She did as I had done, looking back and forth from one to the other. “Why not,” she said. “Let us do it now before someone comes down and makes some objection.”
“He may only live a little while, to be killed in that battle which is coming,” I warned her.
“He will at least die in reality then,” she said bitterly, “not be lost in some rock crevasse forever, caught in neither living nor death, perhaps in that same terror Thandbar felt.”
I nodded, took Windlow’s blue into my hand and put my arms around her as she laid her hands upon Barish’s head.
Then was maelstrom. Nothing which had gone before had prepared me for it. There was Windlow, surging in my mind like a flood, like a mighty stream pouring over a precipice. There was something else, surging to meet it as the tide meets the outflow of a river, battering waves which meet in foam-flecked flood to crash upon one another, flow around one another, mix together in an inextricable rush and tug and wash. Cities toppled in my head; rivers burst mighty barricades; millennia-old trees fell and splintered. Faces passed as in an endless parade. The sun made a single glittering arc across the sky, flickering between darkness and light as day and night sped past. Then the struggle eased, slowly, and I felt things rise in the flood to heave above the waves, to rock and stabilize themselves upon the flow like boats until all within was liquid and quiet above the steady roll of whatever lay below. Windlow’s blue was gone. Silkhands leaned back within the circle of my arms, exhausted. I heard someone come into the room behind us, recognized Queynt’s step but was too strained to turn to him as he gasped.
The figure before me on the pedestal opened its eyes. Someone behind those eyes smiled into my face and said, “Peter?” Then that same someone¾or another¾looked across my shoulder and spoke to Queynt. “Vulpas?” I felt myself thrust aside as Vitior Vulpas Queynt moved to
His brother’s side.
His brother.
My friend.
Windlow.
Barish.
The same.
* * *
12
The Bonedancers of Huld
* * *
“YOU HAD HIM ALL THE TIME!” Queynt advancing as though to strike me.
A voice from the pedestal, laughing weakly, not Windlow’s voice. Not entirely Windlow’s voice. Pattern and intonation different. Not so peaceful, not so kindly. “Oh, Vulpas. He didn’t know he had me. Poor lad. And he didn’t have much of me, at that, or all of me, depending upon how you look at it. He didn’t know; Windlow didn’t know.”
So that Queynt turned again to that voice which seemed more familiar to him than it did to me. “Windlow?”
A long silence. I looked at the body on the pedestal, close wrapped in its Wizardly robes. It had not moved yet, seemed uncertain whether it could. One hand made a little abortive gesture; a foot twitched. The eyes were puzzled, then clearing, then puzzled once more. When he spoke it was tentatively, slowly, as though he had to consider each word and was even then not certain of it.
“The body they brought for me, Vulpas. The bodies were always supposed to be brain-burned. Plenty of those around. Every Game always left them littered about, weeping women, mothers crying, pathetic bodies, able to walk, breathe, eat¾nothing else. They were supposed to bring one like that. So they did; body of a Seer named Windlow. Only it wasn’t brain-dead¾maybe half, maybe only stunned, sent deep…
“The machine. It had been acting strangely. Meant to go to the base and get some tech to come back with me and fix it. I didn’t go. Why? Forget why. The time before, the last time I was in this body¾the machine didn’t separate me. Not all of me. Most of me was still here, in the body, cold. I dreamed…
“Dreamed I saw Thandbar go out of this place like a wind, like a mist, singing. Dreamed little people came in here, singing. Wanted to say `Help,’ wanted to ask them to find Vulpas, find Riddle. Imprisoned. No movement. No voice…”
“Who was it then, who went out of here?” demanded Queynt. “Who was it Riddle put the blue into? That last time. When you were supposed to meet me?”