Pazel knew now what he must do. Watching her, he raised his hands and laid them very carefully upon the sphere.
It trembled at his touch. The woman stared at him, cautious as a deer, and Pazel found he could barely breathe. He had been missing her before he knew she existed. Or had been a part of her before he ever fully became himself.
Mother?
He moved toward her slowly, keeping his hands upon the sphere. He knew somehow that she was alarmed, but this time she did not step away. The sphere so unthinkably delicate. Perhaps she did not dare to move.
Neda?
Islands formed between his fingers; continents turned before his eyes. Their hands were on the surface of the world. They were lifting countries, moving seas. She was frightened, yet she laughed silently, and so did he.
Thasha?
He could feel the world’s winds across his knuckles; the ocean currents tickling his palms. It was like the best moments of his Gift, when the joy of an exquisite language, a language not of suffering but of song, burst open like a rose in his mind. He could look wide across the sphere and see whole coastlines; he could peer close and see the smallest details. A crumbling glacier, a forest draped with sleeping butterflies, a tiny houseboat in a river delta, a diving bell abandoned on a beach.
Klyst?
There was Etherhorde, smoking, bustling; there were her fleets on the prowl. And Aya Rin, there was Ormael, her flat little houses, her cobbled streets, her rubbishy port. The orchard settlements, his houserow, his house. The very window of the room he’d crawled out of years before, clutching a knife and an ivory whale.
Pazel blinked, startled, and found his gaze had flown westward thousands of miles. Now he was following a real whale as it hurled itself, suicidally, upon a beach. It wallowed in the surf, exhausted, possibly dying. Then an armed mob rushed down the beach and surrounded it. One of them, the bravest, put his hand in the whale’s mouth and extracted a golden scepter, and when he held it high the other men fell to their knees in prayer. And suddenly the whale was no longer a whale but a young man, or possibly the corpse of one.
But that scepter: solid gold, but crowned with a black shard of crystal. It was Sathek’s Scepter, the Mzithrini relic, and that meant the island must be Pazel blinked again: the scene was gone. He was only an arm’s length from the woman, and more desperate than ever to know who she was. But now upon the world-sphere there moved a teeming darkness, a boiling cloud. It passed over towns and cities and left them blackened; it moved over the land and left blight. The woman saw it too, and he felt her calling to him silently: Fight it, stop it, stop the Swarm! The Swarm! How could she expect him to fight it? How could anyone fight for a world plagued by that?
And yet (Pazel met the woman’s eyes again) it was no greater than what they shared, the bond between them, the growing trust. He felt suddenly that this was the knowledge he had taken with those gulps of water: the absurdly simple gift of trust and peacefulness. For a moment he did not care if she were human or dlomu or something drastically different. He knew the joy of being close to her, and that was enough.
The darkness began to retreat. Light shone again from the sphere, and once more the winds flowed clean over his hands. They stood like twin statues, and Pazel sensed the woman’s fear ebbing away. Such peace! Could you still want conquests, power over others, worship and dominion and treasure, once you’d felt such peace?
To notice peace when you had it. That was treasure. That was what waking was for.
Through the glass he saw her wide adoring smile. She closed her eyes, and in repose she was so lovely that he could not help it, he lifted a hand and reached to touch her, and the glass sphere burst and rained in a million shards into the pool.
He was alone.
Pazel whirled: one small glass spider crawled from the water and vanished across the floor. He raced around the pool. Gone, gone: he should have been howling with loss. But he could not. He had loved her (loved what?), but her loss was suddenly distant and elusive, as though they had parted years ago.
No, not years. Centuries.
He stared at the empty chamber, shaking, convulsing. There was no source of warmth; he had to move or die. He groped for the exit, dripping, sensing already the deeper cold that lay ahead.
The stairway spat him out upon the lakeshore, half a mile from Vasparhaven, among tall rocks sheathed in ice. The first thing he saw was Hercol and Alyash and Counselor Vadu, talking to a squat figure beside a long wooden boat.
Pazel staggered from the doorway, and the wind went through him like knives. But a bit farther on a great fire blazed, and Ibjen stood warming his shoes. Thasha and Neeps were there as well. They raced to his side, and Thasha wrapped a woolen towel about his shoulders and dragged him to the fire, swearing like a Volpek.
He watched her gruffly as she dried his hair. “You lunatic,” she said, her voice shrill with concern. “You’re cold as a blary fish. How did you get soaked like that?”
Pazel closed his eyes.
“Get nearer to the fire. Take off that mucking shirt!”
He obeyed. Neeps made a joke about him needing a bath anyway, but fell silent when he glared. Thasha was looking at him strangely.
“A novice came from the temple,” she said. “He gave me something gorgeous, in a tiny wooden box. He said it came from you.”
Pazel wished she would just stop talking. He was clutching at memories, like fragments of a story heard once in childhood, and never again. A strange woman, a shining globe.
“We’re crossing the lake tonight,” said Thasha, drying him vigorously, “in three boats. If Hercol can make himself understood, that is. You should go and talk to the fisherfolk, Pazel. They’re mizralds, and we just can’t tell what they’re trying to say. I think they’re afraid of the north shore, but Hercol-”
“Ouch!” he snapped. “Not so hard, damn it!”
Thasha lowered the towel. “Baby.”
“Savage.”
Their eyes met. He touched his scalp, brought away a bloody finger. He was quite annoyed with her, and wondered at the months of agony he’d let her cause. Then Thasha reached into his hair, and brought away something small and hard. It gleamed in the firelight: a shard of crystal, which even as he reached out a finger melted like ice and was gone.
The Black Tongue
8 Modobrin 941
237th day from Etherhorde
When the keel of the fishing-boat dug into the sandy shore, Ibjen was first out: the journey had turned his stomach. And it had been bad, Pazel thought: the open boat with its one spindly mast and weird ribbed sail flapping about like a fin, no lamps on it anywhere, cutting through all that darkness with the wind howling over the peaks, the bright stars wheeling as they pitched and heaved, ice floes looming up suddenly, sometimes even grinding against their sides… He shuddered, and leaped out himself, and winced as his feet sank to the ankles in the watery sand. Freezing, even at midsummer. How did they manage, those fisherfolk, year after icebound year?
At least the moon had sailed above the peaks: a full moon, by which the snowcaps dimly glowed. The second boat drew up beside the first, and the fisherman’s uncle leaped barefoot into the water and pulled it in.
“And to think I’d hoped to sleep a little,” growled Big Skip, wading ashore as the dogs leaped out around him. He cursed as the nearest one shook its wet coat vigorously, then opened the front of his coat. “Are you well, my ladies?” he asked.
“Alive, anyway,” said Ensyl as she and Myett crawled groggily to his shoulders.
The mizralds kept looking at the shore, as though anxious to be gone from it. Hercol counted coins into the fisherman’s hand. The man’s wife took one and studied the strange Arquali designs. “It’s a fake,” she announced. “There’s a tol-chenni on this coin.”