To Green Angel Tower, Volume 1

  She made her way out to the center of the kitchen, moving as quietly as her stiff old bones would allow so she would not obscure the sounds of anyone approaching. There were few people left in the great keep these days—Rachel did not think of the king’s white-faced demons as people—but there were still some mercenaries from the Thrithings and elsewhere billeted in the castle’s scores of empty rooms. It was such barbarians as those, Rachel felt sure, who had reduced Judith’s kitchen to its hideous condition. Surely abominations like those devil-Norns did not even eat earthly food. Drank blood most likely, if the Book of the Aedon was any guide—and it had been Rachel’s only guide since she was old enough to understand what the priests said.

  There was nothing remotely fresh to be found anywhere. More than once Rachel opened a jar to discover the contents rotted, covered with blue or white mold, but after much patient searching she was able to find two small containers of salted beef and a jug of vegetables pickled in brine that had rolled beneath a table and somehow been missed. She also discovered three loaves of bread, hard and stale, wrapped in a napkin in one of the pantries. Although the sample piece she pulled from a loaf was painfully hard to chew—Rachel had few teeth left, and felt sure that such fare as this would finish off the survivors—it was edible, and when dipped in the beef brine would make a nice change indeed. Still, this raid had turned up scant results. How much longer would she be able to keep herself alive on what she could thieve from the Hayholt’s untended larders? Thinking of the days ahead, she shivered. It was horribly cold, even in the rock fastness of the castle’s internal passageways. How long could she go on?

  She wrapped the fruits of her scavenging in her shawl and dragged the heavy bundle across the floor toward the closet and its hidden door, doing her best to obscure the tracks she made in the flour. When she reached the closet, where the flour—so eerily like the snow outside—had not yet drifted, she unwrapped her take for a moment and used the shawl to brush away all the nearest marks, so that no one might wonder at tracks that disappeared into an abandoned closet and failed to come out again.

  As she was rebundling her salvage, she heard voices in the hallway outside. A moment later, the great kitchen doors began to swing inward. Her heart suddenly beating as swiftly as a bird’s, Rachel leaned forward and caught at the curtain with fumbling fingers, then pulled the hanging across the closet entrance just as the outer door thumped back against the wall and booted footsteps sounded on the flagstones.

  “Damn him and his grinning face, where is he?!”

  Rachel’s eyes widened as she recognized the king’s voice.

  “I know I heard someone in here!” Elias shouted. There was a crash as something was swept off one of the knife-scarred tables, then the rhythmic clatter of someone pacing back and forth across the great length of the kitchen floor. “I hear everything in this castle, every foot-step, every murmur, until my head pounds with it! He must have been here! Who else could it be?”

  “I told you, Majesty, I do not know.”

  The Mistress of Chambermaids’ heart skipped and seemed to stumble between beats. That was Pryrates. She thought of him as he had stood before her—her knife standing from his back, no more effective than a twig—and felt herself sagging toward the floor. She reached out a hand to steady herself and brushed against a copper trivet hanging on the wall, setting it swinging. Rachel grasped it, holding its heavy weight out from the wall so that it would make no noise.

  Like a rat! Her thoughts were wild and fragmented. Like a rat. Trapped in the walls. Cats outside.

  “Aedon burn and blast him, he is not to leave my side!” Elias’ hoarse voice, teetering on the edge of some strange despair, seemed almost to reflect Rachel’s own panic. “Hengfisk!” he shouted. “Damn your soul, where are you!?” The sound of the king’s furious pacing resumed. “When I find him, I will slit his throat.”

  “I will prepare your cup for you, Majesty. I will do it for you now. Come.”

  “It’s not just that. What is he doing? Where could he be? He has no right to go off wandering!”

  “He will be back soon, I’m sure,” the priest said. He sounded impatient. “His needs are few, and easily satisfied. Come now, Elias, we should go back to your chamber.”

  “He’s hiding!” Rachel could hear the king’s steps suddenly grow louder. He stopped, and she heard a squeak of hinges as he yanked at one of the broken doors. “He is hiding in the shadows somewhere!”

