Hart's Hope

16

The Taste of Power

How Orem learned the death that gnawed at the heart of the world.

In the Wizard's House

Like all the wizards of Inwit in that day, Gallowglass lived on Wizard Street. His house looked common enough and modest from the outside. Its only advertisement was a horseshoe on a nail, for it had once been a blacksmith shop. The hinges were in such disarray that doors seemed more to lean than close, and a shutter flapped clumsily in the breeze that sighed up the street. There was dust on the porch that seemed to have been undisturbed for years. Yet the wizard seemed to see nothing amiss as he climbed the step, took hold of a door, and eased it out of the way.

"In in in," he whispered. Orem went in, ducking to avoid a heavily laden spider web whose surly mistress seemed resentful at being disturbed. It was dark inside, and darker yet when the wizard stepped within and pulled the door closed behind him.

"Lamp lamp," he said, searching in the darkness.

"What is this place?"

"The heavenly hearth, the kindly fire, the keeper of the heart, the place of rest and comfort. In a word, my domicile."

Gallowglass found a match. He struck once, twice; it wouldn't light. Matches had spells on them, everyone knew that, and now Orem understood why his mother sent him out of the house whenever she had to relight the kitchen fire. Gallowglass put down the matches. "We must teach you quickly, mustn't we."

It was a cramped and crowded room, with things stacked in a hopeless jumble on shelves that sagged along the walls. There were piles on the floor, too, and on the steps of the steep and narrow stair that led to a room above. There were three large barrels against the northern wall, unmarked, yet damp and mossy. And everything was inches thick in dust.

"Is this the best place you could find?" asked Orem.

Gallowglass looked at him in annoyance. "It doesn't look like this usually. But you're here, and so I'll have to forego the normal furnishings for a while." As he spoke the lamp went out again. "Damn, boy, will you get upstairs so I can do this properly?"

Orem stumbled to the stairs in the darkness and clambered up into the cobwebs. Then he listened to Gallowglass wandering around below. A fire soon crackled in the hearth, though there had been no hearth in the room downstairs. And he could hear Gallowglass wander from room to room, opening and closing the doors, though there had been but the one room there before. With magic the place was a palace. With a Sink there, it was a foul place. The wizard had never bothered with housekeeping in reality, when he lived in magic all the time.

Then he heard Gallowglass speaking. "I couldn't help it," Gallowglass said plaintively. Then was there a whisper of an answer? No one had come in with them. Orem waited and tried to listen, and finally, after what seemed hours, he grew impatient.

"Gallowglass!"

"Don't come down the stairs or I'll break your brains!"

"I'm not! I haven't moved!"

"Good! It's the only thing keeping you alive!"

"I'm hungry! It's dark up here!"

Downstairs a barrel lid was tamped into place with a mallet. Soon Orem heard the wizard's footsteps on the stairs. At first the stairs were carpeted, but then, abruptly, the footsteps changed to the smack of leather on bare wood. "May the bones of your ancestors turn to fungus." The voice was soft, but clear because the old wizard's head was now sticking up into the room. He lifted the lamp to illuminate the tiny upstairs room.

"Oh, dismal," said the wizard. Orem silently agreed. Cluttered, filthy, and reeking of decay, it was not half so nice a place as the rooms at the Spade and Grave.

"This is all I get to eat?"

"It was roast dove when I conjured it downstairs, how can I help what it turns into in your presence."

"I can't help it either," Orem said. "But I can't live on that."

"Then learn quickly," the wizard said. "I was ready for the danger of having you. But the inconvenience!" Gallowglass rummaged through the debris and pulled from it a shabby cot with a tear in the middle of the canvas. "Best I can do," he said. "But there it is. Until you learn."

"My bed?" Orem asked.

"Until you learn, you damnable nuisance! Don't complain when it's your flatulent fault!"

"Then teach me!" Orem retorted.

"I can't teach you, not just like that." Gallowglass snapped his fingers in Orem's face. "I can only suggest, respond, inform—you have to learn. It's inside you, once you learn to recognize and control it. How can I teach you, I've never been a Sink."

"Whatever you mean to do, begin it now," Orem said.

"Imperious little bastard, aren't you."

"Just hungry."

