There was no time to ruminate upon it. I walked among the Gamesmen of Barish, looking them over as others were doing, wondering to find myself here among legends and almost-gods. I heard them talk with one another, with Mavin and Himaggery, heard them plan for a new age, a better time, plotting to raise up a hundred thousand great Gamesmen to achieve their purposes. There was Tamor, Armiger; Dealpas the Healer. There was Thandbar, the first Shifter, forebear of Peter and his mother. There was Trandilar, great Queen, mistress of Beguilement, cosseting Peter in a tone that turned me red and eager, not with envy but with some hot feeling it was not easy to put down. Sorah was there, the great Seer of ancient times, pretending to have a vision for him.
Then I saw her face change and the vision became a real one. She was saying. “Shadowmaster. Holder of the key. Storm Grower. The Wizard holds the book, the light, the bell.”
And I did not consider it. I laughed, with Peter, both of us red-faced and a little embarrassed, and we forgot it. The terror was over. All either of us could think of was the fermenting, bubbling joy of being alive, of having a future. Nothing else seemed important. I knew nothing then about the shadowmaster except what Bartelmy had told me. I did not care to hear more about Storm Grower. I had only seen one edge of the bell—had I really seen it at all?—and knew nothing of the book or light. I was only a young girl. I was alive, who had thought she would be dead. I was in love.
I did not give much thought to Bartelmy’s words, or those of the Oracle who tells only part of the truth—not then. Peter had invited me to go with him, northward still, to see the world we had not seen before.
There were things ... things my head wanted. And I’ll confess it, even then a faint fatal curiosity was beginning to brew.
But Peter had asked me to go with him northward.
And for that little time, that was enough.
Dervish Daughter
CHAPTER ONE
Just across the chasm from the town of Zog a bunch of wild brats with crossbows—and poisoned arrows, to add to the general sense of fun—had given us quite a run. We’d barely gotten away from them with our skins whole.
There had been constant storm damage blocking the roads, continuous sullen clouds, and a threatening mutter of sentient-seeming thunder. I had a huge, aching lump on my forehead from not being quick enough ducking into the wagon during the hail storm four days before. Hail the size of goose eggs!
Add to that the remains we kept finding along the way, more and more of them as we went farther north. Human remains, mostly, and the yellow dream crystals that had killed them.
Throw in the fact we’d been driving two days and nights without sleep, dodging shadow, which seemed to be everywhere.
Then season the whole horrid mess with a harsh scream as a night bird plummeted across the moonlit sky screeching, “Lovely dead meat, not even rotten yet!” I understood it as easily as though it had been shouted at me by some old dame in the underbrush.
The bird’s cry said “human meat,” not some luckless zeller killed by a pombi’s claws. I put my hand over Queynt’s where they lay on the reins.
He snapped out of his doze, immediately alert, as I reached beneath the wagon seat for my bow. “More trouble ahead,” I said wearily, nocking an arrow.
Queynt yawned, giving my bow a doubtful look.
Though he had been teaching me to shoot with the stated intention of providing for the pot, my inability to hit anything smaller than a gnarlibar had become a joke. They had begun to call natural landmarks that were suitably huge a “good target for Jinian.” The problem was that I couldn’t shoot anything that talked to me. Oh, if someone else shot it, I could eat it, and if something came at me with unpleasant intent, I was able to kill it readily enough no matter what it was saying. Bunwits and zeller and tree rats, however, were safe from my arrows so long as they said good morning politely. I hadn’t discussed this with Queynt, though I thought he suspected it.
He glanced down, then back into the wagon where his Wizard’s kit was. I knew he was considering getting out his own bow or taking time to set a protection spell, evidently deciding against it. We’d learned to trust the instincts of Yittleby and Yattleby in times of danger, and neither of the two tall krylobos pulling the wagon seemed overly disturbed. Their beaks were forward, their eyes watchful as we came around a curve at the crest of a hill, but neither of them showed any agitation. We came out of the jungle at the top of a long, sloping savannah, dotted with dark, crouching bushes and half-lit by a gibbous moon. I could see all the way to the bottom of the hill where the forest started again and two twinkling lanterns, amber and red, moved among the trees near the ground. That had to be Peter and Chance. They’d been riding ahead and had evidently found something, disturbing the bird at the time. Queynt clucked to the krylobos, and we began the slow descent toward the lanterns with him looking remarkably alert for such an old man.
Vitior Vulpas Queynt is over a thousand years old.
Everything I have learned about him indicates this is really true and not some mere bit of rodomontade. He hadn’t made a special point of claiming to be that old, mind you; it simply came out as we went along. Peter and I had met him a couple of years before, or rather, he had picked us up on the
