The Search for Kä (11 page)

We stayed for Yali's second performance. If Thymas's pleasure was marred by his irritation with the Riders—who had left the place after only one glass of faen—it didn't show in the rapturous expression he wore while Yali played.

I had seen that look before—while Tarani danced.

We turned in and slept late the next morning. I took Thymas to Korredon's bathhouse, and he agreed the old man had magic in his fingers. After lunch, we wandered around Omergol until we found the house Grallen had described as belonging to Somil.

It was, as I had guessed, in the richest part of town, high on the hillside, with a small and fragrant garden lining a stone-paved walkway to the front of the house. The door was made of brass-fastened wood strips, decorative and heavy. It was opened, the second time I knocked, by a delicately beautiful girl whose head would not have reached my shoulder if she had stood on tiptoe.

She looked us over so carefully that I became worried she had figured out I had a fortune in gold coins in my belt. At last she spoke, clearly and softly. “Somil does not know you. What is it you wish?”

“I need the services of a Recorder,” I said. “I am Rikardon; this is Thymas.”

“Do you both wish to pay Somil for his services?”

The girl had large eyes and she tilted her face up to look directly at me.

“If he can do what I wish, I will pay him,” I said.

“Then only you may enter,” she said. She turned her dark gaze on Thymas. “You must go away.”

I wouldn't want to be the one to say that to Thymas,
I thought as I watched the boy's face darken.

“Thymas will stay with me,” I said. “The information I seek is important to him, as well.”

“But only one may seek,” she said, as patient as a teacher with a child. “The one who pays.”

The room behind the girl was the midhall which ran straight through to the back of the house, with rooms and stairways opening from it into the other parts of the house. A shadow moved on the part of the wood-panelled wall I could see.

“Then we will find another Recorder,” I said, dragging Thymas away from the doorway, “to help us find Kä.”

Thymas nearly had apoplexy, but the ploy worked. A tall and thin old man, his head totally bald, snatched the front door away from the girl and stepped up to the sill.

He smiled ingratiatingly and said: “Kä will cost you.”

I reached into my pouch and brought out two of the Eddartan gold pieces, which I had earlier removed from my belt. I held them up, spread so that he could see that there were two.

“This is the price I'll pay,” I said. “No haggling.”

I knew full well, from the flash of eagerness the old man had let me see when he came to the door, that he would have done it for nothing. Ricardo was familiar with the passion of the educated for more knowledge. He was also familiar with the need of a shrewd businessman to maintain that image.

“Agreed,” Somil said, and held out his hand.

I took Thymas's hand and put the coins in it.

“He will pay you—
after
I get the information I came for.”

Somil drew his hand back, his wide-set dark eyes flashing from under his supraorbital ridge. “Who has told you I am a thief?” he demanded. His indignation was so sincere that I was taken aback.

“No one,” I said, wondering if Grallen hadn't meant just that. “But someone
has
told me that not all Recorders have equivalent skills. Would you commission a set of dishes from a potter whose work you've never seen—and pay in advance?”

He made a choking sound, repeated it, then burst out laughing. He stepped aside. “Come into my home, gentlemen, please. It is rare that I face a challenge and have a good laugh on the same day. A potter,” he said again, laughing as we stepped through the doorway. “Indeed, a potter.”

He led us through the midhall to the last door on the right, leaving the tiny girl to close the door. The room we entered was small and bare of any furniture besides four armchairs surrounding a small, tile-inlaid table. A second doorway, hung with a heavy tapestry, opened in the wall nearer the front of the house.

The three of us sat down in the chairs, and another young woman, dressed as the first was in a plain dark gown of a clingy fabric, brought us a cool drink flavored with herbs. As she bent over the table to place the third glass in front of Somil, his hand stroked her side, hip and thigh. She suppressed a giggle, looked at him with adoration, and fled the room.

I stared after her. Neither she nor the other girl could have been over fifteen years old.

I looked back at Somil and found his gaze directly on me.

