Authors: Alison Croggon
Just before he fell asleep, Dernhil wondered if he was beginning to think of Cadvan as a friend. After everything that had happened between them, he thought, that would be odd beyond imagining: no one had caused him more pain. It was Cadvan who had opened the underworld in his mind, awakening shadows he had never suspected lived within him. Ought he to be grateful?
He would rise early tomorrow, he thought. He needed to see Nelac for his own reasons.
T
HE
storm blew out after midnight, bringing in its wake an eerie stillness. In her small chamber at the School of Lirigon, Selmana laid down her pen and slumped back in her chair. She had spent the evening making notes on metallurgy from some obscure scrolls she had found in the Lirigon library. Since Nelac had given her private lessons, she had discovered an unexpected fascination with these writings; although she still struggled to read them, she had begun to wonder if she would write something herself, as Nelac had once suggested she might.
Tonight that seemed a very distant possibility. She stared dully at her notes: “Wherefore smelting is necessary, for by this means earths, solidified juices and stone are separated from their metals so that they obtain their proper colour and become pure…” The words had ceased to make any sense, she was too tired. She stood up and opened the casement, throwing back the shutters that she had closed earlier against the storm, and leant on the windowsill. The cold air was a balm and she breathed in deeply. It was a moonless night, very black, with a few vagrant stars peeking through the ragged clouds. She lingered for a while, huddling a shawl about her shoulders, and stared blankly over the dark roofs of the School.
Her first thought was for her mother. She looked east, wondering, as she had every evening for the past fortnight, if her mother was safe. Selmana had returned to Lirigon reluctantly after the ugly incident with the boar, feeling that she ought to stay at the farmhouse in case something else happened. Nelac had said that he thought Berdh was in no more danger than anyone else in the Fesse, which was, when Selmana thought about it, little comfort. He had put wards about the farmhouse, as he had promised, and assured Selmana that it was most unlikely that Kansabur, if it were she, would return to the same place. But Selmana found it was impossible not to worry. She was having trouble sleeping: sometimes she startled awake, her heart pounding, terrified that a malign spirit was outside her window, or reliving the foul sensation as the revenant had tried to possess her. Even the memory made her break out in a sweat.
Selmana’s answer to these anxieties was to throw herself into work. Despite Calis’s demanding schedules in the crafts of the Making and the other compulsory classes for Minor Bards, she still had some idle hours: she dealt with them by cornering one of the Bards in the library and requesting a list of every book or scroll to do with metalworking. The Bard had been slightly startled, but the next day gave her what he called a “preliminary list”. Selmana crossed out those in languages she couldn’t read, and resolved to work her way through the rest of the recommended writings. There were fifty-four titles in the list, and so far she had stubbornly worked her way through five of the shorter scrolls. At this rate, she thought, she would be chained to her work table for the next half-century.
Still, a person couldn’t work all the time. She should go to bed: but for all her exhaustion, she felt strained and wakeful. Tonight she was sorely missing Ceredin. If her cousin were still alive, she could have visited her room, as she had done so often when she was troubled. She didn’t have to say a word: Ceredin always knew, with her quick, immediate sympathy, that something was wrong. She would have poured her a wine or a tiny glass of laradhel, a delicious golden liqueur brewed by Bards in the valley of Innail, and settled down to talk. It wasn’t so much that Ceredin gave her advice, although when she did it was always good; it was the comfort of her company. They talked about everything under the sun, from the latest family gossip to the mysteries of the Speech. Ceredin had always made her laugh.
Selmana leaned over the windowsill, feeling the heaviness in her shoulders. It was a tiredness of the soul, she thought, deeper than physical weariness. That was harder to deal with. Her eyes were sticky and hot, and she rubbed them, thinking that even if she couldn’t sleep, she should lie down.
When she looked out over Lirigon again, it had vanished. She blinked, and looked again. Where the School had been a moment before, a shadowy plain stretched before her, rising up to a black, cloudless sky studded with stars. For a moment she was utterly still: she thought her heart had stopped beating. She glanced back into her room: it was just as before, with the lamp casting its soft light over her work table, its image shining crookedly in the diamond panes of the window. The sill beneath her folded arms was solid and cold, and below her the wall ran unbroken down to the ground. And yet from the foot of the building nothing was the same at all.
