There were many of them, so many. Their pale faces surrounded him like mist, and everything else disappeared beyond it: Orpheus, Resa, Meggie, the Black Prince, who had been standing beside him only a moment ago. Even the stars vanished, and so did the ground beneath his feet. Suddenly, he was standing on rotting leaves. Their fragrance hung sweet and heavy in the cold air. Bones lay among the leaves, pale and polished. Skulls. Arm bones and leg bones. Where was he?
They’ve taken you away with them, Mortimer, he thought. Just as they took Dustfinger.
Why didn’t the idea make him afraid?
He heard birds above him, many birds, and when the White Women withdrew he saw air-roots overhead, hanging from a dark height like cobwebs. He was inside a tree as hollow as an organ pipe and as tall as the castle towers of Ombra. Fungi grew from its wooden sides, casting a pale green light on the nests of birds and fairies. Mo put out his hand to the roots to see if his fingers still had any feeling in them. Yes, they did. He ran them over his face, felt his own skin, the same as ever, warm. What did that mean? Wasn’t this death, after all?
If not, what was it? A dream?
He turned, still as if he were asleep, and saw beds of moss. Moss-women slept on them, their wrinkled faces as ageless in death as in life. But on the last mossy bed lay a familiar figure, his face as still as when Mo had last seen it. Dustfinger.
Roxane had kept the promise she made in the old mine. And he will look as if he were only sleeping long after my hair is white, for I know from Nettle how you go about preserving the body even when the soul is long gone.
Hesitantly, Mo approached the motionless figure. Without a word, the White Women made way for him.
Where are you, Mortimer? he wondered. Is this still the world of the living, even though the dead sleep here?
Dustfinger did indeed look as if he were sleeping. A peaceful, dreamless sleep. Was this where Roxane visited him? Presumably it was. But how did he himself come to be here?
"Because this is the friend you wanted to ask about, isn’t he?" The voice came from above, and when Mo looked up into the darkness he saw a bird sitting among the web of roots, a bird with gold plumage and a red mark on its breast. It was staring down at him from a bird’s round eyes, but the voice that came from its beak was the voice of a woman.
"Your friend is a welcome guest here. He has brought us fire, the only element that does not obey me. And my daughters would gladly bring you here, too, because they love your voice, but they know that voice needs the breath of living flesh. And when I ordered them to bring you here all the same, as your penalty for binding the White Book, they persuaded me to spare you, telling me you have a plan that will appease me.
"And what might that be?" It was strange to hear his own voice in this place.
"Don’t you know? Even though you’re ready to part with everything you love for it?
You are going to bring me the man you took from me. Bring me the Adderhead, Bluejay."
"Who are you?" Mo looked at the White Women. Then he looked at Dustfinger’s still face.
"Guess." The bird ruffled up its golden feathers, and Mo saw that the mark on its breast was blood.
"You are Death." Mo felt the word heavy on his tongue. Could any word be heavier?
"Yes, so they call me, although I might be called by so many other names!" The bird shook itself, and golden feathers covered the leaves at Mo’s feet. They fell on his hair and shoulders, and when he looked up again there was only the skeleton of a bird Sitting among the roots. "I am the end and the beginning." Fur sprouted from the bones. Pointed ears grew on the bare skull.
A squirrel was looking down at Mo, clutching the roots with tiny paws, and the voice with which the bird had spoken now came from its little mouth.
"The Great Shape-Changer, that’s the name I like!" The squirrel shook itself in its own turn, lost its fur, tail, and ears, and became a butterfly, a caterpillar at his feet, a big cat with a coat as dappled as the light in the Wayless Wood — and finally a marten that jumped onto the bed of moss where Dustfinger lay and curled up at the dead man’s feet.
"I am the beginning of all stories, and their end," it said in the voice of the bird, in the voice of the squirrel. "I am transience and renewal. Without me nothing is born, because without me nothing dies. But you have interfered with my work, Bluejay, by binding the Book that ties my hands. I was very angry with you for that, terribly angry.
The marten bared its teeth, and Mo felt the White Women coming close to him again.
Was he about to die now? His chest felt tight, he was breathing with difficulty, as he had when he felt them near him before.
"Yes, I was angry," whispered the marten, and its voice was the voice of a woman, but it suddenly sounded old. "However, my daughters calmed my rage. They love your heart as much as your voice. They say it is a great heart, very great, and it would be a pity to break it now."
The marten fell silent, and suddenly the whispering that Mo had never forgotten came again. It surrounded him, it was everywhere. "Be on your guard! Be on your guard, Bluejay!"
Be on his guard against what? The pale faces were looking at him. They were beautiful, but they blurred as soon as he tried to see them more distinctly.
"Orpheus!" whispered the pale lips.
And suddenly Mo heard Orpheus’s voice. Its melodious sound filled the hollow tree like a cloyingly sweet fragrance. "Hear me, Master of the Cold," said the poet. "Hear me, Master of Silence. I offer you a bargain. I send you the Bluejay, who has made mock of you. He will believe that he has only to call on your pale daughters, but I am offering him to you as the price for the Fire-Dancer. Take him, and in return send Dustfinger back to the land of the living, for his tale is not yet told to its end. But the Bluejay’s story lacks only one chapter, and your White Women shall write it." So the poet wrote and so he read, and as always his words came true. The Bluejay, presumptuous as he was, summoned the White Women, and Death did not let him go again. But the Fire-Dancer came back, and his story had a new beginning.
Be on your guard. . . .
It was a few moments before Mo really understood. Then he cursed his stupidity in trusting the man who had nearly killed him once already. He desperately tried to remember the words Orpheus had written for Resa. Suppose he was trying to make an end of Meggie and Resa as well? Remember, Mo! What else did he write?
"Yes, you were indeed stupid." Death’s voice mocked him. "But he was even more stupid than you. He thinks I can be bound with words, I who rule the land where there are no words, although all words come from it. Nothing can bind me, only the White Book, because you have filled its pages with white silence. Almost daily, the man it protects sends me a poor wretch he has killed as a messenger of his mockery. I would happily melt the flesh from your bones for that! But my daughters read your heart like a book, and they assure me that you will not rest until the man whom the Book protects is mine again. Is that true, Bluejay?"
The marten lay down on Dustfinger’s unmoving breast.
"Yes!" whispered Mo.
"Good. Then go back and rid the world of that Book. Fill it with words before spring comes, or winter will never end for you. And I will take not only your life for the Adderhead’s but your daughter’s, too, because she helped you to bind the Book. Do you understand, Bluejay?"