“By no means,” said Kirishgan. “The Blades and their power are an awful drug, but more awful still is the idea. The hideous idea! Dlomu Irrimatak! Dlomu atop the hill, all others at their feet! It is the founding lie of the Platazcra that such is the natural order, the right path for the universe. How else to sustain a cult of infinite conquest? Without a belief that dlomic supremacy was ordained by heaven, there would be no Platazcra, only frenzied warfare among the various keepers of the Blades. The Ravens rule the South, Pazel, because they gave the dlomu a sick, sweet lie to believe in. And now, through that lie, the dlomu are destroying themselves.”
“Everyone believes in that lie,” said Pazel.
Kirishgan sat back, startled.
“I mean, it’s no different in the North,” Pazel went on. “The Shaggat’s cult on Gurishal-that’s infinite conquest, too. And the Secret Fist, Arqual’s network of spies-why, they’re selling the same blary story to the Arquali people: that they should rule everyone, everywhere, because they’re naturally better and Rin wants it that way.”
His voice tightened. “Do you know how many Arqualis have told me I ought to feel grateful, Kirishgan? Told me how lucky I am that Arqual came along and noticed me, lifted me up? Rin’s eyes, half the Arqualis I’ve met think they ought to be in charge of the world. Not consciously, I don’t mean that. It’s half buried, but it’s there.”
The selk’s eyes were suddenly far away. For a moment Pazel was afraid that he had given offense. Then Kirishgan blinked and looked at him again, and his gentle smile returned.
“Your words touch me,” he said. “The old prejudices, the cleaving to the tribe: half buried, you call them. But if you were a selk you might take hope from that assertion. To bury them halfway is a great achievement. When at last they are fully buried, they can decay into the primal soil from whence they came.”
Pazel looked down at his tea. Years of insults, abuses, slurs flowed like a phantom river through his mind. “I understand your words,” he said at last, “but I don’t think you’d see it that way if you were in my shoes.”
“Perhaps not,” said Kirishgan. “But I am not in your shoes. And when I looked at your party from the balcony I saw a miracle: humans and dlomu riding out together, side by side. That is something I have not witnessed since before the days of slavery and plague.”
Pazel was abashed. He was sharing tea with a being whose memory spanned centuries. And lecturing him, with the deep wisdom of his years.
“Kirishgan,” he said, “my hand’s getting colder.”
“That is expected,” said the other.
“Am I really going to go blind?”
The selk was quiet a moment, and closed his feathered eyes. “There is darkness ahead of you,” he said at last, “but of what sort I cannot fathom. Despite my great age I am new to Spider Telling. And even the Master has his limits. ‘We pan for gold, like peasants along the Mai,’ he says, ‘but the river is dark, and the sun shrouded, and the gold we call the future is more often dust than bright stones.’ ”
“I’ve been scared so many times,” said Pazel. “From the first few days on the Chathrand. Out of my wits, if you care to know. But blindness?” He drew a shuddering breath. “I don’t think I can face that, Kirishgan.”
The selk looked at Pazel a moment longer, then drank off his tea abruptly and rose. “The time approaches,” he said. “Let us go.”
Pazel got to his feet, and Kirishgan took a candle from the window and led him quickly through the chambers of wood and glass, the varied people of Vasparhaven bowing and smiling as they went. Finally they reached a spiral stair and began to climb. Three floors they ascended, emerging at last into a small, unlit chamber. It was cold here; the walls were ancient, moss-covered stone. There was a single door, and a round stone table of about elbow height in the center of the room, on which rested a box.
Kirishgan set the candle on the table. Opening the box, he withdrew a small square of parchment, a writing quill and a bottle of ink. Pazel looked upward: he could not make out the ceiling. “What is this place, Kirishgan?” he asked.
“A medetoman, a spider-telling chamber,” said the selk. “Now, let me think-”
He primed the quill with ink, gazed distractedly at the crumbling walls for a moment and then wrote a few neat, swift words on the parchment scrap. He raised the scrap close to the candleflame, drying the ink. As he did so he looked up thoughtfully at Pazel.
