What was this? And why was it here in the middle of Boreshum Forest where no man lived? Perhaps he no longer stood in Boreshum, however; perhaps he had walked out of his world and into … where? He knew of no such place, not even in legends.
The wall extended in either direction as far as he could see. It seemed to curve away on both sides, although trees grew right up against it. He wondered in which direction to go, if there might be a way out of this place besides back the way he’d come.
He wanted to call out to Lewyn again, but held back for fear of giving away his position. Dekür heard the straw men off to his left, and that made up his mind for him: He went to the right as quickly as possible, pressed against the wall for support.
Soon his left hand and sleeve were soaked with cold moisture from the wall. Dekür held the sleeve to his head. Drops of icy water drizzled from it down his face and neck. He closed his eyes and groaned, then he wiped his palm along the wall and rubbed it over his face. He wondered if he had a fever because of his ankle.
He maneuvered around the trees that grew too close by the wall for him to thread between them. The wall must be old for the forest to have grown in on it, yet there were no vines on the black stones and no apparent fault or places where old stones had collapsed. Almost, thought Dekür, as if it had erupted out of the ground that morning. He wondered who had built it, what it might hide. Of the ancient and now united tribes, not one had the capabilities to raise such a wall. Not one. His own city, Atlarma, had taken twenty years to finish, and its defensive wall was dwarfed by this.
The forest, the straw men, and now this black wall—the awesomeness of the power that had created these things terrified Dekür. He wanted to flee from this place, to run to the nearest town and take comfort among normal surroundings and people whose greatest concern was gathering enough wood for a cold night’s fire. He did not want to know any more about this wall or what lay behind it. He just wanted his daughter back. And he was nearing exhaustion.
He leaned his whole weight against the wall as he edged along, hoping to conserve what strength he had left. He was trusting it so much for his support that, when it abruptly ended he nearly pitched headlong into the opening.
An enormous arch some twenty feet across enclosed him. Above, a gargoyle face glared down, its jaws opened wide and its tongue stuck out at him. He could almost smell its rancid breath. Beyond the arch, the ground sloped up gently. At the top of the rise stood a titanic black castle. Its towers spiraled into spikes that recalled the helmets of the straw men. They reminded Dekür of antlers atop some squatting dark demon—a bestial horned god waiting to suck the marrow from his bones. Dekür hobbled back a step.
Then he saw Lewyn.
She stood on the edge of the rise, in front of the castle. Behind her was a second figure, much larger, taller, wearing an unnaturally bright white robe with a cowl that hid the figure’s identity. Both of them waited for him.
Dekür’s every instinct shouted at him to run from that place as fast as his legs would go; to crawl if he couldn’t run. This was the work of demons and you cannot do battle against demons with a sword. A wise man flees such an enemy. But the thing in the white robe had his daughter, and he must have her back. He concentrated on that fact alone—made himself angry enough to raise his sword and start forward steadily, denying the pain as he denied his terror.
As he strode through the arch, the chiseled gargoyle face leered down at him.
The ground opened and Dekür fell. He was tumbling down along shaft, plunging inexorably toward a pit of red magma.
The sword slipped from his grasp.
He clawed at the smooth sides of the shaft. He knew he would die when he hit bottom.
“Lewyn!”
he cried.
He landed upon the magma, unbroken and alive. He buoyed him, held him up. The shaft, the fall, the pit had to be illusion. Nothing behaved as it should. He tried to seal his mind off from the treachery, to banish all phantasms from his sight. And even as he rejected all, the heat of the magma poured into him. He tossed madly and rolled onto his back in time to see his own sword plunging after him, as if it had waited for him to fall. He raised his hands, breathed one syllable, “No.” It couldn’t be.
The blade drove through him, the hilt thudded his chest with enough force to splinter his breastbone.
His body shook. His fingers closed over the quillon and tried to pull. He gasped at the agony of the blade moving through his chest. He began to sob at the wrongness of this. Illusion could not kill! And it was all illusion, everything from the silent soldiers to pit that had opened up—for his life, it couldn’t be real.
