Sorcerer's Son (27 page)

Neither slept well, thinking of the task that awaited dawn light.

They had some small difficulty in finding the grave patch, so overgrown was it with weeds and grain gone wild. The three marker stones seemed like so many boulders among the tares, the mounds of the graves themselves like mere hummocks of the earth. The wild flowers that had decked them were lost now, in the rank greenery. Pulling tough stems out by the roots, Cray cleared the tangle from the third grave, the one with the roughest marker. Then he began to dig. The two companions only had one spade between them; when Cray tired of chopping at earth hardened with years of repose, Sepwin took over. They had burrowed almost the height of a man into the earth, marveling at the diligent gravedigging of an old man, when Sepwin struck metal. Something chinked beneath the spade.

“Stop,” said Cray, jumping down into the hole with his friend. “We’ll damage them if we dig farther with that,” He stooped and began to scrabble at the dirt with his knife and his bare hands. Sepwin tossed the spade up to the rim of the excavation and knelt to help him.

The sun was at its zenith, its rays illuminating as much of the bottom of the hole as they could at this season, by the time Cray and Sepwin had uncovered the entire suit of chain mail. The badly rusted chain was laid out flat, as if upon the body of a man; the rotted remnants of a surcoat covered the links, and the quilted padding was inside, brown and delicate, shredding at the lightest touch. Leather gloves and boots, half disintegrated, rested where hands and feet would have been.

There were no bones.

Cray dug on, after sending Sepwin to the surface with chain and cloth and leather. He dug on alone, with knife and bare hands, till the hole was too deep for him to climb from without a rope, till he needed a torch to show him the bottom, far from sunlight, far from the heat of the afternoon. He paid no heed to his friend’s voice, falling continuously from above, begging him to come back to the daylight, pleading that no man, young or old, would dig a grave so deep. He dug on, till almost half of every clod he tossed upward to the rim fell back upon him, till water began to seep into his work and collapse the walls as quickly as he could dig out the floor. Only then, at last, did he rise to unsteady legs, fingers numb from the chilling mud, and allow his spiders to spin him a silken ladder for ascent to the realms of the living. Halfway up, he dropped the torch behind him, and it snuffed itself out in the wetness below. Black with muck, his hands bloody from long scrabbling, he clambered to the surface. He had found only stones.

Sepwin made him sit by their campfire, where a pot of stew was bubbling for the evening meal. The sun was low and red in the west, and already the summer air was beginning to cool. Cray could hardly believe he had been digging for so long. He stretched his hands out to the flames, and the numbness began to drain from them with that warmth, but they shook—his whole body shook, muscles overstrained, as if he had been swinging a sword all day. Sepwin brought a cloth and water and began to clean the dirt and blood from his companion’s skin, from gouges and scrapes that bled afresh with the rubbing. Cray tried to help him, awkwardly, but his fingers were too weary, too leaden to grasp the cloth, so he gave up and merely sat still, letting Sepwin tend him.

“You’ll hardly be able to move tomorrow,” said Sepwin.

“I’ll be all right.” He stared down at the damp and rusty pile of chain near his feet. Earth still clung to it, and the scent of the earth as well, dank and moldy. “What reason could there be in the world, Feldar,” he murmured, “for burying the armor without the man who wore it?”

Sepwin poured more water on the cloth and gently swabbed at his friend’s face. “He said he buried the man.”

“He couldn’t have!”

Sepwin shrugged. “What motive would he have for lying, Cray? He didn’t know who you were.”

Cray’s head drooped low. “Then the body must have been dug up since it was buried.”

“The old man would have known about that, surely.”

“Not if it happened after he was gone.”

“The ground was hard,” said Sepwin. “Too hard to have been disturbed so recently.”

“You think so?”

“I’ve handled a plow. I know virgin soil. Fifteen years is time enough for a grave to become as firm.”

“Then he was never there at all. We come back to a lie, the old man’s lie.”

“I think he spoke the truth,” said Sepwin. “He buried a body there. It wore this suit of chain, the clothing.”

Cray squinted at him in the fading light. “How do you explain the lack of bones, then, Master Feldar?”

