Guile of Dragons, A

by James Enge

  The sun rose in the west here. That’s how far from home she was. She said to Earno, “If the sun rises there, that’s the east.” But he replied, “East and west are not arbitrary directions. The worlds are linked by the Sea of Worlds, and they radiate from the anchor of the Rock Probability in non-random fashion. The points of the compass, like Probability, are fixed. Our sun rises on the western edge of the world, as it faces the Sea of Worlds.”

  “A globe doesn’t have an edge. If I were on the other side of the globe—”

  And then he explained to her that the world was flat. That was a very long strange conversation, in which she learned and unlearned many things.

  The great city center bristled with its many towers, but the city spread far beyond its ancient walls now: long ages of peace had made the towers relics, those that had not been dismantled. On either side of the river Ruleijn the long twisting tree-lined streets ran, speckled with markets and bookstalls and smithies and wineshops and schools and open-air refectories and dancing greens and gymnasia where people wrestled as naked as seals and buildings that clearly had some function but Nimue didn’t understand it.

  And she never got lost. It seemed as if part of her had always lived there, or had waited to live there. She had walked the place in dreams, never remembering them until she woke to find herself there.

  One evening she was coming home to Tower Ambrose, the sun a smoky red eye sinking beyond the blue wrinkled line of the Grartan Mountains in the east, when Earno met her on the street.

  “You shouldn’t walk so much,” he said gruffly, not bothering to greet her.

  “Pregnant women need exercise too,” she pointed out, amused. She knew that he was worried about her trying to escape again, and that he was angry at her because she was associated with Merlin, and that he despised her because she had betrayed Merlin, and that he was frightened of her because her swollen belly reminded him of his mother in her childbearing youth, and that he felt a faint dark trickle of desire for her, which in turn disgusted him because he was primarily attracted to younger men. All these were voices in his chorus, but underneath and overtop of all them was this: she was in his charge and he was concerned for her well-being. That was the strong harmonizing note in his internal chorus. She found his inner self in great harmony with his outer self, more so than anyone whose heart she listened to. She had grown to like him a good deal, though the reverse was not true.

  “Ah,” said Earno’s face. Pregnant women: bad luck on a ship, said his heart.

  “We’re not aboard the Stonebreaker now, Earno,” she replied, to his thought rather than his speech. Stonebreaker was the ship he had commanded in his youth, the one where he had fought and killed a dragon. He was usually thinking about it, even when he wasn’t talking about it, which he seldom did.

  “Are you reading me now?” he asked, alarm coloring his face and all his thoughts.

  She laughed at the question. She could remember when she, like Earno, would have had to go into some sort of trance to reach the level of sight that she experienced continuously, without effort, since her swim through the Sea of Worlds. She could remember it, but she didn’t really believe in it. Everyone walked in all realms simultaneously; most could not bring themselves to notice it, but they garnered knowledge from it unconsciously, as Earno now did, speaking in harmony with her unspoken thought, “I am afraid that the Sea of Worlds did you harm.”

  “You think of the hole in my mind as a flaw. Why not a door?”

  “In any castle wall, a door is a flaw,” he said solemnly. “Our minds are more like castles than like open cities—there is a danger to us if any stranger, any enemy can come upon us and enter our selves.” He said this partly because it was true and partly because he was afraid his farmer-mother would find out that he hated slaughtering animals. His mother had been dead for a century, and it had been more than two centuries since he’d fled the family farm and begun to work on the merchant ships that sailed the Sea of Worlds out of Anglecross Port. But the fear still jangled the song of his thoughts. Also, there was a stone there, weighing heavily down on the notes.

  “You’re thinking of the Witness Stone,” she said.

  He nodded. “There is danger for any witness on the stone, anyone who undergoes a forced rapport in any circumstance. But I fear this will be worse for you. I wish—” He wished there were some way he could protect her, she saw; he also wished there were some way he could hide from the contempt of his dead mother. “There will be seers of great skill and power present,” he said aloud. “They will not seek to harm you. But neither will they really try to protect you. Their goal will be to learn what you know of Merlin’s deeds in your world. If the inquiry harms you, they’ll shed no tears.”

