“And Brann,” the guard said, blowing out a great ring of smoke that blended with the mist around them.
“And Brann. Perhaps you should be kinder to him—he is obviously terrified of you.”
The old guard smiled. “Good.” He leaned forward over the fire coals. “I trust no one any more, Hector, especially those too stupid or selfish to have taken the chance they were given and now want to be saved in the last hour. Better that they fear me. They have reason to.”
Hector turned the scepter of the king in his hands. “You needn’t be on guard against him, Brann. The king’s scepter is formed of an ancient element of power; it rings true in the hand of the one who holds it. I would be able to discern if the old fisherman was lying, and thus far he has told us nothing but the truth.”
Jarmon shrugged. “What does it matter anyway?” he said nonchalantly. “You and he are the only ones who remain with something to lose.” Hector signaled for him to explain, but the old guard just shrugged again.
“You say you believe that the glory is in the trying,” Jarmon said, puffing contentedly on his pipe. “But in truth, you fear failure. You have all along—as if there was anything you could do to ward it off. This situation was doomed to failure from the beginning, Hector, but only you struggled with that. The rest of us are followers, not leaders. We know that even in inevitable failure, there is glory. In the end, to a soldier it matters not what the outcome of the battle is. What matters is how he fought, whether he stood his ground nobly, or whether, in the face of death, he faltered. A soldier does not decide who to fight, or when, or where. Deciding to remain behind with you was the only real choice I have ever made. It’s a choice I do not regret.
“You have struggled in silence with the king’s decision to leave you behind, and with our decisions to remain with you. You could cease that and live out your days in some semblance of peace if you were not born to lead. Unlike you, I know my opinion of His Majesty’s decision doesn’t matter. How I live between now and the end—that is what matters.”
Hector stared out into the darkness. “I stand in the shadow of the king. I am of his line; I am his regent, named so that his power over the land would hold sway. His responsibilities are mine now. If I let go of them, then I have failed.”
“Don’t deceive yourself, lad,” Jarmon said seriously, automatically stowing the wallet where it had come from. “The king’s power that mattered left when he left—the Sleeping Child began its rise as his ship crested the horizon and sailed out of sight of Serendair. While I don’t deny that his claim to the throne is in place because you are here, in the end it will mean nothing. The power that once reigned this land undisputed is broken. The protection it proffered is all but gone. There are holes in it, Hector, gaping holes that were once solid in the king’s time, and that of all the rulers before him; an iron-strong dominion that is now rusted and pitted. You cannot plug those holes, no matter how much you struggle to. It’s already been decided. You try to protect the Island in its last days by virtue of your vow, but your authority does not mean anything.”
He took the pipe from his mouth and looked directly at the younger man. “But that doesn’t mean your sacrifice was not worthy. You may never achieve greatness in itself, but when one has been groomed for greatness, to surrender the chance to prove it, now there’s a sacrifice. On the word of your king to yield, give way in a battle you felt you could win, that’s the most terrible sacrifice. It dwarfs all others.” Jarmon settled down into a pile of leaves by the fire. “Except perhaps for having to serve sandbag duty.”
On that last night Hector dreamed, as he always did, of Talthea and the children. The rocky ground beneath his ear burned with the rising heat from the north, making his night visions dark and misty where once they had been clear.
In his dreams he was holding his daughter, playing with his son, basking in quiet contentment with his wife when he felt a shadow beckon to him. When he looked up, the shade that was summoning him took form. It was the specter of a long-dead king, a forebear he had never known. The headless statue, broken in pieces in Kingston Square, whole once more. His grandfather.
Vandemere.
Wordlessly the king beckoned to him again. Hector looked down to find his arms empty, his wife and son gone.
He followed the shade of the king through a green glade of primeval beauty, back through Time itself. In this dream he trod the path of history, unspooling it in reverse as he walked deep into the silent forest through a veil of sweet mist.
All around him the world turned, undoing what had gone before as it did. The present, the third age in which history was now marked, unwound before his eyes. He could see the fleets returning to the docks from which they had been launched in anticipation of the second cataclysm, watched the disassembly of the new empire into the broken one that was the result of the Seren War, and the war itself. He saw bloody fields strewn with broken bodies turn green again, saw the ages slipping by, unhurried, remaking history as Time passed in reverse.
Hector looked ahead; the shade of the king was farther away now, disappearing into the mist.
He started to run, and as he did, the unspooling history sped back faster and faster. From the Seren War back to the racial wars that preceded it, the coming of the races of man to Serendair in the Second Age, Time hurried crazily backward. He called to the king, or tried, but no sound came out in this drowsy place, the misty vale of cool, rich green.
Racing now, compelled to find out the purpose of this visitation or command, he barely noticed when the Second Age slipped back to the First, the Day of the Gods, when the Elder races walked the earth. From the corner of his eye Hector saw the first cataclysm reverse itself, saw the waters that had covered much of the island recede, the star rise back into the sky, saw the Vault of the Underworld where the F’dor had once been imprisoned sealed shut again, containing once more the formless spirits that, upon its rupturing, had escaped and taken human hosts, like Tsoltan, the one his father had vanquished.
