Chapter Two

When the sun rose high enough to penetrate the valley, its light turned the ice-covered pines into dazzles of beauty outside the door of the brothers' lodge.

Sparrow paused with his armload of wood and stared up at the rainbow sparkles. Slats of ice popped and tinkled, dancing down through the lower branches as they melted from the first sun-warmed needles.

The forest would be dangerous today. When tufts of pine needles lost their covering of ice and flicked upward, the strain of their release would provide the final stress on some of the parent branches. Great limbs would crash down to crush anything beneath them—even a mammoth; even a man as powerful as Sparrow the Smith.

Sparrow chuckled. The forest was always dangerous.

"Shut the damned door, will you?" bellowed Gordon from within the lodge.

"Shut it yourself," Sparrow replied as he pivoted through the doorway carefully, because the logs he carried were each longer than the door was wide. "I'm the one who's doing something useful."

Gordon got up to close the door flapping on its leather hinges; Sparrow clumped past him to the lodge's central hearth. Sledd, the third of the brothers, lay stripped to a loincloth on a bench beside the hearth.

Sledd was in a trance. On the side opposite the fire from him was a carefully-arranged pile of scrap and ores. The materials shifted in response to unseen pressures and choosings. Sledd's mind worked within the Matrix, seeking through chaos.

The Matrix was the pattern of all patterns. Events moved in all temporal directions the way a tossed stone sends circular ripples across the two-dimensional surface of a pond. Sledd searched the infinite possibilities for a template that matched the form he wished to create in crystal and metal. When desire meshed with the reality of the Matrix, atoms of raw material realigned themselves into one of the patterns chance could cause them to take—

And an object of great sophistication formed within the pile of rocks and junk.

A man who could find templates within the Matrix was a smith.

A man who could ride the event waves of the Matrix to any reality—who could focus his mind in the raging chaos and form a palace or a world—a man with that power was a god.

But short of the gods, there was no smith on Northworld the equal of Sparrow and his brothers; and Sparrow was the greatest of the three.

"We're going to have to replace the hinges," Gordon complained. "I don't think Sledd tanned them through this last time. They're starting to crack already."

"It was a cold winter," Sparrow said without concern. He bent at the knees to lower the wood to the puncheon floor. If he simply opened his arms, the dozen 10-kilo billets would crash and bounce in all directions. "And sometimes the hide has flaws. Even mammoth hide."

The wonders the brothers had created stood or moved about the interior of the lodge.

In the center of the single long room, nine balls of light wove a sphere of intersecting circles around an invisible hub. The balls trailed luminous lines that faded gradually until the next slow circuit renewed them. Smoke from the hearth dimmed the illumination, but the soot that coated the ridge pole and the open gable ends through which the smoke escaped in lieu of a chimney did nothing to tarnish the insubstantial balls themselves.

A water clock hung from the wall opposite Sparrow's bed closet. A simulacrum of a wolf worked from tin lifted its leg to spurt droplets into a crystal cylinder scored to mark the minutes. On cold nights the water would have frozen, save that Gordon had fitted it with heating coils powered by energy differentials within the Matrix itself.

A battlesuit stood before each of the bed closets. Most of the objects the brothers had created were unique, but any smith could find the template for the suits of powered armor with which warriors clashed in dazzling radiance across the face of Northworld. Battlesuits like these, however, approached the ideal of the Matrix as closely as physical objects could do.

Sparrow stepped back from the pile of fresh logs and worked the thong and peg which fastened his cape out of the eyelet on the other side. He shook the garment to clear it of drops of melt water, then tossed it on one of the chests which served for clothing storage as well as benches when the brothers sat.

The cape, lifted whole from a cinnamon bear, was nearly the color of the smith's own hair and beard. Shortly after the brothers came to the valley three years before, Sparrow had strangled the beast with his bare hands when he surprised it raiding one of his snares. His forearms still bore scars from that battle.

Sledd began to murmur, coming out of his trance. Sparrow glanced to see what his brother had been creating, but a pile of reduced ores still covered the object like the crust of clay over a lost-wax casting.

Gordon put another log on the hearth. Sparrow walked over to the shelf built onto the front panel of his bed closet and took from it the mirror he kept there.

The polished bronze surface was a circle only about ten centimeters in diameter. For a moment it showed Sparrow his own face and whiskers, tinted even ruddier by the metal's hue.

