[Great age. Great humor. Greater curiosity. Insatiable curiosity. The items on the shelves are copies, some of them miniature, of all the artifacts he’s made; armor, jewelry, houses, mountains, shoes that could Move, a comb that you only needed to use once and your hair would be perfect forever.]
I was nervous when he put me down, but the world stopped its yaw and spin. I actually had to put my hand to the back of a chair—a perfect size for me. I had become so used to the feeling of motion that now the stillness seemed strange. Welcome, but strange.
“Wow,” I said. “You fixed me.”
“Yes, in a manner of speaking. You are now fixed in place.”
“So, will I be all right from now on?” I was thrilled, not only that I felt comfortable for the first time in what seemed like days, but at the thought that now I would be able to come back and forth—but he was shaking his head.
“Stormwolf tells me it is the Lands themselves that give you this sickness, by their very nature. You are not Healed, rather this place is not, in the normal sense of the word, part of the Lands.”
Wolf paused halfway to sitting in his chair. “Where are we, then?”
Ice Tor tapped himself on the forehead. “In my home and workshop. It is the only place I can make you comfortable.”
Wolf shot a quick look at the doorway we’d come in by. “How is this possible?”
“We are the artificers of the People. We Dwarves and the Trolls. It is Dwarves and Trolls who make the gra’if you Riders bear, and your bowls and jars and baskets and containers. It is told, in Songs older even than I am myself, that it was Dwarves who made the Talismans—Sword, Spear, and Cauldron—from the rock of the Stone of Virtue.”
“You can bend space and time,” I said. I turned to Wolf. “Didn’t you say that the Hunt would answer the call of the Horn, no matter where they are? Even though they can’t Move? This is how, because Ice Tor made it.” I turned back to our host. “You made the Portals,” I said. “Oh! And the Rings. Not you, personally, but someone close to you, like a parent or a grandparent. Someone like you.”
“You are a Truthreader, good. That will make my work much easier, then. What else did you see? What else have we made, my People and I?”
“You made—oh, no,” I almost couldn’t say it. “You made the Shadowlands?”
“Cassandra? What is it?” Max rolled over and a light came on over the bed. “Bad dreams?”
Cassandra shivered and allowed Max to draw her into his arms. “No. At least…you know that I told you I could feel Moon’s dra’aj, and Wolf’s, and even to some extent, Valory’s?”
“Sure.”
“Well, now I can’t. Wolf and Valory, they’re gone.”
Max sat up. “Back to the Shadowlands, maybe?”
“No, they’re just gone.”
Chapter Twenty
“ALEJANDRO, THERE’S A WATCH on the deck.” Frowning, Nik leaned closer to the window, squinting through glass and screening.
Alejandro appeared in the doorway from the kitchen, a bottle of wine in his hand.
“It wasn’t there a minute ago, when the cat wanted in.”
The Rider’s eyes narrowed, and he set the bottle down on the marble-topped table. There was the barest shush of air, and he was standing next to Nik again, this time with the watch in his hand. “It is not mine,” he said, as he set it down on Nik’s palm.
Nik turned it over. “This is a really old Seiko,” he said. “See the dark face?” The metal was cool. Nik weighed it in his hand before handing it back. “I think it’s Hawk’s.”
“How can that be?”
Nik shrugged. “I noticed it particularly. I used to have one like it, and when I saw Hawk wearing it, I was reminded.”
“Hawk would not have returned to leave this trinket and go again without a word.” Alejandro turned the watch over. There was engraving on the back, but Nik couldn’t read it from where he stood. “It must have been taken from him.”
“And then brought here? What for?” Nik swallowed. “Some kind of message?”
“But from whom? Even if there had been a confrontation, if Hawk somehow enraged Sunset on Water and was killed, why would it be revealed to us in this way?”
Nik eyed the bottle of wine. He could use something stronger. “Could it be the Hunt? Maybe they captured him and this is some kind of message? Their way of letting us know?”