The wizard made him lie upon the floor with a bundle of cloth under his head. And then strange, soft commands: Reach out with your fingers, close your eyes, and tell me the color of the air just over your head. Hear if you can the sound of my beard growing. Yes, listen, reach your fingers; try to taste the taste of your sweat in the insides of your eyes.

Orem understood none of it. "I can't," he muttered.

The wizard paid him no attention, just went on. You are asleep as you lie there, listening to me, asleep as long as you think you are awake, awake only when you discover your sleep. Feel how the air gets hotter, feel it at the back of your neck, look at the sun shining, look at it through the soft place behind your knees, yes, you have secret eyes there, look how white it is there.

There was something compelling in the rhythm of the old man's speech, the cadences of it, at times sounding like prayer, at times like song, at times like the bark of an angry dog. Orem's senses became confused. He ceased seeing through his eyes, and yet was still aware of vision, or something akin to it. A grey around him, like the fog of the day before. He could hear the rush of time. He no longer felt inside him where his fingers were, but rather tasted them, and his tongue burned in his mouth, then went cold, then wilted and shrank until he lost track of what was mouth, what was tongue, and even what was Orem.

Then something, some command he gave without knowing, caused all the grey fog around him to flex. A quick contraction. He did not know what it was he did, but there! there it was again, yes, and again. Like spasms, but he learned to flex the grey again, again, drew it in, pulled it to him, sustained the pressure. It slipped, it lapsed, he grew tired and felt the weariness as a deep green in his thighs, but this he knew was what was wanted of him. Hold this, draw it in, hold it and hold it and hold it and now he could open his eyes and see, not an old man holding a feeble lamp in a dingy upstairs room, but a young man, blond and beautiful, the man that Orem's father had wished him to be, tall and strong, and it was not a lamp in his hands but a tiny star shining. The room was not filthy and small, either; he was lying in a bed in a room dark with heavily engraved mahogany and brown brocade tapestries, and the young and beautiful man was looking at him with diamonds at the pupils of his eyes.

"This is my home, Orem, when you let it be," said the starholder, said the jewel-eyed lover.

And then it was all too strong for him, and Orem felt something break inside him, and the grey erupted from him and his senses flew madly about the room, about the inside of his head. He writhed on his miserable cot, until at last he fell like a spider gently back into himself, exhausted, surrounded again by the filth. The old man nodded. "Not bad for a first lesson. You'll get better at it as time goes on. If you live through it."

He did get better and stronger, until within weeks he was able to hold the fog just within his skin all his waking hours, much to the wizard's relief. They could take meals together now. And in two months it was such a reflex that he controlled his power even in his sleep. Except now and then, when it slipped away from him, and he awoke again on the cot instead of his soft bed. He told Gallowglass of the lapses. The wizard shrugged and flashed his diamond eyes. "You were probably a bedwetter, too."

The Wizard's Women

"My pickle barrels seem to have caught your eye," said Gallowglass as they read books in his library one night.

"You must be—very fond of pickles," said Orem tentatively.

Gallowglass smiled his bright and beautiful smile. Then he pried open a lid with the crow that lay on the leftmost keg. "What I love best in all the world," said the wizard. "And not held by magic, no, not at all. That's why it wasn't undone when you came in so clumsily and wrecked the place. It's just what it seems to be." The lid came off with a sloshing of water. Orem stood to see. It was not hoarmelon floating in the water, nor onions, nor even a single cabbage as, for a moment, it seemed. For the wizard reached down with his hand, seized a loose handful of hair, and pulled up the shriveled head of a woman.

"My love, my life, my paramour, my wife. Best beloved of all women. The dust of the pouch at my belt, the dust of her blood, here—a shake of it, not much, just a shake, and look, look." The blackish dust settled from Gallowglass's fingers, and Orem saw the body shudder under Gallowglass's hand. The eyes trembled and slackly opened.

"Nn," said the corpse.

"My lady," said Gallowglass.

"Nnnn."

"I have a prentice now, who wants to see you."

"Nnnn."

"He's a smart lad, in his way. Has no manners, eats like a pig and smells worse, and there's no help for it but bathing, since he shuns spells like grease sheds rainwater. But ah, he has a compassionate heart. Do you think he'd be touched at your tale, my love?"

The voice was still a moan, but now Orem realized that the sluggish tongue was articulating; there were words. "Let me sleep," she might have said. Or "Dead so deep." Hard to hear it. And Gallowglass only nodded.

