A Shadow on the Glass (21 page)

Now he was close behind, so close that she could hear the grit squeaking beneath his feet It was a hot day for late autumn, with clear skies and a dry wind blowing. Now she fell, cutting her knee open on a rock, scrambled up; but it was all over—Idlis was on her. Disgusting creature! Desperation lent her a last strength. She flailed at his face, tore at his robes, leapt backwards. The fabric tangled about her good arm and, rotten from sun and sweat and wear, tore right off his back.

Idlis gave a strangled cry and snatched at the cloth. Karan jerked the other way and fell backwards, carrying his robes with her, hood and all. All he had left was a rag in his fist and a short underskirt that fell from a band around his hips and was looped back up. His flesh was the pallid gray of a fish, his limbs bony and thick-jointed, the ribs raised bands around his chest.

Karan scrambled to her feet and limped away, unwinding the cloth from her arm as she went. The fall had badly jarred her wrist and the least movement was agonizing. Then she was struck by the distress on Idlis’s normally blank face. He ignored her and ran jerkily toward his habit, one arm shielding
his anemic face from the sun. She scooped the rank garments up in her good hand and hobbled on.

For more than two hours the chase went on, on that barren plain, but Idlis became slower and slower, his motion more palsied, and at last was lost to sight What kind of trick was this? A blatant one perhaps but Karan was bothered by it and so she went creeping back. She found him collapsed on the red soil. Even from a distance she could see that his limbs were contorted, his bare torso and shoulders burnt bright orange over the gray.

Closer she crept, her curiosity aroused now. Did they have a weakness after all? The Whelm had lost his eye shields in his last travail, and as the long head lifted sluggishly all Karan could see were his eyes, and they were red, weeping wounds.

Once she would have pitied Idlis but not any more. Not after Lake Neid. Then she looked in those eyes and that gave her pause, for she saw what she had seen in her horse’s eyes as she cut its throat

“What can I do with you?” she said.

The Whelm gave what passed for a painful shrug, a curious oscillation of the shoulder blades. “Do what you will,” he said, blinking fluid out of his eyes. “I expect no mercy, nor would give any.”

“Why do you hunt me mis way? What have I done to you?”

“The master’s shame is ours. We cannot rest until we have you.”

Karan could not understand. “What evil creatures you are.”

Now the Whelm did not comprehend. “You stole our master’s mirror, you killed my pup—
and you call us evil
? Did we serve you, you would know none more faithful.”

In spite of herself Karan was fascinated. She crept closer, though not too close. She had never met anyone like him. “Who are you”

“I am Idlis the Healer.”

“Healer!”

“Why not? We hurt, we get ill, we die.
We feel
.”

His words struck Karan strangely. Somehow she had not thought of him as being human. “But what
are
you, Whelm?”

“
We
are just Whelm. We came from the wilderness of ice. Before that—” he was momentarily confused “—too long ago. We have lost what we once had—a perfect partnership of servant and master. We cannot even remember our true master, so long is he gone.” He seemed a little sad, a little wistful. Then his face changed and his voice went cold with rage and self-disgust. “So Yggur is our master now, though he hates us. ‘The contemptible Whelm,’ he calls us. And we serve him, to our shame.”

“Then why do you serve?”

“We are Whelm!” Idlis said vehemently, as though that explained all. Then, seeing that it did not, “Without a master and a purpose we were nothing. We cannot go back to nothing; so we serve Yggur. Do you kill me then?”

“I do not.”

He writhed. Karan leapt back, then realized that he was trying to put himself in her shadow. The very skin of his face seemed to be dissolving. He wrapped his long arms around his torso. “How the sun burns.”

Karan said nothing, only looked down at his blistering face. His eyes wept thick yellow tears but he could not ask.

