Riddle-Master

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Is he coming to Caithnard?”

  “No. He asked me to take his tale and his riddles to the Masters, who in their wisdom would decide whether or not the realm could bear the truth about the one we have called the High One for so long.”

  “That’s why you shut your doors,” she said suddenly to Master Tel, and he nodded, with the first trace of weariness she had ever seen in him.

  “How can we call ourselves Masters?” he asked simply. “We have withdrawn into ourselves not out of horror, but out of a need to reconstruct the patterns we have called truth. In the very fabric of the realm, its settlement, histories, tales, wars, poetry, its riddles—if there is an answer there, a shape of truth that holds to itself, we will find it. If the tenets of riddle-mastery themselves are invalid, we will find that, too. The Master of Hed, in his actions, will tell us that.”

  “He found his way out of that dark tower in Aum . . .” she murmured. Har shifted.

  “Do you think he can find his way out of another tower, another deadly game? This time, he has what he always wanted: choice. The power to make his own rules for the game.”

  She thought of the cold, sagging tower in Aum, rising like a solitary riddle itself among the gold-green oak, and saw a young man, simply dressed, stand in front of the worm-eaten door in the sunlight a long time before he moved. Then he lifted a hand, pushed the door open, and disappeared, leaving the soft air and the sunlight behind him. She looked at Har, feeling as though he had asked her a riddle and something vital hung balanced on her simple answer. She said, “Yes,” and knew that the answer had come from someplace beyond all uncertainty and confusion, beyond logic.

  He was silent a moment, studying her. Then he said, his voice gentle as the mill of snow through the still, misty air of his land, “Morgon told me once that he sat alone in an old inn at Hlurle, midway on his journey to Erlenstar Mountain, and waited for a ship to take him back to Hed. That was one point when he felt he had a choice about the matter of his destiny. But one thing stopped him from going home: the knowledge that he could never ask you to come to Hed if he could not give you the truth of his own name, of himself. So he finished his journey. When I saw him come into my house not long ago, as simply as any traveller seeking shelter in my house from the night, I did not at first see the Star-Bearer. I saw only the terrible, relentless patience in a man’s eyes: the patience born out of absolute loneliness. He went into a dark tower of truth for you. Do you have the courage to give him your own name?”

  Her hands closed tightly, one clenched over the pattern of angles on her palm. She felt something in her that had been knotted like a fist ease open slowly. She nodded, not trusting her voice, and her hand opened, glinting with secret knowledge in the candlelight. “Yes,” she said then. “Whatever I have of Ylon’s power, I swear by my name, I will twist it beyond possibility into something of value. Where is he?”

  “Coming through Ymris, undoubtedly, on his way to Anuin, and then to Lungold, since that seems where he is forcing Deth to go.”

  “And then where? After that, where? He will not be able to go back to Hed.”

  “No. Not if he kills the harpist. There would be no peace for him in Hed. I don’t know. Where does a man go to escape from himself? I’ll ask him that when I see him in Lungold.”

  “You’re going there—”

  He nodded. “I thought he might need one friend in Lungold.”

  “Please, I want to come with you.”

  She saw the unspoken protest in the Masters’ faces. The wolf-king flicked a thin brow. “How far will you go to escape from yourself? Lungold? And then where? How far can a tree escape from its roots?”

  “I’m not trying to—” She stopped then, not looking at him.

  He said softly, “Go home.”

  “Har,” Master Tel said somberly, “that is advice you might well give yourself. That city is no place even for you. The wizards will seek Ghisteslwchlohm there; the Star-Bearer will seek Deth; and if the shape-changers gather there also, not a living thing in that city will be safe.”

  “I know,” Har said, and the smile deepened faintly in his eyes. “There were traders in Kraal when I passed through it, who asked me where I thought the wizards had gone when they vanished. They were men who used both eyes to see out of, and they could look across half the realm to wonder if they wanted to risk their lives trading in a doomed city. Traders, like animals, have an instinct for danger.”

