Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong

by Greg Hamerton

  “My love, listen to my voice. Remember me.” Maybelle came between them, trapping Tabitha against the wall and shielding her from the king. Maybelle held Mellar’s head between her palms and brought her face close to his, as if by staring into his eyes she would see inside his mind. “Come back to me, my love, come back.”

  “Leave me alone!” Mellar shouted. “It is better this way!”

  “My love, remember yourself. You are king. You are my Borace.”

  King Mellar groaned heavily, and pulled Lady Westerbrook close.

  “I am here, my love,” he whispered. He looked at Tabitha over May’s shoulder with a dazed and sickly expression. “You are in great danger, Lady Serannon. Do not come near me. Do not return to me without the crown.”

  He pushed himself away from Maybelle’s embrace. “Take me out of here, Glavenor, take me from these women. Take me where I can do no harm. Rood, be at my side as well, do not let me fight.” He staggered away a few paces and Garyll caught him firmly around the waist. Rood took his bloodied hand carefully, and they led him from the chamber.

  He tried to shake Rood’s hand off at the door, but then he cried out, “Begone, ancestors! I will not hear your dead voices. No! I shall not be mad! No, no, no!” They stumbled out, and down the stairs. “Find the crown, my wizard! Find the crown! Find the crown!” Mellar’s voice echoed as he was led away.

  Then they were gone.

  10. THE WRY PROPHET

  “When you solve a riddle, do you find the riddler,

  Or does the riddler find you?”—Zarost

  May was rosy-cheeked from climbing the stairs. She said nothing, she just smothered Tabitha in a warm embrace. Tabitha sagged against the Lady of Ceremony and breathed in her soft sweet perfume.

  “He wasn’t himself, May. He was so angry, and so ... strange.”

  May held her until Tabitha was steady on her feet.

  “He has told you of the crown?” May asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Its absence affects him worse than he’ll admit. He isn’t well, Tabitha. He’s been suffering. He sees the strong walls of his own mind crumbling. I think he’s mostly scared, the poor man, but he hides that with the anger. Oh, it’s a cruel thing that is happening to him. I don’t think Prince Bevn realises what he is doing to his father.”

  Tabitha looked away from May, resting her eyes upon the stairwell’s empty mouth beyond the open door. “It was more than anger. For a while he seemed like another man altogether.”

  “I know what you mean,” May said. “He spoke to me of the faces he can see, his dead forefathers. They all went mad, did you know that? Every one of them. It is the cost of wearing the Kingsrim. I hadn’t realised it until he told me, and then I looked carefully through the histories. The royals always tried to conceal the painful truth from the people, but there are accounts if you know what to look for.” Her voice softened. “He had a seizure last night, in his bedroom. Since then it’s been worse than ever. This is the first time he’s lost command of his mind during the day. Maybe it was the wine during the banquet. I don’t know. Rood says he was calling for jurrum. Jurrum!” May’s eyebrows peaked in alarm.

  “Thank you for coming, May,” Tabitha said softly.

  “Thank your good man Glavenor for coming to warn me. I assumed he would be by your side. When he told me he’d been banished from the audience, I knew—” May faltered. “Oh, Tabitha! I must know. Do you think you can heal him?”

  Tabitha tried to fight off the rising panic that question brought with it. Healing meant singing, singing meant the Lifesong, and the Lifesong meant reaching for Ethea. Ethea!

  “He—he didn’t ask me to.”

  “He didn’t?” May looked more worried than ever. “He promised he would. It ... I ... ” She paused. “Could it be done while he is asleep?”

  Tabitha had to tell her. She could trust May.

  “I cannot sing, May. I cannot heal anyone. The last man I tried to heal, he didn’t… Ah, he died.” Tears stung her eyes. The memory was too painful. The shivers of her fever grew deep within her again. “I dare not sing. The Goddess Ethea… she is my source. When I sing, I am drawn to her.”

  “It must be special, to hear her song.”

  “She has been captured.”

  May’s mouth hung open. “Ethea? The Goddess Ethea is captured?

  “It is too painful to witness her torture. I must find a way to help her first.”