  The footsteps approached. Rachel held her breath, trying to be as still as stone. She heard the king come nearer, muttering angrily as he yanked at doors and kicked piles of fallen hangings out of his way. Her head whirled. Darkness seemed to descend before her eyes, a darkness threaded with fluttering sparks of light.

  “Majesty!” Pryrates voice was sharp. The king stopped thrashing and quiet descended on the kitchen. “This is accomplishing nothing. Come. Let me prepare your cup. You are overtired.”

  Elias groaned softly, a terrible sound like a beast in final pain. At last, he said: “When will it all end, Pryrates?”

  “Soon, Majesty.” The priest’s voice resumed its soothing tone. “There are certain rituals to be performed on Harrow’s Eve. Then, after the year turns, the star will come and that will show that the final days are at hand. Soon after, your waiting will be over.”

  “Sometimes I cannot bear the pain, Pryrates. Sometimes I wonder if anything is worth this pain.”

  “Surely the greatest gift of all is worth any price, Elias.” Pryrates’ footfalls moved closer. “Just as the pain is beyond what others must bear, so are you brave beyond other men. Your reward will be equally splendid.”

  The two men moved away from her hiding spot. Rachel let out her breath in a near-silent hiss.

  “I am burning up.”

  “I know, my king.” The doors thumped shut behind them.

  Rachel the Dragon sank to a crouch on the closet floor. Her hand shook as she traced the sign of the Tree.

  Guthwulf could feel stone at his back and stone beneath his feet, and yet at the same moment he felt that he stood before a great abyss. He folded to his knees and reached cautiously before him, patting at the ground, certain that any moment he would feel his hand waving in empty space. But nothing was before him but more of the endless stone of the passageway floor.

  “God help me, I am cursed!” he shouted. His voice rattled and echoed from a distant ceiling, obliterating for a moment the whispering chorus that had surrounded him for a length of time he could not guess. “Cursed!” He fell forward, cradling his face on his outstretched arms in an unconscious attitude of prayer, and wept.

  He knew only that he must be somewhere beneath the castle. Since the moment he had stepped through the unseen doorway, fleeing from flames that burned so hot that he was certain they would char him to cinders, he had been as lost as a damned soul. He had wandered through these mazy depths so long that he could no longer remember the feeling of wind and sunshine on his face, no longer recall the taste of food other than cold worms and beetles. And always the ... others ... had accompanied him, the quiet murmurs just below the level of intelligibility, the ghostly things that seemed to move beside him but mocked his blindness by slipping away before he could touch them. Countless days he had stumbled unseeing through this netherworld of mournful whispers and shifting forms, until life was only that which made him sensible to torment. He had become little more than a cord tight-stretched between terror and hunger. He was cursed. There could be no other explanation.

  Guthwulf rolled over onto his side and slowly sat up. If Heaven was punishing him for the wickedness of his life, how long would it go on? He had always scoffed at the priests and their talk of eternity, but now he knew that even an hour could stretch to a terrible, infinite length. What could he do to end this dreadful sentence?

  “I have sinned!” he screamed, his voice a hoarse croak. “I have lied and killed, even when I knew it was wrong! Sinned!” The echoes flew and dissipated. “Sin
ned,” he whispered.

  Guthwulf crawled forward another cubit, praying that the pit he had sensed was truly there before him, a hole into which he would tumble and perhaps find the release of death—if he were not already dead. Anything was preferable to this unending emptiness. Were it not as grave a sin as the murder of another, he would have long since smashed his head against the stone that surrounded him until life fled, but he feared that he would only find himself awakened to an even more dreadful sentence after the added crime of self-slaughter. He groped ahead in desperation, but his crawling fingers found nothing but more stone, the unending, winding passageway floor.

  Surely this was but another element of his punishment, the shifting reality of his prison. Just as a moment earlier he had known beyond doubt that a great chasm lay before him—a chasm that his fingers now proved did not exist—he had at other times encountered great columns that rose to the ceiling, and had run his hands over their intricate carvings, trying to read in their crafted textures some message of hope, only to find a moment later that he stood in the midst of a great and empty chamber as vacant of columns as it was of other human company.

