The River of Shadows (64 page)

“Everyone believes in that lie,” said Pazel.

Kirishgán sat back, startled.

“I mean, it’s no different in the North,” Pazel went on. “The Shaggat’s cult on Gurishal—that’s infinite conquest, too. And the Secret Fist, Arqual’s network of spies—why, they’re selling the same blary story to the Arquali people: that they should rule everyone, everywhere, because they’re naturally better and Rin wants it that way.”

His voice tightened. “Do you know how many Arqualis have told me I ought to feel
grateful
, Kirishgán? Told me how
lucky
I am that Arqual came along and noticed me, lifted me up? Rin’s eyes, half the Arqualis I’ve met think they ought to be in charge of the world. Not consciously, I don’t mean that. It’s half buried, but it’s there.”

The selk’s eyes were suddenly far away. For a moment Pazel was afraid that he had given offense. Then Kirishgán blinked and looked at him again, and his gentle smile returned.

“Your words touch me,” he said. “The old prejudices, the cleaving to the tribe:
half buried
, you call them. But if you were a selk you might take hope from that assertion. To bury them halfway is a great achievement. When at last they are fully buried, they can decay into the primal soil from whence they came.”

Pazel looked down at his tea. Years of insults, abuses, slurs flowed like a phantom river through his mind. “I understand your words,” he said at last, “but I don’t think you’d see it that way if you were in my shoes.”

“Perhaps not,” said Kirishgán. “But I am not in your shoes. And when I looked at your party from the balcony I saw a miracle: humans and dlömu riding out together, side by side. That is something I have not witnessed since before the days of slavery and plague.”

Pazel was abashed. He was sharing tea with a being whose memory spanned centuries. And lecturing him, with the deep wisdom of his years.

“Kirishgán,” he said, “my hand’s getting colder.”

“That is expected,” said the other.

“Am I really going to go blind?”

The selk was quiet a moment, and closed his feathered eyes. “There is darkness ahead of you,” he said at last, “but of what sort I cannot fathom. Despite my great age I am new to Spider Telling. And even the Master has his limits. ‘We pan for gold, like peasants along the Maî,’ he says, ‘but the river is dark, and the sun shrouded, and the gold we call the future is more often dust than bright stones.’ ”

“I’ve been scared so many times,” said Pazel. “From the first few days on the
Chathrand
. Out of my wits, if you care to know. But
blindness
?” He drew a shuddering breath. “I don’t think I can face that, Kirishgán.”

The selk looked at Pazel a moment longer, then drank off his tea abruptly and rose. “The time approaches,” he said. “Let us go.”

Pazel got to his feet, and Kirishgán took a candle from the window and led him quickly through the chambers of wood and glass, the varied people of Vasparhaven bowing and smiling as they went. Finally they reached a spiral stair and began to climb. Three floors they ascended, emerging at last into a small, unlit chamber. It was cold here; the walls were ancient, moss-covered stone. There was a single door, and a round stone table of about elbow height in the center of the room, on which rested a box.

Kirishgán set the candle on the table. Opening the box, he withdrew a small square of parchment, a writing quill and a bottle of ink. Pazel looked upward: he could not make out the ceiling. “What is this place, Kirishgán?” he asked.

“A
medetoman
, a spider-telling chamber,” said the selk. “Now, let me think—”

He primed the quill with ink, gazed distractedly at the crumbling walls for a moment and then wrote a few neat, swift words on the parchment scrap. He raised the scrap close to the candleflame, drying the ink. As he did so he looked up thoughtfully at Pazel.

“Your country was seized and savaged. It is true that I cannot know what that is like, having no country to lose. Still, I do know something of loss, Pazel Pathkendle. The selk have been killed in great numbers by the
Platazcra
. We are loath to bow before those we do not love, and our failure to grovel at the bloodstained feet of the Emperor has made us suspect. This was bad enough when the Plazic Blades granted Bali Adro victory after victory. Now that triumph has turned to chaos and defeat, it has grown much worse. Among other things, we are blamed for the decay of the Blades themselves. We talk to eguar, you see.”

“You
talk
to those monsters?” said Pazel, with a violent start. “Why?”

