Innkeeper's Song

NYATENERI

The boy was watching us from hiding as we rode out that morning. I found that odd, I remember. There was never anything in the least furtive about Rosseth when it came to us: he wore his worship as a bird wears its feathers, and it gave him color and flight, as feathers will. The other two did not see him. I would have said something about it, but Lal was riding ahead, singing one of those long, long, incredibly tuneless songs of hers to herself; and as for Lukassa, there is no way to tell you how her presence changed even my smell and set the hairs of my body at war with each other. I know why now, of course, but then all I could imagine was that I had been far too long away from ordinary human company.

Corcorua is the nearest to a proper town that I ever saw in that wild north country. City folk would think it hardly more than an overgrown fruitstall, a bright spatter of round wooden houses all along the dry ravines that pass for streets and roads. There are more of those houses than you first think: more horses than oxen, more orchards and vineyards than plowed fields, and more taverns than anything else. The wine they serve tells you how tired the soil is, but they make an interesting sort of brandy from their pale, tiny apples. One could come to like it in time, I think.

The townspeople are a low-built lot in general, dwarfed by the wild generosity of their own mountains and sky, but they have something of that same honest wildness about them, which at times restores me. I was born in country like this—though taken south young—and I know that most northerners keep the doors of their souls barred and plastered round, turning their natural heat inward against a constant winter. These folk are no more to be trusted than any other—and less than some—but I could like them as well as their brandy.

The marketplace doesn’t fit the town, and yet it is the town, really, as it must be the trading center of the entire province. According to Rosseth, it is open all year round, which is rare even in kinder climates; and it is certainly the only market where I ever saw the woven-copper fabric they make only in western Gakary on sale next to crate on crate of limbri, that awful tooth-melting candied fruit from Sharan-Zek. They even sell the best Camlann swords and mail, and half the time there’s no finding such work in Camlann itself, so great is the demand. I bought a dagger there myself, at a price that was shameful but almost fair.

I rode up beside Lal as we trotted straight through (skirting the town to pick up the main road takes you the better part of two hours, which no one had bothered to tell us the first time). I said to her, “Northerners can’t abide limbri. I’ve never seen it north of the Siritangana, until now.”

Before I came to know Lal, I most often took her laugh for a grunt of surprise, or a sigh. She said, “He always did have a revolting passion for the stuff. And he likes places like this, plain dust-and-mud farming country. Did you ever know him to live for long in a real city?”

“When he first took me up, we lived in the back of a fishmonger’s in Tork-na’Otch.” Lal made a face—Tork-na’Otch is known for its smoked fish, and nothing else. I said, “He may be gone, but he was here, and not long ago, everything says it. He may have sent you dreams because they could find you most easily in your wanderings, but I was in one place for many years, and to me he wrote letters. I have them still. They came from here, from Corcorua—he described the market and the look of the people, and he even told me what his house was like. About this, I cannot be mistaken. I cannot.”

My voice must have risen, for Lukassa turned in her saddle and stared back at me with those light eyes of hers that were always wide and always seemed to see, not me now but me then, me peering over my own shoulder in time. Lal said, “I take your word, but you can’t find the house, and we have been everywhere twice between the market and the summer pastures. Now I follow Lukassa’s fancy back to the old red tower, as you suggested, because I do not know what else to do. If we find no trace of him there, then I will return to the inn and get drunk. It takes me a very long time to get drunk, so I need to start early.”

I had nothing to say to that. A young merchant caught my stirrup, holding up a cageful of singing birds; another, a woman, was plucking at Lukassa’s bridle, crying a bargain in silken petticoats. “Two for hardly more than the price of one, my lass—a sweet snowdrift of ruffles for a lover to wade through!” Lukassa never looked at her. We followed Lal down the lines of vegetable barrows, wove single-file between the wine vendors and the stalls drifted high themselves with sheepskins and carded wool—our horses held motionless at times by the crush of trade and the fear of treading down one of the market brats who squalled and scrambled between their legs—until a narrow cobbled alley opened to our left, and there were orchards, and the white road away to the yellow hills. We let the horses run for a while then. It was a pleasant day, and I hummed to myself a little.

When Lal drew rein, we were almost to the hills, within sight of houses we had already searched twice over, more or less with the consent of their inhabitants. These are larger than the dwellings below in town, mostly of wood still, save for the occasional stone or brick mansion. They keep to the round design, though, with painted, high-arched roofs that make them look just a bit like muffins beginning to rise. Dull as muffins, too, to my taste: an afternoon of all that snug rotundity, let alone a week, and you begin to pine for eaves, gables, crests, ridges, angles. Of course, the mountains beyond must provide as much edge, even to contentment, as anyone could use. They eat too much of the sky, even at this distance, and snow does not soften them: it is ice that shines like saliva down their lean sides. They look like great wild boars.

Lal touched Lukassa’s shoulder and said, “Today you are not only our companion but our leader. Go forward and we will follow.” She said it with careful lightness, but there came such a look of terror and revulsion into Lukassa’s eyes that both Lal and I turned quickly to see what danger might be slinking upon us. When we turned again Lukassa was already away, and we were well into the hills, far past the first houses, before we caught up with her.

