Stone of Farewell

  “Ah, please, don’t let him have her,” the monk murmured, clawing with desperate fingers, searching for some flaw in the invisible barrier. “Please!”

  His questing was in vain. The wall was seamless.

  Cadrach kneeled before the doorway, head slowly sinking to his chest as the approaching footfalls grew louder. The unmoving monk might have been a prisoner waiting at the executioner’s block. Suddenly, he looked up

  “Wait!” he hissed. “Think, idiot man, think!” He shook his head and took a deep breath, then released it and took one more. He held his palm before the archway and spoke a single quiet word. A wash of cold air blew past him, ruffling the tapestries in the entrance chamber. The barrier was gone.

  He dragged Miriamele through, pulling her across the floor and into one of the archways opening off the grand chamber. They disappeared from sight just as Pryrates’ red-robed figure appeared in the doorway where the unseen impediment had been. Dim sounds of alarm were beginning to filter through the halls.

  The red priest paused as though surprised to find his barrier gone. Nevertheless, he turned and sketched a gesture in the direction from which he had come, as though to sweep away whatever traces of his handiwork might remain.

  His voice boomed, reverberating down the corridors in all directions. “Murder!” he cried “Murderers are in God’s house!” As the echoes died away he smiled briefly and set off toward the chambers where he stayed as the lector’s guest.

  Struck by a thought, Pryrates stopped suddenly in the archway and turned to survey the chamber. He lifted his hand once more, fingers flexing. One of the torches gouted sparks, then spat out a tongue of flame which leaped across to a row of tapestries lining the wall. The ancient weavings blazed, fire licking upward at the great ceiling beams and spreading rapidly from wall to wall. In the hallway beyond, other fires were also blooming.

  The alchemist grinned. “One must give omens their due,” he said to no one present, then departed chuckling. All around, the babble of confused and frightened voices began to fill the byways of the Sancellan Aedonitis.

  Duke Isgrimnur congratulated himself for bringing a candle. The hallway was black as tar. Where were the sentries? Why weren’t the torches lit? Whatever the problem was, the Sancellan was awakening all around him. He heard someone shout boldly of murder, which set his heart swiftly beating, this was followed by other, more distant cries. For a few moments he considered returning to his tiny room, but decided that perhaps the confusion was for the best. Whatever the cause of the alarm really was—and he doubted it was murder—it might mean he would be able to find the lector’s secretary without having to answer wearisome questions from the lector’s guards.

  The candle in its wooden holder threw Isgrimnur’s shadow high against the walls of the great entrance hall. As the sounds of approaching discovery grew, he wracked his brain for the proper exit from the chamber. He chose the archway that seemed likeliest.

  A short distance past the second turning of the hallway, he found himself in a wide gallery. A robed figure lay sprawled on the floor amid a tangle of draperies, beneath the unperturbed stare of several armed guards.

  Are they statues, then? he wondered. But, damn me, statuary never looked like that. See, that one there is leaning as though he were whispering to the other. He stared up at the unseeing eyes that gleamed within the helms and felt his skin crawling. Aedon save us. Black sorcery, that’s what it is.

  To his despair, he recognized the body on the floor the moment he turned it over. Dinivan’s face seemed bluish, even by the dim candlelight. Thin stripes of blood had run forward from his ears, drying on his cheek like red tears. His body felt like a sack of broken twigs.

  “Elysia, Mother of God, what’s happened here?” the duke groaned aloud.

  Dinivan’s eyes fluttered open, startling Isgrimnur so that he almost let the priest’s head fall back against the tiles. Dinivan’s gaze wandered for a moment before fixing on him. It might have been the candle Isgrimnur awkwardly held, but the priest’s eyes seemed to burn with a strange spark. Whatever the case, Isgrimnur knew it was a spark that would not last long.

  “Lector…” Dinivan breathed. Isgrimnur leaned closer. “Look…to…lector.”

  “Dinivan, it’s me,” he said. “Duke Isgrimnur. I’ve come looking for Miriamele.”

  “Lector,” the priest said stubbornly, his bloodied lips struggling to form the word. Isgrimnur sat up.

