Lukassa’s rage of knowledge seemed to ebb somewhat; when she spoke again, saying, “Here and here,” she sounded more like a child driven to exasperation by the sluggishness and stupidity of adults. “Here stood your friend, and here stood his friend—and here”—casually nodding to a near corner—“this was where the Others came from.” It was all so truly obvious to her.
In that corner, which is stone and slate and mortar like the rest, there is no air, only cold. If the tower is gone today, as it may well be, that corner is still there. Lal and I looked at each other, and I know that we were thinking the same thing: This is not a corner, not a wall—this is a door, an open door. Behind us, Lukassa said impatiently, “There, where you stand—look, look,” and she hurried to join us, pointing into an emptiness so fierce that I had to struggle with an impulse to snatch her hand back before that ancient, murderous absence bit it off. Instead, I turned and spoke to her as soothingly as I could. “What other, Lukassa? What did he look like?”
She actually stamped her foot. “Not he—the Others, the Others! The two men fought, they were so angry, and then the Others came.” She peered back and forth at us, only beginning to wonder now: a child first discovering fear in the faces of adults. She whispered, “You don’t. You don’t.”
“Nothing comes uninvited from this kind of darkness,” I said to Lal, over Lukassa’s head. “There has to be a call.” Lal nodded. I asked the girl, “Who summoned the— the Others? Which man was it?” But she took hold of Lal’s hand and would not look at me.
I repeated the question, and so did Lal—to no avail, for all her petting and coaxing. At last she gestured, let it be, and, to Lukassa, “The men fought, you say. Why did they fight, and how? Which of them won?” Lukassa remained silent, and I wished that I had brought the fox with us. She murmurs to him constantly; by now he surely knows far more about her than either of us does. And will continue to—I know him that well, at least.
“Magic,” Lal said. “They fought with magic.” Lukassa pulled away from her, less by intent than because she was trembling so violently. Lal’s voice became sharper. “Lukassa, one of those two was the man we have sought so long, the old man who sang over his vegetable garden. If it were not for him—” She glanced quickly at me, hesitated, then turned Lukassa to face her again, pressing both of the girl’s hands together between her own. She said, clearly and deliberately, “No one but you can help us to find him, and you would be dead at the bottom of a river but for him. What happens from this moment is your choice.” The words rang like hoofbeats on the cold stones.
Unless you are a long-practiced wizard (and sometimes even then), it isn’t good to spend more time than you have to within walls as encrusted with old wizardry as those. It causes mirages inside you, in your heart—I don’t know a better way to put it. In that moment, it seemed to me—no, it was—as though Lal were holding all of Lukassa in her two cupped palms like water, and that if she brimmed over them, or slid through Lal’s fingers, she would spill away into every dark corner forever. But she did not. She bent her head, and raised it again, and looked steadily into both our faces with those backward-searching eyes of hers. I will not say that she was Lukassa once more, because by then I had begun to know a bit better than that. Whoever she truly was, it was no one she had been born.
“He fought so bravely,” she said to no one in the world. “He was so clever. His friend was clever, too, but too sure of himself, and frightened as well. They stood here, face to face, and they turned this room to the sun’s belly, to the ocean floor, to the frozen mouth of a demon. These walls boiled around them, the air cracked into knives, so many little, little knives—all there was to breathe was the little knives. And there was never any sound, not for a thousand years, because all the air had turned to knives. And the old one grew weary and sad, and he said Arshadin, Arshadin.” Even in that clear, quiet voice, the cry made me close my eyes.
Lukassa went on. “But his friend would not heed, but only pressed him closer about with night and flame, and with such visions as made him feel his soul rotting away from him, poisoning the pale things that devoured it as he looked on. And then the old one became terrible with fear and sorrow and loneliness, and he struck back in such bitter thunder that his friend lost power over him for that moment, and was more frightened than he, and called upon the Others for aid. It is all here, in the stones, written everywhere.”
I looked at the clawmarks, waiting for Lal to ask the question that came now. But she said nothing, and when I saw her face I saw the hope that I would be the one to speak. I also saw that she was immensely weary. It matters much to Lal to seem tireless, and never before had she let me see the legend frayed this thin. She cannot be that much older than I; yet I was young still when I heard my first tale of Lal-Alone. When did she last ask a favor of anyone, I wonder?
“Last night you spoke to us of death,” I said. “Who died here, then, the old man or that one you call his friend?” Lukassa stared at me, shaking her head very slightly, as though my blindness had finally worn out her entire store of disbelief, anger, and pity, leaving her nothing but a kind of numb tolerance. The man we were seeking had often looked at me like that.
“Oh, the friend died,” she said casually and wearily. “But he rose again.” It was I who gasped, I admit it—Lal made no sound, but leaned against the table for just a moment. Lukassa said, “The friend summoned the Others to help him, and they killed him, but he did not die. The old man—the old man fled away. His friend pursued him. I don’t know where.” She sat down very suddenly and put her head on her knees, and went to sleep.
LISONJE
Well, if you’d just mentioned the legs straight off. I told you, love, I never remember names, only my lines. And the odd historical event, like that child’s legs—such sweet long legs, practically touching the ground on either side of that funny little gray horse he rode into my life. It was one of those moments that you know right then, on the spot, will keep you company forever: me scrubbing yesterday’s makeup off my poor old face (well, I do thank you, most kind) at the rain barrel that stands near the woodshed—and suddenly those legs, just at the bottom edge of my washtowel. I kept raising the towel—like this, slowly, you see—and those dear legs just kept going on and on, all the way up to his shoulders. Nothing but bone and gristle, poor mite, as shaggy as his little horse, and not a handful of spare flesh between them. My own life, it seems to me so often, has been nothing but endless traveling in an endless circle, as far back as I can remember—which means practically the beginning of the world—but I took one good look at him and I knew that not all my silly miles together would amount to a fraction of the journey that boy had come. I do understand a few things besides playing, if I may say so, whatever you may have heard.
Well, we looked at each other, and we looked at each other, and we might be standing there to this day if I hadn’t spoken. What I think is that they had just come to a stop in that inn-yard, the two of them, that neither he nor his horse had a step or a thought or a hope left in them—they were completely out of momentum, do you see, and that is quite the worst thing you can be short of, you may believe me. His eyes were alive, but they had no idea why—there was nothing in them but life, nothing at all. I’ve seen animals look like that, but never people. A sheltered existence, I daresay.