“Day or night, dark or light,” I prayed, gulping a little, shutting everything out except those words, “lead me to the place I need to be. Bright the Sun Burning, Night Will Come Turning, Road’s Dust to Find It, Heart’s Blood to Bind It.” I used the edge of my star-eye to cut a finger, dropped the blood on a thirsty patch of bare road, then sat very quietly, letting the words flow through me until all my parts understood them.
It always seems to take a long time. Actually, it doesn’t. Within moments, I was worrying about Peter again. There was only time for a modest fret before he emerged from the Maze, somewhat untidily. “I Shifted,” he announced. “To stay out of the way. Something enormous fell. It made a noise like some huge being screaming in agony, a great metallic clamor. It killed several whats-its, then after a little while it was gone and everything was just the way it had been originally. It goes on over and over, like some one-act play at a festival. Performances every few minutes.”
“Did it hurt you?” I wrapped my punctured finger in a leaf and tucked the star-eye back in my shirt.
“Oh. No. No, I couldn’t even feel it.”
“Well, if you can hear it and smell it, how come you can’t feel it?” “Probably because the world . . ,”
“Lom.
“Probably because Lom hears it and smells it but doesn’t feel it. I mean, if they’re memories, then they act like memories, don’t you think? If I set myself to remember—oh, that time I tried to rescue you and Silkhands from the Ghoul. Remember that?—I remember the stink, and the heat of the flames, and I can still hear my own voice yelling stupid things, but I don’t burn. I don’t singe. I wince at the memory, but I don’t end up half-asphyxiated from smoke. I remember the fire having happened, but I don’t reevoke it, so to speak. The stink, though, that always comes back.”
This, too, made sense. Smell, sight, and hearing happen inside one’s head, but assault comes from the outside world. So the memory of smell could be the smell itself, but the memory of pain . . . Well, creatures probably survive better if they can’t remember pain too well.
He nodded. “Of course some memories are very hurtful. It would probably be prudent for us to be careful.”
Now he was talking about prudence. Peter! I didn’t believe it. Agreed with it, yes; believed it, no. Peter had never been prudent in his entire life. He nodded his head a couple of times, as though he were setting that firmly in mind, then asked, “Now. Where do we go, and what do we do?”
During the night we’d just spent together, tight-wrapped in each other’s arms and chaste as two baby bunwits, both trying not to say the things that would frighten us to death or make us cry, sometimes he’d dozed off with his lips next to my throat, his breath tickling me like an owl’s feather. It had been necessary then, since I couldn’t sleep, to think of something unemotional, so I’d spent the time thinking about the Maze. Now I trotted out my conclusions, hoping they were correct. “If these three events are linked, so to speak, by a single line of thought or category or index heading, then we’ll have to suppose other things are linked in the same way. So. We try to find some line of thought that might logically take us where we want to go.’
“Which is?”
“Wherever Lom is thinking about dying.”
He looked depressed. There was nothing I could say to make the task seem either easier or more pleasant. I knew exactly how he felt. It’s how l felt in the Forest of Chimmerdong when something vague and impossible needed doing and I seemed to be the only one around to do it. “I know,” I commiserated. “It’s terrible sounding.”
“It’s not that. You’ve said these events are memories. If Lom is actively thinking about dying, it won’t be in memories, will it? Won’t it be somewhere else? Some other part of its mind?”
I didn’t know. Probably no one did. And if it were so, it was not helpful. “They have to be linked together somewhere, Peter.”
He sighed a put-upon sigh, not offering any better suggestion. “All right. So they must be linked. Now, what shall we look for?”
“That last place? The temple? There were creatures in it. When the thing fell in, whatever it was, you say something got killed. If I’m right, that means there’s a link out of that place to the idea of things dying. We find that link if we can, and we follow it. Event by event.”
“And if nothing got killed?”
“Then we look around until we find an event where somebody did get killed.”
“Makes me feel like a Ghoul,” he said.
So did I, to tell the truth, and only the knowledge that whatever we would see had already happened and could not be changed made me feel any better about it. We took a deep breath, held hands once more, and stepped back into the temple.
Gray and huge and the roar of angry voices. This time I paid moreattention. I looked straight up, trying to see what was above us, but there was only a receding immensity of stone and smoke. There was no roof. We
