Assassin's Quest (Farseer Trilogy, #3)

by Robin Hobb

To my Wit-sense, these trees had a ghostly life that was almost animal, as if they had acquired some awareness simply by virtue of their age. But it was an awareness of the greater world of light and moisture, soil and air. They regarded our passage not at all, and by afternoon I felt no more significant than an ant. I had never thought to be disdained by a tree.

Kettle stepped out of the trees and onto the road’s surface. She, too, halted. For an instant, she seemed startled and muttered something. ‘Did you say Skill-wrought?’ I demanded of her. Her eyes jumped to me as if she had been unaware of me standing right there before her. She glared. For a moment she didn’t speak. Then, ‘I said “Hell-rot!”’ she declared.

Kettle is right here beside me, so I would not be alone. She is as bad as you are, Nighteyes insisted stubbornly. But despite my questions, he could not explain to me what he meant.

‘Kettle says she thinks it’s the road. She said that you said it was Skill-wrought.’ ‘She said I said? No. I thought that was what she said when we came onto it. That it was Skill-wrought.’ ‘What is “Skill-wrought”?’ the Fool asked me. ‘Shaped by the Skill,’ I replied, then added, ‘I suppose. I’ve never heard of the Skill used to make or shape something.’

Nighteyes came immediately to our part of the tent, and lay down between the Fool and the outer wall. He set his great head on the Fool’s chest and heaved a sigh before closing his eyes. I almost felt jealous. He’s colder than you are. Much colder. And, in the city, where hunting was so poor, he often shared food with me. So. He is pack, then? I asked with a trace of amusement. You tell me, Nighteyes challenged me. He saved your life, fed you from his kills and shared his den with you. Is he pack with us or not? I suppose he is, I said after a moment’s consideration. I had never seen things in quite that light before.

More and more often, his reactions and thoughts were a mixture of human and wolf.

‘I’ll take care of you both,’ Burrich offers awkwardly. He is looking down at the child as he speaks. ‘I’m not so old I can’t get work, you know. As long as I can swing an axe, we can trade or sell firewood in town. We’ll get by.’

‘I’ll teach you and then you can teach Nettle,’ he promises her. Nettle. She has named my daughter Nettle, after the herb she loves, though it leaves great rashes on her hands and arms if she is careless when she gathers it. Is that how she feels about our daughter, that she brings pain even as she brings enjoyment?

The sweat on my body chilled and I began to shiver. The Fool surprised me by putting an arm around me. I moved closer to him gratefully, sharing warmth.

‘Where’s Nighteyes?’ I asked as soon as I missed him. ‘Hunting,’ Kettricken said and, With very little luck,

myself. I can only suppose that Skill was somehow used to construct that road. It runs straighter and more level than any road I have ever known. No tree intrudes upon it, despite how little it is used. There are no animal tracks upon it. And did you mark the one tree we passed yesterday, the log that had fallen across the road? The stump and the uppermost branches were still almost sound … but all of the trunk that had fallen upon the road itself was rotted away to almost nothing. Some force moves still in that road, to keep it so clear and true. And I think whatever it is, it is related to the Skill.’

I know of nothing more warming than hot meat and tea and good fellowship. This is pack, Nighteyes observed in contentment from his corner. And I could do no more than agree.

‘What is between you and Starling now?’ He lifted his eyebrows at me and winked slyly. ‘I doubt that very much,’ I retorted. ‘Ah, not all are as immune to my wiles as you are, Fitz. What can I tell you? She pines for me, she yearns for me in the depths of her soul, but knows not how to express it, poor thing.’

Who is this woman who knows so much of what troubles you, who suddenly fishes out of a pocket a game I have only seen mentioned once in a very old scroll, who sings for us “Six Wise Men Went to Jhaampe-Town” with two additional verses I’ve never heard anywhere. Who, oh light of my life, is Kettle, and why does so ancient a woman choose to spend her last days hiking up a mountain with us?’

‘So. What can we surmise about one who guards her tongue as closely as all that? About someone who seems to know something of the Skill as well? And the ancient games of Buck, and old poetry? How old do you suppose she is?’

‘Ah, but that could easily have been just your singing. Let’s not grasp at straws, here.’ In spite of myself, I smiled. ‘It has been so long since your tongue has had an edge to it, it’s almost a relief to hear you mock me.’ ‘Had I known you missed it, I would have been rude to you much sooner.’ He grinned.

‘The Fool is a woman, and she is in love with you.’

