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.