A Shadow on the Glass (39 page)

Llian was no better in the morning, and so weak that he could barely stand. His throat was so inflamed that he could not eat. Terribly thirsty, he drank half a bottle of water and promptly heaved it up again.

In the cold, clear air they saw how the land of Chollaz was outlined by the range of mountains on which they stood. They ran in a straggling oval to the south, the far end of the oval being completed by a rampart of jagged and unclimbable peaks. The land was cut across by a chasm whose path was traced out by the early-morning mist—the gorge of the River Garr, which looped its way from below them south-east and through the encircling mountains into Bannador. There was no sign of life—not a village, bird or bush.

“Where do we go now?” Llian croaked.

“This way. Come!”

Llian took her arm, and she led him down the pass along well-made and cunningly concealed paths that drew them eventually into the gorge of the Garr, which at this point was a scant forty spans across. Down, down they plunged. Now the way was a narrow shelf carved from the living rock, hardly wide enough for one person. At intervals a passing bay was cut into the cliff. The shelf bore neither handhold nor rail, and fell away to dark, unguessable depths on his right, where the sun penetrated only at midday, and in the winter not at all. Llian’s fear of falling was numbed by his illness, otherwise he would never have made it.

“I can’t,” he said, as Karan tried to lead him onto the shelf. “I’ll fall.”

“You must. There’s no other way. Hold my hand and walk behind me. Think of nothing but the next step. Look neither down nor up.”

Llian stood up and took her hand. The warmth helped, and her presence reassured him a little. She squeezed his hand, smiled and, still holding him tightly, took a step backwards. He shuffled forward one step. She took another but he did not.

“What is it?” she asked gently.

“I’m afraid for you now.”

“You needn’t be. I lived here for six years. I’m used to these paths.”

“Turn around. I can’t bear to watch you walking backwards.”

She laughed. “Oh. All right!” and she did so, still holding his hand.

The ledge wound back and forth down into the ravine until, reaching a level, it flattened out and followed the meandering course of the river downstream. The frequent spurs were cut through by narrow tunnels, their walls like polished
glass, but undecorated apart from carvings, so weathered that they were unidentifiable, over the entrance and exit of each. Llian looked around him. There was nothing to see but the smooth dark walls of the cliff looming above and the river foaming far below.

“Surely we must be near now?” he asked in the mid-afternoon.

“We’ve gone perhaps two leagues as the river winds, but less than one in a direct line. We won’t reach Shazmak until tomorrow afternoon.”

Karan had expected Llian to get better as they went down, but he coughed up bloody froth until the front of his coat was stained red with it. She felt as though she was marching him to his doom.

And when she thought about Tensor, it might have been her doom too. If Tensor was in Shazmak after all, she would not be able to hold out against him. He was overwhelming. He had always seemed to know when she had done something wrong. She would never be able to keep such a secret from him.

If only Llian wasn’t with her, she would have been two or three days further on by now, and only days away from food. She would have crawled all the way on her belly, eating snow and stones, just to be home again.

They now found the path to be in poor repair, the edges crumbling. Several times their way was blocked by heaps of broken rock, one of which they were unable to scramble over and had to clear laboriously by hand, in spells, for there was room for only one to work at a time. Water flowed down the cliff, showering on their heads; the stone under their feet was slick with pink slime. Further along, the path had broken away and they had to creep across the raw rock on their bellies. Llian was like a zombie, stepping where Karan told him to step, waiting when she told him to wait, allowing her
to place his hands on the right handholds. He knew with a certainty that was absolute that the next step, or the one after, would fail, the next handhold would crumble within his grip and he would fall silently into the chasm. So the day passed.

The light had begun to fade when they came around a gentle curve in the gorge and looked down on a straight stretch running toward the south. Not far ahead, where the gorge narrowed, the path was joined to another from the east by a slender bridge built of metal and wires; a strange, delicate thing.

