And I, remembering Dinzil, crushed down any doubts and said yes. But it would seem that my mother was not yet fully convinced. For, at that moment, she opened a mind send between us that I might read, though maybe only in part, what she had learned from Hilarion. And the pain and desolation of that sharing was such that I flinched in body as well as mind, to cry out that I did not want to know any more.
“You see,” she said as she freed me, “he has his own thoughts to occupy him now and those are not such as we can easily disturb. If we would go—”
“Then let us do it now!” For in me arose such a desire to be out of this place which was Hilarion’s, and away from all thought of him (if I could so close my mind on part of the past), that I wanted to turn and run as if rasti or the Gray Ones hunted behind.
But though we did go it was at a more sober pace, for we still had Ayllia with us. I began to think about her and what we would do with her. If the Vupsalls were still at the village perhaps we could awaken her sleeping mind and leave her nearby, maybe working some spell which would cloud the immediate past so she would not remember our journeying, save as a quickly fading dream. But if the raid had indeed put an end to the tribe I saw nothing else but that we must take her with us to the Valley wherein Dahaun and her people would give her refuge.
My father left one of the packs of food and water where it had fallen on the floor. But the other he shouldered, letting my mother and myself lead Ayllia. So we went out into the open. Then I, too, learned the surprises time can deal: I had entered here in the coldest grasp of winter, but I came out now into the warmth and sun of spring—the month of Chrysalis, still too early for the sowing of fields, and yet a time when the new blood and first joys of spring stir in one, bringing a kind of restlessness and inner excitement. Still, to my reckoning, I had only been away days, not weeks!
The snow, which had lain in pockets in this long deserted place, was long since gone. And several times our passing startled sunning lizards and small creatures, who either froze to watch us with round and wary eyes, or disappeared in an instant.
I was a little daunted by the maze of streets and ways before us, for I could not clearly remember how we had found our path through the citadel. And after twice following a false opening which brought us up to a wall, I voiced my doubts aloud.
“No way out?” asked my father. “You came in without hindrance, did you not?”
“Yes, but I was drawn by the Power.” I tried now to remember each and every part of how Ayllia and I had come here. Looking back it seemed that our road had been very easy to find from the time we entered twixt those outer gates where the carved guardians gave tongue in the wind. This sprawl of passages and lanes I did not recall.
“Contrived?” I asked that aloud.
We had come to a halt before that last wall when an opening which seemed very promising had abruptly closed. About us were those houses with the blue stones above their doors, their windows empty and gaping, and something about them to chill the heart as winter winds chill the body.
“Hallucination?” my father wondered. “Deliberate by bespelling?”
My mother closed her eyes, and I knew she was cautiously using mind seek. Now I ventured to follow her, fearing always to touch a cord uniting us to Hilarion.
My mind perceived, when I loosed it, what the eyes did not. Simon Tregarth was right, that a film of sorcery lay over this place, erecting walls where there were none, leaving open spaces which were really filled. It was as if, upon closing our eyes, we could see another city set over the one which stood there before. The why of it I did not know, for this was no new spell set for our confounding by Hilarion; it was very old, so that it was oddly tattered and worn near to the first threads of its weaving.
“I see!” I heard my father’s sharp comment and knew that he in turn had come to use the other sight. “So . . . we go this way—” A strong hand caught mine, even as with my other I held to Ayllia, and on the other side of the Vupsall girl my mother walked. Thus linked we began to defeat the spell of the city, going with our eyes closed to the light and the day, our minds tuned to that other sense which was our talent.
So we came to a street which sloped to the thick outer wall, and that I recognized as the one up which we had come on our flight before the raiders. Twice I opened my eyes, merely to test the continuance of the confusion spell, and both times I faced, not an open street, but a wall or part of a house. I hastened to drop my lids again and depend upon the other seeing.
One without such a gift could not have won through that sorcery as we discovered when we came at last to the gate. For within an arm’s length of escape lay a body stark upon the ground, arms outflung as if to grasp for the freedom the eyes could not see. He had been a tall man and he wore body armor, over which thick braids of hair lay, while a horned helm was rolled a little beyond. We could not see his face, and for that I was glad.
“Sulcar!” My father leaned over the corpse but did not touch it.
“I do not think so, or else not of the breed we know,” Jaelithe returned. “Rather one of your sea rovers, Kaththea.”
As to that I could not swear for my glimpses of them on the night they had come to Vupsall had been most limited. But I thought her right.
“He has been dead some time.” My father stood away. “Perhaps he trailed you here Kaththea. It would seem that for him this trap worked.”
But for us it failed and we passed through the wall, between the brazen beasts who would howl in the tempests.
There we found signs that this was indeed a place others found awesome: set up was a stone slab, dragged, I thought, from the ruined village. And on it lay a tangle of things, perhaps once placed out in order and then despoiled by birds and beasts: a fur robe now stiff with driven sand and befouled by bird droppings, and plates of metal which might once have held food. Among all this was something my father reached for with a cry of excitement, a hard ax and a sword. He had never been more than an indifferent swordsman, though he had put much practice into the learning of that weapon’s usage, swords not being used in his own world. To a warrior, however, any weapon, when his hands are empty, is a find to be treasured.
“Dead man’s weapon,” he said as he belted on that blade. “You know what they say—take up a dead man’s weapons and you take on perhaps also his battle anger when you draw it.”
I remembered then how Kemoc, when he came to seek me in Dinzil’s Dark Tower, had found a sword in the deep hidden places of a long vanished race and had taken it, to serve us well. And I thought that since a man’s hand reached instinctively for steel, one had better judge it for good instead of ill.
But my mother had taken something else from that offering table and stood with it in her two hands, gazing down into it with almost a shade of awe on her face.
“These raiders plied their looting in odd places,” she said. “Of such as this I have heard, but I have not seen. Well did they treasure it enough to offer it to the demons they believed dwelt here!”
It was a cup fashioned, I think, of stone, in the form of two hands tight pressed together save for an open space at the top. But they were not altogether human hands: the fingers were very long and thin; the nails, which were made with gleaming metal, very narrow and pointed. In color it was red-brown, very smooth and polished.
“What is it?” My curiosity was aroused.
“A mirror for looking, to be used as one does a crystal globe. But into this one pours water. I do not know how it came to this place, but it is such a thing as must not remain here for— Touch it, Kaththea.”