The Hidden Stars Part 17

Nor did he find it necessary to do so on the present occasion. "She has, in truth, a formidable pedigree. Sinderian Faellaneos, sin Faolein Faellaneos ei Shionneth Ealdridhin-descended, according to my best recollection, from at least seven generations of wizards in both the paternal and maternal lines. Despite which," he added, "she seems to be nothing more than a particularly gifted but innocuous young healer. Perhaps we should not make too much of the fact that Thaga's bindings could not hold her. With such a father, it is no wonder if the young woman is armed with any number of counterspells for her protection. But more than that-?"

Noz scratched at his beard with a long, yellow fingernail, hooked like a claw. "Yet I do recall one thing. It may mean much, it may mean nothing at all."

Again Ouriana experienced that little chill in the blood, that inexplicable intimation of trouble. "What have you remembered?"

"Only that she spent two or three years in the household of the Princess Nimenoe. But at such a tender age, it's unlikely she acquired much of your sister's craft. However, she would have been there, along with her father, when the Princess gave birth."

Self-proclaimed G.o.ddess though she was, the Empress felt a purely mortal dew start out on her skin.

It ought to mean nothing-a child healer present at a difficult and ultimately fatal birth; a little girl rendered helpless by reason of her youth and inexperience, as much as by the effects of Ouriana's own curse; and forced thereby to watch and do nothing while a foster sister came into the world, a foster mother left it. And if Nimenoe (who must have known that she was dying) had tried to protect her babe by linking the infant's destiny to that of another, then surely, surely she would have chosen one of the older, more powerful wizards who were there at the time.

Ouriana's restless movements took her over to one of the tall, arched windows, where she paused, watching the rain sheet down the diamond-shaped gla.s.s panes, listening to the roar of surf on the jagged rocks below. Lightning flashed out over the water, and the concussion that followed rattled the windows.

Suddenly remembering that her hands were not empty, she glanced down at the slightly sweaty object she held in her left palm.

It had arrived with the letters from Dreyde and the magus: a little packet wrapped up in silvery fish skin to protect it from the weather, then bound to the crow's leg. The contents-a slender coil of weather-roughened dark hair, and five short woolen threads-she had originally mistaken for some rustic charm or fetish, for there was still much of the village warlock about Thaga.

But the hair was Sinderian's, obtained (according to the magus) by one of the maidens who had helped her to dress before dinner, and the threads, which were stiff with blood and sweat, had come from the gown she was wearing when she first arrived at Saer. "These I send you," Thaga had written in his bold, uneven hand, "in case you should find use for them."

Ouriana permitted herself a brief, grim smile. Whatever else you could say about Thaga, the wretch was at least resourceful. She could not imagine, for instance, any of the Furiadhin condescending to bribe or bully a lady's handmaids in order to get at her blood or hair. And yet some of the old Earth Magics-the magic of bone dust, spittle, nail clippings, and the like-could be surprisingly potent. Particularly when one wished to harry or curse a person one had never seen or touched, who just at the moment was many hundreds of miles away.

"I think," she said at last, "that we should not dismiss this Sinderian too easily, just because we know so little about her.

"The girl is probably nothing in herself, but she may be a part of something greater."

Behind the building that housed the mews there was a narrow stair, seldom used, which wound up and up to a lonely turret and a barred door, overlooked by a particularly repellent screaming gargoyle.

No one but the Empress ever took that stair. No one but Ouriana herself would have dared to do so. Even to stand on the lowest step and breathe the malign atmosphere seeping down from above would have tested the courage of even the hardiest. As Faolein had discovered at Saer, there are some things a healthy mind utterly rejects, from which the body instinctively recoils.

To the alley behind the mews, and to that stair, the Empress went on that same day, after sending the priests Vitre and Scioleann back to their b.l.o.o.d.y duties at the New Temple and releasing the Lord Chancellor to the dusty pleasures of his musty archives. She left a shivering and unhappy mob of attendants waiting for her in the muddy, drizzling, twilit courtyard, and began her solitary climb.

With her own white hands she removed the heavy bar and pushed open the ma.s.sive door. A rank, nauseating odor flowed out to greet her, so that for a moment her head spun, and her stomach roiled.

It would have been difficult to describe that smell. Reminiscent of graves, sickrooms, torture chambers, it was literally the odor of fear itself, and therefore suggestive of all that inspires it: the sour smell of rodent; the tiny electric tingle of spiders across the skin; plagues, tombs, winding sheets, fear of live burial.

