The Stone of Farewell

by Tad Williams

  If this was one of Morgenes’ favorite hostelries, he thought muzzily some time later, then the doctor had a high tolerance for slackness. He renewed his braying cry, marveling at the pained quality of his own voice as it echoed through this unfrequented area of Kwanitupul. At last, a white-haired head appeared in the doorway above and remained there for long moments, regarding Tiamak as though he were some interesting but unsolvable puzzle. At last the head’s owner left the safety of the doorway and came forward. It was an old Perdruinese or Nabbanai man, tall and well-built, whose handsome pink face wore the simple expression of a young child. He stopped and squatted at the edge of the landing, looking down at Tiamak with a pleasant smile.

  “The ladder.” Tiamak waved his steering pole. “I can’t reach the ladder. ”

  The old man looked kindly from Tiamak to the ladder, then seemed for some time to reflect gravely on the whole question. At last he nodded, his smile widening. Tiamak, despite extreme weariness and the pain of his throbbing leg, found himself smiling back at this strange old bird. After this exchange of unspoken good cheer had gone on for some little while, the man abruptly turned and disappeared back into the doorway.

  Tiamak howled despairingly, but the old man reappeared a few moments later with a boat-hook clutched in his long-fingered hand which he used to jiggle the ladder free; it uncoiled the rest of the way and the bottom splashed into the green water. Tiamak, after a moment of muddled deliberation, took a few things from the boat and began to climb. The Wrannaman found he had to stop twice during the short three-fathom trip to rest. His crocodile-bitten leg was burning with a pain like fire.

  By the time he reached the top his head was reeling worse than it had all day. The old man had gone, but when Tiamak dragged the heavy door open and hobbled through he found him again, now sitting in the corner of an enclosed courtyard on a pile of blankets that looked as though they served as his bed, surrounded by skeins of rope and various other tools. Most of the space in the damp courtyard was taken by a pair of upturned boat-hulls. One had been badly slashed, as though by a sharp rock. The other was half-painted.

  As Tiamak made his way around the jars of white paint that cluttered the path across the courtyard, the old man smiled foolishly at him once more, then settled back into his blankets as though to fall asleep.

  The door at the far side of the courtyard led into the inn itself. This bottom floor seemed to contain only a dowdy common room with a handful of stools and a few long tables. A sour-faced Perdruinese woman, heavy-armed and with gray-shot hair, stood pouring beer from one jug to another.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  Tiamak paused in the doorway. “Are you ... he at last remembered the former nun’s name, ”... Xorastra?”

  The woman made a face. “Dead three years. She was my aunt. Mad as a mudlark. Who are you? You’re a swamp man, aren’t you? We don’t take beads or feathers here for payment.”

  “I need a place to stay. My leg is injured. I am a friend of Father Dinivan and of Doctor Morgenes Ercestres.”

  “Never heard of them. Blessed Elysia, but you do speak decent Perdruinese for a savage, don’t you? We have no rooms available. You can sleep with old Ceallio out there. He’s simple-minded but he does no harm. Six cintis a night, nine if you want food. ” She turned away, gesturing absently at the courtyard beyond.

  As she finished speaking a trio of children thundered down the stairs, smacking at each other with switches, laughing and shrieking. They almost knocked Tiamak down as they pushed past him and went through into the courtyard.

  “I must have help with my leg.” Tiamak swayed as dizziness washed over him. “Here.” He reached into his belt-pouch and pulled out the two gold Imperators he had been saving for years. He had brought them with him for just such an emergency, and what good would money be to him if he died? “Please, I have gold.”

  Xorastra’s niece turned. Her eyes bulged. “Rhiappa and her large Pirates!” she swore. “Look at that, now!”

  “Please, good lady. I can bring you back many more of these.” He couldn’t, but there was a much better chance this woman would help keep him alive if she thought he could. “Just get a barber or a healer to see to my leg, and give me food and a place to sleep.”

  Her mouth, still gaping in surprise at the appearance of the glittering golden coins, widened even further as Tiamak pitched over at her feet, senseless as a stone.

