The Seeker (59 page)

Slowly, I let my head fall back onto the stone, trying to make my mind a passive vessel.

Nerat’s probe was inside then, swift as a snake, smooth as a single strand of silk. “Relax,” he sent. “Dream, and I will do my work. I am not interested in the longings and secret thoughts of a funaga.”

Once Nerat commanded me to release the suppressing, I drifted between excruciating pain and numbness, burning heat and freezing cold.

And the pain in my legs. The pain. The pain.

For a time, I forgot who I was, and it seemed all my life had been spent in a dream of pain on the top of a mountain.

Occasionally, I was aware of Nerat’s mind weaving a pattern in my thoughts as complex and intangible as smoke in the wind. Sometimes I smelled flowers and herbs, and sometimes acrid, choking smoke.

And then I floated for a very long time.

“She wakes,” came a thought bound with weariness and satisfaction.

I opened my eyes and found myself looking into pale avian eyes. The bird was so close I could see the fine crack in his beak, thin as a hair. I felt his mind like tenebrous fingers at the edge of my thoughts; then he gave a strangely human bob of his head and hopped away.

I did not move for a long while, waiting to see where the dream would take me next. Idly, I wondered if I would feel myself plunge into the mindstream when I died. I thought I would like to hear that glorious siren song once more.

Astyanax appeared. “You are well, ElspethInnle. You can get up now. Or do you wish to lie there longer?” he sent with all the politeness of a host not wanting to upset a guest. Urged on by the eager expression in his eyes, I lifted my head carefully.

It is a dream
, I told myself.
That is why there is no pain
.

Slowly, I sat upright. I made myself look down my body, prepared to see ruined, evil-smelling flesh and black infection. My legs seemed to rise at me from a dark mist.

Below the skirt they lay before me, pale as cream and utterly without blemish. Even the old childhood scars of skinned knees had vanished.

My heart sounded like a drumbeat as I reached for the
laces. They were stiff with congealed blood. The socks were the same, but when I pulled them down, they came away from the skin easily. The flesh beneath was as flawless as that on my calves. Unable to believe my eyes, I reached a hand out. The skin felt smooth beneath my questing fingers. I wriggled my toes experimentally, watching the movement as if it were an exquisite dance.

I laughed, and my laughter seemed to reverberate off the mountains. No one could heal that fast, and I knew enough of healing to know it was impossible to heal poisoned flesh or banish old, deep scarring.

“Well met,” Astyanax sent pertly. “You are now to see Atthis—Elder of the eldar.”

I climbed warily to my feet and let myself be led across to a cairn of stones and around to face an opening in the other side.

“Greetings, funaga,” came a thought from within the cairn, so clear and gentle it was like a song in my mind. There was the sound of shuffling movement, and slowly, a very old female Guanette bird emerged, her feathers less red than dusty brown with bald patches of pink. The end of her beak was broken right off. But strangest of all were her eyes. There was no pupil, and they were white and milkily opaque.

She was blind.

Looking at the ancient bird, a mist of terror crept through my veins at the sudden certainty that I was not dreaming.

The old bird stopped, eyes turned unerringly toward me. The movement reminded me of Dameon’s blind grace. “So, now you are come, just as was foreseen. You may call me Atthis, and I will call you ElspethInnle, as does the yelloweyes.”

I blinked, startled. Did she mean Maruman? Then
something else struck me. This was the voice that had called to me in the old cat’s mind.

But I’m dreaming
, I thought dazedly.

The old bird stepped closer, and a suffocating odor of dust seemed to surround me.

“Why do you pretend? You know this is no dream.”

I felt as if someone had kicked me in the stomach, and I was nauseous and breathless all at once.

“You made Maruman sick!” I said indignantly, remembering what had been said to me inside Maruman’s mind.

“It could not be helped,” Atthis sent gently. “We could not reach you otherwise, at such a distance.”

Something else occurred to me. “You told me I had to go on a journey. Is that why I’m here?”
A dark journey
, she had said.

The bird sent nothing for a long moment, but I had the uncanny feeling she could see from those white orbs.

“I did not know we would meet so soon when first I called to you in my dreamtravels through the yelloweyes’ mind. I did not foresee then that the Agyllians would have some other part to play. Even the wise are sometimes pawns.”

The old bird came closer, her tattered wing brushing one of my feet. I looked into her blind eyes with faint dread.

“You do not like the look of my sightless eyes? Well, sight is a facile thing,” Atthis sent.

It was nearing dusk, and a fleeting final sunbeam bathed the old bird in crimsons for a moment. Beyond the cairn lay the rim of the world. On one side, the sky was night-dark, and on the other, the sun shone its final rays. In the west, the moon was rising flat and bright. I looked back to see that the avian face had not looked away from mine.

“ElspethInnle … the Seeker,” the old bird sent.

“I don’t know why you call me that. It’s just a name Maruman made up. I don’t call myself by it,” I sent.

“Not all names are chosen,” Atthis sent. “Some names are bestowed.”

“What is this all about?” I sent briskly.

“You know,” the bird sent, unperturbed. “Have you not wondered at the coincidences and chances in your life? Have you not felt that there were great forces at work about you—forces for good and for great ill? Have you not felt the purpose in your life burning?”

