“Seven days?” The count showed surprise for the second time. “That will not be easy. And you have heard about the kilpa, have you not? They are running like quinis-fish—but quinis-fish do not pull sailors over the rails and eat them. Men are reluctant to go to sea in these dark days.”
“So we have started the bargaining?” Josua asked. “Granted and granted. Times are difficult. What do you want, power or gold?”
Abruptly, Streáwe laughed. “Yes, we have started bargaining. But you underestimate me, Josua, or you undervalue your own coffers. You have something that might be more use to me than either gold or power—something that in fact brings both in its train.”
“And what is that?”
The count leaned forward. “Knowledge.” He sat up, a slow smile spreading across his face. “So now I have given you a bargaining token in return for your earlier gift.” The count rubbed his hands in barely restrained enjoyment. “Let us speak in earnest, then.”
Isgrimnur groaned softly as Josua sat down beside Perdruin’s master. Despite the prince’s stated hurry, it was indeed going to be a complicated dance. This was clearly something Streáwe enjoyed too much to do quickly, and something Josua took too seriously to be rushed through. Isgrimnur turned to look at Camaris, who had been silent during the whole discussion. The old knight was staring at the shuttered windows as if they were an intricately absorbing picture, his chin resting on his hand. Isgrimnur made another noise of pain and reached for his beer. He sensed a long evening ahead.
Miriamele’s fear of the dwarrows was dwindling. She was beginning to remember what Simon and others had told her of Count Eolair’s journey to Sesuad‘ra. The count had met dwarrows—he called them domhaini-in the mines below Hernystir’s mountains. He had called them friendly and peaceful, and that seemed to be true: except for snatching her from the stairs, they had not harmed her. But they still would not let her go.
“Here.” She gestured to the saddlebags. “If you are so certain that something I am carrying is harmful, or dangerous, or ... or whatever, search for yourselves.”
As the dwarrows conferred in anxious, chiming voices, Miriamele considered escape. She wondered if dwarrows ever slept. But where had they brought her? How could she find her way out, and where would she go then? At least she still had the maps, although she doubted she could read them as efficiently as Binabik had.
Where was Binabik? Was he alive? She felt almost ill as she remembered the grinning thing that had attacked the troll. Another friend was lost somewhere in the shadows. The little man had been right—this had been a foolish journey. Her own stubbornness had perhaps brought death to her two closest friends. How could she live with that knowledge?
By the time the dwarrows had finished their discussion, Miriamele did not much care what they had decided. Gloom had settled on her, sapping her strength.
“We will search among your possessions, by your leave,” Yis-fidri said. “In respect of your customs, my wife Yis-hadra only will touch them.”
Miriamele was bemused by the dwarrow’s circumspection. What did they think she had brought down into the earth, the dainty small-clothes of a castle-dwelling princess ? Tiny, fragile keepsakes? Scented notes from admirers ?
Yis-hadra approached timidly and began to examine the contents of the saddlebags. Her husband came and kneeled beside Miriamele. “We are sorely grieved that things should be thus. It is truly not our way—never have we pressed our will by force on another. Never.” He seemed desperate to convince her.
“I still do not understand the danger you fear.”
“It was the place you and your two companions walked. It is ... it is—there are no words that I know in mortal tongues to explain.” He flexed his long fingers. “There are ... powers, things which have been sleeping. Now they awaken. The tower stairwell in which you climbed is a place where these forces are strong. Every day they become stronger. We do not yet understand what is happening, but until we do, nothing must happen which might upset the balance....”
Miriamele waved for him to stop. “Slowly, Yis-fidri. I am trying to understand. First of all, that ... thing that attacked us on the stairs was not a companion of ours. Binabik seemed to recognize him, but I have never seen him before.”
Yis-fidri shook his head, agitated. “No, no, Miriamele. Be not insulted. We know that what your friend fought was no companion—it was a walking hollowness full of Unbeing. Perhaps it was a mortal man once. No, I meant that companion who followed a little behind you.”
“Behind us? There were only two of us. Unless ...” Her heart skipped. Could it have been Simon, searching for his friends? Had he only been a short distance away when she had been taken? No, that would be too cruel!
“Then you were followed,” Yis-fidri said firmly. “For good or ill, we cannot say. We just know that three mortals were upon the stairs.”
Miriamele shook her head, unable to think about it. Too much confusion was piled atop too much sorrow.
Yis-hadra made a birdlike sound. Her husband turned. The she-dwarrow held up Simon’s White Arrow.
“Of course,” Yis-fidri breathed. The other dwarrows leaned closer, watching raptly. “We felt it, but knew it not.” He turned to Miriamele. “It is not our work or we would know it as verily as you know your own hand at the end of your arm. But it was made by Vindaomeyo, one of the Zida‘ya to whom we taught our skills and craft. And see,” he reached to take it from his wife, “here is a piece of one of the Master Witnesses.” He pointed to the cloudy blue-gray arrowhead. “No surprise that we felt it.”
“And carrying it on the stairwell was a danger somehow?” Miriamele wanted to understand, but terror had battered her for a long time, and weariness was now pulling at her like an undertow. “How could that be?”