Sepwin reached for the stew pot, poured a share into the bowl Cray used and another into his own. “I explain it as you would, if you were thinking properly, if you weren’t so tired that you’ll fall asleep before you’ve had dinner if you don’t eat quickly. I explain it by magic.”

“Magic?”

Sepwin nodded. “Where you are involved, my friend, I always suspect magic.”

“But there was no magic involved in his death.”

“No? Well, perhaps not, but

were you there to judge it?”

Cray frowned. “You think the old man was deceived somehow?”

“I don’t know what to think. Only that there is no other explanation at all. How else would one draw a body out of its grave without disturbing the wrappings or the grave?”

Cray closed his eyes, let the savory smell from the bowl in his hands fill his nostrils. “How else indeed?” he murmured.

Sepwin poked him in the shoulder. “Eat now. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

Cray ate.

In the morning, they gathered up the chain and the rotted cloth and a spiderweb sack full of the soil from the grave, to take back to the Seer with them.

“I seem to have told my mother the truth after all,” Cray said, loading the parcel of earth into one of his saddlebags..

“Do you think the Seer will be able to see anything in that dirt?”

“I don’t know. That’s why we’ll bring all of this.” He shrugged. “I even have a few of the wild flowers here. The old man must have planted them years ago. Maybe they’ll help.”

“Something will help” said Sepwin. “Remember the lady Helaine said that you had a long journey still ahead of you, that your quest had barely begun.”

“Yes,” said Cray, mounting Gallant. “I take heart from that, from knowing that however bleak things look right now, this isn’t the end. Come on now, this looks like a good day for traveling.”

The Seer shook her head slowly. “None of this tells me anything, Cray. The chain, the clothing, comes from the same place the sword and shield did. Nor have these any more identity than those had. The earth and flowers

” She gazed at him sadly. “They are empty. There was never a human body buried in that earth; human flesh never nourished these flowers. I know nothing more about him now than I did the last time you saw me, Cray.” She reached out for him, to touch his shoulders lightly with both her hands. “I am sorry.”

“It can’t be true.” He searched her pale eyes. “There must be more.”

“There is nothing.”

Cray covered his face with his hands. “What shall I do now?”

Sepwin, who had stood behind his friend while they spoke to the Seer, now fell to his knees before her in the sand. “Kind lady,” he said, “if it be true that no human flesh was ever buried in this earth, then what was it that the old man saw and spoke to and buried? What was it that chopped his wood for the winter, if it was not a human being?”

The Seer gazed down at him, a frown marring the smooth whiteness of her forehead. “I don’t know. An illusion, perhaps.”

“Wearing real armor?”

“Even so.”

“Then

if Cray’s father was an illusion

who was his father?”

The Seer dipped one hand into her pool. “You must understand something about the limits of my power, Feldar Sepwin,” she said. “Ordinary human beings are as books to me, the pages of the past transparent and full of bold, black writing, the pages of the future blurred and shadowy—yet I am accustomed to interpreting shadows. You are such a book, and you cannot close yourself to me. But Cray

Cray has lived most of his life within the walls of Castle Spinweb, and there I cannot see, nor into any sorcerer’s home. I read only the pages of his book that were written beyond Spinweb’s confines; there are enough of them, though, to show me the important facts of his life. Of his mother, I can see nothing; she and all the others of the sorcerous breed have lives forever beyond me.” She nodded slowly. “There is sorcery at work here, and not just on Cray’s mother’s side. But I can give no aid in puzzling it out.”

Cray gripped her arm. “Who can?”

“Oh, there are those who can, I am sure, but none who will.”

“What do you mean?”

“Whoever your father is, he has gone to great lengths to hide his identity, or someone has done so for him. There are sorcerers who can ferret out such information, they who command demons, but none of them would betray a fellow by giving it to you. They leave each other alone—you know that, Cray; they keep uneasy truces among themselves, and none will chance another’s wrath by revealing his secrets.”

“Not even for a price?”

She flicked her fingers against the water, making it ripple in overlapping circles. “You don’t have that kind of price.”

“I could earn it. Even if it took me years.”

“It wouldn’t be gold, Cray. A demon can find its master all the gold he needs.”

“What then?”

