Assassin's Quest (73 page)

I halted. Here. This was the plaza where I had been kneeling in the snow the night before. There, that pillar standing at its center, I recalled some sort of monument or sculpture looming over me. I walked toward it. It was made of the same ubiquitous black stone veined with gleaming crystal. To my weary eyes it seemed to gleam brighter with the same mysterious unlight the other structures gave off. The faint shining outlined on its side glyphs cut deep into its surface. I walked slowly around it. Some, I was sure, were familiar and perhaps twin to those I had copied earlier in the day. Was this then some sort of guidepost, labeled with destinations according to compass headings? I reached out a hand to trace one of the familiar glyphs.

The night bent around me. A wave of vertigo swept over me. I clutched at the column for support, but somehow missed it and went stumbling forward. My outstretched hands found nothing and I fell face forward into crusted snow and ice. For a time I just lay there, my cheek against the icy road, blinking my useless eyes at the blackness of the night. Then a warm, solid weight hit me.
My brother!
Nighteyes greeted me joyously. He thrust his cold nose into my face and pawed at my head to rouse me.
I knew you would come back. I knew it!

28

The Coterie

P
ART OF THE
great mystery that surrounds the Elderlings is that the few images we have of them bear small resemblance to each other. This is true not only of tapestries and scrolls that are copies of older works and hence might contain errors, but also of the few images of Elderlings that have survived from King Wisdom’s time. Some of the images bear superficial resemblances to the legends of dragons, featuring wings, claws, scaly skin, and great size. But others do not. In at least one tapestry, the Elderling is depicted as similar to a human, but gold of skin and great of size. The images do not even agree in the number of limbs that benevolent race possessed. They may have as many as four legs and two wings also, or have no wings at all and walk upon two legs as a man.

It has been theorized that so little was written about them because knowledge of the Elderlings at that time was regarded as common knowledge. Just as no one sees fit to create a scroll that deals with the most basic attributes of what a horse is, for it would serve no useful purpose, so no one thought that one day Elderlings would be the stuff of legends. To a certain degree, this makes sense. But one has only to look about at all the scrolls and tapestries in which horses are featured as the stuff of common life to find a flaw. Were Elderlings so accepted a part of life, surely they would have been more often depicted.

After a very confusing hour or two, I found myself back in the yurt with the others. The night seemed all the colder for my having spent an almost warm day in the city. We huddled in the tent in our blankets. They had told me I had vanished from the lip of the cliff only the night before; I had told them of all I had encountered in the city. There had been a certain amount of disbelief on everyone’s part. I had felt both moved and guilty to see how much anguish my disappearance had caused them. Starling had obviously been weeping, while both Kettle and Kettricken had the owly look of folks who had not slept. The Fool had been the worst, pale and silent with a slight trembling to his hands. It had taken a bit of time for all of us to recover. Kettle had cooked a meal twice the size of what we usually had and all save the Fool had eaten heartily. He had not seemed to have the energy. While the others sat in a circle around the brazier listening to my tale, he was already curled in his blankets, the wolf snug beside him. He seemed completely exhausted.

After I had been over the events of my adventure for the third time, Kettle commented cryptically, “Well, thank Eda you were dosed with elfbark before you were taken; otherwise you would never have kept your wits at all.”

“You say “taken’?” I pressed immediately.

She scowled at me. “You know what I mean.” She looked about at all of us staring at her. “Through the guidepost or whatever it is. They must have something to do with it.” A silence met her words. “It seems obvious to me, that’s all. He left us at one, and arrived there at one. And returned to us the same way.”

“But why didn’t they take anyone else?” I protested.

“Because you are the only Skill-sensitive one among us,” she pointed out.

“Are they Skill-wrought as well?” I asked her bluntly.

She met my glance. “I looked at the guidepost by daylight. It is hewn of black stone with wide threads of shining crystal in it. Like the walls of the city you describe. Did you touch both posts?”

I was silent a moment, thinking. “I believe so.”

She shrugged. “Well, there you are. A Skill-imbued object can retain the intent of its maker. Those posts were erected to make travel easier for those who could master them.”

“I’ve never heard of such things. How do you know them?”

“I am only speculating on what seems obvious to me,” she told me stubbornly. “And that is all I am going to say. I’m going to sleep. I’m exhausted. We all spent the entire night and most of the day looking for you and worrying about you. What hours we could rest, that wolf never stopped howling.”