  What of the others, he suddenly wondered? What of Elias and the devil Pryrates? Surely if divine justice had been meted out, they had not escaped—not with crimes on their souls vaster and more evil by far than Guthwulf’s poor tally. What had happened to them, and to all the other uncountable sinners who had lived and died on the spinning earth? Was each condemned to his or her own solitary damnation? Did others as afflicted as Guthwulf wander just on the other side of the stone walls, wondering if they, too, were the last creatures in the universe?

  He clambered to his feet and stumbled toward the wall, pounding on it with the flat of his hand. “Here I am!” he cried. “I am!” He let his fingers drag down the cool, faintly damp surface as he slumped to the floor again.

  In all the years when he had been alive—for he could not help but feel that his life was now over, even if he still seemed to inhabit a body that hurt and hungered—Guthwulf had never realized the simple wonder of companionship. He had enjoyed his associations with others—the rough company of men, the satisfying compliance of women—but he had always been able to do without them. Friends had died or left. Some Guthwulf had been forced to turn his back on when they opposed him, some one or two he had been forced to remove, despite previous comradeship. Even the king had turned on him at last, but Guthwulf had been strong. To need was to be weak. To be weak was not to be a man.

  Now Guthwulf thought of the most precious thing he had. It was not his honor, for he knew he had given that up when he did not raise a hand to help Elias combat his growing madness; it was not his pride, for he had lost that with his sight, when he became a staggering invalid who had to wait for a servant to bring him a chamber pot. Even his courage was no longer his to give or receive, for it had fled when Elias made him touch the gray sword and he had felt the blade’s horrible, cold song run through him like poison. No, the only thing left to him was the most ephemeral of all, the tiny spark that still lived and still hoped, buried though it was beneath such a weight of despair. Perhaps that was a soul, that thing the priests prattled about, and perhaps it wasn’t—he no longer cared. But he did know that he would give even that last, crucial spark away if he could only have companionship once more, if there could be some end to this hideous loneliness.

  The empty darkness suddenly filled with a great wind, a wind that blew through him but did not rustle a hair on his head. Guthwulf groaned weakly: he had felt this before. The void that surrounded him filled with chittering voices that brushed by him moaning and sighing words that he could not understand, but that he felt were full of loss and dread. He stretched out a hand, knowing as he did so that there was nothing to grasp ... but his hand touched something.

  With a gasp of shock, Guthwulf snatched the hand back. A moment later, as the rush of wailing shades dwindled down the endless corridor, something touched him again, this time bumping against his outstretched leg. He squeezed his eyelids shut, as though whatever was there might horrify even the eyes of a blind man. There was another insistent push at his leg. He slowly reached out once more and felt ... fur.

  The cat—for surely that was what it was: he could feel its back arching beneath his hand, the sinuous tail sliding between his fingers—thumped his knee with its small, hard head. He let his fingers rest on it, not daring to move for fear of frightening it away. Guthwulf held his breath, half-certain that this would prove to be like other things of this inconstant netherworld, that a moment’s time would find it vanished into air. But the cat seemed pleased with its own substantiality; it put two paws up on his thin leg, delicately sinking its claws into his skin as it moved beneath his careful touch.

  For a moment, as he scratched and patted, and as the unseen animal wriggled with pleasure, he remembered that he had eaten nothing but crawling things since he had come to this place of damnation. The warm flesh moved beneath his hand, a starving man’s banquet of meat and hot, salty blood separated from him only by a thin layer of fur.

  It would be so easy, he thought, his fingers gently circling the cat’s neck. Easy. Easy. Then, as his fingers tightened just a little bit, the cat began to purr. The vibrations moved up through its throat and into his fingers, a throb of contentment and trust as piercingly beautiful as any music of angelic choirs. For the second time in an hour, Guthwulf burst into tears.

