The place reeked of magic; the scent was so strong that even she, who was accustomed to the atmosphere, detected it immediately on entering. Though the room was open to the air, no breeze ever freshened it; the miasma was always there. Sometimes, stray tendrils would drift down to the nearest houses, or to the ships anchored in the bay, causing the inhabitants to dream strange dreams or experience vague, irrational fears.
As soon as she closed the last door behind her, locking it with a curiously constructed key like a tiny fingerbone, Ouriána moved purposefully toward the largest of the stones. They were not quite spherical, and when not in use, the Talir en Nydra appeared dull and opaque. But as soon as she placed her hands on one of them the stone would begin to glow with uncanny lights and became translucent, while a well of darkness appeared at the center. There was peril in gazing too deep, but a strong mind and a resolute will could conjure images in the heart of the well. Then, if that was her desire, she could see the inner fires of the earth, or the upper reaches of the air where the stars shone even in daytime; she could see kingdoms so far distant that their names, even the bare rumor of their existence, had never reached Phaôrax.
There were limitations. The stones lengthened sight but they did not sharpen hearing. You could catch the thief with his hand in somebody else’s purse, but you could not hear the patter of the mountebank three feet away; you could spot a gathering of conspirators met together in secret, but you could not hear them plotting. And with distance came lack of clarity: the images became like figures seen through water, flattened and distorted, their movements crablike and hideous. Moreover, the world was so wide it was almost impossible to locate any single person or any specific place within in, unless you had something—a strand of hair, a handful of soil, or a scrap of cloth—to bridge the gap. For that reason, each stone was linked in some way to a specific location, like the streets outside the King’s house in Pentheirie on Thäerie, or the town of Baillébachlain on Leal, below the wizards’ Scholia. The largest, the one she chose now, she used to spy on her subjects in Apharos and the surrounding towns and villages.
The sun was sinking. Little grey bats flittered outside the unglazed window, but they would not come in. From this dizzy height, looking back from the promontory, the city was a shadowy landscape of spires, peak-roofed houses, and towers whose conical roofs as looked as sharp as thorns from above.
When she looked into the depths of the stone, the city and its inhabitants gradually became more distinct: tiny people in the market squares, the shops, and the gaudy palaces of the nobles. For a time, she allowed her attention to wander, spying out all the places where her people were gathered. And when her thoughts turned at last toward the man she sought, it did not take long for a bent grey figure to swim into view. Though his exact location was unclear—all she could see was wood and stone, dimly illuminated—now that she had found him she had only to watch his movements until he came to some other place that she could recognize. Ouriána felt a surge of satisfaction. Almost, it had been too easy.
Then something wiped it all away: the face, the figure, along with her satisfaction at finding him so easily. It was the sort of resistance she had not experienced in years—in decades. She stepped back from the stone, the breath hissing through her teeth, her brain seething with indignation. Truly, it was too much: first that mum-show in the marketplace, the unrest he had fomented ever since, and now this!
She felt a momentary tremor of doubt, an unaccustomed pang of fear, wondering if the deity within might have abandoned her. Yet how could she suffer such a loss—a severing of flesh and spirit far greater than any mere death—and not know of it?
Swiftly, she cast off the woven silver that bound her hair, let the rich auburn tresses tumble down her back. She unclasped the gem-studded belt that girdled her waist and allowed it to fall to the floor. Rings and bracelets followed, until she stood there with no other adornment but her own beauty and raw power, with no net or chain or fetter to impose any limits.
Reaching deep inside, she eventually found what she was seeking: the Darkness coiled at the center of her being, the ancient thing that sometimes looked out through her eyes, that spoke to her with the dull booming of the tide or came to her with the cold salt smell of the ocean floor. It was still there. How could it ever leave her, when it was her second self?
Gradually, her panic subsided, her confidence returned; she knew herself a goddess. What had happened, she concluded, must be something quite different from what she had feared, some interference from outside. Yes, yes, that was surely it. It could not possibly be through any gift of his own that the old man defied her. There must be some person or entity far greater than he was, who for reasons yet obscure was protecting him. Indeed, it was probably a consortium of magicians, for there was no single mage or wizard of such power still living who was not in her thrall.
Once she had him, she would discover who was responsible, and destroy them too, one by one. She smiled to herself, once again sure of her power.
In a cave by the shore, not a league from the city wall, the object of her search waited, cold, cramped, and utterly miserable.
The cavern was a large one, the abode of smugglers. When the moon was dark, they regularly brought in shipments of illicit goods, but they also occasionally smuggled desperate men out of the country. At the moment, a number of boxes and bales occupied most of a narrow ledge running the length of the cavern. During a low tide that ledge was dry; during a particularly high one it was apt to be submerged, as the presence of sand and shells attested. From the ledge, steps of water-rotten stone led down to an equally rotten wooden pier, where the smugglers moored their boats.
It was on the pier that Maelor sat, awaiting a man who had promised to aid his escape from the island. It was a risk to go out on the sea, which was Ouriána’s ally—of this he was well aware—but the island was hers, too, and her spies too numerous to count. In any case, he had grown weary of hiding, weary of the fear that hunted him day and night.
