Innkeeper's Song

TIKAT

I do not know why she did not see me. Perhaps it was simply that she knew the doorways on this floor are all too shallow even to conceal a child. Anyone but a desperate weaver caught completely by surprise would certainly have gone to earth in the alcove under the stairway. She looked only briefly to either side, then advanced very slowly toward the stair, her swordcane no more than a glint out of its case. I will never like her, and I still despise her condescending kindness to me in front of Lukassa; but I never felt more the bumpkin I am than when I watched her moving across the corridor. I had no business in the same world with people who moved like that, nor did my love. I pressed myself back against someone’s door, held my breath, and tried not to think of anything at all. Thoughts cast shadows and make noises, in that world.

Having assured herself that no one was hiding in the alcove or the stairwell, she backed away into her own doorway, one silent, careful step at a time. The sword was out now, needle-thin, the least bit curved toward the tip, in the same way that her neck and shoulders were bending very slightly forward. One last long stare—not to her left, where I huddled only a few feet away, but to the right and the stair again, plainly expecting to see someone approaching, not escaping. Whoever she was waiting for, it was not me, not dungbooted riverbank Tikat. The needle-sword flicked this way, that way, like a snake’s tongue, and there was honest fear in the wide golden eyes. Then the door closed.

I stayed where I was a little longer; then crept from my doorway to listen again, as I had been when my breathing or my heartbeat alerted them inside. The old man was saying, “He knew me so well—he took advantage of my arrogance as no one ever has. I warded off his absurd little sendings as I cooked my dinner, his annoying night visitations without bothering to awaken. To my own old sense of loss there was added a great sadness for him—for my true son—never to know the true depths of his gift before he betrayed it so foolishly. There was nothing I could do for him now, but I did try not to humiliate him any further.”

He laughed then, and for a moment I heard nothing else, because it sounded so like the laughter of my little brother, who died in the plague-wind. When I could listen to words again, they were in the brusque voice of Nyateneri, the tall one. “But they got worse, the sendings, a little at a time?”

“A little at a time,” the old man whispered. “He was so patient, so patient. Not for years—not until the night when I found myself at last at bay in evil dreams and unable to awaken, did I understand how he had used me to ensnare myself. He knew me, he knew what my body and mind love most and what my spirit fears in its deepest places. Neither of you, nor anyone else, ever came near that knowledge. Only Arshadin.”

“And bloody good use he made of it, too.” Nyateneri again, a snort like an angry horse. “What happened then? He came to you again?”

I had to press my ear hard against the door to hear the answer. “I went to him. It took the best part of my strength, but I went to him in his own house. He did not expect me. We came to no agreement, and he tried to prevent my leaving. I left all the same.” Lukassa must have been close on the other side, for I could smell her new-bread sweetness as I knelt there. The old man mumbled on. “I fled back to the red tower and reinforced it against him as best I knew how. He followed, first in the spirit, with sendings that now strode through my counterspells like wind through spiderwebs—then in the body.” I lost some words when a sudden coughing fit took him, and only made out, “The rest you know. Or Lukassa knows.”

I must have caught something of the black woman’s taut wariness: anyway, I found myself turning often to look over my shoulder for whoever she had been so certain of seeing on the stair. I heard her voice, plainly angry herself now, saying, “At least we knew you well enough to follow a trail of nightmares that had you trapped howling in the arms of burning lovers, falling forever through razory emptiness, running and running from striding flowers that cried after you like babies. Were those the dreams he sent you, your son?”

Right back at her he came—no more coughing or muttering, but quick and clear as a slash of lightning. “They were not dreams. They are not dreams. Have you not understood that yet? What woke you, what brought you here—it has all happened to me, exactly as you saw it. And those were the least of them.” A small, sudden chuckle. “Do you imagine that a few indigestible dreams did this to me?”

A rustle of blankets, cloth, something. A woman cried out. I knew it was Lukassa—it was the sound she would have made if the river had given her time to call my name. I know this. I jumped up to hammer on the door, never mind what I had sworn to myself not an hour before. Something touched my shoulder, very lightly, and I turned to see what it was.