Dragon's Winter (15 page)

The sonorous voice of Edo, the big temple bell, tolled through the room. Erin diMako rose. “My lady, I thank you for your counsel,” he said.

She bowed her head. “I am at your service, my lord.”

He left. She heard his. steps on the stairs, and a man’s crisp voice, not his, raised in command. A wind sprang suddenly through the chamber. It fluttered the bed hangings. The flame of the candle flickered, and went out. Senmet walked back to the table. The wind had teased the silk from the mirror. The keeper of the stall at which she had found the glass had refused to let her pay for it. He had begged her to take a larger mirror, near as tall as she, with an ornate gold-leaf frame, and had been disappointed when she assured him that all she needed was a plain glass, nothing fancy.

Seradis Ishaya, her teacher, had taught her the spell to turn an ordinary mirror into a diviner’s speculum.
Be careful what you ask
, Seradis had cautioned.
The mirror will answer what you ask of it, but it will also respond to that which you do not voice.
A restless warning prickled along Senmet’s skin. She leaned over the glass. The surface rippled like a windblown pond, then cleared. She saw a vast room; it was filled with rows of tall shelves laden with books. A fair- haired man in elegant clothes sat at a table, reading. His youthful face was lean and pale, as if he had been out of reach of sunlight for many months.

“Who are you?” Senmet whispered. But he did not answer: he did not see her. The scene shifted. She saw a mountain lifting into a cobalt sky, and below it a glittering blue sea. A white eagle flew in slow circles around the mountain. She knew the place, though she had never been there: Nalantira Island, where the dragon-mage Seramir had built his castle, and gathered the greatest collection of books of magery the world had ever seen. The castle was gone, but the library, Seradis had told her, still survived, hidden beneath a veil of spells. Turgos lived there: Turgos Archimenedes, who had been Seradis’s teacher.

The scene changed again. She was standing halfway up a hill. It was a rounded hill, but barren and wild, not a place she knew. There was light, a soft pale light like the light of dawn. By it she saw a man, young, fair, with straight black hair that fell to his shoulders. Silently he turned from her, and walked over the crown of the hill. Others followed him: a woman with bright blue eyes and fire-red hair; a wiry, fierce-eyed youth; a warrior in a plain black helm, who held a drawn sword. They marched up the hill, and vanished into darkness.

Then the light brightened. It came from the moon, she saw: a great full moon that rose like a lamp into a starless sky. Within that circle of brightness she saw another man. He raised his hands: fire streamed from his fingers, pouring into the starless night. A voice called across the tor:

“Riven hill; sundered stone; darkness sleeping all alone,

Castle summoned from the ice; Dragons children sacrificed:

Wizard rises, dragons fly; Three shall live, one must die...”

Then the wind came up, driving the words before it. There was more, she
knew
there was more. She strained to hear it, but the words were lost in the rising, tempestuous wind.

“
Remember!
” the voice cried. The man in the moon flung wide his hands.

Then man, moon, and hill shriveled in flames.

9

She flew to Nalantira Island on a storm wind.

It poured out of the north like a giant’s icy breath, and she rode it down the length of Nakase into Kameni. From there she flew east, across rolling hills and fields, now brown in winter, to the great port of Skyeggo.

The ocean, grey and cool and limitless, dreamed in its bed. A few fisher boats plied the currents near the shore, dragging for herring and cod. The big ships sat in winter dry dock, while men caulked and painted and scraped barnacles off their hulls. East of Skyeggo the black basalt cone of Nalantira Island rose from its rock. It was dawn when Senmet arrived at the island. Resuming human form, she sat on a stone, to rest, and to reacquaint herself with hands and feet and upright spine. The warm air was misty, thick with moisture; it reminded her of Laith, where she had been born. Senmet wondered if anyone in that tiny town would recall a skinny long-legged girl who roamed the dunes, collecting black stones and crescent-shaped shells, and talking to the gulls as if she thought they might answer...

A lizard crept onto the stone on which she sat. It blinked at her with huge moon-shaped eyes.

