The Windsingers (8 page)

'Come Ki. To your feet now. Delay won't make things any easier. Come on, Ki.'

The wizard's voice was low, comforting. She puzzled at the familiarity of the tone, then placed it. Thus must she sound to her team when she coaxed them into a particularly difficult river fording. But she found herself rising, nonetheless, to gather up the wizard's head on its mounting block of stone. She held it to her bosom as if it were a talisman against the unknown.

'Ki!' the wizard stirred her gently. 'The beast is waiting, but it grows impatient. We must enter it.'

'Where is it?' she murmured, confused. Her mind was misted, as it had been since Dresh had used her as a signal beacon. Dresh's chuckle was a dash of cold water over her, rousing her to the stranger reality she now moved in. She felt her mind clear slightly even as his words aroused her fighting spirit.

' The swallow, who was queen of the sky, is a drowning bird in the water, ' Dresh quoted maddeningly. 'What a fool I can be. Of course you can't see it. And I have not time to tune your mind to accept what your eyes could show you. I must be your perception. Hold tight to me.'

Ki's peripheral vision began to dim. The greyness moved in rapidly, closing out her sight until she was peering down a long tunnel at a spot of night. Then that, too, vanished. She was in a grey fog. Slowly her world began to open out again, strangely altered. The trees were taller, the grass higher. The horses loomed more massively huge than ever. With a jolt, it all snapped into perspective for her. She was viewing the world through Dresh's eyes, at her own chest level. Dresh chuckled at her dawning comprehension.

'Now that you can see your world through my eyes, let me introduce you to one of my worlds. Behold!'

Dresh blinked for Ki. The shared eyes opened to an unnight world. Yet the light of it did not illumine. The light of this world came not from moon or sun or star, but from the beings within it. Where Sigurd and Sigmund had been tethered, two great beings gave off a greenish-brown glow. Her own body, as Dresh turned their sight down on it, shimmered yellowly. 'And could you but see me, I would be an opalescent glow!' There was no modesty in Dresh's voice. And now, behold the beast!' he said invitingly, and the eyes swung to it. It was among the brownish mist of the trees. Ki walked toward it, through a dimly glowing brown sea of grasses.

The beast was not white, but gave off a translucent light. She sensed its life, but could not recognize its body. It was visible to her only as a tunnel of clear light, or perhaps she could call it a tower, for it rose hollowly into the blackness away from the solid earth. When at last Ki stood at the base of the creature, she could peer up that tunnel. The clear light shone within it as well as without. Ki's logic winced.

'Enter!' Dresh's voice goaded her impatiently.

'Enter?' Did he expect her to step within the thing's maw, or nostril, or whatever other bodily opening it was that gaped before them?

She didn't need to move. Dresh made a sound, like a word spoken by a mouthless creature. Ki felt her hair stir, and then they were rising, or perhaps falling...

They traveled streaming through the brightly glowing belly of the beast. No wind stirred her clothing, but her hair waved about her face. She did not know if they moved, or if the creature moved around them; to consider either theory of motion made her vaguely queasy. Gradually Dresh's murmured words began to reach her mind.

'...Ki. Now, Ki. Easy. It will soon be over. I am here with you. You are safe. It will soon be over. Trust me.'

'I'm not a child!' She thought she had spoken the words, but they seemed to have been ripped from her mouth and flung all about inside the creature. They made no sense as they bounced back to her. They rattled bruisingly against her flesh. The red fragments of them tumbled away.

'Ki. Ki. Ki.' The wizard was reaching for her without words, trying to soothe her soundlessly. 'We do not speak with our mouths. Not within this being. You do not speak at all, but listen to me. No, do not let your mind fly off to puzzle about what it cannot absorb; listen only to me. There will come a moment when you will hear... will perceive a sound. It will not be hearing, but you will know it. The pain we used to summon this creature, the agony you could not voice will come back to you. I caused you to send it forth, but as it issued from you, it is solely yours. Any more than this I cannot explain. I trust to your intuition.'