  When the one-time Earl of Utanyeat awoke, he had no idea how long he had been asleep, but for the first time in many days he felt as though he had truly rested. His moment of peace ended quickly when he realized that the warm body that had nestled in his lap was gone. He was alone once more.

  Just as the emptiness swept back down upon him, there was a soft pressure against his leg, then a small cold nose pressed against his hand.

  “Back,” he whispered. “You came back.” He reached down to touch the cat’s head, but instead found he was pressing something smaller, something warm and slickly wet. The cat purred as he felt the thing that it had pushed against his hip: it was a rat, recently killed.

  Guthwulf sat up, saying a silent prayer of thanks, and pulled the offering apart with trembling fingers. He returned an equal portion to the founder of the feast.

  Deep beneath the dark bulk of Stormspike Mountain, the eyes of Utuk’ku Seyt-Hamakha suddenly opened. She lay motionless in the onyx crypt that was her bed, staring up into the perfect blackness of her stone chamber. She had wandered far along her web, into places in the dreamworld that only the eldest of the immortals could go—and in the shadows of the most distant improbabilities, she had seen something she had not expected. A sharp sliver of unease pierced her ancient heart. Somewhere at the outermost edges of her designs, a strand had snapped. What that meant, she could not know, but an uncertainty had been added, a flaw in the pattern she had woven so long and so faultlessly.

  The Norn Queen sat up, her long-fingered hand clawing for her silver mask. She placed it on her face, so that once more she appeared as serenely emotionless as the moon, then she sent out a cold and fleeting thought. A door opened in the blackness and dark shapes entered, bringing with them a little light, for they, too, wore masks, theirs of faintly glowing pale stone. They helped their mistress to rise from her vault and brought her royal robes of ice-white and silver, which they wrapped about her with the ritual care of burial priests swaddling the dead. When she was dressed, they scuttled away, leaving Utuk’ku alone once more. She sat for a while in her lightless chamber; if she breathed, she made no sound doing so. Only the almost imperceptible creaking of the mountain’s roots sullied the pure silence.

  After some time, the Norn Queen rose and made her way out through the twisting corridors that her servants had carved from the mountain’s flesh in the deeps of the past. She came at last to the Chamber of the Breathing Harp and took her seat upon the great throne of black rock. The Harp hovered in the mists that rose from the vast well, its shifting dimen
sions glinting in the lights that shone from the deeps below. The Lightless Ones were chanting somewhere in the depths of Stormspike, their hollow voices tracing the shapes of songs that had been old and already forbidden back in the Lost Garden, Venyha Do‘Sae. Utuk’ku sat and stared at the Harp, letting her mind trace its complexities as the steams of the pit met the chamber’s icy air and turned to frost upon her eyelashes.

  Ineluki was not there. He had gone, as he sometimes did, into that place that was no place, where he alone could go—a place as far beyond the dreamworld as dreams were beyond waking, as far beyond death as death was beyond living. For this time, the Norn Queen would have to keep her own counsel.

  Although her shining silver face was as impassive as ever, Utuk’ku nevertheless felt a shadow of impatience as she stared into the untenanted Well. Time was growing short now. A lifetime for one of the scurrying mortals was a scant season for the eldest, so the short span that stretched between now and the hour of her triumph could seem scarcely more than a few heartbeats if she chose to perceive it so. But she did not choose that. Every moment was precious. Every instant brought victory closer—but for that victory to come to pass, there could be no mistakes.

  The Queen of the Norns was troubled.

  8

  Nights of Fire

  Simon’s blood seemed almost to boil in his veins. He looked around him, at the white-blanketed hills, at the dark trees bending in the fierce, chilling winds, and wondered how he could feel so full of fire. It was excitement—the thrill of responsibility ... and of danger. Simon felt very much alive.

  He leaned his cheek against Homefinder’s neck and patted her firm shoulder. Her wind-cooled skin was damp with sweat.

  “She is tired,” Hotvig said, cinching the strap on his own mount’s saddle. “She is not meant for such fast traveling.”