It pulled at me, that thought. It became tangled in my mind with the memory of my stepfather’s distracted stare, of the witch in chains. Good could not come from evil, I felt sure. Not without sacrifice. Not without blood and atonement.
My fear was growing again.
The Peaceful Ones might have been gone, but I was learning that their great house remained lively.
As I hurried downward, following the tracks of my stepfather and his company in the dust of centuries, I found suddenly that I had taken a wrong turning. The passage ended in a pile of broken stone, but when I returned to the last cross-corridor, there was no sign of footprints, and the place itself was not familiar, as though the ruins themselves had shifted around me. I closed my eyes, listening for the sound of Tellarin’s voice, for I felt sure that my heart would be able to hear him through all the stone in Erkynland. But nothing came to me but the ghost-murmurs, which blew in like an autumn breeze, full of sighing, rustling nonsense.
I was lost.
For the first time it became clear to me what a foolish thing I had done. I had gone into a place where I should not be. Not one person knew I was there, and when my last candle burned out, I would be lost in the darkness.
Tears started in my eyes, but I wiped them away. Weeping had not brought my father back, or my mother. It would do me no good now.
I did my best to retrace my steps, but the voices flittered around me like invisible birds, and before long I was wandering blindly. Confused by the noises in my head and by the flickering shadows, twice I almost tumbled into great crevices in the passageway floor. I kicked a stone into one that fell without hitting anything until I could not bear to listen any longer.
The darkness seemed to be closing on me, and I might have been lost forever—might have become another part of the whispering chorus—but by luck or accident or the hand of fate, I made a turning into a corridor I did not recognize and found myself standing at the lip of another stairwell, listening to the voice of the witch Valada drift up from the deeps.
“ … not an army or a noble household that you can order about, Lord Sulis. Those who lived here are dead, but the place is alive. You must take what you are given …”
It is as though she had heard my very thoughts. Even as I shuddered to hear my forebodings spoken aloud, I hurried toward the sound, terrified that if it faded I would never again hear a familiar voice.
What seemed another hour went by, although I had been so long in the haunted dark that I was no judge. My lover and the rest seemed almost to have become phantoms themselves, floating ahead of me like dandelion seeds, always just beyond my reach.
The stairs continued to curl downward, and as my third and fourth candles burned I could see glimpses of the great spaces through which we all descended, level upon level, as if making a pilgrimage down the tiers of Heaven. At times, as the candles flickered on the wooden base, I thought I could see even more. From the corner of my eye the ruins seemed to take on a sort of life. There were moments when the ghost-voices swelled and the shadows seem to take on form. If I half-closed my eyes, I could almost see these bleak spaces full of bright, laughing folk.
Why did the Northmen kill such beauty? And how could a people who built such a place be defeated by any mortals, however bloodthirsty and battle-hungry?
A light bloomed in the depths, red and yellow, making the polished stone of the stairwell seem to quiver. For a moment I thought it only another wisp of my imagination, but then, from so close it seemed we could kiss if we wished, I heard my beloved’s voice.
“Do not trust her, sire,” Tellarin said, sounding more than a little fearful. “She is lying again.”
Intensely happy, but with my caution abruptly restored, I shaded the candle with my palm and hurried down the stairs as quietly as I could. As their voices grew louder, and I saw that the light blooming in the darkness came from their torches, I pinched the flame to extinguish my candle completely. However glad I was to find them, I guessed they would not feel the same about me.
I crept closer to the light, but could not see Tellarin and the others because something like a cloud of smoke blocked my view. It was only when I reached the base of the curving stair and stepped silently onto the floor of the great chamber that I could actually see the four shapes.
They stood in the middle of a room so cavernous that even the torches my lover and Avalles held could not carry light to its highest corners. Before them loomed the thing I had thought was smoke. I still could not see it clearly, despite the torch flames burning only an arm’s length from it, but now it seemed a vast tree with black leaves and trunk. A shadow cloaked it and hid all but the broadest outline, a dark shroud like the mist that hid the hills on a winter morning, but it was not mist in which the tree-shape crouched, I felt sure. It was pure Darkness.
“You must decide whether to listen to me or a young soldier,” the witch was saying to my stepfather. “I will tell you again—if you cut so much as a leaf, you will mark yourselves as ravagers and it will not go well with you. Can you not feel that?”
“And I think Tellarin is right,” Avalles proclaimed, but his voice was less sure than his words. “She seeks to trick us.”
My stepfather looked from the tree-shadow to the witch. “If we may not take any wood, then why have you brought us here?” he asked slowly, as though it cost great effort just to speak.
I could hear the sour smile in Valada’s answer. “You have held me captive in your damp pile of stones for two moons, seeking my help with your mad questions. If you do not believe that I know what I know, why did you shackle me and bring me here?”
“But the wood … ?”
“I did not say you could not take anything to burn, I said that you would be a fool to lift axe or knife to the Great Witchwood. There is deadfall beneath, if you are bold enough to search for it.”
Sulis turned to Avalles. “Go and gather some dead wood, nephew.”
