Riddle-Master

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he was the High One’s harpist. So I asked him what he was doing in Isig while Yrth made my harp, a hundred years before he was born. He told me to trust him. Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope. And then he betrayed me.” He drew her against him, but the wind ran between them like a knife. “It’s cold. It was never this cold before.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What does he want? Is he an Earth-Master, playing his own solitary game for power? Does he want me alive or dead? Does he want the High One alive or dead?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the riddler. He’s challenging you. Ask him.”

  He was silent, remembering the harpist on Trader’s Road who had drawn him without a word, with only a halting, crippled harping out of the night into Ghisteslwchlohm’s hands. He whispered, “He knows me too well. I think whatever he wants, he will get.” A gust struck them, smelling like snow, gnawing icily at his face and hands. It drove him to his feet, breathless, blinded, full of a sudden, helpless longing for hope. When he could see again, he found that Raederle had already changed shape. A vesta shod and crowned with gold gazed at him out of deep purple eyes. He caressed it; its warm breath nuzzled at his hands. He rested his brow against the bone between its eyes. “All right,” he said with very little irony, “I will play a riddle-game with Deth. Which way is Isig?”

  She led him there by sunlight and starlight, south across the wastes, and then eastward down the mountains of the pass until at the second dawn he saw the green face of Isig Mountain rising beyond the Ose. They reached the king’s house at dusk, on a wild, grey autumn day. The high peaks were already capped with snow; the great pines around Harte sang in the north wind. The travellers changed out of vesta-shape when they reached Kyrth and walked the winding mountain road to Harte. The gates were barred and guarded, but the miners, armed with great broadswords tempered in Danan’s forge fires, recognized them and let them in.

  Danan and Vert and half a dozen children left their supper to meet them as they entered the house. Danan, robed in fur against the cold, gave them a bear’s bulky embrace and sent children and servants alike scurrying to see to their comfort. But, gauging their weariness, he asked only one question.

  “I was in the wastes,” Morgon said. “Harping. Raederle found me.” The strangeness of the answer did not occur to him then. He added, remembering, “Before that, I was a tree beside the Ose.” He watched a smile break into the king’s eyes.

  “What did I tell you?” Danan murmured. “I told you no one would find you in that shape.” He drew them toward the stairs leading up into the east tower. “I have a thousand questions, but I am a patient old tree, and they can wait until morning. Yrth is in this tower; you’ll be safe near him.”

  A question nagged at Morgon as they wound up the stairs, until he realized what it was. “Danan, I have never seen your house guarded. Did the shape-changers come here looking for me?”

  The king’s hands knotted. “They came,” he said grimly. “I lost a quarter of my miners. I would have lost more if Yrth had not been here to fight with us.” Morgon had stopped. The king opened a hand, drew him forward. “We grieved enough for them. If we only knew what they are, what they want . . .” He sensed something in Morgon. His troubled eyes drew relentlessly at the truth. “You know.”

  Morgon did not answer. Danan did not press him, but the lines in his face ran suddenly deep.

  He left them in a tower room whose walls and floor and furniture were draped with fur. The air was chilly, but Raederle lit a fire and servants came soon, bringing food, wine, more firewood, warm, rich clothes. Bere followed with a cauldron of steaming water. As he hoisted it onto a hook above the firebed, he smiled at Morgon, his eyes full of questions, but he swallowed them all with an effort. Morgon ridded himself of a well-worn tunic, matted sheepskin, and what dirt the harsh winds had not scoured from his body. Clean, fed, dressed in soft fur and velvet, he sat beside the fire and thought back with amazement on what he had done.

  “I left you,” he said to Raederle. “I can understand almost everything but that. I wandered out of the world and left you . . .”

  “You were tired,” she said drowsily. “You said so. Maybe you just needed to think.” She was stretched out beside him on the ankle-deep skins; she sounded warmed by fire and wine, and almost asleep. “Or maybe you needed a place to begin to harp . . .”

