Hare did not answer for a while. He began to beat his mutilated arm against his thigh in a restless, jerky way, and at last he said, forcing the words out in bursts, “They cut off my hand. I can’t weave the spells. They cut off my hand. The blood ran out, ran dry.”
“But that was after you’d lost your power, Hare, or else they could not have done it.”
“Power…”
“Power over the winds and the waves and men. You called them by their names and they obeyed you. “
“Yes. I remember being alive,” the man said in a soft, hoarse voice. “And I knew the words and the names…”
“Are you dead now?”
“No. Alive. Alive. Only once I was a dragon… I’m not dead. I sleep sometimes. Sleep comes very close to death, everyone knows that. The dead walk in dreams, everyone knows that. They come to you alive, and they say things. They walk out of death into the dreams. There’s a way. And if you go on far enough there’s a way back all the way. All the way. You can find it if you know where to look. And if you’re willing to pay the price.”
“What price is that?” Sparrowhawk’s voice floated on the dim air like the shadow of a falling leaf.
“Life- what else? What can you buy life with, but life?” Hare rocked back and forth on his pallet, a cunning, uncanny brightness in his eyes. “You see,” he said, “they can cut off my hand. They can cut off my head. It doesn’t matter. I can find the way back. I know where to look. Only men of power can go there.”
“Wizards, you mean?”
“Yes.” Hare hesitated, seeming to attempt the word several times; he could not say it. “Men of power,” he repeated. “And they must- and they must give it up. Pay.”
Then he fell sullen, as if the word “pay” had at last roused associations, and he had realized that he was giving information away instead of selling it. Nothing more could be got from him, not even the hints and stammers about “a way back” which Sparrowhawk seemed to find meaningful, and soon enough the mage stood up “Well, half-answers beat no answers,” he said, “and the same with payment,” and, deft as a conjuror, he flipped a gold piece onto the pallet in front of Hare.
Hare picked it up. He looked at it and Sparrowhawk and Arren, with jerky movements of his head. “Wait,” he stammered. As soon as the situation changed he lost his grip of it and now groped miserably after what he wanted to say. “Tonight,” he said at last. “Wait. Tonight. I have hazia.”
“I don’t need it.”
“To show you- To show you the way. Tonight. I’ll take you. I’ll show you. You can get there, because you… you’re…” He groped for the word until Sparrowhawk said, “I am a wizard.”
“Yes! So we can- we can get there. To the way. When I dream. In the dream. See? I’ll take you. You’ll go with me, to the… to the way.”
Sparrowhawk stood, solid and pondering, in the middle of the dim room. “Maybe,” he said at last. “If we come, we’ll be here by dark.” Then he turned to Arren, who opened the door at once, eager to be gone.
The dank, overshadowed street seemed bright as a garden after Hare’s room. They struck out for the upper city by the shortest way, a steep stairway of stone between ivy-grown house walls. Arren breathed in and out like a sea lion- “Ugh!- Are you going back there?”
“Well, I will, if I can’t get the same information from a less risky source. He’s likely to set an ambush for us.”
“But aren’t you defended against thieves and so on?”
“Defended?” said Sparrowhawk. “What do you mean? D’you think I go about wrapped up in spells like an old woman afraid of the rheumatism? I haven’t the time for it. I hide my face to hide our quest; that’s all. We can look out for each other. But the fact is we’re not going to be able to keep out of danger on this journey.”