The Stone of Farewell (30 page)

“But why, man?” the priest asked hotly. “By whose orders? Is there plague here, or something like?”

“Something like indeed,” the sergeant said, scratching his long nose in a worried manner. “It's by the orders of Duke Benigaris himself, or so I take it to be. I have his seal on it.”

“And I bear the seal of the Lector Ranessin,” Dinivan said, producing a ring from his pocket and waggling its blood-red ruby beneath the startled sergeant's nose. “Know that we are on the holy business of the Sancellan Aedonitis. Is there plague, or what? If there is no dangerous air or diseased water, we will stay here tonight.”

The troop-sergeant took off his helmet and squinted at Dinivan's signet ring. When he looked up, his thick face was still troubled.

“As I said, Your Eminence,” he begun unhappily, “it's like a plague. It's those madmen, those Fire Dancers.”

“What are Fire Dancers?” Miriamele asked, remembering to imitate a boy's gruff tones.

“Doom-criers,” Dinivan said grimly.

“If that were all,” the sergeant said, spreading his hands helplessly. He was a large man, broad-shouldered and thick-legged, but he looked quite undone. “They're mad, the lot of them. Duke Benigaris has commanded that we ... well, keep a watch over them. We are not to interfere, but I thought that at least we could keep more strangers from coming in ... ” He trailed off, looking uneasily at Dinivan's ring.

“We are not strangers, and as the lector's secretary I am in little danger of falling under the sway of these people's exhortations,” Dinivan said sternly. “So let us in, that we may find shelter for the night. We have ridden long. We are tired.”

“Very well, Your Eminence,” the sergeant said, waving for his troops to unblock the gates. “But I take no responsibility ...”

“We all take responsibility in this life, every one of us,” the priest responded seriously, then softened his expression. “But our Lord Usires understands about difficult burdens.” He made the sign of the Tree as they rode in past the sergeant's jostling men-at-arms.

“That soldier seemed very upset,” Miriamele said as they clattered up the central row. Many houses were shuttered, but pale faces peeped from doorways, watching the travelers. For a town the size of Granis Sacrana, the streets were surprisingly empty. Small groups of soldiers rode back and forth from the gates, but only a few other folk hurried along the dusty street, darting uneasy glances at Miriamele and her companions before dropping their eyes and hustling on.

“The troop-sergeant is not the only one,” Dinivan answered as they rode along in the shadows of the tall houses and shops. “Fear sweeps through all Nabban like a plague these days.”

“Fear goes where it is invited,” Cadrach said quietly, but turned away from their questioning looks.

When they reached the marketplace in the center of town they discovered why Granis Sacrana's streets were so preternaturally empty. A crowd stood half a dozen deep around the town square, whispering and laughing. Although the final glimmers of afternoon still warmed the horizon, the torches had been lit in their sconces all around the square, throwing quivering shadows into the dark places between houses and illuminating the white robes of the Fire Dancers, who swayed and shouted in the middle of the commons.

“There must be a hundred of them or more!” Miriamele said in surprise. Dinivan wore a scowling, worried face. Some in the watching crowd were shouting derisively or throwing stones and refuse at the capering dancers, but others stared intently, even fearfully, as if at some animal upon which they feared to turn their backs.

“Too late for repentance!” one of the robed ones screeched, bounding away from his fellows to bob up and down like a jumping jack before the front row of spectators. The crowd eddied away from him as if fearful of some contagion. “Too late,” he shouted. His face, that of a young man with his first beard, split in a grin of glee. “Too late! The dreams told us! The master's coming!”

Another of the white-clad figures climbed onto a stone in the center of the commons, waving to silence fellow dancers. The watchers murmured as this one threw back a capacious hood, revealing the yellow-haired head of a woman. She would have been very pretty, but for her staring eyes, white-rimmed in the torchlight, and her huge, ghastly smile.

“The fire is coming!” she cried. The other dancers capered and shouted, then quieted. A few in the surrounding crowd called out insults, but quickly fell silent as she turned her burning eyes upon them. “Do not fear you will be left out,” she said, and in the sudden quiet her voice carried clearly. “The fires are coming for everyone—the fires and the ice that will bring the Great Change. The master will spare no one who has not prepared for him.”

“You blaspheme against our true Ransomer, demon-lover!” Dinivan abruptly shouted, standing in his stirrups. His voice was powerful. “You tell these people lies!”

A few in the crowd repeated his words and their murmuring began to grow. The woman in white turned and made a sign to some of the robed ones near her. Several had been kneeling at the stone below her feet, as if in prayer; one of them now rose and walked across the courtyard as she stood staring imperiously outward, her mad eyes fixed on the lowering twilit sky. He returned a moment later with a torch from one of the sconces, which she took and raised above her head.

“What is Usires Aedon,” she screamed, “but a little wooden man on a little wooden tree? What are any of the kings and queens of men but apes raised far above their station? The master will throw down all that stands before him and his majesty shall rise above all the oceans and lands of Osten Ard! The Storm King comes! He brings with him ice to freeze the heart, deafening thunder—and cleansing fire!”

She threw the brand down at her feet. A fierce sheet of flame leaped up around the rock. Some of the other dancers shrieked as their robes caught fire. The crowd pushed back with a shout of surprise as a wall of heat pushed out at them.

“Elysia, Mother of God!” Dinivan's voice was full of horror.

“So it shall be!” the woman shouted, even as the flames ran up her robe into her hair, crowning her with fire and smoke. She was still smiling, a lost, damned smile. “He speaks in dreams! Doom is coming!” The blaze mounted, obscuring her, but her last words rang out over and over.
“The master is coming! The master is coming...
!”