I must have fallen asleep without knowing it and am dreaming, she thought. She breathed in hard, trying to calm her mind, and realized she was trembling. It is a very vivid dream. But in a moment I will wake and all will be well. She rubbed her eyes again, hoping that might make Lirigon reappear, but the empty plains before her remained unchanged. She looked up at the sky and saw with a shock that she recognized none of the constellations. They shone with a different light from the stars she knew: they seemed further away, but their light was more intense, somehow colder, and their groupings were utterly strange. There wasn’t a whisper of wind, and the air struck with a dull chill, as if it had never been breathed. It was absolutely silent.
Selmana didn’t know how long she stood there, staring out of her window, clutching the hard stone of the sill as if it were a spar that would save her from drowning. It was long enough for her body to stiffen so that when she moved, she gave an involuntary groan that startled her. She stepped back from the window, thinking that she should close the casement, bar the shutters and go to bed, locking out this unnerving reality that had suddenly appeared at her window. But what if it doesn’t go away, she thought. What if I wake up and everything is just like this? She glanced over at the door of her room, which was closed fast, and with a shudder it occurred to her that if she opened it, she might not find the ordinary corridor and stairs of the Bardhouse, but something else, some other place.
She dug her nails into her palm until it hurt and then bit her finger hard, hoping the pain might shock her awake. It’s a dream or a vision, it’s not real, she told herself. But some deeper sense told her it was not a dream at all. It was impossible, but it was real. Reluctantly, taking deep, slow breaths, she turned back to the window, trying to control her mounting fear. The plains were still outside, a light grey under the black sky. There was no moon. For some reason she was sure there was never a moon in this sky, never any sun. And suddenly she knew what she was seeing: it was the Shadowplains the Bards spoke of, the second Circle, where the dead walked on their way to the Gates.
The moment she found a name, she seemed to see more clearly, and she felt less afraid. Nelac, she reminded herself, had walked these plains and returned. She stared out curiously into the endless night. Slowly, she became aware that the landscape was not, as she had first thought, utterly desolate: she could see forms like shrubs or small bushes, and she thought something like grass grew on the ground. Were they living plants, she wondered, or just the shadows of things, without substance or life? Were there animals, too? Was that fleeting form in the corner of her eye the shape of a bird? The cold began to bite into her and she shivered, drawing her shawl closer around her, and then leaned forward over the sill. There was a soft illumination in the distance. Something, a form of light, was moving towards her.
At first she wasn’t sure if her eyes were playing tricks, but as it grew closer, the light resolved into a human figure, a slender woman, lit with a pale radiance the same colour as the stars. Selmana was almost sure, from her gait, that it was Ceredin, but she couldn’t see her face clearly. Before she could decide for certain, the figure started and looked fearfully behind her. She lifted her arms in a sudden gesture of defiance or alarm, and vanished.
The plains were empty again, but Selmana sensed that something had changed. She squinted into the darkness, straining to see through the shadows. She could feel a new presence, a weight that pressed on her awareness. Then, as if the darkness rearranged itself before her eyes, she saw it. She leaped back from the window with a cry, covering her face with her hands. When she looked again, the Shadowplains had gone: the night-time roofs of Lirigon again stretched below her window.
Relief flooded her body with sudden warmth. Hastily, her hands trembling, she drew the shutters and closed the window. She stumbled to her bed and sat down, staring at the wall, trying to understand what she had seen. She didn’t know how to describe it to herself: it was like an image in a dream that wouldn’t translate into everyday life, and which therefore slipped out of memory, leaving only its feeling behind. The strongest sensation was of horror. The Shadowplains had frightened her because they were uncanny, but this thing she had seen had terrified her in a wholly different way.
It had no form that she could fix her eye on. It shifted its shape, like smoke. But it wasn’t like smoke at all, because at the same time it seemed to be material, as if the darkness had become glutinous. It had appeared like a disease, like a toxin erupting out of the ground. It had seemed to be many things, many non-shapes, running in and out of each other like mercury, but she was sure it was a single consciousness. It had no face, no eyes, but she had felt it was searching for her, that soon it would discover her sitting at her window.