  Her voice trailed away into a dream; she left him behind. He drew blankets over her, sat for a while without moving, watching light and shadows pursue one another across her weary face. The winds boomed and broke against the tower like sea waves. They held the echo of a note that haunted his memories. He reached automatically for his harp, then remembered he could not play that note in the king’s house without disrupting its fragile peace.

  He played others softly, fragments of ballads wandering into patternless echoes of the winds. His fingers stopped after a while. He sat plucking one note over and over, soundlessly, while a face formed and vanished constantly in the flames. He stood up finally, listening. The house seemed still around him, with only a distant murmuring of voices here and there within its walls. He moved quietly past Raederle, past the guards outside the door, whom he made oblivious to his leaving. He went up the stairs to a doorway hung with white furs that yielded beneath him a strip of light. He parted them gently, walked into semi-darkness and stopped.

  The wizard was napping, an old man nodding in a chair beside a fire, his scarred hands lying open on his knees. He looked taller than Morgon remembered, broad-shouldered yet lean beneath the long, dark robe he wore. As Morgon watched him, he woke, opening light, unstartled eyes. He bent down, sighing, groped for wood and positioned it carefully, feeling with his fingers through the lagging flames. They sprang up, lighting a rock-hard face, weathered like a tree stump with age. He seemed to realize suddenly that he was not alone; for an instant his body went motionless as stone. Morgon felt an almost imperceptible touch in his mind. The wizard stirred again, blinking.

  “Morgon?” His voice was deep, resonant, yet husky, full of hidden things, like the voice of a deep well. “Come in. Or are you in?”

  Morgon moved after a moment. “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” he said softly. Yrth shook his head.

  “I heard your harping a while ago. But I didn’t expect to talk to you until morning. Danan told me that Raederle found you in the northern wastes. Were you pursued? Is that why you hid there?”

  “No. I simply went there, and stayed because I could think of no reason to come back. Then Raederle came and gave me a reason . . .”

  The wizard contemplated the direction of his voice silently. “You are an amazing man,” he said. “Will you sit down?”

  “How do you know I’m not sitting?” Morgon asked curiously.

  “I can see the chair in front of you. Can you feel the mind-link? I am seeing out of your eyes.”

  “I hardly notice it . . .”

  “That’s because I am not linked to your thoughts, only to your vision. I travelled Trader’s Road through men’s eyes. That night you were attacked by horse thieves, I knew one of them was a shape-changer because I saw through his eyes the stars you kept hidden from men. I searched for him, to kill him, but he eluded me.”

  “And the night I followed Deth’s harping? Did you see beneath that illusion, also?”

  The wizard was silent again. His head bowed, away from Morgon; the hard lines of his face shifted with such shame and bitterness that Morgon stepped toward him, appalled at his own question.

  “Morgon, I am sorry. I am no match for Ghisteslwchlohm.”

  “You couldn’t have done anything to help.” His hands gripped the chair back. “Not without endangering Raederle.”

  “I did what little I could, reinforcing your illusion when you vanished, but . . . that was very little.”

  “You saved our lives.” He had a sudden, jarring memory of the harpist’s face, eyes seared pa
le with fire, staring at nothing until Morgon wavered out of existence in front of him. His hands loosed the wood, slid up over his eyes. He heard Yrth stir.

  “I can’t see.”

  His hands dropped. He sat down, in utter weariness. The winds wailed around the tower in a confusion of voices. Yrth was still, listening to his silence. He said gently, when Morgon did not break it, “Raederle told me what she could of the events in Erlenstar Mountain. I did not go into her mind. Will you let me see into your memories? Or do you prefer to tell me? Either way, I must know.”

  “Take it from my mind.”

  “Are you too tired now?”

  He shook his head a little. “It doesn’t matter. Take what you want.”

