The River of Shadows (65 page)

He groped forward, one step, then another. The stone floor pitched like a boat in a gale, and wild thoughts raced through his head.
Nuhzat
. The dlömic dream-state, the trance. Pazel was frightened, and furious—what was being done to him this time? Why didn’t anyone, ever, ask his consent?

I did, Pazel
.

He whirled. That voice! Didn’t he know it? Had it really spoken aloud, or was it an echo in his mind? Whatever it was, it suffused him instantly with an almost unbearable mixture of sadness and hope. He walked forward, blind.
Ramachni!
he wanted to scream.
Where are you?

Afterward it felt as if he wandered for an age on the Floor of Echoes. The mage’s voice called to him again, but now it was one among many: some kind, some desperate, some chuckling with hate. There were heady scents, frigid drafts. There were rough rock walls that ended suddenly in yawning spaces, and tight little rooms with strange objects that he explored with his fingers: tables, statues, a mute piano, an unstrung harp. He found a wooden box with hinges and a padlock, and from within it came a desperate thumping. He brought it close to his ear, and to his horror it was Chadfallow, Ignus Chadfallow, crying from within:
Let me out! Let me out!

Time became slippery. One moment he would be creeping along with moss beneath his feet; the next he would find himself rushing headlong, with the sound of a panting animal close on his heels. He was often frightened. And yet in the worst moments, when he was close to falling or giving way to panic, he found the webbed hand of the dlömic woman in his own, and a little peace returned to him, and he went on.

Then all at once a different hand touched his shoulder, and his head was suddenly, perfectly clear. The hand moved to his face, and a warm, wet cloth rubbed his eyes. The sticky resin melted away. Pazel blinked, and found himself facing the Master Teller.

“Welcome back from blindness,” said the old dlömu. “Now I know that I was right to send you here, for the purpose I could not see before is revealed. You needed practice with the dark.”

Pazel shook his head.

“You don’t understand, of course,” said the Teller, smiling. “Never mind: you will.”

They were in a large, lavish, forbidding chamber, like the hall of some subterranean king. There was a stone table, a barren hearth, some hulking cabinets stuffed with books and scrolls. But dominating the chamber was a round pool. It was about a dozen feet wide, with a ring of stairs descending some five or six feet to the bottom, and the palest imaginable blue light that seemed to come from the water itself.

“You stand in the
Ara Nyth
, the ancient heart of Vasparhaven, and its most sacred chamber,” said the Master. “It is with the water of this pool that I bathed your eyes, and drew the last of the
medet
’s serum. The pool is fed by a spring deep beneath the lake: a spring fed in turn by the Nythrung, which some call the River of Shadows. Through blindness you have come here, protected by our Actors, but guided by your spirit alone. Therefore you may drink from the pool if you like, and become the first human to do so in a great many years. Or you may depart: turn your back, walk directly away, and leave Vasparhaven by the stairway ahead. Do you know your wish? You may speak now, but softly.”

Pazel realized he was blinking over and over.
Nuhzat
. The dream that was not a dream. He was trapped in it; he did not know whether to be honored or appalled. “Did it work, Father?” he asked. “Am I cured?”

“You are cured,” said the old dlömu, “but do not imagine that you are leaving the darkness behind. Not yet, at any rate.”

“What happens if I drink from the pool?”

The Master Teller looked at him piercingly. “I can read the possible fates of Alifros, in a tremor, or the twisting of a spider’s thread. But I do not know what the pool would offer you. And I would not tell you, even if I did: that would be to spoil the wine before you drank it.”

“The glass spiders come from here, don’t they?”

The Teller looked pleased. “That was shrewd, my boy. Yes, they enter Vasparhaven by this pool, and it is said that when they no longer come we must abandon the temple forever. That day will certainly come, for I see it in every version of our future. A few years from now, it may be, or when my novices grow old, or perhaps when Alifros itself falls to ruin. But of that darkest future you know more than I do myself. You have borne the agent of that future, the black orb you call the Nilstone. And you have seen the Swarm of Night.”