“Knowledge. Power.”

Cray bowed his head.

“I know this is a hard end for you, lad,” she said softly.

He clasped his hands and, elbows on his knees, leaned forward to rest his brow on the interlaced fingers. “Where is the long quest you prophesied? Where is the journey scarcely begun? Am I to rush away from here to search aimlessly through the world, asking at every door for my father? Am I to ride on until I drop, without plan or hope?”

She touched his hair with her wet fingers. “There is another way.”

His head snapped up. “Tell me.”

“I don’t think you’ll like it.”

“Let me judge.”

“The secrets of this world, even sorcerers’ secrets, are available to the demons. They pass human information freely among them, like so much gossip, and they will give it to the person who knows how to ask for it. Learn to summon such a creature yourself, and it will answer your questions.”

Cray’s lips pursed whitely. “Become a sorcerer, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“And put aside all I have learned, all I have striven for, all I have been for my whole life?”

“If you would know your father’s name, yes.”

Cray rose heavily and turned away from her. The white sand yielded under his feet as he walked slowly from the pool. “My lady,” he murmured, “that is a heavier price than gold.” He lifted his eyes to the walls, to their flashing specks of crystal, like stars in a firmament of black rock. Wavering torchlight gave them the illusion of motion, and that made him feel dizzy. A whirlpool seemed to yawn beneath his feet, sucking at him like the muck of the swamp, and he reached out for some support to keep him from falling in, but there was none. And then, suddenly, there was: Sepwin, gripping his friend’s arm with surprising strength.

“You have the courage,” Sepwin said, “to do as the lady Helaine says, and afterward to go back to knighthood.”

“I wanted him to be proud of me,” Cray muttered. “What is knighthood to me now that I know he wasn’t a knight?”

“You don’t know anything of the sort.”

“He was not a knight!” Cray said loudly, and his voice echoed from the walls. “No proper knight would have been involved in such a lie!”

“Perhaps not a proper knight

”

“Beggar or sorcerer, sage or fool—he could have been anyone!” He patted Sepwin’s hand that clutched his arm. “Ah, Feldar, I thought it could be no worse than on that day at Mistwell. How wrong I was! And how right the lady Helaine

The apprenticeship will be long, a long journey indeed. But my mother will be pleased.”

“What will you tell her?” asked Sepwin.

Cray looked at his free arm, slipped the sleeve up to expose the chain he had worn so long. Spiders rested within some of the links, as if in tiny nests. “I shall tell her that I have changed my mind. No more than that. No more.”

“Will she believe that, after all this time?”

“She’ll want to believe it. And it’s true enough.” Without looking back at her, he said to the Seer, “Tell me how I may apprentice myself to the proper sort of sorcerer, my lady. I would do so as soon as possible.”

“I can communicate your desire to the sorcerous community. Surely there will be some few who wish apprentices but have no children of their own. You are welcome to stay here, Cray, until one is found.”

‘Thank you, lady. You are very kind. But I cannot impose. I have not even paid your fee.“

“There will be time for that, when you are a sorcerer and have something worth paying with.”

He glanced back at her sharply. “You knew. You knew all the time that this would happen.”

She smiled at him. “I knew that, one way or another, you would return to sorcery. I knew, because I could not see anything after this last journey of yours. But what sort of sorcery you would choose

I could only guess that. Don’t be angry with me, Cray. I have given you choices, not made them for you.” She rose from the rim of the pool and stretched a hand out to him. “Come. There are rooms and rooms beyond this one, and soft beds and every comfort of the finest castle. Accept my hospitality.”

Stiffly, he bowed. “As you wish, my lady. But first, Master Feldar, will you help me shed this suit of chain? I haven’t any further need for it.”

Sepwin helped him, and so did the Seer, and both pretended not to notice the tears that streamed down his cheeks as the links rattled and chinked and dropped finally to the pure white sand.

Ť ^ ť

Rezhyk stormed across the workshop, his metal-studded boots ringing like bronze bells upon the polished floor. All around him, the minor demons that lit the chamber cringed in response to his anger, their flames burning low in the sconces that had never held candles. Their master hardly noticed. “Why did you not tell me about the child?” he shouted.