Miriamele leaned over her horse's neck, fighting to keep from being sick. Dinivan rode forward a short way before dismounting to try and help some of those who had been knocked down and trampled in the crowd's retreat. The princess straightened up, gasping for breath.

Blind to her presence, Cadrach stared at the charnel scene before them. His face, scarlet in the leaping light, was suffused with an unhappy but hungering look—as though an important, terrible thing had come to pass, a thing feared for so long that the waiting had become even worse than the fear.

“Where
are we going, Binabik?” Simon leaned in, moving his reddened hands nearer the fire. His gloves steamed on a fir trunk nearby.

Binabik looked up from the scroll he and Sisqi were studying. “For now, it is down the mountains. After that, we will be needing guidance. Now let me continue to look for such guidance, please.”

Simon resisted the unmanly urge to stick out his tongue, but the troll's rebuff did not really bother him very much. He was in a good mood.

Simon's strength was returning. He had felt a little more fit each of the two days of hard journeying that had brought them down across Mintahoq, chief mountain of the Trollfells. Now they had left Mintahoq altogether and had crossed over to the flank of her sister-peak Sikkihoq. Tonight, for the first time, Simon had not wanted simply to fall asleep when the party had stopped to make camp. Instead, he had helped find a scanty supply of deadwood to build the fire, then dug snow out of the shallow cave where they would spend the night. It was good to feel himself again. The scar on his cheek pained him, but it was a quiet ache. More than anything else, it helped him to remember.

The dragon's blood had changed him, he realized. Not in a magical way, like in one of Shem Horsegroom's old stories—he couldn't understand the speech of animals, or see a hundred leagues. Well, that was not quite true. When the snow had stopped for a moment today, the white valleys of the Waste had leaped into clarity, seeming as near as the folds in a blanket, but stretching all the way to the dark blur of faraway Aldheorte Forest. For a moment, standing quiet as a statue despite the wind biting his neck and face, he had felt as though he
did
possess magical vision. As in the days when he climbed Green Angel Tower to see all Erkynland spread below him like a carpet, he had felt as if he could reach out a hand and so change the world.

But moments like that were not what the dragon had brought him. Pondering as he waited for his damp gloves to dry, he looked to Binabik and Sisqi, saw the way they touched even when they did not touch, the long conversations that passed between the two of them in the shortest of glances. Simon realized that he felt and saw things differently than he had before Urmsheim. People and events seemed more clearly connected, each part of a much larger puzzle—just as Binabik and Sisqi were. They cared deeply for each other, but at the same time their world of two interlocked with many other worlds: with Simon's own, with their people‘s, with Prince Josua's, and Geloë's... It was really quite startling, Simon thought, how everything was part of something else! But though the world was vast beyond comprehension, still every mote of life in it fought for its own continued existence. And each mote
mattered.

That was what the dragon's blood had taught him, in some way. He was not great; he was, in fact, very small. At the same moment, though, he was important, just as any point of light in a dark sky might be the star that led a mariner to safety, or the star watched by a lonely child during a sleepless night....

Simon shook his head, then blew on his chill hands. His ideas were getting away from him, cavorting like mice in an unlocked pantry. He felt the gloves again, but they were not yet dried. He tucked his hands into his armpits and inched a little nearer the fire.

“Are you of great sureness that Geloë said ‘Stone of Farewell,' Simon?” Binabik asked. “I have been reading Ookequk's scrolls for two nights and no luck am I having.”

“‘I told you everything she said.” Simon looked out beyond the lip of the cavern, where the tethered rams huddled, bumping together like an ambulatory snowdrift. “I could not forget. She spoke through the little girl we saved, Leleth, and she said:
‘Go to the Stone of Farewell. That is the only place of safety from the growing storm—safety for a little while, anyway.'”

Binabik pursed his lips, frustrated. He spoke a few quick words of Qanuc to Sisqi, who nodded solemnly. “I have no doubt of you, Simon. We have seen too much together. And I cannot be doubting Geloë, who is the wisest one I know. It is a problem of my poor understanding.” He waved a small hand at the flattened hide before him. “Perhaps I did not bring the correct works.”

“You think too much, little man,” Sludig called from the other side of the cavern. “Haestan and I are showing your friends how to play ‘Conqueror.' It works nearly as well with your troll throwing-stones as with real dice. Come, play, take your mind off these things for a while.”

Binabik looked up and smiled, giving Sludig a wave of his hand. “Why do you not join them in this play, Simon?” he asked. “Surely it would be more interesting than watching my confusion.”

“I'm thinking, too,” Simon said. “I've been thinking about Urmsheim. About Igjarjuk and what happened.”

“It was not as you were when young imagining it to be, hmmm?” Binabik said, absorbed in the perusal of his scroll once more. “Things are not always as old songs tell them to be—especially when it is concerning dragons. But you, Simon, acted as bravely as any Sir Camaris or Tallistro.”

Simon felt a pleasant flush. “I don't know. It didn't seem like bravery. I mean, what else could I have done? But that isn't what I was thinking about. I was thinking about the dragon's blood. It did more than this to me.” He indicated his cheek and the white stripe that now ran through his hair. Binabik did not look up to see his gesture, but Sisqi did. She smiled shyly, her dark, upturned eyes fixed on him as though on a friendly but possibly dangerous animal; a moment later, the troll maiden rose and walked away. “It made me think differently about things,” Simon continued, watching her go. “The whole time you were in that hole, a prisoner, I was thinking and dreaming.”