Kirila and Chessie rode out from Klee on a sharp, clear morning, early enough in the year so that it was still cold until nine o’clock. There were crocuses splashed about, and a few anonymous white flowers that only risked themselves above ground for a few inches, but generally the spring was still brown and muddy and raw. Kirila was sensibly dressed in brown wool instead of bottle-green velvet, she set out at a trot that was easier on the mare than a headlong gallop, and her eyes pinched slightly at the corners, partly from weather lines and partly from a cautious thoughtfulness whenever they approached a new settlement or talked to a stranger on the road. The Quest was a year old.
Chessie looked exactly the same, enchanted Labrador retrievers being exempt from aging.
They rode northeast. To the west lay Tothis, populated with small farms, trade-centered towns, numerous manor houses, one university with no scholars of real note, the usual collection of monasteries and convents and abbeys, and the castle of the politically powerful Duke Calentel IV of Tothis. Casual questioning during the winter had convinced Kirila that no one in Klee had ever heard of the Tents of Omnium, or was interested in them once it was clear that no titil was grown there, and she thought it unlikely that the more inhabited regions to the west would know more. Border towns always put more belief in travelers’ tales than did the centers of civilization. To the south, across the great river, lay the lands of her childhood stretching away to the distant sea, and due east lay the forest and Rhuor.
For nearly two months they traveled on a hard, well-used road with frequent inns or prosperous yeoman farmers willing to put up lodgers for a night in the small, neat bedchambers of their ancient stone farmhouses. Generally they avoided the richer manor houses, where Kirila’s clothes and unaccompanied travel was more likely to raise carefully plucked eyebrows. At first Chessie kept to the shadows, but, as the farmhouses became poorer and further apart, he and Kirila discovered that again people began to accept a talking purple dog as a fact of life, one of those misfortunes that could befall anyone, and Chessie began to join the groups gathered around kitchen fires after evening chores were done to tell his tales and sing ballads. Most of Chessie’s ballads were new to the farm folk, and after a while Kirila and Chessie began to offer them in payment for their lodging, presenting themselves as wandering troubadours, and so conserving the silver coins she had purchased in Klee with yet another of the dagger’s jewels. Kirila was delighted with this play-acting, even though Chessie had forbidden her to do any of the singing, and invented for herself numerous past adventures as a widely-traveled minstrel, some of which made even the credulous farm folk look a little skeptical.
“Do you ever feel odd about this?” Chessie asked her once, after an evening of mournful, dead-lover ballads for the benefit of a peasant’s three heavy daughters, who had listened with their mouths open and nudged each other with thick elbows.
“About what?”
“About pretending to be troubadours.”
“No—why should I? The folk get a show worth a night’s lodging—you sing really well, you know, Chessie—and the performance is as good as the ones troubadours used to put on at Castle Kiril.” After a moment she added, “Even if I can’t sing.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Well, what, then?”
“We are not penniless minstrels,” Chessie said with sudden intensity. “We are not troubadours. We are not jesters. You are a crown princess, on a True Sworn Quest, and I am a prince. We are royalty.”
Kirila stopped what she was doing, which was cleaning her boots, and looked at Chessie closely. He stood by the one window in the tiny chamber, looking out at the dark cowshed behind the cottage. Instead of glass, the window was covered with a stretched, oiled membrane, perhaps a stomach casing, from some large animal, and through it the outlines of the cowshed looked vague, as if it might decide at any moment to become something else. The membrane smelled faintly rancid.
“Singing for our supper makes no difference to the blood royal,” Kirila said, her voice puzzled. “A princess may become a jester, or a beggar, or even a murderess—” she winced a little, “—and still be a princess, always. Royalty goes deeper than that, deeper than...than bones, even. But you must know that, Chessie.”
There was a little silence, and then Chessie said, “Yes, but...” let that trail off, frowned in deep purple ridges, said, “Even so, it isn’t...” frowned again, and gazed out the membrane. Finally he asked, “Did you see that the boy fed the mare?”
“Yes, I did. Chessie, is something bothering—”
“Then we’d best get some sleep. There may not be many more nights indoors, anyway.”
