Again, she found herself speechless, but Samek, having fortified himself for the occasion, did the honors.
“Wailco’ to Silvertrree, my lords and laidees,” he said with a bow. Tildi broke off her gaze, ashamed of staring. “Enter, pray.”
“Thank you,” the leader said, a handsome male with a deep chest, silver-shot, wavy black hair and beard, and an equine coat to match. He swept off a short silver cloak and placed it in Samek’s upstretched hand. “I am Lowan. My sister, Rin. It would seem that we are just in time.”
He nodded toward the ceiling, where brightly colored dust was swirling. As if it had understood that it had gained the visitors’ attention, the whirlwind formed itself into the shape of an arrow that pointed toward the upper chamber.
The grand centaur and his retinue clattered over the fine wooden floor. With a sigh Tildi watched them go, admiring the swish of their beautiful tails, silky, wavy, braided with beads or tied with ribbons, and made for the stairs. If this was a grand council, then she would be in the way.
The cloud of dust had other ideas. Before Tildi could set foot on the first tread, a brilliant red ring looped around her waist, and the other pigments formed a rope that pretended to tow her in the centaurs’ wake. She had no choice but to follow.
“Ah, there you are, Tildi,” Olen called, as she made her way shyly into the room. The wizard sat in his high-backed chair, which had been set upon a small raised platform at one end of the huge chamber. The other guests turned to see whom he was addressing. Tildi felt her cheeks flame red. He held out his hand to her and beckoned.
She felt embarrassed about joining such illustrious visitors in her humble clothes, but she was too curious to let her natural reticence allow her to retreat. As she passed by each of them, many stared with frank, though friendly, curiosity. She held her back straight and walked with a seemly gait. If Olen wanted her there, then she belonged. Not that her twisting stomach believed it! As she passed the piebald-haired minstrel, he winked at her. He must have guessed what nervousness she was suffering.
Tildi had explored the grand hall some weeks before, when it was empty. The plain silver-gray wood of the walls was carved into scenes from Melenatae’s history. It was interesting, but scarcely spectacular. Between Liana’s careful preparations and Olen’s wizardry, the great hall was now fit for any number of kings and wizards. The images had been limned with brilliant jewel colors and gilded in shining gold leaf, and acres of shimmering tapestries hung overhead. The pillars of the high-ceilinged grand chamber glowed with golden light, illuminating the whole room brightly and lending a warm sparkle to the visitors’ ornaments.
The atmosphere was not unlike a meeting back in the Quarters, with Olen presiding in place of the elders. Beside him was a table heaped with papers, tied scrolls, and at least one of the crystals from the table in his study. Before him, instead of benches set in rows, upholstered couches and chairs had been arranged in small groups for each retinue. The golden-haired king in scarlet and white was in the tier nearest Olen’s dais with a blond young man who must be his son and a handful of well-dressed noblemen and noblewomen. To one side of the Rabantavians was a cluster of black-haired elves surrounding a tall, austere woman in a simple blue gown, and on the other a semicircle of warriors in padded tunics with their swords laid across their laps seated behind their lord, a man with red-gold hair who looked younger than Gosto. The centaurs, tallest of all, congregated near the back.
“Now,” Olen said to himself, as he gestured Tildi toward a small stool near his feet. “Where are those documents?”
“Are they in your study, master?” she asked, leaping up. “I will get them for you.”
“No need,” Olen said with an indulgent smile. “Please be seated,
Tildi. Ah, here they are.” He unearthed a cluster of scrolls from the middle of the heap of documents and put them in his lap. Tildi sat down and put her knees together with her hands neatly folded. “Let us begin.”
“Is this the representative from Ivirenn?” asked the chestnut-haired lord, clearly annoyed at the notion of Tildi being given precedence over him in terms of place. “I thought neither the smallfolk nor the dwarves could be bothered to attend this conference.”
“Tildi is my apprentice,” Olen said, raising his voice to carry to the rear of the hall. “As such, she belongs by me. Are there any objections?”
“None at all,” the young man with the mixed-color hair said, his clear tenor voice rising above the murmurs.
“Never seen a female smallfolk before,” added a man in one of the groups.
“Not outside the Quarters, anyhow,” said a short woman with thick blond braids, with a smile for Tildi. “That’s not the wonder you called us to discuss, is it?”
“No, Lakanta, it’s not,” Olen said, though he clearly appreciated her good humor. “Though we can talk about her later. She’s a most interesting person, very worthwhile to know.”
Tildi lowered her gaze to her knees.
“Let’s get to it,” said the man with chestnut hair. He kicked a chair out in front of him and swung his muddy boots onto it. He noticed Tildi’s disapproving glance. “Don’t like my carelessness, do you, little mother?” The lad, for he was a lad in spite of his outlandish size, exchanged smug grins with his cohort. Tildi glared at him.
“Stop annoying my apprentice, Balindor,” the wizard scolded. “Pay attention.” The heap of scrolls chose that moment to cascade off the table. Tildi sprang up to catch the ones she could. “Tildi, you need not pick those up. You pay attention, too. This is important. Will you take notes?” He waved his hand, and the papers tidied themselves back onto the table. The young man continued to gawk at her with amusement. Tildi knew who he was now: Balindor, and his sister Lindora, representatives of their father, Salindor, lord of Melenatae, the country in which Overhill lay. One would think a prince would be raised with better manners. Why, even the merchants and troubadours in the room were better behaved!
“My lords and ladies, I bid you welcome. To those of you who have not visited Silvertree before, I invite you to enjoy its hospitality. To the rest of you, welcome back. You will be looking around and wondering what such a varied group has come to hear. There are representatives
here of several royal households, the guild of scholars, the fraternity of wizards, merchants, peddlers, craftsmen and teachers, bards and poets, of many different races. I promise you, what I and my fellow students of the world must reveal to you is of the greatest importance, to your safety and to the well-being of the entire world! Whatever your station on the outside, within these walls we are colleagues, and we must be allies, for the sake of all our futures.”
