The Seeker

by Isobelle Carmody

  I opened my eyes.

  It was night. I frowned, wondering at the icy chill of the air. Perhaps winter had come early to the White Valley. Even so, it felt too cold for the highlands. I doubted it had ever been so cold even at Obernewtyn in the dead of winter.

  With a shock, I realized something else. The suppressing barrier was gone from my mind, and so was the pain!

  The only answer seemed to be that I had slept off the pain somehow, but if that was the case, the infection in my feet would have worsened, being untended. The pain would come, and it would be dreadful. Better lie still.

  Then something warm and moist touched my face, and I gasped in fright. Gazing down at me with dark, troubled eyes was a black horse—unmistakably Gahltha.

  “It is I, funaga,” he sent in answer to my thought that I was still dreaming. “I am Galta who was once Gahltha.”

  “Galta?” I echoed stupidly. My eyes drifted past the horse, and questions about his change of name were swept aside in an even greater shock.

  I was no longer in the cave in the White Valley, with its pervasive reek of smoke and the blackened skeletons of trees standing outside like silent sentinels.

  I was lying on a flat, narrow stone ledge jutting out from a massive cliff face. I had taken the cliff for the wall of the cave, but there were no walls around me and no roof. Running in all directions from the gray-pitted cliff face was a vast, flat plain covered in snow, glittering in the moon’s cold bluish light. There was not a single tree or bush in sight. In the distance, I could see the darkly defined shapes of mountain spurs and outcrops of cracked stone.

  The ice and snow, the lack of trees, and the incredible brightness of the stars told me I was in the mountains. Except that it was impossible.

  I thought fleetingly that the suppressing barrier had shattered, and the accumulated pain had destroyed my mind. Madness seemed the only rational answer. I giggled at the paradox but shivered when the sound echoed.

  The black horse watched me patiently, his dark coat almost blending with the pelt of the night.

  I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it with an audible snap, thinking of the queer dream I had fallen into after Daffyd had gone. If it had been a dream.

  Carefully, I levered myself into a sitting position. There was no pain in my feet or legs. I looked down.

  My legs were bare and unscarred. I touched them reverently, remembering I had done that in the dream. Only it had not been a dream. Thin legs with knobbed knees and rather long feet, but at that moment the most perfect legs in the world.

  “Where are we?” I asked my feet.

  “In the mountains,” the horse answered gently. He looked down at me with grave serenity, and I wondered at the change in him. The last time I had seen him, on the banks of the Suggredoon, he had been almost insane with terror and frustration. The violent impatience and scorching bitterness that had characterized his behavior had disappeared as completely as my own wounds.

  “Come,” he sent. “If you are too weak to walk, I will carry you. Soon the storm will come, and it must not find us in the open.”

  I looked up at the cloudless sky, wondering why he thought there was going to be a storm. But I left my doubt unspoken. So much had happened that was impossible to explain that a clear sky might easily hide a storm. I pulled my socks and shoes back on and slid from the ledge, tensing myself for the pain that had been part of my life for so long.

  There was a faint jarring but no pain. I stared down at my feet in fresh wonder.

  “I have found a place nearby,” he explained. “There is wood. You will light a fire for us, and perhaps we will live.”

  I looked up, startled, and realized with a faint shiver that he was quite serious.

  “It will be a bad storm,” he sent.

  I stepped forward, sinking up to my knees in powdery snow. The black horse went ahead, forging a wide track. I followed in his wake, marveling at the pleasure of walking without pain.

  The wind whipped my hair and skirt around now that we were away from the buffer of the cliffs, and the cold stole into my bones long before we reached the shelter. It turned out to be a cave at the end of a narrow cleft. I sighed, thinking I was in danger of becoming accustomed to living in caves; I had seen the inside of so many. This one was quite big, dry, and surprisingly warm, being cut off from the wind by its awkward position in the wedge-shaped cleft.

  “We must block the mouth or the coldwhite will come in,” the horse sent.

