The Ropemaker (32 page)

A man stood up and asked for proof of her powers. She stared at him for a moment and a violent gust of wind came out of nowhere, twisted round him and dragged him into the air, high as a tall tree, and there dropped him, leaving the air still. The man fell headlong, yelling. Just before he reached the ground invisible hands seemed to catch him and set him on his feet. He came tottering back to the gathering and agreed to pay the extra fee.

That evening at the way station Tilja and Tahl went to buy roasted honey sticks and were strolling back to their booth— slowly, to allow the other two a little more time alone together— when the magician appeared in front of them. She gazed silently at Tilja and then laid her hand briefly on Tilja’s bare arm. For that moment, as Tilja felt the numbness flicker and fade, the woman changed, became taller, slimmer, white-skinned, ageless, with the stone look so strong that she might have been born with it. Then she was the unimpressive little housewife again.

“Yes,” she said, “my friend Zara, Lord Kzuva’s magician, spoke of you. So you have done what you set out to do, it seems.”

“How did you know?”

“I will trade information.”

“All right.”

“I did not know, but guessed. Before you came, there was nothing in the Empire that could have destroyed the Watchers. But the power you loosed on the walls of Talagh was of a different order. I was in the city that night. All my wards were shattered by the strength of it, though I could tell that it was operating far from its source. That source, I think, could have done it. Yes?”

Tilja hesitated.
What if this woman asked about the ring?

“Yes . . . I suppose so,” she said.

“And the source was a man? A woman? Something else?”

“A man,” said Tilja firmly, but very aware of the
something else
hidden beneath her blouse.

“And where is he now?”

“I don’t know. He was dying. He told us to put him on a raft so that he could go the common way. He’d been waiting to destroy the Watchers before he went. It was up to him, he said, because he’d set them up in the first place.”

“
That
man,” said the magician meditatively, and fell silent.

“Is that why there’s so much crazy magic loose?” asked Tahl. “Like the warden’s family at the way station last night?”

She nodded.

“Things were not always as you have seen them,” she said. “We are taught that long ago, before there were Emperors, there was a balance. Magic came into the world, and those who knew how could use it, and the rest flowed away south. But as the Emperors established their power they hired magicians to take control of the magic. No one foresaw that one result of their work would be that they gathered all the magic they could into themselves, so that now less of it flowed out than came in. The difference was only slight, but the balance was lost. Gradually, over the generations the pressure has increased.

“And, of course, the magicians became ever more powerful, but there was always some man or woman with powers different from and greater than those of any of theirs, who could keep them in check. When each of these grew old they passed the task on to a successor, whom they had themselves chosen. Last but one of these was a woman called Asarta, who in her turn chose a man called Faheel—the selfsame man, I imagine, whom you helped onto a raft and launched upon the common way to die.”

She spoke the name calmly, without any hesitation, and looked enquiringly at Tilja. Tilja nodded. The magician stood, pondering.

“So, as you say, he finished what he had begun,” she said at last. “He destroyed the Watchers he himself had set up.”

“I thought you said it was the Emperors who did that,” said Tahl, who of course by now had taken over the questioning.

“They had hired the magicians in the first place, but it was Faheel who set them up as Watchers, as much to control and counter each other as to control the magic. Naturally he saw to it that the Emperors should think it was their own doing. But in the end the cure proved worse than the disease.”

“So what happens now?” said Tahl.

“Now things are very dangerous. The Emperor left no heir, and the Landholders are struggling for the Opal Throne. My own was fool enough to think he could make a move. His house is destroyed, his servants scattered. The Lord Kzuva was wiser. He retired to his own estates, and my friend Zara went with him, while I am forced to hire my talents along the road. Worse yet, there is an unknown force in the land, something that one by one is seeking out and destroying those Watchers who escaped from Talagh. Five times I have sensed the dissolution of a Watcher’s powers. I do not know how many are left. I had imagined this must be the work of whoever had broken the towers at Talagh, completing his task, but you say he is gone.”

“Yes, I’m sure it wasn’t him,” said Tilja, barely managing to keep her voice steady, knowing what that force must be. She was remembering things that Faheel had said.
He came for the ring.
. . . He will try to come again. . . . You yourself might withstand him—
I do not know. . . . The whole of the next age is in the balance.
She was remembering a fist the color of moonlight rising above a parapet and grasping great eddies of raw force as if they had been cobwebs dangling from a beam in a barn. She needed a name for the enemy, a way of thinking about him.
Moonfist.
Yes, that would do.

