by Tad Williams
But there was more to think about than just his anger. Binabik and the others seemed to be counting on him, and that was something Simon was not used to. Things were expected of him now.
“I’ll do it,” he said finally. “But tell me one thing. What really happened to your master? Why did he die?”
Binabik slowly nodded his head. “I am told that there are two ways that things can happen on the road…things that are dangerous. The first, and it is usually happening only to the unskilled, is that if one tries to walk the road without proper wisdom, it is possible to miss the places where the dream-road and the track of earthbound life go separate ways.” He skewed the palms of his hands. “The walker then cannot locate the way back. But Ookequk, I am thinking, was far too wise for that.”
Going lost and homeless in those imagined realms touched a responsive point in Simon, and he sucked in a breath of damp air. “Then what happened to Ook…Ookequk?”
“The other danger, he was teaching me,” Binabik said as he stood up, “was that there are other things beside the wise and the good that roam upon the Road of Dreams, and other dreamers of a more dangerous sort. It is my thinking that he met one of these.”
Binabik led Simon up the little ramp into the cottage.
Geloë unstoppered a wide pot and stuck two fingers in, bringing them out covered with a dark green paste even stickier and stranger smelling than the moss poultice.
“Lean forward,” she said, and wiped a gob of it on Simon’s forehead just above his nose, then did the same for herself and Binabik.
“What is it?” Simon asked. It felt strange on his skin, both hot and cold.
Geloë settled herself before the sunken fire and gestured for the boy and troll to join her. “Nightshade, mockfoil, whitewood bark to give it the proper consistency…” She ranged the boy, the troll, and herself around the fireplace in a triangle, placing the pot on the floor by her knee.
The sensation on his forehead was most curious, Simon decided as he watched the valada throw green twigs onto the fire. White streamers of smoke went writhing upward, turning the space between them into a misty column through which her sulfurous eyes glowed, reflecting the firelight.
“Now rub this on both your hands,” she said, scooping out another gobbet for each of them, “and a dab on your lips—but not in your mouth! Just a dab, there…”
When all was finished, she had them reach out and join hands. Malachias, who had not spoken since Simon and the troll had returned, watched from the pallet beside the sleeping child. The strange boy looked tense, but his mouth was set in a grim line, as though he willed himself to keep his nervousness hidden. Simon stretched his arms out on both sides, clasping Binabik’s small dry paw in his own left hand and Geloë’s sturdy one in his right.
“Hold tightly,” the witch woman said. “There is nothing terrible that will happen if you let go, but it will be better if you hold on.” She cast her eyes down and began to speak softly, the words inaudible. Simon stared at her moving lips, at the drooping lids other wide eyes; again he was struck by how much she resembled a bird, a proud, steep-soaring bird at that. As he continued to gaze through the column of smoke, the tingling on his palms, forehead, and lips began to bother him.
Darkness was suddenly all around, as though a dense cloud had passed before the sun. In a moment he could see nothing but the smoke and the red fireglow beneath it, all else had disappeared into the walls of blackness that loomed up on either side. His eyes were heavy, and at the same time he felt as though someone had pushed his face down in snow. He was cold, very cold. He fell backward, toppling, and the blackness was all around him.
After a time—and Simon had no idea how long it might have been, only that through it all he could still faintly feel the grip on both his hands, a very reassuring sensation—the darkness began to glow with a directionless light, a light that gradually resolved itself into a field of white. The whiteness was uneven: some parts of it shone like sunlight on polished steel; other places were almost gray. A moment later the field of white became a vast, glittering mountain of ice, a mountain so impossibly tall that its head was hidden in the swirling clouds lining the dark sky. Smoke belched from crevices in its glassy sides and streamed upward to join the cloud-halo.
And then, somehow, he was inside the great mountain, flying as rapidly as a spark through tunnels that led ever inward, dark tunnels that were nevertheless lined with mirroring ice. Uncountable thousands of shapes made their way through the mists and shadows and frostglearn—pale-faced, angular shapes who marched the corridors in moving thickets of glimmering spears, or tended the strange blue and yellow fires whose smokes crowned the heights above.
