They were not his eyes. They were green, yes, but it was the green of the deepest northern seas, the icy, oozy green of the weeds that come up with your anchor from those unhealed places that have never seen the sun since the world began. They were hunting the sun, those eyes, they meant to eat the sun; but infinitely more terrifying was the fact that nothing else of him had changed. “It will look like me,” he had warned us, and so it did—exactly like him, only more so, in the way that trusted faces so often become hugely, monstrously familiar when my dreams turn nightmare. Perhaps we are all, even wizards, no more than faded sketches of the good we contain, the evil we might have done: if that is so, what faced me now was the original of my friend, the sum of his nature. He was all himself, all his possible self, and he was nothing, nothing but destruction. No, I did not turn to stone seeing him, as people do in the old tales; but neither did I escape whole. And the rest is my business.
The griga’ath paid no attention to me. It moved past me, still wearing the face and form—and even the smell, like an old boat in the sun—of someone I loved. Fire was just beginning to leak through the body now, twinkling coyly between the ribs and under the arms. Griga’aths blaze without burning, eternally; in time they become exactly like stars cloaked in human skin, shattering and swallowing what they come near. It halted a step before the darkness, turning my friend’s body this way and that: strangely uncertain, even looking back once. I hid my face from it, like the others.
Someone was pounding furiously on the real door of the real room. As though the noise had suddenly tipped the balance, the griga’ath took a single stride forward and passed from this world. I could still see it for what seemed a very long time, glowing steadily brighter as it grew smaller, spinning slowly away down the black archway that runs between what we know and what we cannot bear to know. I think I cried after it; if I did, the sound was lost when the door gave way and Karsh lunged into the room. Tikat was just behind him.
THE INNKEEPER
I suppose I should give thanks that the bottles hit the Kinariki wagoner and not me when they toppled from the taproom shelves. The Kinariki was paying his score at the time: his hand pulled across mine— courteously leaving his change behind—as he widened his eyes and sank to the floor without a sound. Do the gods expect my gratitude for that? Very well. I give thanks.
And that is all the gods get from me for the rest of my life, and you may tell them so if you’re much in the habit of chatting them up. Between one minute and the next, The Gaff and Slasher, my home for thirty years, came crashing to ruination around me, as I knew would happen the day I let those three women cross my threshold. The bottles were followed by every mug and wine glass I owned, and then by the hanging lamps. I thought javak at first, though we haven’t had one of those corkscrew storms since Rosseth was small. But when the two windows blew out—not in, out—as though they’d never been there, and the shelves behind the bar started pulling loose with a long squeal of old nails in old planks, I knew that this was no javak. The beer pumps were groaning and bucking under my hand, trying to plunge free of their sockets; the few rusty tag-ends of armor I had anchored to the walls to keep people from stealing them shot across the room like crossbow bolts. A hide-factor from Devarati got hit that time, but I think he recovered.
Earthquake? Earthquake? There wasn’t so much as a twitch out of that floor—my customers, the conscious ones, were down flat, clinging to it with their fingernails, like lizards to a wall, while benches and broken glass and overturned tables hurtled past them. Within thirty seconds, I was the one object still standing in the taproom, supported by nothing but outrage. For I never doubted the source of this catastrophe for one instant. Storms and volcanoes and family spats of the gods be damned—the cause, the bloody cause, was only a few bloody inches above my head, and I was already on my way up there even though I may not have seemed to be moving at all. I was just waiting for my feet to catch up with my fury.
Tikat staggered through the outside door just then, crouching low to stay on his own feet. When I came out from behind the bar to meet him, I felt like a very small boat pushing off from shore into a howling rapids. Tikat was yapping something at me and pointing upwards. I couldn’t hear him in the confusion, but I knew he must be asking about his mad white Lukassa. I shook my head and shouted back, “Where’s the boy? Have you seen the damned boy?”
He never bothered to answer, but only reeled on by me, treading on customers and armor bits alike, slipping in the puddles of mingled ale and wine, heading for the stair. I scrambled after him, pushing him out of the way well before we reached the landing. No one was going to break down that door but me.
TIKAT
Down in the taproom it was bad enough. Even with the windows gone, the pressure around me was so great that it was like being under water when I dived and dived for Lukassa. I found myself holding my breath for fear of drowning, and pushing the air away with my spread arms as I struggled forward. But on the stair there was a hot, stinking wind blowing straight down, battering Karsh and me from wall to railing while the steps themselves flew apart under our feet. We seemed to be making no headway at alclass="underline" now we were birds beating against a storm, flying slowly backward, counting it progress to lose only a little ground. How long this went on, I cannot tell you.
I think today—I say I think—that I might well have given up then, but for Karsh. Not that he spared me even a glance after he thrust me aside, let alone any encouragement; indeed, he missed his footing once and lurched full into me, and would have had the two of us bouncing all the way down those splintering steps if I had not been able to catch hold of him and brace myself in time. But he never lost heart or looked back, that fat, roaring man. He bent his fleshy neck and bowed his shoulders, and lumbered ahead, heaving and cursing, hacking out a way through the wind. I followed, gratefully riding his wake, unable to imagine what could be driving him on so savagely. Because it was Karsh, you see. If it had been anyone else, surely I would have understood, but it was Karsh.
On the landing he paused for a moment, shaking himself heavily, and I saw his face, huge with that pale rage that takes him over when nothing is going as he would have it. The blue eyes were darkening as I watched, turning almost lavender; his teeth were set savagely in his lower lip, which was bleeding. Then he was off again, charging along a corridor choked with falling plaster and roiling dust and shrieking half-clad guests trampling each other to reach the stairs. I was knocked down myself, almost immediately, but managed to roll aside and get to my feet by climbing up and over someone in a purple night-robe. The hallway was booming and rippling, like the metal sheets those actors used to use for thunder. I stumbled along, arms across my face, toward the tafiya’s room.
Karsh was already there, hammering on the door, rattling the knob, pounding again, then beginning to heave his whole body against it: one slow, muffled thump after another. For once there was no breath in him for bellowing—I could hear it wheeze out each time he smashed himself into the thick old wood. I was not quite up with him when the door finally burst open and we fell through.
At the far end of the room there was nothing. There was an emptiness. No, listen, don’t interrupt, listen to me. The emptiness was a mouth: you could see its edges writhing and folding like lips, beginning to close, and the foul wind seethed between them. Far away, or far in, or far down, a bright, bright spark tumbling forever, blazing bravely in the void. I knew what it was.