“Master,” said Krawg, “you won’t get far.”
“Far … as I can.”
“Command me to go with you.”
“Something … more important,” said the king. “If I don’t return, do this.” With a bloodied hand, he drew a small circle from his pocket. “For Margi and Luci. They’ll know what to do.” He pressed the Ring of Trust into Krawg’s hand. “And this … this is a gift for Scharr ben Fray.” He pulled from his pocket a small grey stone etched with the outline of a footprint.
“What is it?”
“It was sculpted by a child. Long ago, down on the banks of the Throanscall. The beginning … of a journey.”
The king drew the puzzle keys from his pocket, fit them together, and shoved them into the lock.
“Shall I keep the keys?” Krawg asked. “Shall I shut the gate behind you?”
“No. So long as Auralia is on the other side of this gate … it stays open.”
He turned the keys. The gate opened.
30
THE GREAT ANCESTOR
ersistent as a bad memory, a beastman leapt from one stone outcropping to another, then dove into the current and paddled along in pursuit of the ale boy’s raft.
The creature’s roar had startled the boy out of half sleep to find that his white, winged guardian had left him. All he had was his water flask and his green glowstone, which was wedged between two panels of the raft.
The current carried him swiftly, slamming his float against turns he recognized, and eventually pushing him back into the great bowl, the crossing, where they had enjoyed the meal.
He leaned over the edge to visit his reflection. The water was so turbulent, the figure’s edges blurred as if forces were streaming through him. It seemed as true a reflection as any.
With no way to steer the raft shoreward and no strength to swim, he watched the stalactites’ colorful glow fade as the flow poured him into a different tunnel than he’d traveled through before.
The chase began to feel like a dream outside of time. He clung to the raft’s edge with one hand and to the water flask with the other, listening for the wet slap of his pursuer’s progress.
He sang to calm himself, to fill himself with breath and release his fears. The voice that echoed back was strange, changed by the journey. The quiet tones he’d sung into the Underkeep’s dark were replaced by something bolder, more determined, and tinged with desperation.
How he wished he could surrender his upstream striving through time, float back to those days with Auralia on Deep Lake’s pebbled shore. To whisper with her underneath the stars. His loneliness ached more noticeably than any bodily pains, which were constant now.
He let himself drift back even farther to Obsidia Dram, his guardian in the Abascar breweries and the closest thing to a mother he’d known. He’d practice pouring a perfect glass of Har-baron’s dark brew and then watch her pour another. As the thick head of foam at the top of the glass thinned, Obsidia held the glass with both hands, her eyes sparkling.
Such strange eyes, Obsidia’s. Quick to delight. Slow to darken in anger. And they peered out of a face that was almost masklike, darkly marked, like wood grain.
“Remember,” he murmured now, “when you taught me the best routes for rolling barrels out to the harvesters? I liked those days. I liked it when you’d roll me slowly in the barrel. I’d tumble about, knowing you were there outside the barrel and laughing, keeping me from rolling off a cliff. Steering me around a tree. When I laughed, it echoed, laughs like bright leaves tumbling around inside the barrel with me.”
There was no reply, of course.
“I thought of that when Jordam hid me inside that old, cold stove. I wished I could hear you through the wall. And I sure wish I could hear you now. I’ve been underground too long. You told me it wasn’t healthy. I need to see the sky.” He closed his eyes and tried to imagine it.
He heard the splat of his pursuer landing awkwardly nearby.
“Jordam might help this hungry creature.” The raft rocked as the river grew agitated. The water flask sloshed. “Half-full,” he said. Battered, scarred, it had not yet broken. “I’d give it to him if I thought he could restrain himself. But I’d best keep it with me. You told me not to give away good stuff to folks who would just gulp it down.”
Nevertheless, it hurt to withhold healing from this wretch with its wide, milky eyes and its sagging jaws.
