by Holly Lisle
Seven-Fingered Fat Girl materialized from behind one of the statues and ran to the back of the room. Dog Nose ran after her, and Roba followed.
“He pushed this,” Fat Girl said. She pointed to a stone panel carved to look like a part of the base of the statue.
Once Roba knew what to look for, she didn’t have any trouble seeing the press-bar. She could tell its makers had tried to keep it unobtrusive, but not to hide it. That said something about the purpose of the place at the other end of the passageway. She wasn’t sure what—but it said something.
She told Seven-Fingered Fat Girl, “Go get everyone else and bring them down the tunnel. I’ll go on ahead with Dog Nose.” She gave the boy a questioning look, and he nodded. “I don’t know what Thirk is doing—but I don’t trust him.”
“I go right now,” Fat Girl agreed, and raced off.
Roba watched the girl until she disappeared around a curve, then turned back to the press-bar. Her heart raced, and her pulse pounded in her ears. She wished she knew what Thirk intended. Why hadn’t he told everyone of the press-bar? Did he think he would get additional fame as the discoverer of the secret passageway? That seemed likely to her. But she wished she could be sure. She’d expected him to be angry at her and at Kirgen. They’d mocked him and his grand passion—his scholarly pursuit of Edrouss Delmuirie. But instead of anger, he’d responded with some mystical nonsense about signs and portents and the will of the gods regarding Delmuirie. And he’d said nothing else about her—or to her, for that matter.
What was he thinking?
She pressed the bar—it moved with startling ease, and the panel slid up again. She and Dog Nose entered, and moving as quietly as they could, crept down the dark passageway.
They linked arms to stay together in the darkness. At several points, Roba noted areas of lesser darkness. When she looked up, she could see faint circles of dark blue against the black. She wondered briefly if they were windows into the night sky—but there would be time later to explore.
They heard a voice echoing back through the passageway. “Here you are, little ones. I’ve come to save you.” Thirk’s voice, distorted by the passageway, sounded hideous to Roba.
She tugged at Dog Nose to make him walk faster. She kept her fingers on the smooth side of the wall and felt it change in small degrees to rougher, less finished stone. The texture of the floor beneath her feet changed, too. And then she saw the first gleamings of light ahead.
Thirk’s faeriefire, she thought. I wish I dared summon one—but I don’t want him to know I’m here. Not yet, anyway.
Thirk’s voice suddenly filled the tunnel. “By all the gods,” he roared. “It’s Delmuirie! I’ve found Delmuirie.”
A child screamed.
He’s lost his mind, Roba thought, and broke into a run—
Behind her, she heard the stone passageway moving again, and in front of her she heard Thirk chanting. She heard no further childish screams—in fact, she heard no sounds from the children at all. She burst into a sand-floored cavern, covered with carved boulders—Thirk wasn’t there. The light came from a doorway to the left. She and Dog Nose ran toward the light, dodging the boulders.
Shouts echoed down the corridor behind her—Help is coming, she thought—and she noted the sound of running feet, and she came through the doorway to find Thirk holding Kirtha down on another of the boulders, in front of a pillar of light that contained a kneeling man.
Thirk had a knife in his hand—a stone Wen knife with bright eyes and sharp teeth inlaid in the blade. Choufa and Runs Slow were frozen in one corner, caught in mid-stride—held by a stop-spell of some sort. A man, frozen in a golden pillar of light, knelt behind Thirk, a sword in one hand and a chalice in the other. Roba warded herself instinctively, something the children had not known to do. Kirtha was staring at Thirk, her eyes wide with terror—but the stop-spell held her, too.
“Thirk, no!” Roba screamed.
