Medlo snorted and remarked that Murgin lay eastward, not a good place to go. The old woman concurred. 'I have seen it in visions,' she said. 'Barren, hard, acid, tortured. I would not go there willingly.'

'Nor I, again,' said Medlo.

Thewson said, 'Whether east or west or here, I do not like this grain and salt meat. It is time to hunt for fresh meat, time to be paid and go. We have come as was agreed. Here the canyon ends. I would be paid and go hunting.'

'That is true,' said Leona. 'We were offered payment to come through the canyon with you. Unless you desire that we accompany you further.'

All of them were looking at Jaer, Medlo with mounting irritation, Jasmine with despair. Jaer said nothing, only stared moodily at his feet.

The old woman sighed, then stood in the sun stretching like an old cat, slowly blinking in the light from behind disordered locks of hair. 'If you are in doubt, I would willingly give you of my gift, for I have the gift of prophecy much good has it done me and am able to see past things and future things.'

Medlo smiled mockingly. Terascouros glared at him and made a hissing noise through her teeth. She picked a stick out of the fire to draw with it a circle in the dust of the road and signs and words on and around the circle. From the river she gathered five stones, selecting them with care, each different in colour and shape, marking these too with the sooty stick. Then, over their mild protests and visible amusement, she chivvied them into the circle and thrust a stone into the hands of each. As they stood uncertainly, she began a breathy chant, a sound of dead reeds in a shallow lake, a language older than spoken words.

For a moment they stood there, embarrassed, wondering whether to stay or move away, and then the world dropped away from them slowly, leaving an aching darkness behind and they in it, moored to a circlet of flame. They bloomed upon the circle, orbs of fire, one red as a heart of embers rimmed with black, breathing a slow pulse of fire; one green as new meadows under rising suns, dancing with the light of spring leaves; one amber as the weight of noon, lit with copper and bronze, burning with the topaz glow of deserts; one pale blue and glittering as steel blades, sharp with a deadly whispering; one white and featureless, a sphere of dew or snow or light of summer moon. Out of the void around them a demand fell upon them, a question to which their spirits went out in answer, 'Where is the thing you seek?' Within each of them, the question was breathed in with a smell of bitter frost, accepted, answered, and let go. From each of them fell a meteor of flame, red and amber, green and blue, featureless white, drifting and spiraling away into the void below them all. For a time they burned in their orbs, each bleeding light away along the shining arc, red bleeding into green, green into blue, the colours mixing, muting, becoming more subtle, fading, fading....

And they came to themselves standing upon the dusty road, the marked stones lying within the circle at their feet. Beside them was Terascouros, hunched to the ground, still as the stones, barely breathing. Jaer tried to look at Leona, seeing instead a fiery light, red as blood, glittering like claws. His eyes fell away to Jasmine and were blinded by light reflected from leaves. He closed his eyes, swaying. The others stared at the old woman in awe.

She shuddered, drew herself up. 'So, mockers. You thought the old woman a mad one, eh? So. Learn from this not to judge the soul from the look of the skin. Wrinkled I am, oh yes. But mad I am not.' She waved them away from the circle to stand beside it tracing the paths which the stones had made in the dust as though they were the letters and words of a language she knew well.

'I trace the stone of Leona,' she said. 'It moves to the north, then turns and goes east. And the stone of Thewson goes east also. And here they are, all, lying where the Jaer-stone lies, at the place on the circle Jaer stood. If you find what you seek, you will find it where Jaer is.'

'I will truly find it?' begged Jasmine joyously.

The old woman shook her head. 'I didn't say that. I said if you find it, you will find it there. You may not find it together, but you will not find it separately. Also, the stones lie not to the east, but to the north of east.'

'You draw a strange map, vision maker,' rumbled Thewson.

'Then follow your own,' she snapped.

Medlo coughed. 'Old woman, the fact is simply that we do not know whether to trust you. Is this a true vision? Or a wickedness you have created for us to lure us toward Murgin? We may be weak and vacillating, but we think we know what moves us. What moves you? We do not know.'