“But is—”
“Good night, Kirila.” He crept under the bed, put his head on his paws, and closed his eyes, leaving her puzzling over her left boot, which was as caked with mud as that of any plowboy.
As they traveled, the small farms became farther apart and changed in character. Stone farmhouses gave way to thatched cottages, and then to one-roomed wooden huts daubed with mud and wattle. Dinners of roast duckling and dandelion wine became smoked pork and ale, then rabbit and a strong, sour mead. The road narrowed and became more erratic.
As the country became wilder, the summer bloomed with showy flamboyance, like an adolescent girl newly over acne and bony knees and eager to flaunt her despaired-of beauty. Morning glories and sunflowers grew as high as the brown mare’s neck, and under her hooves she crushed tiny, heavily scented wild strawberries. When Kirila dismounted to drink at sun-warmed ponds, there sounded dozens of small plops as sunning frogs and turtles dived into the silvery water. Dragonflies hummed by her wet face as she lifted it from the pond, and their long bodies under onionskin wings were bluer than the sky, greener than the one emerald left in the hilt of her dagger. At night the summer stars were huge and soft, blurred by all the pollen in the hazy, heavy air.
“It’s a good thing neither of us suffers from hay fever,” Chessie observed as they trotted one blue and gold afternoon past meadows riotous with wildflowers.
“”Mmm,” Kirila said, squinting into the distance.
“Actually, I have no allergies at all. I sometimes wonder if that’s due to that damned Wizard, a sort of sarcastic parting gift, supposed compensation for being enchanted. It would be like him.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t even seem to get the usual dog diseases.”
“Mmmm.”
“Mange and worms and so forth.”
“Mm.”
“Unless of course you count the fact that I’ve picked up rabies somewhere and am about to go howlingly insane and tear into your horse with my foaming mouth.”
“Chessie,” she said abruptly, “there’s something odd coming down the road ahead.”
He leaped into the air, trying to equal her height on horseback, but couldn’t quite make it.
“I can’t see it. Odd how?”
“I’m not sure. It seems to be a sort of moving hill.”
“Hills don’t move.”
“This one is. A small, moving hill covered with dead flowers, with a flag on the top.” She squinted deeply, shading her eyes with one sun-browned hand. “The flag is green, and there’s a design on it, I think.”
“Actually, you happen to be looking at a ranking amateur vexillologist,” Chessie said modestly. “Describe the design.”
“I can’t make it out clearly yet.”
“Well, when you can.” He waited, then added, “Don’t you want to know what a vexillologist is?”
“I assume it’s a flag studier.”
Chessie looked sulky and said nothing. They waited while the hill came closer, and eventually the flag could be seen above the sunflowers. It was a washed-out green, the color of sea water left too long in a corked bottle in the hot sun, and embroidered on it was an empty pedestal, the kind made to look like an Ionic column. The base of the column was cracked.
“That’s a Renkin!” Chessie exclaimed. The hill could now be seen clearly; it was a mound of dehydrated daisies, withered violets, and brown hawksweed, all still rooted in the ground in which they had apparently grown, and all several seasons dead. The hill itself—it was the size of a canopied bed—rested on a broad, low wagon pulled by six patient sheep with dirty wool.
“What’s a Renkin?” Kirila asked.
“They’re the work of the Great Renki, damn him, and they practice Impotent Magic. But I had no idea there were any of them left! Come on!”
“What’s Impotent—” she began, but Chessie was already gone, bounding eagerly toward the hill. Kirila followed more slowly, her eyes pinching at the corners. She never chewed on her hair any more; the habit had been lost in Rhuor, when the red hair had been worn in a tight inaccessible bun.
When she caught up with Chessie, he was sitting on the road behind the lumbering wagon. It moved very slowly, partly because of its heavy burden, and partly because the sheep, each of which was hitched to the wagon tongue by a long frayed rope attached to a leather harness, often pulled in different directions—not contentiously, but with a sort of placid confusion. Whenever three or more sheep happened to achieve vectors that didn’t cancel each other out, the wagon would lurch forward a little, the hill swaying precariously from side to side. It stopped completely when the sheep found a good grazing patch.
