The River of Shadows

Spider Telling

7 Modobrin 941

236th day from Etherhorde

Inside it was cold and dark, but the Master Teller was already climbing the wide staircase before them, and as Pazel and the novices followed him up the air began to warm. They passed several floors, with dark hallways tunneling off into the stone. Pazel saw lamplight at the distant ends of some of these halls, and heard the ring of hammers, the rasp of lathes and saws. “Our workshops,” said the old man, gesturing, “and our warehouses, our mill. In its younger days Vasparhaven was a stronghold where scholars took refuge in times of war or other catastrophe, and kept their learning alive for those who would come after. We are preparing to serve that function again.”

Pazel was distressed by his statement. How much could the old man sense about the world to come? Then, from above, he heard the sound of many voices raised in song-a low, lovely music, and the dread in his heart melted away.

“It is the hour of Evensong,” said the Master Teller. “The hour when we often welcomed guests, in happier years.”

The climb ended on a landing before two large and ornate doors, finished with padded leather of a deep, lustrous red. The novices stepped forward and pulled. Hinges groaned, and the doors swung slowly outward.

A blaze of candlelight met Pazel’s eyes, and a wave of sweet smells-apple blossom, cedar, cinnamon, fresh bread-flooded his nostrils. They were stepping into a grand hall: not vaulted and soaring like that of a Northern palace, but deep and intricate, with several levels to the floor, and pillars carved from the living rock, and many alcoves and niches filled with candles in iron stands. Tapestries adorned the walls, and censers burned on iron stands, gray cat-tails of smoke rising from them to mingle at the ceiling. The hall was full of people. They were dressed humbly, and busy with a variety of tasks, but as the Master and his guests came forward they stopped and bowed as one. Not all were dlomu. The other races of the South were all represented here, in greater proportions than in Masalym. And there were new beings, too, like nothing Pazel had seen before. A hulking figure nearly the size of an augrong, with a barrel under each arm. A pair of lean, wolfish beings who rose from all fours when they bowed. A gray fox watching them from a corner, its tail twitching like a snake. “Welcome, human,” it said in a voice like satin.

“Where is Kirishgan?” said the Master Teller. “I would he met our visitor.”

“I will find him, Father,” said the fox, and darted away into the chamber.

They walked deeper into the room. A young novice handed Pazel a cup and bade him drink. It was wine, pale but very strong, and when Pazel swallowed he felt warmer still. “We dlomu drink more beer than wine,” said the Master, smiling. “But humans always preferred our wine, in the old days when we lived as brothers. Drink it all, child: it is the first part of your cure.”

Pazel finished the wine. As he lowered the cup he wondered if the drink could already be going to his head: for coming toward them was a man-like figure with olive skin and fine black feathers where his eyebrows should have been. They jutted out to either side of his temples, as if a pair of black wings were about to emerge from the skin of his forehead. The eyes beneath these oddest of brows were youthful; but the man himself was not exactly young. He was tall and straight-backed, but there was a subtle, knowing quality to his expression that made Pazel think of the wisdom of great age. The figure greeted him with a bow.

“Welcome, spider’s favorite,” he said.

“I’m glad you’re not afraid of humans,” said Pazel. “In Masalym no one wanted to speak to us.”

“Your murth-cry gave us a start,” said the newcomer, as the corners of his lips curled wryly, “but as for human beings-well, there are stranger things within these walls.”

“Vasparhaven is home to many beings, not all of them native to this world,” said the Teller. “Some were castaways on the River of Shadows, who, unable to return to their own world, climbed to the temple and dwell here yet. Others, especially dlomu, come as war refugees, fleeing the Platazcra. There are woken animals, whom we shelter until their persecution ends. And a few, like Kirishgan here, come as pilgrims did for centuries, before the current darkness: to learn, to study, to bring us new wisdom and carry something of us away with them to distant lands.”

“By his face, Spider Father, I guess that he has never met with a selk.” The olive-skinned figure smiled warmly. “Of course that is no surprise. We are rare enough on this side of the Ruling Sea. In the North we are rare as lilies on a glacier.”

“And yet older than glaciers-old as the mountains themselves,” said the dlomu. “I am glad of this encounter: the young and the ancient of Alifros, met here at the crossroads of our common fate.”

“A crossroads surely,” said the other, “but which road is the world about to choose, I should like to know?”

“So should we all,” said the Master Teller, “for one is sunlit yet, but the other descends into shadow and fear: to what depths none can say.” He took the empty cup from Pazel’s hand. “Our guest would be welcome for a year, Kirishgan, but he has only hours. You know what the second part of the cure entails. The third and final will be given on the Floor of Echoes.” His old eyes focused on the selk. “You will visit the Floor yourself on the morrow, I think.”

“Spider Father!” exclaimed the other, suddenly excited.

