“Gonnuol!” Inmanuàr hailed him, calling the stallion by the name Herren had given him, in Herren’s voice, and the beast, snorting, came to him with small, mincing steps. He snapped at the boy, but not seriously—a warning, maybe, that he was not by any measure tame. But Inmanuàr only laughed. He leaped up onto the fire horse’s back, and Gonnuol began to leap forward, but Prince Inmanuàr checked him after all, wheeled him in a tight circle, and brought him back. “Follow your friend!” he commanded Meridy. “Bind her ghost and let her be your guide out of this memory and into another! She has harbored Tai-Enchar, and what she has learned you must use! You must find Carad Mereth and free him—that is your road now, and you must follow it! Tell him we are well begun, but now we are come to the end. It is the ending of the age! Tell him just that!”
“You intended this to happen to her!” Meridy cried. “How could you?” She meant to shout, but her voice sounded to her own ears like the barest whisper.
Inmanuàr gave her a tense nod, not of apology but acknowledging that she wasn’t wrong to feel so angry and so bereft. “That something of the kind might come to pass, that possibility I foresaw. But we all do as we can and as we must. Take comfort from this certainty: Tai-Enchar erred in letting her go, for now she is out of his power and in the hand of the God, and so she can show you the way even into the witch-king’s realm. Don’t allow grief to blind you to the gift she has yet to give!”
Meridy stared at him, speechless. Before she could gather her wits, Inmanuàr let the fire horse wheel about once more, and this time he allowed Gonnuol to plunge forward, leaping out of light and into dreams, and suddenly there was a great host that rode behind them. They poured past Meridy out of the air, more and more of them, on and on. The hoofbeats of their horses were the ringing of bells, surely as audible in the real world as here in the realms of memory. Some were kings or princes; she saw their crowns, but the signs they bore were mostly unfamiliar. These were the old dead, the long dead, who rode past her now. They had been loosed from the hand of the God to ride out to battle, and they went eagerly, as though flying from a tightly strung bow.
Leaping straight through the wall of the Great Hall, Inmanuàr and the stallion and all that host vanished from Meridy’s sight. She knew they wouldn’t stop now, not until Inmanuàr had brought Tai-Enchar to bay in Cora Diorr. And then one of them would drive the other out of every realm and leave him with no refuge but the White Road of the Moon. Meridy only wished she knew which of them would win that final battle. She was certain Inmanuàr would win, but what if she was wrong, what then?
She knew she still had to find Carad Mereth. That was her task, either way. The ending of the age. She felt that it was, one way or the other.
But Jaift was still dying, and there was nothing Meridy could do to save her. Far from saving her, she had to use her friend’s death. That was the worst thing of all.
Niniol, recovering his wits or maybe his nerve long before Meridy could scrape hers together, came and dropped a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. “Well,” he said, his voice a little rough. “Well. I thought when they met here in Moran Diorr, that was supposed to end everything. And instead, here we are.” He paused and then said, even more softly, “I failed her. I can’t imagine what I’ll say to her parents. How could I let this happen?”
Meridy looked down at Jaift, lying discarded, her head on Meridy’s knee. She felt dull and stupid. She shook her head, but after a moment, she managed to say, “It wasn’t your fault. It was my fault. I left her there. I left her in Cora Diorr, even knowing what I knew about the princess-regent, and about Tai-Enchar, and about how he makes the…the servitors.”
“She’s free of him now, at least,” Diöllin offered tentatively, approaching side by side with the ghost of her brother.
They might look like living people, but in all this memory of a kingdom, Meridy knew, no one was alive but she. Or in merely another moment, that would be so.
“But she’s still dying,” Meridy said, dry-eyed and bitter. “Can you save her? Then don’t say her death doesn’t matter.”
Jaift drew one last faltering breath, and died.
Before Meridy, the White Road of the Moon glimmered into view.
Jaift’s ghost pulled free of her body and got to her feet. She stood in the middle of the White Road, moonlight shining down from above and billowing up around her feet like water, until she seemed almost to be made of light herself. The moon, full and heavy, stood above, its cool silver radiance pouring down to create and illuminate a long, pale road of light that ran through the darkness.
