The track descended into the valley, where tents and cooking fires were arranged in a circle with a large bonfire in the center. More goats were penned nearby. Children came out of the tents and ran toward the carts as they approached. They were dressed in a chaotic assortment of Unseelie clothing, wilted finery and rough-hewn commoners' tunics. They shouted out in a strange, staccato language that Ironfoot didn't recognize. When they saw Ironfoot, Timha, Sela, and Silverdun, however, the children stopped and looked to Je Wen.
Je Wen spoke to the children in the same rapid tongue, and they con tinned onto the carts, taking the bags of loot and the larger items. The children remained wary of the newcomers, however, and gave them a wide berth.
A very tall, very slender woman came out of one of the tents and looked at the carts. She was dressed in a gentleman's silk blouse and a housemaid's dress. A necklace of wooden beads was around her neck. All of the Arami stopped what they were doing and watched as she approached. Clearly, she was someone to be reckoned with. She stopped in front of Je Wen's cart and looked at Silverdun, then Sela, then Ironfoot, and finally Timha without speaking. The entire camp had gone silent. Up close, Ironfoot saw that she was in early middle age, perhaps forty, with a few streaks of gray in her long, wavy black hair.
Finally she scratched her head and said in unaccented Common, "I was wondering when you four were going to show up."
The woman's name was Lin Vo, and she was the clan's leader. She ushered them into her tent, which was no different from any of the others. A bit smaller than most, in fact. The interior of her tent was decorated simply, in the same random assortment of styles as her clothing. Nothing matched, and some of the furniture seemed ludicrously unsuited to a nomadic lifestyle. There was an expensive oil lamp atop an antique side table. The bed was a wide mahogany four-poster complete with a gauze hanging atop it; the frame had been broken, but had been efficiently nailed back together. The sheets were silk, but stained with wine.
"Can I get you tea?" said Lin Vo, once they'd all been seated on comfortable cushions that were strewn on the mat-covered ground.
"Tea would be lovely, thank you," said Sela. Sela had a strange knack for understanding what it was that people wanted to hear, so Ironfoot went along with her and accepted as well.
Lin Vo went outside to her cooking fire and came back inside with a battered kettle filled with hot water. She measured some tea into an earthenware teapot and emptied the kettle into it. Then she placed the pot and five chipped porcelain cups on a silver tray and set it down in the midst of her guests. She did all of this without speaking.
"You pour," she said to Sela. She watched carefully as Sela lifted the kettle.
"Might I ask-?" began Silverdun, but Lin Vo cut him off with a harsh look.
"Don't talk while someone's pouring tea," she said.
Once the tea was poured, Lin Vo took a cup and raised it to them. "The Arami welcome you," she said.
"Now," she said, cutting off Silverdun, who was about to speak again. "We can skip the formal introductions and back and forth. I know who all of you are, and I know why you're here, and how you ended up here."
"You have the Gift of Premonition," said Silverdun.
Lin Vo scoffed. "You people and your Gifts. You always have to have everything in nice neat rows. Twelve Gifts, twelve months in a year, twelve constellations looking down over you. Have you ever seen a Chthonic cynosure? Big dodecahedron. They'll go on for hours about all the lines and facets and vertices on it and what they mean."
"What do you want from us?" asked Timha. He'd been silent since they'd arrived at the Arami camp, and was clearly scared out of his wits.
Lin Vo laughed. "Oh, Journeyer Timha. You're frightened, and I can see why. But that's no excuse to be rude. Besides, it's not about what I want from you, which is nothing, and all about what you need from me."
"And what is it that we need from you?" asked Silverdun.
"Well, it seems to me that you need a couple of things. You need to get back to where you came from with our friend Timha in tow, and in order for that to happen, you're going to need Je Wen to lead you down to the border. Because if you try to make it on your own, you'll be dead in two days."
"A premonition?" asked Ironfoot.
"Merely stating the obvious," said Lin Vo. "Folks from up in the sky who find their way down here have a tendency to wander into quakes or get eaten by wolves."
"This is nonsense," said Timha. "Premonitive or not, this woman is lying. We're most likely going to be held for ransom, and this tale is simply to keep us docile in the meantime."
"I can see you're not going to let me get any work done," said Lin Vo to Timha. "So let's get this over with now. Here's what you think is going to happen. You think you're going to waggle your fingers under your robe and do something nasty and I'm going to fall over dead and you and your friends are going to fight your way out of here."
Timha glared at her but said nothing.
"What's really going to happen is that you're going to try that and fail, and then you're going to sit there and listen, and then when we're done you're all going to say `Thank you very much, Lin Vo,' and then I'm going to send you off with Je Wen at first light."
Timha still said nothing. Lin Vo looked at Ironfoot and said, "Watch closely, Ironfoot. You're going to like this."
