The Fathomless Fire (9 page)

“You mustn’t do that,” she whispered.

“Don’t like it here,” Riddle whined. “Too many others. Too many voices.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. Trust me. No one’s going to hurt you.”

“Riddle wants to go back. Back under the trees.”

“Just keep quiet, all right? And no disappearing.”

“Won’t drink this stuff.”

“Then don’t.”

“What does Rowen get to drink?”

“
Sshhh!
”

The cat gave a feline whimper but said nothing more. Rowen and her grandfather drank their cider in silence and listened to the conversations around them, which were mostly about the weather, the crops, and how the forest looked today. The general consensus about that was
unsettled.
After a while Rowen felt the warmth working on her. Her eyelids drooped and she began to slide down by degrees in her chair. She shook herself awake, then looked across the table to see that her grandfather, too, was nodding off.

She remembered the hill of the sleeping giant.
Sometimes a story withers and dies…

“Grandfather,” she whispered urgently.

Pendrake stirred and looked around in surprise.

“I must have dozed off,” he said, frowning. Then he eyed his mug and gave a soft laugh. “I wonder what Kate put in this cider…”

“I’d like to hear more about Grandmother,” Rowen said. “You told me she went into the Weaving, but you didn’t say what happened to her.”

Pendrake nodded.

“It’s something all loremasters must do, sooner or later. The Weaving is the source of our power and the storehouse of all wisdom. Maya, your grandmother, hoped to recover the ancient lore of the Stewards. To restore at least some of what was lost in the Great Unweaving.”

He gazed down at the table and drew a deep breath.

“I begged her not to try,” he said. “But she was determined. This was after Gildred – after your mother and father died, and you were still a little child, but Maya knew, somehow she knew that you were … different. That your Untold heritage would be a gift and a burden no loremaster had known before. She wanted you to have all the knowledge you might need some day. So she went. But she never returned.”

Rowen swallowed. Tears stung her eyes.

“But she didn’t
die…
”

Pendrake looked at her a long moment before answering. She could see how much he wished to tell her something hopeful.

“I searched the Weaving myself,” he said slowly, “as deeply as I dared, but I never found her. The longer one stays there, the more difficult it is to come back.”

“But what
is
the Weaving, Grandfather? I still don’t understand.”

“That’s one of the reasons we’re going home, Rowen. You have to see for yourself, and Fable is the only place you can do that.”

“You want me to go into the Weaving?”

“It’s not that I want you to, Rowen. You
have to
.”

“Why?”

Pendrake was about to answer, then his gaze shifted suddenly to something behind Rowen.

“Come out of the Deep, have you?” a thin, scrapy sort of voice rasped in her ear. She nearly jumped out of her chair. An old man with long, snow-white hair stood behind her, glaring at her. A white scar ran down one side of his long, leathery face, from the tip of one eyebrow to the corner of his mouth.

“Pardon?” Rowen stammered, her heart thumping.

“The
Deep
,” intoned the old man. “Is that where you’ve come from, friends?”

“He means the forest, Rowen,” Pendrake said. “And yes, we were in the Deep, if you must know.”

The old man nodded knowingly, as if this information explained a great deal.

“And where might you be headed?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.

Pendrake didn’t answer, and the quick glance he gave Rowen warned her not to speak up either.

“Well,” said the old man with a shrug, “it’s a good thing you stopped in for the night. It’s a steep dark one out there. Not good for decent folk to be travelling.”

“Yes, it is dark,” Pendrake said. “And cold, too.”

“Aye, a coat and two scarves colder than yesternight. Mighty odd weather for this season.”

“You’re right about that.”

The old man pointedly eyed one of the empty chairs at the table. It was clear he was hoping to be invited to sit. When that didn’t happen, he lowered himself quickly into the chair anyway, then leaned across the table. His next words came in a whisper.

“Odd times all around. Odd things happening, odd creatures prowling the edge of the Deep as were never seen before by these old eyes.”

He glanced down at Riddle, then fixed his disconcerting gaze on Pendrake.

“Never seen before,” he repeated.

“What have you seen?” Pendrake asked.

“Ohhhh,” the old man breathed, shaking his head ominously, “things as should know their place and keep to it. Old things, from the oldest tales. And strangers washing up here, like flotsam from some faraway shipwreck. All manner of strangers. Where do
you
hail from?”

