Fantasy: The Best of 2001 Read online

  Dulse considered himself a wordy, impatient man with a short temper. The necessity of not swearing had been a burden to him in his youth, and for thirty years the imbecility of prentices, clients, cows, and chickens had tried him sorely. Prentices and clients were afraid of his tongue, though cows and chickens paid no attention to his outbursts. He had never been angry at Silence before. There was a very long pause.

  “What for?”

  Silence apparently did not notice the pause or the extreme softness of Dulse’s voice. “Milk, cheese, roast kid, company,” he said.

  “Have you ever kept goats?” Dulse asked, in the same soft, polite voice.

  Silence shook his head.

  He was in fact a town boy, born in Gont Port. He had said nothing about himself, but Dulse had asked around a bit. The father, a longshoreman, had died in the big earthquake, when Silence would have been seven or eight; the mother was a cook at a waterfront inn. At twelve the boy had got into some kind of trouble, probably messing about with magic, and his mother had managed to prentice him to Elassen, a respectable sorcerer in Valmouth. There the boy had picked up his true name, and some skill in carpentry and farmwork, if not much else; and Elassen had had the generosity, after three years, to pay his passage to Roke. That was all Dulse knew about him.

  “I dislike goat cheese,” Dulse said.

  Silence nodded, acceptant as always.

  From time to time in the years since then, Dulse remembered how he hadn’t lost his temper when Silence asked about keeping goats; and each time the memory gave him a quiet satisfaction, like that of finishing the last bite of a perfectly ripe pear.

  After spending the next several days trying to recap­ture the missing word, he had set Silence to studying the Acastan Spells. Together they finally worked it out, a long toil. “Like ploughing with a blind ox,” Dulse said.

  Not long after that he gave Silence the staff he had made for him of Gontish oak.

  And the Lord of Gont Port had tried once again to get Dulse to come down to do what needed doing in Gont Port, and Dulse had sent Silence down instead, and there he had stayed.

  And Dulse was standing on his own doorstep, three eggs in his hand and the rain running cold down his back.

  How long had he been standing here? Why was he standing here? He had been thinking about mud, about the floor, about Silence. Had he been out walking on the path above the Overfell? No, that was years ago, years ago, in the sunlight. It was raining. He had fed the chickens, and come back to the house with three eggs, they were still warm in his hand, silky brown lukewarm eggs, and the sound of thunder was still in his mind, the vibration of thunder was in his bones, in his feet. Thunder?

  No. There had been a thunderclap, a while ago. This was not thunder. He had had this queer feeling and had not recognised it, back—when? long ago, back before all the days and years he had been thinking of. When, when had it been?—before the earthquake. Just before the earthquake. Just before a half mile of the coast at Essary slumped into the sea, and people died crushed in the ruins of their villages, and a great wave swamped the wharfs at Gont Port.

  He stepped down from the doorstep onto the dirt so that he could feel the ground with the nerves of his soles, but the mud slimed and fouled any messages the dirt had for him. He set the eggs down on the doorstep, sat down beside them, cleaned his feet with rainwater from the pot by the step, wiped them dry with the rag that hung on the handle of the pot, rinsed and wrung out the rag and hung it on the handle of the pot, picked up the eggs, stood up slowly, and went into his house.

  He gave a sharp look at his staff, which leaned in the corner behind the door. He put the eggs in the larder, ate an apple quickly because he was hungry, and took up his staff. It was yew, bound at the foot with copper, worn to satin at the grip. Nemmerle had given it to him.

  “Stand!” he said to it in its language, and let go of it. It stood as if he had driven it into a socket.

  “To the root,” he said impatiently, in the Language of the Making. “To the root!”

  He watched the staff that stood on the shining floor. In a little while he saw it quiver very slightly, a shiver, a tremble.

  “Ah, ah, ah,” said the old wizard.

  “What should I do?” he said aloud after a while.

  The staff swayed, was still, shivered again.

