"

  Rushton turned back from the window. "The only person he saw leave was an older gypsy who rode hell for leather toward the lowlands. He is almost certainly the one who shot the arrows. I suppose he took you both for true gypsies and for some reason expected you to have gone that way. Fortunately, he did not take it into his head to track the wagon. By the time he realizes his mistake, the trail will be too old even for a gypsy. Just the same, I will ask Garth to have his coercers keep their eyes open so they can turn him aside if he does appear."

  "I'm surprised the other soldierguard didn't come after me."

  "I expect the gypsy put an end to him and to the acolyte. The villagers are probably still arguing about who should report the whole thing. It wouldn't surprise me if they had not even removed the corpses."

  "The queerest thing was how frightened the villagers were of the Herder. I thought the Faction had lost influence, but you would not have thought so to see them cowering."

  "The plague has restored their power," Rushton said.

  I frowned, remembering mat the Herder in Guanette had spoken of the plague. It had erupted the previous year in Aborium or Morganna, spreading rapidly to all the populous coastal cities, and killing one in three who contracted it. Those who survived bore hideous scarring.

  In the aftermath of the disease, there had been almost no one to work the farms and this had resulted in terrible shortages which had seen hundreds starve, and the shortages continued as many of the farms still lay abandoned and unproductive. We had seen little of its impact in the highlands, because it had barely touched the more remote parts of the Land.

  "They claim it was a punishment on the Land for the treatment of the Herders," Rushton said, "and they keep me fear alive by saying mat it will happen again unless they are obeyed."

  I nodded, then wished I hadn't for the movement set up a dull throbbing ache in my head. "The Herder's acolyte said Lud had given his masters great power to smite their enemies."

  "I must send word to the safe house in Sutrium, and ask Domick to look into the relationship between the Herders and me Council. At his last report, they were still at odds and I will be happier if mat is still so," Rushton murmured.

  To my relief he rose, his thoughts absorbed by these larger concerns. "I am dunking of sending someone down to make contact with the safe house. Domick's reports have been scant of late, and he has sent no word yet about how our offer of alliance was received by the rebels. I will speak of it at the next guildmerge if I have no word from them by men."

  Briefly his eyes returned to me. "We will also have to decide, too, what to do with your gypsy when she wakes."

  "If she wakes," Roland said, coming over determinedly.

  Rushton nodded distractedly and allowed himself to be ushered out.

  I lay back, weary and curiously depressed. Rushton had been right about one thing—there had been too much death. Grieving for it had drained the heart and soul out from me, and sometimes I felt as if all that was left of me was a pale, shadowish wraith. And now the gypsy
might die too. Well, I had known that even as I strove to save her.

  I looked out to the mountains almost lost in the blackness of the stormy evening, and wished for the thousandth time that Atthis would call, and that I might begin to live and act, instead of waiting.

  III

  Lantern light glimmered on patches of wet, black stone, dulling the pallid glow emanating from a thick phosphorescent crust on the rock wall.

  Fian reached out and prodded gently at one of the scabbed mounds and a cloud of glowing insects rose, exposing uneven patches of bare rock as they flitted away into the echoing darkness.

  "Do ye know these little beggars eat th' holocaust poisons but are nowt poisonous themselves?" he murmured.

  I was startled at that, but did not comment. There was no reason to be silent, yet the thought of the mountain of stone pressing down on top of the subterranean cave network seemed to compact the darkness and thicken it, leaving no room for words.

  I looked back, searching in vain for a glimpse of daylight but even the rock shelf we were walking along vanished into the shadows a few steps behind. The ledge had been laboriously cut out of the cave walls by the teknoguilders, and was designed to run from the White Valley entrance, shaped by the flow of the upper Suggredoon River, around the cavern walls just above the level of the subterranean lake. In spite of the constant flow of water from the Suggredoon, the lake remained at the same level because a steep channel offered an outlet through the other side of the mountain to the lowlands.

  The only other way to move about the caverns was by raft, poling along the straight, narrow waterways between buildings that, leagues below, were streets. Clusters of the strange, glowing insects that were the cave's sole inhabitants lit segments of the stone walls and crumbling buildings, reflecting them in pale disconnected shimmers on the dark water, but the majority of the dead city and the caves that contained it were sunk in eternal night.

  As ever, I could not help wondering how the city had survived the shifts in me earth, that had buried it under a mountain. How had not the enormous stone dwellings, hundreds of floors high, been crushed in me geological upheavals of the Great White? Was it yet another impossible feat of technology on the part of the Beforetimers that kept the city intact?

  Or had fate saved the ancient city for some purpose of its own?

  I shivered.

  "This way," Garth panted, an undercurrent of excitement in his tone. He waved the tattered map vaguely ahead and moved through the labyrinth of broken stone with an energy and agility that belied his enormous bulk.

  Behind him came the Teknoguild ward, Fian, with Rushton and myself at the rear. We were moving in single file, because the ledge path was too narrow to walk two abreast. I stared at Rushton's back wondering what had possessed him to permit an expedition of guild leaders into the least accessible water caves. Ordinarily he was violently opposed to our taking part in anything dangerous, considering us too valuable to be risked. His admonition to me in the Healer hall after the rescue of the gypsy in Guanette showed that this attitude had not changed.

  For a moment my thoughts slipped back to the gypsy woman, pale and fading, baffling the Healerguild with her refusal to heal or waken.

  I had been returning from a visit to the Healer guild-master to check on her, when Rushton had summoned me to say that Garth had requested our presence on a journey into the caves under Tor the following day. I had been genuinely astounded at his apparent willingness to acquiesce. The fat Teknoguildmaster must have presented a compelling case.

  It would have been nice if either of them had thought to tell me what we were supposed to be going to see, I thought with a flicker of irritation.

