The stone behind his head smelled of moss.
That’s peculiar,
Lorn thought, almost giddy with fear. The footsteps were just around the bend now. But the stone felt slightly warm under him, like that stone wall he had leant on outside Elefrua, baked with an afternoon’s sun, cooling only slowly while clouds dragged their rainstorms through the broken blue behind them, showering the wheat and the fallow.
But that stone
was
this stone, something insisted. Quarried from the same land. And this stone knew him. Knew its own. Could take care of its own—
They came into view around the curve, moving along at moderate speed, like men on business—the serjeant from this morning, and a companion also in the tunic and breeches of an Arlene regular, a taller man, dark-haired, thinner. They looked right at him. Lorn gripped the knife, leaned against the warm wall, and waited.
They looked straight through him, and walked on toward him, and right past him, as if they saw nothing but stone. “No, there’s something else that wants looking into, apparently.”
“Something else? What, then? Take the head off him, that’s the answer to everything, I’d have thought.”
Lorn stopped being astonished at his sudden unseeability, and went hot at what they had been saying a few seconds earlier. “Shoot him at the gates—”! So much for his “excellent” disguise, so much for his cool handling of the serjeant. They had known all along.
How long have they been watching me? Since Elefrua? Before, possibly?
—But it was at Elefrua that this strangeness had started to come to him, something to do with the land: the knowing of it. The being known by it: recognized, owned.... He felt the stone of the wall against his shoulders and back, good Arlene granite, the bones of the earth hereabouts, and thanked it silently.
And did he hear it say something in return? --
They were past him now, heading down the alleyway. “No, it seems not. Some business down south—they weren’t too forthcoming, but I can guess. And they want to see who his friends are in Prydon, too. Use to be made of them.” There was a mutter of annoyance. “All we have to do now is find him.”
“No problem there. What’s he going to do, tunnel under the walls? He’ll go out by the gate like everyone else. We’ll put someone behind him the minute he moves. He stays here, that’s fine too. No one minds if the rat’s comfortable in the trap.”
Their voices faded gradually. Much too gradually, Lorn realized. He had been hearing, not through his own ears, but someone else’s. Did stone hear? Was a wall more than its component stones, but a kind of organism? It was going to take a while to understand all this....
He put his knife away and just leaned there against the wall for a moment, as much for companionship as to get his breath and his wits back after his fright. The stones, at least, knew who he was, or what. He thought with a twinge of fear of Lalen, and Nia.
Fastrael,
he corrected himself nervously.
Some business down south—
He swore softly. If his carelessness had endangered them— He could just hear Lalen’s angry voice: “What new trouble are you going to bring down on us?”
He scrubbed at his face for a moment, wiping the sweat away.
Nothing to do but get things moving as quickly as possible,
he thought.
Make certain people too busy with matters up north to worry much about the south. It’s all I can do.
He patted the wall as he stood away from it. The feeling was strange: did the hard stone curve like a cat against his hand for a moment?...
Lorn headed back toward his lodgings, with conjectures burning in his brain. Finally, feeling like a fool, he tested one of them. He found another small street, well-lit, and went so far as to stand under a lamp there, having first made friends with the wall of the house to which the lamp was fastened. The moss-smell, the feel of sun-warmed stone, was there as well, and a sense of bemused greeting. Lorn leaned there and watched four or five people go by, singly or together, and satisfied himself that they couldn’t see him—by tripping one of them, finally: a drunken gentleman who fell down without hurting himself, and got up convinced that he had simply missed his step. More experimentation showed Lorn that he could get the cobblestones to recognize him as well, and could walk right through a crowd unseen, if he did it slowly. Sometimes the control slipped, and he became seeable again. But after a few tries Lorn learned to find his control again, more and more quickly, and he spent an hour or so practicing—walking through city streets that smelled of rain and wheatfields instead of damp and dung, brushing past the City watch and many a late-night walker with no more trace of his passing than a slight breeze where he had been.
Now if I can lead horses while doing this, he wondered—
He was sure he could.
