Mirror 04 The Way Between the Worlds (26 page)

'The thranx has changed you.'
'Perhaps it has. I lived so long in terror of Rulke that it coloured every
aspect of my life.'
'And that's gone now?'
'I think so. At Carcharon I resolved to face my fears and die, but somehow I
survived. Transformed, I hope.' He rubbed his cheek with his fingertips. 'This
beard is so damned itchy! And it stinks! What did you make it from?'
Shand chuckled. 'Horsehair and fish glue.'
There had been rain during the night, just enough to make slush of the dirty
snow on the road. A morning breeze came off the sea. Fog drifted in patches
across the fields. The sun rose, thickening the fog, but within an hour it was
gone.
'I feel that I've just put aside a great burden,' said Yggur. 'Is this what I
really want, to spend all my days chairbound, administering an empire?
Scheming, manipulating, trying to outwit Mendark and his pretenders? I was
happier in those years I spent on the road, when I had nothing.'
'I used to think that too,' said Shand. 'Tell me about it.'
'I was recovering from the Proscribed Experiments. You would know all about
that.'
'Hearsay only. I've never heard it from Mendark.'
'You won't hear the truth from Mendark!' Yggur said with a tinge of his old
bitterness. 'The Experiments were a different way of using the Secret Art. I
won't say much about that, even to you, Shand, but you can probably guess that
it was like the summoning that Rulke originally used to draw Shuthdar to
Aachan, to make the golden flute for him. And a bit like the warping of place
and space that goes to make up a gate.'

'And the Experiments were forbidden,' said Shand, sifting through ancient
memories of his own, 'because they often went wrong.'
'No one has ever been able to codify the laws governing that branch of the
Art. It's like trying to design a bird without understanding that there are
laws of flight. More than once the Experiments punched a hole through into the
void and let in creatures that were never intended to roam Santhenar. With
terrible consequences, though of course the Council never owned up. It was
just an unfortunate conjunction of the planets, people were told.
'All such experiments were proscribed a good few thousands of years ago,
before the Forbidding sealed Santhenar off. Though not everyone obeyed the
edict.'
'Perhaps that's what Basunez was up to in Carcharon,' said Shand.
'I'd say so.'
'So why did you use the Proscribed Experiments, Yggur?'
'The Council, and particularly Mendark, was desperate to rid the world of
Rulke. They saw the Experiments as the only way to trap him, and me as the
only one who could control them. One Council made the prohibition; another had
the power to overturn it. And of course by that time the Forbidding protected
us from the worst consequences. Nothing could get through it.'
Yggur's horse picked its way around a mud-filled hole in the road that could
have swallowed it. Soon they were spattered with yellow mud. The sun came out
momentarily.
'But the Experiments failed,' said Shand, taking a swig from his water bottle.
'The Council's courage failed them at the critical time, and Mendark abandoned
me when he should have supported me. He made the failure certain! Rulke
possessed me, and though he was later imprisoned in the Nightland, I was left
to die and blamed for the whole disaster.'
'But you did not die!'
'I was driven mad though. I'd give anything to know what really happened then,
but the memories are completely gone. A hundred years vanished! I rolled out
of my furs one morning, looked around and was aware. The light of morning
showed all the ugliness and squalor of my past existence -a century of
beasthood. My furs reeked - ratty uncured hides, gnawed by vermin, full of

