A Shadow on the Glass (67 page)

“What have you done?” he gritted, wanting to shake her.

His furious, uncomprehending face set her off in another peal of laughter. “I haven’t done anything. You gave me your cloak just after the fire, remember. You looked in your
coat
pocket.” She patted the cloak, located a bulge, put her hand inside and pulled the coil out just far enough to be sure that it was the Mirror.

Llian was so relieved that he felt all dizzy. He put his head in her lap and closed his eyes, and felt no need to say
anymore. Karan stroked his cheek and the frizzy stubble on the side of his head.

“I can never thank you enough,” she said. “I’m sorry for teasing you.” She could no longer hide her feelings toward him. Indeed she no longer wanted to. When Hassien looked back a few minutes later they had their arms around each other and were fast asleep. She smiled and looked away again.

“I tried to use it,” he said later, when the high sun woke them. “I still feel a little ashamed about that.”

“So you should be,” Karan replied with a smile. “Did you see anything?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Nor I.”

“Another time,” he said hesitantly, “I even thought about making a bargain with Tensor.”

“You would dare? What for?”

“The Mirror in exchange for you. And a look at the secrets of the Forbidding.”

She frowned.

“Have I angered you?”

Karan took his hand. “Of course not. I don’t expect you to take on my burdens. I may be making a terrible mistake with this Mirror.”

“You knew I had it,” he said shortly. “I heard you say so to Vartila. How did you know?”

“I didn’t know at all,” she replied. “I was merely shooting out ideas in all directions, like sparks from a firework, hoping that one would catch in her mind and turn her attention elsewhere. But I knew you were in Name. I knew you would try some ridiculous scheme, the kind that only you would think of. Like burning the house down while we were still in it.”

“You mock me.”

“Indeed I do not. You saved me, and doubly. For I was in despair, my quest in ruins, you gone I knew not where. I had plenty of time to think about my failings, in between her torments. The one was scarcely worse than the other.

“At first I thought Maigraith would come. Once I was sure that she was nearby, but she never found me and I couldn’t call her. I’m afraid to use my talent.” Her voice be came melancholy. “And they tormented me with what they had done to her.”

“I heard that,” murmured Llian. “For some reason your talent is very precious to them. You must guard yourself.”

“But they didn’t know that I knew Maigraith was free, for at the moment I was taken my will cried out for a friend, and moving of its own volition, found one. I sensed her searching for me, not far away.”

Llian was touched by the story, and saddened as well. He had not been there.

“But in the end I was ready to tell them everything, even knowing that they would kill me afterwards. Then I sensed you, creeping about in your foolish way, and I was hard pressed to contain my joy. You gave me the strength to resist.”

“Then why did you send me away, back there at the campsite? I could have helped you then.”

“Formidable you may be when roused, but you are a long time in the rousing,” she teased.

“Yes, how I have been tormented by my cravenness.”

“What nonsense! You swore that you would do whatever I told you, remember? Even then it took you long enough. There was nothing you could have done. If you’d stayed you would have been dead in the first minute, and I would have attacked them with such fury that they would have killed me too.”

“Then why did you just wait for them?”

Karan closed her eyes, back in that nightmare, trying to make sense of it. “They did something to me. They had some power over me,” she said haltingly. “Something happened. You saw the first of it, and then they reached me- my dream. I had will enough only to send you away. I was paralyzed in a way. It’s not easy to recall.”

And how could she tell him about her subsequent abuse? How she had been the link between the Whelm and their long-lost master. She had cut herself off from her talent now, too afraid to use it for fear of what might come next time. She dug a hole and buried the memories in it.

The river ran straight for several leagues but the banks were high on both sides and little could be seen save a white smear of mountains to the left and the smooth brown water ahead. Presently there came the sound of children’s voices from the bow and the two, almost identical apart from their height and with a striking likeness to their mother, appeared.

The girl was about six years old; she shook both their hands gravely. The boy was younger. He turned his head away and would not look at them.

“I will make my Atonement,” said Hassien, “then we take breakfast.” She conducted an exercise of bowing, murmuring and delicate hand movements. Llian had not seen any thing like it before.

Karan put her lips to his ear. “The people of the land of Ogur, far to the south near the Black Sea, have similar rituals, I am told, though if Hassien is from that country she is far from home indeed.”

Hassien looked up and saw her whispering. She completed her ordinance then rose and came down to where they sat together, perhaps feeling a need to explain.

“Our lives are just a fragment in the great design-we cannot hope to understand or influence it, only to keep the
shadows away from our door. The crimes of the past draw them to us. So I make my Atonement.”

She fetched a large wooden bowl. The boat rocked slightly as she moved. “Will you share food with us?” she asked, looking first at Karan then at Llian. She did not even glance at Pender, who was still glowering at the tiller.

Karan smiled. “Your gift of food will lighten our journey,
halima nassa ak-tullipu mas
,” she said. “Gladly and with thanks.” Hassien’s face lit briefly.

The bowl contained a variety of dried fruits, even the wonderful gellon that Shand was so fond of. Llian had not tasted dried gellon before. There was dark bread, a strong yellow cheese and a pile of red triangular nuts. Karan took a piece of bread and offered it to Hassien, according to her custom, but she merely smiled, showing small white teeth, and shook her head.

They ate. When each had taken what they wanted, and the children had eaten, Hassien picked up the bowl again and offered it to Pender with an ironic bow. He sat there, holding the tiller with his right hand, staring forward while with his left he conveyed the remainder of the food to his mouth. When he had finished Hassien bowed again, even lower than before, and repaired to the bow. Now she looked at the two passengers, wondering. They sat close together, touching at shoulder and hip and knee, and did not move from each other all the day.