“Your country was seized and savaged. It is true that I cannot know what that is like, having no country to lose. Still, I do know something of loss, Pazel Pathkendle. The selk have been killed in great numbers by the Platazcra. We are loath to bow before those we do not love, and our failure to grovel at the bloodstained feet of the Emperor has made us suspect. This was bad enough when the Plazic Blades granted Bali Adro victory after victory. Now that triumph has turned to chaos and defeat, it has grown much worse. Among other things, we are blamed for the decay of the Blades themselves. We talk to eguar, you see.”
“You talk to those monsters?” said Pazel, with a violent start. “Why?”
“Only the elder creatures of this world possess memories to match our own,” said Kirishgan. “We talk to them as we would our peers-as I dare say you would wish to speak to a fellow Ormali, even a dangerous one, if he were to step into this room. But the Ravens imagined that we were plotting their downfall. They could do little against the eguar, but us they have tried to exterminate. They did not quite succeed, but the damage done to our people may never be repaired: not in Alifros at any rate.”
Pazel did not know what to say. He was ashamed of his earlier words to Kirishgan, and his assumptions. At the same time he felt glad that the other had been willing to tell him of such terrible loss.
Then he saw the spider.
It was descending on a bright thread, directly over the candle on the table: a creature of living glass and ruby eyes, twice as large as the one that had bitten him. Kirishgan watched it descend, walking in a slow circle about the table, both hands raised as though in greeting. He was murmuring a chant: “Medet… amir medet… amir kelada medet…” The spider dropped to within a foot of the flame, and its crystalline legs scattered rainbows on the stone.
“Come here, Pazel!” said Kirishgan in an urgent whisper. “Hold out your hand!”
Nervously, Pazel approached. He trusted Kirishgan, but did not relish the thought of a second bite. With some trepidation he raised his hand. Kirishgan took his wrist and tugged him closer, and Pazel’s breath caught in his throat. The spider’s head was inches from his fingertips.
The creature grew quite still. Pazel had the strong feeling that those red eyes were studying him. Two mandibles like slivers of glass reached out cautiously toward his hand. Kirishgan tightened his grip. “Don’t pull away,” he hissed.
It took a great effort not to do so, but Pazel held still, and felt the brush of those strange organs against his fingers. They were barbed; it would have been easy for the spider to grab him with those mandibles and sink its fangs, hidden in that glass knob of a head, into finger or palm.
But this time the spider did not bite him. The mandibles withdrew, and Kirishgan released his wrist.
“Excellent,” he said. “The second stage of your cure has begun.”
“Has it?” said Pazel, starting. “But nothing happened, it barely touched me.”
“Only a touch is required. Now watch.”
The spider turned about on its strand of web, so that its head pointed upward. It remained directly above the candle. As Pazel stared, transfixed, a drop of clear liquid the size of a quail’s egg emerged from its abdomen and descended toward the flame. Though clear, it was thick, and hung suspended like a teardrop. In that moment, Kirishgan reached out and pressed the little square of parchment into the liquid. It passed inside, and the bubble of liquid separated from the spider, and Kirishgan caught it with great care. The spider retreated up its strand and was soon out of sight.
Kirishgan rolled the droplet from hand to hand, inches above the candleflame. It had become a perfect sphere. It was also expanding, and Pazel realized it was hollow. And very light, now, too, for it moved with the slowness of a feather. Then Kirishgan withdrew his hands. The sphere floated above the candle, motionless, glistening in the yellow light.
“This is not part of your cure,” he said, “only a gift, from one traveler to another.”
Kirishgan blew. The sphere drifted toward Pazel; and once away from the candleflame it began a slow descent. “Catch it; it is yours,” said the selk. “But be gentle! The shell is delicate as a prayer.”
Pazel let the tiny sphere settle onto his palm. It was light as a dragonfly, and its surface was an iridescent marvel: every color he could imagine danced in its curves, only to vanish when he looked directly. “It’s beautiful,” he