  “Very well.” He looked helplessly for something to cushion the priest’s wounded head, but could find nothing. He let Dinivan down, then rose and walked to the end of the hallway. There was little doubt which room was the lector’s—the door lay in great shards, and even the marble around the door-frame was scorched and crumbled. There was even less doubt about Lector Ranessin’s fate. Isgrimnur took one look around the ruined chamber, then turned and retreated hurriedly into the corridor. Blood had been smeared across the walls as if by a huge brush. The mangled forms of Mother Church’s leader and his young servant were barely recognizable as human: their corpses had been spared no indignities. Even Isgrimnur’s old soldier’s heart quailed at the sight of so much blood.

  Flames were flickering in the far archway when the duke returned, but he steeled himself to ignore them for a moment. Time for thought of escape later. He took Dinivan’s cold hand.

  “The lector is dead. Can you help me find Princess Miriamele?”

  The priest breathed raggedly for a moment. The light in his eyes was fading. “She’s…here,” he said slowly. “Called…Malachias. Ask room-warden.” He gasped for air. “Take her…to…Kwanitupul…to Pelippa’s Bowl. Tiamak is…there.”

  Isgrimnur’s eyes filled with tears. This man should be dead. There could be nothing keeping him alive but sheer will “I’ll find her,” he said. “I’ll keep her safe.”

  Dinivan suddenly seemed to recognize him “Tell Josua,” he panted. “I fear…false messengers.”

  “What does that mean?” Isgrimnur asked, but Dinivan was silent, his freehand crawling across his chest like a dying spider, fumbling hopelessly at the neck of his robe. Isgrimnur gently pulled out Dinivan’s Holy Tree and laid it on his chest, but the priest shook his head feebly, trying once more to reach inside his robe. Isgrimnur lifted out a golden scroll and quill pendant on a chain. The catch broke as he held it, the chain spilled out into the damp hair at Dinivan’s neck like a tiny, gleaming snake.

  “Give…Tiamak,” Dinivan rasped. Isgrimnur could barely hear him over the clamor of approaching voices and the crackle of flames in the corridor beyond. The duke slipped it into the pocket of his monk’s robe, then looked up, startled by a sudden movement nearby. One of the immobile guards, illuminated by pulsing fire-glow, was swaying in place. A moment later he fell forward with a crash, his helmet skittering across the tiles. The toppled soldier groaned.

  When Isgrimnur looked down again, the light had fled Dinivan’s eyes.

  16

  The Unhomed

  The darkness in the abbey was complete, the silence marred only by Simon’s ragged breath. Then Skodi spoke again, her voice no longer whisperingly sweet.

  “Stand up.”

  Some force seemed to tug at him, a pressure delicate as a cobweb but strong as iron. His muscles flexed against his will, but he resisted. A short time before he had struggled to rise—now, he strained to lie still.

  “Why do you fight me?” Skodi asked petulantly. Her chilly hand brushed across his chest and down onto the quivering skin of his stomach. He flinched, and control of his limbs slipped away as the girl’s will closed on him like a fist. A forceful but intangible pull brought him to his feet. He swayed in the darkness, unable to find his balance. “We will give them the sword,” Skodi crooned, “the black sword—oh, we will get such lovely presents…”

  “Where…are…my friends?” Simon croaked.

  “Hush, silly. Go out to the yard.”

  He stumbled helplessly through the darkened room, barking his chins on
hidden obstacles, lurching like a clumsily manipulated puppet.

  “Here,” Skodi said. The abbey’s front door swung open on grating hinges, filling the room with baleful reddish light. She stood in the doorway, pale hair fluttering in the swirling wind. “Come, now, Simon. What a night this is! A wild night.”

  The bonfire in the dooryard blazed even higher than it had when the travelers arrived, a beacon of flame that reached the height of the sloping roof and threw the abbey’s cracked walls into red relief Skodi’s children, the young and old alike, were feeding all manner of strange objects into the fire broken chairs and other bits of ruined furniture, and dead wood from the surrounding forest that burned with a ceaseless hiss of steam. In fact, the bonfire’s eager wardens seemed to be throwing everything they could find into the blaze, without regard for suitability—rocks and animal bones, cracked pottery, and shards of colored glass from the abbey’s decaying windows. As the flames roared and leaped in the surging wind, the children’s eyes caught the light, glowing like the yellow orbs of foxes.