  “ ... But although not everything that thrives in shadow is bad, Hakatri, still much that hides in darkness does so to keep its evil hidden from all eyes.”

  Simon was beginning to lose himself in this strange dream, to feel as though it were to him that the patient, pained voice spoke: he felt bad for having been so long absent, for bringing further suffering to such a high yet afflicted soul.

  “Your brother has long hidden his plans beneath a cloak of shadow. The year-end was danced countless times after Asu’a’s fall before we had even a hint that he still lived—if his spectral existence can be called life. Long he plotted in darkness, hundreds of years of black-minded deliberation before the first steps were taken. Now, with his plan marching forward, there is so much still hidden in shadow. I think and I watch, I wonder and I guess, but the subtlety of his design eludes my old eyes. I have seen many things since first I saw leaves fall in Osten Ard, but I cannot make sense of this. What does he plan? What does your brother Ineluki mean to do... ?”

  The stars seemed very naked over Stormspike, gleaming white as polished bone, cold as knobs of ice. Ingen Jegger thought them very beautiful.

  He stood beside his horse on the road before the mountain. The bitter wind whistled through the ivory muzzle of his snarling, dog-faced helm. Even his Norn-stallion, bred in the world’s blackest, coldest stables, was doing its best to duck the brutal sleet that the wind flung like arrows—but Ingen Jegger was exalted. The shrill of the wind was a lullabye, the sting of freezing sleet a caress. Ingen’s mistress had set him a great task.

  “No other Queen’s Hunter has ever been granted such a responsibility,” she had told him as the indigo light of the Well filled the Chamber of the Harp. As she spoke, the groans of the Singing Harp—a great, translucent and ever-changing thing cloaked by the mists of the Well—had made the very stones of Stormspike shudder. “We have brought you back from the outlands of Death’s Country.” Utuk’ku’s glittering mask threw back the Well’s blue radiance so fiercely that her face was obscured, as though a flame burned between shoulders and crown. “We have also given you weapons and wisdom no other Queen’s Hunter has ever had. Now we offer you a task of terrible difficulty, a task like no one, mortal or immortal, has ever faced.”

  “I will do it, Lady,” he had said, and his heart had throbbed within him as though it would burst from joy.

  Standing now on the royal roadway, Ingen Jegger looked at the ruins of the old city that lay all about him, skeletal litter on the lower slopes of the great ice-mountain. When the huntsman’s progenitors were scarcely more than savages, he thought, ancient Nakkiga had stood beneath the night sky in her full beauty, a needle-forest of alabaster and white witchwood, a chalcedony necklace around the mountain’s throat. Before the huntsman’s people had known fire, the Hikeda’ya had built pillared chambers within the very mountain itself, each chamber blazing with a million crystalline facets of glittering lamplight, a galaxy of stars burning in the darkness of the earth.

  And now he, Ingen Jegger, was their chosen instrument! He wore the mantle no mortal had ever borne! Even to one of his training, of his horrifying discipline, it was a maddening thought.

  The wind gentled. His steed made a noise of impatience, a large pale shape beside him in the flurrying snow. He stroked the horse with his gloved hand, letting his touch rest on its powerful neck, feeling the quick pulse of life. He put a boot into the stirrup and lifted himself into the saddle, then whistled for Niku‘a. A few moments later the great white hound appeared on a rise nearby. Nearly as large as the huntsman’s hors
e, Niku’a filled the night with his steaming breath; the dog’s short fur was pearled with mist so that it glowed like moonlit marble.

  “Come,” Ingen Jegger hissed. “Great deeds lie before us!” The road stretched before him, leading down from the heights and into the unsuspecting lands of sleeping men. “Death is behind us. ”

  He spurred his horse forward. The hooves fell on the icy road like hammers.

  “... And so in a way I am blinded to your brother’s machinations.” The voice in Simon’s head was growing more and more faint now, withering like a rose lingered past its season. “I have been forced to my own stratagems—and poor, weak games they seem when placed against the swarms of Nakkiga and the enduring, deathless hatred of the Red Hand. Worst of all, I do not know what I am fighting, although I believe I am now discerning the first faint shapes. If I have even a glimmer of the truth, it is horrible. Horrible.

