1633880583 (F) (49 page)

“Let’s hear the other two,” Bone said.

“Second, overpower me, a creature of the rushing waters, by force.”

“And the last?” Gaunt said.

“Impress me with your fiddling. The Vestvinden fiddle will do nicely.”

“I don’t have a Vestvinden, or any fiddle,” Gaunt said. “Nor do I know how to play one.”

The fossegrim laughed. “Give me a song I have never heard. Open your thoughts, and I will know if you have one.”

Gaunt closed her eyes and imagined all the lullabies and rhymes of youth, all the lore of the bards, all the strange things she’d heard on the road.

“You have nothing,” the fossegrim sighed. “Kantenings have traveled far, and I know all your songs, skald. But return on Tordensday with a fiddle and a fat lamb, and I may teach you. For I sense tumult in the land, and a spirit of the waterfalls likes tumult.”

“Our ship won’t wait that long,” Gaunt said. “Not when there’s a good wind blowing.”

“That is no matter to me.”

“We’re not letting you go so easily,” Bone said, advancing, making Gaunt wonder what had gotten into him. “I’ve survived a dragon. I can face you, see what’s beyond your gateway.”

“Boastful,” said the fossegrim. “The woman is at least intriguing. You I have no time for.”

Before anyone could react, the water-spirit slapped Bone aside with an arm that seemed a sideways fork of the falls. The fossegrim fiddled as Bone plunged toward his doom.

Gaunt lunged for him, dropping the
Chart of Tomorrows
on the path. She had him by the arm, but he dangled over the abyss.

“Deserts,” he was saying. “Much better than mountains. Flat . . .”

“Shut up,” she said, pulling, straining, until she saw the brilliant burst of color below him.

“Bone, let go,” Gaunt told him.

“I realize Katta’s religion has been rubbing off on all of us,” Bone said, struggling to get purchase on the cliff, “and I respect the outlook of the Undermined, but I’d rather not be plunging to my doom just yet. . . .”

“You’re not doomed, Bone. Trust me.”

And, closing his eyes, he did.

The flying carpet Deadfall caught him in his plummet.

“I had a premonition we were needed after all,” said Katta, Freidar beside him, as Deadfall rolled Bone off onto a stony ledge beside the waterfall path.

“Be grateful at the risk I take,” said Deadfall, “thief.”

“Very, very, very grateful,” said Bone, hugging the ground.

Freidar stared up at the waterfall in wonder. “The reality of the fossegrim overwhelms the tales.”

As they watched, the misty figure began fading back into the falls.

“Wait!” Gaunt called out, pointing at Katta. “Behold this man. He’s journeyed from hidden lands of the East. Search his mind for new songs, fossegrim.”

The figure’s sharp definitions returned. “I sense this is true. Speak, traveler.”

Katta did not miss a beat, and Gaunt wanted to hug him. He said, “O spirit of the waterfall, I have come from far lands to tell you the ways of the Undetermined, who broke the chain of causes, and has had great effect. I will sing you a song of his teachings, and then speak of its meaning. For skilled as I am, I cannot match the songs of the Plateau of Geam to the tongue of Kantenjord. You must take sound and meaning as if they were two accounts of a deeper reality, like two blind men trying to deduce the shape of an elephant.”

Katta took a deep breath and intoned low rumbling notes that astonished Gaunt, who hadn’t heard a singing voice so deep since her time in a lamasery of far Xembala. Katta’s words boomed slowly upon the face of the rock, and their strength and inevitability made even the doom-laden song of Wiglaf seem a lighthearted, ephemeral thing. If the Earthe itself had a heartbeat, it might sound like this.

It seemed a thousand years before the booming was done, and yet in its aftermath it felt like an isolated moment, a single thought.

She could see nothing in the waterfall now but sensed a presence there, listening.

Katta said, “That is a song based on a poem of a great teacher of Geam. I will try to render his words in Kantentongue:

Here is my place of meditation

Snowy heights rise high above

Far below, my patron village

Down the snow-edged rippling river.

The eagle soars between

Above the village meadows blooming

Below the wheeling clouds

And shepherds graze their scattered herds

Singing songs and playing reeds.

Yet all of it is as a mirage,

A reflection in the waters.

I am nothing much

Fathered by eagles, birthed by glaciers

I don’t balk at the endless sky

Nor fear the constricted earth

It will all pass away

Like a magic trick, a dream.

How strange the phenomena of this illusory world—

Everything manifested from nothing.

The sky unexpectedly cleared, and sun blazed upon the waterfall. Within the spray the fossegrim’s form had become dark, like a human-shaped portal into the underworld. Within him gleamed tiny lights like distant stars, or flecks of white in onyx, or fireflies of a distant summer land.

The voice of the fossegrim, gentle and sad, resonated like water striking rock. “You have given me a gift with these words, and especially with this song, a music unlike any I’ve ever heard. You have paid the price I demanded of the bard. So, poet of Swanisle, you who would learn the fiddle. Step forward.”

She did so, shivering in the spray.

“Step into the water.”

After a moment’s hesitation she did so.

She should have been drenched, but what she felt instead was a rush of sensations pouring into her mind. Stars whirled, and meteors flashed, and worlds were formed from fire and died in ice. In between came the music, bright, bittersweet, rich with archaic echoes. She knew with sharp clarity how Kantenjord was but one era upon one tiny corner of Earthe, and Earthe was but one world of an unimaginably vast cosmos.

