The Crow (50 page)

T
HE
B
LIND
H
OUSE

The longer Hem stayed at the camp, the more difficult he found his double life. He had secret tasks almost every night, so he was often short of sleep. On his fifth day there he had to renew his disguise, which required him to make a very strong mageshield and then perform the demanding spell, and the following day he could barely get through the training. The continuous fear that he might be exposed at any moment only added to his weariness.

Perhaps the worst thing he felt was loneliness. He spoke to Ire as often as he could manage, but their mindtouchings were always hurried and brief. Ire told him that he had established a territory for himself, throwing out rival birds from an almond tree, and was foraging without too much difficulty; but he was bored and missed Hem. He had flown off to meet Hared on the day that Hem was supposed to return, taking the information Hem had passed on about the structures of the camp. He came back with a curt message: if Hem were caught, he was to kill himself at once.

I know that already, Hem thought impatiently. For a moment he felt angry that Hared had not seen fit to praise him for what he was finding out about the child army; it was more than the Bards could have possibly known before. But, he realized resignedly, that was really asking too much: after all, he had expressly disobeyed Hared's orders. Still, he was sure that Hared would find his information very useful.

* * * *

After the exhausting business of renewing his disguise, Hem found that his weariness was beginning to be a real problem. He didn't have to pretend that he was as dull as Slasher: his mind was thick with exhaustion. The only thing that kept him alert was terror at the thought of being unmasked.

The following night he decided to go out spying again, despite his tiredness; he felt that he didn't have much time, and that he had to discover as much as he could about Sjug'hakar Im and find Zelika. As he lay in bed, listening to the snores and muffled cries of the sleeping snouts, he wondered about his dream of the Elidhu – if it was a dream – three nights before. He remembered that Saliman had taken his vision of the tree man in Nal-Ak-Burat very seriously, and had not dismissed it as the fancy of a disordered mind. So why shouldn't this vision also be real? Hem remembered that Saliman had given the tree man a name, and groped around in his mind before he recalled it: Nyanar. That was it.

Who was this Nyanar? And what did he want with Hem? He seemed nothing like Maerad's descriptions of Ardina, who sounded almost human; this Elidhu, even when he took human form, did not seem human at all. And yet, despite his prickling awareness of the Elidhu's strangeness, an awareness that was only this side of fear, Hem felt an intimacy, as if the Elidhu plucked some deep chord of kinship inside him. Perhaps that odd feeling of familiarity was part of the music that Nyanar had breathed into him, which had opened his senses to a new, uncomfortable awakening.

He wondered why he had felt so at home in a wild place he had never seen before. This seemed an even deeper mystery. What did Nyanar mean by
home,
after all? Hem had not had a home since he could remember; almost his entire life he had been alone and ophaned, abandoned in a cruel world. Turbansk had been a home for him, almost – especially when he had found that he was a healer, when he had found work that he could do. But Turbansk was gone. And when he imagined a home for himself, a real home, Maerad was always there. This was a different feeling, and he didn't understand it at all.

He was too tired to think further. Whether it was true or not, he could do with some of that enchanted sleep; his whole body ached, remembering the sheer luxury of that rest. His longing for sleep was so intense it overshadowed even his need for food. He battled to stay awake, but his eyelids kept shutting of their own accord, and at last he gave up the struggle and drifted into the blank sleep of utter exhaustion...

...and woke, after an unmeasurable, dreamless time, under the high tree, in a clear, unstained landscape.

Again it was just after dawn, and the beams of the rising sun stretched over the trembling grasses, turning individual drops of dew into prisms of unbearable brightness. Hem blinked and stared, his belly taut with a sudden anticipation: would Nyanar step into the air again and speak with him? He sat up and waited for what seemed like a long time, trembling with a strange, inexpressible delight, but no one appeared. Oddly, it didn't disappoint him, and the sweet tautness seemed to gather and grow stronger inside him, until he thought he might burst.

I am here,
said a voice into his mind.
I am all that is here. There is no here that is not me.

It was almost as if Hem were thinking these words himself, and yet he knew they did not come from his own mind. They fell into his hearing as gently as petals falling onto a stream. Hem nodded, suddenly understanding, and relaxed. Yes, Nyanar
was
this place; he was not in this place. He did not need to make a home here; he
was
that home. Hem breathed out slowly. He thought he could begin to understand what an Elidhu was.

The sun lifted itself over the tree-darkened hills, pouring its warmth onto his back, and Hem's shoulders relaxed as he remembered his weariness. He had longed to be in this place, he had longed to lie down on this soft grass, to restore himself. Unquestioningly, like a small baby nestling into the arms of its mother, he curled up and fell asleep.

