The Soul Weaver (24 page)

We stood unobtrusively in a corner, watching the crowd of Singlars file out of the audience hall and through the rotunda. I glanced at Paulo, wondering if his thoughts had wandered the same path as mine. Though most Leiran commoners were wed by eighteen, Paulo's comments about the village girls near Verdillon had always concluded with an avowal that none of them could compare to some particular girl he had met in Avonar before he went to Zhev'Na. I guessed that a Dar'Nethi family wasn't likely to welcome Paulo's attention any more than the Guardian and his folk welcomed their two rebels.

When the hall was almost empty, I bade Paulo wait in the audience hall and grabbed the sleeve of one of the house servants who was hurrying past, licking his fingers and brushing crumbs and hair from his white ruffled collar. “Please take me to the Guardian. He agreed to meet with me when his audience session was over.”

Without a word, the servant bowed and led me, not through the gold curtain, but around through the passageway to a proper door—perhaps so I could see the two maintainers who stood beside the door holding quite normally efficient-looking swords and spears. The servant knocked, stepped inside at a growling summons, and, moments later, held the door open for me to enter.

The small room, furnished with a wide table, several chairs, and a shelf with cups and porcelain jars on it, was tucked away in an alcove behind the gold curtain. A retiring room, a Leiran noble would have called such a retreat adjacent to his audience hall. The Guardian sat behind the large table, hammering his fingers on the polished wood top, fuming. The morning's events had clearly unsettled him.

When the servant closed the door behind me, the Guardian jerked his head toward one of the chairs, and then popped up and strode around the room, fingering the ruby-studded key about his neck. On every circuit his rapid pace billowed the heavy gold curtain that separated him from the audience hall. “Singlars . . . sharing a fastness . . . male and female . . . Disgusting! And names! I must report this to the Source . . . seek counsel to stop such perfidy. Fifty lashes were not enough. Should have been a hundred. Two hundred.”

“Your customs here are very different from those of other lands,” I said, folding my hands in my lap. The chair and its lumpy cushions were uncomfortable, but I tried not to shift or fidget.

“Question our customs, and I'll show you and your insolent companion the same punishment as that wicked Singlar! We are satisfied with our ways, and you'll not come here and muddle them. It doesn't matter who you are or what you can do, or what any empty-headed Singlar thinks you are.
I
make the rules for the Bounded!” His distress seemed to have lowered his guard on his tongue.

“Remember, Guardian, all I want is answers.” Well, I also wanted to meet this Source, whoever or whatever it was, but this didn't seem the time to mention the fact.

Abruptly, he stopped his pacing, returned to his chair, and began our interview as if nothing had happened. I had come to this meeting alone, not wanting his antipathy for Paulo to make an accommodation impossible. Paulo should be just beyond the curtain, close enough to come if I called, though I wasn't sure how well he could hear.

“What answers do you seek, traveler? I have many responsibilities. The dwarf and his companions have clearly disrupted your life with their mistaken opinions. They will be disciplined for it, but not too severely, due to your kind interest in their welfare.” He smiled, but he could have cracked nuts in his jaw. “I would send you on your way as soon as possible with our apologies and good wishes.”

I played it just as he did. Answers were the important thing. “I appreciate your time and patience, Guardian. So, tell me, what is this land? Where do you and the other people come from, and why do you seek your king in my dreams? That should do to start.”

He sat back in his chair, his spine straight, his shoulders rigid. “This land is, of course, the Bounded. We have lived here always, except for the few persons that our overeager seekers have brought us from other bounded worlds. The Source has said that our king would come from another bounded world and would discover us in his dreams, but that he might be lost upon his way. Therefore I was commanded to choose seekers to go to certain places and be visible to the dreamer, so perhaps to lure him here, and then I was to send the seekers through the moon-door to find him. And so I have done. I know nothing of their dealings with you. Many many persons dream of the Bounded, I am sure. Beyond that, we are as we are. It is satisfactory.”

