Riddle-Master Trilogy

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Good-bye. Go home.” She held Raederle’s eyes a moment before she loosed her and repeated softly, “Go home.”

  She turned, mounted, and gave them a spear-bearer’s salute, her spear flaring upward like a silver torch. Then she wheeled her horse, took her place beside Trika at the head of the lines, and led the guards out of the Hlurle docks without looking back, Raederle watched her until the last guard disappeared behind the warehouses. Then she turned almost aimlessly and saw the empty ramp before her. She went up slowly, found Bri and Tristan watching the flicker of spears in the distance. Bri sighed.

  “It’s going to be a quiet journey without someone using the boom for target practice. We’ll finish getting supplies here and sail a straight run past Ymris to Caithnard. Making,” he added grimly, “the widest possible detour around Ymris. I would rather see the King of An himself off my bowsprit than Astrin Ymris.”

  They saw neither on the long journey to Caithnard, only an occasional trade-ship making its own prudent path around the troubled Ymris coast. Sometimes the ships drew near to exchange news, for tales of the errant ship out of An had spread from one end of the realm to the other. The news was always the same: war in Ymris had spread up into Tor and east Umber; no one knew where Morgon was; no one had heard anything of Mathom of An; and one startling piece of news from Caithnard: the ancient College of Riddle-Masters had sent away its students and closed its doors.

  The long journey ended finally as the weary ship took the lolling afternoon tide into the Caithnard harbor. There were cheers and various remarks from the dockside as the dark sails wrinkled and slumped on the mast and Bri eased the ship into its berth. Bri ignored the noise with patience tempered by experience, and said to Raederle, “We’re taking in a little water; she’ll need repairs and supplies before we continue to Anuin. It will be a day or two, maybe. Do you want me to find you lodgings in the city?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She gathered her thoughts with an effort. “Yes. Please. I’ll need my horse.”

  “All right.”

  Tristan cleared her throat. “And I’ll need mine.”

  “You will.” He eyed her. “For what? Riding across the water to Hed?”

  “I’m not going to Hed, I’ve decided.” She bore up steadily under his flat gaze. “I’m going to that city—the wizards’ city. Lungold. I know where it is; I’ve looked on your maps. The road leads straight out of—”

  “Hegdis-Noon’s curved eyeteeth, girl, have you got a sensible bone anywhere in you?” Bri exploded. “That’s a six-weeks journey through no-man’s land. It’s only because I have a hold weeping bilge water that I didn’t take you straight to Tol. Lungold! With Deth and Morgon headed there, the Founder and who knows how many wizards coming like wraiths out of the barrows of Hel, that city is going to fall apart like a worm-eaten hull.”

  “I don’t care. I—”

  “You—”

  They both stopped, as Tristan, her eyes moving past Bri, took a step backward. Raederle turned. A young man with a dark, tired, vaguely familiar face had come up the ramp. Something in his plain dress, his hesitant entry onto Bri’s ship, stirred a memory in her mind. His eyes went to her face as she moved, and then, beyond her, to Tristan.

  He stopped, closing his eyes, and sighed. Then he said, “Tristan, will you please come home before Eliard leaves Hed to look for you.”

  Something of the mutinous, trapped expression in her eyes faded. “He wouldn’t.”

  “He would. He will. A trader coming down from Kraal spotted this ship at Hlurle and said you were coming south. Eliard was ready to leave then, but we—I won a wrestling match with him, and he said if I came back without you, he’d leave Hed. He’s worn to the bone with worry, and his temper is short as a hen’s nose. There’s no living on the same island with him, drunk or sober.”

  “Cannon, I want to come home, but—”

  Cannon Master shifted his stance on the deck. “Let me put it this way. I have asked you politely, and I will ask you again. The third time, I won’t ask.”

  Tristan gazed at him, her chin lifted. Bri Corbett allowed a slow smile of pure contentment to spread over his face. Tristan opened her mouth to retort; then, under the weight of Cannon’s implacable, harassed gaze, changed tactics visibly.