Over the next few days, Hem kept alert for any scraps of information, finding that Slasher's simplicity was a useful mask. Because the snouts thought Slasher was stupid, their talk around him was often unguarded; it was as if he were invisible. On the other hand, his food supplies were becoming his major difficulty: his raids on the vegetable garden were more and more risky.

On his final raid, Hem almost ran into a dogsoldier on guard in the darkness. He retreated in confusion, his heart hammering, but he had been so hungry he had overcome his fear and stolen into the garden anyway. He realized that his thefts must have been noticed, and it was only a matter of time before he was caught. When a snout was sentenced to the spike for stealing vegetables a couple of days later, Hem was stricken by guilt. It was, as Reaver had told him with such macabre relish, a particularly horrible way to die; and the child was being punished for Hem's crime.

He joined a small group of snouts who had the lowest status in their blocks, and who sometimes didn't get enough to sate their ravenous appetites. They lingered by the kitchen after meals, begging for more to eat, until they were chased away to their blocks. Sometimes, for the amusement of the cooks, the snouts were thrown scraps, for which they would fight like starving dogs.

These gatherings were always chaotic, but Hem used his Bard hearing and eavesdropped on the cooks' casual conversations. He was very cautious in his listening, as the cooking was done by low-ranking Hulls and he feared they might sense him. Once he thought he had betrayed himself when two Hulls looked up and swept their blank eyes toward the snouts. But in this way he discovered how the children were ensorcelled.

It was, as he had suspected, something that was put in the food: a drug the cooks called morralin, made of the crushed shells of snails and the powdered root of some plant that Hem didn't know. There were three kinds, of differing strengths: one for the morning meal and one for the night, and another – a more potent mixture, Hem assumed – that was given before battle.

One nerve-racking night, Hem covered himself with several layers of glimveil and raided the kitchen. This was his most dangerous mission so far, as the kitchens were next to the Prime Hut and there was a real risk he might be sensed. Wrinkling his nose at the smell of rotting peelings and other refuse, he found the three clay pots where the morralin was kept. He stole a small spoonful of each, careful not to touch it with his naked skin, and bound them in scraps of cloth. He could feel the sorcery in the drug even through the cloth, as if it burned his hand. When he got a chance, he would give the bundles to Ire to send to Hared.

His eavesdropping also solved his pressing hunger. He discovered that the morralin was cooked only with the pulses that made up the major part of the snouts' meals. Hem thought that he could perhaps eat the other foods without harm, and tried some cautious experiments. He was dubious about the meat, remembering that it was hunted from the Glandugir Hills: what poisons might it hold? But sometimes the training left him so famished that he ate the meat anyway. He found his body was a good guide: he simply could not keep down anything tainted with morralin.

He had been finding mealtimes increasingly difficult. When one of the Blood Block snouts made a derisive comment on his strange eating habits, he panicked. Even with the chaos at mealtimes, when the snouts gobbled their food with an almost insane appetite, it was sometimes difficult to avoid eating without being noticed. He had developed an especially messy way of devouring his food that permitted him to spill much of it and scrape it off the table and into his sleeves with a bit of shielded illusion. At the worst, he would eat his meal and heave it up later, but he could not continue to vomit in the latrines without someone beginning to notice, and perhaps even reporting it to a Hull. Now he could eat at least some of the food he was given. Vile though the meals were, they were enough to stop him starving.

With the edge taken off his hunger, Hem began seriously to search for Zelika. It was much more difficult than he had expected.

Part of the problem was that the snouts, with their cropped hair and dull uniform dress, all looked the same from a distance. In the long hours of the counting, Hem would scan all the other blocks, trying to discern her face, but it was hopeless. There was no communication between the different blocks: they kept to themselves, and ate always at the same tables. Every few days during training, one block might be assigned to fight another, and Hem took advantage of this to examine furtively the faces of the snouts; but he realized, with an increasing sense of despair, that there were some blocks he would never have a chance to see close up, and if he did not, he would never be sure if Zelika were there.

After two days of increasing desperation, he decided to try to feel for her with his mind. If she were there, even if she were bewitched, surely he would know. This was magery even more difficult than the disguising spell, and much more dangerous: because he would be touching minds, there was a real risk that a Hull might become aware of him. He permitted himself an unbroken night's sleep before he attempted it.

When the snouts were snoring quietly, he made his shield and then summoned the image of Zelika to his memory. Like everyone else, she had her own unique mental vibration: it was like a particular music, a particular smell, a particular glow. Even if she were bewitched, it would still be there, however blurred, and he knew he would recognize it if he felt it. Cautiously and delicately, Hem sent out his magesense into the camp, searching for any trace of her presence.