The spark that was Simon still felt two firm hands grasping his own, or rather felt something else that told him he was not alone, for certainly a spark could have no hands to hold. He was at last in a great chamber, a vast hollow in the mountain’s center. The roof was so high above the ice-glazed tiles of the floor that snow flurried down from its upper reaches, leaping, whirling clouds of snow like armies of tiny white butterflies. In the center of the immense chamber was a monstrous well, whose mouth flickered with pale blue light, and which seemed the source of a hideous, heart-squeezing fear. Some heat must have been floating up from its unguessable depths, for the air above it was a roiling pillar of fogs, a misty column gleaming with diffuse colors like a titan icicle catching the sun’s light.
Hanging somehow in the fog above the well, its shape not quite clear or its dimensions entirely guessable, was an inexplicable something: a thing made up of many things and many shapes, all colorless as glass. It seemed—as its lineaments appeared here and there in the swirling mist-pillar—a creation of angles and sweeping curves, of subtle, frightening complexity. In some not quite definable way it seemed an instrument of music. If so, it was an instrument so huge, alien, and frightening that the spark that was Simon knew he could never hear its awful music and live.
Facing the well, in an angular seat of rime-crusted black rock, a figure sat. He could see it clearly, as though suddenly he hovered directly over the terrible, blue-burning well. It was cloaked in a white and silver robe of fantastic intricacy. Snowy hair streamed down over its shoulders to blend almost invisibly with the immaculate white garments.
The pale form lifted its head, and the face was a mass of shining light. A moment later, as it turned away again, he could see that it was only a beautiful, expressionless sculpture of a woman’s face…a mask of silver.
The dazzling, exotic face turned back toward him. He felt himself pushed away, brusquely disconnected from the scene like a clinging kitten being pulled free from the hem of a dress.
A vision swam up before him that was somehow a part of the wreath of fogs and the grim white figure. At first it was only another patch of alabaster whiteness; gradually it became an angular shape crisscrossed with black. The black shapes became lines, the lines became symbols; at last an open book hung before him. On its opened page were letters Simon could not read, twisting runes that wavered and then came clear.
A timeless instant passed, then the runes began to shimmer once more. They pulled apart and reformed themselves into black silhouettes, three long, slender shapes…three swords. One had a hilt shaped like the Tree of Usires, another a hilt like the right-angle crossbeams of a roof. The third had a strange double guard, the cross pieces making, with the hilt, a sort of five-pointed star. Somewhere, deep in Simon’s self, he recognized this last sword. Somewhere, in a memory black as night, deep as a cave, he had seen such a blade.
The swords began to disappear, one by one, and when they were gone only gray and white nothingness was left.
Simon felt himself falling back—away from the mountain, away from the well chamber, away from the dream itself. A part of him welcomed this falling away, horrified by the terrible, forbidden places where his spirit had flown, but another part of him did not want to let go.
Where were the answers?! His whole life had
been caught up, snagged by the passage of some damnable, remorseless, uncaring wheel, and deep in the part of himself that was most private, he was desperately angry. He was frightened, too, trapped in a nightmare that would not end, but what he felt now was the anger; at that moment, it was the stronger.
He resisted the pull, fighting with weapons he did not understand to retain the dream, to wring from it the knowledge he wanted. He seized the fast-diminishing whiteness and furiously tried to mold it, to make it into something that would tell him why Morgenes had died, why Dochais and the monks of Saint Hoderund’s had perished, why the little girl Leleth lay close to death in a hut in the depths of the wild forest. He struggled and he hated. If a spark could weep, he wept.
Slowly, painfully, the ice mountain formed again from the blankness before him. Where was the truth? He wanted answers! As Simon’s dream-self struggled, the mountain grew taller, grew more slender, began sprouting branches like an icy tree as it reached into the heavens. Then the branches fell away, and it was only a smooth white tower—a tower that he knew. Flames burned at its summit. A great, booming sound came, like the tolling of a monstrous bell. The tower wavered. The bell thundered again. This was something of dreadful importance, he knew, something ghastly, something secret. He could feel an answer almost within reach…
Little fly! You have come to us, have you?
