“We are alive,” she whispered, practical and fearful at once. “I would rather be alive, even sweating like this. Having seen death, I would rather be alive.”
“I can raise them up again, if we need to…”
“Not now,” she begged. “I am so tired. I have been afraid for so long. Not now.”
We lit the torch and followed the footprints of those who had fled, but the hope of escape was vain. The great room of tombs was lit with a thousand torches and there were watchers at every corner of it. I could Read Mandor in the room, glowing with anger. I could read Dazzle there, as well, writhing thoughts, like a nest of serpents twining upon one another in incestuous frenzy. A telltale tickle at the edge of my mind pushed me back behind a towering midfeather which held up the groined ceiling. I hugged Silkhands to me. “We can’t stay here. Huld is searching for us. We need stone between us and him…”
My words were interrupted by a fury of sound, drums throbbing, a wild clatter of wheels, and a thunder upon the bridge. Trumpets called. Silkhands said, “So, someone has come to give Mandor a Great Game. Those are the last of the wood wagons being driven across the bridge with fuel for the ovens…”
We heard Mandor scream instructions at the guards. The doors clanged shut and there was a scurry of purposeful movement. We withdrew into the shadows of the corridor.
“I have not slept in days,” said Silkhands. “If we may not get out, let us hide away and rest. I cannot Heal myself of this weariness much longer, and I am hungry…”
I was hungry, too, and we had nothing with us to eat or drink. As for sleep, however, that we could do. We went from squared and vaulted rooms into dim bat-hung halls where dawn light filtered down from grilled shafts twenty manheights above us, and from there into darker corridors lined with vaults bearing each the sign and legend of him who slept there. At last we found a high, dry shelf three-quarters hidden behind hanging stone pillars down which water dripped endlessly in a mournful cadence. There we would be hidden by stone in all directions, hidden by shadow, hidden by sleep. We shared the last of Windlow’s herb and fixed our minds upon peace. Lost in the darkness of the place of tombs, we slept.
Mavin
I WOKE TO A CLICKING SOUND, a small, almost intimate sound in the vastness of that stone pillared cave. It reminded me of the death beetle we had often heard in the long nights in School House, busy in the rafters, the click, click, click timing the life of the Tower as might the ticking of a clock. I was still half asleep when I peered over the edge of the ledge we lay upon. The cavern drifted in pale light, mist strewn, and at the center of it a woman was sitting in a tall, wooden chair, knitting. She had not been there before. I had not heard her arrive. For the moment I thought it was a dream and pinched myself hard enough to bring an involuntary exclamation, half throttled. Silkhands heard it, wakened to it, sat up suddenly, saying, “What is it? Oh, what is it?” Then she, too, heard the sound and peered at the distant figure, her expression of blank astonishment mirroring my own.
Before I could answer her, if I had had any answer to give, the woman looked up toward us and called, “You may as well come down. It will make conversation easier.” Then she returned to her work, the needles in her hands flashing with a hard, metallic light. I stared away in the direction we had entered this vault. Nothing. All was silence, peace, no trumpets, no drums, no torches. Finally, I heaved myself down from the ledge and helped Silkhands as we climbed down to the uneven floor of the cave. The clicking was now interspersed with a creaking sound, the sound of the chair in which the woman sat, rocking to and fro. Once, long, long ago I had seen some such chair. I could not remember when. The yarn she used frothed between her hands as though alive, pouring from the needles in a flood which spread its loose loops over her knees and cascaded to the stone. The speed of her knitting increased to a whirling rattle, the creaking of the chair faster and faster, like a bellows breathing, until she was finished all at once. She flung the completed work onto the stone before her where it lay like a pile of woolen snow.
“What have you made?” asked Silkhands, doubtfully. I knew she was unable to think of anything else to say. I could think of nothing at all. The woman fixed us with great, inhuman eyes, yellow and bright as those of a bird.
“I have knitted a Morfus,” she said in a deep voice. “Soon it will get up and go about its work, but just now it is resting from the pain of being created.” The piled fabric before her shivered as she spoke, and I thought it moaned. “Would you care for some cabbage?” the woman asked.
Silkhands said, “I would be very grateful for anything to eat, madam. I am very hungry.” When she spoke, my mouth filled with saliva, even though I hated cabbage raw or cooked and always had. The woman found a cabbage somewhere beside herself in the chair and offered it. Silkhands tore off a handful of leaves.
The woman said, “It is better than nothing. Although I do not like it as it is.” She stared intently at the vegetable in her hand, turning it this way and that. It fuzzed before my eyes, fuzzed, misted, became a roasted fowl. The pile of fabric moaned once more, sat up, extended long, knitted tentacles and pushed itself erect. Vaguely manshaped, it swayed where it stood, featureless and without much substance. I could see through it in spots. An impatient snort from the woman brought my attention back to her. She had given the fowl to Silkhands.
“Try this instead. Tell me if it tastes right.”
Silkhands tore a leg from the fowl and took a bit of it, wiping her face on her arm, nodding. “It tastes…only a little like cabbage.”
“Ah. Well, then, it’s an improvement. Still, you could do much better, being a Healer, if that lazy youth would help you.”
“I don’t understand,” said Silkhands, remembering at last to offer me some of the fowl. “What do you mean, I could do better?”
“Have you ever Healed a chicken?” the woman asked.
“Never.”
“Ah. Well then, perhaps you could not do as well as I have done. If you had ever Healed a chicken, you would know how the flesh is made. And if that boy were to Read you as you thought about that, then he could change the cabbage far better than I have done.”
“Pardon, madam,” I said. “But I have not that Talent.”
“Nonsense. You have all the Talents there are, from Dorn to Didir, or from Didir to Dorn, as the case may be. You have the Gamesmen of Barish, I know it. Even if I had not felt the spirit of Dorn moving in the corridors of the earth like a waking thunder I would still have known. Was it not Seen? Was it not foretold? Why else am I here and are you where you are?”
“The Garnesmen of Barish?” By this time I was certain that I still slept, dreaming in the high stone wall on the little ledge. “I don’t know what you…”
“These,” she flicked a knitting needle at me, catching the loop of my pouch and rattling the Gamesmen within it. “These. You have already taken Dorn into being. Soon you must take others, or if not soon then late. By the seven hells, you’re not afraid of them are you, boy?”
“Afraid? Of them? Them…who?”
“Witless,” she commented acidly, looking me over from head to foot as though she could not believe what she saw. “Witless and spitless, no more juice than a parsnip. By the seven hells, boy, you raised up the ancient Kings of Bannerwell. How did you think you did that? Did you perhaps whittle them up out of a bit of wood and your little knife? Or whistle them up like a wind? Or brew them, perhaps, like tea? How did you do it, gormless son of an unnamed creation? Hmmm? Answer me!”
I was beginning to be very angry. As I grew wider awake and even slightly less hungry (the fowl was filling, though it did taste like cabbage), I became angrier by the moment. I was distracted, however, for at that moment the Morfus decided to do whatever it was a Morfus did. Moaning shrilly, it staggered off toward one side of the great cavern and began to climb the stone. It lurched and flapped like laundry upon a slack line, wavering and lashing itself upward.