“That way leads to Bannador and Gothryme, my family home,” said Karan.

“Why do we not go that way then?” Llian gasped.

“We’d never get there. Gothryme is at least a week away, at your pace.”

As they drew near, the sight of the bridge raised Llian from his torpor. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “It is built the way a spider would build—so delicate, so beautiful, so irregular. No engineer of Iagador would ever make such a thing.”

“That is the way the Aachim have always built,” said Karan, looking at it with a kind of satisfaction. “Many times have I stood here and gazed at it, the link between my two lives.”

“The road is better here.”

“Yes. Of the three paths into Shazmak, this is the only way still used.”

Across the gorge the path continued downstream for fifty paces or so before sweeping east along the side of a tributary gorge. The ravine was sufficiently broad and open here that, though they were well below the rim, they could see the tips of the eastern ranges in the distance.

They camped near the end of the bridge, where the cliff had been cut back from the ledge, leaving an open space perhaps five paces across. In one corner a jumble of boulders, where part of the cliff had collapsed, offered shelter from the wind. And shelter they needed, for with nightfall the breeze had intensified to a frigid gale that howled in the structure of the bridge and chilled them even through their thick clothing.

“It’s going to be a grim night,” said Karan, as she struggled to make a shelter with their cloaks. There was nothing to make a fire with.

All that remained of the food was a small quantity of damp oatmeal. Llian made a slurry of the stuff in lukewarm water from his bottle and they sat in their makeshift shelter shoulder to shoulder eating the unsatisfying mess. It had a moldy taste. The roof was made from their oiled cloaks, stretched across a cluster of boulders and weighted down with stones. The edges flapped in the wind and Karan had to constantly adjust the structure to ensure that it did not blow away. Inside it was dark, but not as dark as the gorge below, up from which the misty air spiraled and the river roared.

After dinner Llian was a little better. He still breathed heavily but the cough was gone. “Please tell me about the Mirror,” he begged, speaking what had been on his mind for days. “I think about it all day and at night I dream of it. Where did it come from? May I not see it?”

A faint glow appeared in the east, outlining the tips of the mountains from behind. The moon was rising. Karan stared at the spot until it came up, almost full and mostly the yellow side showing.

“I can’t show it,” she said. “But I will tell you what I know—that is no secret. Though doubtless it will only whet
your curiosity and cause me trouble later. All I know is from a story told by my father. This is how I remember it.” She felt self-conscious, telling the Histories to Llian, and she began stiffly.

“The Mirror of Aachan is old—very old. It was made in Aachan in ages long past, as a thing to look from one place to another. Such devices were common there. It was smuggled into Santhenar when our ancestors were brought here as slaves to Rulke. But here on Santhenar it was difficult to use and did not always show true. Perhaps its essence rebelled against the fabric of the world. And it changed with time and with use, as such things are wont to do, taking on a shadow of the life and color of their owners. The Mirror became capricious, showing things that never were; things that might never be. Sometimes, if the user was unskilled, or careless, it concealed or deceived. Eventually it grew so strange and entangled that it was perilous to use and it was laid aside by the Aachim. It was lost in the Clysm, some say, along with much else.”

A gust of wind swirled into the shelter, sending one corner flapping loose in a shower of little stones. She paused while Llian adjusted it, then said, “My father used words that I didn’t understand, but I can recite every one of his tales from memory. Others say that Yalkara, the Mistress of Deceits, the third of the Charon to come here, stole the Mirror at the fall of Tar Gaarn and took it on her long march to the
Wahn Barre
, the Crow Mountains. For she knew how to control it, and had learned its other secret. On Santh it had acquired (or had been given) a memory. It retained the imprints of the scenes that it had reflected, and though the remembrances were confused and cloudy they could be read by one who was skilled. Yalkara forced the Mirror to her will; she used it to see across the world, to pry into the secrets of the past, and she grew powerful, and
cruel. But at last she found what she had sought for so long, a warp in the Forbidding, and escaped back to Aachan.”