Dresh paused to let the rustling of panic settle in Ki's mind. 'You will know it, never fear. You will recognize it as a part of yourself, as familiar to you as your own hand. When you know it, you must seize it. Do not, however, let go of me. Cradle me in your left arm. That's right. Now keep your right hand at the ready. And once you have seized your sound, do not let it go.'

Ki found that she would obey, despite a searing rage deep within her soul. Time passed, both endless and swift. They flitted on. And now they began to pass other objects in the beast; Ki saw the peal of a dirge bell, and the quivering wail of a child that had fallen down a well. She did not understand how she knew what these strange knobs of light and thorny darknesses were. But she knew them. She saw a tiny blob that was the suddenly expelled breath of a king killed by a friend's treachery. She passed through a terrible palpable orange mist of a man who had been bludgeoned to death in his sleep, but had cried aloud in his dream.

She nearly missed. She was upon hers almost before she saw it. It was white and yellow and black, angular here and swollen there. It could not be grasped with a hand. It was too large. She flailed at it wildly as it spun toward her, missed, and then, as it slipped past her, abruptly hugged it to her ribs with her whole right arm.

Ki felt she had thrust her arm into a rapidly spinning wheel. She was flung wildly and swiftly around with her right shoulder as the center of her cyclone. Vertigo overtook her. She clutched her pain and Dresh close to her, trying vainly to shut his eyes and wipe out the dizzying vision of worlds whipping past her.

She felt the pain slip back into her body, huge at first, and then ripping to the center of her being, growing smaller but more intense, until it rejoined some core within her that she had never before known. When that happened, a floor rose up to slam itself against her head and back and heels. A grey ceiling crashed into place. Dresh did not need to tell her that she had been slammed into a reality.

Ki lay motionless, the breath knocked out of her. The back of her head and the knobs of her spine had been bruised by the landing. Yet strangely she felt better, complete again. The misty indecision that had plagued her since Dresh had summoned the creature through her had gone. Whatever had rejoined her inside the beast had burned away the fog, returning to her a sense of independent judgment. Once more she was whole. And furious.

She gathered herself as her breath came back to her, staring at a ceiling patterned with grey swirls. She lifted her bruised head cautiously. It produced no change in perspective. Only when she sat up all the way, lifting Dresh's head with her, did her view change. She was still using his eyes.

The muscles of his jaw struggled under her hand. She had been gripping him by the jaw rather than by the block of stone, she realized, and had unconsciously retained her clutch. She shifted her hands quickly.

'Thank you,' Dresh murmured scathingly. 'For a moment I thought myself paralyzed in your death grip.'

'It would be less than what you deserve. I'll use my own eyes now.'

'As you will,' Dresh replied indifferently, unruffled by the icy fury in Ki's voice.

There was a swirling of mist that gradually cleared. Ki blinked her eyes in an effort to focus them. But what had been dull black walls to Dresh's eyes were to her rippling opaque curtains. She could not see what lay beyond them, but neither could she recognize their solidity.

'Enjoy your view?' Dresh asked solicitously. 'Why don't you just drop me here and trot along in your own independent way?'

Ki did not respond. She tried to focus her eyes on the wall, but it defied her normal depth perception. The wall was right before her nose; it was an arm's length away; she would have to cross the room to touch it. Pride would not let her surrender, but practicality forced a concession.

'Much as I would enjoy it, Dresh, I dare not drop you here. But the reverse holds true as well.'

'What you perceive as my casual abuse of you is but the haste I must make, out of necessity. Ki, if you persist in taking all this personally, we shall never get ourselves out of this.'

Ki closed her eyes and felt his vision once more rise to her mind. Dresh spoke again. 'We shall have to go on sharing my eyes. A handicap, and not a small one, as you seem to think. I begin to question the wisdom of this venture. I suppose we could have gone to Bitters, and perhaps I could have found a suitable body to usurp. But there is nothing like the comfort of one's own flesh. And, ah, the powers I should surrender by letting them keep my hands and body, to say nothing of my secrets the Windsingers would steal. Well, there's nothing we can do now except continue. Stand up. Let me get my bearings.'

