“I told Himaggery. He said it was a natural feeling, but silly. He wouldn’t trade his pain now for his joy then—back when he and Mavin were lovers—so he says. And I mustn’t, either. So. I won’t. And I think—well, I think we must take whatever time for love we have, and the time of your oath must be about done.”
“It will be soon,” I said, wiping several tears away surreptitiously. “Murzy says the time is probably already past.” Then I made myself get busy with something else or I would not have done anything all that day but cry.
We made a ceremony for Mavin. There had been no time back at the caverns. We lit candles. We placed her upon a temporary catafalque, one great stone that Dodir and several of the other Tragamors had moved beside the empty pool in the ruined Tower. I longed for music, but there was none. Most of the Gamesmen of Barish were there. Barish-Windlow, Hafnor, Wafnor, and Shattnir were away east, setting up the power transmission from the Bright Demesne. Trandilar was there. She wept. I kept my eves away from Dorn the Necromancer, knowing Peter was struggling in the same way. Dorn could Raise up the dead. But Mavin was not dead. And yet she was. For a thousand years dead.
Beedie and Roges were there. When the ceremony was done, they bid me good-bye before setting out to return over the sea. “It may be we will never come to the chasm alive again,” Beedie said. “Never see the children again. If you fail in what you are doing here, then all will fail. I know that. Sometimes I wish we had not come. . . .”
“Beed,” said Roges. “You don’t mean that.”
“Well, and no, I don’t,” she confessed. “Mavin was my friend. She saved my life and the lives of many in the chasm. It was she brought Roges and me together. No. I would have come. But it is a sad thing, nonetheless.”
I agreed with her it was a sad thing, then let them go, setting such spells of protection on them as I could, and thinking it was wise of them to get out of the city while they still could.
Vitior Vulpas Queynt was there. When I had told him about the Oracle and its followers, about Ganver and the other Eesties, he had flushed with anger. “Evil,” he muttered at me. “What we did, what men did, was heedless and stupid, but what they do is purposefully evil.” At the ceremony he was grim-faced and said nothing.
Chance was there, of course, close beside Peter, offering his shoulder and his strong arm. Mertyn and Himaggery were both good, strong men, but I loved Chance.
When it was over, I stood looking around at the shattered stones of the floor and remembering the lamp. I had fallen over it in memory, kicking it into that corner. A large stone lay there. Finding me tugging at it, Dodir asked if he could help me, and when he moved it away the lamp was there, flattened but whole.
“Ganver said the Tower was a gift from Lom which contained three treasures,” I told him. “The Bell, the book—by which he meant the music—and the lamp. Here is the lamp. Can it be repaired?”
He looked at it doubtfully. I knew they had recruited smiths among the laborers and said something to that effect. Shaking his head over it, he took it away. When I went to see Mavin the next day, the lamp stood upon its pedestal, and I could not even see where it had been mended. It glowed dimly from a candle burning within it. I wondered how the lambent light that had come from it in times past might be restored.
The metalworkers had set up their foundry just outside the Tower walls. There an artist had labored over the fragments of the Bell, piecing them together. Now it was complete, he told me, he was making a mold from it. Then he would smooth all the broken places in the mold itself so the Bell, when melted and recast, would be as perfect as it once had been.
“You were lucky to find it all,” I murmured, lost in admiration for what would have seemed to me a hopeless task.
“Not quite all of it,” he complained. “Here on the rim is a line of writing, or symbols, perhaps. There is a nick. One small piece we cannot find. Perhaps one symbol or letter upon it, and no way of knowing what it was.”
I stared at the line of symbols, strangely evocative, as though I might once have known their meaning. As an Eesty I would have known what they meant, but my Talent for understanding speech did not extend to writing. “Perhaps the piece will turn up. The Tower floor isn’t completely cleared yet.”
He nodded gravely, going on with his work. “We can’t wait,” he said. “We must try to cast it soon, while there is still enough life in us to do so.”
And it was true. Life burned low in all of us. There were no smiles, no laughter. If it had not been for the turnips, we would have wept our way into silence. We were calm, too calm. Only the antics of the shadow-eaters kept us moving, irritated but alive.
We had three laborious days after that during which no attacks came. On the fourth day came an Elator to tell us of an assault of the blind runners, those who had lived in the city before we came. We seven went to the outskirts and waited for them. They had befriended me when I was a child. I thought it might be possible to talk to them. Which it might have been, had they not come hooded and blind and unhearing, running on
