The huddled dwarrows watched them with distrust, as though the very act of preparing a resistance made them almost as dangerous as the enemy outside. Miriamele and Binabik quickly gathered a pile of stones, then Binabik broke down his walking-stick and placed the knife section in his belt, then readied the blowpipe.
“Better to use this first.” He pushed a dart into the tube. “Perhaps a death they cannot see will make them a little more slow for coming in.”
The doorway appeared to be only another section of the striated cavern wall, but as Miriamele and the troll stood before it, a faint silvery line began to creep up the stone.
“Ruyan guide us!” Yis-fidri said miserably. “They have breached the wards!” There was a chorus of fearful noises from his fellow.
The silver gleam crept up the rock face, then coursed across the length of a man’s reach and started down again. When a whole section was bounded by a thread of light, the stone inside the glow slowly began to swivel inward, scraping as it moved against the cavern floor. Miriamele watched its ponderous movement with terrified fascination, trembling in every limb.
“Do not step to the front of me,” whispered Binabik. “I will tell you when it is safe for moving.”
The door ground to a halt. As a figure appeared in the narrow opening, Binabik raised his blowpipe to his mouth. The dark shape tottered and fell forward. The dwarrows moaned in fear.
“You hit him!” Miriamele exulted. She hefted a rock, ready to try for the next one through while Binabik loaded another dart … but no one else moved into the doorway.
“They’re waiting,” Miriamele whispered to the troll. “They saw what happened to the first one.”
“But I was doing nothing!” said Binabik. “My dart is still unflown.”
The figure raised its head. “Close … the … door.” Each word was an agonized effort. “They are … behind me. …”
Miriamele gaped in astonishment. “It’s Cadrach!”
Binabik stared first at her, then at the monk, who had collapsed again. He put down his walking-stick and ran forward.
“Cadrach?” Miriamele slowly shook her head. “Here?”
The dwarrows rushed past her, hurrying to shut the door.
50
The Graylands
The colorless fog went on forever, without floor or ceiling or any visible limit at all. Simon floated in the middle of nothingness. There was no movement, no sound.
“Help me!” he shouted, or tried to, but his voice never seemed to leave his own head. Leleth was gone, her last touch upon his thoughts now grown cool and distant. “Help! Someone!”
If any shared the empty gray spaces with him, they did not answer.
And what if there is someone or something here? Simon thought suddenly, remembering all he had been told about the Road of Dreams. It might be something I don’t want to meet. This might not be the Dream Road, but Leleth had said it was close. Binabik’s master Ookequk had met some dreadful thing while he walked the road—and it had killed him.
But would that be worse than just floating here forever, like a ghost? Soon there will be nothing left of me worth saving.
Hours went by with nothing changing. Or it might have been days. Or weeks. There was no time here. The nothingness was perfect.
After a long empty space, his weak and scattered thoughts again coalesced.
Leleth was supposed to push me back, back to my body, to my life. Maybe I can do it myself.
He tried to remember what it felt like to be inside his living body, but for a long while could form only disjointed and disturbing images of the most recent days—burrowing diggers grinning into the torchlight, the Norns gathered whispering on the hilltop above Hasu Vale. Gradually he summoned a vision of the great wheel, and a naked body prisoned upon it.
Me! he exulted. Me, Simon! I’m still alive!
The figure hanging on the wheel’s rim was shadowy and without much form, like a crudely carved image of Usires on His Tree, but Simon could feel the intangible connection between it and him. He tried to give the shape a face, but could not remember his own features.
I’ve lost myself. The realization crawled over him like a blanket of killing frost. I don’t remember what I look like—I don’t have a face!
The figure on the wheel, even the wheel itself, wavered and became indistinct.
No! He clung to the wheel, willing its circular shadow to stay before his mind’s eye. No! I’m real. I’m alive. My name is Simon!
He struggled to remember how he had looked in Jiriki’s mirror—but first had to draw up the memory of the mirror itself, its cool feel beneath his fingers, the delicate smoothness of its carvings. It had warmed at his touch until it felt like a living thing.
Suddenly he could recall his own face prisoned in the Sithi glass. His red hair was thick and unkempt, slashed by a white streak; down his cheek from eye to jaw ran the mark of the dragon’s blood. The eyes did not reveal all that went on behind them. It was not a boy who looked back from Jiriki’s mirror, but a rawboned young man. It was his own face, Simon realized, his own face returned to him.
He narrowed his will, straining to force his own features onto the shadowy form hanging on the wheel. As the mask of his face grew upon the dim figure, everything else became clearer, too. The forge chamber grew out of the indistinct gray nothing, faint and ghostly, but unquestionably a real place from which Simon was separated only by some short, indefinable distance. Hope flooded back into his heart.
But no matter how he tried, he could not push any farther. He wanted desperately to return—even to the wheel—yet it remained tantalizingly out of reach: the more he struggled, the greater the distance seemed between the Simon that floated in the dreamworld and his empty, slumbering body.
I can’t reach it! Defeat pulled at him. I can’t.
With that realization, his vision of the wheel dimmed, then vanished. The phantom forge evaporated as well, leaving him adrift once more in the colorless void.
