“The machine. It had been acting strangely. Meant to go to the base and get some tech to come back with me and fix it. I didn’t go. Why? Forget why. The time before, the last time I was in this body — the machine didn’t separate me. Not all of me. Most of me was still here, in the body, cold. I dreamed…
“Dreamed I saw Thandbar go out of this place like a wind, like a mist, singing. Dreamed little people came in here, singing. Wanted to say `Help,’ wanted to ask them to find Vulpas, find Riddle. Imprisoned. No movement. No voice…”
“Who was it then, who went out of here?” demanded Queynt. “Who was it Riddle put the blue into? That last time. When you were supposed to meet me?”
The figure on the slab moved, a supine shrug, a testing of long unused muscles. “Windlow, mostly. Partly me. The machine broke that time, once for all, finally. Screamed like a wounded pombi, like a fustigar in heat, screamed and shrieked and grated itself silent. The light went on. I saw it when I departed, and Riddle said something about not bothering to come back, there was nothing anyone could do…”
“But if you knew all that,” I said stupidly, “then why didn’t you tell me, Windlow? Why all the mystery? The hiding and hunting and not seeming to know everything there was to know about the Gamesmen and the book? Why all that?”
“Ah, lad.” Whoever it was began to sit up, struggling more than any of the others had had to do, achingly. I moved forward to help him, and he patted me on the arm in a familiar way. “I didn’t remember. Windlow didn’t remember. It was all so dreamlike, so strange. How would Windlow tell the difference, Vision or reality? And it was then that the moonlet fell, the world shook and tumbled and fell apart. Then it was run and run and try to stay alive, partly Windlow, partly Barish, the memories all mixed and tumbled with the world, all the people and all the landscape. I forgot Vulpas, forgot the Gamesmen almost, forgot the book almost. Then later some memories came back. Were they memories? Visions of a Seer? How would Windlow-Barish know? And then the memories began to tease, began to make mysteries. Then Windlow-Barish began to search for the book, search for the Gamesmen, remember odd things. Did he ever come back here? Why would he? If he did, the way was lost I suppose…”
“What do you mean, did he?” I shrieked at him. “If Windlow is in you at all, he knows whether he did or not! Think him. Ask him.” I was grieving. I had not meant to trade Windlow, whom I loved, for this stranger.
There was long silence from the pedestal, then the rustle of his cloak, the harsh scratch of the embroideries rubbing upon one another. His voice, when it came, was more as I remembered it. “Right, my boy. Of course. I did not come here. I did not remember this place. I did remember the book, the Gamesmen, but did not remember why they were important. Well, why would Windlow remember any such thing?”
I turned to him desperately. “Are you in there, Windlow? Have I killed you?”
He laughed, almost as Windlow would have done. “No, Peter. No. See. All of Windlow is here when I reach for him. I remember the garden of Windlow’s House, the meadow you chased the fire bugs through. I remember the tower in which Prionde had us imprisoned, the way we escaped by creeping through the sewer…”
“You did not creep,” I said. “We carried you.”
“You carried me. Yes. And I came to Himaggery’s place, to the Bright Demesne. It’s all there, my boy, all the memories of Windlow’s life. They may not be exactly as they were in Windlow’s head before, but they are there.”
I felt as though someone had told me I was not quite guilty of some grave crime. The face was not Windlow’s face, the body not Windlow’s body, but in those memories Windlow still lived. Except — he lived alloyed with another. Silver melted with tin is still silver, and yet it appears in a new guise. One cannot call pewter silver with honesty, and yet all the silver one started with is contained therein. Unless, I thought, the mix was rather more like oil and wine, in which case the oil would rise to the top and the wine lie below, seething to be so covered. Was he silver, Windlow, or oil? Or was he wine? Did it matter, so long as he lived? For a time.