  “Ineluki’s game has begun. He was the child of my loins; I cannot shirk my responsibility. Two sons I had, Hakatri. Two sons I have lost.”

  The woman’s voice was only a whisper, the merest breath, but still Simon could feel its bitterness. “The eldest are always the loneliest, my quiet one, but no one should be left behind for so long by those whom they, had loved ...”

  And then she was gone.

  Simon awakened slowly out of the extended darkness that had held him. His ears seemed to echo strangely, as though the absence of the voice to which he had listened so long left a greater emptiness. When he opened his eyes, light flowed in, dazzling him; when he closed them, rings of bright color spun before his shuttered lids. He assayed a more careful view of the world and found that he was in a tiny forest dell blanketed in new-fallen snow. Pale morning light streamed down through the overhanging trees, silvering the naked branches and speckling the forest floor.

  He was very cold. He was also completely alone.

  “Binabik!” he cried. “Qantaqa!” A moment later he added “Sludig!” as an afterthought. There was no reply.

  Simon untangled himself from his cloak and clambered unsteadily to his feet. He shook off a coating of powdery snow, then stood for a moment rubbing his head to clear the shadows. The dingle mounted up steeply on either side of him; judging by the array of torn branches piercing his shirt and breeches, he had tumbled down from above. He felt himself gingerly, but other than the long, healing wound on his back and some ugly toothmarks on his leg, he seemed only bruised and scraped and very, very stiff. He grabbed a protruding root in his hand and clambered painfully up the side of the dell. His legs were trembling as he scrambled over the edge and stood up. A monotonous profusion of snow-robed trees stretched away in all directions. There was no sign of his friends or his horse; in fact, there was no sign of anything but endless white forest.

  Simon tried to remember how he had come to this place, but drew only a shuddering memory of the last mad hours in Skodi’s abbey, of a hateful, icy voice that had plagued him, and of riding into blackness. Afterward there had been a gentler, sadder voice that had spoken long in his dreams.

  He looked around, hoping at least to find a saddlebag, but with no luck. His empty scabbard was tied to his leg; after some searching, he finally spotted the bone knife from Yiqanuc lying at the bottom of the dingle. With many a self-pitying curse, Simon climbed back down to retrieve it. He felt a little better to have something sharp close to hand, but it was a very tiny consolation. When he reached the top once more and looked around at the inhospitable expanse of wintery woods, a sense of desertion and fear crept over him that had been absent for a long while. He had lost everything—everything! The sword Thorn, the White Arrow, the things that he had won, all were gone! And his friends were gone, too.

  “Binabik!” he screamed. Echoes fled and vanished. “Binabik! Sludig! Help me!” Why had they deserted him? Why?

  He shouted for his friends again, over and over as he stumbled back and forth across the forest clearing.

  His voice hoarse, his many cries unanswered, Simon slumped down on a rock at last and fought back tears. Men shouldn’t cry just because they were lost. Men didn’t do that sort of thing. The world seemed to shimmer a little, but it was only the fierce cold that made his eyes sting so. Men shouldn’t cry, no matter how terrible things had gotten....

  He put his hands in his cloak pocket to ease the chill and felt the rough carvings of Jiriki’s mirror beneath his fingers. He lifted it out. Gray sky was reflected there, as though the looking glass were full of clouds.

  He held the scale of the Greater Worm before him. “Jiriki,” he murmured, breathing on the shiny surface as though his own warmth might lend the thing a kind of life. “I need help! Help me!” The only face that looked back was his own, wearing a pale scar and a sparse red beard. “Help me.”

  Snow began to fall once more.

  19

  Children of the Navigator

  Miriamele awakened slowly and unpleasantly. The pounding in her head was not helped at all by the side-to-side swaying of the floor, and she was unhappily reminded of a particular Aedonmansa supper at the palace in Meremund when she was nine years of age. An indulgent servant had allowed her to drink three goblets of wine; the wine had been watered, but Miriamele had still become very ill, throwing up all over her new Aedontide frock and spoiling it beyond reclamation.

