Orson Card - Wyrms

Her face showed none of this to Angel. Instead she smiled wickedly, the way she did when she teased him.

"So you think I'd be safe to let Ruin know I have the scepter that should be his, and then ask him to cut open my brain and put it in?"

Angel held out his open hands. "I didn't say it was without risks."

She poked him playfully. "Go back to spending the days asleep. You were more helpful then."

She could see his tension ease, as she pretended to be the lighthearted, trusting girl she had always been with him in private. He believed her. "I think Ruin will agree," he said, "that the scepter is more human than gebling now. The Heptarchs have had it for more than three hundred generations. Still, I'm not saying you should up and tell him right now."

"It's impossible to know what to do," she said. "All the prophecies hint at disaster, but they don't tell me what causes the disaster. Anything I choose might destroy the world or save it, and I don't know which is which. And you aren't even going to help me decide."

He smiled. "You knew you might be leading the world to disaster when you decided to go to Cranning.

I'm just going along for the ride. Been lots of fun, so far." He got up and walked weakly back to his pallet under the canopy.

Patience sat and watched the water for some time. Just when she had begun to feel confident, Angel turned out to be playing his own game. There was no one she could trust completely.

Yet she couldn't brood for long. For whenever her attention was not closely engaged with work or conversation, her mind turned back to that constant, nagging need to go north, to go upriver, to find relief from the urgent pressure of her body's desire.

River's hawk circled, swooped down to the boat. She turned to watch as it tore open a dove, ate its gut, and dropped the body, feathers and all, into the jar. The monkey was playing with itself; this was a calm, slow reach of the river, so the pilot didn't need a voice for a while.

The balance of River's ecology was a marvel and a mystery to her. River himself, he was fairly easy to understand; like all heads, he was somewhat insane, living for the journey up and down Cranwater. As long as the boat was sailing, he was well rewarded. But the monkey and the hawk-what did they get? The n key ate with the humans, and seemed content enough. Be sides, he had nowhere else to go. Monkeys were a species humans had brought with them to this world; they had no natural habitat here, and could survive only as pets. So maybe, at some primitive level, the monkey knew that his slavery at the bellows was the only way that he could live.

But the hawk-she could not understand the hawk. It could provide for itself. It needed no one. What did it gain from its service to River? Why did it stay? River had no hands to restrain it, no power to reward or punish it. The hawk seemed to live for pure generosity.

Perhaps the hawk conceived River to be part of itself, feeding the head out of the same instinct that made parents feed their children. Or perhaps the hawk had been trained, folded into a pattern in which it could not conceive of leaving River to die. Perhaps the hawk did not long for freedom. Or perhaps, being free, this was what the hawk freely chose to do.

When Will called them to dinner at noon, Patience did not want to come. It was Reek's hand on her shoulder that brought her. "Whatever Angel said to you," whispered the gebling woman, "you're still the heart of all our futures. Come, eat."

Yes, thought Patience. Come, puppet. Come, folded paper. Dance your dance, hold the shape we gave you.

Until your usefulness is over. Then someone-the geblings, Unwyrm, perhaps some mad Vigilant along the way-someone will burn you up.

LATE ONE AFTERNOON THEY WERE TRIMMING SAIL AS THEY rounded a bend through a narrow channel between sandbars, when River clicked his tongue twice and the monkey began to screech. By now everyone knew this meant River wanted a quick change in course. They stopped all conversation and listened-River's voice was never loud.

"Hard port!" he said. Will, who was at the helm, heeled the lever toward the starboard side, and almost at the same moment Sken grabbed Patience and a gebling and ran to the left side of the boat. Patience only had time to catch a glimpse of what they were avoiding-a large buoy, big enough that if they had collided head on, with their speed from such a brisk wind, it would have done real damage to buoy and boat alike. As it was, they still bumped into it, but side-on and slower.

"That's supposed to be two mile upriver," said the pilot. "Last flood season must have dragged her anchor down here so far. Cast a line."

Sken didn't hesitate. She knotted a rope onto a grappling hook, swung the hook above her head, and cast it against the buoy, now bobbing some dozen yards behind them. The hook caught on the first throw, but Patience didn't know whether that was remarkable or just what a competent riverwoman would be expected to do.

"What are you doing with that!" demanded Ruin.

"Putting it back where it belongs," said Sken, as if it were-a fact that should be obvious even to a child.

"None of our affair," said Ruin.

"There's too many on the river feels that way already," said Sken. "But River and me, we feel the same on this. When something's out of place that you can fix, then you fix it, so next pilot won't risk what almost got us."

They got back on course through the channel and then it was clear sailing for a while. Long enough to take a better look at the buoy. It had a sign on it, at such an angle that you could just read it if you leaned out from the stern on the starboard side. In Geblic, Gauntish, Dwelf, and Agarant-the language all traveling humans used, regardless of their native tongue-the sign advertised a single thing for sale:

ANSWERS

Angel laughed aloud when Patience told him what it said. "When have you seen such arrogance before?"

"Maybe they're not selling," said Reck. "Maybe they're buying."

Patience did not laugh. It was too ironic. If there was anything she needed right now, it was answers. And here they were, offered hi trade.

Two miles on, they dropped anchor and hauled in the buoy. Sken and Will lashed it to the boat, then hauled up the buoy's anchor and added a bag of ballast to it. It was an hour's work at most, but Patience took no part in it, so she had time to look for the place on shore where the answers might be found. It wasn't a heavily settled area, so it could only be the house well up on a hill, perhaps a quarter-mile walk from the river.

If the house had been one of the common inns along the river, preying upon travelers with rigged games, indigestible food, and bug-ridden beds, Patience would not have had them put ashore. Instead, though, it was old and modest, and far enough back from the water that it couldn't be a money trap for travelers. If they hadn't anchored to fix the buoy, it would have been visible only for a moment in a gap between trees along the river's edge. To Patience, this suggested that the sign was sincere enough. It was a place for people who wanted truth enough to work to get it-out of the way, hard to reach, with only a single sign to tell them what it was, and only a single sight to tell them where.

Of course, the moment she thought of stopping. Patience felt the pressure of the Cranning call within her, urging her to go on, faster, faster. It was no stronger now than before; Unwyrm was not trying to get her to avoid this place in particular. But because the need to hurry on was so great, and because she knew that someone else was producing that need within her, she resisted for the sake of resistance, the way that she had deliberately endured extra suffering as a child, to inure herself to hardship.