Alejandro, head tilted to one side, set the watch down and picked up the bottle of wine again. Nik followed him back into the kitchen, watched as he took a corkscrew from its hook among the other kitchen utensils. The cork was out, and the wine poured almost before Nik was ready to take the glass handed to him. Before he raised it, Alejandro had already tossed his back, and was pouring himself another.
“I hope this isn’t the good stuff,” Nik said.
Alejandro grimaced and refilled his glass. “The People have always thought of the Hunt only as unreasoning beasts, a living hunger.” Alejandro took a more careful sip of his second glass, and this time Nik joined him. “It is hard to keep in mind that we must think of them as rational creatures, capable of planning. But if leaving this watch here is somehow a message, an opening of negotiations, even if only for ransom, why would there not be a message?”
Nik thought of Moon, and the computer monitors in Elaine’s office. “Can they write?”
Alejandro looked down at the wine in his glass. “Hawk can, if he were still alive.”
Nik’s mouth was suddenly dry, and somehow he knew the wine wasn’t going to help. “Yeah, but they wouldn’t trust what he’d said, would they? So they wouldn’t let him write anything.” The hope on Alejandro’s face was almost as painful to see as it was to feel. He reached out and tapped the watch. “If Valory were here, she could tell us what’s going on.”
“Ah, no, we did not make the Shadowlands. Not exactly.” Again there was a deep rumble of laughter in the Dwarf’s chest. “We make things, we Dwarves, objects, even doors, like the Rings and the Portals. Places we cannot make, that takes other skills, other talents. Though we did help to make the Shadowlands what they now are. So the Songs told, at least, and I am gratified to have it confirmed in so far as you can do so. These events took place so long ago that even the existence of the Songs that tell of them has been forgotten, the Singers who Sang them long gone, remembered only vaguely by some of us very Old Ones. And the Songs tell that the fixing of the Shadowlands in its place was not done by Dwarves and Trolls alone, but by all of the People, Riders, Solitaries, Naturals. All of us.”
We were in that strange sitting room, or study, Wolf leaning forward in his chair, his clasped hands hanging between his knees, me sipping on my chicken broth, taking advantage of the steadiness of my stomach. I thought about asking who I had to kill for a bacon and tomato sandwich, but I knew I shouldn’t risk it.
“I had always thought the Shadowlands to be exactly that,” Wolf said. “A shadow version of the Lands.”
Sheesh, I thought. No wonder humans weren’t very important to them. Who cares about the welfare of their shadow?
“Not at all,” Ice Tor was saying. “What we call the Shadowlands always existed, separately from the Lands. But the two, separate, were unstable. Together,” he moved his hands as if they were the plates on a scale.
“Yin and Yang,” I said. “A balance,” I added when they both looked at me. “Black and white, light and dark, male and female.”
“Exactly. Each anchors the other. Each contains some part of the other within it.”
“Dra’aj,” I said. “That’s why human dra’aj works differently for us.” I’d read some of this when he’d picked me up in his arms; I just hadn’t understood what I was seeing. “My world is like the foundation of a building. It was crumbling, and dra’aj was poured into it, like humans would pour cement, or put rebar in.” I thought about it. “So if we’re the foundation, is the Lands the building?”
The Dwarf waggled his massive finger at me. “Now you see the pr
oblem with trying to take an analogy too far.”
Ice Tor was grinning, but Wolf was frowning intently at his clasped hands. “All this is very interesting, and I would love to hear more about the Songs that tell of these events, but we are here for another purpose.”
“Ah, yes, the Horn.” Ice Tor rose to his feet and led us through a doorway I hadn’t seen before into a different section of his home. Not that any of the doorways actually contained doors, I noticed. The new room looked much more like a workshop than the first one we’d passed through, though now that I looked more closely, the unfinished statue and the broken wheel were in here as well. It was more like the room itself had changed. There were tools and objects I thought I recognized from seeing them on television. Hammers and sledges, cutters, clamps, carving tools. Other things looked familiar, like the forge fire that glowed to one side, but I couldn’t have sworn to what they were.
Ice Tor went first to the shelves on the far side of the room, returning with what looked like a piece of tree branch in his hand. I saw, when he laid it on the table, a piece of a deer’s antler. Horn, I said to myself.
