The Light That Has No Source

Opening

"We received an invitation," Zuktind said. "From one who signed the letter only S. Does this road lead to S., and to their residence?"

The old man took his time. He picked up whatever it was he fed the ravens — nobody ever saw it — and opened his palm, and the birds came off the ground for it and ate in silence.

"It doesn't matter, little pilgrim." He did not look up. "There is only one road, and there is only one gate ahead."

Ahead of them the gate stood fifty feet of black iron and older stone, and the road went into it and did not come out the other side. The valley had been narrowing for hours. It went down to that gate the way water goes down a drain, the pine wood thickening on both flanks until it was the thickest forest any of them had ever walked beside, the slopes climbing steep and close on either hand. Standing in it, walking toward it, the feeling was not of arriving anywhere. It was of being swallowed.

"Fine," Zuktind said. "I guess we have no choice, then. To the gate we go."

That was the moment the birds gave him away.

The Man Who Fed the Ravens

They stopped feeding. All seven at once — hopping, resettling, heads cocked, and every black eye in the clearing aimed at one thing.

Not the palm. Not the party. Down, and to the left, at the height of a hand held at a walking woman's side: the small platinum mirror set into the bracelet on Telno's wrist, which had a faint shine on it even in that grey.

"I don't know what to make of that," Zuktind said, and he said it into a silence nobody filled.

He turned to the others rather than to the old man. "Guys. Any ideas of what to say, or what to do? So it's not just me making all the choices." And then, before anyone could answer, an arrangement that would matter later that morning in a room none of them knew existed yet: "When we get to where we're going — if there's someone to greet us, you'll be speaking to them, Yeltsu. Not me. You're better at it."

Then he turned back and asked the question the way a man asks it when he has run out of subtler ones.

"Are you S.?"

The pilgrim considered it, and answered something else. "Well," he said. "I am the one you met before. The one who sent you here."

"You are the fog."

"Not the fog, pilgrim." A pause, and the head came up, and the eyes found Zuktind's and held them. "Don't you recognize me?"

"Not really."

He opened his hands and looked down at his birds.

It was Yeltsu who got there. He had been quiet through most of it, in the way he is quiet — listening, assembling, saying nothing until the thing is built — and then he said it flatly, twice, because the first time nobody heard him. This is that guy. The one we met. There's no way it can't be. And then the rest, reasoned out loud the way he reasons: this realm is a bizarre place. Maybe it did something to his birds. Maybe it changed them into ravens.

Zuktind took that and made a question of it, and it was the best question he asked all night.

"Tell me then, old wise one. If we were elsewhere — would those ravens have been canaries?"

The old man laughed.

He was not a good-looking man. But there was a pilgrim in him, a traveller, an old man on a road, and when he looked into Zuktind's eyes his own eyes smiled. "Let's keep on the road, shall we? It's all about the journey, after all. It's all about the now." The hands opened again; the birds came for whatever was in them. "Don't mind about those questions."

And he stood, and started walking toward the gate.

He walked beside them. Not a figure barring the way, not a thing on a milestone behind them — an old man matching their pace on the last mile, companionable, patient, going where they were going.

Zuktind tried to read him and could not; he was distracted by the size of what waited past that gate, and the prospect of speaking to a god again is not a thing a mind sets down easily. What came back to him instead arrived from the edges of his attention rather than the middle of it, and it was worse. They were being followed. Close to the gate, behind them and out along both flanks, keeping to the treeline and the fog — and they had been there for a while.

Once, on the walk, the fog opened.

It did that from time to time, or the sky thinned enough, and when it did there was a castle: high on a mountain, far off, unmistakable, the kind of place that is obviously always there whether or not anyone can see it. There was no way to reach it and it never got closer. It hung in the gap in the weather for as long as the weather allowed, and then the grey closed over it again.

Zuktind assumed, reasonably, that the gate led there. It did not. They were nowhere close to the castle. They never had been.

Turning Point

Telno had been walking with the pilgrim in her peripheral vision for a quarter of an hour, and she was a cleric of the Platinum Dragon, and she had been carrying his sign on her wrist through three days of a country that ate signs.

She put it together all at once.

The faithful tell it this way: that the god walks the worlds sometimes as an old man, unremarkable, feeding seven canaries yellow as struck gold. The shape beside her was right. Every single detail inside the shape was wrong. And the object on her arm — which had stripped the mask off every liar in that valley without being asked to — had gone cold and heavy hours ago and stayed that way, and she had thought that meant the Mirror was tired.