  “So do you,” Master Tel said, with some severity, “but without the instinct to avoid it.”

  “Where do you suggest we go to be safe in a doomed realm? And when, in the void between a riddle and its answer, was there ever anything but danger?”

  Master Tel shook his head. He yielded the argument finally when he realized it had become one-sided. They rose then for supper, cooked for them by a handful of students who had no other family but the Masters, no home but the College. They spent the rest of the evening in the library, while Raederle and the wolf-king listened, discussing the possible origins of the shape-changers, the implications of the stone found on King’s Mouth Plain, and the strange face within it.

  “The High One?” Master Tel suggested at one point, and Raederle’s throat closed in a nameless fear. “Is it possible they could be so interested in finding him?”

  “Why should they be any more interested in the High One than he is in them?”

  “Perhaps the High One is hiding from them,” someone else suggested. Har, sitting so quietly in the shadows Raederle had almost forgotten him, lifted his head suddenly, but he said nothing. One of the other Masters picked up the weave of the thought.

  “If the High One lived in fear of them, why wouldn’t Ghisteslwchlohm? The law of the High One in the realm has been untroubled; he seems oblivious of them, rather than frightened. And yet . . . he is an Earth-Master; Morgon’s stars are inextricably bound to the earlier doom of the Earth-Masters and their children; it seems incredible that he has made no response to this threat to his realm.”

  “What precisely is the threat? What are the extent of their powers? What are their origins? Who are they? What do they want? What does Ghisteslwchlohm want? Where is the High One?”

  The questions spun into a haze like torch smoke in the room; massive books were drawn from the shelves, pored over, left lying with wax from the candles pooling in their margins. Raederle saw the various unlockings of wizards’ books, heard the names or phrases that opened the seamless bindings of iron or brass or gold; saw the black, hurried writing that never faded, the blank pages that revealed their writings like an eye slowly opening to the touch of water, or fire, or a line of irrelevant poetry. Finally the broad tables were hidden beneath books, dusty rolls of parchment, and guttered candles; and unanswered riddles seemed to be burning on the wicks, lying in the shadows of the chair-backs and bookshelves. The Masters fell silent. Raederle, struggling with weariness, thought she could still hear their voices of their thoughts converging and separating, questioning, discarding, beyond the silence. Then Har rose a little stiffly, went to one of the books lying open and turned a page. “There is an old tale nagging at my mind that may not be worth considering: one out of Ymris, in Aloil’s collection of legends, I think, with a suggestion of shape-changing in it . . .”

  Raederle stood up, feeling the fraying tendrils of thought stir and eddy around her. The Masters’ faces seemed remote, vaguely surprised as she moved. She said apologetically, “I’m half-asleep.”

  “I’m sorry,” Master Tel said. He put a gentle hand on her arm, led her to the door. “One of the students had the forethought and kindness to go to the docks and tell your ship-master you were here; he brought your pack back with him. There will be a room prepared somewhere; I’m not sure—”

  He opened the door, and a young student lounging beside the wall, reading, straightened abruptly and closed his book. He had a lean, dark, hook-nosed face, and a shy smile, with which he greeted Raederle. He still wore the robe of his rank: B
eginning Mastery; the long sleeves were stained at the hems as though he had helped cook supper in it. He ducked his head after he gave her the smile and said diffidently to the floor, “We made a bed for you near the Masters’ chambers. I brought your things.”

  “Thank you.” She said good-night to Master Tel and followed the young student through the quiet halls. He said nothing more, his head still bent, the flush of shyness in his cheeks. He led her into one of the small, bare chambers. Her pack lay on the bed; pitchers of water and wine stood on a tiny table under a branch of burning candles. The windows, inset deeply in the rough stone, were open to the dark, salty air billowing up over the cliff’s edge. She said, “Thank you,” again and went to look out, though she could see nothing but the old moon with a lost star drifting between its horns. She heard the student take an uncertain step behind her.

  “The sheets are rough . . .” Then he closed the door and said, “Raederle.”

  Her blood froze in her veins.

