“Old woman,” he says, and his voice was now loud enough to make the valley rumble, so that stones broke loose from the walls and rolled down to the bottom, breaking trees as a person would break broomstraws, “I tell you for the last time. Move! I wish to pass.”
At last she looked up at him and says, “I am old and weary and the day is hot. If you will bring me water to slake my thirst, I will move out of your way, great lord.”
Crooked was not pleased, but he wasn’t mannerless, and the woman was in truth very, very old, so he went to the stream beside the road and filled his hands and brought it back to her. When she had drunk it down, she shook her head.
“It does not touch my thirst. I must have more.”
Crooked took a great boulder and with his hand of bronze he hollowed it into a mighty cup. When he had filled it in the stream he brought it back to her, and it was so heavy, when he set it down it made the ground jump. Still, the old woman lifted it with one hand and drained it, then shook her head. “More,” she says. “My mouth is still as dry as the fields of dust before the Stone Man’s palace.”
Marveling, but angry, too, at how his journey had been halted and bollixed, Crooked went to the stream and tore up its bed, pointing it so that all the water flowed toward the old woman. But she only opened her mouth and swallowed it all down, so that within a short time the stream itself ran dry, and all the trees of the valley went dry and lifeless.
“More,” she says. “Are you so useless that you cannot even help an old woman to slake her thirst?”
“I do not know how you do those tricks,” he says, and he was so angry that his banished uncle’s fire was a-dancing in his eyes, turning them bright as suns, pushing back the very shadows that covered the valley, “but I will not be courteous any more. Already I must carry the load of shame from my family’s defeat, must I also be thwarted by an old peasant woman? Get out of my way or I will pick you up and hurl you out of the road.”
“I go nowhere until I have finished what I am doing,” the crone says.
Crooked sprang forward and grabbed the old woman with his hand of ivory, but as hard as he pulled he could not lift her. Then he grabbed her with his other hand as well, the mighty hand of bronze which its strength was beyond strength, but still he could not move her. He threw both his arms around her and heaved until he thought his heart would burst in his chest but he could not move her one inch.
Down he threw himself in the road beside her and said, “Old woman, you have defeated me where a hundred strong men could not. I give myself into your power, to be killed, enslaved, or ransomed as you see fit.”
At this the old woman threw back her head and laughed. “Still you do not know me!” she says. “Still you do not recognize your own greatgrandmother!”
He looked at her in amazement. “What does this mean?”
“Just as I said. I am Emptiness, and your father was one of my grandchildren. You could pour all the oceans of the world into me and still not fill me, because Emptiness cannot be filled. You could bring every creature of the world and still not lift me, because Emptiness cannot be moved. Why did you not go around me?”
Crooked got to his knees but bowed low, touching his forehead to the ground in the sign of the Dying Flower. “Honored Grandmother, you sit in the middle of a narrow road. There was no way to go around you and I did not wish to turn back.”
“There is always a way to go around, if you only pass through my sovereign lands,” she told him. “Come, child, and I will teach you how to travel in the lands of Emptiness, which stand beside everything and are in every place, as close as a thought, as invisible as a prayer.”
And so she did. When Crooked was finished he again bowed his head low to his great-grandmother and promised her a mighty gift someday in return, then he went on his way, thinking of his new knowledge, and of revenge on those whom had wronged him.”
It was strange, but Vansen was wondering if being lost again behind the Shadowline was not stealing his wits. Even after the raven’s harsh voice had fallen silent Vansen could feel words in his head, as though someone was muttering just out of earshot.
“Foolishness,” Barrick said after a long pause. “Gyir says the bird’s tale is foolishness.”
“All true it is, on our nest, us swears it.” Skurn sounded more than a little irked.
“Gyir says that it is impossible that the one you call Crooked would not know his great-grandmother, who was the mother of all the Early Ones. It is a foolish raven story, he says, told from between two leaves.”
“What does that mean?” asked Vansen.
“From where a raven sits, in a tree,” Barrick explained. “We might say it is like groundlings discussing the deeds of princes.”
Vansen stared for a moment, wondering if he were being insulted, too, but Barrick Eddon’s look was bland. “The fairy talks in your head, yes?” Vansen asks. “You can hear him as though he spoke to your ears?”
“Yes. Much of the time. When I can understand the ideas. Why?”
“Because a moment ago I thought I heard it. Felt it. I don’t know the words, Highness. A tickling, almost, like a fly crawling in my head.”
“Let us hope for your sake that you did indeed sense some of Gyir’s thoughts, Captain Vansen. Because there are other things behind the Shadowline, as you doubtless already know, that you would not want crawling around in your head, or anywhere else on you.”
Will you tell me now who this Jack Chain is that the raven has been prattling about? Barrick asked Gyir. And the Longskulls? And the things he called Night Men?
You are better not knowing most of that. The fairy-man’s speech was growing more and more like ordinary talk in Barrick’s head. It was hard to remember sometimes that they were not speaking aloud. They are all grim creatures. The Night Men are those my folk call the Dreamless. They live far from here, in their city called Sleep. Be grateful for that.
I am a prince, Barrick told him, stung. I was not raised to let other people do my worrying for me.
He could feel a small burst of resigned frustration from Gyir, something as wordless as a puff of air. “Jack Chain” is a rendering of his name into the common tongue, he explained. Jikuyin he is called among our folk. He is one of the old, old ones—a lesser kin to the gods. The one in the bird’s story, Emptiness, she was his mother, or so I was told. In the earliest days there were many like him, so many that for a long time the gods let them do what they would and take pieces of this earth for their own, to rule as they saw fit, as long as they gave the gods their honor and tribute.
The gods? You mean the Trigon—Erivor and Perin and the rest? They’re truly real? Not just stories?
Of course they are real, Gyir told him. More real than you and I, and that is the problem. Now be quiet for a moment and let me listen to something.
Barrick couldn’t help wondering exactly what “be quiet” was supposed to mean to someone who wasn’t talking out loud. Was he supposed to stop thinking, too?