Jill left the causeway and followed a fine road, paved with limestone blocks, through the smallish town that had sprung up near the temples. In among the round, thatched houses townsfolk and visitors strolled around or sat in the windows of one of the many inns, and pedlars kept accosting her with trays of sweetmeats or baskets of little silver medals and pottery souvenirs. She brushed them all off and strode on her way, skirting the main complex, too, bustling with visitors and priests here in the summer season, and took a little-used path that ran south-east through pine trees, all twisted and bowed down from the constant wind. In a little bay of rocky shore a jetty stood with a ferry bobbing at anchor beside it. Beyond, a scant mile away, she could see the rise of East Island, a long sliver of land that most visitors knew or cared nothing about.
‘Jill, halloo!’ The ferryman, a stout priest draped in an orange cloak, waved both hands at her as she led her horses gingerly down the steep path. ‘Back so soon?’
‘I am, at that. How have things been? Quiet?’
‘They always are, out our way.’ He grinned, revealing brown and broken teeth. ‘His holiness has pains in his joints again.’
‘I’m surprised you aren’t all as bent and stiff as village crones, frankly, out here in the fog.’
‘True, true. But well, we’ve got a bit of sun today at least. Enjoy it while we can, say I.’
Since the tide was running out, the journey was quick and easy, though the ferryman was bound to have a harder trip rowing back by himself. Jill coaxed her horses off, left him sighing at the job ahead, and headed across a wind-scoured meadow to a complex much smaller and plainer than those of the main island. At the base of a low hill stood a clutter of roundhouses and a stable, shaded by a few stunted oaks. Dust drifted and swirled over the threadbare lawns and sickly vegetable gardens. She turned her horses over to a groom, carried her saddle-bags and bedroll to a hut that did for a guest house, dumped her gear onto the narrow cot, and decided that she’d unpacked. With a deferential bob of his head, a servant came in, bringing her a wash basin and a pitcher of water.
‘His holiness is in the library.’
‘I’ll join him there.’
After she washed, she lingered in the silence for a moment to get her questions clear in her mind. Like all the other pilgrims, she’d come to Wmm’s temple for help in making a decision, in her case about a voyage to the far-lying islands of the Bardekian archipelago, a very major undertaking indeed in those days. It was likely that she’d be gone for years and almost as likely that she wouldn’t even find what she was looking for, the translation of a single word that she’d found inscribed inside a ring. The word, written in Elvish characters though it made no sense at all in any language, might have been a name or sheer nonsense for all that she knew. What she did know, in the mysterious way that dweomer-masters have, was that the inscription would make the difference between life and death to thousands of people, men and elves alike. When, she didn’t exactly know. Someday, perhaps even soon.
She suspected – but only suspected – that the answer lay in Bardek. She was hoping that the priests of Wmm could either confirm her suspicion or lay it to rest.
The library of Wmm was at that time an oblong building in the Bardek style of whitewashed stucco, roofed in clay tiles to cut down the fire danger. Inside, in a row of hearths peat fires constantly smouldered to keep the chill and damp off the collection of over five hundred books and scrolls – a vast wealth of learning for the time. Jill found the chief librarian, Suryn, standing at his lectern by a window with a view of the oak trees beyond. Unrolled in front of him was a Bardekian scroll. He looked up and smiled at her; as always, his weak eyes were watering from the effort of reading.
‘Oh, there you are, Jill! I’ve been looking for that reference you wanted.’
‘The history scroll? You’ve found it?’
‘I have indeed, and just now, so it’s a good thing you wandered in like this. Must be an omen.’
Although he was joking, Jill felt a line of cold run down her back.
‘In fact, I’ve found both of the sources you were talking about.’ He tapped the papyrus in front of him with a bone stylus. ‘Here’s the scroll, and it does indeed have a reference to elves living in the islands. Well, maybe they’re elves, anyway. Take a look at it, and I’ll just fetch the codex.’
The scroll was an ancient chronicle of the city-state of Arbarat, lying far south in the Bardekian islands. Since Jill had learned to read Bardekian only recently it took her some minutes to puzzle out the brief entry.
‘A shipwrecked man was washed up on shore near the harbour. His name was Terrso, a merchant of Mangorat …’ There was a long bit here about the archon’s attempt to repatriate the man, which Jill skipped through. ‘Before he left us, Terrso told of his adventures. He claimed to have travelled far far south, beyond even Anmurdio, and to have discovered a strange people who dwelt in the jungles. These people, he claimed, were more akin to animals than men because they lived in trees and had long pointed ears. Because he was so ravaged by fever, none took his words seriously.’
‘Curse them all!’ Jill snapped.
‘They don’t truly go into detail, do they?’ Suryn came up at her elbow. ‘Here’s the Lughcarn codex. Do be careful with it, won’t you? It’s very old.’
‘Of course I will, your holiness. Don’t trouble your heart about that. May I take it back to the guest house to read? I need to rest from my journey.’
Suryn blinked at her for a moment.
‘Oh, you’ve been gone. Of course – silly of me. By all means, keep it with you if you’d like. There’s a lectern in the hut?’
‘A good one, and a candle-spike, too.’
Jill bathed and ate a sparse dinner before she got around to looking at the codex. By then, early in the evening, the fog was coming in thick, darkening the hut and turning it chilly, too. She laid a fire in the hearth, lit it by the simple means of invoking the Wildfolk of Fire with a snap of her fingers, then stuck a reading candle, as long and thick as a child’s arm, onto the cast-iron spike built into the lectern. Before she lit the candle, though, she sat down on the floor by the fire to watch the salamanders playing in the flames and to think for a while about the work she had in hand, gathering every scrap of available information about the mysterious inscription. Although it was a pretty thing, made of dwarven silver and graven with roses, the ring itself carried no particular magic. It might, however, be important as a clue.
She already knew much of its history. Once it had belonged to a human bard named Maddyn, who had travelled to the western lands and given it to an elven dweomer-master as a gift. That master had in turn given it to a mysterious race of not-truly-corporeal beings called the Guardians. She was assuming that the Guardians had added the unintelligible inscription for the simple reason that the ring hadn’t been inscribed before they’d got hold of it, but, when one of their kind returned it to the physical world by giving it to another bard, elven this time and named Devaberiel, it carried its little riddle. As far as dweomer-masters could tell, the Guardians perceived important omens about future possibilities as easily as most men see the sun. Since they insisted that the inscription had some important Wyrd to fulfil, Jill saw no reason to doubt them. Abstract terms like ‘why’, however, seemed to have no meaning for them, and there was much in the way of explanation that they’d left out of their tale.
As she always did toward evening, she found herself thinking about her old master in the dweomer and missing