“Really?” I said aloud. “Just that simple?”
“Just that symbol,” he said, laughing the way punsters always do. I wrinkled my nose and stuck out my tongue in the approved manner of those receiving puns, and the Dwarf laughed louder. “Go on, touch it and tell me what you feel.”
Wolf put out his hand as if to stop me, but when I raised my eyes to look at him, he lowered his hand again.
“We’ve got to know,” I said, and he nodded, but his lips were pressed tightly together.
I laid the tips of my fingers on the piece of antler and, as I suspected, felt only the cool, slightly uneven surface of bone. I didn’t move my hand at all, I didn’t have to. This wasn’t a symbol anymore. It wasn’t anything.
“There’s nothing there,” I told them, lifting my hand away, and jumped back, startled, as the antler suddenly disappeared. It was like it had never been there in the first place. Even my fingers didn’t remember the feel of it.
“So you are right, Younger Brother. The Horn is no more, and another may be made.”
Ice Tor went to a clear area on a central bench, and began pulling objects toward him, among them a hammer as long as my arm, and some tongs. Directly in front of him, he placed what looked like a mortar and pestle made of some pale gray stone.
“The more elements an object contains,” he said, sorting through a number of lids until he found one that would fit the mortar, “the stronger it is, the more often it can be used without wearing out or breaking.” He turned to look at us as he strapped on an apron. I was immediately reminded of Alejandro in the kitchen. “The first Horn had many elements, so many that, from what you tell me, it took the Dragon fire of the new High Prince to destroy it—that and the use to which it had been put.”
“It was used to summon the Hunt.” Wolf was clearly puzzled. He had pulled up a couple of high stools for us to sit on. Obviously, Ice Tor was used to having an audience. “What other use has it?”
“It gathers the Hunt, yes. And who holds it can lead them. But what use was then made of the Hunt by the Basilisk Prince?”
I could tell by the look on his face that Wolf wasn’t following, and I have to say I wasn’t in much better state. “But did he not use them to hunt?” Wolf said. “To find and kill his enemies?”
“Ah, but was that the true use of the Horn?” Ice Tor said. “Such a Horn is used to call, and to direct, as are the horns of war. Some say this Horn is older than the Hunt, some say it was originally conceived as a tool to control the Hunt. In either case, it was used to lead them to a place where they would not be a danger.”
Wolf looked at me, but I shook my head. “I can’t know,” I said. “Not without touching the Horn itself, or at least someone who’s touched it.”
“And no such person is available to us.” Ice Tor gestured with his tongs to underscore his point.
“Why was the Horn not used to destroy them?” Wolf was completely flummoxed. I had to admit, having seen them in action, that I agreed with him. Besides, locking an addict away somewhere, with no cure and no access to the drug they craved, didn’t strike me as the best kind of solution.
I was reminded once again that Riders—and perhaps the rest of the People—didn’t always think in humanitarian terms.
“That I cannot say. Some discord, perhaps, some disagreement? No record remains of the Horn’s use. It was lost for many Cycles, and the Hunt dormant, until the Basilisk Prince located it and called them. The details of its original purpose may well have been lost to us.”
“But not how to make one,” I said.
He grinned again, clearly happy at the thought of building something, and I noticed how square and even his teeth were. “No, not how to make one. That knowledge is still with us.”
“So you are…” Wolf cleared his throat. “The Song that led us here told that Ice Tor made the Horn, so…”
The Dwarf laughed aloud, so infectiously that even Wolf smiled. “No, no Younger Brother. I am not that Ice Tor, otherwise I could answer all and any of your questions about the Horn. I am this Ice Tor.” He thumped himself on the chest. “Any who lives here,” the sweep of his arm indicated the whole of his living space, but I noticed he kept his other hand on his chest. “Any who occupies this space is Ice Tor.”
But manipulating space—and time—was what Dwarves did, I thought. Was it possible that this huge Solitary, this old/young giant Dwarf both was and was not the Ice Tor who had made the original Horn? Perhaps without being aware of it himself? I wanted to touch him again, to find out, but I was also afraid, not sure that the answer wouldn’t overwhelm me.
