XIV: Monsters

Sorchone was right: a Runedaur moot was like no council she had ever seen.

The Vasty Hall of Death was the name of the great dark cavern where she had fallen asleep in the midst of the High Priestess’s rites. It was not dark by day: seven high northward windows admitted a shadowless light that the cloud-pale limestone spread evenly everywhere. And now, by torch and magelight they lit it at night as well. Seen from the ford of the Daorlas, the rough northern face of Colderwild’s rocky perch shone with a cluster of seven golden eyeslits.

“You know,” Rothesay mused aloud, gazing across the sunset-dim floodplain to the rock wall as Daorlas’s sand crunched between her toes, “we could climb that, and get in by a window.”

Cobry hauled himself upright, out of the shallows. She noted peripherally that the waterfall cascading from his almost perfect nakedness made only a musical trickle compared to the thunder that had poured from her clothes.

“Hall’s full of knights,” he observed. “So they’ve probably left all the traps unset. Yeah, sure, let’s!”

It took them close on an hour, and cost Cobry scrapes and abrasions that made Rothesay slightly fonder of her garments, but at length they propped their elbows on neighboring sills, and looked down into the great gallery.

Steep-rising tiers of benches had been carved into the sides, all the way up till the walls started to lean in again to become the domed, stalactite-studded ceiling. Knights and witches half-filled them all, but few of them beneath the window-slits; and those few, Rothesay reckoned, were in their way all but traps themselves. A fire burned in the central pit: though the summer night lay hot upon the two students on the cliffside, the Vasty Hall was as cold as it had been on her first night here.

Silence filled the great empty space, welling from nearly five hundred Runedaur. It usually did. No one even coughed.

The first time she had investigated the moot, Rothesay had been able to stand this for maybe ten or twenty heartbeats. Then she had held her confused peace, reluctant to draw anyone’s—everyone’s—attention with any remark, and finally left, utterly bemused, after a quarter-hour of soundless impatience.

She was wiser now, if far less comfortable in her window-perch; and as it happened, she had hardly to wait before, on the third tier, towards the east, an unfamiliar man clad in the Silver rose to his feet, cleared his throat, and asked the silence, “What does it mean, to pray?”

Rothesay shot a glance to the great doors on the south. Terge, the shadow-sorceress she had met at her own Welcoming Feast, had Recorder’s duty tonight, seated at the high, narrow bookstand; a white quill in her hand flickered as she swiftly added the question to the Moot Book.

The questioner sat down again. Silence resumed. Rothesay and Cobry waited. Perhaps five minutes later—an amazingly brief span—a woman on the first row rose and asked, “Can a god want?” Terge’s quill danced again as the woman reseated herself, and, O amazing celerity, another man stood up at once to add, “If yes, then why?”

Two people from opposite sides rose almost as one, quietly picked their way down the tiers of seats and left, nodding as they passed three others coming in, who paused to let Terge show them the Moot Book and then dispersed to various seats. Probably no one would take much notice if the two students climbed in—Rothesay looked down at a drop of no more than four yards down the polished slope from the windowsill over the three-yard thickness of the stone, and then the fall of a fathom from the slope’s end to the topmost tier—and left by the doors, but it seemed rude nonetheless. Moreover, she had personal reasons to avoid notice. She clicked her tongue in signal to Cobry, and tipped her head back towards the cliff’s foot.

“How often do we have moots?” she asked, as at last they ambled east towards the Kavinsrae road. The latest crop of grass in the broad river-meadow had just been cut and lay now drying for hay, and the sweet smell rose all about them.

“Dunno. First one I’ve seen, and I’ve been here three years. But, couple years ago, Raven’s Trace had one, mostly just them but Mistress Carialla went, and then, same season, Rose House did too and that’s when old Garrod went and stayed a while. Funny things, aren’t they?”

She agreed, not asking if the questions raised were ever discussed. They were; often loudly, vigorously, and even violently, but never in the moot itself. Mealtimes had become remarkably educational in recent weeks. Among the lessons she had learned was to take her suppers in hiding. For she herself was the chief reason for this moot.