  She was strangely moved at his cold concern, the sympathy he betrayed when he said they instead of we. But she was not afraid, not until it was too late to do any good, if it ever would have done any good.

  They came for her before dawn. The west-facing window of her bedroom was still dark when she found herself shaken awake by the grumpy doorwatcher. (He was not one of Merlin’s people. He’d been hired by the Graith to tend the tower while Merlin faced his trial, or whatever they called it—hired with whose money she had no idea. The sole comfort of being a prisoner is that money is someone else’s problem.)

  She threw the doorwatcher out and dressed at a leisurely pace, keeping her eyes on the strange stars out her window. When she was ready, she threw a shawl over her head and went to meet her inquisitors.

  There were eight Guardians waiting for her in the dooryard of the tower. Four wore long bloodred cloaks like Earno did. She knew (now) that this marked them as vocates—full members of the Graith of Guardians. The others wore short gray capes—that meant they were thains, mere candidates to the Graith, really. They were the most soldierly of the three ranks of Guardian, and these ones carried spears taller than themselves. They might have been mere ceremonial weapons; the shafts were ivory-pale and the gores glittered like ice. But the thains carried them lightly, as if from long practice, and they looked sturdy enough to do some damage at need.

  “So!” laughed Nimue, pointing at the points. “You’ll poke me with those until I talk, eh?”

  “Be quiet,” said one of the vocates, a furious white-faced, white-haired woman. “We don’t need you to talk.”

  “God Avenger, Noreê!” uttered another vocate, a dark-haired man who moved with catlike grace and wore a sword at his side. “Please ignore my colleague’s ill-temper, Nimue. Talk as it suits you—though it’s true that it doesn’t matter what you say. The real questions, and answers, will not involve words.”

  “They never do. Naevros,” she added impishly, reading his name floating on the surface of his mind. He had been thinking of introducing himself but then thought better of it.

  His pleasant face didn’t twitch, but inwardly he recoiled violently when he realized what she’d done.

  The gray-caped thains weren’t as self-controlled and moved farther away, as if that made their thoughts safer from intrusion. Since they were taking her to have her thoughts intruded on, Nimue found this amusing and laughed outright.

  “Well, Guardians,” said a tall, bendable, fair-haired vocate, “she’s either got nerves of stone or she has no idea what’s ahead of her. Or she’s crazy. Or maybe there’s something I haven’t thought of; it’s just barely possible. Madam, I’m called Jordel. Naevros you know, and he has introduced Noreê to you. It remains to me to introduce the brooding silent craglike figure yonder, known with bitter irony as Illion the Wise.”

  Illion’s wry jester’s face grinned a little wider and he said, “Ignore him, Nimue. We all do.”

  “Except when you need me.”

  “We never need him. Shall we introduce the thains, too, Jordel, or should we be off?”

  “First, you should be off. Second, she already knows their names. Third, I can’t remember their names. Fourth, I don’t want to know their names, because I don’
t anticipate needing the services of these quivering custards in gray capes on any future occasion.”

  Sullenly, the thains closed in again, their clenched determination to do their duty like heads of barley on the long wavering stalks of their fear.

  Jordel and Illion led the way with two of the thains while the others followed. As he walked Jordel chatted with her, the thains, Illion, and stray passersby—either to set her at ease, or to pass the time, or because he couldn’t bear to do otherwise. Underneath he was like steel—so guarded in his thoughts that she wondered if even he could hear them.

  They came finally to the old wall of the city. It had long since fallen into ruin through disuse, but the Chamber of Stations was there, where the ruined wall met the river Ruleijn. There the Graith of Guardians had met since before there was history (so Earno said). The chamber was faced and domed in red marble, a beautiful if somewhat sinister shade, reminding her of dried blood. A single thain stood on the steps outside the chamber, spinning her heavy spear idly in her fingers as if it were a stylus. Her hair was mingled red and black; her eyes were amber; her skin was pale; her mouth was like a wound. She frightened Nimue more than anyone she had met in the Wardlands.