  In the soft, shifting light of the candles, his face was a blur of spare lines and shadows. He was taller than she remembered; the stained white robe that had not changed with his shape-changing was puckered and strained across his shoulders. A wind shift stirred the candlelight, pulled the flames toward him and she saw his eyes. She put her hands to her mouth.

  “Morgon?” Her voice jumped uncontrollably. Neither of them moved; a solid slab of air seemed wedged like stone between them. He looked at her out of eyes that had stared endlessly into the black, inner hollows of Erlenstar Mountain, into the rifts and hollows of a wizard’s brain. Then she moved forward, through the stone, touched and held something that seemed ageless, like the wind or night, of every shape and no shape, as worn as a pebble runnelled with water, tossed for an eon at the bottom of a mountain. He moved slightly, and the knowledge of his own shape returned to her hands. She felt his hand, light as a breath, stir her hair. Then they were apart again, though she did not know which one of them had moved.

  “I would have come to you at Anuin, but you were here.” His voice sounded deep, harrowed, over-used. He moved finally, sat down on the bed. She stared at him wordlessly. He met her eyes, and his face, a stranger’s face, lean, hard-boned, still, shaded into a sudden, haunting gentleness. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “You didn’t.” Her own voice sounded remote in her ears, as though it were the wind beside her speaking. She sat down beside him. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “I know. I heard.”

  “I didn’t think . . . Har said you weren’t coming here.”

  “I saw your father’s ship off the coast of Ymris. I thought, since Tristan was with you, it might stop here. So I came.”

  “She might still be here; Cannon Master came for her, but—”

  “They’ve gone to Hed.”

  The finality in his voice made her study him a moment. “You don’t want to see her.”

  “Not yet.”

  “She asked me, if I saw you, to tell you this: be careful.”

  He was silent, still meeting her eyes. He had, she realized slowly, a gift for silence. When he chose, it seemed to ebb out of him, the worn silence of old trees or stones lying motionless for years. It was measured to his breathing, in his motionless, scarred hands. He moved abruptly, soundlessly, and it flowed with him as he turned, stood where she had been, gazing out the window. She wondered briefly if he could see Hed in the night.

  “I heard tales of your journey,” he said. “Tristan, Lyra and you together on Mathom’s ship stealing by night out of Caithnard, blinding seven Ymris war-ships with a light like a small sun, taking a slow barge up the floodwaters of the Winter to the doorstep of the High One to ask him a question . . . And you tell me to be careful. What was that light that blinded even Astrin? It gave rise, among the traders, to marvellous speculation. Even I was curious.”

  She started to answer him, then stopped. “What conclusions did you come to?”

  He turned, came back to her side again. “That it was something you did, probably. I remembered you could do small things . . .”

  “Morgon—”

  “Wait. I’ll want to tell you now that—no matter what else has happened or will happen—it mattered to me that while I was coming down from Isig, you were making that journey. I heard your name, now and then, as I moved, Lyra’s, Tristan’s, like small, distant lights, unexpectedly.”

  “She wanted to see you so badly. Couldn’t you have—”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then when?” she said helplessly. “After you’ve killed Deth? Morgon, that will be one harpist too many.”

  His face did not change, but his eyes slid away from her, towards some memory. “Corrig?” He added after a moment, “I had forgotten him.”

  She swallowed, feeling as though the simple statement had set the slab of distance between them again. He assumed his stillness like a shield, impervious and impenetrable; she wondered if it hid a total stranger or someone as familiar to her as his name. He seemed, looking at her, to read her thoughts. He reached across the distance, touched her briefly. Then another memory, shapeless, terrible, welled through the stillness into his eyes; he turned his face slightly until it faded. He said softly, “I should have waited to see you, too. But I just—I wanted to look at something very beautiful. The legend of An. The great treasure of the Three Portions. To know that you still exist. I needed that.”

