A Guile of Dragons (4 page)

It was an odd ship indeed to Nimue's eyes. The wood of the hull looked blue and shiny like glass; and it was smooth and cold like glass under her fingers when Earno helped (or forced) her to climb aboard. The interior of the ship was just ordinary wood, as far as she could tell, so she guessed the exterior was like paint or glaze applied to decorate the ship. She didn't know how one could do this with glass, but she added it to her list of things she was eager to know.

The single sail was pale and translucent, as if it was woven from glass. It moved in the wind, as sails will, but when Earno hauled it high and cast off from the shore, Nimue noticed that the wind that moved the sail was not the wind she felt on her face. The world's wind was from the northwest, and should have driven Earno's shining blue craft back onto the rose-pale rocks of the Breton coast. The shining sail felt the wind from some other quarter, some other world, and carried them westward, straight into the Ocean.

She wanted to ask about the boat and the sail and the wind, but Earno brushed her off. “I will answer all your questions in time,” he said. “But now I have a course to lay out. I prefer to travel with a navigator, but that wasn't possible on this trip.” He sat on a bench outside the little ship's single cabin and fiddled with a slate and a spidery sort of compass which had a number of legs that moved independently.

Nimue solemnly watched the coast fade behind her, then turned to look ahead. She had never been on a long sea voyage, and she wondered what it would be like. Ahead of them was a clot of darkness and fog, strangely out of place in the bright clear afternoon.

“Earno,” she said, “there is a dark patch ahead of us.”

“Excellent,” he replied.

The patch grew larger as they grew nearer—actually larger, not just apparently larger. Soon it stretched from horizon to horizon. The mist covered sun and sky like a curtain. She felt her heart fall suddenly, as if she were losing something she could never regain.

Earno got up from time to time to adjust the tiller or the sail, but apart from that he was absorbed in calculations. She moped at the rail of the ship, idly staring into the fog.

As she did so, strange notions began to grow in her head. Ordinary fog veils sight by putting something in the way of everything else, but this fog seemed to be too full of things for any one thing to be seen clearly. But if she concentrated, she could see things in it: faces, and human forms, and inhuman forms, and dark shapes like islands, although they moved past very quickly, much more quickly than she thought they were sailing. She heard voices, too, a mingled chorus of ghosts and shadows like a crowd on tournament days, everyone saying so much that none of it made any sense.

Then another ship passed quite near them. It was only a boat, really. But it was quite clear in the darkness and fog, because of an orange lantern hanging on the stern. A ghostly pale old man was pulling the oars, singing a sad song in a happy voice. Nimue didn't know the words, but they moved her inexpressibly. In the prow sat a dark-skinned child or dwarf. The boat came into view, passed alongside them, began to vanish in the mist.

Earno was wrapped up in his calculations. If he didn't notice the splash when she struck the water, she might reach the other boat and be well away before he saw she was gone. And, with escape attempts, perhaps the sixteenth time was the charm. Hoping that was so, Nimue jumped from the blue craft into the sea.

Except she never did strike the water. She found herself adrift in the dense mist alongside the blue craft, the other boat quite gone. She felt strange; she could suddenly hear all the voices sighing in the mist. And now they did make sense. It was she who didn't. Didn't make sense at all, would never make sense again. The blue craft began to get rather vague and indefinite, as if it were farther away in the foggy sea-that-was-not-a-sea.

Then Earno was there, bending over the rail. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her back into the blue craft.

“You must not do that again,” he said to her. “Please believe this for your own safety: the time for escape has passed. This is like no worldly sea you may know; it may transform those reckless enough to pass through it. Our course and the magical intentions sealed into the hull will protect us, but if you leave the ship you may be changed or destroyed.”

She did believe him, but she guessed his warning came too late. She already felt different. The voices she had heard in the mist were still in her head, and her belly had changed size and shape; she was more pregnant than she had been this morning.

She lay on the deck, her head sodden with alien dreams, a strange life moving tentatively within her, and waited for her next chance.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

The Witness Stone

T
here were voices in Nimue's head all the time now. Only some of them were her own, and those weren't the most interesting ones.

People, she found, were like choirs of singers, not all of whom were singing the same tune. Very often the same thought, the same words, were sung very differently by the mind's many mouths.

She was standing once on a street in A Thousand Towers—a city much greater than any she had seen. And a woman was saying to a man, “I will see you at Three Hills House when Trumpeter sets.” That was what she was saying with the mouth in her face, the least important of her many mouths. But inside her, she was screaming it with fear. She was crooning it with desire. She was gnashing the words angrily like broken teeth. She was grieving over them like dead children.

And the man said nothing, but smiled at a woman who wasn't there at all. They walked off in different directions, unaware that they had never really been in the same place, would never be.

But Nimue stayed, and watched, and listened to the things that people said, and the things that they really said.

She never tried to escape anymore. She had no idea where the Wardlands were, what part of the map they were on, if they were on any map. But she knew she didn't know how to get from here back to where she was from, and she had a thin frosty feeling from the future that she would never see the old places again.

She wasn't terribly upset about that. She had seen the spires of Camelot and the walls of Paris. She had even seen Rome, where fingers of broken stone accused the uncaring sky and a frightened baron and his knights crouched behind a curve of the dirty green river and called themselves the kings of the world. She had heard wilder tales of the east with its many cities and silken roads. But she didn't believe there was any city on Earth like A Thousand Towers.

