Without opening his eyes, my friend said, “Sit down somewhere and be quiet, Lal.” Nyateneri touched my arm and drew me away. The air had become bitterly thin and cold; no matter how fiercely you drank it in, there was never quite enough breath in your lungs. That was the only sound: our shallow, too-rapid breathing. There was no wind, no flicker in the grayness, no slightest sense that we were moving, except for the distant come-and-go shapes that might have been nothing but eyestrain. I hugged myself for warmth and huddled beside Nyateneri.
“We are in a far place,” my friend said presently, “neither where nor when, but what you might call elsewhen. This”—and he gestured blindly at the freezing mist around us—“this is not a fairy coach, not a magic carpet sweeping us away to safety; it is a bubble of time—but it is not our time. Do either of you understand me?”
Nyateneri said simply, “I don’t want to understand you. Why do you have your eyes shut like that?”
“Because I am not entirely sure what would happen if I opened them. You might cease to exist—I might cease to exist. Or existence itself might—no, let that go, it makes even me a bit seasick. Like as not, we would merely end up back with Arshadin. Which would amount to the same thing.”
For all the familiar and comforting testiness, there was an undertone to his voice that I had never heard before. It was not a note of fear or anxiety or plain uncertainty—it fell between all such words, such sounds. But I was frightened, and literally uncertain even of what was under my feet; and cold as well, rattling with it. I demanded, “What happened there, back with Arshadin? Where are we going now? And why, in the name of”—but I could find no god quite equal to the situation—“why are you sitting in the air?”
My friend laughed, but for once it did not comfort me to hear him. “Am I? I hadn’t noticed. Where are we going? Why, back to the inn, if I should be permitted to manage it without undue distraction. I have never liked this particular method of travel, and I don’t think I have a natural knack for it. Arshadin, now—Arshadin has the knack. He used to scurry about like this all the time, no matter what I said to him. Had it fetch his lunch sometimes.”
He was silent for a moment, his eyes squeezing a bit more tightly shut. He said, “It betrayed him this time, that knack. There was no way I could resist him when he used the time-bubble to bring me here; but it drains so much strength merely to hold such a thing in this world, let alone make it work for you, that I knew he could not possibly keep it and me and you two all under control at once. I have told him so often—all energy has its natural limits: all, even his. I did tell him.” The last words were spoken in a near-whisper, and not to us. ”And then you two caused your diversion—clumsily, if I may say so, but quite effectively—and he tried to kill me in the bubble, believing that I was manipulating you, which shows a certain touching faith in his old teacher, even now.” His half-laugh held more rue than triumph.
Nyateneri said, “He spoke of those who are waiting. Are they waiting for you?”
“They are indeed,” my friend replied with surprising cheerfulness. “But they may have to wait a little longer yet. Now, if nobody asks me any more questions, I think—I am very nearly sure—that I will be able to bring this unseemly anomaly to rest at Karsh’s dining table. Whether it will be the right Karsh, of course, or the right Karsh’s table—well, well, in any case we should all find it an instructive experience, especially Karsh. Lal, if you close your eyes, too, you will not shiver so much. Do as I say.”
He was right—the murderous cold receded once I could no longer see the grayness, as though the sight of it had been what was truly invading my bones—but I could not keep from stealing small glances around me, though nothing was visible except the tiny dark figures that never drew nearer and never quite disappeared. I said, “Those. Who are they?”
“The people whose time we are using,” he replied shortly. “Close your eyes, Lal.”
I shut them. I said, “Arshadin does not bleed. My sword went almost through him, and there was no blood.”
“Because there is no blood in him,” my friend answered. “Lukassa is quite right—he gave his life to the Others, that night in the red tower, and they gave him back a kind of aliveness for which blood is not necessary. I know of such bargains, very long ago, but I never thought to see one struck in my time. My poor Arshadin. My poor Arshadin.” And after that quiet, toneless wail, he said nothing at all.
How much more time passed—ours or someone else’s—I cannot say. I heard my friend humming to himself: a maddeningly repetitious up-and-down five-note pattern that came, after awhile, to seem like the drone of a great engine under us, tireless and strangely soothing. I think I slept a little.