I had been tired and irritable the night before, and suggesting that we return to the red tower had been as much an angry joke as anything else. Lal had given Lukassa neither orders nor directions, but she turned off the road at the only path that could have led her there, as though she knew the way of old. Nearing the place, she drew her horse to as slow a walk as it had been held to in the Corcorua market. Her eyes were empty, and her mouth loose—I have seen diviners look so, in realms where the art is honored, tracking the scent or sense of water to a place where water cannot be. Behind me Lal’s breath, quick and shallow.

The red tower was as much a ruin as a building can be without falling down, but it would have stood out as absurdly among these bitter gray mountains if there hadn’t been a single brick out of place. This country runs to endurance, to keeping your head down and well swaddled: a grand manor here is just a crusty muffin; a fortress just a stale, stone-hard one. A tower—a tower with an outside stair, windows at every turning and what must have been an observatory of some kind at the top—belongs strictly to southern fairy tales, to nights and lands where you can actually see the stars long enough to make up stories about them. It was just the sort of thing he would have set up for himself, that impudent, impossible old man. I should have realized it yesterday, before Lukassa, before anyone.

She dismounted in the tower’s shadow, and we crept after her—at least, it felt like creeping, somehow, still as the day was and slowly as she passed through the great shambly entranceway. The gate was flat, with ground vines lacing over it, but we had already proved the place safe enough to enter, else we would never have let her go ahead of us. She paid no heed to the stair but went straight to an inner wall, opened an all-but-invisible door that neither of us had ever mentioned to her, and unhesitatingly began to climb the steps within, never speaking, never looking back.

We followed silently, Lal swatting spiderwebs aside and I covering my face against the owl and bat droppings that Lukassa’s progress dislodged, and which made the shallow steps treacherous. It was just as long, tiring, and smelly an ascent as it had been the first time. I thought often of the look in the boy Rosseth’s dark hazel eyes as he watched us pass that morning, so clearly imagining us on our way to the wonderful adventures with which he so busily endowed our lives. Too much going on in his head, and no idea of his own worldly beauty—no combination more attractive. As though I needed more trouble than I had.

Dark as it was, both Lal and I knocked our heads—as we had before—on the sudden low ceiling that ended the steps. Lukassa did not. Moving easily, despite having to bend almost double, she slipped away to the left, so quickly that we lost her in the darkness for a few moments.

When I had caught my breath, I whispered to Lal, “Whether or not we ever find our friend, sooner or later you will have to tell me how she knew. You owe me that much.”

The tower was double-built, of course: a hard secret core at the heart of all that crumbling frippery. The outer stair would never have brought us to the landing where we stood, nor ever to the little room where we knew Lukassa had gone. Lal and I had spent all yesterday afternoon tapping, prowling, discussing, reasoning—and, at the last, cursing and guessing—our way to this chamber, and that blank child had gone straight to it as though she were strolling home. Lal said softly back, “It is not mine to tell. You must ask her.” But it was not in me then to ask Lukassa to pass the cheese, to help me with a harness buckle. Lal knew that.

The room is very cold. Magic does not have a smell, as some believe, but it leaves a chill behind it that my laughing old friend said so often was the breath of the other side, that place from which magic visits us—“like a neighbor’s cat, whom we coax over the fence with bits of chicken to hunt our mice.” There was a cooking-tripod and its stewpot, overturned on a straw mat; a deep-blue silk tapestry, hanging by one corner on a far wall; there were a few retorts, a long table, a high wooden stool; a single wineglass, broken; and a number of patterns chalked and charcoaled on the floor, which neither Lal nor I could interpret. They had been trampled over and badly smudged.

Lukassa was standing in the middle of a black-and-red scrawl that looked like nothing but a baby’s play with colored inks. When she looked at us, her face was terrifying: a sibyl’s face, crawling with furious prophecy, wrinkling like water to unhuman rhythms and commands. She screamed at us, our pale companion who never raised her voice, even when challenging me head-on, “Can you see nothing, can you feel nothing? It was here—it was here!” I will swear that the stone room jumped when she cried out, as a good lute will sigh and stir in your arms when someone speaks close by.

Lal said gently, “Lukassa. Truly, we cannot see. What happened in this room, Lukassa?”

For no good reason but personal vanity, I wish to set down here a moment’s defense of my own vision, and Lal’s as well. Neither of us would have been alive to stand in the doorway of that cold little room, had we read the air and recent history of certain others as poorly as we had that one. Either some sorcerous residue slowed our senses when we came there first without Lukassa; or, as I would prefer to believe, it was her presence that summoned onto the table the little dry red-brown stain, brought the clawmarks on the floor out of hiding, and made the silk tapestry give up a hidden design in green and gold, showing a man with dragon’s wings locked in battle with something like a glittering shadow. Whatever had dragged the tapestry almost down from the wall had ripped a raw gash almost from top to bottom, and the woven blood of the fighters seemed about to spill into our hands as we stood dumbly before it. I said a word of blessing, for my own comfort, not meaning it to be heard, and Lal breathed what must have been an amen, though in no language I know.