  “Cannon, I know where Morgon is, or where he’s going to be. If you’ll just wait, just tell Eliard to wait—”

  “Tell him. I told him it was a fine morning once and be threw a bucket of slops at me. Face one thing, Tristan: when Morgon wants to come home, he’ll come. Without help from any of us. Just as he managed to survive. I’m sure, by now, he appreciates the fact that you cared enough to try td find out what happened to him.”

  “You could come with me—”

  “It takes all my courage just to stand here with that bottomless water between me and Hed. If you want him to come home, then go back yourself. In the High One’s name, give him something he loves to come home to.”

  Tristan was silent, while the water murmured against the hull and the lean black shadow of the mast lay like a bar at her feet. She said finally, “All right,” and took a step forward. She stopped. “I’ll go home and tell Eliard I’m all right. But I don’t promise to stay. I don’t promise that.” She took another step, then turned to Raederle and held her tightly. “Be careful,” she said softly. “And if you see Morgon, tell him… Just tell him that. And tell him to come home.”

  She loosed Raederle, went slowly to Cannon’s side. He dropped a hand down her hair, drew her against him, and after a moment she slid an arm around his waist Raederle watched them go down the ramp, make their way through the hectic, disorderly docks. A longing for Anuin wrenched at her, for Duac, and Elieu of Hel, for Rood with his crow-sharp eyes, for the sounds and smells of An, sun-spiced oak and the whisper, deep in the earth, of the endless fabric of history.

  Bri Corbett said gently behind her, “Don’t be sad. You’ll smell the wind of your own home in a week.”

  “Will I?” She looked down and saw the white brand on her palm that had nothing to do with An. Then sensing the worry in him, she added more lightly, “I need to get off this ship, I think. Will you ask them to bring my horse up?”

  “If you’ll wait, I’ll escort you.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll be all right. I want to be alone for a while.”

  She rode through the docks, down the busy merchants’ streets of the city, and if anyone troubled her, she did not notice. The fading afternoon drew a net of shadows across her path as she turned onto the silent road that led up to the College. She realized she had seen no students that day, with their bright robes and restless minds, anywhere in Caithnard. There were none on the road. She took the final wind to the top and saw the empty sweep of the College grounds.

  She stopped. The dark, ancient stones with their blank windows seemed to house a hollowness, a betrayal of truth as bitter and terrible as the betrayal at Erlenstar Mountain. The shadow of that mountain had swept across the realm into the hearts of the Masters, until they found the greatest deceit within their own walls. They could send the students away, but she knew that though they might question themselves, they would never question the constant, essential weave and patterning of Riddle-Mastery.

  She dismounted at the door and knocked. No one came, so she opened it. The narrow hall was empty, dark. She walked down it slowly, glimpsing through the long line of open doors each small chamber that had once held bed, books and endless games over guttering candles. There was no one downstairs. She took the broad stone stairs to the second floor and found more lines of open doors, the rooms holding no more in them than an expressionless block of sky. She came finally to the door of the Masters’ library. It was closed.

  She opened it. Eight Masters and a King, interrupting their quiet discussion, turned to her, startled. The King’s eyes, ancient, ice-blue, burned as he looked at her with sudden curiosity.

  One of the Masters rose. He said gently, “Raederle
of An. Is there some way we can help you?”

  “I hope so,” she whispered, “because I have no place else to go.”

  8

  SHE TOLD THEM, sitting in their gentle, impartial silence, of the shape-changer, who had come to her in Danan’s house, and of her flight out of Isig Mountain. She told them of the stone Astrin had found on King’s Mouth Plain and showed them the mark of it on her palm. She told them how she had held fire in the empty hollow of night in the backlands, while the wine cup of the High One’s harpist flashed and fell in its light. She told them, knowing they knew it, but telling them by right of sorrow and heritage, the tale of Ylon, born out of An and the formless sea, and she saw in their eyes the gathering of the threads of riddlery. When she finished, dusk had crept in to the room, blurring the silent, dark-robed figures, old parchment and priceless, gold-hinged manuscripts. One of the Masters lit a candle. The flame gave her the patient, weary working of lines on his face, and beyond him, the spare, ungentle face of the Osterland King. The Master said simply, “We are all questioning ourselves these days.”