Unwished, a vision came to me of the black chasm I had glimpsed while being tortured by the Zebkrahn. I thought of Jik asking if it were possible for it to happen again and of the Druid and his insane search for Beforetime weaponmachines, his greed for power and revenge blinding him to all else.

“You know,” sent Atthis. “You have always known.”

“Who are you?” I whispered.

“You may call me a chronicler and … what do your people call it—a futureteller. Long ago, I foresaw that the machines that made the great destruction lie sleeping. I saw that a second and greater destruction would come to the world if these machines were not destroyed. That will be no easy matter, for the machines have a kind of intelligence and will protect themselves. But I dreamed one would be born among the funaga, a Seeker to cross the black wastes and ensure that the deathmachines can never be used again.

“Very recently, I foresaw a faltering in that life—a moment when you might easily die. I saw that you would suffer such mental and physical injuries as only the Agyllians could heal. And so I sent out my egglings to find you.”

“I’m grateful,” I said. “But why seek the machines at all? If they’re so far away—if they’re truly in the Blacklands—might they not be useless by the time anyone found them?”

“The machines are beyond the Blacklands, but they have slept without harm for hundreds of lifetimes. The danger of their discovery alone would not be enough to make me act. But I have foreseen that there is another funaga whose destiny is to resurrect the machines. Your paths intersect. You are the Seeker, the other is the Destroyer. If you do not find the machines first …”

I felt sick. I wanted to tell myself that it was too ridiculous, that I must be dreaming, that prophecies belonged to stories. But too much had happened. I had seen and felt too much, and in my heart, just as the bird said, I had known for a long time that I would find the chasm from my vision. The burning of the maps on Obernewtyn’s doors had only been the beginning.

“Why does it have to be me who finds them?” I asked. “Don’t I have any choice?”

“There are always choices.”

I shook my head, feeling suddenly bitter. “If what you say is true, then the future is set out, and I
have
no real choice.”

“The future is a river whose course is long designed but which a flood or drought might easily alter. Whatever choice you make will have its own consequences. If I had not chosen to interfere and have you healed, your death would have been a kind of choice.”

The sun sank, and suddenly it was night, the old bird no more than a dust-scented shadow.

“What do I have to do?” I whispered.

“For now, only live,” Atthis sent. “What else comes will come.”

“You … you brought me here to say that?” I asked, incredulous.

The old bird seemed to sigh. “The time is not yet right for you to travel that black road. You were brought here to be healed, and so you are healed. Return to your home and friends. Help them in their struggle, for it is worthy and they have need of you. But do not forget that your true path lies away from them and their quests.”

“Have you … foreseen that I will succeed on that path? Will I destroy the machines if I go on this journey?”

Atthis shifted slightly and dust filled the air. “That, I have not foreseen.”

A wave of weariness flowed through me, and a kind of hopelessness. I sensed compassion in the mind of the old bird. “One day, you will learn that it is not always safest to be alone. Until then, happiness will elude you. But perhaps it is best for you to be alone with this secret burden.”

“I don’t understand,” I sent.

“I know. You are tired. Sleep, and while you sleep, my egglings will transport you to a place where one waits to carry you back to the mountain valley of Obernewtyn.”

The old bird’s eyes stared into mine, and I felt myself falling into them, sinking into the soft whiteness as if it were a feather bed.

24

T
HE COLD WOKE
me.

I was freezing, and I wondered if it had snowed in the night. I felt a sharp stab of grief and was puzzled by it. Then I remembered Jik.

I opened my eyes.

It was night. I frowned, wondering at the icy chill of the air. Perhaps winter had come early to the White Valley. Even so, it felt too cold for the highlands. I doubted it had ever been so cold even at Obernewtyn in the dead of winter.

With a shock, I realized something else. The suppressing barrier was gone from my mind, and so was the pain!

The only answer seemed to be that I had slept off the pain somehow, but if that was the case, the infection in my feet would have worsened, being untended. The pain would come, and it would be dreadful. Better lie still.

Then something warm and moist touched my face, and I gasped in fright. Gazing down at me with dark, troubled eyes was a black horse—unmistakably Gahltha.

“It is I, funaga,” he sent in answer to my thought that I was still dreaming. “I am Galta who was once Gahltha.”

“Galta?” I echoed stupidly. My eyes drifted past the horse, and questions about his change of name were swept aside in an even greater shock.

I was no longer in the cave in the White Valley, with its
pervasive reek of smoke and the blackened skeletons of trees standing outside like silent sentinels.

I was lying on a flat, narrow stone ledge jutting out from a massive cliff face. I had taken the cliff for the wall of the cave, but there were no walls around me and no roof. Running in all directions from the gray-pitted cliff face was a vast, flat plain covered in snow, glittering in the moon’s cold bluish light. There was not a single tree or bush in sight. In the distance, I could see the darkly defined shapes of mountain spurs and outcrops of cracked stone.

The ice and snow, the lack of trees, and the incredible brightness of the stars told me I was in the mountains. Except that it was impossible.

I thought fleetingly that the suppressing barrier had shattered, and the accumulated pain had destroyed my mind. Madness seemed the only rational answer. I giggled at the paradox but shivered when the sound echoed.

The black horse watched me patiently, his dark coat almost blending with the pelt of the night.