“Only the elder creatures of this world possess memories to match our own,” said Kirishgán. “We talk to them as we would our peers—as I dare say you would wish to speak to a fellow Ormali, even a dangerous one, if he were to step into this room. But the Ravens imagined that we were plotting their downfall. They could do little against the eguar, but us they have tried to exterminate. They did not quite succeed, but the damage done to our people may never be repaired: not in Alifros at any rate.”

Pazel did not know what to say. He was ashamed of his earlier words to Kirishgán, and his assumptions. At the same time he felt glad that the other had been willing to tell him of such terrible loss.

Then he saw the spider.

It was descending on a bright thread, directly over the candle on the table: a creature of living glass and ruby eyes, twice as large as the one that had bitten him. Kirishgán watched it descend, walking in a slow circle about the table, both hands raised as though in greeting. He was murmuring a chant:
“Medet … amir medet … amir kelada medet …”
The spider dropped to within a foot of the flame, and its crystalline legs scattered rainbows on the stone.

“Come here, Pazel!” said Kirishgán in an urgent whisper. “Hold out your hand!”

Nervously, Pazel approached. He trusted Kirishgán, but did not relish the thought of a second bite. With some trepidation he raised his hand. Kirishgán took his wrist and tugged him closer, and Pazel’s breath caught in his throat. The spider’s head was inches from his fingertips.

The creature grew quite still. Pazel had the strong feeling that those red eyes were studying him. Two mandibles like slivers of glass reached out cautiously toward his hand. Kirishgán tightened his grip. “Don’t pull away,” he hissed.

It took a great effort not to do so, but Pazel held still, and felt the brush of those strange organs against his fingers. They were barbed; it would have been easy for the spider to grab him with those mandibles and sink its fangs, hidden in that glass knob of a head, into finger or palm.

But this time the spider did not bite him. The mandibles withdrew, and Kirishgán released his wrist.

“Excellent,” he said. “The second stage of your cure has begun.”

“Has it?” said Pazel, starting. “But nothing happened, it barely touched me.”

“Only a touch is required. Now watch.”

The spider turned about on its strand of web, so that its head pointed upward. It remained directly above the candle. As Pazel stared, transfixed, a drop of clear liquid the size of a quail’s egg emerged from its abdomen and descended toward the flame. Though clear, it was thick, and hung suspended like a teardrop. In that moment, Kirishgán reached out and pressed the little square of parchment into the liquid. It passed inside, and the bubble of liquid separated from the spider, and Kirishgán caught it with great care. The spider retreated up its strand and was soon out of sight.

Kirishgán rolled the droplet from hand to hand, inches above the candleflame. It had become a perfect sphere. It was also expanding, and Pazel realized it was hollow. And very light, now, too, for it moved with the slowness of a feather. Then Kirishgán withdrew his hands. The sphere floated above the candle, motionless, glistening in the yellow light.

“This is
not
part of your cure,” he said, “only a gift, from one traveler to another.”

Kirishgán blew. The sphere drifted toward Pazel; and once away from the candleflame it began a slow descent. “Catch it; it is yours,” said the selk. “But be gentle! The shell is delicate as a prayer.”

Pazel let the tiny sphere settle onto his palm. It was light as a dragonfly, and its surface was an iridescent marvel: every color he could imagine danced in its curves, only to vanish when he looked directly. “It’s beautiful,” he whispered. “Kirishgán, I don’t know that you should give it to me. How can I keep from breaking it?”

“You cannot,” said the selk, “but surely you knew that already? We can possess a thing, but not its loveliness—that always escapes. Close your fist, lock your door, imprison the cherished thing in your home or heart. It makes no difference. When next you look, a part of what you cherished will be gone.”

“I’d like to give it to Thasha,” said Pazel on an impulse.

“A fine idea,” said Kirishgán. “I will send it to her, while your cure progresses. The message within is for all of you.”

Pazel carefully rolled the sphere back into his hands. “Thank you,” he said with feeling. “But Kirishgán, I still don’t understand what that spider had to do with my cure.”

“A great deal,” said Kirishgán. “Pazel, the
medets
exist in this world the way murths and spirits do: here and elsewhere at once, and detecting us as much by our spirits as our bodies. There was a reason for that bite, and you must seek it on the Floor of Echoes, or there can be no cure. The Actors will help you if they can—but the help of the
medets
is more important. They are expecting you, though you may not see them.”

