The Wind Through The Keyhole (25 page)

Is he alive, then?
Tim asked, and the question was so absurd that Nell laughed.

He was shaken awake,
that much
did
happen, but not by his mother. It was Helmsman who was bending over him when he opened his eyes, the man smelling so powerfully of sweat and decaying vegetable matter that Tim had to stifle a sneeze. Nor was it morning. Quite the opposite: the sun had crossed the sky and shone redly through stands of strange, gnarled trees that grew right out of the water. Those trees Tim could not have named, but he knew the ones growing on the slope beyond the place where the swamp boat had come to ground. They were ironwoods, and real giants. Deep drifts of orange and gold flowers grew around their bases. Tim thought his mother would swoon at their beauty, then remembered she would no longer be able to see them.

They had come to the end of the Fagonard. Ahead were the true forest deeps.

Helmsman helped Tim over the side of the boat, and two of the oarsmen handed out the basket of food and the waterskin. When his gunna was at Tim’s feet—this time on ground that didn’t ooze or quake—Helmsman motioned for Tim to open the Widow’s cotton sack. When Tim did, Helmsman made a beeping sound that brought an appreciative chuckle from his crew.

Tim took out the leather case that held the metal disc and tried to hand it over. Helmsman shook his head and pointed at Tim. The meaning was clear enough. Tim pulled the tab that opened the seam and took out the device. It was surprisingly heavy for something so thin, and eerily smooth.

Mustn’t drop it,
he told himself.
I’ll come back this way and return it as I’d return any borrowed dish or tool, back in the village. Which is to say, as it was when it was given to me. If I do that, I’ll find them alive and well.

They were watching to see if he remembered how to use it. Tim pushed the button that brought up the short stick, then the one that made the beep and the red light. There was no laughter or hooting this time; now it was serious business, perhaps even a matter of life and death. Tim began to turn slowly, and when he was facing a rising lane in the trees—what might once have been a path—the red light changed to green and there was a second beep.

“Still north,” Tim said. “It shows the way even after sundown, does it? And if the trees are too thick to see Old Star and Old Mother?”

Helmsman nodded, patted Tim on the shoulder . . . then bent and kissed him swiftly and gently on the cheek. He stepped back, looking alarmed at his own temerity.

“It’s all right,” Tim said. “It’s fine.”

Helmsman dropped to one knee. The others had gotten out of the boat, and they did the same. They fisted their foreheads and cried
Hile!

Tim felt more tears rise and fought them back. He said: “Rise, bondsmen . . . if that’s what you think you are. Rise in love and thanks.”

They rose and scrambled back into their boat.

Tim raised the metal disc with the writing on it. “I’ll bring this back! Good as I found it! I will!”

Slowly—but still smiling, and that was somehow terrible—Helmsman shook his head. He gave the boy a last fond and lingering look, then poled the ramshackle boat away from solid ground and into the unsteady part of the world that was their home. Tim stood watching it make its slow and stately turn south. When the crew raised their dripping paddles in salute, he waved. He watched them go until the boat was nothing but a phantom waver on the belt of fire laid down by the setting sun. He dashed warm tears from his eyes and restrained (barely) an urge to call them back.

When the boat was gone, he slung his gunna about his slender body, turned in the direction the device had indicated, and began to walk deeper into the forest.

Dark came.
At first there was a moon, but its glow was only an untrustworthy glimmer by the time it reached the ground . . . and then that too was gone. There
was
a path, he was sure of it, but it was easy to wander to one side or the other. The first two times this happened he managed to avoid running into a tree, but not the third. He was thinking of Maerlyn, and how likely it was there was no such person, and smacked chest-first into the bole of an ironwood. He held onto the silver disc, but the basket of food tumbled to the ground and spilled.

Now I’ll have to grope around on my hands and knees, and unless I stay here until morning, I’ll still probably miss some of the—

“Would you like a light, traveler?” a woman’s voice asked.