A horrible, searing black nothingness reached up and engulfed him, blocking out the tower and the sounding bell. He felt the breath of life burning away inside his dream-self as infinite coldness closed around him. He was lost in the screamingly empty void, a tiny speck at the bottom of a sea of infinite black depths, cut free from life, breath, thought. Everything had vanished…everything except the horrible, crushing hatred of the thing that gripped him…smothered him.
And then, beyond all hope, he was free.
He was soaring, dizzyingly high above the world of Osten Ard, clutched in the strong talons of a large gray owl, flying like the wind’s own child. The ice mountain was disappearing behind him, swallowed up in the immensity of the bone-white plain. In impossibly swift moments the owl carried him away, over lakes and ice and mountains, winging toward a dark line on the horizon. Just as it came clear to him, as the line became a forest, he felt himself beginning to slip from the owl’s claws. The bird clutched him tighter, and dropped earthward in a whistling dive. The ground leaped up, and the owl spread her wide wings. They flattened out, gliding, and whirled across the snowfields toward the security of the forest.
And then they were under the eaves, and safe.
Simon groaned and rolled over onto his side. His head was pounding like Ruben the Bear’s anvil during tournament time. His tongue seemed swollen to twice its normal size; the air he breathed tasted of metal. He pulled himself into a crouch, moving his heavy head as slowly as possible.
Binabik was lying nearby, his wide face pale; Qantaqa nosed at the troll’s side, whimpering. Across the smoking fireplace dark-haired Malachias was shaking Geloë, whose mouth hung slack, her lips gleaming wetly. Simon groaned again as his head throbbed, hanging down between his shoulders like a bruised fruit. He crawled to Binabik. The little man was breathing; even as Simon leaned over him the troll began to cough, gasped for air, and opened his eyes.
“We…” he rasped, “we…are…all here?”
Simon nodded, looking over to Geloë, still motionless despite Malachias’ attentions. “A moment…” he said, and slowly got to his feet.
He walked gingerly out the hut’s front door carrying a small, empty pot. He was faintly surprised to see that, despite the pall of fog, it was still full afternoon; the time on the dream-road had seemed much longer than that. He also had the nagging feeling that something else had changed outside the cottage, but could not put his finger on what the difference was. The view seemed slightly off. He decided it must be some effect of his experience. After filling the pot with lake water and washing the sticky green paste from his hands, he returned to the house.
Binabik drank thirstily, then gestured that Simon should take the container to Geloë. Malachias watched, half-hopeful, half-jealous, as Simon carefully took the witch woman’s jaw in one hand and splashed a little water into her open mouth. She coughed, then swallowed, and Simon gave her a little more.
As he held her head Simon was suddenly aware that, in some way, Geloë had saved him while they were all walking in dream. As he looked down at the woman, who was breathing more regularly now, he remembered the gray owl who had caught him up when his dream-self had been at its final gasp, and had borne him away.
Geloë and the troll had not expected quite such a circumstance, he sensed; in fact, it was Simon who had put them in such danger. For once, though, he had no feelings of shame over his actions. He had done what needed doing. He had been fleeing the wheel long enough.
“How is she?” Binabik asked.
“I think she will be well,” Simon replied, looking at the witch woman carefully. “She saved me, didn’t she?”
Binabik stared for a moment, hair hung in sweaty spikes on his brown forehead. “It is likely that she did,” he said finally. “She is a powerful ally, but even her strength has been by this taxed to the limit.”
“What did it mean?” Simon asked now, releasing Geloë to the supporting arms of Malachias. “Did you see what I saw? The mountain, and…and the lady with the mask, and the book?”
“I wonder if we saw all things the same, Simon,” Binabik answered slowly. “But I am thinking it is important we wait until Geloë can share her thoughts with us. Perhaps later, when we have eaten. I am full of terrible hunger.”
