In the Red Lord's Reach Page 20

  She hesitated, staring at him, as if reading the soul behind his eyes. At last, more quietly, she said, "Why didn't you use your witch's power to go down into the crevasse after him?"

  "I told you then: I promised. I tried to honor that promise, whatever you may think. At the end, there was no choice."

  "He was no special friend of yours."

  "He was a comrade on this journey. And a human being."

  She was the one to drop her gaze, finally, and then to half turn away from him. "You have nowhere to go in the south," she said.

  "No."

  "You have stayed among us, in spite of many… unfortunate events."

  "Yes."

  "You really think this is the home you never had."

  "I've thought so, sometimes. I would regret leaving it. But I have left many places before, and I have many regrets; I have the strength to carry another. But not to joust with you, lady. I'll have no more of that."

  "You never feared me."

  "I did."

  "But not anymore."

  "You have great wisdom, and I respect you. Respect is better, I think, than fear. I would still serve you, lady, if you would let me. I want to serve the good of the people of the north, just as you do. How much better it would be if we worked together."

  She looked at him, over one shoulder. "Give me credit for your successes."

  "Lady, you raised the dead, not I. I am a child beside you."

  She smiled then, just a little. "Yes."

  "You told me once that I was yours. Use me, and my power will belong to you. And everyone will know it."

  She met his eyes. "Simir would be sorry to see you gone."

  "And your daughter, I think."

  "She's of no importance." She held her hand out to him. "Shall it be a truce, then?"

  "With all my heart," said Alaric, and he took her hand. It was cold, cold as ice, but the grip was firm.

  "You belong in the north," said Kata. "I've known that for some time. I would be wrong to send you away. You don't believe in the net of power that lies across the world, but you are part of it just the same. Perhaps you'll understand that by the time this journey is done." She let his hand go at last. "I thought you were a coward, Alaric. But now I know that you were only a child. The north will nourish you, has nourished you, and you will become full-grown with us."

  He bowed to her.

  ****

  KATA WOULD NOT let them stay encamped any longer; their goal was still too far off to let any more time pass in idleness. Grem was still weak and unsteady on his feet, so they made him a litter of some pieces of the large tent, and each of the others took one end of a pole for carrying him. Kata and Alaric walked in front. They crossed the crack at the narrow place she had found.

  She consulted her north-seeking needle often now, and when Alaric glanced at it, he noticed that the needle sometimes quivered from side to side, as if unsure of the north. Kata said that was a good sign.

  A few sleeps later, Grem was walking for part of each trek, tramping beside Alaric, saying with a grin that he wanted to be near help in case anything happened to him again. Soon enough, there was no more need for the litter at all, and Grem resumed his share of their common goods.

  By then, Kata's needle was quivering constantly, like a palsied finger. By then, too, Alaric was beginning to feel ill.

  He said nothing to the others. He had been sick before, with coughs or mild fevers. This ailment seemed familiar enough in its symptoms, mainly a slight dizziness that came and went, that was strongest when he was tired. He thought it must be caused by the long, cold marches, or perhaps it was an aftermath of his dunking. Sometimes he felt almost queasy enough to vomit, but he fought it down. They had already suffered a delay, and he knew that Kata was anxious to keep moving.

  But one day he drank too much water at one draft, and he did vomit, miserably and painfully; and once the vomiting began, he could not control it but spewed again and again; and when his stomach was empty, it continued to knot itself up, as if trying to turn his whole body inside out. Grem and Kata caught his arms and supported him while the spasms racked him, and when he was finished at last, and exhausted, they eased him to the ice, and Kata swept his mask off to look into his face.

  "Pale," she said. "I should have seen it before this."

  "Sorry," Alaric whispered.

  She took his water bottle, sniffed its contents, tasted. All of their water was ice chipped free of the whiteness underfoot and then melted in bottles carried under their furs; she pronounced his drinkable. She tasted the dried meat in his pack and found it adequate. Then she bared her right hand, warmed it inside her clothing, and slid it into his hood to touch the back of his neck.

  "No fever," she said. "How do you feel now?"

  He swallowed thickly. "Thirsty."

  She shook her head. "No water for now. It might bring back the vomiting. Does your belly hurt?"

  "An ache here, from the vomiting." He touched his side.

  "Was that there before?"

  "No."

  "And your head?"

  "I'm… dizzy. Have been, a little, for a while."

  "No pain?"

  "No."

  She stared at his eyes a moment, then prodded his middle with both hands. "Does this hurt?"

  "No. I'm all right. It's nothing. Maybe the grease in the meat. It's a bit rancid. But I'm all right now. I can go on."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes."

  She and Grem helped him up.

  "Still dizzy?" she asked.

  "A little. But I can walk. We shouldn't waste time standing here."

  "True enough." She gave him one last look, then said, "Grem, take his arm."

  "I'm all right," said Alaric.

  "Take his arm. Now let's go on."