The low, round chamber, already close and breathless, became more oppressive still when she shut the door behind her. A faint light came in through a small window of cloudy green gla.s.s, but not enough to illuminate the room. The green gla.s.s shone like a jewel in what was otherwise total darkness.

And she could hear queer, disquieting noises in that darkness: the piteous mewling of sickly infants; a consumptive rattle like air pa.s.sing through a pair of diseased lungs; a wracking animal cry of terror and agony; an insane babbling that went on and on and on.

With a Word, Ouriana ignited a branch of candles on a stand by the door. The noises rose to a feverish pitch-and then died down.

Twenty-one iron cages dangled on chains from the great oak beams that held up the ceiling, twenty-one cages containing an equal number of tiny monstrosities.

They were something like rats and a good deal like monkeys. They were no two exactly alike: They were horned, winged, taloned-several were armed with vicious stingers at the end of long reticulated tails. When they skinned back their wrinkled black lips, they showed double rows of sharp bra.s.s teeth. A few were covered in s.h.a.ggy brown hair, but most were naked.

Those who lived in the palace at Apharos grew accustomed to the ugly, the deformed, the grotesque, but even Ouriana's household monsters (the Furiadhin, for instance, or the dwarfish Noz) would have flinched at the sight of these. They were nightmare incarnate: the malicious imps who carry bad dreams, who bring hallucinations to feverish minds, and horrors and delusions to drunkards and drug-fiends.

As befitted a G.o.ddess, the Empress, of course, was quite immune. With a firm step, she crossed the room and opened one of the cages, allowing the grey-skinned nightmare inside to leap through the air and land on her shoulder.

At once, all of the others set up a piteous plaint. There was a rattling of leathery wings, and a whirr like a thousand insects. Inside their iron cages, the imps flinched, jittered, and chattered their teeth, as if to show that even they were troubled by their own presence, or at least by the proximity of so many of their own kind.

Ouriana ignored them, her mind on other things. "For you," she said, reaching up to stroke the shivering and excited nightmare balancing on her shoulder, "I have a most important task. Seek out the one to whom these belong-" She held up three of Sinderian's hairs, and the imp reached out and s.n.a.t.c.hed them with its tiny shriveled hands. "You will find her traveling through Hythe or Mere."

The nightmare hissed in her ear, sidled down her arm, and settled on her wrist, where it sat fanning its double pair of wasplike wings and swinging its barbed prehensile tail, as if eager to be off. Perhaps its most disquieting feature was a pair of milky blue eyes, innocent and pure, particularly startling in that depraved little mad-monkey face.

Ouriana held it on her wrist for several minutes longer, savoring the moment. Then she swept across the floor with a determined step, and threw open the door. While she had lingered in the room, the last light had faded from the sky. Torches flared down in the courtyard, and the wind brought in a strong whiff of smoke along with the rain.

Like an austringer loosing a favorite hawk, she tossed the nightmare softly into the air, and watched it take wing. "Sinderian Faellaneos," she called out, by way of farewell. "Bend her or break her."

19.

Toward evening the road began to climb; in the distance, Sinderian thought she could just make out the dusky outlines of the foothills. Then the wind blew rain into her eyes, momentarily blinding her.

Blinking the water away, she saw something dark flying high overhead, just under the clouds. It was impossible to see clearly in the failing light, the falling rain, but she had a vague impression of immense size and a tremendous wingspan.

Wyvaerun? she wondered. But she knew that the creatures generally traveled in flocks. It was unusual to see one flying alone, unusual, too, to see one flying in the rain. Only when Ouriana or the Furiadin sent one out to spy or to carry messages. When that happened- She felt a p.r.i.c.kling of gooseflesh across her skin, and her mind began to whirl with endless possibilities, of defeat, of disaster; above all, of failure, which was unacceptable, considering the price they had already paid.

Don't borrow trouble, she told herself. You didn't see anything, not really, so don't conjure up dangers that aren't even there. More than that, you are a wizard: be careful what you think.

Morning brought a welcome break in the weather. The clouds parted and a little silvery sunlight shone through. By midafternoon, the land was unmistakably rising into foothills, a bleak country of basalt and limestone, heather and sage. It was a hard-knuckled land of knife-edged ridges and stony valleys, of chasms half sunlight and half shadow, where noisy waters flowed down from the mountain heights.