It seemed that the Runedaur had, over the ages, come to regard the gods as something like figures of speech and nothing more, metaphors that only the simple and superstitious took literally. The story of Arngas, and Rothesay’s undeniable powers, had shaken that belief to its foundations, and the response of the Order of Runedaur to such a conceptual earthquake was to poke and prod among the rubble and devastation with the avidity of ghouls for corpses. That they could have been so deeply, fundamentally wrong—apparently wrong—was more an occasion for rapt fascination than for dismay. “Oh, gods, I haven’t had this much fun since Geilla-Davi took the Chain and Master Armaolin asked what a Runedaur is!” chortled a knight from Kingscroft, a man so elderly and battle-battered that he could barely move himself from a litter to a seat on the lowest tier. And then he caught what he had said and roared, “Oh, gods, I guess I’d best be fair careful of my expletives now!”

“How often do you get a chance to rethink the basis of existence?” Garrod had asked her, when she tried to shake some proper horror of chaos into him.

“How often do you want to?” she shot back. He patted her gently.

“If I am not overcome by surprise of this magnitude,” he suggested, smiling, “shall I not be proof against any trick of a merely mortal opponent?”

So he might be; but she was not proof against the inquisitiveness of Runedaur. Every last one wanted to see her sword, her strength, and such skill as could be shocked out of her, for himself. She was fast growing astoundingly furtive, keenly alert to the least irregularity that offered a Runedaur any concealment from which to jump her, or to surprise her with a yell of, “Hey! You, girl! Come here and let’s see if you can lift this!” This very morning she was summoned to see if she could lift a horse, but she escaped while that bunch worked out how she might do so without hurting the horse’s belly; “Maybe a leather sling and a pulley,” she heard as she slithered away around a corner and up the far stable wall. Yesterday, it was a quarter-ton lead ingot and a quarter-ton bale of hay lashed snug. The ingot was work enough, but she could not lift the hay at all, as she could find no way to get a grip on the awkward hulk.

Tonight, Cobry showed her the secret entrance behind the Dorchastir butcher’s middens. An old well with a rotting wood cover (“We bring a new one—a new rotten-looking one—out here every so often,” he told her); a drop of four or five ells to cold water and a descent of a fathom to a sidewise tunnel just big enough to kneel in and twice her full extension, fingertips to pointing toes. That tunnel sloped a little upwards as well, and then one broke air in a twisting passage, nature’s work only triflingly aided by art, that writhed through the deep stone to the caves under Colderwild.

They crawled out at last in a lower buttery, and then Rothesay bounded up to the main kitchen four steps at a stride.

Smoke from ages of cooking-fires sharpened the smell of the air here to a throat-piercing edge, but, soft and dense as gold, the summery perfume of honey and the intoxicating fragrance of strawberries sheathed it tonight. The half-dozen people sitting about the tables seemed to be there just to breathe. She hurried past them to the big copper kettle, swung free of the hearth on its crane, and plucked down a wooden spoon without looking.

She prodded the deep ruby mass—spun sharply about, wielding the spoon menacingly, and felt almost certain that at least one of the men at the table, and maybe one of the women, too, relaxed out of attack-readiness—then scooped up a spoonful and critically watched it slide, ooze, and at last plop back down. A freshened aroma of strawberries wafted up, twining invisible arms coyly about her. Nice, she thought, unmoved, but the proof’s in the eating of you. Taking a delicate nibble of the gel still clinging to the spoon, she rolled it slowly over her tongue, considering, pondering, picking up every last nuance and examining it exhaustively before putting it aside for the next. And at last she grinned. Damn, I’m good. Take that, you old Arngas. I bet you couldn’t even boil water without burning the pot.

“Well? Well? Is it ready yet?” impatient helpers boiled over into voice. Rothesay turned her grin on the group sitting at the table, and the four now jamming the main doorway. This was her second batch of strawberry preserves; the success of the first accounted for this near dozen of assistants: they were the ones who had Ghost-won the chore of crocking—and the attendant privilege of sampling as they went.

“Patience, patience,” she cooed, casting a spark-spell into the wood ready-laid in the hearth and swinging the pot back in. “All this great lot has to get back to a boil, yet. You’ve time for a beer or two—what the devil—?”

