Innkeeper's Song

LAL

Laughter does not always mean to me what it does to others. I have heard too many madmen laughing in my life: men, and women too, who were not too mad to realize that they had the power to do anything they wanted. Yet I am alive, having heard them. I have even heard the laughter of the red sjarik at noon, and I am alive, and not many can say that. But this was the worst of all, this sound over those naked stones. There was no quickness of any kind to it, good or evil: no proper chaos, no surgingly joyous cruelty—no smile, even in its triumph. I will remember the dreadful smallness of that laughter when I have forgotten what it is to see a river stop flowing.

“Turn,” he said behind us. “Come to me.” We did neither. He laughed again. He said, “Easy to see whose students you are. As you will, then,” and he let the river go. We saw it flash into life, heard its great blinding cry of freedom as it sprang toward us, roaring back across its bed faster than any beast could have run. Any beast but us: we scrambled up the bank, wet and half-naked as we were, so frantically that I actually bumped into Arshadin and fell at his feet. Nyateneri had charged on past him, but he wheeled back instantly to help me rise. And that is how we first encountered the wizard Arshadin.

He was between us in height: a thickly-made man in a plain brown tunic, with a pale, bald, wide-jawed face. I say bald, not because he had no beard or mustache, but because—how can I make you see? Yes, the hair was graying; yes, there were folds around the mouth and creases framing the eyes—even a tiny old scar under his chin— yet none of that added up to an expression. Life gives us lines and pouches and the rest, everyone, even wizards, who live longer than most and always look younger than they are. But only our confusions give us expression, and Arshadin’s face was so bland of those that it appeared painted on, wrinkles and features alike. I have once or twice seen infants born far too soon to breathe more than a few minutes in this world: they have a cold transparency about them, and a terrible softness. Arshadin was like that.

“Welcome,” he said to us now. “Lalkhamsinkhamsolal—Soukyan, who calls himself Nyateneri.” His eyes were a strange hazy blue, seeming to focus on nothing at all, and his voice could have been a woman’s voice or a man’s.

Miraculously, my swordcane had somehow remained thrust into my belt. Edge or no bloody edge, it would still go through even a thick wizard. It embarrasses me to talk about what happened next—who should know better that because a wizard is not looking at you doesn’t mean he isn’t watching? But this man’s presence somehow filled my head with smoke, putting slow clouds between me and all my bitterly won skills and understandings. I lunged—quite prettily for a limping near-cripple— watched from far away as the point sank into his belly, and still had time to take him in the chest as he sagged toward me. Except that he did not sag, and that my blade came out with no burst of blood following it into the sunlight. No sag, no wound, no blood. Not a drop, even on the swordcane—only a wisp of something like bright smoke, and then not even that. He did not laugh now, but regarded me as though I had interrupted him while he was talking.

“Stop that,” he said, tonelessly irritated. “I have watched and touched every step of your journey. I can command rivers and dharises—do you suppose I am for your nursery sword, or that carpet-tack in your boot?” He clenched his left hand and opened it again, and Nyateneri—who had imperceptibly shifted his weight onto one leg, bracing himself for a certain spinning kick— doubled over, his face without color. If he made a sound, it was lost in the jubilation of the river.

Arshadin never looked at him. He repeated the gesture, and all my muscles turned to ice, holding me where I stood. He said, “Whatever your plans, they have failed. You cannot harm me, and you cannot help your master. Do you wish proof of that? So, then,” and he sketched a wide circle on the ground with one foot and spat into it, closing his eyes. Instantly a grayness shivered heavily within the circle, and within it stood my friend. This was no bodiless image, such as he had sent to me in the Northern Barrens: wherever he, and that grayness, truly existed, it was the man himself, snatched from bed in The Gaff and Slasher, blinking mildly at the three of us, whom he plainly saw and knew. He was still in his nightgown, but even so the sight of him made me feel as dizzyingly, immediately safe as it had one morning on the Lameddin wharf when my stinking, sheltering fish basket was suddenly lifted away and there he was, blinking. There he was.

“Well,” he said, looking vaguely around him. “This is a bit sudden even for you, Arshadin.” He did not bother to greet Nyateneri and me, but gazed up the slope at the thatched cottage with earnest interest. “A very nice job you made of rebuilding, I must say. No one would dream what it looked like, the last time I left here.”

