The Fathomless Fire (5 page)

“It
stops
,” Pendrake murmured, gazing around the quiet clearing. “I wonder… He was usually napping whenever I visited him. He
was
getting very hill-like. Maybe this time he’s gone all the way.”

“Gone where?”

“Sometimes the story just goes out of a place. The giant becomes a hill. The dragon becomes a river. It’s the way of things in this world. But…”

He paused, and pursed his lips.

“But you don’t think that’s it,” Rowen said.

“Sometimes a story withers and dies before its time, like some of those we’ve seen, because another story is growing stronger.”

“You mean Malabron’s?”

Pendrake nodded.

“Like an invading weed, choking the life out of other plants.”

He leaned wearily on his staff, and Rowen thought again how much older and more tired he had seemed these last few weeks. As if whatever was happening to the Realm was also happening to him… She thrust the terrifying thought from her mind.

“Will the giant come back?” she asked.

“That could happen, yes, in the natural course of things. If stories are needed again they sometimes return from the Weaving, where they came from in the first place. But if one story grows too powerful, others will be swallowed up by it and forgotten.” He gazed around at the clearing spread out below them and pulled his cloak closer around him. “Let’s not linger here. We need to get back to Fable.”

They walked slowly back down the hill to the wagon, Rowen pondering her grandfather’s frightening words.

He had already taught her a little about the Weaving, the mysterious, hidden realm-within-the-Realm that was the source of all stories. As far as she’d been able to understand, the Weaving was something like the place you went to when you dreamed, that ghostly, ungraspable world where anything could happen. Everything possible and impossible, everything the Realm was made from, flowed out of the Weaving, like water bubbling from a hidden spring. When Rowen had seen the giant’s story as it had once been she was touching the Weaving, because the past was contained in it, and the future, as well as everything that might have been or never was.

But a loremaster could do more than just catch these fleeting glimpses of the Weaving. One could tap into it, like drawing water from a well. What one drew out was a kind of power or living spirit that the Stewards had called
innumith.
Her grandfather called it the fathomless fire. The stuff of Story.

He had shown her something of what a loremaster could do with this power. He could kindle a fire in damp wood, and mend torn clothing just by running his fingers over the tear. Once when they were caught in a sudden storm he kept the rain from falling on them, even though it went on falling everywhere else.

“You start with what’s already in front of you,” he’d explained to her when she asked how he could do these things. “You take what is, and you … nudge it a little, with what might be.” These were useful little tricks, he’d added when he taught her to do them, but some day she would accomplish far greater things. It was said the loremasters of old could perform wonders like walking on air, or moving mountains, or stepping through the Weaving into other worlds.

“But that’s not what really matters,” he’d cautioned her. “What matters is what you learn about yourself. About what you can be. And that’s something I can’t teach you.”

After they had parted from the Fair Folk, he would no longer let her practise the so-called tricks he’d taught her. There was a very good reason: every such drawing upon the Weaving, no matter how slight, was like a tug on one of the countless interwoven threads of Story that bound the realm together. And Malabron in his realm of shadow, like a spider lurking in its web, could sense the movements of these threads. They already knew that he was aware of them and probably also had some idea of where they had come from. The Bourne had always been a quiet, unimportant place, and often Rowen had wished she lived somewhere more exciting, more in the middle of things. But now, as they climbed onto the wagon and set off again for home, she found herself wishing that the Bourne could go on being a quiet, unimportant place for ever, even though she knew with dread in her heart that those days were over.

L
ATE THAT AFTERNOON
they stopped to rest by the side of a narrow, stony stream. Pendrake looked around approvingly and said that they were very close to the western border of the Bourne. Rowen was glad to hear it. In a few days they would be home.

“Should we send Sputter with a message to Edweth?”

“I think we should wait,” her grandfather said. “We don’t know what we may find when we return.”

Rowen’s brighter mood dimmed as she considered what her grandfather’s words implied. He would only be this cautious if he was afraid that the wisp’s message to the housekeeper might be intercepted by someone hostile to them. That meant he was no longer certain that even the toyshop was safe.

Gloomily she sat down near Briar, who was munching contentedly on the lush grass at the edge of the stream. Pendrake sat quietly for a while, too, then he reached into the tall grass in front of him and lifted out a short stick of dry wood. He turned it over in his hands, studying it. When he had looked the stick all over several times, he began to whittle it with his pocket knife. Rowen had seen him do this often on their travels. He was always picking up odds and ends with which to make toys, even though he hadn’t made any for a long time now.

“How did you become a toymaker, Grandfather?” Rowen asked him.

“I was always carving as a boy,” he said with the flicker of a smile. “It was my favourite pastime back then. But I left that all behind when I began my training as a loremaster. I wandered far and wide, seeking knowledge, seeking understanding, and I forgot about carving, forgot about making toys. Then I met your grandmother, and I knew that my wandering days were over.”

Rowen knew little about Maya, her grandmother. She had been a loremaster too, from a land far to the east, a place Rowen had never been. And she had been a weaver, like Morrigan of the Tain Shee. She had woven many of the tapestries that hung in the toyshop, including the one in Rowen’s room that depicted her own mother and father. Rowen did not remember her. All she knew was that her grandmother had somehow gone
into
the Weaving and had never come back.