  Simon tottered out onto the snowy courtyard with Skodi following close behind. A keening howl lanced through the night, a wretched, lonely sound. Slow as a sunning tortoise, Simon swiveled his head toward the green-eyed shape crouched atop the hill that overlooked the clearing. Simon felt an instant of hope as it lifted its muzzle and moaned again.

  “Qantaqa!” he cried, the name fell strangely from his stiff jaws and slack lips. The wolf came no closer than the hill-crest. She howled once more, a cry of fear and frustration as clear as if it had been spoken with a human tongue.

  “Nasty animal,” Skodi said with distaste. “Child-eater. Moon-shouter. It won’t come near Skodi’s house. It won’t break my charm.” She stared hard at the green eyes and Qantaqa’s baying became a whimper of pain. A moment later the wolf turned and vanished from the rise Simon cursed inwardly and struggled again to break free, but he was still as helpless as a kitten dangled by the scruff. Only his head seemed his own, and every movement was painfully difficult. He turned slowly, looking for Binabik and Sludig, then stopped, eyes widening.

  Two crumpled shapes, one small, one large, lay on the frosty ground against the abbey’s rotted plaster front. Simon’s tears froze into stinging ice on his cheek as something tugged his head back around and drew him another unwilling step toward the fire.

  “Wait,” Skodi said. Her voluminous white nightdress flapped in the wind. Her feet were bare. “I do not want you too close. You might be burned and that would spoil you. Stand there.” She pointed a plump arm at a spot a couple of paces away. As if he were an extension of her hand, Simon found himself trudging unsteadily across the thawing mud to the spot she had indicated.

  “Vren!” Skodi cried. She seemed gripped by maniacal good cheer. “Where is that rope? Where are you?”

  The dark-haired boy appeared in the abbey’s front doorway. “Here, Skodi.”

  “Tie his pretty wrists.”

  Vren shot forward, skittering over the icy ground. He grasped Simon’s limp hands and pulled them behind his back, then deftly bound him with a length of rope.

  “Why are you doing this, Vren?” Simon gasped. “We were kind to you.”

  The Hyrka boy ignored him, pulling the knots tight. When he had finished, he put his small hands on Simon’s hips and pushed him toward where Binabik and Sludig lay huddled.

  Like Simon, both had their hands trussed behind their backs. Binabik’s eyes rolled to meet Simon’s, the whites gleaming in the fire-shadowed yard. Sludig was breathing but insensible, a strand of spittle frozen on his blond beard.

  “Simon-friend,” the troll rasped, each word a labor. The little man drew breath as if to say more, but instead fell back into silence.

  Across the yard, Skodi had bent to draw a circle in the melting snow, trickling a handful of reddish powder from her fist. When that was finished, she began to scrape runes into the muddy ground, her tongue clenched between her teeth like a studious child. Vren stood a short distance away, swiveling his head from Skodi to Simon and back again, face empty of all emotion but a sort of animal watchfulness.

  Finished stoking the fire, the children were huddled near the wall of the abbey. One of the youngest girls sat on the ground in her thin shift, sobbing quietly; an older boy patted her head in a perfunctory way that seemed meant to comfort her. They all watched Skodi’s movements with fascinated attention. The wind had blown the fire into a rippling pillar, which painted their sober little faces with vermilion light.

  “Now, where is Honsa?” Skodi called, clutching her nightdress closer to her body as she straightened up. “Honsa!?”

  “I’ll get her, Skodi,” Vren said. He slipped into the shadows at the corner of the abbey, vanishing from sight, then reappeared a few moments later with a black-haired Hyrka girl a year or two older than himself. A heavy basket swung between them, bumping and jostling across the uneven ground until they set it down by Skodi’s swollen feet and scampered back to the crowd of watching children. Once there, Vren squatted in front of the little group and pulled a knife from his belt, then began to nervously shred the end of his remaining hank of rope. Simon could feel the boy’s tension from across the yard. He wondered dully what the cause might be.