“Stay here in the Great Hall for now,” said the Teller, “and when Evensong concludes, be so good as to show him to the door. I will alert the Actors myself.” The old dlomu moved away without another word, flanked by his two attendants.

“So the day has come!” said the one called Kirishgan. “I thought it might have, as soon as I saw your face.”

“What do you mean?” said Pazel. “I thought all I needed to do was drink three gulps of that wine, over three hours.”

“There is a bit more to it than that,” said Kirishgan, smiling again. “Come, and I will try explain.”

He threaded a path through the Great Hall. The people watched, quietly fascinated, and some murmured soft words of welcome. Tapestries gave way to windows, and Pazel realized that they were no longer within the mountain but in the part of the temple that projected over the lakeshore, suspended on those titanic beams. They climbed a short stair, passed a fire dancing in a brass vessel and sat upon a rug in a little glassed-in alcove, with the stormy lake spread beneath them. The wind moaned and rattled the windows, and despite the fire the glass was rimmed with frost.

“The bite of the medet is rare,” said the selk abruptly, “because it never occurs by accident. There are two possibilities. The spider bit you that you might go blind, and stay among us for the rest of your days. Or the spider bit you that you might visit us, and be cured, and perhaps gain something else in the bargain.

“Vasparhaven is larger than it appears from outside, and while most of its halls are open to the whole community, some are closed and sacrosanct. Of these, the most sacred of all is the Floor of Echoes. None go there save the Master Teller, and a special group we call the Actors-and very rarely, travelers in need. The Actors dwell on the Floor for nine months-never exiting, never even speaking to their brethren outside. For those pledged to the Order it is a privilege extended only once in a lifetime.”

“And your Master is sending me there?” Pazel exclaimed. “Whatever for?”

“I cannot tell you,” said the selk, “but I am glad you have come. Three years have I dwelled in Vasparhaven. When I came, weary and cold, I thought only to spend the night, but the Master bade me remain until the deeper purpose of my visit should reveal itself.”

“Has it, then?”

“We shall see,” said Kirishgan. “There is an old rule concerning the Floor of Echoes: that anyone who sets foot in it must leave it by a passage that exits Vasparhaven, and not return for nine years at the earliest. I am to visit the Floor myself, the Master has declared; therefore my time here is at an end.”

A novice brought a tray with a steaming kettle and two cups, and Kirishgan served them each a cup of fragrant tea. Pazel seized it gladly: it was good to have something to warm his hands. “Don’t you mind being sent away?” he asked.

“Mind?” laughed Kirishgan. “On the contrary. Life is rich here, in ways I cannot hope to describe. But I have grown restless. Friends await me far across the Empire, and beyond it too. I doubt I shall ever again know the peace I have found in Vasparhaven. Yet I came here to heal and to learn, not to escape. The arts I have studied here tell me of the doom that is building over Alifros, gathering like a second Worldstorm. I would fight that storm, and those who are brewing it with their hate. I am eager to resume my journeys.”

“And we’re not eager at all,” said Pazel, “but we have to go, as quickly as we can.”

“You are close to the heart of that doom,” said Kirishgan. “You, and your party, and those ill-favored three who came before. And above all the one you call Thasha. I have never felt a stronger tremor from a passing soul! Who is she, Pazel?”

Pazel looked at him uneasily. He had taken an immediate liking to this Kirishgan, but what of it? They’d been betrayed so many times, and the circumstances of his visit to this temple were odd to say the least.

He was groping for some evasive reply when he noticed with a start that his right arm was colder than the rest of him. He placed his hand on the kettle, but only dimly sensed its warmth. “Please,” he said, “what about the cure?”

“The second part will be given to you soon,” said Kirishgan. “The third you must seek on the Floor of Echoes. But it is no good counting the minutes, Pazel. Tell me of yourself! For sixty summers have come and gone since last I met a woken human-and ten times that since I met a human from the North. Let us share what we can while the music lasts.”

Pazel sighed: there was clearly no way to hurry anyone here along. Kirishgan for his part was insatiably curious. Pazel told him of the Northern Empires, the cities he’d visited on the Chathrand and his earlier ships. He described the great market on Opalt, the splendid mansions of Etherhorde, the jungles of Bramian and the warm white sands of the Outer Isles. But when he spoke of Ormael and the life he had lost there, he felt a strange emptiness, almost an indifference, in himself. And that was a new sort of loss. I could tell him anything. I could say that Ormalis worship ducks. It’s unreal to him and always will be. And what if they never caught up with the Chathrand, never found a way home? Would the North become just a story for them as well-a yarn that unraveled with each telling, a fable about the lives of people they no longer knew?

“Tell me of the crossing,” said Kirishgan.

Pazel spoke of the awful storms, the lives lost on the Ruling Sea, the Vortex that had almost swallowed the ship. He moved on to their landfall at Narybir, the attack of the Karyskan swimmers, their confused reception in Masalym. Kirishgan listened in silence, but when Pazel mentioned Prince Olik he looked up sharply.