"Come so far, such a long and weary way, yes my love? And yet though the journey is long, still you know I love you. That must be a comfort to you in your death, as it is a comfort to me to have your company."

"Nnnn," said the pickled head. A spurt of bile came from the mouth, and then all went slack again. Gently the wizard lowered the head again. When he turned to Orem, his eyes were emeralds, green as the growth on the barrels.

"Did I tell you that I'm the greatest of the wizards of Inwit? It's true, but small honor, small honor. Do you think Queen Beauty would let me stay, if I were strong? A strong wizard doesn't have to let his wife and daughters die of some ridiculous disease. Doesn't have to watch them waste away to nothing. A strong wizard isn't so fainthearted that he lets them die with their blood. Sleeve wouldn't have done it, you know. Sleeve would have seen their deaths, and calmly drawn their blood alive, with the power hot in it. But like a witch I waited, and took it cool, took it dead, found blood. Powdered here, with only enough power in it to bring them back now and then for conversation." The tears flowed down his cheeks. "I grow maudlin, but I will not hide my heart from my disciple. Oh, Scanthips, my lad, my boy, my wife was the most beautiful of the ladies of power, saving only Beauty herself, my wife was lovely, and her loveliness was not diminished even when divided between my daughters. Look at them!" Gallowglass unlidded the other barrels, and lifted up his daughters, and Orem looked, though he had no wish to see.

Orem could not, but he murmured his assent. To him the daughter was as utterly old as the mother, for what years had not done, brine did.

"Golden hair, and her sister dark, like day and night walking through the city. I touched them with no spell to make them beautiful—it was in them, it was them. And ah, the men who pled with me to give them up. But I was saving them for a better lover than any man." Again the bright tears flowed from the emerald eyes. "I was saving them for Death, who crept in and seduced them as I helplessly looked on. Shriveled them, wasted them under my eyes. But I have enough power to waken them. I can draw them back. You saw it!"

"Yes," Orem said.

"Oh, by the Sisters, by the Hart, by that damnable God who broke our power and penned us in, if only I knew what the masters knew! I slay the hart in the tower, so my competitors will see the corpse and worry that perhaps I have more power than they—but I know nothing to do with that blood except foolish tricks of invisibility, and that can be done with sheep! I draw the hart's blood, and what does it accomplish? It proves to me again my weakness." He closed the barrels, tamped down the lids again. "My life is here, shriveling in brine. But with your gifts I will be the strongest in Hart's Hope, the greatest of them all. And yet." He wandered off to the stairway, intoning to himself. "Strongest of them all, and yet still too weak, still too weak, I couldn't save them."

That night Orem did not sleep long. He awoke disturbed, and on the cot, not in the mahogany room. In his dream the pickled head of the wizard's wife had called to him, and so he went to her, because he could not deny her.

There was a faint light in the library. It came from the green luminescent slime on the barrels. He sat on a pile of rubbish in the cluttered, unmagical room. He watched.

It was the barrel that held the wizard's wife that shuddered first; then the others, as if the bodies inside were having silent convulsions, rocking the kegs, sloshing the water. Then a lid popped up loudly; another split in half; the third was sucked down into the barrel, and the water seeped and flowed over the top of it as it was drawn down.

In the dream there had been no danger, but Orem was afraid. Things that were dead ought to keep still, everyone knew that. But when the dead call, only a fool refuses them. And so he stayed and watched as a hand reached up from one, from two, from all of the barrels, long-fingered hands, with green light dripping slow as caterpillars down to the wrists, into the water.

"Don't hurt me," Orem whispered.

Abruptly the hands all thrust out toward him. He gasped, reached out with his power of negation to try to stop them; but this was not magic, not the blood-bought magic that a Sink could swallow up. The hands were undisturbed by his strongest effort. They reached over the barrels' lip, and a single finger of each began to write in the slime. Orem could read the dark lines in the green shining, each woman writing her word, each trembling as if an uncontainable power controlled them. "Sister," wrote the wife. "God," wrote the dark daughter. "Horn," wrote the light daughter. Then faster, as the hands grew more sure.

woman writing her word, each trembling as if an uncontainable power controlled them. "Sister," wrote the wife. "God," wrote the dark daughter. "Horn," wrote the light daughter. Then faster, as the hands grew more sure. Go Ho ter d rn Slu Sla St t ve one Yo Yo Yo u u u M M M ust ust ust Se Se Sa e rve ve

Then the hands shook violently, flew up in the air and splashed down again, then reached out, but kept getting sucked back in, as if they were struggling to write more, or even to leave the barrels entirely, and something fought as hard to keep them. The will to write was stronger: the fingers traced in barely readable letters words that meant only together.

