The tomb guardians, colorful and fierce, prowling silently around the tomb on their half-human legs, the black stone effigy itself, of a tall old man frowning faintly, it looked, at the doings in the tower, impressed Corleu fully but briefly. His eyes kept returning to the globe.
Just a light, his brain told him. But his hands wanted to hold it; he wanted to see into it. Nothing in it but a green-white mage-flame, his eyes told him, but his attention fluttered around it like some frantic moth. There, he wanted to say, there. But it wasn’t there.
“Nothing there but fire,” the tinker said. Corleu dragged his eyes from it finally, turning. He opened his mouth to answer, then could not, stunned finally in that chamber full of wonders.
The Gold King stood in his gold spiked armor, masked in gold, crowned with the seven gold stars of his house. The edges of his scabbard rippled like flame. The chain he dragged went just so far across the marble floor, then simply stopped in the middle of a link, as if it continued elsewhere, in another chamber, perhaps, or somewhere among the stars.
Behind him the Warlock, dressed in the black of his night-shadow, juggled the stars that limned the shadow, and the one red star that was his heart.
“We’re close,” he said. His red-furred, feral face looked intent, watchful, the blood fox scenting the hunters, perhaps, or the prey. It was an ancient expression, Corleu thought suddenly, seeing the first blood fox in the Delta waiting, wide-eyed, still, for what it smelled flying low over the swamps on the wind.
His heart pounded. There was too much power. Tinker, he had told Nyx; old blind beggar woman. The Blind Lady wore peacock feathers from throat to foot. Her long black hair tumbled away from a delicate oval face. Her eyes were closed, a faint frown between her brows. Her ringed hand wove threads of palest silver; like the Gold King’s chain, they stopped short in the air, continued elsewhere. Her face was so calm she seemed elsewhere as well, but she spoke. “A little farther, Wayfolk man. Take us farther.”
He stared at her, not knowing how he had gotten even that far. “You must promise,” he said desperately. “You haven’t promised what I asked.”
The Dancer chuckled. One side of her hair was black as night, the other white as snow. She wore a Fire Bear pelt; her fingers were its curved ice-white claws. She looked old as night one moment, then, at a shift of light or expression, as young as morning. “We gained ground without a promise.”
“Then I won’t move. I’ll go no farther.” He sat down at the foot of the effigy, his arms folded. “I’ll stay here with the dead until you promise.” His face was blanched; his old man’s hair, he thought, would have turned white anyway at this point. The Gold King turned his imperious mask of gold at Corleu, and he had to drag at air, just at the movement.
“Tell us who might be waiting for us,” the Gold King said. “Tell us who might have taken an interest in whatever you searched for, who might have turned a thought toward taking this thing I want. How can we promise without a name?”
“I won’t name until you promise.” He had reached out, clung to something solid on the tomb, in the face of the Gold King’s wrath. The guardians swung their horned, beaked, goat-eyed heads at him as they roamed around the tomb. But no fire came out of their mouths, no roars of warning. “And she doesn’t know what or where. She can’t be there waiting.”
The Warlock paced, juggling, with one hand, small worlds of fire.
“Then why are you afraid for her? This ignorant, innocent sorceress who has no interest in why we wake? If she’s nowhere, how could we harm her? I know mages, witches, sorcerers. Their minds are always turning, always busy, nosing out this, that. She pointed your way here. You’d have spent years searching on your own for this maze. But she would not come with you if only to see for herself what you might find? She was not curious? She had better things to do? And why,” he added, tossing a star and catching it, “would we harm her for helping us?” Corleu, gripping stone, stared at him, dry-mouthed. “No answer from the Wayfolk? Then I’ll answer. Because she intends us harm.”
He threw a glass ball in his hand hard across the chamber, straight at the globe. Corleu, on his feet before he realized it, saw the ball pass through the globe as if it were air, and rebound against the wall. The Warlock caught it. Corleu molded stone in his hand, still searching the globe, for a crack, injury, a wavering of its light. He moved finally, took a step toward it, touched it with one hand.
He flinched away from hot glass; it was only mage-light, burning for centuries, likely old as the maze. He turned, found an audience out of nightmare watching him.
“What do you see,” the Dancer asked softly, “in there, Wayfolk? It’s only a round globe of light.”
“Nothing.” He sat down again, cooling his hand against the cold marble: It was the effigy’s left foot, he realized, he had hold of like a spar off a swamped ship. He moved his hand quickly before the effigy stirred in annoyance.
“I looked into a round globe of light once,” the Blind Lady said in her low, grave voice. “I saw what I saw and never saw again. Be careful, Wayfolk, what you look too closely into.”
“It’s too late for care.” His eyes wandered back to the globe, then dragged away from it, to meet the Gold King’s expressionless, armored face.
