The Keeping Place Read online

  I was puzzled. “Then they are lost to us still, for the bottom of the building is under water and earth. Unless Garth has found some way to transform people into fish.”

  The teknoguilder opened his mouth, then shut it again. But I received a clear visual image of someone swimming beneath the water.

  “What is Garth up to?” Ceirwan sent to me, for he had seen it, too.

  I told the teknoguilder to let his guildmaster know that I would call on him in the Teknoguild cave network that afternoon. But he flushed and said apologetically that Garth had gone down to Tor three days before. This surprised me, because Garth seldom left the caves just outside Obernewtyn’s wall.

  As the teknoguilder hurried away, I turned to speak to Kella, but she had slipped away. “That girl is like a wraith,” I muttered.

  “She grieves,” Ceirwan said gently.

  My fleeting annoyance at Kella dissolved into pity, for I knew Ceirwan was right. The young healer still mourned the end of her relationship with the estranged coercer Domick.

  This brought me back to the Coercer guild, for I felt sure that it was Domick’s defection that had paved the way for Miryum and her knights to consider forming a splinter group. The guild had always been somewhat troubled because of the mind-controlling aspects of its members’ Talent, and the shift to pacifism had been more difficult for them than any other.

  More than ever I missed Dameon, for he had the gift of seeing to the heart of such impossible disputes.

  Taking a side corridor, I came out of the building onto a path that ran along the west side of Obernewtyn. A wall constructed too close to the other side of the path meant that almost no sun reached the narrow walkway; as a consequence there were still deep drifts of snow along each side. The path would originally have been used by servitors bringing wood to the front-room fires, but there were now more convenient ways in and out.

  The wall enclosed the area that had once held Ariel’s wolf pens. Bars and gates had long since been removed and an herb garden planted in the enclosure, but it still had a grim feel, as if tainted by the cruelness of our nemesis long after he had left Obernewtyn and become a Herder agent.

  I went straight through the garden and out a gate on the other side of the enclosure to a flat patch of grass, as gray and dull as an old man’s hair. This was where Ariel had tortured the wolves and half-wolves he had bred. “Training them,” he had called it, curling his pretty lip.

  On the other side of the grass was the outer wall that surrounded all of Obernewtyn. A scraggy line of dead-looking shrubs ran parallel with it, continuing to the greenthorn wall of the maze. At a glance, it looked as if the maze and outer wall were one, but in fact there was a hidden lane between them.

  I pushed my way through the shrubs to where a weathered bench stood against the wall. Behind it, a creeper hung in spidery tendrils that spring would transform into a thick, shiny tapestry. Beside the bench grew a small rosebush that offered the deepest crimson blooms right through spring and summerdays and even the Days of Rain, if it was not allowed to run to seed.

  I did not know how the seat or the rosebush came to be there, and I could not ask without giving away my secret retreat. Only Maruman knew of it. Sitting, I realized I had half hoped the old cat would be here, but no doubt the snowdrifts had put him off.

  I never thought of Maruman as intruding on my solitude. He spent so much time with his mind curled around mine that my shield took him as part of my own self and would not keep him out unless I concentrated on excluding him.

  The lane was choked with weed and tough shrubs gone wild, but cleared, it would make a swifter route to the farms than the maze path, which had been designed to confuse. The maze was now clearly marked by carved posts, and some sections of the wall had been removed for ease of access on the other side of Obernewtyn, but it was still slow going during wintertime when the snow clogged every turn. My conscience pricked me, and I knew that I should mention the path. It would mean the loss of my retreat. But, after all, it was only a matter of time before one of the teknoguilders discovered it. A greater number of them explored the grounds of Obernewtyn more than even the submerged ruinous city beneath Tor.