The back of the hill was covered with the most ancient piece of cloth Kirila had ever seen. It might once have been a tapestry, but the colors and design had long since become a mottled brown. Various patches looked sunbleached, rain-soaked, mildewed, salt-cured, damp-rotted or eaten by moths.
Kirila dismounted and stood by Chessie. “Where’s the Renkin?”
“Inside. It’s undoubtedly his dormant period; we’ll have to wait till he’s conscious. Then he’ll come out, if he wants to. All the Renkin are very ill-tempered, I should warn you. Try not to make him angrier than he’ll already be.”
She looked dubiously at the stalled wagon. Three of the sheep were trying to eat the same daisy. “Do we want him to come out?”
“Kirila, the Renkin are enchanted. They were put under the last spell ever performed by the greatest of the original Dark Wizards, Renki. It was a permanent and unalterable spell. You didn’t get back as far as the Dark Wizards in your research at the Holds—maybe records don’t even go back that far. And even if they did, come to think of it, you can be sure that the origins and works of the Dark Wizards wouldn’t be recorded anywhere. That research the Quirks are doing only illuminates a very little corner of the world, you know. Anyway, the Dark Wizards are a shadowy lot, and except for the enchantment of the Renkin, which only happened four or five hundred years ago, they’ve been gone for ages.” He got up, followed the wobbling wagon for a few yards until he’d caught up with it, and sat down again.
Then he added, reluctantly, “No one knows where they’ve gone—you can’t even pick up rumours. But they come from the time of the Old Ones, the Lielthien.”
Kirila stood very still, then involuntarily glanced upward. She knew she was going to look up a second before she did it, and her whole body tensed to abort the gesture, but she couldn’t help herself. The sky was empty. She closed her eyes, opened them again, and asked determinedly, “What’s Impotent Magic?”
“The kind that can’t do anything, only talk about things. Sybils, clairvoyants, prophets, seers, astrologists, that sort of thing. Your Wizard never told you much about his profession, did he?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Overprotective. Anyway, I’m hoping the Renkin can tell us something about the way to the Tents of Omnium. Save us hacking around up north trying to stumble across it ourselves. He might even—” Abruptly he fell silent, his burnt-sugar eyes widening in sudden surmise. The wagon lurched forward, creaking.
“He might even,” Chessie continued slowly, “be able to divine something about my past.”
Kirila looked from the dog, his every muscle suddenly tense in hard ridges under the purple fur, to the shambling dirty hill. Her face was doubtful. “You said it—he—was in a dormant period. What’s that?”
“They only are conscious for three hours every month; the rest of the time they’re rigid, inanimate. It’s part of the spell. A masterly job, really—you have to admire the workmanship of those Dark Wizards, if not the intent.”
“But, Chessie, a month! If he just recently had a...an undormant period, then we might have to wait a whole month! Is there some way to tell if—”
“No,” Chessie said impatiently. He never took his eyes off the wagon. “It could be weeks. You’d better pry another jewel, maybe two, out of your dagger. Renkin don’t sell cheap.” He moved ahead a few yards. Kirila opened her mouth to protest, considered Chessie’s intent face, and began to work on a ruby set in the dagger’s left quillon.
They followed the dead hill for two days, back along the route they had come, sleeping in shifts so as not to miss the undormant three hours. On the third day, just after sunset when the fading golds and pinks and lavenders seemed to be leaking off the painted horizon and seeping through the rest of the thick, pollen-heavy air, the tapestry at the back of the hill trembled, billowed stiffly, and collapsed inward. For a moment there was a confusion of bagging cloth and muttered “Get off me, damn it!” and then the tapestry was flung aside and the Renkin hopped out of the hill.