“There,” the Gold King said softly. “In there, Corleu?”
“No.”
“Maybe in its shadow?”
He did not answer; his face turned resolutely from it. But it burned in his thoughts. “You must promise,” he said doggedly, “or none of us will ever know. She could never harm the likes of you. She could never take from you.”
“Could she not?” They consulted one another silently; so did the fey-eyed tomb guardians.
“Never harm,” the Warlock said thinly, tossing balls again. “Never take.”
“But would she try?” the Dancer asked, revealing her ancient furrowed face. “There’s the question. If we promise, and she tries to harm, then what, Wayfolk man? Will you come to our rescue?”
“She can’t harm you,” he said again, wearily. “No one could. You’re old as story. You never die. Nothing’s got more power than a dream. Or time. Or sun. You’ll take what you want and walk through her like glass through that globe. She’d maybe throw a spell or two, but what’s that to do with you? You’ll go on forever. Promise.”
“Name her.”
“Promise. Her, and her house, and all who know her name.”
“Name her.”
“Nyx.”
Rush’s voice, pleading, breathless, caught them across the black tower. Meguet, pushing the Cygnet banner away from the door, saw Nyx’s eyes widen, expression cross her face, before she finally turned.
“Rush.” It sounded like a sigh. He was armed, but for his heart, which had no defense against Nyx anywhere, it seemed.
“I heard you had come home to fight for this house.”
“Rush, we cannot wait—”
“I’ll come with you.”
Meguet closed her eyes. An impatience like some deadly acrid desert wind shook her. The Wayfolk man had breached time. She saw his face, turned upward, gazing, pale, entranced, puzzled, at the silver-green globe over Chrysom’s effigy. “Nyx,” she whispered. “We have no time left—”
Rush swept a torch out of its sconce, crossed the floor toward them. “You’ll need help. I have some power, Nyx—”
“No.”
“I won’t let you go there alone.”
“Rush,” Nyx said, her voice cold as the gate hinges in midwinter, “you have been saying that for nine years. And for nine years I have gone my way and I have gone alone. You don’t have the power to follow us. I will not be distracted trying to guard you.”
“You won’t.” He had reached her. His eyes narrowed slightly, as if he were trying to fit a face of memory over the sharp-boned, expressionless, intent face in front of him. “I’ll take care of myself. I’ll guard Meguet—she has only her sword against those sorcerers.”
“I need only Meguet,” Nyx said flatly. His temper flared a little, sending blood to his face.
“I’ll come with what I have: The house is in danger. You can’t return after three years, give me a glimpse of your back and your shadow and then disappear into that convoluted puzzle out of a dead mage’s brain, and expect me to wait—”
“I never expected you to wait!” Nyx’s cold, calm voice, raised in sudden, genuine despair, startled Meguet. “I never wanted you to wait! You kept thinking I would return to love you—if it was love I wanted, I would never have left! You can’t understand, you never could, that I could want knowledge more than you, experience and power more than you. You love a shadow that left this house nine years ago. I have nothing in me of that woman. I have travelled a strange country, and I have changed myself to live in that magic country. Love is not what I have learned in nine years, Rush. It’s what I left behind.”
“I don’t believe that,” Rush said. He was shaken, white, but grim, clinging with a blood fox’s death grip to something that, to Meguet’s eye, had given up life years ago without a protest. Nyx’s mouth thinned; her eyes looked silvery in the torchlight. “For nine years, yours was the first face I saw waking, the last I saw sleeping, no matter who lay beside me. How could I be that mistaken? You must have given me something, each time you returned—the way you spoke my name, the way you turned your head to catch my voice—You can’t have turned so far from love—”
“You did,” she said flatly. “It was you who turned away from love, these nine years, turned away from those who might have truly loved you, to wring love out of a memory, a ghost, air. You loved nothing, Rush. You loved no one. Not even me. At least in nine years I learned something.”
She turned abruptly, pulled aside the banner. Rush stood blinking, his face patchy, as if she had thrown more than words at him. For a moment he almost heard her: Meguet saw the hesitation in his movement. Then, obdurately, he stepped forward. Nyx spun so fast she blurred; there was a sound like air ripping. A line smoldered across the stone in front of Rush.
“You will wait,” she said, her voice shaking with anger, “and you will wait, and you will wait in this dark tower—”
“Nyx,” Meguet breathed.
“Until the woman you will love freely frees you from your waiting.”
“Nyx, what have you done?” He stood very still, looking half perplexed, half frightened, as if he had come to that moment, to that place, by choice, and then could not remember why. Nyx turned again.