The smith's fingers manipulated the controls on the back of the circle. Metallic luster cleared into a scene of figures moving against the brilliant green of summer foliage.

"Gods but it's cold!" Sledd mumbled. "Stoke up the fire, won't you?"

"Sledd," Sparrow said. "Gordon. Look at this."

His brothers' faces blanked as they joined him, one to either side. Sledd reached down to work a cramp out of his right thigh.

"Can you make them bigger?" Gordon asked.

"A little," said Sparrow. His index finger stroked the controls. The face of the nearest figure, a woman with perfect features and long black hair, filled the mirror's small field.

"No one we know," said Gordon as Sparrow panned the image back to capture the surroundings again.

"They're Searchers," said Sledd. "And that's the spring at the foot of this valley."

The other two women were blonds, both of them larger than their black-haired companion. As the Searchers ran down the flower-carpeted slope to the spring, Sparrow shifted the image in his mirror to examine the equipment the women had left on the knoll behind them.

Sledd trembled with the chill of the Matrix. He picked up his brother's cape because it was handy and slipped it over his own shoulders. "What are Searchers doing here?" he said.

"How did you find them?" asked Gordon simultaneously.

"Unless I ask the mirror for something in particular," said Sparrow, "it shows me what's nearby that it thinks will most interest me. The picture is near in time. A few months from now."

Three battlesuits stood on the wooded knoll. Each of the frontal plates which covered the wearer's face and thorax was swung open against the hinges on the left side of the join.

The brothers' eyes narrowed as they surveyed the armor. Even with the image shrunken to fit the mirror, they could see that the suits were of excellent quality.

That was to be expected of battlesuits which clothed the servants of North the War God.

Behind the armor were the mounts which had brought the Searchers to the brothers' valley: electronic dragonflies.

For the moment, at rest with their gear stowed, the fragile-seeming vehicles looked more like long-legged cave crickets. When the gossamer antennas unfolded like wings to shroud the saddle in a bubble of separate spacetime, the Searchers could slip between the worlds of the Matrix.

When they were on North's business, the dragonflies hovered over battlefields, just out of temporal phase with the struggle going on below, while their receptor antennas drank and stored the minds of the dying. Flickering shutters of black radiance marked the Searchers' passage to the humans of the Open Lands.

"Go back to the women," Sledd murmured thickly. "It's been a long time."

"Don't be a fool!" Gordon said. "They're Searchers."

Sparrow adjusted his image. "Why not Searchers?" he said. "They're women too."

The women were splashing one another in the cold water of the spring. They had left their tunics on the bank.

"These are the god's servants," Gordon said. "We can find other women."

"If we want to trek for a week we can find other women," Sledd replied tartly. "And who would we find then worthy to bring back here? Our father is a king!"

"If there's any justice," said Gordon, "our father is freezing in hell."

"And his new wife," said Sledd. "And their bastard whelps."

One of the women sprang to the bank laughing and ran into the woods. Her companions followed a moment later. The black-haired Searcher was as lithe and compact as lynx.

Sparrow stroked his ginger beard. "The Searchers have lives beyond the god's orders," he said. "These three aren't on North's business now."

His lips pursed. "They won't be on North's business next summer, I mean."

He shifted the image again. The women were picking fruit from a blackberry tangle at the edge of the woods. They reached carefully to avoid scratching their bare flesh.

"If we do," said Gordon cautiously, "we'll have to wear our battlesuits."

"No," said Sparrow.

The black-haired woman flicked a ripe berry at one of her companions. It burst in a purple blotch on flesh so clear that the veins showed blue beneath the surface. The blond laughed and flung back a handful of the fruit.

"Sparrow," Sledd protested, "you're forgetting they're Searchers. If we try to take them unarmed, they'll put their own armor on and cut us down."

Sparrow focused the image down again on the face of the black-haired woman. "No," he said slowly, "I'm not forgetting who they are. But if they're worthy of us, then we have to be worthy of them. We can't force this sort."

Gordon nodded agreement. "Not and live," he said. "We have to sleep sometime ourselves."

Sparrow reached out as though he were going to stroke the woman's smooth, tanned cheek; but his fingers paused just short of the mirror's surface.

"It may be," he said, "that we can convince them of our worth. . . ."