Selmana shook her head. How could she describe this to anybody else? She couldn’t make sense of what she had seen even to herself. The only thing that was clear was the feeling: an almost tangible wave of malevolent intent. It was like (but not at all like) a suffocating stench, that made you dizzy. You breathed it in and it became part of you, whether you liked it or not. It was like…
Selmana’s thoughts faltered. She wondered if she should write her impressions down while they were still vivid in her mind, but as her terror waned and her body stopped shaking, she realized that she was so tired she could barely stand. There was one thing that she was sure of, one thing that was clear: it was exactly the same feeling, as distinct and particular as an individual voice, as that she had experienced in her mother’s orchard a fortnight before. Exactly the same.
When Selmana woke the following morning, she lay on her bed staring at the shuttered window. She had to force herself to open it and let the morning in. Even though she could hear a chatter of morning birdsong and a cockerel crowing in the distance, she feared that she would see only the grey landscape: but there it was, the red-tiled roofs of Lirigon glowing in the early sun, the sky paling to the clear blue of what would be a beautiful autumn day. She drew in a shuddering breath of relief.
She dressed hurriedly and ran to Nelac’s Bardhouse, but when she knocked on his door there was no answer. Biting her lip with impatience, she stood a while in indecision, and then made her way to her lessons for that day. She spent the morning trying to concentrate on the theory of the Speech, which was taught by Inghalt, one of her least favourite teachers. He seldom invited discussion and Selmana had twice fallen asleep in his classes out of sheer boredom.
This morning she was particularly distracted. Her sleep had been full of uneasy dreams, none of which she now remembered, and ever since she awoke she had been fighting a sense that something was tracking her, growing ever closer. It was absurd: what could happen here in the heart of Lirigon? And yet the feeling grew on her during the morning: the hairs on her neck prickled at odd moments, and she would turn swiftly, as if she might catch a glimpse of something that sniffed at her footsteps. Her friends noticed she was behaving oddly, and teased her for her jumpiness. She thought it would not be surprising to imagine things after her strange experience the night before. But the sensation wouldn’t go away. She listened to Inghalt with half an ear, in case he surprised her with a question, fighting back her anxiety.
What did it mean, Inghalt was asking, when Bards said that it was impossible to lie in the Speech? “It means,” he said, “that unlike other forms of language, the Speech has an indissoluble relationship to reality. This is why, in the mouth of a Bard, it can change reality. This is the core of the mystery of magery…”
At this point, one of her fellow students interrupted. “If that’s really so, Bard Inghalt, then how is it that Hulls also used the Speech? Because we all know they did.”
“Please don’t distract us with juvenile questions, Gest,” said Inghalt. “Hulls didn’t use the Speech as we use it. Neither do those who are not born with it in their tongue, but who learn it in the same way they learn other languages. In such usages, the Speech is not the Speech…”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” said Selmana, suddenly interested. “It’s the same words, isn’t it? How can the words have a – an indissoluble relationship to reality – when they can be used in other ways too?”
Inghalt looked harassed. “The Black Speech is a mere side-alley to our subject today,” he said. “Sorcery has nothing to do with us. As I said…”
“But the Hulls use the Speech to make charms, just as we do,” said Gest, glancing at Selmana. “The Black Speech changes reality, and so must be one with the Speech in that way.”
“And we all know that Hulls can lie,” said another student. There was a rustling through the room: suddenly all the Minor Bards were paying attention.
It was a common game among the younger Bards, to try to lie outright in the Speech: they all knew how the words wouldn’t form on the tongue or in the mind if you tried to say something that you knew was untrue. Sometimes the more talented among the Minor Bards could say things like “the sky is made of stone”, but only if they concentrated very hard. Yet you could recite poetry – or at least, most poetry – in the Speech, and poetry often described things that were not real. Bards said this was because poetry explored more complex truths than literal realities. The smarter Minor Bards worked out that they could say something that was untrue if they believed it was true. How different was that from a lie? How different was a poem from a lie? If a Hull could lie in the Speech, why not a Bard as well?