The Revenants (25 page)

They were escorted to seats at the centre of the chamber, where Terascouros greeted her white-haired aunt with a kiss, was kissed in return and drawn into an embrace. The old woman whispered to them all, ‘We see and do not see. There is among us no doubt at all, and doubt only. We do not know what is so, though we are sure what is not. Our complacency is shattered. Now we need you, your eyes, thoughts, memories, to add to our own.’

They sat down, all but Terascouros apprehensive. She smiled comfortingly at them, patted Jasmine’s hand. ‘Just sit quietly,’ she said. ‘Listen to the singing. You needn’t
do
anything.’

The silence in the chamber was full of currents and eddies which they could feel brushing them. There was in one place a tension, a
tightness
which drew in. Elsewhere was a looseness, a letting go. One balanced against the other so that the chamber seemed to rock. The singing had been going on for some time before they realized it, and when they realized it they were already part of it, inextricably bound up in it, held and carried. To Leona it was an electrical feeling, an attraction to which she fled as if she went home. To Medlo it was as if he were a note in the song, drawn to his own place in it, sung by it and singing. Jasmine swam in it, as a fish in water, endlessly against the flow. And Thewson found himself flying in the air, suddenly winged, soaring above an earth green and glorious beneath an endless sky.

Then they were drawn in to the wholeness of the mind which the Sisterhood sent outward, becoming only a part of a greater whole, a single, curving edge of searching thought.

The mind moved over the saddle of the Hill, into the little valley where the mists swirled, narrowed itself into a fine blade of thought and moved to cut away one swirl of mist, one bit of circling shadow. Into that bit the mind looked, questioned: ‘What are you? Who are you?’ and heard the agonized whisper in answer.

‘I am … I am … My name is … Give me … I need … I am…’

Reluctantly the mind turned from this swirl of mist to another, again questioned, again heard. ‘I am … Let me … I need …’ That was all.

Though the mind questioned again and again, it was answered only by a hollow, hungering, inexpressible need without identity. The mind withdrew, saddened. It gathered itself and fled away to the west like a cloud before wind, swiftly. It rested above the castle garth of Rhees, searching downward through fleecy clouds, knowing through Medlo’s intelligence what was seen.

Riders came from the gates of the castle. Medlo’s mother, the lady Mellisa, her brother, courtiers, the Master of Hawks, several gorgeously gowned ladies, three grooms, and a meaty, lumpish boy of eight or nine who glanced at the world from the back of a small horse, all swept out into an afternoon beautiful with blossom and sun. They were waved farewell by a stout, bearded man, the erstwhile Lord Hardel of the Marches, and he watched them long as they rode away, a curious look, part satisfaction, part regret.

On the heights above the road a half-completed temple towered, and the troop clattered past long lines of sweating black robes hitched to sledges loaded with dressed stone as they tugged them upward in endless procession to the heights. At one time an ancient keep of the Drossynian house had stood there. Now a Temple of Separation reared toward completion. The troop, to its last and youngest member, looked pointedly elsewhere. The mind could hear the thoughts of the Lady Mellisa as though she spoke aloud. There had been certain threats by the Keepers of the Seals. The Lord Hardel has negotiated. In return for being allowed to build the Temple without hindrance, and to take a levy of the common people into their group, the black-robed Gahlians had agreed to leave the lady and the lord in possession of their lands, titles, and enjoyments.

The lady mused that it would not have happened in the days of the High King at Methyl-Dain, but Methyl-Dain was in ruins and the High King survived only in certain esoteric references to oaths and guarantees formerly exchanged among the duchies of the kingdom. They would be exchanged no more. All the duchies had been ‘Separated’ as the Keepers put it.

Knowing all this, the troop made no reference to it. They spurred their horses into a clatter of rising dust and swept by, away to the riverside for an afternoon of fishing, hawking, and dalliance. The hovering mind followed their journey. As they neared the river meadows, one of the grooms fell back, his horse limping. The others went on to confront two iron wagons on the verge of the road. Two red-robed ones stood nearby. As the troop drew up, doubtfully, one of the Keepers raised his hand as if in greeting, and something round and shiny as a bubble flew from the raised hand to burst in the dust at the lady’s feet. She smelled something unpleasant, started to say something….