He seemed not to hear her. He kept chanting, with the knife at Kirtha’s throat. Then, like a man wakening from a dream, he looked up, and a vicious smile crawled across his face. “This is the will of the gods,” he said. “The gods have given me suitable sacrifice to raise the magic that will set Edrouss Delmuirie free. I was right after all, wasn’t I, Roba? Delmuirie is here—you see? You mocked me—all of you mocked me. You scoffed at me for believing Delmuirie created the Barrier. You scoffed at Delmuirie. Now you can see him, standing in front of you, waiting in a pillar of magic for me to come to him and release him into the world of the living again. He’ll set us free, Roba. He’ll release the Barrier, and give us the rest of the world, and the universe beyond. He’ll set all of Arhel free.”
Thirk frowned and pressed his knife against Kirtha’s throat. “But you were right, too—the children did have a reason for being on this expedition. I simply failed to realize the gods would provide all I needed to work their will in this manner—”
“No, Thirk! Let the children go. The dark magics are never the will of the gods!”
“Not so,” he said. “The gods created both light and dark, and all things work their will. The power grows in me—from the fear of this child, from the pain she will soon feel, and ultimately from her death. At the moment of her death, I will break the bonds that hold the great Delmuirie prisoner, and he will go free.”
There was a rustling behind Roba in the doorway, and others crowded around her.
“You’ll die first,” Faia said.
“No. My death is not the will of the gods.” He smiled, and made a quick cut along Kirtha’s arm. Blood spouted from the wound.
Every magician in the room attacked instantly—with faeriefire, with stop-spells, with anything they could throw—and the column of light bent the magic toward itself and drew it all in. It didn’t touch Thirk.
Thirk smiled, and pressed the knife to Kirtha’s throat. “You see,” he said. “The will of the gods.” He began to chant. A reddish glow grew around him—Roba saw it at the same moment she and Kirgen and Faia all charged at the madman. His hand flashed, and blood spurted from Kirtha’s other arm—
Roba was closest. She got there first.
My debt to Faia, she thought. And—I’ll kill him!—as she drove her head into his side. He fell backward against the pillar of light. She saw it enfold him—but she fell with him. The glows of red and yellow fire mixed, and behind her children started to scream—
Stop-spell broken, she thought. Good.
She twisted as she fell, and the brilliant yellow light surrounded her. Her fall slowed, and she realized she could hang there, in mid-air, and never fall. She floated, surrounded by the light and watched Thirk’s knife.
How very strange, she thought. Look at how it floats. The knife was spinning upward in slow, lazy spirals. Sounds dimmed and distorted; the voices of her friends seemed to come to her through miles of water.
“Get out” they were yelling. “Get out Roba!”
Silly of them, she thought. Why would I ever want to leave?
Peace enveloped her—but someone was pulling at her ankle. She wished whoever it was would quit. She was becoming part of the universe—and that distraction would not let her forget the outer world so that she could join completely with the mind of the magic around her. Thirk was with her in that mind—rapturous and repentant. Delmuirie’s thoughts met hers in joyful merging. Peace became one with her, and a presence that was more than Thirk, more than Delmuirie—that was wisdom and life itself—filled her, and she suddenly understood everything.
Still, she couldn’t take her eyes off that knife. For an instant and an eternity, it hung in mid-air, suspended up among the carved spirals and stone knotwork.
Then another incredible burst of magical fire poured itself into the pillar, and someone screamed, “Come on, Roba! Help me!”
The knife sped up at once and fell very fast to the floor, and Roba finished slamming to the ground with a painful thud. She was able to move her eyes. Kirgen was leaning over her and
looking down at her. “Roba, can you hear me?” he asked. “Speak to me.”
She felt an incredible sense of loss. The wisdom was gone. The warmth and the peace were gone, the understanding of all the secrets of the universe—all gone. She frowned at Kirgen. If he took me away from all that, I’ll never forgive him, she thought. And she said, “Of course I can hear you. Why wouldn’t I be able to hear you?”
Kirgen started to answer.
He didn’t have the chance. From the other chamber, a ululating cry began. It was a heathen sound, primitive, heartrending; it was the sound of grief too great for words.
