Beneath the haunted ruins of Tchent, a practitioner of Gahl had been busy with torch and sacrificial knife, now and again leaving off to lap thirstily at the puddled blood upon the stones. A mother left dead in the Thanys might have recognized the zeal with which the sacrifice was made. Even she would not have recognized the face, now most horribly changed.
Smoke rose from the twitching body of the victim to press against the massive stones of one wall, as though sucked there by something beyond. On previous occasions, Lithos had spent long hours before this wall, waiting for the stone to crystalize into glassy translucence in which blots moved, perhaps coalesced into a form. Today he did not wait. Terrible shadows rose within the wall, like great fish rising inexorably in murky water, and a voice enveloped him:
‘Hear! Find! Bring ME!’
His body jerked in a hideous spasm of comprehension, thrashing ecstatically upon the floor as the shadow vanished, leaving behind only that far, thin crying toward which Lithos turned as a snake turns toward warmth – by using a peculiar sense other, less venomous creatures were not given.
On the tower steps, Jaer Suddenly remembered what she had been taught and coiled into herself. Across the world most of those who had turned toward her stopped, confused. Except for a few. These continued in the direction they had gone. Unaware of this, or of anything, Jaer wept.
There was a time after that of mist, haze, dimness. The world itself seemed shrouded. The goats were milked. Food was cooked and eaten, but it tasted of ashes and fog. After a month of this, however, the world began to clear. Jaer woke one morning to find everything crisply edged once more, and on that day he decided to set the tower in order and leave it. It was a dull job, shelving all the piled and scattered books in the vaults deep below the tower, hanging clothing away, brushing blankets to fold them in the chests, closing and bolting shutters; stuffing chimneys; bringing items of equipment from the area around to be stored away in the cellars. Jaer knew what to do. The opening and closing of places of refuge had been one of the many, many things which Nathan and Ephraim had thought it good for Jaer to know.
The rooms which Nathan had used were high in the western quadrant of the tower, and these Jaer left until last. Moments after he entered the room, he found the quest book. Nathan had added to it during the winter and spring, had laid it out in his best script on parchment pages, had bound it with boards of sandalwood and a snakeskin back. During the days since Nathan’s death, the book had lain on his table beside the open window. The page edges had been nibbled, the boards stained with rain and bird droppings. It looked old to Jaer’s untutored eyes. Moreover, it was obviously rare and wonderful and mysterious. Since it was written in Nathan’s best script, not the scrawl he had used for daily things, Jaer saw nothing familiar in the hand.
He cleaned the cover with his sleeves. The second page, partially obscured by a water stain, was a map. The third page was full of mystic signs. The fourth page was a cryptic poem. The pages which followed were similar. On the map a hand pointed inexorably eastward, and below the pointing finger was a legend in curly letters, ‘There lyeth the Gateway of Mankind.’ The hand seemed to move, beckoning, though it could have been only the tears in Jaer’s eyes.
Jaer studied the book for a long time. He was still very young, very alone, and what he did next he did not try to explain to himself. He went into the courtyard and scraped up a few ashes remaining from the pyre. Onto these he dropped a few drops of his own blood, and with this mixture he marked die covers of the book. ‘I take oath,’ he cried into the great valley of air which stretched before the tower, ‘to complete the journey that Nathan and Ephraim delayed for me.’ He was firmly convinced that this book described the journey which Nathan had once mentioned to him. There was nothing anywhere in the tower to contradict that belief.
The book went with him. So did an appropriate supply of all the things he had been taught he would need, including gold coins, some in a belt, some in a purse, some sewn into the hem of his tunic. He put his arms through the straps of his pack, opened the goat pen to let the animals run wild, locked the iron door in the secret way he had been shown which set ancient and dangerous devices into motion. He went down the cliff carefully and slowly, timing his trip through the village to coincide with moonrise. The road went on to the west until it bordered the river and then continued beside the river, narrower and narrower until the river plunged into the western chasm and the road became only a track which followed the south side of the stream among the rocks and clusters of bamboo and vast trees which clung to the rocks with webs of roots and netted vines. Mist hung in the hollows of the trail, gathering thicker as the chasm dropped over falls, blending the sound of water until he found himself scrambling over slick stones in an endless white roar of water noise. He stopped, trembling, unaware of having thought anything for long hours. Morning could have come above him, for a dim shadow divided the sky above into lesser darknesses. Or it might only be the moon, or imagination, or the weariness of his