He looked like a statue. Made of what appeared to be white plaster, he stood just over three feet high, the bottom two-thirds of which was an ill-proportioned Ionic column. The column was topped with the bust, arms, and head of a famous ancient philosopher, whose name was known even to people who would not have considered reading his books, or anyone else’s. The philosopher’s broad, contemplative brow, however, was drawn into a fierce wrinkled scowl, and the plaster eyeballs glowed with monumental bad temper as he glared at Kirila and Chessie.
“So come on, let’s have it, don’t keep me waiting,” he growled. At that moment two sheep got their ropes crossed, tried to pull in opposite directions, and fell down into a bleating tangle. The Renkin hopped on his pedestal around to the front of the wagon, shouting obscenities and jumping frantically up and down. The sheep ignored him, languidly drifting into various positions until they happened to become untangled.
“A statue that acts like a being!” Kirila exclaimed.
“No,” Chessie explained, “he’s not a statue that acts like a being—he’s a being that is forced to usually act like a statue. There’s a big difference.”
“He looks like the philos—”
“Don’t ever call him that! It’s not the Renkin’s name; the Renkin’s only enchanted into looking like him, and it’s an outrage to be called by his name. A question of identity. I can,” Chessie said with an odd dignity, “sympathize with that.”
“But the phil...the original was supposed to be calm and sort of genial. He was supposed to be well, philosophic. Why does the Renkin face have those twisted lines in the plaster?”
“He’s smudged.”
“Smudged?” The statue looked clean enough to her, especially considering his dwelling.
“The statue was a late-century copy of an early-century marble work based on a Rendellian interpretation of a First Period Lakite bust, which the Laks made after they conquered Rejan and imitated the Rejan style, which was a popular rococo version of the actual wax death masks used in the philosopher’s day. Successive copies of anything tend to smudge the concept. Even personalities.”
“Oh,” Kirila said faintly.
The Renkin finished screeching at the oblivious sheep, hopped back to the rear of the wagon, and jumped into his hill of dead flowers.
“Thought they’d make it that time, the little devils!” He spat out the door. Kirila jumped; she hadn’t expected a statue to be able to spit. “So what is it you want? Come on, come on, my time is limited!”
Chessie said firmly, “First, we want to know the route to the Tents of Omnium.” After a moment he added, “The shortest route.”
“For what, for what? It better be good, it’s a seller’s market.”
Kirila held out her palm, not getting too close to the Renkin. A square-cut ruby flamed in the light of the setting sun. The Renkin licked his plaster lips, and his white eye sockets turned shiny red.
“Not enough,” he said promptly.
“That’s it,” Chessie said, and his eyes locked with the Renkin’s. They held for a long moment, burnt-sugar brown and shiny red, and then the Renkin broke free, muttering curses. Kirila hoped Chessie had been right about the Impotent part.
Snatching the ruby from Kirila’s palm—his touch was dry and powdery, like talcum—the Renkin stuffed it in his mouth, whirled around three times, nearly tripping on the last turn, and spat the ruby into his hill. A harsh click like the snapping of jaws came from its depths, and the brown mare, tethered to a nearby tree, danced skittishly backwards.
“Now, then,” Chessie said.
The Renkin closed his eyes and began to rattle in a fast, slurred voice, the same voice children use to chant “Nyaah nyaah on you!”
“Not over, not under, the mountains of old;
Across where the ancient was lost;
And then in the forest none can be in;
“Ere the final proved rampart is crossed.”
“No fair!” Kirila cried. “That was too fast!”
“Never mind, I got it,” Chessie said. His eyes were speculative. “Ambiguous, but not as bad as some. But why ‘proved’ rampart, I wonder? Some sort of test, or just convenient for the meter?”
“Now,” said Kirila to the Renkin with elaborate casualness, “I think I’d like to have my past read.”
“Your past?” the statue said, startled despite himself. “Don’t you mean your future, sister? Tall dark strangers, long journeys, all the usual sentimental sludge?”
“No, my past.” She grinned impudently at the Renkin. “Maybe I’m testing you, to see if you actually have any power at all.”
The Renkin puffed and swelled with rage to the point where Kirila was half afraid he would crack, plaster not being very elastic, and cursed at her in a language that sounded like grinding ice, hopping up and down on his pedestal.
