Someone nudged me, and I turned to find Rawen gazing at me. She looked a good deal less a fine young lady’s horse than she had when I had first set eyes on her. Her coat was dull and dusty in patches, and her mane and tail were badly tangled, but her eyes sparkled as she told me that I was to ride her, since Golfur carried a burden already. I thanked her and would have mounted, but Merret called softly that we would walk at first.
As we crossed the road, I glanced along it in the direction of Murmroth and then in the direction of the Suggredoon, but there was no sign of movement. I wondered how long it would be before the Hedra returned. The people who had camped near us would speak of us when questioned, but Merret had spent some time the previous night coercing memories into key people in the groups, one of whom had us heading toward the ocean at about midnight, and another would swear to have seen us angling back toward Halfmoon Bay. I noticed Orys and Blyss carefully brushing away our tracks with swatches of cloth to disguise our true direction.
By the time Merret gave the command to ride, my heels were bleeding and painful. Before I mounted, I removed my heavy shoes with relief, pushing them into one of Golfur’s saddlebags just in case I needed them.
We had spoken little while we walked, and we continued in silence, conscious that voices carried far on the plain, but soon we were approaching the fantastic and distorted shapes of vegetation on the badlands: bizarrely shaped giant shrubs and spiked green tubers rising above the ground. I had never been here before, and the reality defied any description I had heard of its strangeness. But it was a narrow enough strip that allowed me to see the dark jagged form of the immense mountain range that ran along the Blacklands.
Blyss rode up on Zidon to offer some small hard twigs of food. “We will have a proper firstmeal a bit later, Merret says, but these will take the edge off your hunger,” she promised.
I did feel uncomfortably hollow, so I took two of the graying twigs and crunched one gingerly. I was about to comment on its tastelessness when Blyss asked why Ariel and the Herders would unleash a plague on the west coast when so many of their own people would die as well.
“It is a question I have asked myself many times,” I said. “There is no satisfactory answer. The One approved the plan, but Ariel was behind it.”
“And the Raider approves?” Orys asked. “Surely he would rather have people alive so they can be sold as slaves?”
Before I could answer, Merret said, “Who knows truly what the Raider desires? With all the slaves he has traded, he must have amassed wealth enough for several lifetimes. And yet his slaving continues. At least it did until recently. So maybe his desire is not for coin.”
“I think both he and Ariel gain pleasure from the suffering they cause,” Orys said, nodding to Domick’s prone form on Golfur’s back. “And if hurting one person is pleasurable, imagine how much more delicious the suffering of thousands.”
“Stop it!” Blyss whispered, white to the lips. “I have never heard anything so ugly.”
“Forgive me,” Orys said remorsefully. He looked at me. “I fear I have become somewhat obsessed with Salamander—the Raider as we have come to call him, like those on this coast. I have made it my business to try to learn more of him, and there are stories aplenty of his readiness to kill and maim.”
“Tell me what you have learned,” I said.
“That he is fanatically secretive and instinctively deadly and always seems to know if treachery is intended or if he is being lied to; that there are rules he seldom breaks; that his entire head and body are always covered, of course, and that these days he only comes ashore in a ship boat with an enormous mute to inspect the Council’s offering. Then he gets aboard the ship boat, the mute rows him back out to his ship, and someone else comes to strike the bargain and load the slaves.”
“We know most of this already,” I said.
“Exactly,” Orys said. “In all the months I have worked on trying to learn more about him, I have discovered almost nothing. And I wonder why he maintains such secrecy.”
Conversation lapsed again for a time, and at length dawn broke. I watched birds pass across the silver-gray sky in arrowhead formations. Above, high skeins of cloud shifted constantly in a wind that slowly descended to scour the earth. There was sand enough in it that I was glad of the cover of the misshapen bushes and weirdly oversized plants, but eventually it was so strong that we stopped to tie cloths about our mouths and those of the horses. Gahltha had once told me horses had a hundred names for the wind, which could not possibly be translated into human speech. According to the stallion, funaga senses were too dull to pick up minuscule but important differences between degrees of dryness in the wind or slight shifts in angle or direction, or even the smells carried on the wind, all of which required a specific name.
