The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) (28 page)

A Baited Trap

Alan lay back against the keel of the canoe in a distracted mood. He could smell the river, a very different aroma from the Suir back in friendly Clonmel: This smelled stranger, more bitter, the quintessence of dark magic in an alien and frightening world. Snow gusted around him in the darkness. He was still dosed with healwell to treat his damaged joints, and his weakness from the blood loss was being gradually restored with strange-smelling potions administered by the Aides woman, Layheas.

Nobody spoke a word.

He thought about Mo, the fact that she was still missing, and he thought about Kate. He missed his friends. He had to pray that they were safe, that soon they would all be together again, as he listened to the
soft and steady rhythm of the rag-quieted oars wielded by Ainé and her companions, their canoe the lead of many carrying the fighting band of Shee southward toward Isscan through the inky-black current.

During those long hours of silence, Alan also thought about the young Shee who had died to save him. He saw again the great funeral pyre, with its orange flame, as it had engulfed Valéra and her dead companions, their heads positioned so that they faced northwest, across the great landmass of continental Monisle toward their ancestral home in the Guhttan mountains. In this same canoe, Muîrne cradled the sleeping crescent of Valéra’s sister-child, so startlingly reminiscent of her mother, with the first wispy tresses of golden-blonde hair and the first twinkling of babyish curiosity in the same lambent amber eyes.

So hope had been born out of despair.

At daybreak, once they had pulled in the canoes and rested, he had a little more time for a whispered conversation with Milish. He learned that only noviciates among the Shee carried their daughters in the womb. The mature warriors had long ago given birth. Their sister-daughters were safe from their enemies, back in the heavily defended mountains of their homeland, where they were in turn schooled in their warrior history and trained in arms. All the other Shee who had died in the recent battle had been full warriors, so that, in a sense, they had not died at all. It was a thought Alan would need time to get used to, even as he listened to Milish’s explanations.

He presumed that Ainé also had a sister-daughter, though in the Kyra’s brooding silence he also sensed a tragic family secret, one he knew better than to enquire into. In his heart he felt a growing apprehension about his role in this world as, with his new companions, he lay down to get some sleep in the daylight hours. Even his dreams were pervaded by foreboding so that he woke frequently, afraid of shadows.

Then on the third night of travel, the southern sky became increasingly aglow—the reflection of the night lamps of Isscan.

A few hours before dawn, as they pulled the canoes under the canopies of some riverside trees, Milish told him the history of the city states of Monisle, and that of Isscan in particular, this great inland port and market center from the days when it was a proud regional capital renowned for its trading wealth and ancient traditions. But a shake of her head and the lowering of her eyes suggested that things had changed since the coming of the Death Legion. As they whispered together, Ainé and Muîrne were rigging a cover of pine branches over an already shadowed hollow, so that they could sleep a few hours before entering the city.

Alan felt guilty about the fact that he was concealing from Milish the real focus of his thoughts and hopes. He never mentioned the fireside chat with Kemtuk, or the shaman’s belief that a great mage lived here in Isscan: a mage more ancient than any other and whose art could probe the labyrinths of the mind. The shaman had called him the Mage of Dreams.

When, a few hours later, Milish, Alan and Layheas emerged from their hiding place disguised as a merchant woman with her two servants, the Ambassador led them toward the city with a jaunty step. Alan did his best to look the part with a worn and tattered seal cape, lagging tiredly in the wake of his mistress. For many a mile they walked through farm lanes surrounded by winter pasture. They encountered few people at this early hour, and those they saw ignored them, little interested in strangers. But one farmer, a bald man with a pale, round face, leaned on a field wall and watched them pass, his expression surly and suspicious.

Milish wished him good morning in a guttural language new to Alan, without even a momentary pause in her step. Once past the man, however, she fell back abreast of Alan to murmur, “A farmer with the face of a townsman—if I am not mistaken, we have encountered the first spy of the Death Legion.”