  Ever since we had stumbled on the Reichler Clinic Reception Center in the Beforetime city, the Teknoguild had been obsessed with learning more about it. We knew that the clinic had been a Beforetime organization devoted to researching Talented Misfits, then called paranormals. This was proof that Talents existed before the Great White and were a natural development in human evolution. Our amazement was redoubled when we discovered that the Reichler Clinic had been founded by a woman whose second name was the same as Rushton’s—Hannah Seraphim. Hannah had had some dealings with a man named Jacob Obernewtyn, who we believed had constructed a home, the ruins of which provided the foundations of our current Obernewtyn.

  The real Reichler Clinic, too, had been sited in our valley, although there had been an earlier Reichler Clinic in a different location, which had been destroyed. The establishment of a “reception center” in the city under Tor had been a ploy to divert the attention of the Beforetime organization called Govamen, which had developed a sinister interest in the use of paranormal abilities as weapons. The Reception Center served to distribute what Beforetimers named misinformation. Anyone who tested paranormal was immediately spirited away to the real Reichler Clinic.

  Hannah and her people had begun publicly to falsify their researches, claiming the abilities they had detected were weak and generally uncontrollable, but Govamen continued its surveillance. This led Hannah to undertake her own inquiries, whereupon she discovered that the destruction of their original headquarters had been contrived by Govamen to cover the kidnapping of a group of paranormals. The Teknoguild had found documents detailing the prisoners’ whereabouts and the various experiments performed upon them—documents that indicated Hannah had had a spy within Govamen. The last clear information the Teknoguild had compiled suggested Hannah had intended to rescue the paranormals. Whether or not she had done so, we had no idea, for the time of the holocaust was nigh.

  Most of us accepted that we would probably never know the true history of the Reichler Clinic, and Rushton openly disapproved of time being spent on historical puzzles. He could not see any point in learning more about Beforetimers, because they were all dead and gone. What did it matter if he was related to Hannah Seraphim? It neither helped nor hindered us in our struggle to find a legitimate place in the Land.

  But the Teknoguilders continued to pick at the mystery like an old scab. Suddenly I had no doubt Garth had deliberately timed his trip to the White Valley to coincide with Rushton’s absence. Which meant the Teknoguildmaster was almost certainly up to something he knew Rushton would not like.

  There was a crackling sound, and I glanced up to see the Futuretell guildmistress, Maryon, push her way through the shrubbery. Her expression was so blankly preoccupied that I thought she was in a trance. But then her eyes widened in surprise.

  “Elspeth! I was just thinkin’ of ye.”

  I did not much like hearing that. I was all too conscious that I appeared often in the futureteller’s inner jour neying.

  “Do ye mind if I sit by ye?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” I lied.

  Sitting down, she gave me a wry sideways look, and I was uncomfortably reminded that she discomposed me and always had.

  I did not dislike her. I did not know her well enough for that, and this fact alone said much, for I had met Maryon at the same time as I had met Roland, Alad, and Gevan. I thought of the latter three as friends but not Maryon. I had almost hated her when the young Herder novice Jik was taken on an expedition at her futuretelling insistence, only to die. In addition, she had allowed the young empath Dragon to follow me secretly to Sutrium, knowing this would lead to her current comatose state. All because her visions demanded it.

  It was this quality of remoteness from the things she foresaw that disturbed me. Possibly I was being unfair, f
or many novice futuretellers lamented their helplessness in the face of what they saw. Older futuretellers were silent, perhaps becoming resigned to what they had learned could not be changed. Certainly it seemed that futureteller remoteness was not a personal trait but part of what they did with their minds and Talent. Like all coercers and some farseekers, futuretellers used the Misfit ability known as deep-probing. But whereas coercivity used a deep probe to dig into the unconscious of other minds and bend another’s will, futuretellers delved only into their own minds.

  Their training focused on enabling them to descend through the conscious and subconscious layers of their own minds, all the while shielding themselves at the levels where minds lose individual focus. Here, dreams and longings both dark and bright swim like exotic fish in a thick, seductive soup. A descending mental probe could easily become lost in a memory or a nightmare or some delicious imagining. It was their goal, and I sometimes thought their addiction, to descend to the point where the barriers between all minds faded. This was the level at which myth moved from mind to mind and generation to generation. Beneath this level lay the glittering mindstream, which called to all minds to merge and surrender their individuality. This surrender would mean individual death, but twice in my life I had come so dangerously close to it as to hear the unearthly loveliness of its call-song to a final merging.