We struggled on for another hour before Merret shouted that we must stop, for Ran had signaled to her that the wind was about to whip up a series of small but dangerous dust demons. Having no idea what these were, I dismounted hurriedly because of the tension in the coercer’s voice and the speed with which Orys and Blyss reacted. I went to help untie Domick’s pallet, but Merret said there was no time and signaled Golfur to get down. The other horses did the same, and Rawen took her place alongside the enormous Golfur, her skin twitching with excited apprehension. Orys and Merret quickly distributed blankets with ropes at the corners, which I was bidden to grasp as tightly as I could. By the time the dust demons struck, we were all huddled beneath the blankets.
For half an hour, we were buffeted but unharmed by a shrieking wind. I did not know what dust demons looked like, but their voices were dreadful.
Then the wailing stopped abruptly, and the wind was gone. Merret and Orys threw off the blankets and began shaking them free of dust and refolding them while the horses stood and shook themselves. All save Golfur, who knew what he carried and stood still as Blyss checked on Domick. None of the others seemed shaken by the dust-demon assault, but my legs still trembled as I stood and brushed away the fine powder of sand that had seeped through the blankets.
Merret suggested that we might as well have a bite to eat and wash the dust from our throats. Without ceremony, we ate rolls with cheese that we had prepared the night before and passed around a small bladder of water while the horses ate some oats and drank water from the wooden bowls Orys prepared.
I was eating and gazing absently across at the Blacklands when Blyss came to stand with me, asking, “You know what I think about when I see them?” I realized she was speaking of the Blackland mountain range and shook my head. “I think of how they are part of the same range that encircles Obernewtyn. You cannot imagine how I have sometimes missed greenness and misty rain.”
“We even missed the snows of wintertime,” Merret laughed, coming to stand beside Blyss and ruffling her flyaway golden curls.
Ran lifted his white head and whinnied. As he stamped and twitched his ears to explain to the others what he sensed, I impatiently entered his mind to find that the stallion could smell a host of riders moving back toward the Suggredoon.
Orys knelt down and pressed his ear to the ground, and he sat back on his heels and nodded. “Thirty riders, I’d say.”
“The Hedra who rode toward Murmroth, by my guess,” Merret said with satisfaction. “Now that they have passed, we can go more swiftly, for there will be no one to see our dust.”
Two hours later, Domick began to groan and strain at his bonds, and I knew that the sleep potion was wearing off again. We stopped long enough to check the ties, and Blyss reluctantly administered another small dose from Rolf’s bottle. When we rode on, the empath’s expression was full of anxiety, and she admitted that Domick’s fever had been mounting since morning and was now dangerously high. I suggested Orys ride ahead to warn Jak we were on our way, but Merret pointed out that Dell was likely to know exactly when we would come.
To take my mind off worrying about the coercer, I rode up beside Merret and asked her if Dell had dreamed of M
atthew.
She gave me a sharp look of interest. “As a matter of fact, we have all dreamed of him at one time or another. Enough were true dreams for us to piece together that he is a slave in the Red Queen’s land and has been trying to rally the people there to rise against the slave owners who occupy the Land. Only they refuse to rise because they believe they must wait for their queen to return. But Dell claims that it is Dragon whom Matthew is waiting for.”
I took a deep breath, and on impulse, I spoke aloud for the first time of what I knew. “Dell is right,” I said. “Dragon is the daughter of the Red Queen.”
“What!” Merret cried, and the other two looked equally astounded.