No, I know I slept, because I remember jolting painfully awake at the tensing of Nyateneri’s arm around me. He was saying very quietly, close to my ear, “Lal. Something is happening.” Even through the grayness I could see how stiff and pale his face was.
“What is it?” I asked. Nothing seemed to have changed: we were still motionless in freezing nowhere, and my friend was still sitting in the air, humming the same notes over and over. The only difference, if it was a difference, was that the little shapes at the edge of my vision had finally vanished. Nyateneri’s hand tightened on my left arm, the bad one, and I did not notice at all; not until later, when I saw the new bruise. “Look,” he said.
The grayness was thinning slowly, down from mist to dirty bathwater, and there were people appearing through it, and they were us. How much more plainly, or more madly, can I say it? I saw the three of us—perfect duplicates, down to the ribbons in my friend’s beard and the river mud caked on Nyateneri’s feet—but they, the figures, they didn’t see us. They went on about their business, which was not here, and were followed by others—some of them were us again, but more were being Karsh and Marinesha, and there seemed to be more Tikats than anyone else. No two were identical: there were versions of my friend that had neither ribbons nor beard nor nightgown, and variations on Nyateneri that I might not have recognized but for the height and the changing eyes. As for me, it made me giddy and a little sick, seeing so many copies of myself obliviously passing two feet away. There were small differences enough between them, as well, in dress and mannerism; but to my mind they were all twins, and all too short, too wide-mouthed and pointy-chinned—the old goblin face I have learned to tolerate in the glass, but not in bloody dozens!—and every one of them walking with the same awful swaggering roll. Do I walk like that? I still cannot believe I really walk like that.
There were others, too, crowding around and past them, coming and going in the dissipating grayness. I recognized Rosseth—looking wide-eyed and kind in every translation, and stronger than any of them knew—and other servants or guests at The Gaff and Slasher; beyond those were countless faces I had never seen, or anyway could not remember having seen. They were opaque but not solid: they passed through one another as they did through the mist, without taking notice. What I noticed, gaping and shaking my head, was that not one of them was Lukassa.
Beside me Nyateneri said, quite loudly, “Master”—and then he pronounced what I had always believed to be my friend’s name—“enough mystification is enough. What are we seeing, and who are these?”
My friend’s eyes were still so grimly shut that the corners of his mouth squeezed up with them when he turned toward us, but in that instant his face was very terrible. I did not know that face at all, and I was frightened of it—of him—then. He said in a slow, light, almost dreaming voice, “We will now all proceed to be extremely glad that I have at least maintained sense enough never to tell either of you my true name. If you had spoken it here, now, the three of us would have been spread through time—no, across time, smeared over it like so much butter. Do you have the least notion of what I am telling you?”
Before that blind face and that even more terrifying voice, I cowered as silently as I had when he first found me; but it was worse now, because I was older and could almost conceive of what he meant. Nyateneri tried for a moment to face him down, then crouched humbly before him. The voice said, “No, of course not, what possessed me to ask you that? If you ever came anywhere near understanding what I just told you, that understanding would drive you mad. At present, I think I could endure that well enough, but sooner or later I would probably start to feel bad about it. Probably. Are all that lot gone yet?”
Almost all of the duplicates had passed out of sight, save for a couple of the Tikats and one Karsh. I told him so, and he nodded and sat up straighter in the chair we could not see. His hands were shaping something equally invisible that seemed to be leaping and struggling between them, and growing as well. “When those go,” he said, “those last, tell me. Immediately.”
The Tikats vanished together, and there was just Karsh left—a younger, brown-eyed Karsh, wearing the embroidered vest and leather leggings of a prosperous south-coast farmer. It did not surprise me that he was the only one of all those figures who stood still even for a moment, peering briefly but very intently into the grayness all around him. Wherever he really was, he knew that something to do with him was happening somewhere. I said, “He’s going away now. He’s gone.”
“So, then,” my friend said softly, like Arshadin. He spoke several words that did not even sound like a language: from another room, I would have thought he was snoring or clearing his throat. The unseen thing growing between his hands seemed first to surge into him, and then to explode out of his grasp with a violence that rocked him backward, almost knocking him off his perch in the air. The grayness turned to night, but not any sort of night I knew. The air was too clear, as though its skin had somehow been ripped away, and the stars were too big. I never breathed that air, but held my breath for an hour or an instant, until my friend suddenly opened his eyes, and we were all three sitting quietly, like picnickers, on the stubbly little hill where Karsh has his travelers’ shrine. It was late afternoon, with a gray quarter-moon already rising in the west, behind the inn. We could hear the hogs snuffling in their pen, and Gatti Jinni shouting across the courtyard.