“Nothing more,” she said with grim weariness, “than what he has laid on himself for nine years. You said to hurry.” Meguet, with a final, stunned glance back at Rush, followed her down the steps. “We’ll have to elude Chrysom’s tricks,” Nyx added, “to reach the center. We might have used Corleu’s Ring of Time, but it frayed when the house and all its odd time-paths broke apart.” She paused at the bottom of the steps; a mage-fire in her palm illumined a lion’s face at the first wall, turned to gaze back at her. “However, there are other ways of passing through time—”
Meguet, impelled by a thousand years of voices incoherent in their urgency, did not bother to speak. She gripped Nyx’s arm, pulled her forward through the wall into the center of the maze. For a moment, the strange statues appeared around them, then Meguet, all her attention focused on the prism, changed that moment. The statues disappeared; black walls rose around them, enclosing the black eye of the Cygnet. It slowly paled, turned its fire-white gaze on them.
Meguet let go of Nyx then, her eyes flickering at the shadows. She drew Moro Ro’s sword, out of habit. Nyx, standing stone-still, her back to the prism, blinked at the sound.
“He’s close, the Wayfolk man,” Meguet said, prowling, tense. “He changed time at the center. I don’t know how.” Nyx moved, turned her head slightly to follow Meguet’s movements. “Only a Guardian can do that.”
“Meguet.” The word was almost inaudible, but in that chamber any word ran clear as crystal to the ear. “What is this place?”
“The heart of the maze.”
“How did you find it?” Still she had not moved; expression had not yet come back into her face. “Who showed you the way?”
“You did,” Meguet said a little bitterly. “Those that you and Corleu woke hid themselves here. I came here to search for them. They attacked, I had to run. Time opened. I ran here.” She stopped pacing finally, leaned against the wall, watching Nyx. “You should not know about this place. I could have left you behind easily. But you said you wanted to see the face of power. I don’t know its face. But there is its eye.”
Nyx turned. She moved then, swiftly, to stand beside Meguet, staring at the great prism that, moonlike, was affixed to nothing but time. “What is it?”
“The eye of the Cygnet.”
Nyx was silent, testing it, Meguet knew, recognizing the intent, detached expression, as if she were trying to breathe it like air, swallow it with her mind. “It yields nothing,” she whispered. “Who made it?”
“Astor Ro. Chrysom made the maze to protect it. She was the first of us.”
“The first—”
“Of the Guardians.”
“What is it—exactly that you guard?”
“The Cygnet.”
Nyx stared at her. “You never even wanted power. You never cared. You couldn’t get through the maze when we were young. Is this what gave you power?”
“Yes. It needs hands, eyes, a mind living in the world. Other minds, older Guardians, woke in me to give me advice.”
“What advice are they giving now?”
“They are silent. Listening.”
“Listening?”
“To you. For any sign of danger from you.”
“Toward you?” Nyx asked with a certain wariness. “Or toward the Cygnet?”
“They did not help you before.”
“The danger was only to me, not the Cygnet. Now, it would be to both, but”—she shrugged slightly, a small gesture she regretted—“now you could not touch me.”
Nyx’s gaze flicked away, back to the eye. “Why you?” she asked. “Why were you chosen?”
“We are all related, in some way, to Astor Ro. Beyond that, I don’t know why.”
“And you never knew. As we grew up together, you never sensed this power.”
“I never needed it. The Cygnet was never in danger.”
Nyx was silent, searching her face. The fire-white prism drew any hint of color from her eyes. “The thing he seeks belongs to the Cygnet,” she said slowly. “Or is it a danger to the Cygnet? Does the Cygnet give holding power to the Holders of Ro Holding? The power of the Holders turns on a tale? A constellation? But where is the Cygnet? Four Hold Signs and their faces of power are gathered in this maze. But where is the Cygnet’s face? You, Meguet?”
She shook her head, wondering, herself, what mask the Cygnet might choose. “No. I’m simply a Guardian.”
“My mother?”
“Perhaps. But these powers only wear their faces to give them a human aspect. Tear the mask away, and you would have other words for them. Take those words away and—what?”
“The power itself,” Nyx said softly. She looked at the prism, her arms folded, her face intent in a way that made Meguet alert, uneasy. She was no longer overawed; her busy mind had begun to weave again. “The eye of the Cygnet . . . What is in there?” Meguet did not answer. Nyx threw her a curious glance. “May I look into it?”
“Be careful.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“No. But that’s what the Wayfolk man is reaching toward, through time.”
“Where is he?”
“Here.”
“Here?” Nyx said, startled.
“In this chamber. In the same moment, but in a different circle of it. The wall is a Ring of Time. Not like you make them, from one place to another. But in one place, one moment, and deeper into the same moment. It is part of the knowledge within that eye.” She paused, wishing she had bitten the word in two and swallowed it before she flung it to Nyx like bait. She added carefully, “As I said, all the power it gives is transitory; it can be used only for one purpose.”