“We’re from the Bourne,” Pendrake said curtly.

“Aye, I knew that, by the look of you. You’re Fable folk, I’m thinking.”

Pendrake said nothing.

“Ah, well,” the old man shrugged, “there’s one thing I know for certain, and you can take the news home with you for free. Something on the worse side of bad is brewing out there in the world, and the waves of it are lapping at our shores.”

Pendrake nodded.

“I believe you,” he said.

The old man stared at Pendrake as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard right.

“You
do
?” he whispered, then cleared his throat. “I mean, of
course
you do. These fools don’t see that it’s already on our doorsteps, but those of us with sharp eyes, with brains—”

“Seamus Gudgeon,” Kate shouted from the bar, “are you plaguing my guests with your farragoes of doom and gloom?”

The old man stood up suddenly and glared at the tavernkeeper, one eye twitching. It was clear he was about to reply with heated words, when suddenly the door flew open. Everyone turned to look at the new arrival, a short, stout man with immense sideburns, a walking stick under one arm. He stamped his feet on the mat and rubbed his pudgy hands together.

“Cold as a gravedigger’s backside this night, boys,” he announced to the room. “Nearly froze helping the wife furl the bed-sheets.”

“Thanks for the breaking news, Gilly Sprat,” Kate shouted. “Now shut the door with yourself on this side of it.”

The man nodded eagerly, turned and gave a shrill whistle. As he was pulling the door closed, a dog came loping in after him.

Only very large dogs can lope. This was a very large dog, Rowen saw first. Then she saw that the dog had caught sight of Riddle. And Riddle had seen the dog.

From there things went badly, fast.

The dog made straight for the cat, but then Riddle was not there and the dog was under Rowen’s chair, barking and snapping at her heels, but that wasn’t the worst of it, because something that hadn’t been in the room a moment before was high up in a corner by the fireplace, something like a very large, scaly bat with outspread wings, shrieking and hissing. And now people were yelling and scrambling over each other to get out of that suddenly unpopular corner, and glasses were shattering and crockery smashing, and Rowen was knocked out of her chair by the dog, and the table went over too, and as she was picking herself up out of a puddle of cream she saw that the bat-thing was gone and the dog was whimpering with terror and scrambling backwards across the floor, because now there was a black horse in the middle of the rapidly emptying room, snorting gouts of red fire from its mouth and nostrils and pawing at the air with its hooves.

She had to do something.

The next thing she knew she was standing in front of the frantic, mad-eyed horse, a hot wind in her face, speaking to it in as calm a voice as she could muster through her own fear.

“It’s all right, Riddle, it’s all right…”

The horse’s huge eyes rolled about in terror then seemed to see her, focus on her. Parts of its body began to bob and flicker, like shadows cast by a flame wavering in a gust of wind. Then the horse was gone, or it
was
only bobbing shadows of people and things cast by the fluttering candles along the walls. A disembodied tongue of fire hung in the air a moment, then went out suddenly with a
pop
.

There was a brief hush, in which Rowen could hear her own panting breath.

People began to pick themselves up off the floor and each other. Kate’s round head rose slowly from behind the counter like the moon, and nearly as pale. The dog and its master were one quivering huddled thing by the door.

And here was Riddle, a tawny cat again, sitting quietly at Rowen’s side as if he’d never been anywhere else. He licked one of his paws, in a rather unconvincing attempt to look feline. It didn’t help, given that he still had a horse’s ears. After a moment he seemed to realize this. With a blurry flicker, the proper cat’s ears took their place.

He might have trampled me
, Rowen thought with a shudder, as if only now could she let herself feel the terror of what had just happened.
But he didn’t. He listened
.

Then she thought,
Grandfather
. She turned, seeking him out in the jumble of bodies and overturned furniture, and saw him picking himself up off the floor, a grimace of pain on his face.

“Grandfather!”

“I’m fine, Rowen,” he said, but she heard the strain in his voice and wondered how bad a fall he had taken.

“Didn’t I tell the lot of you?” croaked Seamus, climbing unsteadily out from under a table. “Didn’t I say mind now, the Deep is vomiting up its evil on our shingle, but you all told me I was cracked, you did…”

“I’ll crack you all right if you don’t hush your gob,” Kate warned him, patting down her apron with shaky hands as she came out from behind the bar. “It’s Nicholas Pendrake that I’d be hearing from right now.”