Le Di

Me

te

It was over, the hands splashed back into the water; the lids came quickly into place; the broken one seemed to heal as it closed. The slime began to dim, the last letters of the last words faded into a uniform blackness. Orem fled upstairs.

Sister slut you must see.

God slave you must serve.

Horn stone you must save.

Let me die.

He understood nothing, and lay halfway between sleep and wakefulness all night, trying to understand, trying not to think at all. If the last message was the wizard's women speaking for themselves, then whose message was the first part? Or was it meaningful at all? Who could lift the hands of the dead even when the power of a Sink had stolen all the magic?

Only in the first light of morning did he think to do that most obvious, most instinctive thing: he summed the words up, he summed them down, conceiving them both as columns and as rows. The upward sum of rows was Palicrovol. The downward sum of rows was Beauty. And either way the columns were added, they said, Give all, get nothing.

Pranks All through the winter and spring Orem learned to use his new senses. He had no language to describe even to himself what he felt, so he adapted what language he had. When he described it to me, it was all a tale of tongues and tasting, pinpricks and bludgeons, though through it all he usually lay still as death on his cot.

From the first the experiment was a success.

"Orem! My Scanthips! You should have heard the woe! All up and down Wizard Street! Two buildings held up by magic collapsed. One old wizard who only kept his horn with spells is so humiliated he won't go back to Whore Street for years. And never knowing when a spell will work or not. The rats and sheep that have spilt their blood in vain these weeks—ah, if only you could hear the cutters complain. In the taverns where we go, I listen, I complain along with them. They think sometimes it must be the God's men found some terrible incantation. And sometimes they think it's the Queen, putting them in their place, though it's been a long time since she worried much about our paltry powers. Some think the Sweet Sisters, and it's time for women to take the place of power in the world. None of them suspects, none of them dreams that here in my miserable filthy blacksmith shop of a mansion I have found and trained a Sink!"

"It worked, then?" Orem asked.

"Somewhat. There was an assassination over in the Great Exchange, a dearly paid-for murder—was it you that snuffed that out?"

"I don't know. There was a far one. I can't tell what they are."

"It was poison. You killed the power of it, but the taste remained. Luckily the assassin killed himself before letting on who hired him—quite dependable fellow, a rare thing these days—but there was a wizard who stared death in the face, you may be sure, for a few anxious moments."

"Who was it?"

"Me. This isn't going to work well if you don't learn to differentiate between my magics and theirs."

And so they talked through everything that Orem had done, and Gallowglass showed him all his spells and powers, and Orem gradually learned to distinguish one wizard's flame from another by taste or texture or color.

That was why he came to know Queen Beauty first by her magic.

How Orem First Engaged the Queen in Battle It was late in autumn, and Orem ranged far and wide, following all his senses where they led him. He knew by then which points of light were men, and which were women; he had already learned the difference between the whiteness of a man who is awake and the bright silver of a soul asleep. He had learned also that the things done in a place lingered there even when the men were gone, so that he could taste a long and passionate love affair and tell when the coupling was only bought, could smell the difference between a house with love in it and a house with hate, could feel in the ground what sort of man had passed through a certain door. There were the fires of wizards, whose works he recognized now easily; there were the pools of bitter water where the Godsmen made islands in the surrounding sweetness. Orem could follow the life of the world as if it were a map spread before him. He vanquished the other wizards so easily that it wasn't sport anymore. It was boredom in the cold of an autumn afternoon that led him to search for King Palicrovol. It was a game, to see if he could match, in his small way, the Queen's Searching Eye.

So he rose into the air, to see if he could perceive as a bird did, from high above. As he ascended, the sea of sweetness in which he had always moved suddenly ceased, and instead of the dark seeing and faint smelling he had been able to do, he felt as though he could sense all things forever. Except that wherever he dipped downward, there was the sweetness again like the fog of the city, slowing him and obscuring wherever he looked.

