Today, her thoughts were not so easily quieted, and she was not alone in that. She had seen it in the faces of a few others, those in whom the Shared flowed most strongly. The pained uncertainty she felt in her own heart was reflected in their eyes. The seed of that uncertainty had been sown yesterday: it had come to her, quite sudden and sure, that one of them—one of the waking—was no longer present in the Shared, but only remembered there. And though she could not be sure, not yet, she thought she knew who it was.
She smoothed the feathers of the great black crow that perched upon the balcony’s balustrade.
‘Can you tell me it’s not true, my sweet one?’ she murmured to the bird. It fixed its bead-like eye upon her, and she smiled. ‘No, you’ll be no help to me, old feathers.’
The messenger, a thin, gangly na’kyrim who rubbed his hands together as if striving to rid them of some clinging stain, found her there, lost in thought above the toiling scribes.
‘Elect,’ he whispered, fearing to disturb the concentration of those labouring below, ‘the Dreamer speaks.’
For thirty years Tyn of Kilvale, the Dreamer, had lain in a chamber high in the Great Keep of Highfast. Young na’kyrim tended him, bathing his bedsores, turning him and cleaning him. Often it was the first task given to those newly arrived at Highfast. It taught them patience and passivity. And proper awe for the Shared, for Tyn’s slumber was that of one falling away from the world and into the infinite ocean of that incomprehensible space. The Dreamer dreamed, but not as others did.
There were others, too, who attended him. Their duty was more singular. One after another, they would take their turn watching over the sleeping na’kyrim, waiting. In his ever-deepening sleep Tyn journeyed down paths unknown to those who still resided in the tangible world, and on occasion something of what he found there would emerge, half-formed, from his splitting, flaking lips. These were the words for which those at his side waited, for they were words trawled up from the deepest, furthest reaches of the Shared; otherworldly treasure cast up on the beach of his bedchamber. As the years passed he spoke less and less often. Seldom now did the Dreamer rise close enough to wakefulness for any fragment to be recorded.
It came as no great surprise to Cerys that this should be one of those infrequent times. Inurian had spent many hours at the Dreamer’s bedside in his younger years. She followed the messenger up the winding stairways towards Tyn’s chamber, apprehension stirring in her stomach. It would cause her nothing but pain to have her fears confirmed.
To her relief, Cerys found Tyn as deeply asleep as ever. His attendants kept his appearance as healthy as they could. Someone setting eyes upon him for the first time, and not knowing his past or future, might imagine that here was an old man who had fallen asleep mere moments before. For those who knew better there were signs of his long, slow disengagement from the world of the waking. His skin had become a fine veil of ivory. It stretched feebly over the bones of his face. His sparse silver hair lay on the pillow like the collapsed web of a dead spider. The undulations of the bed covering hinted at an emaciated form beneath.
It was not age that had worked such changes upon the Dreamer’s body. He had lived for seventy years; not so long for one of the na’kyrim. The Shared was drawing him ever further away from the shell of his flesh, and day by day he was sloughing it like the old skin of a snake. Every few months Amonyn would come and lay his hands upon Tyn’s chest in an effort to stave off the slow decay of his fleshly form. The sessions always left the healer drained, and they seldom had great effect. Only in Dyrkyrnon or somewhere in the dark heart of Adravane might there be na’kyrim who could surpass Amonyn’s skills in healing, but that which consumed Tyn was beyond his power to thwart. The most important part of Tyn had ceased to care about the world in which his body slept, and without that interest to call upon there was little even Amonyn could do.
A scribe sat to one side of the bed. The man was leafing through papers. He rose as the Elect entered. He had the look of a man who longed to trade his place with another.
‘Elect,’ he whispered, ‘I think I have it all, but he spoke only briefly . . . and so fast.’
‘Spoke of what?’ Cerys asked. She leaned over the frail figure in the bed. Beneath almost translucent lids, Tyn’s eyes rolled this way and that like beetles struggling under a silken cloth. What sights he must see, she thought to herself. Does he even remember that the rest of us are still out here, in this other place?
‘M-most confused, Elect,’ the scribe said. ‘You may comprehend more clearly than I...’
He held out the sheets of parchment. Cerys took them without examining them.
‘The gist?’ she insisted gently.
‘Mention of Inurian, I think. Perhaps ... I think perhaps death, Elect. His death. But something—someone—else, as well. A man, though the Dreamer spoke as if it were a beast: a black-hearted beast, loose in the Shared.’
Cerys nodded. It was as she had anticipated. Tyn’s words were seldom obvious in their meaning—how could they be, having travelled so far and across such strange territory—but this message was clear enough, and it fitted with what the Shared whispered in her own mind. Inurian was gone, then. She would not be the only one at Highfast to feel that loss keenly. But what of the other part? This other man? Cerys had the deep, instinctive sense that change was in the wind. For a waking na’kyrim such instincts were seldom to be ignored, and now they whispered to her that if change was coming it would not be of a gentle kind.
With worry etched upon her brow she went to find Olyn. The keeper of crows was the one to whom the Elect always turned in matters of the deep Shared, since Inurian had left Highfast.
As Orisian and the others drew closer, more details became visible amongst the mass of ruins. Most of them stood no taller than a man. In places the city was nothing more than a jumble of stone and rock, gathering snow in its crannies, but here and there the rough outline of walls, of doorways and chambers emerged out of the rubble. They came up to the first crumbling wall and passed through a breach into the dead streets beyond. The wind at once fell away a little. Orisian puffed his cheeks out and rubbed at his face. There was no feeling in his skin. Rothe laid his hand upon a massive stone block. Its dark, ancient surface was crusted with overlaid growths of lichen.
‘They must have been very great buildings once,’ he said, glancing round at Orisian.
They picked their way through the bones of the city, as cautious in their steps as if it were the bones of its ages-dead inhabitants they were treading upon. Ess’yr and Varryn were tense, moving like deer that sensed but could not see the hunter. Instinctively, all of them crouched a little to keep their heads below the horizon. The wind howled above them. The daylight would fade soon, and the thought of night casting its cloak over these ruins was unsettling.
A space opened out before them, where snow had piled up in drifts. They paused on its threshold. Looking from face to face, Orisian drew some comfort from the evidence that the unease was not his alone. Even Ess’yr and Varryn were on edge here, far from their protective forests. The two were muttering to one another in clipped sentences.