“Six Wisemen went to Jhaampe-town”!’ she snarled. ‘In my days, children were not only taught their learning rhymes, they knew what they meant. This is the hill in the poem, you ignorant pup! The one no wise man goes up and expects to come down again!’

‘The Wisemen were Skilled ones, weren’t they?’ I asked softly. ‘Six, and five, and four … coteries, and the remains of coteries …’

But what more commonly happened is that as people grew in the Skill, they became more and more attuned to it. Eventually the Skill called them. If one were strong enough in the Skill, one could survive the trip up this road. But if she were not, she perished.’ ‘And if one succeeded?’ I asked.

It leads to the source of all Skill as well.’

‘And how do you know them?’ I pressed. She turned to regard me levelly. ‘Because I am fated to do so. Even as you are.’

Nighteyes suddenly hit me from behind, his front paws striking my shoulders. His weight and speed threw me face first on the thin layer of snow covering the road’s smooth surface. Despite my mittens, I skinned the palms of my hands and the pain in my knees was like fire. ‘Idiot!’ I snarled at him and tried to rise, but he caught me by one ankle and flipped me down onto the road again. This time I could look down over the edge into the abyss below. My pain and astonishment had stilled the night, the folk had all vanished, leaving me alone with the wolf.

Then suddenly I felt that shift in perception. There was no space between me and the game. For a time I tried my pebble in various positions. I finally found the perfect move, and when I set my stone in place, it was as if my ears had suddenly cleared, or like blinking sleep from my eyes. I lifted my eyes to consider those around me. ‘Sorry,’ I muttered inadequately. ‘Sorry.’ ‘Better now?’ Kettle asked me softly. She spoke as if I were a toddler. ‘I’m more myself now,’ I told her. I looked up at her, suddenly desperate. ‘What happened to me?’ ‘The Skill,’ she said simply. ‘You just aren’t strong enough in it. You nearly followed the road where it no longer goes.

Fitz walks here naked as a new-born child. And as naive.’ Kettle leaned back suddenly against her bedroll, and all the lines in her face deepened. ‘How can such a child be the Catalyst?’ she asked of no one in particular. ‘You don’t know how to save yourself from yourself. How are you going to save the world?’

We are together again,’ I told her. A thought occurred to me. ‘How did you know we were unable to communicate?’ She shrugged. ‘I suppose I assumed it. He seemed so anxious and you seemed so distant from everyone.’ She has the Wit. Don’t you, my queen?

I patted her back as if she were a child and told her tales of the bluff, hearty man I remembered from my boyhood. For a time her forehead rested on my shoulder and she was completely still. Then she coughed once, as if starting to choke, but instead terrible sobs welled up from her. She cried suddenly and unabashedly as a child that has taken a bad fall and is hurt as well as frightened.

I knew I might have terrible sorrows to bear. I am strong enough … to bear these things. But no one warned me that I might come to love the man they’d choose for me. To bear my sorrow is one thing. To bring sorrow to him is another.’

Twice more I woke the city before I realized all it took was the touch of my hand on a crystal-veined wall. It took an unreasonable amount of courage but I began to walk with just my fingers trailing along the buildings’ sides. When I did so, the city bloomed into life about me as I walked.

My mind darted back to that puzzle. When had I left the Skill road and my companions? Perhaps I never had. Perhaps all this was a dream.

Did I view the events of a night a hundred years ago? Had I come here another night would I view the same events played out or see a different night from the city’s history? Or did these shades of folk perceive themselves as living now, was I an odd cold shadow that crept through their lives? I forced myself to stop wondering about things I had no answer to. I had to trace my way back the way I had come.

While I touched a wall, I saw a dim interior. Tables and shelves were laden with fine pottery and glassware. A cat slept by a banked hearth. When I lifted my hand from the wall, all was cold and pitch-black.

I wondered if it had been a palace. Great lions of stone guarded the entrance steps. The exterior walls were of the same shining black stone I had come to regard as the common building material for the city, but affixed to them were silhouettes of folk and beasts all cut from some gleaming white stone. The stark contrast of white on black and the grand scale of these images made them almost overwhelming. A giant of a woman gripped an immense plough behind a team of monstrous oxen. A winged creature, perhaps a dragon, took an entire wall to himself. I slowly climbed the wide stone steps to the entryway. It seemed to me that as I did so, the murmuring of the city grew louder and more insistently real.

suddenly the stairs were peopled with tall robed folk coming and going. Most gripped scrolls or clutched papers, and the tone of their conversation was that of people discussing weighty matters. They were subtly different from any folk I had ever been among. The colours of their eyes were too bright; the bones of their bodies were elongated. But for all that, much else about them was ordinary.

an immense window of stained glass. The image presented was one of a woman and a dragon. They did not appear to be at odds, but instead stood as if speaking to one another. The woman in this window had black hair and black eyes and wore a band of bright red on her brow. She carried something in her left hand, but whether it was weapon or wand of office I could not tell. The immense dragon wore a jewelled collar, but nothing else in its stance or demeanour suggested domestication.

