“Before I could walk or talk I started making things come to me if they looked interesting. One day, when I’d just learned to crawl, he left me with a neighbor while he went to market. Her bitch had a new litter. He came back to find that my cot was empty, and the neighbor was having hysterics, and there was an extra puppy sucking at the bitch’s teats.
“All that low-level stuff—stuff on the surface of things—it’s never been any problem for me. Some ways it’s been too easy. If you find everything easy—if you never have to puzzle anything out—then you never have to think how anything connects, because it doesn’t, up in the easy levels. That happens way down, at deeper and deeper levels, as the connections on the level above connect with each other. If you wanted to change the whole world you’d have to go right down to the single root of everything, below the fifth and below the sixth to where the Tree of the World grows all alone, that carries the stars on the tips of its branches, and the clouds, and the singing birds, and the tears of humankind.
“It isn’t really like that, of course, it’s just how it feels, like the layers of rock in the cliff or breathing a different kind of air. The last bit, about the World Tree, comes from a poem Fodaro gave me to learn….”
He paused and looked up, tense and watchful.
“There’s someone at the cottage,” he said. “He’s trying to open the locks. So he’s not a Watcher—they’d have no problem. There—he’s done it, he thinks. So he’s a magician—third-level at a guess. There’s no one that good round here…. Wait. Ah, now get out of that, you bastard….”
“You don’t think he just happened along?” said Ribek.
“Didn’t feel like it. He’d come in a hurry. I think the Watchers didn’t want to lose two more of themselves, so they sent somebody they could spare. We should be all right for tonight—I’ll keep an eye on him. I’ll take the sheep down to the farmer first thing, and then we’d better be on our way.”
“Do you know where we’re going?” said Maja.
“Away from here, for a start,” said Benayu. “As far and as fast as possible without using magic. That means south. After that we’re going to start looking for this Ropemaker of yours, though I’ve no idea how or where. Jex might know, but he can’t tell us.”
“He’ll be somewhere in the Empire, won’t he?” said Saranja. “That must mean south too.”
“Are we going to have enough money?” said Ribek. “We haven’t got any. We don’t use Empire money in the Valley, and in the story there were endless bribes to pay wherever you went. Or have things changed?”
“No, of course not. It’s always been like that. Fodaro says…used to say…the Watchers are all for it, because it means people’s lives are one long struggle against corrupt officials and they don’t have time to worry about what the Watchers are up to. I’ve brought what we had in the cottage—I hope that’ll get us to one of the safe places Fodaro told me about, and there’ll be people there who’ll give us money. If not I’ll have to use magic. It’s too dangerous to make or fetch money, because any good magician can smell that at once, and it’s a nasty death if you’re found with any you got that way, but I should be able to fetch one or two things we can sell.”
“I may have something,” said Saranja, beginning to fish in under the coarse, high-necked blouse a farmer’s wife had given her on her way to Woodbourne. “My warlord was in council when his brother attacked. He liked to have me there, sitting on a stool by his knee, wearing a lot of his jewelery and precious little else, because I was the mother of his sons. It was a way of showing how rich and powerful he was. This was one of his prize possessions. It’s a sort of all-purpose amulet. It’s famous. It’s even got a name, Zald-im-Zald. It didn’t really belong to him, or anyone else. He’d looted it from another warlord who’d looted it from somewhere else, and so on.
“Anyway, there I was sitting on that stupid stool and smiling away till my face ached, when all of a sudden the castle was full of his brother’s soldiers. There hadn’t been any warning. Somebody must have betrayed him and opened the gates. Everyone was rushing around screaming. Five years I’d been longing for something like this to happen and worked out exactly what I was going to do if it did. I ran down to one of the laundry rooms and put some clothes on over what I was wearing and ran on to the kitchens. Nobody bothered me—they were all eating and drinking themselves stupid—but I grabbed a sack of scraps and I was out through an unused sewer-pipe I’d found and well into the desert before I remembered I was still wearing Zald-im-Zald. We’ll have to take it apart and sell it stone by stone, of course. We’d never find anyone who could pay for the whole thing. It isn’t as if I’d stolen it, at least no more than my warlord had, and I reckoned he owed me. Three times over he owed me, three times over. Once for myself and once for each of my sons. I was never even allowed to nurse them, you know. They were brought up by eunuchs in another part of the palace. They weren’t even told I was their mother. Oh, it’s mine all right.”
While she was speaking she’d carefully eased out from under her blouse and laid across it a prodigious ornament, far more than a necklace or pendant, a kind of chestpiece the size of a child’s face. At its center was an oval of brown-gold amber, clear as a drop of liquid but filled with inward fire from the refracted and reflected sunset. This was circled by faceted red gems, each the size of a man’s thumbnail, and out from these fanned sprays of smaller jewels, dark gold and then paler and then almost colorless, all set into a lacework of gold, stiff enough to hold its shape but flexing to follow the contours of the flesh beneath.
“Perhaps you’d better have a look at it, Benayu,” she said. “It’s supposed to be full of powers, but everyone’s forgotten what they are.”
He leaned forward, held his hand for a moment above the ornament, and carefully withdrew it and sat staring at it, breathing deeply. To Maja he seemed suddenly more involved, more alive, than at any time since he’d sworn his oath in the woods above the sheep pastures.
“Well,” he said. “It’s pretty near dormant at the moment, apart from one little stone. Just as well—if it was all activated it would send out a signal strong as a beacon. And there’s a curse on anyone who tries to question it or take it apart. I think I can deal with that, but you’d better not be wearing it while I’m at it.”
Saranja slipped the gold chain over her head and handed the ornament to him, but as she let go of the chain the strange vague magical feeling that Maja had all along sensed coming from her suddenly ceased. In the same instant she collapsed forward, almost into the embers of the fire. Maja jumped to her feet and helped Benayu haul her clear and turn her over. She seemed to be fast asleep, her face calm, her breathing slow and heavy. Benayu felt her pulse and nodded.
“Nothing we can do,” he said, and returned to the jewel. “It’ll be that active stone. This one. It makes the wearer tireless. Only you pay for it after. It must have been made to switch itself on when the wearer starts to get exhausted. How long ago was that?”
“Five days in the desert, she told us,” said Ribek, reaching for her wrist from where he lay. “And at least four since. She may have taken it off at night. I didn’t see.”
“And she’s still breathing? It ought to have killed her. How’s her pulse?”
“Not bad. Very slow, but fairly strong.”
“All right. Just leave her there for the moment while I close it down,” said Benayu.
He knelt beside Saranja’s body and laid the jewel across her chest. Maja sensed a blip of power suddenly woken, and Saranja began to stir. Supporting her left hand with his right, with his other hand Benayu moved the tip of its middle finger in gentle circles over one of the jewels, three times one way and then three times the other. Maja could feel a second blip as the power subsided and Saranja returned to sleep.