“You are friends of Olik?” he said, his feathered eyebrows knitting. “How close? Did the prince give you no token of that friendship to prove your claim?”

Pazel could only shake his head. “Nothing, as far as I know,” he said.

“Then you are his friend indeed,” said Kirishgan, delighted. “Olik hands gems to those he wishes others to be wary of. Had you produced one I should have told you nothing more. But this changes matters. Olik Ipandracon! Years have passed since I saw his noble face. Where does he wander now?”

Pazel told him what he understood of Olik’s fight against the Ravens and Arunis. Kirishgan was dismayed. “Let him not fall into the hands of Macadra!” he said. “She would find a way to kill even a Bali Adro prince, if it suited her. But more likely she would alter his face by magic or mutilation, and hide him in one of the royal ‘hospitals’ in the west, where those she fears to kill outright are locked away.”

“Your Empire seems fond of such places,” said Pazel. “We were locked in one ourselves. Oh, Pitfire, we should have begged Olik to come with us.”

“Do not despair for him yet,” said the selk. “The prince has a knack for survival, as any must who fall afoul of the Ravens. But Bali Adro is not my Empire, Pazel. Indeed, we selk refuse all citizenship save that of Alifros itself. When I first woke into life, Bali Adro was a little territory on the Nemmocian frontier, and this temple was yet to be built, and the waters of Ilvaspar remained frozen even in summer. Lake and mountain claim no citizenship, nor do the eagles drifting above them. So it is with the selk. By ancient practice most countries grant us freedom of movement, and we joke with border guards that we permit them the same. In any case there are few who could prevent our coming and going.”

“But don’t you have a home?” asked Pazel. “The place you were born, a place you dream of going back to?”

Kirishgan’s eyes grew briefly wary. “That is one secret I am sworn to keep,” he said.

There was an awkward silence. Then Kirishgan seemed to reach some decision, and gestured for Pazel to lean close. In a softer voice, he said, “Hear me, lad. For as long as the Ravens have existed there have been those who fought them. I am one of that number: I resolved long ago to resist them until the day I breathe no more. Olik has made a similar choice, and so have many across Bali Adro and even beyond it. Once, the dlomic Emperors stood with us. But for well over a century now the throne of Bali Adro has been merely a tool of the Ravens, the figurehead behind which they marshaled the Platazcra.”

“I thought those Blades were the whole cause of this Platazcra,” said Pazel.

“By no means,” said Kirishgan. “The Blades and their power are an awful drug, but more awful still is the idea. The hideous idea! Dlomu Irrimatak! Dlomu atop the hill, all others at their feet! It is the founding lie of the Platazcra that such is the natural order, the right path for the universe. How else to sustain a cult of infinite conquest? Without a belief that dlomic supremacy was ordained by heaven, there would be no Platazcra, only frenzied warfare among the various keepers of the Blades. The Ravens rule the South, Pazel, because they gave the dlomu a sick, sweet lie to believe in. And now, through that lie, the dlomu are destroying themselves.”

“Everyone believes in that lie,” said Pazel.

Kirishgan sat back, startled.

“I mean, it’s no different in the North,” Pazel went on. “The Shaggat’s cult on Gurishal-that’s infinite conquest, too. And the Secret Fist, Arqual’s network of spies-why, they’re selling the same blary story to the Arquali people: that they should rule everyone, everywhere, because they’re naturally better and Rin wants it that way.”

His voice tightened. “Do you know how many Arqualis have told me I ought to feel grateful, Kirishgan? Told me how lucky I am that Arqual came along and noticed me, lifted me up? Rin’s eyes, half the Arqualis I’ve met think they ought to be in charge of the world. Not consciously, I don’t mean that. It’s half buried, but it’s there.”

The selk’s eyes were suddenly far away. For a moment Pazel was afraid that he had given offense. Then Kirishgan blinked and looked at him again, and his gentle smile returned.

“Your words touch me,” he said. “The old prejudices, the cleaving to the tribe: half buried, you call them. But if you were a selk you might take hope from that assertion. To bury them halfway is a great achievement. When at last they are fully buried, they can decay into the primal soil from whence they came.”

Pazel looked down at his tea. Years of insults, abuses, slurs flowed like a phantom river through his mind. “I understand your words,” he said at last, “but I don’t think you’d see it that way if you were in my shoes.”

“Perhaps not,” said Kirishgan. “But I am not in your shoes. And when I looked at your party from the balcony I saw a miracle: humans and dlomu riding out together, side by side. That is something I have not witnessed since before the days of slavery and plague.”

Pazel was abashed. He was sharing tea with a being whose memory spanned centuries. And lecturing him, with the deep wisdom of his years.

