There Sparrowhawk caught up with Hare and set a hand on his shoulder, at which Hare cringed as if scalded, wincing away, and backed into the shelter of a massive doorway. There he stood shivering and stared at them with the unseeing eyes of the hunted.
“Are you called Hare?” asked Sparrowhawk, and he spoke in his own voice, which was harsh in quality, but gentle in intonation. The man said nothing, seeming not to heed or not to hear. “I want something of you,” Sparrowhawk said. Again no response. “I’ll pay for it.”
A slow reaction: “Ivory or gold?”
“Gold.”
“How much?”
“The wizard knows the spell’s worth.”
Hare’s face flinched and changed, coming alive for an instant, so quickly that it seemed to flicker, then clouding again into blankness. “That’s all gone,” he said, “all gone.” A coughing fit bent him over; he spat black. When he straightened up he stood passive, shivering, seeming to have forgotten what they were talking about.
Again Arren watched him in fascination. The angle in which he stood was formed by two giant figures flanking a doorway, statues whose necks were bowed under the weight of a pediment and whose knotmuscled bodies emerged only partially from the wall, as if they had tried to struggle out of stone into life and had failed part way. The door they guarded was rotten on its hinges; the house, once a palace, was derelict. The gloomy, bulging faces of the giants were chipped and lichen-grown. Between these ponderous figures the man called Hare stood slack and fragile, his eyes as dark as the windows of the empty house. He lifted up his maimed arm between himself and Sparrowhawk and whined, “Spare a little for a poor cripple, master…”
The mage scowled as if in pain or shame; Arren felt he had seen his true face for a moment under the disguise. He put his hand again on Hare’s shoulder and said a few words, softly, in the wizardly tongue that Arren did not understand.
But Hare understood. He clutched at Sparrowhawk with his one hand and stammered, “You can still speak- speak- Come with me, come-“
The mage glanced at Arren, then nodded.
They went down by steep streets into one of the valleys between Hort Town’s three hills. The ways became narrower, darker, quieter as they descended. The sky was a pale strip between the overhanging eaves, and the house walls to either hand were dank. At the bottom of the gorge a stream ran, stinking like an open sewer; between arched bridges, houses crowded along the banks. Into the dark doorway of one of these houses Hare turned aside, vanishing like a candle blown out. They followed him.
The unlit stairs creaked and swayed under their feet. At the head of the stairs Hare pushed open a door, and they could see where they were: an empty room with a strawstuffed mattress in one corner and one unglazed, shuttered window that let in a little dusty light.
Hare turned to face Sparrowhawk and caught at his arm again. His lips worked. He said at last, stammering, “Dragon… dragon…”
Sparrowhawk returned his look steadily, saying nothing.
“I cannot speak,” Hare said, and he let go his hold on Sparrowhawk’s arm and crouched down on the empty floor, weeping.
The mage knelt by him and spoke to him softly in the Old Speech. Arren stood by the shut door, his hand on his knife-hilt. The grey light and the dusty room, the two kneeling figures, the soft, strange sound of the mage’s voice speaking the language of the dragons, all came together as does a dream, having no relation to what happens outside it or to time passing.
Slowly Hare stood up. He dusted his knees with his single hand and hid the maimed arm behind his back. He looked around him, looked at Arren; he was seeing what he looked at now. He turned away presently and sat down on his mattress. Arren remained standing, on guard; but, with the simplicity of one whose childhood had been totally without furnishings, Sparrowhawk sat down cross-legged on the bare floor. “Tell me how you lost your craft and the language of your craft,” he said.