In the Eye of Heaven (5 page)

After another fit, he tried to right himself, damp fingers adhering to the frigid stone. "Host Below!" "Take care whom you call."

Durand squinted, pawing his forelock from his eyes. There was nothing to see. "I've had my fill of you and your stick, stranger," he managed. But as he gave his stinging fists a twist, he realized that the stranger stood feet taller than any man he had ever seen. He filled the well like a tree.

Now Durand saw the stranger smile: a thing of black pegs. The stranger swung his forked staff against the water. There was no splash. And the pool itself glowed—deep, aurora-fingers reaching for the roots of the world.

"Queen of Heaven." An icy plume rose as Durand spoke.

The light climbed the folds of the stranger's cloak and his staff's convolutions. Durand saw fingers like hog bones wrapped in twine. Under the pilgrim's hat, he caught the edges of a face: a thorn bush of knotted twine spilling from cheekbones where hairy cord knotted like a weapon's grip. Two cold pennies winked in the sockets of the man's eyes: one a nicked black, the other bright silver. There were teeth. They looked like shoeing nails.

"Better."
The voice rustled.

It took a lot to square off with the creature.

Through clenched teeth, Durand managed a few words: "Who are you?"

"I am the Traveler."

Durand forced his gaze into that knotted face. Into the glinting coins.

"What?" he demanded.

"Prince of Heaven. Spirit. Lord of Roads. Warder at Crossroads. The Longwalker."

"You're a sorcerer," Durand accused, even as he realized that no breath steamed from the dry jaws above him.

Laughter leapt the walls. "My Brother dreams the World. He set his Eye in the Vault of Heaven, and you do not call him sorcerer."

The Creator, Silent King of Heaven, dreamt the world. Durand had stared into his warm eye every morning at Dawn's Thanksgiving. The brown iron pegs of thing's teeth meshed a fathom over Durand's head.

"You're mad," he said.

"No."

'Then I
am!"

The stranger's head tipped abruptly in a gesture that seemed almost birdlike, and allowed the thin light to wink in its tiny penny eyes. "No."

"Host of Heaven!" Durand swore.

"No, no," the stranger corrected sharply. "I miss the days of the Old Gods in these lands, when my Brother and his children had not yet eclipsed the other lights in Heaven. Men
knew."

The corded brow flexed. "Imagine a sea," it said, "—an
ocean!
—and in it each drop of water sits on the next without mingling. A rattling main of beads without the slightest connection holding one to the next." For a moment, its hand touched Durand's head in a mad, paternal gesture. "Such is the memory of man. I am more than a sorcerer, forgetful one, for I was never born."

Durand stared at the well and the man and the eyes and the staff. "Why have you come for me?"

"I have not 'come for you,' you have arrived. I haunt the crossroads, Durand of the Col." He fingered the burly crook of his staff.

Durand felt the grip of soaked clothing squeezing the heat from him. He felt the ache of his bruised elbow. His lungs were raw.

"What do you want of me?" he said.

"You are a traveler," the Power said.

"A traveler
...
?"

"You do not see. You little ones are thoroughly trapped in this old dream of my Brother's—no matter that you'll leave it one day." A thousand knots slithered tight to pitch the creature's metal eyes toward the sky. "In my youth I was a wanderer. I walked the tracks of my Brother's Creation. I watched as old spirits preyed on young. And I spent an age at my Brother's side, no help to give, too far to reach. And now I am near." Again, the Power was all narrow chin and brown peg teeth. "But I must be quiet. Quiet or the Host Below must hear."

The knotted face twitched. What such a gesture portended, Durand could not understand. "You are a strange breed, you men, and I have learned that only the lost will heed me." Durand was too near, like a mouse on a blacksmith's anvil. Starlight sparked in the Power's eyes like lightning. This thing was brother to the King of Heaven. Durand could feel the Traveler's spirit thundering out beyond the castle walls, beyond the fields—the flash of a smith's hammer on the world.

The coin eyes fixed Durand's. "You must be a traveler or lost."

Durand had no answer. Ev
ery road that stretched over Er
rest the Old twitched under the weight of the same Power. "What is to become of me?" Durand rasped. "The question."

The Power turned toward the glowing pool. For a moment, the wide brim obscured its terrible face. The light seemed to reach fathoms down. "How deep?" Durand found himself asking.

The empty eyes turned on him, one winking, one suddenly bottomless. "It was old when the
Cradle's
prow first scraped the shore at Wave's Ending to found your nation. It runs to the days of the Old Gods."

It had been more than twenty centuries, twenty-three. He spoke of a time before time.

'There are bones down below," the stranger said. "And jewels and swords and the brazen shields of chieftains; lambs for the wild gods, and fallen children. The water curls in every bone and hasp." The Traveler stretched his staff out once more and struck the surface. Again, the water rang. It turned, finally, to Durand. "What would you know?"

Durand clenched his teeth and forced himself to stare into the metal eyes. "Is there a place? Will I find a place?"