He clapped his hands together. “So, what elements did you bring me?”
Wolf and I looked at each other. “Um, what elements were you hoping for?” I said.
“For a Binding, or Summoning, object—such as this one—a piece of the thing or Person to be bound or summoned is customary.”
“Where would we get a piece of a Hound?” I said. “And if we were able to fetch one, why would we even need a Horn?” I glanced at Wolf and the look, bordering on despair, that sat on his face was heartrending. “Oh, no, Wolf. That can’t be what he means.”
“Stormwolf is not a Hound,” Ice Tor said warily. “He would not have been able to enter here if he was.”
I wondered if they knew what DNA was, and if they didn’t, whether I could explain it to them. “I know, but he was a Hound,” I said. Wolf stiffened, but instead of looking away, as I expected him to, he kept his head up, and looked the Dwarf in the eye. “And I’m maybe the only person who knows it and isn’t freaked out by it.” My voice sounded sharp even to me. It was so easy to be frustrated by people who couldn’t know. I turned to the Dwarf. “If I can read the things that Wolf knew before he became a Hound by touching him, then the part of him that was a Hound is still there as well. So won’t something of his do?” I thought about the things I’d read about spells and enchantments. “Hair? Fingernails?”
The Dwarf nodded, scratching his chin. “There is only one way for us to know.” Was his smile a little toothier than it had been a few moments before? “But other elements, similar in nature, are also needed. Those who require the artifact must contribute also. For the original Horn, contributions came from each of the People: Rider, Solitary, and Natural. Have you a piece of live wood from a Tree Natural? Voluntarily given, of course. Or water from a living spring or fountain?”
I was wondering what I’d done with the walking stick Wolf had got for me when he spoke.
“Water we have, in my pack.” He started to get down off the stool, but Ice Tor held up his palm.
“Allow me.” He lifted a small trapdoor I hadn’t noticed on the surface of his workbench and reached in, pulling out a blue ceramic bottle I recognized as part of the supplies Wolf had picked up at the hostel where we found the Cloud Horses. When he saw us both staring, he grin
ned again. “Doorways, my Young Ones, doorways. Always a specialty of mine.” He unstoppered the bottle and poured the water drop by drop into the pestle, counting under his breath as he did.
He restoppered the bottle, placed it back into the opening in the table, and closed the trapdoor. This time I looked, and there was definitely no sign of a door on the tabletop. He dusted off his hands.
“Have you anything else?” When we shook our heads, he gave a sharp nod. “Well, we have a Natural here,” he tapped the pestle, “and a Hound.” He pointed at Wolf. “I am myself a Solitary, but what shall we do for a Rider?”
“What about—” but just as I was about to say “me,” Wolf’s hand flashed out and closed on my wrist. That’s going to leave a bruise, I thought.
“This comes from Walks Under the Moon,” Wolf said. He took off the bracelet made from Moon’s hair and set it down in the center of the Dwarf’s enormous palm. Ice Tor placed the bracelet into the mortar and looked at us again.
“And now you, my houndling.”
Wolf’s sloe-black hair, cut fashionably short when we were in my world, had reverted to its natural state here, hanging halfway down his back, partly loose, and partly made up of small braids used to restrain the loose part. He sorted out a braid a little thicker than a pencil and held it out.
“Have you scissors?” he asked.
“Younger Brother.” Ice Tor’s voice was solemn and deep. “We used the Rider’s hair because that is all we have of her. From ourselves we must have something stronger, or the magic will not work.”
Wolf’s eyes narrowed, and his lips thinned. I remember something Alejandro had told me, about there traditionally being a level of distrust between Riders and Solitaries. That distrust was clear on Wolf’s face. “Something stronger?” he said, his tone full of skepticism.
“He’s not lying,” I said. “Or trying to trick us. What he says is the truth.”
“Thank you, Young One,” he said. “I knew it would be good to have a Truthreader with us, and so again I am proved right.” He turned to Wolf. “But to offer my own proof, to show you that what your friend says is correct, I will give first.”
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