Weatherwitch: Book Three of The Crowthistle Chronicles (27 page)

Asrathiel, who had been intent on her grandfather’s monologue, broke in. Clapping her hands impetuously, she exclaimed, “As ever when we speak of Clementer’s discoveries, I am delighted! It is always splendid to be assured that Life is
not
a fragile thing. I myself ponder much over this same matter, amongst others, as I sit at the bedside of my mother.”

Her grandfather had nodded. “I am aware that such thoughts have often occupied you, my dear child.” She had smiled lovingly at him, comforted by his sympathy.

Their discussion had ended here. As the first day of Asrathiel’s party approached, Clementer’s protege Agnellus came, in person, to High Darioneth, and when he first set eyes on the comb he recoiled as if bitten by a
snake. On recovering his composure the sage spread his fingers and tapped the fingertips of his right hand against those of his left—a habit of his—saying in wonder, “Well, well. I never thought to see such a thing in all the days of my life.”

“I gather it is something noteworthy,” commented the Maelstronnar.

“My dear Avalloc,” the scholar replied, “I cannot say for certain, but this might well be an artifact written of in one of my old master Clementer’s rarest and most ancient tomes of lore. I believe it might possibly be the Sylvan Comb, a long-lost thing of goblin make.”

“What are its properties?” asked Asrathiel.

“It is impossible to be sure, my lady, until I try it out.”

Dristan, who had lately returned from the Dome site, interposed, “Would that not be a perilous undertaking, Agnellus? One supposes that goblins would be hardly likely to fashion items that did not pose some sort of danger to humankind.”

“Certainly. Be assured, sir, I will perform the trial with utmost care. But first, I must send my apprentice back to my lodgings to fetch that ancient tome of which I spoke. For on its pages is written a Word of Mastery, and I shall need that Word if I am to test this thing.”

The apprentice was duly dispatched. Meanwhile, Rowan Green buzzed with activity as the day of the party drew nearer.

A lavish junket was to be held at High Darioneth, to celebrate Asrathiel’s birthday. Guests arrived in a timely fashion; the houses of the weathermasters were filled with royalty, aristocrats and commoners scattered their pavilions across Rowan Green, and before long the Seat of the Weathermasters resembled a fairground. Even sturdy octogenarian Earnán Kingfisher Mosswell made the long journey from the Great Marsh of Slievmordhu to attend, accompanied by Cuiva Featherfern Stillwater, the carlin of the Marsh. Although he was no true blood relative of hers, Asrathiel accorded Earnán the status of great-grandfather. He had been the second husband of her great-grandmother, Liadan, the grandmother of Asrathiel’s mother, Jewel. For the sake of her mother, Asrathiel had paid a few visits to the Marsh over the years. She had grown fond of the ancient eel-fisher, and also of Cuiva, a wise woman who had been her grandmother’s friend. As for Avalloc, he esteemed the marsh-man and the carlin highly, and the three spent many hours in conversation.

On the twenty-eighth of Aoust in that year, Asrathiel Heronswood Maelstronnar turned nineteen, and the final secrets of weather working were conferred on her with all due ceremony.

First, she had to fast and meditate overnight, alone, and custom dictated that this be done in Lord Alfardene’s Reflectory. Behind the houses on Rowan Green, a twisting path climbed steeply through the dim light beneath overhanging pines and across bridges spanning deeply cloven gorges, until it arrived at the tranquil dell, high on Wychwood Storth, that cupped the cemetery of the weathermasters. Central to the elegant tombs and mausoleums stood a building of vaulted stone. Here was the reflectory; a haven of serenity and seclusion; a sanctuary in which to reflect and ponder. The shining water-pools encircling the exterior held perfect images of the sur-rounding snow-capped peaks, wreathed in cloud. Before sunrise a group of women came to terminate Asrathiel’s lonely vigil—weathermages all—but not a word was spoken by anyone, for this part of the ritual was performed in silence.

At the heart of the building stood a great silver-lined bowl, kept clean and filled with pure water, and it was here that Asrathiel’s handmaidens bathed her. They arrayed her in ceremonial robes and dressed her hair, after which they gave her the traditional spiced bread and seasonal fruits with which to break her fast.

As the sun peeped over the horizon, Asrathiel’s attendants left the reflec-tory. Her tutor, Avalloc, took their place, speaking words of formal greeting. The Storm Lord taught his pupil the final secrets of weatherworking—long, intricate phrases and gestures that affected such powerful and potentially catastrophic phenomena as the world’s magnetic fields, the major ocean currents, and the large-scale wind systems.

By evening the arduous lesson was over. Then Asrathiel was conveyed down the mountain path on a litter, beneath a trellised double arch decked with the flowers and leaves of late Summer, carried high on the shoulders of eight stalwarts.

The magehood ceremony took place in Ellenhall, the belfried meetinghouse at the seat of the weathermasters. In attendance were the councillors of Ellenhall and a vast audience comprising all the denizens of Rowan Green and their guests. There was not room enough to hold everyone who wanted to view the proceedings. People from the plateau, who had journeyed up the cliff road for the occasion, crowded around the doors and the open windows, craning their necks and straining their ears.

Words were uttered and further rituals were performed, witnessed by all. At the end, Avalloc, in his role as Storm Lord, officially awarded Asrathiel the title of weathermage, and the spectators gave a loud shout of
delight, accompanied by the waving of scarves and general acclamations.

