bench outside the little ship’s single cabin and fiddled with a slate and a spidery sort of compass which had a number of legs that moved independently.
Nimue solemnly watched the coast fade behind her, then turned to look ahead. She had never been on a long sea voyage, and she wondered what it would be like. Ahead of them was a clot of darkness and fog, strangely out of place in the bright clear afternoon.
“Earno,” she said, “there is a dark patch ahead of us.”
“Excellent,” he replied.
The patch grew larger as they grew nearer—actually larger, not just apparently larger. Soon it stretched from horizon to horizon. The mist covered sun and sky like a curtain. She felt her heart fall suddenly, as if she were losing something she could never regain.
Earno got up from time to time to adjust the tiller or the sail, but apart from that he was absorbed in calculations. She moped at the rail of the ship, idly staring into the fog.
As she did so, strange notions began to grow in her head. Ordinary fog veils sight by putting something in the way of everything else, but this fog seemed to be too full of things for any one thing to be seen clearly. But if she concentrated, she could see things in it: faces, and human forms, and inhuman forms, and dark shapes like islands, although they moved past very quickly, much more quickly than she thought they were sailing. She heard voices, too, a mingled chorus of ghosts and shadows like a crowd on tournament days, everyone saying so much that none of it made any sense.
Then another ship passed quite near them. It was only a boat, really. But it was quite clear in the darkness and fog, because of an orange lantern hanging on the stern. A ghostly pale old man was pulling the oars, singing a sad song in a happy voice. Nimue didn’t know the words, but they moved her inexpressibly. In the prow sat a dark-skinned child or dwarf. The boat came into view, passed alongside them, began to vanish in the mist.
Earno was wrapped up in his calculations. If he didn’t notice the splash when she struck the water, she might reach the other boat and be well away before he saw she was gone. And, with escape attempts, perhaps the sixteenth time was the charm. Hoping that was so, Nimue jumped from the blue craft into the sea.
Except she never did strike the water. She found herself adrift in the dense mist alongside the blue craft, the other boat quite gone. She felt strange; she could suddenly hear all the voices sighing in the mist. And now they did make sense. It was she who didn’t. Didn’t make sense at all, would never make sense again. The blue craft began to get rather vague and indefinite, as if it were farther away in the foggy sea-that-was-not-a-sea.
Then Earno was there, bending over the rail. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her back into the blue craft.
“You must not do that again,” he said to her. “Please believe this for your own safety: the time for escape has passed. This is like no worldly sea you may know; it may transform those reckless enough to pass through it. Our course and the magical intentions sealed into the hull will protect us, but if you leave the ship you may be changed or destroyed.”
She did believe him, but she guessed his warning came too late. She already felt different. The voices she had heard in the mist were still in her head, and her belly had changed size and shape; she was more pregnant than she had been this morning.
She lay on the deck, her head sodden with alien dreams, a strange life moving tentatively within her, and waited for her next chance.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Witness Stone
There were voices in Nimue’s head all the time now. Only some of them were her own, and those weren’t the most interesting ones.
People, she found, were like choirs of singers, not all of whom were singing the same tune. Very often the same thought, the same words, were sung very differently by the mind’s many mouths.
She was standing once on a street in A Thousand Towers—a city much greater than any she had seen. And a woman was saying to a man, “I will see you at Three Hills House when Trumpeter sets.” That was what she was saying with the mouth