A distant, confused echo of argumentative people rolled down the narrow steps winding from the southern courtyard, an echo swiftly overborne by its original as the argument came down as well, counterpointed with some huge, rather poorly-made bell being struck at random. One last, loud bonk resounded in the last turn, and the cheap bell fell silent. “Ah, shit!” said the entire argument, and then also fell silent.

Her assistants gazed warily at the archway; Rothesay stayed by her cauldron, stirring, stirring and straining to see.

The Colderwild smith—what was his name again? something like Vakiloth, and him Móriad—stumped down the last half-flight till he could just peer under the arch. “Lend a hand, with youse, right?” he groused peremptorily, and then noticed Rothesay. His beard split in a grin that outshone his bald head, and he pointed at her like flinging a spear. “Hey, now we’ve got it! Come, then!” Copper studs in his leather vambrace flashed in the firelight with the sweep of his summoning arm, and he vanished back up the steps without waiting to see that she followed.

“But I’ve got to stir this—” Rothesay began, when Gatha, something like Carialla’s right-hand witch, took the long spoon from her and gave her an encouraging shove. Rothesay sighed, wiped her hands on her short summer tunic, and grumbled off after the smith. Glancing back just as she ducked the low arch, she saw the spoon stirring all on its own, and her eyes widened. The preserves were thick; even she felt the force needed to disturb so much. Gatha was a sorceress to reckon with, then.

Vakiloth stood just below the small square landing where the stairs made a turn; two men and a woman filled the last steps above it. Solidly wedged between them, half on its side, a fine great kettle barred the passage.

Rothesay stared. Had the pot been made all of gold, she would have been less astonished. But it was black, black as the stones of Colderwild’s outer walls, black as the Earthshaker’s face. A whole cauldron, all of iron. Vakiloth grinned.

“And can you pick that up, eh?”

She shrugged. At least this was a strength contest with a point. Marvelling, her preserves forgotten, she gazed over the wonder, looking for a good leverage spot. The uppermost edge of the rim: experimentally, she grab—

—falling, a hard band crushing her ribs, she leaped convulsively, hurling her back into the wall of the stairwell. She flung her arms wide, clutching desperately at the stone. Vakiloth blinked at her in surprise, and she realized that the hard band had been the pressure of his arms, catching her.

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“Are you all right, love?” said the woman; Lanag?, from Raven’s Trace.

“What happened?” the young man beside her asked, in curiosity rather than concern. “Did you faint, or what?”

“What?” Rothesay echoed.

Before she could sort her sensations enough even to begin to shape a reply, Vakiloth reached mildly for her uphill hand. Numbly she let him take it, and his swift but gentle shove in her belly tumbl—

The four Runedaur looked down at the redhaired dishrag slumped, moveless, in the depths of the sidelong pot. Several from the kitchen squeezed up the narrow way, in time to see the curious young man reach in, pulled up an arm and let go; it dropped bonelessly.

“Well, now, what d’y’ make of that?” someone murmured.

Vakiloth licked a finger and held it under her nose, then quickly grabbed an arm, the curious young man seized the other, and they popped her out.

—leaping in cold terror, smashing into a man on the steps below her, who staggered back but held firm.

“You all right?” asked Vakiloth warily.

“Oh, sure!” Rothesay shot back, clutching her rescuer’s tunic, her eyes huge, staring back over her shoulder at the dreadful pot. “Naturally! Why not?” Slowly, grudgingly, helpless memory yielded to fancy, to make at least a kind of sense of—not ‘the experience’; there was no ‘experience’ for memory to grasp. Instead. . . .

“Speak.” The command came so gently from the man who had caught her this time, one Kiellod, a Colderwilder, that she had no thought to resist.

“Like,” she began, groping for words. “Like a candle,” she said at last, and looked back at Kiellod. “You know? When you snuff it out,” she shuddered on the word ‘snuff,’ “and then bring another flame close to it, right away, but you don’t touch it—how it’s all aflame again, just like that?” She stared back at the iron pot. Like that, she thought: the whole world snuffed out and then—snuffed?—back in again. Not an unpleasant sensation; not any sensation at all. Utterly horrible.

“What’s this?”

Her heart leaped to her throat. Still more horrible: Dav’s voice from up the stairs. Oh, merciless gods, not Master Inquisitive, not now!