The lagging groom had seen the wagons from the curve of the road and had prudently dismounted, tugging his horse into a screening copse. He watched, round-eyed, until the wagons were gone, then returned in all haste to the castle. There, he learned that a council of black robes had been installed as the governing body of Rhees. The consort, Lord Hardel, was stating the doctrine of the Gahlians as though it had been his own. It was being said that the Lady Mellisa and her brother, Pellon, had gone to visit her sister in the lower reaches of Methyl-lees, by the sea. The groom, more sensible than many twice his age, changed his clothing for something less conspicuous and left Rhees by the straightest road. What the groom had seen and heard, the mind knew, having watched and listened long into the night hours.

The mind turned to flow southward, over the Outer Sea and the clustered islands, across beaches glimmering under starlight, over vast brown deserts, and into the jungles which edged the land of the Lion Courts. In the deeps of this jungle a clearing flowed beneath the mind, in the clearing one tree, a tree which seemed to brush the sky, xoxa-auwal, sky gatherer, Tree of Forever, looming and eternal, at its roots a tiny rock shrine which was being dismantled stone by stone by black-robed acolytes who worked by glaring torchlight while others plied axes against the giant trunk. An aged man tottered into the clearing, waving a leafy branch, crying out in remonstration. An axeman stepped forward, almost casually, and cut him down. Thewson’s perception allowed the mind to grieve for the shaman, faithful to the forest gods, dead.

The mind seemed to hear within itself a plangent, metallic call, a turning of the will toward the north. It drifted to the dark moors of Anisfale, grey in the early dawn, to hang there above ruins of ancient houses and crofts. A temple was being built on the site of the ancestral graveyard at Gaunt. The gravestones were set into the walls of the temple. A Gahlian minion hacked with chisel and mallet at one of them, smoothing away the words:
‘Fabla, widow of Linnos. Too long dying. Too young dead.’

The mind raged, drew itself into fury, spat fire. ‘Fabla,’ raged the mind. ‘Cannot even her marker lie in peace on the moors of Anisfale?’ The mind recoiled, shocked, flowed around its own rage, isolated the anger, cushioned it and bound it, carried it away toward the east, toward Lak Island. It went into the dawn, over wooded valleys and down the long river courses to the endless freshwater lakes of the eastern plains. The city of the island lay quiet in the dawn, the primeval bulk of the convent and Temple dark and tenantless, the city walling itself into enclaves with walls half built, the sound of bell and drum from a newly built Temple of Separation filling the streets as water fills a bowl. Deep under the convent, in the immemorial cellars, at a door so old that its hinges fell away in reddened dust, the mind found several women in the garb of nuns stealing away from the city, under the walls, down long root-dangled muddy tunnels to the distant countryside. With them went a child.

On the floor of the sanctuary, white and still in a pool of clotted blood, lay Eldest Sister, true to her vision of the Goddess, cut down by the robed ones who now searched the maze-like corridors for other life. There was none. Behind the fleeing women in the tunnels, dirt fell in a tiny avalanche, hiding their footprints. ‘Hu’oa,’ the mind breathed gently. ‘Flee swiftly. Get away.’

The mind came up from Lakland, peered south and east, toward the city of Tchent and the lands beyond the Concealment, encountering a wall of stubborn darkness, of amorphous shadow, of quilted mist, layer on layer, impenetrable. From this hidden place flowed malice, evil intent, a kind of horrid hunger as though something licked at their souls with a loathsomely coated tongue and breathed on them with a rotting, leprous breath. The mind retreated, burned as by a corrosive acid, and fled swiftly so that the towering, watchful darkness in the east should not follow them back into the Council chamber.

Medlo and Jasmine wept, the one for a loved land lost, the other for a child endangered. Thewson’s jaw was clenched tight and his eyes blazed. He had not loved the old shaman, but he had honoured him and had honoured the great tree. Leona’s pale gaze was fixed on the far wall of the cavern, expressionless and hard.

Out of the silence came the whispery voice of the Old Aunt who had called peace upon the Council.

‘You have seen, travellers, and we with you. In our previous search we saw the city of Murgin fall. Some of us saw the creatures you described. Some of us saw – other things. All of us now know that forces, powers, something came at your call, something we do not know, have not learned of, do not recognize. Long have we served the True Powers, these thousands of years. Long have we been true to Taniel who began our order. Long have we served those who guard and guide, those Masters of our earth; in metaphor, in symbol we have served. Now, we see symbols walking, metaphors sprung to life and moving upon cities.