“Well, then,” she said, “if you’re not interested—”
He calmed down with a visible effort. “Another ruby!”
“Too much.”
“Reading the past isn’t easy, you know!”
“But I won’t be hearing anything I don’t already know, so it’s not worth that much to me. Actually, there’s probably no point in doing it all...”
They haggled noisily, and Kirila finally agreed, with a great show of reluctance, to another ruby if the Renkin would throw in a reading of her dog’s past as well, with payment after both readings. She was very proud of herself.
“I’ll need something you both use, that can hold water. Come on, come on, I haven’t got all day, you know.” He glanced with dread at the sky, lighted by a huge full moon and the promise of stars.
She gave him a pewter cup and he retreated into his hill. There was another snapping sound, a great deal of mumbling and a muted thump, and the Renkin returned, the cup full of clear, curiously thick liquid that shimmered and tried to crawl up the cup’s side. He struck the side hard and the liquid oozed back to the bottom, roiling in agitation. Kirila shuddered.
“All right, her first,” the scowling statue told the liquid. “Get started!”
There was a long silence, during which the Renkin stared intently at the cup. An owl hooted in a nearby tree. Overhead the first of the bright summer stars appeared. A rabbit darted by, rustling the grass.
“When does it begin?” Kirila asked.
“Begin? It’s already up to your tenth birthday!”
“Well, what does it say?”
“Nothing. Nothing happened to you.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said angrily. “Lots of things happened to me!”
The Renkin shrugged. “Nothing worth commenting on, apparently. Look, it only does notable highlights, sister—you want a complete story about what you eat for breakfast and who’s your favorite poet, hire a biographer.”
Kirila started to retort but he cut her off. “Wait, I’m getting something now—just a personality wash. A streaky green. That’s usually for boys—girls are a syrupy lemon—but it happens. Hardly worth noticing, but it’s probably desperate.” He shrugged again, a ripple of plaster shoulders. Some of the plaster flaked off onto the dewy grass.
A few more stars appeared, faint in the lingering, moonlit twilight. The owl gave another hoot, followed by the rushing of wings and a single, high-pitched squeak. Two of the sheep lay down to sleep.
“Where are you now?” Kirila demanded.
“Seventeen years. Boy, you led a dull life, sister – how did you stand it? No, wait—here’s something, in this last year. A tree growing roots, but only shallowly, in the topsoil. Now it’s falling...no, only half-way. It’s staying half-way toppled over; I’ll be damned. Now there’s another picture, it’s a—” He stopped and stared at Kirila, mouth open, his high white forehead wiped smooth of scowl lines by a comical surprise.
“A feather,” he whispered. “A white falcon feather.”
For just a second the summer night faded to gray, and a dark rushing filled Kirila’s ears. She shook her head so violently that her hair lashed her face and ordered, “Go on!”
The Renkin stared at her a moment longer in surprise, irritation, and the beginnings of resentful fear. Hastily he glanced back at the cup and muttered, “A drop of blood, shaped like a skull. It’s going—didn’t stay long, not too important, that’s all!” Flinging down the cup, he hopped into the hill and began to clumsily nail up the tapestry with a hammer. The handle had been chewed in deep, fang-marked grooves.
“Wait a minute! You promised to do Chessie, too!”
The Renkin kept on nailing, and hit his thumb.
“If you don’t, you won’t get your ruby!”
Grimacing horribly, the statue hopped back out of the hill. Kirila picked up the cup and handed it to him. The thick liquid had fallen out and was crawling away into the bushes in a spittled glob, humping like an inchworm. The Renkin clapped the cup over it, shouting, “Gotcha!”
The tips of Chessie’s ears quivered, and Kirila put her hand on his neck. It was hard as knotted stone.
“It started,” the Renkin said, peering into the cup, “with the St. John’s dog. There was some inbreeding with both setters and spaniels, some of it selective and some—”
“Not the past of his body!” Kirila cried. “He’s not a dog! His own past!”
The Renkin grinned slyly. “Didn’t promise that. You said ‘the dog’s past.’ That’s what you said, that’s what you paid for, that’s what you get.”