With each undone event, the world through which he ran grew greener, newer, more peaceful, more alive. It was in watching the turning back of Time that Hector began to realize how much of the magic had been gone from the world he had known, how much it had been present at one time, long before, when the world was new.
As the First Age melted away into the Before-Time, the prehistory, he saw the birth of the primordial races that sprang from the five elements themselves—the dragons, great wyrms born of living earth; the Kith, Cantha’s race, children of the wind; the Mythlin, water-beings who were the forebears of humans, building the beautiful undersea city of Tartechor; the Seren, the first of the races born, descended of the stars; and the F’dor, formless demons sprung from ancient fire, destructive and chaotic, sealed by the four other races into the Vault to spare the earth from obliteration at their hands.
He saw the primeval world, glorious and unspoiled, and quiet. And even that slipped from his view as he watched; the land disappeared into the sea as the wind died away, leaving the surface of the world burning with fire, until it was nothing more than a piece of a glowing star that had broken off and streaked across the heavens on its own. That glowing ball sped backward, joining the burning body from which it had come.
Leaving nothing around him but starry darkness and the shade of the long-dead king.
Finally the shadow of Vandemere turned around and stared at him sadly.
What, Grandfather?Hector asked, no sound coming from his lips, but echoing nonetheless in the dark void around them.What is it you are trying to show me?
Eternity,the king said. His voice did not sound, but Hector heard the word anyway.
What of eternity?Hector asked, struggling to breathe in the heavy mist of the dark void.
The king’s shadow began to fade.
There is no time in eternity.Vandemere’s voice echoed in the emptiness.In staying behind, you fought to give them more time. Instead, you should be fighting to keep from losing
eternity.
Hector woke with a start.
The ground beneath his head was splitting apart, a great fissure ripping the Earth asunder.
In a heartbeat he was on his feet, grasping the startled fisherman next to him and dragging the old man back from the brink of the chasm as Jarmon made a dive to untie the horses.
A roar like thunder shivered the scorched trees around them, and the fisherman shouted something that Hector could not hear. They backed away, pulling the frightened beasts with all their strength, running blindly north into the fire-colored mist, until the ground beneath their feet stopped shaking, settling into a seething rumble that did not cease.
“You all right, Brann?” Hector asked, trying to settle the roan and failing; the animal whinnied in fear and danced in place, her ears back and eyes wild.
The old man’s eyes were as glassy as the horse’s, but he nodded anyway.
“The Awakening—it’s coming,” he whispered, his voice barely audible above the rumbling ground. “There is no more time for sleep, Sir Hector. We are not that far away; if we hurry, we will be in Dry Cove before morning. Let us make haste, I beg you! My people await rescue.”
“Your people are fools if they haven’t quit the village by now, old man,” Jarmon muttered. “The heat is searing from here. If they be closer, they have already cooked in the belching fire.”
Hector took the trembling fisherman by the shoulders and helped him mount.
“We go,” he said. “We will stop no more until we are there, or we are in the Afterlife.”
Through the lowlands that had once been the towns and villages near the Great River’s mouth they rode, the air thick with black smoke that obscured their vision of anything but the riverbed.
The horses, ridden ceaselessly and deprived of frequent stops for fresh water, began to show signs of faltering. When Brann’s mount finally collapsed into a quivering mass on the mule road, Jarmon pulled the fisherman, gray of face from exhaustion and fear, behind him in the saddle and spurred his own mount onward.
“Sorry, Rosie, old girl,” he muttered, patting the animal’s neck. His hand was covered with flecks of sweat and horse sputum. “It will soon end, and then you can rest.”
Finally the sound of the sea crashing in the distance broke through the screaming wind.
“Here! We are here!” Brann whispered, tugging roughly on Jarmon’s sleeve. “The sea has drawn back a goodly distance, but you can hear it still.”
Hector reined the roan to a halt. Off to the north sparks of molten flame, like iridescent fireflies, shot haphazardly into the wind above the sea, swirling in menacing patterns against the blackening sky. He strained to see through the smoke, and thought he made out the silhouettes of shacks and docks, charred timbers blending into the darkness.
They dismounted, abandoning the horses at the shoreline, and waded into the wet sand, every now and then passing what was probably once a body, now buried beneath a thick coating of ash.
Hector glanced at Brann, but the fisherman’s gaze did not waver; rather, the old man shielded his eyes, trying to peer through the gray and black fog to where he had seen what he thought were the doors to the mammoth mine.
“This way,” the fisherman said, his voice stronger now. “It was just north of that failed land bridge, past the tip of the peninsula, where once the water met on three sides.”
As if to punctuate his words, the sandy ground shook violently.
“Lead onward,” Hector shouted, following the fisherman into the sand bed.
Blindly they made their way across the tidal wasteland, where the sea had once swelled to the land, now nothing but a desert of ocean sand. The sea’s retreat had laid bare the bones of ships, broken reefs, shells of every imaginable kind, broken and jagged in the wet grit where the water once broke against the shore.
A plume of fire shot into the black sky in the near distance, then fell heavily back into the sea.