"We have been cursed," she said.

Then she turned to the pilgrim walking beside them, and she raised the Platinum Mirror at him, and she spoke with the whole weight of her clergy behind it.

"I banish you. Pretender, be gone."

The light went out of the Mirror in a beam and took him in the chest, and he burst into dust. The seven ravens screeched — the only sound they had made all night — and burst into flame in the air where they hung. And the thing that had spent that hour wearing the face of Lord Bahamut left behind exactly one thing: a shadow burned into the road. A permanent one, human-shaped, with seven small specks scattered around it.

"A shadow burnt into the ground," Zuktind said.

"Yes," she said, and looked at them all, and the certainty in her had not lifted anything from her at all. "We have been cursed. This land is going to swallow us, and we will never be able to get out of here."

Zuktind stepped toward her. "Sister — if we could slay the one who placed the curse upon us. Would that allow us to leave?"

He did not get to finish the thought.

The Road That Runs North

The Mirror answered.

Not gradually. Between one heartbeat and the next it went from cold weight to blazing, and the light came out of it in a burst that put every face in that clearing into hard white relief. Seven motes rose off its face like sparks struck off platinum. They climbed over the party's heads, wheeled once in a wide slow circle — and where they passed, the fog did not glow. It went.

Then they strung themselves out into a line running north. Not down the road. Off the road, away from the gate entirely, between the black pines where there was no path and had never been one.

And the light laid itself down as they went.

Not on the ground. Off the ground — every leaf and root and grain of sand and stone along that line lit from within, a path of white gold opening into the deep woods, one thing at a time, a road being made in front of them as they watched.

Nothing carried it. Nothing cast it. There was no lantern in it, no hand, no bird.

"I guess that's our answer," Zuktind said. "Instead of this gate — we take this path."

"Yeah," Yeltsu said. "That makes sense."

And Rathenfall, who had said perhaps nine words all that long night, said: "I'm just glad that we're finally moving forward."

They looked at him. Asked whether he had felt otherwise, before.

"Before," he said, "I felt like we were stuck."

It was the truest description anyone gave of that country the whole time they were in it. It is the land of the stuck. People get stuck there. They are not, as a rule, as lucky as these five were.

Telno went first. She stepped onto the light, and turned back to look at them from it, and she was not steady — she had spent three days holding a sign she was no longer certain was answering, and it had just answered.

"Bahamut is ahead of us," she said. "He would not leave us in such a desperate place."

And she walked, and they followed her, and Lissandra came, and Mira Ashveil came, and the valley understood what was being taken from it.

It screamed.

Not one throat. Every throat. Every wolf and dire wolf and lycanthrope in that fog at once, howling out of their lungs, and other things too, things that had never shown themselves in three days, screeching from every slope. Behind them the fog came down like a fist closing — the flock of it collapsing inward across the road they had just left.

"Of course," Zuktind said. "Now they're going to attack."

They did not. Nothing came onto the light. Nothing could. The platinum road was a corridor and it ran straight through the middle of a domain in full voice, and the party walked up it while the country on both sides tried to bring the sky down, and not one hair on any of them was touched.

The road ended at a wall of white.

Not fog. Light, standing on end — a curtain from the earth to somewhere above that world's sky. There was nothing in it. That was the first thing they understood, and the understanding kept getting bigger, because nothing stood in it, because the light was not something standing.

It was a regard.

They were being seen. Fully, specifically, kindly, all the way down — the way none of them had been seen since they were small enough to be carried.

The Mirror burned like a small sun on Telno's wrist, and every one of them understood that the light ahead and the light on her arm were the same light. The way the sea and a cupped handful of it are the same water. That was what had fit through. That was what a relic and a promise can carry across a border that even gods respect.

The seven motes came to rest above them, holding still. And they understood, in the way of dreams, that these had never been birds and had never been sparks, and that they had names old enough to frighten the owner of that valley.

Behind them the screaming went on. It sounded very small now.

And then the voice. Not in the air. In the sternum — in the oldest room of each of them. A few words each, and no two of them heard the same thing.

To Zuktind: Your people are more than what they choose. So are you. Go and see.

To Telno: You carried my sign through the dark, and it never once grew heavy. That was not the sign's doing.