“Kirishgan,” he said, “my hand’s getting colder.”

“That is expected,” said the other.

“Am I really going to go blind?”

The selk was quiet a moment, and closed his feathered eyes. “There is darkness ahead of you,” he said at last, “but of what sort I cannot fathom. Despite my great age I am new to Spider Telling. And even the Master has his limits. ‘We pan for gold, like peasants along the Mai,’ he says, ‘but the river is dark, and the sun shrouded, and the gold we call the future is more often dust than bright stones.’ ”

“I’ve been scared so many times,” said Pazel. “From the first few days on the Chathrand. Out of my wits, if you care to know. But blindness?” He drew a shuddering breath. “I don’t think I can face that, Kirishgan.”

The selk looked at Pazel a moment longer, then drank off his tea abruptly and rose. “The time approaches,” he said. “Let us go.”

Pazel got to his feet, and Kirishgan took a candle from the window and led him quickly through the chambers of wood and glass, the varied people of Vasparhaven bowing and smiling as they went. Finally they reached a spiral stair and began to climb. Three floors they ascended, emerging at last into a small, unlit chamber. It was cold here; the walls were ancient, moss-covered stone. There was a single door, and a round stone table of about elbow height in the center of the room, on which rested a box.

Kirishgan set the candle on the table. Opening the box, he withdrew a small square of parchment, a writing quill and a bottle of ink. Pazel looked upward: he could not make out the ceiling. “What is this place, Kirishgan?” he asked.

“A medetoman, a spider-telling chamber,” said the selk. “Now, let me think-”

He primed the quill with ink, gazed distractedly at the crumbling walls for a moment and then wrote a few neat, swift words on the parchment scrap. He raised the scrap close to the candleflame, drying the ink. As he did so he looked up thoughtfully at Pazel.

“Your country was seized and savaged. It is true that I cannot know what that is like, having no country to lose. Still, I do know something of loss, Pazel Pathkendle. The selk have been killed in great numbers by the Platazcra. We are loath to bow before those we do not love, and our failure to grovel at the bloodstained feet of the Emperor has made us suspect. This was bad enough when the Plazic Blades granted Bali Adro victory after victory. Now that triumph has turned to chaos and defeat, it has grown much worse. Among other things, we are blamed for the decay of the Blades themselves. We talk to eguar, you see.”

“You talk to those monsters?” said Pazel, with a violent start. “Why?”

“Only the elder creatures of this world possess memories to match our own,” said Kirishgan. “We talk to them as we would our peers-as I dare say you would wish to speak to a fellow Ormali, even a dangerous one, if he were to step into this room. But the Ravens imagined that we were plotting their downfall. They could do little against the eguar, but us they have tried to exterminate. They did not quite succeed, but the damage done to our people may never be repaired: not in Alifros at any rate.”

Pazel did not know what to say. He was ashamed of his earlier words to Kirishgan, and his assumptions. At the same time he felt glad that the other had been willing to tell him of such terrible loss.

Then he saw the spider.

It was descending on a bright thread, directly over the candle on the table: a creature of living glass and ruby eyes, twice as large as the one that had bitten him. Kirishgan watched it descend, walking in a slow circle about the table, both hands raised as though in greeting. He was murmuring a chant: “Medet… amir medet… amir kelada medet…” The spider dropped to within a foot of the flame, and its crystalline legs scattered rainbows on the stone.

“Come here, Pazel!” said Kirishgan in an urgent whisper. “Hold out your hand!”

Nervously, Pazel approached. He trusted Kirishgan, but did not relish the thought of a second bite. With some trepidation he raised his hand. Kirishgan took his wrist and tugged him closer, and Pazel’s breath caught in his throat. The spider’s head was inches from his fingertips.

The creature grew quite still. Pazel had the strong feeling that those red eyes were studying him. Two mandibles like slivers of glass reached out cautiously toward his hand. Kirishgan tightened his grip. “Don’t pull away,” he hissed.

It took a great effort not to do so, but Pazel held still, and felt the brush of those strange organs against his fingers. They were barbed; it would have been easy for the spider to grab him with those mandibles and sink its fangs, hidden in that glass knob of a head, into finger or palm.

But this time the spider did not bite him. The mandibles withdrew, and Kirishgan released his wrist.

“Excellent,” he said. “The second stage of your cure has begun.”

“Has it?” said Pazel, starting. “But nothing happened, it barely touched me.”

“Only a touch is required. Now watch.”

The spider turned about on its strand of web, so that its head pointed upward. It remained directly above the candle. As Pazel stared, transfixed, a drop of clear liquid the size of a quail’s egg emerged from its abdomen and descended toward the flame. Though clear, it was thick, and hung suspended like a teardrop. In that moment, Kirishgan reached out and pressed the little square of parchment into the liquid. It passed inside, and the bubble of liquid separated from the spider, and Kirishgan caught it with great care. The spider retreated up its strand and was soon out of sight.