While her head was turned, Timha lifted his hands and drew a sigil of unbinding in the air. This was the call to some spell that he'd memorized previously and kept fully formed in his mind with a binding around it to keep it contained. The sigil was meaningless to Ironfoot, but when the re started condensing around him, he recognized immediately what Timha was doing. He was creating a space of Motion around Lin Vo, stopping the vibration of all matter in a sphere around her. This sphere would not only immobilize her, but it would also render her body and the air around her solid and freezing to the touch, killing her. Lin Vo sat looking at Timha, doing nothing, looking disappointed.
Ironfoot watched closely, his re sense having become heightened along with his strength and his other senses. What had Jedron done to him back on Whitemount? He could almost see the flow of essence from Timha, channeled as Motion, enveloping Lin Vo. She was going to die.
"Timha!" shouted Silverdun, who was probably seeing this as well as Ironfoot was. "Stop!"
Ironfoot moved to rush Timha, but before he could get up, something strange happened. Lin Vo didn't move, but a warm pulse of re shot from her, filling the room. But it was like no re Ironfoot had ever seen. Somehow Lin Vo had used re without channeling it through one of the Gifts. It made no sense. It was like a colorless color, or an animal that wasn't of any species, or a sung note with no pitch. It was the reitic equivalent of division by zero. It was simply not possible.
But there it was. Ironfoot watched, enthralled, as Lin Vo's re encompassed Timha's Motion. It wasn't like a duel between battle mages; there was no confrontation, no conflict. The two essences combined, and where Timha's Motion had been, suddenly there was Elements, and the Elements swirled back toward Timha, and the air around him turned to water.
Suddenly soaking wet, Timha flinched backward, staring at Lin Vo in astonishment.
Lin Vo looked at Ironfoot. Only a second or two had passed since she'd last spoken. "See what I mean? You liked it, didn't you?"
Ironfoot nodded, stymied. What he had just seen wasn't just impossible, it was ... paradoxical.
Lin Vo took a deep breath and settled herself on her cushion. "There's a towel behind you," she told Timha. "I had a feeling something like this might happen."
There was indeed a towel. It was monogrammed. Timha rubbed his hair with it, looking haunted. Lin Vo's display had not been lost on him, either.
"What did you just do?" asked Ironfoot.
"Me?" said Lin Vo. "That was nothing. I just changed things around a bit."
"You have the Thirteenth Gift," said Silverdun. "Change Magic."
"There you go with your Gifts again," said Lin Vo. "Ev
erything's a Gift with you people."
She sighed. "Now if we're done with the histrionics, I'd like to get the conversation going, because it's going to be light in a few hours, and that's when you need to leave."
Silverdun rolled his eyes and said, "Please tell me you're not going to launch into a rambling, vague prophecy of some kind, telling us our fate."
"No," said Lin Vo. "And I don't like that word `fate.' There's no such thing as fate. There's only the river."
"What river is that?" asked Sela.
"Time is the river, Sela, and we're all floating down it. It's a strong current and it carries us. We can paddle this way and that and we can try to swim upstream for a while or make ourselves go faster, but we're headed down that river one way or another.
"What you call Premonition is just the ability to sit up a little bit and look downstream. Sometimes you can see rocks ahead; sometimes you can see that we're all about to go over a waterfall."
"Why are you telling us all this?" asked Silverdun. Ironfoot could see that he was growing impatient. Silverdun claimed to have a philosophical bent, but Ironfoot had noticed that he was always far happier when he was in action.
"Because there's a waterfall just up ahead."
"If we're all going over it anyway," said Silverdun, "then why bother telling us?"
"So you can go down it feet first, with your eyes open, silly." She sipped her tea. "So I sent Je Wen out there to wait for you to come falling out of the sky, and here you are."
"Surely you didn't do this out of the goodness of your heart," said Silverdun. "What do you want in return?"
"Oh, my! How cynical you are," said Lin Vo. "Sometimes people do the right thing because it's the right thing to do."
She touched his knee. "There's a war coming, Silverdun. War is the greatest waste there is, and we Arami are particularly indisposed to waste, as you may have noticed. And this isn't just any war. This is a war that has the power to end Faerie. The power to turn this world to dust."
"The Einswrath," said Ironfoot.
"There you go," said Lin Vo. "That little device changes everything, as the four of you know all too well. In fact, none of you would be here if it weren't for the Einswrath."
"There aren't any Einswrath," said Timha.
"What?" said Silverdun, glaring at him.
"We couldn't figure out how to do it," said Timha, his eyes downcast. "We tried. We did everything we could. They said they would kill us all if we didn't."
"And that's why you ran," said Sela.
"But you've got the plans with you," said Silverdun. "Are you saying they're not real?"
"No!" shouted Timha. "They're real. They're extremely detailed, and they were drawn by Hy Pezho himself. But he's gone and he can't explain how it all works."
"Now he tells us," said Silverdun.