  Under his direction, I labored for more than an hour, piling stones at the mouth of the cave, shivering in my light dress and coat. When I had finished, there was nothing but a narrow slit I could barely squeeze through.

  “Now the fire,” Galta instructed.

  Fortunately, I still had my hand flint, and there was a pile of wood and twigs. I managed to burn myself twice before setting them alight. I crouched over the flames, trying to warm my fingers as smoke curled up to the roof of the cave. Outside, the wind had reached a shrieking intensity, and snow fell in a dense curtain. I looked at Galta searchingly, but he only stared into the flames as if mesmerized. “How long do you think the storm will last?” I asked humbly.

  He answered simply that he did not know.

  I bit my lip. “How did you get here?” Never mind about me, I thought.

  The horse looked up. “The funaga must know everything,” he sent, but without his old contempt. He looked into the fire as if it were a window, and miniature flames leaped in his eyes.

  “I spent many days in the place where the mountain ate you. I thought you must be dead, and I was tortured by my cowardice. I believed then that I did not care what happened to me, but when the funaga tried to trap me with their nets, I fought them and ran away. I did not go to Obernewtyn, but higher, to the fields where I once ran with Avra. But I could not stay. I went on and on to the high places where the old equines go to die. I meant to abase myself before their spirits. I hoped I would die, that they would demand it of me.

  “I did not eat or drink, as is the custom among equines seeking a vision. I waited and day after day, there was no answer. I thought the old ones were deaf to me and had cast me out. I called myself Galta—nothing.

  “Then one night I slept, and in my dream I saw a vision of a high mountain valley, where a lake lay yet unfrozen in the midst of ice and snow. A voice told me to find that place. It promised that I would find absolution there. When I woke, I began to search.

  “It was hard, and many times I despaired and thought of giving up. But every night in my sleep, the voice came, reassuring me, urging me higher, promising an answer to the pain in my heart and a purpose for my life. It told me many things for my ears alone, and a blackness, one that had been inside me all my life, began to melt as easily as coldwhite before the sun. I could have gone back to Obernewtyn then, for I understood that pride and arrogance, rather than true grief, had kept me away. But the voice urged me always to go on.

  “At last, I found this valley. Then the voice came again, telling me I had been drawn to the mountains to take part in a quest whose end would concern not only equine and funaga, but all living creatures. This was to be my life’s most important work, above any other glory I had imagined.” I could feel the faint sense of awe that marked his thoughts.

  “The voice told me a funaga would be brought here, one whom I must keep safe. One day, this funaga would fight a great and perilous battle whose outcome was unknown even to the wisest of the wise but which might mean the destruction of all life on the earth forever. I must carry this funaga wherever it wishes to go and protect it with my own life if it were needed.

  “It was strange and ironic that I, who had so despised the funaga, should find myself bound to such a task. There was a time when I would have refused, believing your kind to be a blight on the world. But the voice had helped me see that no life-form is greater than another and that all are bound up in an intricate and delicately balanced pattern of coexistence.

  “In
the daylight, I found this cave. And then I waited. Many weeks passed, yet always the voice told me to wait. So I waited. Two moons passed, and still I waited, wondering if it was my punishment to wait forever in these cold lands for one who would never come,” he sent bleakly.

  “Two moons?” I whispered incredulously. I remembered how I had imagined time passing in my sleep. If he was right, winter was near ended. I felt a stab of despair at the thought that Obernewtyn was yet unwarned, unless Daffyd had got there in time.

  “Then I found you, lying on the ledge. At first I could not believe you were the funaga the voice had spoken of. But why else would you be there? And how could you have come there, when there was not a single footprint in all the untouched snow? Then I thought you were dead, for your skin was like ice. But your heart was beating, and you woke.”

  There was a long silence in the wake of his strange tale. Outside, the storm winds howled derisively, and tiny whirlwinds of snow blew through the cave opening, falling in a white drift against the stones. The fire’s orange light danced silently upon the walls.