Kirishgan rolled the droplet from hand to hand, inches above the candleflame. It had become a perfect sphere. It was also expanding, and Pazel realized it was hollow. And very light, now, too, for it moved with the slowness of a feather. Then Kirishgan withdrew his hands. The sphere floated above the candle, motionless, glistening in the yellow light.

“This is not part of your cure,” he said, “only a gift, from one traveler to another.”

Kirishgan blew. The sphere drifted toward Pazel; and once away from the candleflame it began a slow descent. “Catch it; it is yours,” said the selk. “But be gentle! The shell is delicate as a prayer.”

Pazel let the tiny sphere settle onto his palm. It was light as a dragonfly, and its surface was an iridescent marvel: every color he could imagine danced in its curves, only to vanish when he looked directly. “It’s beautiful,” he whispered. “Kirishgan, I don’t know that you should give it to me. How can I keep from breaking it?”

“You cannot,” said the selk, “but surely you knew that already? We can possess a thing, but not its loveliness-that always escapes. Close your fist, lock your door, imprison the cherished thing in your home or heart. It makes no difference. When next you look, a part of what you cherished will be gone.”

“I’d like to give it to Thasha,” said Pazel on an impulse.

“A fine idea,” said Kirishgan. “I will send it to her, while your cure progresses. The message within is for all of you.”

Pazel carefully rolled the sphere back into his hands. “Thank you,” he said with feeling. “But Kirishgan, I still don’t understand what that spider had to do with my cure.”

“A great deal,” said Kirishgan. “Pazel, the medets exist in this world the way murths and spirits do: here and elsewhere at once, and detecting us as much by our spirits as our bodies. There was a reason for that bite, and you must seek it on the Floor of Echoes, or there can be no cure. The Actors will help you if they can-but the help of the medets is more important. They are expecting you, though you may not see them.”

He gestured at the door. “You may enter as soon as you like. Leave your boots; they will be returned to you when you exit Vasparhaven. And do not speak on the Floor of Echoes unless bidden to do so: that is essential.”

Pazel looked at him steadily. “This is a sort of test, isn’t it?”

“What isn’t, Pazel?”

“And does everyone who visits the Floor of Echoes take this test?”

Kirishgan nodded. “In one form or another. Tomorrow it will be my turn.” He gripped Pazel’s arm. “I must bid you farewell, sudden friend. Do not forget the heavens: that is what my people say. We are all young beneath the watchful stars. They will wait out our ignorance and errors, and perhaps even forgive them.”

Cradling the glass orb, he descended the stair. Pazel listened to his footsteps fade. It felt strange to be alone in this temple, inside a mountain, on the far side of the world from Ormael. Strange, and eerily peaceful. But he could not linger, he knew. Lifting the candle from the table, he walked to the door and swung it wide.

Another staircase rose before him. It was steep and built of ancient stone, and candles burned in puddles of wax on the crumbling steps, dwindling into the darkness above. Pazel tugged off his boots and set them outside the door.

The stones were wet and cold against his feet. The staircase curved and twisted, and soon Pazel knew that he had climbed the height of several additional floors. He glanced back, and saw to his great surprise that every candle he had passed was extinguished. He cupped his hand protectively around the one he bore.

The staircase ended, as it had begun, with a door, but this one stood open a few inches, and a brighter light was shining through the gap. Pazel crept forward and glimpsed a small fire crackling in a ring of stones. Figures crouched around it, and through their shoulders Pazel caught the flash of a crystal abdomen, the flicker of a ruby eye. Then the door creaked, and the figures leaped up and scattered into the darkness.

All but one. A young dlomic woman remained by the fire, wearing a pale peach-colored wrap that left her black arms bare to the shoulders, and a dark mask on the upper part of her face. She was holding a wide stone bowl over the flames. Of the spider Pazel saw no trace.

The woman beckoned him in, her silver eyes gleaming. Pazel stepped through the doorway, and found that he could see neither the ceiling nor any wall save that behind him. A strong draft, almost a wind, blew about them, making the fire dance and flare and shrink by turns. If he had not known better, Pazel would have thought that they were meeting not underground but on some desolate plain.

His candle went out. The woman held the bowl in one hand and with the other took his own, drawing him down to kneel across from her. As he did so a flute began to play in the darkness: a melancholy tune, full of loss and yearning; but somehow thankful all the same, as though there were gifts the music remembered. Pazel closed his eyes, and it seemed to him that the song drained some of the road-weariness from his body. There were other sounds from the shadows, now: a voice softly matching the flute, a repeated note from the quietest imaginable drum. The woman moved the bowl close to his chin.

“Breathe,” she said.

The bowl held a colorless liquid. He gave it an uncertain sniff, and the woman shook her head. She drew a deep breath, demonstrating, and rather stiffly Pazel imitated her. Whatever was in the bowl had no scent.

