“What did he try?”
“Drugged wine. Or poisoned. No, I think drugged, because he was wild when I convinced him I was dead.” I went on to tell her in fits and starts what had occurred during the journey, leaving out nothing except what had set me off in haste to her in the first place. Well, I was full of wineghost. When I told her of my long trials in Schlaizy Noithn, she shook her head.
“We call it the monument of Thandbar, true. Howsomever, it is as much a nursery as anything else. Many of those there are new come to their Talents, or very young, or limited. Sambeline has only three shapes, her own, a pombi, and an owl. Many there are were-owls or were-pombis. Some there are experimentalists, madmen or women who cannot adapt to the Talent at all, who shift and become locked into strangeness. Roads which move. Speaking hillocks. Some experiment themselves into shapes they cannot get out of. I think Castle Lament was one such. I have long thought it would be worthwhile to have a few Immutables available to unlock them, but I have been unable to convince the Immutables of that.”
“They have no fondness for Gamesmen.” I yawned. “Though Riddle has been very kind to me.”
“Well, perhaps we can call upon that kindness come someday. Tell me of my kindred? Is Mertyn well? Does he plot still with Himaggery and old Windlow?”
I cursed myself. She didn’t know. I had sat by her fire eating and drinking for an hour, and she did not know. I blurted it all out, the disappearances, Himaggery gone, Windlow gone, Mertyn in the Bright Demesne. She looked at me frozen-faced with suspicious wetness at the corner of one eye.
“Himaggery vanished! Oh, Gameslords, but I feared it would happen. He is a sweet man, full of juice as ripe fruit.” She paused, and then said, “He is your father. I remember him kindly always, though he does not so remember me. He would have had me stay with him and live with him like some pawnish wife of a farmer; me, Mavin Manyshaped, for whom the world is not too large! So I left him against his will and he likes me no longer.”
“Does he know? Did he … I mean, that he is my father?”
“Oh, knowing I am your mother and what your age is, he should have figured it out. Yes. I should think so. Not that it matters. Which is what I told him, but he was full of pawnish ideas. Enough. Whether he likes me well or not at all, still I would not have him vanished into the shadows like so many of our friends. Mertyn did well to send you to me. Now. What’s to do about this.”
“Mertyn wanted me to find them, search for them. He told me to ask for them wherever I went, as Necromancer .”
“Tush. Those who are vanished in this way are not dead. We had figured that out a decade ago. Nor do they live, for the Pursuivants cannot find them. No, it is into the Land of Dingold they have gone, the place of shadows, and it is there we must Shift to find them. Nap, now, he knows something, you may be sure.”
This abrupt change of subject caught me by surprise, and seeing this, she pointed down from the height we sat upon to the place below, slowly emerging into the light as the shadow of the precipice grew shorter. I peered down at strangeness, stranger even than Schlaizy Noithn, for it looked like nothing I had seen before that time, a weirdness lying below us at the foot of the cliff. If a giant child had built a mud-spider out of shreds and threads, rat fur and murk, then set it upon a stone dish with its legs arrayed full circle around it and its eyes glittering in all directions, this might have been likened to what I saw. Then, if the child had built bulky mud towers between the spider’s legs, each tower with doors at the bottom in the shape of faces, each face a maw opening into the dark¾why then, that might have been likened to what I saw. Then, if the child had surrounded it all with a saw-edged wall and set the whole thing in quivering motion—well, that was the place. Smoke rose from it. Clangor sounded from it, soft with distance. The faces upon the tower doors grimaced, eyes first open then shut. The spider turned its eyes this way and that, the whole a clot, a bulk of dark in the light of morning.