The water surged fast enough to keep him ahead of his pursuer. “If only it were flowing in the opposite direction.” The distance he and the others had gained over days of hard rowing he now covered in very little time at all. “Don’t suppose I’ll ever see them again. I’ll be moving through the Core soon. If you can hear me, would you send someone to help me, like you sent that duty officer when I got lost and stuck in the berries?”
A sound rose over the rush of the stream. He had heard it before. A moan from the Cent Regus abyss. An inexplicable misery.
He knew, then, that he was close. Close to the dark lake that had broken his fall.
The long, unspooling groan diminished. The boy lay still. Something had changed. He no longer heard someone following him. He sat up, looked back, and saw the beastman watching him, unwilling to follow him farther.
The raft struck rock. He heard a crack. A piece of it broke loose and spun away, while the old door remained caught on something beneath the surface.
He lay flat, holding on. Then in the green light of the glowstone, he saw a strand of black, muddy shore and a stairway running up through a break in the wall. The stairs were chaotic, as if the ground beneath them had sought to shake them off, bending each stair to a different slant.
He heard a splash and saw the flask begin to sink. He lunged and caught the strap with one finger before the raft dumped him off. He crawled and kicked until his hands and feet felt loose ground and he could drag himself to the shore.
He forced himself onto the stairs. “Climb out of sight. Just a few steps. Then, rest.” He could swear that the stairs beneath him shifted, the earth underneath them writhing in discomfort. “That will give you more time to send help.”
The stairs were cold, the air oppressive, and the glowstone seemed reluctant to highlight details of the walls. He found himself longing for fire, for the voices he sometimes heard in the flames—his father and mother calling his name, reminding him of their love.
There were no flames. But there were voices. They sounded stale, like age-old cries that had fallen unheard, seeping through the ground, slipping into the earth’s own throat where they went on and on and on. Voices in the grotesque Cent Regus speech, distorted and spiteful. Cries of people calling for help until their voices weakened and turned to gasps.
The walls fell away, and he stumbled forward. As he did, the voices were cut short as if a dagger had severed the earth’s throat. He had disrupted something. He felt suddenly visible, as if he’d stepped into the circle of a silent vigil.
Slowly he raised the glowstone.
He knew a seat of power when he saw it.
This was a chair made of blackstone, outlined in spikes, and set in a circle of cauldrons like the ornament of a ring. A staff rested against it, and the silver ferrule at its tip glinted in the crystal’s glow.
A Seer’s been here.
The gurgling cauldrons smoked and steamed. Ladles large as boat oars rested inside them. Bones were strewn all about—large as the ribs of seabulls, small as the frames of hummingbirds, and familiar as those of men and women. Intricate hands. Empty skulls. And the crumpled spirals of children too small to have been born.
A massive stalactite of clay, clad in a nest of intricate fibers, hung from the distant ceiling into the center of the cauldron circle. A pulse like the earth’s own heartbeat thrummed from within.
One of the cauldrons erupted, a wave of ooze curling over the lip and splashing on the floor, and a foul stench singed the boy’s nostrils. He knew at once that he had found what all the beastmen sought—th
e materials that mixed to make Essence. It was still a stew, not yet the distillation of pitch that beastmen craved.
He backed away from the circle, too troubled to look. His gaze was drawn to more familiar sights. The chamber was surrounded with gaudy boxes of bones and pillage from the world’s richest kingdoms—armor, sculptures, relics, scrolls, game pieces, farglasses, saddles, racks of enormous antlers, chairs, a broken rain canopy. He could see that the debris overrunning the cart positioned to contain it had fallen from a chute that descended through the wall.
There, amid the treasure, he saw the long and pale fingers of an adult’s open hand, reaching up through rubble.
He could not move at first. Then he leapt toward the cart and began to pull the treasures away. It was Jaralaine.
“I have the secret water,” he whispered. “I can bring you back.”
As he studied her, he felt something break open within him, and what resolve he had left began to spill away like sand from a broken hourglass. He began to shake and to weep. They had labored so long together to free the prisoners, to help the beastmen, to keep each other hopeful in the dark.