‘Long have we repudiated –
that
, all its works, all its darkness, all its ancient shame; yet the darkness and shame remain. We are caught upon a battlefield, ill prepared for battle, unsure of the identities of the antagonists, sure only that we are opposed to – something.

‘Murgin is destroyed, and its pitiable wraiths now surge in the shadows, lost, unable to rejoin, Separated indeed as their doctrine insisted and yet not, we think, as they hoped. For what is left of them, we weep.

‘And now you come to say the Sai Surrah is come, the Lasurra sai who sleeps, and sleeping changes, and is now male, now female as was foretold by the Woman of Hanar a century and a half ago. Such wonders! So, Sisters, travellers, hear the words of this Council. Until the Sleeper wakes, we wait. And when the Sleeper wakes, we will take up our weapons, contemptible though they may seem to the powerful. Rest then, for it may be long and long before we rest again, or it may be too short a time until we rest forever.’

They went forth from the chamber in twos and threes, not talking, each searching the faces of others with fearful, resolute eyes, as though to memorize and keep forever the appearances of this time. Old Aunt came to the place where the travelers stood.

‘Teras, I have sent the singers into the wilds.’

Terascouros looked puzzled. The old woman shook her head almost impatiently. ‘The seven singers …’

‘To sing the names, weeping? Aunt. You would call for help with rituals which haven’t been used for a thousand years?’

‘Rituals given us by Taniel, to use in a time of need. Yes. What else would you have me do? What you may do is ray that there is one remaining in the wilds who will ear.’ And she went into the corridor, nodding to herself. Terascouros shepherded the others away to the place where they slept.

Jasmine asked, ‘Where was Sybil? I didn’t see her.’

‘Sybil was wrong,’ said Terascouros. ‘Wrong out of pride, out of ambition. In the Sisterhood, if one is wrong, one is set to a long silence. One may be mistaken and still hold honour and place, but one may not be wrong. We may see her again, but we will not hear her voice in our lifetime.’

In this Terascouros was herself wrong.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

MAGISTER

Year 1169 – Later Winter

In the brightness of morning, Magister Omburan walked between two of the places of the world. High on the eastern face of the Palonhodh, at the midpoint of a long, east-west ridge, an outcropping of stone towered in the form of a hooded figure facing south. Shadows moving beneath the craggy hood created a vast and commanding face, and at the feet of the figure a spring bubbled into a moss-edged cup of water-smoothed stone. Bare, shivering trees surrounded the clearing, and a great slab extended its lichenous mass over the pool to shadow the water.

Magister Omburan knew this place, this concatenation of stone and water, of grass blooming with violets in spring and with tiny, purple asters in the fall, of white-trunked trees. He knew its numen, its identity, singular and unique, and the name of its inhabiting spirit. He spoke this name, a sound in which stone, water, leaf and tree were included, each in its own relationship to all the others, and the numen replied:

‘Magister. Omburan. Contentment in time.’

‘Contentment in time, Dweller.’

‘Walk in earth, Magister.’

‘I walk in earth, Dweller, speaking of long growth.’

The dweller, too, spoke of long growth, of the accretion of slow ring upon slow ring within the trees, the swifter unfolding of bud to blossom, the away and return of birds. Magister Omburan waited, untiring, feeling with the numen the eastward roll upon the wheel of the humming earth. Noon came as they spoke, the hot light filtering through the Magister’s silver flesh and across the blue feathering of his wings and crest.

‘A troubling, Magister.’

‘Troubling?’
Magister Omburan bent his attention toward the dweller, uttering a word of contrition and shame for his distraction, his failure of concentration.

‘Men, Magister. Troublers. They come singing the names. They weep. They go.’

Magister Omburan meditated upon this as the afternoon moved into evening. So they had come, singing the names, weeping. Many the seasons since that had last occurred; long the sunpaths and moonpaths; countless the leaves. Those who had come singing had not known the earthways, could not move as the Magister did, for to do so required knowing the names of the places, their limits and connections, their true sounds. When still learning, Omburan had come to this place to sit yearlong in the shadow of the looming stone as the water spoke. Another year had been needed to learn the way into Dalisslintoro-oa, next numen to the south. Only Omburan and a few others could walk in those ways, for only they had taken the time to learn the names and the places. Only one people, then, could have come singing the names – those to whom the names had been given.