The Seekers of Shar-Nuhn. Ardath Mayhar
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Your father is not here. Good. That gives you the time and the leisure for work. Despair saps the will and the spirit. Discard it as an unworthy thing. Focus your attention upon your arts and bring them to the fullness of fruition. Then, should I succeed, you will be doubly armed. Should I fail, you will have greater strength than you would have done had you despaired alone.”
She peered through the deepening gloom, seeing only his small shape black against the darkness. “Old man, I will,” she said. “You are wise and clever. Do you seek the Cat; I will seek other things. Together we will thwart Tro-Ven.”
* * * *
For a day and a night Kla-Noh sat upon his terrace, looking across the Purple Waters. Si-Lun waited in silence, knowing his companion’s inscrutable methods. Once they sailed across the bay, lighted by one waxing moon, Ralias, and stood off the cliff shore by the house of Tro-Ven. High in the ranks of tall windows blackly watching the bay, one window glowed with a strange and flickering luminescence. Then, though Si-Lun could not see the smile on the face of his friend, he could hear a smile in his voice as he said, “Ah, she is at work. Let us go home, Si-Lun, and begin our own.”
But what he began was not apparent. No mysterious messenger came or went. No stealthy footfall was heard in the night. None who watched the house would have suspected that the old Seeker was frantically busy with his part of the project. Only one who could mark the pigeon’s flight could have learned of his working. But his dovecote was an old pastime, and none who knew him had ever learned that it was his communication line to the world of secrets.
When a week had passed, the old man summoned Si-Lun and asked that his craft be made ready for a voyage of several days.
“We will approach rough coastlines and berth in unpeopled coves, so provide for all our wants. No man shall know when we leave or when we return, for when we sail away at moonset another craft shall be moored in the place of this, and our quiet lives will continue, so far as any watcher can discern.”
The younger man’s eyes glowed with excitement, though he spoke softly. “It begins, then?”
“We go to consult an...oracle,” said Kla-Noh. “I suspect that I know the answer to my questions, but we must know certainly. There is a spot in the wild, Si-Lun, my friend, which I know of old. I strongly suspect that it is a place where the veil is thin, or there is a hidden door, or a passage exists between this world and that of Li-Ah’s mother. I have before now consulted there with voices from the air and the earth, and their words have always been truthful and wise. Only there may we find the track of the Cat with the Sapphire Eyes.
“For I have made inquiry among the high and the low, the subtle and the crafty, and none among the men of Shar-Nuhn has pilfered that talisman.”
“Then we shall leave at moonset,” said Si-Lun, “for the craft has been provisioned and prepared these two days. Somewhat do I, also, know of the ways of the Seeker.” And he grinned in his hollow-cheeked way.
At moonset their dark sail merged with the dark sky as they slid from the bay into the full current of the Purple Waters.
Within two days they sighted a grim cape, thrusting its shoulder into boiling waves amid tumbled boulders. Standing well off, they rounded its profile and hove to in a steep-sided cove, then waited for darkness.
When the full moon and the waning one were the only light left in the sky, the two Seekers paddled to the shore and found a perilous path that led through young growth upward toward the lip of the circling cliff.
Though Kla-Noh affected the infirmities of age, when pressed by need he moved with the ease of a young man. Long before moonset the two reached the meadows that topped the cliffs and moved along a line of pines toward a distant wood.
“There,” whispered Kla-Noh, “lies the place of the oracle. This is my greatest secret, and I have had no son to share it. You are my spirit’s son, and this is my bequest to you, for with this you have the answer to any question unanswerable by other means.”
“This is a great gift,” said Si-Lun softly. “You have taken me, who had no home and no father, and have given me both. It is enough. Yet with this you have given me a life of ease and honor. Be certain I will use it well, Seeker.”
The wood glowed dimly in moonlight as they approached. No night bird sang, no current of air moved the branches. They entered and moved along a faint path that their feet felt, though their eyes could not see. So quietly did they move, and in such an enchanted stillness, that when Kla-Noh paused, his companion felt that he had been waked from a dream. But the old man was busy with the pack Si-Lun carried, feeling among its contents for a bundle of herbs, and a fagot of wood and his heat stone. When his torch was lit at last, a fragrance moved with them along the path and into a circle of stones and giant trees.
At the center of the little amphitheater the Seeker stopped and thrust the torch into a riven pillar that stood there. At once the silence, which had seemed complete, became a thing of agony, pressing into the ears like rods of wax. For a long moment they floated in a bubble of nothingness, then the bubble popped, and they again drew breath. From the air about them came voices, faint yet strong, remote yet so near that they sounded within their skulls.
“We are,” they said. “We have been. We shall be. What need have you, young friend?”
Kla-Noh sank to his knees, and Si-Lun covered his ears, that he might not hear the voices, and staggered from the circle until he stumbled upon his own pack, fell, and lay, waiting for his friend.
* * * *
The warped fragment of one waning moon hung over the Purple Waters. Under the golden-flowered bush waited Kla-Noh and Si-Lun, apprehensively. Long was twilight done, and the lady had not stepped upon the terrace. For hours they had crouched in their pollened lair, debating whether to go or to risk approaching the house by stealth.
But at last a lagging step was heard, and a voice said hopelessly to the air, “One day is left before my father’s return. Where are my friends? Have I a friend? Or am I doomed to work the destruction of all I love?”
Then Kla-Noh rose up and said, “We are here, Lady. And despair you need not, though the Cat with the Sapphire Eyes will not be seen again in this world.”
“It is gone, then, irretrievably?” she asked mournfully.
“It has returned to its maker,” said the old man sternly. “Long have I known your mother’s people, though I did not know who they were. Through a way I found long ago I have spoken with your mother herself, though hard and long the task must be to reach the ear of a queen. No man stole away the Cat with the Sapphire Eyes, that I learned soon. Then I thought long. Your father, though subtle and powerful, still could not reach across the sea—as yet—to remove it from your care. But your mother, if my speculations were not in error, was able to do this thing.
“You are about to ask why. But think. You have taught your only child the old strengths you know. You have loved her and nurtured her, but she will be taken into a strange world by an enemy whom she must fight alone. She is untried in her arts, utterly unused to battle with sorcerers. She will need, above all things, confidence. So you create a talisman. But you are able to see into that world where she is taken, and you find that she is relying upon that talisman to the injury of her powers. You know she has more than she will need of art and of will, if she will only use them, practice with them, strengthen them. So you reach out your thought, and you take back the talisman. For such is your confidence in your child that you have no fear of her failure.
“Do you see, child?”
The lady swayed tiredly upon the edge of the terrace. “I see,” she said clearly. “In my unwisdom, I misused it. And in your wisdom, you made me learn to work without it. And tomorrow my father will return to find an enemy within his own stronghold, ready to wrest from him his stolen arts and to thwart his twisted schemes.
“My thanks, friends, for your aid. Without it, much that is good might have perished.” They saw the slim shadows that were her hands, and each took one and touched it to his forehead,