For it would be only for a time. Until what he knew and thought became no longer relevant or necessary and was forgotten. But that was the same with all of us. We were only what we were for a time, at that time. Then our own silver began to mix with the tin of our future to change us. I knew this to be so and grieved for Windlow while I grieved for me. In time I would not be this Peter, even as now I was not the Peter of two years ago who had grieved for Tossa on the road to the Bright Demesne. Yet that Peter was not lost. So Windlow was not lost, and yet he was not Windlow, either.
Silkhands took me by the hand and led me away, shaking her head and murmuring to herself and me. She had loved him, too, perhaps more than I had done, and I wondered if she felt as oddly torn as I did. We did not speak of it just then. Instead, we sat beside the fire, drinking tea and looking into the flames as though to see our futures there, my head feeling like a vacant hall, all echoing space and dust in the corners. We heard Queynt and Barish-Windlow come up out of the place, so we went below to raise up Trandilar and Sorah. If what was to come was wreck and ruin upon us all I did not want them lying helpless under the stones.
There was some milling about when they were all raised up, with much talk, before Hafnor flicked himself away to the north, hoptoad, to see what moved against us. Night was coming, the second night since we had raised up Thandbar. I had spent two days and a night below, and the morrow would be the third day since Huld’s host had left Hell’s Maw. I warmed my hands at the fire while hoping Himaggery and Mavin would reach us before Huld did, even though I feared it unlikely. There was nothing much we could do in the dark. I told Thandbar of my meeting with the Bonedancer outside Three Knob, and he chuckled without humor. “Grole, eh? Well, I’ve done that, or something like. It’ll take time to grow big, though, so I’ll go back among those rocks when we have eaten. I relish the taste of these birds more than the flavor of stone.” He had been hunting, as I had done a few days before, in the guise of a fustigar.
So we sat eating and warming ourselves, thinking small thoughts of old comforts and joys. I kept remembering the kitchens in Mertyn’s House and the warm pools at the Bright Desmesne. In the hot seasons, one does not often remember how delicious it is to be warm, but beside this fire in the high, windswept wastes, I thought of warm things. Jinian sat down beside me to take my cold hand in her own and rub it into liveliness. I used it to stroke her cheek, feeling I had not seen her for days. Across the fire, Kelver did something similar with Silkhands and smiled across the coals at me in shared sympathy. Queynt was talking to the krylobos, freeing them from their harness so that they could leave us. They stalked away over the wasteland, into the darkness, making a harsh, bugling cry. “They do not like those who feed upon the shadowpeople,” Queynt said. “They will bring some help for us from among the krylobos and gnarlibars. I do not expect it will amount to much, but they will feel better for its having been tried. I wish there were some of the eesty here, though they would probably refuse to interfere…”
Dorn talked of laying bones down again which another had raised, telling stories of the long past and the far away. Some, I am sure, were not meant to be believed, but only to cheer us. Some were funny enough to laugh at, despite the plight we found ourselves in. Then Trandilar took up the storytelling, stories of glamour and romance and undying love, turning the fullness of her Beguilement on us so that we forgot the bones of Hell’s Maw, forgot Huld, forgot the cold and the high wastes to live for a time in such lands and cities as we had never dreamed of. And all this time Sorah and Wafnor passed the food among us, saving nothing for the morrow, thinking, I suppose, that we would be too busy to eat then and glad of anything we had eaten tonight. So it was we were all replete, and so Beguiled by Trandilar that danger had vanished from our minds, and we were calm and still as a day in summer, lying close together in our blankets, to drift into sleep. I think Trandilar probably walked among us all night long, softly speaking words which led us into pleasant dreams, for when we woke in the morning, it was with a sense of happy fulfillment and courage for the day. Now it was Barish passed the cups among us, but I saw him gathering the herbs he put into them from the rock crevasses, and the way he searched them out and bent above them, the way he crushed them and brought them to his nose, all that was Windlow. The brew was hot and bitter, but it brought alertness of an almost supernatural kind. We had just finished it when Hafnor returned to tell us our fears were less than the truth.