Riddle-Master

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The realization filled him with both fury and terror. On the shores of White Lady Lake, he turned to fight. He waited for them in his own shape, the stars in his sword-hilt flaring a blood-red signal to them across the backlands. But nothing answered his challenge. The hot afternoon was motionless; the waters of the huge lake lay still as beaten silver. Groping, he could not even touch their minds. Finally, as the waning sun drew shadows after it across the lake, he began to breathe a tentative freedom. He sheathed his sword, shrugged himself into wolf-shape. And then he saw them, motionless as air, ranged across his path, shaping themselves out of the blur of light and darkness.

  He sparked a flame from the dying sun in his sword hilt, let it burn down the blade. Then he frayed himself into shadow, filled his mind with darkness. He attacked to kill, yet in his exhaustion and hopelessness, he knew he was half-goading them to kill him. He killed two shape-changers before he realized that in some terrible mockery, they had permitted it. They would not fight; they would not let him go south. He changed back into wolf-shape, ran northward along the lake shore into the trees. A great herd of wolves massed behind him. He turned again, flung himself at them. They grappled with him, snarling, snapping until he realized, as he rolled over and over on the bracken with a great wolf whose teeth were locked on his forearm, that it was real. He shook it away from him with a shudder of energy, burned a circle of light around himself. They milled around him restlessly in the dusk, not sure what he was, smelling blood from his torn shoulder. Looking at them, he wanted to laugh suddenly at his mistake. But something far more bitter than laughter spilled into his throat. For a while he could not think. He could only watch a starless night flowing across the wastes and smell the musk of a hundred wolves as they circled him. Then, with a vague idea of attacking the shape-changers, he squatted, holding wolves’ eyes, drawing their minds under his control. But something broke his binding. The wolves faded away into the night, leaving him alone. He could not fly; his arm was stiffening, burning. The smell of loneliness from the cold, darkening water overwhelmed him. He let the fire around him go out. Trapped between the shape-changers and the black horror of Erlenstar Mountain, he could not move. He stood shivering in the dark wind, while the night built around him, memory by memory.

  The light wing-brush of another mind touched his mind, and then his heart. He found he could move again, as though a spell had been broken. The voice of the wind changed; it filled the black night from every direction with the whisper of Raederle’s name.

  His awareness of her lasted only a moment. But he felt, reaching down to touch the bracken into flame, that she might be anywhere and everywhere around him, the great tree rising beside him, the fire sparking up from dead leaves to warm his face. He ripped the sleeves off his tunic, washed his arm and bound it. He lay beside the fire, gazing into the heart of it, trying to comprehend the shape-changers and their intentions. He realized suddenly that tears were burning down his face, because Raederle was alive, because she was with him. He reached out, buried the fire under a handful of earth. He hid himself within an illusion of darkness and began to move again, northward, following the vast shore of White Lady Lake.

  He did not meet the shape-changers again until he reached the raging white waters of the Cwill River, as it broke away from the northernmost tip of the lake. From there, he could see the back of Isig Pass, the distant rolling foothills and bare peaks of Isig Mountain and Erlenstar Mountain. He made another desperate bid for freedom then. He dropped into the wild current of the Cwill, let it whirl him, now as a fish, now a dead branch, through deep, churning waters, down rapids and thundering falls until he lost all sense of time, direction, light. The current jarred him over endless rapids before it loosed him finally in a slow, green pool. He spun awhile, a piece of water-soaked wood, aware of nothing but a fibrous darkness. The gentle current edged him toward the shore into a snarl of dead leaves and branches. He pulled himself onto the snag finally, a wet, bedraggled muskrat, and picked his way across the branches onto the shore.

  He changed shape again in the shadows. He had not gone as far east as he had thought. Erlenstar Mountain, flanked with evening shadows, stood enormous and still in the distance. But he was closer to Isig, he knew; if he could reach it safely, he could hide himself interminably in its maze of underground passages. He waited until nightfall to move again. Then, in the shape of a bear, he lumbered off into the dark toward the pattern of stars above Isig Mountain.