He tried to think what it could be, wondered if there were some layer in the air, or if where the clouds began, his magic vision improved. But the sweetness hung too low, never rising much above the height of the tallest buildings—and suddenly Orem understood. The sweet sea of fog was not natural at all. It was Queen Beauty's Searching Eye. It was her magic, pervading everything. Of course she did not bother to maintain it much above the level where a man was likely to climb. It was men she meant to spy on.

Does she see me? Or does a Sink devour the magic of Queen Beauty? Daringly he dipped down into the sweet fog and, instead of moving through it, he tasted it the way he tasted the fires of the wizards. It had no center to it, no potent place to snuff out, but he found that he could easily erase wide patches of it like clearing chalk from a slate, with no effort at all, and what he cleared stayed cleared.

At first he was alarmed at what he had done. Surely Queen Beauty would notice the gap in her vision, would come searching for him. But as he lay on his bed, feeling a little sick with fear, he realized that if he could block her Searching Eye miles from Inwit, he could block it here as well. And so he did, clearing her vision out of Wizard Street, away from the edges of the bitter island of the Great Temple, and from other places, too, so that she could not pinpoint one gap as the source of her enemy.

Enemy? Am I Queen Beauty's enemy?

He remembered Palicrovol, looking up at him with golden eyes at the House of God in Banningside. Had he, or perhaps some god, called to Orem then so he would do this very work, blinding Queen Beauty? He had never heard of a wizard daring to challenge her Searching Eye; he had never heard of a wizard who even understood how she did it. For the first time it. occurred to Orem that his power as a Sink might have been given him, not to play pranks on the other wizards of Inwit, but to challenge Beauty herself. His father had found him soldiering in the dirt, childish games—but could he not now serve King Palicrovol as no other could serve him? Could he not, in fact, block Queen Beauty's power to make cowards of his men, and let his army come against an undefended city?

But before he acted, he remembered the Queen. She was the unspoken breath at the back of every speaker who fell silent, every lover who looked over his shoulder, every thinker who hummed to take a dangerous thought from his mind. He remembered that she was the helpless child raped on the back of the hart. Who was he to judge that her vengeance should be interrupted, that it was time to break her power?

You know what Orem decided, Palicrovol. You remember the night. Suddenly a wizard came in, his face white with terror, to say that the Queen had destroyed all their spells; then another came to say that the Queen's power, too, was gone. You did not dare believe that magic was so perfectly undone, until the itching at your groin let up for a few hours, your long-stopped bowels flowed normally, painlessly for a few hours, and you were able to sleep dreamlessly for the first night in three hundred years. Then you believed.

But why did Orem decide to do battle with the Queen? He did not suspect he was your son. You had done him no kindness. The Queen had done him no especial harm. It was simply this: If Orem had been alive when you ravished Asineth upon the hart's back, and he had had the power to stop you, he would have done it. He was one who instinctively fought against the strong, to help the helpless. It was his way, born into him. He hadn't the heart for necessary cruelty, the way you had. And so he challenged Queen Beauty, in part because he was brave and she was his only interesting adversary, but mostly out of pity for his weak and beaten King. Do not discount that when you judge him. There was a time when you were helpless, and he helped you.

That night Orem attacked incessantly, for hours, not just swallowing up all the magic anywhere near you, but spreading himself over as broad an area as he could, clearing away the Queen's sight, in hopes of disorienting her, distracting her, buying even more time for you. He had no hope of challenging her at the Castle, for his power was negation—he could do nothing to harm her person. But he could undo her work, and so he unwove her nets of seeing as long as he had strength to do it that night.

At last he slept, exhausted, and after several hours of searching, Queen Beauty found you again, Palicrovol, and your suffering began anew, and sharper than before, and many of your wizards died. Orem was young, and he did not know how angry she would be, or that you would bear the brunt of her quick revenge. He assumed she would know what he was, and that she would search for him. But even so, it told you things. You knew then that if Beauty was angry, it meant there was a force in the world that could thwart her, if only for a time. You did not know if one of the gods had broken free of her, or if Sleeve had managed to free himself and work some magic, but you knew that it was a good omen, and that you should try again to bring your armies to the gates of Inwit. Admit it, Palicrovol: It was Orem who summoned you to your final battle with the Queen.