“Perhaps. I think power is malleable; it can be used to suit purpose. How much knowledge must have collected there, in a thousand years . . . And you might never have such power again in your life. This place could close like an eye closing, never to be seen again while we live. How much of it do you know, Meguet?”
“I have no idea,” Meguet said shortly. “But it will be enough to stop the Wayfolk man.”
Nyx was silent. All her attention had withdrawn from the prism to focus, suddenly, on Meguet. She put her hand on Meguet’s arm, gently, as if to coax her to turn, to look at something. “Meguet”—she picked words slowly—“whatever Corleu is searching for, he has been compelled to find. He is not acting by choice.”
“Compelled,” Meguet said flatly, “he may have been, but he has found his way step by step to this time, to this place, and he has always known exactly what he wanted. And I am born to defend it.”
“He is Wayfolk, powerless. I had to teach him spells a cottage brat could work, to get him this far.”
“He should never have taken the first step.” Nyx’s fingers tightened on her arm; she moved slightly, left them closing on air. She eased into shadows again, her face shadowed. “He threatens the Cygnet. That is what the powers within me will see.”
“Meguet.” Nyx’s face, with the color washing into her eyes, seemed candle-pale. “He is an innocent—”
“How would you recognize innocence anymore? You have no mercy for any who love you, why would you defend someone you yourself coerced, except to get what you want?”
“I did not coerce him. He needed me so he could rescue some Wayfolk girl—”
“And that moved you, I suppose.”
“It did, oddly,” Nyx admitted. Her brows were pinched; expression had broken through the cool detachment in her eyes. “I know he looks for something of great, dangerous power. But he wants nothing from it. All he wants is to rescue his Wayfolk love. It is a kind of innocence. A kind I never knew. I thought I could take what he found, and then use the power in it to protect him, send him unharmed back to his life. Back into that innocence. It seemed—even to me, living that way in the swamp—something worth protecting.”
Meguet closed her eyes. “Then why,” she breathed, “did you send him here? He could never have known about the maze without you. What kind of innocent dream does this look like to you? You knew I wanted him. What did you think I would do when I found him in this house? Why should I believe what you tell me, rather than what I see with all the power within me? He is here. He is searching not for the face of power, but for its heart. You have sent him here to die.”
Nyx caught her breath, a small, unguarded sound, a half-formed word. She vanished abruptly. Meguet, startled, had time only to tense, and then she found herself adjusting her vision like a telescope, pulling Nyx out of the air, focusing clearer and clearer, until she could see even the changing expression in Nyx’s eyes.
The great swan-etched broadsword wrenched itself out of her hands. It stroked the air with silver, a line drawn straight toward the shining prism. Fast as it moved, Meguet was faster, folding the moment in her mind, stepping across time to seize the sword with both hands, stop it an instant before its tip broke the facets of the prism. It resisted her, in midair, dragging against her on its determined path. Then the desire that had held a door against Nyx’s power filled her; the need to see, to protect, became stronger than the threat, and she pulled the blade down and whirled.
“Nyx!” She caught her breath, furious and terrified. Nyx had disappeared again; Meguet’s eyes picked her out from behind an illusion of black stone wall. She looked unfamiliar in concentration, detached, unreachable.
“You can move like thought,” Nyx said softly. “You can see through illusion, your strength is formidable. You can walk through stone, you can walk through time. What else can you do? What else did that eye teach you that not even I know how to test? You guard a living power. I want it.”
“Nyx, be careful,” Meguet begged, white, trembling. “Please stop—”
“What mind is in that eye?”
“You will go too far—too far even for me to protect you. Nyx, please—”
The dark walls blinked, hid Nyx. Meguet turned, drawn as always toward the Cygnet’s eye, and found her there, reaching out to it with both hands.
Finally the voices within her spoke. They checked her, stilled a thought that would have transfixed Nyx within that moment, left her always reaching, never grasping. Wait, the Guardians said. She waited; their voices stilled, left a silence in her like the silence in the face of the moon. Nyx’s hands touched the prism, held it.
In the misty light between her hands, the Cygnet flew.
Corleu saw it within the globe. It left him no time to think, no time to move; he stood at the globe, reaching for it, his hands settling on it before he had even gotten off the tomb. He never felt the hot glass. Here, it was, he knew: The thing that trapped him and would set him free, the Cygnet, flying through that mist between time, to the place where it had hidden its heart.
A face formed out of the mist; mist lingered in the eyes. “Nyx,” he said, a small word startled out of him that seemed to echo in whispers behind him. She also looked surprised, at something he could not see.
And then he saw.