Authors: Alison Croggon
“It’s complete indeed. I thought this would be a perilous enterprise, and I’m not even nervous! The chief difficulty will be convincing Nelac that you are who we say you are.”
“Nelac will know,” said Cadvan.
When they arrived at the School of Lirigon, the rain that had threatened since dawn began to arrive in little squalls and eddies. They passed through the gates without remark, and Cadvan rubbed down Brownie in the communal stables. Nelac’s horse, Cina, was still in her stall, which reassured them that he was still in Lirigon, and Dernhil gave her a message just in case Nelac passed them by mischance.
As he walked through the grey-cobbled streets, lined with poplars now turning to the gold of autumn, Cadvan felt his chest constrict; this was where he belonged, and he could never be a part of it again. They passed a Bardhouse where a group of musicians sat in one of the ground-floor rooms, playing one of the Canticles of Light. Cadvan halted, involuntarily overwhelmed as the music flowed over him. His whole body ached to be part of the world of Barding, to know this difficult beauty living again in his hands. Dernhil turned to him, taking his elbow in sudden concern, and Cadvan started and smiled painfully.
“I’d almost forgotten,” he said. “I feel like I’m haunting a house where I used to live.”
“It’s always hard, coming back,” said Dernhil. “But we must hurry, or we’ll get soaked. The weather’s beginning to set in.”
The cobbles were already dark with rain when they reached the Bardhouse where Nelac lived. No one was about: the household was already busy at classes or other business. Dernhil knocked on Nelac’s door, but there was no answer. He swore softly.
“He’s out,” he said. “I hope we didn’t pass him on our way here.”
“I doubt he’s far away,” said Cadvan. “He won’t mind if we wait.”
He pushed the door open, and they entered Nelac’s sitting room. Inside was dark and chilly, and a fire had fallen to ash in the grate. Dernhil woke one of the lamps, and it was only then that they saw Nelac slumped on the couch. Cadvan ran to kneel beside him, taking his hand. It was as cold as the earth. Colder.
“Has he died?” whispered Dernhil, at his shoulder.
“I don’t know.” Cadvan felt for a pulse, first in Nelac’s wrist, then at his neck. “I can feel nothing. But…”
“I’ll get help.”
“No, wait.” Cadvan put his hand on Nelac’s forehead and began to glow with Bardic magery. As he did so, the Pilanel charm was broken, and his disguise fell away. “He’s not dead,” he said at last. “But he is absent. I don’t know how long he has been away. Long enough for the fire in the grate to burn out…”
“Absent? What do you mean?”
“My guess is that he has entered the Shadowplains, and has yet to return.”
“Do you think he has been here all this time we were waiting? Why did nobody find him?”
“Perhaps nobody thought he was here. People are reluctant to interrupt Nelac, after all. But my guess is that he has been here since last night.”
“What shall we do?”
Cadvan stood up, considering. “I think you should light a fire and warm the room,” he said. “I’ll try to find him.”
“In the Shadowplains?”
“That’s my best guess.”
Dernhil bit his lip. “You know that you’re no longer disguised? If we’re found here, and Nelac as one dead, I don’t know what will happen… They might think you killed him…”
“Then we had better find Nelac, no? Bolt the door, so no one can interrupt us. If this doesn’t work, you’ll have to find Bashar and tell her what has happened.”
Dernhil stood up, and started pacing the room in agitation. “I’m not sure. I think I ought to find Bashar now. I know nothing of the Shadowplains, Cadvan, only what I have seen in dreams, and that is bad enough. I wonder how you can find anyone in there…”
“I know more than I care to remember,” said Cadvan. “One thing I do know is that time passes differently there, if indeed it passes at all. You can spend what seems like days in the Shadowplains and when you return here, only a little time has gone by. If Nelac has been here since last night, I am sure he is trapped.”
“And if even Nelac may be trapped there, why not you?”
Cadvan hesitated. “It’s a risk, certainly. But I think it’s a gamble that I must take. My Knowing is open now, Dernhil, and I think … it’s difficult to explain, but perhaps I can trust it. Let me try.”
Dernhil halted, and met Cadvan’s eyes. “And if you end up like Nelac?”
“Then call Bashar, and we will deal with what we must deal with. But I think I will not.”
After a long pause, Dernhil nodded.
“Light the fire,” said Cadvan. “It’s cold in the Shadowplains.”