  “Enough of that, my dear,” Dulse said, laying his hand on it. “Come now. No wonder I kept thinking about Silence. I should send for him. . . send to him. . . No. What did Ard say? Find the center, find the center. That’s the question to ask. That’s what to do. . .” As he muttered on to himself, routing out his heavy cloak, set­ting water to boil on the small fire he had lighted earlier, he wondered if he had always talked to himself, if he had talked all the time when Silence lived with him. No. It had become a habit after Silence left, he thought, with the bit of his mind that went on thinking the ordinary thoughts of life, while the rest of it made preparations for terror and destruction.

  He hard-boiled the three new eggs and one already in the larder and put them into a pouch along with four apples and a bladder of resinated wine, in case he had to stay out all night. He shrugged arthritically into his heavy cloak, took up his staff, told the fire to go out, and left.

  He no longer kept a cow. He stood looking into the poultry yard, considering. The fox had been visiting the orchard lately. But the chickens would have to forage if he stayed away. They must take their chances, like everyone else. He opened their gate a little. Though the rain was no more than a misty drizzle now, they stayed hunched up under the henhouse eaves, disconsolate. The King had not crowed once this morning.

  “Have you anything to tell me?” Dulse asked them.

  Brown Bucca, his favorite, shook herself and said her name a few times. The others said nothing.

  “Well, take care. I saw the fox on the full-moon night,” Dulse said, and went on his way.

  As he walked he thought; he thought hard; he recalled. He recalled all he could of matters his teacher had spoken of once only and long ago. Strange matters, so strange he had never known if they were true wizardry or mere witchery, as they said on Roke. Matters he certainly had never heard about on Roke, nor had he ever spoken about them there, maybe fearing the Mas­ters would despise him for taking such things seriously, maybe knowing they would not understand them, because they were Gontish matters, truths of Gont. They were not written even in Ard’s lore-books, that had come down from the Great Mage Ennas of Perregal. They were all word of mouth. They were home truths.

  “If you need to read the Mountain,” his teacher had told him, “go to the Dark Pond at the top of Semere’s cow pasture. You can see the ways from there. You need to find the center. See where to go in.”

  “Go in?” the boy Dulse had whispered.

  “What could you do from outside?”

  Dulse was silent for a long time, and then said, “How?”

  “Thus.” And Ard’s long arms stretched out and upward in the invocation of what Dulse would know later was a great spell of Transforming. And spoke the words of the spell awry, as teachers of wizardry must do lest the spell operate. Dulse knew the trick of hearing them aright and remembering them. When Ard was done, Dulse had repeated the words in his mind in silence, half-sketching the strange, awkward gestures that were part of them. All at once his hand stopped.

  “But you can’t undo this!” he said aloud.

  Ard nodded. “It is irrevocable.”

  Dulse knew no transformation that was irrevocable, no spell that could not be unsaid, except the Word of Unbinding, which is spoken only once.

  “But why—?”

  “At need,” Ard said.

  Dulse knew better than to ask for explanation. The need to speak such a spell could not come often; the chance of his ever having to use it was very slight. He let the terrible spell sink down in his mind and be hidden and layered over with a thousand useful or beautiful or enlightening mageries and charms, all the lore and rules
of Roke, all the wisdom of the books Ard had be­queathed him. Crude, monstrous, useless, it lay in the dark of his mind for sixty years, like the cornerstone of an earlier, forgotten house down in the cellar of a man­sion full of lights and treasures and children.

  The rain had ceased, though mist still hid the peak and shreds of cloud drifted through the high forests. Though not a tireless walker like Silence, who would have spent his life wandering in the forests of Gont Mountain if he could, Dulse had been born in Re Albi and knew the roads and ways around it as part of himself. He took the shortcut at Rissi’s well and came out before midday on Semere’s high pasture, a level step on the mountainside. A mile below it, all in sunlight now, the farm buildings stood in the lee of a hill across which a flock of sheep moved like a cloud-shadow. Gont Port and its bay were hidden under the steep, knotted hills that stood inland above the city.