The cave was dank and dim, lit only by a pair of green glass lanterns. From the sea that light could easily be mistaken for the glow of phosphorous in marshy places along the shore. Dampness trickled like snails’ tracks down the rough stone walls. There were bones under the green water, for there was only the one entrance, and on certain days of the month the place became a death trap. In a rare moment of prescience, Maelor knew that someday soon one of the wild, lawless men who frequented the place would drown; with equal certainty he knew that any prediction of his would go unheeded.
Rather than waste his breath on warnings, he sat in the sickly light, scratching the waterlogged wood with a rusty knife over and over, creating the patterns that had obsessed him for all the years that he could remember: the same figures he had painstakingly formed of sticks and bones, or written in chalk, charcoal, and red paint on the walls, floor, and ceiling of his cluttered attic chamber.
He had performed the same useless and frustrating ritual a thousand times before. He expected nothing to come of it; it was merely habit—less than habit by now, it was mindless instinct. Yet his thoughts were swarming with strange fancies, with bright, many-colored shadows of realities that had been or might be; another identity and another life were struggling to emerge. The familiar exercise was a welcome distraction.
Maelor the Astromancer was a fabrication, not even his own, he had always known that much—but the real man had been buried for so long, the old juggler and sometime magician had never allowed himself to believe it might be possible to bring him back into the light. Now he was beginning to hope, and that hope terrified him, almost as much as the knowledge that Ouriána’s soldiers, Ouriána’s spies, were seeking him. Indeed, the two fears fed each other—because what if they should find him before he learned the truth?
As he gazed down, with a puzzled frown, at the symbols he had carved in the wood, something happened. Perhaps it was Ouriána’s probing, the brief touch of one powerful mind against another whos
e power was only latent, bright steel striking dull flint to make a spark and ignite a fire. However it came about, the spark was lit and cold ashes stirred to life.
The slap of water against rotting pylons gradually receded, along with the rumbling voices of the men loading the boats. In a growing excitement, he drew a new line here, scratched out another there. The symbols began to make sense—why had he not recognized them before? They were runes, images of power that wizards studied and used in their spells.
A sudden trembling came over him, and the words seemed to speak themselves: “Duenin. Désedh. Güwelen. Theroghal.”
As soon as he named the runes aloud, all that had been confused and mysterious became orderly and familiar in his mind. A whole train of memories trooped through his brain until he knew his entire history, both before and after the disaster that had changed him so grievously; he knew his name and the purpose that had driven him. And with that knowledge, power welled up inside of him, filling him from the soles of his feet to his fingertips, to the roots of the hair on his head. He buried his face in his hands and wept for joy.
Even when the tears had passed, for a time he remained oblivious to all around him, and therefore failed to notice when the man he had been waiting for finally arrived. It was several minutes before it even occurred to him that a harsh, impatient voice was speaking to him and not to somebody else.
“We won’t dally here to miss the tide. If you mean to come with us, old man, it must be now.”
The old man—no longer so old, so feeble or befuddled—glanced up with a bright, lucid, wide-awake gaze. He was weighing very carefully his own situation.
One thing he knew for certain. Broken, as he had been before, he had managed to pass Ouriána’s wards and reach this island—where otherwise he might never have come at all. He had, in fact, successfully penetrated defenses that, if he should ever decide to return as a whole man, would undoubtedly defeat him.
It was not, in the end, such a difficult decision.
“I thank you,” said the wizard Éireamhóine in his deep, calm, powerful voice, “but I think I am not ready to leave Phaôrax as yet.”
19
For Winloki, Mistlewald was as another world. The land spoke to her, at first in snatches and whispers, gradually growing more distinct and comprehensible: voices of earth, wind, and stone, the long, slow dreams of trees—she had never imagined that trees could be so eloquent. Raised in a country where wizards and great magicians were only a distant rumor, she had never suspected this brimming life in the landscape, and many days would pass before she finally realized that none of this arose from any special qualities in the place; it came of a profound change in herself.
In the meantime, her material circumstances had altered, too. The three men who had gone into the nearest seaside town to buy (or steal) horses and supplies returned with an elegant little cream-colored mare, complete with a lady’s saddle. Unable to conceal her own delight, Winloki saw a corresponding pleasure briefly add color and animation to the pallid face of the young acolyte who handed her the reins, and the same emotion even more fleetingly (but just as unmistakably) reflected on the faces of his elders. Spirited yet gentle, the mare was a joy to ride and a vastly superior animal to the sturdy but undistinguished horses assigned to the rest of the party. Even Camhóinhann’s great grey stallion was of lesser breeding. This gift—for it was impossible to view it in any other light—along with her fine new clothes, made it clear to Winloki she would henceforth be treated as a privileged individual, a princess of Phaôrax in truth. Yet far from reassuring her, these marks of status only served to emphasize that the barrier of the Necke had placed her, once and for all, beyond any hope of rescue or escape.
As though I needed any reminders, she thought wistfully, of how very far I am from home.