The young knight hesitated, then handed his torch to my stepfather and walked a little unsteadily toward the great dark tree. He bent beneath the outer branches and vanished from sight. After an interval of silence, Avalles stumbled back out again.
“It is … it is too dark to see,” he panted. His eyes were showing white around the edges. “And there is something in there—an animal, perhaps. I … I can feel it breathing.” He turned to my stepfather. “Tellarin’s eyes are better than mine …”
No! I wanted to scream. The tree-thing sat and waited, cloaked in shadows no torchlight could penetrate. I was ready to burst from hiding and beg my beloved not to go near it, but as if he had heard my silent cry, Lord Sulis cursed and thrust the torch back into Avalles’ hand.
“By Pelippa and her bowl!” my stepfather said. “I will do it myself.”
Just before he stepped through the branches, I thought I heard the leaves whisper, although there was no wind in the chamber. The quiet hiss and rattle grew louder, perhaps because my stepfather was forcing his way beneath the thick branches. Long moments trudged past; then the rustling became even more violent. At last Sulis emerged, staggering a little, with what seemed a long bar of shadow clasped under each arm. Tellarin and Avalles stepped forward to help him but he waved them off, shaking his head as though he had been dealt a blow. Even in the dark room, I could see that he had gone very pale.
“You spoke the truth, Valada,” he said. “No axe, no knife.”
While I watched, he bade Avalles and my beloved make a ring on the ground from the broken stones that littered the chamber. He crossed the two pieces of wood he had gathered in the center of the circle, then he used kindling from a pouch on his belt and one of the torches to set the witchwood alight. As the strange fire sputtered into life, the room seemed to become darker, as though the very light from the torches bent toward the firepit and was sucked away. The flames began to rise.
The rustle of the shadowy tree stilled. Everything grew silent—even the flames made no sound. My heart pounded as I leaned clos
er, almost forgetting to keep myself hidden. It was indeed a Black Fire that burned now in that deep, lost place, a fire that flickered like any blaze, and yet whose flames were wounds in the very substance of the world, holes as darkly empty as a starless sky.
It is hard to believe, but that is what I saw. I could look through the flames of the Black Fire, not to what stood on the other side of the fire, but to somewhere else—into nothingness at first, but then color and shape began to expand outward in the space above the firepit, as though something turned the very air inside out.
A face appeared in the fire. It was all I could do not to cry out.
The stranger surrounded by the black flames was like no man I had ever seen. The angles of his face were all somehow wrong, his chin too narrow, the large eyes slanted upward at the corners. His hair was long and white, but he did not look old. He was naked from the waist up, and his pale, glossy skin was marked with dreadful scars, but despite the flames in which he lay, his burns seemed old rather than new.
The Black Fire unshaped even the darkness. All that was around it bent, as though the very world grew stretched and shivery as the reflection on a bubble of river water.
The burning man seemed to slumber in the flames, but it was a horribly unquiet sleep. He pitched and writhed, even brought his hands up before his face, as though to protect himself from some terrible attack. When his eyes at last opened, they were dark as shadow itself, staring at things that I could not see, at shadows far beyond the fire. His mouth stretched in a silent, terrible scream, and despite his alien aspect, despite being so frightened I feared my heart would stop, I still ached to see his suffering. If he was alive, how could his body burn and burn without being consumed? If he was a ghost, why had death not ended his pain?
Tellarin and Avalles backed away from the firepit, wide-eyed and fearful. Avalles made the sign of the Tree.
My stepfather looked at the burning man’s writhing mouth and blind eyes, then turned to the witch Valada. “Why does he not speak to us? Do something!”
She laughed her sharp laugh. “You wished to meet one of the Sithi, Lord Sulis—one of the Peaceful Ones. You wished to find a doorway, but some doorways open not on elsewhere, but elsewhen. The Black Fire has found you one of the Fair Folk in his sleep. He is dreaming, but he can hear you across the centuries. Speak to him! I have done what I promised.”
Clearly shaken, Sulis turned to the man in the flames. “You!” he called. “Can you understand me?”
The burning man writhed again, but now his dark unseeing eyes turned in my stepfather’s direction. “Who is there?” he asked, and I heard his voice in the chamber of my skull rather than in my ears. “Who walks the Road of Dreams?” The apparition lifted a hand as though he might reach through the years and touch us. For a moment, astonishment pushed the agony from his odd face. “You are mortals! But why do you come to me? Why do you disturb the sleep of Hakatri of the House of Year-Dancing?”
“I am Sulis.” The tremble in my stepfather’s voice made him seem an old, old man. “Called by some ‘the Apostate.’ I have risked everything I own—have spent years studying—to ask a question which only the Peaceful Ones can answer. Will you help me?”
The burning man did not seem to be listening. His mouth twisted again, and this time his cry of pain had sound. I tried to stop my ears, but it was already inside my head. “Ah, it burns!” he moaned. “Still the worm’s blood burns me—even when I sleep. Even when I walk the Road of Dreams!”
“The worm’s blood … ?” My stepfather was puzzled. “A dragon? What are you saying?”