He summoned up the strength to try again, but this time could bring into existence only the faintest glimmering of the world he had left behind. It faded swiftly. Furious, despairing, he tried again and again, but was unable to break through. At last, his will flagged. He was defeated. He belonged to the void.
I’m lost. …
For a while Simon knew nothing but hollowness and hopeless pain.
He did not know if he had slept or passed over into some other realm, but when he could feel himself think again, something else had finally come to share the emptiness. A single mote of light glowed faintly before him, like a candle flame seen through a thick fog.
“Leleth!? Leleth, is that you?”
The spark did not move. Simon willed himself toward the gleam of light.
At first he could not say if it grew nearer, or whether, like a star on the horizon, it remained remote and beyond reach no matter how he traveled. But even though Simon could not be sure that the spark was any closer, things began to change around him. Where once there had been only airy nothingness, he now began to see faint lines and shapes which gradually became sharper and more distinct until at last he could make out the forms of trees and stones—but all were transparent as water. He was passing along a hillside, but the very earth below him and the vegetation that shrouded it seemed only scarcely more real than the void that stretched overhead in place of the sky. He seemed to be moving through a landscape of clear glass, but when he lost his way for a moment and stepped into a rock in his path, he passed through it.
Am I the ghost? Or is it this place?
The light was nearer. Simon could see its warm glow reflected faintly in the fog of tree-shapes that ringed it round. He moved closer.
The radiance hovered on the edge of a ghostly valley, perched at the end of a jut of translucent stone. It was cradled in the arms of a dim, smoky figure. As he drew closer, the phantom turned. Ghost or angel or demon, it had the face of a woman. The eyes widened, although they did not quite s
eem to see him.
“Who is there?” The shadowy woman’s face did not move, but there was no question in his mind that it was she who spoke. Her voice was reassuringly human.
“I am. I’m lost.” Simon thought of how he would feel, approached in this deathly emptiness by a stranger. “I mean no harm.”
A ripple passed through the woman’s form, and for a moment the gleam of light she cradled against her breast glowed more brightly. Simon felt it as a spreading warmth inside him and was strangely comforted. “I know you,” she said slowly. “You came to me once before.”
He could make no sense of that. “I am Simon. Who are you? What is this place?”
“My name is Maegwin.” She sounded uneasy. “And this is the land of the gods. But surely you know both those things. You were the gods’ messenger.”
Simon had no idea what she meant, but he was desperately hungry for the company of another creature, even this ghost-woman. “I am lost,” he repeated. “May I stay here and talk to you?” It seemed somehow important that he have her permission.
“Of course,” she said, but the uncertainty had not left her voice. “Please, be welcome.”
For a moment he could see her more clearly; her sorrowful face was framed by thick hair and the hood of a long cloak. “You are very beautiful,” he said.
Maegwin laughed, something Simon felt more than heard. “In case I had forgotten, you have reminded me that I am far from the life I knew.” There was a pause. The glowing light pulsed. “You say you are lost?”
“I am. It’s hard to explain, but I am not here—at least, the rest of me is not.” He considered telling her more, but was hesitant to open himself completely even to this melancholy, harmless-seeming spirit. “Why are you here?”
“I wait.” Maegwin’s voice was regretful. “I do not know who or what I am waiting for. But I know that is what I do.”
For a time the two of them did not speak. The valley shimmered below, pellucid as mist.
“It all seems so far away,” Simon said at last. “All the things that seemed so important.”
“If you listen,” Maegwin replied, “you can hear the music.”
Simon listened, but heard absolutely nothing. That in itself was astonishing, and for a moment he was overwhelmed. There was nothing at all—no wind, no birdsong, no soft babble of voices, not even the muffled bumping of his own heart. He had never imagined a quiet so absolute, a peace so deep. After all the madness and uproar of his life, he seemed to have come to the still center of things.
“I fear this place a little,” he said. “I’m afraid that if I stay here too long, I won’t even want to go back to my life.”
He could feel Maegwin’s surprise. “Your life? Are you not already long dead? When you came to me before, I thought you must be an ancient hero.” She made an unhappy sound. “What have I done? Could it be that you did not know you were dead?”
“Dead?” Shock and fury and more than a little terror surged through him. “I’m not dead! I’m still alive, I just can’t get back. I’m alive!”
“Then what are you doing here with me?” There was something very strange in her voice.
“I don’t know. But I’m alive!” And although he said it in part to combat his own sudden apprehension, he felt it, too—ties that had grown weak but were nevertheless quite real still bound him to the waking world and his lost body.
“But surely only the dead come here? Only the dead, like me?”
“No. The dead go on.” Simon thought of Leleth flying free and knew he spoke truly. “This is a waiting place—a between-place. The dead go on.”
“But how can that be, when I …” Maegwin suddenly fell silent.
Simon’s frightened anger did not dissipate, but he felt the flame of his life still inside him, a flame that had dimmed but had not yet blown out, and he was comforted. He knew he was alive. That was all he had to cling to, but it was everything.