  “Only someone insane could believe your story. Or mine,” I said softly, but my words sounded hollow. I had fallen asleep, half-dead, in the highlands and had woken completely healed, sixty days and thousands of spans distant, on the highest and loneliest of mountain peaks.

  I felt a ghostly echo of the dangerous weight of pain that had pressed against the feebly erected barrier in my mind. I shuddered.

  The fire crackled, and I turned my face to the glowing embers, drinking in the warmth.

  “When this storm is over, we will go back to Obernewtyn,” I said.

  But outside, the storm winds shrieked.

  25

  HOPING THE SUDDEN silence was not merely a lull, I used a stick to clear the snow and rocks from the entrance of the cave. We had lost count of time, and the firewood was nearly exhausted.

  Coming out of the narrow crevice, I was cold and hungry, but I forgot physical discomfort in the dazzling sight that met my eyes. The world was blanketed in pristine white, reflecting the sunshine with painful intensity. A delicate lace of icicles hung from the ledge on which I had slept until I’d been found by Gahltha—for that, I’d decided, was a far more appropriate name for the formidable black horse than “Galta” could ever be.

  Unaccountably, I remembered sitting at the Kinraide orphan home with Maruman, dreaming of the fabled world of the Snow Queen, a forbidden Oldtime tale my mother had told us.

  “It is a hard trek to Obernewtyn,” Gahltha warned. “It will not be safe to go too quickly. The coldwhite will hide crevices and rocks. We will have to put our feet down carefully.”

  “Life has always been a matter of putting one’s feet down carefully,” I said. Even the prospect of a long hard trek through frostbitten country with an empty belly and scant clothes could not quell my joy.

  We left at once, for there were no preparations to be made. Gahltha led, forging a path; even so, my shoes and legs were quickly soaked. I was glad to walk, since the exertion kept me warmer than the dazzling sunlight could on its own.

  Gahltha warned me to shade my eyes with a piece of cloth to avoid being snow-blinded.

  I looked back once at the mountain in whose skirts we had sheltered. It sloped backward, outjutting rocks and drifts of snow adhering to the flat surfaces, making it look like the stern face of a very old man. The slant made it impossible to see the top, and I wondered if that was where the Ken of the Agyllians lay.

  We traveled across the ice lake, and the land beyond seemed to go right to the horizon. This puzzled me until Gahltha said the distance was an illusion. We were on a large, flat plateau and would shortly reach its edge.

  The wind, which had howled for days and nights, seemed to have exhausted itself, and the air was clear and still. The only sounds to break the silence were those of our footsteps and breathing. We could have been the only beings alive in all the Land. I felt as if the air were a kind of fement that one might become drunk on, and hunger increased the heady feeling. At the same time, I felt I could understand anything and everything very easily there on the roof of the world.

  It was nearing dusk when we reached the edge of the plateau. I was within a single handspan of the edge before I realized. Only a sharp warning from Gahltha stopped me walking off the edge. I looked over, and a cold, freshening gust of air blew up into my face. What I saw below took my breath away.

  Clouds were strung out across the sky like skeins of wool—below my feet!

  Seen from above, the clouds were fluffy mounds of cream or sea foam shot with glorious sunset colors—a fairy realm. The Land was barely visible through the woolly curtain. And between the Land and the plateau there were rank upon rank of mountains, jagged as upturned teeth, streaked with snow and lacking the slightest touch of color or softness.

  Some of the mountains were dense and dark, unmistakably Blacklands. Few dared travel through mountainous terrain, because a snowfall could hide lethal, poisonous ground. Yet Gahltha seemed unperturbed, saying only that the voices had told him where to walk safely.

  I had often gazed at the distant mountains, but I had never had any real idea of the sheer size and barrenness of them. Gahltha’s lone trek to the heights had been an incredible act of faith.

  Something glistened on the far horizon. Squinting, I realized I was looking at the great sea. For a moment, I seemed to smell the salty wetness of waves on the shore. All the world lay spread at my feet. The one thing I could not see was a way down. The plateau stood apart from the other plains and mountains. I looked at the black horse and found him watching me inscrutably.