“You destroyed my home,” Arshadin’s empty voice said. “I have not forgotten.”

“You have apparently forgotten that when I asked you to let me leave, flames leaped from the walls and great fanged pits opened in the floor. I regarded that as childish and ungracious, in addition to doing your woodwork no good at all. I said so at the time.”

Arshadin said, “What shall I do with your servants? What is their return worth to you?”

“Who? Them? Worth to me?” My friend stared a moment longer, and then he threw back his head and laughed in his way—as though no one in the world had ever even dreamed of making such a prodigious noise before—so that neither of us could forbear to laugh with him, wretched as we were and humiliated to have him view our helplessness. “Worth to me? Arshadin, you brought me all this way to ask me that? How often have I warned you about that sort of wasted power—it’s really not inexhaustible, you know. A simple letter would have done just as well.”

Arshadin had not yet looked at him directly. “Power is never wasted. Strength grows only with use. So, apparently, does frivolity. I will ask you again—what shall I do with these two?” His voice was flat and distant, hardly inflected even on the question.

My friend laughed briefly again. “Do? Do whatever you will, why should that be my affair? I told them not to meddle with you. I told them to stick to bandits and pirates—that in you they were dealing with a force beyond their imaginations, let alone their abilities. But they would challenge you, and now they must take what comes. I cannot forever be rescuing them from the consequences of their own folly.”

Does that sound heartless to you? To us it was music and miracles; it was food, clothing, home all in one. Riddle and berate us as he might, he would never abandon us—we trusted that as we could afford to trust nothing else in our separate lives. Nor am I even now ashamed of our dependence on him for our lives: he was depending on our wit, our attention, for more than that.

Heads lowered in feigned despair, we awaited the tiniest signal, while Arshadin watched us with his hazy pupilless eyes.

“As for myself”—my friend went on more briskly now— “if I were you, I would send me back to my bed as quickly as possible. You cannot get at me where I stand, and it is costing you energy—energy you can no longer spare—merely to hold me here. I am giving you good advice, Arshadin.”

He looked even more fragile than we had left him—I was amazed to see him on his feet. Nevertheless, his eyes showed a trace of the sea-greenness that had been gone for so long, and—most important to me—there were two bright pink ribbons twined through his bristly gray beard. I had last seen them in Marinesha’s hair. Arshadin answered him, saying, “Yes you always gave me good advice, and nothing more. I think it would be instructive for you to remain and see me dispose of your friends, or whatever they are. You might learn more of what you should know from that than ever I learned from you.”

His voice remained sexless and rigidly ordinary, but with the last words his face changed. If I had been frightened before of a face that gave witness to a lifetime of showing nothing, I was more frightened now of what happened to his eyes when he finally turned them on my friend. The bitter rage and loss in them made his heavy, shovel-shaped face seem strangely delicate, almost transparent, like a burning house just before it collapses on itself. His mouth was slightly open, the lips twisted slightly up at one corner, down at the other. I remember even now a fleck of cracked skin in the down corner. He said, “Afterward it will be time to meet those who are waiting.”

My friend was silent for a moment, then rubbed a hand across his own mouth, as I remembered him doing very long ago, when I would somehow come too close to winning an argument. “As you please. But if you are considering doing to them what I think you are, I must drearily warn you again—you cannot do it and still hold me in this place. You probably have the strength, yes”—oh, the gentle contempt in that probably would have maddened me, never mind an Arshadin— “but you have nothing like the mature precision that is necessary. If you did, I could never have escaped you, and if you had gained it since, I could not have remained out of your reach, as I will remain. Free yourself of me, have that much sense, and then—” He looked full at us and shrugged. “A nasty, messy little parlor trick, I always thought it—but there, your tastes are your own affair, quite right. Who am I, after all, to plague you with counsel? Quite right. Quite right.”

His voice had fallen into a sleepy singsong drone, which instantly alerted Nyateneri and me: that was the way he always sounded when he was about to set you a particularly exasperating riddle or challenge. He nattered on, buzzing away, turning slowly one way and another within the grayness like a fat fly against a windowpane. Arshadin’s deathly heed was all on him: he watched him with a completeness that—for that moment—left no room for us. We realized so suddenly that we could move that it was shockingly painful not to. I still remember that strange pain of stillness.

