The Executioner's Cane (46 page)

He greeted Ralph with a brief kiss, savouring
the way their colours blended on his lips, red and blue and the
deepest mauve. Simon sensed the Lammas Lord’s curiosity but also
his patience, hard-won. He hoped he would not keep him guessing for
too long, but he could not explain anything now. It was destined to
keep until they came to the place the mind-cane had showed him. The
place where his journey, seemingly so long ago, had truly
begun.

Thank you for agreeing to accompany me, Simon
said in thought only, knowing this close and after their recent
love-making, the words would be simple for Ralph to hear. I have
need of a friend.

I am glad you do me the honour of counting me
as such, Lost One.

Ralph’s words were faint, due to his status
as mind-sensitive and not a full dweller, but Simon heard them
nonetheless, and his answering smile echoed Ralph’s own.

The two men took the journey through the
courtyard, over the newly-repaired bridge and onto the path around
the woods to the fields in silence. Near the stables, however,
Simon lingered for a moment in case Ralph wished to ride, but the
Lammas Lord merely shook his head and walked on, his limp not as
pronounced as was usual for the end of a day. Still, Simon set a
slower pace to lessen any pain. He would feel it too if it
happened.

As they walked, the Lost One gripped the
mind-cane close and remembered. The snow-raven had flown on ahead
and he could not see the bird for the darkening sky. He trusted the
raven would know when to appear again, if he did. All the time, in
his memory Simon saw Carthen, his lost boy, and Isabella too,
Johan’s sister. Alongside her, Iffenia, the elder’s dead wife, and
all the havoc she had wrought in the lives of Jemelda and, through
her, Frankel. Simon hoped one day Frankel could be easy in his
presence, but he understood this would not be soon, if he was
spared tonight. Still, he prayed for it, and with a depth which had
not been present in his prayers for a long time. He remembered
Thomas the Blacksmith also, and his own father, and he wished with
all his soul his father could have lived. Simon would have tried to
come close to him if that particular blessing had been granted, in
a way they had never been close for most of his life. There was no
saying if he could have done this, but for the love of the stars he
would have liked to try.

Impatiently, Simon brushed a hand over his
eyes and felt Ralph’s brief touch on his arm. It gave him strength.
Some things were not destined to be, and his father’s return to him
was one of those.

But this evening, he had other matters to
attend to, and he must give them his undivided heart, mind and soul
if they were to be carried out to the full. Ralph would know all
soon.

Finally the two men reached the edge of the
Lammas boundary, the fields which led to where the mountains had
once been, in their ancient splendour. The mind-cane in Simon’s
hand began to hum, although he could see no sight of the
snow-raven.

But it was the mind-cane which had brought
him here, wasn’t it? All those day-cycles of terror, discovery and
strange deep joy had brought him once more to this place. Not long
ago, but how it seemed like a lifetime since the scribe had stood
here, at the path to the mountains, poised between one life and
another. How well he remembered the fear which had thundered
through him, fear of what the Gathandrians, Johan and the
unfortunate Isabella, had asked him to do, fear of the mountains,
fear for the young boy that had stood next to him, and fear for
himself.

He had taken the first step then, but the
choices on that day-cycle had been obvious: stay in Lammas and die,
or travel through the terrifying mountains and live. Today, the
choices were not so clear. The Lost One frowned and the humming of
the mind-cane at his side intensified. Turning towards the
artefact, he grasped it more closely, but as had been increasingly
the case during these last seven-days, it danced out of his grip.
How he missed the warmth of it flowing through his thoughts.

What did it need from Simon? Had he ever in
fact been the master it wanted him to be, and could he be so in the
future? He would not know until he enquired of it. He squared his
shoulders and faced the mind-cane, hands outstretched to the side
and vulnerable.

For a heartbeat before he spoke, he was going
to sift the words only in his thoughts, knowing the cane could read
him, but then he understood he was here not simply of his own
volition, but on behalf of Lammas, and Gathandria, and all the
countries beyond. So his voice met the evening air and twisted into
the wind.

“I don’t know what you want,” he told the
cane, “and perhaps I have never done so. But you have been both an
enemy and a friend to me, and whatever you wish I will try to do
it. You know the visions I have seen these last few day-cycles, but
I cannot sift their rightness from my own imaginings, and fears
too. So, please, speak to me in a way I can truly understand.”

Simon had thought the cane would come to him
then, rest in his hand in the way he longed for it to do. Instead,
silver fire flew from its carving, something like the sun and
stars, and surrounded him with light. He heard Ralph cry out and
then everything went silent.

He opened his eyes, not having realised he
had closed them but the light must have been too bright to bear. It
was softer now, thank the stars, so he sat up from where he had
fallen, and stretched out his hand. At once he heard a low and
unfamiliar voice.

It is time.

Whether those words were only in his mind or
spoken aloud, he could not have said. He only knew they were true,
and in a way that cut him to the heart, though he did not wish to
understand them.

No.

The silence following his denial swallowed
him up as the land swallows water. He could not endure it, but when
he opened his mouth, the silence filled him also, crushing any
words he might have had. Inside him, it felt white and heavy, like
snow. Almost as it had in the last battle, and he could not bear
the thought of revisiting such terrors once again. He had had
enough of winter and silence, and even though it threatened to
overpower him, he would be damned if he’d let it. Concentrating
with the powers the mind-cane itself had liberated in him, he
pierced through the whiteness within and found his own small
centre. The effort of it all but shattered him but he fought on,
holding to his sense of himself, the blue and the silver, as much
as he could. All the time, the denial he had voiced clung to him,
nearly choking him until finally he had strength enough to release
it.

Enough! You must listen to me, as well as I
to you. Is that not where grace lies?

A flash of heat in his mind and the silence
suffocating him ebbed slowly away. Simon took a much-needed breath
and rose to his feet.