* * *
Fat Girl had appeared out of the gathering darkness, frantic. “Come,” she had gasped. “Hurry. Children are found.”
Medwind and Kirgen had automatically scooped Nokar into the Hoos carry and run after Fat Girl back into the library.
Medwind worried while she ran. Found? In the library? she had wondered. How can that be? And if everything is as it should be, why are we running? Then Fat Girl revealed the hidden tunnel, and Medwind’s concern grew. Thirk was not in the room waiting for them. So apparently he was down the tunnel—
A scream echoed out of it, cut short. The exploration party charged in—
Something wrong, terribly wrong, she kept thinking, and indeed, it was. Thirk stood at the side of a man held motionless in a column of light and enacted some ritual in which Kirtha appeared to be slated for role of main sacrifice; the other children were frozen in their places; Roba was trying to reason with the lunatic—
She and Kirgen put Nokar down at the same moment Thirk made his first cut. The room erupted with magic—she and Roba and Kirgen and Faia and Nokar attacked—the man should have fried where he stood.
That wasn’t what happened. The column of light reached out and bent all that magical fury toward itself and swallowed it.
Thirk cut Kirtha again, and everyone ran forward. Roba got to him first, and butted into him with her head; he fell sideways into the column, and she fell, too. Then everything happened at once.
Faia grabbed Kirtha, who’d started screaming at the top of her lungs.
The column grew brighter, and, almost as if it were a living thing, it reached out and enveloped Thirk, and began to swallow Roba as well.
Kirgen tried to pull Roba out of the devouring pillar of light.
A stream of pure white fire shot from behind her and poured into the column, and the encroaching light receded enough that Kirgen could pull Roba to safety.
Medwind turned as that white bolt faded, to see that it had come from Nokar—and to see Nokar draw in on himself and crumple to the ground. She ran to his side, dragged him out of the archway into the other room so she could have enough space to revive him, and reached out with her magic to touch him and feed him her strength.
His body rejected her magic. He was dead. There was no cell of him that was intact—he had poured every bit of his lifeforce into saving Roba. Medwind couldn’t give him back his life—he had given it away too completely. Not even years of her own life would revive him.
He was lost to her—and as she stroked his paper-thin skin and brushed closed his still-warm eyelids over his clouding eyes, she thought of the skulls on her altar. She thought of Nokar as a painted skull, a green ghostflesh face that whispered at her in anger, and that cowered in the dark, endless horror of the place between the worlds. No, she thought. I love him—and because I love him, I will not give him over to that place. She would lose him entirely before she would let his soul huddle in fear of the things that hunted between the worlds.
He would go on, his soul would go free—and whatever life there was at the end of the darkness, she hoped that he would find it. If the saje hells awaited him, she hoped he found himself in one he liked, full of bookish friends and bawdy women.
And if there was nothing beyond, as she sometimes thought, she hoped that at least there had been enough goodness in his life to make up for the long darkness.
She threw back her head then and cried out; gave tongue to the Hoos cry of mourning, gave voice to her howling grief and loss. He was the first love she’d lost and she was losing all of him. She cried, and thought even as she did that the gods had never seen so many warrior’s tears.
She stood at last, ignoring the hands that touched her shoulders, the voices that murmured sympathy.
She dragged him over and propped him against one of the boulders—Hoos custom, that the dead should not enter eternity lying down. She pulled off one of her war-necklaces and draped it over his neck—Hoos honor, to tell the gods that here was a warrior’s spirit. She pulled from her waistbag a bit of jerky, and ripped a piece from it, and placed it on his tongue—Hoos duty, that the dead should not go hungry.
Then she knelt and kissed him once. Around the lump in her throat, she whispered, “I love you, old man. Find safe passage to whatever fate awaits you. Remember me if you can.”
