Or rather, it was clear enough where she was. She was behind the mirror. Someone hidden in her reflection had come out, and Timou had taken this person’s place behind the mirror. In whatever place this was.
Timou calmed herself. She made her mind as still and clear as a pool, so that she would be able to see clearly everything there was to see. It took a moment. It took longer than she would have liked. She had risen at dawn to find a place on a coach, endured the hard seat the coach offered all day, crossed the Lake and the City, found a man who was a mirror and a mirror that was a doorway. . . . It seemed unjust, to have to cope with this, too, now, when she was already tired and frustrated. Timou wished bitterly for her father. She tried very hard not to think about her mother. . . . She was ashamed to find tears prickling behind her eyes, rising in her throat, threatening the calm she had just worked to gain. She held her breath, rubbing her eyes hard with the heels of her hands, struggling to still her heart again. After a long moment she was able to lift her head and take a breath that did not tremble much at all, in a calm that was almost real. And, at last, she was able to take down her hands and examine the place to which she had come. Been brought. By her mother . . . She would not think of that. She turned instead in a slow complete circle, looking around herself.
It seemed that she stood at the narrow bottom of a sharp-edged valley made of flat planes of light rising and tilting outward, so that they spread out infinitely far to either side as they rose. Other sheets of light fell at sharp angles, intersecting the narrow valley in which she stood: other paths, she surmised. Each sheet of light seemed infinite, each path led away forever.
There were no shadows because light was everywhere, concentrated and hard to the touch, like glass. When Timou sent her mind experimentally into one sheet of light, she found nothing but more light that stretched out straight and clear forever: nothing that she could touch or hold or break. When she followed the lines of it with her mind, it seemed to run infinitely far in strange directions, oddly seductive in its geometric purity.
It was difficult to pull her mind out of the light . . . in fact, when she tried, she could not. She was being swept along into its infinite reaches; she had lost her body, her sense of herself; she would never get out. . . . She calmed herself again, with an effort, and tried to break sideways out of the light’s streaming path. Nothing happened. Her awareness was concentrated within the light, trapped by it. Yes, she thought. It was a trap. A trap for mages, who might reach out into light and never again find a way back into themselves. . . . For the first time, panic brushed the edges of her mind.
Timou thought of her father, of his calm composure. The thought steadied her. She needed that steadiness. Was there, somewhere, an end to light? If she wondered that, she might begin to flail desperately about, and yet there was nothing in this that she could fight. Terror would not help her.
She let the light carry her, steadied her mind, and tried, rather than to break away from it, simply to halt her own rushing progress. This attempt, also, had no influence on her own motion, and she tried harder, and harder, and had again to fight against panic so that she might cease the effort and consider further. The light poured past her and around her, endless and formless. It did not speak to her as the forest had done; it was not aware of her at all. It was only light and motion.
So. Stillness again, fear put ruthlessly aside. There was, she knew, a way out. There was always a way out of any trap.
The great mage Irinore had once been trapped in the deep dark of the earth while he followed the roots the forest sent down to the heart of the world. Only with great difficulty had he found his way back into the light, which seemed, at the moment, ironic. He had done this in the end by folding himself into the water of the earth and letting the roots of the trees draw him back up along their intricate pathways until he was pulled at last into the light . . . a method that seemed to have limited application to her own situation.
Another famous mage, Simoure, had once found herself lost in something she had described as “the country of ice, the country where darkness becomes light and all directions are the same.” Timou had not understood what Simoure meant, but she would not have said that darkness became light here in this place behind the mirror. This was true light.
Other stories passed through her mind. She searched within them for infinite planes of light. The powerful foreign sorcerer Deserisien . . . had he not once found a maze of glass? Yes, Timou thought, there had been a tale about that: Deserisien had come upon a crystalline maze that perfectly reflected the mind of the trapped mage so that its prisoner could not get outside it. But Deserisien had escaped, for he had made his mind reflect the maze and so discovered its exit. Later he had made it a prison of his own in which to trap others. Timou suspected uneasily that she had perhaps been trapped within the exact maze the great foreign sorcerer had discovered. But she did not know how to make her mind reflect the maze of light. The sorcery of Deserisien was nothing she knew: she doubted she could take his way out into the ordinary world. She must find a way of her own, a way of magecraft rather than Deserisien’s sorcery.
Timou, carried by rushing light, thought of the dark. The dark at the heart of the earth, where Irinore had once ventured; the dark of the storm; the dark that lies at the turning of the year, when the longest night of winter stretches coldly out to press back dawn. She remembered darkness. She shaped it with her mind. She poured herself into it; she spun it out of her heart and wrapped it around her awareness. Its silence engulfed her. It was a kind of stillness, a kind of emptiness, she thought; a dark that was more than an absence of light. It was an ending to light. It had a shape and a presence of its own.