All this Meridy saw through and around and above the City of Bells, one dream overlaying the other. Finding herself on her feet, she took one step forward and seized Jaift’s hand in hers. “Jaift!” she said. “By your name I call you and by your name I anchor you and by your name—by your name—I bind you to the world.”
Jaift turned her head to gaze at Meridy, blinking.
“Where is Carad Mereth?” Meridy asked her. It wasn’t what she wanted to say, but she didn’t know what she wanted to say, and so she asked the question Inmanuàr had laid on her. She asked it again, “Where is Carad Mereth, and how can I free him from Tai-Enchar’s power?”
Jaift tilted her head, blinked again, and then shivered all over, a swift convulsive shudder so that Niniol put a hand on her arm to steady her. “Jaift!” he said gently. “I’m so sorry.”
Jaift frowned at this, seeming at last more like herself. “What do you mean? It wasn’t your fault, Niniol!” Then she turned her frown on Meridy. “Or yours. Tai-Enchar did this to me, not either of you.” Then she looked around at the splashing light and added uncertainly, “But I need to go. You’ve bound me, Mery, but I need to go.”
Meridy wanted to weep. Even though she knew it was wrong to hold a ghost who longed to take the God’s Road, she wanted to keep Jaift’s ghost bound so close and tight that her friend would never take the White Road and never leave her. She knew that would be wrong, but she needed Jaift.
She really did; not just for herself, but to help her find Carad Mereth. She whispered a scrap of poetry: “ ‘Look to the vivid sky, which strikes through the night! The face of the sky is the moon’s face.’ ”
Moonlight rose around them like a tide coming in, washing past their knees. Meridy said again, urgently, “Where is Carad Mereth? We must free him!”
And Jaift said, “Of course we must.” She took Meridy’s hand and began to walk forward, not following the Road but heading at an angle across or through or somehow past its foaming light.
Meridy followed. But she waved Niniol back when he would have come with them, and she gestured to Herren to hold back Diöllin, because she feared any ghost that was once swept away upon the White Road of the Moon would never return to the realm of men. Jaift she hoped to keep hold of; but she knew she had no chance of holding so many ghosts against the tide of the White Road. “I’ll find you!” Meridy called to them over her shoulder. “When I come back into the world, I’ll find you, or you’ll find me! Take care of them, Niniol!”
“I will,” he promised her, his expression grim.
But Meridy, now breasting the current of the White Road with Jaift, hardly heard him. And whether the White Road of the Moon would run both ways in the end Meridy didn’t honestly know. Except that Inmanuàr had told her to follow Jaift. So she did that, not quite blindly.
Meridy knew she would never have found the way by herself—not unless she, too, had died—but now she followed Jaift. And her friend didn’t merely follow the White Road but bent their path through numberless realms of dream and memory, and so they walked not only into the moonlight but out of the moonlight. Meridy held tight to her hand and Jaift gripped her back and would not let go, and so when they stepped out of the moonlight again and into the dark, they were still together, hand in hand. Dust blew around them in a wind that whispered of solitude and despair.
They had come into the heart of Tai-Enchar’s realm. Dr
ead ran through Meridy. Though she turned and looked again for the White Road, nothing now but darkness and emptiness surrounded them.
Then a voice, light and quick, taut with strain hidden beneath the lightness, spoke suddenly from behind her: “ ‘What lies in the shadows the full moon casts below? Under the hand of the God, under the bright shadow they lie; from day to night to day again they flow.’ ”
Meridy caught a breath in relief so intense that it was almost painful. Still gripping Jaift’s hand in hers, she turned. Behind her, where a moment before had seemed only darkness, stood Carad Mereth. They had found him after all.
The sorcerer stood surrounded by darkness, but it had not yet mastered him. He made his own light, and it might be pale and flickering, but it was a light in the dark. She could see his golden hair and brilliant cornflower-blue eyes. Yet if the darkness had not overcome him, neither had he defeated it. He had begun to lose himself to the emptiness. His hands were translucent, his form indistinct, shredding softly away at the edges. His eyes were open but blind.
“ ‘The souls of the dead,’ ” Meridy said to him, answering the riddle the sorcerer had posed.