Tim would later tell himself he shouted in surprise—for don’t we all have a tendency to massage our memories so they reflect our better selves?—but the truth was a little balder: he screamed in terror, dropped the disc, bolted to his feet, and was on the verge of taking to his heels (and never mind the trees he might crash into) when the part of him dedicated to survival intervened. If he ran, he would likely never be able to find the food scattered at the edge of the path. Or the disc, which he had promised to protect and bring back undamaged.

It was the disc that spoke.

A ridiculous idea, even a fairy the size of Armaneeta couldn’t fit inside that thin plate of metal . . . but was it any more ridiculous than a boy on his own in the Endless Forest, searching for a mage who had to be long centuries dead? Who, even if alive, was likely thousands of wheels north of here, in that part of the world where the snow never melted?

He looked for the greenglow and didn’t see it. With his heart still hammering in his chest, Tim got down on his knees and felt around, touching a litter of leaf-wrapped pork popkins, discovering a small basket of berries (most spilled on the ground), discovering the hamper itself . . . but no silver disc.

In despair, he cried: “Where in Nis are you?”

“Here, traveler,” the woman’s voice said. Perfectly composed. Coming from his left. Still on his hands and knees, he turned in that direction.

“Where?”

“Here, traveler.”

“Keep talking, will ya do.”

The voice was obliging. “Here, traveler. Here, traveler, here, traveler.”

He reached toward the voice; his hand closed on the precious artifact. When he turned it over in his hand, he saw the green light. He cradled it to his chest, sweating. He thought he had never been so terrified, not even when he realized he was standing on the head of a dragon, nor so relieved.

“Here, traveler. Here, traveler. Here—”

“I’ve got you,” Tim said, feeling simultaneously foolish and not foolish at all. “You can, um, be quiet now.”

Silence from the silver disc. Tim sat still for perhaps five minutes, listening to the night-noises of the forest—not so threatening as those in the swamp, at least so far—and getting himself under control. Then he said, “Yes, sai, I’d like a light.”

The disc commenced the same low whining noise it made when it brought forth the stick, and suddenly a white light, so brilliant it made Tim temporarily blind, shone out. The trees leaped into being all around him, and some creature that had crept close without making a sound leaped back with a startled
yark
sound. Tim’s eyes were still too dazzled for him to get a good look, but he had an impression of a smooth-furred body and—perhaps—a squiggle of tail.

A second stick had emerged from the plate. At the top, a small hooded bulge was producing that furious glare. It was like burning phosphorous, but unlike phosphorous, it did not burn out. Tim had no idea how sticks and lights could hide in a metal plate so thin, and didn’t care. One thing he did care about.

“How long will it last, my lady?”

“Your question is nonspecific, traveler. Rephrase.”

“How long will the light last?”

“Battery power is eighty-eight percent. Projected life is seventy years, plus or minus two.”

Seventy years,
Tim thought.
That should be enough.

He began picking up and repacking his gunna.

With the bright glare to guide him,
the path he was following was even clearer than it had been on the edge of the swamp, but it sloped steadily upward, and by midnight (if it
was
midnight; he had no way of telling), Tim was tired out in spite of his long sleep in the boat. The oppressive and unnatural heat continued, and that didn’t help. Neither did the weight of the hamper and the waterskin. At last he sat, put the disc down beside him, opened the hamper, and munched one of the popkins. It was delicious. He considered a second, then reminded himself that he didn’t know how long he would have to make these rations last. It also crossed his mind that the brilliant light shining from the disc could be seen by anything that happened to be in the vicinity, and some of those things might not be friendly.

“Would you turn the light off, lady?”

He wasn’t sure she would respond—he had tried several conversational gambits in the last four or five hours, with no result—but the light went off, plunging him into utter darkness. At once Tim seemed to sense living things all around him—boars, woods-wolves, vurts, mayhap a pooky or two—and he had to restrain an urge to ask for the light again.

These ironwoods seemed to know it was Wide Earth in spite of the unnatural heat, and had sprinkled down plenty of year-end duff, mostly on the flowers that surrounded their bases, but also beyond them. Tim gathered up enough to make a jackleg bed and lay down upon it.