The Traveler said nothing, though its great limbs creaked in their knots. Its eyes hesitated on Durand's face, waiting, and as the flat metal glinted, Durand felt himself drawn to speak.

"Will I succeed? I—What point is there in striving if..."

The Traveler would not turn away, and Durand felt suddenly uneasy at what he was doing. Maybe he was wrong. Did he want the answers? It might be better to leave some things down among the bones. This thing called the Lord of Dooms its brother. What would Durand do if the Power spoke the wrong words? He tried to tell himself that it didn't matter, that when he came before the Warders of the Bright Gates of far Heaven, all that mattered was how well he had lived the life he'd been given. And still the Traveler waited.

A question came
unbidden. "Will I..." but Duran
d stopped. Surely some things were too much to say. But he could not help but think: What woman would want some vagabond thug, a tramp with nothing to offer.

"What of a family?" he said.

At this, the vast Traveler nodded. It turned to the wavering disk of water. As it passed its staff over the still surface, the light stirred below, moving in loose tendrils. Huge, glowing branches swept through the gloom, drifting in the current.

'There are answers here," the Traveler said. "Many answers."

Durand looked deeper, seeing finer and finer branchings weaving in the blue. He looked to the Traveler. The light shone in the knotted curves of its face.

"Ah. Yes. I see the place you crave. Yes. And a share of glory." The Power stopped suddenly, almost starting.
By the Host,"
it whispered.

The Power's jaws opened, and a weak thread of vapor climbed the well like a wisp of incense, like a prayer. "There is success."

Durand tried to face the Power. "And the rest?"

"Yes," the great Power murmured, and it seemed angry then. "A beauty. Soon, you will find her." It withdrew its heavy staff, the dry fingers stroking whispers from the wood.

"Are these things true?"

"Yes," the Power answered.

"Without doubt?" Durand pressed.

"Yes."

They were so close that the breath of the stranger's words stirred in Durand's mouth. He tasted the earth. After a long moment, the great Power stirred. There was a stiffness in its movements as though it had only just remembered the Ages it had seen. It raised its staff and glanced down on Durand, its expression unreadable. "It's no easy path."

The staff dropped and struck the water, leaving only blackness.

Durand knew at once: Both the Traveler and the light were gone.

D

urand bared his teeth, breathing hard against the chill of stone and water. He looked up at the circle of pale cloud high above and the mirroring ring down the well. It seemed as if the distant Heavens were reaching for him. Then something dropped out of the sky—a tight black flutter. He extended his hand, but the flutter missed his fingers and struck him—hard—taking a bite from his forehead. It clattered between his boots.

From the courtyard, Durand heard a strange metallic tapping—not the Traveler's staff this time. Confused and more than tired of mysteries, he mounted the stair.

At the well's edge was a boy, driving a nail through a dark, folded bundle with a shoeing hammer. For an instant, the child remained absorbed, then he took note of Durand standing over him and the hammer clattered to the stones. "Host of Heaven!" His eyes were wet and wide. Durand pictured himself, towering against the sky, hair dripping in oily rivulets. "Easy," he said.

The boy stared, paralyzed. His eyes followed Durand's shaking hand. It was, Durand saw, black with blood. He pictured himself, a blood-soaked monster rising from the dark of a well. He smiled, wiping the blood away between his hands. "I'm really no one to be frightened of," he said, almost sighing. "Flesh and blood. Less blood than before you threw that thing down the well, but still flesh and blood." "What were you doing in the well?" asked the boy. "What are you doing hammering past curfew?" "Asking questions," the boy whispered.

"Well," Durand said, "one of your questions has struck me in particular."

The boy only looked at the folded question in his hand. Durand crouched. "I fell in," he offered and tried the smile again.

The boy was not so easy to win over. "May I see?" Durand ventured.

The boy opened his hand, revealing a small dark parcel shot through with an iron nail. There was blood in the seams of his palm.

"It's lead," the boy said.

"A bit of the roof, looks like," Durand said.

"You hammer a sheet, then write your question. Or your wish, or whatever. You scratch with the nail, and a bit of blood. And then you knock the nail through. Has to be the same nail."

"You write?" Durand asked. "I only read faces." "You have to," the boy said. "Who told you these things?" "Everyone around here knows."

"You're from the Col?" He had never seen the boy, but he supposed that meant very little.

"No," said the boy. "My father is the priest."

"Oh." The priests had been trying to rid the peasants of their old, wild gods since the
Cradle
skidded ashore at Wave's Ending. "A priest taught you these things?"

"My father is a Vairian and a scholar!"

That might explain it. The Vairians were the strangest of priests, binding scraps of hearsay to stretched skins with knots of ink. They made good scribes.

"Your father is my father's priest-arbiter?"

The boy squinted. "Yes,
Milord.
He studied at the library in
Parthanor. And he's a scholar."

"And he taught you?"

"No. I learned it from your mother's women. They know all these things."

The cold was overtaking Durand. He might have known. Patriarchs for law, wise women for birth and death and fortune. "Why the well?"