Treacherous and unchancy country it might be, but Gilrain seemed to know it well. He could find a path through a bramble thicket in a gully where even Prince Ruan's sharp eyes failed; he could lead the way after dark or in a fog past pitfalls and landslips innumerable, and never once come to grief.

Somewhere nearby, Sinderian decided, there must be hidden bogs, a whole network of secret waterways, breeding midges and mosquitoes. Though she never saw so much as a puddle of standing water, each night when she drifted off to sleep it was to a low whine as of myriad insect wings sounding in her ears-and once it seemed that something bit her, a deep venomous wound just over the large vein in her left wrist, which itched and burned throughout the night.

Only perhaps she had dreamed or imagined that after all, because when she examined the arm in the morning, there was no swelling, no redness. Staring at the unbroken skin, she shook her head, questioning the evidence of her own eyes. The pain had seemed so real, yet her memory of that pain was interwoven with fragments of nightmare.

Three days pa.s.sed, each as uneventful as the day before. Sometimes they encountered traces of previous travelers-a circular fire pit filled with ashes, a horseshoe and an earthenware bottle left behind-but they never overtook any other party along the way, nor did anyone overtake them.

Late on the third day they paused at the crest of a hill, and saw stretched out before them a broad, wooded valley of unknown depth, and on the other side, marching along the horizon from north to south, the terrific ma.s.ses of the Cadmin Aernan, ranged peak above peak, precipice beyond precipice-showing here a glittering tracery of ice-blue glacier, dropping there a slender thread of silver waterfall, yet still rising up and up to unguessable heights, white with snow and purple with shadow, in ever more fantastical shapes: spires, columns, tusks, battlements, scimitars-the legendary mountains they had yet to cross.

Gilrain named the great peaks, pointing them out one by one: Pennsligo, with his head above the clouds; Gwinemon; Min Odeluen, of evil name; Min Ogra. And farther to the east, barely seen in the misty distance: Mineirie, Penadamin, Dain Aerum.

As he spoke, Sinderian saw something that made her heart jump and the cold sweat start out on her skin: a bird the size of an eagle or even greater, sailing high overhead with odd uneven wing strokes, weaving back and forth across the sky, as though searching for something-or someone-below.

Seeing which way she looked, Gilrain shaded his eyes with one hand and stared out across the distance. "Have you spotted our wyvaerun, then? The creature has been following us for many days now, yet it never seems to come within range." He motioned toward the quiver of arrows he carried on his back. "If ever it does, be sure I'll be ready for it."

Taking up the reins, the Ni-Ferys urged his black mare down a steep, rocky trail, and Prince Ruan, Aell, and Jago rode after him in single file. But Sinderian continued to watch the wyvaerun for many minutes more, before giving the chestnut gelding its head and following the others down.

"How long-how long till we reach the barrier you spoke of before?" she asked Gilrain, when she reached the bottom and found the others waiting for her. "The one that Ouriana's servants can't cross?"

Gilrain gave the very faintest of shrugs. "A week or ten days, if this weather holds."

Sinderian winced inwardly. A week or ten days-it seemed an eternity. Too much could happen during that time, too many mischances could slow them down.

And again, reality tangled for a moment with nightmare.

She had dreamed of traveling through a horribly animate landscape, the very outlines of the hills, the contours of the land, suggesting monstrous figures struggling to emerge out of solid rock, shapes of giants, behemoths, leviathans, lying just under the surface and waiting to be born in some future cataclysm.

Caught up in that memory, she glanced back at the hill they had just descended, and thought with a shiver, Those rocks might be the spine, that formation the head-Is it possible we have been pa.s.sing for days through a nursery of monstrosities? That horrible things are incubating under the very ground where we sleep?

Then reason a.s.serted itself, and she made an effort to shake off her fears.

You have enough to worry about, she scolded herself, without populating the landscape with imaginary terrors.

They began their ascent of Gwinemon, following a winding path through a lightly wooded country of beech, chestnut, and silver pine, where primrose and lady's slipper grew in the shady places. As they continued to climb, the character of the forest changed, became darker and denser. The trees were fir, birch, alder, and fragrant spruce. Branches blotted out the sky, and the paths through the wood became more and more tangled, like witches' knots.

A maiden moon as slender as a needle rose in daylight and set before midnight; Ouriana's power would be at its lowest ebb. With the waning of her influence, the wyvaerun was seen no more. Perhaps it had lost them under the trees; perhaps it had never been following them after all. The men were inclined to think so, anyway.