He felt something strange beside him. Maegwin was crying, not in sounds, but in great shuddering movements that caused her entire being to waver and almost dissipate, like breeze-stirred smoke.
“What’s wrong?” As odd and unsettling as all this was, he did not want to lose her, but she had become alarmingly insubstantial. Even the light she bore seemed to have grown fainter. “Maegwin? Why are you crying?”
“I have been such a fool,” she keened. “Such a fool!”
“What do you mean?” He tried to reach out to her, to take her hand, but the two of them could not touch. Simon looked down and saw nothing where his body should be. It was odd, but in this dreamlike place it did not seem as terrifying as it might have elsewhere. He wondered how he looked to Maegwin. “Why have you been a fool?”
“Because I thought I knew all. Because I thought even the gods waited to see what I would do.”
“I don’t understand.”
For a long time she did not reply. He felt her sorrow flow through him in great gusts, angry and mournful in turn. “I will explain—but first tell me who you are, how you came to be in this place. Oh, the gods, the gods!” Her sorrow threatened to sweep her away again. “I have made too many assumptions. Far, far too many.”
Simon did as she asked, starting slowly and hesitantly at first, then gaining confidence as bit by bit his past returned to him. He was surprised to find that he could remember names which only a little while before had been misty holes in his memory.
Maegwin did not interrupt, but as his recitation went on she became slightly more substantial. He could see her clearly again, her bright, wounded eyes, her lips pressed together tightly as though to keep them from trembling. He wondered who had loved her, for certainly she was a woman someone could love. Who mourned for her?
When he spoke of Sesuad’ra, and of Count Eolair’s mission from Hernysadharc, she broke her silence for the first time, asking him to tell more of the count and what he had said.
As Simon described Aditu, and what the Sitha-woman had said about the Dawn Children riding to Hernystir, Maegwin again began to weep.
“Mircha clothed in rain! It is as I feared. I have almost destroyed my people with my madness. I did not die!”
“I don’t understand.” Simon leaned a little closer, basking in the warmth of her glow. It made the strange ghostly landscape a little less empty. “You didn’t die?”
The shadow-woman began to speak of her own life. Simon realized with dawning amazement that he did indeed know of her, although they had never met: she was Lluth’s daughter, sister of Gwythinn the Hernystirman Simon had seen at Josua’s councils in Naglimund.
The story she told, and then the further tale of dreams and misunderstandings and accidents that she and Simon pieced together from fragments and guesses, was terrible indeed. Simon, who had spent much of his time on the wheel in a fury of self-pity, found himself sickened by Magwin’s losses—her father, her brother, her very home and country taken from her in a way that even he, for all his sorrows, had not experienced. And the cruel tricks that fate, with Simon’s unwitting help, had played on her! No wonder she had lost her wits and imagined herself dead. He ached for her.
When Maegwin had finished, the phantom valley again fell into total silence.
“But why are you here?” Simon finally asked.
“I do not know. I was not led here, like you. But after I touched the mind of the thing in what I thought was Scadach—in Naglimund, if that is where it was—I was nowhere at all for a time. Then I awoke to this place, this land, and knew I was waiting.” She paused. “Perhaps it was you I was meant to wait for.”
“But why?”
“I do not know. But it seems we fight the same fight—or rather we did fight it, since I see no way that either of us will leave this place.”
Simon waited and thought. “That thing … that thing at Naglimund. What was it like? What did … what did you feel when you touched its thoughts?”
Maegwin struggled to find a way to explain. “It … it burned. Being so
near to it was like putting my face in the door of a kiln—I feared it would scorch away my very being. I did not sense words, as I do from you, but … ideas. Hatred, as I told you—a hatred of the living. And a longing for death, for release, which was almost as strong as the longing for revenge.” She made a sad noise. For a moment her light dimmed. “That was when I was first troubled about my own thoughts, for I felt that longing for death, too—and if I was already dead, how could I desire to be released from life?” She laughed, a bittersweet sensation that pricked at Simon’s being. “Mircha shelter me! Listen to us! Even after all that has passed, this is a madness beyond all understanding, dear stranger. That you and I should be in this place, this moiheneg,” she used a Hernystiri word or thought that Simon did not understand, “talking of our lives, although we do not even know whether we still live.”
“We have stepped out of the world,” Simon told her, and suddenly everything seemed different. He felt a sort of calm descend upon him. “Perhaps we’ve been given a gift. For a time, we’ve been allowed to step outside the world. A time to rest.” Indeed, he felt more like himself than he had since he had fallen through the earth of John’s barrow. Meeting Maegwin had done much to make him feel like a living thing again.
“A time to rest? Perhaps for you, Simon—and if that is so, I am happy for you. But I can only look on the foolishness I made of my life and mourn.”
“Was there anything else you learned from … from the burning thing?” He was anxious to distract her. Her sorrow over her mistakes seemed only barely contained, and he feared that if it overwhelmed her he would find himself alone again.
Maegwin shimmered slightly. An unfelt wind seemed to toss her cloudy hair. “There were thoughts for which I have no words. Pictures I cannot quite explain. Very strong, very bright, as though they were close to the center of the flames that give that spirit life.”