Riddle-Master Page 12

  “But—” Lyra said stubbornly.

  “If I ever carried a weapon into Hed and told the people of Hed to arm themselves, they would look at me as though I were a stranger—and that is what I would be: a stranger in my own land, the weapon like a disease that would wither all the living roots of Hed. And if I did it without the High One’s sanction, he could take the land-rule from me.”

  Lyra’s dark brows crooked above her eyes. “I don’t understand,” she said again. “Ymris is always fighting within itself; An and Aum and Hel have had terrible wars in the past. The old lords of Herun have battled each other; why is Hed so different? Why should the High One care if it’s armed or not?”

  “It just evolved that way. It made its own laws in the Years of Settlement, and the laws grew to bind the Princes of Hed. It had nothing anyone would have fought for: no wealth, no great stretches of land, no seat of power or mystery, just good farmland and good weather, in a land so small not even the Kings of An in their years of conquering, were tempted by it. Men found the rulers they wanted to keep the peace, and their instinct for peace drove deep into the land like a seed. It’s in my blood. To change that in me, I would have to change my name . . .”

  Lyra was silent, her dark eyes on Morgon’s face as he drank. He felt, as he put his cup down again, the light touch of her hand on his shoulder. “Well, then, since you won’t protect yourself, I’ll come with you and guard you,” she said. “There’s no one in the Morgol’s guard who could do that better than I could—no one in all Herun.” She looked across him to El. “May I have your permission?”

  “No,” Morgon said.

  “Do you doubt my skill?” She picked up her knife, poised the blade between finger and thumb. “Do you see that rope at the far end of the room holding the torch?”

  “Lyra, please do not set the room on fire,” the Morgol murmured.

  “Mother, I’m trying to show him—”

  “I believe you,” Morgon said. He turned to take the hand holding the knife in his hands. Her fingers were lean and warm, stirring a little, like a bird in his hold, and something he had half-forgotten in the long, rough weeks touched him unexpectedly. He kept his voice steady, gentle with an effort. “Thank you. But if you were hurt or killed trying to defend me, I would never forgive myself as long as I lived. My only hope is travelling as quickly and quietly as possible; doing that, I will be safe.”

  He saw the doubt in her eyes, but she said only, putting the knife down, “Well, in this house I will guard you. And even you can’t argue with that.”

  Deth played for the Morgol after they finished supper—sweet, wordless songs from the ancient court of An, ballads from Ymris and Osterland. The room was hushed when he finished, empty but for the four of them; the candles were burned low in their holders. The Morgol rose reluctantly.

  “It’s late,” she said. “I’ll replenish your supplies so that you won’t have to stop in Osterland, if you’ll tell me what you need in the morning.”

  “Thank you,” Deth said, slipping the harp strap over his shoulder. He looked at her a moment in silence, and she smiled. He added softly, “I want to stay. I will come back.”

  “I know.”

  She led them back through the wandering maze of corridors to their room. Water and wine, soft blankets had been left for them; the fire burned steadily, sending out a clean, elusive scent.

  Morgon said before El turned to go, “May I leave some letters with you for the traders? My brother has no idea where I am.”

  “Of course. I’ll have paper and ink brought to you. And may I ask something of you? May I see your harp?”

  He took it out of the case for her. She turned it in her hands, touching the stars and the fine tracery of gold, the white moons. “Yes,” she said softly. “I thought I recognized it. Deth told me some time ago about Yrth’s harp, and when a trader brought this harp into my house last year, I was sure Yrth must have made it—it was a spell-bound harp, with its mute strings. I wanted so badly to buy it, but it was not for sale. The trader said it was promised to a man in Caithnard.”

  “What man?”

  “He didn’t say. Why? Morgon, what did I say to trouble you?”

  He drew a breath. “Well, you see, my father—I think my father bought it in Caithnard for me last spring, before he died. So if you could remember what the trader looked like, or find out his name—”

  “I see.” Her hand closed gently on his arm. “I see. Yes, I will get his name for you. Good night.”