For his life.
Chapter 1.
A Mirian minstrel, dressed in gaudy clothes with puffed sleeves and tight orange pantaloons, walked lackadaisically along the narrow road to Tandragh. He was thinking of a song.
The air around him was cool, and sweet with commingled scents of just-opened flowers whose identities were secreted within the long shadows of morning. The minstrel strolled into a small copse. A gentle breeze drifted after him, touching the trees overhead, realigning all the arrows of sunlight that fell across his path.
He would have preferred company on this part of his journey, but no one had been going this way from the tavern where he had spent the previous night. Tandragh was at the end of a road that led nowhere else, and Tandragh was small. If the finest maker of
cymrallins
had not lived there, the minstrel would not have been going there, either. And so, alone, he chose to work on a song. It would be a love ballad, he had decided. The first line— “Your face, more soft than cat’s fur, my love” —was evidence of this. It was a line he had worked on for well over an hour. The rhythm was as he wanted it, but the imagery felt a tad forced. Nonetheless, he chose to keep it for the present.
He was not the most renowned of composers in Miria. His magic tricks (for he had performed as a magician since his cymrallin had been stepped on) were little better.
With his mind so bound up in the fundamentals of song, the minstrel was slow to react when the brightest of lights he had ever seen suddenly flared before his face and the air in front of him seemed to solidify. It struck him, and he stumbled back, clutching at the polished hilt of his sword.
The sounds of the forest grew to a roar, and then vanished in a thunderclap. A gust of wind like winter’s breath poured over him. The light grew larger, took shape, became a huge silvery globe floating above the ground. The globe contained some dark shape that moved but was obscured from identification by the metallic sheen of the globe. The globe itself did not mirror its surroundings; it reflected ripples of sheer white folded against black, the way a deeply shadowed drape might appear.
All of this—the light, the globe, and his awareness of it—took place in seconds. The minstrel turned to flee and came up against a second sphere. With a shriek he backed away. The second sphere was smaller than the first and was deformed by holes and lumps on one side as though hot wax had been poured over it. The minstrel looked back and forth at the globes, then cried out, “Gods! I’m in the presence of gods!” He fell to his knees and averted his eyes so as not to be struck blind.
The larger globe shot out a white tendril that coated the minstrel from head to foot with a glossy clear sap. It trapped him, bowed down, paralyzed, between thoughts, between breaths, between moments in time.
The second globe, too, attached a tendril to him.
The first globe began to alter. It compressed, its perfect roundness disappeared. The living form within it stretched out, filling in the changing portions of the globe like molten metal in a mold. There came a sound—a crackling, hissing, white-hot sound. The globe thinned and elongated further. Its sides began to ripple, and a roughly humanoid form appeared within it. The silver mold redefined itself, first expanding, then contracting; and with each set of “breaths” a new feature emerged beneath the silver: first arms and legs, then feet and hands. A torso was carved out, then clothing upon it. The very top of the figure stretched out to each side and became the brim of a hat.
When all else had been defined, the area beneath the hat was still blank. Images, impressions drawn from the minstrel’s mind, flickered across the silver surface, each face lasting for a split-second, instantly replaced with another and then another face until, at last, a set of eyes remained, and then a mouth, a nose, a beard. When the face had been sculpted, a silver human statue stood beside the minstrel. Reflected on its features still was a place that was not the forest. The sculpted being did not exist here yet.
The silver began to shrink away and everywhere that it retracted, colors—material and flesh—appeared. Brown leather for the hat, and the darker brown fur of a jerkin; a maroon shirt with loose sleeves; black leggings, shiny black boots, and a heavy black cape that was chained to the jerkin. The face was square-jawed, the dark beard trimmed close. Had the minstrel been able to look up, he would not have known the face, but he would have recognized in it some familiar aspect. The body, too, would have called to mind someone whose companionship he had often enjoyed—the gray-haired blacksmith of Dolm.
The last few threads of silver pulled away from the man beneath. All of the sphere’s outer shell was now collected over his left hand, a silver ball at the end of his arm, which hung from his wrist like an enormous tear.