  His fingers brushed her again, as though she were something fragile as a moth wing. She closed her eyes, brought the heels of her hands against them and whispered, “Oh, Morgon. What in Hel’s name do you think I’m doing in this College?” She let her hands fall and wondered if, behind the armor of his solitude, she had at last got his attention. “I would be that for you, if I could,” she cried. “I would be mute, beautiful, changeless as the earth of An for you. I would be your memory, without age, always innocent, always waiting in the King’s white house at Anuin—I would do that for you and for no other man in the realm. But it would be a lie, and I will do anything but lie to you—I swear that. A riddle is a tale so familiar you no longer see it; it’s simply there, like the air you breathe, the ancient names of Kings echoing in the corners of your house, the sunlight in the corner of your eye; until one day you look at it and something shapeless, voiceless in you opens a third eye and sees it as you have never seen it before. Then you are left with the knowledge of the nameless question in you, and the tale that is no longer meaningless but the one thing in the world that has meaning any more.” She stopped for breath; his hand had closed without gentleness, around her wrist. His face was familiar finally, questioning, uncertain.

  “What riddle? You came here, to this place, with a riddle?”

  “Where else could I go? My father was gone; I tried to find you and I couldn’t. You should have known there was nothing in the world that would not change—”

  “What riddle?”

  “You’re the Master here; do I have to tell even you?”

  His hand tightened. “No,” he said, and applied himself in silence to one final game within those walls. She waited, her own mind working the riddle with him, setting her name against her life, against the history of An, following strand after strand of thought that led nowhere, until at last he touched one possibility that built evenly onto another and onto another. She felt his fingers shift. Then his head lifted slowly, until he met her eyes again and she wished that the College would dissolve into the sea.

  “Ylon.” He let the word wear away into another silence. “I never saw it. It was always there . . .” He loosed her abruptly, rose and spat an ancient curse on a single tone into the shadows. It patterned the glass in the window with cracks like a spider’s web. “They touched even you.”

  She stared numbly at the place where his hand had been. She rose to leave, not knowing where in the world she could go. He caught her in one step, turned her to face him.

  “Do you think I care?” he demanded incredulously. “Do you
think that? Who am I to judge you? I am so blind with hatred I can’t even see my own land or the people I loved once. I’m hunting a man who never carried weapons in his life, to kill him while he stands facing me, against the advice of every land-ruler I have spoken to. What have you ever done in your life to make me have anything but respect for you?”

  “I’ve never done anything in my life.”

  “You gave me truth.”

  She was silent, in the hard grip of his hands, seeing his face beyond its husk of stillness—bitter, vulnerable, lawless—the brand of stars on his forehead beneath his dishevelled hair. Her own hands lifted, closed on his arms. She whispered, “Morgon, be careful.”

  “Of what? For what? Do you know who was there in Erlenstar Mountain to meet me that day Deth brought me there?”

  “Yes. I guessed.”

  “The Founder of Lungold has been sitting at the apex of the world for centuries, dispensing justice in the name of the High One. Where can I go to demand justice? That harpist is landless, bound to no King’s law; the High One seems oblivious to both our fates. Will anyone care if I kill him? In Ymris, in An itself, no one would question it—”

  “No one will ever question anything you do! You are your own law, your own justice! Danan, Har, Heureu, the Morgol—they will give you everything you ask for the sake of your name, and the truth you have borne alone; but Morgon, if you create your own law, where will any of us go, if we ever need to, to demand retribution from you?”

  He gazed down at her; she saw the flick of uncertainty in his eyes. Then his head shook, slowly, stubbornly. “Just one thing. Just this one thing. Someone will kill him eventually—a wizard, perhaps Ghisteslwchlohm himself. And I have the right.”

  “Morgon—”

  His hands tightened painfully. He was no longer seeing her but some black, private horror in his memory. She saw the sweat bead at his hairline, the muscles jump in his rigid face. He whispered, “While Ghisteslwchlohm was in my mind, nothing else existed. But at times when he . . . when he left me and I found myself still alive, lying in the dark, empty caverns of Erlenstar, I could hear Deth playing. Sometimes he played songs from Hed. He gave me something to live for.”