The First Collier (8 page)

But now Siv was there in front of me. My queen, my dear friend, my secret love.

“Grank! Thank Glaux you are here!” She rose from the nest and came to give me a welcome preening, running
her beak through my flight feathers. It felt good after the long flight.

“Yes, I am here, Siv.” I nodded deeply to her, then turned and greeted her faithful servant, Myrrthe.

“Do you know, I think there was a hagsfiend in the ice canyon tonight?” Siv said. “Both Myrrthe and I caught a strong whiff.”

I had not planned to tell her about Penryck, the hagsfiend whom I had just seen. “Don’t worry. It’s gone now,” I said.

“You saw it? Was it male or female?” She blinked rapidly.

“Male. It was Penryck.”

“Penryck,” she repeated. She seemed relieved and shut her eyes for several seconds. “I was so fearful it might be the one called Ygryk. She is a terrible hagsfiend.”

“Yes, I have heard, but not, I think, as bad as Penryck.”

“Worse,” she said firmly.

“Why is that?”

“She craves this egg of mine, Grank. She is the mate of Pleek now. They cannot have a chick. She’s a hagsfiend and he’s a Great Horned, so it is impossible. But she wants my egg for her own, for their own. She wants to practice her evil magic on it and transform it into a monster. She wants to be its mother!” Poor Siv nearly gagged on the
word “mother.” “I am frightened, Grank. There is nothing more terrifying than a hagsfiend who craves a chick.”

“There you are wrong, my dear,” I replied.

“What do you mean?” Siv asked, genuinely perplexed.

“I mean that there is something more fierce, more violent.”

“What is that?”

“A mother whose chick is threatened.” I saw a startled look pass through the amber luster of Siv’s eyes. “Now step aside, my dear, and let me see the egg.”

I came up to the schneddenfyrr. There, nestled in the delicately woven pieces of ice and packed snow, was an egg, an egg the likes of which I had never seen. It was indeed a special egg, so luminous that one might have thought that within its white shell a tiny silvery moon lay cradled. I knew immediately that it was a male. And it came to me that this small male chick who would hatch soon should be called Hoole. Hoole, like the fabled mage of times past, who was thought to be merely an invention to soothe the ruffled spirits and tremulous gizzards of desperate owls in a world overrun by hagsfiends. A Hoole, whose spirit had led the dire wolves to the Beyond!

I looked up now at Siv and our eyes met. A sliver of moonlight came through the issen clarren and ignited tiny amber fires in her eyes. I could read these flames
perfectly. A bird in flight, an egg cradled in its talons as it flew across the Bitter Sea. She almost guessed what I was seeing. Her voice trembled as she spoke.

“The egg
is
special, isn’t it?” She paused for a long time. I knew that she was thinking of the inevitable choice she must make. I could not tell her. It was not my place. How could I, a male owl, know what it was like to lay an egg—any egg—whether it was luminous like this one or an ordinary white egg?

Finally, Siv spoke: “In order to save him, I must part with him.” It was not a question but a statement.

I nodded. “It will simply be too dangerous for you and the egg, Siv. You have every hagsfiend on your tail. They are looking for a queen with an egg. And they will find you. Lord Arrin would love to take your egg. It would give him incredible power if this chick were hatched in his realm, under his stewardship.”

“Imagine”—she lowered her voice to barely a whisper as she looked down on the egg, her own face now basking in the luminous light it gave off—“imagine using this precious egg as a thing for evil.”

“It is unimaginable.”

Siv gave a little shake of her shoulder feathers and straightened herself. She blinked and looked directly at
me. “You will take the egg and care for it and raise the chick, then?”

“With all the care and love that I can give. I promise you this, Siv. And if there is a night when you can come to see him…” She startled when I said “him,” and I nodded and went on, “Siv, if there is a time when the wars are finished and there are no more hagsfiends, I promise I shall send for you.”

“Yes, of course, I know you will.” Her eyes had begun to stream with tears. She looked down at the egg, and it almost seemed that it was composed entirely of light. It was incandescent and appeared to have no substance save for the unearthly glow that emanated from it. And if the egg was nothing but light, Siv herself had become pure grief.

“Where will you take it, Grank?” she asked.

