The Riddle - Alison Croggon [71]
She hung poised above it, as if she were an eagle, looking over destruction in every direction as far as the eye could see. All about her was an absolute silence. A great lake stood in the far distance, glinting red, with rivers running toward it like crimson threads, and behind her stood a range of mountains. Although she could not have said how, she realized, with a great heaviness in her heart, that she was looking at the Suderain, the rich, fertile region between the Osidh Am and the Lamarsan Sea.
Without warning, it seemed she was suddenly rushed at great speed to the east, toward the great lake of the Lamarsan. Beneath her she saw the white line of a Bard Road, and more devastated villages and fields. As she neared the shore, she could see a high red tower topped with a golden dome that caught the dying rays of the sun. It was higher than any tower she had seen, save the Machelinor in Norloch, and it stood in the middle of a great city enclosed by high walls. She knew it must be the city of Turbansk, and her heart rose into her mouth. A black, evil-smelling smoke rose from it, and even at a distance she could see that in places its high walls were breached and scarred by fire.
Then suddenly, without transition, Maerad was within the city, looking down from a height just higher than the walls. Some terrible force had been at work there: some of the buildings were collapsed into utter ruin, with not a single wall left standing. Surely even war, she thought, could not cause such utter devastation.
Only the red tower and the buildings around it, which she guessed belonged to the School of Turbansk, remained whole, and they were teeming with the dogsoldiers Maerad had seen from a distance in her previous foredream. Seen close up, they made her gorge rise with fear: she saw long brutal snouts fanged with steel, eyes illuminated by dull red flames, limbs that were edged with weapons of metal or that expelled jets of fire, all animated by a malign intelligence.
Maerad realized the dogsoldiers were working in teams, sniffing through the ruins of Turbansk for survivors: she saw some hundred prisoners, bound and gagged, lined up by a wall, their heads bowed. She strained desperately to see, but she couldn’t tell if Hem or Saliman were among them.
A scream gathered in her throat, but she could make no sound.
She woke drenched in sweat, the cry still on her lips, the dread and grief of her dream filling her mind to the exclusion of all else. Gradually she became aware of the outlines of her chamber, limned in a pale predawn light, and her possessions, carefully placed about the room. She counted them over slowly to bring herself back to the present, as she always did when dreams afflicted her. Was Turbansk doomed to be a charnel house? Did Hem even now lie cold in the ruins, while crows flapped down to pluck out his eyes? Maerad covered her face with her hands, struggling to drive out her dreadful visions. I could not bear it if Hem died, she thought. I would go mad.
Desperately, as she began to calm down, Maerad tried to recall what Cadvan had told her about foredreams. Foredreams are perilous riddles to unravel, he had said. There are many stories of those who seek to avoid their prophecies, only to bring about what they most fear. Perhaps I have seen only what might happen, she thought. If all goes wrong. If our quest fails. If we do not find the Treesong . . . But she knew already of the forces ranged against Turbansk, and her arguments seemed futile, the empty words given to calm a child’s terror, when the speaker knows there is no hope against the darkness drawing in around them.
IT was a morning of hard frost, presaging an early autumn, when they rode out of Ossin. The horses snorted misty plumes from their nostrils and skittered over the hard ground, their newly shod hooves shattering the frozen puddles and churning them into mud. Maerad had put on some extra layers of clothes that morning, and, for the first time in weeks, drew on the mailcoat she had been given in Innail. It was a marvelous