Lukassa’s rage of knowledge seemed to ebb somewhat; when she spoke again, saying, “Here and here,” she sounded more like a child driven to exasperation by the sluggishness and stupidity of adults. “Here stood your friend, and here stood his friend—and here”—casually nodding to a near corner—“this was where the Others came from.” It was all so truly obvious to her.

In that corner, which is stone and slate and mortar like the rest, there is no air, only cold. If the tower is gone today, as it may well be, that corner is still there. Lal and I looked at each other, and I know that we were thinking the same thing: This is not a corner, not a wall—this is a door, an open door. Behind us, Lukassa said impatiently, “There, where you stand—look, look,” and she hurried to join us, pointing into an emptiness so fierce that I had to struggle with an impulse to snatch her hand back before that ancient, murderous absence bit it off. Instead, I turned and spoke to her as soothingly as I could. “What other, Lukassa? What did he look like?”

She actually stamped her foot. “Not he—the Others, the Others! The two men fought, they were so angry, and then the Others came.” She peered back and forth at us, only beginning to wonder now: a child first discovering fear in the faces of adults. She whispered, “You don’t. You don’t.”

“Nothing comes uninvited from this kind of darkness,” I said to Lal, over Lukassa’s head. “There has to be a call.” Lal nodded. I asked the girl, “Who summoned the— the Others? Which man was it?” But she took hold of Lal’s hand and would not look at me.

I repeated the question, and so did Lal—to no avail, for all her petting and coaxing. At last she gestured, let it be, and, to Lukassa, “The men fought, you say. Why did they fight, and how? Which of them won?” Lukassa remained silent, and I wished that I had brought the fox with us. She murmurs to him constantly; by now he surely knows far more about her than either of us does. And will continue to—I know him that well, at least.

“Magic,” Lal said. “They fought with magic.” Lukassa pulled away from her, less by intent than because she was trembling so violently. Lal’s voice became sharper. “Lukassa, one of those two was the man we have sought so long, the old man who sang over his vegetable garden. If it were not for him—” She glanced quickly at me, hesitated, then turned Lukassa to face her again, pressing both of the girl’s hands together between her own. She said, clearly and deliberately, “No one but you can help us to find him, and you would be dead at the bottom of a river but for him. What happens from this moment is your choice.” The words rang like hoofbeats on the cold stones.

Unless you are a long-practiced wizard (and sometimes even then), it isn’t good to spend more time than you have to within walls as encrusted with old wizardry as those. It causes mirages inside you, in your heart—I don’t know a better way to put it. In that moment, it seemed to me—no, it was—as though Lal were holding all of Lukassa in her two cupped palms like water, and that if she brimmed over them, or slid through Lal’s fingers, she would spill away into every dark corner forever. But she did not. She bent her head, and raised it again, and looked steadily into both our faces with those backward-searching eyes of hers. I will not say that she was Lukassa once more, because by then I had begun to know a bit better than that. Whoever she truly was, it was no one she had been born.

“He fought so bravely,” she said to no one in the world. “He was so clever. His friend was clever, too, but too sure of himself, and frightened as well. They stood here, face to face, and they turned this room to the sun’s belly, to the ocean floor, to the frozen mouth of a demon. These walls boiled around them, the air cracked into knives, so many little, little knives—all there was to breathe was the little knives. And there was never any sound, not for a thousand years, because all the air had turned to knives. And the old one grew weary and sad, and he said Arshadin, Arshadin.” Even in that clear, quiet voice, the cry made me close my eyes.

Lukassa went on. “But his friend would not heed, but only pressed him closer about with night and flame, and with such visions as made him feel his soul rotting away from him, poisoning the pale things that devoured it as he looked on. And then the old one became terrible with fear and sorrow and loneliness, and he struck back in such bitter thunder that his friend lost power over him for that moment, and was more frightened than he, and called upon the Others for aid. It is all here, in the stones, written everywhere.”

I looked at the clawmarks, waiting for Lal to ask the question that came now. But she said nothing, and when I saw her face I saw the hope that I would be the one to speak. I also saw that she was immensely weary. It matters much to Lal to seem tireless, and never before had she let me see the legend frayed this thin. She cannot be that much older than I; yet I was young still when I heard my first tale of Lal-Alone. When did she last ask a favor of anyone, I wonder?

“Last night you spoke to us of death,” I said. “Who died here, then, the old man or that one you call his friend?” Lukassa stared at me, shaking her head very slightly, as though my blindness had finally worn out her entire store of disbelief, anger, and pity, leaving her nothing but a kind of numb tolerance. The man we were seeking had often looked at me like that.

“Oh, the friend died,” she said casually and wearily. “But he rose again.” It was I who gasped, I admit it—Lal made no sound, but leaned against the table for just a moment. Lukassa said, “The friend summoned the Others to help him, and they killed him, but he did not die. The old man—the old man fled away. His friend pursued him. I don’t know where.” She sat down very suddenly and put her head on her knees, and went to sleep.