  Lyra, in a short, dark tunic, took her place at the doorway as the Morgol left, her straight back to them, her spear motionless, upright in her hand. A servant brought paper, pens, ink and wax; Morgon sat down in front of the fire. He stared into it, the ink drying on his pen, for a long time; he murmured once, “What am I going to say to her?” And slowly he began to write.

  Finished finally with Raederle’s letter, he wrote a brief note to Eliard, sealed it, and lay back against the cushions, watching the flames meld and separate, half-aware of Deth’s quiet movements as he sorted and checked their gear. He lifted his head finally, looked at the harpist.

  “Deth . . . did you know Ghisteslwchlohm?”

  Deth’s hands stilled. They moved again after a moment, loosening a knot in a bedroll. He said without looking up, “I spoke to him only twice, very briefly. He was a distant, awesome figure in Lungold, then, in the years before the wizards’ disappearance.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that Master Ohm might be the Founder of Lungold?”

  “There was no evidence of it that would have made such a thought occur to me.”

  Morgon reached out to add wood to the fire; shadows falling in webs and tapestries from the ceiling, shifted and settled. He murmured, “I wonder why the Morgol couldn’t see through Ohm. I don’t know what land he’s from; it may be that he was born, like Rood, with some witchery in his blood. . . . I never thought to ask where he was born. He was simply Master Ohm, and it seemed he had been at Caithnard forever. If El told him she thought he was Ghisteslwchlohm, he would probably laugh . . . except I’ve never seen him laugh. It happened so long ago, the destruction of Lungold; the wizards have been silent as death since then. None of them could possibly be alive.” His voice trailed away. He turned on his side, his eyes closing. A little while later he heard Deth begin to harp gently, dreamily, and he drifted asleep to the sound.

  He woke to the song of a different harpist. The harping wove through him like a net, the slow, deep beat measured to the sluggish, jarring beat of his blood, the swift, wild high notes ripping at the fabric of his thoughts like tiny, panicked birds. He tried to move but something weighed on his hands, his chest. He opened his mouth to call for Deth; the sound that came out of him was again the squawk of the black crow.

  He opened his eyes and found he had dreamed them open. He opened them again and saw nothing but the dark behind his eyelids. A terror rose in his throat, sending the birds in his mind into a frenzy. He reached out of himself as though he were swimming through deep, heavy swells of darkness and sleep, straining himself toward awareness. And finally he heard the harpist’s voice and saw between his lashes the faint, fiery eyes of embers.

  The voice was husky, rich, and word by word it bound him with a nightmare.

  Withering your voice, as the

  root of your land are withering.

  Slow your heart’s-blood

  slow as the dragging waters,

  the rivers of Hed.

  Tangling are your thoughts

  as the yellow vines are tangling,

  drying, snapping underfoot.

  Withering the life of you

  as the late corn is withering . . .

  Morgon opened his eyes. The darkness and the red, panting embers whirled around him until the darkness rose about his face like a tide, and the fire seemed tiny, far away. In the well of night he saw Hed drifting like a broken ship in the sea; he heard the vine leaves whispering drily, felt in his veins the ri
vers slowing, thickening, draining dry, their beds cracking to the harpist’s weave. He made a harsh, incredulous noise, and saw the harpist finally, beyond the fire, his harp made of strange bones and polished shell, his face lost in shadows. The face seemed to lift a little at Morgon’s voice; he caught a flick of fire-scorched gold.

  Dry, dust dry, the earth

  the earth of you, land-ruler

  lord of the dying. Parching the fields

  of your body, moaning the wind

  of your last word

  across the waste of them,

  the wasteland of Hed.