  “Maijarra, my dear—” Jordel began.

  “I’m not your dear.”

  “Thain Maijarra, then. We want to return these thains for the money back, please. They were quite useless.”

  Maijarra’s yellow eyes scanned the abashed thains. “Oh?”

  “Yes. Fortunately, Nimue came along quietly. Otherwise Illion and I would have had to subdue her with bare fisticuffs.”

  “What’s a fisticuff?”

  “How should I know, and me being a man of peace?”

  “I’ll talk to them. The others are inside.”

  The thains stayed behind and spoke with Maijarra in low voices while Nimue and the vocates mounted the gray steps to the door of the red dome.

  The others, many others, were indeed there. The barrel of the dome was ringed with windows and there was plenty of light, but still Nimue felt a darkness and a chill in that chamber. There was a round table on a dais, and standing at the table were many red-cloaked figures: the vocates of the Graith of Guardians.

  Earno was not standing with them. He stood at the foot of the dais along with Merlin, whose wrists were bound with golden cords. Earno was speaking passionately about something. The First Decree, or monarchy, or freedom, or something. But he was thinking about slaughtering season on his family’s farm, how he used to run and hide, how they always dragged him there to watch the killing and, on one nightmarish occasion, to actually kill a beast: an old ram with scraggly wool. In Earno’s mind, Merlin was that ram, which Nimue thought was quite amusing. She was less amused to realize that her face was on one of the dead beasts in Earno’s submerged, distorted memory—one of the beasts whose death he had watched and had been unable to prevent.

  He turned and looked at her. “Here is my witness,” he said, looking at her but still speaking to the Graith. “She will tell you of Merlin’s deeds in this other world. Then you, my peers, will speak his fate.”

  Earno stepped forward and took her by the hand. He walked her over to a gray marbled chunk of rock in an apse of the chamber. He said no word to her, nor needed to: she knew this was the Witness Stone, and what he would do. He put her hand on the stone and she was suddenly not herself.

  Not only herself, anyway. She was still there, floating in the center of her own awareness, but now circling her in every dimension were these other minds, briefly hers and forever not-hers, joined for this moment in the rapport of the stone.

  They remembered her memories and understood them in ways she never had. For instance: when she assisted Merlin in moving the Giants’ Walk from Ireland to Britain. It was the feat of making she was most proud of. They had anchored the stones so securely in the green plain of Salisbury that they seemed to have grown there. As the vocates remembered her memories, she slowly realized it was even more marvelous than that. Merlin had used a power-focus that anchored the stones in time as well as space, rewriting the history of the world so that the stones had been there for ages, had never been in Ireland at all. This the vocates understood, and so she understood it. That was interesting to her.

  But not as interesting as their memories. While they were riffling through her fragmented selfhood, she found herself free to explore theirs. This one, named Vineion, lived in a tower with a hundred dogs. He thought rather like a dog, mulling over feeding times and runs along the river and games and loyalty and fear. Jordel was remembering a time when Merlin had sewn up a wound in his side, but was regretfully deciding that the old man would have to be exiled. Callion the Proud, a tall marble-faced vocate, was detached from the inquiry, having already made up his mind. He was watching Noreê with cool patient longing.

  Noreê herself was the strangest mind of all. Her self was like a crystal shell on which played simulacra of feelings or thoughts, but that wasn’t what she was really thinking or feeling. Nimue had never sensed so harrowingly complete a personal defense. She wondered idly what was going on behind it.

  Merlin was in the room, but apparently the rapport of the stone barred her from joining minds with him. He looked concerned. Really, she had never seen him so concerned.