“We were on our way home to Fable after a long journey,” Pendrake went on, “and one night we took lodgings at an inn. That night Maya told me the baby was coming, so I fetched a midwife, and she sent me down to the common room to wait. I don’t mind telling you, the thought of becoming a father was terrifying to me. What trade could I live by, to feed my family? The few coins I got from telling stories were hardly enough for the two of us, and now we were going to be
three
. Well, there was a travelling minstrel in the common room that night. He sang an old song from your grandmother’s homeland, about a weaver woman who weaves a tiger on her loom with such skill that the tiger comes to life, so then she has to weave a jungle for the tiger to live in, and before long, the woman has woven a whole world. While I waited and worried about the future, I took a scrap from the woodpile by the fire and I carved a tiger. That night your mother, Gildred, was born, and I knew what trade I could live by.”

He held up the stick he’d been whittling.

“Not sure what this one will be yet,” her grandfather said, appraising his handiwork.

Rowen smiled. She was about to ask him a question about her grandmother when she saw that the look in his eyes had changed. She had seen this before and she knew that he had sensed something out of the ordinary. Slowly, so as not to appear suspicious, she glanced around. There was nothing but what she had seen for days now as they passed through the great forest: trees, flickering sunlight, leafy shadows.

Pendrake noticed her glance. He nodded slowly.

“Someone or something is watching us,” he said in an undertone. “Keep on your guard.”

They climbed back onto the seat of the wagon, and Briar reluctantly started across the shallow stream. The pots and pans hanging from the wagon’s boards made their usual tinny clatter, but to Rowen the noise now sounded ten times as loud. On the other side the path began to climb a densely wooded rise, and Briar plodded along even more slowly. At the top of the rise the path went around a huge mossy boulder that leaned out over the trail.

On the other side of the boulder Briar stopped abruptly. She snorted and pawed the ground with her hoof.

In the path before them stood a large grey wolf.

“Shade!” cried Rowen. Before Pendrake could stop her, she jumped from the wagon. She ran a few steps towards the wolf, then halted. The eyes. There was something wrong with the wolf’s eyes. They were large and luminous, like the eyes of an owl. These were not a wolf’s eyes.

Rowen backed away. This was not Shade, the wolf that had been Will’s companion and protector during their journey together. She was not even certain this creature really was a wolf.

“You’re a long way from home,” Pendrake said to the wolf in a calm, quiet voice. He had climbed from the wagon and was standing beside Rowen.

“Don’t come any closer,” the wolf snarled in a voice like rough stones scraping together. “I’ll eat you.”

“There’s no need for that kind of talk,” the old man said. “We both know you won’t do anything of the sort. I just want to know why you’ve been following us.”

Grandfather’s met this creature before
, Rowen thought to herself. Then, as she watched in astonishment, something happened to the wolf that was even more strange. It turned and bounded away, but as it ran its shaggy wolfish shape seemed to waver, as if one was seeing it through a haze of rippling heat. Rowen kept her eyes on it, but in the next moment there was no wolf, only a patch of dappled green shadows. She blinked, startled, with an eerie feeling that the wolf had never been there at all, as if the creature had only been a trick of the light. But that couldn’t be…

They waited, but when the wolf did not reappear, they climbed back onto the seat of the wagon. It took a few words of encouragement to get Briar moving again.

“Did you see the eyes?” Pendrake asked Rowen.

“Yes.”

“We’ve seen those eyes before.”

At that, Rowen remembered. On their way through the Forest of Eldark with Will they had been waylaid by a strange, mad being who could change his shape. He had lured them to a maze-like grove from which not even Shade could find the way out. The being had wanted them to solve a riddle, and when Pendrake gave the right answer, he had grudgingly let them go. Her grandfather said that some called him the Woodwraith. He was a creature of Story without a story.

“His grove is a long way from here, though,” Pendrake mused. “I wonder what brought him out of it.”

No more riddles
, whispered a voice so close that it made them both start. Briar huffed nervously and tossed her head. Pendrake pulled up on the reins. He climbed down from the wagon and Rowen joined him.

“Where are you?” Pendrake shouted, looking this way and that. “Show yourself.”

No more riddles
, the eerie, whispery voice repeated.
Someone’s house is gone. No more house. No more riddles.

There was a stirring of shadows and leaves around them. Rowen glanced from place to place. Every time her eyes fell on something that looked like a shape, a creature,
something
, it was suddenly not there, as if her very act of seeing had made it vanish.

“Has something happened to the place where you lived?” Pendrake asked. Rowen remembered that the creature called his strange bare grove in the forest his house.

The one who is not
, said the voice.
He happened. The one who was following you. It’s your fault. You brought that one. To
our
house.

“He means the Angel,” Rowen said. She felt a cold chill at the memory of Malabron’s terrible servant, who had almost succeeded in taking her away to the Shadow Realm.

“The one who is not, he came to your house?” Pendrake asked.

You asked someone to play the riddle game with that one, but that one would not play. He tore down someone’s house. He broke everything. Everything broken. Then he found … he found…

“What did he find?”

USssss!
the voice hissed, becoming a shriek like wind rising to a gale.

“What did he do to you?” Rowen asked when the piercing noise had faded again to silence.

There was no answer.

“Show yourself to us, please,” Pendrake said. “Let’s talk face to face.”

Whose face? We have every face. No face. Any face.

“Well, choose one. We want to see you.”

The wind rose to a roar. Leaves skittered and whirled around the wagon. The dappled shadows that Rowen had seen darting among the branches seemed to gather in one place in the midst of the spinning whirl of leaves. Then a huge brown bear stood there, teetering on its short hind legs. Like the wolf, it had large yellow eyes that glimmered as if the shifting light and shadow of the forest was within them as well as without.