  I glared up at the broad space between Rushton's shoulders thinking he was as high-handed as ever, ordering me to come without giving me a reason. As if he felt my gaze, he glanced back, but I let my eyes fall quickly.

  "Damn!" he muttered, as he stumbled in the darkness. "Garth, how much further is this?"

  Garth grunted something unintelligible from ahead and Rushton stumbled and cursed explosively again.

  "Nowt far," Fian assured us, holding his lantern higher. His eyes met mine fleetingly over Rushton's bowed head, gleaming with amusement. In spite of my mood, I found myself smiling in response. There was something irrepressible about the highlander. His eyes sparked with intelligence and a wry humor that stopped him being as painfully earnest as so many of his guild, though, if anything, it was rumored he was more foolhardy than the rest in his quest for knowledge. He was one of the few at Obernewtyn who did not treat me with stultified awe.

  We came to a place where a brief murky stretch of water separated the ledgeway from a sloping island of rubble formed by the collapse of one of the towering Beforetime monoliths. Dark water lapped sluggishly on the makeshift landfall. Garth leapt across the intervening space with a grunt, and on the other side made his way to the foot of an intact building. The light from the lanterns reached no further than the row of square windows on the second level, before black shadows obscured the floors above. Most of the buildings in the underground city were submerged, excepting a few top floors. This had meant the only way to enter them was via a window, or by making a door. But at this end of the caverns, the ground sloped up so that almost all of the towering buildings were exposed. What made the area so dangerous was the possibility of a hundred-floor, stone building collapsing without warning.

  As we approached the building, I saw that a hole had been knocked in its immense wall.

  "This is it," Garth wheezed, flapping his hand in a flourish at the construction before us. "All five-hundred floors. Oh, you needn't worry," he added, seeing my look of horror. "It's quite stable because a good deal of it is buried in the rock above and behind. Including what would have been the front door. The astonishing thing is that we discovered this at all, especially with so much of the city under water. Of course, the very fact that so many buildings are still standing is incredible in the first place. We are becoming convinced that this city was one of the last built before the holocaust. The degree of technology here is far superior to that of other ruin sites and may well explain how this city survived when so many others did not. But there are certain strange facets to the architecture ..."

  "Garth, get on with it," Rushton said brusquely.

  The Teknoguildmaster frowned at him. "I was simply making the point that the chance of us just happening on this was so unlikely, that one might be forgiven for thinking it was ordained."

  "Happening on what?" I asked.

  Garth ignored this. Giving Rushton an offended look, he turned to enter the building. I glanced up and the row of empty windows seemed to look down like eyes.

  "Elspeth, are you all right?" Rushton asked, glancing back at me.

  I flinched, as if his hand instead of his voice had reached out to me, the note of concern in his tone quashing a momentary surge of apprehension.

  "I'm fine," I said tersely, and stepped through the gap and into a smooth, straight hallway. The last thing I wanted was him fussing over me.

  "It took an age to knock th' hole in the wall," Fian said, coming through after us with the second lantern. "Them Beforetimers built solid."

  "Our main fear was that we might destroy something irreplaceable by knocking a hole in the wall," Garth explained.

  The building was cast along the lines of all Beforetime constructions, walls and floors bare, squared and uniform with no ornamentation. The Beforetimers were admittedly inspired at construction, but they lacked imagination.

  Garth led us along the hall and up three featureless gray flights of stairs. Stepping out of the stairwell onto a small landing, the Teknoguildmaster lifted his lantern to reveal that the wall facing us had words carved into it. They read: Reichler Clinic Reception.

  I stopped dead.

  My mind rushed back to the moment when I had found the book in a Beforetime library called Powers of the Mind. Standing in another ancient darkness I had read enough
to understand that there had been Talented Misfits before the holocaust. The book had spoken of tests performed at the Reichler Clinic which proved conclusively that human beings in the Beforetime had possessed Misfit Talents, though these had been largely latent. It concluded forcefully that, in time, more and more people would be born with such powers, though it would take a great catalyst to release them into the conscious mind. We had taken this as proof that we were not mutated freaks, as the Herder Faction and Council claimed, but a natural progression in human evolution. And what greater catalyst could have occurred than the Great White?

  The teknoguilders had regarded the book with skepticism after the initial euphoria, however, fearing it might merely be one of the fictions the Beforetimers had produced in such number. But the discovery of the actual Reichler Clinic must resolve all doubt.

  "Worth a bit of a walk through the dark, eh?" Garth sounded pleased by our reactions. "Of course, we knew from the book Elspeth found that the Reichler Clinic was somewhere in the mountains, if it existed. I must admit I had thought it would be located in the high mountains— perhaps even in our own valley." He poked at my arm. "I thought since you discovered the book and argued so strongly that it was true, you should see this, my dear," he added.

  "Strange to think of Beforetimers comin' here to be tested to see if they was Misfits," Fian said dreamily.

  I felt a strange chill at the thought that, a thousand years before, a girl like me might have come to the clinic, wondering if she was a freak because she could use her mind to speak to animals or to other people.

  Garth led the way through the door alongside the sign and we found ourselves in a large room with metal benches. Windows along one wall opened to the darkness of the caves while along the other walls were a line of the unmistakable box-like metal structures that were Before-time machines. These were smaller than the ones in the Teknoguild cave network.

  "We know the Reichler Clinic was a paranormal research center," Garth said, in a lecturing tone of voice. "Paranormal was a Beforetime word for Talented Misfit. As Fian said, people would come here to be tested. We had no expectation of finding the clinic and, once it was found, it never occurred to me that we would find much in the way of information because damp has destroyed all but the most impervious materials in the city, and even they will not resist it forever."