Riddle-Master

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “So you came here?”

  “It is one last place.”

  “Here.” She drew breath and shouted at him in sudden, furious despair, halting Duac mid-pace, “You came here, and because of you I have let all the Kings of Hel into their house!” She heard the hollow rasp of Farr’s question in her brain, and she turned on him. “You brought the wrong man! He isn’t even a shape-changer!”

  “We found him in that shape, and he chose to keep it,” Farr answered, in his surprise momentarily defensive. “He was the only stranger moving secretly through Hel.”

  “He couldn’t have been! What kind of a poor bargain was it that you kept? You would have had to search all the back streets and docksides of the realm to find a man I wanted less to see.”

  “I kept the vows I swore.” She could tell by Duac’s expression that the harsh, unearthly voice was rebounding also in his mind. “The skull is mine. The binding is finished.”

  “No.” She backed a step from him, her fingers locked tightly around the lidless gaze and grin of the skull. “You left the man you swore to guard somewhere in Hel, to be harried by the dead, to be discovered by—”

  “There was no one else!” She saw even Deth wince slightly at his exasperated shout. He stepped towards her, his eyes dark smoldering. “Woman, you are bound by your name to your own vow, to the bargain that brought me across this threshold where Oen carried that skull and my last curse with it and throned me king of his midden. If you don’t give me that skull, I swear by—”

  “You will swear nothing.” She gathered light from the shields, kindled it in her mind, and laid it like a yellow bar in front of him. “And you will not touch me.”

  “Can you control us all, Witch?” he asked grimly. “Try.”

  “Wait,” Duac said abruptly. He held a hand, palm outward, in the air, as Farr’s baleful gaze swung at him. “Wait.” The authority of desperation in his voice held Farr momentarily at bay. Duac stepped cautiously past the light on the floor, reached Raederle and put his hands on her shoulders. She saw, looking up at him, Ylon’s face briefly, the pale, angled brows, the eyes uneasy with color. Her shoulders flinched slightly at the sudden human touch, when she had spoken to nothing human for nine days, and she saw the anguish break into his eyes. He whispered, “What have you done to yourself? And to this house?”

  She wanted, gazing back at him, to spread the whole tangled tale out for him, to make him understand why her hair hung lank and dirty to her waist, why she was arguing with a dead king over his skull and could seemingly shape pure air into flame. But in the face of Farr’s anger she dared yield nothing. She said stiffly, “We made a bargain, Farr and I—”

  “Farr.” His lips shaped the word almost without sound, and she nodded, swallowing drily.

  “I made Hallard Blackdawn give me his skull. I sat up all night during the rousing of Hel, circled by fire, working with fire, and by dawn I had the power to bargain. The Star-Bearer was coming through Hel to Anuin; Farr swore to gather Kings to protect him in exchange for the skull. He swore by his own name and the names of the Kings of Hel. But he didn’t keep his part of the bargain. He didn’t even try to find a shape-changer; he simply guarded the first stranger who he found travelling across Hel—”

  “The stranger made no objection.” The cold voice of Evern the Falconer cut across her words. “He was being hunted. He used our protection.”

  “Of course he was hunted! He—” Then the realization slapped at her, of the true extent of the danger she had brought into her house. She whispered, her fingers icy against the bone in her hands, “Duac—” But his eyes had flicked away from her face to the harpist.

  “Why did you come here? The Star-Bearer has not reached Anuin yet, but you must have known the traders would bring his tale.”

  “I thought your father might have returned.”

  “What,” Duac inquired more in wonder than anger, “in Hel’s name would you expect my father to say to you?”

  “Very little.” He stood with a haunting, familiar quiescence, but there was a preoccupation in his face, as though he were listening for something beyond their hearing. Raederle touched Duac’s arm.

  “Duac.” Her voice shook. “Duac. I am bringing more than the Kings of Hel into Anuin.”

  He closed his eyes, breathed something. “What now? You vanished two months ago from Caithnard, took our father’s ship and left Rood to ride home alone without the faintest idea of where you were. Now you appear out of nowhere, with as much warning, accompanied by the Kings of Hel, an outlawed harpist and a crowned skull. The walls of this house could cave in on my head next and I doubt if I’d be surprised.” He paused a moment; his hold tightened. “Are you all right?”