“She was like a great black snake,” Hakatri murmured. “My brother and I, we followed her into her deep place and we fought her and slew her, but I have felt her scorching blood upon me and will never be at peace again. By the Garden, it pains me so!” He made a choking sound, then fell silent for a moment. “Both our swords bit,” he said, and it was almost a chant, a song, “but my brother Ineluki was the fortunate one. He escaped a terrible burning. Black, black it was, that ichor, and hotter than even the flames of Making! I fear death itself could not ease this agony …”
“Be silent!” Sulis thundered, full of rage and misery. “Witch, is this spell for nothing? Why will he not listen to me?”
“There is no spell, except that which opens the doorway,” she replied. “Hakatri perhaps came to that doorway because of how the dragon’s blood burned him—there is nothing else in all the world like the blood of the great worms. His wounds keep him always close to the Road of Dreams, I think. Ask him your question, Nabban-man. He is as like to answer it as any other of the immortals you might have found.”
I could feel it now—could feel the weird that had brought us here take us all in its grip. I held my breath, caught between a terror that blew like a cold wind inside my head, that screamed at me to leave Tellarin and everything else and run away, and a fierce wondering about what had brought my stepfather to this impossibly strange meeting.
Lord Sulis tilted his chin down toward his chest for a moment, as though now that the time had come, he was uncertain of what he wished to say. At last he spoke, quaveringly at first, but with greater strength as he went on.
“Our Church teaches us that God appeared in this world, wearing the form of Usires Aedon, performing many miracles, singing up cures for the sick and lame, until at last the Imperator Crexis caused him to be hung from the Execution Tree. Do you know of this, Hakatri?”
The burning man’s blind eyes rolled toward Sulis again. He did not answer, but he seemed to be listening.
“The promise of Aedon the Ransomer is that all who live will be gathered up—that there will be no death,” my stepfather continued. “And this is proved because he was God made flesh in this world, and that is proved because of the miracles he performed. But I have studied much about your own people, Hakatri. Such miracles as Usires the Aedon performed could have been done by one of your Sithi people, or even perhaps by one of only half-immortal blood.” His smile was as bleak as a skull’s. “After all, even my fiercest critics in Mother Church agree that Usires had no human father.”
Sulis bowed his head again for a moment, summoning up words or strength. I gasped for air—I had forgotten to breathe. Avalles and Tellarin still stared, their fear now mixed with astonishment, but the witch Valada’s face was hidden from me in shadow.
“Both my wives have been taken from me by death, both untimely,” my stepfather said. “My first wife gave me a son before she died, a beautiful boy named Sarellis who died himself in screaming pain because he stepped on a horseshoe nail—a nail!—and caught a death fever. Young men I have commanded were slaughtered in the hundreds, the thousands, their corpses piled on the battlefield like the husks of locusts, and all for a small stretch of land here or there, or sometimes merely over words. My parents are dead, too, with too much unspoken between us. Everyone I ever truly loved has been stolen from me by death.”
His hoarse voice had taken on a disturbing force, a cracked power, as though he meant to shout down the walls of Heaven itself.
“Mother Church tells me to believe that I will be reunited with them,” he said. “They preach to me, saying, ‘See the works of Usires our Lord and be comforted, for his task was to show death should hold no fear,’ they told me. But I cannot be sure—I cannot simply trust! Is the Church right? Will I see those I love again? Will we all live on? The masters of the Church have called me a heretic and declared me apostate because I would not give up doubting the divinity of the Aedon, but I must know! Tell me, Hakatri, was Usires of your folk? Is the story of his godhood simply a lie to keep us happy, to keep priests fat and rich?” He blinked back tears, his stolid face transfigured by rage and pain. “Even if God should damn me forever to hell for it, still I must know—is our faith a lie?”
He was shaking so badly now that he took a staggering step back from the fire and almost fell. No one moved except the man in the flames, who followed Sulis with his blank, dark eyes. r />
I realized that I was weeping too, and silently rubbed the tears away. Seeing my stepfather’s true and terrible pain was like a knife twisted inside me, and yet I was angry too. All for this? For such unknowable things he left my mother lonely, and now had nearly destroyed his own life?
After a long time in which all was silent as the stone around us, Hakatri said slowly, “Always you mortals have tortured yourselves.” He blinked, and the way his face moved was so alien that I had to turn away and then look at him anew before I could understand what he said. “But you torture yourself most when you seek answers to things that have none.”
“No answers?” Sulis was still shaking. “How can that be?”
The burning man raised his long-fingered hands in what I could only guess was a gesture of peace. “Because that which is meant for mortals is not given to the Zida’ya to know, any more than you can know of our Garden, or where we go when we leave this place.
“Listen to me, mortal. What if your messiah were indeed one of the Dawn Children—would that prove somehow that your God had not chosen that to happen? Would that prove your Ransomer’s words any the less true?” Hakatri shook his head with the weird, foreign grace of a shorebird.
“Just tell me whether Usires was one of your folk,” Sulis demanded raggedly. “Spare me your philosophies and tell me! For I am burning too! I have not been free of the pain in years!”
As the echoes of my stepfather’s cry faded, the fairy-lord in his ring of black flames paused, and for the first time he seemed truly to see across the gulf. When he spoke, his voice was full of sadness.