  Futuretellers spent a good deal of their time hovering above the mindstream, and perhaps it was the effort of resisting the longing for that lovely death that caused their remoteness. They saw much as they hovered in this way, for the mindstream threw up bubbles of memory from the minds absorbed. Occasionally, bubbles of what would be rose, since the stream contained both all that had been and could be, but it was not the express purpose of their delving to see into the future. The futuretellers’ desire, as far as I understood it, was to know themselves deeply and, through this, to know life. They claimed that thinking intensely of a matter at this level drew thoughts from the mindstream of others, long dead, who had pondered the same questions. They believed that knowledge could be best obtained on the brink of dissolution of the individual.

  Their purposes seemed strange to me, and oddly self-centered, but it was not my place to judge them. Indeed, their ability to penetrate minds had profoundly enabled them to draw healers deeper than they could go alone, and on more than one occasion, this had saved someone’s life or sanity.

  “I have sometimes wondered who made this wee garden,” Maryon said, breaking her silence at last. It seemed an innocuous enough comment, but I was not deceived. Futuretellers took charge of the dreariest household duties, because the monotony allowed their minds to soar. If Maryon was talking of gardens, I had no doubt her attention was on something far more complex.

  “I suppose it must have been part of Lukas Seraphim’s design,” I said blandly.

  “No. The maze existed before Lukas Seraphim had Obernewtyn built. He simply had the maze replanted.”

  I stared at her in surprise, for I had always assumed the maze had been the creation of Obernewtyn’s reclusive first master.

  “I dreamed of Rushton last night,” Maryon went on, and now her eyes were distant and fey. “I saw him swimmin’ in dark waters….”

  Her words made me think of the image I had seen in the young teknoguilder’s mind. “Was it a true dream?”

  She gave me a long look. “If ye mean was he truly in th’ water, I can nowt say. Of late, clear futuretellin’ has been difficult.”

  “Difficult?” I echoed.

  “It happens from time to time that there are disturbances. Lately, much of our futuretellin’ is of th’ past. ’Tis as if a storm rages above th’ mindstream, wrenching up what has been an’ drivin’ it at us like rain afore wind.”

  “Do you think Rushton is in danger?” I pressed worriedly.

  Maryon sighed. “I said nowt of danger.”

  I debated telling her of the picture I had seen in the young teknoguilder’s mind that so disquietingly paralleled her dream, but she went on before I could speak.

  “I have been wantin’ to speak wi’ ye on th’ subject of dreams,” she said. “All folk dream, an’ most sometimes dream true whether they ken it or no. Even unTalents. We recognize a true dream because it recurs. If it comes only once, whether or no it feels true, we dinna mull on it. But lately I have come to believe that true dreams can recur in a number of people, rather than in only one, an’ so my guild has begun to create dreamscapes that show th’ patterns of our dreams. T’would make the dreamscapes more accurate to include the dreams of those of other guilds, but it is impractical for my guild to record all dreams. Dell suggests that each guild keep its own dream journal.”

  “So long as it does not require another meeting,” I said. Maryon’s mouth curved into a rare smile, but almost immediately a breeze blew up out of the stillness, and as the bare branches of the trees clattered together, the futureteller gazed up at them, her expression once again distant and serious. My own vague apprehensions hovered and refused to settle.

  I wondered if Maryon knew anything about the dreamtrails Maruman spoke of and, on impulse, asked. She gave me a long look. “Dreamtrails is too tamish a name fer them. It suggests some windin’, pleasant path to wander on. Dreamrapids, I would sooner call them, or perilous dreamslopes.”

  “Have you traveled on them, then?” I persisted.

  “Traveled? I would nowt say so. I have stumbled onto them by accident, an’ sometimes I have been affrighted by encounters on them. But I will nowt speak more of them. There are many things better left unsaid. Ye’d ken that well enow, Elspeth Gordie.”