In a moment, he stood across the wedged kettle from her, full of the story, his eyes keen and blazing.

“Try it again.”

“No!”

“You are afraid?”

“Yes! And you’d be, too!”

His head tipped regally. “I do not doubt it. Try it again.”

“NO! Why?”

“I am the teacher,” he said, just short of smiling.

She weakened; though even as she did, she saw why she did. It occurred to her that that ought to make a difference, but she had not the will for it just now. Not wholly. “S-so, teach me something,” she demanded, stalling. Her voice quavered, but at the moment she feared the pot more than she feared the Master.

He nodded slightly. “Then: because you are afraid to do so.”

“I sh-should do a thing, because I’m afraid to?”

“Are you harmed?”

“Well—” She checked herself over. Though they told her how she had fallen, she was not even bruised, thanks to their quickness. “Er. No,” she admitted. Dav said nothing. The rest said nothing. Her palms sweated, she shook like a bowstring, but at last, with a little sob, she ventured one fingertip slowly towards the pot, hoping at every quarter inch that Dav would call off the test. The black surface of the kettle looked like a hole in the world, a hole that nonetheless grinned like a goblin at her, waiting to swallow her into oblivion again. A finger’s breadth away, she stopped, swallowed hard, prayed violently to no one in particular, crushed her eyes shut and touch—

—suspended, Kiellod’s hands in her armpits, her buckled knees level with her navel, and she stood up sharply, wet with sweat.

“Again,” said Dav.

She glared across at him, a steady glare of cold hate. One day, you bastard, I will have the power to kill you. If he read this in her, he made no reply, and in fury she grab—

—suspended, as before. She jerked to her feet. “This is very tiresome,” she grated. “And I’ve—”

“Again.”

Staring him full on, with not a glance for her object she swung her hand all but indifferently into contact. This time, Kiellod let her drop almost no way at all; she had only to reassume command of her abandoned body. Dav glanced inquiringly at the smith.

Vakiloth fumbled in the deep pockets of his leather apron and fetched out an iron ring, a palm’s breadth across, and held it out to her. She recoiled, shot Dav a glance of mingled rage and dismay, ground her teeth, and took—. And agai—. And by the third time, she was too embarrassed and angry to care about the damnable iron: the world fell away, the world came back, and one day she would beat his grin into his teeth.

Vakiloth scrabbled in a pocket again and came up with a small orangish flake, which he passed to her. She turned it in her fingers, snapped it in half, handed the pieces back, puzzled.

“Well, now, that’s interesting,” said Dav.

“I’ve got preserves boiling!” Rothesay shouted at him.

“Do you? Well, one more trial: are there gloves down there?”

Someone passed up leather gauntlets from the hearthside tools, Rothesay put them on and, knowing full well what he was about, did not wait but seized the rim of the black pot. And pulled. It scraped free of the far wall with a long metallic shriek and rolled on its bottom edge; she groped for control, braced it with her thigh—

—slumped against Kiellod halfway down the stair. The rest held the kettle, saving it from tumbling on down and crushing them. Dav stepped into it by way of passage through the landing, and crouched to stick a finger in the hole in her trousers, just below the fraying hem of her tunic.

“I’m sorry; stuff gets torn,” she mumbled, fearing reprimand, though how anyone’s clothes could be expected to stay whole in the unending violence of training, she did not know.

“Here.” Dav draped a corner of his own thin silk sleeve over the edge of the pot.

Feeling bolder, since the leather gauntlets had negated the weird power of the iron, she pulled off a glove and gingerly touched the silk.

Nothing happened.

“Well, well,” Dav murmured. “Well, let be, now; though your mistress may summon you to her, when she learns of this,” he grinned.

“Gaaah!” broke from her not wholly unwilling, and she retreated to her preserves, in their beautiful, warm, friendly, ruddy-brown copper pot.

At long last she sat, bowl in hand, crosslegged on the table in the scullery. She had the last half-cupful of preserves that no crock nor belly of her assistants could accommodate, and idly she stuck a laden spoon in her mouth and watched a visitor from Windhome wash out the copper pot.