“Again,” said the woman; and, “Again,” once more. Still Pazel could not smell a thing, but all at once he realized that his eyes were watering-streaming, in fact. The woman leaned closer, her masked face glowing; Pazel blinked and scattered tears.

It was then that her eyes changed. Silver darkened suddenly to glossy black, and the pupils vanished altogether. The woman’s mouth opened, as though she were as startled as Pazel himself. “Nuhzat!” she said, and emptied the bowl into the fire.

The sudden steam burned Pazel’s eyes. He surged to his feet. It was pitch black, and hands were gripping him on all sides. The dlomic woman was standing before him, her bare feet atop his own. Then a hand daubed something cold and sticky on his eyelids, and Pazel found he could not open them. He wanted to shout aloud, tell them to stop-but Kirishgan had warned him to be silent, and he knew somehow that he must obey.

The woman removed her feet from atop his own; the hands abruptly withdrew. Pazel reached out, trying to find what had become of them. His hands met with nothing at all.

He groped forward, one step, then another. The stone floor pitched like a boat in a gale, and wild thoughts raced through his head. Nuhzat. The dlomic dream-state, the trance. Pazel was frightened, and furious-what was being done to him this time? Why didn’t anyone, ever, ask his consent?

I did, Pazel.

He whirled. That voice! Didn’t he know it? Had it really spoken aloud, or was it an echo in his mind? Whatever it was, it suffused him instantly with an almost unbearable mixture of sadness and hope. He walked forward, blind. Ramachni! he wanted to scream. Where are you?

Afterward it felt as if he wandered for an age on the Floor of Echoes. The mage’s voice called to him again, but now it was one among many: some kind, some desperate, some chuckling with hate. There were heady scents, frigid drafts. There were rough rock walls that ended suddenly in yawning spaces, and tight little rooms with strange objects that he explored with his fingers: tables, statues, a mute piano, an unstrung harp. He found a wooden box with hinges and a padlock, and from within it came a desperate thumping. He brought it close to his ear, and to his horror it was Chadfallow, Ignus Chadfallow, crying from within: Let me out! Let me out!

Time became slippery. One moment he would be creeping along with moss beneath his feet; the next he would find himself rushing headlong, with the sound of a panting animal close on his heels. He was often frightened. And yet in the worst moments, when he was close to falling or giving way to panic, he found the webbed hand of the dlomic woman in his own, and a little peace returned to him, and he went on.

Then all at once a different hand touched his shoulder, and his head was suddenly, perfectly clear. The hand moved to his face, and a warm, wet cloth rubbed his eyes. The sticky resin melted away. Pazel blinked, and found himself facing the Master Teller.

“Welcome back from blindness,” said the old dlomu. “Now I know that I was right to send you here, for the purpose I could not see before is revealed. You needed practice with the dark.”

Pazel shook his head.

“You don’t understand, of course,” said the Teller, smiling. “Never mind: you will.”

They were in a large, lavish, forbidding chamber, like the hall of some subterranean king. There was a stone table, a barren hearth, some hulking cabinets stuffed with books and scrolls. But dominating the chamber was a round pool. It was about a dozen feet wide, with a ring of stairs descending some five or six feet to the bottom, and the palest imaginable blue light that seemed to come from the water itself.

“You stand in the Ara Nyth, the ancient heart of Vasparhaven, and its most sacred chamber,” said the Master. “It is with the water of this pool that I bathed your eyes, and drew the last of the medet’s serum. The pool is fed by a spring deep beneath the lake: a spring fed in turn by the Nythrung, which some call the River of Shadows. Through blindness you have come here, protected by our Actors, but guided by your spirit alone. Therefore you may drink from the pool if you like, and become the first human to do so in a great many years. Or you may depart: turn your back, walk directly away, and leave Vasparhaven by the stairway ahead. Do you know your wish? You may speak now, but softly.”

Pazel realized he was blinking over and over. Nuhzat. The dream that was not a dream. He was trapped in it; he did not know whether to be honored or appalled. “Did it work, Father?” he asked. “Am I cured?”

“You are cured,” said the old dlomu, “but do not imagine that you are leaving the darkness behind. Not yet, at any rate.”

“What happens if I drink from the pool?”

The Master Teller looked at him piercingly. “I can read the possible fates of Alifros, in a tremor, or the twisting of a spider’s thread. But I do not know what the pool would offer you. And I would not tell you, even if I did: that would be to spoil the wine before you drank it.”

“The glass spiders come from here, don’t they?”

The Teller looked pleased. “That was shrewd, my boy. Yes, they enter Vasparhaven by this pool, and it is said that when they no longer come we must abandon the temple forever. That day will certainly come, for I see it in every version of our future. A few years from now, it may be, or when my novices grow old, or perhaps when Alifros itself falls to ruin. But of that darkest future you know more than I do myself. You have borne the agent of that future, the black orb you call the Nilstone. And you have seen the Swarm of Night.”

