King of Here and There! We have heard rumor of you ere now, the promise spoken on the shores of the Final Water. So the time of our meeting is come. And yet, we do not fear you as we believed we would.
“Please,” Foxbrush said, his knuckles whitening as he clutched his lance tighter. “Let her go. Return the children you stole.”
That does not suit our purpose.
“I’ll . . . I’ll kill you,” Foxbrush said, taking a trembling step forward.
Kill us? You’ll have to catch us first!
“No, wait!” Foxbrush shouted, dropping his weapon as he put out both hands. But it was too late.
The creature that was Daylily hurled itself and the child it held into the mouth of the Mound.
Foxbrush, without stopping to think, ran. The distance to the door stretched on for a small forever, like an impassable dreamscape. Then the doorway seemed suddenly to reach out, to grab him, and he plunged into the darkness within.
13
HE STOOD IN THE GREAT HALL of the Eldest.
Considering he’d been expecting sudden and searing death, this wasn’t all that bad. Surprising, to be sure. But not bad, exactly.
Great pillars rose up from the floor to support the high roof, and elegant railings framed the galleries above. Enormous windows, open to the darkness outside, lined the walls from floor to gallery, from gallery to ceiling. Through these poured a light colder than moonlight, and it shone upon long, filmy curtains embroidered with starflowers and panthers, which fluttered without the aid of a breeze, like so many writhing, elongated phantoms.
Odd, Foxbrush thought, frowning where he stood. He wondered if this strange, cold light was playing tricks on his eyes. This looks like the old Great Hall. From before the Dragon.
He began to tremble, and the fear he’d expected from the moment he stepped through that black doorway finally caught up with him. For the old hall had been decimated by dragon fire, torn down by dragon claws. Yet it was that hall he saw before him, not the new, unfinished one of his day.
Have I stepped back in time again? Foxbrush wondered. Or rather, forward in time? Or . . . or . . .
And then he saw a sight that told him he was nowhere in time, nowhere in reality, or at least, no reality that he knew.
High above the galleries, in the empty space between the supporting pillars and the arched roof, ghostly figures floated. Like dust motes drifting in directionless patterns, so these figures floated, arms and legs out like the points of a star, heads bowed over chests, hair floating like that of drowned men underwater. Weightless they wafted, never touching one another, as though each was a world apart. Hundreds of them filled the space above Foxbrush’s head.
The lost firstborn.
Foxbrush craned his neck back to stare up at them, those wraithlike children. The cold light washed their dark skin pale and their dark hair silvery, and they seemed to glow faintly with a pulsing luminosity. Were they dead? Were they beyond dead? Some of them looked thinned, as though their very existence was being drained away, leaving behind a flickering residue of reality. Some of them possessed scarcely any remaining form but drifted in and out of visibility like curls of white smoke.
But some were still solid. And among these Foxbrush spotted a shock of red hair, vibrant hued even in that eerie light.
“Lark!” he cried. His voice echoed through the cavernous hall. Everything was bigger, he now realized, than the hall of his memory. He and the floating figures above him were no more than mice compared with the vastness of this place. He ran across tiles that were each half a field in length, and the pillars were like tall mountains around him. Above his head, the drifting form of Lark vanished in the swirling bodies of the children, only to reappear farther away. Foxbrush chased her, uncertain what he hoped to do but unwilling, even so, to let the girl out of his sight.
It’s useless to run, you know.
Foxbrush staggered to a halt and whirled around to face the voice that had spoken behind him. There was no one there. Only darkness at the end of the hall where everything vanished beyond all hope of light. His heart thudding in his breast, he searched the deeper shadows behind the pillars and beneath the windows.
Are you looking for us? You are more foolish than we thought.
“Where are you?” Foxbrush cried.
Not here. This is your memory. You’ll not find us.
“Are . . . are you in my mind?”
No. You came to us. You are inside us. But we must use other minds to take shape, for we have no shape of our own. This is your memory within us.
Foxbrush cursed. He turned again to search for Lark up among the children above. He’d lost her. Frantic, he ran, his eyes upturned.
He nearly collided into Daylily.
She stood before him, no longer wearing the Eldest’s garment but adorned in the wafting rags of her wedding gown, as ghostly pale as the children above, her red hair, bereft of its life and curl, falling in straight sheets on either side of her face, over her shoulders.
“He is drinking,” Daylily said.