He gestured at the door. “You may enter as soon as you like. Leave your boots; they will be returned to you when you exit Vasparhaven. And do not speak on the Floor of Echoes unless bidden to do so: that is essential.”

Pazel looked at him steadily. “This is a sort of test, isn’t it?”

“What isn’t, Pazel?”

“And does everyone who visits the Floor of Echoes take this test?”

Kirishgán nodded. “In one form or another. Tomorrow it will be my turn.” He gripped Pazel’s arm. “I must bid you farewell, sudden friend. Do not forget the heavens: that is what my people say. We are all young beneath the watchful stars. They will wait out our ignorance and errors, and perhaps even forgive them.”

Cradling the glass orb, he descended the stair. Pazel listened to his footsteps fade. It felt strange to be alone in this temple, inside a mountain, on the far side of the world from Ormael. Strange, and eerily peaceful. But he could not linger, he knew. Lifting the candle from the table, he walked to the door and swung it wide.

Another staircase rose before him. It was steep and built of ancient stone, and candles burned in puddles of wax on the crumbling steps, dwindling into the darkness above. Pazel tugged off his boots and set them outside the door.

The stones were wet and cold against his feet. The staircase curved and twisted, and soon Pazel knew that he had climbed the height of several additional floors. He glanced back, and saw to his great surprise that every candle he had passed was extinguished. He cupped his hand protectively around the one he bore.

The staircase ended, as it had begun, with a door, but this one stood open a few inches, and a brighter light was shining through the gap. Pazel crept forward and glimpsed a small fire crackling in a ring of stones. Figures crouched around it, and through their shoulders Pazel caught the flash of a crystal abdomen, the flicker of a ruby eye. Then the door creaked, and the figures leaped up and scattered into the darkness.

All but one. A young dlömic woman remained by the fire, wearing a pale peach-colored wrap that left her black arms bare to the shoulders, and a dark mask on the upper part of her face. She was holding a wide stone bowl over the flames. Of the spider Pazel saw no trace.

The woman beckoned him in, her silver eyes gleaming. Pazel stepped through the doorway, and found that he could see neither the ceiling nor any wall save that behind him. A strong draft, almost a wind, blew about them, making the fire dance and flare and shrink by turns. If he had not known better, Pazel would have thought that they were meeting not underground but on some desolate plain.

His candle went out. The woman held the bowl in one hand and with the other took his own, drawing him down to kneel across from her. As he did so a flute began to play in the darkness: a melancholy tune, full of loss and yearning; but somehow thankful all the same, as though there were gifts the music remembered. Pazel closed his eyes, and it seemed to him that the song drained some of the road-weariness from his body. There were other sounds from the shadows, now: a voice softly matching the flute, a repeated note from the quietest imaginable drum. The woman moved the bowl close to his chin.

“Breathe,” she said.

The bowl held a colorless liquid. He gave it an uncertain sniff, and the woman shook her head. She drew a deep breath, demonstrating, and rather stiffly Pazel imitated her. Whatever was in the bowl had no scent.

“Again,” said the woman; and, “Again,” once more. Still Pazel could not smell a thing, but all at once he realized that his eyes were watering—streaming, in fact. The woman leaned closer, her masked face glowing; Pazel blinked and scattered tears.

It was then that her eyes changed. Silver darkened suddenly to glossy black, and the pupils vanished altogether. The woman’s mouth opened, as though she were as startled as Pazel himself.
“Nuhzat!”
she said, and emptied the bowl into the fire.

The sudden steam burned Pazel’s eyes. He surged to his feet. It was pitch black, and hands were gripping him on all sides. The dlömic woman was standing before him, her bare feet atop his own. Then a hand daubed something cold and sticky on his eyelids, and Pazel found he could not open them. He wanted to shout aloud, tell them to stop—but Kirishgán had warned him to be silent, and he knew somehow that he must obey.

The woman removed her feet from atop his own; the hands abruptly withdrew. Pazel reached out, trying to find what had become of them. His hands met with nothing at all.