Simon gave the troll a shaky half-smile, and turned to find Malachias staring at him. The boy started to turn away, then seemed to find some internal resolution and held his stare, until it was Simon who began to feel uncomfortable.
“It was as if the whole house was shaking,” Malachias said abruptly, startling Simon more than a little. The boy’s voice was strained, high-pitched and hoarse.
“What do you mean?” Simon asked, fascinated as much by the fact of Malachias speaking as by what he said.
“The whole cottage. While you three sat and stared at the fire, the walls began to…to quiver. Like someone picked it up and set it down again.”
“Most likely it was only the way we were moving while we were…I mean…oh, I don’t know.” Simon gave up in disgust. The truth was, he didn’t really know anything right at this moment. His brains felt as though they’d been stirred with a stick.
Malachias turned away to give more water to Geloë. Raindrops suddenly began to patter down onto the windowsill; the gray sky could hold back its burden of storm no longer.
The witch woman was grim. They had pushed aside the soup bowls and sat facing each other on the bare floor: Simon, the troll, and the mistress of the cottage. Malachias, although obviously interested, remained on the bed beside the little girl.
“I saw evil things moving,” Geloë said, and her eyes flashed. “Evil things that will shake the roots of the world we know.” She had recovered her strength, and something else: she was solemn, and grave as a king in judgment. “I almost wish we had not taken the dream-path—but that is an idle wish, from the part of me that wants just to be left alone. I see darker days coming, and I fear to be drawn in by events so ill-omened.”
“What do you mean?” Simon asked. “What was all that? Did you see the mountain, too?”
“Stormspike.” Binabik’s voice was strangely flat. Geloë looked over at him, nodded, then turned back to Simon.
“True. It was Sturmrspeik we saw, as they call it in Rimmersgard, where it is a legend, as far as Rimmersmen are concerned. Stormspike. The mountain of the Norns.”
“We Qanuc,” Binabik said, “know Stormspike to be real. But still, the Norns have not been intruding on the affairs of Osten Ard since time beyond time. Why now? It looked to me as if, as if…”
“As if they were preparing for war,” Geloë finished fo
r him. “You are right, if the dream is to be trusted. Whether it was true-seeing, of course, would take a better-trained eye than even mine. But you said the hounds that pursue you wear the brand of Stormspike; that is real evidence in the waking world. I think we can trust this part of the dream, or at least I think we ought to.”
“Preparing for war?” Simon was already confused. “Against who? And who was the woman in the silver mask?”
Geloë looked very tired. “The mask? Not a woman. A creature out of legend, you could say, or a creature out of time beyond time, as Binabik put it. That was Utuk’ku, the Queen of the Norns.”
Simon felt a chill sweep over him. The wind outside sang a cold and lonely song. “But what are these Norns? Binabik said they were Sithi.”
“The old wisdom says that they were part of the Sithi once,” Geloë responded. “But they are a lost tribe, or renegades. They never came to Asu’a with the rest of their folk, but disappeared into the unmapped north, the icy lands beyond Rimmersgard and its mountains. They chose to separate themselves from the doings of Osten Ard, although that seems to be changing.”
For a moment Simon saw a flicker of deep unease cross the witch woman’s sour, practical face.
And these Norns are helping Elias chase me? he thought, feeling panic rise again. Why am I sunk in this nightmare?
Then, as if his fright had opened a door in his mind, he remembered something. Unpleasant shapes climbed up from the hidden places in his heart, and he struggled to catch his breath.
“Those…those pale people. The Norns. I’ve seen them before!”
“What!?” Geloë and the troll spoke at the same time, leaning forward. Simon, startled by their intensity, backed away.
“When?” Geloë snapped.
“It happened…I think it happened: it may have been a dream…on the night I ran away from the Hayholt. I was in the lich-yard, and I thought I heard something calling my name—a woman’s voice. I was so frightened that I ran away, out of the lich-yard and toward Thisterborg.” There was a stirring on the pallet: Malachias nervously shifting position. Simon ignored him and continued.