During their rest by the riverside, Milish had explained a little more about the occupying army, and why they had not plundered and destroyed Isscan as they had so many other towns and cities. Having witnessed the brutality of the Storm Wolves, Alan guessed that it could only mean that the city was useful to them. Now he understood that the Storm Wolves were only a minority of the main army of Death Legion, a force of occupation that, in Milish’s estimation, numbered in the millions. An army that size must need its belly fed. And Isscan, as the great trading center
and confluence of river, forest and farms, provided an important source of grain, fuel and fish.

The ramshackle outer city gathered itself about them, the dispersed farmsteads condensing into villages—viper pits of gossip, as Milish took care to warn him—then dirt-lined streets, their meanderings too higgledy-piggledy to owe anything to any architect’s pen.

Alan disliked these slum-warrens, devoid of clean water or sanitation, where desperation bred greed, cruelty and disease.

There was no longer any possibility of being ignored. Sharp eyes in unwashed faces watched their every step. More intrusive still were the outstretched hands of beggars, the sight of deliberately blinded and maimed children. Here he saw a mixture of peoples, much as one might see in a shantytown around some developing city back on Earth. But a great many of these people looked distinctly feral, with downy or frankly hairy faces, a medley of furry skins, claw-like hands and scaly bare feet.

They had to pass a gauntlet of offerings: unwholesome sweetmeats and alcoholic drinks as well as trinkets, often gaudy and increasingly vulgar. In one section, where the proliferating shanties hung back in the shadow of the massive city walls, the offerings were a good deal darker. Here, in the frames of rickety doorways, the most perverse of fantasies were openly advertised. Sadistic deviations of pain and pleasure were paraded before their averted eyes.

“Stop and indulge your wildest dreams!” a man with black stumps of teeth wheedled, running among and around them. “What could be more tasty than these fruits of the secret passions?”

“None, I grant you.” Milish concocted a smile. “And perhaps we shall have time to dally after our business is done.”

Alan struck out at the clawing hands, or the beckoning fingers, but Milish, with a squeeze of his arm, maintained her calm. “Keep your distaste to yourself. There is much at stake. Remember your friend, Mo, and endure it.”

For what seemed the hundredth time, Mo explored what appeared to be a corridor of ivory-smooth stone. She stopped and looked up high in the wall to one of the tiny circular openings that was the source of daylight. The light diffused rather than fell into the featureless space. There was no clear angle where the floor met the walls or where the walls met the vaulted ceiling, high above. Everything seemed to melt into a blur of whiteness. When she held up her hands to examine the effects of the light falling on them, her flesh looked too bland to be real, as if her presence had no more substance than a ghost. Even her dress—what should be a lovely dress, from her throat to her ankles, made of what appeared to be gossamer-white silk—couldn’t possibly be real. And when she tried
to remember where she was, how she had come to be here, her memory too was blank, as if her very personality had been stolen from her.

She cried her thoughts aloud, into the white-glowing air. “I’m not some doll, or puppet in . . . in somebody else’s imagination!”

The worst thing, the very worst thing of all, was the fact that she could not sleep. Oh, she felt so tired, so needful of lying down and abandoning her aching limbs to rest! But there was no bed, no rug on the floor, not even a simple chair to sit on. She inhabited a world of utter blandness, no more than an endless circular corridor made out of faintly glowing smooth white stone.

Nothing appeared to make sense—unless, of course, it made an altogether too perfect sense.

“There should be windows!” she cried.

Abruptly, as if she had willed it into being, a tall narrow window, like an arrow-slit in a castle, appeared in the outer wall. When she ran over and looked out through the slit, she saw a sunlit garden, a garden which, the more she looked into it, was broodingly still, with a mirror-like pond in its center. On one side of the pond was a rounded gray stone on which a large white bird was perched. The bird looked like a big gray stork, with long spindly legs and a bright yellow beak. It was perfectly motionless. Its head was averted so the face was in profile and it was peering fixedly back at her with one huge yellow eye.