  In spite of his protests, Alaric found Grem's arm useful. He felt weak from the vomiting, and unsteady, and the hoops on his feet were suddenly much more difficult to walk with. And though he felt stronger soon and, at Kata's instructions, ate a small amount of meat and drank a few sips of water, the dizziness did not pass.

  When they camped that night, Kata called him into her tent.

  "It's nothing," he said. "It will pass. Probably when I wake tomorrow, I'll be fine."

  She felt of his forehead and the back of his neck, of the sides of his throat and the area beneath his jaw. By the dim light of her lamp, she looked into his mouth. Again, she prodded his belly. Then she shook her head. "This is no ordinary illness." She unpinned the brooch and held the quivering needle in front of his face. "This is yourself, my Alaric. Small wonder your head is dizzy."

  He frowned. "I don't know what you mean."

  "Did I not say that you were part of the net of power that lies across the world? This needle traces its lines and bows to their sources. But those sources dance, my Alaric; they dance so fast that, were they visible, no human eye would see more than a blur. From far away, the dance seems small, and the needle doesn't notice it; but we are close to them, and the needle quivers because it cannot keep up. Just so are you quivering, my Alaric."

  He shook his head, though that made him dizzier. "I am not a needle."

  "No? Then the dizziness will pass. But I think it will not, until the dance halts. And it will halt, for that place and time is the goal of this journey. And that will be a good test of my surmise about you."

  He smiled wanly. "Will it be soon?"

  "Yes, soon. But until then, I have something that will help you." She reached into her pack and drew out a leather flask. "Give me your water bottle." When she had it open in her hands, she poured some powder from the flask into the bottle, capped it, and shook it hard. "Drink this when you're thirsty, a mouthful or two at a time. And when you refill it, I'll give you more. It will control the vomiting."

  "And the dizziness?"

  "Perhaps. But I think you would do well to hold fast to Grem, and not to think about your head too much. Now you'll need rest. Go to the others and t
ell them that it is time to use the wheel lamp."

  "Wheel lamp?"

  "Another bit of ancient magic. You will see."

  The other men grinned when he told them, as if they were children being given a special treat. Two of them hovered at the entry of their tent while Velet went inside to fetch his pack, which was the bulkiest of them all and the only one which had never been opened in their long northward journey. When he had set it on the ice and they had all helped to untie its lashings, Alaric saw that almost the entire pack was taken up by a pyramid-shaped wooden box that measured nearly hip-high from base to apex. Two of its faces swung downward to reveal a strange device inside, held immobile by wooden chocks; with careful hands, the nomad men brought it out into the cold sunlight.

  Alaric had never seen anything like it. In its middle was a six-spoked metal wheel an arm's length across, pierced by a vertical axle of the same length. Encompassing the wheel, but touching only the ends of the axle, was a seamless framework of pale green polished ceramic; a hoop encircled the wheel itself two finger spans beyond its rim, and four struts joined that hoop to each end of the axle from points spaced equally about the circumference. The whole contrivance resembled some giant, elaborate spindle, and indeed, wound about the axle on each side of the wheel were many turns of thin, tough cord.

  Lanri held the thing with the axle vertical while Velet swung a brace out from beside each of the lower four struts; the braces clicked into place, making four slanted legs for the thing to sit on firmly, with the lower part of the axle as the fifth. There was a flat loop at the end of each brace, and Lanri hammered his longest tent pegs into them, making the device as stable and immovable as any structure could be on ice. Then he strapped cleats on his boots, and Velet did the same; and Grem pulled Alaric back twenty or thirty paces away from them.

  "We have to give them plenty of room," said Grem.

  Lanri took the free end of the cord that was wound about the axle above the wheel, and Velet took the end from the one below the wheel. They looked at each other, nodded, made a short synchronized count, and began to ease apart, the cords tight in their hands. Faster and faster they moved, their cleats biting hard into the crusty surface, till they were speeding away from each other like bounding jackrabbits; between them, the wheel of the device spun up, faster and faster, like a child's top. They were still running headlong when both cords came free of the axle, and they staggered as the cords snapped into the air like frightened snakes.

  The wheel, spinning, began to glow. By the time Grem pulled Alaric back beside it, it was yellow bright and yellow hot, like the flame of a wood fire.

  Swiftly, the men opened their tent up and, pulling it to the device, enclosed that glow in leather walls. Inside, the wheel lamp was like a brazier, flooding the space with light and warmth.

  "I haven't been this warm since we left the band," Grem said, holding his hands out to the glowing wheel as to a flame. He had spread their ground covers between the wheel lamp's braces, to keep the ice beneath from melting too much. "This is always the best part of the journey."

  Lanri and Velet nodded.

  "But what is it?" asked Alaric.

  "Only Kata knows," said Grem.

  But all she would say was, "Ancient magic, my Alaric. And only good here in the heart of the north."