She did not know how long she waited, wrapped in the silent dark. It seemed a long time. Long enough to remember her own body, the heft of it, the feel of muscle and bone and rushing blood and human life. . . . The darkness faded at last, as even the longest night fades at the dawn. Timou found herself standing once more at the base of a valley of light. Planes of light cut through space all around her. She was shaking, terrified now that she could afford the luxury of terror. But she was herself. Still trapped. But no longer caught in the deeper layer of the trap.
That seemed, at the moment, enough to be grateful for.
She walked slowly along the path of angled light, more because she wanted to walk and move and feel her human body than because she hoped to find anything useful by simply walking about. Other narrow paths intersected hers from time to time, at odd angles, and she chose one or another to follow at random. They all seemed the same once she set her foot on them: narrow, straight, absolutely level, with walls that tilted oddly outward as they rose.
Though she seemed to walk for a long time, Timou did not grow hungry or thirsty. Nor did she become weary. It occurred to her she might walk forever on these paths and find nothing. . . . The thought did not daunt her; she was too newly glad to be trapped only in a maze behind a mirror and not in a bodiless rush of light. There would be a way out, and she would find it. Her hand ached, and she rubbed it absently, welcoming the slight, ordinary discomfort . . . and came to a halt between one step and the next. She sent her mind not outward into the sheets of light, but inward, into her hand, looking for . . . she was not quite sure what . . . traces of venom, a memory of a cool snake’s egg and a hatchling snake. She opened her eyes.
Around her wrist was coiled the tiny white snake from the disturbing dream she’d had in the forest, slipping into solidity here in this place of angles and light. The little snake was soft as silk to the touch, delicate as fine ribbon. It lifted its narrow head, no larger than her smallest fingernail, and asked, in a sweet husky voice, “What do you seek?”
Timou thought of the long sleek black serpent saying to her, If you help me now, I will guide you when you most need guidance. And now this little one was here. Was it truly a different serpent, then, or the same one in a different guise? Either way, Timou did not trust the strange creature as a
guide—but she surely needed guidance. She said cautiously, “I seek the way out of this maze.”
“Oh, no. That isn’t what you seek,” said the hatchling. It uncoiled itself, slid to the floor at her feet, and flowed away, down shadowless pathways of light. Timou followed it hastily.
The little snake, at least, seemed to have no question where it was going, or how to get there. It chose paths without hesitation, and slowed, finally, coiling itself into a tight little spiral. Before it, along a deep, arrow-straight channel with banks made of light, so wide Timou could not have thrown a stone to the farther side, ran a river of blood.
In this place of colorless light such a thing was doubly shocking. Timou stood at the edge of the river and looked at it, her eyes wide. The liquid was clearly blood. It ran slowly past, sluggish, thicker than water, darker and clotting at the edges, warmer than the air. Steam rose from it. She could smell it: like the butchering of pigs, but more disturbing because in this place it lacked all context.
“You won’t need a guide now. Simply follow this river until you come to its source,” said the serpent. Its voice was still sweet, but edged, as in Timou’s memory, with malice.
She was more and more certain that both the black serpent and the white were aspects of the same creature—more and more certain that she did not understand at all what they were. Or what it was. “What are you?” Timou asked it slowly, not quite sure that she wanted to know.
“Do you not know me?”
“I . . . No.”
“You should,” said the snake.
Timou gazed at it for a little while, but when the snake did not speak again, she finally walked forward, along the river of blood. It did not follow. It was still there when she glanced back, until she had gone so far it was lost in the distance.
There was not much room to walk on the bank along the channel of blood. Timou placed her feet carefully. Trying to look ahead, she saw nothing but blood and light, diminishing in the distance. She walked on. There was no guide before her, but as the little serpent had said, she scarcely needed one.
The river dwindled as she walked beside it. She noticed this gradually. When she did notice it, she stopped and looked more carefully. She thought that now, if she had a stone, she could throw it easily to the far side. She turned back to her journey, but this time she watched the river and knew that it was narrowing as she approached its source. The time came when she might have leapt across the channel, and after that, when she might have stepped across.
Nor did the flowing blood seem deep at all. In fact, there was barely a channel here for it to flow through, as though this strange place of light had created the channel only when it had needed something through which liquid might flow. The blood was a ribbon of red, creeping along the floor of the path . . . it was a thin trickle, no wider than a hatchling snake, but longer, longer—she looked ahead and saw at last its source. There was a man lying there, in a place where the path widened out to create a broad place. Sheets of light came down on all sides, leaning outward dizzyingly as they rose. Timou thought at once, Of course, this is the Prince. So he is dead after all. . . . She walked forward.
It was not the Prince. It was her father.
He was on his back, limbs straight and face composed as though he had merely lain down to rest. His eyes were open, but blind. A narrow silver knife stood out of his chest and a tiny thread of his heart’s blood ran from the wound and away across the floor. There was no doubt that he was dead.