I breathed a sigh of relief. She had not sensed where I would take this egg.

“I can’t tell you, Siv. If I told you, it would endanger not just the egg, but you as well.”

“I don’t matter,” she said quietly.

“Siv, don’t say that. You do matter.”

“I feel as if I am nothing without my egg, without my mate.”

“Now, now, milady.” Myrrthe tried to console her mistress, putting a snow-white wing lightly on her shoulder.

“Siv,” I said. “You are still a mother, no matter where your chick is. You brought this egg into the world. You shall always be a mother, just as you shall always be a queen.”

She looked up around her and murmured, “A queen imprisoned in her own Ice Palace.”

At just that moment, there was a loathsome stench. We all froze and then, suddenly, the ice was washed in an eerie yellow glow.

“Hagsfiends!” Siv whispered. “Hagsfiends!”

“Noooo!” A shuddering cry came from Myrrthe, but I turned and saw her swell to twice her size. It was as if a large cumulus cloud had descended into the Ice Cliff Palace.

A
t the moment the word “hagsfiend” was uttered, Siv’s eyes went through an incredible transformation. The amber beam hardened, as hard as the metals that Fengo and I had extracted from rocks, as hard as the strong ice from which we made our swords. She grabbed an ice scimitar that had been H’rath’s and rushed out into the tunnel, ordering Myrrthe to go in an opposite direction. “You know where we’ll meet, Myrrthe.” It was not a question.

“Yes, milady,” Myrrthe replied, and picked up a small ice dagger for herself.

I knew immediately what Siv planned. She was going to decoy them, distract them. I reached for the egg and, clutching it with my talons, made for a back passageway out of the Ice Cliff Palace. I had no idea if I would ever see Siv again. But only moments before I had said that a mother whose chick was threatened was fiercer and more violent than any hagsfiend. The time to prove this had come.

Once I had left the Ice Cliff Palace, I headed across the Bay of Fangs on a straight course for the Bitter Sea. There was an island there with a dense forest and trees with good hollows where I thought the egg and I would be safe. In general, owls of the N’yrthghar nest in ground burrows or the ice caves of a glacier or the many cliffs of ice along the coastline. We do not like tree nests. We prefer the solidness of ice and find the dank hollows and swaying of the trees in the wind uncomfortable. So I knew that this isolated place would be good for minding the egg until it hatched. There was also another reason I wanted to go to the forest: I had brought with me from the Beyond an interesting object that Fengo and I had made out of the metal we had drawn from rock. We had experimented with it, heating it up and then bending it. We had succeeded in shaping it into a small container of sorts, no bigger really than a very large acorn or perhaps a tiny owl’s egg. And in that container—a cupper we called it—I had brought, in addition to the coals that were tucked into the moose horn, a bonk coal swaddled in a special moss that grew in the Beyond. The moss kept the coal glowing and hot and yet the coal did not melt the metal. The bonk coal, along with the ones in the moose horn, were the first ever brought to the N’yrthghar. And I planned to make great use of them. Not only for experiments with
metals, but for flame reading. If I must stay on that remote island in a forest, thick with trees, tending this egg and the young chick that would hatch from it, it was essential for me to know what was happening in the rest of the kingdom. The trick would be to ignite a small fire without burning down the rest of the forest.

That wintry night, I found a place on the island where the trees grew tall and straight. Between the highest branches of an ice-sheathed tree, there were two hollows. One was the perfect size for an orphan egg and its foster father, and the larger one a perfect size for a collier and his fire. I knew I could line one hollow with soft moss, tucked in tightly around the egg, along with twigs and fir needles and scraps from the forest, besides the more traditional materials of snow and ice. It would be perfect for a nest. The other hollow—the fire hollow—I would pack only with snow and make a small pit for my coal. Then I would gather strips of birch bark for what I came to call the Telling Fire.

I was desperate to know how Siv had fared, and as soon as I tucked the egg in I went to the other hollow and began to pack it with snow. I decided to use the bonk coal. So from my coal cupper, I withdrew the glowing ember. As the flames ignited I leaned forward. What would I see?

