There was someone beside her, then. She heard heavy wheezing breaths. She felt soft arms, warm comforting flesh.
Boldirinthe. The enormous bulk of the offering-woman enfolded her in a steadying embrace.
“Come with me,” Boldirinthe said gently. “You need to rest now. Come. We’ll pray together. The gods will watch over Nialli Apuilana. Come with me, Taniane.”
I could pray to Dawinno, Hresh tells himself. But he doubts it would do any good. It was Dawinno, after all, who had taken Nialli Apuilana away — not Dawinno the Destroyer, but Dawinno the Transformer, the god in his higher manifestation. Dawinno seems to want her to live with the hjjks. That was why the god had allowed her to be taken the first time, so that they could fill her mind with love for them. And now he has sent her to them again. If that is what Dawinno wants — Blessed be Dawinno! Who can know his ways? — then no amount of prayer is going to bring her back. The girl has been swept from him by the hand of the Transformer, who has uses of his own for her that go beyond mere mortal understanding.
After a time Hresh’s hand reaches for the little amulet that dangles against his breastbone, the one that he took from the body of old Thaggoran when the rat-wolves killed him in the frosty plains, long ago, just a few days after the tribe had left the cocoon. It is an oval bit of what might have been polished green glass, obviously ancient, with inscriptions in its center so faint and fine that no one can make them out. Thaggoran had said it was a Great World thing. Hresh has worn it almost constantly ever since Thaggoran’s death.
He touches it now, fondling its smooth worn surface. It has no real power that he had ever been able to discover. But it was a thing of Thaggoran’s; and in those first days when Hresh became chronicler he had touched the amulet often, hoping desperately that Thaggoran’s wisdom would descend from it to him. And perhaps it has.
“Thaggoran?” he says, looking into the dimness of the darkened room atop the House of Knowledge. “Can you hear me now, wherever you are? It’s me, Hresh.”
There is silence, a silence so profound that it roars. It deepens into a stillness deeper even than any silence could be: not only the absence of any sound, but the absence even of the possibility of it. And then a murmur as of a gentle wind comes drifting in. There is a lightness in the air, a barely perceptible glow.
Hresh feels a presence entering the chamber. It seems to him that he can see gaunt grizzled bent-backed old Thaggoran before him, eyes red-rimmed and rheumy with age, his fur pure white.
“You,” Hresh says. “You, here, old man?”
“Yes. Of course. What is it, child?”
“Help me,” Hresh says softly. “Just this one last time.”
“Why, child, I thought you always insisted only on doing things by yourself!”
“Not now. Not any longer. Help me, Thaggoran.”
“If that is what you need, yes. But wait a moment. Look there, boy. There, by the door.”
There is that all-consuming roaring silence again, and then the even deeper stillness once more, and another gradual ghostly stirring in the darkness beyond the door; and then the sound of soft wind once more. A second figure has come in, just as grizzled, just as frail with age, or even more so: Hresh’s other great mentor, it is, the wise man of the Helmet People, Noum om Beng, who in the Vengiboneeza days had ordered him to call him “father,” and had taught him deep wisdom by means of oblique questions and sudden unexpected slaps in the face.
“So you’re here too, father?”
A tall gaunt figure, flimsy as a water-strider: who can it be but Noum om Beng? He nods to Thaggoran, who offers him a salute as one would to an old comrade, even though in life they had never met. They whisper together, shaking their heads and smiling knowingly, as if discussing their wayward pupil Hresh and saying to each other, “What will we do with him? The boy is so promising, and yet he can be so dense!”
Hresh smiles. To these two he would always be an unruly boy, though by now he is as old and grizzled as they, and the last tinge of color will soon be gone from his own whitening fur.
“Why do you call us?” asks Noum om Beng.
“The hjjks have taken my daughter once again,” he tells the two half-visible spectral figures who stand side by side in the shadows at the far side of the room. “The first time, they simply seized her and carried her off. She was able to escape from them, then. But now I fear something far worse. It’s her spirit they’ve captured.”
They are silent. But he feels their benign presence, sustaining him, nourishing him.
“Oh, Thaggoran, oh, father, how frightened I am, how sad and weary—”
“Nonsense!” Noum om Beng snaps.
“Nonsense, yes. You have ways, boy,” comes Thaggoran’s hoarse wispy voice. “You know that you do! The shinestones, Hresh. Now is the time at last to make use of them.”
“The shinestones? But—”
“And then the Barak Dayir,” comes the thin whisper of Noum om Beng. “Try that, too.”
“But first the shinestones. The shinestones, first.”
“Yes,” Hresh says. “The shinestones.”
He crosses the room. With quivering hands he draws the little talismans from their place of safekeeping. The shinestones are still mysteries to him after all these years. Thaggoran had died before he had any chance to tell Hresh how they were used.
Tools of divination is what they are, that much he knows: natural crystals, found deep in the Earth beneath the cocoon. They can be used in some way to focus one’s second sight and provide glimpses of things that could not be seen by ordinary methods.
Carefully he lays them out in the five-sided pattern he remembers from a day long ago when he had spied on Thaggoran in the cocoon. It seems to him that Thaggoran stands by his elbow, guiding him.
The shinestones are shining black things, bright as mirrors, which burn with some cool inner light. This one, Hresh knew, is named Vingir, and this is Nilmir, and these are Dralmir, Hrongnir, Thungvir. He stares a long while at the stones. He touches them, one by one. He feels the force that lies within them. Then, with reverence, he opens himself to them.
Tell me tell me tell me tell me—
There comes a warmth. A tingling. Hresh brings his second sight into play, and feels the stones interacting with it somehow.
“Go on,” Thaggoran says hoarsely, from the shadows.
Tell me tell me tell me—
The stones grow warmer. They throb under his hands. In fear and anguish he frames the question whose answer he is half afraid to learn.
My daughter — is she still alive?
And he conjures up the image of Nialli Apuilana with his mind.
A moment passes. The image of Nialli begins to blaze with celestial radiance. A fiery corona of white light surrounds it. Nialli Apuilana’s eyes are bright and keen. She is smiling; her hand is extended lovingly toward him. Hresh feels the vitality of her, the deep surging energy of her.
She’s alive, then?
The image comes toward him, glowing, arms outstretched.
Yes. Yes, it must be so.
Her presence is almost overpoweringly real. Hresh feels as though she were actually in the room with him, only an arm’s length away. Surely that’s proof that she lives, he thinks. Surely. Surely.
He stares in wonder and gratitude at the shinestones.
But where is she, then?
The shinestones can’t tell him that. Their warmth diminishes, the tingling ceases. The light within them seems to be flickering. The image of Nialli he has conjured up is beginning to fade. He looks toward Thaggoran, toward Noum om Beng. But he can barely find the two old ghosts. They look faint, filmy, insubstantial, in the darkness across the room.