Riddle-Master Trilogy

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “He must have gone in the tavern,” Raederle said, and added a little irritably, for her feet hurt and she could have used a cup of wine, “He might have waited for us.” She saw then, above the small tavern, the dark, endless rise of granite cliff and the Pass, itself, blazing with a glacial light as the last rays of the sun struck peak after icy peak. She took a breath of the lucent air, touched with a chill of fear at the awesome sight, and wondered for the first time since she had left An, if she had the courage to come face-to-face with the High One.

  The light faded as they watched; shadows slipped after it, patching the Pass with purple and grey. Only one mountain, far in the distance, still burned white in some angle of light. The sun passed finally beyond the limits of the world, and the great flanks and peaks of the mountain turned to a smooth, barren whiteness, like the moon. Then Lyra moved slightly, and Raederle remembered she was there.

  “Was that Erlenstar?” Lyra whispered.

  “I don’t know.” She saw Bri Corbett come out of the tavern, then cross the street. His face looked oddly somber; he seemed as he reached them and stood looking at them, at a loss for words. His face was sweating a little in the cool air; he took his cap off, ran his fingers through his hair, and replaced it.

  Then he said for some reason to Tristan, “We’re going to Isig Mountain, now, to talk to Danan Isig.”

  “Bri, what’s wrong?” Raederle asked quickly. “Is there—is it something in the Pass?”

  “You’re not going through the Pass. You’re going home.”

  “What?”

  “I’m taking you home tomorrow; there’s a keel-boat going down the Ose—”

  “Bri,” Lyra said levelly. “You are not taking anyone as far as the end of the street without an explanation.”

  “You’ll get enough of one, I think, from Danan.” He bent unexpectedly, put his hands on Tristan’s shoulders, and the familiar, stubborn expression on her face wavered slightly. He lifted one hand, groped for his hat again, and knocked it into the street. He said softly, “Tristan…” and Raederle’s hand slid suddenly over her mouth.

  Tristan said warily, “What?”

  “I don’t… I don’t know how to tell you.”

  The blood blanched out of her face. She stared back at Bri and whispered, “Just tell me. Is it Eliard?”

  “No. Oh, no. It’s Morgon. He’s been seen in Isig, and, three days ago, in the King’s court in Osterland. He’s alive.”

  Lyra’s fingers locked in a rigid, painful grip above Raederle’s elbow. Tristan’s head bent, her hair brushing over her face. She stood so quietly they did not realize she was crying until her breath caught with a terrible sound in her throat, and Bri put his arms around her.

  Raederle whispered, “Bri?” and his face turned to her.

  “Danan Isig himself gave word to the traders. He can tell you. The trader I spoke to said—other things. You should hear them from Danan.”

  “All right,” she said numbly. “All right.” She took Tristan’s cloth from her as Bri led them toward the horses. But she turned to see the dark, startled expression in Lyra’s eyes and, beyond her, the darkness moving down the Pass in the wake of the silvery Ose.

  They found two of the guards before they left the city. Lyra asked them briefly to find lodgings in Kyrth; they accepted the situation without comment, but their faces were puzzled. The four followed the road across the bridge up the face of the mountain, which had settled into a shadowy, inward silence that the beat of their horse’s hooves on the dead pine needles never penetrated. The road’s end ran beneath the stone archway into Danan’s courtyard. The many workshops, kilns and forges all seemed quiet, but as they rode through the darkened yard, one of the workshop doors opened suddenly. Torchlight flared out of it; a young boy, gazing at the metalwork in his hands, stepped under the nose of Bri’s horse.

  Bri reined sharply as the horse startled; the boy, glancing up in surprise, put an apologetic hand on the horse’s neck and it quieted. He blinked at them, a broad-shouldered boy with black, blunt hair and placid eyes, “Everyone’s eating,” he said. “May I tell Danan who has come, and will you eat with us?”

  “You wouldn’t be Rawl Ilet’s son, would you?” Bri asked a little gruffly. “With that hair?”

  The boy nodded. “I’m Bere.”

