“You’ll have to stay right away,” said Tilja. “And . . . and if it goes wrong . . . he said it might . . . no, there won’t be anything.”
There was another silence.
“He told you to try this?” said Alnor.
“Yes . . . if . . . I can’t tell you that either.”
“Then it’ll be all right,” said Meena firmly. “If it’s something you’ve got to do, you’d better get it over. And just smell that wind—it’ll be raining in a couple of hours. You’d best take Calico. We’ll stay here and look for chestnuts. Don’t you worry about us. They’re good honest trees, these. They’ll look after us.”
Tilja settled herself by the strange burnt slab in the little circular hut. She wanted privacy, secrecy, for what she had to do. Everywhere else was too exposed.
Ten seconds, she told herself. That should be enough.
Her fingers were covered with sweat as she rolled up her sleeve, unwound first the lashings that held the roc feathers in place and then the Ropemaker’s hair from their quills. She slipped the feathers into the pocket of her blouse and laid the hair on the rock beside her. Then she hauled the box out, opened it, laid it down beside the hair and started to count to ten. At three the hair tie burst into flame. Instantly the flame was a raging blast of fire straining toward the forest. At the hut’s edge it became a roaring gale. She could see the bushes outside being lashed about, and hear the crash and creak of falling timber mixed with Calico’s squeals of panic. She smelled her own clothes and hair beginning to scorch in the heat, but felt nothing on her skin. The flame was a made magic and could not harm her. Grasping that knowledge, she forced her hand into the heart of the blast, found the box by touch and picked it up. The flame died instantly.
The Ropemaker’s hair tie had vanished. The ring floated in blackness, as she’d first seen it. The box seemed untouched. She closed it, ran the cord round her neck and slid it in under her blouse.
Calico in her panic had tripped on her hobble and fallen. She was still struggling to her feet when Tilja found her. Shakily Tilja helped her up and stood with her for a while, soothing and calming her, and at the same time soothing herself with the homely feel of horse. Then she left Calico to graze and went and sat, in front of the hut, waiting, in a tangle of hope and dread, for the Ropemaker. Or Moonfist.
A wall of cloud was looming to the north—the rain must already be sheeting down at Woodbourne—but overhead the sky was clear, and the setting sun, hardly lower than when she had gone into the hut, colored the cloud mass with heavy purples and fringes of gold. Time passed. Nothing happened until Meena, Alnor and Tahl came cautiously up the slope, just as the last fiery streaks were dulling in the west. Meena had her skirt held up in front of her, full of the chestnuts they’d been collecting.
“Is everything all right?” said Alnor.
Tilja could hear the anxiety in his voice.
“I . . . don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m hoping someone will come and help us, but there may be other things. . . .”
“D’you want us to keep away still?” said Meena. “I don’t fancy leaving you here alone in the dark.”
“Nor us being away from you, either,” said Alnor, “if that sort of stuff’s going to happen. Let’s get a fire going. We’ll need it anyway if we’re going to get the chestnuts roasted before it rains.”
Nobody wanted to talk about what had happened or might still happen. Alnor used his tinderbox to light the dry branches that he and Tahl had already laid in while Meena and Tilja were in the forest. By the time it was fully dark the embers were hot enough for the chestnuts. They were fat and full of flavor, but Tilja could barely eat for tension. In her mind the conviction grew and grew that Axtrig had been wrong and the Ropemaker wouldn’t come after all, would never come, because Moonfist had already found and destroyed him. And if Moonfist himself came . . . She felt utterly drained, certain that she would lack the strength to deal with him. When a chestnut popped or a burning branch collapsed, her heart leaped like a rabbit. And if anything beyond the circle of firelight stirred—a leaf, a settling bird—she froze with the hair on her nape erect while she waited for the intruder.
What came in the end was a little mouselike creature. She saw it first as a pair of glistening eyes at the edge of darkness. She froze. It crept forward, nose twitching. Now Meena saw it, and whispered to the others to sit still. Very slowly she leaned and crumbled part of a chestnut into the animal’s path. It hesitated, then came on in short, nervous darts. When it reached the crumbs it sniffed at the largest one, picked it up between its forepaws, sat back on its haunches and nibbled rapidly. The firelight sparkled off its fur. There was something odd about its movements, a kind of gawky deftness, as if it had not really been born as a whole mouse, but had been somehow assembled from several other mice. Like the unicorn, the dog, the lion . . .