You have spoken well, this time-cycle.

Thank you, was the only thought he could
convey, though a wealth of others lay lurking beneath. Then: Are
you the mind-cane in truth?

A sensed sound like laughter, quickly hushed,
and only this: I am what I will be and what I have always been.

Good, thought Simon, another riddle to add to
the many riddles this role of Lost One had given him. So I am not
to know the answer to my question?

There are many questions and the answers do
not satisfy them, nor would they satisfy your thoughts, Lost One.
Have I stepped alongside you for all these lengths and you have not
understood this simplicity?

That much was true, and in these words Simon
found a rock of sorts he could hold to. He laughed, and his
laughter formed strange spikes in the air around him which melted
away almost at once. There is much I do not understand and much I
never will, and perhaps this is true between us in both ways though
I cannot tell it for sure. But you speak of time and I long to know
your meaning: the time is here, for what?

You fear so much it blinds you. Do you not
read and digest the legends, the legends which speak of you?

Simon let the memory of the legends Annyeke
had showed him and the ones already in his blood fill his thoughts.
He could see nothing obvious the mind-cane might be trying to
convey to him, simply the story and life he knew: a boy lost and
found again through danger and pain; a slow realisation of his
life’s meaning; the struggle to change what had gone wrong; the
battles on the way; death and life again; and then a kind of
enlightening on the road to achievement. Taught by his friends, the
snow-raven and the mind-cane, this was what he knew and what he had
found. The legends revealed nothing else, and here he was.

He blinked and something cleared in his inner
vision.

This is it then, isn’t it? There is nothing
more beyond what the legends say and I have come to what is now.
Annyeke and Johan and the Gathandrians interpret what is happening
through their legends and I have come to the end of their
knowledge. The next step is my own.

He sat down, suddenly, heart beating fast,
trying to understand his own unspoken words. Unexpectedly, he
laughed, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, shaking his
head. When he looked up, the cane was floating in front of him, its
colours sparking and jagged as if puzzled at his response.

His amusement seeped away and he found
himself staring at his strange companion, as if looking at it truly
for the first time. And when he came to think of it, perhaps he had
not contemplated the fact of the mind-cane before, not with his
eyes. At their initial meeting, Simon had been too terrified even
to glance at it for more than a moment, let alone gaze like this.
Since that time, he had run from the cane, fought with it, been
thought-beaten by it and, more recently, held it close in order to
access his own power, but he had never truly looked at it.

He did so now. At first glance, it was
nothing more than a walking cane. But, as his eyes grew accustomed
to the shape of it, Simon could see slight curves and indentations
patterning its smooth ebony length, as if it had lived for so long
a time-cycle and endured much which could never be conveyed. What
histories had this object seen, both of his own lands, those he
knew and those he did not? What people had it encountered, and how
had it left them? Terrified, inspired or, most likely, both? If it
hadn’t killed them first. By the gods and stars, Simon would never
reach the end of its mysteries, however short or long a season they
spent together.

Gradually his eye reached the mind-cane’s
carved silver top: the constellations and all their glory in
miniature, both beautiful and deadly. The everlasting mountain,
present in the sky though no longer here on the land, the lone man
and the lovers, the horseman and the elm, the latter his mother’s
sign. Then, as the cane slowly spun in its air-dance before him, he
could see the signs of the river, the wolf and the oak. Something
strong and wild. Finally in the carving and echoed in the night
skies came the fox, Ralph’s sign, and the owl, his own. Strange how
they were always together, although their differences were so many.
He flicked the memory away, believing it unsuited to the time.

Not so: you must hold that remembrance, and
look again, my friend.

The mind-cane had never spoken to him, in any
fashion, with such gentleness before, and Simon was moved to obey.
Not that any other choice remained to him, as the both of them were
together in this silver no-land, poised between one time and the
next, just as he had been at the Lammas outlands before the great
mountains.

He turned his attention back to the cane’s
carving. For a while, longer than he would have wished even though
he did not think of himself as an impatient man, nothing changed.
Then he realised the carving was not only beginning to glow a
deeper shade of silver, but it was pulsating too, slowly turning as
if linking itself to a more demanding rhythm, one Simon could not
yet hear.

He could not help himself, he reached out to
touch it. Before he could complete the gesture, fire leapt from the
cane, a long rich flame of all the colours in the world and more
besides, piercing the silver structure around them and flying out
towards the skies. Simon gasped and rose to his feet, staring as
the flame spread itself wider and wider even as it travelled
upwards until at last the whole expanse of the sky was linked to
the cane’s constellations. He heard singing also, the voice of the
mind-cane multiplied a thousand times until the magic of the notes
filled his whole being, body and thought, skin, bone and blood. He
thought he had never heard anything so beautiful and never would do
so again, and he listened and gazed, quite unable to do otherwise,
as the fire linked the hidden stars to the land, and back again,
and all the gods sang the beauty and meaning of it.

It was for this he had come; it was for this
he had been formed. May the gods and stars themselves grant him the
joy and memory of it, he prayed, and knew his plea was surely
answered. So the song continued until, in the end, he could take no
more joy, being only of the land not yet of the skies, and
somewhere the mind-cane knew this, as it knew everything, and the
fire ceased, returning to its source, and the song was quiet and
everything around them was still.

After a time-cycle and a time-cycle again,
Simon voiced his thought to the cane, knowing at last the strange
truth of it. You are the stars, aren’t you, he said. You are the
stars and the gods themselves if we could only see them; the
carving you carry is no carving as we know it but the life and
pulse of the world above, dwelling here on the land below.

He needed no answer, but the mind-cane gave
it him nonetheless: Yes. I am the beginning and the end, the stars,
the moon and the sun, the earth you stand on and everything
between. Know me.