His voice remained sexless and rigidly ordinary, but with the last words his face changed. If I had been frightened before of a face that gave witness to a lifetime of showing nothing, I was more frightened now of what happened to his eyes when he finally turned them on my friend. The bitter rage and loss in them made his heavy, shovel-shaped face seem strangely delicate, almost transparent, like a burning house just before it collapses on itself. His mouth was slightly open, the lips twisted slightly up at one corner, down at the other. I remember even now a fleck of cracked skin in the down corner. He said, “Afterward it will be time to meet those who are waiting.”
My friend was silent for a moment, then rubbed a hand across his own mouth, as I remembered him doing very long ago, when I would somehow come too close to winning an argument. “As you please. But if you are considering doing to them what I think you are, I must drearily warn you again—you cannot do it and still hold me in this place. You probably have the strength, yes”—oh, the gentle contempt in that probably would have maddened me, never mind an Arshadin— “but you have nothing like the mature precision that is necessary. If you did, I could never have escaped you, and if you had gained it since, I could not have remained out of your reach, as I will remain. Free yourself of me, have that much sense, and then—” He looked full at us and shrugged. “A nasty, messy little parlor trick, I always thought it—but there, your tastes are your own affair, quite right. Who am I, after all, to plague you with counsel? Quite right. Quite right.”
His voice had fallen into a sleepy singsong drone, which instantly alerted Nyateneri and me: that was the way he always sounded when he was about to set you a particularly exasperating riddle or challenge. He nattered on, buzzing away, turning slowly one way and another within the grayness like a fat fly against a windowpane. Arshadin’s deathly heed was all on him: he watched him with a completeness that—for that moment—left no room for us. We realized so suddenly that we could move that it was shockingly painful not to. I still remember that strange pain of stillness.
Nyateneri sprang first—I lost an instant in getting my sword clear, because of my bad arm. I heard my friend shout furiously, “Fools! No!” Arshadin turned the vermillion-striped face of a rock-targ on us, all bony frills and great dripping mouth horribly topping the same squat human body. Nyateneri never faltered, but lunged in under the neck-plates, bare hands reaching for the still-human throat, trusting me to follow with my blade. So I did, but the dharises swooped screeching at my eyes, hurling themselves against my face and head until all I could do was to flail at them with the swordcane, helpless to aid Nyateneri as he clung desperately to Arshadin’s constantly changing form—rock-targ to bellowing sheknath to eight-foot-high, axe-beaked nishoru to something that I would, quite simply, kill myself to keep from seeing again. Nyateneri held on and held on, sometimes with only one hand, riding barely out of reach between hairy shoulders or razor-feathered wings like some baby animal perched high on its mother’s back. He was laughing, his lips stretched grotesquely back from his teeth like any rock-targ’s, and his eyes straining wide in the same way. So Rosseth must have seen him when he killed those two in the bathhouse. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly, as it always seems at such times. In fact, of course, everything is happening so fast that your mind trudges along far in the rear, dusty and lame. I remember at some point glimpsing Nyateneri through that battering cloud of dharises and thinking quite seriously, Well, he certainly does enjoy this more than sailing.
My friend, for his part, was jumping wildly up and down in his foggy prison, kicking and pounding at silent gray walls. All dignity seemed forgotten, even that of a caged animal; he was only a mad old man in a nightgown, yelling till his voice cracked in frustration. “Stop that! Lal, Nyateneri—idiots, idiots, stop that! To me, you imbeciles—here, to me! You cannot kill him!” Arshadin had taken the nishoru form—more or less—a second time; now he spread those stubby, scabby, glittering wings and finally shook Nyateneri loose, hurling him ten yards away, back toward the riverbank. He landed rolling, but brought up hard against a rock. I could hear the wind retch out of his lungs even from that distance.
Arshadin was already turning, himself again, ignoring me as I ran past him toward Nyateneri. With his rightful shape, his ghastly blank calmness returned; he glanced briefly toward my friend, dancing and swearing futilely, then let his breath out in a long, barely audible sigh that became a bolt of black lightning and made exactly the same sound slashing into the grayness that a blade makes in flesh.
The grayness did not vanish or blow apart, but hissed and darkened like meat over a fire; in a moment I could not see my friend at all. Nyateneri was on his feet, swaying—I clutched his wrist and dragged him forward, while Arshadin shouted boulders and dharises after us. The rocks came careening down the cliffside out of nowhere, gouging real tracks in the dirt and bringing real trees and stones ripping and skidding down with them. I lost hold of Nyateneri and screamed for him until grayness came down over me like a heavy, smothering cloth over a birdcage, and an irritable voice announced, “Chamata, a little less bustle, if you don’t mind. This wretched thing is difficult enough to manage at the best of times.”
Close as he was, I could barely see him, let alone distinguish him from Nyateneri. He was sitting straight up, as though in a high-backed chair, slightly above my head. His eyes were closed. The river gorge, the house, and Arshadin were gone, as were earth, sky, and everything but the grayness, which had no dimension and no ending, but only dwindled off into a further grayness, in which, at the very end of my eyesight, I thought I saw darker shapes appearing and vanishing again. I asked loudly, “Where are we? What has happened? When are we?”
I have dealt with magicians before. There isn’t one of them, even the best—even my friend—who could ever resist the least excuse to play with time. I think it must be the first thing they are all warned never to do. True or not, it is the first thing they turn to in a crisis, as others turn to red ale. I dread it and want no part of it, ever, and I always know when it is happening again.
Without opening his eyes, my friend said, “Sit down somewhere and be quiet, Lal.” Nyateneri touched my arm and drew me away. The air had become bitterly thin and cold; no matter how fiercely you drank it in, there was never quite enough breath in your lungs. That was the only sound: our shallow, too-rapid breathing. There was no wind, no flicker in the grayness, no slightest sense that we were moving, except for the distant come-and-go shapes that might have been nothing but eyestrain. I hugged myself for warmth and huddled beside Nyateneri.
“We are in a far place,” my friend said presently, “neither where nor when, but what you might call elsewhen. This”—and he gestured blindly at the freezing mist around us—“this is not a fairy coach, not a magic carpet sweeping us away to safety; it is a bubble of time—but it is not our time. Do either of you understand me?”
Nyateneri said simply, “I don’t want to understand you. Why do you have your eyes shut like that?”
“Because I am not entirely sure what would happen if I opened them. You might cease to exist—I might cease to exist. Or existence itself might—no, let that go, it makes even me a bit seasick. Like as not, we would merely end up back with Arshadin. Which would amount to the same thing.”