Carad Mereth smiled. His blind eyes drifted shut and then slowly opened again, veiled by settling dust. He told her, his voice strained, “ ‘I dreamed a rushing river flowed. On its swift wave the new dead rode, nor did not pause, nor turn to stay, but straight and fast they flowed away. And whither then? I cannot say.’ ” As he spoke, dust and ashes fell from his mouth and stained his lips. His words dissolved into silence a heartbeat after he spoke them.
“ ‘The River that is the Road!’ ” Meridy answered. “Jaift is our way to the White Road, but how can we free you to take it? And how can any of us take that Road back into the world of men rather than to the hand of the God?”
“ ‘The path that can be found is not the true path,’ ” Carad Mereth told her, his voice husky, ashes pluming on his breath. “ ‘The way unbarred is not the true way.’ ”
Meridy snapped, frustrated and terrified, “Can’t you talk like a normal person?”
“No,” said Carad Mereth, and bowed his golden head. Dust shifted across him, and he became more indistinct still. “Not here. I am thorn-caught in this world of dreams.”
“Thorn-caught?” Meridy stared at him. When she lifted a hand to her hair, the rose fell into her palm, but it had become brittle. As she touched it, three petals cracked and fell away into gray dust barely touched with the memory of crimson. Meridy cupped the flower carefully, the faint memory of the fragrance of roses rising around her. She held it out to Carad Mereth. She said to Jaift, “Find the Road! Show us the Road!”
The fragrance lifted around them, but Jaift only gazed at her blankly.
Then Carad Mereth murmured, “ ‘I turned away into the darkness, and the pale moon rose in beauty, shining like death, the road shining before me, a straight road laid for me through the shadows.’ ”
“Oh. Yes,” said Jaift, sounding surprised. She took the rose from Meridy, turning away into the dark as the rest of the petals fell and drifted into dust. But when Jaift took a step, it was out of the darkness and into the moonlight.
Meridy looked up at the full moon where a moment before there had been no moon. She thought she could hear ten thousand bells ringing in a darkness that was suddenly not empty, but a crystalline darkness filled with stars. It seemed to her that the sound of the bells was quite clear, a swelling sound that rang against the very moonlight.
The God’s moon stood above the White Road, its light silvery and cool and comfortless, yet infinitely more inviting than Tai-Enchar’s emptiness. Meridy gasped in hope and terror, and caught Carad Mereth’s hand, and gripped Jaift’s hand hard in her other hand. The thorns of the rose stem stabbed into Meridy’s thumb as they grasped it together, but she did not loosen her grip, and when Jaift stepped onto the White Road, Meridy threw herself forward into the rushing silver light alongside her friend and dragged Carad Mereth after her.
—
The White Road of the Moon was not like any ordinary road. Nor like any ordinary river. Its light swept you up and onward and poured through you and around you, and yet you never lost your footing or drowned in the rushing light. Like a river in flood, it carried you where it would.
Yet Meridy had stepped from it once, into Tai-Enchar’s dark realm; and now when she could neither think nor see, Carad Mereth gripped her hand and pulled them all together, in some way she did not understand, inexorably, to some other shore. She clenched her fingers hard around his, and held on to Jaift with her other hand, and staggered to a halt.
Gasping for breath, or for something like breath, Meridy tried to understand where they had come. She still stood between Carad Mereth on the one hand and Jaift on the other; each still held one of her hands. Jaift shifted as though she might let the White Road carry her away, but Meridy clung to her and refused to let go.
All three of them stood on a long, shining road of light that stretched out infinitely far, but now that they had stopped, it seemed again more like a road and less like a river. To each side stood a wall of darkness, infinitely deep, but this was not like Tai-Enchar’s darkness. Sparks of light floated around them like stars, touching Meridy’s hands and face, cold and stinging, like snowflakes, but with a brilliant living cold that was nothing like the cold of any ordinary winter. Jaift was gazing down this road, her expression abstracted and a little sad.
“Oh, well done. Well done,” Carad Mereth said to both Meridy and Jaift. He stood taller already; by anything Meridy could see, he had recovered himself entirely. He said to Jaift, more gently, “But you have paid the price for this chance we have won at last from the teeth of disaster.”
Jaift blinked and after a moment smiled, so much like herself that Meridy could hardly stand it. She answered, “We all paid the price. You not least.”