He made his way back to his lodgings, checked Blackmane’s and Pebble’s fodder, and made sure that their tack was arranged so that he could find it quickly in the morning. Then he went up to bed and lay there awake for a long time.
Goddess among us,
Lorn thought.
Who knows how soon this might have happened, if I had stayed here after Father died? Maybe all it needed was that I be past a certain age, a certain stage, for it to start happening. Or just had to be willing to be known.
He had to laugh slightly at that. Incessant seeker of action, lover of last stands and lost causes, of doing things, no surprise that it had taken him a long time to find out that what needed doing was to
stop
doing.
What if I had come back sooner, and stayed a tenday, a month?
And maybe I would never have had it at all, without Herewiss, and whatever he’s done to me.
And Herewiss, of course, had become what he now was because Lorn had not become King. The coil of it all ran back and forth in time, interwoven with other strands he couldn’t even begin to understand, and Lorn knew Whose hand was on the shuttle. No matter. He had this piece of kingship, this feel, this power,
now
. The land recognized him, and was willing to help. Now all he had to do was make use of that help—get to Prydon without being noticed, and get into the city, and go looking for some things that were his.
And perhaps find them... at which point a war might just become unnecessary.
Always assuming that he could find those things in time.
Hergótha,
Lorn thought.
He turned over and went to sleep.
The Shadow was the first to have to claim
It was in the right: and ever since, the
claim has been suspect. For the Goddess
didn’t need to claim—She knew.
—d’Arien,
Charestics
“I could not find him,” Sunspark said.
Herewiss looked at it. It sat in the chair, leaning back indolently, in the shape of that young red-haired woman, and its glance went back and forth from Herewiss, to Moris, to Andaethen, with—was that a trace of unease?
“But surely you know the feel of his mind by now.”
“I know it,” Sunspark said. “I’m telling you it wasn’t there. Something—” It shook its head. “There is another power interfering. Some other element, some other force.... Every now and then I would get a flicker of his thought: then—” It waved a hand. “Away again.”
Andaethen shrugged. “We’ll assume he’s all right, then. Doing otherwise won’t help us. Are you ready for this evening?”
Herewiss nodded. “I’ll be done with the job I have to do by sunset,” he said. “After that....” He smiled slightly. “It should be an interesting party indeed.”
*
Keep them from crossing,
Eftgan had said to him.
Just keep them on their side of the water for a few days more, until we’re less than four days away. I’ll manage the rest.
It had been a pretty problem, despite the fact that there were only two fords near the city, and the bridge. Some of Cillmod’s forces were already on the Darthene side of the river, but only about a thousand. The main levies were still coming up from the south, where they had been billeted on the smaller towns—partly to guarantee those towns’ loyalty to the person presently sitting in the Throne, and partly because Prydon and its environs simply couldn’t support them all. They could spend little time near the city, and Herewiss made use of that fact. At first, parties of fifty or a hundred had started crossing the Arlid by whichever ford was convenient. Herewiss had put a stop to that, several nights ago, by doing one of the things he had always wanted to do before he had the Fire: by becoming the river.
It was not a thing that one did suddenly. A long time, he had spent in his circle of Fire up in his room, dissolving his physical self away in the sense and flow of Arlid’s water; feeling the rocks of the river-bottom, every weed that grew and waved there, every fish and bug; and the water itself, endlessly malleable, but stubborn enough in its way to wear down rock, let alone flesh. Herewiss let it wear him away so—that was part of the price to be paid for a wreaking like this—until there was little left of his consciousness but that sense of flowing past the restraint of banks, himself shouldering himself aside in whirlpool and eddy, running shallow over Daharba ford all in a roil, barely four or five feet between surface and bottom: then running under the walls of Prydon, and dividing in turmoil around the piers of the great bridge before reuniting to run over the ford at Anish, and further north. Though gravity and the Sea tugged at him, whispering of final dissolution and commingling in the great deeps, Herewiss carefully confined his consciousness to that single stretch of water. The Arlid was not a quiet river, this far down its course. It might seem placid in its wider stretches, but the water ran fast and deep, and anyone who took its seeming placidity for granted was likely to be nastily surprised.
