Lur Raldnor walked over to the Lowlanders. They were both men, and though blanched, their eyes were not white. They looked at him, without menace it must be admitted. But then, without anything.
“If you’re trying to speak within to me,” he said, “I can’t.”
“But you have done so,” one said.
“With my mother,” he said. It was a personal thing, he did not like to tell them. At the same time they stung him, for he had their blood and wanted to prove so.
“Yes, Medaci. You are Medaci’s son.”
“And, as my hosts will also have informed you, the son of Yannul,” Lur Raldnor said fiercely.
“Are you fit, now?” the other man asked.
“Where is it,” Raldnor said, “you want me to go with you?”
Then he stepped away from them, catching his breath with a silly little sound. For they had shown him. It was there only a moment, the picture of the terrace, a palace with snapped-off pillars, and through the gaps as well as open space.
He mastered himself, and said, “Why?”
No mind-picture, no intrusion, now.
One of them said, “You wished to fight, once.”
“What? You mean you’re organizing an army again, to take on Free Zakoris? Or is it against Kesarh?”
“No army,” the man said.
“A fight nonetheless.” The other smiled. For the first, Raldnor acknowledged they were neither of them much his senior. As he got used to them after the dark Xarabians, they looked less like ice, more the shades of light he had seen so often in his mother, and his younger brother. He himself was winter-pale, wind-burned, no more. And he had learned early on how he could use the color of his eyes.
He shrugged, to gauge them.
“We,” said the paler man, “are not your enemies.”
“Some of our people have chosen remoteness. We remain. The world is our mother, as Anackire is the world’s soul, to us. To see the world at war again, the scars opened on themselves, new scars made, the sweep of Zakorian hate which is insanity, the hunger of Karmiss which is cruel. These are the enemies. Not men, never men, but the evil dreams of men.”
Lur Raldnor began to feel a desolate fatigue. He remembered what he had thought in Elyr, the hopeless resignation worse than fear or rage. The world tumbling into chaos, and no one to prevent it.
“Oh yes,” the paler of the two Lowlanders said, tackling the thought Raldnor had not spoken. “Even in that, there’s more than one path to extinction. But other paths, also. Ashni passed by our village. We came here. Very many came here.”
“Like the other time,” the second man said. Now he grinned. “Raldnor’s time. But she’s the daughter of Raldnor.”
“Ashne’e?” Lur Raldnor questioned.
But they said the name over, and he heard the slight difference.
“Ashni.”
The paler man said, “Come and see.”
“This woman you say—”
“Ah, no. She’s gone already, into the north. Each of the cisterns of the world’s power must be woken and tapped. Hers is Koramvis.”
Then, at last he saw how they looked at him, and he went cold.
“You’ve been told about the great wolf.”
“Yes.”
“You expected me to come here, as you did. Why?”
But he knew.
Even the Xarabians did not seem surprised when, solemnly and irrevocably, the Amanackire each touched forehead and heart, the arcane reverence the Shadowless Plains now gave to a lord or a priest, those upon whose fate they saw the Choice of Anackire.
Although in fact it was never given to those who, like Raldnor, Ashne’e, Ashni, were in essence themselves considered to be aspects of the goddess herself. Since the goddess asked nothing, needing nothing, being everything.
They went out into the street, and crowds were standing there with torches. There was no element of the macabre or the portentous. It felt almost frivolous, like a party going to a wedding or a feast.
The Xarabians followed them out.
They walked, hundreds of people, through the snow towards the ruined palace and the magic well.
Later, almost into dawn, lying alone on the border of sleep, he thought: Can it be so simple—ingenuous?
And somewhere, maybe from some other drifting mind in the dark city, or from some cave within himself, the affirmative.
Men are drops of water in the ocean of life. And yet the vast ocean is only that, myriad drops of water. One single thought, crying out: This shall be! Or crying out: This shall not be! And the vast ocean is altered.
They had said something like this to him, not in words. He tried from habit to put it into words now, although the words would lessen it, make it unclear.
The palace had been warmed by the torches. What occurred? They had stood on the ancient mosaics, and drunk yellow wine which they said came from a well. . . .
There were Xarabians, Elyrians, Dortharians even, and mixes of all types. And the Amanackire, spread through the crowd, like a silver string holding everything together.
Lur Raldnor had always had the telepathy of the Plains. Now those who had elected themselves, or been elected to educate him, began to do so. It was not hard to learn, after all. But then, it was not really learning, only recapturing.
Was he important to them because of these obvious things, Lowland blood which brought the mind speech, Yannul’s blood which was proximity to what had gone before? Even, maybe, the significant name of Raldnor, which now was his, and had always been his, though one of Raldnor’s sons had attempted to strip him of it.
Sleep moved over him.
He would not be having the girl now. Sex, the magic power, would be retained and channeled. Strangely, already he did not want her in that way. He could think back to Yeiza, or to others, and there would come merely a glimmer of the senses, cerebral, no longer governing the flesh.
Of course, the cold and loneliness of the journey, the hardship, the being lost, the closeness to death, these had enabled him to enter the occult aura of the ruin. The magician’s purgation before sorcery.
Floating now, as if in the sky. Murmurs of awareness all about him that were not sound, and glows like candles that were not seen.
He remembered how Ashni had gone by them. It seemed to him that, laboring in Xarabiss, desperate to get to Lan, he had caught rumors of something bizarre, and paid no heed—Men and women moving through the last coppery summer days and over the starry hills, something about music and song that were not audible, and sheens and rainbows invisible, and wildcats, wolves, serpents dancing, and flowers in long yellow hair that did not wither. And yet perhaps there had only been a group of travelers walking in the dust, riding carts past the villages through the still ear of night. Which was the vision, the mirage, which the truth? Were both the same? Or could it be that something which had not happened at all had yet happened, because the mind perceived it where the eyes would not?
He thought of a primeval forest in the snow, persisting where it could not persist, centuries.
He was asleep, now, and sleeping, he looked about him without eyes, to find Medaci.
Presently he did find her.
She was as utterly before him as if they had met in sunlight in a little room. But such things were equivalents, as spoken words were the equivalents of the speech of the mind.
In a response then, which was the equivalent of a quiet touch upon her shoulder, he asked her attention, and received it. She was not nonplussed. She seemed unastonished to behold him, safe and where he was, and meshed in the Dream of Anackire. But her gladness in him was as he recollected.