"I didn't want to die," said Timha. "I'm giving you the plans; that's how badly I don't want to die. If you can figure out how to make the thing work then you'll have the Einswrath and Mab won't. Don't you get it? Don't you understand what I've done?"
"Funny name, `Einswrath,"' said Lin Vo. "The wrath of Ein. Strange thing to name a weapon. You wouldn't think they'd name it after a made-up god who's supposedly been buried in the ground for thousands of years."
"So you don't believe that any gods are real?" asked Silverdun. "I'd always heard that the Arami worshipped the Chthonic gods."
"Oh, the gods are real," said Lin Vo. "Just not the way you think. And you're all going to have to learn how to think things anew if you're going to survive."
"A premonition?" asked Silverdun.
"A fact of life," said Lin Vo. She looked at Timha. "Not you, though. You just keep doing what you're doing."
Silverdun stood, clearly irritated. "I don't know about my companions, but I've had enough clever presentiment for one night. I appreciate your hospitality, but I think I'd prefer a bed."
"I don't blame you, Silverdun. This is all very tiresome and vague. Pre- monitives have a reputation for that. But true vision isn't something that can be expressed in words. To put it into words is to render it false. I can only point you in a direction; I can't tell you what you'll find when you get there. Maddening, I know. Not too different from the gods, really."
"Ah," said Silverdun. Ironfoot could tell that Silverdun was tired. The pressure of leading this assignment was wearing him down.
"You go rest, Silverdun. I don't have anything more to tell you; in fact, the less I tell you, the better. Take Timha and Ironfoot here with you. Je Wen will find a place for you to lie down."
"Thank you," said Silverdun, visibly relieved.
"What about me?" asked Sela.
"Let's talk about you, Sela. Let me pour you a cup of tea, because this is going to take a while." She looked up at the men. "Go on, you three. Ladies only."
Ironfoot, Silverdun, and Timha left the tent, and found Je Wen waiting for them outside.
"Was your conversation profitable?" he asked.
"I have no idea," said Ironfoot.
Je Wen gave him a knowing smile. "Come with me."
The tent next to Lin Vo's held four mattresses piled with blankets and pillows, and not much else. Silverdun sprawled on one, his eyes wide open, and Timha was fast asleep on the other by the time Ironfoot got his boots off.
"I thought you were tired," said Ironfoot, looking at Silverdun.
"I am. More exhausted than I can remember being in a long, long time."
"That was an ... unusual conversation."
Silverdun sat up, rubbing his temples. "People like her drive me utterly mad," he said.
"Did you see what she did to Timha?" Ironfoot asked. "The way she used re?"
Silverdun shook his head. "I haven't the slightest idea what happened there. I saw Timha channeling Motion, and the next thing I knew, he looked like he'd been dunked in a pond. Strangest thing I ever saw." He lay back down and closed his eyes.
"Get some sleep," he said. "I have a feeling we've got a couple of long days ahead of us."
Ironfoot lay down as well, but couldn't sleep either. When he closed his eyes he saw the patterns in his mind again, and the colorless color of Lin Vo's magic.
An undefined term. Division by zero.
Some time later, just as he was drifting off, Sela slipped into the tent. He caught a glimpse of her in the firelight from outside. Tears glistened on her face, but she didn't look sad. Quite the opposite: For the first time he could remember, she looked at peace.
Ironfoot awoke what felt like a moment later, although it must have been at least four hours, because gray dawn was already filtering in through the tent flaps. Though he'd slept little, and fitfully, when he stood up he felt fully awake and rested. Another perk of the change wrought upon him and Silverdun at Whitemount, whatever it had been. He needed little sleep these days, and what little he got worked wonders.
Hell, it even grew back a hand if necessary.
"About time you woke up," said Silverdun. He was already up and pulling on his boots. He looked as refreshed as Ironfoot felt.
"How do you feel right now, Silverdun?" he asked.
"Just fine," said Silverdun.
"After just four hours of sleep."
"I'm not questioning it today," said Silverdun. "Just grateful for it. I woke up in fine fettle and don't intend to let anything bring me down today."
"That's uncharacteristically optimistic of you," said Ironfoot.
"Apparently my previous character wasn't doing me much good," said Silverdun drily.
"Is it morning already?" said Sela. She sat up on her mattress and looked around, groggy. "I feel as though I just fell asleep."
Outside, the Arami tribe was already up and active. The central fire pit had been covered over with sand, and the tents were being struck. Timha walked through the camp, his eyes half-closed and suspicious, but took coffee and a pipe when they were offered. Je Wen was rolling up a portion of tent canvas when they found him.
"Goo
d morning," Je Wen said. "I trust you all slept well?"
"Your trust is misplaced," said Silverdun. "We all slept poorly. But we're ready to go when you are."
Midwinter 02: The Office of Shadow Page 31