“Yes, dear. Of course,” said Sarah in her soft voice. “Of course we know. Now do put your piece in so we can look.”
Abashed, I pushed my piece into the circle and sat down with the others, peering into the silvery circle that began to shimmer once the pool was completed.
“A mountain,” said Murzy in a firm voice. “A mountain with three peaks. In the Shadowmarches.”
Darkness swam across the pool, then light, then darkness once again. Something flapped horribly within the pool, seemed to look out at us, then fled. We seven reached out to take hands, making a circle around the pool, bending our will to Murzy’s in order that she might See.
“A three-peaked mountain,” she repeated insistently. “A mountain in the Shadowmarches, with three peaks. . . .”
Something floated up at us; not a mountain. A Tower. Black and tall. Except for the color, I knew it. It was the Tower of the Daylight Bell in reverse image. Dark as coal. Shadow swarmed at its base, around its walls, poured from the arched openings at its top. Something seemed to peer out at us from those openings.
Patiently, Murzy repeated, “A mountain with three peaks.”
The Tower dwindled. We were looking down on it from above. It dwindled still further, and I could see the fold of valley that held it, the road spur that ran to it, the road that ran past it farther down the hill. Against the sky was the mountain with three peaks. This, too, diminished until we were looking down on it. There was the sea, to the west, and the line of road east and west through the marches, and to the north of the road a faint glimmering, as though a star burned there. “Enough,” said Murzy in a weak voice. “Enough for now. We have the general direction. Let’s get closer before we try to see in greater detail.”
As it was, it was morning before we set out. Murzy was in no condition to travel until then. Seeing takes a great deal out of one, particularly when it is done purposefully in this way, not merely allowing any random vision to happen into one’s head. One does it at cost, and one weighs the risk first, as Murzy had done.
The starlight glimmering on the envisioned map had marked our own position relative to the three-peaked mountain. We needed to go on south until we encountered the remains of an Old Road. Cat estimated two days’ travel, and about noon the second day I took off my shoes. It had been some time since I’d done any footseeing—and longer since I’d gone barefoot for any period of time, so my feet were sore by evening.
We struck Old Road early the next morning and turned west upon it, me leading, for it was virtually invisible under drifted soil and leaves and the growth of centuries. We would need to go a day’s travel west, Cat said, rubbing salve into my feet, which made them look even dirtier. If Footseer had not already been my proper Wize-ard nickname, I would have been called Jinian Dustboots by the end of that day. As it was, Dodie found she, too, could feel the road in her toes, so she was given the sobriquet. Dodie Dustboots. She seemed very proud of it.
In midafternoon we stopped to use the fragments again. The glimmer that was us was almost due south of the three-peaked mountain, and when the clouds lifted along about evening, we could see it. “Show us the garden of the Gardener,” Murzy demanded, and the fragment flowed up and down the slopes, stopping at last on the southern slope, about halfway up. Sighing, she let the image go, and we wearily prepared a sensible meal before curling into our blankets for the night.
“Do you think it’s really there?” Dodie asked me in a whisper, the firelight making a specter’s face of her, all black and orange.
“Who knows. The fragment showed us something.” “Maybe it’s only ruins.”
“Maybe.” Possible, I thought. If it were really there, why hadn’t the Gardener done something about the ever-encroaching shadow? Even as I thought the question, I knew the answer. Because whoever or whatever the Gardener was, it hadn’t been his job. Just as it hadn’t been the Eesties’ job. Just as it hadn’t been anyone’s. This started to make me angry and tense, so I set the thought aside and thought of Peter instead. “At the Old South Road City,” I said to him, wherever he might be. “My oath’s about run out, Peter Shifter. Please be at the Old South Road City.”
Silence and the stars. No point in crying about it. I put Peter out of my mind—mocking laughter from certain parts of my body—and went off to sleep.
We climbed north from the road the next morning. After a time we came upon a flattened, twisty trail through the trees, a place animals had walked for many years, zigzagging first east then west but always northward. We followed along it, noticing how it avoided the steep places and the rock outcroppings and how it made clever crossing use of narrow places in the streamlets. We had just stopped next to a fringe of tall trees to catch our breath when we all heard a tiny, shrill voice crying, “I tell you, the ground is shaking. There are feet coming, and not feet that belong here. No zeller trying to get through your fence, Gardener. People feet!”
At least that’s what I heard. The others, so they told me, heard only a shrill piping, rather like a bird’s inconsequent