The moon over our little boat’s masthead last night had been full and golden, dripping ripe into the river. Nyateneri and I looked at each other. Someone began whistling in the stable.
THE INNKEEPER
They paid me handsomely for the horses—I will say that—and did me the honor of offering no explanations as to what had become of them. When you are my age, you’ll have long given up expecting the truth from anybody, but you will appreciate not being lied to all the more for it. As for where they had been and, more important, how they got back in only seven days from a journey that had left the black one limping badly and a good ten pounds thinner, while Miss Kiss-my-ring Nyateneri looked as many years older… well, what could they have told me that I’d have believed, then or even now? I took the money, told the boy to tell Marinesha to bring dinner to their room, and bloody let it go.
The old man was starting to have me more nervous than the women by then, anyway. I knew him for a wizard, of course—had from the first day; you can’t miss them, it’s almost a smell—which made no matter by itself. I don’t like wizards—show me someone who does—but they’re usually mannerly guests, generous to the help, and a good bit more careful than most about keeping the landlord sweet. But I also knew from Marinesha that this one was frail, sick, practically dying, hadn’t stirred out of his room since Rosseth and Tikat carried him there. And here he was now, on his feet at any rate, and plainly up to his neck in whatever those women had been at since they left the inn. No simple woods wizard, either, curing colicky-animals and promising sunshine for the harvest—oh no, thank you, this one was turning out to be just the sort that trouble delights in following home like a stray dog, never mind whose home it may be, nor who’s to feed the beast. I’d no idea what breed of trouble it was likely to be, but I could smell that, too, as you smell rain, or a cartload of manure coming around the next bend. Unmistakable. About that, at least, I am never wrong.
Turn him out? Turn him out? Oh, aye—Karsh, who hadn’t the stomach to order three women out of The Gaff and Slasher, Karsh is now to tell a wizard to take his custom somewhere else. Well, I have no shame in telling you that I smiled and nodded at him whenever I saw him, asked him if his room was comfortable enough, and sent him up better wine than Miss I’ve-killed-men-over-a-bad-vintage Lal ever wrinkled her nose at. He appreciated it, too—said so in her royal presence more than once. Even innkeepers have their moments.
Yet nothing seemed to happen—nothing you could call happening, anyway, smells or no smells. The summer days creaked by, travelers came and went—Shadry’s wife ran off with one of them, the way she does most summers, just for the vacation from Shadry—horses got looked after, meals got cooked, dishes went on being washed, rooms were more or less swept out, carters lugged casks of red ale and Dragon’s Daughter into the taproom, and a family of Narsai tinkers left in the night without paying their score. My fault for not charging them in advance—my father was half-Narsai, and I know better than that.
The three women behaved almost like ordinary guests, taking the sun and buying trinkets and antiquities at Corcorua Market; though why they stayed on, except to nurse their wizard friend, I couldn’t fathom. Tikat seemed to have given up running after that daft white one, Lukassa—hardly looked at her these days, except to move out of the way when she passed by, more like a little wandering ghost than ever, with those eyes eating up her face. I’d have kicked him out, just to be kicking someone, but he was more than earning his keep between the stable, the house, and the kitchen garden. A silent, grim-faced lad, with a south-country brogue to curdle beer, but a good worker, I’ll say that.
In honesty, the only real complaint I could have mustered during that time had to do with the boy. And I couldn’t have put it in words, either, as well as I know him and myself. He was happy as bedamned to see those women back, of course—took on to unsettle your dinner, and was forever slipping off to see if any little chore of theirs wanted doing. Nothing new about that, certainly: no, what niggled at me was an idea that something was niggling at him, and growing worse by the day. Not that he said a word about it—not to me anyway, of course, he’d die first—but Gatti Jinni could have read that face, and that anxious way he was developing of looking quickly around him at odd moments, just as though he were sneaking off to bother Marinesha and heard me shouting for him. I thought it was the wizard then. I thought he’d taken to hanging after him, as he did with those women. It gave me a bit of a queer feeling.
