Vaelin and Dahrena sat before the dozen chiefs, finding no welcome in any gaze. One of them said something, a woman with a crow feather in her hair.
“We give you no leave to enter,” Dahrena translated. “Yet here you are. She asks for a reason why they shouldn’t kill you.”
“I come to seek your help,” Vaelin replied as she related his words to the chiefs. “A great and terrible enemy has attacked my people. Soon they will come to the forest, bringing fire and torment . . .”
Hera Drakil held up a hand and Vaelin fell silent as the Seordah spoke in his own language. “Your people could not take this forest from us,” Dahrena related. “Though they tried. Why should we fear these newcomers when we do not fear you?”
“My people saw wisdom in making peace. Our enemy has no such wisdom. Ask your sister, she has seen their hearts.”
The chiefs’ gaze turned to Dahrena who nodded and spoke at length in the Seordah tongue, no doubt relating what her gift had revealed of Varinshold’s fate and the Volarians’ nature.
“You face a cruel foe indeed,” she translated when one of the other chiefs responded to her tale, a wiry man with a foxtail hanging about his neck. “But it is your foe, not ours. The wars of the Marelim Sil are their own.”
Vaelin paused, pondering how best to phrase what he hoped would silence their doubts. “I am named Beral Shak Ur by Nersus Sil Nin. I tell you true that I have seen and spoken with the blind woman. She has blessed the course of my life. Can any here claim the same?”
He saw some flickers of uncertainty on the faces of the chiefs, but no shock or fear, and certainly no change of heart.
“If the blind woman blesses you,” Dahrena related the words of Hera Drakil as he pointed over Vaelin’s shoulder, “she will hear you now.”
Vaelin turned, regarding the stone for a moment then getting to his feet. “You don’t have to.” Dahrena moved to his side as he approached the stone, looking down at the smooth flat surface with the single perfectly round indentation in the centre. “Let me talk to them. With enough time, they’ll listen.”
“Who am I to deny them a show?” he asked. “One I suspect they’ve been expecting for a long time.”
“You don’t understand. Seordah have been coming here for generations, usually the old and the sick, some the mad. All come to touch the stone and seek the blind woman’s counsel. Most just touch it, wait for a time then leave disappointed, but some, only a very few . . . Some it takes, leaving their bodies empty.”
“Except you,” he said. “You said you had seen her.”
“After my husband died . . .” Her eyes went to the stone, clouded with sorrowful remembrance. “My grief was such I didn’t care if I lived. I came here in search of some kind of answer, some reason. If that was denied me then I would happily accept death. The blind woman . . . She showed me something to live for.” Her hand reached out, hovering over the surface of the stone. “It put me back in my body, because she willed it.”
“Then,” he said, stepping closer. “Let’s hope she finds me similarly worthy.”
The granite was cool under his palm, but he felt no other sensation, no change in his song, but when he looked up Dahrena and the Seordah were gone. It was night and a woman sat at a fire, face turned away from him but he knew her instantly. “Nersus Sil Nin,” he greeted her, walking to the fire. She was older than he remembered, lines deeply etched into the flesh around her red marble eyes, her hair entirely white. She blinked and glanced up at him.
“You’re older,” she said. “And your song is stronger.”
“You said I should learn its music well.”
“Did I? It was so long ago. There have been so many visions since.” Her hand reached down to the stack of firewood at her feet, tossing some branches into the flames. “Still serving your Faith?” she asked.
“My Faith was a lie. Though I think you knew that.”
“Is a lie really a lie if it is honestly believed? Your people sought to make sense of the world’s many mysteries with their Faith. Misguided perhaps, but based on a truth not fully revealed.”
The thing that lived in Barkus, the cruelty of its laugh. “A soul can be trapped in the Beyond.”
“Not all souls, only those with a gift. This power, this fire that burns in you and I, doesn’t cease burning when our life fades.”
“And when it slips into the void. What then?”
Her aged lips formed a smile. “I suspect I’ll discover that myself before long.”