You have eaten our food
, Tilja thought.
Now you must deal well
by us.
She smiled and waited for what it would do next.
Without warning it turned and flipped away into the darkness.
Nobody said anything. For a moment she assumed they hadn’t recognized the mouse-thing, and were waiting for it to recover its nerve and return. Then she became aware of their stillness. She looked. All three were sitting rigid, gazing straight ahead of them, unblinking. At the edge of darkness she could see Calico, motionless.
Something moved on the far side of the fire. A man was standing there, behind Alnor, watching them. She knew at once he was Moonfist. He came round the fire and faced her, looking down. She scrambled to her feet. He was about Da’s age, but broader and shorter, and clean-shaven, not dressed in the fashion of the Empire, but wearing a soft cap, short cloak, jerkin and leggings, with a belt of large silver links at the waist. He carried a sturdy wooden staff with a leather bag tied to it at the top. There was nothing about him to tell her she should be afraid, but she was. Fear seemed to beam out of him. Fear held Meena and the others rigid in its nightmare. She was outside the nightmare. She could move and think. And be afraid.
He glanced at Alnor. Alnor jerked and strutted forward, stiff as a doll, and faced him. Moonfist studied him for a moment, then laid his hand on his shoulder. Instantly Alnor became a little mannikin, only a few inches high, dangling from Moonfist’s hand. Moonfist slipped him into the leather bag at the top of his purse. He did the same to Meena, but when Tahl stood in front of him he paused.
“Too clever,” he murmured. “Too clever for your own good.”
He tapped him on the shoulder, put him in the bag and turned to Tilja.
“You have my ring,” he said. “Give it to me.”
“It isn’t yours,” she whispered.
“It is mine,” he said calmly. “Faheel should never have had it. Give it to me.”
“No.”
“You destroyed Varti, who was last of the Watchers,” he said. “All powers are now mine. I could destroy you, but choose not to. You will be useful to me. Give me my ring, and I will give you back your companions unharmed.”
“No.”
“Very well.”
He glanced at the leather bag and it became a transparent globe, lit from within. The three mannikins were awake now, alive, looking around, seeing her, staring at her with terrified, pleading eyes. Moonfist glanced at the fire. A white flame shot up at its center and steadied, gently roaring. He gripped his staff by its lower end and swung the globe toward the flame. The mannikins shrank away from the heat, covering their heads with their arms. He stopped the movement and looked at her.
She put her hand into her blouse, drew out the box, opened it and took out the ring. Gripping it lightly between the forefingers and thumbs of both hands, like a priestess laying an offering on a shrine, she held it toward him. He reached out his cupped hand to accept it. At the last moment she let go with her left hand and snatched at a finger, while her right flung the ring into the darkness where the mouse had gone.
“Ramdatta!” she cried.
In the shadows something moved, began to explode. Then she was in darkness.
Again, but hopelessly, she sought the lake. She was still holding Moonfist’s finger. He strode beside her in the darkness, untroubled. She had to take him to the lake. She couldn’t have let go, even if she had wanted, but she didn’t. To take him was the only hope. If he was with her, with all his powers, he was not by the fire, and the Ropemaker would have a few moments more to find the ring.
They were there. In the starless blackness she could feel the icy wind sweeping down from the glaciers, hear the rattle of wavelets at her feet.
He stretched out an arm and called. Four heavy syllables. Four blows on a great gong, echoing and reechoing from the mountains. Avalanches slid bellowing toward the lake, and with a vast, sucking roar the water started to drain away, down through the chasm that Moonfist’s cry had opened beneath it.
It was happening to her. Everything that was in her, everything that made her Tilja, thoughts, memories, loves, hopes, dreams, terrors, was draining away through the hand that held Moonfist’s finger, into him, becoming part of him.
No, I will not
, she thought.
I am Tilja, Tilja, Tilja, Tilja.
There was nothing to hold to, nothing to stop the awful slither of herself into the man’s otherness. She had to have something to hold to. Her free hand clutched uselessly at her own body, as though that would do, and brushed against the roc feathers in the pocket of her blouse. Yes, there! Not the actual feathers, not the memory of the roc, but the place, Faheel’s island, where, while his unseen friends had danced their dance of farewell, she had discovered who and what she was, the innermost Tilja, her true self.