Pazel shuddered. He did not want to think about the Swarm. “Father, how can I be in nuhzat? I’m not a dlomu.” He looked up at the old seer, pondering. “Unless… Prince Olik said that some humans could go into nuhzat, if they’d been close to dlomu, in the old days before the plague. And my mother came from that time. And Rin knows she has a lot of fits. Could she have been with a dlomu, Father, before she crossed the Ruling Sea? Was she slipping into nuhzat, all those times we thought she was mad?”

The old Teller smiled inscrutably. “Knowledge, Pazel Pathkendle. Hasn’t that been your desire from the start?”

Pazel leaned over the edge of the pool. The bottom was a mosaic of fine blue tiles. “I’m not going to drink,” he said. “Don’t take it the wrong way, Father, but I’ve had quite enough of-”

He stopped. The Master Teller was gone without a trace. He stood alone in the chamber, facing the dimly glowing pool.

Alarmed, he turned in a circle. Behind him was a dark doorway, and a staircase leading down. He felt the temptation sharply… but there lay the pool. He bent down and dipped his hand into the water. It was icy cold.

Knowledge. What good did it do? Was he happier for knowing the mind-bruising languages of murths and eguar? The tortured life of Sandor Ott? The fact that something as ghastly as the Swarm lurked just outside Alifros, pressing in, like an ogre’s face at the window? What would he learn this time? Something even more terrible, probably.

He cupped some water in his hand, and winced: even that little puddle on his palm burned with cold. He brought it close to his mouth. No, by the Pits. He did not want any more visions. He deserved not to see.

He drank.

At first the cold all but scalded his lips, but when he swallowed it was mere water he tasted, cool but pleasant. He dipped his hand and drank again, his fear abruptly gone. It was too late anyway, and despite the earlier wine and tea, he was thirsty.

After his fourth drink something made him look up. Directly across the pool a figure crouched, in almost the same posture as Pazel himself. A woman. She was no more than a silhouette above the pale blue light.

Was she the one who had met him in the first chamber, the one whose hand had always been there to catch him? He blinked. Something was still wrong with his eyes, or his mind. For although there was enough light to see her, he could not decide if she were young or old, human or dlomu. “Who are you?” he whispered.

The woman shook her head: speaking, apparently, was once more forbidden. Her very silence, however, woke a sudden and almost overpowering desire in Pazel: a desire to see her clearly, to know her, touch her. More than anything, to speak her name.

He rose and started around the pool-and the woman, quick and agile, jumped up and moved in the opposite direction, keeping the water between them. Pazel changed directions: she did the same. Heart hammering, he feinted one way, then dashed another. She mirrored him perfectly. She could not be fooled.

He stopped dead. Their eyes met; he had a vague idea that she was teasing him. Fine, he thought obstinately, you win. He stepped down into the pool, and the cold closed like teeth upon his ankles.

The woman gazed at him, standing very still. Pazel gritted his teeth and stepped down again, and then again. The water was now above his waist, and the cold was a shout of pain that would not stop. Two more steps to the bottom. There were deep cracks in the floor, some wide enough to put his foot in, and an idea came to him that the cracks led down infinitely far, into a dark turbulence beyond the bounds of Alifros. He descended another step, and then the woman put out her hand.

Stop. The command was as plain as if she had spoken aloud. She crouched again, lowering both hands into the pool, and when she lifted them he saw that they held something beautiful.

It was a transparent sphere, very much like the one Kirishgan had formed with the spider’s liquid, but this one was as wide as a bushel basket, and growing even as he watched. Like the other sphere it seemed light in her hands, and very fragile. Colors and whorls and tiny translucent shapes danced over its surface, racing like clouds. Like a soap bubble, it rested on the surface of the pool, and very soon it had grown so large that Pazel had to retreat one step, and then another, until he was back upon the pool’s rim, watching her distorted features through that sleek, uncanny shape.

Pazel knew now what he must do. Watching her, he raised his hands and laid them very carefully upon the sphere.

It trembled at his touch. The woman stared at him, cautious as a deer, and Pazel found he could barely breathe. He had been missing her before he knew she existed. Or had been a part of her before he ever fully became himself.

Mother?

He moved toward her slowly, keeping his hands upon the sphere. He knew somehow that she was alarmed, but this time she did not step away. The sphere so unthinkably delicate. Perhaps she did not dare to move.

Neda?

Islands formed between his fingers; continents turned before his eyes. Their hands were on the surface of the world. They were lifting countries, moving seas. She was frightened, yet she laughed silently, and so did he.

Thasha?

