A Shadow on the Glass (27 page)

There was one consolation, he realized, as chilly threads trickled down his back: the Whelm could not climb the cliff in this, and after dark the wet would freeze to ice. Surely he was safe until the morning.

The waterfall stream lay in a channel cut deeply into the plateau, with steep rocky banks. It was only ten paces across but rising visibly, and soon would be impassable. Upstream the river narrowed between two rocky shoulders and a scatter of boulders in the stream might serve as stepping stones. He plodded along the bank and stood there, uncertainly. From the shore the first three stones looked secure, but the last two were small and already awash. If he fell in, the current might carry him over the precipice. But Llian could see no other crossing place.

He jumped—a long stretch to the first boulder, then two short steps to the second and third. As he leapt to the fourth he knew that he had misjudged the distance—his outstretched foot overshot and skidded off the far side. He flailed and crashed into the water. The torrent whirled him away, rolling him over and over. Llian panicked, unable to tell which way was up.

He thrashed and the race flung him against rock with a thud that drove the breath from his lungs. It felt as though his ribs had given way. He lay there for a moment, the river tugging at him, the weight of the pack pulling him ever so slowly down in the water. Llian clawed his way up, groaning
and grunting. A fingernail tore half off and he did not notice. Blood was running down his face from a cut above his eye and the whole of his left side was raw. Each breath, each movement stabbed through him from front to back.

Llian ripped off a rent sleeve and tried to bind it round his forehead. His fingers were grated and hurt abominably. He bit off the torn nail, warmed his fingers in his mouth and wavered off again. The bandage kept slipping off, and just to tie it back up was too difficult, too wearying. How he longed for Chanthed. Wistan did not seem such a bad fellow after all.

Then Llian was reminded of how Karan had touched him last night. Something in him had responded to her call for help, her loneliness, her pain… She was no longer an anonymous stranger. He had to find her, to meet her, to hear her tale. Before all, he was a chronicler.

His mind began to wander. The Mirror, the Whelm, the enigma of Shand and the mystery of Karan, all began to blur together into a horrible dream. Llian had just enough wit to realize that if he did not find shelter he would die of exposure. He staggered off, falling down every few paces, each time getting up and dragging himself a little further, his only goal to take the next step.

An eternity of cold and wind and pain, but at last the mass of the ruins loomed up before him. Their shape reminded him of a tale, a grim one too, but he was too weary to care. He climbed over a pile of rubble and flopped at the base of a wall, squatting there until his head steadied. There was a faint smell of smoke in the air but no light and no sound save the sleet hissing down.

Before him were the ruins of many buildings: a corner of a wall here, and there a standing chimney. To his right was a tall keep, to the left the hulk of a tower loomed. The rain must have come less heavily here, for there were still icy
drifts in sheltered places. It was late afternoon, the light fading, the sleet turning to snow. Llian was utterly exhausted, saturated and freezing, the cold creeping into the core of him, filling him with lethargy. He sat down for a while in the snow and it did not feel cold any more. Blood was trickling into his eye again, the bandage lost somewhere in the rain. He pressed his hand to the wound and stumbled off toward the tower.

Adjoining was a hall with part of its roof still standing, but the rain had streamed in through holes of every shape and size, so that it was scarcely more sheltered than outside. The smoke smell was stronger here. As he dragged himself down the hall he spied an anteroom on his right, at the end. A faint glow came from inside, and a welcoming aroma of stew. He reached up to the doorway and saw that a door still swung on brass hinges. Llian brushed the blood from his eye and pushed the door. The hinges whined and the door swung open. A small woman leapt up from beside the fire, feeling at her hip. Her hand came up empty, then she sprang sideways, snatched a knife from the hearth and held it out in front of her.

“My name’s Llian.” Her eyes widened in disbelief and the knife fell to her side. “I’ve come to save you.” He caught his foot on a broken step, stumbled and crashed to the floor at her feet. His head struck stone and the lights went out.

T
he guard flung Maigraith into the cell. She skidded across a slimy floor, cracking her knee painfully against a bench of stone. The door crashed closed. She clung to the bench in the darkness, trying to will away the pain and the fear. She was prisoner in Fiz Gorgo, prisoner of Yggur. Karan had fled with the Mirror hours before; she was utterly alone.

Holding Yggur was the hardest thing that she had ever done. Maigraith still did not understand how she had held him all those hours. With Karan’s link supporting her it had just been bearable; without, it had nearly broken her. But the greater the power used, the worse the aftersickness. The pain in her head was so bad now that she wanted to shriek, to batter her head against the stone until something broke. It felt as though crystals as long and sharp as needles were growing behind her eyes, needle balls spreading out from each of those points, impaling, interlocking.

All at once she felt dizzy. Then her head whirled violently, the needles behind her eyes grew as hot as candle flames, her stomach roiled and she slipped forward underneath the bench and retched, over and over again, into the dank moldy space until her throat burned and she could retch no more. The aftersickness had never been this bad before.

Maigraith roused. She was thirsty, and so cold. They had taken her pack but she still had the water bottle. Her fingers were so weak that just to prise the stopper out made her heart pound, and her shaking hand slopped water down her front. There was enough left for a good draught, and a little remained to wash her face.

