I came to the wagon, walking in my best plenipotentiary manner.
“Madame.” Queynt bowed.
I gave them all a haughty look before climbing to the seat. “When Drarg returns, he will see to turning the mill off for you, though I am bound to tell you he may not return for several hundred years.” Then I waved at them all in an imperious manner while Queynt krerked to the birds and took us off.
Peter and Chance mounted up and plodded behind the wagon. “We could’ve got one night’s sleep,” complained Chance. “Before settin’ out again. Those were good beds there in the mansion.”
“I think our Wizards are on the track of something,” said Peter a little sullenly. He was cross and irritable, overtraveled, underslept, underloved. With a sudden clarity I realized that if I was finding our relationship difficult, Peter was finding it damn near impossible, and this threw the whole matter into confusion again.
If he felt grumpy and uncivil about it, well, so did I.
We followed on Brom’s track for the first part of the way, back up the twists and down the turns of Sheel to the Forum Road, thence northwest on Tan-tivvy until it came to a crossing some way out of the town. Painted signboards pointed the way to a dozen places, east to Omaph and Peeri and beyond them to Smeen. Northeast to Jallywig and the unexplored depths of Boughbound Forest. Northwest to Luxuri and the Great Maze.
South, the way we had come, to Zib, Zog, Zinter, Chime, and Thorpe. North to Woeful and Fangel.
The way from Zinter to Bloome had been river bottom, a flat road and an easy one, which went on through Bloome to Luxuri through the warm, moisture-laden airs of the jungle. The northern road to Woeful climbed abruptly out of this basin onto a narrow ridgeback above the trees. We looked down onto a steaming roof of vegetation, where flocks of bright parrots screamed their way toward the setting sun. The road stretched upward, no end to the slope in sight, and after some leagues of it, the krylobos decided abruptly that they had had enough for one day. They communicated this fact by squatting and waiting to be unharnessed.
“They never stop unless there is water near,” commented Peter. “I’ll find it.” He set off down the western slope, listening as he went. In a few moments he called out, returning shortly thereafter with a full bucket. “A spring,” he said. “Running into a lovely, cool basin. Supper first, then cold baths if anyone wants.”
“How far to Fangel?” I asked.
“A long day,” replied Chance. “The fellas I talked to usually make it in two, stopping in Woeful for the night, but that’s with a late start. I figure we can make it in one.”
“The fellas?” inquired Peter. “What were you up to, Chance?”
The round, brown man shrugged elaborately in response. “Well, we have to know what’s goin’ on.”
“There wasn’t a small game, was there?” Peter asked.
“Might have been,” Chance replied with a complacent expression. “Looky here.” He squatted at the side of the wagon, spreading the contents of his pouch on a flat rock. Coins, large and small, silver and gold. A piece of worked gold—half of a lacy brooch. And an amethyst dream crystal, larger than others we’d seen, of a curiously muted color, as though a shadow lay across it.
“They gamble with crystals? As though they were coins or gems?”
“This one fella did. I said no to him twice, told him I didn’t want it. Fella insisted. Said it was valuable, not like any others we’d ever seen.”
“You won, of course.”
“No reason not to.” He shuffled his loot upon the stone, running it through his fingers. “Wonder what good it is?” Before I could move to stop him, Queynt reached for the stone and touched it to his tongue. Truly, I did move to stop him, warned by something, perhaps by the shadow that seemed to lie across the color in the stone. I was too late.
It was as though he had turned to lava, a kind of liquid stone that surged slowly beneath the skin, changing him as one watched, but so slowly one could not see change from moment to moment, could not say, “See, see what just happened,” for nothing just happened. His face changed, and his body, not as a Shifter changes, but as water in a bucket changes, sloshing to and fro, returning always to the shape of the container. I couldn’t keep myself from screaming, a little high-pitched shriek of horror that brought Peter to us at once.
Queynt was weeping, huge tears welling from both eyes to make long dust tracks down his broad face, and he making no effort to stop them or wipe them away, meantime shrieking a high, lifeless sound like a knife upon a whetstone. His eyes were distant, unfocused, his breathing shallow and slow. The hideous shifting under his skin went on for a moment longer, then stopped slowly, like a tide ebbing away as he sagged onto the ground, the thin, shrieking sound going on and on, endlessly. The amethyst crystal dropped into the dust. I seized it and put it away, where it could do no more damage.
He had showed me the blue crystals he carried, those few the Shadowman had given him in the long ago, the ones he had offered to me. They were in his pouch, and I burrowed for it, trying to move his heavy, shrieking body aside, finally dragging it out and pouring the contents into my hand, three of the small blue crystals he had shown us in the tower of Bloome.
I didn’t know what to do! Surely these had some curative properties if one of