Rowen’s grandfather came to her side, limping slightly. He gave her a quick smile that said,
You did very well.
For some reason she couldn’t quite get at, she felt tears rise. Then she saw the shadow of pain still on his face and understood. In moments like this she had always counted on him to take charge and make things right. This time she’d done it herself, without a second thought. As if deep down she had begun to doubt he could.

“This is Riddle,” Pendrake said, gesturing to the cat, who had put on a convincingly feline expression of
who, me?
“He’s a creature of the forest, the Deep, it’s true, but he’s harmless. He was lost and alone, and needed our help, so my granddaughter and I brought him with us.”

“And what else did you bring with you?” Seamus croaked. “Decent folk don’t be prowling around in the Deep these days. It’s unnatural. We were never meant to swim in those waters, and anyone who does is not to be trusted, I say.”

“And didn’t I say mind your mouth, old man,” Kate snapped.

“I’ll go one better than that,” Seamus said with a scowl, and he strode for the door. “I’ll take my custom elsewhere, while I still can. And if any of you have a crumb of brains, you’ll join me.”

“Well if you’re going, then be off with you,” Kate said, waving him away with a hand.

The door rattled behind the old man as he stalked out. No one else moved, not because they didn’t want to, Rowen realized, but because they were afraid to take their eyes off Riddle, even for a moment.

Kate snatched a tumbler from one of her customers, who was letting the contents spill unnoticed down his shirtfront as he stared slack-jawed at Riddle. “Now, Nicholas,” she said, “we’re old friends, we are, but I just don’t know about this … this …
that.
”

She pointed a trembling finger at Riddle, who had slunk behind Rowen’s legs. Rowen reached down and scooped him up in her arms. To her surprise, he didn’t resist. He was lighter than she had expected, too, and there was something else surprising about him, she now discovered: she had held cats before who purred, but Riddle
hummed.
That was the only word for the strange feeling he gave off, of something vibrating with life. It didn’t make her feel calm and sleepy like a cat’s purr could, but more awake. It was like holding a bag full of bees.

“I understand, Kate,” Pendrake said. “I assure you there’s no danger. Riddle won’t harm anyone. He’s just not used to being around so many people.”

“It isn’t so many
now.
”

“You’re right and I’m sorry about that too. We’ve done enough damage here for one night, so we’ll be on our way.”

Rowen was only too glad to be leaving, but they had taken only a few steps towards the door when it burst open and Seamus came staggering in, his long haggard face contorted in fear. He clutched Pendrake’s sleeve and wheezed out a string of words Rowen couldn’t catch.

“What is it, Seamus?” Kate cried.

“The D – D – Deep,” the old man managed to gasp out. “The Deep is…”

He couldn’t summon the words.

“Show us,” Kate said.

Everyone who was still in the room after Riddle’s shape-changing episode hurried out into the street after the old man. The wind had died down, but there was a heaviness in the air, Rowen thought, like you sometimes felt before a thunderstorm. Dogs were barking their heads off all over the village. Lamps were lighting up in windows, and people in nightshirts were peering out their doors. Some joined the procession, asking anxiously what was going on. Up the street the growing crowd went, following Seamus. In a short time they came to an elevated spot where they could all gather, near the edge of the ridge the village was perched on, and look out over the forest.

Only now they didn’t have to look out quite as far as usual.

“Do you see?” croaked Seamus, stabbing a bony finger, as if anyone needed further directions. Despite the clouded night, it was clear as day.

“The Deep is rising.”

For as long as anyone in Molly’s Arm could remember, the eaves of the Forest of Eldark had nestled at the foot of the ridge. Near, but safely far at the same time. Now there were trees growing more than halfway up the slope, looking ancient and deeply rooted, as if they had always been there. The tops of a few of the tallest trees even rose above the rim of the ridge. Somehow, in the short time since Rowen and her grandfather had left the forest, it had
come closer.
Or had the trees grown larger, Rowen wondered. Or both? And what was just as frightening was that there was no sound. The forest was absolutely still. Not a breath of wind stirred the leaves. Not a chirp, a hoot or a rustle could be heard. If the forest was a sea, it was under an eerie calm.