“Iftcan. Yes, there is such a city, but much of it is now dead,” Naill told her. “What you remember is from long ago.”
“But how—and why?” She asked his own questions of him.
“How—I can guess in part. Why”—Naill shrugged—”that I do not know. But what I have discovered is this.” As they went he told her of what he had found in Iftsiga, of the treasure buried at her own holding, and of all he had learned or suspected.
“So—those who sin by taking the forbidden things”—she summed it up in her own way—”they are punished—by becoming as we. And so the Forest Devil does tempt us, even as the Speaker has always said.”
“But is that so?” Naill countered. “Is this truly punishment, Illylle? Do you hate the forest and are you unhappy here as you would be if this was a punishment?” He was arguing awkwardly, perhaps, but he was sure he must alter her rationalization of the Believers’ creed and her application of it to their own problem. If she believed that the forest was a punishment for the damned, then for her it might be just that.
“The Speaker said—” she began, and then paused, plainly facing some thought, perhaps not new to her but one of which she was still wary. She stopped short and put out her hand to the tree beside which she stood. It was an odd gesture she made, as if her warm flesh curved about a loved and beautiful possession. “This—this is not evil!” she cried aloud. “And the city of trees, of which I dreamed, that is not evil! But good—very good! To Ashla there was evil—to Illylle good! For Illylle there is no Speaker, no one to say this is bad when it is good! So”—she was smiling now, looking at Naill with a light in her eyes, on her face, the light of one making a discovery of a new and joyful freedom—”so now I am Illylle for whom the world is good and not filled with sin—always so many, many sins, so many sins where the Rule holds the listing.”
Naill laughed involuntarily, and a moment later she echoed him. It was as if some of that feeling of joy had winged between them. At that moment Naill felt no weariness, no pain. He wanted to run—to cry aloud in this new feeling of freedom and delight.
But behind, the hounds bayed, and striking deeply into his mind came a warning from Hoorurr.
“They come faster, forest brother—go!”
Naill caught at Illylle’s hand and started on at the best pace he could muster.
ELEVEN
TO THE MIRROR
The sun that had plagued them was veiled by dull clouds. Illylle was looking out over the open riverbed. By her shoulder Hoorurr perched on a tall rock, his head turning from Naill to the north and back again slowly, while he snapped his bill in small sharp clicks of dissent.
Across the water lay a rock-paved shore where a mist—or was it smoke from smothered fires?—curled in languid trails.
“What lies there?” she asked.
“I don’t know. But—”
“It is evil!” That was no question, rather a statement of fact. The girl raised both hands to her head, bent forward a little, her eyes closed. Naill laid fingers on her upper arm.
“Are you ill again?”
She shook her head. The quarrin stirred, regarded the girl with a surprise as open as that which might be expressed on human features. From Hoorurr’s throat came a series of small purring notes, which Naill had never heard before. The quarrin’s feet lifted, first right and then left, as if he were engaged in some solemn dance in time to his own calls.
And now Naill saw Illylle’s head move too, slightly but unmistakably in that same rhythm, back and forth, in time to Hoorurr’s stamping feet and muted cries—or was the quarrin taking his lead from her? This was something Naill could not understand except that within him the conviction grew that at this moment the leadership of their small party was passing from him to her.
“No!” He tried to catch at her arm once more. But she was already gone, flitting ahead, to splash into the river shallows, wading out in the main current. Hoorurr voiced a great hooting cry and spiraled up, circling above the river and the girl. There was nothing for Naill to do but follow.
Illylle pushed on without hesitation, as if she knew just where she was going and why, swerving to avoid storm wrack, yet always coming back to a line that would bring her out on a rock ledge on the opposite shore. One of the mist trails drifted over the water, and Naill caught the reek of smoke: true enough, smoke from a fire fed by vegetation. Thin as that was, it made him cough and was raw in his nose and throat.
The girl scrambled up on the ledge, going on all fours to reach the crown of the slope. Hoorurr continued to wheel overhead, but the quarrin called no longer. At the top where that rock shelf leveled, Illylle halted and stood straight, her wet garment clinging to her body above her scratched and welted legs. She faced north, inland, her arms hanging to her sides, her eyes now wide open—yet, Naill believed, not fixed on any visible point ahead. She was either seeing farther than his own sight reached, or something that was within her own mind.
“Gather dark, gather dark,
Bring the blade, bring the torch—
Summon power the land to walk.”
Her voice was very soft, close to a whisper, and she accented the words oddly, chanted them into a song without music.
“Hooooorurrrr—” the hooting cry of the quarrin was her answer.
As Naill pulled himself up to join her, she turned her head, and once more he saw the luminous spark deep in her now wide-open eyes.
“The power is thin, perhaps no longer can it be summoned.” Her words meant nothing. Maybe she had plunged so deeply into Illylle memory he could no longer reach her.
“Come.” He faced east—toward Iftcan.
“That way is closed.” Now it was her hand that held him back. “The barrier thickens.” There was for a moment a slow smile on her lips. “No warrior steel cuts a path through the White Forest.”
“What—?” Completely bewildered, but realizing that her cryptic warning was indeed seriously meant, that Ayyar memory stirred in him at the mention of the White Forest, Naill hesitated. “How, then, do we go?” he asked.
Illylle’s head lifted; her nostrils quivered. Through the dark mass of the cloud bank broke a flash of lightning. And the wind sang along the river with a wild, rising voice.
“They gather—oh, they gather! And the power is thin—so thin!”
Naill lost patience. To be caught in the open if the coming storm proved as severe as the last one was folly, perhaps close to suicidal. They would have to find cover. He raised his voice to top the wind: “We must have cover from the storm!”
She caught his hand and began to run west, along the rock ledge bordering the river. He found that he dragged back as his wrenched leg stiffened, slowing the pace she set. Then she studied him, came to some decision of her own.
” . . . not . . . run . . .” Her words were tattered by the rising wind. They were both lashed with whips of water from the river. Her pull was insistent as she angled abruptly from the stream edge straight into the murky portion of the wasteland. Naill strove to hold back, to argue.
His earlier distaste for that country was hardening into something a great deal stronger and more militant.
“To the Mirror—the Mirror of Thanth!”
Ayyar memory . . . for an instant he had a mind picture of silver, rimmed with pointed rocks. A place of power—not Forest Power, but power! Then that was gone, and the wisp of meaning it held for him vanished as the wind about them swept the mist murk out of their way, cleaving a clear path into the dreary overgrowth of the waste.
Naill was moving faster before he noted that what lay underfoot now was not the broken earth with its trap-tangle of vine and vegetation, but a pavement of gray stone, very old, with dusty hollows and grooves worn into its surface as if for many centuries feet had trod here. Old—and alien to even Iftin kind—but not forbidden.
Illylle ran a little ahead, having dropped his hand when he followed. There was an eagerness about her, not only in her eyes, in the curve of her lips, but in every line of her thin body. She could be one hastening to a long-awaited rendezvous . . . or home.
The pavement was not wide, and in places sand and earth had silted over it so that only the faintest traces were discernible. But the girl never looked down at where her feet trod; she watched ahead—seeking some other guide, or perhaps already moved by one.