A mage did not blush. “Nothing.”
“Bed, you mean? That isn’t what I want.”
He believed that, she saw. Oh, poor Woom! Mist had confused love with sex, as if one was the same as the other.
Woom thought they were totally separate, unrelated. Both men were wrong. She was certain of that, although she did not know how she knew.
“And what’s different now?” he said harshly. “Oh—five words? We know five words between us, is that it? You’re afraid we’d start whispering words of power in each other’s ears?”
His face was shinier now than when he’d been chopping wood. Oh, poor Woom!
“I thought it hurt to share words of power?” he said.
She had never thought about it. She thought about sorcery in other ways now, somehow, knowing things she had never learned. “It does. Four’s the limit.”
“So Teal told us. Why? What’s so special about four words? Why not five?”
“Too much power?” she said uncertainly. Suddenly redhot hammers were beating in her head. “It would tear you apart. That’s some of it, but . . . But not all of it. It’s love, Woom. Not just sex, but love.” Love and sorcery, an unholy mixture, or a holy mixture perhaps, and together . . . The world swayed nauseously and her eyes felt ready to boil. “I can’t talk anymore!” she gasped.
She let the elusive thoughts slide away, and her pounding headache eased. What to do about poor Woom? Shreds of forgotten talk floated into her mind, hints and innuendos .
“Speak to Teal,” she said suddenly. “He can arrange for you to, er, go visiting outside the College. Meet girls.” People from the College always married mundanes; that was the rule.
Woom stared hard at her. “I don’t want to go visiting outside the College. I don’t want to meet girls. I have a job to do here and I’m glad of the chance, and I wish we hadn’t gotten on the subject. You going to feed a hungry man or just talk?” From him, that was a rib-splitting joke.
“I’ll magic something,” she said irritably, staring at the darkening clearing. Memories kept nudging at her mind, man memories. That might be why she had pried into Woom’s thoughts, or even why she had come here at all. Not Mist. Not Woom. Who? The new word of power in her head was trying to tell her something. Man. Man. Man? Leeb?
Oh, what a strange day. “Thaile?”
“Mm?”
“Why did Keef kill her lover?”
“Huh?” She looked hard at Woom’s steady amber eyes and the inquiry in them.
“Teal won’t tell. It’s the heart of the legend, but he won’t say. Or can’t. Maybe he doesn’t even know. Keef slew the man she loved. Why?”
Love and sorcery . . . “I don’t know.”
He was right, though. Why had the first Keeper slain her lover? That was the heart of mystery, and no one ever said why it had happened, why it had to happen. How strange that Woom should have seen that and she had not. And he had more—
“What’s the Keeper, Thaile? What is she? Why is she different?”
Chill and horror . . .
“I don’t know that, either.” The pain came rushing back. “I think you do,” he said solemnly.
“No! No, I don’t!” She didn’t want to know that. She would know that soon enough. Woom never would.
Poor Woom in his sweat-soaked shirt! Just an ordinary adept, barely more than a mundane, destined at best to be a very ordinary sorcerer all his days.
Behind him, the image of the Keeper was beckoning, transparent and faceless.
“Come to me, Thaile. You don’t need directions now.”
“Yes. No.”
Thaile stood up. “Sorry, Woom. I mustn’t talk about such things. I have to go.” She walked away without waiting for an answer. He did not call out to her, as most men would have. She came to the Way and told it to take her to the Keeper, and in a moment she was gone from the Woom Place.
4
She did not know where the Keeper lived, but she did not have to know. No longer need she be familiar with a place to make the Way take her there. Now she could control the Way.
The moon was rising. She could have managed as well in the dark, but she admired the beauty of the silver light angling down through gaps in the forest canopy. The trees became even larger, damp and monstrous. Soon the black jungle cut off the moonlight completely, but the Way went on. It was very narrow, very twisted, winding between the great trunks, a tunnel through foliage. There was no sound except the soft pad of dripping water.
The Way ended at a mossy cliff, thick moss completely burying the stones beneath. There was a great building here, wrapped in jungle, but it was shielded. She left the white gravel and had to take several squelching steps over soggy humus to reach an alcove and an inconspicuous little door. The flap creaked open for her on corroded bronze hinges.
Inside was brighter, and empty. The moon shone through vacant windows that still held a few remnants of stone tracery and stained glass to hint at their former glory. The ceiling was intact, though, preserved by sorcery, along with most of its ribs and carvings. The floor was a barren plain of uneven flags, but something had kept it clear of dust and leaves through all the silent centuries. The air was still, as if frozen.
She knew what place this must be. In a far corner was power. It radiated up from the floor, but it was cold power, dark power. If this was the Chapel—and it must be the Chapel—then that was Keef’s grave. Thaile resisted the urge to approach it, refusing the call.
She had tried to go to the Keeper. Instead she had gone to the very heart of Thume, the resting place of the first Keeper. Did Keef rest? Remembering the wraith that had guided her in the Defile, Thaile wondered. Her guess about that wraith might be wrong, of course—but she did not think it was.
She looked around at the emptiness. At one end two doorways led out to a vestry and the main entrance. There was nothing else, no altar or holy balance, no lamps. The Gods had forsaken this place. The Good and Evil were not worshipped here.
She had made no mistake. This was a test. Again she surveyed the curiously misshapen and asymmetric hall, although her mundane eyes could see only shreds of moonlight on stone. Two corners held doors; one held Keef’s grave. The fourth corner was empty.
She recalled the duplicate cottage she had visited so briefly at the Woom Place. There had been two Places, set apart in the same Place. That was the answer, then. The Chapel was in the occult Thume. What occupied this space in the mundane Thume?
She stepped sideways.
The Chapel remained unchanged, and Keef’s grave, also, but now a cluster of furniture stood in that fourth corner: a desk, a chair, a high shelf of books, a closet. A bed—why a bed? The Keeper never slept. Perhaps she sometimes rested. She was sitting at the desk now, waiting.
Thaile walked to her, half the length of the Chapel, thinking “What a horrible Place.” Not even a rug. As she drew near, she saw a thick book lying on the desk and recognized it. Beside it stood a slim silver vase holding a single white lily. That was sad.
As always, the Keeper was shrouded in a dark robe; her cowled head was bent over her hands. Thaile arrived and sank to her knees on the icy, greasy stone. The head lifted, but the face within was dark and shielded. Not even eyes showed.
She felt strangely calm. “’The Little Keeper” the novices called her, so Woom had said, and Woom never joked. She knew the book, although its voice was muffled now and its text concealed from her. Her name was in that book. She was important, she mattered! Perhaps now she would find out how, and why.
“Your power is beyond belief,” the familiar rustling voice said. ”Baze swears he told you only the one word.”
“He did, ma’am.”
“You have not learned a fourth elsewhere? No pillow whispers?”
“No!”
“Do not raise your voice to me, child! I can still apply discipline. You can suffer more and yet be useful. Mayhap another visit to the Defile is needful.”
Thaile shuddered. “Threats demean you,” she said with all the courage she could muster.
“Insolence!” the Keeper said, but more gently. “You have yet much to learn, and time is short. Time is desperately short. Had you come to the College when you should . . .”
Memories stirred. “What?”
“Never mind.” The hidden eyes were studying her. Doubtless the power she could sense was reading her thoughts. “So with three words you have been working sorceries. You clamored all over Thume like temple bells and some of what you did was true sorcery. And with only three words! There is no record of that since . . . for a long time.”