“And the Unbounded . . . what is that?” If there was a Bounded, its opposite must also exist.

He shifted a bit, and a shadow touched his eyes and his face. “It is beyond the Edge. It is nothing. Terrible. Nothing.”

He was afraid. His fear, deep and profound, shaped his thoughts and deeds. To know more of that fear could be a useful thing. “Was the Bounded at one time the Unbounded?”

He pursed his thick lips and clasped his hands together tightly on his fine table, considering his answer as if my question were not rampant nonsense. “Some say it. I don't hold with it. I say we are as we are. I certainly have no memory of such a time.”

“Why is your king to lead you to victory over all bounded worlds?”

At this, the Guardian drew himself up even tighter and glared at me. “The dwarf told you this?”

“I heard it said.”

“He should not have said it. The dwarf and those like him are too eager. You are
not
the king. You are
not
to know our business.”

“But now I do, so you may as well explain.”

He considered for so long a while that I was sure he would refuse. But after a time he rose and circled the room again, brushing invisible specks of dust from the plain tables and chairs set about the room. “You have seen a firestorm?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose they are quite common outside the Bounded.” The slightest hint of a question in this statement.

“No. Not common.”

“But you know of them. The Singlars claim you caused one to stop, so you must understand their nature.”

“That was only a coincidence. In fact, I was going to ask you about them. What are they? How often do they occur?”

“Humph. They come from the same place as you, so your question is clearly foolish and deceitful. The storms tell us that those outside the Bounded—maybe you and your uncivil companion—do not care about our survival. The Source prophesies that our king will not allow this destruction to continue, and that he will shape the destiny of all bounded worlds. We do not know how that is to occur. Because of the firestorms, some believe it will be a great violence, and thus our king will be victorious in this conflict.”

“And what do you think?”

He stopped behind his table, directly in front of me, and drew up to his full height. “I think only as the Source commands me. But I have not yet seen our king. So I encourage our people to nurture their fastnesses and wait.”

“Does the Source know the nature of the storms?”

“The Source knows all.”

“Can you take me to the Source?”

“Certainly not!” He ground his thick, knobbed fingers into the edge of the table. “Only the Guardian and the king may visit the Source. I think you've asked quite enough questions, traveler. I think you should take your leave of the Bounded.” He pointed to the door.

The Guardian's fear washed over me like a heavy sea lapping at the sides of a boat. Frightened men were always more dangerous than they might appear, so I didn't think it wise to push him further. I hadn't forgotten the two beefy maintainers outside the door.

I stood up to go and bowed respectfully. “I am not your king, Guardian. I have no desire to be a king of anything. I just want to understand about my dreams, and about your world, and how they are related. Nothing more. And so I present you with this proposition. Allow me to stay here for a while. Tell the Source of me and see if it is willing to hear my questions. If not, I promise to go peacefully, leaving you my sincere thanks. And in either case—answers or none—I will grant you the name you desire.”

“You make no claim?” Incredulity dripped from his tongue.

“No claim. I don't want to rule anyone. Ever. I'm not suited to it. And I have no wish to make my home in the Bounded.”

He dropped into his chair and drummed his fingers while he looked at me. When he made his decision, he leaned forward. “And if I tell you the Source refuses to answer . . .”

“. . . I will present you the name Mynoplas, and then I'll go. Do we have a bargain?”

“For now you may stay. Until I consult the Source.”

He dearly wanted a name, for he was still very much afraid of me.

It is a strange fact of war and politics that fortunate circumstances can condemn the best of strategies to ruin. Another of Lord Parven's maxims. I wasn't sure that I had actually stopped the firestorm on my first day in the Bounded, only that I had kept myself intact, but it happened that no more of them struck in the days following. And because this astonishing and welcome eventuality was associated with my arrival, the people of the Bounded came to believe I was their king.

Whenever I explored their city, they bowed or cheered as I passed. When I attended the Guardian's daily audiences, the petitioners knelt before me and begged my indulgence or my hearing. They would not attend to the Guardian, even when I insisted they do so. I started sitting in the retiring room behind the gold curtain to listen discreetly, but it only took them two days to find me and come after me again.