  Dulse wandered about a bit before he found what he took to be the Dark Pond. It was small, half mud and reeds, with one vague, boggy path to the water, and no tracks on that but goat hoofs. The water was dark, though it lay out under the bright sky and far above the peat soils. Dulse followed the goat tracks, growling when his foot slipped in the mud and he wrenched his ankle to keep from falling. At the brink of the water he stood still. He stooped to rubhis ankle. He listened.

  It was absolutely silent.

  No wind. No birdcall. No distant lowing or bleating or call of voice. As if all the island had gone still. Not a fly buzzed.

  He looked at the dark water. It reflected nothing.

  Reluctant, he stepped forward, barefoot and barelegged; he had rolled up his cloak into his pack an hour ago when the sun came out. Reeds brushed his legs. The mud was soft and sucking under his feet, full of tangling reed-roots. He made no noise as he moved slowly out into the pool, and the circles of ripples from his movement were slight and small. It was shallow for a long way. Then his cautious foot felt no bottom, and he paused.

  The water shivered. He felt it first on his thighs, a lapping like the tickling touch of fur; then he saw it, the trembling of the surface all over the pond. Not the round ripples he made, which had already died away, but a ruffling, a roughening, a shudder, again, and again.

  “Where?” he whispered, and then said the word aloud in the language all things understand that have no other language.

  There was the silence. Then a fish leapt from the black, shaking water, a white-grey fish the length of his hand, and as it leapt it cried out in a small, clear voice, in that same language, “Yaved!”

  The old wizard stood there. He recollected all he knew of the names of Gont, brought all its slopes and cliffs and ravines into his mind, and in a minute he saw where Yaved was. It was the place where the ridges parted, just inland from Gont Port, deep in the knot of hills above the city. It was the place of the fault. An earthquake centered there could shake the city down, bring avalanche and tidal wave, close the cliffs of the bay together like hands clapping. Dulse shivered, shuddered all over like the water of the pool.

  He turned and made for the shore, hasty, careless where he set his feet and not caring if he broke the silence by splashing and breathing hard. He slogged back up the path through the reeds till he reached dry ground and coarse grass, and heard the buzz of midges and crickets. He sat down then on the ground, hard, for his legs were shaking.

  “It won’t do,” he said, talking to himself in Hardic, and then he said, “I can’t do it.” Then he said, “I can’t do it by myself.”

  He was so distraught that when he made up his mind to call Silence he could not think of the opening of the spell, which he had known for sixty years; then when he thought he had it, he began to speak a Summoning instead, and the spell had begun to work before he realised what he was doing and stopped and undid it word by word.

  He pulled up some grass and rubbed at the slimy mud on his feet and legs. It was not dry yet, and only smeared about on his skin. “I hate mud,” he whispered. Then he snapped his jaws and stopped trying to clean his legs. “Dirt, dirt,” he said, gently patting the ground he sat on. Then, very slow, very careful, he began to speak the spell of calling. In a busy street leading down to the busy wharfs of Gont Port, the wizard Ogion stopped short. The ship’s captain beside him walked on several steps and turned to see Ogion talking to the air.

  “But I will come, master!” he said. And then after a pause, “How soon?” And after a longer pause, he told the air something in a language the ship’s captain did not understand, and made a gesture that darkened the air about him for an instant.

  “Captain,” he said, “I’m sorry, I must wait to spell your sails. An earthquake is near. I must warn the city. Do you tell them down there, every ship that can sail make for the open sea. Clear out past the Armed Cliffs! Good luck to you.” And he turned and ran back up the street, a tall, strong man with rough greying hair, running now like a stag.

  Gont Port lies at the inner end of a long narrow bay between steep shores. Its entrance from the sea is between two great headlands, the Gates of the Port, the Armed Cliffs, not a hundred feet apart. The people of Gont Port are safe from sea-pirates. But their safety is their danger: the long bay follows a fault in the earth, and jaws that have opened may shut.

  When he had done what he could to warn the city, and seen all the gate guards and port guards doing what they could to keep the few roads out from becoming choked and murderous with panicky people, Ogion shut himself into a room in the signal tower of the Port, locked the door, for everybody wanted him at once, and sent a sending to the Dark Pond in Semere’s cow pasture up on the Mountain.