The Wounding of the Hart

He would have slept late in the morning, but Gallowglass awoke him just after dawn. "What have you done?" demanded the wizard.

"Done?" asked Orem.

"Last night the house shivered, and I awoke this morning to hear the cries of a hundred thousand birds. I looked out the window and the sky was filled with them, wheeling and turning, and then suddenly they dispersed, they flew far, but all of them dipped and turned over this house. Was it real or a vision? Did you call them?"

"I don't know how to call."

"No, it was a vision, I know it was. No magic, I'd know magic, I'm not likely to mistake that. Don't you feel how the floor is trembling?"

Yes, there was a low, low hum that shook him in his bed. He was afraid now, remembering his foolish bravery of the night before. He dared not leave Gallowglass ignorant of what he had done, since only Gallowglass would know what he must do now. So he told him of last night's battle for Palicrovol against the Queen.

"Oh, Orem," whispered Gallowglass, "no sooner do you have a grasp than you try to overreach! Touch nothing of the Queen's!"

"Is it she who shakes the house?"

"No! No, not Queen Beauty. There's no way she could know where you are. It's bad enough she knows that you exist."

"She'll know that suddenly somewhere in Burland there's a wizard who can undo her doing. It will worry her. She'll search, she'll ask, and then she'll learn that here on Wizard Street also there are spells undone, and then she'll begin to wonder what's abroad in the world."

Up and down he walked, clapping his fist into an open hand. "It's a fool who tries to pit his power against the Queen! The Queen could crush us in a moment. She lets us wizards be because we do no harm. We can cure warts and other blemishes. We can do love words and vengeances on enemies, and pranks and little spies. We can even keep a hart's blood hot on the city wall and go invisible in the daylight when we have the need. But we do not darken skies or move the hearts of masses in the city. We do not question the Sweet Sisters and we do not shiver the earth. The river's course is beyond our reach, and the wind must not be spoken to, and we may not poison the milk within the breast or dry the semen in a man's loins."

Orem made no answer, for directly behind Gallowglass, stamping intermittently upon the floor, was a hart with a hundred-pointed head, his great neck high upraised to bear that impossible weight. Gallowglass heard the beast almost as soon as Orem saw him, and he turned and knelt, and said, "O Hart, why have you come?"

The Hart regarded him and did not stir to answer.

"Are you real or vision?" Gallowglass cried.

The wizard was afraid, but Orem was not. This was the beast that he had seen before, in the bushes at Banning's shore, watching his mother as she bathed. He looked into the glistening eyes and knew he should not be afraid. The Hart had not come angrily. Orem drew the covers from himself and walked forward toward the great stag.

"Don't do anything to frighten him," Gallowglass said.

"He hasn't come for you," Orem said. "He forgives you for the harts you've bled upon the wall." Now Orem could see that the chest was throbbing with deep, silent breaths, and the hart was wet with sweat, matting his fur.

Where have you been tonight? And running so hard?

Orem knelt and reached for the hart's hoof. The stag lifted the leg, and willingly gave it to the boy; but it was not there, Orem felt nothing, he was holding no weight at all. And yet his hand could not close, and a great dark warmth spread upward through his arm. The Hart, while insubstantial in Inwit, dwelt in flesh within the city of Hart's Hope.

"Why have you come to me?" Orem asked, his voice as reverent as a priest at prayer.

"Silence," Gallowglass softly pleaded.

Orem looked upward, and the Hart slowly bowed its head. The weight of the horns was too much for any neck to bear, but the neck bore. The Hart set its hind legs and braced backward, and the head sank until the horns danced directly in front of Orem's face, until one single horntip rested still as a mountain right where he could not look at anything else. And he looked, and looked again, and looked deeper, and saw:

The city teemed with life below him; boats docked and undocked at the wharves; the guard marched here and there like ants upon the city walls. But it was not the life of the city that gave it the look of constant motion. For even as Orem watched the city was unbuilding itself, as if time had come undone and it was a century, two centuries in the past. Roads changed their path; buildings grew new and flashed as brief skeletons of frames and then were replaced by older, smaller buildings. There were more and more farms within the city walls, and the settlements outside shrank and nearly disappeared. Suddenly the Great Temple was gone, and the Little Temple changed so there were not seven circles over every column, and then the Little Temple, too, was gone, and the city bent a different way. King's Street twisted sharp to the west, and the great gate of the city was Hind's Trace, West Gate, the Hole.