  “I know. I know how imperatively. You have not closed your doors only because you accepted the Founder of Lungold as a Master here. I know who was there to meet Morgon when Deth brought him to Erlenstar Mountain.”

  The taper the Master held dipped toward a wick and halted. “You know that, too.”

  “I guessed. And later, Deth—Deth told me it was so.”

  “He seems to have spared you very little,” Har said. His voice sounded dry, impersonal, but she saw in his face a hint of the anger and confusion the harpist had loosed into the realm.

  “I was not asking to be spared. I wanted truth. I want it now, so I came here. It’s a place to start from. I can’t go back to An with this. If my father were there, maybe I could. But I can’t go back and pretend to Duac and Rood and the Lords of An that I belong to An as surely as the roots of trees and the old barrows of Kings. I have power, and I am afraid of it. I don’t know—I don’t know what I might loose in myself without meaning to. I don’t know, any more, where I belong. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Ignorance,” the wolf-king murmured, “is deadly.”

  Master Tel shifted, his worn robe rustling in the hush. “You both came for answers; we have few to give you. Sometimes, however, the turn of a question becomes an answer; and we do have many questions. Above all: one regarding the shape-changers. They appeared almost without warning at the moment the Star-Bearer began realizing his destiny. They knew his name before he did; they knew of the sword bearing his stars deep in the grave of the Earth-Masters’ children at Isig. They are old, older than the first weave of history and riddlery, originless, unnamed. They must be named. Only then will you know the origins of your own power.”

  “What else do I need to know about them, except that they have tried to destroy the King’s lines in An and Ymris, that they blinded Astrin, they almost killed Morgon, they have no mercy, no pity, no love. They gave Ylon his life, then drove him to his death. They have no compassion even for their own—” She stopped, then, remembering the voice of the shape-changer striking its unexpected, puzzling timbre of richness.

  One of the Masters said softly, “You have touched an incongruity?”

  “Not compassion, but passion…” she whispered. “The shape-changer answered me with that. And then she wove her fire into such beauty that I hungered for her power. And she asked me what had driven Ylon back to them, if they were so terrible. She made me hear the harping Ylon heard, made me understand his longing. Then she told me Morgon had killed the harpist.” She paused in their silence, the practiced stillness of old men, the heart of patience. “She handed me that riddle.” Her voice was toneless. “That incongruity. Like Deth’s kindness, which maybe was only habit, and… maybe not. I don’t know. Nothing—the High One, this College, good or evil—seems to keep its own shape any more. That’s why I wanted Morgon, then, so badly. At least he knows his own name. And a man who can name himself can see to name other things.”

  Their faces under the restless candlelight seemed molded out of shadow and memory, they sat so quietly when her voice faded.

  At last Master Tel said gently, “Things are themselves. We twist the shapes of them. Your own name lies within you still, a riddle. The High One, whoever he is, is still the High One, though Ghisteslwchlohm has worn his name like a mask.”

  “And the High One’s harpist is what?” Har asked. Master Tel was silent a moment, withdrawing into a memory.

  “He studied here, also, centuries ago… I would not have believed a man who took the Black could have so betrayed the disciplines of riddle-mastery.”

  “Morgon intends to kill him,” Har said brusquely, and the Master’s eyes lifted again, startled.

  “I had not heard…”

  “Is that a betrayal of riddle-mastery? The wise man does not pursue his own shadow. There are no instincts of his own land-law in him to stay his hand; there is not one land-ruler, including the Morgol, who will not comply with his wishes. We give him understanding; we bar the gates to our kingdoms as he requests. And we wait for his final betrayal: self-betrayal.” His implacable gaze moved from face to face like a challenge. “The Master is master of himself. Morgon has absolute freedom of this realm. He has no longer the restraints of land-law. The High One is nowhere in evidence except in the evidence of his existence. Morgon has bound himself, so far, to his destiny by the tenets of riddle-mastery. He also has enormous, untested power. Is there a riddle on the master lists that permits the wise man to revenge?”