Mo’s hand reached up to her throat. Her fingers searched for something that should be there, but whatever they searched for was missing.

Mo panicked. She began to run down the circular corridor, stopping to peer out of one window slit after another. In every window she saw that identical view, the garden with the large white bird. She retracted her gaze, sensing the awful malice that looked back at her in that single great eye.

“There should be a bed, or a rug, or a chair—and food!”

But no bed, rug or chair—or food—appeared.

She flopped down listlessly on the featureless white floor, sitting upright, with her legs crossed. Her hands brushed her face, touched the skin of her arms, and felt nothing substantial. Nothing was real. A frantic restlessness invaded her, causing her arms and legs to jump and her mind to wander, as if her very thoughts as well as her memories were trapped in the white labyrinth.

She took a deep breath. With a trembling voice, she tried to calm her fears by speaking aloud a new riddle:

Into her mind crept a voice, like a whispered secret at the very edge of consciousness, “The answer, pretty one, is the rain!”

Mo gasped, whirling from one side to another, to try to find the source of the whisper but there was nobody near her. The voice appeared to have washed into her consciousness through the very glow in the air.

“Who are you?”

The reply came again, like a breath in her mind:

Mo easily solved the riddle. The barriers and old coat were walls that keep some out while keeping others safe within. And the trumpets were ears.

The riddle was a warning:
These walls have ears!

She climbed to her feet, dashed to the nearest slit window and stared out again: that same bird was watching her with its huge yellow eye. She thought that the walls had eyes as well as ears!

She returned to sitting down in the corridor and she murmured, “So I must be careful what I say.”

“Very careful indeed!”

She hesitated, attempting to think this through. “Since I can’t see you, how can we be talking to each other?”

“In a world of magic, everything is possible.”

Her heart leaped. Was this truly a world of magic? “Where is this place?”

“You are the prisoner of one who calls itself the Mage of Dreams.”

Her heart lurched. She had to swallow a moment and her head dropped. “You said ‘itself,’ not ‘himself’ or ‘herself.’”

“It is not human, though it takes human form when the need arises.”

“But why—why should this Mage of Dreams want me?”

“You are the honey in its trap.”

“What does that mean?”

“Can you not imagine for yourself?”

“I have lost my memories. I know little more than that my name is Mo. That and the fact that this—this Mage of Dreams—will not let me sleep.”

“Ah, now, there is the puzzle.”

“But surely my dreams could not threaten one who calls itself the Mage of Dreams?”

“How clever you truly are, pretty one. And no wonder the Mage fears something about you!”

She paused again, her mind as bewildered as ever. “But you never told me your name. Who are you?”

“I’m afraid that I’m not yet ready to tell you that. Though you may freely set eyes on me.”

Into her imagination came an image of a squat but very heavily set little man with shoulder-length hair the red of copper and eyes as green as emeralds.

“Are you a . . . a dwarf?”

“Indeed I am, from the distinguished warrior race of the Fir Bolg.”

Even in her tired mind, his words evoked a memory. Mo blinked, trying to recall . . . There was something familiar about that name, the “Fir Bolg” . . . Why couldn’t she remember what it was? Now Mo studied the face still hovering in her imagination. It was a strange face, heavy and brooding, with bronze-colored skin and a broad flat nose, and fiercely sad lips. It was a face in which she sensed great strength of character as well as pride and determination.

“Are you breaking some rule in talking to me like this?”

“At the risk of my life.”

“Oh!” She sat back with another jolt of fright.

“But who cares for risk when a companion is so pretty, and so resourceful, as you!”

“You must be very brave.”

“No braver than you, little one! You see, in your mind I have discovered a little of your journey and purpose here.”

“My name is Maureen Grimstone, although everyone calls me Mo. And I don’t understand what you’re saying. Can you tell me what I’m doing here?”