  “I am Bri Corbett, ship-master of Mathom of An. I used to sail with your father, when I was a trader. This is Mathom’s daughter, Raederle of An; the Morgol’s land-heir, Lyra; and this is Tristan of Hed.”

  Bere’s eyes moved slowly from face to face. He made a sudden, uncharacteristic movement, as though he had quelled an impulse to run shouting for Danan. Instead he said, “He’s just in the hall. I’ll get him—” He stopped speaking abruptly, a jump of excitement in his voice, and went to Tristan’s side. He held her stirrup carefully for her; she gazed down at his bent head in amazement a moment before she dismounted. Then he yielded and ran across the dark yard, flung the hall doors open to a blare of light and noise, and they heard his voice ringing above it: “Danan! Danan!” Bri, seeing the puzzled look on Tristan’s face, explained softly, “Your brother saved his life.”

  The King of Isig followed Bere out. He was a big, broad man whose ash-colored hair glinted with traces of gold. His face was brown and scarred like tree bark, touched with an imperturbable calm that seemed on the verge of being troubled as he looked at them.

  “You are most welcome to Isig,” he said. “Bere, take their horses. I’m amazed that the three of you travelled so far together, and yet I’ve heard not a word of your coming.”

  “We were on our way to Erlenstar Mountain,” Raederle said. “We didn’t give anyone word of our leaving. We were buying supplies in Kyrth when Bri—when Bri gave us a piece of news that we could scarcely believe. So we came here to ask you about it. About Morgon.”

  She felt the King’s eyes study her face in the shadows a moment, and she remembered then that he could see in the dark. He said, “Come in.” and they followed him into the vast inner hall. A weave of fire and darkness hung like shifting tapestries on the walls of solid stone. The cheerful voices of miners and craftsmen seemed fragmented, muted in the sheer silence of stone. Water wound in flaming, curved sluices cut through the floor, trailed lightly into darkness; torchlight spattered across raw jewels thrusting out of the walls. Danan stopped only to give a murmured instruction to a servant, then led them up a side staircase that spiralled through the core of a stone tower. He stopped at a doorway, drew back hangings of pure white fur.

  “Sit down,” he urged them, as they entered. They found places on the chairs and cushions covered with fur and skins. “You look worn and hungry; food will be brought up, and I’ll tell you while you eat what I can.”

  Tristan, her face quiet again, bewildered with wonder, said suddenly to Danan, “You were the one who taught him how to turn into a tree.”

  He smiled. “Yes.”

  “That sounded so strange in Hed. Eliard couldn’t understand how Morgon did it. He used to stop and stare up at the apple trees; he said he didn’t know what Morgon did with—with his hair, and how could be breathe—Eliard.” Her hands tightened on the arms of her chair; they saw the flash of joy in her eyes that was constantly tempered by a wariness. “Is he all right? Is Morgon all right?”

  “He seemed so.”

  “But I don’t understand,” she said almost pleadingly. “He lost the land-rule. How can he be alive? And if he’s alive, how can he be all right?”

  Danan opened his mouth, closed it again as servants entered with great trays of food and wine, bowls of water. He waited while the fire was laid against the cool mountain evening, and they had washed and begun to eat a little. Then he said gently, as though he were telling a story to one of his grandchildren, “A week ago, walking across my empty yard at twilight, I found someone coming towards me, someone who seemed to shape himself, as he moved, out of the twilight, the ember smoke, the night shadows, someone I never again thought to se
e in this world… When I first recognized Morgon, I felt for a moment as though he had just left my house and come back, he looked that familiar. Then, when I brought him into the light, I saw how he was worn to the bone, as if be had been burned from within by some thought, and how his hair was touched, here and there, with white. He talked to me far into the night, telling me many things, and yet it seemed that there was always some dark core of memory he would not open to me. He said that he knew he had lost the land-rule and asked for news of Hed, but I could tell him almost nothing. He asked me to give word to the traders that he was alive, so that you would know.”

  “Is he coming home?” Tristan asked abruptly. Danan nodded.