Unaccountably, she grinned at them. 'Well, I don't blame you. Here you are, going along full of your own troubles, and you pause to rescue an old hag from chained captivity' at this, Jaer started 'who thrusts you into a vision with the Seekers chant. Well then. What am I? A member of the Sisterhood. Gone from it these fifteen years. Tired. Weary. Going home once again. A simple thing.'

There was an uncomfortable silence. Leona said, 'I know of the Sisterhood. There is no evil in them that I have heard. Which Choir is yours?'

'The Choir of Gerenhodh-south. At least it was. Who knows whether they will welcome me.'

'I suppose it is only coincidence,' drawled Medlo, 'that from here, Gerenhodh Mountain lies north of east? It would not be that you simply wanted company?'

The old woman choked down laughter. 'You are very bright, young man. No. I had not thought of that until now. But it is true. The vision I called for you lies along my path. And if the things you seek lie anywhere, they lie there.'

'Well, I will go,' said Thewson. 'I have been not far to the east, and if the Crown of Wisdom is there, it is worth the journey. Two years I have asked of this Crown, and no one in these lands knows of it. Faxo voa luxuf; a mockery this journey. They say the one who took the Crown from my land was called the Axe King, so let us go east and ask about him. Why not? Wa'osu.'

Jasmine cried, 'And what about me? I don't want to go eastward. I came from eastward. I may be a slave, bought and paid for, but I do not want to go back the way I came. You, old woman, say my search ends there or not at all, but when I ask if I will find it there, you say no! You are full of weaseling words, old woman.'

Jaer looked up, hurt and angry, but Medlo forestalled him. 'No, Jasmine. That is not just. If you would rather go west, go. Jaer would undoubtedly give you gold enough to get there. He did not bring you to Byssa on a leash. As for me, I will go to Gerenhodh if others go. Why not? My search has had no luck elsewhere, and I don't much care.'

Leona said, 'I am not unwilling to go. Though I may find my search there, it is probably too late to matter.' For Leona had begun to believe that Fabla was dead, needed to believe that Fabla's suffering had ended. When she had taken Jaer's gold, she had assumed the leadership of the little group as she had done countless times in the past with similar groups. But now she sensed a difference, a strangeness, and something which had slept within her wakened slowly to uncoil and peer out at the world. 'I do not desire to return the way we came. If you go northeast, I will go with you until the time I wish to go elsewhere.'

'Yes,' sighed Jaer. 'Whether we go east, or north of east, to the Sisterhood, or to the Sunrise... well. I welcome those who will come with me. Even you, Jasmine or you can stay here. Or turn back to Byssa, or go overland to Hynath Port once more.'

Jasmine turned her back on them, weeping. The old woman patted her on the shoulder.

'I know it is hard. You would rather go elsewhere, though you know not where. Still, girl, you won't do your lost child any good if you are dead. Better to turn aside with us for a time and stay alive. At least Thewson's great spear and Leona's great hounds will guard you.'

Leona and Thewson acknowledged this grimly, already adjusting their packs for the road. Jaer gazed at Jasmine reproachfully, his lower lip out like a pouting child and totally unconscious of it. Jasmine began to laugh as she cried, took him by the hand and followed after the others.

They went across the ragged meadows into the wide forest lands which lay like petticoats at the foot of the mountains. They were going into the land called Ban Morrish in which were small villages named Bast and Rent and Vallip. Eastward lay Murgin, and beyond that the rumoured places of Tchent. On the horizon before them was the far white top of Gerenhodh, and south of that somewhere a settlement of the Sisterhood. Jaer felt almost satisfied. He did not know where he was going, but the direction felt right.

They travelled the day in the light, with birdsong and laughter and the trickle of small streams running down southerly to join the River Del. The sunlight was warm and golden, and the way was smooth for their feet. Thewson Killed a small wild goat and was restored to good humor by fresh meat to eat and more hung to smoke over their afternoon fire for later meals. Medlo flounced himself into a better humour and then teased Jasmine into laughter, finally making a playlet with her for their amusement. He took the part of a gentleman of Rhees, intent upon seduction, and assigned Jasmine the role of a lady of the court intent upon marriage. They fluted and trilled and made delicate hand gestures and posturings to underline sentiments of such outrageous insincerity that the others laughed aloud, except for Thewson who only watched them in studied incomprehension. Jaer was glad to forget his own thoughts in watching their silliness, the two in appearance so different yet as much alike in manner as brother and sister or at least two weaned at the same tit.