Over the broken land bridge for a mile, then another, and another, the three men limped hurriedly across the wet sand, burning now through their boots. Finally, when they reached a place where the smoke blackened the air almost completely, Brann stopped near a small, intact fishing boat wedged in the seabed, dropped to his knees, and pointed beneath the low-hanging smoke down into the distance.
“There,” he whispered.
Hector crouched down and followed the old man’s arthritic finger with eyes that burned from the heat and ash.
At first he could see nothing save for the endless sand and black smoke. But after a moment, his eyes adjusted, and his breath caught in his raw throat.
They were standing on what appeared to be a great ridge in the seabed, a towering wall that led down into a crevasse a thousand or more feet deep, at the bottom of which the remnants of seawater pooled. Hector followed the perimeter with his eyes, and could not see its beginning, nor its end. The depression seemed to stretch to the horizon; the cliff wall beneath them made the seabed seem as if they were standing in a vast meadow atop a mountain. Whatever the actual dimensions of the ancient mine, it was clear that a man could not see all of it at once even in clear air; it stretched out beneath the sand, hidden for millennia by the sea, into the place to which the water had retreated. He finally now understood Brann’s insistence that enough of the sea could be diverted into such a mammoth space that at least a part of the Island might be spared.
“Where are the doors?” he shouted over the thundering roar that came forth from within the sea to the north.
“At the bottom,” Brann shouted in return, struggling to remain upright in the burning wind.
“Can we scale the cliff face, Hector?” Jarmon asked, looking for a foothold and finding none. “If we fall from this height there will be no stopping; ’twill be a quick end at least.”
“There looks to be a path of a sort, or at least a place where the cliff wall slants,” Hector said, ducking again so that he could see more clearly.
Brann was eyeing the sky nervously. “We must hurry!” he urged as liquid fire shot aloft again, spewing ash and making the ground lurch beneath their feet. He scurried over the rim and began sliding down the wall that Hector had indicated, followed a moment later by the two soldiers.
Down into the crevasse, running and slipping they ran, falling, sliding on knees or even on their backs, only to rise, driven by necessity and the imminence of the Awakening. The seabed was thick here, like rock beneath the sand, but absent of the debris that they had seen in the higher ground at the shoreline.
Finally, when they had fallen far enough down to have descended a small mountain, they found themselves at the base of a sheer cliff wall, their feet wet in the dregs of the sea that had covered this place a short time before, staring up at a solid wall of rock.
The wind howled and shrieked above them, but stayed at the level of the sea, venturing down into the canyon only long enough to whip sand into their eyes. “Where are the doors?” Hector asked again, his voice quieter in the near silence.
Brann pointed to a towering slab to the north. “There,” he said, in a trembling tone.
Crawling now, the three men made their way over the scattered rock of the seafloor, scaling outcroppings, climbing over dips and hollows, until at last they stood where the fisherman had indicated.
Above them towered what appeared to be two massive slabs of solid earth, smooth as granite and white as the rest of the sea sand. There was a slash of thin darkness between them; otherwise they appeared in no way different from the rest of the rocky undersea hills.
Beneath their feet the ground trembled again, more violently than before. The winds atop the canyon screamed, rising into an atonal wail that fell, discordant. Distant fire shot into the sky, turning the clouds the color of blood.
From his pack Hector drew forth the scepter. It glowed brightly in his hand, the gilt shaft shining beneath the diamond, which sparkled almost menacingly.
Before them the slabs of stone seemed to soften. The thr
ee men watched, transfixed, as the sand that had covered them for time uncounted began to slide away, pooling at the base, revealing towering doors of titanic size bound in brass, with massive handles jutting from plates of the same metal, a strange keyhole in the rightmost one. The gigantic doors were inscribed with ancient glyphs and wards, countersigns and runes the like of which Hector had never seen before.
Brann was watching the northern sky nervously over his shoulder. “Make haste, sir knight,” he urged.
Hector stared at the ancient key in his hand. It appeared different somehow than it had been a moment before; the dark shaft of once living wood that he thought was the branch of a stone tree now more closely resembled a bone, the diamond perched atop it on the rim of where a joint would connect. Carefully he held it next to the keyhole, trying to ascertain the angle which would fit it.
“Viden, singa ever monokran fri,” he said. Open, in the name of the king.
The glyphs on the doors glowed with life.
The gilding began to fall from the scepter’s shaft, sliding off in sandy golden flakes.
Hector pushed the key into the lock and slowly turned it counterclockwise.
Beneath his hand he more felt than heard an echoing thud. Ever so slightly the crack between the stone doors widened. Hector pushed on the rightmost of the two, but could only cause it to move infinitesimally. He attempted to look inside. He could see very little.
The darkness was devouring in its depth. Gingerly Hector pushed the door open a little farther, straining against the wedge of sand that had built up at the door’s base over the ages. Brann took up a place beside him, adding the remains of his strength to the effort.
Behind him the flares of fire from the Awakening rose suddenly higher, burning more intensely, casting shadows into the black cavern beyond the doors. Hector peered through the crack.
The immensity of the place was more than Hector could fathom. From the small vista he had gained there seemed to be no border to it, no walls below limiting it to edges, but rather was more like opening a door into the night sky, or the depths of the universe.