  Her eyes were again on my face, as pure and direct as a beam of sunlight. I felt suffocated under her intense regard. I told myself that she must once have been a child, playing and singing, a girl who had loved and hated and feared as passionately as half-grown folk do when trying out their emotions. But it was impossible to imagine her as anything but a lofty futureteller. Wanting to break through her shell, I asked how she had come to Obernewtyn.

  She lifted her dark brows, unperturbed by the personal nature of my question. “A man desired me, but I rejected him. I had foreseen he was cruel an’ violent behind his honeyed mouth an’ pretty eyes an’ made th’ mistake of sayin’ so aloud. He gathered friends an’ tried to take me. My family defended me an’ died fer it. I saw my sister killed by his hand, an’ my wits left me. I remembered nothin’ more until one day I woke here. I found that I had been condemned defective, but rather than sendin’ me to th’ Councilfarm, I was sent to Obernewtyn. Or sold mebbe.”

  Maryon told her story without any visible emotion, but I could not blame her for that. I had seen my parents slain in front of my eyes, and when I thought of it, something in me turned to stone, too. More gently, I asked if her family had known she was a futureteller.

  She answered in the same clear, distant tone. “I had no name then fer what I was. I nivver considered that seeing what would come from time to time made me Misfit any more than peepin’ round a corner ahead of friends. My family knew of it an’ did not speak of it as evil but only warned me nowt to tell anyone. We were seldom among folk, as our farm was remote, so there was little danger of givin’ myself away. Th’ night before they attacked our farm, I had a nightmare that my sister would die. It was so terrible, I could nowt believe it. I was even ashamed of it, because I had quarreled with her over a length of ribbon th’ day before an’ thought th’ dream some nastiness of mine comin’ out. If I had spoken, my father would have acted, fer he trusted my visions mebbe more than me. I could have saved them, but I didna speak.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said inadequately.

  She looked at me calmly. “There is no need fer sorrowin’. I ken now that my nowt speakin’ out back then was fer a reason, as was th’ death of my family. I dinna ken what that reason is, but I have faith that life’s purpose is finer an’ more profound than th’ purposes of me or my sister or father, an’ I serve it with my whole self willingly.
That is what bein’ a futureteller means.”

  She was silent for a time; then suddenly she said, “’Tis cold here without th’ sun. I will go in now.”

  I watched her depart and found myself pitying her for the first time. I could see that she had given herself to fate as its instrument as a way of bearing the destruction of her family. Possibly, learning to see things in the way she did now was all that had enabled her to return to her senses.

  I shivered, realizing she was right. The breeze had developed a sharp edge. Pulling my coat tight around me, I rose and made my way back inside.

  4

  “CAN’T YOU HOLD on!” Zarak gasped aloud.

  The young coercer beside him glared. “I could, if you would keep your mindprobe still and not shake it all over the place. It’s like trying to hold a fish!”

  “I wasn’t shaking!” Zarak sent indignantly.

  “You were,” Aras sent gravely.

  “You were, son,” Khuria murmured in his quiet rasp of a voice.

  Zarak reddened. Ignoring his father, he turned on Aras furiously, but Ceirwan forestalled his outburst by directing them all to make their minds quiet. “There is no point in accusations,” he sent firmly. “It didn’t work, an’ that’s that. I ken yer all tired. So am I, but let’s try one last time an’ concentrate very hard.”

  “I was,” Zarak cried aloud.

  “There is no point trying again unless Zarak can see he was not concentrating and remedy it,” Aras sent.

  “It’s a stupid, impossible idea anyway!” Zarak snarled at her, a tide of red rising in his cheeks. “You think you’re so smart!”

  At that moment, Freya entered with a gust of wind that slammed the door behind her.

  “I’m late,” she said.

  Ceirwan went to take her by the hands. “It doesna matter that yer late. It’s wonderful that yer here. We were just about to have a last try.”