Nyateneri sprang first—I lost an instant in getting my sword clear, because of my bad arm. I heard my friend shout furiously, “Fools! No!” Arshadin turned the vermillion-striped face of a rock-targ on us, all bony frills and great dripping mouth horribly topping the same squat human body. Nyateneri never faltered, but lunged in under the neck-plates, bare hands reaching for the still-human throat, trusting me to follow with my blade. So I did, but the dharises swooped screeching at my eyes, hurling themselves against my face and head until all I could do was to flail at them with the swordcane, helpless to aid Nyateneri as he clung desperately to Arshadin’s constantly changing form—rock-targ to bellowing sheknath to eight-foot-high, axe-beaked nishoru to something that I would, quite simply, kill myself to keep from seeing again. Nyateneri held on and held on, sometimes with only one hand, riding barely out of reach between hairy shoulders or razor-feathered wings like some baby animal perched high on its mother’s back. He was laughing, his lips stretched grotesquely back from his teeth like any rock-targ’s, and his eyes straining wide in the same way. So Rosseth must have seen him when he killed those two in the bathhouse. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly, as it always seems at such times. In fact, of course, everything is happening so fast that your mind trudges along far in the rear, dusty and lame. I remember at some point glimpsing Nyateneri through that battering cloud of dharises and thinking quite seriously, Well, he certainly does enjoy this more than sailing.

My friend, for his part, was jumping wildly up and down in his foggy prison, kicking and pounding at silent gray walls. All dignity seemed forgotten, even that of a caged animal; he was only a mad old man in a nightgown, yelling till his voice cracked in frustration. “Stop that! Lal, Nyateneri—idiots, idiots, stop that! To me, you imbeciles—here, to me! You cannot kill him!” Arshadin had taken the nishoru form—more or less—a second time; now he spread those stubby, scabby, glittering wings and finally shook Nyateneri loose, hurling him ten yards away, back toward the riverbank. He landed rolling, but brought up hard against a rock. I could hear the wind retch out of his lungs even from that distance.

Arshadin was already turning, himself again, ignoring me as I ran past him toward Nyateneri. With his rightful shape, his ghastly blank calmness returned; he glanced briefly toward my friend, dancing and swearing futilely, then let his breath out in a long, barely audible sigh that became a bolt of black lightning and made exactly the same sound slashing into the grayness that a blade makes in flesh.

The grayness did not vanish or blow apart, but hissed and darkened like meat over a fire; in a moment I could not see my friend at all. Nyateneri was on his feet, swaying—I clutched his wrist and dragged him forward, while Arshadin shouted boulders and dharises after us. The rocks came careening down the cliffside out of nowhere, gouging real tracks in the dirt and bringing real trees and stones ripping and skidding down with them. I lost hold of Nyateneri and screamed for him until grayness came down over me like a heavy, smothering cloth over a birdcage, and an irritable voice announced, “Chamata, a little less bustle, if you don’t mind. This wretched thing is difficult enough to manage at the best of times.”

Close as he was, I could barely see him, let alone distinguish him from Nyateneri. He was sitting straight up, as though in a high-backed chair, slightly above my head. His eyes were closed. The river gorge, the house, and Arshadin were gone, as were earth, sky, and everything but the grayness, which had no dimension and no ending, but only dwindled off into a further grayness, in which, at the very end of my eyesight, I thought I saw darker shapes appearing and vanishing again. I asked loudly, “Where are we? What has happened? When are we?”

I have dealt with magicians before. There isn’t one of them, even the best—even my friend—who could ever resist the least excuse to play with time. I think it must be the first thing they are all warned never to do. True or not, it is the first thing they turn to in a crisis, as others turn to red ale. I dread it and want no part of it, ever, and I always know when it is happening again.

Without opening his eyes, my friend said, “Sit down somewhere and be quiet, Lal.” Nyateneri touched my arm and drew me away. The air had become bitterly thin and cold; no matter how fiercely you drank it in, there was never quite enough breath in your lungs. That was the only sound: our shallow, too-rapid breathing. There was no wind, no flicker in the grayness, no slightest sense that we were moving, except for the distant come-and-go shapes that might have been nothing but eyestrain. I hugged myself for warmth and huddled beside Nyateneri.