“How long is the journey to Sith?” Karan called out to Hasssien, a long time later.

“Once we leave the hills the river is slow and winding. Traveling only in daylight, five or six days would be required.”

“And traveling all day and all night?”

“A little more than two days. Do you wish it?”

“We must.”

‘Tender has no equal on the river,” said Hassien, without pride or affection. “They will not catch us.”

Karan, who knew something of the handling of boats, could see that this was no boast. Pender, for all his surliness, handled the big craft with such grace and subtlety that it seemed as though he was flesh with the boat and the boat one with the river.

“How is it that the best boatman on the river has no work?” asked Llian.

“We are foreigners. The folk of Name are cold, hateful and suspicious. We may do only what no one else will.”

All that day they traveled, and all night, and all the next day and night. The sun rose late and set early, its slanting attenuated rays giving little warmth. Each night a mist rose from the river and hung there until scattered by the morning breeze, but it influenced not their course or their speed in the slightest. At times it appeared that Pender drove the boat by sense alone, or perhaps some subtle variation in the sounds of the river from place to place. As the day wasted away the mountains and the tall forested hills gave way to the gentlest of hillocks, and then, when the river was joined by another of almost equal size arising in the peaks of northern Bannador, it transected the western edge of the Plain of Iagador. The high banks shrank down. Now they could see to their right a grassy plain that stretched treeless to the horizon, save where the meandering course of the river was marked by a ribbon of forest. On their left the mountains had re ceded, the westering sun reflecting off their snow-covered flanks. Here and there the river passed through patches of woodland, though mostly the banks were grassy or covered with the stubble of autumn crops.

On the afternoon of the second day the grasslands were
succeeded by a dry land of low ridges, steep and rocky on the northern side, gently sloping and covered in heath on the other, through which the great river had cut its meandering path.

“That is the land of Crayde,” said Hassien, indicating the barren hills on their left

Llian looked at the country without interest—its unfortunate, impoverished peoples featured little in the Histories. There was no trace of habitation to be seen, neither fortification, village nor road, just the drab foothills and the mountains of Fildorion towering behind. They passed on.

Karan did not talk further of her ordeal with the Whelm, and Llian, who could imagine it too well, did not question her. She was weak at first but recovered quickly, and cheerful now that they neared Sith and the end of her mission. But still she would not say who she would give the Mirror to, though it was plain that she hoped Maigraith would already be there. She often spoke of her, with longing.

It was near to noon on the third day when the river turned sharply east and ahead, running off the river in a gentle curve, was a steep-sided canal about a hundred spans across.

What a monumental labor that must have been, thought Llian as the current swept them past. Then they drifted down a long straight stretch where the cuffed banks towered above to left and right, and around another sweeping bend to the south. The cuffs fell away and ahead was the ancient stone bridge with its mighty central arch of iron over which the High Way passed, and on their left the waterfront of Sith, impossibly crowded with boats of all types. Behind the waterfront the city covered all the slopes of the island.

Karan gave a vast sigh. “Sith at last. If I must be in a city, this is where I would be. It is such a beautiful place. And the people are warm and generous.”

“You don’t like Thurkad?”

“Thurkad
! Filthy, horrible place, like Name grown a thousand times bigger, more squalid and more vile. Don’t bring that up again.”

Sith
was
a beautiful place too, what Llian could see of it from the boat. It was all built of yellow sandstone, the towers gleaming in the afternoon sun, the sun turning their slate roofs to silver. Even the wharves were clean and orderly, though very busy.

“After Sith, will you still do as you said before?”

The low sun shone through her hair so that it glowed like bronze poured from a crucible. She did not hesitate, or even need to think.

“Of course. I am going home to Gothryme. How I long for home. And it will need me, especially if the war comes that far.”

“Perhaps you will have a further duty here.”

“I owe no duty save to my own. Bannador is a free state and we are a free people. Not even if Maigraith begs on her knees will I have more to do with this business. What about you?”

Llian was silent. Gothryme was not where this would be resolved, or his tale completed. The Mirror would move on and he would not be able to follow it. And there was his debt to Mendark. Sooner or later he would be called to pay it—later, he hoped, after his failure with the Mirror. He felt quite afraid about that. Llian too wanted peace and rest, and not to carry his world on his back each day. And how could he part from Karan now?

“I am told that Gothryme is the most perfect place in the world,” he said. “That’s where I plan to spend the winter.”

“And after the winter?”

“I don’t know. I’ll wait for a sign.”

The free city of Sith was set upon hilly land enclosed on
all sides but the south by a loop of the river. On that side, in the distant past, the founders of the city had dug a canal, wide and deep, from one arm of the loop to the other. In this way they formed an island about two leagues across, and one and a half the other way. On this rocky hill, defended by the great expanse of the river and its steep banks, grew that great trading nation.

Pender unshipped the oars and directed the boat into the still waters of the harbor. Drawing up in a backwater, he leaned on his oars while Hassien scanned the harbor for a berth. Shortly she pointed and he pulled away to an old jetty made of unbarked logs, though even there the boats were tied up three deep, and they had to clamber from one to an other with their few possessions to reach the wharf.

They climbed the short ladder and Llian stared around him. A maze of wharves stretched in every direction, and everywhere the activity was furious. Nearby a group of laborers were unloading sacks of grain from a small ship with triangular sails, staggering under the huge bags, while an overseer with a red face shouted at them from the wharf. A little further a girl was trying to coax a flock of goats one by one up a narrow plank. The lead beast had its foot on the plank but refused to go another step, and the rest of the flock milled around bleating on the deck.