Then late, as the sun sank toward the forest over their left shoulders, Medlo resolved to try Leona's plan to send possible pursuers away from their trail. He turned to Jaer, tugging at his sleeve to evoke velvet and lace, as he had done in his role as gentleman of Rhees. 'Jaer, dear boy,' he twittered. 'Up ahead is the town of Yenner-po-tau, which you'd have no reason to know, dear boy, is a most inappropriate place for warriors and people of violence. Oh, most inappropriate, dear love.'

Since Medlo and Jasmine had been whispering together for the last half hour, Jaer had been expecting something of the kind. 'What do you want me to do about it, Medlo?'

'Oh, simply think about the town, dear boy. How exquisite it is, with its tiny porcelain houses set in the lovely wee gardens. Quite jewel-like and lovely. You would do well there, love. As a gardener, we think. Come let Jasmine and me tell you all about it-such a dear, sweet little place.'

Sighing ruefully, Jaer walked beside them. Evidently both Jasmine and Medlo had visited the town or created it out of their imaginations for they trilled endless details about it into Jaer's uninterested ears. All in all, Jaer felt it sounded better than Anisfale, but he had done enough gardening with Ephraim and Nathan out of necessity not to feel passionate about more of it. By the time night had come, however, and the strips of goat meat had been hung again in the smoke of a fire which they watched contentedly, Jaer was at least willing to accept that he could be a little man with a short-handled hoe who went about the porcelain village cultivating flowers. As he drifted into sleep he heard the mannered, musical voices of Jasmine and Medlo telling him who he was.

He was Pah-bau, gardener, walking under the sweetness of flowering trees, standing with other villagers in the evening to watch the colours of the sunset and calling them i-dau, smoky pink, and i-chau, silver pink, and sanu-dan-do, the colour of bruised sky. He was Pah-bau, in the village of peace, a worker in the fields of tranquility, and he rejoiced in the feel of the soft wind filtered through massed barriers of trees.

But storm came. He dreamed storm. Clouds came, heavy and ominous, with sagging bottoms, black udders swollen from the weight of rain. Lightning came. Darkness came. The people fled, and Jaer found herself alone in the forest, a voice from the sky calling implacably, Tell me where you are.' Jaer would not answer, began to run, but the horror pursued. The gryphon was there again, plucking her out of the storm as a flower is plucked up by a grazing beast.

She woke, held tight in Leona's arms, with Terascouros throwing wood onto the fire while Thewson circled the edge of the firelight, listening.

Terascouros turned toward her, shrilling, 'So you could not stay in the little town they made for you?'

'Indeed.' The old woman was suddenly as though younger by an accession of anger. 'Why was I not told you had this habit of switching about, boy to girl? This isn't the first time.'

Jaer was shivering uncontrollably. 'As long as I was the little man, it was all right. But I I something knew'

'No,' said Jaer weakly. 'There was no reason to say anything-'

'There was good reason not to,' grated Medlo. 'It was none of your business.'

'Mine!' she shouted. 'Mine, more than any!' She stood taller, her old body stretching upward, hair breaking from its loose knot to fly about her like smoke. 'It has been my business for fifteen years, fifteen years of listening, wandering, listening, running, sitting silent, getting away when they hunted, telling fortunes, reading visions, hiding outside filthy enclaves, avoiding filthy villages. It has been my business since you were born!'

She was in a perfect rage. Thewson was trying to listen to something far off, and he tried to shush her. It did no good.

'Sixteen years ago she came, Mute Mawen, of the Sisterhood, to tell us the one we waited for would soon be born. Signed us, that is, for she could not speak, would not write. Always strange she was. Talked to birds, talked with little animals. Came back and signed us that the one would be born soon, soon. Didn't say where, when, just soon. Who believed that? Some might have if not for Sybil, but Sybil put an end to that. Then she was gone, and I heard the baby crying in the far dark, one time. Two times. Each time the cry came, something else would come, bigger, stronger, hideous and oily, saying "Tell me where you are!" Then nothing. No more crying. Nothing. Old Terascouros couldn't just sit and sing. No. No, she had to go out in the world and find it, search it out. Fifteen years and you say it was none of my business?'