And indeed, it was a very different country from Skyrra, more forest than meadow or farmland, and exceedingly flat. If there were any hills in Mistlewald they were either too far off to be seen, or so lowly and humble they never held their heads above the trees. Oak, elm, ash, cowan, and other species she could not identify until they whispered their strange but beautiful names in her ear crowded on either side of the road. For the better part of two days she spotted no farms or villages, nor even the smoke of a single hearth fire rising in the distance. It was not, perhaps, a land for men. The roots here went deep, the trees were very old, and the woods—of which these were only the latest generation—far more ancient than any wood in Skyrra. She thought she had never met a living thing of like antiquity.
One evening they stopped long before sunset to set up camp in a little dell of green grasses, and Winloki detected a stir of excitement and anticipation among the priests and acolytes unlike anything she had seen in them before. Immediately after a hasty supper, the Furiádhin and their particular servants among the acolytes all left the camp at once, disappearing among the trees.
“What is it? Where are they going?” she asked—not wishing to show too much interest in their private rituals, but so curious and apprehensive that the questions slipped out.
“By all the signs, the Empress has performed a Summoning,” said Lochdaen, who happened to be the nearest guard. “They hear her calling, and when the full moon rises above the trees they will be in deep communion with her. When this happens,” he added, dropping his voice and casting a wary glance over his shoulder, “they will often have speech with her the rest of us are not intended to hear.”
“They can speak with her across such a distance?” Winloki was frankly incredulous. She had been told that more than a thousand miles of land and sea still divided them from Phaôrax. The night suddenly turned close and breathless as she tried not to imagine what sort of rite they masked with this lie.
“She speaks to them, that is all I know,” the young guardsman replied, with another backward glance. “Who can say what an incarnated goddess can or cannot do?”
Before the priests returned, a harvest moon the color of brass, tiger-striped with dark clouds, stood high in the sky. Finally, about midnight, they came striding into camp with the acolytes following behind them, more subdued than ever. Then it was very hard for Winloki to maintain her belief in some blatant deception meant to fool the temple guards—it was so obvious the Furiádhin had received momentous and disturbing news. Yet even when the information began to spread, moving from one campfire to the next, no one saw fit to enlighten the Princess.
By the time they were ready to break up camp the next morning, she had already decided that Camhóinhann was the one most deeply affected; his expression, ordinarily solemn and aloof, had become so grim and terrible. Dyonas, hitherto imperturbable, seemed vaguely troubled, and she could see that Goezenou harbored some gloating satisfaction.
“It is an interesting situation,” she heard him say to Dyonas. “We knew, did we not, there was little enough chance she would choose Cuillioc to rule after her—but no chance at all for Meriasec. What use will she have for the girl now? I had imagined it would be either a wedding or a knife—”
“You imagine too much!” Dyonas cut him off with a severe look. “And you would be wise to say none of it to Camhóinhann.”
This conversation occupied Winloki’s thoughts for many days. A wedding or a knife—except something had happened to the supposed bridegroom. She knew very little about Prince Cuillioc. That he had not, apparently, stood very high in his mother’s favor ought to be enough to commend him, and he and his brother Meriasec would be, she supposed, her own first cousins. So while she would never have married him, of course, she would be very sorry to hear that he was dead—and more so if it happened that his death had sealed her fate too.
It was about that same time that she began to notice Goezenou watching her more avidly than ever. If they stopped in a clearing to rest the horses or to set up camp for the night, he had a habit of hovering somewhere nearby whenever she dismounted, of never being very far off when she moved among the black tents.
She
found him indescribably loathsome: his wide, sneering mouth and aggressive nose; the thick fingers, curving nails, and silvery fish-scale backs of his hands. Yet, it was more than physical deformity that made him hideous. Had that been all she would have pitied him, but every instinct told her there was mental and spiritual deformity as well. The liquid quality of the metallic eyes, which in the other Furiádhin suggested mirrors, in him reflected a bottomless hunger, a monstrous craving. He was like one being devoured from the inside out, seeking to devour others that he might assuage his own emptiness. Had he, Winloki wondered, chosen to serve Ouriána hoping she would fill him up? If so, then why did he continue to serve her when she had done no such thing?
Again and again she had seen how the guards and acolytes tried to avoid attracting his notice—he was so liable to find fault with even the most instant and complete obedience. His magic was formidable, he could command the elements, yet he seemed to gain greater satisfaction from petty displays of power over his own servants.
In his eyes she saw a rage of envy and desire—not an ordinary desire of the flesh, but something darker, more obscure—and why either of these emotions should center on her she did not know.
When she could bear it no longer, she began asking her guards, one after the other, “What does he want of me? Why does he look at me in that way?” One after another, they shook their heads. If they knew, not one of them dared to say so. Finally, she appealed to one of the acolytes.
Longest in service to the Furiádhin, Rivanon was of them all the most like his masters: wan, hollow-cheeked, angular, with ash-white hair. Yet he had no deformity that she could see, and his eyes were dark and utterly human. There had been times when she had seen him shield the younger men from Goezenou’s wrath and she thought he was a kind man, for all his silence and reserve.
A Dark Sacrifice Page 20