But Sinderian did not, and Prince Ruan-watching her grow more and more colorless and silent as the days went by-began to doubt, also. That she still grieved for her father he knew, but he feared there was more eating at her heart than that.

He knew, at least, that her nights were disturbed, that she slept very ill. Often, he heard her tossing and turning, muttering in her sleep.

And late one evening, when they had accepted shelter for the night in a woodman's hut, as the Prince was standing watch at about the hour for which he was named, she started up from her bed on the floor, sweating and shivering. She called out in a voice that jarred at his nerves: "The earth is breeding monsters. How can we hope to prevail against so many?"

The fine hairs p.r.i.c.kled at the back of his neck. He stood there listening to his heart beat three more times, waiting for her to say more, before he realized that she was dreaming, that she spoke to someone other than himself.

Then she dropped down again with a soft little sigh, curled up on her side, and lapsed into a deep and peaceful sleep that lasted, if not through the rest of the night, at least until the end of his vigil, when Aell took over.

Ruan said nothing of her outburst then or later, neither to Sinderian nor to the other men, but he began to observe her even more closely than he had done before. He saw how she rose each morning wan and listless, how that remarkable face of hers, which had once been a mirror for a hundred different emotions in an hour, had taken on a stony stoicism.

He found the change distressing, and in more ways than one. The King and his Council at Baillebachlein had chosen Faolein and his daughter to make this journey for very specific reasons, and Ruan had an idea that once they reached Skyrra-if ever they did reach Skyrra-it would be impossible for him acting on his own to convince King Ristil of anything, let alone that he should yield up his adopted niece to the protection of strangers, that he should send her hundreds and hundreds of dangerous miles away to Thaerie, all for the sake of a prophecy that would certainly mean nothing to him. Any hope of success would surely depend on Sinderian's presence, her eloquence and conviction, speaking not only on behalf of the wizards on Leal, but as Winloki-Guenloie's foster sister.

He told himself that without Sinderian, the quest must fail.

The land became rougher and craggier, the paths steeper; the forest straggled to an end. Now there was only clover and hawkweed growing in the thin soil, monkshood, blue nettle, and thistle rooted in the scree. The last of the hunters' and woodsmen's cottages receded into the distance, and the travelers camped each night under the firefly stars.

Here there were freakish winds that seemed to blow in all directions at once, winds that threatened to lift them right off the mountain and dash them on the jagged rocks below. As soon as the sun set, the nights were filled with high, wailing voices, with deep, booming laughter, with an incredible cacophony of growls and squeals.

The wind, said Gilrain, that was all it was: the wind blowing through the stacks and chimneys of rock, down narrow gullies, through cracks in the mountainside.

Night after night, the voice of the wind entered into Sinderian's dreams. It was the same nightmare that had plagued her ever since leaving the lowlands, but each time it came the terror increased.

Dark forces tore at her, winds of sorcery railed in her ears. Her father, Prince Ruan, and the others had abandoned her; she was lost and alone in the wilderness, defenseless in the howling gale.

A storm of birds descended: rooks, blackbirds, crows, ravens. They raked at her with b.l.o.o.d.y talons, fastening their claws like hooks in her flesh, flaying skin, muscle, and sinew until nothing was left but hollow bones. The wind whistled in her empty rib cage; voices chattered and raved inside her fleshless skull.

For years beyond counting, for centuries upon centuries, she felt her bones disintegrating. At last, worn away by the relentless, scouring blast, they were reduced to sand and blown away on that dark wind.

It seemed that where the wind went, Sinderian went, too-bodiless, bereft, yet keenly-even agonizingly-aware. All about her was the stink of corruption, the corrosive taste of ruin. In the heavens, the snake that was a galaxy of stars devoured its own tail; the moon was a loathsome, putrifying ma.s.s, raining down poisons and dark sorceries on the earth and the ocean. The earth itself was a foetid womb, breeding its own destruction.

Some part of her knew that she was dreaming, and struggled to wake. Yet she was helpless, bound and ensorcelled; a pitiless universe held her in thrall.

So she could only watch as a vast figure rose up, blotting out the stars: a giantess beautiful and terrifying at the same time, who stood with one foot on Phaorax and the other on the continent, straddling the sea between. Her gown was made of rushing waters, her cloak of wind. A crown made of bone rested on her high, pale brow; twelve silver bracelets glittered on her bare white arms.