fleas, lice and ticks. I stank too. The mouth of the cave was a midden of
bones and shredded fur. Scavengers slunk away as I came out.' Yggur scratched
furiously at his beard.
'Walking hurt me. Not just a twinge but a grinding of the bones and a spasming
of the muscles along my side. The last I remembered, I had been young and
strong and whole. Handsome and brilliant too, I could have had anything I ever
wanted.'
He went silent and they rode on until the morning was gone, Yggur lost in his
memories as Shand was in his.
'This village is called Spinet.'
It took some time for Shand's voice to penetrate Yggur's introspection. Yggur
inspected the scattering of mud-and-thatch cottages to right and left. Most
were only one or two rooms but they looked well cared for, and here and there
in a front garden the first winter crocuses peeped cheerfully through the
snow, as yellow as butter.
A white-haired crone smiled toothlessly at them from a front porch. A red and
blue parrot squatted on her white-spattered shoulder. 'Look at the ugly man!
Look at the ugly man!' it squawked as they passed.
'It's talking about you!' Yggur and Shand said together, then burst out
laughing.
'There are two ways we can go from here,' said Shand as they approached an
intersection. 'The main road is more direct but it goes through several large
towns. The left-hand fork is longer, but goes only by villages.'
'Let's go the winding way. There's less chance I'll be recognised.' Yggur
lapsed back into his study, then realised that he hadn't finished his tale. 'I
beg your pardon, my friend.'
'I'd like to hear the rest of the story, if you care to finish it.'
'Why not? Doubtless there are parallels with your own life.' Yggur looked away
and they jogged along without speaking for a while. He was choosing his words
with care, or perhaps wondering where to start. In the end he sighed and went
back to where he had been before.
'What was I saying?' He paused for a long time. 'I didn't even know where I
was, though it was a long way from Alcifer, where the Experiments were done. I
must have fled for months in my madness. Of the hundred years following that,
when I was a mindless creature, just occasional flashes.' Another long
hesitant pause.
He mused. 'Imagine how I felt that morning. I wanted to run and shout like a
young man, but I was a wretched cripple. It was painful to walk, even to talk,
as it still is sometimes. I'm not half the man I was.
'I came to terms with that in time. I cast off my furs, plunged into the river
and rasped my skin with a piece of sandstone until the filth was gone. I cut
my hair, beard and nails, got new furs. I still looked like a wild man, but at
least I was a man. How was I to make a new life? I did not want employment; I
was too used to solitude. I wanted to wander, to see the civilisations and
ruins of Santhenar, to find out who I was now.
'I had to have clothes, food, coin. I might have used my
powers. They remained, reduced but not lost. The hiring out of the least of
them would have made me wealthy. Yet I was reluctant. The Secret Art had
betrayed me.'
They were now climbing toward the top of a steep hill, the horses plodding in
the clinging mud. Yggur and Shand swung down simultaneously.
'So what did you do?'
'I became a wandering tinker. I had always been good with my hands. I fixed
pots, mended chairs, windows, cartwheels - anything that was broken. I earned
an honest living and travelled the four corners of Lauralin for a few hundred
years more - my wizardly long life had not been taken from me either.'
The road became an overgrown track. They reached the top and saw that ahead
the path wound across an undulating meadow of grey turf - coarse grass that
was long dead. A line of green marked the course of a rivulet, wandering back
and forth to their left. The road crossed it half a league ahead. Directly in

front of them, beside the road, were the ruins of a cottage. Just a chimney
remained, the angle of two walls and a scatter of stone. Behind was an old
fruit tree, twisted and rotten in the middle, but with one upstanding branch
to which a few yellow leaves still clung. Two rotten strands of rope, forlorn
remnants of a child's swing, dangled down.
'What a sad place,' said Shand, this ruin making an echo in his own life.
They mounted up again but Yggur did not resume his tale. He was thinking much
the same thoughts as Shand. How would it be when they found Maigraith? How
would she react to him? Yggur felt insecure. Surely if she still cared she
would have tried to contact him before this.
'How did you find the Mirror, Yggur?'
'I heard rumours about it.'
'Long ago?'
'No, only twenty years. Just yesterday in the span of our
lives, though long after I went to Fiz Gorgo and made it mine.'

'
'So what brought you out of your tinker's life?'
'I enjoyed listening to the wandering tellers and the tavern yarns,
particularly about the deeds of the great, such as Yal-kara's disappearance.
That was a long way from here - I spent most of my time in the east and the
chilly south. But one time I had come west as far as the shore of the Sea of
Thurkad, and there I heard a tale about a certain Magister of Thurkad, a great
hero who single-handedly saved the world from Rulke after my follies had
brought all to ruin. My memories of that time were faulty, but not so faulty
that every twisted bone and warped sinew did not scream out, Lies! Lies!'
Shand listened in silence, but for all his liking for Yggur he could not help
wondering who was doing the lying. Wondering if Yggur, after committing the
great crime of the Experiments, might not have invented the story to avoid
facing up to his own culpability and his own failure. The past year had
demonstrated what an unstable man Yggur was. When he was up, he could be the
most pleasant company. But when he was down, not even his best friend was
safe.
Yggur continued. 'Then I learned that Mendark was still alive. He was still
Magister of Thurkad as he had been eight hundred years before, when my
downfall began. He had lost nothing, yet still he felt compelled to aggrandise
himself and destroy my reputation.' Yggur twisted the reins so hard around his
fist that they made red and white stripes across his skin. 'That day, that
minute, that second I resolved to revenge myself on him for that great lie.
'But I soon found that Mendark's tentacles were in every business. He was rich
beyond any description of riches, while I was a wandering tinker with nothing
but what I carried on my back. In eight centuries my powers had faded
practically to nothing. I had forgotten most of the Secret Art, so long had it
been since I'd used it. My revenge would have to be the project of lifetimes.
'I had to have a place where I could slowly build my strength, and moreover
one that cost me nothing, since I had nothing. So I took over the ruin that
was Fiz Gorgo. It was so far from anywhere important that for a decade no one
even knew I was there. I made parts of it habitable, wrote down a book hardly more than a pamphlet, actually - of what I remembered of the Secret
Art, and began to practise it. That took the most laborious and painful effort
to cram into my brain, and even more to keep there. Finally I mastered some of
the simplest procedures, and that gave me something I could sell. I hired out
my powers in enterprises that were dubious more often than not, gaining wealth
enough to employ retainers and begin the repair of Fiz Gorgo. After that,
fifty or sixty years ago, I discovered the Whelm. They had dwindled away to
nothing for want of someone to serve, so I swore them to me.'
'Did you know that they'd once been Ghashad?'
'Of course! That's why I went looking for them. I had the irony in mind,
though it has bested me since. Anyhow, I set out to track down any device from
the ancient world that could help me gain what I desired. The tavern tales
were full of magical cups and rings, chalices and swords, bells and orbs, and