Maigraith measured the bench with her fingers. It was long but narrow, the stone rough on the sides but smooth on top, as if it had been waxed. That was a grim thought-how many years or centuries had other prisoners huddled here, for the grease of their bodies to bring the stone to this silky state? She put the thought away, levered herself onto the bench and sat down. Her eyes could now make out the bare details of the room: four walls, the outer one slightly curved, her bench and a tiny high slit of a window. It was dawn.

She lay down on the bench, shivering, willing her mind to become blank, the way she had been taught, but she could not. One scene played over and over again—Yggur stooping down, Karan’s pale terrified face, herself trying to help but failing. Then Yggur’s
command
, and Karan’s choked whisper, “
Faelamor
.” Then Karan had broken the link and fled.

Over and again Maigraith saw the agony on Karan’s face. Over and over she saw the potency of Yggur, the fury that bent Karan like a sapling in a tempest. Yet underneath, most curious, the puzzled way he looked at her. Maigraith groped for a meaning, but could not find one.

Maigraith stared at the dim, stained ceiling of her cell,
sick with her failure and fearful for Karan. How badly she had treated her. What could Karan do alone? Perhaps she had already been taken; perhaps she was already dead. She imagined them dragging her, heaving her broken onto a great pile of filth for the vermin to scuttle over… Her mind shied away from the images.

Maigraith looked back on the long journey from the east, the difficult way through the swamps to Fiz Gorgo, to her last brief meeting with Faelamor.

“Go alone into Fiz Gorgo,” Faelamor had said. “And tell no one of me. No one!”

But Faelamor’s secret had been revealed to Yggur, and because of it his armies would soon march on the east. What other disasters would flow from the betrayal? How could she tell Faelamor?

If only she had not delayed. Why
had
she stood there staring at the Mirror for so long? It had called to her so powerfully that nothing else mattered. She knew, as soon as she held it in her hands, that it would change her life. Why her? But the Mirror was gone as well.

The light grew in the room, seeping from a slit near the ceiling. Presently a rectangular patch of sunlight appeared on the opposite wall. It showed a small room with bare stone walls, a stone floor and a thick door of aged wood reinforced with iron. There was nothing else; not even a water jug, toilet bucket or blanket. Everything was damp and covered in mold, save for a patch around the window where the mold was replaced by a green growth.

Maigraith took off her sodden boots and lay down on the bench again. She was freezing. Her clothes were still damp from the cistern, though that was ten hours ago. She had not eaten for almost a day, nor slept for two. Her head throbbed abominably. She was filled with a sick feeling of failure. Her
mission was in tatters. Much worse, Faelamor’s long-kept secret was betrayed. In her mind’s eye she saw the cold, mask-like beauty of Faelamor, the look in her eyes worse than any anger; the look that told Maigraith of her own worthlessness.

She was right about me—I do not deserve her. If I had set out to ruin all her long-laid plans I could not have hoped to achieve so much, she thought, and abandoned herself to misery.

The day passed and night fell; still there had been no sign that anyone cared about her existence. Each moment she expected a thump on the door: Yggur coming to interrogate her. Did he prolong the waiting just to torment her? But Yggur was far away, directing the search of the tunnels and, later, along the shores of the estuary. Maigraith could wait.

Maigraith was unable to sleep. She had hardly slept since leaving Lake Neid, and though exhausted would not sleep now. She paced the cell, four steps across, four steps back, four steps and four and four. When the shivering stopped she lay down again, but her feet were still icy and the cold soon seeped back up her legs. So she had passed the day, and now the evening. Within her was a vast emptiness.

In the middle of the night, without warning, the door banged open. The man standing there was extremely gaunt, with an angular face and long graying hair—a Whelm. He beckoned. Maigraith sat up slowly, shielding her eyes from the glare.

“I am Japhit,” he said, in a voice that was like sand rubbing against steel. “Come!”

Maigraith reached for her boots.

“You will not need them,” rasped Japhit, gripping her arm just above the elbow. His bony fingers were hard and cold. He led her down many flights of steps and into a large
room without windows but brightly lit by lamps on the walls. The room was as cold as hers had been and smelled of damp. There was wood in a large fireplace but the fire was not lit.

Inside were two more Whelm, a man and a woman, both with sharp faces like the first. In the center of the room three short benches were arranged to form a square open at one end. The woman led Maigraith to the center of the square.

“Sit!” she said.

Maigraith sat down on the cold floor. The three Whelm sat on the benches, staring down at her. The woman was thin and bony like Japhit, with a narrow prominent nose as sharp and curving as the blade of an axe, and long gray hair. All had skin of a pallid gray, akin to the skin of a fish. In spite of the cold the woman wore sandals, the straps criss-crossing up her legs, and Maigraith saw that she had narrow ugly feet, the bones visible beneath the skin and the veins. Her toes were long and thin but fleshy at the tips. Just to look at her put Maigraith on edge, as though something about her, about
them
, was not quite right.

Finally their gaze became unendurable, and she looked down. The woman spoke. “Your name is Maigraith?” Her voice grated, like Japhit’s voice, but her face was harder still.

She nodded.

“Why have you come here?”

Maigraith did not answer; the question was repeated. Again she said nothing. The three Whelm moved as one along their benches, their collective will enveloping her, cutting off all her senses, stifling her. Her heart was thudding wildly. Her mouth was dry.

“Water, please,” Maigraith said hoarsely.

“When you have answered our questions you may drink,” said the woman.

“Who was your accomplice?” asked Japhit. “What is her destination?”