  “But she is eternal, immortal. How can this be?”

  “I don’t understand it myself, May. But I have seen it. I know it to be true.”

  “You had a vision of it?”

  Tabitha nodded. “A place I’ve never seen before, a land where the air is hot and humid and salty, where the men are bronzed by the sun, where the sky is red… A place of clamorous noise, where the three brothers rule.” They have her shackled to the rock among the blood of sacrifices. She couldn’t bear to say it out loud.

  “But that doesn’t sound like anywhere in Eyri!” May exclaimed. “And if it is beyond Eyri, then the only place to find such a land is in the myths. Oh, poor Tabitha. How can you help the Goddess if she is in a land which doesn’t exist anymore? Your vision must have been of another time.”

  “What if we can go through the Shield, May? What if those lands still exist beyond the rim of Eyri?”

  “Three brothers, three brothers,” May muttered to herself. “I’ve read that somewhere.” She looked at Tabitha in a puzzled way. “How would you get through the Shield? It is the edge of Eyri. No one has ever passed it since the Forming.”

  “The king fears Bevn has. The new Swordmaster said Bevn was sighted at a pass above Llury. The Swords could not follow where he went. That was when the king grew weak and his behaviour became strange. He spoke of chaos and death coming upon Eyri, and later of the fate foretold by a prophecy.”

  “He spoke of the prophecy? Oh, Borace! You waste too much of your thought upon the Revelations.”

  “The Revelations?” Tabitha asked.

  “It is a suspicious old text, a strange and disturbing work to dwell upon. I showed it to him after the great battle, hoping we might find clues to Bevn’s whereabouts in its verses, for it is littered with references to the Kingsrim. Now I wish I hadn’t shown it to him. He seems to have dwelled upon it too heavily. But oh! That is where I read it. The Revelations mention three brothers. They are at the centre of the chaos which is supposed to wreak havoc in the mythical world beyond Eyri. ‘Three brothers, ’midst fire and smoke and blight, all of Oldenworld scoured by their dreadful sight.’ Maybe you saw something of the world the prophet saw! Maybe it really is there. I don’t know, Tabitha, the writings are mostly a muddle, but the king seems to have taken some of their warnings to heart. I think you should see the writingsyou might see something which we have missed.”

  “Where is it kept?” Tabitha asked.

  “We can go there now, if you’d like.”

  She was glad to leave that high desolate chamber, with its shattered chair and lingering atmosphere of disorder. She followed Maybelle down the stairs, taking care not to hurry the lady’s ponderous steps. Drops of blood stained the stairs.

  “Who was the prophet who wrote these Revelations?” she asked May.

  “A man known as Wry Tad Zastor,” May answered over her shoulder. “He suffered a great many visions and omens regarding Eyri.”

  Wry Tad Zastor.

  She turned the words over and over in her mind.

  “What kind of a name is that?”

  “Wry Tad? He had a caustic tongue, I suppose.” May paused on a landing, and turned to face Tabitha. “Prophets are prone to being rather ... eccentric, to use the polite term. You know Mad Zac, up in the caves near Respite. No? He’s a crusty one, he is. He must have predicted the end of Eyri on five different occasions. It’s best for prophets to predict events a little beyond their lifespan, so they don’t have to live through their failures. Yet sometimes even that hermit has been oddly p
rescient. The great fire of Levin in four-sixteen? He predicted that two years before it came to pass. Then again, many said he laid that fire, just to fulfil his prophecy. Either way, he proved that sometimes he was worth listening to.”

  They continued down the stairs.

  “What of Wry Tad Zastor?” Tabitha asked, after a while. “Have any of his prophecies come true?”

  “Oh yes, a great many,” said May. “I would say he’s the best we’ve ever had, but none of his verses have ever been unravelled in time to prevent what he has foreseen. I suppose he took delight in protecting his own genius. If we had warning of something bad, we would try to change it, and so the event would not come to pass.”

  “What good is a prophecy if it can only be understood after the event?” Tabitha exclaimed. “What use is that? Why write it down at all?”