I seek the way out, Timou had told the little serpent. No, it had answered. That isn’t what you seek. And it had been right. She understood that now. She had wanted to find the lost Prince, but more than that she had wanted to find her father. Beyond that, Timou realized, she had wanted him to be glad to be found; she’d wanted him to welcome her and—could she have been so young and foolish as to hope for such a thing?—to take her himself to meet her mother. She’d hoped her mother would be happy and proud to meet the daughter she’d given away. That Kapoen would be happy and proud to show her to her mother.
Well, she had found him. Only to discover he had left her again, this time with terrible finality. And she had met her mother—at least, all but met her. A certainty settled from somewhere into her heart: a certainty that it had been her mother’s hand on the silver knife. This certainty seemed somehow even worse than her father’s death. Timou wondered what he’d thought when he’d found her mother here: Had he understood at once that she would kill him? Had he fought her? Or had he stood in disbelief while she set that little silver knife in his heart and let out the river of his life’s blood?
Had he regretted leaving Timou behind him in the village? Or regretted his failure to explain to her why she should stay there? Perhaps he had had no time to regret either decision.
Timou walked forward very slowly to her father’s side. She took a breath, and let it out. She had come all this way, along all these strange roads, searching for her father, hoping to find her mother. And all her hopes had come to this. She wanted to cry, or scream, or even laugh: she could not tell whether what she felt was grief or rage or incredulity. She did not make a sound. She felt she had been pulled apart into the light and had not after all managed to find her body again. Had it only been this very morning that she had crossed Tiger Bridge into the City and peered with such pleased interest at its reflection in the Lake? She felt she was no longer the girl who had crossed the Bridge; she had become someone quite different.
All her past reordered itself in her memory. Nothing about her life was as she’d believed it to be: She’d believed that her father, stern as he might be, must have loved her mother as the fathers of her friends loved their mothers. She’d thought her mother must have been sorry to give her away. Now she understood that, whatever her mother’s reason for bearing her, it had surely had nothing to do with love. It had been part of the betrayal leading to this place, to the knife standing in her father’s heart.
Timou sat down cross-legged by her father’s body. She sat like that for a long time. After a while she reached out listlessly, took hold of the silver knife, and drew it out of the wound. She had not expected her father to come back to life after it was withdrawn. Nor did he. The knife melted in her hands, turning into wisps of thin vapor and dissipating in the air. As though all her volition had gone with it, she folded her hands over her knees and sat still.
After a while she noticed that the blood had disappeared. Sometime after that, she noticed that her father’s body had grown somehow less substantial. It faded slowly. She could not see how it went; it did not seem to grow more distant or to become smaller. Only to be less completely present. She watched, too numb to be horrified, as her father faded . . . and faded. . . . She could see the floor of light through his hands where they lay at his sides . . . she could see through all of him. . . . He did not become mist, as the knife had done, and disperse in the air. But he was gone, as though he had become shadow and so could not exist in this place of light.
Timou wondered, her thoughts moving sluggishly, as though for the first time in a very long while, whether this way out was a way she, too, might take.
“That is not a way that leads anywhere you would wish to go,” said the snake, lifting its narrow head to gaze at Timou from eyes like flecks of sapphire. It had come as her father’s body had vanished: with such subtlety she had missed the moment of its arrival. It was just there, coiled and unobtrusive. There was no teasing malice in its tone now, but neither did it speak gently. Its voice held a strange kind of coolness, as though it did not understand human grief and so could not pity it.
It was a coolness that roused both envy and outrage in Timou. She jumped to her feet. “How could you?” she cried at it. “How could you not tell me?” She wanted to throw something at it, break its passionless regard, make it care that her father was dead.
“Why do you blame me for your father’s failings? Or for your mother’s cold heart?” asked the serpent, unmoved.
&nb
sp; “I . . .,” said Timou, unable to form a coherent protest. “You . . .”
“When you’re ready, your way lies there.” The snake pointed with its head down a path of light that was, to Timou’s eyes, like any other.
On an impulse born of grief and of surprising rage, not caring whether this was a wise thing to do, not caring whether it was a dangerous thing to do, Timou sent her mind toward the snake itself. It seemed both present and not present, both powerful and powerless; it did not seek to avoid Timou’s probing mind, nor did it defend itself, nor attack her. It only slipped through her awareness like smoke, impossible to encompass. She could not find the shape of it with her inner eye.
When she opened merely human eyes again to look for it, the serpent was still there, but it had grown huge: coils rolled out of sight all around her, disappearing and reappearing through sheets of light. Its head alone was larger than a man’s torso, its mouth large enough to swallow her whole. It had become the color of gold, of light. Its eyes, red and gold, contained fire and the memory of fire. Delicate horns, crimson as blood and long as swords, curved back from its broad flat head; its fangs when it smiled were made of crystal and light. Astonished, shocked out of the storm of emotions that had beset her, Timou tipped her head back to stare up at it. She swallowed, blinking, and the snake was suddenly once more tiny and white, with blue eyes and a blue tracery across its throat. Dazzled, her eyes stunned by light, she needed a moment to find it again.
The City in the Lake Page 12