“I pity you,” Karan said. “That is my weakness.” The Whelm flinched. The eye shields were lying about twenty paces away. She walked over and picked them up. They were carved from a single piece of flexible, yellow bone. Idlis watched her without expression. She should do for him as she did for her horse. But he was in torment. She feared him still but could no longer hate him.

She came back and threw the eye shields down on the dirt before him. He showed surprising dignity-reaching across, he touched the bone, then slowly and painfully forced himself to his feet, the yellow tears flooding his cheeks, and bowed to her. She looked at him in astonishment. He bent down, picked up the shields and put them over his eyes.

“Your weakness is your strength,” Idlis said, “your pity my humiliation, the worst torment you could put me to. No one has ever done me a
kindness
before.” He said the word in a shuddering way, as if it was an insult or an offense, and his upper lip twisted back to show the gray gums and the dog teeth. “What can I do? To let you get away is treason. Yet honor demands that I repay even an enemy her gift. Come, let me attend your wrist. I can see how it hurts you. You are quite safe—I do not avenge my dog today.”

Her wrist was now so swollen and painful that she had to hold it rigid with her other hand. The knee, by comparison, was a minor wound. Karan was no stranger to the dictates of honor and duty but his kind was beyond her understanding. How could he offer aid one day while planning her demise for the next? She could never trust him, this alien Whelm. The thought of his touch, his rubbery cold fingers on her wrist, his nearness, was worse than the pain. “No!” she said with a shiver.

“Then go. I give you half a day, though it cost me dear.”

Karan stepped back half a step. Idlis’s skin had grown redder even as they spoke, and huge blisters were forming on his shoulders, his arms, his chest. He must be in agony, though he showed it only by a shuddering.

She put her hand in her pocket to take the weight off her wrist and encountered something long forgotten, the slab of chocolate that Tallia had put there in Freddie. Instantly her mouth filled with saliva and longing. She unwrapped it, still staring at Idlis, and broke it in half.

“It is my birthday today,” she said, offering him one half.

Idlis’s face twisted and a yellow tear leaked out of one eye. “I am your enemy still,” he said, bowing his head. “But I wish you joy this day.”

They ate their chocolate in silence. Karan had never in her life eaten anything that tasted so delicious, so intensely sweet. She was glad she had shared it

“My brother Whelm are coming,” said Idlis. “My torment is their shame, which they must amend. Go at once.”

His eyes blinked behind the bone covers and what she saw there frightened her badly. She looked back. Half a league away a small patch of dust clung to the stony plain. Karan walked away without another glance, but rather more hastily than her own dignity would have liked, and when she was beyond his sight she ran and ran and ran.

There was no pursuit for hours, but after that their presence, and his face, were always in her mind. She set her wrist clumsily, so that it ached constantly and the hand was almost useless. Several times she crossed the hills of Sundor, back and forth, working her way east toward Hetchet and the mountains beyond, feeling that they were driving her and knowing that she would be trapped there.

There were five of them now and they were mounted again. She often saw them in the distance, far apart, and though she managed to keep away from them in this rough country she could not find a way past; there was no way to go but the way they allowed. At last the Gate of Hetchet appeared at the end of the road, the slot in the hills that framed the once great city of the same name.

She had grown hard and humorless during the past month. Cold and obsessed. Emotionally closed off-the most difficult thing of all for her. The Whelm were not far behind. Where to now?

She still longed to go to Chanthed, to seek out someone
to tell her the Histories, what she needed to choose the fate of the Mirror. She knew people in Chanthed but they were not chroniclers. Who had she met there that would know? Only the master of the college, a withered little man called Wistan, at a meeting with her father when she was a child. Wistan was still there, or at least had been a few months ago. He could surely tell her what she needed if she had the courage to approach him.

But she sensed that the Whelm were too close, possibly between her and Chanthed. Even with the crowds there for the festival it was too small a place for hiding, unless she sat in a cellar for weeks. Not Chanthed then. How she longed to hear the Great Tales again. How she wished that she’d said no to Maigraith, that she’d never met her. But Maigraith was in Yggur’s cells and she was here.