The magician was staring at her. She was saying something.

“. . . why Faheel never chose his successor . . . Do not tell me, child, that
you
are his chosen successor.”

“Oh, no! Of course not . . . but . . . I think it may be all right.” Again, for an even longer while, the magician stood deep in thought.

“You do well to be careful,” she said. “Well, I have a message for you to pass on, perhaps. If there is work to be done, I am willing to help. So, now, I wish you well.”

She smiled an unmeaning, purse-lipped housewife’s smile, nodded and turned away.
She’s frightened too,
Tilja thought.
She
isn’t just hiring her magic along the road to earn a living. She’s hiding
from Moonfist.

“Chosen successor?” murmured Tahl, as soon as the magician was out of earshot.

Tilja shook her head unhappily. She could almost hear the fizz of Tahl’s brain as he tried to piece what the magician had told them into what they already knew.

“I want to get home,” she said, desperate to distract him. “If things are as dangerous as she says . . . we aren’t going fast enough.”

The next day was miserable for Tilja. In the middle of the night a hideous thought had come to her. She had woken with her own words buzzing in her mind, like a bee she had once seen buzzing against one of Aunt Grayne’s glass windows, trying to find its way through.
We aren’t going fast enough.
She had spoken the words almost at random, but knew in her heart they were true. And now, waking, she knew why.

Somewhere along the road, Faheel had said, the Ropemaker would be waiting for them. But now Tilja had learned that Moonfist was systematically seeking out and destroying other magicians. He already knew of the Ropemaker’s existence—he had seen him change himself into a giant lion in the palace courtyard. He would be looking for him, surely. So every day she and the others spent on the journey put the Ropemaker in greater danger. The sooner they reached the place where he was waiting for them, the sooner she gave him the ring, the better.

She spent the rest of the night wondering how she could persuade the others of the need to hurry. All she could think of to tell them was that she’d had bad dreams about what was happening in the Valley.

They didn’t agree.

That wasn’t enough. Alnor in particular was adamant.

“Not worth the risk,” he said. “The road gets more dangerous every day. We’ve had the luck to pick up a good convoy. The guards are honest, and this new magician knows her business. We’ll be home before winter with time to spare, and that’s all that matters. There’s nothing I can do before the first snow falls, and Meena won’t be sowing her barley until next spring. I’m sorry, Til. You’ll need to produce a stronger reason than just a vague feeling.”

“He’s right, Til,” said Meena. “So let’s enjoy the journey while we can, eh?”

She didn’t glance at Alnor as she spoke, but there were layers of meaning in her smile. She was quite open about her love for him, and her determination to make the most of it for the few weeks she had left to her in this young body. Even Alnor had mostly given up trying to pretend he didn’t feel the same.

And Tahl was relishing the journey for different reasons. He liked traveling in company, making friends, giving a helping hand here and there, asking questions all the time, so easily and unashamedly that people told him the answers, laughing as they did so. If a newcomer joined the convoy one morning, by nightfall he’d know all about them. At one point he even persuaded a glassblower to set up his kiln and show him how it was done, and thus became the proud owner of a small misshapen flask that he had blown himself.

And against these powerful arguments all Tilja had to offer was some dreams she hadn’t really dreamed, and a real, strong reason that she wasn’t allowed to tell them. She tried several times during the day’s march. Soon Alnor refused to listen, and in the end Meena lost her temper, and in a brief flare of the old anger that reduced Tilja to tears told her she was as tiresome as Calico and it was time to stop being a stupid baby wanting its own way and blubbering because she couldn’t have it.

From then on Tilja walked in silent unhappiness, vainly trying to think of some new reason the others might listen to. Tahl walked beside her, for once not chatting but keeping her company, seeming to understand that it was no use trying to cheer her up. In the end he broke the silence.

“You know something you can’t tell us, don’t you, Til?”

She shook her head, not looking at him, but knowing the intelligent, questioning glance that would have gone with the words.

“And there’s a good reason, of course,” he said, just as though she’d told him he was right. “Difficult for you.”

She couldn’t pretend any longer.

“Try not to think about it,” she muttered.

He laughed, and she knew why, and managed to laugh with him. Tahl, of all people, not thinking about something that was puzzling him.

“All right,” he said. “I’ve thought of something else just worth trying.”

The convoy halted well before nightfall and settled into a busy way station. It was still too soon for supper when the boys had finished their kick-fighting.

“Why don’t we go and see if the river’s got anything to tell us?” said Tahl. “There’s just a chance we might pick something up from the Valley, and set Til’s mind at rest.”