  May spread her hands. “Ask Wry Tad. Well, you can’t, he must have been dead three hundred years. Nonetheless, come and read what he wrote. You might recognise his skill even better than I.”

  May took her to a scrollroom within the palace, a cool chamber guarded by a locked door one of the guardsmen opened for them. The air inside was still and stale, but the floors reflected the gleam of the torches they lit. The works appeared far more valuable than those Tabitha had seen in the Stormhaven Library. Here gilt-edged charts of the night sky lay casually upon a reading table, and those manuscripts she could see were illuminated with bright inks and fine silver outlines. May led her to a heavy reader of some sort, where a great scroll was wrapped around two axles. Finely penned verses were exposed on the paper stretched across the space between the cartridges.

  “The Revelations of Wry Tad Zastor,” May announced. She rolled the stacks by running her palms on the wheels at either end until she came to a verse that had been marked with a short thread stitched once through the thin paper.

  “Here,” said May. “This is one which recently caught my eye.”

  Tabitha read the words of the ancient prophet.

  an argent smear upon the fair lake

  left in the month when the winter did break

  the year twenty-three crows and fourteen doves chased

  shall follow the path of the morning sun’s haste

  the walls cannot hold the night and mist

  for those who shelter from the tempest

  shall feel the cruel bite of the disturbéd air

  spawned from the opened gate, elsewhere

  A strange feeling came upon her as she stared at the prophecy, like a wind in her mind. There was more to the verses than the words themselves, as if there were ideas hiding in the ink. An argent smear upon the fair lake.

  “Argent is silver, isn’t it?” Tabitha asked.

  “Yes,” May replied. “I believe that was a reference to the starburst we had just over a month ago. That was the sign, the first in the month of Wintersbreach, the month when winter is broken. Mellar has been ruling for twenty-three years since his father passed away. He is the fourteenth to take the Kingsrim. See there in the third line how the numbers are hidden? I should have seen this, I’ve known of the Revelations for a while, but it all appeared to be nonsense. Most of it still is. The future is no clearer than before, but Zastor mocks us with a past foreseen.”

  “Forgive me, May, but you’ve had longer to consider this than I have. I don’t see what he’s trying to say.”

  “Look,” said May, stabbing at the scroll with her finger. “‘Shall follow the path of the morning sun’. The sun comes from the east, thus the threat of Ravenscroft was identified. This Zastor was no fool. He even marked where the conflict would end, in Stormhaven. The morning sun ends at noon, overhead, in the centre of the realm, and then near the end, he mentions shelter from the tempest. That’s storm-haven. It was all there, everything. But only if you choose to read it in that way.”

  “There are more crows than doves, more Shadowcasters than Lightgifters,” noted Tabitha, beginning to understand the eccentric style of the prophet. “And the cruel bite of disturbed air is the Morgloth, winged beasts striking from the sky. Sweet Ethea!” The prophet’s words seemed to darken as Tabitha concentrated on the page. Each word was a window to many possible associations. The verses were finely inked, and the writing ran off the visible roll at both the top and the bottom.

  “How many verses did he write?”

  “Thousands,” May replied. “Yet we understood none of them in time.”

  Tabitha was awestruck. “How could he foresee such a thing as the rise of the Shadowcasters, and give the King no real warning?”

  “Oh, he did, in his way,” May replied. “Remember he’s writing over three centuries ago. Maybe he couldn’t see things as clearly as we can, looking back. Maybe the verses are as precise as he could make them. Maybe he receives these visions in poetic terms, not as exact definitions. We’ve been poring over these Revelations but all we’ve achieved is to mark some quatrains as likely predictions of historic events.”

  Tabitha’s eye was drawn back to the scroll.

  the straightest blade shall bend upon the hilt

  master of an armoured heart, so pierced with guilt

  many lives shall save, many lives shall shed

  until day and night balance upon a metal thread

  She didn’t read it aloud. The first line was about Garyll. He was surely the blade who had been bent upon itself. The straightest Sword had been the Swordmaster. His fall had cost many lives, but had ultimately left him in a position to claim victory back from the Darkmaster. The master of a cold heart could be interpreted in various ways: the Darkmaster, or the Swordmaster. The balance of power had been critical, resting on Garyll’s final moment of defiance, balanced upon a thread.