He took her cold, stiff hand in both of his own, forcing himself past the fear. “I will be your son,” he said. “Just like you asked me. Remember? Before you started calling me Raven, you said you’d make me your own, make me heir to Abascar. I don’t want to be a prince. But you … you’d make a good mother. I won’t complain.”
As he scrabbled at the flask’s crumbling cork, Jaralaine moved. At first he thought she might be waking. But no, a Deathweed tendril was coiled about her leg, pulling her away.
A groan shocked him as if the chamber were a drum that had been struck. He looked up at the strange pillar of tangled cords and misshapen clay that hung from the ceiling. What he saw this time brought him to his feet.
Sculpted in the clay he saw a face. A face once human. Distorted, swollen, stretched—two dark cavities where the eyes had been, nostrils like deep cuts, and then the cave of an open mouth.
He looked again, interpreting what he had seen before a different way. This column, this descending mass was not made of stone at all. It was a pulsing, living thing imprisoned in a bundle of Deathweed. No, it was the source of Deathweed. This man, suspended upside down, had evolved beyond the boundaries of human definition, his legs becoming roots thick as tree trunks that ascended, divided, and spread across the ceiling.
And those two feeble roots that reached down to almost touch the floor, those were the limp, elongated remnants of the man’s arms, ending in tiny stubs that had once been fingers.
The creature was gasping long, deep lungfuls of air.
“Strength,” it said.
“What …,” the boy whispered. “Who are you?” The creature closed and opened his lips like a fish.
The boy’s eyes traced the suspended creature’s body up to where it frayed into a multitude of limbs that spread and disappeared into the earth. Mosses hanging from those limbs bled the black rain that pooled and sank into cracks in the floor.
“The Curse. It’s from you. The feelers, your limbs. The Essence, your blood.”
The creature did not respond. It faced him, eyeless.
“The Seers … they fed you, didn’t they? For a long, long time.” He looked about at the carts along the wall, loaded with carcasses, bones, faces.
Then he said boldly, with the certainty of solving the riddle, “You’re Tammos Raak.”
The name echoed in empty space.
The creature’s lips closed and opened. Closed and opened.
The ale boy looked at Jaralaine’s broken body. “I want you to let her go,” he said weakly. “Give her back to me. Please.”
The creature’s tongue emerged from between its lips, a stump, pale as a piece of ancient firewood.
“You’re thirsty. The Seers have been gone for a while.”
The boy felt something within him fail. His hope, perhaps. For what he now must do seemed inevitable, as if it had been written down and he could only fulfill it.
And so he made the most laborious journey of his short and troubled life, putting one foot before the other across the poison floor, passing between two cauldrons. He stumbled and nearly dropped the flask.
The creature’s lips closed, then unglued from one another again.
The boy reached up.
Tammos Raak’s nostrils flared. A wheeze of air rushed up into that wretched body. Then the creature unleashed a storm of sound—a lament, a longing, a thirst.
The boy cowered, ears ringing. He clutched the flask to his chest as if it were the last scrap of his raft floating on a turbulent river. He smells the water. He recognizes it. When silence returned, he stood, reaching up to set the mouth of the flask on the creature’s upper lip.
Tammos Raak convulsed and turned, and the flask fell aside.
The room brightened. The boy watched, bewildered, as five blue phantoms swam through the air, curling around the suspended prisoner as if to protect him.
A thick tendril of Deathweed from the shadows above lashed out like a whip, flinging the boy across the chamber. He hit the wall and fell in a heap. The flask dropped, spilling water across the ground.
The boy crawled forward, tipped it upright. “Go ahead,” he shouted at the imprisoned giant. “You don’t deserve it anyway.” Then he crawled back to Jaralaine. Her right arm was still cast out, her left folded across a bundle against her body. He lifted the flask and put the spout to her lips.