“We will explain if we can. Things are changing. Balances are delicate. The red stone in the sky speaks to the stones of the earth, and we Tinukeda‘ya hear the voices of those stones.”
“And these stones tell you to snatch people off the staircase?” She was exhausted. It was hard not to be rude.
“We did not wish to come here,” Yis-fidri said gravely. “Things that happened in our home and elsewhere drove us ever southward, but when we reached this place through the old tunnels, we realized that the menace here is even greater. We cannot go forward, we cannot go back. But we must understand what is happening so that we can decide how best to escape it.”
“You’re going to run away?” Miriamele asked. “That’s why you’re doing all these things? To give yourself a chance to run away?”
“We are not warriors. We are not our once-masters, the Zida‘ya. The way of the Ocean Children has always been to make’ do, to survive.”
Miriamele shook her head in frustration. They had trapped her and torn her away from her friend, but only so they could escape something she did not understand. “Let me go.”
“We cannot, Miriamele. We are sorry.”
“Then let me go to sleep.” She crawled away toward the wall of the cavern and curled herself in her cloak. The dwarrows did not hinder her, but began talking among themselves again. The sound of their voices, melodious and incomprehensible as cricket calls, followed her down into sleep.
22
A Sleeping Dragon
Oh, please, God, God, don’t let him be gone!
The wheel carried Simon upward. If Guthwulf still spoke in the darkness below, Simon could not hear him above the creak of the wheel and the clanking of the heavy chains.
Guthwulf! Could it be the same man Simon had so of ten glimpsed, the High King’s Hand with his fierce face? But he had led the siege against Naglimund, had been one of King Elias’ most powerful friends. What would he be doing here? It must be someone else. Still, whoever he was, at least he had a human voice.
“Can you hear me?” Simon croaked as the wheel brought him down again. Blood, regular as the tide at evening, was rushing into his head once more.
“Yes,” Guthwulf hissed. “Don??
?t speak so loudly. I have heard others here, and I think they would hurt me. They would take away all I have left.”
Simon could see him, a dim, bent figure—but large, as the King’s Hand had been, broad shoulders evident despite his stoop. He held his head in an odd way, as though it hurt him.
“Can I have ... more water?”
Guthwulf dipped his hands into the sluice beneath the wheel; as Simon swung low enough to reach, he poured the water over the prisoner’s face. Simon gasped and begged for more. Guthwulf filled his palms three more times before Simon rose out of reach. “You are on ... on a wheel?” the man said, as though he could not quite believe it.
His thirst quenched for the first time in days, Simon wondered at the question. Was he simple-minded? How could anyone who wasn’t blind doubt it was a wheel?
Suddenly Guthwulf’s odd way of holding his head made sense. Blind. Of course. No wonder he had felt at Simon’s face.
“Are you ... Earl Guthwulf?” Simon asked as the wheel headed downward again. “The Earl of Utanyeat?” Remembering what his benefactor had said, he kept his voice low. He had to repeat the question when he was nearer.
“I ... think I was.” The earl’s hands hung limply, dripping. “In another life. Before my eyes were gone. Before the sword took me....”
The sword? Had he been blinded in battle? In a duel? Simon dismissed the thought: there were more important things to think about. His belly was full of water, but nothing else. “Can you bring me food? No, can you free me? Please!? They are tormenting me, torturing me!” So many words rasped his tender throat and he broke into a fit of coughing.
“Free you... ?” Guthwulf sounded distinctly shaken. “But ... you do not wish to be here? I’m sorry, things are ... so different. I have trouble remembering.”
He’s a madman. The only person who might help me, and he’s mad!
Aloud, he said: “Please. I am suffering. If you don’t help me, I’ll die here.” A sob choked him. Talking about it suddenly made it real. “I don’t want to die!”
The wheel began to carry him up again.
“I ... could not. The voices will not let me do anything,” Guthwulf whispered. “They tell me that I must go and hide, or someone will take everything I have from me.” His voice took on a horribly wistful tone. “But I could hear you there, making noises, breathing. I knew you were a real thing, and I wanted to hear your voice. I have not spoken to anyone for so long.” His words grew faint as the wheel took Simon away. “Are you the one who left me food?”
Simon had no idea what the blind man was talking about, but heard him hesitating, troubled by Simon’s pain. “I did!” He tried to be heard above the wheel without shouting. Was the man out of hearing? “I did! I brought you food!”
Please let him be there when I get back, Simon prayed. Please let him be there. Please.
As Simon neared the bottom again, Guthwulf reached out his hand once more and let it trail across Simon’s features. “You fed me. I do not know. I am afraid. They will take everything from me. The voices are so loud!” He shook his shaggy head. “I cannot think now. The voices are very loud.” Abruptly, he turned and lurched away across the cavern and vanished into the shadows.
“Guthwulf!” Simon cried. “Don’t leave me!”
But the blind man was gone.
The touch of a human hand, the sound of a voice, had awakened Simon to his terrible pain once more. The passing hours or days or weeks—he had long since given up trying to mark time—had begun to smear into a gradually increasing nothingness; he had been floating in fog, drifting slowly away from the lights of home. Now he was back again, and suffering.