It took him half a day to become the river properly: and it became him, as a result, though not so completely. It found his complexities and commitments fascinating, being so different from its own—a river makes few promises, except to flow downhill—and took them on gladly for a short period, with what Herewiss found was a rather shocking enthusiasm. The result was that the first time a group of Arlene mercenaries tried to ford the river at Daharba, they and their escort of regulars were sucked down by a sudden whirlpool, and about half of them did not come up again, except several days later, bloated.
Their deaths were on his head, and Herewiss grieved over them; but a lesser number of deaths now could possibly prevent a great many more later, and he hardened his heart to what he and the river were doing. It was a strain to keep the Firework fueled day and night, but the same thing happened again the next day, at Anish ford and Daharba both, and the next as well. It happened to fewer and fewer soldiers, though. Rumor had traveled fast, as Herewiss expected, and company after company of mercenaries and regulars both arrived at Prydon on the western side, heard the news—or saw it happen themselves—and refused to cross. Short of moving the whole army down to Hasmë, there was nothing the commanders could do but march men up to the City and across the bridge. This made a fine bottleneck, what with the commercial traffic that used the bridge as well, and there was no moving large groups across it quickly. Considering that the Arlenes would have about five thousand people to move within the next few days, all this suited Herewiss well. Pressure from Prydon might insist that the troops should keep trying, and the fords might presently be proved safe. That didn’t matter: Herewiss now had the bridge to deal with.
Nearly a tenday ago, now, he had strolled across the bridge with Sunspark, had leaned there on the broad handsome parapet, halfway across, and watched the curl and hiss of the brown water running under the graceful curve of the huge granite piers. It was twenty cubits wide and three hundred cubits long, of which two hundred fifty cubits was span, with five sets of arched pillars beneath on either side. All those arches were the circular and semi-elliptical kinds that had been popular in buildings in those days. Besides being beautiful, they bore weight better than some other kinds of arches: which was a problem for Herewiss. He was going to have to convince this bridge to fall down, and one so stubborn-built was going to be a problem.
A bridge’s nature is to bear,
he thought, gazing at the Fire as it leapt around him,
and to keep doing so despite whatever forces are being brought against it.
If it should decide to resist what Herewiss was going to require of it—its suicide, essentially—he would have to “kill” again.
He closed his eyes and composed himself. That was another thing he had been having some difficulty with—this ongoing discovery that almost everything seemed alive, at least to the Fire. He shrugged and went looking inside him for that long hallway inside the old Hold in the Waste.
There seemed to be a faint breeze blowing along it as he stood there for a second, getting his bearings. Black floor, black ceiling and walls, all polished, reflected him dimly; light struck down in a bright shaft some ways down the hall, from one of the many skylights that pierced through the high ceiling of the Hold at unpredictable intervals. He started to walk, touching the stone briefly in greeting as he went. This place he had always known was somehow conscious, even before he came into his Fire; it had watched him, waited, even assisted him—so he sometimes suspected. Certainly it did so now.
He didn’t have to wander long before he found the doorway that led, in mind, to one end of the Bridge. Herewiss walked through it and out onto the roadbed, looking down for a moment at the hexagonal paving-setts, and the ancient mortar holding them together. As usual, the mortar was even stronger than the stone, and still getting stronger every day: it wasn’t nearly old enough, at a mere six centuries, to have started deteriorating significantly.
One more problem,
Herewiss thought, and strolled out into the middle of the bridge again, standing where he had stood the other day. The grace of the thing, the age of it, stirred his guilt anew at the thought of having to destroy something so beautiful and venerable. And worse, he was going to have to pull it down in some way that would leave it wholly unusable, but otherwise mostly unhurt, so that it could be put up again later—no point in wasting the effort of hundreds of people in quarrying and shaping the stone.