“How did she escape? How did she get through the Forbidding?”

“I don’t know. That wasn’t part of the tale. Let me finish my father’s story. After that the Mirror was lost, or hidden. That is what the Recorder told him.”

“The Recorder?” The name had aroused Llian’s professional interest.

“Someone my father mentioned a few times. He knew a lot of the old tales.”

Llian suddenly looked much better; alive again.

“Tell me about the Recorder,” he said eagerly.

“I don’t know anything more about him.”

“So, the Mirror is a
seeing
device too—maybe that explains Yggur’s successes!” said Llian.

“And everyone thinks that they will be the one to master it, and read its secrets…” Her voice trailed away. She stared at the moon unblinking, her face pinched in the cold gray light. The wind buffeted the shelter, ruffling her hair. The oilskin quivered. “I’m dreadfully afraid.” She shivered and retreated into the shadows.

“That’s all over now,” said Llian, thinking of the Whelm. “We’ve lost them.”

“No! It’ll never be over until I can be rid of it. I don’t know what to do, who to trust.” Karan’s voice came melancholy from behind. “I had thought to give the Mirror back to the Aachim, but how can I, after your tale?”

A sudden thought came to Llian. “The other night, in the tunnel,” he said, “I caught a fragment of your nightmare. It was as though I looked down at a surface of polished metal, on which there appeared fleetingly the face of a woman.
Dark were her eyes, and her hair was dark too, save where it had turned to silver. Who is she?”

“I often think of her. Perhaps that’s why she came to you. I saw her on the Mirror just as Yggur appeared. She is the very image of Maigraith, but much older. Perhaps it is Maigraith in some distant time and place, perhaps someone else. Perhaps just a deceit of the Mirror.”

“Have you seen anything else?” he asked breathlessly.

“No. I tried it once or twice, but nothing came. And why should it? I’ve no training in the use of such things.”

He sat there, hugging his knees, staring out across the gorge. The bridge hung like a web in the night, swaying gently and touched with moonlit silver. The wind wailed in the wires, moaned around the boulders, flapped the roof of the shelter, roared in the ravine below. Ice gripped his heart. Karan, too, was a pawn. What drew the powerful together around her? Was it only chance? Or was it a tide that swept through the vast sea of the Histories, casting them all together on this cold shore?

The names washed across his subconscious: Shuthdar the smith; Rulke the Great Betrayer; Yalkara, or the Mistress of Deceits; Mendark; Yggur; Maigraith; the Recorder…So many names, so many people. And one of them he knew.

Llian thought back on the time. It was when he was still a student; to prove his skill he had been set the solving of the riddle in the
Lay of the Wanderers
, a saga from the time of the Zurean Empire. Traveling west to Zile to consult the librarian, he had fallen in with a shabby man of middle age, and they found a common interest in the sagas, or so it had seemed at the time. Llian had enjoyed the companionship, and it was not until much later that he realized that the man was Mendark, watching him in disguise.

A desperate fear crept through him, driven by the cold seeping into his bones. These were not mere happenings.
Something brooded in the abysses of the world; something moved with slow patience toward a long-awaited consummation. The malevolence was almost palpable in the frigid night. Who was shifting the pieces? Llian shuddered involuntarily. He crept closer to Karan and they huddled together for warmth and comfort all the long night.

A
s Karan and Llian dozed in their frigid shelter a crucial meeting was about to take place in distant Thurkad, almost fifty leagues to the north-east, as the skeet flies. Mendark, longtime Magister of the High Council, sat by his fire in the citadel, scowling, afraid. Even the servants knew of the intrigues building against him—and their eyes no longer met his as they passed. Llian would scarcely have recognized the man he had traveled to Zile with five years ago. At that time Mendark had had dark hair, bright blue eyes and laughter wrinkles about his mouth, and he had drunk great quantities of wine and laughed at everything.