Pazel shuddered. He did not want to think about the Swarm. “Father, how can I be in
nuhzat
? I’m not a dlömu.” He looked up at the old seer, pondering. “Unless … Prince Olik said that some humans could go into
nuhzat
, if they’d been close to dlömu, in the old days before the plague. And my mother came from that time. And Rin knows she has a lot of fits. Could she have been with a dlömu, Father, before she crossed the Ruling Sea? Was she slipping into
nuhzat
, all those times we thought she was mad?”

The old Teller smiled inscrutably. “Knowledge, Pazel Pathkendle. Hasn’t that been your desire from the start?”

Pazel leaned over the edge of the pool. The bottom was a mosaic of fine blue tiles. “I’m not going to drink,” he said. “Don’t take it the wrong way, Father, but I’ve had quite enough of—”

He stopped. The Master Teller was gone without a trace. He stood alone in the chamber, facing the dimly glowing pool.

Alarmed, he turned in a circle. Behind him was a dark doorway, and a staircase leading down. He felt the temptation sharply … but there lay the pool. He bent down and dipped his hand into the water. It was icy cold.

Knowledge. What good did it do? Was he happier for knowing the mind-bruising languages of murths and eguar? The tortured life of Sandor Ott? The fact that something as ghastly as the Swarm lurked just outside Alifros, pressing in, like an ogre’s face at the window? What would he learn this time? Something even more terrible, probably.

He cupped some water in his hand, and winced: even that little puddle on his palm burned with cold. He brought it close to his mouth. No, by the Pits. He did not want any more visions. He deserved not to see.

He drank.

At first the cold all but scalded his lips, but when he swallowed it was mere water he tasted, cool but pleasant. He dipped his hand and drank again, his fear abruptly gone. It was too late anyway, and despite the earlier wine and tea, he was thirsty.

After his fourth drink something made him look up. Directly across the pool a figure crouched, in almost the same posture as Pazel himself. A woman. She was no more than a silhouette above the pale blue light.

Was she the one who had met him in the first chamber, the one whose hand had always been there to catch him? He blinked. Something was still wrong with his eyes, or his mind. For although there was enough light to see her, he could not decide if she were young or old, human or dlömu. “Who are you?” he whispered.

The woman shook her head: speaking, apparently, was once more forbidden. Her very silence, however, woke a sudden and almost overpowering desire in Pazel: a desire to see her clearly, to know her, touch her. More than anything, to speak her name.

He rose and started around the pool—and the woman, quick and agile, jumped up and moved in the opposite direction, keeping the water between them. Pazel changed directions: she did the same. Heart hammering, he feinted one way, then dashed another. She mirrored him perfectly. She could not be fooled.

He stopped dead. Their eyes met; he had a vague idea that she was teasing him.
Fine
, he thought obstinately,
you win
. He stepped down into the pool, and the cold closed like teeth upon his ankles.

The woman gazed at him, standing very still. Pazel gritted his teeth and stepped down again, and then again. The water was now above his waist, and the cold was a shout of pain that would not stop. Two more steps to the bottom. There were deep cracks in the floor, some wide enough to put his foot in, and an idea came to him that the cracks led down infinitely far, into a dark turbulence beyond the bounds of Alifros. He descended another step, and then the woman put out her hand.

Stop
. The command was as plain as if she had spoken aloud. She crouched again, lowering both hands into the pool, and when she lifted them he saw that they held something beautiful.

It was a transparent sphere, very much like the one Kirishgán had formed with the spider’s liquid, but this one was as wide as a bushel basket, and growing even as he watched. Like the other sphere it seemed light in her hands, and very fragile. Colors and whorls and tiny translucent shapes danced over its surface, racing like clouds. Like a soap bubble, it rested on the surface of the pool, and very soon it had grown so large that Pazel had to retreat one step, and then another, until he was back upon the pool’s rim, watching her distorted features through that sleek, uncanny shape.

Pazel knew now what he must do. Watching her, he raised his hands and laid them very carefully upon the sphere.

It trembled at his touch. The woman stared at him, cautious as a deer, and Pazel found he could barely breathe. He had been missing her before he knew she existed. Or had been a part of her before he ever fully became himself.