He could feel the world’s winds across his knuckles; the ocean currents tickling his palms. It was like the best moments of his Gift, when the joy of an exquisite language, a language not of suffering but of song, burst open like a rose in his mind. He could look wide across the sphere and see whole coastlines; he could peer close and see the smallest details. A crumbling glacier, a forest draped with sleeping butterflies, a tiny houseboat in a river delta, a diving bell abandoned on a beach.

Klyst?

There was Etherhorde, smoking, bustling; there were her fleets on the prowl. And Aya Rin, there was Ormael, her flat little houses, her cobbled streets, her rubbishy port. The orchard settlements, his houserow, his house. The very window of the room he’d crawled out of years before, clutching a knife and an ivory whale.

Pazel blinked, startled, and found his gaze had flown westward thousands of miles. Now he was following a real whale as it hurled itself, suicidally, upon a beach. It wallowed in the surf, exhausted, possibly dying. Then an armed mob rushed down the beach and surrounded it. One of them, the bravest, put his hand in the whale’s mouth and extracted a golden scepter, and when he held it high the other men fell to their knees in prayer. And suddenly the whale was no longer a whale but a young man, or possibly the corpse of one.

But that scepter: solid gold, but crowned with a black shard of crystal. It was Sathek’s Scepter, the Mzithrini relic, and that meant the island must be Pazel blinked again: the scene was gone. He was only an arm’s length from the woman, and more desperate than ever to know who she was. But now upon the world-sphere there moved a teeming darkness, a boiling cloud. It passed over towns and cities and left them blackened; it moved over the land and left blight. The woman saw it too, and he felt her calling to him silently: Fight it, stop it, stop the Swarm! The Swarm! How could she expect him to fight it? How could anyone fight for a world plagued by that?

And yet (Pazel met the woman’s eyes again) it was no greater than what they shared, the bond between them, the growing trust. He felt suddenly that this was the knowledge he had taken with those gulps of water: the absurdly simple gift of trust and peacefulness. For a moment he did not care if she were human or dlomu or something drastically different. He knew the joy of being close to her, and that was enough.

The darkness began to retreat. Light shone again from the sphere, and once more the winds flowed clean over his hands. They stood like twin statues, and Pazel sensed the woman’s fear ebbing away. Such peace! Could you still want conquests, power over others, worship and dominion and treasure, once you’d felt such peace?

To notice peace when you had it. That was treasure. That was what waking was for.

Through the glass he saw her wide adoring smile. She closed her eyes, and in repose she was so lovely that he could not help it, he lifted a hand and reached to touch her, and the glass sphere burst and rained in a million shards into the pool.

He was alone.

Pazel whirled: one small glass spider crawled from the water and vanished across the floor. He raced around the pool. Gone, gone: he should have been howling with loss. But he could not. He had loved her (loved what?), but her loss was suddenly distant and elusive, as though they had parted years ago.

No, not years. Centuries.

He stared at the empty chamber, shaking, convulsing. There was no source of warmth; he had to move or die. He groped for the exit, dripping, sensing already the deeper cold that lay ahead.

The stairway spat him out upon the lakeshore, half a mile from Vasparhaven, among tall rocks sheathed in ice. The first thing he saw was Hercol and Alyash and Counselor Vadu, talking to a squat figure beside a long wooden boat.

Pazel staggered from the doorway, and the wind went through him like knives. But a bit farther on a great fire blazed, and Ibjen stood warming his shoes. Thasha and Neeps were there as well. They raced to his side, and Thasha wrapped a woolen towel about his shoulders and dragged him to the fire, swearing like a Volpek.

He watched her gruffly as she dried his hair. “You lunatic,” she said, her voice shrill with concern. “You’re cold as a blary fish. How did you get soaked like that?”

Pazel closed his eyes.

“Get nearer to the fire. Take off that mucking shirt!”

He obeyed. Neeps made a joke about him needing a bath anyway, but fell silent when he glared. Thasha was looking at him strangely.

“A novice came from the temple,” she said. “He gave me something gorgeous, in a tiny wooden box. He said it came from you.”

Pazel wished she would just stop talking. He was clutching at memories, like fragments of a story heard once in childhood, and never again. A strange woman, a shining globe.

“We’re crossing the lake tonight,” said Thasha, drying him vigorously, “in three boats. If Hercol can make himself understood, that is. You should go and talk to the fisherfolk, Pazel. They’re mizralds, and we just can’t tell what they’re trying to say. I think they’re afraid of the north shore, but Hercol-”

“Ouch!” he snapped. “Not so hard, damn it!”

Thasha lowered the towel. “Baby.”

“Savage.”

Their eyes met. He touched his scalp, brought away a bloody finger. He was quite annoyed with her, and wondered at the months of agony he’d let her cause. Then Thasha reached into his hair, and brought away something small and hard. It gleamed in the firelight: a shard of crystal, which even as he reached out a finger melted like ice and was gone.