Then this, too, passed; the walls of the city unraveled, revealing smaller walls, and those too unwound themselves and there were no walls at all, and no castle, either, except the tiny Old Castle at the eastmost point of the King's Town Hill. This lingered, this was steady for a time. And then the castle, too, was gone, nothing but forest there, and nothing left of Inwit but a few hundred houses built in circles around the single shrine. And the houses grew fewer and fewer, and the shrine diminished, bit by bit, and Orem fell again until he saw as if he hovered only a few yards above the ground. There was no village. Only forest, and one clearing with a hut in the middle, and where the Shrine would be there was only a farmer plowing in the field.

This farmer did not plow as Orem's father plowed. The farmer himself drew the soil-cutting knife, and his wife guided it, and it made only a weak and shallow furrow in the ground. It was painful work, and Orem could see why the plot was small—there was no hope of plowing more land than that.

Suddenly there was a movement at the edge of the clearing. To Orem's relief, time was flowing forward again, and at a normal pace. A stag bounded onto the furrows, its hooves plunging deep into the loosened soil. It was frightened. Behind it came four huntsmen with bows and pikes, and dogs that barked madly at the deer. The hart ran to the farmer, who shed the harness of the plow and took the hart's head between his hands for a moment, then let it go. The hart did not move. Nor did it show fear of the farmer, and perhaps this was why the hunters stopped, to see such a marvel.

The farmer raised his hand, and the stag took a step away from him, toward the forest on the far side of the clearing. As it did, the hunters also moved, the dogs bounding forward a single leap. The farmer lowered his hand and the movements stopped, and all waited for him again.

The farmer turned to the plow. He picked it up, heavy as it was, and laid it upside down in front of the hunters' dogs. He knelt, trembling, before the plow. Then, behind him, his wife bent and took his head in her hands, helped him lay his throat against the blade of the plow. For a moment they waited, poised. It was not the wife, for her hands drew back at the last moment, too merciful to do the thing. It was the farmer himself who drove his neck sharply into the plow. Blood spurted, and Orem winced with the agony of it. Now the wife finished what the husband had begun; she drove the farmer's head down and down, until the blood spouted and the blade was almost all the way through the neck.

It was dark, and the moon rose, and the man's body still lay broken over the plow when the hart returned to the clearing. This time the hart came with a dozen harts and a dozen hinds, and then seven times seven of them, and one by one they came and licked the hair of the dead farmer. When they were through, they came to the farmer's wife, and the hart whose life the farmer had saved stretched out its neck to her. She reached out and took a small sapling tree that grew beside her hovel, and broke it as if it were brittle, though the leaves on it were lush and green. Then with the sharp and jagged end of the tree she cut the hart's belly from breast to groin. The bowels of the hart lurched downward. The bleeding halt staggered to the man and lay beside him, and their blood mingled on the plow.

Then, as Orem watched, the plow became a raft, and the head of the man and the head of the stag lolled over the edge, drifting in bright water. The raft flowed against the stream. Or did the water flow from the wounded bodies of the two broken animals? Along the banks of the river a million people knelt and drank, each a sip, and left singing.

At last the raft came to rest against a shore. Like wineskins the two bodies seemed empty, and no more water flowed from them.

Orem looked up and saw, standing beside the corpses on the bank, the living hart and the living man, whole again, both naked in moonlight.

And the farmer's face was Orem's face, and the hart was the deer that stood before him in the room, its horn lowered to offer a naked brown point.

Orem breathed to calm the violent beating of his heart. How much of it was true, and if true, what did it mean?

As if in answer came the face of a woman. It was the most beautiful face Orem had ever seen, a kind and loving face, a face that cried out like a tragic virgin starved for a man's life within her. Orem did not know her, but recognized her at once. Only one living human could have such a face, for that face cried out for a single name: Beauty. It was the Queen, and she called to him, and a tear of joy stood out in one eye as she saw him and reached for him and took him into her embrace.

Then the vision was gone, abruptly, and Orem and Gallowglass were alone in the attic room.