Chessie snarled and crouched low, but before he could spring, Kirila stepped in front of him. She looked directly at the Renkin and, not hesitating at all, said stonily, “His own past. Go on, you heard me. L’aarthen ka ruatha!”
As soon as she pronounced the ancient command, the dark rushing filled her head and the forest blanched to grey—and then kept on fading. The separate gray objects, trees and flowers and the grotesque statue holding his seething cup, wavered and slid together into a quivering choking blur that felt mushy under her feet. Frantically she stabbed about for the image of the Tents of Omnium, and could find nothing but the alien grayness. She cried out, and then suddenly saw the tents, as if from a long distance away, seen through a cloud of gray gelatin that gradually chilled, set, and crystallized into hard, rainbow-colored forest objects with the blessed precision of separateness. Kirila was trembling, and the armpits of her wool tunic were soaked with sweat. She bowed her head in silent acknowledgement to the unseen; that would be the last time she could invoke that much closeness and still withdraw, and she knew it.
The Renkin had sunk to what would have been his knees if he had any, bent at approximately half-way up the Ionic column. He was peering desperately into the pewter cup. “It’s trying, my Lady,” he whined. “It’s trying. But it’s hard to read an enchanted past, it’s terrible hard. Just give us a minute, there, we’ll have it in a minute, my Lady—” And to the cup he hissed, “Come on, you, or I’ll dissolve you in a sweet-water brook, I will!”
Several long minutes dragged by. Kirila’s ankles went rubbery and she sat down, putting out her hand to steady herself and to feel the distant, coarse, achingly green blades of green under her palm. One sharp-edged blade cut her finger. Chessie crouched, silent.
Finally a hissing began to come from the cup, building up to a shrill whistle like an outraged teakettle. The liquid inside grew black and boiled with great bubbles that looked like bursting pustules. The whistling became a splitting screech, and then the cup shattered with a sharp crack. Fragments of pewter flew outward and Kirila flung up her arm to protect her face.
“Bells,” the Renkin gasped. “Just before it broke—bells. Ten-year-old bells. That’s all I saw, honestly, my Lady, that’s all, it’s very hard to read enchanted pasts anyway and the spell on that one is like a dead-bolt, must have been a Master Wizard, a real professional job...” He backed away toward his hill, making futile little hand gestures at Kirila, jumped inside, leaped back out again to snatch up his second ruby, and sprang again into the hill. A second later the startled sheep jerked into a shambling run, bumping into each other and causing the dark hill—the tapestry had leaped into place without any hammering—to tilt so far to the left that a shower of pebbles and a few dead leaves cascaded off the top. Then the mound righted itself and disappeared around a bend in the road.
Kirila knelt by Chessie. He didn’t look at her. She waited silently. The liquid, again clear and thick, was humping off into the bushes, hissing weakly.
“Bells,” Chessie said. His voice was perfectly flat.
“That’s something, anyway. “
“A whole life—my whole life—lost somewhere, and all I can get is ten-year-old bells.”
“It could be from a coat-of-arms,” Kirila hazarded.
He swung his head around to look at her, his eyes like frozen caramel.
“It’s possible,” she said desperately. “Or a family motto, or...or maybe in the name of your castle! Like Cloches d’Argent!”
“Where’s Cloches d’Argent?”
“Well, actually I know everyone there, it’s next door to Castle Kiril. But you get the idea! It’s a clue, Chessie, a real clue! Next town we come to, we’ll check the local monastery for a copy of Reglyth’s Peerage, and then if there’s a strong lead we can go to that place first, and travel to the Tents of Omnium afterward. We’ll check this out thoroughly; of course we will!”
Chessie considered, tilting his head to one side so that his ears flopped. Then he crept closer to Kirila and put one paw on her knee. Giving just one uncharacteristic wag of his rounded purple tail, he laid his head in her lap. She scratched his ears softly. They sat like that a long while, while the stars came out and the bewitching warm starwinds of a summer night whispered in the trees and ruffled the sheep-trampled grass.