Accompanied by a wrathful roar, the Deathweed tendril lashed out again, snatching the flask from the ale boy and casting it like a stone toward the prisoner’s own head. It flew deep into Tammos Raak’s throat. His lips sealed shut, and his misshapen face crumpled in discomfort as he fought to swallow the flask.
The lips opened and closed. It was gone.
The ale boy collapsed against the treasure pile, his head resting against Jaralaine’s cold breast. “That’s it then,” he whispered. “Served my last drink, and I’ve got nothing left.” His hands gripped the folds of cloth beneath Jaralaine’s arm. Something inside him felt broken, sharp-edged, crooked.
He did not know how much time went by. He dreamed awhile, images drifting through his mind.
He was sitting with Obsidia Dram, and she was hunched over a stream, catching water in a basin while he sifted grain in a bowl. She was clumsy, moving as if everything she wore were several sizes too large. And that hunch between her shoulders—had she been born like that, or was it an injury?
“Do you like kites, my boy?” she asked. “I don’t suppose anyone’s ever taught you to make one.”
“Auralia,” he had answered. “I saw some kites in her caves. You should see the ribbons she ties to the tails.”
“I’d like that,” said Obsidia. “I’d so like to go and meet her sometime. She sounds … she sounds like family.”
“Oh,” said a whisper.
The dream shattered, and the ale boy woke, his teeth chattering. The suspended man was staring at him. With eyes. Eyes that had emerged from the dark depths of vacant cavities. Small, human eyes.
“Ohh,” the creature sighed.
He sees.
So cold he couldn’t move without shaking, the boy reached for the bundle caught in Jaralaine’s embrace. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “But I’m going to need to borrow this.”
Intending only to draw it around him for warmth, he shook it out, and it unfurled. As the cave filled with light and color, a slight red ribbon was cast into the air. The ale boy caught the string and unthinkingly threaded it through the loops to bind it at his throat.
He felt a spark. The cloak brightened. The darkness vanished, vanquished by the full spectrum of Auralia’s colors.
In this way Tammos Raak beheld again the glory of all he’d abandoned.
The light of all colors flooded his cell—whiter than white, infused with every hue the Expanse had ever known and worlds more than those.
The light burned
deep into the great ancestor’s gaze. Colors penetrated his mind and body like rivers saturating a desert. They resonated like the meeting of strings and a bow. They sang in a language that his heart—frail and buried deep within the many-chambered engine that had encompassed and overpowered it—had forgotten.
Received, these colors were not discovered but recognized. Memories broke the dam that he had set up against them, and they quenched his fearful, wasteful desire to be separate and solitary, to be disconnected from the whole. For he knew that these colors had been sent by his sister as a declaration of love, love in spite of all his offenses.
He saw the whole Expanse from a high place, through a lens of crystalline cloud. The stark white and black of winter; the rough, seething green of spring; the ripeness of summer; and autumn’s smoldering fire. This was the view he had once known from the home he had abandoned.
Like a stone cast to shatter a vast and frozen sea within him, the light shocked his broken heart to beating once again.
He was caught by surprise. Before he could open up the deep reservoir of lies he had gathered to shield himself, he felt a powerful emotion welling up from deep inside.
Gratitude.
I abandoned my family. I rejected the gift of who and how I was invited to be. I left my sister and my source behind. And yet here is an invitation. I can be sewn again into their dance, join their music. I can live.
This burst of life drove the water from the flask that Tammos Raak had swallowed coursing through his body, out into his limbs.
The root of the disease, which fed upon the stony deadness in Tammos Raak’s heart, had nothing left to eat, for his heart was alive again. The shock of that deprival shot out through the roots of Deathweed, out through the limbs, the fingers, the filaments that lurked in the ground of the Expanse, that wormed their way into the trees of the forests, that distorted the nature of all things green and growing.
The trees of the world shuddered in a distress felt by the crawling branches they had cast off to fulfill the Curse’s appetite.