  Skodi reached into the basket and lifted out a skull whose mandible clung by only a few knots of dried flesh, so that the eyeless face seemed to gape in surprise. The bulging basket, Simon now saw, was full of skulls. He suddenly felt sure he knew what had happened to the parents of all these children. His numbed body shivered reflexively, but he perceived the movement only dimly, as though it happened to someone else who was some distance away. Nearby, dark-eyed Vren picked at the end of rope with his gleaming blade, his features set in a brooding scowl. Simon remembered with a sinking heart how Skodi had said that beside his other chores, Vren butchered and cooked for her.

  Skodi held the skull before her, her oddly pretty face utterly absorbed—a scholar studying a table of high mathematical formulae. She swayed from side to side like a boat in high wind, nightdress flapping, and began to sing in her high-pitched, childish voice.

  “In a hole, in a hole,”

  Skodi piped,

  “…in the ground, in a hole, where the wet-nosed mole

  sings a song of cold stone, and of mud and gray bone,

  a quiet, small song all the chill, dark night long

  as he digs in the deep, where the white worms creep,

  and the dead all sleep, with their eyes full of earth

  where the beetles give birth, laying little white eggs,

  and their brittle black legs go scrape, scrape, scrape,

  and the dark, like a cape, covers all just the same,

  darkness hiding their shame as it covered their names,

  the names of the dead, all gone, all fled,

  empty winds, empty heads,

  Above grass grows on stone, fields lie fallow, unsown

  all is gone that they’ve known

  so they wail in the deep, crying out in their sleep,

  without eyes, still they weep, calling out for what’s lost,

  in the darkness they toss, under pitweed and moss

  in the deeps of the grave, neither master or slave,

  has now feature or fame, needs knowledge or name,

  but they long to come back, and they stare through the cracks

  at the dim sun above, and they curse cruel love,

  and the peace lost in life, think of worry and strife,

  ruined child or wife,

  all the troubles that burned, dreadful lessons unlearned,

  still they long to return, to return, to return,

  they long to return.

  Return!

  In a hole, in the ground, under old harrow-mound,

  where skin, bone, and blood turn to jelly-soft mud,

  and the rotting world sings…

  Skodi’s song went on and on, circling downward like a black whirlpool in a weed-strewn and u
nfrequented pond. Simon felt himself sinking with it, tugged by its insistent rhythms until the flames and the naked stars and the gleaming eyes of children blurred together into streaks of light, and his heart spiraled down into darkness. His mind could feel no connection with his shackled body, or with the actions of chose around him. A bleak hiss of idiot noise filled his thoughts. Bleak shapes moved across the snowy courtyard, unimportant as ants.

  Now one of the shapes took the round, pale object in its hand and tossed it into the fire, throwing a fistful of powder in after it. A plume of scarlet smoke belched forth, trailing off into the sky and obscuring Simon’s view. When it cleared, the fire was burning as brightly as before, but a heavier darkness seemed to have settled over the courtyard. The red light that splashed the buildings had become subdued, old as sunset on a dying world. The wind had failed, but a deeper cold crept through the abbey’s grounds. Though his body was no longer fully his own, still Simon could feel the intense chill crawling right into his bones.

  “Come to me, Lady Silver Mask!” the largest of the figures cried. “Speak with me. Lord Red Eyes! I want to trade with you! I have a pretty thing you will like!”

  The wind had not returned, but the bonfire began to waver from side to side, bulging and shuddering like some great animal struggling inside a sack. The cold intensified. The stars dimmed. A shadowy mouth and two empty black eye-smudges formed in the flames.

  “I have a present for you!” the large one shouted gleefully. Simon, drifting, remembered that her name was Skodi. Several of the children were crying, voices muffled despite the curious stillness.

  The face in the fire contorted. A low, grumbling roar spilled from the yawning black mouth, slow and deep as the creaking of a mountain’s roots. If words were part of that drone, they were indistinguishable. A moment later, the features began to shimmer and fade.