  She shook her head, still whispering. “No. Oh, no. Duac, I was trying to guard Morgon against Ghisteslwchlohm.”

  “Ghisteslwchlohm?”

  “He is—he followed Deth through Hel.”

  The expression died on his face. His eyes went beyond her to Deth, and then he lifted his hands carefully off her shoulders as though he were lifting stones. “All right.” There was no hope in his voice. “Maybe we can—”

  The harpist’s voice, sprung taut, interrupted him. “The Founder is nowhere in An.”

  “I felt him!” Raederle cried. “He was behind you at the gates of Anuin. I felt his mind searching all the corners of Hel; he would break through my mind like a black wind, and I could feel his hatred, his rage—”

  “That is not the Founder.”

  “Then who—” She stopped. The men, living and dead, seemed motionless as figures on a chessboard around her. She shook her head slowly, mute again, while the bone strained under her grip.

  The harpist said with unexpected intensity, “I would never have chosen this place. But you didn’t give me a choice.”

  “Morgon?” she whispered. She remembered then his quick, silent departure from Caithnard, the lawless mind that had found her, yet never threatened her. “I brought you here so he could kill you?” His face, hopeless, exhausted, gave her his answer. Something between a shout and a sob of grief and confusion welled through her. She stared at Deth, breathing tightly, feeling the hot swell of tears behind her eyes. “There are things not worth killing. Curse us all for this: you for making him what he has become; him for not seeing what he has become; and me for bringing you nearly face-to-face. You will destroy him even with your death. There’s the door, open. Find a ship out of Anuin—”

  “To where?”

  “Anywhere! To the bottom of the sea, if nowhere else. Go harp with Ylon’s bones, I don’t care. Just go, so far he’ll forget your name and your memory. Go—”

  “It’s too late.” His voice was almost gentle. “You have brought me into your house.”

  She heard a step behind her and whirled. But it was Rood, flushed and dishevelled from riding, coming precipitously into the hall. He cast a crow-colored eye at the assembly of wraiths pulled out of their graves by a dream of revenge, armed as no King of An had armed himself for centuries. He stopped short; Raederle saw, even as his face whitened, the gleam of recognition in his eyes. Then Ohroe the Cursed, standing near him, whose face was seamed red from temple to jaw with his death wound, gripped the neck of Rood’s tunic and wrenched him backward. His arm, heavy with chain mail, locked tightly around Rood’s throat; a knife flashed in his other hand; the point of it pricked Rood’s own temple. He said succinctly, “Now. Let us bargain again.” Raederle’s terrified, furious rill of thought blazed white-hot across the knife blade and leaped into Ohroe’s eyes. He gasped, dropping the knife. Rood’s elbow slamming into the mailed ribs seemed to have no effect, but the arm around his throat loosened as Ohroe lifted his hand to his head. Rood slipped free, pausing as he crossed the hall only to pull off the wall an ancient blade that had hung there since Hagis’s death. He joined Duac who said tersely, “Will you put that sword down? The last thing I want is a pitched battle in this house.”

  The Kings seemed to be s
hifting together without sound. Among them, the harpist, his head lowered slightly as though his attention were focussed on nothing of the movement around him, was conspicuous in his stillness, and Rood made a sound in his throat. He took a firmer grip on the sword hilt and said, “Tell them that. At least when we’re wraiths ourselves, we can fight on our own terms. Who brought them here? Deth?”

  “Raederle.”

  Rood’s head turned sharply. He saw Raederle, then, standing a little behind Duac. His eyes went from her worn face to the skull in her hands, and the sword tip struck the floor with a clink. She saw a shudder rack through him.

  “Raederle? I saw you and I didn’t even recognize you . . .” He flung the sword on the stones and went to her. He reached out to her as Duac had, but his hands dropped before he touched her. He gazed at her, and she saw that, deep in him, something dormant, unfamiliar to him, was struggling with the sense of her power. He whispered, “What happened to you? What happens to people who try to make that journey to Erlenstar Mountain?”

  She swallowed, lifted one hand away from the skull to touch him. “Rood—”

  “Where did you get such power? It’s like nothing you ever had before.”

  “I always had it—”

  “From what? I look at you now, and I don’t even know who you are!”