Thewson shook his head in frustration, came up behind her and took hold of her as though she were an old fragile doll. He lifted her gently, sat her down, stroked her arm. 'Now, grandmother, now. This Jaer is a strange one, surely. Wa'osu the strange one you seek, wa'osu not that one. Do not be evil at us for not knowing what thing you look for. Now, tell us quietly, for there is something far in the trees which listens.'

Terascouros took a deep breath, shuddering, the cords of her neck and shoulders twisting, jaw clenched. Then she collapsed, fell into herself all at once. 'Oh, how can I tell you? We in the Sisterhood are taught that in the time of the River of Hanar, the way will be found by Ahl di lasurra sai the "one who finds the direction." Centuries now of darkness with the darkness spreading. Towers of Separation built everywhere. Every street full of black robes, walls ever higher, groups ever smaller, languages changing, growing smaller, more secret so that fewer can speak together. Less laughter, less joy. Hatred growing, and malice, and pain. Our prophecy says that the Ahl di will be not male nor female only, will come from the west, in the time of Hanar, which is now. Oh, it must be now or the world will die of this blackness....'

'But you don't mean me,' pleaded Jaer. 'I know all about the Towers and the rest of it. Nathan and Ephraim said it was terrible, but they couldn't do anything about it. I can't. No one can.'

The old woman was crying, tears running down her cheeks to gleam like crystal in the firelight. 'Someone must.'

Thewson's head came up sharply, as did Leona's. The dogs growled deep in their throats. Far off, very distance but clear, was the sound of one harsh voice calling to another. Thewson grabbed up his spear and scattered the fire with his feet. 'Quickly,' he whispered. 'Be still.'

He picked Terascouros up under one arm, took an armload of their blankets and vanished like a shadow into the forest. Leona gathered things up and was gone, beckoning them to hide quickly. Medlo and Jasmine fled away, trailing their packs, leaving one or two things that Jaer caught up with her.

'I'm always running away,' Jaer thought. 'Always. I don't know why they hunt me, but I run. Like an animal afraid of hunters. Like a mouse afraid of the owl. Does the mouse ever think to reason with the owl, say "Why me?" or "Explain this strange appetite you have for mouse?" Do I dare face these faceless creatures coming this way? After me? Why me? Why? I do not know why, and yet I believe it, and I am frightened. My heart is beating like a drum.' She struggled into a thick copse of young trees, huddled under the blanket and prayed to be invisible. She could hear movement away to her left, a twanging string. Medlo had caught his jangle on something. She wanted to laugh hysterically, but only buried her face in her arms and tried not to breathe loudly.

Out in the clearing the scattered coals opened slow, fiery eyes against the darkness, then lidded them into black once more. The sounds came closer. There was a cautious prowling, a shadowy skulking, a muttered curse as someone laid naked skin upon a live coal. The night stretched over all like thick draperies, softening sound.

After what seemed a long time, Jaer stood up and moved out of the copse, leaning wearily against one of the trees while the leaves shivered around her. The hand that fell on her shoulder came out of shadow. For a moment she did not even realize it was there. When she knew it, finally, for what it was, she screamed.

From the trees the others heard it. Leona and Thewson, as though they had been one person, lunged out of hiding at a full run, thrashing through the underbush toward the echoes of that scream. Medlo struggled out of his hiding place and blundered after them, but the darkness hid the way they had gone, opened alleyways of shadow down which he ran, this way and that. Terascouros simply pressed her face into the mold of the forest floor and wept.

They met finally in the clearing, to find it empty. Those who had taken Jaer had gone as silently as an owl's flight is made out of darkness into darkness. They could find nothing. There was no sound but an endless soft cursing as Thewson queried his gods without waiting for their answers.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

THE GRYPHON.

