She was right, of course. I leaned upon her shoulder and gave a great sigh, half weakness and half weariness, thinking the whole time of roast fowl. My weakness was simple hunger, and I said so. She remedied the lack as soon as I expressed it by putting a mug of hot soup into my hand and crumbling hard bread into it. As I ate it with a tired greediness, she went on.
“There is something we are not thinking of,” she said. “Something simple and obvious. The song we heard in Xammer was learned at the Minchery in Learner from a young songsmith who dreamed it. It is the same music we heard when the giant strode across us in the hills behind Three Knob. It came from Thandbar, somehow, and Thandbar’s blue is in your pocket. Somehow, Peter, the separation of body and blue is not as complete as we thought, for something sensible of Thandbar escaped, rose up from his body lying here in the cold wastes of Bleer to stride across the world crying for our help. There is a clue there we are not seeing, Peter. Help me think.”
“It probably has something to do with cold,” I mumbled around a mouthful of bread. “In the School Houses, we always kept the blues cold. They have not been cold in my pocket. Perhaps that has something to do with it. Perhaps it is natural for them to recombine, and the machine only aids that process…”
“What does the machine do, Peter?”
“Ahh,” I said, remembering chill wire and hostile casing, the infinite lattices of crystal in which I had lost myself. “It warms the body, warms the blue, scans the blue and Reads it into the mind of the body. Having seen the innards of the machine, I can do part of what the machine does. I can Read the blue, I think, with Didir’s help. And Shattnir can help me warm the place. But I don’t know how to Read the thing back into a body. It seems all a puzzle…”
“I can Read the body,” said Silkhands. “If you will link with me, as they linked in the Bright Demesne when they searched for you. As Tragamors sometimes link to increase their strength.”
I shuddered, remembering that such a linkage was precisely what Mandor and Huld had demanded of me in Bannerwell — of me, or of Mavin. Still, this was to no evil purpose. It took me a while to work myself up to it, but once we were started it seemed to flow along of its own movement. It was not as simple as that sounds, and yet it was simpler than I would have expected.
First was Shattnir, gathering all the warmth she could from the sun to bring it below and warm the chamber of the Gamesmen. Then was Didir, to set her pattern firmly in my head, telling her what we intended, begging her to stay within and help me, show me the way.
Then I took the blue of Thandbar in my hand and put my arms tight around Silkhands as she laid her hands upon Thandbar’s head. He came into my mind and greeted me with such joy that it burst through me in a wave, a wordless, riotous joy, the rapture of a prisoner released, a caged thing set free. “Only free,” I heard him murmur in my head. “Only free.” I remembered it as one of his names and knew in that instant what innate quality it was had enabled him to escape the cold room and move out across the world. His Shifter’s soul could not have been held, had not been held. I had no time to think of it, for with Didir’s pattern tight in my mind I began to Read him, spark by spark, shivering lattice by lattice, sending my warmth down the chill circuits of his being, following those circuits as Silkhands Read them from me and impressed them once again into the body before her.
Time went, seeming hours of it, days of it. Pictures fled through my head. I saw Schlaizy Noithn, bright in the noon light, where Thandbar walked with a loved one. I saw far mountains as seen from above by the eyes of a mist giant. I heard music, not only the wind song I had heard before but generations of bell and flute in the high, wild lands of the shadowpeople. I became tree, mountain, road, a whole legion of beasts I had never seen and knew nothing of. In Thandbar’s day, they had lived closer to mankind. In the intervening centuries they had fled away.
I saw memories of Barish: Barish lecturing; Barish pounding a table; Barish laughing; Barish cajoling. I felt horror at the things being done by some Gamesmen, revulsion, anger, and felt Barish play upon that horror and revulsion. In Thandbar’s mind, I heard Barish’s voice. “We will accumulate the best, like seed grain. We will plant them in the ground of today, for a mighty harvest in the future,” his voice ringing, passionate. In Thandbar’s mind, I Read belief, then doubt (centuries of doubt), then terror at a conviction of eternal imprisonment. Out of that terror he had fled like mist, to walk the wide world calling for help from his kinsmen.
So the pictures fled across my mind as the blue melted away in my hand, becoming a featureless lump, a sliver, a nothing at all. The body before us stirred, stirred again, until at last its eyes opened, its mouth moved. “I dreamed you, Healer,” it whispered in a voice whiskery with dust and age. “I dreamed you.” The eyes blinked, blinked, tried to focus. I knew they saw only blurs of light, mute shadows. At last they fastened upon me, and the dusty voice said, “Kinsman. Thanks.”
And after that was a long, cloudy time in which Silkhands lay upon the floor exhausted and I trembled in my place like a wind gong perpetually struck, and the others had to take us up, we two and Thandbar, to wrap us up warmly and feed us to the wild piping and cheers of the shadowpeople. It was night. “How long?” I whispered to Queynt.
“You were both exhausted when you began,” he said. “You must not try any more tonight. Silkhands could not, in any case. On the morrow, raise up Dealpas. She must help you. Then Didir, for she can do what you have done if I understand it aright.” So I slept. Bones marched against us from over the edge of the world, and I slept. Horror collected itself and thundered toward us with drums and trumpets, and I slept. If I had been condemned and upon the scaffold ready to be hanged, I would have slept. There was no more strength in me to stay awake, and morning came and moved itself toward noon before I wakened again to find Silkhands sitting beside me, looking a little wan but determined.
“Come,” she said. “Let us waken Dealpas.”
Which we did, though Barish’s Healer did not wish to be wakened. She fought us the whole way, moaning and weeping, carrying on as though she were the only creature in the world ever to have felt pain. Her whining sickened us, and I was ready to give up and let her lie there forever, but Silkhands was not. I felt her do something I had never known of before: she administered a mental spanking — a lashing along the nerves like a snake striking — and we had Dealpas’ attention at last. When we had her awake, she began to moan, half-heartedly, and Jinian came forward to shake her into full wakefulness.
“I have no patience with this Broken Leaf nonsense,” she cried into Dealpas’ pouting face. “I know not why Barish chose you as a worthy one of his Eleven, why he chose you from among all Healers, unless perhaps there were no others in your time. Well, you are not the best, by any rule, not fit to wear Silkhands’ smalls, but you will do what you will do or by the Giant of Thandbar I will teach you what pain is!”
Dealpas was stung, furious, her pain forgotten. I linked with her, somewhat reluctantly, to raise Didir, and in that linkage I learned what had set Dealpas upon her course of whines and plaints. Barish had thought her pretty, had babied her, had petted her — the more she whined, the more petting. So it was I began to doubt that Barish was what I had thought him to be. Wizard, perhaps, but not all wise to have spoiled her so.
We did not work together as well as Silkhands and I had done, but Didir was helping from within to raise up her own body, so all went well and expeditiously in the end. She came up off the stone slab in one fluid movement, not at all grandmotherly, but lithe and still young. “Peter,” she said to me, looking full into my eyes, “there will be a better time than now for thanks. Be sure that time will not be forgotten.” She hugged me then, and kissed me as a mother might (as Mavin never had in my memory) and went off above to gather some power and settle some ancient matter between herself and Dealpas. When they returned, they were ready for work, and I did not hear Dealpas whine again.