  The wheel spun for a long time, longer than he would have credited; he fell asleep before it even slowed perceptibly. By the time he woke, it had halted, but even so, he could still feel faint warmth radiating from it, the last remnants of its glow. During the next march, the men showed him how, here in the heart of the north, all metal warmed, though nothing like the wheel lamp; even his knife was warm as flesh to the touch, and if his hands became numb, he could bring the feeling back by wrapping them about the blade. He did that, more than once, for the air was bitter; and he laid the blade against his cheek as well, and his forehead, for his furry hood was never quite enough to keep the cold away.

  Kata's needle was quivering more violently now every time he looked at it. His own internal quivering was less, though, because of her medicine, and so was the dizziness in his head. But they weren't gone entirely. And looking at the needle always made him feel worse.

  Still they moved on, heads down against the ever-strengthening wind, daggers slipped into their mittens, the wheel lamp warming their sleep. Walk, sleep, walk, sleep, and still the ice stretched onward, endless, changeless. Sometimes Alaric felt that Kata must have missed her goal long since, and they would never find it, only wander with the uncertain needle until they fell off the end of the world.

  "That can't happen," Grem said when Alaric voiced his suspicions in a half-joking tone. "The world is round. It doesn't have an edge."

  "I've heard that before," Alaric said, smiling with cold, cracked lips, "but it doesn't make a very good song."

  And then, on a day like all the others, in a place that looked like any other place on the ice, Kata shrugged off her pack.

  "We stop here," she said, and she began to pitch her tent.

  The rest were happy enough to set up their shelter and thaw themselves at the wheel lamp, even though they had not walked half as far as usual. Alaric was curious to see how long the wheel took to spin down; his wakefulness had never yet outlasted it. This time, however, before he could detect any slowing, Kata called him to come to her tent.

  There, she had a duplicate of the wheel lamp, though much smaller, and in a frame of polished wood where the seams and joins were easily visible. But it glowed as bright as the other, and filled her smaller space with warmth.

  "Still dizzy?" she asked, gesturing for him to sit beside her.

  "Yes, though your medicine helps."

  "Good. You should be feeling better soon."

  He smiled a little. "I hope so."

  "You could always leave us, you know. I think the dizziness would vanish if you went back south."

  "I can manage."

  She nodded. "Then I have something to show you." From within the only cushion in her tent, she drew the wooden box he had seen once before, the box inlaid with symbols of the Pole Star. She opened it and lifted the flask and cups out, lifted out even the mossy lining, and showed him its bare floor. The wood was pale there, not ebony like the rest, and burnt into it was a queer family of symbols—first, the familiar Pole Star; next, a hexagon with its vertices joined by internal crossing lines; and last, a six-pointed star made from two overlapping triangles:

  "These are the symbols of power," she said. "The first you know—the Pole Star, ruler of the north. Ruler of yourself, my Alaric, from the day you were born. The second, the bound hexagon, derives from the heart of the Pole Star and represents the powers of attraction; as iron is drawn to the lodestone, so these powers pull upon each other, though they never unite. The third symbol, the triangle star, marks the Pole Star without its heart, and represents the powers of repulsion; as one lodestone can repel another, so these powers strive to thrust each other away, yet they never fly apart. These are the forces around us this very moment, my Alaric." He smiled again. "Small wonder I'm dizzy."

  "Indeed," she said. "And now I will show the deepest mystery of all." She touched something in the box, and the pale wood that bore the three symbols fell free, revealing another bottom beneath, and another symbol:

  N

  "This is a figure of my own devising, yet based on all that I learned from my own teacher, and since. It combines anew the attractive and repulsive forces of the last two figures—to show the northern heart of the net of power that overlays the world. But it is not merely a symbol, my Alaric; it is a diagram. It is a map of the land on which we sit at this moment." With the tip of one finger, she touched the lowermost vertex of the figure. "We are very near to this one."

  He peered at the indicated area. And not knowing what else to say, he said, "Well."

  "This is one of the net's very sources, one of the six in the north. These runes at each vertex are the ancient signs of their qualities
. Look here." She held the false bottom of the box close to the wheel lamp and touched the empty center of the third diagram. At that angle, Alaric could make out a pair of tiny runes carved in the pale wood, that he had not noticed before:

  "This is the sign of the lodestone," she said, "for it bears both qualities of power in itself, though in none but the smallest measure."

  "The two qualities… of attraction and repulsion?"

  "Oh, nothing so simple, my Alaric. Nothing less than the powers that hold the world together."

  "Yes, I can see that would not be simple."

  "And here, in the very midst of it all, equidistant from the sources of power and held in thrall by them, is the axis upon which the sphere of the world spins. The axis, capped by the Pole Star, upon which the very sky spins. No, these are not simple things, my Alaric. I would not spend my life on simple things." He looked at her. "Will we be going to that axis?" Her mouth quirked slightly. "Do you love the ice so much, minstrel?"

  "Would I be dizzy there?" She hesitated. "Perhaps not. But we won't be making that trip. We have reached our goal, or so close that it is near the same thing. We have only to wait now until the sources of power stop dancing."