Yet all was connected, worlds linked by one fabric of space and time, landmasses rising from one lithosphere, beneath one atmosphere. She saw the connections could bring pain as well as joy, for she experienced Kantenjord erupting in fire and smoke, and the smoke covering the whole world, choking out light and heat.

The world died in endless winter: Kantenjord, Swanisle, and the Eldshore. Amberhorn, Palmary, and Qushkent. The Karvak Realm, Xembala, Qiangguo. All dead in a grave of frost.

And on went the sound of the Vestvinden fiddle. Even at the end of the world there must be music.

“Gaunt? Gaunt. Persimmon.”

Now Bone had his hands on hers, and she realized she was facing away from the waterfall and whistling. She stopped.

“Persimmon?”

“I’m here, Bone.” She met his gaze. She was hardly touched by the water, but the feeling of doom stayed with her. Turning, she saw the fossegrim was gone. Its insights would remain, however. She shivered. “I’ve learned how to play. I just need a fiddle. Imago. I can open the way with this. We find the right waterfall, we can find Innocence through the Straits of Tid. We can find our son.”

“That can wait,” Bone said. “We nearly lost each other, here. Let’s get back to
Bison
.”

“We should hurry,” Freidar said. “Villagers are streaming into Klarvik from up Garmstad way. Something has happened.”

Despite the news, Deadfall declined to fly them back to Klarvik but instead rustled down the path like a colorful serpent. Freidar and Katta looked thoughtful. Malin walked silently, bearing the
Chart of Tomorrows
and staring into it now and again. Peik, once voluble, looked lost in worry.

“If there are refugees . . .” Bone began.

“They are lost,” Peik said. “The army. I know it in my gut.”

“We have to get Innocence out of this,” Bone told Gaunt.

“Yes,” Gaunt said, but it was hard to hear his words over the memory of the music.

When they returned, Bone saw that Klarvik seemed on its way to adding a hundred more people, peasants fleeing word of the sacking of Garmstad Town and the burning or submission of the villages in the Karvaks’ path. Folk were coming here because the Karvaks were ignoring Klarvik. The horde was headed to Svanstad.

Of Ragnar’s army, there was nothing left but a few, many too shamed to speak of it. There was a new prayer in the air: ‘From the fury of the Karvaks, Goddess preserve us.’”

“The wheel turns,” Bone heard Gaunt murmur, as they loaded supplies onto
Bison
.

A boy approached the ship. It was Peik.

For a moment, Bone thought the lad was going to ask to sail with them. Instead he held out a fiddle, nearly the shape of a violin, with mother-of-pearl inlay.

“This is . . . was . . . my father’s. He is not coming back. You’re on a mission to kill Karvaks, yes? If giving you this fiddle will help you avenge him in any way, I am happy.”

“I am honored to take this,” Gaunt managed to say. “I will find a way to be worthy of the gift.”

“Just kill Karvaks,” the boy said, never leaving the strand. He was still there when
Bison
rounded the bay’s edge.

CHAPTER 28

SIEGE

Joy was training with Nan when word of the disaster at Garmsmaw Pass came to Svanstad.

“Training” seemed an odd word for it. In the world of
A Tumult of Trees on Peculiar Peaks
, training had meant pugilism and swordplay, concentration exercises to cultivate chi, endless jogging regimens through mountain paths, and discussions of the body’s energy flow and how to redirect it.

“Training” for Nan seemed to consist of learning strange old stories and a peculiar old writing system.

“I’m just not sure,” Joy said in frustration one day, “how learning
about
something can teach me to
do
something.”

“I understand,” the old woman said, not pausing from the work she was performing in the Fortress courtyard, to the consternation of the guards and servants. They stood in a twenty-foot-diameter circle of white, for all the rest of the night’s snowfall had been cleared at dawn. Nan was slowly tracing a pattern in the snow, using a knobbed wooden staff decorated with brass and gems. “The difficulty is, the only people with experience being a Runethane are long dead. I can’t take you to the Great Chain of Unbeing. What I can do is tell you stories of earlier Runethanes, and help you to picture the Great Chain in your mind. It is marked with the elder runes of the Vindir. Know these runes and you can truly envision the Chain. Now then, behold the rune
raido
, meaning ‘journey.’”

“So . . . you summon the power by tracing a rune?”

“Yes.”

“Couldn’t you save time by making it smaller?”

“Ha! Yes. There are Runewalkers who have spent days tracing out the patterns. Indeed, I suspect there are a few runes now activated in this city, writ in stone, barley, ash, or blood.”

“Is bigger better?”

“A larger pattern carries more influence but is also less specific in intent. The bigger the wish, the more likely the intent will go awry, or succeed in a fraught way.”

“What have you wished?”

“That you might travel mentally. Close your eyes and spread-eagle yourself in the snow. Think of the Chain as I’ve described it.”

She did these things, though she felt foolish.

“Do you see the Chain?”

“I see horses . . . they carry riders . . . they carry riders here!”

Hoofbeats echoed through the courtyard of the Fortress. Joy rose and dusted snow off herself. Ten men rode up to Nan, mistaking her for an authority.

“Well?” Nan said.

They were so distraught they had trouble speaking. A hairy teenaged boy and a bald teenaged boy each began speaking, each failing to get the words out, each vainly encouraging the other to talk. Yet if their tongues were still, their eyes spoke of horrors. At last a burly, florid-looking man spoke up. “I am Huginn Sharpspear, Lady. Kollr here, Rolf, the rest . . . we are nearly all that’s left of Ragnar’s army.”