The air swirled and a great roaring echoed through the copse. The man trembled as he passed into the reality of the place called Secamelan.
The man sighed, his head hung forward, then tilted back as he drew his first deep breath. His eyes opened. The irises were black; around them the whites were so shiny as to seem almost porcelain. He looked about himself and smiled. He had come through the doorway another time and survived. How many more passages could he withstand? And happily, this world appeared to be intact, not scorched and dying. “You may have finally arrived in time, Lyrec,” he said to himself; then he cocked his head and repeated, “Lyrec.” How strange his name sounded on these lips, in this manner of speech. He glanced down at the minstrel and reflected upon what knowledge he had acquired from the hapless creature. The fellow had either not been very bright, or the society here was not much to speak of—the rudiments of language, a sense of the world that could only be called dim, and a handful of concepts that as yet made little sense. Beyond that, the minstrel’s mind had been closed to him, if there were anything more inside.
The weight on his left hand drew his attention. His
crex
, reduced in size, shining silvery, still encased his hand. That would not do. It would have to be disguised. He looked the minstrel over again. There, near the man’s waist, was a thin leather scabbard ending in a short shaft with a semi-circle of woven metal around it. Lyrec was not sure what this device was—the concept of weapons had not been one that he’d elicited from the minstrel. Nevertheless, it was perfect for his needs. He closed his eyes.
The silvery
crex
fluctuated for a moment. Then it sent out two shining strands that slowly colored and altered to become leather, ending in a sheath.
The remaining silver dropped down and fit itself into position, assembling above the sheath into a grip with full-basket hilt.
Lyrec flexed his freed left hand. He looked down. The thing strapped around his waist was not quite the same as the one on the minstrel. The sheath was scarcely more than the length of his hand.
There had not been enough material left for the
crex
to extend further down his leg. He hoped it would be sufficient.
Quite suddenly, Lyrec realized that he was alone. He searched the copse, but saw no one else. “Borregad?” he called out. “Borregad, where are you? Are you intact?”
A terrible caterwaul answered him.
Lyrec envisioned his poor friend lying in the weeds in dreadful pain, even near death. Borregad’s
crex
had been so damaged that he could never assume a form on the same level as Lyrec’s, and Lyrec was forever fearful that his friend would accidentally incarnate into an object—transform into a table or a boulder or something worse. They did not know, either of them, what Borregad’s limits of transformation were.
He called out again, but received no answer.
The grass was very high in the copse, and it was impossible to tell where Borregad might be. Lyrec got down onto his knees and began prying through the grass, expecting at any moment to find the twisted, dying form of his friend. As he crawled about, he scuffed up clouds of dust from the side of the path.
“Borregad. I can’t find you.” Was he too late, had his companion succumbed at last? They never should have undertaken these journeys. What did they know of this kind of travel? “You’ll have to make some kind of sound, direct me. Can you hear me?”
Just to his left a voice called out: “For pity’s sake, leave me alone, will you?”
Lyrec sat back on his haunches. “What?” he asked. “What did you—you’re not hurt at all!” He got to his feet.
“Hurt!” cried out the voice. It had an odd, nasal twang to it. “What does
hurt
have to do with it? You should see me. It’s horrible.”
The high grass shook. Lyrec crouched down again. He saw a dark shape move behind the wall of grass, and dove forward. “Bo—ah! What’s this?” He withdrew a feather the size of a writing quill from the bushes. The feather was brown and blue and green, and opalesced into gold when the light lay directly upon it. Lyrec twirled it, and a memory not his own passed through his mind. “Good luck charm,” he murmured. The exact meaning of this escaped him. He removed his hat and placed the feather in its band. He held the hat out to admire it, but his eyes focused on some movement in the bushes beyond and a look of exasperation set over his black-bearded face. He brushed a hand through his silver hair and scrunched the hat back down on his head. With a final tug on the brim, he stood and began slapping at his clothes, raising dust like a plague of gnats.