“I went into her mind to try drawing her out of her coma, and I learned that it was the memory of her mother’s death and betrayal that initially sent her into a coma—or rather her need to deal with the memory that she had repressed. Inside her mind, I saw her mother betrayed and stabbed by her advisor, and then she and Dragon were given to slavers with instructions that they be sold or thrown overboard. But something happened. Dragon’s mother beastspoke whales that attacked the ship. She was dying even as she and Dragon entered the water. Then she summoned a ship fish and commanded it to take Dragon ashore. I believe the ship fish brought her to the west coast, and somehow she made her way to the ruins and lived there until we found her.”
“It explains her fear of water,” Orys said, shaking his head.
“Of course, that was a dream, so the real events might be rather different. Remember, she would have been younger and very frightened and confused. But my own dreams tell me that Matthew knows who Dragon is,” I said. “At first he wanted to free the Red Land and come for Dragon, but now he wishes to fetch Dragon to the Red Land to fulfill the legend so the people there will overthrow their oppressors.”
“We knew from Dell’s futuretelling dreams that Dragon had awakened, but it was not until you offered me memories of all that transpired in Saithwold that I understood that her memory was flawed,” Merret said.
“Kella and Roland say her memory will return, but even if it does not, I will ask Dardelan to send a ship to escort Dragon to the Red Queen’s land. Perhaps the sight of her true home will remind Dragon of what she has forgotten.”
Merret gave a shout, and I looked up to see the low broken walls of the Beforetime ruins.
After so long, it was strange to ride again into the grid of streets and piles of broken rubble remaining from the Beforetime settlement that had once stood here. Close to the edge of the ruins facing the Suggredoon, I noticed a square broken tower rising above the other buildings that I did not remember. It was ruined, yet surely there had been nothing so high when I had been here last. The others must have built it and made it look like a ruin, to serve as a lookout tower.
When I asked Merret, she grinned at me. “Fortunately, these west-coast folk are not as observant as you,” she said. “They still think of these ruins as haunted, and we do all we can to support the legend Dragon began with her coerced visions.”
As we neared the tower, I saw that there was a good solid lookout post atop a set of sturdy steps, hidden inside the corner where the two walls had been repaired. I farsought the lookout but found it empty.
The ground under the horses’ hooves was now sand, and I remembered that from Aborium to Murmroth there were patches of true desert like those in Sador, and from time to time, dunes drifted slowly from these like slow strange nomads. It seemed that one had invaded the ruins some time past, for our passage, slow as it was, raised a gauzy cloud of fine sand, which the wind and sun spun into an opaque haze of gold.
We entered a narrow street and traveled single file, Merret in the lead on Ran, followed by Blyss on Zidon, Orys on Sigund, and Golfur behind them bearing Domick. I brought up the rear on Rawen. We passed a corner that stood at about the height of the horses’ chests, the stone wall cracked and crumbling where a dry scrub grass had taken root, and it looked familiar. We were close to the central square where we had first dismounted years past, when I had come here with Pavo. How the discovery of the vast, dark Beforetime library had thrilled and astonished me. Since then, Teknoguild expeditions had come many times before the rebellion to gather more books, and I knew they now believed that the library was the very top level of a building that went deep beneath the earth. How deep, they had never been able to say, because they had been unable to access the other levels.
Looking around, I saw no sign of any settlement, save the broken tower. Not a smudge of smoke existed, nor anything else that would prompt someone riding past the ruins to investigate, and this made me wonder if Dell and the others had made their refuge beneath the ground in the library level. Or perhaps deeper. I asked Orys if they had managed to find a way into any of the levels beneath the library.
“We have entered all thirty levels below the surface,” he answered blithely.
“Thirty levels of books!” I cried in disbelief.
“Not books,” Orys said. “They were only on the first level. Dell says the building that housed the library was not a keeping place for books or a place to work, as most of the Beforetime buildings were. She thinks that the library existed only to hide the true purpose of the levels beneath, which were intended to house people in an emergency. There are sleeping chambers for more than three hundred, though they are very small, and there is a vast kitchen and eating area. Pretty much all the other space on the kitchen level and the next two is taken up with storerooms containing food enough for years.”