“With a hundred other rivers talking away?” said Alnor.

“Oh, go on,” said Meena. “You’re dying to, really. It’s ages since you had a good chat with one of your wet friends.”

Alnor grunted agreement and rose to his feet. They walked down to the river, a good half mile wide at this point, a great smooth expanse of water moving southward under the darkening sky. The first stars were out. One or two lights glimmered along the further shore. A little below the way station a sandspit ran out from the bank.

“That’ll do,” said Alnor. “You two wait here.”

So the two girls settled down at the edge of the water and watched the boys moving out along the sandspit and wading into the shallows where it ended until they were almost waist deep and needing to steady themselves against the press of the current. It was dusk, with the Herald rising bright in the east, and a few other stars faintly showing. The boys stood awhile with bowed heads, motionless dark shapes against the moving flood, then turned and came slowly back along the sandspit and up the bank, deep in serious talk.

“Well,” said Meena. “How are things back home, then?”

“The voice of our river was there indeed,” said Alnor, speaking as he’d used to when he’d been an old man. “It was loud, because the glacier is melting fast, and our river is in spate. There has been fighting beside it. It has carried the bodies of slain men.”

“That means the pass is open,” said Tahl.

The four of them stood in silence. The boys’ drenched clothes dripped steadily onto the ground.

16

Lord Kzuva’s Tower

From then on they traveled alone, making the best speed they could, but limited always by Calico’s needs and their own endurance. Nobody noticed them unless they chose to be noticed, though the further north they traveled the busier the great highway became. Every scrap of possible forage by the roadside was already grazed bare, but there were plenty of well-stocked forage stalls along the way, where they could buy enough for Calico to eat while they took their midday rest. Such was their apparent invisibility that they sometimes wondered whether they could simply have taken what they wanted, unobserved.

But they weren’t certain how far Faheel’s magic protected them from the other magical powers that were now loose in the Empire, especially at night, so for safety they continued to sleep at well-warded way stations, slipping wearily in in the dusk, and away again as the sun rose, unquestioned by anyone.

Opposite Talagh they left the river and turned northwest. Resting on the first foothills they looked back over the plain. There lay the great city, the wounded heart of the Empire. Even at such a distance they could see how it was changed, with the spindling towers from which the Watchers had controlled the great tide of magic now mere stubs, or fallen completely.

Tilja and the others had joined a group of travelers, resting under some shade trees. As they gazed out at this symbol of the enormous change, they were talking in hushed and apprehensive voices about what else might now happen, and swapping stories of the dangers and marvels they had seen.

As it turned out, little of that kind awaited the four on the road to the Pirrim Hills. Nor did the Ropemaker, though this was where Tilja had been expecting at last to meet him.
He will
choose a place you must pass,
Faheel had said,
and be waiting for you
there.
Not the Grand Trunk Road—that was far too thronged— but now that they had turned off toward home, and there were fewer people on the road . . . Indeed, the way stations became less and less busy as travelers reached the turnings to their own destinations. Still the Ropemaker was not among them.

The way station beside the last town before the hills was completely deserted, apart from one lame old man and the chickens he had started to rear in the empty booths.

“No point your going on,” he told Meena.

“You’re telling me there are robbers in the hills?” she asked.

“Nah. They’ll have gone south. Richer pickings for them there. But the Lord Kzuva—he’s Landholder up the other side of the hills—he’s shut off the whole of the North West Plain. He’s not letting anyone in, barring those as belong there or as got business with him. Doesn’t want a lot of strangers crowding in because they’ve heard things are quieter there.”

“We’re on our way back from Goloroth,” said Meena. “We live there.”

“You’ll be all right then,” said the old man. “With Lord Kzuva, anyway . . .”

He hesitated and went on in a lower voice.

“Better warn you. My wife’s sister—she’s got . . . gifts. She says there’s some weird stuff moved into Pirrim Forest these last few weeks.”

Tilja slept and woke, slept and woke, slept and woke. Each time she opened her eyes she expected to see the gangling figure with the enormous headdress looming above her, outlined against the stars. It didn’t happen.
In the Pirrim Hills, where we
first met,
she told herself.
There, at last, surely.

In view of the old man’s warning they did a short stage next day rather than face the pine forest in the dark, and camped at the deserted way station immediately below the hills, taking turns to keep watch while the other three slept close together, within easy reach of Tilja. Next morning they started at dawn, for three long hours toiled up the steeply winding road, and around midmorning reached the pass. As soon as they were in among the pines Calico shied and bolted.

