We traveled back through the Grole Hills, leagues of twisty road over which little black tunnel mouths pursed rocky lips, with gravel everywhere. It was the waste product left by the groles after men washed out the heavy metals which the groles don’t use. Hooves on the gravel made an endless, sliding crunch, a monotonous grinding sound. There were a few dirty trees in the valley bottoms, so many gray dusters along the scanty water courses. Occasionally a bird would dip from one tree to another with a tremulous, piping call. The air was still, with no smell to it. Men called to one another across the valleys, long echoing sounds fading into silence, and we rode along half asleep with the endless crunch and jog.
Then, all at once, a shadow moved across us from the south, a chilly shade which removed most of the sound and color from the world. The crunch of gravel was still there, but far away as though heard through multiple layers of gauze. The call of the birds became dreamlike. We rode in a world of distance, of disattachment. Something moved past us, around us, toward the north, and we heard a shred of music and a voice speaking inside us saying, “Kinsman, help.” As soon as we heard the words a whip of air struck, and the quiet was gone. Dust swirled up around us, and we coughed, for the air was suddenly cold and smelled of storm.
Jinian gasped, “That was a wild, ill wind,” leaning over the neck of her horse and trying to get the dust from her throat.
All three of us had tears running down our faces, all of us were crying as though utterly bereft. The voice we had heard had had no emotion in it at all, and yet we had heard it expressing a horrible loneliness and despair. It took us an hour or more to stop the tears, and I cried longer than the women did, almost as though the voice had spoken to me in a way it had not spoken to them. I was not sure I liked that idea or Jinian’s compassionate glances toward me. That young woman seemed to understand too much about me already.
It was not long after that the dusk came down, soft and purple. Bird piping gave way to the oh-ab, oh-ab of little froggy things in the ditches. I heard a flitchhawk cry from the top of the sky, a sound dizzy with the splendor of high gold where the sun still burned. He made slow, shining circles until the darkness rose about him, and then it was night and we could go no farther. We talked then of the music, the voice, the wind.
“We must be sensible,” murmured Jinian. “Things do not occur without purpose, without order, without Gamesense.”
“If it is a thing which has occurred,” said Silkhands, “and not some mindless ghost.”
“A mindless ghost who calls us kinsman?” Jinian doubted.
“Kinsman to us all,” I said, “or to only one? And which one?”
“And asking our help,” brooded Jinian. “How can we help?”
“We can do nothing except wait,” I said. I did not even bother to seek the advice of Didir or the others — not even Windlow. I simply knew that whatever it was, it would return, and no amount of cogitating or struggling would make anything clearer. I knew.
So we ate the food which had been packed for us in Three Knob, and let our talk wander, and grew more and more depressed.
“All day I have thought of Dazzle,” Silkhands said. “When the Ghoul came with his train, the death’s heads reminded me of her. Reminded me she may still be alive, there beneath Bannerwell in the ancient corridors. But she is likely dead, young as she was. There are so few old ones of us, Peter. Windlow was old, but he is gone. Himaggery and Mertyn are not old. There are so few old. I was thinking I would like to be able to grow old…”
I tried to make her laugh. “We’ll grow old together, sweetling. When you are so old you totter upon your cane, I shall chase you across the hearth until you trip and roll upon the rug.” It was evidently not the right thing to say, for she began to weep, the same strong, endless flow of tears we had experienced earlier.
“Will any of us come to that time? Life in Vorbold’s House is sweet! Need I lose it in some Ghoul’s clutches, be arrow shot by some Armiger at Game? I think of all I knew when I was a child, and so few are left, so very few…”
After that, I could only hold her until she went to sleep, then roll myself in my blankets and do the same, conscious all the while of Jinian’s silence in her own blankets across the fire. I knew she had heard each word. And in the morning she told us that she had.
“I did not mean to intrude,” she said, flushing a little. “But I have keen hearing, and a keen understanding of what is going on. We are all feeling terribly sad, lonely, and lost. We began to feel so when the whatever — it — was happened yesterday. We must not make the mistake of thinking those emotions are our own.”
She sounded very like Himaggery in that instant. I was amazed.
Silkhands shook herself like a river beast coming out of the water, a single hard shudder to shed a weight of wet. “You’re right, Jinian. Always good for the instructress to be taught by her student. Well. It is wise and perceptive of you, no doubt, and good of you to tell us so firmly. I am beginning to melt from my own misery.”
“You and Peter and I,” said Jinian, pouring herself more cider and taking another crisp, oaty cake from the basket, “feel the same, but I know my only reason for sadness is that the two of you have planned to share something in which I was to have no part, that you would go on to an adventure without me. Well, so I have decided I will not let you go on without me. I have heard your story, read your book, felt your wind, heard your music. I know as much of all this as you do. So I will not be left behind.”
“But King Kelver will be in Reavebridge,” objected Silkhands.
“So,” said Jinian. “Let him be in Reavebridge.” And we could get nothing further from her, even though Silkhands tried to argue with her several times that morning.
All day we waited for something to happen, another silence, another voice. Nothing. We rode in warm sunlight, bought our noon meal from a farmwife — fresh greens, eggs, and sunwarm fruit just off the trees — and came down to the banks of the Boneview River at sunfall. We were grubby and dusty, and the amber water sliding in endless skeins across the pebbles could not be resisted. We were in it in a moment, nothing on but our smalls, pouring the water over us and scrubbing away at the accumulated dust, when it happened again.
First the silence. River sounds fading. Bird song softening to nothing. Then the fragment of melody, tenuous, fading, at the very edge of hearing. Kinsman, help.
Just there the river ran east and west in a long arc before joining the northerly flow. We were near the bank, looking down the glittering aisle of sunset beneath the graying honey glow of the sky. Against that sky moved the shape of a man, moving as a cloud moves when blown by a steady wind, changing as a cloud changes. Time did not pass for us. We watched him against the amber, the rose, the purple gray, the vast swimming form filling the sky until stars shone through its lofty head, arms and legs moving in one tortuous stride after another, slow, slow, inexorably walking the obdurate earth toward the north. Fragments of mist shredded the creature’s outline only to be regathered and reformed, again and yet again, held as by some unimaginable will, some remote, dreaming consciousness expressed as form and motion. The idea of this came to all of us at once so that we turned in the direction it moved, toward the north, to stare beyond the lands of the River Reave to the mighty scarps of the Waenbane.
“A god,” whispered Silkhands.
I thought not. Or not exactly. Something, surely, beyond my comprehension, and yet at the same time something so familiar I felt I should recognize it, should know what it was — who it was. There was something tragic about it, pathetic for all its monstrous size. We were silent, in awe for the long time that darkness took to cover it. Then: