“Everyone is waiting for you, Father Strangyeard,” Tiamak told him.
The archivist nodded his head distractedly. His eye was cast down, as though he could not walk without watching where he set his feet. Tiamak let him pass, then followed him into the comparative warmth of the tent.
“Welcome back, Strangyeard,” said Josua. “Before you begin, tell me: how is Camaris? Should we send someone to him?”
The priest looked up in startlement, as though it was a surprise to hear a human voice. The look he gave Josua was curiously fearful, even for the timid archivist. “I … I do not know, Prince Josua. I do not know much … much of anything at this moment.”
“I’ll go see to him,” Isgrimnur grumbled, levering himself up off the stool.
Father Strangyeard raised his hand. “He … wishes to be alone, I think.” He fidgeted with his eye-patch for a moment, then ran his fingers through his sparse hair. “Oh, merciful Usires. Poor souls.”
“Poor souls?” said Josua. “What are you saying, Strangyeard? Can you tell us anything?”
The archivist wrung his hands. “Camaris was in Jao é-Tinukai’i. That much … oh, my … that much he told me before he asked for the seal of confession, knowing that I would tell you. But the reason, and what happened there, are locked behind the Door of the Ransomer.” His stare wandered around the room as if it hurt him to look at anything too long. Then his eye fell on Vorzheva, and for some reason lingered there as he talked. “But this much I can say, I believe: I do not think that his experiences have aught to do with the present situation, nor is there anything to be learned from them about the Storm King, or the Three Great Swords, or any of the other things you need to know to fight this war. Oh, merciful Usires. Oh, dear.” He patted at his thin red hair again. “Forgive me. Sometimes it is hard to remember that I am merely the doorkeeper of the Ransomer, and that the burden is not mine to bear, but God’s. Ah, but it is hard right now.”
Tiamak stared. His fellow Scrollbearer looked as though he had been visited by vengeful spirits. The Wrannaman moved closer to Strangyeard.
“Is that all?” Josua seemed disappointed. “Are you certain that the things he knows cannot help us?”
“I am not certain of anything but pain, Prince Josua,” the archivist said quietly but with surprising firmness. “But I truly think it unlikely, and I know for certain that to force anything more from that man would be cruel beyond belief, and not just to him.”
“Not just to him?” Isgrimnur said. “What does that mean?”
“Enough, please.” Strangyeard seemed almost angry—something Tiamak had not imagined possible. “I have told you what you needed to know. Now I would like to leave.”
Josua was taken aback. “Of course, Father Strangyeard.”
The priest nodded. “May God watch over us all.”
Tiamak followed Strangyeard out through the tent door. “Is there something I can do?” he asked. “Perhaps just walk with you?”
The archivist hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. That would be kind.”
Camaris was gone from the spot where he had stood; Tiamak looked for him, but saw no sign.
When they had traveled some way down the hill, Strangyeard spoke in a musing voice. “I understand now … why a man would wish to drink himself into oblivion. I find it tempting myself at this moment.”
Tiamak raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
“Perhaps drunkenness and sleep are the only ways God has given us to forget,” Strangyeard continued. “And sometimes forgetting is the only cure for pain.”
Tiamak considered. “In a way, Camaris was as one asleep for two score years.”
“And we awakened him.” Strangyeard smiled sadly. “Or, I should say, God allowed us to awaken him. Perhaps there is a reason for all this. Perhaps there will be some result beside sorrow after all.”
He did not, the Wrannaman thought, sound as though he believed it.
Guthwulf paused and let the air wash over him, trying to decide which of the passageways led upward—for it was upward that the sword-song was leading him. His nostrils twitched, sniffing for the faintest indication from the damp tunnel air as to which way he should go. His fingers traveled back and forth along the stone walls on either side, questing like eyeless crabs.
Disembodied, alien speech washed over him once more, words that he did not hear so much as feel. He shook his head, trying to drive them from his brain. They were ghosts, he knew, but he had learned that they could not harm him, could not touch him. The chittering voices only interfered with what he truly wanted to hear. They were not real. The sword was real, and it was calling.
He had first felt the pull return several days before.
As he awakened into the confusion of blind solitude, as he had so many times, a thread of compelling melody had followed him up out of sleep into his waking blackness. It was more than just another of his pitiful dreams: this was a powerful feeling, frightful and yet comfortably familiar, a song without words or melody that rang in his head and wrapped him with tendrils of longing. It tugged at him so strongly that he scrambled clumsily to his feet, eager as a young swain called by his beloved. The sword! It was back, it was near!
Only as the last clinging remnants of his slumbers left him did he remember that the sword was not alone.
It was never alone. It belonged to Elias, his once-friend, now bitter enemy. Much as Guthwulf ached to be near it, to bask in its song as he would the warmth of a fire, he knew he would have to approach cautiously. Miserable as his current life was, he preferred it to what Elias would do to him if he was captured—or worse, what Elias would let that serpent Pryrates do to him.
It never occurred to him that it would be even better simply to leave the sword alone. The song of it was like the splash of a stream to a traveler dying of thirst. It drew him, and he had no choice but to follow its call.
Still, some animal cunning remained. As he felt his way through the well-learned tunnels, he knew he needed not only to find Elias and the sword, but also to approach them in such a way so as to avoid discovery and capture, as he had managed once before to spy on the king from a shelf of rock above the foundry floor. To this end, he followed the sword’s compelling summons but remained at as great a distance as he could, like a hawk circling its master on a long trace. But trying to resist the complete pull was maddening. The first day he followed the sword, Guthwulf forgot completely to go to the spot where the woman regularly left food for him. By the second day—which, to the blind Earl of Utanyeat, was whatever came between one sleep and the next—the sword’s call beating within him like a second heartbeat had almost dissolved the memory that such a spot even existed. He ate what crawling things his groping hands encountered, and drank from any moving trickle of water he could find. He had learned in his first weeks in the tunnels what happened when he drank from standing pools.
Now, after three sleeps full of sword-dreams, he had wandered far beyond any of the passageways familiar to him. The stones he felt beneath his hands had never met his touch before; the tunnels themselves, but for the always-present phantom voices and the equally constant pull of the Great Sword, seemed completely alien.
He had some small idea of how long he had been searching for the sword this time, and, in a rare moment of clear thinking, he wondered what the king was doing down in the hidden places beneath the castle for such a long time.
A moment later, a wild, glorious thought came to him.
He’s lost the sword. He’s lost it down here somewhere, and it’s just sitting, waiting for whoever finds it! Waiting for me! Me!
He did not even realize that he was slavering in his dusty beard. The thought of having the sword all to himself—to touch, to listen to, to love and to worship—was so horrifyingly pleasurable that he took a few steps and then fell to the floor, where he lay quivering until darkness took his remaining senses.
After he had regained his wits, Guthwulf rose and wandered, then slept once more. Now he was aw
ake again, and standing before the branching of two tunnels, trying to decide which one was most likely to lead him upward. He knew, somehow, that the sword was above him, just as a mole beneath the ground knows which way to dig to reach the surface. In other lucid moments he had worried that perhaps he was grown so sensitive to the sword’s song that it was leading him upward to the king’s very throne room, where he would be caught and slaughtered just as a mole would be if it dug its way up into the kennels.
But even though he had been moving steadily upward, he had started very deep. He felt sure the rise had not been anything so great as he feared. He was also certain that in his roundabout way he was moving ever outward, away from the core of the castle. No, the beautiful, terrifying thing that drew him, the living, singing blade, must be somewhere here beneath the earth, coffined in rock just as he was. And when he found it, he would not be lonely any more. He only had to decide which of these tunnels to follow. …
Guthwulf raised his hands and reflexively rubbed at his blind eyes. He felt very weak. When was the last time he had eaten? What if the woman gave up on him and stopped putting out food? It had been so nice to eat real food. …
But if I find the sword, if I have it all to myself, he gloated, I won’t care about any of that.
He cocked his head. There was a scratching noise just beyond him somewhere, as though something were trapped inside the stone. He had heard that noise before—in fact, he heard it ever more frequently of late—but it was nothing to do with what he sought.
The scratching ended, and still he stood in painful indecision before the forking tunnels. Even when he put down stones for markers, it was so easy to become lost, but he was certain that one of these passages led upward to the heart of the song—the crooning, sucking, soul-drowning melody of the Great Sword. He did not want to go the wrong way and spend another endless time trying to find his way back. He was weak with hunger, numb with weariness.
He might have stood for an hour or a day. At last, beginning as gently as a dust devil, a wind came tugging at his hair, a puff of breeze from the right-hand turning. Then, a moment later, a flurry of somethings welled up out of the tunnel and floated past him—the spirits that haunted the dark nether-roads. Their voices echoed in his skull, dim and somehow hopeless.
… The Pool. We must seek him at the Pool. He will know what to do … Sorrow. They have called down the final sorrow …
As the twittering things blew past, blind Guthwulf slowly smiled. Whatever they were, spirits of the dead or bleak products of his own madness, they always came to him out of the depths, from the deepest, oldest parts of the labyrinth. They came from below … and he wished to climb.
He turned and shuffled into the left-hand tunnel.
The remains of Naglimund’s massive gate had been plugged with rubble, but since it was lower than the surrounding wall and the piles of broken stone offered purchase for climbing feet, it seemed to Count Eolair the logical place for an assault to begin. He had been surprised when the Sithi had concentrated themselves before a blank and undamaged stretch of wall.
He left Maegwin and the contingent of anxious mortal warriors under Isorn’s command, then crept up the snowy hillside to join Jiriki and Likimeya in the shell of a broken building a few hundred ells from Naglimund’s outwall. Likimeya gave him a cursory glance, but Jiriki nodded.
“It is almost time,” the Sitha said. “We have called for the m’yon rashí—the strikers.”
Eolair stared at the contingent of Sithi before the wall. They had stopped singing, but had not moved away. He wondered why they should risk the arrows of the Norns when whatever their singing was intended for seemed finished. “Strikers? Do you mean battering rams?”
Jiriki shook his head, smiling faintly. “We have no history of such things, Count Eolair. I imagine we could devise such an engine, but we decided to fall back on what we know instead.” His look darkened. “Or rather, what we learned from the Tinukeda’ya.” He gestured. “Look, the m’yon rashí come.”
A quartet of Sithi were approaching the wall. Although he did not recognize them, Eolair thought they looked no different than the hundreds of other Peaceful Ones camped in Naglimund’s shadow. All were slender and golden-skinned. Like most of their fellows, no two seemed quite alike in the color of either their armor or the hair that streamed from beneath their helms; the m’yon rashí gleamed against the snow like misplaced tropical birds. The only difference the count could see between these and any other of Jiriki’s people was that each bore a dark staff long as a walking-stick. These staffs were of the same odd gray-black stuff as Jiriki’s sword Indreju; each was knobbed with a globe of some blue crystalline stone.
Jiriki turned from the Hernystirman and called out an order. His mother rose from her crouch and added words of her own. A contingent of Sithi archers moved up until they surrounded the group near the walls. The bowmen nocked arrows and drew, then froze in place, eyes scanning the empty walls.
The leader of the m’yon rashí, a female Sitha with grass-green hair and armor of a slightly deeper green, lifted her stick and slowly swung it toward the wall as if she forced it against the flowing current of a river. When the blue gem struck, all the m’yon rashí chanted a single loud syllable. Eolair felt a tremor in his bones, as though a tremendous weight had struck the ground nearby. For a moment the earth seemed to shift beneath him.
“What …?” he gasped, struggling to find his balance. Before him, Jiriki raised a hand for silence.
