"Could well be," said Tylvis. "I'll feel bad if you decide to take an unplanned swim. Otherwise, look! See what they have to say. Maybe nothing, maybe something. But look. Look and see."
"Those pools in the caves?" asked Vell. "Are they different from the ones on the plateau?"
"Hmm." Tylvis stroked his bearded chin and made an odd little hop on his goat legs. "Don't know, 'cept that of all those who vanished into the waters never to be seen again, the bulk vanished in there."
"That's where the most intense visions occur?" asked Lanaal.
"You could say that," said Tylvis. "Myself, I don't know."
"What do you see when you look in the pools?" asked Kellin.
"Oh, I never look in them," said Tylvis. "Nothing in there I need to know. The past, the present… what do such things matter to the Dancing Folk?" His smile was mysterious, unreadable-did Tylvis speak the truth, or some merry joke only he understood? "But you three go ahead. Make sure you stay on this side of the pool."
"That's all you have to say?" asked Lanaal.
Tylvis smiled a trickster's smile. "What more would you have me say, elf? So many have come here seeking wisdom-I don't know if they get it or not. So good luck. Hope you don't see anything you'd rather not have known." With that, the korred turned and hopped away down the plateau.
"Do we trust the goat man?" asked Vell. "If this place is sacred to his god, then why leave it so accessible-and why doesn't he treat it with more reverence?"
"Korreds are an irreverent kind," said Kellin. "Not all religions regard their sacred places in the way the Uthgardt do."
"Better yet" Lanaal added, "it may be that this place isn't sacred to Tapann at all. Rumor has it that his followers keep their own sacred fountains secret, and encourage all others, even their allies, to believe that these are the sacred ones."
"I wonder what they are then." Kellin found a pebble at her feet and cast it into the nearest pool. The stone sank, but not a ripple disturbed the pristine surface. "More clear than any mirror."
"I've never looked into a mirror," Vell said. He remembered a time that a foreign merchant in Grunwald presented a mirror to Gundar as a token of his generosity. Gundar accepted it in gratitude but refused to look into it, and later turned it over to Keirkrad to be destroyed as an affront to Uthgar.
"Vanity is one of civilization's primary flaws," Kellin admitted.
"Mirrors don't always reflect the whole truth," Lanaal cautioned Vell. "They can mislead. I spent my early life looking into mirrors and seeing an elf staring back."
"I will look into the pool alone," said Vell. Acknowledging each of the ladies with a nod, he walked into the cave, to the pools within.
When he was out of earshot, the two women stood alone together for the first time, silently assessing each other.
"In some ways, you are more a mystery than Vell," Lanaal said. "I can't understand what compels you to keep the company of barbarians who disdain your very existence."
"The Thunderbeast chose me," Kellin answered.
"It called you, perhaps, but you chose to answer. Uthgar is not your god-what is his summons to you? When you set out from the halls of learning, did you truly feel a personal interest in this particular barbarian tribe?"
"Yes… no…" Kellin rubbed her eyes. "My father…"
"Memory," Lanaal said, as if the word contained all the answers, and she spread her arms wide to indicate their setting. "It can be clear or faulty. It can tell the truth or deceive."
Taking a deep breath, Kellin walked to the nearest pool and gazed down into the water. And what she saw made her flush with embarrassment, and feel rage in her bones.
The caves had a light of their own, shimmering out from those strange pools. It cast eerie rippling shadows over the low cave ceiling, though Vell could not see any movement in the water itself. This was the kind of mystical place that alternately repelled and attracted the average Uthgardt-repelled him because of unknown magic, yet attracted him for the warm intimacy of the mystery, and the feeling of being wrapped in history. Vell bent over the nearest pool and found himself staring into his reflection.
So that's what I look like, he thought. He was not so different from any other Thunderbeast, and even his brown eyes did not distinguish him. All faded, and only his eyes remained as the water shimmered and he was looking into another time. It was another face, but somehow he knew it was his, or rather, that of an ancestor who remained tied to him from the spirit world. The sun was shining brightly behind him onto a spectacular white city, and he was garbed in robes of gold marked with ornate symbols.
A wizard. He was descended from a wizard.
The vision told him something else. This scene was surely not one of Ruathym, the rocky isle that was the home of Uthgar's mortal line. More likely, it was an image of his ancestry from his other line, stretching back to the Empire of Magic. Often he wondered if his brown eyes marked a stronger concentration of that blood. Most Uthgardt tribes denied that history, the Thunderbeasts included; it was a matter of shame to believe that they were spawned by those decadent magicians.
Vell leaned closer. The wizard melted away, and his eyes were set instead into the sunken sockets of a great lizard, one of the Thunderbeasts or behemoths that the tribe used in their art, or occasionally to tattoo upon themselves. It was the creature Vell had become. There was no human intelligence in those eyes-this was an animal, nothing more. It looked closely at him, as if staring through time back at Vell.
It turned and lumbered through a thick forest. The great beast planted a foot next to an oak sapling, struggling to grow within the dense underbrush. Vell realized with a shock that this must be Grandfather Tree. He knew it. While all of the other trees that stood around it, much greater trees, had died and gone, it remained. What force blessed it with such permanence? Before his eyes, it sprouted higher and higher, spreading its limbs wider and wider until they blocked the sky.
Now ripples disturbed the pool, each beginning at the center and bringing with it a new image. The scenes passed with such speed that Vell could not inspect each one closely. He saw images of heated battles, of a wide-shouldered man with coal-black hair. The dark-haired warrior wielded a greataxe and hacked at a shaggy demon on a mountainside. Then came a scene of that same axe cutting the neck of a behemoth on a vast green hill, but in the hands of a warrior with yellow hair and a bright yellow beard.
The axe! Vell recognized it immediately. It had been the weapon of the chiefs of the Thunderbeasts, both Gundar and Sungar. Sungar had disposed of it some years ago after he learned it contained arcane magic. Vell did not know what to make of this-he was not in the Fallen Lands when it happened-though many took this as a signal that Sungar was an unfit leader.
"Tell me more," Vell said to no one. As if on cue, a new image unfolded-one he knew well. It was Morgur's Mound on Runemeet. Vell saw himself, the bones of the beast hovering above him. He saw his lips move, and though he had no memory of the event, he knew the words: "Find the living."
Another ripple, and the axe appeared again. It was in a different hand, an inhuman hand-the hand of one of the huge goblinoid beasts, a hobgoblin, decked out in armor. The pool revealed a purple-robed man and four other men, humans all, together with a small human woman dressed in tight black leather. He knew her. The man and the beast in him both knew her.
Vell clenched his fists in anger. He wanted to jump into the pool. Perhaps it would transport him there and let him crush the woman who had kidnapped Sungar, and who had eluded him on a hippogriff's wings. But he remembered Tylvis's words of caution and held his ground.
The party of seven was walking along the banks of a river with forest all around. More water, he thought, as he saw the pristine flow rippling in the sunlight. He recognized the high mountains towering over them as the ones Kellin had named the Star Mounts.