  The fire grew small in front of him, broke into bright fragments of memory. He endured once more his wild, lonely flight across the backlands, falling out of the sky into the depths of Erlenstar Mountain. The tower flooded with night; he swallowed bitterness like lake water. The fire beyond his vision whispered in languages he did not understand. A wind smashed through the voices, whirling them out of his mind. The tower stones shook around him, shattered by the deep, precise tuning of a wind. Then there was a long silence, during which he drowsed, warmed by a summer light. Then he woke again, a strange, wild figure in a sheepskin coat that hung open to the wind. He drifted deeper and deeper into the pure, deadly voices of winter.

  He sat beside a fire, listening to the winds. But they were beyond a circle of stone; they touched neither him nor the fire. He stirred a little, blinking, puzzling night and fire and the wizard’s face back into perspective. His thoughts centered once more in the tower. He slumped forward, murmuring, so tired he wanted to melt into the dying fire. The wizard rose, paced a moment, soundlessly, until a clothes chest stopped him.

  “What did you do in the wastes?”

  “I harped. I could play that low note there, the one that shatters stone . . .” He heard his voice from a distance, amazed that it was vaguely rational.

  “How did you survive?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I was part wind, for a while . . . I was afraid to come back. What will I do with such power?”

  “Use it.”

  “I don’t dare. I have power over land-law. I want it. I want to use it. But I have no right. Land-law is the heritage of kings, bound into them by the High One. I would destroy all law . . .”

  “Perhaps. But land-law is also the greatest source of power in the realm. Who can help the High One but you?”

  “He hasn’t asked for help. Does a mountain ask for help? Or a river? They simply exist. If I touch his power, he may pay enough attention to me to destroy me, but—”

  “Morgon, have you no hope whatsoever in those stars I made for you?”

  “No.” His eyes closed; he dragged them open again, wanting to weep with the effort. He whispered, “I don’t speak the language of stone. To him, I simply exist. He sees nothing but three stars rising out of countless centuries of darkness, during which powerless shapes called men touched the earth a little, hardly enough to disturb him.”

  “He gave them land-law.”

  “I was a shape possessing land-law. Now, I am simply a shape with no destiny but in the past. I will not touch the power of another land-ruler again.”

  The wizard was silent, gazing down at a fire that kept blurring under Morgon’s eyes. “Are you so angry with the High One?”

  “How can I be angry with a stone?”

  “The Earth-Masters have taken all shapes. What makes you so certain the High One has shaped himself to everything but the shape and language of men?”

  “Why—” He stopped, staring down at the flames until they burned the shadows of sleep out of his mind and he could think again. “You want me to loose my own powers into the realm.”

  Yrth did not answer. Morgon looked up at him, giving him back the image of his own face, hard, ancient, powerful. The fire washed over his thoughts again. He saw suddenly, for the first time, not the slab of wind speaking the language of stone that he thought was the High One, but something pursued, vulnerable, in danger, whose silence was the single weapon he possessed. The thought held him still, wondering. Slowly he became aware of the silence that built moment by moment between his question and the answer to it.

  He stopped breathing, listening to the silence that haunted him oddly, like a memory of something he had once cherished. The wizard’s hands turned a little toward the light and then closed, hiding their scars. He said, “There are powers loosed all over the realm to find the High One. Yours will not be the worst. You are, after all, bound by a peculiar system of restraints. The best, and the least comprehensible of them, seems to be love. You could ask permission from the land-rulers. They trust you. And they were in great despair when neither you nor the High One seemed to be anywhere on the face of the realm.”

  Morgon’s head bowed. “I didn’t think of them.” He did not hear Yrth move until the wizard’s dark robe brushed the wood of his chair. The wizard’s hand touched his shoulder, very gently, as he might have touched a wild thing that had moved fearfully, tentatively, toward him into his stillness.

  Something drained out of Morgon at the touch: confusion, anger, arguments, even the strength and will to wrestle with all the wizard’s subtlety. Only the silence was left, and a helpless, incomprehensible longing.

  “I’ll find the High One,” he said. He added, in warning or in promise, “Nothing will destroy him. I swear it. Nothing.”