  “You know me,” she whispered, her throat burning. “I am of An . . .”

  “Rood,” Duac said. His voice held an odd, flat tone of apprehension that pulled Rood’s eyes from Raederle’s face. Duac was staring at the doorway; he groped behind him for Rood. “Rood. That. Who is that? Tell me it’s not who I think it is—”

  Rood swung around. Crossing the threshold, soundless, shadowless, on a great black mount whose eyes were the color of the eyes of Farr’s skull, rode a man with a single blood-red jewel on the circle of gold on his head. He was dark, sinewy, powerful; the hilts of his knife and sword were of braided gold; the rich coat over his mail was embroidered with the ancient emblem of An: an oak holding a bolt of black lightning in its green boughs. He left a following on the threshold that must have come out of the fields and orchards around Anuin. Beyond them, through the open doors, Raederle could see Duac’s own guards and unarmed servants struggling to get through. They might as well have struggled against a stone wall. The effect of the crowned man on the wraiths in the hall was immediate: every sword in the room was drawn. Farr moved forward, his flat, expressionless face livid above the cut on his neck, the huge blade raised in his hand. The dead King’s eyes, ignoring Farr, moving slowly over the gathering, touched Duac. The black horse stopped.

  “Oen.”

  Rood’s voice drew the King’s attention to him briefly, then his gaze returned to Duac. His head bent slightly, he said, his voice temperless yet inflexible, “Peace be on the living in this house, and may no dishonor come into it. To those with honor.” He paused, his eyes still on Duac’s face as he recognized the ageless instinct in him for land-law, together with something else. He gave a short laugh that held little amusement. “You have a face out of the sea. But your own father is more fortunate. You bear little more of my land-heir than his memory . . .”

  Duac, looking harrowed, found his voice finally. “Peace—” The word shook, and he swallowed. “Will you bring peace with you into this house and leave it behind when you go?”

  “I cannot. I have sworn a vow. Beyond death.” Duac’s eyes closed, his lips moving in a succinct, inaudible curse. Oen’s face turned finally to Farr; their eyes met across the room for the first time outside of their dreams in six centuries. “I swore that as long as the Kings ruled Anuin, Farr of Hel would rule the king’s midden.”

  “And I have sworn,” Farr rasped, “that I would not close my eyes in my grave until those ruling Anuin were lying in theirs.”

  Oen’s brow flicked upward. “You lost your head once before. I heard that a woman of Anuin carried your skull out of Hel, back to this house and to her shame opened the doors of this house to the dead of Hel. I have come to cleanse it of the smell of the midden.” He glanced at Raederle. “Give me the skull.”

  She stood dumbfounded at the contempt in his voice, in his eyes, the dark, calculating eyes that had watched a tower with iron bars at its windows being built for his land-heir beside the sea. “You,” she whispered, “bringing empty words into this house, what did you ever know of peace? You small-minded man, content in your battles, you left a riddle behind you in Anuin when you died that was far more than just a sea-colored face. You want to fight with Farr over this skull like dogs over a bone. You think I betrayed my house: what do you know of betrayal? You have roused yourself for revenge: what do you know of revenge? You think you saw the last of Ylon’s strange powers when you walled him in his tower so efficiently with such little understanding, such little compassion. You should have known that you cannot bind a sorrow or an anger. You have waited six centuries for a battle with Farr. Well, before you raise your sword in this hall, you will have to fight me.”

  She stripped light from the shields, from the armbands and jewelled crowns, from the flagstones, blazed a circle on the stones around Oen. She looked for a single source of fire in the room, but there was not even a candle lit. So she contented herself with drawing it out of her memory, the shapeless, flickering element she had mastered under Farr’s ominous gaze. She laid the illusion of it around the illusions of the dead. She opened her hand and showed them how she could shape with it, drawing it high into the air, sending it spattering like waves breaking against her will. She circled them with it, as she had been forced by them to circle herself, watched them close together away from it. She burnished the shields with flame, saw them drop, soundless as flowers, to the floor. She ringed the crowns with it, watched the Kings send them spinning, wheels of flaming metal, into the air. She heard the voices, faraway, indistinct, birds’ voices, the fragmented voice of the sea. Then she heard the sea itself.