The other three Sithi stepped forward to join the woman in green. As they all chanted, each in turn brought his staff forward to strike in a rough triangle around the first; each syrup-slow impact reverberated through the earth and up through the feet of Eolair and the other observers.
The Count of Nad Mullach stared. For a dozen ells up and down the wall from where the m’yon rashí stood, the snow slid off the stones. Around the jeweled heads of the four staffs, Eolair saw that the stone had turned a lighter shade of gray, as though it had sickened somehow—or as though it were covered with a web of fine cracks.
Now the Sithi lifted their striking-rods away from the wall. Their chanting grew louder. The leader struck again, a little more swiftly this time. The silent thunder of her blow rolled through the icy ground. The rest followed suit, each strike emphasized by a loudly chanted word. As they struck for the third time, bits of stone began to shiver loose from the top of the high wall, falling down to vanish into the high snow.
The count could not contain his astonishment. “I have never seen the like!”
Jiriki turned, his high-boned face serene. “You should go back to your folk. It will be only a moment more and they should be ready.”
Eolair could not take his eyes from the strange spectacle. He walked backward down the hill, steadying himself with his arms outstretched whenever the shifting ground threatened to topple him from his feet.
At the fourth impact, a great section of the wall crumbled and fell inward, leaving a hole at the top that looked as though some huge creature had taken a bite from it. Eolair at last realized the imminence of what Jiriki had told him and hurried the rest of the way down to Isorn and the waiting Hernystiri.
“Ready!” he cried. “Be ready!”
There was a fifth shuddering, the strongest yet. Eolair lost his balance and fell forward, tumbling down the hill until he rolled to a stop, his nose and mouth stinging and cold from the snow. He half-expected his troop to laugh, but they were staring wide-eyed up the hill past him.
Eolair looked back. Naglimund’s great wall, as thick as the height of two men, was dissolving like a wave-struck sand castle. There was a loud rasping of stone on stone, but that was all. The wall fell down into the banks of white with an eerily muffled sound. Great gouts of snow were thrown up everywhere, so that a fog of white flakes filled the air, obscuring all.
When it cleared, the m’yon rashí had retreated. A hole a dozen ells across was opened into Naglimund and its shadows. Slowly, a sea
of dark figures was filling that hole. Eyes gleamed. Spear-points glimmered.
Eolair struggled to his feet. “Men of Hernystir!” he cried. “To me! The hour has come!”
But the count’s troops did not budge, and instead it was the horde within Naglimund that came surging out through the breach, swift and uncountable as termites swarming from a shattered nest.
There was a great clang of blade on shield from the Sithi ranks, then a flight of arrows hissed out, felling many of the first Norns rushing down the hillside. Some of the Norns carried bows as well, and clambered up onto the castle wall to shoot, but for the most part neither side seemed content to wait. With the eagerness of lovers, the ancient kindred rushed forward to meet each other.
The battle before Naglimund quickly became a scene of horrible confusion. Through the swirling snow, Eolair saw that more than the slender Norns had issued from the crack in the wall. There were giants, too, creatures tall as two men and covered with gray-white fur, yet armored like humans, each bearing a great club which crushed bones like dry sticks.
Before the count could even retreat toward his men, one of the Norns was upon him. Incredibly, though a helm hid most of his pale face and armor covered his torso, the black-eyed creature wore no shoes, his long feet carrying him across the powdery snow as though it were solid stone. He was swift as a lynx. As Eolair stared in amazement, he almost lost his head to the Norn’s first sweeping blow.
Who could fathom such madness? Eolair pushed all thoughts but survival from his mind.
The Norn bore only a small arm shield, and with his light sword was far faster than the Count of Nad Mullach. Eolair found himself instantly plunged into a defensive struggle, wading backward down the hill, encumbered by his heavy armor and shield, almost betrayed several times by treacherous footing. He fended off several blows, but the Norn’s exultant grimace told Eolair that it was only a matter of time before his sinewy opponent found a fatal opening.