I would wait. And watch.
Each day was spent wandering, looking, finding different lookouts from which one might spy upon the world. Each vantage point was more depressing than the last, for there were great swatches of forest dying, strange stinking smokes rising from far valleys. One day I thought of going back to the cavern of the giants but did not. Funk, I think. I couldn’t face it. My imagination told me too vividly what I would find there.
Having rejected that idea, I decided to visit the ridge above the Great Maze. Since it was a high point, I could see a long way from there. It occurred to me I might see Peter returning.
It wasn’t far, actually. Less than a half day’s scramble.
It was saddening to look down into the empty pervasion, and the hill wasn’t as lofty as I remembered it.
Still, it gave a good view out over the Great Maze and the lands sloping down to the sea. I scouted around in the pervasion, robbing a few huts of their stale bread it wasn’t bad dipped in tea—and a pot to boil water in. Somewhere between Storm Grower and Fangel, I’d lost mine.
I built a small fire at the foot of one of the stone pillars, brewed some tea, and set myself to watch the southern sky.
Birds. Clouds. Nice white ones, for a change. Sitting there with the fragrant breeze in my face, it was hard to believe that the world was dying beneath me. Grasses nodded; small things crept about making nests. It didn’t feel dead or dying, and yet I knew it was. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted Peter, and the less likely it seemed he was going to come. The sky was empty.
I looked down for a while, to rest my eyes.
I saw it coming out of the Great Maze.
It came from the Maze itself. There was a movement at the edge of the Maze, a puzzling kind of change. I stared at it. The hedge of the Maze was no different.
Nothing was entering or leaving it. And yet...
Something had changed. There was a new configuration of light. Something shifted. For a time I gazed at it, uncertain, and then it moved. The shadow. Flooding out of the Maze and flowing downward, along the trail.
An endless gray tide, covering the world.
From the Maze? Why from the Maze?
I spent a few minutes in futile cursing, then headed back for my camp. I’d have to find out as much as possible, before Peter came. He might drop directly into it. Be frozen, as Himaggery had been before Bartelmy had rescued him. Oh, by the Hundred Rotten Devils, I sighed, why now?
Finding out anything would be like playing with an avalanche, rather. Toying with an angry dragon. I had talked long with Mavin. I knew what the shadow could do. Still, one had to know, as Queynt would say. One had to know.
Back at the hut I considered the matter. What was there around me that still retained some integrity? The forest was smashed, riven, and storm-wrecked. The very mountains were torn. About the only thing around that looked whole was the lake we had built the hut beside, a charming little oval of shallow water, set in reeds, decked with lilies, full of fish and small plopping things. Though the forested banks were reduced to rubbish and the lake itself muddied from landslides upstream, still it had a certain immaculate charm left about it.
The hut had one window, which I used for the window magic. As in Chimmerdong, I hung my blanket before it to serve as a curtain. Then I called up the lake.
I don’t know quite what I expected. Some bubbly shape, perhaps, with fish for eyes. Some reedy thing with lilies in its hair. What came was a rounded silver dart, not unfishlike in shape, curved on every side and reflecting the interior of the hut like a mirror so that I saw a hundred Jinians in its sides. It did not bubble; it did not splash. It spoke as running water speaks, a quiet burble, a ruminative sibilance. “What would you, Jinian Star-eye?” it asked me as I was shutting the curtain.
“The giants are dead,” I told it. “I expect you already knew that.”
“We did. Yes.” Expressionless. That fact meant little to it, I thought.
It made me dizzy to look at it. I stared into the fire, instead. It kept shifting, never alike for two instants. “I have seen the shadow flowing from the Maze. I thought it might come from there for some reason.”
“You thought your being here might evoke it? That your summons might interest it?” It still seemed very little concerned. Instead it was detached, remote. “No. It does not concern itself with you now, Jinian Star-eye. It grows as the algae grows when lakes and rivers have died. It grows without thought, without care, and will die in its time without grief. When everything dies, so then will the shadow die as well.”
“I am told,” I said carefully, “that the shadow can seek a certain person.”
“It can be sent to do so,” sighed the lake. “Of itself, it does not seek. It grows in the Maze and flows from there. Whenever the destruction is remembered, more shadow flows ....”
“Destruction?”
“Of the Daylight Bell.” I thought about that. At the moment it didn’t make much sense to me, but I didn’t pursue it. “Then the only reason it’s flowing out of the Maze now is that the Maze is full of it? No other reason?”
“No other reason. We are too near, too small, to concern those who sometimes send it.”
“Chimmerdong concerned it.”
“Chimmerdong was mighty, once. Boughbound was mighty, once. And the Glistening Sea and the Southern Sea and the River Ramberlon, which you call Stonybrook. If we live, call us up again, Jinian Footseer, and we will tell you the names of all the mighty who once gloried in the
