Pelmen listened intently. He heard nothing. “I wonder,” he mumbled.
Speak up! How can you expect this House to respond if it cannot hear your comments?
Pelmen just gazed at the ceiling, and argued with himself. “Just your imagination,” he muttered.
What about imagination? asked the House. Come, come, speak up! This Maythorm fellow seems to think you a power shaper Is that so?
The player was silent. It had been a long day of travelling. He’d fallen asleep.
Pelmen woke with a jerk. He was sweating. The air in his tiny room was stale and close, but he found himself gulping great mouthfuls of the stuff. He felt strangely terrified, as if someone or something had laid a hand on his shoulder as he slept. He peered into the black corners. There was nothing here. That terrified him even more.
He jumped up from his mattress and shuffled cautiously for the door.
Though these craftsmen’s rooms had never housed captives, they were built sturdily enough to double as jail cells if the need ever arose.
He put his weight to the unvarnished wood, and swung his heavy door outward.
It was dark night. No sunlight filtered down the hall from the slits in the outer walls. Some very dim light flickered off the masonry beyond the corner, the evidence that one of the torches still burned.
But no one moved in the hallway. The castle was as quiet as a forgotten tomb.
Then it began. The irregular flicker of that torch around the corner suddenly grew patterned. The light began to flash evenly, regularly, as if beating time to some unheard orchestration, written for ears other than man’s. Pelmen dismissed it as the result of a draft. But there was no draft in this ancient hall, and he knew it.
His first impulse was to run. But Pelmen rarely followed his first impulse in anything. More often than not, he followed the dictates of his intuition, but he refused to be a slave to those illogical feelings that mediated his sensitivity. He waited. He leaned against the rock wall and listened.
A chill tiptoed down his back as the stone under his 12J
hand turned a slimy cold. He jerked away then the hand returned, feeling of the suddenly moist rock. He shook his head in bewilderment.
The torch suddenly went out
Light disappeared. Everywhere was shadow. And still Pelmen listened, while the awareness grew in him that his whole body was trembling with tension. He took a deep breath of the cooler air of the hallway and shook himself to bring on relaxation. When he was quiet again, he listened to the emptiness. Nothing stirred. Pelmen heard only his heart.
This was not the Power, of that he was sure. There was a cruel humor to this, and he had never experienced such in his communication with that Being who had made him a Prophet. But he was equally sure there was something here alive, something or someone who wished, it seemed, to talk with him. Not the Power, no. But certainly a power.
Pelmen abruptly slipped back into his room and closed the door with a heavy thud. The sound was reassuring. He leaned his back on the wood, as if barricading himself against the force in the hallway. But the act was unconscious. He knew full well that the presence was in here as well
Pelmen stretched his hand out before him, palm up. Though only inches from his face, it couldn’t be seen for the utter lack of light Using his shaper power, he needed only to speak a phrase or think a thought, and above his invisible palm would grow a glowing ball, any color he chose, to light his way in the darkness. Pelmen would have thought nothing of doing so in the land of the Maris. Felt there, these strange sensations would simply prompt him to begin shaping. Yet here, he hesitated… This was but a power like all the others, probably and if he chose… There was a long dark moment of decision… But he did not choose. Pelraen lowered his hand to his side. Instead of shaping, he spoke. “I know you’re here. Whether you are a Man power, travelling far from home, or some other kind of power I know nothing about, still I feel you, and I know you’re here. Perhaps you enjoy teasing me, but if you—”
He cut himself off. An idea broke into his chain of thought, and he stopped himself in the mid threat Perhaps he could shape this power but did he need to? And should he shape it, would this power be harmed? He remembered the terror he always experienced just prior to being seized by the Power and though the joy that always followed inevitably flooded away any scars, he knew that joy proceeded from the Power’s nature it wasn’t due to the nature of shaping.
“Ill let you be,” Pelmen said softly. “But I have an important day tomorrow. I have a friend who must be freed from a woman’s enforced will, and a land to be freed from her tyranny. Plus a dozen other problems I’m sure you’re no more interested in hearing than I am in listing. What I’d like to do is get some sleep, and forget them for a while. Now ” Pelmen tried to say it nicely, but a hint of unintended annoyance crept into his tone, “would you let me get some rest?”
He threw himself on his mattress, and crossed his arms on his chest in aggravation.
Sleep came again quickly. This time, it was undisturbed except for one thing; his dreams were all oddly colored, as if a ball of blue flame burned all night, just beyond his eyelids…
CHAPTER EIGHT
A Sudden Duel
STILL HOODED, Rosha was led down the long, glass-enclosed corridor that separated his quarters from the upper apartments of the Queen. Ligne had placed him in the room she herself had occupied as Talith’s mistress, near the aviary on the castle’s roof. There was apparently only one entrance, and that way led down a series of steps through Ligne’s gigantic suite on the lower levels. There had at one time been many entrances, which Ligne herself had installed to accommodate the hosts of men who visited her in Talith’s absence. These she’d ordered walled up before depositing Rosha there. The Queen wanted this lad all to herself.
Rosha heard the guard grumbling as they descended the by-now familiar stairway into Ligne’s suite. They passed on through the apartment, evidently greeting no one. Then door? opened before them, and Rosha heard the sounds of people moving about in the halls. He was led around corners and down corridors until he felt his hand being placed on the railing and knew he was descending the grand spiral in the very heart of the castle. This staircase was twenty feet in diameter. It had been designed to permit impressive royal entrances to the great hall, for it opened out onto the
“Wizard in Waiting
The Wixaf& in Waiting
Queen’s dais- Rosha and his guardian stepped down into the aroma of frying bacon, stewed beef and a clamor of other delicious smells. But Rosha wasn’t hungry. For some reason he felt particularly hostile today.
“Good morning, Rosha,” he heard the Queen call, her voice dripping with honey.
“Is it?” he snapped. “I wouldn’t know.” A chair was pushed up against the back of his legs, and he sat in it Then he stared sightlessly out over the noisy throng that crowded the hall and radiated his hatred at any who cared to look.
“Good morning, Fallomar,” Yona Parmi said cheerfully, looking up from a plate piled with sausages and bread. “How did you sleep?”
“Not as well as I might have liked,” Pelmen grumbled quietly, as he crawled over a long bench to sit across from his friend. “And your—”
“I fared quite well, thank you,” Parmi answered.
“No dreams of powers?”
Yona stopped eating and looked up from his plate again. “No… why?”
“As I said, it proved a somewhat sleepless experience for me.”
“I should guess so, on that sack of straw they gave you for a bed, in that rat warren of a room. That should teach you not to mock the Lord of Entertainments when he’s making room assignments. I slept on a feather mattress myself.”