To Rathenfall: Your oath was heard the day you swore it. It was heard again last night. It was always heard.

To Lissandra: You wanted to know if the old accounts were true. Now you are one. Write it well.

To Yeltsu, who has spent a lifetime being told what he is: You were told what your blood makes you. You have been busy proving otherwise, I notice.

Then the only words they shared.

*"Not this door, little flames. Your road is mine, and it runs north."*

And the white took them. It did not feel like falling. It felt like being carried.

A Sun Out of the East

Grass.

They felt it before they saw it, because their eyes were full of white and needed time. Dew soaking through at the knee. And a smell none of them had breathed in three days, which was the smell of the sea.

They were standing in an open field in the grey-gold of just-before-sunrise. And then the sun came up.

It heaved itself up out of the east the way it has done every day of the world, ordinary and enormous, and not one of them had ever watched it do that before. Not like this. Gulls somewhere. Harbour bells, far off. Behind them, farmland and a hedgerow. No fog. No pines. No road at all — except, printed in the dew for a few fading yards, the shape of where a road of light had set them down.

"I was starting to become afraid that I would never see the sun rise again," Zuktind said. He was not looking at anyone. "It's so good to see the sun again."

On the grass at their feet lay seven small yellow feathers, already lifting in the morning wind.

Six of them scattered.

One stayed.

Zuktind bent and picked it up, and closed his hand around it, and kept it — a token of gratitude, and the only thing any of them carried out of that place. Then, with it still in his hands, he prayed. He thanked the Platinum Dragon for pulling them out of a country that had no exit in it.

He was asked, gently, whether he might leave an offering, on an occasion like this one. He would not. That is not what Bahamut asks for; the Platinum Dragon does not trade in goods left on stones. He takes oaths. It is more a matter of promising oneself, Zuktind said, than of promising belongings — and he did not put the feather down.

When they finally looked around, they knew where they were standing.

Six wagon-ruts in a ring. A fire ring, cold. One thread of smoke still standing straight up in a windless morning, like a held note. And on a flat stone beside it, face up, squared to the rising sun as though placed by someone who knew exactly which direction it needed to be read from:

A card. The Platinum Star.

There Are No Tracks Leaving

They heard hooves before they saw anything, and nobody up the lane was making the slightest effort to be quiet.

Six or seven riders came up from the Neverwinter road at a working trot. They slowed when they saw the party, and slowed further when they saw the ruts, and they were armed, and not one of them reached for anything.

The woman at the front swung down and walked directly past the five of them without so much as looking at their faces. She crouched at the edge of the wagon-ring with her eyes on the ground and spoke to nobody at all.

"Six wagons. Horses. Ten, twelve people."

She walked the whole circle. She stopped exactly where she had started.

"There are no tracks leaving."

Only then did she look up. And in her looking they became suddenly, uncomfortably aware of themselves: filthy as if they had been days on the road, quivers empty, dried blood on most of them, standing in a ring of ruts on a bright morning outside a city where nothing had happened.

"You were here," she said.

It was not an accusation. It was something a great deal closer to relief.

"Please tell me you were here."

Zuktind told her the truth, all of it, and it cost him nothing to tell, because he had stopped caring an hour ago how it sounded. They were here, but not when the wagons left; when they came back, the camp was simply gone. A fog had rolled over them and the next thing they knew they were somewhere else, a place they had never seen on any map, and the people there called it Barovia. There had been a cottage full of people too frightened to open the door, who spoke to them only through it, and who gave them the name of the country and nothing else at all.

She looked at her men. She looked back at him. She looked at the sea, far off and barely visible, and at the sky.

"Well. Despite being unexplainable — that would explain a lot." A breath. "I'm Captain Ardice. Lords' Alliance. We have been investigating these people for a while, and so far, you are the only ones that came back."

They were linked, she said, to a string of disappearances among the townsfolk. When word came that the wagons were here, she rode.

"After all the things we've seen in that wretched place," Zuktind said, "I'm sorry to say it may be possible that a lot of those who disappeared may never come back. It was not an easy place to survive."

"But you did come back."

He pointed at Telno's wrist. That artifact, he said, was able to rip the way out.

Captain Ardice looked at the bracelet. It looked ordinarily beautiful, or beautifully ordinary — a plain platinum band with a small mirror set in it, sitting on the arm of a tired woman on a wet morning. Whatever had burned in it at the gates had gone back to sleep, or gone home, and it was not going to perform for an officer of the Alliance.

