The Windsingers (10 page)

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Authors: Megan Lindholm

Tags: #Fantasy, #Fantasy - General, #General, #Fiction, #Fiction - General, #Fantastic fiction

BOOK: The Windsingers
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NINE
K
i shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She was weary of standing still and silent, awaiting Dresh's next order. Her mind was torn between her boredom and her anxiety. Dresh's eyes, and perforce Ki's vision, were still fixed on the same spot of wall. She could find no special fascination with it. Whenever she tried to speak, he shushed her. Ki sighed loudly.

'Curse you!' Dresh barked out angrily. 'How can I reach for a presence with you distracting me? You cannot be still; you let your mind run in small useless circles and then hold them up for my inspection! Cannot you keep your mind empty?'

'I had not considered that our enforced companionship might grate on you as well, Master.' Ki's voice was salty.

Dresh snorted. 'Well may you sneer at me as Master, you who have not learned even to be master of yourself. Enough of this. I cannot use my power while interpreting the sky for a mole. Let go of me, but stand still, if you would not get yourself into mischief.'

'With great relief,' Ki rasped. With a solid clunk she deposited the wizard's head upon Rebeke's table and folded her arms across her chest.

She waited in darkness. Her total lack of perception puzzled her. Then a slow hot flush flooded her face as she realized her eyes were closed. So swiftly had she adapted to Dresh seeing for her! She opened her eyes to a foreign world. Ki had not stirred from her spot, and she did not now. But where Dresh's eyes had shown her a bed and hides, her own saw a palely glowing gelid mass, reminding her of a mushroom sagging into rot.

In size and structure, the table bore a faint resemblance to Dresh's interpretation. But to Ki's eyes it was made of a glassy stone rather than wood. A fibrous tube stalked up from its center. Beside the tube was a place of nothingness, a cube of darkness. From its center glowed a spark of light almost too tiny to see, but so brilliant that her eyes watered as she looked upon it. In confusion she turned away.

The opaque walls of the room rippled before her gaze, shifting pale colors like an opal in the sunlight. She moved her eyes to the floor to rest them from the sickening motion, only to discover that the floor beneath her feet heaved and wavered also. Yet she felt no sensation of movement. Her stomach protested this contradiction.

She let her eyes roam the walls again, seeking any relief from their queasy rippling. She found it. There was a window. It alone in the walls was stationary. Its homely wooden frame was as comforting and familiar as a peasant's hut. Outside was daylight. Ki felt a shiver of worry. She had never had her time sense disturbed in such a fashion. Her body told her it was late night. But the day outside was bright and clear. A few chickens scratched in the dirt of a small dooryard. An open forest of paper birch and alder was held back from the dooryard by a flower bed planted with anemones, white and purple. A light breeze stirred the nodding flowers. Ki found herself stepping forward to catch the light caress of the wind on her face, to smell with relief the smell of earth and flowers. She could see the corner of a little kitchen garden. Pea vines climbed up crooked branch supports. The tensions eased out of her shoulders. She smiled at her own fears, and tried to remember where she had imagined herself to be. Dresh had made a great show of his magic, but from the look of the countryside, they weren't far from Bitters. Small wonder he had not allowed her to see this window with her eyes. He hadn't wanted her to know how easily she could walk away from his charade.

She listened to the gentle shushing of the wind over the flowers. Her ears picked up a faint far humming like bees disturbed in a hive at night. The room behind her was silent. With a prickling sensation she realized that the only breathing in the room was her own. She swallowed her uneasiness. Weird as Dresh might be, he was her ally in this. To fear him would not help the situation. But she was glad she had found the window.

She glanced back to the table. Tiny flecks of light swirled and danced about a red spark in the cube of darkness - like flies buzzing about offal, Ki thought. Their glow was paler, softly phosphorescent like swamp-rotted stumps. She found it disgusting. She was not sure what she looked upon, but she would not argue with her instincts. She closed her eyes to the sight. She still had not mastered the queasiness the rippling walls and floors awoke in her.

