There was no light at all, down here. Never in her life had she been in blackness so complete. She began tasting and sniffing at the thick black around her. Blacker than an agli’s heart, blacker than Nilis’ soul had to be. Black. Raven, ebony, obsidian, jet, sable, sooty, swart, pitchy.
In the blackness, sounds: scuffle of hands, knees, feet, sliding whisper of the norit’s black wool robe over the bricks, pounding of blood in ears, assorted rubbings of surface against surface, the rasp of breathings.
In the blackness, smells: wet wool and stone, wet leather, ancient dust, sour-sweet taint of something recently dead, not the corpse they pulled behind them, smell of cold over all like paint, the dead smell of the cold.
Then she saw bricks a short distance ahead. Then she saw Rane’s hand and side. The light crept up to them, shining back at them off the snow. They crawled around a bend and she could see the crossbars of the grating and the spray of snow drifted through them.
Rane dropped the nor’s arm and crawled up to the opening. She fished in her boot for the lockpick, reached a long arm through the grating and began working on the lock. Some fumbling and grimaces later, she got to her feet, stood hunched over, brushed off her knees and tugged at the grating. It squealed and hung up on the small drift but she jerked at it, muscling it a little farther open. She frowned at the opening, twisted half-around to look at the corpse. “I suppose we can kick him through.”
“Well, he’s getting a bit stiff.”
Rane leaned back, reached out, tapped Tuli on her nose. “That’s a norit for you; anything to make life difficult.”
After some awkward maneuvering, they got the body through the opening. Tuli shivered as the long sweep of the wind slammed into her as soon as she stepped out from the wall. Above the whine of the wind she could hear the tumble of the river close by, so close it startled her, She stomped freezing feet in the snow as Rane tugged the grating back into place and snapped the latch.
The river was not yet frozen over, though plates of ice were forming along the banks, breaking off and sweeping away with the hurrying water. Rane and Tuli swung the body back and forth, then launched it into an arc, out over the broad expanse of icy black snow-melt. It splashed down, sank, resurfaced; for a short while a stiff arm appeared and disappeared, the body rolling over and over as the current sucked it away.
Rane plucked at Tuli’s sleeve, leaned down to shout in her face. “Hook onto my belt. We’ll pick up the snowshoes and get back to the macain.”
“What about Gesda?”
“He can take care of himself.”
“Tell me about him.”
Rane chuckled, “Later, Moth. When I don’t have to yell every word.” She took Tuli’s gloved hand, hooked it over her jacket’s belt and started plowing forward through the deepening snow, the sack that Gesda had given her bumping rhythmically with the shift of her shoulders.
The stone hut was cold and stuffy at once, the windows shuttered, the heavy door shut tight. Inside, it smelled of old woman and chini in equal proportions (though the big black chini Tuli had seen before gave no sign of her presence) as if generations of both species had in some way oozed into the walls and stayed there to haunt the place with their odors. There were cured hides on the walls to break the drafts that somehow found their way through the thick stone walls and the tightly fitted shutters and the door. More hides were scattered about the floor, pelts piled on pelts so that walking across the room was an exercise in caution and balance. The old woman sat cross-legged before the fire, her face a pattern of black and red, glitters of eyeball from the drooping slits in the smudges about her eyes. Her hands were square and strong like her face, wrinkled like her face, the palms broad, the fingers so short they looked deformed, more like an animal’s paws than human hands. Tuli watched her and felt the last of the chill, physical and mental, begin to seep out of her. She glanced at Rane and saw something of the same relaxation in the ex-meie’s face. “Tell me about Roveda Gesda.”
Rane sighed. “He calls himself a silversmith, but he’d starve if he had to live by it. He’s a thief and smuggler and, well call him an organizer. He’s got connections in Oras with the man we’re going to see there, with a number of caravan masters and certain merchants on the east coast. He and some others like him give us a lot of information from all over the world.” She yawned, twisted her head about. “Shayl, I’m tired. Hal’s part of the net, so are the others we’ll be talking to.” She smiled at Tuli. “Maybe you’ll be a part of it one day.” She turned to the old woman. “Read for us if you will, Ajjin.”
The old woman flicked a hand at the fire. The pinch of herbs she tossed on the coals flared up, blue and green, a pungent, pleasant smell floating out into the room, trails of misty smoke drifting out to hover about them. The old woman breathed deeply three times then three times more. Her hands moved on her thighs, fingers curling to touch her thumbs. Her lips, dark, almost black, trembled, stilled, trembled again. “A changer’s moon is on us,” she said, her voice at once soft and harsh. “The land is stirring, a strange folk come with strange ways. What was will be lost in what will be. Follower and Keeper both will fade. Changer’s moon…”
The words echoed in Tuli’s head. Moon. Moon. Moon. Moon. Passages of change. Change. Clang-clang, chimes ringing, the world, the word, the clapper ting-tant-tang. War. War. Warooo. A howl. Churn the land. Waroo, oohwar, wrooo. Waroo. Churn the land. Destroy. Destruction. Death, rot, death and rot, the old gone, the new born from ashes, ashes and pain. Changer’s moon. New newborn thing… thing what will what will what will come? Who knows what it is, misborn or wellborn, mis or well?
The red light shifted across the black of the wood, forming into shapelier blobs, melting into anonymity, forming again. Each time closer to the shape of something-as if something agonized to be born out of the fire. Tuli watched that struggle with a growing tension and anxiety. Now and again, for relief as much as anything else, she shifted her gaze to Rane. Who sat silent, exhaustion registered in the map of faint lines etched across her pale skin, too tired to move, too comfortable with the warmth on her face to go to the sleep she needed, too tired to see the thing that was happening before her eyes. Tuli swung her head and stared at the old woman.
Ajjin was brooding over the fire. Whether she too saw nothing or saw the beast trotting about the coals, Tuli couldn’t tell. Beast. Small and sleek, as long as the distance between her elbow and the tip of her longest finger, translucent body with a sort of spun glass fur, red and gold. The beast leaped from the fire and went trotting about the room, pushing its nose against things, small black nose that twitched with an amazing energy in spite of the stuffy chill of the room. The old one sat staring at the coals, silent now, but Tuli thought she looked inward, not out. Her lips moved, the black hole of her mouth changed shape like a visual echo of the rhythm of the silent chant.
Gradually the walls around the room turned to mist, melted away entirely. At first Tuli was only peripherally aware of this, then suddenly-yet at the time so smoothly she felt no shock or surprise-she wasn’t in the room at all. Somehow she floated above the mijloc, could see the whole of it, see it from many directions at once, moving points of view. It was as if she was in a great round dance, fleeting from point to point, round and round the mijloc-and others danced with her, wraiths of folk she knew, wraiths of folk she’d never seen before, dancing the round dance of Primavera. She was euphoric, then later as the dance went on and on under the dance of the moons, through moon-shadow and moon glow, across the snow-stifled land, she was afraid and not afraid, the others lifting her, cradling her, singing soundless songs to her that she sang back to them; they sang together to the land slipping away below them, they sang to the life of the land, calling to it, comforting it, rousing it and the life it bore to slip the chains laid on it, to burst free of all but the round of life itself, the round dance of birth and death and rebirth.