Tilja wasn’t ready. For the last few days Calico had been unusually biddable. In her stupid horse mind she might even have realized that at last they were on their way home. Now, instantly, she was crazed, wrenching her lead rope from Tilja’s grasp, squealing and rearing like a stallion. She whirled round. Her hindquarters slammed into Tilja, stunning her briefly as she grabbed at Alnor for support.

Tilja came to with something pressing on her chest—Alnor’s arm clasping her tight against his body. Meena and Tahl were holding her hands. Calico, at full gallop, was disappearing round the corner ahead. She realized that the other three were standing very still and all breathing in slow, gulping lungfuls. She could feel the thud of Alnor’s heart against her shoulder blade.

“Wh-what happened?” she stammered.

“Don’t let go!” Meena gasped. “Can’t move unless you’re holding us! The forest’s come alive!”

Another terrified squeal rang out, and again, and again. Awkwardly, holding hands, the four of them stumbled forward and round the corner. Calico was lying on her side in the middle of the path, while a sort of gray net that seemed to be growing out of the ground was wrapping itself around her in billowing folds.

“I need that hand!” Tilja yelled. “Hold somewhere else, Tahl!”

With the other three trailing she flung herself forward and grabbed at the gray stuff. It stopped growing, but didn’t otherwise change or loose its hold on Calico. There was a slow, strange pulse in the numbness of her arm, a sense of some vague, large thing resisting her power. She concentrated, forced her willed attention onto it. Now, instead of rushing on through her and away, the thing withdrew. The net shriveled in her grasp, became powder and fell away. Calico started to kick herself to her feet, still squealing, but unbalanced as Tilja grabbed her by the bridle, forced her head down and sat on it, then laid her free hand against her neck and worked her fingers down against the skin. Shuddering, Calico quietened, and as soon as Tilja let her got shakily to her feet. A heavy, earthy reek filled the air.

“What was that?” said Tahl.

“Bull’s-ears, by the smell of it,” said Meena.

This was a poisonous toadstool that grew out of rotting stumps in the forest near Woodbourne. All summer these stumps would become covered in a fine gray mesh, dewy with little droplets that stank of moist mold. Then, later, as all the leaves changed color, brown and white fungi would emerge, looking exactly like the ears of cattle.

“It’s not just the bull’s-ears,” said Meena in a low voice. “It’s the whole dratted forest—it’s come alive. I can feel it. Watching us, somehow. It wasn’t like this when we were going the other way.”

“We must be through here by nightfall,” said Alnor. “Suppose Tilja rides, with Meena behind. Then Tahl and I can walk either side of her with our hands on her ankles. It’s either that or go back.”

“We’ve got to give it a go,” said Meena. “Should be all right if we all hang on to Til.”

At first this seemed to work well enough. Calico wanted nothing more than to be out of the forest, and seemed to have realized that she was safe nowhere except under Tilja’s protection, so she plodded steadily on.

But Tilja was deeply troubled. There had been something wrong about what had happened when she had shriveled the fungus in which Calico was trapped. She felt it shouldn’t have worked, because the magic of the forest was surely natural magic, against which she had no power. And at first the fungus indeed had seemed to resist her, in a way that not even Dorn had done. That was the forest magic, surely, holding her back. But then, when she had concentrated, the fungus had shriveled. So, somehow, the fungus must have been made magic. She didn’t understand it at all.

And now, after a while, she realized that something like that was happening again. The silence of the forest was more than an absence of sound. It was a thing in its own right, dense and oppressive. Tilja saw Tahl holding his hand to his mouth, rather than break it with a cough. A dense fog was closing down. Tilja could feel the thing that caused the silence all around them, filling the long valley up to the invisible tree lines on either side. It was far more than just a huge number of trees. It was the living forest, a great, strange power. A natural magic.

Still, somehow, and with increasing effort, she seemed to be holding it back. No. It wasn’t the forest itself that she was holding, but something else, some kind of made magic that was
using
the power of the forest to try to crush her. It was the same thing that had controlled the fungus that had almost trapped Calico. Again she concentrated, and again the thing seemed to yield.

But this time there had been nothing for her to lay her hand against and shrivel, and after a brief respite the pressure returned, closing in on her like a gradually tightening fist. The others were feeling it too. Alnor and Tahl, who had at first walked easily beside her, now had their shoulders pressed against Calico’s flanks, and the fingers that grasped Tilja’s ankles felt like iron shackles. Meena had her arms around her, hugging her so close that it was hard to breathe. Calico had shortened her stride and was moving as if she were leaning against a horse collar, with a full load behind her.