ROSSETH
Part of it was the heat, surely. That part of the country, high as it is, turns hot as a forge in late summer. I grew up used to the weather, of course—I miss it now, to tell you the truth—but after the wizard arrived, every day felt stretched tight over a bed of white coals, as the people there scrape sheknath hides. The nights are usually a relief, because of the mountain breezes, but that summer they never came. Dogs and chickens lay in the dust and gasped; the horses hadn’t the energy to swish away flies; the guests sprawled in the taproom, keeping their gullets cool at any rate; and even Karsh stamped and roared a little less than usual, and had a few less orders for Tikat and me. Myself, I woke up sweat-soaked in the hayloft every smoldering dawn, already exhausted, with a head full of cinders. Nearly twenty years it’s been, and I can still recall exactly the strange, hopeless taste of those wakings.
Because it wasn’t really the weather—not that taste, not that sense of being under a glass: a lens that was focusing the heat of someone’s attention on The Gaff and Slasher. It got even worse when Lal and Nyateneri returned: there was rarely a moment, asleep or awake, when I couldn’t feel myself watched more and more intensely by a cold considering that had nothing to do with me—me, Rosseth, or whoever I am—nor with anything I understood or loved in this world. Sometimes it seemed far away; at others, close enough to share my bed-straw and finger over my dreams. In either case, there was no avoiding it, and no fighting off the evil dreariness that always attended it, that kept me constantly frightened in a vague, dull way, and truly tired to death. Sad to death, I suppose you could say.
If Tikat was suffering from the same complaint, I saw no sign of it. Not that I saw much of Tikat in those days: he had quietly taken over the nursing and guarding duties with which I had been entrusted, and now spent most of his free time with the old man upstairs, whom he called tafiya. I missed him sharply—until he came I’d never had a friend of almost my own age to work and talk with, mucking out stalls or lying awake in the loft—and I envied him terribly as well. Mainly, of course, because his closeness to the wizard brought him close to Lal, Nyateneri, and Lukassa every day; but I was jealous, too, that somebody valued his presence and asked for him often, which is different from being sent for. I could have gone on my own, I know that, but I didn’t, and there it is. I was very young.
The women kept even more to themselves than they had done before, whether they rode out or stayed shut in their room, or in the old man’s room. When I saw them at all, I always saw them together, which wasn’t what I wanted. Most particularly I wished to tell Soukyan—who still looked and moved and smelled like Nyateneri—that I liked him no less for the deception, and that I was not avoiding him out of anger or shame. I wanted to ask Lal why and how they had returned so soon, and to tell her that I had looked after her wizard as well as I was permitted. (The third assassin never turned up, by the way—to this day I don’t know what became of him.) And I wanted to say to Lukassa that every time Tikat heard her voice or saw her in the stair or crossing the courtyard, his heart cracked in one more place. Oh, I had a speech ready for Lukassa, I certainly did. I used to practice it aloud on the horses.
But none of all that ever happened, somehow: it was almost as though the three of them had never come riding around that bend beyond the spring, as though I had dreamed the trembling dimples in Lal’s shoulders, dreamed that I watched Nyateneri kill two killers singlehanded. All that was real was a loneliness I had never given name to before they came—that and the heat, and the fear.
Once I asked Marinesha how the wizard was faring, because I would not ask Tikat. She answered, not in her usual starling chatter, but in a subdued, hesitant mumble, “Well enough, I suppose.” When I pressed her further, she bridled at first, and then began to weep—not in mim silence, like a lady, as she always tried to shed her tears, but with great honks and sniffs, wringing my best noserag to shreds. What I made out of her misery was that she had hardly seen the old man since Lal and Nyateneri’s return—“but I hear him every night, Rosseth, all night every night, marching up and down the room till dawn, talking and chanting and singing to himself. He can’t be sleeping at all…”
I petted and quieted her as well as I could, saying, “Well then, he must sleep by day, that’s what it is. And he’s a wizard, Marinesha—wizards don’t need things like sleep and food and such, not the way we do.” But she pulled free of me and looked into my face, and there was a desperate sorrow in her eyes that I had never imagined they could show.