Year 1168-Winter When it was light enough to see, they searched the clearing and into the depths of the forest. Thewson found the place where horses had been tied, some dozen of them, and he followed the tracks away to the east, returning to say that Jaer had been taken toward Murgin, whether alive or dead he did not know.

Terascouros had scrabbled a few sticks together into a pallid fire, and they sat about it staring, as though they might find in the flames a vision of whet should be done next, with the old woman muttering, 'My fault, and thine, and mine again. You, Medlo, for seeing in Jaer a shadow of someone you loved, and you, Jasmine, for seeing your child, and you, Leona, for seeing someone else again, and Thewson, for seeing a mystery he searched for, and I, for seeing another mystery, and all of us for not thinking of her, Jaer, him. Oh, I tell you, we have done evilly this night....'

Leona said coldly, 'Dommai, werai, mimai, topar k'dom-meto. In the Fales we say, "Magicians speak only of shadows, silence, and sorrow." '

'I am no magician. If I were a magician, I would become a whirlwind and go to rescue the child.'

'So let us become a whirlwind. I loved once. A girl who was soft and gentle, sweet-voiced when she sang on the moors. She was taken away without her consent and has died of it since, I think. He who took her did not care for her. She was a thing, nothing more, made for the breeding of sons and the weaving of cloth. So they have taken Jaer. A thing. Made for some strange purpose they have. What I did not know to do when Fabla was taken, I will do now. Come, old woman. Let us go north for a time.

'And you,' she said, turning to the others, 'go with Thewson to the place they have taken Jaer. Do not try to go into the city. Instead find a hidden place in the forest nearby, and wait for me in the last edge of dead trees as near to the west of the city as you can come. I want one of the black robes. Get me one. Do not try to make it talk, because it will not. But get me one and it will talk with me when I return.' These directions were firmly given to Medlo and Jasmine as though Leona expected total obedience, and neither of them argued with her as she set her pack upon her shoulders and led Terascouros away, calling to the dogs as she went.

Thewson went calmly about the business of packing and was ready to go while Medlo and Jasmine were still fumbling and casting about for whatever it was they were sure they had misplaced. Finally Thewson tapped his spear on a stone, expelling held breath in an impatient 'Chaiii!'

'Oh, all right,' said Medlo. 'I'm coming. I don't want to go toward Murgin. That's the last place in the known world I want to go, but...'

Thewson led them away.

They walked the day away, down forested halls as the sun moved in the empty sky toward dusk. They lay side by side in night's shadow, lost in the sound of water, watching the endless dance of their fire. In a strange quiet between despair and despair they slept, only to rise and walk another day away. The land sloped upward, gently, endlessly, across meadows edged with saplings, along tumbling streams, in groves of pines which held great branches above them like green clouds, their feet wading in puddles of dead needles in the tang of sun-warmed resin. They walked through green-trunked beech groves, light spattering through boughs like a shower of gold tossed by charitable hands. They plunged through gullies leveled by drifts of old oak leaves, and found evening there among the moss-hung oaks, and slept once more.

So went two more days, and on the evening of the fourth day since Leona had left them they heard the sound of axes. Thewson's head went up, listening. His spear went up, too, circling toward the sky in a ritual to a god the others did not know. Jasmine stared at the spear, at the narrow shaft, the leather thongs which bound it to the blade, the blade coloured and shaped like a leaf of grass with a curled base. A man of ordinary size could have used the blade for a sword. She closed her eyes at the hypnotic circling and slumped. Medlo caught her as she fell.

'It is too late to go on tonight.'

Thewson came to himself abruptly. 'Yes. Almost the dark has come. We will stay here. Tomorrow we will catch a black robe for Leona. Or the next day.'

The next day they followed the sound of axes to find the place where all the trees had been killed, where the trunks stood silver on the sterile earth in a belt of death around the stony plain. In the middle of the pave, miles wide, hard and hot in the sun, loomed the darkness of Murgin, a black pile out of which no light showed, above which no pennant waved. The bulk of a monstrous, squat tower grew out of the mass, and from the top of this came glints of reflected light as though lenses turned this way and that to keep watch on the plain and the forest. Medlo turned away, his face bleak.