When she raised her hands, rain fell like scalding acid, scoring the dust below. When she spoke a Word, lava seethed under the skin of the earth. Mountains belched fire; ice caps melted; great landma.s.ses crumbled and slid beneath the sea. Wearily, hopelessly, Sinderian watched as the waters boiled, as the oceans dried up, until all the world was a vast wasteland of crawling muds and choking ash. Then there was not even that-only Darkness, between an infinitude of dead stars.

But it was then, when her dreaming mind felt the greatest despair, when she had no hope, that the nightmare took a surprising turn and carried her where she had never gone before.

In the manner of dreams, she was suddenly transported to a great cavern inside the earth. All around her there was a red glare, and a mighty clamor, like a mill and an armory and a battle combined. Despite the desolation above, the secret fires were still burning.

"They are forging a New World," said a voice, infinitely sweet, infinitely gentle, infinitely seductive. "This is the furnace, this is the smithy, where a new age will be born."

And gradually, she became aware of t.i.tantic shadowy figures wielding colossal hammers. Something that shone like a star went into an enormous vat of water-there was a mighty hissing and steaming.

With a thrill of mingled terror and delight, Sinderian realized what the giants were doing. They were beating out new suns, new stars, in magnitude many times brighter than any that had existed before. They were creating new races, new species to inhabit the world that was to come.

"You could be a part of all this," the beguiling voice whispered, just before she woke.

"Forsake the old myths, repudiate the lies taught by senile old men and women on Leal. If you choose, you shall be the midwife of the new age-"

Sinderian started awake, sweating and breathless, and lay there for a long time, sick and terrified. Even when the sun rose and the day began, even when she and her fellow travelers broke their fast, saddled up, and continued on their way, the images of the dream ran in her brain.

This new turn had made it all very clear: these were not ordinary dreams, but something evil, something insidious. The Dark was wooing her. It almost took her breath away even to think such a thing, yet it was unmistakable.

Which fault of mine, she wondered, what taint, what sin, has opened the way for this to happen? Is it because of impious thoughts? Is it because I've asked questions I had no business asking?

Perhaps I have always been vulnerable, she thought miserably. Perhaps it had only been her father's wide knowledge and exemplary goodness, the counsel of wizards older and wiser than she was, that had shielded her before. That was a particularly lonely and terrifying thought. And if it was true- If it was true, without Faolein, without Nione, Sinderian very much feared she was inadequate to save herself.

20.

For days they followed Gilrain over steep-sided ridges, across ledges, and up trails that were breathless and dangerous, often leading to the edge of some fall or landslide. Then their guide was forced to turn the black mare around and lead them some other way.

"Another dead end. Is it possible we're lost?" Prince Ruan challenged him on one such occasion. His temper was even more explosive than usual, because earlier that day he had caught Sinderian standing heedlessly balanced on the very brink of a sheer precipice, looking down with the slack expression and dull, unseeing eyes of a sleepwalker. When he gently and wordlessly reached out and led her away, she had not even reacted to that-which was so unlike her, it unnerved him more than anything.

"Things change here in the heights; it is never the same two years in a row," Gilrain threw back over his shoulder. "In the winter there are avalanches; in the spring, mud slides. I haven't been this way for many seasons. But if you think you can lead us better than I can, you're welcome to try."

Sinderian watched this exchange with a listless eye. More and more she felt detached from the others, isolated by her own misery.

On Midsummer's Day, the hinge of the year, they pa.s.sed by the site of eireamhoine's now-legendary battle with six of Ouriana's warrior-priests.

Ascending by a parallel trail, Sinderian looked out across a great gulf of air and shadow to a sheer rock wall, riven with thousands of fissures and crevices, where half the mountainside had been ripped away. There was a jagged ridge above, like rotten teeth, and an immense cairn of shattered stones below-beneath which, she imagined, the bodies of the three Furiadhin who had perished were buried so deep the survivors had not even attempted to recover them.

Riding through the magical barrier was like pa.s.sing through a sheet of cold water; it made her flesh tingle and her vision blur. At the same time, the ward seemed to shatter into a rainbow of brilliant colors: vivid blues and violets; stormy greens; yellow, vermillion, and tangerine; a deep, pulsing crimson.

It was light, she realized, light so pure and intense that creatures of the Dark could not pa.s.s through. The few minutes that it took the chestnut gelding to cross were agonizing and exhilarating at the same time. She felt all of her petty faults and doubts and fears exposed, all artifice, all pride stripped away; she felt as naked as an infant fresh from the womb, and as helpless.