And, of course, all this made my bargain with the Guardian go sour very quickly. At first he only grumbled and snarled at me as we sat at meals. Eventually I decided it was politic to stay away from his audience sessions, which annoyed me, as I was learning a great deal about life in the Bounded from listening to its troubles. But even that did not pacify him, and whenever I asked if he had yet spoken to the Source, he turned red and tightened his lips. “The Source has said nothing of you. No answers to your queries have been spoken.” Then he clamped his mouth shut. But he didn't send me away.

I was no less irritated than he, because seven days had passed, and I'd learned nothing of real importance. I was worried about my mother and worried about what other untoward events my father might be blaming me for. But nothing could be done about either concern, and I didn't know of anyplace else to look for the truth. So we stayed and tried to learn what we could.

Though the Guardian disapproved of our wandering, Paulo and I spent our days poking about the Blue Tower, also called the King's Fastness, and the Tower City, trying to discover how the place worked. Everyone in the Bounded seemed to be holding his breath, waiting: waiting for the mythical king, waiting for the next firestorm, waiting for someone to come and give all of them names. Life was dreadfully dull.

The Blue Tower itself revealed little. The lamps lit and darkened themselves in a rhythm quite familiar to those who'd lived in sunlit worlds. You could control them with your fingers, too, in the way of ordinary lamplight. A few other fastnesses in the Bounded had slot windows and lamps like these, and the Singlars watched the lights in those towers to measure their days, passing the information from tower to tower. Besides his maintainers, the Guardian had an army of servants at his beck, a hundred quiet, oddly shaped men and women who wore ruffled collars over the same brown tunics as the other Singlars wore. Neither servants nor Guardian seemed to understand why the lamps behaved in the way they did. It was only one of a thousand things they didn't know.

Beyond the tasks of serving or protecting the Guardian, the servants in the Blue Tower could tell me nothing of other people's occupations. The Guardian's food was grown or raised, fabric was woven and thread was spun, but no one could say who did those things or where. Meat and flour, oil, fruit, fabric, pottery, and all types of goods arrived in the storerooms of the Blue Tower, seemingly without the interference of servants or laborers, and were used as the Guardian desired.

The Singlars had no such luxuries. Their diet consisted entirely of the tappa root, a white vegetable that looked something like a turnip and tasted worse. They boiled it, baked it, or fried it in oil squeezed from its stem. They dried and ground it for flour and baked it into a flat, slightly sweetish bread. They made their clothing from the woven fibers of the tappa and the other stunted shrubs that grew in the dim light, and they made a thin bitter ale by fermenting the tough skin of the tappa root along with its shredded gray leaves. We saw little evidence of commerce or trade, only rudimentary bartering.

Most of our information we gleaned from observation, for the Singlars were too much in awe of me to speak, and I didn't know how to make them. Frustrated, I asked some of the Singlars where I could find Vroon and his friends. Everyone knew the three Singlars who had been granted names, and they pointed us toward three towers not far from the Blue Tower. One was tall, straight, and gleamed silver in the starlight. One was shaped like a stepped pyramid of ruddy sandstone, and one, Vroon's, curved upward from a wide base to a crown-like peak.

Vroon, Ob, and Zanore were delighted to accompany us in our explorations, despite the Guardian's having specifically forbidden them to have contact with me. They said that since I was certainly the king, all would be made right eventually. Every morning after the lamps came up, the three waited for Paulo and me in a lane near the Blue Tower and guided us about the confusing countryside.

 

“Tell me, Zanore,” I said, “does anyone know the shape of the Bounded or make maps or charts? Perhaps if we could see a map, we could get some idea of where to go.” The morning was dismal and rainy—morning in name only, as it was still and always night in the Bounded. The constant dark and the wild, fickle weather made it difficult to estimate the size and shape of the land or even to decide if we had been in some particular place before.