“Something lives there, in the void. Something that takes these souls and twists them, making them serve its purpose, sending them back to take the bodies of other gifted.”
Her eyebrows rose in faint surprise. “So, it grew after all.”
“What grew? What is it that lives there?”
She turned her blank eyes to him, face heavy with regret. “I do not know. All I know is that it needs. It hungers.”
“What for?”
She voiced her answer with a flat certainty making doubts redundant, “Death.”
“Can you tell me how to defeat it?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “But I can tell you it has to be fought, if you care about this world and its people.”
He looked up at the small patch of night sky visible through the branches above, seeing the seven stars of the sword. This high in the sky meant it was early autumn here, though how many years before his time was an unfathomable mystery. “Has it happened yet?” he asked. “Have my people come to take this land?”
“I’ll be many years dead before that happens. Though I’ve had enough visions from that time to make me thankful for it.”
“And the future? The future of this land?”
She stared into the fire for some time and he suspected she wouldn’t answer, but eventually she said, “You are as far into the future as I’ve seen, Beral Shak Ur. After you, there is no future. None that I can see.”
“And yet you would have me fight?”
“My gift is not absolute. Many things remain hidden. And in any case, what else would you do? Give up your hope and sit waiting for the end?”
“Your people require persuasion to grant passage through the forest. What do I tell them?”
Her brow creased into an amused frown. “Tell them I said they should. That might help.”
“And that will be enough?”
Her frown turned into a laugh, bitter and short. “I haven’t the faintest notion. The people you find in this forest may speak my language and share my blood, but they are not my people. Those who come to touch the stone are shadows of former greatness and beauty. They gather in tribes and pursue their endless feuds with the Lonak, myth and legend has replaced knowledge and wisdom. They have forgotten who they were, allowed themselves to be diminished.”
“If they don’t join with me, then even that shadow of your greatness will be gone, along with any chance that it might one day be rebuilt.”
“What is broken remains so. It is the way of things.” She turned to the stone. “We did not craft these vessels of memory and time, they were here long before us. We merely divined their use, and even then they prove fickle, taking the minds of those they deem unworthy. Once a people far greater than the Seordah crafted wonders and built cities the length and breadth of this land. Now, even their name is lost forever.”
She turned back to the fire and fell silent, features sagging with fatigue. “I had hoped our final meeting might be joyous, that when you came it would be with tales of a wife and family, a long life lived in peace.”
He reached for her hand, knowing it would feel nothing, but let it hover there for a moment. “It grieves me to disappoint you so.”
She said nothing and he sensed that her vision was fading. He returned to the stone, extending his hand then hesitating. “Good-bye, Nersus Sil Nin.”
She didn’t turn around. “Good-bye, Beral Shak Ur. If you win your war, return to the stone. Perhaps you’ll find someone new to talk to.”
“Perhaps.” He pressed his palm to the stone, daylight returning in an instant, banishing the night’s chill. He drew a breath, forcing authority into his voice as he turned to address the Seordah. “The blind woman has spoken . . .”
He trailed off when he saw their gaze was elsewhere, all twelve Seordah chiefs now on their feet staring at something to the side of him. Dahrena stood nearby, eyes wide in wonder. He turned and the song surged.
The wolf sat on its haunches, green eyes regarding him with the scrutiny he remembered so well. He couldn’t recall its being so large before, standing at least as tall as he. After a moment it licked its lips and raised its snout, a great howl rising to the sky, loud enough to banish all other sound, filling the ears of all present to the point of pain.
The wolf lowered its snout, the howl fading and for a heartbeat silence ruled the forest, then it came, rising from the trees for miles around, the answering howl of every wolf in the Great Northern Forest. On and on it went as the wolf rose to trot forward, its great head level with his chest, nostrils twitching as it sniffed him. He could hear its song, the alien tune he remembered from the day Dentos died, the music so strange as to be baffling, but one note was clear and unmistakable. Trust. It has trust in me.