Then even that slight excuse for activity was gone. All anger been used up, all old pains mined out for what rage they could supply. There was nothing more to use. I sat on the tailings of my discontent, staring out the window, thinking nothing. Time went by unmeasured, dark and light. How long? Very long. Perhaps. No one counted the time. Nothing mattered.
Sound came. Rain, perhaps. A pattering. No. Wind? Odd. The sound was somehow familiar. Curiosity brought my head up and my feet under me. The remote, uncaring person inside me watched some other Jinian get herself outside the ruins where she might listen.
More a whirring sound. Like a giant top, spinning.
Then of course I remembered even before I saw the shape come spinning down the road from the north, the road I had unburdened. A Dervish. Perhaps the Dervish—Bartelmy of the Ban. The one who ...
It came to a stop before me, the fringes settling into their disturbing stillness. “Jinian Footseer,” it said to me in that toneless, emotionless voice. “The road is open. Well done.”
“That is true,” I said.” A road is open.” My voice was as toneless as the Dervish’s. Truth to tell, I didn’t even care about the Dervish.
“When one is open, workers may come in,” she said. “When one is open, workers will come in. Tragamors, perhaps, to move great hills? Sorcerers to hold power for them?”
I did not answer. What was there to say?
“What have you to tell me?” it asked then, still not moving, as though we had all day and night to stand there and talk before the ruins. I wanted to sit down.
“Will you come in?” I offered. It was only studied politeness, the habit learned from a year and a bit at Vorbold’s House.
“Stand,” it said. It wasn’t a preference. It was an order. I stood. “Tell me.”
I mumbled a bit about summoning the forest, about the Oracle, the Dagger, the Oracle again. The Dervish hissed, not like the Basilisk but like a tea kettle, full of hot annoyance. I had not thought they ever became annoyed.
“The Oracle! Here! Where is the Dagger?”
“I have it,” I said dully. “I will use it, if need be. I learned I will need it, as the answer to one of my questions.”
An angry buzz then, like a whole hive of warnets. A cry almost of pain. “Oh, Jinian, what questions did you have!”
Something snapped in me. “A lot!” I screamed at her. “A hell of a lot! Nobody tells me anything! Why don’t I have any Talent? That’s one question! How come Mother and Mendost were always so hateful? That’s another! How come Murzy keeps things from me? How come I’m all alone out here in the middle of nowhere with everybody, including you, coming at me from all sides! What the hell am I supposed to do!” Then I sobbed. I don’t know where the pain and tears came from, all at once, out of nowhere. I thought I had used them all, but there were more ...
The Dervish trembled. I saw it even through my own tears, feeling as surprised at that as I did at my own uncontrolled emotions. The Dervish trembled like a tree in wind, as though it wanted to move—toward me? away from me?—but could not. A sound came from it. If I had not known better, I would have said it was an anguished sound. Not from a Dervish, though. Never.
Perhaps never. When it came, the voice was still toneless, unemotional, but it held a timbre as of concealed sorrow. “I will come into your dwelling, Jinian Footseer. I will answer your questions, those I can.” She spun once more and moved through my ancient doorway. I saw with astonishment that the door was shaped correctly for it, narrow at the bottom, wide at the top, as though the creatures that had come here in the far past might have been like this one who came here now.
And I followed to bend over the hearth where a small fire burned. Habit made me offer the Dervish tea, a quiet, minty brew made of plants Murzy had showed me. The pot was always full of it. It was all I had eaten or drunk for a long time. The Dervish accepted a cup and stood there, pillar still, with the hand and cup beneath the fringes as she drank, her face invisible. The cup came down empty in a wide hieratic gesture, like a ritual. I thought suddenly of thirst endured for its own sake, of hunger endured for its own sake. Of endless, whirling hours spent in concentration. Of never sitting, seldom lying down. Of becoming something other than oneself. In that moment I thought all those things and knew the Dervish thought them, too.
“You don’t care that you have done a good thing,” she said at last. “You don’t feel at all.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I try to care, but I can’t.”
“Ah,” she said. “When did this unfeeling begin?” I tried to think. It had begun before I had trapped the pig, for this deadly lethargy had almost killed me then. I had never noticed it until after talking with the forest. Perhaps then. When the shadow had gathered. My body had continued to move for a while, out of