"Did you see?" asked Orem. "I saw you kneel before the Hart, and it offered its horn to you, and suddenly blood came from a deep wound in your throat, and I thought you were dead."

"What was it that you saw?"

"I saw how Hart's Hope came to be the name of this place. And what the Shrine of the Broken Tree is for. And I saw the face of Beauty."

There was no ambiguity when that name was said. Beauty wore only one face in Burland, though few there were who had seen it for themselves. Every man held his image of Queen Beauty in his mind, to fear and adore when he was most alone. Every woman knew her, and every woman knew the ways that Beauty mocked their insufficiency.

"Has she found me?" Orem asked.

"No," Gallowglass answered. Abruptly he turned and staggered from the room. It took a moment for Orem to know that he was grieving. The boy arose, pulled on his wrap and shirt and belted his clothing as he followed the wizard down the stairs. When he reached the hall, the wizard already had the lid pried up, and now he pried the next, the next, and then lifted up the women's corpses that floated in the brine, lifted them high and draped them limply over the barrel's edges, face upward and outward, hanging upside down and dripping slime in pools upon the carpet. "You betrayed me!" the wizard cried. "You're oathbreakers! You're thieves!" And he seized the golden daughter's shriveled head and held it so close that he spat into the staring eyes. "What are you to me, you bloated, filthy flesh! You cheated me of your power, cheated me of your lives within my house, and now the Hart has stepped within my home, and where were you? Where were you when the life flowed from the throat of my terrible boy? A sip and you would have lived, you would have lived, you would have lived!"

And the wizard stood, letting the head dangle again, bobbing back and forth a little. To the shelf, to the bag of powdered blood. Orem could not bear to see the women called forth again from the half-death that Gallowglass forced upon them. And so he sent himself out, suddenly, the way a cutpurse flashes forth his knife, and in a moment the blood was empty of its desiccated power. He knew as he did it that he was granting the desire of the dead women and breaking Gallowglass's heart. The wizard cast the pinch of blood, and now instead of quickening the women, it fell like corruption, and their faces blackened, and their hair fell to the floor in gobbets, and their flesh peeled back and slipped to the soggy carpet with tiny slaps, and one by one the heads loosened and dropped, only to dissolve quickly into unrecognizable masses of putrefaction.

Only when the bones had come apart and lay in careless heaps on the carpet, only when the bottom halves of the three women had slid back into the water and out of sight, only then did Gallowglass turn to Orem, and his face was terrible. His eyes shone with ruby light, his teeth were bared like a badger's teeth, and Orem saw murder in the man's hands..

He darted leftward, for the door, and shoved it open. A hand had hold of the nape of his shirt to draw him back, but Orem shrugged him away, letting the shirt tear as he threw himself through the door. He ran out into the bitter cold of the street, his shirt hanging off his shoulders, held to his body only by his belt. He ran out into the bitter cold of the street, under the steady drip of the melting icicles, to race across the face of the frozen street with cold sunlight on his back.

He ran without purpose, more afraid of what he had done than of Gallowglass himself. By the time he was on Thieves Street, though, a plan was forming in his mind. He would find Flea again, and ask his help in hiding. The Queen would be looking for him among the wizards, and Gallowglass would never find him, for he could not use magic.

What he hadn't counted on, of course, was the enemy that always waited for the unwary in Inwit. A troop of guards were patrolling in the Cheaps. One look at the tattered shirt and the frightened face and they knew that Orem was theirs. They did not need to know his crime to know that he was guilty. They cried out for him to stop, demanded that he show his pass.

He had no pass with him; nor did he dare to tell them his pass was with Gallowglass, for they would take him to Gallowglass's house to verify it, and Gallowglass could have whatever vengeance he wanted then. So Orem turned and ran back, ran deep into the Cheaps, dodging this way and that among the narrow, twisting streets.

He was faster than the guards, but they were many and he was one. Wherever he ran they were waiting, and at last they funneled him back until he leaned upon the unkempt Shrine of the Broken Tree. He could see that up and down Shrine Street the guards were coming. There was no avenue of escape. And so he leaned on the low wall around the shrine, and looked down on the stump, and saw that the jagged upsticking point was just as the farmer's wife had left it in the vision. The dream was true, then. It was good to know that something was true. But what, name of heaven, did it mean?