“We are in a far place,” my friend said presently, “neither where nor when, but what you might call elsewhen. This”—and he gestured blindly at the freezing mist around us—“this is not a fairy coach, not a magic carpet sweeping us away to safety; it is a bubble of time—but it is not our time. Do either of you understand me?”

Nyateneri said simply, “I don’t want to understand you. Why do you have your eyes shut like that?”

“Because I am not entirely sure what would happen if I opened them. You might cease to exist—I might cease to exist. Or existence itself might—no, let that go, it makes even me a bit seasick. Like as not, we would merely end up back with Arshadin. Which would amount to the same thing.”

For all the familiar and comforting testiness, there was an undertone to his voice that I had never heard before. It was not a note of fear or anxiety or plain uncertainty—it fell between all such words, such sounds. But I was frightened, and literally uncertain even of what was under my feet; and cold as well, rattling with it. I demanded, “What happened there, back with Arshadin? Where are we going now? And why, in the name of”—but I could find no god quite equal to the situation—“why are you sitting in the air?”

My friend laughed, but for once it did not comfort me to hear him. “Am I? I hadn’t noticed. Where are we going? Why, back to the inn, if I should be permitted to manage it without undue distraction. I have never liked this particular method of travel, and I don’t think I have a natural knack for it. Arshadin, now—Arshadin has the knack. He used to scurry about like this all the time, no matter what I said to him. Had it fetch his lunch sometimes.”

He was silent for a moment, his eyes squeezing a bit more tightly shut. He said, “It betrayed him this time, that knack. There was no way I could resist him when he used the time-bubble to bring me here; but it drains so much strength merely to hold such a thing in this world, let alone make it work for you, that I knew he could not possibly keep it and me and you two all under control at once. I have told him so often—all energy has its natural limits: all, even his. I did tell him.” The last words were spoken in a near-whisper, and not to us. ”And then you two caused your diversion—clumsily, if I may say so, but quite effectively—and he tried to kill me in the bubble, believing that I was manipulating you, which shows a certain touching faith in his old teacher, even now.” His half-laugh held more rue than triumph.

Nyateneri said, “He spoke of those who are waiting. Are they waiting for you?”

“They are indeed,” my friend replied with surprising cheerfulness. “But they may have to wait a little longer yet. Now, if nobody asks me any more questions, I think—I am very nearly sure—that I will be able to bring this unseemly anomaly to rest at Karsh’s dining table. Whether it will be the right Karsh, of course, or the right Karsh’s table—well, well, in any case we should all find it an instructive experience, especially Karsh. Lal, if you close your eyes, too, you will not shiver so much. Do as I say.”

He was right—the murderous cold receded once I could no longer see the grayness, as though the sight of it had been what was truly invading my bones—but I could not keep from stealing small glances around me, though nothing was visible except the tiny dark figures that never drew nearer and never quite disappeared. I said, “Those. Who are they?”

“The people whose time we are using,” he replied shortly. “Close your eyes, Lal.”

I shut them. I said, “Arshadin does not bleed. My sword went almost through him, and there was no blood.”

“Because there is no blood in him,” my friend answered. “Lukassa is quite right—he gave his life to the Others, that night in the red tower, and they gave him back a kind of aliveness for which blood is not necessary. I know of such bargains, very long ago, but I never thought to see one struck in my time. My poor Arshadin. My poor Arshadin.” And after that quiet, toneless wail, he said nothing at all.

How much more time passed—ours or someone else’s—I cannot say. I heard my friend humming to himself: a maddeningly repetitious up-and-down five-note pattern that came, after awhile, to seem like the drone of a great engine under us, tireless and strangely soothing. I think I slept a little.

No, I know I slept, because I remember jolting painfully awake at the tensing of Nyateneri’s arm around me. He was saying very quietly, close to my ear, “Lal. Something is happening.” Even through the grayness I could see how stiff and pale his face was.

“What is it?” I asked. Nothing seemed to have changed: we were still motionless in freezing nowhere, and my friend was still sitting in the air, humming the same notes over and over. The only difference, if it was a difference, was that the little shapes at the edge of my vision had finally vanished. Nyateneri’s hand tightened on my left arm, the bad one, and I did not notice at all; not until later, when I saw the new bruise. “Look,” he said.

