able to find us so quickly, I put up defenses.…” She sighed. “Perhaps that woman can sense the Key.”
I immediately felt like tearing the artifact off my neck.
“Or perhaps that has nothing to do with it, and there is some other sign that they use to track us.”
There was another question I was very curious about.
“Was the thing that hit the ferry Kronk-a-Mor?”
“Yes, the ogres’ most dangerous magic, and now a human being has control of it. But Lafresa doesn’t have the experience of the Nameless One, and what she created on that day should have killed her on the spot.”
“But it didn’t kill her.”
“No. The House of Power is capable of defending its servants,” said Miralissa, looking hard at me.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head. “The House of Power is no more than an empty phrase to me. Isn’t it time to stop playing at riddles?”
“The time for answers has not yet come, Dancer in the Shadows,” said the goblin, who had crept up behind me unnoticed.
“I’m afraid that when the time does come, it will be too late, fool,” I replied rather angrily. “I’m sick of mysteries! I’m sick of my dreams!”
“You are the Dancer in the Shadows, and that is why you have these dreams.”
“Just at the moment you’re not much like a royal jester, more like a fat priest spouting sacred nonsense to fleece the worshipers of a few more coins.”
“What do you want to know, Harold?” Kli-Kli sighed, sitting down beside me.
“Everything.”
“A praiseworthy aspiration,” the goblin giggled. “But what’s impossible is impossible. It’s good that you’re no longer a child and I think you’re capable of understanding.… I’ll tell you about the Four Great Houses and the Creation. This story was told to me by my grandfather. We goblins remember things that the orcs and the elves have forgotten; we remember things that you humans never even knew.”
“Yet another goblin fairy tale?” I asked him rather churlishly.
“A fairy tale? I suppose so. But you’ve got nothing against that, have you? I thought not. Where should I begin? When the world was young … No, not like that.… When Siala did not yet even exist, when even the gods were carefree children, and no one had ever heard of ogres, only one world existed throughout the entire universe. Now it is called the World of Chaos. It was the First, the Primal World, and in it there lived —” The jester hesitated for a moment. “—people, probably. One day, one of them discovered a secret—that creatures were living in the shadows of their world, even if they were rather different. The shadows were the seeds, the prototypes of other universes. And if a man knew how to control them, that is, if he could ‘dance’ with them, he could take any shadow in Chaos and build a new world. His own world. Or at least, he could try to build it—it might not work out too well for everyone. Not everybody was capable of doing this, only one in a hundred million, or perhaps two hundred million, but in those hoary old times there were a lot more of them than now. Those who were capable of creating worlds out of shadows came to be known as Dancers in the Shadows.”
I shuddered.
“Are you trying to tell me that I can take any shadow and make something like Siala out of thin air?”
“You can deny it if you like, Harold, but you are the Dancer, and there’s no way you can get away from that. And as for the shadows, the answer is no, you can’t. I told you. A new universe can only be created from shadows of the World of Chaos. The shadows of our world are only shadows of shadows of shadows of shadows of the Primal World. They are dead and not capable of dancing.”
“But if I did end up in Chaos, then I could manage it?”
“How would I know? It’s only a fairy tale, after all, and you don’t know how to wander between different worlds…”
“And Sagot be praised for that,” I said with a sigh of relief. “Carry on then, let’s hear a few more lies.”
“Where was I, now? Ah, yes! The Dancers took the shadows, and thousands and thousands of new worlds appeared, thanks to them. But in creating new worlds, the Dancers took away a little part of their own world, and the time came when the World of Chaos died. There were no shadows left there. It was filled with the darkness and the fire of the Elemental Time. The people left it and settled in other worlds, and the way to the Primal World was forgotten. None of the Dancers in that time tried to save the World of Chaos, although they could have done it. What for? With so many new and unusual universes all around, why bother trying to restore an old piece of junk?”
“What are you thinking about, Harold?” asked Miralissa, who had kept quiet all this time.
“About the joker who created our world. So, Kli-Kli, you say that Chaos can no longer be restored?”
“No. The way to it has been forgotten. And if there was a way to get there, you need a shadow from that world in order to breathe life into it.”
I remembered the three female shadow-friends dancing on the crimson tongues of flame and asking me to save their world. I got an itchy feeling in my stomach—maybe the jester was right? Maybe there was an element of truth in his fairy tale?
“Why are you telling me all of this? I have enough trouble sleeping at night already. And just how does the House of Power fit into your story?”
“This is only the prehistory.… To be honest, Harold-Barold, I don’t really know anything about these houses.… My grandfather said there were Four Great Houses, and that they were supposedly created by the Dancer who gave life to our world. But no one knows why he created these houses. The goblin books don’t even hint at the reason.”
“But it is mentioned in the
“What were they created for?”
“You must understand that we know nothing for certain and can only guess. That one short paragraph in the annals, written by an unknown author, has provoked controversy among our historians for thousands of years. Entire works of scholarship have been written, based on that fragment, but how reliable are they? We only know that someone who has passed through all the Four Great Houses is no longer simply a man, an elf, or a dwarf—he is something completely different. I have no idea what they do in the Houses of Love, Pain, and Fear. The only thing we do know is that those who are in the House of Power are exceptionally powerful in magic, or rather, in its initial aspect—shamanism. And that is all I know, Harold.”
“That is all you know?” I repeated like an echo. “And you hid this knowledge from me? A stupid story about how our world was supposedly created, and assumptions based on some tiny little paragraph? Is this the greatest and most terrible secret of the goblins and the elves?”
I was amused. Go into any tavern and you’d hear a better story than that. And it would sound a lot more plausible than what Kli-Kli and Miralissa had told me.
“This knowledge is very dangerous,” the elfess rebuked me gently. “Especially for certain people—when they learn that they can become even greater than the gods and create their own world.”
“I beg your pardon, milady, but this is nonsense.”
“I told you it was still too early and he wouldn’t understand a thing,” said the goblin, looking reproachfully at the elfess. “The Order would pay us a wagonload of gold for the story that we’ve just told you.”
“That does not speak well for the wizards,” I said.
“Pah, you fool,” the jester said irritably, and walked away.
I thought he was reacting a bit too sensitively to my skepticism.
“Perhaps you will understand some time later, Harold,” Miralissa sighed, also standing up.
“Wait,” I said to her. “Why did you think that I might know something about the House of Power?”
“You are the Dancer in the Shadows.… But take no notice, I made a mistake.”
“And the Master? Why did you decide that the Master is in this House of Power?”
“He has a distinctive magical signature.… You would not understand that, Harold, you have no skills in