Why was this river city abandoned, and when? Had this been the home of the Elderlings? Were they the dragons I had seen on the buildings and in the stained-glass window?

I was kneeling by the river’s edge, one palm flat on the paving stone, drinking cold water when the dragon appeared.

Then the water parted and a great head emerged from the river. Water dripped from it and ran gleaming down the golden serpentine neck that next appeared. All the tales I had ever been told had alluded to dragons as worms or lizards or snakes. But as this one emerged from the river, holding out its dripping wings, I found myself thinking of birds. Graceful cormorants rising out of the sea from a dive after fish, or brightly-plumaged pheasants came to my mind as the huge creature emerged. It was fully as large as one of the ships and the spread of its wings put the canvas sails to shame. It paused on the riverbank and preened the water from its scaled wings. The word scale does no justice to the ornate plates that sheathed its wings, yet feather is too airy a word to describe them.

The dragon had the bright eyes of a gyrfalcon and the carriage of a stallion as it strode up to them. The folk parted to make way for it, murmuring respectful greetings. ‘Elderling,’ I said aloud to myself.

I understood now the reason why the main streets of this city had been built so wide. It was not to allow the passage of wagons, but so that nothing might impede one of these great visitors.

Ahead of us suddenly loomed that great gash of destruction that marred the city’s symmetrical form. I followed the ghostly procession to the lip of it, only to see everyone, man, woman and Elderling, vanish completely as they strode unconcernedly out into the space. In a short time I stood alone on the edge of that gaping crevasse, hearing only the wind whispering over the still deep water. A few patches of stars showed through the overcast sky and were reflected in the black water. Whatever other secrets of the Elderlings I might have learned had been swallowed long ago in that great cataclysm.

It was made of the same ubiquitous black stone veined with gleaming crystal. To my weary eyes it seemed to gleam brighter with the same mysterious unlight the other structures gave off. The faint shining outlined on its side glyphs cut deep into its surface. I walked slowly around it. Some, I was sure, were familiar and perhaps twin to those I had copied earlier in the day. Was this then some sort of guidepost, labelled with destinations according to compass headings? I reached out a hand to trace one of the familiar glyphs. The night bent around me. A wave of vertigo swept over me. I clutched at the column for support, but somehow missed it and went stumbling forward. My outstretched hands found nothing and I fell face forward into crusted snow and ice.

The Fool had been the worst, pale and silent with a slight trembling to his hands. It had taken a bit of time for all of us to recover.

the Fool had eaten heartily. He had not seemed to have the energy. While the others sat in a circle around the brazier listening to my tale, he was already curled in his blankets, the wolf snug beside him. He seemed completely exhausted.

‘Well, thank Eda you were dosed with elfbark before you were taken; otherwise you would never have kept your wits at all.’ ‘You say “taken”?’ I pressed immediately. She scowled at me. ‘You know what I mean.’ She looked about at all of us staring at her. ‘Through the guidepost or whatever it is.

A Skill-imbued object can retain the intent of its maker. Those posts were erected to make travel easier for those who could master them.’

‘Comes the Catalyst, to make stone of flesh and flesh of stone. At his touch shall be wakened the dragons of the earth. The sleeping city shall tremble and waken to him. Comes the Catalyst.’ The Fool’s voice was dreamy.

‘Hundreds of writings and prophecies and they all terminate in you?’ ‘Not my fault,’ I said inanely.

I was drowsing off when the Fool reached over to pat my face with a warm hand. ‘Good you’re alive,’ he muttered. ‘Thank you,’ I said. I was summoning up Kettle’s game board and pieces in an effort to keep my mind to myself for the night. I had just begun to contemplate the problem. Suddenly I sat up, exclaiming, ‘Your hand is warm! Fool! Your hand is warm!’

Flank him, suggested Nighteyes. The big wolf shifted to press more closely against him. I added my blankets to those covering the Fool and then crawled in beside him. He said not a word but his shivering lessened somewhat.