I had nothing to say to that. A young merchant caught my stirrup, holding up a cageful of singing birds; another, a woman, was plucking at Lukassa’s bridle, crying a bargain in silken petticoats. “Two for hardly more than the price of one, my lass—a sweet snowdrift of ruffles for a lover to wade through!” Lukassa never looked at her. We followed Lal down the lines of vegetable barrows, wove single-file between the wine vendors and the stalls drifted high themselves with sheepskins and carded wool—our horses held motionless at times by the crush of trade and the fear of treading down one of the market brats who squalled and scrambled between their legs—until a narrow cobbled alley opened to our left, and there were orchards, and the white road away to the yellow hills. We let the horses run for a while then. It was a pleasant day, and I hummed to myself a little.
When Lal drew rein, we were almost to the hills, within sight of houses we had already searched twice over, more or less with the consent of their inhabitants. These are larger than the dwellings below in town, mostly of wood still, save for the occasional stone or brick mansion. They keep to the round design, though, with painted, high-arched roofs that make them look just a bit like muffins beginning to rise. Dull as muffins, too, to my taste: an afternoon of all that snug rotundity, let alone a week, and you begin to pine for eaves, gables, crests, ridges, angles. Of course, the mountains beyond must provide as much edge, even to contentment, as anyone could use. They eat too much of the sky, even at this distance, and snow does not soften them: it is ice that shines like saliva down their lean sides. They look like great wild boars.
Lal touched Lukassa’s shoulder and said, “Today you are not only our companion but our leader. Go forward and we will follow.” She said it with careful lightness, but there came such a look of terror and revulsion into Lukassa’s eyes that both Lal and I turned quickly to see what danger might be slinking upon us. When we turned again Lukassa was already away, and we were well into the hills, far past the first houses, before we caught up with her.
I had been tired and irritable the night before, and suggesting that we return to the red tower had been as much an angry joke as anything else. Lal had given Lukassa neither orders nor directions, but she turned off the road at the only path that could have led her there, as though she knew the way of old. Nearing the place, she drew her horse to as slow a walk as it had been held to in the Corcorua market. Her eyes were empty, and her mouth loose—I have seen diviners look so, in realms where the art is honored, tracking the scent or sense of water to a place where water cannot be. Behind me Lal’s breath, quick and shallow.
The red tower was as much a ruin as a building can be without falling down, but it would have stood out as absurdly among these bitter gray mountains if there hadn’t been a single brick out of place. This country runs to endurance, to keeping your head down and well swaddled: a grand manor here is just a crusty muffin; a fortress just a stale, stone-hard one. A tower—a tower with an outside stair, windows at every turning and what must have been an observatory of some kind at the top—belongs strictly to southern fairy tales, to nights and lands where you can actually see the stars long enough to make up stories about them. It was just the sort of thing he would have set up for himself, that impudent, impossible old man. I should have realized it yesterday, before Lukassa, before anyone.
She dismounted in the tower’s shadow, and we crept after her—at least, it felt like creeping, somehow, still as the day was and slowly as she passed through the great shambly entranceway. The gate was flat, with ground vines lacing over it, but we had already proved the place safe enough to enter, else we would never have let her go ahead of us. She paid no heed to the stair but went straight to an inner wall, opened an all-but-invisible door that neither of us had ever mentioned to her, and unhesitatingly began to climb the steps within, never speaking, never looking back.
We followed silently, Lal swatting spiderwebs aside and I covering my face against the owl and bat droppings that Lukassa’s progress dislodged, and which made the shallow steps treacherous. It was just as long, tiring, and smelly an ascent as it had been the first time. I thought often of the look in the boy Rosseth’s dark hazel eyes as he watched us pass that morning, so clearly imagining us on our way to the wonderful adventures with which he so busily endowed our lives. Too much going on in his head, and no idea of his own worldly beauty—no combination more attractive. As though I needed more trouble than I had.
Dark as it was, both Lal and I knocked our heads—as we had before—on the sudden low ceiling that ended the steps. Lukassa did not. Moving easily, despite having to bend almost double, she slipped away to the left, so quickly that we lost her in the darkness for a few moments.
When I had caught my breath, I whispered to Lal, “Whether or not we ever find our friend, sooner or later you will have to tell me how she knew. You owe me that much.”
The tower was double-built, of course: a hard secret core at the heart of all that crumbling frippery. The outer stair would never have brought us to the landing where we stood, nor ever to the little room where we knew Lukassa had gone. Lal and I had spent all yesterday afternoon tapping, prowling, discussing, reasoning—and, at the last, cursing and guessing—our way to this chamber, and that blank child had gone straight to it as though she were strolling home. Lal said softly back, “It is not mine to tell. You must ask her.” But it was not in me then to ask Lukassa to pass the cheese, to help me with a harness buckle. Lal knew that.
The room is very cold. Magic does not have a smell, as some believe, but it leaves a chill behind it that my laughing old friend said so often was the breath of the other side, that place from which magic visits us—“like a neighbor’s cat, whom we coax over the fence with bits of chicken to hunt our mice.” There was a cooking-tripod and its stewpot, overturned on a straw mat; a deep-blue silk tapestry, hanging by one corner on a far wall; there were a few retorts, a long table, a high wooden stool; a single wineglass, broken; and a number of patterns chalked and charcoaled on the floor, which neither Lal nor I could interpret. They had been trampled over and badly smudged.
Lukassa was standing in the middle of a black-and-red scrawl that looked like nothing but a baby’s play with colored inks. When she looked at us, her face was terrifying: a sibyl’s face, crawling with furious prophecy, wrinkling like water to unhuman rhythms and commands. She screamed at us, our pale companion who never raised her voice, even when challenging me head-on, “Can you see nothing, can you feel nothing? It was here—it was here!” I will swear that the stone room jumped when she cried out, as a good lute will sigh and stir in your arms when someone speaks close by.
Lal said gently, “Lukassa. Truly, we cannot see. What happened in this room, Lukassa?”
For no good reason but personal vanity, I wish to set down here a moment’s defense of my own vision, and Lal’s as well. Neither of us would have been alive to stand in the doorway of that cold little room, had we read the air and recent history of certain others as poorly as we had that one. Either some sorcerous residue slowed our senses when we came there first without Lukassa; or, as I would prefer to believe, it was her presence that summoned onto the table the little dry red-brown stain, brought the clawmarks on the floor out of hiding, and made the silk tapestry give up a hidden design in green and gold, showing a man with dragon’s wings locked in battle with something like a glittering shadow. Whatever had dragged the tapestry almost down from the wall had ripped a raw gash almost from top to bottom, and the woven blood of the fighters seemed about to spill into our hands as we stood dumbly before it. I said a word of blessing, for my own comfort, not meaning it to be heard, and Lal breathed what must have been an amen, though in no language I know.