“Yes, I think so.”
“Right. Then while you’re busy your end Saranja and I will put the wings on the horses and Sponge—I’ll speed that up—and I’ll bring us. I’ve got everything ready to change you into your inert form the moment you’ve found what we’re looking for. I’ll do it whatever else is going on. All right? I’ve told Ribek in his head.”
“I’ve got to have Jex close. Do you think he counts as an animal?”
“I am stone again until you are through the gate. Take me out of the saddlebag and put me in your pouch. Put me on the ground when you tell Benayu that you are ready to proceed.”
Before Maja had finished doing that Benayu was back in the maze of his own mind.
She gazed around. They were traveling up a broad path beside a brick-banked canal, whose waters looked very different from the opaque and sluggish streams of the inner delta, clear and clean enough for her to be able to see a school of silvery minnows scuttling along beside the dark green weed that cloaked the further embankment, all the way from the canal bed to the high-tide mark a few inches above the surface.
The buildings either side were solid but elegant houses that somehow announced their owners’ richness without any parade of wealth. From snatches in the conversation ahead of her Maja could tell that the Magister was telling Ribek about those owners, and the trades that supplied their wealth, and Ribek was making Striclanishly knowledgeable remarks about those trades and at the same time trying tactfully to get the subject back to the history of the oyster-beds.
Yes, of course he was having a good time, and she was glad for him. But underneath, she guessed he was as scared as the rest of them, and this was his way of dealing with it, just as Saranja’s way was to be furious, and Benayu’s was to work on his magic, and hers—hers was to think about Ribek.
There was a bridge across the canal, at which the two rows of handsome houses stopped abruptly. A road crossed the bridge with a ten-foot brick wall on the far side. An iron gate barred the path they were on. There was an odd little Eye on the gate.
As Ribek and the Magister approached, a man appeared, uniformed like a soldier and armed with a pike. He opened the gate and saluted the Magister, but then moved as if to bar the horses.
“The animals are remaining outside, Gidder,” said the Magister. “Two of our honored visitors will remain with them. Supply them with anything they may need as befits Freepeople of our sister city of Larg.”
“There’s an Eye on the gate,” Maja whispered to Benayu.
He considered a moment.
“There to spot magicians,” he muttered. “Wouldn’t have let me through anyway. I wonder why. You’d better go. Don’t want to keep him waiting.”
She hurried to join Ribek, but she needn’t have worried, as the Magister was still impressing the guard with the importance of his visitors. Then all three walked on together through a landscape so different that Maja was tempted to look back and check that the roofs of Barda were still there beyond the wall. This was the same level, stream-threaded delta through which they had arrived, but here as kempt and tidy as that rich man’s garden with the pleasure yachts beside it had been. No tumbledown sheds and barns, no miserable horses in paddocks, only, a few hundred yards ahead of them now, an organized line of sturdy timber buildings along the banks of one of the larger waterways. There seemed to be no one apart from themselves anywhere in all that flatness and emptiness.
“…established seven hundred and fifty-eight years ago,” the Magister was saying. “I am the sixty-third to hold the office of Magister. The oyster-beds themselves are owned by the individual members, but the Guild supervises the processing, checking and marketing. It was set up during the great oyster plague, when all the beds down the whole east coast of the Empire were ravaged by oyster worm. Only Barda escaped. Prices went sky high, our oyster-beds expanded out of all recognition and we have never looked back.”
“How exceedingly fortunate for you,” said Ribek. “Magical, almost.”
“Certainly not,” snapped the Magister. “Our competitors have many times accused us of employing rogue magicians to inflict the plague on them while sparing ourselves, but the authorities in Talagh—as you no doubt know, extremely strict in such matters—made a thorough investigation and cleared us completely. Exceedingly fortunate, yes. According to our records we have nineteen times over the centuries been spared such plagues, while others have suffered. It is thought to be something to do with the quality of the water, which is another reason for our security precautions. Lunatics believe that their ailments will be cured by immersion among the oysters. There is a flourishing illegal trade in bottled Barda water—much of it fake, of course. We attempt to discourage it. That is not the sort of publicity we want to encourage. The excellence of our oysters is advertisement enough.”
“And has that always been the case?”
“Indeed it has. Our earliest records include regular orders from the Emperor’s kitchens.”
“And those actual beds still exist, you tell me? I should very much like to see them with my own eyes.”
“So you shall, so you shall. We will do that first of all. You will want to talk to some of the old oystermen later, but it is high tide, and they are taking their rest. They won’t be returning till the tide is well into the ebb, when the work begins again. Now these beds here on your right…”
He burbled on. Ribek answered just enough to keep him going, but his mind was no longer on it, and he’d almost stopped using his Striclan voice. Maja could understand why. Most of his attention was absorbed by what the waters were saying, or rather singing. She could almost hear it herself, an endless, slow, wavering chant, repeating and repeating itself but never quite the same each time. Utterly, utterly peaceful.
Of course, she thought. The same pattern as everything else that had happened. The Ropemaker would have hidden his material self in a place which only someone from the Valley could find. Only someone from Northbeck. Only Ribek.
They came to a slightly wider stretch of water, almost a pool, where two streams joined and flowed out as one. The floor of the pool was gray with layers of oysters. The tide was almost full, barely moving, but there must have been some faint current because she could see a white down feather moving very gently along, close by the near bank, away from the sea, and realized, from her sense of the secret sound that only Ribek was hearing, that the whole body of water was quietly rotating round some central point, an unending ritual dance, the slowest of slow measures to the soundless chanting.
“Marvelous,” said Ribek in his own voice, his awe wholly genuine. “I was born by a millstream, high in the mountains. I have always had a kind of feeling for water. Never anything like this.”
“How strange,” said the Magister dreamily. “You have never tasted oysters and I have never seen mountains. Ever since I was a boy I have longed to see mountains.”
They stood together in silence, lost in their separate trances.
“Wake up, Maja!”
She shuddered herself into the here and now, tugged urgently at Ribek’s sleeve and felt him do the same.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “Ready?”
She nodded. He took her by the elbow, led her to the edge of the bank and crouched beside her, pointing, as if he were showing her something in the water. She slipped the stone pendant out of her pouch and laid it on the ground.
“Just show me the way,” he muttered. “I’ll find it. Hold your breath when I say…I’m going to push you in. Don’t try to swim. Now!”
She filled her lungs and stopped breathing. Two thundering heartbeats and the world went black. The hair blazed through that dark. She was jerked forward, was falling, distantly heard Ribek’s shout of alarm, heard the Magister’s yell, met the shock of cold, automatically clung on to her breath, but barely noticed any of these things as the blazing strand streaked onward, filling her consciousness, all there was. Her hand must have been already pointing when Ribek gripped her wrist and dragged her on down, but she didn’t feel him doing so. All she knew, all that held her together, was that single intense line of fire seeking its home.