  “I brought you here to see the world, funaga. I wondered if it would move you as it once moved a proud and bitter equine. It was here I saw my own smallness and understood how stupid and arrogant I had let pride and hatred make me,” he sent.

  “Not many could see this and be unchanged,” I sent gently. “But you haven’t said how we can get down.”

  “Patience,” Gahltha sent.

  He made for the opposite side of the plateau, and there I looked out, aghast. Again the plateau was high, but there were no clouds to hide the dreadful vision from us.

  Stretched out like a charred skin were hundreds of spans of Blacklands, lifeless and still. I had thought the snowy slopes barren, but this was a terrible stretch of obsidian, flecked here and there with dark, gleaming pools reflecting a tarnished sky. A stretch of mountains, breaking away from the main mass, ran across the nightmarish terrain and out of sight. It was the Land, dead and without hope of life. Looking at that, it was impossible to share Pavo’s assurance that the Blacklands would not last forever.

  Even as I watched, night crept like a dark shadow across the bleak plains, and though the heights were still bathed in sunlight, I felt strangely cold. I had wondered why the Agyllians left me in the mountains when it would have been so easy for them to carry me down to Obernewtyn. Now I thought I understood.

  “I did not know it went on so far. So much land poisoned …,” I whispered.

  “Perhaps there are many lessons to be learned in the mountains,” Gahltha sent gravely.

  I could not take my eyes away.

  I thought of the Oldtimers and wondered whether they would have built their weaponmachines if they could have foreseen what would come to pass. And why create machines that would outlast a hundred lives? Had they been so enamored of war and destruction that they had to make it immortal?

  For the first time, I felt I could understand the original Councilmen and their tyrannous rule. Farmers and children of the Oldtimers, they had seen firsthand the will to destroy and the hunger for power that knew no boundaries. Perhaps they had even known the deathmachines existed and had hoped to ensure no one would ever use them again. No wonder they had forbidden delving into the past.

  They had been afraid.

  Unfortunately, the repressive philosophies had become a different sort of threat. I doubted the present Council underst
ood the real dangers any better than those who had made the weaponmachines in the first place. I had only to think of Henry Druid and Alexi to know there would always be men and women prepared to pay any price for power. Even our own Teknoguild would risk agonizing death to revive the knowledge of a lost age.

  The Elder was right. It was inevitable the machines would someday be unearthed and used. And Atthis had said I was the only one with any chance of destroying them. If that made me the Seeker, it was a responsibility I was finally ready to accept.

  Resolutely, I thrust the machines and the Agyllians from my mind and looked at Gahltha. “I will be glad to go from this place and its foreboding lessons.”

  He blew air from flared nostrils. “I did not bring you here for lessons. See, there is where we will go down.”

  I followed his gaze and saw a natural stone path leading unevenly to the next plateau, cleaving to the edge of the slope. The path began not far from where we stood, moving this way, then that, ever lower, across the face of the cliff.

  Gahltha looked at me. “You are weak still. Ride on my back and we will travel more quickly.”

  I looked at him curiously. “You want me to ride?” I asked.

  “One warrior will carry another, if the strength of one proves greater. Each has his own strength but also his own weakness.” He spoke with the air of repeating a well-learned lesson.

  “Wise words,” I said simply. “I am glad to ride on your back if it will help us move more quickly.”

  We traveled that day and the next through the monotonous snowbound terrain of the high mountains, and on the third day, we came upon a few scant green shoots, thrusting their tips through the snow. “It will be more dangerous now that the thaw has begun,” Gahltha said. “But I think tomorrow we will reach the valley of the barud.” Barud was the equine word symbol for “home”—it seemed Gahltha had come to miss Obernewtyn.

  Snow clouds gathered overhead, and with the bleak afternoon came unexpected doubts. I began to fear Obernewtyn had changed and that I would find there was no longer a place for me there. My whole life had been spent as an outsider, and even at Obernewtyn, I had felt misplaced until the journey to the coast. Ironic if I discovered too late where my own barud lay.