I’ve gone jippa,
he thought—the unpleasant Tree term for people who lost their minds. But he didn’t
feel
jippa. What he felt was full and content, although he missed the Fagonarders and worried about them.

“I’m going to sleep,” he said. “Will you wake me if something comes, sai?”

She responded, but not in a way Tim understood: “Directive Nineteen.”

That’s the one after eighteen and before twenty,
Tim thought, and closed his eyes. He began to drift at once. He thought to ask the disembodied female voice another question:
Did thee speak to the swamp people?
But by then he was gone.

In the deepest crease of the night, Tim Ross’s part of the Endless Forest came alive with small, creeping forms. Within the sophisticated device marked North Central Positronics Portable Guidance Module DARIA, NCP-1436345-AN, the ghost in the machine marked the approach of these creatures but remained silent, sensing no danger. Tim slept on.

The throcken—six in all—gathered around the slumbering boy in a loose semicircle. For a while they watched him with their strange gold-ringed eyes, but then they turned north and raised their snouts in the air.

Above the northernmost reaches of Mid-World, where the snows never end and New Earth never comes, a great funnel had begun to form, turning in air lately arrived from the south that was far too warm. As it began to breathe like a lung, it sucked up a moit of frigid air from below and began to turn faster, creating a self-sustaining energy pump. Soon the outer edges found the Path of the Beam, which Guidance Module DARIA read electronically and which Tim Ross saw as a faint path through the woods.

The Beam tasted the storm, found it good, and sucked it in. The starkblast began to move south, slowly at first, then faster.

Tim awoke to birdsong
and sat up, rubbing his eyes. For a moment he didn’t know where he was, but the sight of the hamper and the greenish shafts of sunlight falling through the high tops of the ironwood trees soon set him in place. He stood up, started to step off the path to do his morning necessary, then paused. He saw several tight little bundles of scat around the place where he had slept, and wondered what had come to investigate him in the night.

Something smaller than wolves,
he thought.
Let that be enough.

He unbuttoned his flies and took care of his business. When he was finished, he repacked the hamper (a little surprised that his visitors hadn’t raided it), had a drink from the waterskin, and picked up the silver disc. His eye fell on the third button. The Widow Smack spoke up inside his head, telling him not to push it, to leave well enough alone, but Tim decided this was advice he would disregard. If he had paid attention to well-meaning advice, he wouldn’t be here. Of course, his mother might also have her sight . . . but Big Kells would still be his steppa. He supposed all of life was full of similar trades.

Hoping the damned thing wouldn’t explode, Tim pushed the button.

“Hello, traveler!” the woman’s voice said.

Tim began to hello her back, but she went on without acknowledging him. “Welcome to DARIA, a guidance service of North Central Positronics. You are on the Beam of the Cat, sometimes known as the Beam of the Lion or of the Tyger. You are also on the Way of the Bird, known variously as the Way of the Eagle, the Way of the Hawk, and the Way of the Vulturine. All things serve the Beam!”

“So they do say,” Tim agreed, so wonderstruck he was hardly aware he was speaking. “Although no one knows what it means.”

“You have left Waypoint Nine, in Fagonard Swamp. There is no Dogan in Fagonard Swamp, but there is a charging station. If you need a charging station, say
yes
and I will compute your course. If you do not need a charging station, say
continue.
”

“Continue,” Tim said. “Lady . . . Daria . . . I seek Maerlyn—”

She overrode him. “The next Dogan on the current course is on the North Forest Kinnock, also known as the Northern Aerie. The charging station at the North Forest Kinnock Dogan is off-line. Disturbance in the Beam suggests magic at that location. There may also be Changed Life at that location. Detour is recommended. If you would like to detour, say
detour
and I will compute the necessary changes. If you would like to visit the North Forest Kinnock Dogan, also known as the Northern Aerie, say
continue.
”

Tim considered the choices. If the Daria-thing was suggesting a detour, this Dogan-place was probably dangerous. On the other hand, wasn’t magic exactly what he had come in search of? Magic, or a miracle? And he’d already stood on the head of a dragon. How much more dangerous could the North Forest Kinnock Dogan be?