It was cold in the Shadowplains, but while you were there you didn’t feel temperature. Here was no smell, no taste: only a sensation that afterwards you thought of as a memory of taste, a tang of acrid air. You knew hardness, softness, light and dark, length, breadth and height, you could hear whispers and cries and the sound of your feet treading down the shadows of grass. Distance was very different: far and near meant as little as they did in dreams. You moved around as if you had a body, but somehow you knew it was an illusion, a memory formed by the mind to cover the unfamiliar. As some of your senses shut down, others, of which you were scarcely aware in the World, sharpened and blossomed. It made it hard to describe being in the Shadowplains: the meanings words had in the World had little purchase. As Bards often said when they recorded their experiences, it was like attempting to describe colour to someone who had never in their lives been able to see.
Even fear was different: it had a muted quality, as if it were a feeling that was witnessed rather than experienced. Cadvan was frightened now. As the sky opened above him, still and dark with its scattering of white stars, he felt horribly visible, as if the ground itself were aware of him. It usually took a while for the Shadowplains to coalesce from indeterminate shadows into something that was seeable, but this time it was quick, snapping into instant, clear focus.
For a time, how long he couldn’t tell, Cadvan didn’t move. He stood in the middle of a long slope, which gradually shelved down into a wide valley. At the bottom there was a winding darkness, which looked like a river, although Cadvan already knew that there was no water there. Rather, it was a course filled with a dark vapour, its surface curling and wisping in strange formations, responding to air currents that were undetectable in this windless place. Bards in Lirigon called it the River of Forgotten Souls. Behind Cadvan the slope ran up and up, like a vast wave, and at its top he could see sharp outcroppings of stone.
Gradually the sense that he was being watched ebbed away, as if whatever had noted his arrival had lost interest in him. Cadvan wrenched his mind into focus: it was too easy in the Shadowplains to lose yourself, to become like the shades that he could see drifting along a pale path that meandered down the slope, without memory or desire or hope. It was this leaching of yourself that Bards warned was the chief peril of entering the Shadowplains: it was as if your soul slowly evaporated, leaving only a husk. It was no place for the living.
Cadvan gathered his will and stepped onto the path, grasping for the intuition he had felt in Nelac’s study. There, he had sensed Nelac, faint but unmistakable, in the inner constellation that mapped the presences of those he loved. That was all he needed to listen to, that echo of love: he fastened his mind onto the thought. He looked uncertainly up the slope, and then turned down towards the river. He walked slowly and deliberately, as if his heels were dogged with loathing.
The long slope seemed at once crowded with people and yet empty. Somehow everyone was at a distance: although he saw many shades wandering up and down the path and across the grey grasses, none ever came close to him, and he never passed anyone. He wondered if Ceredin were among the souls he saw, but pushed the thought aside. It could only distract him. He felt strangely heavy, as if his limbs were made of mud, but he forced himself on. He was nearing the river, and could see the coils of vapour on its uneasy surface. Nelac was near by, he was sure, but he couldn’t see him.
Cadvan had always tried to avoid the River of Forgotten Souls when he had entered the Shadowplains. Once, he had been forced to cross it, treading the Bridge of Tears, a stone arch unmade by hands that linked the shores, and it had seemed to him that the vapour entered his soul like ice, numbing his thoughts. But that time he had not been alone. Perhaps Nelac had gone too close to the vapour. Cadvan halted, questing for the faint light that had guided him, and turned to walk along the shore. And at last he saw something: a still, dark figure, motionless on the bank of the river.
Cadvan no sooner perceived Nelac than he was beside him, saying his name. Nelac didn’t respond, and Cadvan took his arm and shook him. The old Bard turned and looked at him incuriously, gently removing his arm from Cadvan’s grasp, and turned back to face the river.
“Nelac,” said Cadvan again. “It’s me, Cadvan. You must come back.”
Again Nelac turned, but no recognition flickered in his eyes. “I knew a man named Cadvan once,” he said slowly. “You have something of his likeness…”
Cadvan took Nelac’s arm again, and this time Nelac didn’t resist. “Come,” Cadvan said. “You must leave the river behind.”
“Come where?” said Nelac.
“Come home.” Even as he said these words, Cadvan felt uncertainty rising inside him: what did home mean? Surely it did not exist, surely it was a dream… With an effort, he recalled Lirigon, the sunlight falling through the latticed window of Nelac’s chambers, the red-tiled roofs, the streets of grey stone, the apple orchards of the Fesse where he had run as a boy. But it was as if these memories slid away as soon as he recalled them, as if they peeled off and dissolved in the vapours of the river.
