‘I am no magician. If I were a magician, I would become a whirlwind and go to rescue the child.’
‘So let us become a whirlwind. I loved once. A girl who was soft and gentle, sweet-voiced when she sang on the moors. She was taken away without her consent and has died of it since, I think. He who took her did not care for her. She was a thing, nothing more, made for the breeding of sons and the weaving of cloth. So they have taken Jaer. A thing. Made for some strange purpose they have. What I did not know to do when Fabla was taken, I will do now. Come, old woman. Let us go north for a time.
‘And you,’ she said, turning to the others, ‘go with Thewson to the place they have taken Jaer. Do not try to go into the city. Instead find a hidden place in the forest nearby, and wait for me in the last edge of dead trees as near to the west of the city as you can come. I want one of the black robes. Get me one. Do not try to make it talk, because it will not. But get me one and it will talk with me when I return.’ These directions were firmly given to Medlo and Jasmine as though Leona expected total obedience, and neither of them argued with her as she set her pack upon her shoulders and led Terascouros away, calling to the dogs as she went.
Thewson went calmly about the business of packing and was ready to go while Medlo and Jasmine were still fumbling and casting about for whatever it was they were sure they had misplaced. Finally Thewson tapped his spear on a stone, expelling held breath in an impatient ‘Chaiii!’
‘Oh, all right,’ said Medlo. ‘I’m coming. I don’t want to go toward Murgin. That’s the last place in the known world I want to go, but…’
Thewson led them away.
They walked the day away, down forested halls as the sun moved in the empty sky toward dusk. They lay side by side in night’s shadow, lost in the sound of water, watching the endless dance of their fire. In a strange quiet between despair and despair they slept, only to rise and walk another day away. The land sloped upward, gently, endlessly, across meadows edged with saplings, along tumbling streams, in groves of pines which held great branches above them like green clouds, their feet wading in puddles of dead needles in the tang of sun-warmed resin. They walked through green-trunked beech groves, light spattering through boughs like a shower of gold tossed by charitable hands. They plunged through gullies leveled by drifts of old oak leaves, and found evening there among the moss-hung oaks, and slept once more.
So went two more days, and on the evening of the fourth day since Leona had left them they heard the sound of axes. Thewson’s head went up, listening. His spear went up, too, circling toward the sky in a ritual to a god the others did not know. Jasmine stared at the spear, at the narrow shaft, the leather thongs which bound it to the blade, the blade coloured and shaped like a leaf of grass with a curled base. A man of ordinary size could have used the blade for a sword. She closed her eyes at the hypnotic circling and slumped. Medlo caught her as she fell.
‘It is too late to go on tonight.’
Thewson came to himself abruptly. ‘Yes. Almost the dark has come. We will stay here. Tomorrow we will catch a black robe for Leona. Or the next day.’
The next day they followed the sound of axes to find the place where all the trees had been killed, where the trunks stood silver on the sterile earth in a belt of death around the stony plain. In the middle of the pave, miles wide, hard and hot in the sun, loomed the darkness of Murgin, a black pile out of which no light showed, above which no pennant waved. The bulk of a monstrous, squat tower grew out of the mass, and from the top of this came glints of reflected light as though lenses turned this way and that to keep watch on the plain and the forest. Medlo turned away, his face bleak.
They found a tangle of felled timber at the top of a low hill which overlooked the place the black robes were working and yet hid them from the distant tower. They heard the rumble of iron wheels coming and going from Murgin, and the endless sound of the axes, but nothing else. The acolytes of Gahl did not sing at their work.
Medlo and Jasmine lay in the tangle, staring at the blind sky and amusing themselves with stories. Medlo spoke of Sud-Akwith and the Sword of Power, gift of the Firelord to the Northking at a time of great peril. ‘The end of it was that he grew very proud and crochety, and his son told him that he should be more humble since he had conquered by the Sword, not by his own strength alone. So he fell into a fury, cursed his son, and took all the court to the lip of that great chasm near Seathe and cast the Sword into it. As the Sword fell, he fell, quite dead.’
‘And that was the end of that.’
‘No. Some creature lived in the chasm, some nameless cavern dweller, who brought the sword out of the chasm. In one of the libraries in Tiles a very old book says that the Sword came into the hands of the Axe King and was lost by him in the Southern wars.’
Jasmine talked of the Girdle of Chu-Namu, singing in a quiet voice the ‘Lamentation’ which was among the notes given her by the Library Sister. Shortly thereafter, Thewson returned
