“If I fight him outside and he takes to the air, it’s all over,” John returned, as if he were talking about backgammon strategy. “And though it’s crossed my mind we’re walking through a morass of plots here, it’s to no one’s advantage to have the dragon stay in the Deep. The rest of it’s all none of my business. Now, are you going to guide us, or do we go about the streets asking folk where the gnomes might be found?”
To Jenny’s surprise and probably a little to his own, Gareth offered his services as a guide.
“Tell me about Zyerne, Gar,” Jenny said now, thrusting her hands deep into her jacket pockets as she walked. “Who is she? Who was her teacher? What Line was she in?”
“Teacher?” Gareth had obviously never given the matter a thought. “Line?”
“If she is a mage, she must have been taught by someone.” Jenny glanced up at the tall boy towering beside her, while they detoured to avoid a gaggle of passersby around a couple of street-comer jugglers. Beyond them, in a fountain square, a fat man with the dark complexion of a southerner had set up a waffle stand, bellowing his wares amid clouds of steam that scented the raw, misty air for yards.
“There are ten or twelve major Lines, named for the mages that founded them. There used to be more, but some have decayed and died. My own master Caerdinn, and therefore I and any other pupils of his, or of his teacher Spaeth, or Spaeth’s other students, are all in the Line of Herne. To a mage, knowing that I am of the Line of Heme says—oh, a hundred things about my power and my attitude toward power, about the kinds of spells that I know, and about the kind that I will not use.”
“Really?” Gareth was fascinated. “I didn’t know it was anything like that. I thought that magic was just something—well, something you were born with.”
“So is the talent for art,” Jenny said. “But without proper teaching, it never comes to fullest fruition; without sufficient time given to the study of magic, sufficient striving ...” She broke off, with an ironic smile at herself. “All power has to be paid for,” she continued after a moment. “And all power must come from somewhere, have been passed along by someone.”
It was difficult for her to speak of her power; aside from the confusion of her heart about her own power, there was much in it that any not mageborn simply did not understand. She had in all her life met only one who did, and he was presently over beside the waffle stand, getting powdered sugar on his plaids.
Jenny sighed and came to a halt to wait for him at the edge of the square. The cobbles were slimy here with sea air and offal; the wind smelled offish and, as everywhere in the city of Del, of the intoxicating wildness of the sea. This square was typical of the hundreds that made up the interlocking warrens of Bel’s Dockmarket, hemmed in on three-and-a-half sides by the towering, rickety tenements and dominated by the moldering stones of a slate-gray clock tower, at whose foot a neglected shrine housed the battered image of Quis, the enigmatic Lord of Time. In the center of the square bubbled a fountain in a wide basin of chip-edged granite, the stones of its rim worn smooth and white above and clotted beneath with the black-green moss that seemed to grow everywhere in the damp air of the city. Women were dipping water there and gossiping, their skirts hiked up almost to their thighs but their heads modestly covered in clumsy wool veils tied in knots under their hair to keep them out of the way.
In the mazes of stucco and garish color of the Dockmarket, John’s outlandishness hadn’t drawn much notice.
The sloping, cobbled streets were crowded with sojourners from three-fourths of the Realm and all the Southern Lands: sailors with shorn heads and beards like coconut husks; peddlers from the garden province of Istmark in their old-fashioned, bundly clothes, the men as well as the women wearing veils; moneychangers in the black gabardine and skullcaps that marked them out as the Wanderer’s Children, forbidden to own land; whores painted to within an inch of their lives; and actors, jugglers, scarf sellers, rat killers, pickpockets, cripples, and tramps. A few women cast looks of dismissive scorn at Jenny’s uncovered head, and she was annoyed at the anger she felt at them.
She asked, “How much do you know about Zyerne? What was she apprenticed as in the Deep?”
Gareth shrugged. “I don’t know. My guess would be in the Places of Healing. That was where the greatest power of the Deep was supposed to lie—among their healers. People used to journey for days to be tended there, and I know most of the mages were connected with them.”
Jenny nodded. Even in the isolated north, among the children of men who knew virtually nothing of the ways of the gnomes, Caerdinn had spoken with awe of the power that dwelled within the Places of Healing in the heart of the Deep of Ylferdun.
Across the square, a religious procession came into view, the priests of Kantirith, Lord of the Sea, walking with their heads muffled in their ceremonial hoods, lest an unclean sight distract them, the ritual wailing of the flutes all but drowning out their murmured chants. Like all the ceremonials of the Twelve Gods, both the words and the music of the flutes had been handed down by rote from ancient days; the words were unintelligible, the music like nothing Jenny had heard at Court or elsewhere.
“And when did Zyerne come to Bel?” she asked Gareth, as the muttering train filed past.
The muscles of the boy’s jaw tightened. “After my mother died,” he said colorlessly. “I—I suppose I shouldn’t have been angry at Father about it. At the time I didn’t understand the way Zyerne can draw people, sometimes against their will.” He concentrated his attention upon smoothing the ruffles of his sleeve for some moments, then sighed. “I suppose he needed someone. I wasn’t particularly good to him about Mother’s death.”
Jenny said nothing, giving him room to speak or hold his peace. From the other end of the square, another religious procession made its appearance, one of the southern cults that spawned in the Dockmarket like rabbits; dark-complexioned men and women were clapping their hands and singing, while skinny, androgynous priests swung their waist-length hair and danced for the little idol borne in their midst in a carrying shrine of cheap, pink chintz. The priests of Kantirith seemed to huddle a little more closely in their protecting hoods, and the wailing of the flutes increased. Gareth spared the newcomers a disapproving glance, and Jenny remembered that the King of Bel was also Pontifex Maximus of the official cult; Gareth had no doubt been brought up in the most careful orthodoxy.
But the din gave them the illusion of privacy. For all any of the crowd around them cared, they might have been alone; and after a time Gareth spoke again.
“It was a hunting accident,” he explained. “Father and I both hunt, although Father hasn’t done so lately. Mother hated it, but she loved my father and would go with him when he asked her to. He teased her about it, and made little jokes about her cowardice—but he wasn’t really joking. He can’t stand cowards. She’d follow him over terrible country, clinging to her sidesaddle and staying up with the hunt; after it was over, he’d hug her and laugh and ask her if it wasn’t worth it that she’d plucked up her courage—that sort of thing. She did it for as long as I can remember. She used to lie and tell him she was starting to learn to enjoy it; but when I was about four, I remember her in her hunting habit—it was peach-colored velvet with gray fur, I remember—just before going out, throwing up because she was so frightened.”
“She rounds like a brave lady,” Jenny said quietly.
Gareth’s glance flicked up to her face, then away again. “It wasn’t really Father’s fault,” he went on after a moment. “But when it finally did happen, he felt that it was. The horse came down with her over some rocks—in a side-saddle you can’t fall clear. She died four or five days later. That was five years ago. I—” He hesitated, the words sticking in his throat. “I wasn’t very good to him about it.”