  HE SLEPT FOR two days in the king’s house, waking only once to eat, and another time to see Raederle sitting beside him, waiting patiently for him to wake up. He linked his fingers into hers, smiling a little, then rolled over and went back to sleep. He woke finally, clear-headed, at evening. He was alone. From the faint chaos of voices and crockery that seeped into his listening, he knew that the household was at supper, and Raederle was probably with Danan. He washed and drank some wine, still listening. Beneath the noises of the house, he heard the vast, dark, ageless silence forming the hollows and mazes within Isig Mountain.

  He stood linked to the silence until it formed channels in his mind. Then, impulsively, he left the tower, went unobtrusively to the hall, where only Raederle and Bere noticed him, falling quiet amid the noise to watch his passage. He followed the path of a dream then, through the empty upper shafts. He took a torch from the wall at the mouth of a dark tunnel; as he entered it, the walls blazed around him with fiery, uncut jewels. He moved unhesitantly through his memory, down a honeycomb of passageways, along the sides of streams and deep crevices, through unmined caves shimmering with gold, moving deeper and deeper into the immensity of darkness and stone until he seemed to breathe its stillness and age into his bones. At last he sensed something older, even, than the great mountain. The path he followed dwindled into crumbled stone. The torch fire washed over a deep green slab of a door that had opened once before to the sound of his name. There he stopped incredulously.

  The ground floor was littered with the shards of broken rock. The door to the Earth-Masters’ dead was split open; half of it had fallen ponderously back into the cave. The tomb itself was choked with great chunks of jewelled ceiling stone; the walls had shrugged themselves together, hiding whatever was left of the strange pale stones within.

  He picked his way to the door, but he could not enter. He crooked one arm on the door, leaned his face against it. He let his thoughts flow into the stone, seep through marble, amethyst, and gold until he touched something like the remnant of a half-forgotten dream. He explored farther; he found no names, only a sense of something that had once lived.

  He stood for a long time, leaning against the door without moving. After a while, he knew why he had come down into the mountain, and he felt the blood beat through him, quick, cold, as it had the first time he had brought himself to that threshold of his destiny. He became aware, as he had never been before, of the mountain settled over his head, and of the king within it, his ancient mind shaped to
its mazes, holding all its peace and all its power. His thoughts moved once again, slowly into the door, until he touched at the core of the stone, the sense of Danan’s mind, shaped to that tiny fragment of mountain, bound to it. He let his brain become stone, rich, worn, ponderous. He drew all knowledge of it into himself, of its great strength, its inmost colors, its most fragile point where he might have shattered it with a thought. The knowledge became a binding, a part of himself, deep in his own mind. Then, searching within the stone, he found once more the wordless awareness, the law that bound king to stone, land-ruler to every portion of his kingdom. He encompassed that awareness, broke it, and the stone held no name but his own.

  He let his own awareness of the binding dwindle into some dark cave deep in his mind. He straightened slowly, sweating in the cool air. His torch was out; he touched it, lit it again. Turning, he found Danan in front of him, massive and still as Isig, his face expressionless as a rock.

  Morgon’s muscles tensed involuntarily. He wondered for a second if there was any language in him to explain what he was doing to a rock, before the slow, ponderous weight of Danan’s anger roused stones from their sleep to bury him beside the children’s tomb. Then he saw the king’s broad fist unclench.

  “Morgon.” His voice was breathless with astonishment. “It was you who drew me down here. What are you doing?” He touched Morgon when he could not answer. “You’re frightened. What are you doing that you need to fear me?”

  Morgon moved after a moment. His body felt drained, cumbersome as stone. “Learning your land-law.” He leaned back against the damp wall behind him, his face uplifted, vulnerable to Danan’s searching.

  “Where did you get such power? From Ghisteslwchlohm?”

  “No.” He repeated the word suddenly, passionately, “No. I would die before I did that to you. I will never go into your mind—”

  “You are in it. Isig is my brain, my heart—”

  “I won’t break your bindings again. I swear it. I will simply form my own.”