On a fresh roll of parchment Tildi wrote as quickly as she could, hoping she got the list down correctly. Collective nouns were easy, but there were so many, and they were surprisingly similar in design.
“What’s this I hear about a book, Olen?” Halcot demanded, one of the few guests whom Tildi could now identify by name. He tilted his chin back so his golden beard pointed directly at the wizard. “Hauled all this way when your messenger could have explained it in words of one syllable in my private study. I’ve got more pressing concerns within my own borders. We are still not at our full strength.”
Olen acknowledged him with a polite nod. “My lord Halcot, your war has been over for two years. I respect that you are still rebuilding, but I need to warn you about the possibility of another war, this one waged across every realm. This summons has some urgency, because if my fears were true, then we are all in danger. If they were not … well, my lords and ladies, they are. I have had confirmation.
“It was a message from a fellow wizard in the south lands that has recently come to me that caused me to call for all of you. I could not tell the whole story to you in a mere message, my lord, and you will hear why. It takes a great deal of telling, and these here with you have the right to hear it as well.
“You will have heard of the legend of the Makers, the great wizards of a hundred centuries ago, who called themselves the Shining Ones. That was somewhat conceited of them,” Olen added with a quirk of his mustache, “though their accomplishments most certainly allow them to claim great renown. We know some of their names, which are taught to every seeker who comes to learn magic, carrying on the oral tradition that gives those eight wizards a measure of immortality among humankind.”
“Infamy,” snorted the female centaur beside Lowan, her jade-green eyes flashing in her dark-hued face.
“I cannot dispute that, dear lady,” Olen said. “Nor would I try. These eight wizards were very powerful and focused people. They discovered, after many years of study, that there is a vital link between a thing and a
written symbol for a thing. They learned that, under the appropriate magical circumstances, to visit changes upon that symbol, or rune, was to visit the same changes upon the thing itself. Their studies, over many decades, not only confirmed their hypothesis, but allowed them to experiment upon the nature of reality itself.”
“Perversion,” growled one of the elves, a male with a perfectly young face framed by silky silver hair.
“Again, I cannot disagree with you,” Olen said. “In light of the outcome. Wizards are by inclination observers, as many of you have complained when we have refused to perform functions that you see no reason to refuse. The reason we refuse is what immeasurable harm can come from meddling inappropriately. Alas, the measure of a true philosopher is whether or not he ever stops asking questions to take action. You would think that they would be content only to study what they had discovered. They were not.”
“What did they do?” Halcot asked impatiently. Olen spread out his hands.
“Why, what any alchemist would do when given a number of reactive chemicals: they mixed them together to see what would happen.”
“What is the problem with that?” asked Balindor curiously, hoisting his glass. “When you have a few good liquors you can make better drinks than with one.”
“Yes, but what we are speaking of here are not liquors,” Olen said patiently. “We are speaking of living beings. The Shining Ones combined species, to see what would live and what would die.”
“Impossible!”
“Not impossible.” Olen sighed. “Look around you. The world is full of the products of their imaginations. They came up with new kinds of plants, but also many, many kinds of animals. The very symbols of your houses are products of those studies. The pegasus race of Rabantae were horses given the wings of swans. The gryphon of Melenatae is a lion mated with an eagle. Countless others, successful and many less so. But the Makers did not even stop there. They began to experiment with themselves, and create new races of men bred with animals to produce
intelligent beings
. Centaurs. Werewolves. Mermaids. Dwarves. Borrens. Thraik. Smallfolk. They are the work of these eight wizards. Brilliant as it may have been, as viable as these species have become, the question still remains after all these centuries: was it right to do?”
“Blasphemy! How can that be true?” a hairy-faced man demanded.
Tildi noticed that his canine teeth were long and unusually sharp. Another werewolf. “We are natural beings, as old as humanity!”
“You are only as old as humanity because you are part of humanity, Timmish,” Edynn spoke up from her place. “In the form your people wear most of the month. The three days of the full moon, your other part manifests itself. It was a less successful bonding than many.”
“It’s a lie,” he snarled. “I will kill you for saying such nonsense.”
“Truth,” the wizardess said simply, with a sigh. “It would not matter at all if you did kill me. The truth would remain unaltered. Unlike Olen, I would rather have allowed this generation to go on having forgotten about its origins, as you have for thousands of years, and just faced the immediate problem at hand. I have studied this knowledge all my life, as have most of my magical companions here.”
The other wizards in the room nodded gravely.
The Chief Lycanthrope, Timmish, was not appeased.
“The werewolf was brought into being to assuage the curiosity of the Makers—and disaster has befallen many because of it. You know your history. You know your behavior. There are tribes of your people whom you cast out because they refuse to control themselves when the change is upon them, isn’t that true?”
Timmish was too offended to reply, but many of his people nodded to themselves.
“The alterations that the Shining Ones made caused many species to come into being. See all these symbols?” Olen began to draw them upon the air with his fingertip, and they hung there, shining in silver. “All of them descend from the rune for human”—he drew them on the air with a fingertip—“Dwarves, smallfolk, centaurs …”
Tildi studied them, astonished. She had noticed the similarities between the species’ symbols before, but had passed them over as coincidence, thinking that all sentient beings must have something in common. She never dreamed that it would be because they were all variations on one general rune, that for
human.
She was surprised to be able to consider the matter with such dispassion. In her belly was a cold lump of lead. Like the werewolves, she did not want to believe that her race had not descended from antiquity as she had been taught from childhood. How could it possibly be true?