A guest, she would have called him before the moot, but Runedaur had funny ideas in hosting as in everything else. Of course there was four times the cooking, and therefore cleaning, to be done, just to feed everyone, on top of the summer-work of putting up all manner of preserves against the winter, haying, and so forth, but the Runedaur, wherever they came from, fell in with all of it just as if it were their own home.

“It is,” the Waterspook pot-washer, Beorlaf, replied when she remarked on it. “And it’s one of the homes that know it.”

Rothesay mulled that over as she sucked the spoon clean. “Very well, sir, I give up: what do you mean, one of the ones that, er, know it?”

Beorlaf pulled up the chain to raise a gate in the pipe from a roof-cistern, letting a vigorous stream of water splash into the cauldron. He stepped back, to be heard over the swift gurgling. “Everywhere’s home,” he grinned, and winked. “Most of ’em don’t know that, though. Some of ’em don’t even want to let you in the door. You have to act special, there. They wouldn’t believe you, if you said you’d come home there.”

“I can just imagine.”

“Just don’t let yourself start believing what they believe. It’s home, whatever they think, and you do what you have to do.” He shoved the pipe-gate closed again and thrust a hairy blond arm into his copper pool, to slosh away the remains of the soap.

Rothesay took another spoonful of strawberry sweetness. And here is a ranking knight—Beorlaf’s name on the choreboard was always struck through; almost always, unless, as tonight, he wanted the task—doing what he had to do, the washing-up, while a novice almost too new to find her way around her own hall sat by and looked on, eating a treat. He made up for it, though, once he had the pot hung back in the hearth. He attacked bruisingly, but informatively, and, once he had Ghosted onto her his place in the haying, let her practice on him a new blocking move and a throw.

And then he was gone, and her sample of preserves was gone, and her bowl and spoon washed up and put away, and she had imposed an entirely unnecessary degree of order upon the kitchenware, and she could not find the copper polish, and now nothing stood between her and thinking about iron.

What the hell had all that been about? Plainly there was no point in asking her new masters; indeed, plainly she now had more reason than ever to slink and hide because sure as Areolin rose in the morning every last one of these mad jackdaws would want to see it for himself. It was sheer amazing that the entire moot had not come crowding down after Dav.

Did Padriag know anything about it? She wished she had a mirror like his, or that she could fly north and ask him—

With that thought, and with only a slight kind of ‘wobble’ in her bearings, she ‘intended’ the old oak on the knoll in Andrastir.

Nothing happened.

She tried again, and again more wildly, scrabbling for the least hint of the vertiginous peerie-realm. The stones of the scullery slept and she could not touch their dream.

Wait, girl, wait: something Master Merry had said, only a few days ago, about learning being like climbing into the mountains; that the path was never a steady ascent, but rose and dipped and—yes, yes, only persevering took one at last to the peaks, but it was a screaming nuisance that she should have stumbled into a ‘dip’ in learning to travel the peerie-land just when she really needed the knack. She closed her eyes, ferociously attempted to relax with one of the breathing techniques, felt irrationally resentful when it succeeded, and, steadier now, reached for the Otherworld again. And this time she did not trouble herself with reproach or anger when her efforts failed, over and over.

Still, when she opened her eyes to the same old everyday scullery after she had lost count of all her attempts, she calmly plucked a fist-sized stone where it had loosened from its mortar in the hearth, and calmly but with great force shattered it against the wall. In a strange cool rage, she passed from the room in great gliding strides, and flowed more than climbed up the stairs—and stopped halfway.

Halfway places: fens, shores, slopes, and doorways, and stairways, places neither one thing nor the other, where the Wall of the worlds was thinnest. Of course, of course! She giggled, a little embarrassed, feeling much as she might if she had just been failing of her best sword-play against the dazzling attack of a tree bole.

And tried again, and though she stayed yet in Colderwild, she thought she could feel, or maybe hear, the Otherworld now, nearer to her ‘touch.’ And she sensed that she would not pass through even here, however she tried, though whether the barrier were her own feebleness or some innate impenetrability, she could not say.

When in doubt, Leoff said, always assume that the fault is in you. You will learn so much, in attempting redress, that even if—perhaps singularly because—you never succeed in your original object, you will have made for yourself unguessable power.

True enough, she thought, but none too hopeful of your original object and I want to go to Andrastir. Now.