enchanted handkerchiefs for all I knew. I made lists and set out to find them,
and if necessary wrest them from their owners. I collected a great swag of
them, though few lived up to their reputation.'
'Including the Mirror?'
'It wasn't on my list - I came across it by accident.'
'Really?' said Shand. 'I have some interest in this part of your story.'
'Not really accident, I suppose, since by now I had a network of spies who
reported strange and unusual things to me. Some third-rate cutpurse had looted
it, or stolen it from someone who had. She made a living with it at country
fairs, reading futures. She must have had a minor talent, for she could make
the Mirror show a different scene each time
a customer looked at it, and then she told them what it meant.
'I had never heard of the Mirror of Aachan but I was interested enough to go
to the future-teller myself. As soon as I saw the device I knew how valuable
it was, and how old. It showed me Aachan and it showed me Rulke, though now
that I think of it, never Yalkara. I took the Mirror - I paid her a fair
price! - and went back to Fiz Gorgo to learn how to use it. As a spying device
it was far from perfect, but it gave me an impossible advantage over my
neighbours, and soon I grew powerful.'
By the time they reached the stream it was mid-afternoon. They broke the
journey with bread, cheese, onions and a bowl of chard or two to warm them. A
south wind had come up strongly and neither was in a hurry to go back out in
it. Shand put the pot back on the fire for a second brew.
Scarcely had Yggur lifted his bowl to his lips, found that it was too hot and
put it down again, when they heard galloping hooves. Shortly a patrol of his
own troops came up the road from the west in full flight. As they flew past
they must have seen the smoke, for they wheeled and came trotting toward the
camp. They were soldiers of his First Army. He knew the sergeant, a veteran
called Grisk.
For once in his life Yggur did not know what to do. His disguise would fail as
soon as he opened his mouth - his voice was utterly distinctive. The last
thing he wanted was to be recognised, to put up with the apologies, the
discussion of his plans, and probably, no matter what his orders were, being
secretly watched over by them. His troops took their duty seriously.
Shand came to the rescue. 'Hunch down. Look ill. If you have to speak, just
whisper.' He took the bowl out of Yggur's hand and held it to his lips. Yggur
sipped then Shand tipped the bowl right up and a flood of hot chard poured
down his windpipe. Yggur choked and spluttered. Tea dripped from his beard.
When Grisk strode up Yggur was gasping, tears flooding from his eyes. 'Don't
laugh,' said Shand. He rose to meet the sergeant.
'Papers!' said Grisk.
Shand was already patting his pockets, looking obsequious and bobbing up and
down on his toes with the expression of anxiety characteristic of the
genuinely innocent when confronted by authority. Grisk frowned at the papers,
which were in perfect order, but much tattered and stained. He turned towards
Yggur. Shand had already anticipated him and was fumbling in the pocket of
Yggur's greatcoat. He drew out the documents in their wallet, handed them to
the sergeant and turned back to Yggur, whose beard was now sagging off his
chin. The tea had dissolved the glue. Yggur stank of rotten fish.
'My cousin is poorly,' said Shand over his shoulder, shoving the beard back in
place with the heel of his hand. 'I'm taking him to his daughter in Sallitt to
be nursed.'
Grisk inspected the papers, then peered at Yggur. He had drawn his shoulders
forward and assumed a look of abject misery, punctuated by fits of coughing.
Grisk examined the papers again. He looked uneasy.
Yggur hawked, coughed and hawked again, trying to clear his throat. He made a
revolting gurgling, bubbling noise and finally spat a strand of mucus onto a
stick in the fire, where it lay sizzling. Then he began again, hunching his
shoulders and coughing until the tears started out of his eyes. He paused for
a moment, managed to whisper, 'Rafe at your service, sur.' Hawk, hawk, gurgle,