“Yes, but you know, I am a servant of the God.”
Jaift patted his hand. “Aren’t we all? I’m free. Tai-Enchar’s carelessness and arrogance freed me, for he never dreamed Herren would give up his own life willingly to Inmanuàr and so he never planned for that.”
Jaift sounded perfectly certain of this, and Meridy winced, afraid to ask How much do you remember? She already knew the answer. But she said, “That’s good, of course that’s good, but you know, we left Inmanuàr—Herren—Inmanuàr—we left him pursuing Tai-Enchar. But the witch-king will turn at bay in Cora Diorr, and then I don’t know what will happen—this is the ending of the age, Inmanuàr said—”
“Indeed, it is the ending of the age,” Carad Mereth agreed. “Though Tai-Enchar has not yet been cast out from the world of men. He will remain dangerous so long as any part of him lingers in the world. But now, I think, we have at last come to the moment in which it will be possible to defeat him. This is the moment the God has fashioned out of the brief lives and bright courage and tiny, bitter agonies of men.” His gaze lingered on Jaift.
Meridy said sharply, furious with grief, “If we’ve paid the price for it, then why aren’t we finished?”
“Nearly finished,” Carad Mereth told her gently. “Nearly finished, I hope.” And, stretching out his hands, the sorcerer recited in his expressive voice, “ ‘What shall I say, what words will ever come, when all my words are done, when words have gone astray? What shall I give, what can my need sustain, when nothing else remains, when nothing else shall live? What light is there, what light shines through these years, when darkened by my fears, there’s no light anywhere?’ ”
Then he stepped forward into the light and into the hand of the God, drawing Meridy and Jaift after him…and out of the light, and into life.
Though they returned to the realm of men, they were no longer in Moran Diorr. Meridy knew it at first because this time they were not greeted by the harmonious ringing of ten thousand bells. But for that first moment, she was blind—all light seemed to have failed and she could see nothing. She heard a low murmu
r of voices and an indistinct shout, and neither seemed far away, but she couldn’t see—
Then Niniol gripped her shoulder, the light touch of a ghost—she knew him, steady and reassuring as always, and her vision began to clear. “You’re here,” she said, turning to him, relieved, and then was relieved again to glimpse the pale shadowy forms of Diöllin and Herren beyond him. And Jaift was still beside her—Meridy still held her hand, though Jaift’s hand was tenuous now, and hard to hold.
“He brought us,” Niniol said grimly, with a nod, meaning Carad Mereth.
The sorcerer glanced at them sidelong, his cornflower-blue eyes as secretive as the eyes of a witch. “A small exercise of sorcery, simple enough, as Meridy is your true and proper anchor. We’ll need all our friends before the end, I think.” He added to Meridy, “You can always bring your bound ghosts to your side. You’ll learn that, eventually.”
She supposed she might, if they lived through the next hour. She would hardly be able to help learning such things, if everyone she knew died and became quick and she bound them all. But there was terribly little time for grief, because as her vision recovered, Meridy realized that they had stepped off the White Road into a fabulous and crowded chamber. The room was wide and open, round rather than square. All the walls were smooth and white, oddly slanted inward toward a high, pointed ceiling, pierced by narrow, arched windows. The floor was a beautifully inlaid marquetry of different woods. It took Jaift’s voiceless murmur of surprised alarm for Meridy to realize that she might recognize this place, and then she understood, with piercing fear, that this must be one of the tall white spires of Cora Diorr, and that they had stepped straight into the witch-king’s stronghold.
Nor was this hall empty. The witch-king himself was not here, not yet, for they had stepped through the realms of dream and shadow and come to this place before him. But Meridy knew he must be coming. Even now, noblemen and a few noblewomen, men of means and soldiers and all kinds of people cluttered the round hall. They comprised nothing like the graceful gathering Meridy might have imagined, though, for the air was filled with a violent sense of fury and fear. Among the ordinary people, appearing untouched by any human emotion, Princess Tiamanaith sat elegantly perched on a heavy chair—probably a throne, Meridy realized. The princess-regent wore a simple white gown, clasped at the waist with a girdle of silver set with tiny black diamonds, and one earring that was a strand of tiny black pearls and another that was a single ruby drop.
The White Road of the Moon Page 30