“Turgos Archimenedes,” she said into the mist. “Magister, I am Senmet Antok. I was Seradis Ishaya’s student. I need your help.” A white and brown spotted goat with budlike horns gazed at her, then wandered away. High in the treetops, a single monkey gabbled, and was answered by a shrill hoot.

By midday, she had walked the whole west curve of the island. She had not found Turgos, nor his library, nor any sign that there were any human beings on the island. Goats browsed the stony slopes, and golden-eyed monkeys clambered over the vine-wreathed stones. There were spells to make visible that which is hidden: she recited them, but the monkeys only chittered at her, and the goats continued their incurious chewing. The mist had burned away. She sat on a stone. A dust-brown monkey dropped from its treetop refuge and sat opposite her. Its bright, alien eyes watched her curiously. Three more leaped from their nests, calling challenge, imprecations, mockeries. They played a dizzying game of tag around the massive granite blocks, racing from one to the other, yipping, following some path she could not see.

Suddenly, in mid-leap, the pursued monkey vanished. Thirty seconds later it reappeared twenty feet behind its pursuers. It shrieked joyfully at its friends. They whirled, screaming, and began to chase it, flinging themselves into invisibility and out again.

“Let all objects and beings seen and unseen now manifest and be made visible...”

As she spoke the spell, the jungle faded, to be replaced by a wide room filled with shelves, which were themselves piled with every kind of book: books in boxes, books in covers, loose sheets, scrolls... Senmet lifted one at random. Its pages crumbled as she turned them: she put it hastily back.

A plump woman with coal-black hair, wearing a long indigo robe, glided soundlessly by her. “Excuse me. Can you tell me where to find Turgos?” The woman did not respond. A tall man with a tilting walk like that of a crane stalked by. “Excuse me—” Senmet said, and caught her breath, realizing that he had not seen her, and would not see her. Other phantoms appeared: grave old men and women with studious faces, young ones with bright and burning eyes.

At a small table under a window, a white-haired man in a shabby grey robe sat reading a book. More books lay in neat piles on and beneath the table. She studied him, uncertain, until she noticed the tiny monkey curled on his knees, sucking its thumb.

After a while he lifted his head. “Who are you?” he said. He had a fierce, bony face.

“Magister, I am Senmet Antok. I was Seradis Ishaya’s student.”

“Senmet of Mako. Senmet of Mako. I know of Senmet of Neruda, who spoke only to birds, Senmet the Faithless... Ah. I remember. You are Senmet of Laith, who was called the Last Mage. You killed the Black Dragon.” He marked his place with a strip of yellow cloth, and, to the irritation of the monkey, which flounced away chittering, he levered himself from his chair. He was thin as a stick, and very tall. He walked to a shelf and returned with a manuscript.

“Here,” he said, thrusting it at her. “Read.”

The words were in a language she did not know, but even as she stared at the page, the looping script shifted so that she could read it... And the youthful wizard caused an illusion of a golden dragon to appear in the cloudless sky. But the Black Dragon, perceiving an enemy or rival, flew at the apparition and shriveled it with his fiery breath...

“Who wrote this?” she asked.

The old man frowned. “You should ask,
Who will write that
? The answer is: a woman named Lyass of Mako, putting down the words of her grandmother, Dorcas Niro.” He lifted the manuscript from her hand. “An observant woman, Dorcas. I have not read this in many years.”

A phantom glided past the table: a regal, grey-haired man with skin like ivory, and smoky black eyes in which a deep red flame seemed to burn. His black robe was embroidered with small silver stars.

“Magister,” Senmet said softly, “who is the man with stars on his gown?”

“That is the shade of Seramir, the Firelord. This library existed in his castle, until Shea Sealord destroyed it.” He nodded to a man seated in a phantom armchair, head bent over a book. His right arm ended at the wrist. “That is Hedruen Imorin, Prince of Lienor, master of us all.” The shade of Hedruen Imorin glanced up from his book. He was not old, as she had always pictured him: he was young, fair, with straight black hair that brushed his collar. His eyes were a keen, pale grey. He seemed so present, it was hard for her to accept that he was not flesh and blood.