  Another presence she couldn’t feel was the life in her own womb. It was odd to her, alien indeed since their passage through the Sea of Worlds, but she had grown used to feeling it and the not-feeling was unpleasant, like the numbness of a frozen limb. Why would they bar her from contact with her unborn child? It made no sense.

  She explored the barrier with her awareness . . . and was trapped by it.

  Her selfhood divided. Part of it was as unconcerned as ever, if diminished. Part of her was trapped in the barrier wrapped around her own womb.

  Her child was dying. Anyway, it was fighting for its life, helplessly struggling against a more powerful, endlessly malefic entity: Noreê. That was the secret behind the vocate’s shell: she had somehow used the Stone to create a separate rapport between herself and the fetus and she was launching attack after attack on it, trying to kill it with her mind. Nimue knew she should stand between her child and the murderous seer, but her heart quailed as she even thought of doing so: Noreê’s hate was raw, desperate, dangerous. It would kill Nimue as readily as her child.

  She wondered if she could disrupt the separate rapport through the Stone. . . . Noreê was fearfully powerful, but she was doing three things at once: sustaining the separate rapport, maintaining her facade for the Graith, and striving to kill the child. If Nimue could strike one of those things off balance . . .

  The rapport that was killing her child was also a passageway. Things can move both ways through a passage. . . . She tried sending thoughts past the volcanic torrent of Noreê’s hate. The seer was intent on her task, and hardly noticed their passage.

  The thoughts percolated through Noreê’s facade, appearing on the surface of her shell. Help, they said, in Latin and Wardic. Noreê is killing us.

  Callion was the first to notice. He broke rapport and spoke sharply to Noreê with his mouth. He called to the other Guardians. They shifted their attention to batter at Noreê’s facade.

  The barriers broke. The tide of hate receded and Nimue was alone in her own mind with her wounded weeping child.

  She would have spoken then, said something to the frost-faced witch who hated her child so much with so little reason. But something was wrong. There was a pain in her, merely physical, but demanding all her attention. Noreê had succeeded in convincing her body to reject the child.

  She slipped in a puddle of amniotic fluid and blood pouring from her own body and fell speechless from the stone.

  Or was it the child rejecting her? She thought of that as she swam in and out of awareness over the next few hours. The child seemed fighting to be free of her, struggling to climb out of her. She wanted to let it. She had never felt pain like this before. This could not be n
ormal. Or maybe it was. Old women talked of childbirth and looked wise and said poetic things . . . and all the time they knew it was like this. Lying whores. She’d do the same to them one day. Christ, oh sweet Christ, it hurt.

  And in the end, there it was, a boy, and the pain was receding like a fiery red tide, and Merlin was there holding the child, cutting the cord and wrapping the baby with a grayish cloth. He said a funny thing as he handed the child to her: “The blood may fume a bit, but the cloth won’t burn, at least for a while.”

  She took the child and tried to feel for it what you were supposed to feel. It looked funny. And it watched her, oddly intent, with slate gray eyes. It had long fingers and its head was hairy—she’d seen some newborns, but never with heads of hair like this.

  “What do we call it?”

  “In the Wardlands, the first name is the mother’s privilege, the last name the father’s. I’ll call him Ambrosius, if you don’t mind.”

  “No, that’s right.” Names. She should have been thinking of names. Only she’d had no one to talk to about it, really. “Aren’t you mad at me?”

  “Some,” Merlin admitted. She’d seen him lie like a fiend, but he never did to her; she wondered why. “But,” he continued, “the thing is done. This part of our lives is over. We have a chance to start again.”

  “With our. With our son.” She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

  “Not necessarily. The Graith have given me permission to leave him behind. He can be raised in the Wardlands.”

  “Is it really so wonderful here?” She thought resentfully of Noreê but couldn’t say anything, not yet.

  “He’d be better off. But we can take him with, if you’d like.”

  She didn’t want to. She wanted someone to take the pain and the strangeness of him from her. It was a relief to think of someone else bearing that burden. “All right,” she said weakly.