  He followed the stars until they faded at dawn; and then, without realizing it, he began to alter his path. Trees thickened around him, hiding his view of the mountain; thick patches of scrub and bramble forced him to veer again and again. The land sloped downward sharply; he followed a dry stream bed through a ravine, thinking he was going north, until the stream bed rose up to level ground and he found himself facing Erlenstar Mountain. He angled eastward again. The trees clustered around him, murmuring in the wind; the underbrush thickened, crossing his path, imperceptibly changing his direction until, shambling across a shallow river, he saw Erlenstar Mountain again in a break between the trees ahead of him.

  He stopped in the middle of the river. The sun hung suspended far to the west, crackling in the sky like a torch. He felt hot, dusty, and hungry within the shaggy bear pelt. He heard bees droning and scented the air for honey. A fish flickered past him in the shallow water; he slapped at it and missed. Then something rumbling beneath the bear-brain sharpened into language. He reared in the water, his head weaving from side to side, his muzzle wrinkled, as if he could smell the shapes that had been forming around him, pushing him away from Isig.

  He felt something build in him and loosed it: a deep, grumbling roar that shattered the silence and bellowed back at him from hills and stone peaks. Then, in hawk-shape, he burned a golden path upward high into the sky until the backlands stretched endlessly beneath him, and he shot towards Isig Mountain.

  The shape-changers melted out of the trees, flew after him. For a while he raced ahead of them in a blinding surge of speed toward the distant green mountain. But as the sun set, they began to catch up with him. They were of a nameless shape. Their wings gathered gold and red from the sunset; their eyes and talons were of flame. Their sharp beaks were bone-white. They surrounded him, dove at him, snapping and tearing, until his wings grew ragged and his breast was flecked with blood. He faltered in the air; they flung themselves at him, blinding him with their wings, until he gave one piercing, despairing cry and turned away from Isig.

  All night he flew among their burning eyes. At dawn, he saw the face of Erlenstar Mountain rising up before him. He took his own shape then, in midair, and simply fell, the air battering out of him, the forests whirling up to meet him. Something cracked across his mind before he reached the ground. He spun into darkness.

  He woke in total darkness. It smelled of wet stone. Far away, he could hear a faint perpetual trickle of water. He recognized it suddenly, and his hands clenched. He lay on his back, on cold, bare stone. Every bone in his body ached, and his skin was scored with claw marks. The mountain’s silence sat like a nightmare on his chest. His muscles tensed; he listened, feverish, blind, expecting a voice that did not come, while memories like huge, bulky animals paced back and forth across him.

  He began to breathe the darkness into his mind; his body seemed to fray into it. He sat up, panicked, his eyes wide, straining into nothing. From somewhere in the starless night of his thoughts, he pulled a memory of light and fire. He ignited it in his palm, nursed it until he could see the vast hollow of stone rising about him; the prison where he had spent the most unendurable year of his life.

  His lips parted. A word stuck like a jewel in his throat. The flame glittered back at him endlessly, off walls of ice and fire, of gold, of sky-blue streaked with wind-swept silver like the night of the backlands rimed with a million stars. The inner mountain was of the stone of the Earth-Masters’ cities, and he could see the frozen wrinkles where blocks of stone had been hewn free.r />
  He stood up slowly. His face stared back at him out of wedges and facets of jewellike color. The chamber was enormous; he nursed the flame from its reflection until it shot higher than his head, but still he could see nothing but a vaulting of darkness, flickering vaguely with a network of pure gold.

  The water, whose endless, changeless voice he had heard, had wept a diamond-white groove into a sheer wall of stone as it trickled downward into water. He shifted the flame; it billowed across a lake so still it seemed carved of darkness. The shores of the immense lake were of solid stone; the far wall curving around it was pure as hoarfrost.

  He knelt, touched the water. Rings melted into rings slowly across its dark face. He thought suddenly of the spiralling circles of Wind Tower. His throat contracted, fiery with thirst, and he bent over the lake, scooping water with his free hand. He swallowed a mouthful and gagged. It was acrid with minerals.