  Or upon the string of her lyre, a ‘metal thread’. That lent a whole different slant to the quatrain. Maybe she had been the one to cost many lives, because Garyll had made his sacrifice to protect her. She had toiled in Levin to heal those hurt in the conflict, and so had fulfilled the condition ‘many lives shall forfeit, more shall save’.

  The ambiguities made the interpretation complex, but she understood enough to know there was truth in the prediction—an uncanny kind of truth. It would have been impossible to anticipate the events from what had been written, but in hindsight, the verse described the two events of Garyll’s ordeal and her balancing of the essence with eerie accuracy. There was a riddle, hiding in that verse. Tabitha was beginning to suspect that Wry Tad Zastor was more than just a gifted visionary.

  She ran her finger across the yellowed verse of prophecy. The paper was smooth, age-worn.

  “You said it mentioned the Kingsrim?”

  “Those verses are closer to the end.” May rolled the wheels carefully, and as she did so, the many quatrains of the prophet blurred by and were wound around the growing upper cartridge.

  “This is the first.” May pointed to another thread-tagged verse. “This is the one that eats at Mellar so.”

  if the rulers’ horizon can’t be seen from the isle

  the cracks shall soon cross over that central tile

  the shelter shall crumble under three moons falling

  the order shall drown in fire and chaos appalling

  Tabitha considered the words for some time.

  “Rulers’ horizon meaning the crown, the Kingsrim?” she guessed.

  One had to think laterally with Zastor’s riddles, that was for sure.

  “Yes,” May replied. “That is the way Mellar has interpreted it, but I suggested it could also mean the outline of the mountains, and thus speaks of a day of mist when you can’t see the horizon.”

  Tabitha struggled to define her feelings. May’s interpretation didn’t satisfy her truth-sense. She preferred the king’s, but if the king’s version was correct, they would soon see ‘order drown in fire and chaos appalling’.

  “The isle must be Stormhaven,” May offered.

  “Yet you thought it might be a misty day, in another time.”

&n
bsp; “Can you see why I said you should read it?” May asked. “Does Wry Tad Zastor really warn of doom for Eyri should the Kingsrim leave the realm, or is the king reading too much into these riddles?”

  As Tabitha gazed at the verse before her, the words blurred and she found a quiet place of perspective. Two thoughts came together—the idea that what she was looking at were riddles, and the name of the prophet.

  Wry Tad Zastor. Scramble the letters slightly and you had one devious scoundrel of a man.

  Tabitha would have laughed if the mood of the prophecies had been less ominous. Wry Tad was surely Twardy, Zastor was Zarost—he had twisted his name. If Twardy Zarost had penned these words, nothing would be false, for the Riddler never lied. His truth could be more crooked than a stunted vine, but for someone who knew how to interpret his wisdom, there would be truth ripe for the picking.

  She imagined Zarost grinning at her from within the scroll, bobbing his bristly beard from side to side with glee, his furry hat askew atop his head. He had looked different when he’d been masquerading as Tsoraz, but when she thought of him, he always had his bristly beard and hat, and he was always grinning. Zarost! He had never come back after their strange parting amid the stars, when he had returned her to Eyri to find Garyll. Where was he now? She needed him more than ever.

  And yet here he was before her.

  “Oh, the tricky rascal. When did you say this was written, May?”

  “The Year 110, in the reign of Mellar the Fourth. It is dated at the beginning.”

  Tabitha whistled softly. She had a lot to ask the Riddler when she saw him next, especially about not growing old. “Wouldn’t this event be far in the future, if the sequencing is right? The verse is so far after the ones about the battle against the Darkmaster.”

  “It should be so,” Maybelle agreed, “but the king must fear it has begun already, that Bevn has forced it to begin…”

  “Because he has stolen the crown, and taken it off the isle,” Tabitha finished. The condition was satisfied, and so this verse of the prophecy had begun. Three falling moons might mean three months, the time it would take for the shelter to crumble. The end of the Shield of Eyri?