The grayness was thinning slowly, down from mist to dirty bathwater, and there were people appearing through it, and they were us. How much more plainly, or more madly, can I say it? I saw the three of us—perfect duplicates, down to the ribbons in my friend’s beard and the river mud caked on Nyateneri’s feet—but they, the figures, they didn’t see us. They went on about their business, which was not here, and were followed by others—some of them were us again, but more were being Karsh and Marinesha, and there seemed to be more Tikats than anyone else. No two were identical: there were versions of my friend that had neither ribbons nor beard nor nightgown, and variations on Nyateneri that I might not have recognized but for the height and the changing eyes. As for me, it made me giddy and a little sick, seeing so many copies of myself obliviously passing two feet away. There were small differences enough between them, as well, in dress and mannerism; but to my mind they were all twins, and all too short, too wide-mouthed and pointy-chinned—the old goblin face I have learned to tolerate in the glass, but not in bloody dozens!—and every one of them walking with the same awful swaggering roll. Do I walk like that? I still cannot believe I really walk like that.

There were others, too, crowding around and past them, coming and going in the dissipating grayness. I recognized Rosseth—looking wide-eyed and kind in every translation, and stronger than any of them knew—and other servants or guests at The Gaff and Slasher; beyond those were countless faces I had never seen, or anyway could not remember having seen. They were opaque but not solid: they passed through one another as they did through the mist, without taking notice. What I noticed, gaping and shaking my head, was that not one of them was Lukassa.

Beside me Nyateneri said, quite loudly, “Master”—and then he pronounced what I had always believed to be my friend’s name—“enough mystification is enough. What are we seeing, and who are these?”

My friend’s eyes were still so grimly shut that the corners of his mouth squeezed up with them when he turned toward us, but in that instant his face was very terrible. I did not know that face at all, and I was frightened of it—of him—then. He said in a slow, light, almost dreaming voice, “We will now all proceed to be extremely glad that I have at least maintained sense enough never to tell either of you my true name. If you had spoken it here, now, the three of us would have been spread through time—no, across time, smeared over it like so much butter. Do you have the least notion of what I am telling you?”

Before that blind face and that even more terrifying voice, I cowered as silently as I had when he first found me; but it was worse now, because I was older and could almost conceive of what he meant. Nyateneri tried for a moment to face him down, then crouched humbly before him. The voice said, “No, of course not, what possessed me to ask you that? If you ever came anywhere near understanding what I just told you, that understanding would drive you mad. At present, I think I could endure that well enough, but sooner or later I would probably start to feel bad about it. Probably. Are all that lot gone yet?”

Almost all of the duplicates had passed out of sight, save for a couple of the Tikats and one Karsh. I told him so, and he nodded and sat up straighter in the chair we could not see. His hands were shaping something equally invisible that seemed to be leaping and struggling between them, and growing as well. “When those go,” he said, “those last, tell me. Immediately.”

The Tikats vanished together, and there was just Karsh left—a younger, brown-eyed Karsh, wearing the embroidered vest and leather leggings of a prosperous south-coast farmer. It did not surprise me that he was the only one of all those figures who stood still even for a moment, peering briefly but very intently into the grayness all around him. Wherever he really was, he knew that something to do with him was happening somewhere. I said, “He’s going away now. He’s gone.”

“So, then,” my friend said softly, like Arshadin. He spoke several words that did not even sound like a language: from another room, I would have thought he was snoring or clearing his throat. The unseen thing growing between his hands seemed first to surge into him, and then to explode out of his grasp with a violence that rocked him backward, almost knocking him off his perch in the air. The grayness turned to night, but not any sort of night I knew. The air was too clear, as though its skin had somehow been ripped away, and the stars were too big. I never breathed that air, but held my breath for an hour or an instant, until my friend suddenly opened his eyes, and we were all three sitting quietly, like picnickers, on the stubbly little hill where Karsh has his travelers’ shrine. It was late afternoon, with a gray quarter-moon already rising in the west, behind the inn. We could hear the hogs snuffling in their pen, and Gatti Jinni shouting across the courtyard.

The moon over our little boat’s masthead last night had been full and golden, dripping ripe into the river. Nyateneri and I looked at each other. Someone began whistling in the stable.