“It was meant to be a refuge?” I managed to croak.
“It was, only no one ever came here for refuge. We found the bones of a single person in one bedroom, and Dell said that some bodies found on the upper levels were probably trapped when the Great White came. Jak thinks that is probably what happened to the man whose bones we found in the lower levels; he would have had no choice but to stay there.”
I felt as if one of the dust demons from the plain had blown into my head. I wanted to think about what I had learned, but we were now approaching the central square. The last time I had seen it, it had been at night, and moonlight had given the broken walls and streets a ghostly look.
Lost in memory, I gasped as a column ahead of us moved, until I saw that it was Dell. She had been sitting atop a broken pillar watching our approach. Merret called out a greeting as the lean futureteller slipped from her perch and approached us. I saw with astonishment that she wore queer blue trousers in a fabric and design I had never seen before and enormous black boots, rather than the traditional beautifully dyed sweeping gowns and tunics favored by those of her guild. And she had cut her hair very short. But her cool, tranquil expression was unchanged by her months of exile, and as her pale eyes settled on me, I felt the same shiver of apprehension I always felt in the presence of a powerful futureteller, half fearing that she would make some dreadful pronouncement. At the same time, I longed to ask exactly what Atthis had said to solicit her aid in saving me from drowning. She merely gave me a formal bland greeting.
“It is good to see you safe,” I said, dismounting and striving to appear at ease. She smiled and turned aside to watch as Merret and Orys took Domick’s pallet from Golfur’s back. I fetched out my clodhoppers, pulled them on, and straightened.
“Poor man,” Dell murmured in her soft voice. “He has suffered much.”
Seely appeared behind the futureteller, and I was startled to see that she wore exactly the same clothing as Dell, but her thin hair had grown, and now she had it plaited on either side of her face. Seeing me, she smiled and raised her hand, but her expression grew serious as her eyes settled on Domick, whose pallet the others had laid on the cobbles.
“Is Jak ready for him?” Dell asked.
“Of course,” said Seely without looking away from Domick’s gaunt face. Dell gestured to Merret, whereupon she and Orys lifted the pallet and bore it away carefully in the direction from which Seely had come. Dell suggested the younger woman go and he
lp them with the doors, and she obeyed at once.
“Shall we go?” she asked me.
“We should tend to the horses,” I said, for they were all still saddled save for Rawen. “There is also food in the saddlebags.…”
Dell smiled. “Pellis will be here in a moment to give them fodder and offer them a rubdown if they wish it.”
“Pellis?” I asked, not recognizing the name.
“Merret found him. He is a Misfit. There are seven others who have joined us here since the Suggredoon closed, all children. They delight in tending the horses, for all except Pellis have learned Brydda’s signal speech. Pellis does not need it, for he is a beastspeaker. But you will meet them soon enough.” She strode away, obviously expecting me to follow, and I did so, wincing as the boots pressed against my blisters and realizing that, contrary to my expectations, Dell rather than Jak or Merret was leader of the library refuge. Her every gesture and word had the authority of leadership, and the others clearly accepted this. It seemed utterly uncharacteristic, for futuretellers were usually far too preoccupied by their inner worlds to bother with the real world.
Belatedly, I sent a probe back to Rawen promising my return and asking her to tell Golfur that I had not forgotten my promise to send him to Rolf.
Dell turned into a long street, which brought us to a labyrinth of broken and tumbledown walls. After wending our way through them, we reached a doorway that was almost intact and was in a bit of wall that, when I looked closely, appeared to have been rebuilt. It had been done subtly so it would not immediately be obvious to passersby. Through the door was the great pile of rubble that I had climbed with Pavo so long ago. At the top was the trapdoor that had led us to the Beforetime library. We had simply come to it from another direction.