“But I cannot afford to do that until I have passed the ring to a new keeper, or chaos will come again. Twice over the years I have chosen one. Both became Watchers, and both then failed me, corrupted by their own power. Now you come with news of another, this Ropemaker. From things you have told me, and from the single hair you brought me, I believe that he has great natural powers, so far uncorrupted. But what the map showed us tells us that he is at this moment present at a grand parade in the courtyard of the Emperor’s Palace, and this almost certainly means that he has been chosen to take Dorn’s place as a Watcher, and will be installed in the course of the ceremony. Then it will be too late for me to pass the ring on to him.”
“That’s the bad news, I suppose,” said Tilja. “You said I’d brought you bad news as well as good. . . . Oh, no, that was before you’d used your map to find where the Ropemaker was, so you didn’t know then.”
“No, that is not what I meant,” said Faheel. “It is in fact part of the good news. It means that everything is coming together to my advantage. Many of the Watchers will be present at the ceremony, and not in their towers, so they will be more vulnerable to the attack I have long prepared. The Ropemaker will also be there, so when I have done I will be able to give him the ring and go, for my task will be over.
“The bad news . . . no, I have no time now, and if all goes well it will no longer be my problem. What matters now is that I must go instantly to Talagh. I do not dare wait, or the chance will be lost. The Ropemaker will be lost. He is in far more danger than he can understand. But there is a difficulty. I could go to Talagh between a breath and a breath, but I must take the ring for what I may have to do, past the warded walls of Goloroth, and stand, unnoticed, with twenty Watchers around me, whose task it is to detect the existence of such things as the ring in the presence of the Emperor.
“I still have power to do all this, but that would leave me no strength for what else I have to do. Moreover, if I were detected and it came to a magical battle, the power I would need to defeat twenty Watchers would destroy me also. You understand?”
“I think so. Would it help if I came with you and held the ring? I got Axtrig past the wards, and I think I’m stronger now.”
“That is what I was about to suggest, but there is a further difficulty. Because you are what you are I cannot take you instantaneously to Talagh, as I could take myself. You must be carried there, physically, mile by mile, minute by minute. By the swiftest means I can devise this will take too long. So what I must do is ask the ring to hold all time still for everything but you and your immediate surroundings while you are carried to Talagh. There will be a sort of bubble of moving time inside an unmoving universe. The bubble will be centered on you. Our journey will seem to us to take several hours, but when we reach the palace at Talagh the parading soldiers will not have moved a step. Asking the ring to do this will take strength from me, but it is in the nature of the ring, once asked, to deal directly with time of its own un-mediated power, and I will then be able to rest while we are carried to Talagh. Will you do this?”
Tilja was too astonished and overawed to do more than nod her head. Faheel smiled at her.
“Good,” he said. “Now you had better go back downstairs while I do what I have to. Your friends are there. Do not try to wake them.”
Tilja climbed down the ladder and found Meena, Alnor and Tahl each asleep on a separate pile of cushions, but still in the exact attitudes in which they had lain when she had last seen them, far below her, from halfway up the cliff. All three faces had the same look, Meena not sharp and touchy, Alnor not proud and angry, Tahl not eager and inquisitive, but all of them full of deep, quiet content. Tilja smiled at them and went and leaned on the windowsill, gazing out over the garden and the sea to where she guessed the Empire must lie.
Her mind was full of a jumble of thoughts about the Ropemaker. They didn’t seem quite to fit together, in the same way that the Ropemaker’s own gawky body didn’t . . . and the animals he’d been didn’t either, if Faheel was right, the lion, the donkey perhaps, the cat on the walls of Talagh, the dog by the river, the unicorn on the crag, guarding them, helping them all the way south. . . .
Except for the unicorn. The unicorn was one of the things that didn’t fit. It had been different, menacing, dangerous, almost an enemy, nothing like the Ropemaker himself, strange but friendly, not frightening at all—until she remembered what Tahl had said about the bit of rope that had wrapped itself round Calico’s legs in the pine forest . . . and . . .
And—she really didn’t want to think about this—Ma’s dream. It touched me with its horn. What else could she have been talking about . . . ?
Tilja was jolted out of her wonderings by the appearance of the bird. A little to her right, beyond the nearest flower bed, was a small meadow cropped by a pair of sheep, each tethered to a single peg so that they mowed a series of circles. The bird appeared in what must have been one of yesterday’s circles. At one moment there was just a patch of short-cropped grass; the next it was filled by an enormous brown bird, far larger than the elephants Tilja had sometimes seen hauling loads of timber on the journey south. It had a fiery red crest and a black, hooked beak, which looked as if it had been designed for tearing at meat, but the two sheep merely glanced up at it and went back to grazing. The bird put up an immense, taloned foot and started to scratch itself under the chin, like a farmyard hen. A moment later a large, cushioned litter appeared on the grass beside it. There were poles at each corner with a striped canopy stretched between them and what looked like a sort of carrying handle lying loose on the cloth.
Before the bird had finished scratching, time stopped. Tilja both saw and heard it happen. The bird stuck, motionless, with its claw against its chin and a look of idiot absorption on its face. The sheep stuck with their mouths against the turf. The gulls wheeling above the cliffs stuck in midglide on slanting wings. All over the garden the birdsong stilled in an instant, and in the same instant the endless faint rustle of leaves and hush and shush of waves against the cliffs became a silence so intense that Tilja could hear not only her own breath but, at last, that of the three sleepers in the room.
She frowned. Time ought to have stopped for them. They shouldn’t still be breathing. Then wood creaked on wood behind her and she turned and saw Faheel, now back in the shape of an old man, climbing shakily down the ladder.
“Ready?” he said. “We will need food and drink, if you will carry the basket.”
With trembling hands he fetched stores out of a cupboard and she stowed them neatly away.
“Why hasn’t time stopped in here?” she asked.
“Because you are here. Your friends will stop breathing as soon as you are out of the room, and when you are close to the roc it will wake and carry us to Talagh. Now, if you will let me lean on your shoulder . . . I shall be stronger after a rest.”
As they passed the nearer sheep it began grazing again as if nothing had happened. A few paces further on, the bird woke and went on with its scratching. When they reached the litter Tilja put the basket down and helped Faheel settle onto the cushions, where he lay back with his eyes closed while she found a place for the basket and made herself comfortable at the other end. The bird—a roc he had called it—seemed to know what was expected of it. It rose and settled its feathers into place with a thunderous rattle, so huge, standing, that that she could see only its scaly, yellow lower legs beneath the canopy of the litter, and then only one as it reached out with the other to grasp the handle above the canopy. With a deep thud of its enormous wings it drove itself into the air.