There were other avenues of sense of explore. She flared her nostrils, drew in a deep breath. To her puzzlement, she no longer smelled the day outside the window. Only Vanilly. And more Vanilly. Beneath that, only a slight musky scent that she associated with Dresh's head. The strength of the Vanilly obscured whatever else her nose might have been able to tell her.

Touch: through her soft boots, Ki pressed her toes down against the floor. It felt solid. She moved her feet slightly, and was unreasonably pleased with the soft rasping noise they made against the floor. Cautiously, lest she disturb Dresh and draw another reprimand from him, she moved her hand out, to brush it against the edge of the table. She jerked her fingers back. The surface of the table was yielding and sticky, like an extremely large lump of lard on a cold day. She rubbed her fingers together, but nothing clung to them.

'Take me up again!' Dresh's command broke in upon her explorations. Cautiously she opened her eyes, and fixed them on the cube of darkness. Gingerly, as if she were about to pick up a red hot coal, she reached out for the blackness that was Dresh. Before her hand could touch him, the room around her winked, and in an instant became the room as Dresh saw it. Ki shied back violently from a hand right in front of her face. It disappeared.

'It's your own hand, fool!' Dresh laughed.

She reached out again, and saw her hand appear again in front of Dresh's eyes. To guide her hands down to pick up the head that saw for her required her full concentration. It left her with a heaving stomach and the germ of a headache between her brows.

'Well, if you are finished peeking about, we shall be on our way.'

'You know where your body is now?'

Dresh pursed his lips slightly and then sighed in resignation. 'Of course I know where my body is. Do you know where yours is? How can you be so naive? Ki, Ki, if only I could have foreseen... but enough of that. This is no time to be lamenting what I don't have. What I do have is you. You will have to suffice, no matter how limited I find...'

His vision streaked before her eyes, so rapidly did she thump him back onto the table and step clear of him. She folded her arms across her chest and stared with stony eyes at the cube of darkness. The spark in the center waxed horribly bright, swelling to twice its size and pulsing scarlet. Ki remained motionless, her arms clenched tightly lest her hands betray her by trembling. It was several long moments before Dresh spoke.

'I suppose I deserved that.' The spark shrank and faded to white. 'You cannot be pleased with me as a companion, either. Come, Ki, let us make amends with one another. Help me in this venture in which I so greatly need your cooperation, and I shall put a curb upon my tongue.'

Ki remained motionless, but she could not keep a smile from ghosting over her lips.

'Please.' Dresh half-sighed, half-hissed the word. Ki stepped forward and took up his head. Dresh's image of the room snapped back around them.

He cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice was controlled. 'Two Windsingers watch over my parts. Yet she whom I feared most to encounter seems less of a danger now. There is someone, or something, else here. I do not know what name to put to it, and it troubles me. I fear a trap within a trap. Though they appear unaware of us, that may be dissembling. With so many unknowns, I hesitate to confront them. Yet to hold off may lose us the element of surprise, which in reality I may not possess. And the time I may survive in this state is trickling away from me.' Dresh's voice sank and he sighed. He roused himself abruptly. 'What say you, Ki?'

She shrugged. 'Attack now. If we have the surprise, use it. If we do not, what have we to lose?'

Dresh's voice was bittersweet. 'Only my body and your life, my dear. But those are also the only things we stand to gain. Onward, then. Ki, as a child, did you ever play at jump-points?'

Ki frowned slightly. Like a dim echo there came to her mind the image of an old tree-stump in a clearing by a river. Dark-eyed Romni children danced about it. A slender young boy crouched on top of it. Suddenly he leaped into the air. 'West!' cried one of the other children at the very moment that his jump peaked. With a lithe twist the flying boy jerked his body to the west, to land cleanly within a square scratched on the dirt to the west of the stump. With a grin, he leaped back onto the top of the stump, his dark hair blowing about his face. He crouched again, and again the circle of children danced around the stump. The boy leaped, and 'South!'...

'I remember the game, wizard,' Ki replied. 'But it is at least a score of years since I last played it. I always lost, as I recall. The Romni used it, I believe, to train the youngsters so that they might be ready to learn the leaping and tumbling tricks that would bring them pennies at the fair. What of it?'

