The next morn I hired Chance away from the Tragamor’s Tooth with much noise and many objections on the part of the innkeeper. We left the town, having seen none of it, to move in slow procession onto the road to Learner, along the deep, silent flow of River Reave. It took the King out of his way, but not greatly. He could go on north of Learner and then cut across country to the Dragon’s Fire Purlieu, did he choose. Queynt set the pace for us, slower than I would have liked, with Silkhands riding beside him once more and King Kelver on a prancing mount alongside. Two of his Dragons followed behind, mounted, saving their Gaming and displaying for some better time. Far to the rear to avoid the dust came Jinian and I, with Chance and the baggage beast bringing up the tail.
“The King seems willing to follow you to Waeneye,” I said to Jinian.
“The King isn’t following me,” she replied in a steady voice. “Though he is an admirable Gamesman. I had been ready for anger or threats, but he made neither. He is too wise for that. If our agreement is kept — or rather, if his agreement with my brother, to which I assented, is kept — he wants no memory of anger to stain the bed between us.”
Hearing her talk in this way put me in a temper again, though I was uncertain why. If it was Silkhands he was courting, why did Jinian’s speaking of him thus upset me? It should rather have pleased me as though to say Kelver would not long be seeking Silkhands’ company. Looking back on it, it seems that it should have pleased me, but the truth is it did not. I was flustered with myself, eager to fight with someone and ashamed for feeling so. So, we jogged and jogged until the silence grew tight and I sought to break it somehow.
“Have you made your stew yet?” She looked at me with incomprehension, forgetting what she had said on the road from Three Knob. “The stew you said you were making up, your hypothesis?”
“Oh,” she said. “That. Why, yes, Peter.”
We went on a way farther.
“Are you going to tell us what it is?” I asked, keeping my voice as pleasant as possible. She was very trying, I thought.
“If you like, though it is only to tell you what you already know.”
“I? I know too little,” I said, sure of it.
“Perhaps. But you know what you are going to find on the top of the Waenbane Mountains. You are going to find Barish’s place, his Keep, his hideaway. You will go to find the bodies matching the blues you carry.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” I gloomed. That much seemed unavoidably clear.
“So much we learned from a whirly ghost,” said Chance. “Of that much we may be certain.”
“Is there more?” I asked.
“Some more,” she said. “I believe I know what plan it was that Barish had, what he intended should be the result of all this mystery and expense of time. We shall see if I am right.”
“You think we’ll find Barish then?”
She shook her head. “Everything indicates he was awakened last in the time of Riddle’s grandfather. He left the northlands then, and he did not return. In which case, we will not find Barish himself. Only the eleven. Your Gamesmen.”
“The eleven,” I murmured. “Barish’s eleven. And a machine to resurrect them.” I clutched at the pouch in my pocket. Perhaps, I said to myself, the machine is broken. Perhaps it cannot be used. The other ones, those the magicians had, were broken. If it is there at all, it will be centuries old. Rust and corruption and rot might have spoiled it. The serpent coiled cold upon my heart, and I thought of Windlow.
“Logic says it should be there,” she said. “If it was used to wake Barish at intervals, it will be there, where he was.”
“And what then?” asked Chance, eager for more mystery.
“And then,” she said, serene as the moon in the sky, “we will do whatever it was Barish would have done if he had returned.”
That one struck me silent in wonder at her audacity in saying it, even more at her colossal arrogance in thinking it.
“Barish was a Wizard.” I laughed at her, the laughter fading as she turned cold eyes upon me.
“Well, certainly, Peter,” she said. “But then, so am I.”
Hell’s Maw
ONE OF THE EARLIEST THINGS they had taught me at Mertyn’s House in Schooltown was that one does not meddle with Wizards. Himaggery was the only one of the breed I had known, and I couldn’t say that I knew or understood him well. Strange are the Talents of Wizards, so we are told, and I could not have told you what they were. Had anyone other than Jinian made claim to Wizardry, I would have laughed to myself, saying “Wizard indeed!” I did not laugh. Jinian did not joke about things. If she said she was a Wizard, then I believed her. Surprisingly, all I could feel was a deep, burning anger at Silkhands that she had not told me and had let me play the fool.
Oh, yes, I had done that right enough. I had said to Jinian that she was very young, that she did not understand. One does not say to a Wizard that the Wizard does not understand. I must have muttered Silkhands’ name, for Jinian interrupted my anger with a peremptory, “Silkhands did not know, Peter. Does not know. I would prefer she not. You keep my secret, I will keep yours.”
“I have none left,” I muttered. “Silkhands has given them all away.”
“I think not,” she said. “Queynt knows what Queynt knows, but not because Silkhands has told him.” Then she smiled me an enigmatic smile and we jogged our way on to Learner.
So, in the time it took me to consider all this, to feel alternately angry and guilty and intrigued, let me stop this following of myself about in favor of telling you what was happening elsewhere. I did not know it at the time, of course, but I learned of it later. What I did not hear of directly, I have imagined. So, leave Silkhands on the wagon seat beside strange Queynt; leave King Kelver and his men trotting along beside, full of courtesies and graceful talk; leave Jinian there upon the road, calm as ice; leave Chance — Oh, how often I have left Chance; leave Yittleby and Yattleby in their unvarying stride, their murmured krerking. Leave me, and lift up, up into the air as though you were an Armiger to lie upon the wind and fly toward those powers which assembled against us and which we knew nothing of.
Go up, up the sheer wall of the Waenbane Mountains, high against that looming and precipitous cliff to the place where they say the wind has carved monstrous, organic forms which they call the Winds’ Bones. Do not look north to Bleer. We will travel there soon enough and stay longer than we would wish. Instead, cross the mountain scarp and the high desert to come to that gorge the Graywater has cut between two highlands. There is Kiquo and the high bridge, narrow as a knife edge, and the steely glint of the river, then high cliffs once more and another highland north of Betand.
Find the wide roadway there which leads into the northlands, see the strange monuments built along it, the greeny arches which hang above it. In spring, it is said, they glow with an undomainish light and have been known to drive travelers mad. Follow this road as it approaches the gorges of the River Haws and along the edge of that gorge to the town of Pfarb Durim. Hanging there high above Pfarb Durim, turn your head back toward the east and notice how all the lands between this city and the Wastes of Bleer lie flat and without barrier. A man might walk from one place to the other in two or three days, an Armiger fly it in much less time. Yet it is true that Peter did not think, nor Jinian, nor any in that company of the place called Pfarb Durim along the River Haws.