She rose in silent obedience, though her pride chafed at Dresh's assumption of control. Perhaps she would have warmed to the adventure had she been Dresh's partner; but she was not. She was no more to him than a set of legs and arms to use, like a riding beast or a docile team. The imagery jarred her a bit. What insights would she take back to teamstering? she wondered.

Dresh surveyed the chamber and Ki observed it with him. It was a contradiction, a room of austere opulence. The dull black walls were as plain as a prison's, the air cool enough to raise the fine hair on Ki's body, but the low bedstead in one corner was strewn with the thickest shag deer hides that she had ever beheld of the peculiar brown-violet shade that commanded the highest prices. Smoothly rolled at the foot of the bed were blankets such as the Kerugi wove from the wool of their mountain sheep, but even the tiny fingers of the Kerugi could not have fashioned such a fine weave. In another corner was a wooden table, and a single backless stool of stark design. She did not recognize the wood, but it glowed mellowly, and she coveted the tall crystal flagon filled with lavender liquid that centered the table.

'Ah,' Dresh breathed out, well satisfied. 'I haven't lost the touch, Ki. Not a bit. We are not only in her realm, but in her very bedchamber. This room speaks of Rebeke, if ever a room could, with her stark self-denial one moment, and her lascivious self-indulgence the next.'

'Rebeke?'

'The Windsinger that stole my parts. A power-hungry witch if ever there was one.'

But as Dresh spoke, a double image rippled before her eyes. The room as he saw it for her remained, but she saw more - like seeing the pebbly bottom of a pool through one's own reflection. Ki saw a woman. She was tall, and her height seemed the greater for the sweeping mantle of pale green that fell from her wide shoulders to the soles of her bare feet. White anemones peeped from the grasses about her feet, and the sun glanced off the brightness of her flowing hair. 'Rebeke,' the wind whispered as it rustled through the grass and nodding flowers. But this was a woman, no Windsinger she, and as Human as Ki herself. Even as Ki puzzled, the image retreated and faded, until there was only the empty room before her eyes. Dresh was still speaking. Ki wondered if he had intended to share the vision with her.

'... and therefore the most dangerous of them all. For her self-discipline is such that there is no act she could not force herself to, if she felt it behooved her. No act at all, no matter what pain or self-destruction it involved. I could wish it had been another that had stolen my boxes. But I doubt that any could have done it, except her.'

'Where are your boxes?' Ki demanded. Her spine ached with tension, and with the unaccustomed burden of carrying about a head mounted on a block of stone. She did not relish standing about in the bedchamber of Dresh's enemy. Might she not return at any moment? The sooner Ki reclaimed her cargo and Dresh got them out of here, the better. She didn't wish to indulge his chatter any longer.

'Patience!' Dresh calmly rebuked her. 'Did you suppose the Windsingers would allow us to enter, reclaim my boxes, and leave? They will be guarded. Or did you suppose that I am such a trifle as to be left about in bits? Did you think to find me stashed under the bed? No, this shall be a delicate game to play. The move is now ours. In this very lack of vigilance, I smell a keener watch than I had supposed. Do we teeter on the edge of a trap? Let us consider that.' But Ki's mind was elsewhere.

'The rapier!' She shifted Dresh's head into the crook of one arm, with an alarming sway in vision resulting. Futilely she felt at her belt, her stomach sinking with the knowledge that the sheath would not be there. Embarrassment and despair dropped her voice to a whisper. 'I've been a great fool, Dresh. I've left the rapier behind.'

'And your teapot and Vanilly as well!' Dresh added in mock alarm.

'Of what use would they be to us?' Ki growled in annoyance at his frippery. 'I tell you that we are unarmed.'