The many towers that gave the city its name were mostly very old, from a time when the city was bound by its walls. But they were all in excellent repair, working homes for the ancient families that lived in them. She herself was housed in one: Tower Ambrose, ancestral home of Merlin and his notorious kin. Every morning she climbed to its height and watched the sun rise out of the west, over the steep ragged ridge of the Hrithaen Mountains.

The sun rose in the west here. That's how far from home she was. She said to Earno, “If the sun rises there, that's the east.” But he replied, “East and west are not arbitrary directions. The worlds are linked by the Sea of Worlds, and they radiate from the anchor of the Rock Probability in non-random fashion. The points of the compass, like Probability, are fixed. Our sun rises on the western edge of the world, as it faces the Sea of Worlds.”

“A globe doesn't have an edge. If I were on the other side of the globe—”

And then he explained to her that the world was flat. That was a very long strange conversation, in which she learned and unlearned many things.

The great city center bristled with its many towers, but the city spread far beyond its ancient walls now: long ages of peace had made the towers relics, those that had not been dismantled. On either side of the river Ruleijn the long twisting tree-lined streets ran, speckled with markets and bookstalls and smithies and wineshops and schools and open-air refectories and dancing greens and gymnasia where people wrestled as naked as seals and buildings that clearly had some function but Nimue didn't understand it.

And she never got lost. It seemed as if part of her had always lived there, or had waited to live there. She had walked the place in dreams, never remembering them until she woke to find herself there.

One evening she was coming home to Tower Ambrose, the sun a smoky red eye sinking beyond the blue wrinkled line of the Grartan Mountains in the east, when Earno met her on the street.

“You shouldn't walk so much,” he said gruffly, not bothering to greet her.

“Pregnant women need exercise too,” she pointed out, amused. She knew that he was worried about her trying to escape again, and that he was angry at her because she was associated with Merlin, and that he despised her because she had betrayed Merlin, and that he was frightened of her because her swollen belly reminded him of his mother in her childbearing youth, and that he felt a faint dark trickle of desire for her, which in turn disgusted him because he was primarily attracted to younger men. All these were voices in his chorus, but underneath and overtop of all them was this: she was in his charge and he was concerned for her well-being. That was the strong harmonizing note in his internal chorus. She found his inner self in great harmony with his outer self, more so than anyone whose heart she listened to. She had grown to like him a good deal, though the reverse was not true.

“Ah,” said Earno's face.
Pregnant women: bad luck on a ship
, said his heart.

“We're not aboard the
Stonebreaker
now, Earno,” she replied, to his thought rather than his speech.
Stonebreaker
was the ship he had commanded in his youth, the one where he had fought and killed a dragon. He was usually thinking about it, even when he wasn't talking about it, which he seldom did.

“Are you reading me now?” he asked, alarm coloring his face and all his thoughts.

She laughed at the question. She could remember when she, like Earno, would have had to go into some sort of trance to reach the level of sight that she experienced continuously, without effort, since her swim through the Sea of Worlds. She could remember it, but she didn't really believe in it. Everyone walked in all realms simultaneously; most could not bring themselves to notice it, but they garnered knowledge from it unconsciously, as Earno now did, speaking in harmony with her unspoken thought, “I am afraid that the Sea of Worlds did you harm.”

“You think of the hole in my mind as a flaw. Why not a door?”

“In any castle wall, a door is a flaw,” he said solemnly. “Our minds are more like castles than like open cities—there is a danger to us if any stranger, any enemy can come upon us and enter our selves.” He said this partly because it was true and partly because he was afraid his farmer-mother would find out that he hated slaughtering animals. His mother had been dead for a century, and it had been more than two centuries since he'd fled the family farm and begun to work on the merchant ships that sailed the Sea of Worlds out of Anglecross Port. But the fear still jangled the song of his thoughts. Also, there was a stone there, weighing heavily down on the notes.

“You're thinking of the Witness Stone,” she said.

He nodded. “There is danger for any witness on the stone, anyone who undergoes a forced rapport in any circumstance. But I fear this will be worse for you. I wish—” He wished there were some way he could protect her, she saw; he also wished there were some way he could hide from the contempt of his dead mother. “There will be seers of great skill and power present,” he said aloud. “They will not seek to harm you. But neither will they really try to protect you. Their goal will be to learn what you know of Merlin's deeds in your world. If the inquiry harms you, they'll shed no tears.”

She was strangely moved at his cold concern, the sympathy he betrayed when he said
they
instead of
we.
But she was not afraid, not until it was too late to do any good, if it ever would have done any good.

They came for her before dawn. The west-facing window of her bedroom was still dark when she found herself shaken awake by the grumpy doorwatcher. (He was not one of Merlin's people. He'd been hired by the Graith to tend the tower while Merlin faced his trial, or whatever they called it—hired with whose money she had no idea. The sole comfort of being a prisoner is that money is someone else's problem.)

She threw the doorwatcher out and dressed at a leisurely pace, keeping her eyes on the strange stars out her window. When she was ready, she threw a shawl over her head and went to meet her inquisitors.

There were eight Guardians waiting for her in the dooryard of the tower. Four wore long bloodred cloaks like Earno did. She knew (now) that this marked them as vocates—full members of the Graith of Guardians. The others wore short gray capes—that meant they were thains, mere candidates to the Graith, really. They were the most soldierly of the three ranks of Guardian, and these ones carried spears taller than themselves. They might have been mere ceremonial weapons; the shafts were ivory-pale and the gores glittered like ice. But the thains carried them lightly, as if from long practice, and they looked sturdy enough to do some damage at need.