Howling?

I called you. You did not answer.

I did not hear you, or I would have tried.

I begin to fear, little brother. Forces pull at you, taking you to places I cannot follow, closing your mind to mine. This, right now, is as close as I have ever come to being accepted into a pack. But if I lost you, even it would be lost to me.

You will not lose me,
I promised him, but I wondered if it was a promise I could keep. “Fitz?” Kettricken asked in a nudging voice.

“I am here,” I assured her.

“Let us look at the map you copied.”

I took it out and she drew out her own map. We compared the two. It was hard to find any similarities, but the scales of the maps were different. At last we decided that the piece I had copied down in the city bore a superficial resemblance to the portion of trail that was drawn on Kettricken’s map. “This place,” I gestured to one destination marked on her map, “would seem to be the city. If that is so, then this corresponds to this, and this to this.”

The map Verity had set out with had been a copy of this older, faded map. On that one the trail I now thought of as the Skill road had been marked, but oddly, as a path that began suddenly in the Mountains and ended abruptly at three separate destinations. The significance of those endpoints had once been marked on the map, but those markings had faded into inky smears. Now we had the map I had copied in the city, with those three endpoints on it also. One had been the city itself. The other two were now our concern.

Kettricken studied the glyphs I had copied from the city’s map. “I’ve seen such markings, from time to time,” she admitted uneasily. “No one truly reads them anymore. A handful of them are still known. One encounters them mostly in odd places. In a few places in the Mountains, there are raised stones that have such marks. There are some at the west end of the Great Chasm Bridge. No one knows when they were carved, or why. Some are thought to mark graves, but others say they marked land boundaries.”

“Can you read any of them?” I asked her.

“A few. They are used in a challenge game. Some are stronger than others. . . .” Her voice trailed off as she studied my scratchings. “None match exactly the ones I know,” she said at last, disappointment heavy in her voice. “This one is almost like the one for “stone.’ But the others I have never seen at all.”

“Well, it’s one of the ones that was marked here.” I tried to make my voice cheery. “Stone” conveyed nothing at all to me. “It seems closest to where we are. Shall we go there next?”

“I would have liked to see the city,” the Fool said softly. “I should have liked to see the dragon, too.”

I nodded slowly. “It is a place and a thing worth seeing. Much knowledge is there, if only we had the time to ferret it out. Did not I have Verity always in my head with his “Come to me, come to me’ I think I would have been more curious to explore.” I had said nothing to them of my dreams of Molly and Chade. Those were private things, as was my ache to be home with her again.

“Doubtless you would have,” Kettle agreed. “And doubtless gotten yourself into more trouble that way. I wonder, did he so bind you to keep you on the road and protect you from distractions?”

I would have challenged her again on her knowledge, had not the Fool repeated softly, “I would have liked to see the city.”

“We should all sleep now. We are up at first light, to travel hard tomorrow. It heartens me to think that Verity had been there before FitzChivalry, even as it fills me with foreboding. We must get to him quickly. I can no longer stand wondering each night why he never returned.”

“Comes the Catalyst, to make stone of flesh and flesh of stone. At his touch shall be wakened the dragons of the earth. The sleeping city shall tremble and waken to him. Comes the Catalyst.” The Fool’s voice was dreamy.

“The writings of White Damir,” Kettle added reverently. She looked at me and for a moment was annoyed. “Hundreds of years of writings and prophecies and they all terminate in you?”

“Not my fault,” I said inanely. I was already rucking my way into my blankets. I thought longingly of the almost warm day I had had. The wind was blowing and I felt chilled to the bone.

I was drowsing off when the Fool reached over to pat my face with a warm hand. “Good you’re alive,” he muttered.

“Thank you,” I said. I was summoning up Kettle’s game board and pieces in an effort to keep my mind to myself for the night. I had just begun to contemplate the problem. Suddenly I sat up, exclaiming, “Your hand is warm! Fool! Your hand is warm!”

“Go to sleep,” Starling chided me in an offended tone.

I ignored her. I dragged the blanket down from the Fool’s face and touched his cheek. His eyes opened slowly. “You’re warm,” I told him. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t feel warm,” he informed me miserably. “I feel cold. And very, very tired.”

I began building up the fire in the brazier hastily. Around me the others were stirring. Starling across the tent had sat up and was peering at me through the gloom.