She wondered who the man who walked like a crane might be. She turned to ask Turgos, but he had picked up his book again. His concentration was so acute that it was nearly audible. Amber light sifted through tall arched windows. The phantoms ignored her. If there was order to the placement of books, she could not see it. If there was a key which might help an ignorant traveler find what she was looking for—assuming she knew what she was looking for—Senmet could not imagine it.

She wandered among the shelves, letting intuition steer her. At random she unfurled a dusty scroll. Its spidery letters read: A
spell to make gold; to ensure the potency of this spell it is first necessary to obtain a basilisk’s skin...
Near it she spied a basket of smoky-crystal globes, some small as her thumbnail, some large enough to hold in two hands. She cupped one in her palm. It was light, warm to the touch, and vibrating slightly. Hastily she put it back.

Then she heard the laughter. It raised the hairs on her neck. Silently, she chased it, hunting through the aisles until she could go no farther. The monkeys shrieked at her as she edged into a narrow space formed by two looming shelves, and out again into a tiny chamber. Its walls were lined with shelves. A shade sat at a table, a pile of manuscripts and scrolls at his elbow. The man was young, pleasant-faced in a nondescript way. But his eyes were wrong. They gleamed with a barren, dreadful darkness. Careful not to touch him, she slid behind him, and peered over his shoulder at the text. It contained a dispassionate, detailed description of death by drowning.

The pleasant-faced man, uninterested in the agonies of the drowned, set that scroll aside and unfurled another.

Let one who would make a warg first seek out a place of death and despair. Recommended is a battlefield, an executioner’s ground, or a chamber in which men suffer torture
... Senmet’s skin crawled. Wargs were the Dark Mage’s creatures, fashioned from the rot of corpses and the despair of dying souls, and animated by foul spells.

Turgos said, “His name is Henrik Lum.”

The old man stood under the arch of shelves, leaning on a pale grey staff. Over his head, in the jungle of the shelves, the monkeys gabbled warningly.

“Who is he? What is wrong with him?”

“He was a sorcerer; he lived in Chuyo, in Namyrie, a small town east of Dorry. Fifty years ago darkness fell over Namyrie; a frightening icy darkness, in which voices called from the mist. Your teacher, Seradis, finally found the device which made the darkness: a tiny box, cold and lightless as the Void.
He
had made it. They discovered him barricaded in his house, dying of starvation, tormented by demons which he saw, though no one else did.”

Turgos’s eyes glittered through the oddly shifting shadows. “Ninety-two years ago, in Merigny, in Nakase, the daughter of the sorcerer Ydrial Diamanti died of a fever. They found Diamanti mad, and the undecayed, Unburied body of her child walking the streets of the city, kept animate by a spell not heard in Nakase since before the Binding.”

“What happened?”

“A wizard happened to be passing by the town. He knew the spell which freed the sorceress from her madness. When she realized what she had wrought, she killed herself. Her daughter’s body fell at once into dust.”

“Is she here, too?”

“If you stay long enough, you will see her,”

Like a cold wind, distant laughter blew through the cul-de-sac. The amber light dimmed. The shadows thickened, and seemed to wriggle forward. Turgos snapped a phrase, and they retreated.

“Why would anyone choose such a path?”

“Grief,” Turgos answered. “Fear. Love. Hatred. Envy. Hunger for power.”

“Do they always die?”

“The ones who call the darkness? Always. The Hollow One has no life of his own to give them. He makes them into monsters, and devours them.”

“I don’t understand,” Senmet said. Her mouth was unaccountably dry. “My teacher told me: Ankoku is bound.”

“Ankoku is bound,” Turgos said gravely. “I know it. I was present at the Binding.” His voice strengthened. “We stood on the Hill of Anor, in Kameni, in the circle of stones. Imorin called four of us to guard the hill: north, south, east, west. The south side was mine to guard. Genarra of the White Spear held the east, and Danio Shapechanger the west. Sorvio Ulief, Myrdis Ulief’s brother, held the north, the place of danger. He was not a mage, but he was an experienced, deadly warrior, and he swore that he and his company could hold hill against any assault.”