Mother?

He moved toward her slowly, keeping his hands upon the sphere. He knew somehow that she was alarmed, but this time she did not step away. The sphere so unthinkably delicate. Perhaps she did not dare to move.

Neda?

Islands formed between his fingers; continents turned before his eyes. Their hands were on the surface of the world. They were lifting countries, moving seas. She was frightened, yet she laughed silently, and so did he.

Thasha?

He could feel the world’s winds across his knuckles; the ocean currents tickling his palms. It was like the best moments of his Gift, when the joy of an exquisite language, a language not of suffering but of song, burst open like a rose in his mind. He could look wide across the sphere and see whole coastlines; he could peer close and see the smallest details. A crumbling glacier, a forest draped with sleeping butterflies, a tiny houseboat in a river delta, a diving bell abandoned on a beach.

Klyst?

There was Etherhorde, smoking, bustling; there were her fleets on the prowl. And
Aya Rin
, there was Ormael, her flat little houses, her cobbled streets, her rubbishy port. The orchard settlements, his houserow, his house. The very window of the room he’d crawled out of years before, clutching a knife and an ivory whale.

Pazel blinked, startled, and found his gaze had flown westward thousands of miles. Now he was following a real whale as it hurled itself, suicidally, upon a beach. It wallowed in the surf, exhausted, possibly dying. Then an armed mob rushed down the beach and surrounded it. One of them, the bravest, put his hand in the whale’s mouth and extracted a golden scepter, and when he held it high the other men fell to their knees in prayer. And suddenly the whale was no longer a whale but a young man, or possibly the corpse of one.

But that scepter: solid gold, but crowned with a black shard of crystal. It was Sathek’s Scepter, the Mzithrini relic, and that meant the island must be—

Pazel blinked again: the scene was gone. He was only an arm’s length from the woman, and more desperate than ever to know who she was. But now upon the world-sphere there moved a teeming darkness, a boiling cloud. It passed over towns and cities and left them blackened; it moved over the land and left blight. The woman saw it too, and he felt her calling to him silently:
Fight it, stop it, stop the Swarm!
The Swarm! How could she expect him to fight it? How could anyone fight for a world plagued by
that
?

And yet (Pazel met the woman’s eyes again) it was no greater than what they shared, the bond between them, the growing trust. He felt suddenly that this was the knowledge he had taken with those gulps of water: the absurdly simple gift of trust and peacefulness. For a moment he did not care if she were human or dlömu or something drastically different. He knew the joy of being close to her, and that was enough.

The darkness began to retreat. Light shone again from the sphere, and once more the winds flowed clean over his hands. They stood like twin statues, and Pazel sensed the woman’s fear ebbing away. Such peace! Could you still want conquests, power over others, worship and dominion and treasure, once you’d felt such peace?

To notice peace when you had it. That was treasure. That was what
waking
was for.

Through the glass he saw her wide adoring smile. She closed her eyes, and in repose she was so lovely that he could not help it, he lifted a hand and reached to touch her, and the glass sphere burst and rained in a million shards into the pool.

He was alone.

Pazel whirled: one small glass spider crawled from the water and vanished across the floor. He raced around the pool. Gone, gone: he should have been howling with loss. But he could not. He had loved her (loved what?), but her loss was suddenly distant and elusive, as though they had parted years ago.

No, not years. Centuries.

He stared at the empty chamber, shaking, convulsing. There was no source of warmth; he had to move or die. He groped for the exit, dripping, sensing already the deeper cold that lay ahead.

The stairway spat him out upon the lakeshore, half a mile from Vasparhaven, among tall rocks sheathed in ice. The first thing he saw was Hercól and Alyash and Counselor Vadu, talking to a squat figure beside a long wooden boat.

Pazel staggered from the doorway, and the wind went through him like knives. But a bit farther on a great fire blazed, and Ibjen stood warming his shoes. Thasha and Neeps were there as well. They raced to his side, and Thasha wrapped a woolen towel about his shoulders and dragged him to the fire, swearing like a Volpek.