  The sound of it wove in and out of her shaping. She recognized the slow break and drag of it; the hollow wind moaning through broken iron bars. The harping was ended; the tower was empty. She drew her attention back to Oen; half-blind with the thought of fire, she saw him only as a shadow, hunched a little on his horse. And a fury that did not belong to her but to his roused land-heir began gathering in her like one enormous wave that might have torn the tower out of the rocks by its roots and flung it into the sea.

  The fury gave her dark insight into odd powers. It whispered to her how to crack a solid flag-stone in two, how to turn the thin, black rift into a yawning illusion of emptiness that would drain the wraith of Oen, nameless, memoryless, into it. It showed her how to bind the windows and doors of her own house, lock the living and dead in it; how to create the illusion of one door in it opening constantly to an illusion of freedom. It showed her how to separate the hopeless essence of sorrow she felt from the sea, the wind, the memory of the harping, to work it into the stones and shadows of the house so that no one in it would ever laugh. She felt her own sorrow and anger stirred, as she had kindled the light, mixed with an older agony and rage against Oen until she could barely tell them apart; she could barely remember that Oen was to her simply a memory of An, and not the living, terrible, merciless figure of Ylon’s memory.

  She felt herself lost, drowning in the force of another’s hatred. She struggled against it, blind, terrified, not knowing how to break free of the determined impulse to destruction aimed against Oen. Her terror gave way to a helpless anger; she was bound, as Oen had bound Ylon, by hatred, by compassionlessness, and by misunderstanding. She realized, before she destroyed Oen, before she loosed something alien to the very land-law of An into the house of its kings, that she had to force the wraith of Ylon, roused in her, to see clearly for the first time, the heritage they both shared, and the King who had been simply a man bound to its patterns.

  One by one, with impossible effort, she drew the faces of the Kings out of the firelight. She wrested out of the dark void of rage and s
orrow, names for them, histories, spoke their names as, weaponless, crownless, mute, they faced her again across the hall: Acor, Ohroe, cursed with sorrow for his sons, Nemir who spoke pig-language, Farr who had done her bidding for the sake of a six-hundred-year-old skull, Evern who had died with his falcons, defending his home. The fire dwindled away around them, became sunlight on the flagstones. She saw the High One’s harpist again among the Kings. She saw Oen. He was no longer on his horse, but standing beside it. His face was bowed against its back. She saw then the black, jagged break from end to end in the flagstone at his feet.

  She said his name. The naming seemed to shift him to perspective: the frightened wraith of a dead man who had once been, centuries ago, a King of An. The hatred in her roused only weakly against him, against the power of her seeing. It roused again, then drained away like a spent wave. It left her free, gazing at the broken stone, wondering what name she would bear for the rest of her life in that hall.

  She found herself trembling so badly she could hardly stand. Rood, beside her, lifted his hand to hold her, but he seemed to have no strength either; he could not touch her. She saw Duac staring at the flagstone. He turned his head slowly, looked at her. A sob burned in her throat, for he had no name for her either. Her power had left her placeless, had left her nothing. Her eyes fell away from him to a strip of darkness at her feet between them. She realized slowly that the darkness was a shadow that stretched across the floor in a hall full of shadowless dead.

  She turned. The Star-Bearer stood at the threshold. He was alone; Oen’s following had vanished. He was watching her; she knew from the expression in his eyes, how much he had seen. As she gazed at him helplessly, he said softly, “Raederle.” It was no warning, no judgment, simply her name, and she could have wept at the recognition in it.

  He moved, finally, across the threshold. Plainly clothed, seemingly unarmed, he walked almost unobtrusively among the silent Kings, and yet one by one he drew their attention to him. The dark twisting of pain, hatred and power that had trailed them all into Anuin was no longer the awesome shadow of wizardry, but something they all recognized. Morgon’s eyes, moving from face to face, found Deth’s. He stopped; Raederle, her mind, open, vulnerable, felt the memories shock through him to his core. He began to walk again, slowly; the Kings shifted without sound, away from the harpist. Deth, his head bent, seemed to be listening to the final steps of the long journey that had begun for them both at Erlenstar Mountain. When Morgon reached him, he lifted his face, the lines on it etched mercilessly in the sunlight.