With heavy heart Karan turned away and took the eastern path to Tullin and Bannador, miserable, exhausted in body and soul, trapped. The moon was in its first quarter, and all of it was dark—a miserable omen. The terrible dreams kept coming back. Looking up at the mountains she saw that already they were white with snow. Even uninjured it would be a hard crossing. She was more tired than she had ever been. How her wrist pained her. If only it would end.

The Whelm came to Hetchet close behind her. It was Utile more than a village where once a city stood, but every step told of its former greatness: the wide streets, curbed and guttered and paved with flat stones that were as neat and even as the day they were laid; the magnificent temples and columns and empty villas on either hand. And its people seemed to have the same air about them, an air of pride, antiquity, dignity.

“They are the proudest goat-herders in all of Meldorin,” said the Whelm leader with contempt. He was quite unlike
the others, being short and stout. They rode up to the great gate, so broad that ten could ride abreast between its carved stone flanks.

“We seek a young woman with red hair,” said the tall man with the face like a hatchet. The gray skin was scarred and flaking as though it had been burned, and the whites of his black eyes were stained yellow.

“Such a one was here recently,” replied the guard.

“And where is she now?” The Whelm moved forward in their saddles.

The guard had spoken to Karan more than once, and liked her. He would help her as long as there was no risk to himself.

“She asked for the road to Chanthed, and she went that way,” the guard lied, moving backwards into his box.

“Chanthed! You are sure of this, guard?” The hard eyes probed him.

The guard looked away. “People come and go every day, and I speak to them all. She said Chanthed. That’s all I know.”

The Whelm rode away. “Why would she go to Chanthed?” one asked, a woman who looked rather like Idlis. “What is there, save the College of the Histories? The guard must be lying.”

“Doubtless he is, Gaisch,” said the stout one. “But nothing can be left to fortune. There are those in Chanthed who might have an interest in the Mirror, even though the other thief said Sith. Two will go to Chanthed. Another two will come with me: you, Idlis, where I can watch you, and you, Gaisch. It is more likely that she goes to Bannador, that being her home, but she will find no refuge in the mountains in winter. To go off the main way means death. But if you do find her in Chanthed, bring her back here. Away!”

* * *

Karan was high in the mountains now. One night, after worrying herself to sleep in her refuge, a cave that stank of bats, she had a quite different dream. She dreamed she was in Chanthed again, walking through the sun-drenched streets, past neat houses of yellow sandstone up to the college at the top of the hill, her hand in her father’s hand, seeking out the master of the college. Now they were in Wistan’s office, her father talking to the balding little man about things she did not understand. The scene changed, her father was gone and she was pouring out her tale to Wistan, who looked ridiculous in nightcap and gown, a gnome in a bed made for a giant He sat up suddenly, the dream Wistan, as though he had just found the solution to an old problem. He did not respond to her pleas though, just stared past her and faded away.

Her last memory was of that marvelous telling and the young chronicler, Llian, who had the entire hall on its feet. She recalled how their minds had touched briefly during his tale. That was normally like finding the path through a maze, but the way to him was marked at every turn. Momentarily he seemed like the hero of one of his Great Tales, and in her desperation Karan reached out to him.

O
nce more Llian’s wonderful dreams were interrupted by someone belting at the door. It was so loud that they might have been trying to smash it in. He had a premonition that he was not going to get off so lightly this time.

“All right,” he screamed.

The crashing continued, louder than before, and the latch was rattled furiously. Llian searched the floor by feel, found a cloak and wrapped it around him as he stumbled to the door.

“I’m coming,” he shouted over the racket, but the noise continued. He slipped the bolt and wrenched the door open. “What do you want,” he began angrily, then stopped, recognizing the visitor. “Turlew!” he stammered. “There’s something wrong?” He knew what it was though. They had found out who had raided the library in the night.