  A tide seemed to be draining back from the dark, broken land, drawing the last of the river waters with it, drawing the stream-waters out of Hed, leaving the coasts bare, leaving a wasteland of shell and sand around Hed as it drained back to the black edges of the world. Morgon, feeling the dry, cold earth, the life of Hed draining away with the sea, fading away from him, drew a breath. He shouted with his last strength a protest that was no word but a bird cry against the impossibility of the harp song. The squawk brought him back to himself, as though his body, fraying into darkness, had pulled itself together again. He got to his feet, shaking, so weak he tripped over the hem of his long robe and fell near the fire. He picked up, before he rose again, handfuls of hot ash, chips of dead wood and flung them at the harpist. The harpist, his face jerking away from them, rose. His eyes in the dim light were pale, flecked with gold. He laughed, and the heel of his hand slammed upward against Morgon’s chin. Morgon’s head snapped back; he fell to his knees, dizzy, choking, at the harpist’s feet. His fingers slid through harp strings sending a faint cacophony of sound into the darkness. The harpist’s own harp, whistling down, brushed past Morgon’s head as he moved and broke into pieces against his collarbone.

  He cried out at the sharp, sickening snap of bone. Through the sweat and haze in his eyes, he saw Lyra standing motionless in the doorway, her back to him as if he were silent as a dream behind her. The hurt, unreasoning anger in him cleared his head a little. Still kneeling, he threw himself against the harpist, lunging with his good shoulder, knocking him off-balance against the heavy cushions. Then, his fingers tangled in the harp strap, he flung the harp in his hand out, arching toward the harpist. It crashed with a spattering of notes, and Morgon heard a faint, involuntary gasp.

  He flung himself onto the shadowed figure. The harpist struggled beneath him; in the faint light from the hall Morgon saw blood streaking down his face. A knife seemingly made from air blurred towards Morgon; he caught desperately at the harpist’s wrist; the harpist’s other hand closed with a hawk’s grip on Morgon’s broken shoulder.

  He groaned, the blood drained out of his face, the harpist darkening in his sight. And then he felt the shifting shape of the man he held, the fraying of form beneath him. His teeth clenched, he held onto the figure with his good hand as though he were holding onto his name.

  He lost count of the brief, desperately struggling shapes he gripped. He smelled wood, the musk of animal fur, felt feathers beat against his hand, a marsh-slime ooze ponderously through his hold. He held the great, shaggy hoof of a horse whose effort to rear pulled him to his knees; a salmon slick and panicked, who nearly flipped out of his hold; a mountain cat who whirled in fury to slash at him. He held animals so old they had no names; he recognized them with wonder from their descriptions in ancient books. He held a great stone from one of the Earth-Masters’ cities that almost crushed his hand; he held a butterfly so beautiful he nearly let it free rather than harm its wings. He held a harp string whose sound pierced his ears until he became the sound itself. And the sound he held turned into a sword.

  He held the blade of it, silver-white, half as long as himself; strange whorls of design wound down the blade, delicately etched, snagging the light from the scattered embers. The hilt was of copper and gold. Set in gold, fire sparkling in their cores, were three stars.

  His grip loosened. The dry, whistling breath in his throat stopped until there was no sound in the room. Then, with a sudden, furious cry, he flung the sword away from him, across the floor, where it spun on the stones of the doorway, startling Lyra.

  She picked it up and whirled, but it came alive in her grasp and she dropped it again, backing away from it into the hall. She gave a shout; there was a flurry of voices down the hall. The sword vanished; in its place stood the master of the shapes.

  He moved swiftly, turning toward Morgon; Lyra’s spear, thrown a fraction of a second late, skimmed past him and ripped through one of the cushions beside Morgon. Morgon, still on his knees, watched the figure breaking through the web of shadows, the hair weaving into darkness, the face sparse, shell-colored, the eyes heavy-lidded, blue-green, gleaming with their own light. The body was fluid, blurred, the colors of foam, the colors of the sea; he moved without noise, his strange garments shifting lights the colors of wet seaweed, of wet shell. As he came, inexorable as tide, Morgon sensed an enormous, undefined power, restless and unfathomed like the sea, impersonal as the light behind the eyes fixed on his face.

  Lyra’s cry jarred him as if out of a dream. “The spear! Morgon! The spear by your hand. Throw it!”

  He reached for it.