“The Fool is never warm,” I told them, trying to make them understand my urgency. “Always, when you touch his skin, it is cool. Now he’s warm.”

“Indeed?” Starling asked in an oddly sarcastic voice.

“Is he ill?” Kettle asked tiredly.

“I don’t know. I’ve never known him to be ill in my whole life.”

“I am seldom ill,” the Fool corrected me quietly. “But this is a fever I have known before. Lie down and sleep, Fitz. I’ll be all right. I expect the fever will have burned out by morning.”

“Whether it has or not, we must travel tomorrow morning,” Kettricken said implacably. “We have already lost a day lingering here.”

“Lost a day?” I exclaimed, almost angrily. “Gained a map, or more detail for one, and knowledge that Verity had been to the city. For myself, I doubt not that he went there as I did, and perhaps returned to this very spot. We have not lost a day, Kettricken, but gained all the days it would have taken us to find a way down to what remains of the road down there and then tramp to the city. And back again. As I recall, you had proposed spending a day just to seek for a way down that slide. Well, we did, and we found the way.” I paused. I took a breath and imposed calm on my voice. “I will not seek to force any of you to my will. But if the Fool is not well enough to travel tomorrow, I shall not travel either.”

A glint came into Kettricken’s eyes, and I braced myself for battle. But the Fool forestalled it. “I shall travel tomorrow, well or not,” he assured us both.

“That’s settled, then,” Kettricken said swiftly. Then, in a more humane voice she asked, “Fool, is there anything I can do for you? I would not use you so harshly, were not the need so great. I have not forgotten, and never shall, that without you I would never have reached Jhaampe alive.”

I sensed a story I was not privy to, but kept my questions to myself.

“I will be fine. I am just . . . Fitz? Could I beg some elfbark of you? That warmed me last night as nothing else has.”

“Certainly.” I was rummaging in my pack for it when Kettle spoke out warningly.

“Fool, I counsel you against it. It is a dangerous herb, and almost often more damaging than good. Who knows but you are ill tonight because you had some night before last?”

“It is not that potent an herb,” I said disdainfully. “I’ve used it for a number of years, and taken no lasting ill from it.”

Kettle gave a snort. “None that you are wise enough to see, anyway,” she said sarcastically. “But it is a warming herb that gives energy to the flesh, even if it is deadening to the spirit.”

“I always found it restored me rather than deadened me,” I countered as I found the small packet and opened it. Without my asking her, Kettle got up to put water on to boil. “I never noticed it dulling my mind,” I added.

“The one taking it seldom does,” she retorted. “And while it may boost your physical energy for a time, you must always pay for it later. Your body is not to be tricked, young man. You will know that better when you are as old as I.”

I fell silent. As I thought back over the times I had used elfbark to restore myself, I had the uncomfortable suspicion that she was at least partly right. But my suspicion was not enough to keep me from brewing two cups rather than just one. Kettle shook her head at me, but lay back down and said no more. I sat beside the Fool as we drank our tea. When he handed me back the empty mug, his hand seemed warmer, not cooler.

“Your fever is rising,” I warned him.

“No. It is just the heat of the mug on my skin,” he suggested.

I ignored him. “You are shaking all over.”

“A bit,” he admitted. Then his misery broke though and he said, “I am cold as I have never been before. My back and my jaws ache from shaking with it.”

Flank him,
suggested Nighteyes. The big wolf shifted to press more closely against him. I added my blankets to those covering the Fool and then crawled in beside him. He said not a word but his shivering lessened somewhat.

“I can’t recall that you were ever ill at Buckkeep,” I said quietly.

“I was. But very seldom, and I kept to myself. As you recall, the healer had little tolerance for me, and I for him. I would not have trusted my health to his purges and tonics. Beside. What works for your kind sometimes does nothing for mine.”

“Is your kind so vastly different from mine?” I asked after a time. He had brought us close to a topic we had seldom even mentioned.

“In some ways,” he sighed. He lifted a hand to his brow. “But sometimes I surprise even myself.” He took a breath, then sighed it out as if he had endured some pain for an instant. “I may not even be truly ill. I have been going through some changes in the past year. As you have noticed.” He added the last in a whisper.

“You have grown, and gathered color,” I agreed softly.

“That is a part of it.” A smile twitched over his face, then faded. “I think I am almost an adult now.”

I snorted softly. “I have counted you as a man for many years, Fool. I think you found your manhood before I did mine.”