He fixed me with blazing eyes, and told me the pain was gone and he could flex the fingers and wrist. I told him he could expect total recovery, providing he did not remove the bandage for seven days nor look at the wound. He gawked, and began to argue that he could feel no wound, that I was a magician. I leaned very near, and promised him if ever he called me that again, to my face or at my back, I would send a ghoul to gnaw on his liver.
We parted in unfriendly silence, my patient and I.
I sat on a rock, some way above the camp. Smoke, firelight, and a yapping of hounds and men filled up the space below. The space above had changed from carmine to indigo, and the brass dust-moon of the Wilderness had just risen. Somewhere the dog-rats of the waste were twittering, barely audible, out of a vast hollow quiet. It is a phenomenon of such spots that any noise is encapsulated in this ringing stillness, and made strangely tiny, however loud. The shouts of bandits and the squeaks of fauna sound as if confined in bubbles, a symbol of their impermanence. Only the desert endures.
I sat a long while there. Now and then I noticed the glare of the smithy fire burst up, and thought, Well, I have won Gyest his forge. But mainly my mind went wandering. I was digesting my life. To say I was at peace would not be honest, but to say peace showed itself to me, brushed me with its cool breath, yes. There is, too, a sort of relief in admitting defeat. Struggling to drag a mountain from my path, acknowledging at last the mountain would remain, lying down beneath the mountain, thankful for the shade of it.
About five hours must have folded themselves away into the night. The moon had touched the roof of the sky and turned her sail to the west.
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I was gazing down into the fire-blur of the camp, gathering myself to return there. All at once I glimpsed a man dismounting from a black horse. It caught my eye, for the horse was finer than anything I had seen of the bandit mounts this far. Then the man turned. His hair was curling, cropped rather shorter than mine, and he was gaudily dressed, yet he had a look of me. A second after, I saw a woman on a mule; he had moved to converse with her. They were speaking trivial words, yet I could sense something between them, like a current of heat or energy. The woman was dressed in black and the black shireen of the tribes. Her hair poured around her like unseasonable snow.
It was gone as suddenly as it came. It did not dismay me; it was like a dream.
Gyest was standing beside me. He said softly, “What were you seeing?”
“My mother,” I said. “My mother, and some man not my father.”
“So,” he said, “and there is no anger now.”
“No anger. Yet I swore a vow to some dark thing once, some remnant of my father’s despair, that I would kill her.”
He seated himself, asking me if he might, on the rock nearby.
“You know you can never rest until you find her,” he said.
“Oh, I can rest. As much as I shall ever rest, perhaps.”
“Once,” he said, “you sought within my brain. One adept, read by another, also reads. You learned something of me, and I something of you. Did you appreciate this?”
“Lellih scoured my brain as she would scour a cookpot with a knife,” I said. “Yes, gift for gift. What do you know of me?”
“Enough to show you the way,” he said.
A snake moved inside my belly. I was waking up. Visions, truths, reverie, leading me back to consciousness and feeling, to involvement, to life, where, perhaps, I was reluctant to go.
“Gyest,” I said, “we had this through before. If I seek her, I shall kill her. This I believe. I have no hate left, but he has cause to hate her, and it is his genius, his will, that created me. Ah, Gyest, if only I had known my father!”
“The shining dark,” Gyest said, “the reflection of the flame upon the wall: Shadowfire. Vazkor, you are too much of his, too much of hers. You can’t escape this road. You must confront them both in order to resume yourself. Now. Suppose that you seek her, how shall you do it?”
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“The Power of my will, the very thing I don’t mean to use again. Very well, I will heal, but not this other. Not again.”
“A focus, then,” he said. “As the Sri use it. Small power, much concentration. To trace a man, you take something that has belonged to him, a garment or an ornament, preferably something worn often. If he has not left you such a thing, then you fashion one in the semblance, as near as may be. There is an image in your brain when you think of her. You’re accustomed to the form and have mislaid it. Uast the cat, the white lynx. Look.”
He opened his cloak, and put before me on the rock the silver mask I had dug for in Ettook’s treasure chest, the mask Demi/dor had worn about the krarl, the mask Tathra had shunned, the mask the Eshkiri slave had brought. The mask of my mother, Uastis, Karraket, the witch. The face of a silver lynx with open black eye-holes, the yellow strings pendant from its back like sunrays on the rock, each ending in a flower of amber.
I cursed aloud. The blood shot to my heart in a pang I had forgotten could take me.
Gyest went on calmly, extending this calm to me.
“The silver is debased, and the flowers are only yellow glass, but the illusion is as perfect as I could get it. The mold Omrah made at my direction, the rest is the skill of Darg Sih’s clever smith who at one time, before he slew a man and fled here, constructed jewelry in Bar-Ibithni.”
“Why have you done this?”
‘To aid you.”
“Why aid me?”
“God has moved me to help you. Or, if you prefer, it was my reasonless inclination to do so.”
I reached out, and took up the mask. I half anticipated the shock to go through my palm when I touched it, as it had when I first drew it from the treasure chest. But this was not the same. It weighed heavier in the hand, and the gems more lightly. It was a focus, as he had said. If I stared down into the blank eye-holes of it, what witch-eyes should I behold staring back at me across lands and seas and time itself?
“No,” I said, “I am done with this.”
“It’s not done with you,” he answered.
No, truly it was not. She had sat her mule in the camp below, her white hair around her shoulders. No, it was not done.
I got to my feet, the mask in my hand. I walked into the
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Wilderness just far enough to put the small lights and sounds of men behind me.
About a quarter of a mile from the camp I halted by a narrow towering fretwork stack, like a pillared temple carved by the wind. It was the very wind I could hear blowing now, through the empty bell of the desert. The dust stirred like smoke underfoot. The brown moon lay on the horizon’s edge.
I held the mask between my hands, and let my Power drip slowly down on it, like my soul’s blood.
I woke in the dawn. The plains of the Wilderness were exploding into light. It was the first hour of day, one of the two most beautiful hours of the desert, where sunrise and sunset are the queen and king. I kept where I was and watched till the mystery ended. Then I got up and went back into the camp of Darg Sih.
It seemed to me I had slept. I recalled no dream, no revelation, nothing. Yet I knew the way. I knew the way to find her. I must do what only madmen do, turn aside before the Seema-Saminnyo, travel to the brink of the southwestern ocean, bribe some ship’s captain to take me south and west again to that unknown featurless land-I had not seen it, knew it only as one knows some object one has touched in the dark, through gloves-and there she would be. Sea-girt, summer gone with the birds from that anchorage, maybe even snow there now, and near to a place of snow. It was apt for her, my snow-haired dam.
It recurred, the image Hessek had shown to me: The sorceress was sinewy and raddled, with her claws of fire and her cat’s head. My fear was dead, yet still she seemed an inspiration for fear, of all the world’s fear if not of mine. An elemental? A witch? What would she do indeed, when I walked up to her on some western street, or in some icy garden there, under the pale winter sun? / am your son, Uastis of Ezlann, whom you abandoned to the stinking krarl of savages, and trusted never to meet again. I am the son of Vazkor, your husband, by whose shadow I have sworn to slay you, Uastis, and let dogs destroy your healing bones and fire your healing flesh so never from that wreck can you remake yourself. There shall be no part or portion left, Uastis, that can heal itself; not a grain, not a hair. True death for a daughter of the Old Race, and I bring it.