She seized the moment and clung to it, as she might have clung to a rock in a raging torrent. The outflow faltered, ceased. Moonfist turned toward her. She felt him summoning up further powers and knew that this was the end.
Everything changed. The finger she was grasping melted from her hand. With a shudder the chasm below the lake sealed itself shut. She felt warmth, heard the mutter of a human voice, opened her eyes and found herself swaying with exhaustion by the fire in front of the hut. Hands took her by the shoulders before she could fall and lowered her to the ground, where she crouched, shivering, her whole body bathed in sweat.
“Near thing,” said the Ropemaker’s voice. “Did it between us, just.”
He was standing beside her, much as she remembered him, a skinny, gawky figure topped by his immense turban. A body lay at his feet. The head was away from her but she recognized the silver links of the belt chain. The hand that protruded from the sleeve beside it was fleshless bone.
Meena,
she thought.
Alnor. Tahl.
She looked toward the fire. Moonfist’s staff lay half across it. The end to which the bag had been fastened was blackened embers.
Numbly, through her sobs, she was aware of being lifted, carried, set down. A voice spoke. She didn’t take it in. She must stay where she was. He was going to do something. She was alone with her horror and grief, and the knowledge of failure. All useless. Alnor dead. Tahl dead. Meena, whom she loved more than anyone in the world, dead, horribly, horribly dead. Nothing else mattered. Nothing ever would.
Something changed. She didn’t feel or hear or smell the change, but there was a sort of inward flicker, and the world was different, just as it had been when Alnor had spoken Faheel’s name in Lananeth’s warded room. She looked up. Through the gray blur of her tears she could see the entrance of the hut, but nothing beyond. She wiped her eyes. There
was
nothing beyond. The hut floated in grayness, lit by a vague light that came from nowhere. As she stared the grayness changed, becoming paler at the center and darker to either side. Faint shadows appeared in it, acquired dim shapes, five people standing in a group. The man on the left moved his arm and touched one of the others on the shoulder. That figure vanished. The man moved his hand and did something at the top of the staff he was carrying, then moved it back to touch the next figure. And the next. Now the girl on the right faced him alone, and Tilja understood that she was looking back out of one time into another, watching herself a little while ago confronting the magician she called Moonfist.
They stayed motionless. Tilja knew what they were saying, but could not hear the murmur of their voices. As the time she was watching came nearer to the time in which she watched, the figures became clearer. She couldn’t breathe for the sudden intense hope and intense fear. Now, as Moonfist swung his staff toward the fire, she could see the transparent globe at its end. The movement paused. The girl moved her arms to draw something from under her clothing and offer it to the man. He reached to take it.
She saw the spasm of violent action, her own grab at his hand, her other arm flinging the ring into the darkness; heard, like a far whisper, her own cry, Ramdatta!; saw the staff toppling into the flame . . .
Now, Ropemaker! Now!
At the edge of the darkness on the right the Ropemaker exploded into his shape. His arm moved, flicking something toward the fire. The staff was twitched clear. The Ropemaker was bending, picking the ring up, sliding it onto his finger . . .
For a long moment he stood rigid, then turned and strode toward the motionless pair by the fire, locked in their desperate inward conflict. He seemed larger than he had been, no longer gawky and misshapen in his monstrous turban, but all of a piece, commanding, magnificent. Briefly he considered the magician, then raised his hands in a firm gesture and held them over the magician’s face. Something invisible grasped Moonfist’s body and battered him violently from side to side, like a terrier killing a rat. It let go. He collapsed and lay still.
The Ropemaker turned to the girl and far more gently made the same gesture. The invisible hands caught her as she crumpled and lowered her to the ground, where she crouched, hiding her face in her hands.
Tilja understood what she must now do. Sobbing with relief, she huddled down into the same posture as the girl. She heard the pad of the Ropemaker’s feet on the hut floor, felt herself lifted and carried. The Ropemaker waited for the exact instant at which the time that he was in caught up with the stilled moment from which Tilja had been watching. When the two times became one he lowered her into herself.