When she stood straight again, she set her jaw and wiped the tears from her eyes. She took Nokar’s sturdy wood staff, and, with the voices of the not-Hoos calling after her, she walked away, through the boulder-strewn room and up the passage. There was something yet that she had to do—one final duty she owed the dead.
Kitchkithn, Hoos faeriefires, lit her way. Behind her she heard footsteps, but she did not care. She wanted no company for the task that awaited her. So she walked faster.
At the top of the passage, she could not find any latch that led out. Impatient, unwilling to search, she made a vodrono, a “far hand,” to push the press-bar on the other side. The panel rose, and her kitchkithn raced in front of her through the library and back up the hill to the building that housed her altar.
She did not release the light until she faced the skulls of her vha’attaye. Then she let it go, and with the weight of darkness around her, she knelt, and placed Nokar’s staff on the ground in front of her, and lit the candles and the incense, and took up her drum.
The vha’attaye came—all but Troggar Raveneye, who by her hand was destroyed for all eternity.
She pressed her forehead to the floor and whispered, “I come to honor you.” Tears started down her cheeks again—the pain of parting was too much. But she had her duty to the dead.
The vha’attaye hissed and creaked and began their whispery speech, but she held up her hand and stopped them. “Waking dead,” she said, “spirits of the people I will always love, who are those people no more—I have come to say goodbye. Nokar told me to love many things, so it would take longer for me to lose the things I loved. But of those I have loved, all are gone—beyond my reach in one way or another. Except you. And you do not want my love.
“I’ve brought you to me to give you your freedom. I would not—trap you in the p-p-place between the worlds. I would—know your sp-sp-spirits were safe.”
She was crying so hard the ghostly faces were mere blurs in front of her.
“Find glory, and n-n-n-new life,” she sobbed, and took up Nokar’s stick and smashed it down on the skull of Inndra Song, grandmother’s grandmother. Bone shards flew, and flecks of fire from the burning incense blew in the wind and winked out.
“Find glory, and new life.” She smashed the skull of Haron River, grandfather’s father.
A wind rose up around her—the magical fury of Rasher the Hunter, who tried to fend off her staff. She ignored the buffetings of the wind and held her staff steady.
“Find glory, and—and new life.” She smashed the skull of Rasher the Hunter.
“I’m s-s-s-sorry,” she wept, and smashed the empty skull of Troggar Raveneye, best enemy and Advisor.
She stood then, with the bone shards surrounding her, and stared into the eyes of Rakell Ingasdotte, once friend, once Mottemage, now angry and unappeased spirit waiting freedom. “Once you t-t-truly loved me, as I still love you,” Medwind whispered. “You were my teacher and my champion; we were friends and colleagues. I gave up my husbands and my herds to learn from you; now I give up my people an
d my past to set you free. I did not ever want to hurt you, Rakell. I did not ever mean to cause you this pain. I did not want to lose you—and when you were killed, I never got to say goodbye.”
She clenched the stick tighter in her hands. “Goodbye, Rakell Ingasdotte. Find glory and new life. I hope someday you will find a way to forgive me, too.”
She raised the staff.
Rakell spoke. “Goodbye, warrior and friend. Thank you.”
Medwind closed her eyes and swung her stick. The skull of Rakell Ingasdotte, Mottemage of Daane University, teacher and best friend, shattered—and the spirit it had chained flew free.
Medwind pressed her face to the floor. It was cool and hard and somehow soothing. She stayed like that until the crying passed, until she could breathe normally.
Then she pushed herself upright, and kneeling, faced the shards of the vha’attaye. She sang the warrior’s song that summoned the gods, and when she was finished, she stared at the darker swirls of black that hung between the glowing candles.
She spoke in the GodTongue:
“Etyt, Thiena,
Know I have failed in my duty
To preserve and protect,
To honor and keep the vha’attaye.
The spirits entrusted to me
Are lost by my hand.
I have failed in my duty
To have husbands,
For I am husbandless.
I have failed in my duty
To have children,
For I am childless.