The wheel turned. Sometimes, when all the forge chamber’s torches were lit, he saw masked, soot-blackened men hustling past him, but none ever spoke to him. Inch’s helpers brought him water with excruciating infrequency, and did not waste words on him when they did. On a few occasions he even saw the huge overseer standing silently, watching as the wheel bore Simon around. Strangely, Inch did not seem interested in gloating: he came only to inspect Simon’s misery, as a householder might pause to mark the progress of his vegetable garden while on the way to some other duty.
The pain in Simon’s limbs and belly was so constant that he could not remember what it was like to feel any other way. It rolled through him as though his body were only a sack to contain it—a sack being tossed from hand to hand by careless laborers. With each rotation of the wheel, the pain rushed to Simon’s head until it seemed his skull would burst, then pushed through his empty, aching guts to lodge in his feet once more, so that‘it seemed he stood on blazing coals.
Neither did the hunger go away. It was a gentler companion than the agony of his limbs, but still a dull and unceasing hurt. He could feel himself becoming less with every revolution—less human, less alive, less interested into holding onto whatever made him Simon. Only a dim flame of vengefulness, and an even dimmer spark of hope that someday he might come home to his friends, kept him clinging to the remains of his life.
I am Simon, he told himself until it was hard to remember what that meant. I won’t let them take that. I am Simon.
The wheel turned. He turned with it.
Guthwulf did not return to speak to him. Once, as he floated in a haze of misery, Simon felt the person who gave him water touch his face, but he could not move his lips to make a sound of inquiry. If it was the blind man, he did not stay.
Even as Simon felt himself shrinking away to nothingness, the forge chamber ‘seemed to grow larger. Like the vision the glowing speck had shown him, it seemed opened to the entire world—or rather, it seemed that the world had collapsed in upon the foundry, so that often Simon felt himself to be in many different places at the same moment.
He felt himself trapped upon the empty, snow-chilled heights, burning with the dragon’s blood. The scar upon his face was a searing agony. Something had touched him there, and changed him. He would never be the same.
Below the forge, but also inside Simon, Asu‘a stirred. The crumbled stone shivered and bloomed anew, gleaming like the walls of Heaven. Whispering shadows became golden-eyed, laughing ghosts. Ghosts become Sithi, hot with life. Music as delicately beautiful as dew-spotted spiderwebs stretched through the resurrected halls.
A great red streak climbed into the sky above Green Angel Tower. The heavens surrounded it, but the other stars seemed only timid witnesses.
And a great storm rolled down out of the north, a whirling blackness that vomited wind and lightning and turned everything beneath it to ice, leaving only dead, silent whiteness in its wake.
Like a man floundering in a whirlpool, Simon felt himself at the center of powerful currents with no strength to alter them. He was a prisoner of the wheel. The world was turning toward some mighty, calamitous change, but Simon could not even lift his hand to his burning face.
“Simon.”
The fog was so thick he could not see. Gray blankness surrounded him. Who called him? Couldn’t they see he needed to sleep? If he waited, the voice would go away. Everyone went away if he waited long enough.
“Simon. ” The voice was insistent.
He did not want voices any more. He wanted nothing except to go back to sleep, a dreamless, endless sleep....
“Simon. Look at me. ”
Something was moving in the grayness. He did not care. Why couldn’t the voice leave him be? “Go away. ”
“Look at me, Simon. See me, Simon. You must reach out. ”
He tried to shut out the troubling presence, but something inside him had been awakened by its voice. He looked into the emptiness.
“Can you see me?”
“No. I want to sleep.”
“Not yet, Simon. There are things you must do. You will have your rest someday—but not today. Please, Simon, look!”
The moving something took on a more definite form. A face, sad and beautiful, yet lifeless, hovered before him. Something like wings or flowing garments moved around
it, barely distinct from the gray.
“Do you see me?”
“Yes.”
“Who am I?”
“You’re the angel. From the tower.”
“No. But that doesn’t matter. ” The angel moved closer. Simon could see the discolorations on her weathered bronze skin. “I suppose it is good you can see me at all. I have been waiting for you to come close enough. I hope you can still get back. ”
“I don’t understand.” The words were too difficult. He wanted only to let go, to float back into uncaring, to sleep....
“You must understand, Simon. You must. There are many things I must show you, and I have only a little time left. ”
“Show me?”
“Things are different here. I cannot simply tell you. This place is not like the world. ”
“This place?” He labored to make sense. “What place is this?”
“It is ... beyond. There is no other word.”
A faint memory came to him. “The Dream Road?”
“Not exactly: that road travels along the edge of these fields, and even to the borders of the place where I will soon go. But enough of this. We have little time. ” The angel seemed to float away from him. “Follow me.”
“I . . . I can’t.”
“You did before. Follow me.”
The angel receded. Simon did not want her to go. He was so lonely. Suddenly, he was with her.
“You see, ” she said. “Ah, Simon, I waited so long for this place—to be here all the time! It is wonderful! I am free!”
He wondered what the angel meant, but he had no strength for more riddles. “Where are we going?”