The festivities continued for four days. It was a blithe period for Asrathiel—one of the happiest times in her life—however she was unable to prevent some slight impatience for the conclusion, so that she would be free to claim her adult independence. The party did eventually come to an end, and most of the guests duly departed. Asrathiel then began to make her preparations for taking up her new post as representative of High Darioneth and resident mage at King’s Winterbourne.

Nine days after the party, Agnellus’s apprentice returned from the scholar’s lodgings, bearing the tome of lore his master had requested. Agnellus rifled through the pages, found the Word he was seeking and returned the book carefully to its velvet-lined box.

“I am ready,” he announced, “to test the artifact from the Dome of Strang.”

Avalloc, Dristan, Asrathiel and the carlin Lidoine Galenrithar accompanied the aging savant to a wild and uninhabited corner of the mountain plateau, near the steep chasm where the Snowy River broke through the Mountain Ring and thundered down in savage cataracts over the border into Grïmnørsland.

“We must carry this thing well away from the dwellings of humankind,” Agnellus had warned. “There is no knowing how far its influence might reach.”

They gathered on an open tract of smooth, green sward starred with tiny alpine flowers and dappled with the shadows of fast-moving clouds. Drifts of thistledown went gusting past like crowds of tiny, fleeing ghosts—perhaps the airborne seeds of crowthistle. On rafts of vapor high above and close by, the frosted tips of the mountains glittered. They hung in the sky as pristine as white jewels rinsed in rainwater.

From somewhere near the river, a kingfisher uttered a note.

“I must advise you,” Agnellus told his companions, “that if anything strange happens you must on no account believe your eyes. Do not panic, but stand fast.”

With that, he threw the Comb to the ground, articulating the Word.

The nineteen sharp prongs stuck into the turf, and the Comb stood up right. At once a silvery forest, weird and mysterious, sprang up all around the weathermasters. The tree boles resembled the tines of the Comb, their bark whorled, engraved, chased, and twisted. The company was enclosed within a landscape of argent trunks and glimmering whispering leaves.
Smoky shadows or shadowy smoke roiled, as if alive, between the trees. Other movements hinted at entities moving deep in the woods; possibly a glimpse of a slender horn, or a pearly hoof, or inscrutable eyes watching. The sibilance of whispering and the murmur of the wind was all around, so that the weathermasters were completely disoriented, as if they found themselves in an unearthly world, a place that existed on another plane entirely. A certainty of imminent peril seized them, laced with astonishment and curiosity.

Then came a feeling deep in the bones, like a thrummin g vibration so low as to be inaudible, striking the universal note of terror. It entered the soles of the feet, climbed up through the limbs, and seized control of every bodily organ, seeping finally to the brain, where it sent rapid shoots along primordial pathways of utmost fear and madness. Those who were its prey experienced heightened awareness of every detail in their illusory surroundings. All seemed to threaten horror and death; the trees to crush with their boughs, the leaves to gust into every orifice and suffocate, the horns to pierce, the hoofs to trample, the wind to exhale poison, the shadows to dissolve everything they touched, leaving no sign aught had ever existed. . . .

Agnellus bent down and picked up a thing that lay glinting on the ground, and in an instant the forest had completely disappeared, and he was putting the Comb back in his pocket.

The audience stood stunned.

“That,” said Avalloc quietly, voicing the opinions of all, “is an extraordinary object.”

Looming above the weathermasters, the mountains—so magnificent, so formidable, they seemed like the very ramparts of the world—ranged out to the south and the north. Mystically blue were their steeps, as if veiled in translucent blue-dyed gauzes. Somewhere beneath the northern ranges the busy burrower continued to delve, as ever, pushing forward persistently in the dark.

Amongst the numerous species of subterranean wights, the coblynau were famous for manifesting extravagant displays of labor and producing nothing. Many underworld caverns were illuminated by tiny lanterns grasped by milling throngs of these diminutive manlike beings. Each of the
wights was about eighteen inches in height, with skinny limbs, disproportionately large hands and feet, and stout, bulbous trunks. Their faces were wide-mouthed and grotesque, their noses elongate. In shape, their ears resembled those of donkeys. Their pupils were large, dark and gleaming, filling the whole eye so that no whites showed, like the orbs of dogs and horses. Cheerfully they bustled back and forth, carrying picks and shovels and crow-bars across their shoulders, or pushing barrows, or lugging buckets on poles.

If any human intruder ever caught them unawares, the coblynau would recover from their surprise in time to trick the spy with their simple catch-phrase, “Ooh,
Mathy,
what’s that behind ye?” As soon as the intruder took his attention off the wights, they vanished. A moment later, if the visitor turned back, not one of the miners was to be seen. Only their miniature tools lay where they had been discarded, haunted by a fading memory of sniggering and twittering. It would have been useless to try to catch them a second time. The supernatural creatures were now aware of the spy, and would be gone in a puff of dust before he could so much as wink an eye.

As the black-handed burrowing foreigner moved on, the wights boldly emerged behind its back, even before it was wholly out of sight, and returned to their ceaseless, useless travail. Although these small folk seemed very occupied with the business at hand, their buckets and barrows were empty of ore, and, despite all the wielding of picks and shovels, not one of the little miners had been actually digging. There was no tangible sign of their work.

The coblynau vacuously playacted, the fridean scrabbled furtively, and unnameable underground dwellers shot away from the edges of vision with abnormal speed. Ignoring these manifestations, shunned by them, the anonymous burrowrer dug relentlessly on. It had no way of knowing it was heading straight towards the location of one of Tir’s greatest secrets.