They found a tangle of felled timber at the top of a low hill which overlooked the place the black robes were working and yet hid them from the distant tower. They heard the rumble of iron wheels coming and going from Murgin, and the endless sound of the axes, but nothing else. The acolytes of Gahl did not sing at their work.

Medlo and Jasmine lay in the tangle, staring at the blind sky and amusing themselves with stories. Medlo spoke of Sud-Akwith and the Sword of Power, gift of the Firelord to the Northking at a time of great peril. 'The end of it was that he grew very proud and crochety, and his son told him that he should be more humble since he had conquered by the Sword, not by his own strength alone. So he fell into a fury, cursed his son, and took all the court to the lip of that great chasm near Seathe and cast the Sword into it. As the Sword fell, he fell, quite dead.'

'And that was the end of that.'

'No. Some creature lived in the chasm, some nameless cavern dweller, who brought the sword out of the chasm. In one of the libraries in Tiles a very old book says that the Sword came into the hands of the Axe King and was lost by him in the Southern wars.'

Jasmine talked of the Girdle of Chu-Namu, singing in a quiet voice the 'Lamentation' which was among the notes given her by the Library Sister. Shortly thereafter, Thewson returned to ask if they wanted the black robe brought. 'Do you want it now?' he asked, as though he were taking orders for breakfast. 'Or later?'

'I don't want one at all,' murmured Jasmine. 'Not at all.'

'Whenever,' said Medlo firmly. 'So that it will be here when Leona returns.' Yet when Thewson returned with a limp burden over his shoulder and Medlo started to make a gag for it, he turned from it, retching. 'Take it away, Thewson.'

'Is it dead?'

'No. But it has no tongue. The tongue has been cut out. Leona will need one that can speak.'

Thewson made an exclamation of disgust, then spoke a litany of some kind in his own language. 'Ya! Fomun luxufus, ya zhoanu. Ya! Fua Foxomol, sar luxufus.'

'Do you know what he's saying?' asked Jasmine.

'It's a prayer. Something about, "God, if you made people so foolish, it's your own fault." I was on a ship once which touched at the Wal Thai delta where that tongue is spoken.'

They settled into depressed silence, finding it more difficult to speak of anything. Even breathing was too much effort. At last Thewson returned again, this time with a body which struggled and made strangled noises.

'This one talks, all the time. This one is a boss.'

The Keeper turned to gaze at them, eyes full of a strangeness which Medlo could not identify. It was not precisely anger, nor hate. No, it was a kind of dim, fervid hollowing look, as though the creature had been burned away from the inside, leaving only a speaking shell. Gagged, it stared and burned at them.

They waited once more, silent except for the long, honing sound as Thewson sharpened his spear blade, a deadly whisper in the tangle. The sun dropped. Darkness gathered. They rose wearily, ready to find a sleeping place in the forest once more. Then they halted, listening to a thin, far crying.

'Haii. Haii. Haii.'

'It's Terascouros,' said Jasmine.

Leaving the Keeper tied in the tangle, they went toward the sound to find Terascouros stumbling along the edge of the trees, pausing to call out from time to time. She was exhausted.

'Well,' she whispered. 'So you're here. Well, so are we, in a manner of speaking. I had to find you first, because because I had to tell you, Thewson, to give Medlo your spear and let him hide it somewhere. Leona says that. Please, she says.'

Thewson drew himself taller and said ominously, 'I do not give my spear. And if Medlo takes it, grandmother, he will be a dead picker of flowers.'

'Just for a little moment, Thewson. She says it is important. For the space of a few breaths, no more. Give him the spear, and let him hide it, then come with me.'

There was a long, hostile silence, but she looked so tiny and harmless that Thewson shook his head. The poor old grandmother was a pitiful sight; let them get this nonsense over with so that she could sleep. He tossed the spear to Medlo, sneering as Medlo staggered under the weight. He turned his back pointedly, as Medlo carried the spear into the dead forest and put it somewhere out of sight. The old woman turned away along the trees, among stumps and fells, up a little hill beside an outcropping of stone, ochre and dun in the failing light. She stopped, peering ahead, and there at the edge of the trees was the gryphon huge, brazen, and terrible.