“Home,” Cadvan said stubbornly, and pulled Nelac’s arm. Nelac took a step, and then another, stumbling like a blind man. “I have come to take you home. But first we must leave the river…”
Cadvan turned his face to the slope above them and began the long trek upwards, dragging Nelac with him. Nelac didn’t resist, but would not walk on his own; if Cadvan didn’t push him along, he simply stood where he was. Cadvan’s only thought was to leave the deathly river as far behind as possible. He placed one foot in front of another, step by step by step, and every inch was a slow anguish.
At last he could go no further. He looked back: the river was further away than he had thought, lost now in shadow. Cadvan wondered how long Nelac had been in the Shadowplains: in this timeless place, it could have been years, it could have been centuries. How could he bring Nelac back to the World, if he had lost his memory?
“Nelac,” he said, feeling his voice die on the unmoving air. “Nelac. I am Cadvan. You gave me my Truename. The ceremony was held in the courtyard of your Bardhouse and afterwards we sat in your chambers and drank laradhel and we sang the Song of Making. Do you remember? You named me.”
Nelac remained silent and unresponsive beside him. Cadvan would have wept, except that this was a place too dry for tears. Desperately he turned to face him, taking the old Bard’s face between his hands and staring into his empty eyes.
“Do you not remember me?” he said. “You are the father of my magery. You opened the door so I could be myself at last. If I have closed that door for ever, it is no reflection on the gift you made me. Nelac, you Named me. You said I was black and silver, like the storm cloud that surges out of a still sky. You looked into my darkness and there found my light. I owe you my life. I remember how the star music surged through me, and I became a Bard at last, when you revealed to me who I was. I am Inareskai, Nelac. Do you not remember?”
As he said his own Truename out loud, Cadvan felt an echo of the cold and beautiful star music he had heard in his Instatement, and the light in the Shadowplains shifted. It was if he had shouted in a place of terrible silence: everything around him was aware again, and a shadow was present where there had been nothing before. But at last Nelac stirred. He took Cadvan’s hands and held them between his own.
“Inareskai,” he said.
“Home,” said Cadvan. He could feel the shadow gathering around him, like a predator bunching its muscles to pounce, but he kept his gaze locked on Nelac’s. “We have to go home.” He summoned an image of Nelac’s sitting room in his mind: the only thing he could remember was the red couch, laved with the light of a flickering fire. Everything else was vanishing into vague mist. As the red silk flared in his mind, he felt Nelac’s thought groping towards it in recognition, and knew that their minds had melded.
A terrible pressure was building around them, but Cadvan ignored it: all his remaining will was concentrated on Nelac. And even as he felt the shadow leap, like a giant whip at last releasing its energy, they stepped out of the Shadowplains and opened their eyes on Nelac’s chamber, and good plain daylight roared into Cadvan’s sight.
Dernhil stepped forward and caught Cadvan as he slid to the floor, and helped him back onto the couch. Nelac gasped and stirred, like a man pulled from deep water, and Dernhil began to chafe his hands, looking over his shoulder to Cadvan.
“What happened?”
“I scarcely know. Was I absent for long?”
“No, though it felt like an age.” Dernhil nodded towards the fire, which was just now beginning to catch the wood. “A few minutes, if that.”
Cadvan rose clumsily and knelt beside Dernhil, studying Nelac’s face anxiously; it was ashen, although he was now breathing evenly. Nelac opened his eyes, and focused painfully on Cadvan. At last he spoke, so quietly that Cadvan had to lean close to hear him.
“That was a near thing,” he said.
“It was, my friend. Too near.”
A long silence fell, and gradually Nelac’s colour began to return. He sat up, pushing the two younger Bards away.
“Laradhel, Dernhil,” he said. “There’s some on the table over there. And make mine a large one, eh?”
Dernhil and Cadvan’s eyes met, and they almost grinned. Dernhil busied himself pouring the golden liqueur into three silver goblets, and Cadvan stood up, stretching, and stamped his feet. His whole body felt full of pins and needles. He was shaking so badly he could barely hold the goblet that Dernhil gave him, but he grabbed it between two hands and drank it in a single draught. It went down like smooth fire.