At first, the images were pale and quivering. It was hard to make out any shapes at all, let alone owls. I thought I spied a ragged black smear that could have been a hagsfiend. Then I soon realized that there was more than one. They were definitely hagsfiends. How would Siv and Myrrthe survive this? Things became more distinct. I saw a glimmer, like the mist that rises at twilight in this land of the North Waters, and arced above it was a silver curving radiance—the ice scimitar of H’rath raised to attack.

S
iv flew with a lumpish ball of snow and ice in her talons and an ice scimitar in her beak. I could tell that the stench of hagsfiends was almost overpowering her. She staggered in flight but only briefly. The two hagsfiends were coming toward her at great speed. If they pinned her against the ice wall, she would be finished. But she had one thing in her favor: They still believed that she had the egg. With the ball of snow and ice clutched in her talons, she led them on a chase. As long as they believed that this ball was the egg, they would be careful because they wanted to snatch it from her. But now they were backing her toward an ice wall and very soon they would discover that it was not an egg that she clutched in her talons. Suddenly, the night flinched and the blackness throbbed with a glaring yellow light. The moon, the stars turned yellow. The snow “egg” began to slip from her talons. Her wings were beginning to fold. Her gizzard grew still. But she was not going yeep. It was far worse.
The hypnotic yellow glare of the hagsfiends’ eyes had bathed the entire world around her. It was at this moment of the yellow glare’s greatest intensity that Siv spread her wings, dropped the ice ball, took the ice scimitar in her talons, and rushed with an unmatched speed straight for the hagsfiends.

The harsh yellow light began to recede. The white swirling madness of the blizzard returned and in the flames of my fire I watched in horror as the snowflakes turned red with blood. I felt my gizzard tremble as I saw an entire upper wing torn off in flight. I leaned closer to the fire. Was that wing black? Was it brown with spots? There was too much blood to tell, and then the images began to dissolve. They simply melted away. I blinked once, twice. I was often exhausted after seeking visions in the flames of a fire, but I had never before felt so weakened. I knew that I must return to the other hollow. My duty was to the egg, guarding it and nurturing the chick who would break from it. I must put Siv out of my mind. It tore at my gizzard to think of her dead, murdered by those hagsfiends, but it was the life within the egg that counted now. Siv trusted me. Whether she was dead or alive, that trust must never be broken. But I knew that those feathers drenched in blood would haunt my dreams for
the rest of my life. My one great love, Siv of the Hrath’ghar, was gone.

It would be a long time before I dared build another Telling Fire. My concentration had to be on the egg. And it was. I plucked down from my breast feathers every day. I burrowed in the snow for old leaves that had dropped from the trees, then dried them and tucked them into the nest. I poked at rotting logs to find where the plumpest grubs might be for the chick’s first food after it had hatched.

The forest itself had a different kind of silence from the rest of the N’yrthghar. There was not the groan of grinding ice, but the trees creaked in the wind. There were many land creatures but none of air. And that was fine with me. It was a strangely peaceful place, and I felt far away from the wars and the hagsfiends, away from the chaos and the blood—except the blood that haunted my dreams, the blood of Siv. But I had sworn not to build a fire and look into those telling flames, at least until the chick had hatched.

Of course, I could not resist. I made another fire. But again I made the mistake of hunting for visions rather
than letting them come to me. The odd thing was that I did see something in those flames that possibly could have been coming toward this lonely tree-clad island in the Bitter Sea, but I paid it no heed. It appeared to me as a small smudge in the most unstable region of the flame. You must understand that when I was in the Beyond, and Fengo and I were experimenting with fire, we isolated four distinct regions within a flame. Fengo, of course, could not read the flames as I could and he was only interested in them for their utilitarian value—how we could coax metal from rock, or change sand into glossen. But I found that the clearest images always came to me from what we called the pale fire region, which is usually at the vortex of the flame.

I knew it was useless searching the flames for Siv. Her image would appear when it did. But at least building this fire revived my interest in my previous study of flames and the various effects of fire on different materials. I especially wanted to explore the possibilities of using fire and ice in some combination to improve our weapons. Could, for example, the edge of an ice scimitar made with issen blaue be honed to a new sharpness by exposing it to that peculiar region in the flame that Fengo and I called the “yellow curved plane”?