“Whatever you may think of my lifestyle,” he said pointedly, “I
am
a Recorder and I take the actual work of my profession as seriously as any of those who make the pretentious claim that virtue and skill are equivalent. There are operational rules which I will not violate. Only the Recorder and the seeker may be present,” he said, a slight movement of his head indicating the tapestried doorway behind him. “Your friend may wait out here, if he likes, as long as he understands that to interrupt our session may be fatal to both of us.”

“What do you mean, ‘fatal?'” Thymas demanded.

“I mean fatal, as in dead or dying,” Somil answered. “A Recorder builds a bridge, makes a connection with the All-Mind, and leads the seeker across. Both of us will be gone for the duration of the session. An interruption destroys the bridge, and the All-Mind has grown by two, do you see?”

“I see that if there is such danger, I should be the seeker,” Thymas said flatly.

“No, I must go,” I said, astonished that I had come to think of this mental exercise as a physical journey.

“There is another condition,” Somil said. “If you knew precisely what you seek, you would have no need to seek it. Therefore you cannot tell me,
precisely
,” he emphasized, “what you want, and if I do not know it, I cannot guarantee it. I will do what you ask of me, and I will be paid, in good faith, for doing
only
what you ask of me. Any error in the request is your own responsibility.”

“We agree to your terms,” I said.

“Rikardon,” Thymas protested. “I do
not
like this.”

“Trusting, is he not?” Somil said. “Decide. Will you seek?”

His manner changed again in those last three words. When he had come to the door, he had been a showman. On entering this room, he had become a nuts-and-bolts professional. Now he was almost mystic, the holder of secrets, the guardian of truth.

The All-Mind may not be a god to the Gandalarans,
I thought,
but the Recorders hold a place equivalent to that of “high priest” in Ricardo's world.

I felt myself responding to the sense of ritual, and from Markasset's memory came the words which acknowledged Somil's transformation. “I will seek, Recorder,” I said.

The old man rose silently and held back the tapestry for me to enter the inner room. Thymas grabbed at my arm, but I pressed his hand reassuringly, then removed it. I went into the dim room, which fell into near blackness when the door curtain swept back into place. I stood still until my eyes adjusted. The room was fairly small, with dark-paned lattice windows along one wall—the sole source of light. Against the doorway and inner walls were wide ledges with thick pallets. Somil was seated on one; he motioned me to the other.

“What do you seek?” he asked.

I remembered what he had said about asking the right question, so I thought a moment before I said anything. “Show me where Kä was built,” I said, “and where it is today.”

“One may follow from the other,” he said, “but be warned: the All-Mind knows only what men have known. Do you understand?”

“I understand, Recorder.”

He waved slightly, and lay full-length on his pallet. I followed suit, fighting a wave of panic. I had come this far because some instinct had told me that Somil
could
do this, but suddenly I had second thoughts.

“What troubles you?” Somil asked, and I jumped.

“How do you know I am troubled, Recorder?”

“You breathe shallowly; I see your hand clenching the edge of the pallet. You must be calm when we enter the All-Mind. Speak your fears, that I may put them to rest.”

There was a richness to his voice, a timbre that was familiar—I had heard it in Tarani's voice while she worked for healing. It was strongly hypnotic, and I felt myself becoming more calm as Somil spoke.

I could resist this
, I thought,
just as I can resist Tarani's skill. But if I let my non-Gandalaran mind resist this, I might make it impossible for Somil to make his link. I have chosen to use this Gandalaran power; I must let myself be Gandalaran.

I let the peace wash over me.

“What do you fear?” Somil asked again.

“I fear being in your power,” I said.

“I use my power only in your service,” he said, and I believed him. “What else do you fear?”

“That you will see secrets in my mind,” I said. I was vaguely conscious that my voice was slurred with relaxation. Part of me was surprised that I was speaking so frankly, but the lethargy had settled in too far to allow me to be alarmed.

“I will share with you what I see in the All-Mind, but I will not share your thoughts. What I learn of the All-Mind in your seeking is mine to keep or to give. Whatever I may learn of you will remain yours.” He paused for a moment. “You are still afraid. Tell me.”

