For a while Tilja herself lay still, not daring to stir, trying to hush her own breath, the betraying thud of her heart. She was filled with the same sense of nightmare that she had felt on the walls of Talagh. When she could bear it no longer she forced herself to sit up and reach across to where Tahl lay and shake his shoulder.
He didn’t respond. She shook him harder. Nothing. She felt for his face, found his ear and pinched the lobe fiercely between fingernail and thumbnail. Still not a movement, not a whimper. She found his nose and laid two fingertips against his nostrils, almost blocking them. Yes, just, faintly, she felt the come and go of his breath.
Still filled with dread, she straightened and looked around. Something had changed. There was a new light over toward the other side of the enclosure. It was paler and larger than the yellowish glow of the lanterns, like a patch of moonlit smoke. Tilja watched it glide slowly across to the edge of the enclosure and start back. As it turned, part of it blanked out for a moment as something dark came between it and where Tilja was sitting. This thing was also moving.
The patch of light crossed the arena, nearer now, and turned again. Again part of it blanked out as it turned. Now Tilja realized what it was doing. It was systematically searching the arena for something. In her left arm the numbness was spreading from where Axtrig lay. That was what had woken her, and it was still there, steady, not flowing away. Now she knew what the light patch and the dark thing were looking for.
Steadily they came nearer and nearer, the dark shape leading with a clumsy, unnatural waddle that told Tilja what it was, and from that she could make out Silena herself, gliding along in the misty patch of light. Now they were working their way directly toward her. As they passed close by the beast paused and turned. There had been no change in the feeling in her arm. It could not have known Axtrig was there. Perhaps it had sensed her wakefulness.
Still she could not move. Her mouth and throat wanted to scream, but no sound would come. Only when the beast stood right over her and she could smell its sickly hot breath and see the gleam of starlight in its single eye as its muzzle snuffled toward her face did movement suddenly come. Desperately she raised her arms to shove it away.
Her fingers locked into the coarse fur of its chest, and everything changed. There was a sudden convulsion, a sense of things being sucked violently to and fro, her whole self, body and soul, filling with the numbness, something inside her waking, knowing what to do, how to master the turmoil, channel it on, through her, out and away. . . .
She was sitting up, trying to push herself free of the attentions of what seemed to be a small dog which only wanted to get at her face and give it a friendly lick. The voice of Lord Kzuva’s magician whispered in her mind, I think Silena’s beast could not have touched you.
Quickly she drew the dog to her, hugged it against herself and looked up. The patch of light seemed to have changed. Before, it had been as calm and still as moonlight itself, and Silena had glided along inside it steady as a statue, but now the misty stuff of which it was made was covered with confused ripples, like the surface of a pond into which someone has tossed a handful of pebbles. This made Silena seem to ripple too, like a reflection in that pond. Her voice rippled as she spoke.
“Give me the thing you are carrying. Put it in the mouth of my dog and let him go.”
“No,” said Tilja, hugging the dog yet closer to her. Its whole body had gone rigid at Silena’s first word, except for the tip of its tail, wagging anxiously against Tilja’s thigh. The light seemed weaker now, but it was still enough for her to see the bodies of her sleeping companions beside her, and Calico standing with her head bowed in sleep just beyond. For herself she felt safe from Silena’s magic, but the others wouldn’t be. The only thing she could think of was to distract the magician somehow. Still clasping the dog, she rose to her feet and walked directly toward Silena.
Silena was not expecting this. She actually backed away, and her light dimmed yet further. Then she stood her ground and straightened and the light grew strong again. When they were barely a pace apart she twitched the dog’s leash. Fire shot along it and reached the collar. The dog yelped as the blazing line ringed its neck, and squirmed so violently that Tilja could scarcely hold it. Desperately she grabbed at the fiery leash, but felt no heat or strangeness, only a tough everyday leather strap, because that was all there was now, reaching from her to Silena, who immediately dropped the leash as if it was she who had been burnt.
She backed off another pace and drew herself up. Tilja could sense her summoning her powers. Her light grew stronger again and the ripples began to die away.
“A magician cannot afford to be overcome,” she said. “Unless you give me the thing you have against your arm, I must attempt to destroy you, or else be myself destroyed.”
“No,” said Tilja.
“Very well,” said Silena.
She closed her eyes. Her lips began to move. For a short while nothing seemed to happen, except that the dog’s tail stopped wagging. Then Tilja began to hear—no, to feel, rather than hear—a deep, pulsing hum gathering all around her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw one of the distant lanterns starting to quiver, and realized that not only the lights but everything she could see, the black outline of the walls of the enclosure, the very stars in the sky, was shuddering to and fro. The only still things in the whole universe were Silena, and Tilja herself facing her, with the dog in her arms. And now she could feel something try to grasp her, an invisible fist that couldn’t quite touch her but had closed all round her, and was attempting to wrench her into that shuddering movement and shake her apart. An enormous energy was battering itself to and fro, stronger and stronger, against her stillness. Soon, soon, something had to give. She willed that stillness, gave it a place and name. Woodbourne—herself leaning on the farmyard gate in the stillness of a summer dawn, looking north across the Valley to the mountains. In that loved landscape she centered herself, gathered it round her. She could see Silena opposite her, pale with ferocious concentration, drawing out of herself all the powers that were in her and focusing them into Tilja’s destruction. The light blazed around her, bright as noon, but now shed no ray into the darkness beyond.
Close by in that darkness a donkey brayed. Tilja’s heart bounced with the shock of the sudden harsh clamor, but she knew at once what it was, because there used to be a mischievous old donkey at Woodbourne that liked to bray suddenly in people’s ears. But Silena wasn’t ready for it. She thought she had put the whole courtyard to sleep. The unexpected bellow told her she was wrong. All her powers were focused on Tilja. She had nothing to spare. She faltered.
The pulse behind the humming lost its implacable beat and dwindled away. The lamps and skyline and stars steadied, and the light around Silena herself died out.
Before it faded completely Tilja saw the proud figure of the magician stoop. Lines creased the emotionless dead face and made it human, the face of an ordinary woman, extremely old, but alive.
Around them sleepers stirred and muttered. There were cries of alarm here and there, as if some had woken from nightmares.
Silena’s voice came out of the dark.
“Well, it is I who am destroyed,” she said quietly. “The Emperor must find another Watcher. Give me back my dog and I will go. You need not be afraid. It is too late for me to start again.”
Tilja didn’t need to ask herself if she could trust her. She had both seen and felt what had happened. She set the dog down. Silena called it and it ran to her. Tilja could hear it fawning happily, as any dog might do on a mistress just come home.