Who were the voices crying to me? Why did Dorn cry so loud? Why did Didir sting me with her voice? Out? Out of where? Of what? The mysteries which lay around me were tantalizing. Why come out?
Was that Jinian? Silkhands? I felt hands upon me, pulling me, some inner person walking my veins and my nerves, hauling upon my bones. I wanted to tell them to let be, but it would take a mouth and lungs to do that. A mouth. Lungs.
Panic. So does one who is more than half drowned struggle to the surface of water, gasping for breath, unable to breathe. Someone helped me from within. Silkhands.
And I lay upon the floor of the place while Silkhands and Queynt hovered over me and screamed and cried on me.
“Fool, fool,” said Silkhands. “Even Mavin would not have tried such a thing.”
“Fool, fool,” wept Jinian. “Oh, Peter, but you are hopeless and I love you.”
I was not afraid until I knew what I had done, which was to spend the better part of two days trying to become a machine. Silkhands was worn and exhausted. She had spent the time since her arrival trying to extricate me. If there had been no other reason for her to come to the Wastes of Bleer than to save my life, I was grateful for Windlow’s vision and the musician’s song. It was she who had come into my inside out body and followed it down into madness, calling it out of its strange preoccupation. When I learned of her effort and my foolishness, I wept tears of weary frustration.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with it,” I confessed.
“And nor do I, my boy,” said Queynt. “I had little knowledge of maintenance. We had techs who were specially trained to do that work. It may be that the books are here, somewhere, and even the parts we may need, but I find Jinian’s reasoning persuasive. If Barish could have fixed it, he would have done.”
“I find it odd,” said King Kelver, “that the plans of a thousand years would be allowed to go awry on the failure of one mechanism.”
I could not have agreed with him more. However, I had no time for such fine philosophical points because of the news they brought. “The Elator told me last night that Huld is coming,” said the King. “I am to betray your location to him when he arrives. He grew impatient and left Hell’s Maw last night.”
Jinian had my map upon the floor, measuring the distance with her fingers. “Three days,” she whispered. “They will be upon us within three days. Four at most!”
In a few moments I built and discarded a hundred notions. I could take Wafnor and make a mountain fall. Buinel would burn the bones as they came toward us. Hafnor would flick me to the Bright Demesne where I would repeat my call for help. Didir would Read Huld’s mind. All these wild thoughts tumbled one upon another until Jinian took my hand, and I knew she had followed them almost as though she could have Read them.
“Peter. You can manage two or three of the Gamesmen of Barish at a time. If worst comes to worst, you will do it and we will all pray your success. But oh, how much better it would be if all of them fought at our side.”
She was right, of course. I leaned upon her shoulder and gave a great sigh, half weakness and half weariness, thinking the whole time of roast fowl. My weakness was simple hunger, and I said so. She remedied the lack as soon as I expressed it by putting a mug of hot soup into my hand and crumbling hard bread into it. As I ate it with a tired greediness, she went on.
“There is something we are not thinking of,” she said. “Something simple and obvious. The song we heard in Xammer was learned at the Minchery in Learner from a young songsmith who dreamed it. It is the same music we heard when the giant strode across us in the hills behind Three Knob. It came from Thandbar, somehow, and Thandbar’s blue is in your pocket. Somehow, Peter, the separation of body and blue is not as complete as we thought, for something sensible of Thandbar escaped, rose up from his body lying here in the cold wastes of Bleer to stride across the world crying for our help. There is a clue there we are not seeing, Peter. Help me think.”