  His old master was sitting in the grass near the pond, eating an apple. Bits of eggshell flecked the ground near his legs, which were caked with drying mud. When he looked up and saw Ogion’s sending he smiled a wide, sweet smile. But he looked old. He had never looked so old. Ogion had not seen him for over a year, having been busy; he was always busy in Gont Port, doing the business of the lords and people, never a chance to walk in the forests on the mountainside or to come sit with Heleth in the little house at Re Albi and listen and be still. Heleth was an old man, near eighty now; and he was frightened. He smiled with joy to see Ogion, but he was frightened.

  “I think what we have to do,” he said without preamble, “is try to hold the fault from slipping much. You at the Gates and me at the inner end, in the Mountain. Working together, you know. We might be able to. I can feel it building up, can you?”

  Ogion shook his head. He let his sending sit down in the grass near Heleth, though it did not bend the stems of the grass where it stepped or sat. “I’ve done nothing but set the city in a panic and send the ships out of the bay,” he said. “What is it you feel? How do you feel it?”

  They were technical questions, mage to mage. Heleth hesitated before answering.

  “I learned about this from Ard,” he said, and paused again.

  He had never told Ogion anything about his first teacher, a sorcerer of no fame even in Gont, and perhaps of ill fame. Ogion knew only that Ard had never gone to Roke, had been trained on Perregal, and that some mystery or shame darkened the name. Though he was talkative, for a wizard, Heleth was silent as a stone about some things. And so Ogion, who respected silence, had never asked him about his teacher.

  “It’s not Roke magic,” the old man said. His voice was dry, a little forced. “Nothing against the balance, though. Nothing sticky.”

  That had always been his word for evil doings, spells for gain, curses, black magic: “sticky stuff.”

  After a while, searching for words, he went on: “Dirt. Rocks. It’s a dirty magic. Old. Very old. As old as Gont Island.”

  “The Old Powers?” Ogion murmured.

  Heleth said, “I’m not sure.”

  “Will it control the earth itself?”

  “More a matter of getting in with it, I think. Inside.” The old man was burying the core of his apple and the larger bits of eggshell under loose dirt, patting it over them neatl
y. “Of course I know the words, but I’ll have to learn what to do as I go. That’s the trouble with the big spells, isn’t it? You learn what you’re doing while you do it. No chance to practice.” He looked up. “Ah—there! You feel that?”

  Ogion shook his head.

  “Straining,” Heleth said, his hand still absently, gently patting the dirt as one might pat a scared cow. “Quite soon now, I think. Can you hold the Gates open, my dear?”

  “Tell me what you’ll be doing—”

  But Heleth was shaking his head: “No,” he said. “No time. Not your kind of thing.” He was more and more distracted by whatever it was he sensed in the earth or air, and through him Ogion too felt that gathering, intolerable tension.

  They sat unspeaking. The crisis passed. Heleth relaxed a little and even smiled. “Very old stuff,” he said, “what I’ll be doing. I wish now I’d thought about it more. Passed it on to you. But it seemed a bit crude. Heavy­handed. . .She didn’t say where she’d learned it. Here, of course. . . There are different kinds of knowledge, after all.”

  “She?”

  “Ard. My teacher.” Heleth looked up, his face un­readable, its expression possibly sly. “You didn’t know that? No, I suppose I never mentioned it. I wonder what difference it made to her wizardry, her being a woman. Or to mine, my being a man. . . What matters, it seems to me, is whose house we live in. And who we let enter the house. This kind of thing—There! There again—”

  His sudden tension and immobility, the strained face and inward look, were like those of a woman in labor when her womb contracts. That was Ogion’s thought, even as he asked, “What did you mean, ‘in the Mountain’?”

  The spasm passed; Heleth answered, “Inside it. There at Yaved.” He pointed to the knotted hills below them. “I’ll go in, try to keep things from sliding around, eh? I’ll find out how when I’m doing it, no doubt. I think you should be getting back to yourself. Things are tightening up.” He stopped again, looking as if he were in intense pain, hunched and clenched. He struggled to stand up. Unthinking, Ogion held out his hand to help him.