  “Eventually, but… he told me he was using every shade of power he had learned just to stay alive—”

  Lyra leaned forward. “What do you mean ’learned’? Ghisteslwchlohm taught him things?”

  “Well, in a way. Inadvertently.” Then his brows pulled together. “Now, how did you know that? Who it was that had trapped Morgon?”

  “My mother guessed. Ghisteslwchlohm had also been one of the Masters at Caithnard when Morgon studied there.”

  “Yes. He told me that.” They saw something harden in the peaceful eyes. “You see, apparently the Founder of Lungold was looking for something in Morgon’s mind, some piece of knowledge, and in probing every memory, every thought, burning away at the deep, private places of it, he opened his own mind and Morgon saw his vast reserves of power. That’s how he broke free of Ghisteslwchlohm at last, by drawing from the wizard’s mind the knowledge of his strengths and weaknesses, using his own power against him. He said, near the end, at times he did not know which mind belonged to whom, especially after the wizard stripped out of him all instinct for the land-rule. But at the moment he attacked finally, he remembered his name, and knew that in the long, black, terrible year he had grown stronger than even the Founder of Lungold…”

  “What about the High One?” Raederle said. Something had happened in the room, she felt; the solid stones circling the firelight, the mountains surrounding the tower and the house seemed oddly fragile; the light itself a whim of the darkness crouched at the rim of the world. Tristan’s head was bent, her face hidden behind her hair; Raederle knew she was crying soundlessly. She felt something beginning to break in her own throat, and she clenched her hands against it. “What… Why didn’t the High One help him?”

  Danan drew a deep breath. “Morgon didn’t tell me, but from things he did say, I think I know.”

  “And Deth? The High One’s harpist?” Lyra whispered. “Did Ghisteslwchlohm kill him?”

  “No,” Danan said, and at the tone in his voice even Tristan lifted her head. “As far as I know he’s alive. That was one thing Morgon said he wanted to do before he went back to Hed. Deth betrayed Morgon, led him straight into Ghisteslwchlohm’s hands, and Morgon intends to kill him.”

  Tristan put her hands over her mouth. Lyra broke a silence brittle as glass, rising, stumbling into her chair as she turned. She walked straight across the room until a window intruded itself in her path, and she lifted both hands, laid them flat against it. Bri Corbett breathed something inaudible. Raederle felt the tears break loose in spite of the tight grip of her hands; she said, struggling at least to control her voices, “That doesn’t sound like either one of them.”

  “No,” Danan Isig said, and again she heard the hardness in his voice. “The stars on Morgon’s face were of some thought born in this mountain, the stars on his sword and his harp cut here a thousand years before he was born. We’re touching the edge of doom, and it may be that the most we can hope for is an understanding of it. I have chosen to place whatever hope I have in those stars and in that Star-Bearer from Hed. For that reason I have complied with his request that I no longer welcome the High One’s harpist into my house or allow him to set foot across the boundaries of my land. I have given this warning to my own people and to the traders to spread.”

  Lyra turned. Her face was bloodless, tearless. “Where is he? Morgon?”

  “He told me he was going to Yrye, to talk to Har. He is being tracked by shape-changers; he moves painstakingly from place to place, taking shape after shape out of fear. As soon as he left my doorstep at midnight he was gone—a brush of ash, a small night animal—I don’t know what he became.” He was silent a moment, then added wearily, “I told him to forget about Deth, that the wizards would kill him eventually, that he had greater powers in the world to contend with; but he told me that sometimes, as he lay sleepless in that place, his mind drained, exhausted from Ghisteslwchlohm’s probing, clinging to despair like a hard rock because that was the only thing he knew belonged to him, he could hear Deth piecing together new songs on his harp… Ghisteslwchlohm, the shape-changers, he can in some measure understand, but Deth he cannot. He has been hurt deeply, he is very bitter…”

  “I thought you said he was all right,” Tristan whispered. She lifted her head. “Which way is Yrye?”

  “Oh, no,” Bri Corbett said emphatically. “No. Besides, he’s left Yrye, by now, surely. Not one step farther north are any of you going. We’re sailing straight back down the Winter to the sea, and then home. All of you. Something in this smells like a hold full of rotten fish.”

