But out of the white carcass of the cities a shape rose, a man’s shape—Darak? Vazkor? He beat up toward me on black wings, and he grinned as he held wide his arms—not to embrace me but to keep me out. Nearer and nearer—I could see him well now, the plaits of his black hair, the scars on his sunburned skin, the tribal ornaments, the knife in his belt.
“Your son,” he shouted at me across the air which divided us. “Ettook’s warrior! Do you like what you made of me? I have killed forty men, and I have four wives and thirteen sons, and three days from now I will die with an out-tribe spear between my ribs. I might have been a prince in Eshkorek Arnor, or in Ezlann. I might have been a king with a great army at my back, beautiful women to please me, and Power to make all men do as I wished. Do you like what you have made?”
And he drew from his belt a knife, and with one strong beat of the black wings, twisted and threw it. It soared toward me through the darkness.
“This has no ability to kill me,” I said.
But then I saw the knife for what it truly was, or what it had become. The knife from the altar beneath the Mountain—the one blade which could end my life, which Karrakaz had shown me—the Knife of Easy Dying. Its cold tip entered my breast, so sharp I did not feel it. I screamed as it burrowed to the hilt in my flesh.
And found Huanhad’s face and the dawn, instead of death.
2
That day we reached the sea.
Since the marshes, the weather had been strange, drab and dull for summer, yet often very hot. Now, in the afternoon, the skies had a still intense grayness; there was a pre-storm glare on the outlines of the trees. The ground had sloped downward for some while. Rough meadowland stretched away into shadowy valleys. Then ahead, against the gray light, appeared the jutting silhouettes of a cliff range, and beyond that, a faint mauveness like a chalk line on the sky.
Huanhad stopped, pointed, and cried out, “The sea! The sea!”
One or two others joined in her cry, using other words I had not learned yet. It was the first time I had seen them in anything resembling excitement. The children skipped and laughed, and the goats bleated crazily. Qwenex lifted his arm and called us on, and the normal rhythmic walking speed increased to a brisk trot. I hurried with them, but why, I did not fully understand. The smudgy line of color meant nothing to me, and after my dream, there was reluctance besides.
After a few minutes, a guttural roar broke open the cloud sheet. Brazen lightning shot across the open land, and rain fell in large heavy drops, warm on our hands and necks, widely spaced at first, gradually joining together, until we moved through a chain mail of tepid water that beat like a drum on our heads.
Lightning made rose-pink interludes in the sudden darkness. I could not see where we were going, and had an abrupt conviction that we would all run over some cliff edge, like a herd of pigs driven mad.
But they knew the way too well for that. Huanhad firmly grasped my shoulders and brought me to a halt, and I found they had spread out in a line along the cliff top, about a yard from the drop. So I looked down and saw the sea, stretching out and out from the sheer rock strand, two hundred feet below us. On either side the ghosts of other headlands thrust forward to the water, pale in the streaming rain. Ahead, the boiling caldron, seething, limitless, seeming to curve with the round shape of the world, banded with every color of the changing sky, joined to its last perceptible horizon with a thin green lacquer of spume and a hallucination of violet. True beauty is always oddly surprising.
I understood then that I had known the sea before, as my dream should have warned me. I turned my head slowly southward, looking for that scatter of broken bones on this eastern tip of the land. Rain and cliffs were in the way of my eyes. I sensed nothing southward, only empty land, stone beaches, and the carving chisels of the waves. Yet my Power was gone. How could I know?
Huanhad touched my shoulder softly.
“The sea,” she whispered. “You will be better here, Morda.”
After a time, Qwenex called to them, and they turned away, one by one, as if reluctant to let go of the sight of the sea. Through the rain we trudged, parallel to the brink, though a little farther inland. I stumbled over the white limestone outcroppings. We went in a curve and upward, and suddenly there was a white shape ahead, squat, disheveled, and we had reached a broken tower, open to the rain, and breached in a hundred places. Perhaps it had been a watch or beacon in earlier days. It had something of that tower in the marsh where I had first found their krarl.
Swift as its coming, the rain began to ease. In the last drizzling, they formed a circle around the tower’s base, a few feet from it, and stood quite still, as if waiting. A silence fell in place of the rain. Muddied pink lights quivered over the sky. There was something secret, close, mystic even, in the way they stood around the tower. I drew out of their circle, shivered, and waited also.
Qwenex raised his arm, all one black narrow shape against the pale rumbled ruin. He saluted the tower.
And then he moved to one of the broken openings, stooped, and went inside.
A gull screamed furiously, out at sea. There was no other sound.
Qwenex came out of the tower, and in his hands he carried a wooden cask covered with the white powder of the stones that had been laid on top of it. With his knife he prized up the lid. The lid fell off.
Inside, a dull glimmer, something metallic?
He lifted the something out, and it was a great book, covered all over with plated gold. At first, all that stirred in me was the memory of Ezlann, Za, Belhannor, and the books of Asren Javhovor, set with many jewels, glittering and priceless in the candlelight. Qwenex carried the book forward and went around the circle to each of them in turn, and each man, woman, child, touched the book, very lightly, as if it were too hot or cold for them. I remembered then what Uasti, the healer of the wagons, had told me—of the wandering tribe and the golden book that contained legends of the Lost Race. My heart sprang against my ribs. I reached across the circle, and laid my hand full on the surface of the golden book. Qwenex looked at me. He let me touch the holy thing, but he would not let me do more. This much I could see.
What had Uasti said? No woman was allowed to look inside it. Yet I felt the inscription, blurred by age and handling, seek my palm like a moving snake. I lifted my hand, and saw the words as I had seen them written in the green dust on the wagon floor.
BETHEZ-TE-AM, Herein the Truth.
Then Qwenex was moving away from me, carrying the book to others, waiting motionless and yearning.
I shuddered, and before I could stop myself, I laughed. They did not seem to notice what I did. They, the black peaceful ones from the marshlands, who carried the sin and sorrow of what had created me, who worshiped the annals of hubris and stupidity; the annals that were perhaps the key to what I must know of myself, to my lost Power—even the location of the green comfort, my soul-kin, the Jade.
A huge vermilion gong rapidly sinking over the inland meadows was the first and last we saw of that day’s sun. Their black tents were up between the sea and the tower, and along the flinty scrubland behind it. Their cook-fires sizzled and popped and hiccuped smutty protests in the wet grass. They went about their ordinary tasks as I had seen them do every evening since I had been with them, yet I had been with them long enough to know that there was a different feel to what they did. The women talked more than usual, the men less. The children ran about and rolled in the meadows, where the goats nibbled and stared around them with bright mad eyes, catching the anticipation that tingled in the air. Some ceremony or feast or rite was to come with the full darkness. Some rejoicing which had to do with the sea, and the ancient book.