  That long-ago bout of stomach-sickness had been preceded by just such a sway as she was now feeling, as though she were aboard a boat rocking up and down in the midst of the ocean. The morning following her drunken adventure she had remained in bed with a horrific headache—a pain almost as bad as the one she was experiencing now. What grotesque indulgence had led her to this dreadful pass?

  She opened her eyes. The room was fairly dark, the roofbeams overhead heavy and crudely cut. The mattress on which she was lying was impossibly uncomfortable, and the room would not stop its terrible tilting. Had she been so drunk that she had fallen and struck her head badly? Perhaps she had split her crown and was even now dying... ?

  Cadrach.

  The thought came to her suddenly. In fact, she remembered, she hadn’t been drinking or doing anything of the sort. She had been waiting in Father Dinivan’s workroom, and ... and ...

  And Cadrach had struck her. He had said they could not wait any longer. She had said they would. Then he had said something else and hit her on the head with something heavy. Her poor head! And to think that for a foolish moment she had regretted trying to drown him!

  Miriamele struggled to her feet, holding her head between her hands as though to keep the pieces together. It was just as well she was bent double: the ceiling was so low that she could not have stood up. But the swaying! Elysia, Mother of God, it was worse than being drunk! It seemed mad that being cuffed on the head could make things veer and wobble so. It was indeed just like being on a ship....

  She was on a ship, and a ship under sail at that. The realization came suddenly from a subtle amalgam of clues: the movement of the floor, the faint but definite creaking of timbers, the thin, saltier-than-usual scent of the air. How had this happened?

  It was hard to make out anything in the near-blackness, but as far as Miriamele could tell she was surrounded by casks and barrels. She was in the hold of a ship, that was certain. As she squinted into the darkness, another sound began to make itself heard, something that had been there all along, but was only now becoming clear.

  Someone was snoring.

  Miriamele was immediately filled with a mixture of rage and fear. If it was Cadrach, she would find him and strangle him. If it was not Cadrach—Merciful Aedon, who could say how she had wound up on this boat, or what the mad monk might have done that had made them both fugitives? If she revealed herself, it might be to a stowaway’s death sentence. But if it was Cadrach—oh, she so wanted to catch hold of his flabby neck... !

  She hunkered down between a pair of casks; the sudden movement sent a stabbing pain down the back of her neck. Slowly and quietly, she began to crawl toward the so
urce of the rasping noise. Whoever was burring and mumbling so did not seem apt to be sleeping lightly, but there was no sense taking unnecessary risks.

  A sudden thumping from overhead set her cowering both from possible discovery and the painful noise itself. When nothing followed but softer repetitions, Miriamele decided it was only the normal business of the ship going on above. She continued to stalk her snoring prey through the rows of close-stacked barrels.

  By the time she was a few cubits away from the snorer, she no longer felt even the slightest doubt—she had heard that sodden, drunken rumble too many nights to mistake it.

  At last she crouched over him. Feeling with her hand, she located the empty jug curled in the crook of his arm with which he’d besotted himself. Above that, she felt Cadrach’s unmistakable round face, the wine-sour breath piping wetly in and out of his open mouth as he snored and muttered. The feel of him filled her with fury. It would be so easy just to crack his sodden skull with the plundered jar, or topple one of the leaning barrel towers to crush him like a bug. Hadn’t he plagued her since she had met him? He had stolen from her and sold her to her enemies like a slave, and now he had struck her and dragged her by force out of God’s house. Whatever else she was, whatever her father had become, she was still a princess of the blood of King Prester John and Queen Ebekah. No drunkard of a monk had a right to lay hands on her! No man! No one... !

  Her anger, which had been curling and spiraling higher within her like the flames of a wind-tortured fire, blazed up and then abruptly vanished. Tears choked her; sobs thudded painfully in her chest.