“I fear the All-Mind will not admit me,” I said.

“That has never happened,” he replied, “but there is no danger in it. We would merely stop the seeking. Are you feeling more calm now?”

“Yes, Recorder.”

“Then make your mind one with mine, as I have made mine one with the All-Mind …”

I stared into the darkness behind my closed eyelids and waited. There was a sliding sensation, a wrenching tug, and then I seemed to be in the midst of a network of brilliance.

… We begin!
said Somil's mind voice.

I felt no sense of my own substance. I was merely a location from which I could observe, but not act. The physical equivalent of that sensation would have disturbed me deeply, but here it promoted a feeling of security and calm in the face of overwhelming strangeness.

I knew I was “seeing” not the All-Mind itself, but a visual representation of it. The place that was me, enclosed and protected by the place that was Somil, began to move along one spoke of what seemed to be a geometrist's fantasy. Shining and translucent, cylinders of light joined an unplanned pattern of points that threaded through a three-dimensional shape that was roughly spherical. Some of the cylinders were short, others long. The only perceptible logic of the pattern was that the ragged, interconnected spines of light moved outward from the center of the sphere. Somil and I seemed to be toward the outer edge of the sphere, which was marked by an amorphous radiance into which the outermost cylinders disappeared. We had begun to move inward, seeking the congested core of the All-Mind.

I wondered if the All-Mind “looked” like this to everyone, or if this were Somil's interpretation of it, or mine.

It is your vision
, Somil's mindvoice said,
and I thank you for it. I shall see it this way always.

The shining spokes were everywhere. They flashed by us, the only source of awareness that we were moving. The spoke we followed joined another, and another, until we were enclosed in a shining, three-dimensional maze.

How do you find your way?
I asked Somil.

Hush
, he warned,
I must concentrate.

Even though all my own perceptions came through Somil, I realized that I was observing independently. In an effort to understand what
he
was seeing, I “watched” Somil more closely, focusing on his mindvoice and closing off my own awareness of the glowing cylinders. I had felt as if I were floating beside the cylinders without “touching” them. Somil did seem to touch them; it was as if they were tracks which he rode, and he was holding me away from direct contact with them.

I forced my consciousness into closer bond with Somil, trying to see what
he
was seeing. I caught the barest glimpse, and my mind jerked backward, reeling from the impressions I had shared with Somil.

As if we had physical presence, my reaction pulled at Somil, snapping him away from the cylinder he was following. Our linked minds went spinning through the emptiness that was not black, nor white, nor even space, merely a place
between
shining cylinders. Panic and guilt and vertigo swept through me, so that I was barely conscious of Somil's mindvoice, speaking to me with surprising calm—surprising because, when I did sense the sound and focused on it, I could also sense fear in the Recorder.

“Come closer, as you did then,”
he advised me.
“Join with me, or we are both lost.”

Somil's voice soothed my panic. I did the mental equivalent of closing my eyes and hanging on to him for dear life, and our dizzying whirl slowed. I sensed, but did not watch, Somil reaching out for a cylinder, establishing a tenuous contact, and gradually guiding us along that contact. I knew when we were close enough to touch the cylinder, and fear churned up in me again.

“It will not be the same,”
Somil assured me.
“We will touch only a single moment. I will not move again until you have withdrawn.”

He waited until he knew I had control and was ready, then he “landed” on the cylinder.

I was standing at the edge of a harvested grain field, kicking at the dry dirt and worrying about next year's crop. The yield, and the income from it, had been the smallest ever. I hated the watermaster, but I knew he was right about the ground drying out. If I paid him for water, would next years crop be bigger enough to give me more profit? Or would I end up like all the rest, owing him so much that, piece by piece, he would begin to own this stretch of ground that had supported my ancestors? What else could I do? We could move
—
I, and my wife, and our two daughters
—
but we could not take the land with us, and any land that would still grow crops was sure to be occupied. And I had no other skills. Visions of my family in rags, my girls working as household help or toiling in someone else's fields tortured me.