Mira Ashveil spoke then, and she had said very little since the light let them go.

"I never came across it. Nothing to say." She was steady until she wasn't. "And I did try to map it, while I was there. And I felt like a complete failure. It was like the landmarks just decided to move from their places. We would see things over and over again. The pine woods were suffocating. But the road — no matter what, the road would find us. I was facing east."

There is no version of that sentence that a cartographer says lightly.

Ardice invited them to the Lords' Alliance building to put it on paper — an official deposition, taken down properly. Their accounts were important, she said on the way. They would let the Alliance warn the city about the people who lure them into that dreadful place.

Zuktind looked at Yeltsu. "Should we accept?"

"Sure."

"My information has probably been useful thus far," Zuktind told the captain, "but he has better social skills than I do, ma'am. So I would appreciate it if you interviewed him about this."

So the record of the strangest three days in the party's life was given in Yeltsu's careful, measured voice, in a room with a clerk in it, with Mira corroborating every impossible clause of it — and with Zuktind interrupting exactly once, before the handover, to put a card on the table.

They had found this where the fortune-teller's tent had stood, he said. She had given it to them before the fog took them; it had come back to the ground while they had not. Perhaps someone here knew the arcane well enough to test whether there was anything dark in it. Someone who had been at it a long while. Someone really old.

Lissandra, standing right there, did not react at all, which was worse than reacting.

Zuktind had already looked, and looked hard, and had felt nothing but thick paper and craftsmanship — art made once, by somebody, for money. Lissandra already knew the answer, because she has her ways; she performed the ten-minute ritual anyway, diligently, in front of everyone, and dismissed the card as ordinary.

"Strange," Zuktind said. "Then why would it be the one thing they left behind?"

"Of course," Lissandra said, "it might be that I have not completed my internship yet. You can always find an older wizard. Preferably a male."

"I never said a man."

She let that hang exactly as long as it needed to.

The card went to Captain Ardice in the end, as evidence — a real object out of a camp that left no tracks, filed with an institution, in a report that also contained a god.

And then, with her ear still available, Zuktind asked the question they had been carrying door to door across Neverwinter for weeks. Had the Alliance heard anything of sightings of an ancient gold dragon, in the mountains?

"Gold? No."

No hesitation at all. And then, after a hesitation, the part that was worse than a guess.

"Understand what you're asking. Those mountains are forty miles from where we are standing right now. I have people there constantly — patrols, surveyors, the mining concerns, every caravan that goes north. If something that size were up there, it would be in a file, and I would have read it. There would be cattle claims. There would be stories." She spread her hands. "There's nothing. Not that I've heard of. Not this year. Not in my whole service that I can remember."

Zuktind pushed. He told her about the seven motes that came out of the mirror, and the voice they belonged to, and that they had met that voice before, and that it had told them to seek out exactly such a dragon.

She had nothing to give him. No reports. Interesting, she said, that others had told them they had seen dragons. She had not seen any.

Closing

They walked out of the Lords' Alliance building into a city with a sun over it.

Behind them, filed and countersigned, was the only account anyone has ever given of that valley — five witnesses, one cartographer's testimony, and a mundane card in an evidence wrap. Captain Ardice was not sure how many people would believe it. She was not going to publish it; the ordinary folk would panic and she had no solution to offer them. She would brief the people who needed briefing, quietly. She was afraid, she admitted, that the town might do something to the girl who had invited the party to the camp in the first place, if the town found out.

As for the wagon-folk: she did not expect to catch them. "They're like ghosts. When we hear that they have been around, they are quickly gone. It's like they know we are coming."

So the day ended roughly where the last one had started. Mira Ashveil was outside Neverwinter's walls and still breathing, which was the whole point of the errand the fog had interrupted, and Zuktind still carried a sealed letter addressed to a dragon king he had never met. On Telno's arm was a plain band that had banished a pretender and held a road open through a screaming country and now looked like jewellery. And somewhere on Zuktind's person, folded away, was a small yellow feather that had fallen off nothing at all.

They had believed for a season that the dragon they were sent to find waited somewhere in the mountains north of the city.

A woman with patrols in those mountains, and files, and forty miles of ordinary between here and there, had just told them — kindly, and without a trace of doubt — that there is nothing up there at all.

She was almost certainly right. And nobody in Neverwinter had yet told them where else to look.