  “Judgment,” one of the Masters murmured, but his eyes were troubled. “Who else is permitted to judge and condemn this man who has betrayed the entire realm for centuries?”

  “The High One.”

  “In lieu of the High One—”

  “The Star-Bearer?” He twisted their silence like a harp string, then broke it. “The man who wrested his power from Ghisteslwchlohm because no one, not even the High One, gave him any help? He is bitter, self-sufficient, and by his actions he is questioning even the elusive restraints of riddle-mastery. But I doubt if he sees even that in himself, because wherever he looks there is Deth. His destiny is to answer riddles. Not destroy them.”

  Something eased in Raederle’s mind. She said softly, “Did you tell him that?”

  “I tried.”

  “You complied with his wishes. Deth said he was driven out of Osterland by your wolves.”

  “I had no desire to find even the shape of Deth’s footprint in my land.” He paused; his voice lost its harshness. “When I saw the Star-Bearer, I would have given him the scars off my hands. He said very little about Deth or even about Ghisteslwchlohm, but he said… enough. Later, as I began to realize what he was doing, how far from himself he seemed to have grown, the implications of his actions haunted me. He was always so stubborn…”

  “Is he coming to Caithnard?”

  “No. He asked me to take his tale and his riddles to the Masters, who in their wisdom would decide whether or not the realm could bear the truth about the one we have called the High One for so long.”

  “That’s why you shut your doors,” she said suddenly to Master Tel, and he nodded, with the first trace of weariness she had ever seen in him.

  “How can we call ourselves Masters?” he asked simply. “We have withdrawn into ourselves not out of horror, but out of a need to reconstruct the patterns we have called truth. In the very fabric of the realm, its settlement, histories, tales, wars, poetry, its riddles—if there is an answer there, a shape of truth that holds to itself, we will find it. If the tenets of riddle-mastery themselves are invalid, we will find that, too. The Master of Hed, in his actions, will tell us that.”

  “He found his way out of that dark tower in Aum…” she murmured. Har shifted.

  “Do you think he can find his way out of another tower, another deadly game? This time, he has what he always wanted: choice. The power to make his own rules for the g
ame.”

  She thought of the cold, sagging tower in Aum, rising like a solitary riddle itself among the gold-green oak, and saw a young man, simply dressed, stand in front of the worm-eaten door in the sunlight a long time before he moved. Then he lifted a hand, pushed the door open, and disappeared, leaving the soft air and the sunlight behind him. She looked at Har, feeling as though he had asked her a riddle and something vital hung balanced on her simple answer. She said, “Yes,” and knew that the answer had come from someplace beyond all uncertainty and confusion, beyond logic.

  He was silent a moment, studying her. Then he said, his voice gentle as the mill of snow through the still, misty air of his land, “Morgon told me once that he sat alone in an old inn at Hlurle, midway on his journey to Erlenstar Mountain, and waited for a ship to take him back to Hed. That was one point when he felt he had a choice about the matter of his destiny. But one thing stopped him from going home: the knowledge that he could never ask you to come to Hed if he could not give you the truth of his own name, of himself. So he finished his journey. When I saw him come into my house not long ago, as simply as any traveller seeking shelter in my house from the night, I did not at first see the Star-Bearer. I saw only the terrible, relentless patience in a man’s eyes: the patience born out of absolute loneliness. He went into a dark tower of truth for you. Do you have the courage to give him your own name?”

  Her hands closed tightly, one clenched over the pattern of angles on her palm. She felt something in her that had been knotted like a fist ease open slowly. She nodded, not trusting her voice, and her hand opened, glinting with secret knowledge in the candlelight. “Yes,” she said then. “Whatever I have of Ylon’s power, I swear by my name, I will twist it beyond possibility into something of value. Where is he?”