  “Morgon.”

  Every muscle in his body locked. He swung on his haunches, met Ghisteslwchlohm’s eyes.

  They were haunted, restless with a power not his own. That much Morgon saw before the darkness swallowed the flame in his hand, leaving him blind again.

  “So,” he whispered, “the Founder himself is bound.” He stood up noiselessly, trying, in the same movement, to step into the fragment of dawn beyond the splintered doors in the High One’s throne room. He stepped instead over the edge of a chasm. He lost his balance, crying out, and fell into nothingness. He landed on the lake shore, clinging to the stones at Ghisteslwchlohm’s feet.

  He dropped his face against his forearm, trying to think. He caught at the mind of a bat tucked in its secret corner, but the wizard gripped him before he could change shape.

  “There is no escape.” The voice had changed; it was slow, soft, as if he were listening beneath it for another voice, or a distant, uneasy rhythm of tides. “Star-Bearer, you will use no power. You will do nothing but wait.”

  “Wait,” he whispered. “For what? For death?” He stopped, the word flickering back and forth between two meanings in his mind. “There is no harping this time to keep me alive.” He lifted his head, his eyes straining again at the blackness. “Or are you expecting the High One? You can wait until I turn to stone here like the Earth-Masters’ children before the High One shows any interest in me.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “You. You hardly exist. You no longer have the ability to doubt. Even the wraiths of An have more will than you do. I can’t even tell if you’re dead or alive still, deep in you, the way the wizards lived, somehow, beneath your power.” His voice dropped a little. “I could fight for you. I would do even that for freedom.”

  The hand left his arm. He groped into the strange, sea-filled mind, to find the name it held. It eluded him. He struggled through swells and heaving tides, until the wizard’s mind heaved him back on the shore of his own awareness. He was gasping, as if he had forgotten to breathe. He heard the wizard’s voice finally, withdrawing into the dark.

  “For you, there is no word for freedom.”

  He slept a little, then, trying to regain strength. He dreamed of water. His raging thirst woke him; he felt for the water, tried to drink it again. He spat it out before he swallowed it, knelt racked with coughing. He drifted finally back into a feverish sleep and dreamed again of water. He felt himself falling into it, drawing a cool darkness around himself, moving deeper and deeper into its stillness. He breathed in water and woke himself, panicked, drowning. Hands dragged him out of the lake, left him retching bitter water on the shore.

  The water cleared his head a little. He lay quietly, staring into the darkness, wondering, if he let it fill his mind, whether it would drown him like water. He let it seep slowly into his thoughts until the memories of a long year’s night overwhelmed him and he panicked again, igniting the air with fire. He saw Ghisteslwchlohm’s face briefly; then the wizard’s hand slapped at his flame and it broke into pieces like glass.

  He whispered, “For every doorless tower there is a riddle to open the door. You taught me that.”

  “There is one door and one riddle here.”

  “Death. You don’t believe that. Otherwise you would have let me drown. If the High One isn’t interested in my life or my death, what will you do then?”

  “Wait.”

  “Wait.” He shifted restlessly, his thoughts speeding feverishly towards some answer. “The shape-changers have been waiting for thousands of years. You named them, the instant before they bound you. What did you see? What could be strong enough to empower an Earth-Master? Someone who takes the power and law of his existence from every living thing, from earth, fire, water, from wind. . . . The High One was driven out of Erlenstar Mountain by the shape-changers. And you came then and found an empty throne where legend had placed the High One. So you became the High One, playing a game of power while you waited for someone the stone children knew only as the Star-Bearer. You kept watch on places of knowledge and power, gathering the wizards at Lungold, teaching at Caithnard. And one day the son of a Prince of Hed came to Caithnard with the smell of cowdung on his boots and a question on his face. But that wasn’t enough. You’re still waiting. The shape-changers are still waiting. For the High One. You are using me for bait, but he could have found me in here long before this, if he had been interested.”