Faheel, Tilja thought dimly, had known powers like this. He had made them his friends. She remembered waiting below through a timeless afternoon while those powers had gathered to say farewell to him, calling to him as they had come. Perhaps this forest had been one of them.

With an effort she straightened her back and called aloud.

“Faheel sent us. He is our friend. We are doing his work.”

The dead silence absorbed her voice. Nothing happened. The pressure grew and grew.

“This won’t do,” Meena croaked in her ear. “I’ll try and tell ’em. Maybe they’ll listen to me. They’re trees, aren’t they?”

She drew a deep, gasping breath and, faintly, creakingly, started to sing.

The song was at first wordless, no more than a humming in the throat, slow and wavering, but after a little while Meena began to repeat the name of Faheel, drawing it out into a dozen floating notes.

Her voice grew stronger. Little by little the pressure began to ease. Steadily Tilja concentrated her will against the thing, whatever it was, that she had felt using the forest’s power. There was a sudden moment of change, of breakthrough, a rush of release. Tahl moved away from Calico’s side and looked around, interested. Alnor let go of Tilja’s hand and took Meena’s. The fog became palely golden and a little while later they were walking along a track with the sun already westering ahead of them so that it lit the tree trunks on their right almost as far as the ground. Meena stopped singing.

“Done it!” she said, triumphantly. “It wasn’t the forest’s fault, mind you—there’s no real malice in trees. Something was making it act that way, but it didn’t really like it. But that’s better, isn’t it?”

The silence was silence still, but they weren’t afraid any longer to speak. They knew that the forest had fully withdrawn its menace when Calico stopped in her tracks to sample a patch of grass growing beside the road.

The sun was full in their faces by the time they came to the end of the pass. Only on the long descent to Songisu did it cross Tilja’s mind that the Ropemaker, after all, hadn’t been waiting for them in the hills. She felt strangely unworried about this. Of course there was still time. Though she hadn’t known it, he had been with them on their way south, in the shape of one animal or another, all the way across these northern plains, ever since they had landed from their raft. He would be waiting for them here.

The stars were out before they reached the way station at Songisu. To their surprise this was manned, and running, much as it had been on the outward journey.

There was a guard dozing at the entrance, wearing what Tilja recognized as Lord Kzuva’s livery. They might have slipped in unnoticed, as usual, if Tahl hadn’t spoken to him.

The guard looked up, blinking.

“Where you from, then?” he asked, yawning.

“We are on our way back from Goloroth,” said Alnor.

The guard frowned and sat up.

“Try another one,” he said. “Forest’s not letting anyone through no longer. Lord Kzuva, he got his magicians to see to it.”

“We told the forest what we were doing and it let us through,” said Alnor.

“Did it, now?” said the guard, impressed. “All right, then, make yourselves at home. You’re the only ones here. You’re lucky to find us still going—we’ll be closing right down any day now. Stalls are closed already, but we’ll find you a bite.”

He and his wife joined them as they ate and questioned them eagerly about what was happening in the Empire, so Tahl and Meena joyfully fed them their fill of wonders and horrors.

“Well, you’ll be finding things easier, now on,” he told them when they’d finished. “The magicians have got things pretty well under control up here. It’s only a couple of women, mind you, but they’re making a real go of it, I give them that.”

It was strange to be back in something like the old Empire. Strange to find it a relief, order instead of chaos, the grip of strong rule instead of the whirling free-for-all of loose magic and lawlessness. Soon, perhaps, they would have found this as oppressive as they had on the journey south, but now it simply meant that they could relax their guard and hurry on.

The traffic increased, though the way stations were less busy than they’d been on the outward journey. The wardens asked no more than the fee and the official bribe. The talk in the evenings was cheerful and ordinary.

But every mile they walked Tilja became more and more oppressed and withdrawn. A new and terrible fear had begun to obsess her. What if Moonfist had already found and destroyed the Ropemaker? Then, when at last she took out the hair tie and laid the ring beside it, only Moonfist would come.
No,
she told herself,
I won’t believe it. There’s still time. He’ll be here, somewhere,
waiting for us.

Just after they had left the way station on the third morning after the Pirrim Hills she stopped to watch a golden cockerel scratching in the dust by the road. It was almost the right color, but not gawky enough, she decided, and was about to move on when a man came up and spoke to her. He was wearing the Lord Kzuva’s livery, and she had half noticed him studying the groups of travelers as they came through the gateway.