  There was a short silence. Tristan’s eyes were hidden, but Raederle saw the set, stubborn line of her jaw. Lyra’s back was an inflexible, unspoken argument. Bri took his own sounding of the silence and looked satisfied.

  Raederle said quickly before anyone could disillusion him, “Danan, my father left An over a month ago in the shape of a crow, to find out who killed the Star-Bearer. Have you seen or heard anything of him? I think he was heading for Erlenstar Mountain; he might have passed this way.”

  “A crow.”

  “Well, he—he is something of a shape-changer.”

  Danan’s brows pulled together. “No. I’m sorry. Did he go directly there?”

  “I don’t know. It’s always been difficult to know what he’s going to do. But why? Surely Ghisteslwchlohm wouldn’t be anywhere near the Pass, now.” A memory came to her then, of the silent grey waters of the Winter coming down from the Pass, churning faceless, shapeless forms of death up from its shadows. Something caught at her voice; she whispered, “Danan, I don’t understand. If Deth has been with Ghisteslwchlohm all this year, why didn’t the High One warn us, himself, about him? If I told you that we intended to leave tomorrow, go through the Pass to Erlenstar Mountain to talk to the High One, what advice would you give us?”

  She saw his hand lift in a little, quieting gesture. “Go home,” he said gently. But he would not meet her eyes. “Let Bri Corbett take you home.”

  She sat late that night, thinking, after they had finished talking, and Danan’s daughter, Vert, had taken them to small, quiet rooms in the tower to sleep in. The thick stones were chilly; the mountain had not fully emerged into spring, and she had lit a small fire laid in the hearth. She gazed into the restless flames, her arms around her knees. The fire flickered like thoughts in her eyes. Out of it rose fragments of knowledge she had; she wove them back and forth into one shapelessness after another. Somewhere far beneath her, she knew, hardened forever into memory, were the dead children of the Earth-Masters; the fire shivering over her hands might have drawn their faces out of their private blackness, but never warmed them. The stars that had grown in that same darkness, that had been brought to light and given their own pattern in Danan’s house, would have burned like questions in the flame, but of their own place in a greater pattern they offered little answer. The thought of them lit her mind like the blue-white stone Astrin had given her; she saw again the strange face always on the verge of turning towards her, moving into identity. Another face shifted into her mind: the private, austere face of a harpist who had placed her uncertain finders on her first flute, who had, with his flawless harping and vigilant mind, been the emissary of the High One for centuries. The face had been a mask; the friend who had led Morgon out of H
ed, down the last steps to near-destruction, had been for centuries a stranger.

  She shifted; the flames broke apart and rejoined. Things did not match, nothing seemed logical. Ylon leaped in her mind, at the sea’s harping the sea he came out of had given her and Mathom gifts of power; it had nearly given Morgon his death. Something in her had wept with a memory at the sight of the ruined city at King’s Mouth Plain; something in her had wrenched at her mind for the dangerous knowledge in the core of the small blue stone. Morgon had ridden towards the High One’s house, and the High One’s harpist had twisted his path into horror. A wizard had ripped from his mind the right he had been born with; the land-law, which no one but the High One could alter, and the High One had done nothing. She closed her eyes, feeling the prick of sweat at her hairline. Deth had acted in the High One’s name for five centuries; he had been given nothing less, in those centuries, than absolute trust. Following some private pattern of his own, in an unprecedented, inconceivable act, he had conspired to destroy a land-ruler. The High One had occasionally, in early days, dispensed doom for the simple intention. Why had he not acted against this man who had betrayed him as well as the Star-Bearer? Why had the High One not acted against Ghisteslwchlohm? Why… She opened her eyes, the fire flaring painfully at her widened pupils, and she bunked, seeing the room washed in flame. Why had Ghisteslwchlohm, who had the whole of the backlands of the realm to hide in, and who should have felt the need to hide, kept Morgon so close to Erlenstar Mountain? Why, when Deth had harped to himself that long year while Morgon clung to the despair that was his life, had the High One never heard that harping? Or had he?