  “He will come.”

  “I doubt that. He allowed you to deceive the realm for centuries. He is not interested in the welfare of men or wizards in the realm. He let you strip me of the land-rule, for which I should have killed you. He is not interested in me . . .” He was silent again, his eyes on the expressionless face of darkness. He said, listening to the silence that gathered and froze in every drop of liquid stone, “What could be powerful enough to destroy the Earth-Masters’ cities? To force the High One himself into hiding? What is as powerful as an Earth-Master?” He was silent again. Then an answer like a glint of fire burning itself into ash moved in the depths of his mind.

  He sat up. The air seemed suddenly thin, fiery; he found it hard to breathe. “The shape-changers . . .” The blade of dryness was back in his throat. He raised his hands to his eyes, gathering darkness to stare into. Voices whispered out of his memory, out of the stones around him: The war is not finished, only silenced for the regathering. . . . Those from the sea. Edolen. Sec. They destroyed us so we could not live on earth any more; we could not master it. . . . The voices of the Earth-Masters’ dead, the children. His hands dropped heavily on the stone floor, but still the darkness pushed against his eyes. He saw the child turn from the leaf it touched in its dreaming, look across a plain, its body tense, waiting. “They could touch a leaf, a mountain, a seed, and know it, become it. That’s what Raederle saw, the power in them she loved. Yet they killed each other, buried their children beneath a mountain to die. They knew all the languages of the earth, all the laws of its shapes and movement. What happened to them? Did they stumble into the shape of something that had no law but power?” His voice was whispering away from him as if out of a dream. “What shape?”

  He fell silent abruptly. He was shivering, yet sweating. The smell of water pulled at him mercilessly. He reached out to it again, his throat tormented with thirst. His hands halted before they broke the surface. Raederle’s face, dreamlike in its beauty, looked back at him from the still water between his hands. Her long hair flowed away from her face like the sun’s fire. He forgot his thirst. He knelt motionlessly for a long time, gazing down at it, not knowing if it was real or if he had fashioned it out of longing, and not caring. Then a hand struck at it, shattering the image, sending rings of movement shivering to the far edges of the lake.

  A murderous, uncontrollable fury swept Morgon to his feet. He wanted to kill Ghisteslwchlohm with his hands, but he could not even see the wizard. A power battered him away again and again. He scarcely felt pain; shapes were reeling faster than language in his mind. He discarded them, searching for the one shape powerful enough to contain his ra
ge. He felt his body fray into shapelessness; a sound filled his mind, deep, harsh, wild, the voices out of the farthest reaches of the backlands. But they were no longer empty. Something shuddered through him, flinging off a light snapping through the air. He felt thoughts groping into his mind, but his own thoughts held no language except a sound like a vibrant, untuned harp string. He felt the fury in him expand, shape itself to all the hollows and forms of the stone chamber. He flung the wizard across the cavern, held him like a leaf before the wind, splayed against the stones.

  Then he realized what shape he had taken.

  He fell back into his own shape, the wild energy in him suddenly gone. He knelt on the stones, trembling, half-sobbing in fear and amazement. He heard the wizard stumble away from the wall, breathing haltingly, as if his ribs were cracked. As he moved across the cavern, Morgon heard voices all around him, speaking various complex languages of the earth.

  He heard the whispering of fire, the shiver of leaves, the howl of a wolf in the lonely, moonlit backlands, the dry riddling of corn leaves. Then, far away, he heard a sound, as if the mountain itself had sighed. He felt the stone shift slightly under him. A sea bird cried harshly. Someone with a hand of tree bark and light flung Morgon onto his back.

  He whispered bitterly, feeling the starred sword wrenched from his side, “One riddle and one door.”

  But, though he waited in the eye of darkness for the sword to fall, nothing touched him. He was caught suddenly, breathless, in their tension of waiting. Then Raederle’s voice, raised in a Great Shout, shook stones loose from the ceiling and jarred him out of his waiting. “Morgon!”