  There was a movement in the sea-colored eyes like a distant, faint flick of a smile. Morgon rose, backed slowly, holding the spear with both hands between them. He heard Lyra’s desperate cry, “Morgon!” His hands began to shake; the smile deepened in the strange eyes. With the sob of a rare Ymris curse that tore out of him, Morgon drew back his arm and threw.

  “I’M GOING HOME,” Morgon said.

  “I don’t understand you,” said Lyra. She was sitting beside him at the fire, a light, crimson coat over her guard’s tunic, her face smudged with sleeplessness. Her spear lay loosely under one hand at her side. Two other guards stood at the doorway facing opposite directions, their spearheads, in the fragile morning sunlight, forming a gleaming apex of light. “He would have killed you if you hadn’t killed him. It’s that simple. There is no law in Hed that forbids you to kill in self-defense, is there?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?” She sighed, her eyes on his face as he stared into the flames. His shoulder was set and bound; his face was set, as accessible as a word-locked book. “Are you angry because you were not well-guarded in the Morgol’s house? Morgon, I asked the Morgol this morning to be relieved of my place in the guard because of that, but she refused.”

  She had his attention, then. “There was no reason for you to do that.”

  Her chin rose slightly. “There was reason. Not only did I stand there doing nothing while you were fighting for your life, when I finally did try to kill the shape-changer, I missed. I never miss.”

  “He created an illusion of silence; it wasn’t your fault that you heard nothing.”

  “I failed to guard you. That’s simple, too.”

  “Nothing is simple.”

  He leaned back against the cushions, wincing a little; his brows pinched together again. He was silent; she waited, asked tentatively, “Well, then are you angry with Deth because he was with the Morgol when you were attacked?”

  “Deth?” He looked at her blankly. “Of course not.”

  “Then what are you angry about?”

  He looked down at the silver cup and the wine she had poured for him, touched it. Finally, the words dredged slowly, painfully from him as out of some shameful place, “You saw the sword.”

  She nodded. “Yes.” The perplexed line between her brows deepened. “Morgon, I’m trying to understand.”

  “It’s hardly difficult. Somewhere in this realm there is a starred sword waiting for the Star-Bearer to claim it. And I refuse to claim it. I’m going home where I belong.”

  “But Morgon, it’s only a sword. You don’t even have to use it if you don’t want to. Besides, you might need it.”

  “I will need it.” His fingers were rigid on the circle of silver. “That would be inevitable. The shape-changer knew. He kne
w. He was laughing at me when I killed him. He knew exactly what I was thinking when no one except the High One himself could have known.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “That no man could accept the name the stars on that sword gave him and still keep the land-rule of Hed.”

  Lyra was silent. The uneasy sunlight faded, leaving the room grey with shadows; leaves, wind-tossed, tapped like fingers against the window. She said finally, her hands clasped tightly around her knees, “You can’t just turn your back on this and go home.”

  “I can.”

  “But you—you’re a riddle-master, too—you can’t just stop answering riddles.”

  He looked at her. “I can. I can do anything I must to keep the name I was born with.”

  “If you go back to Hed, they’ll kill you there. You don’t even have guards in Hed.”

  “At least I will die in my own land, be buried in my own fields.”

  “How can it matter so much? How can you face death in Hed that you can’t face in Herun?”

  “Because it’s not death I’m afraid of—it’s losing everything I love for a name and a sword and a destiny I did not choose and will not accept. I would rather die than lose the land-rule.”

  She said wistfully, “What about us? What about Eliard?”

  “Eliard?”

  “If they kill you in Hed, they’ll still be there and so will Eliard. And we’ll be alive, asking questions without you to answer them.”

  “The High One will protect you,” he said grimly. “That’s his business. I can’t do it. I’m not going to follow the path of some fate dreamed up for me thousands of years ago, like a sheep going to be fleeced.” He took a sip of the wine finally, saw her uncertain, anxious face. He said more gently, “You are the land-heir of Herun. Some day you will rule it, and your eyes will turn as gold as the Morgol’s. This is your home; you would die to defend it; your place is here. At what price would you give up Herun, turn your face from it forever?”