Dresh's eyes and Ki's vision roved about the blank black walls. 'It is not only the Romni who train their children so, Dresh muttered to himself. 'Indeed, one of the mysteries of the Romni is where they first learned of the exercise. What we play at here, Ki, is jump-points on a grand scale. Where do you suppose the next chamber is connected? We shall not know until we leave this one. If your reflexes are not sharp enough to let us gain it, we will find ourselves falling through the cold dark that lies between the worlds.'

'And onto the chickens,' Ki replied disgustedly. She was weary of his wizardry dramatics.

'What?'

'The window,' Ki spoke curtly. 'If we went, for instance, out the window, we might fall through the endless void and land on the chickens.'

'The window...' His voice trailed off in consternation. Then the Dresh vision of the room winked out. Ki found it replaced with a seeing identical to her own. Dresh's vision riveted itself to the window. 'I scarcely can believe it.' His voice was hushed. 'Closer, Ki. Can it be the same one?'

Ki obligingly advanced to the window. Dresh's brief scanning of the room had made her aware of one fact. There was no door. The window was the only possible exit.

She felt her hand lift, to run lightly across the rough wood of the window sill. Someone used her nails to pick at the coarse grain of the wood. 'Stop it!' she hissed at Dresh.

'A moment,' he muttered, ignoring her anger at his casual use of her body. She watched her hand pass through the window, felt it engulfed in a cold and treacly substance. Dresh abandoned control of it, and Ki jerked it back. She felt an unreasonable urge to go and wash.

'It's the same frame,' he said aloud, musingly. 'And she has created the old view. I never suspected Rebeke of such rank sentimentality. Interesting. And surprisingly touching. But not a way out, Ki. We could no more leave through that window than ask directions of a portrait. It's a created image, nothing more.'

'Then there's no door?' She wiped her hand down the front of her tunic, then returned it to share the burden of the head. She shifted Dresh to rest on the cant of her hip, trying to ignore the stomach-wrenching sway in perspective. The damn head was getting heavier every minute. Her shoulders ached.

With a blink, Dresh returned them to his interpretation of the room. Ki saw the bed and table restored to his imaging, but no sign of the window. Dresh picked up her consternation.

'Because Rebeke does not care for the casual visitor to see it. It takes a bit of doing to make a thing visible on this plane, but invisible if viewed with the wrong attitude. More than a bit of doing. She must value it greatly to expend the time and effort. Touching.' He repeated the word, and then jerked his voice away from the thought, as if fearful. 'Doors. No, Ki, the problem is not that there is no door, but that there are too many exits. We may depart this chamber at any point, walls, ceiling or floor. We may assume that at some point, or points, it adjoins other chambers. At other points, it is probably close enough to permit a leap to another chamber. At all other points, there is nothing but otherness.'

'How do we know where to leave?'

Ki felt the bob as Dresh's head shrugged. 'Pick a wall, Ki. Your guess in this matter is as good as mine.'

Ki's mouth went dry. 'Some wizard,' she muttered. 'Even the crossroads wizards that tell fortunes profess to see through walls.' Dresh did not deign to respond. Instead, he sent their gaze roaming slowly over the walls.

'Were this your chamber, Ki, and you had set out the furniture thusly, where would the door be?'

Ki pursed her lips at the shrewdness of this method.

'Not too near my bed. I should want it across the room from where I slept, that if one entered, he would have some space to cross before he could take me unawares. My way would be to enter, advance to the table there, and then across to my bed. Let us take the space in the wall across from the bed and in line with the table.'

Dresh grunted. 'Why not? Although all you and Rebeke have in common is your sex, in this matter you may have some insight. To the wall, then.'

'To the wall, Ki!' Dresh repeated an instant later. With a start Ki realized she had been waiting to follow Dresh's lead. Shaking her head at her lapse, she moved to the spot she had chosen.

'For a few moments, I must leave you to your own eyes, Ki. This will take full thought on my part. So, if you will excuse me...'

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