At that moment, sitting with a great company around the table, Guthwulf felt himself as alone as a man upon a windswept peak. He could not bear up under the burdens of deception and fear any longer. It was time to flee. Better to be a blind beggar in the worst cesspits of Nabban than stay a moment longer in this cursed and haunted keep.
Guthwulf pushed open the door of his chamber and paused in the frame to let the chill hallway air wash over him. It was midnight. Even had he not heard the procession of sorrowful notes ring from Green Angel Tower, he would have recognized the deeper touch of cold against his cheeks and eyes, the sharp edge that the night had when the sun was at its farthest retreat.
It was strange to use eyes to feel with, but now that Pryates had blasted away his sight, they had proved to be the most sensitive part of him, registering every change in wind and weather with a subtlety of perception finer even than that of his fingertips. Still, useful as his blinded orbs were, there was something horrible about using them so. Several nights he had wakened sweating and breathless from dreams of himself as a shapeless crawling thing with fleshy stalks that pushed out from its face, sightless bulbs that wavered like snail’s horns. In his dreams he could still see; the knowledge that it was himself that he looked at dragged him gasping up from sleep, time and again, back into the real darkness that was now his permanent home.
Guthwulf moved out into the castle hallway, surprised as always to find himself still in blackness as he stepped from one room to another. As he closed the door on the chamber, and thus on his brazier of smoldering coals, the chill grew worse. He heard the muffled chinking of the armored sentries on the walls beyond the open window, then listened to the wind rise and smother the rattle of their surcoats beneath its own moaning song. A dog yipped in the town below, and somewhere, past several turns of the hallway, a door softly opened and closed.
Guthwulf rocked back and forth uncertainly for a moment, then took a few more steps away from his door. If he were to leave, he must leave now—it was useless to stand maundering in the hallway. He should hurry and take advantage of the hour: with all the world blinded by night, he was almost on equal terms again. What other choice was left? He had no stomach for what his king had become. But he must go in secret. Although Elias now had little use for Guthwulf, a High King’s Hand who could not ride to battle, still Guthwulf doubted that his once-friend would simply let him go. For a blind man to leave the castle where he was fed and housed, and also to flee his old comrade Elias, who had protected him from Pryrates’ righteous anger, smacked too much of treachery—or at least it would to the man on the Dragonbone Chair.
Guthwulf had considered this for some time, had even rehearsed his route. He would make his way down into Erchester and spend the night at St. Sutrin’s—the cathedral was all but deserted, and the monks there were charitable to any mendicants brave enough to spend nights inside the city walls. When morning came, he would mix with the straggle of outgoing folk on the Old Forest Road, traveling eastward into Hasu Vale. From there, who knew? Perhaps on toward the grasslands, where rumor whispered that Josua was building a rebel force. Perhaps to an abbey in Stanshire or elsewhere, some place that would be a refuge at least until Elias’ unimaginable game finally threw down everything.
Now it was time to stop thinking. Night would hide him from curious eyes; daylight would find him sheltered in St. Sutrin’s. It was time to go.
But even as he started down the hallway he felt a feather-light presence at his side—a breath, a sigh, the indefinable sense of someone there. He turned, hand flailing out. Had someone come to stop him after all?
“Who …?”
There was no one. Or, if someone was indeed near, that one now stood silent, mocking his sightlessness. Guthwulf felt a curious, abrupt unsteadiness, as though the floor tilted beneath his feet. He took another step and suddenly felt the presence of the gray sword very strongly, its peculiar force all around. For a moment he thought the walls had fallen away. A harsh wind passed over and through him, then was gone.
What madness was this?
Blinded and unmanned. He almost wept. Cursed.
Guthwulf steeled himself and walked away from the security of his chamber door, but the curious sense of dislocation accompanied him as he made his way through the Hayholt’s acres of corridors. Unusual objects passed beneath his questing fingers, delicate furnishings and smooth-polished but intricately figured balusters unlike anything he remembered from these halls. The door to the quarters once occupied by the castle chambermaids swung unbolted, yet though he knew the rooms to be empty—their mistress had smuggled all of her charges out of the castle before her attack on Pryrates—he heard dim voices whispering in the depths. Guthwulf shuddered, but kept walking. The earl already knew the shifting and untrustworthy nature of the Hayholt in these days: even before he lost his sight it had become a weirdly inconstant place.
Guthwulf continued to count his paces. He had practiced the journey several times in recent weeks: it was thirty-five steps to the turning of the corridor, two dozen more to the main landing, then out into the narrow, wind-chilled Vine Garden. Half a hundred paces more and he was back beneath a roof once again, making his way down the chaplain’s walking hall.
The wall became warm beneath his fingers, then abruptly turned blazingly hot. The earl snatched his hand away, gasping in shock and pain. A thin cry wafted down the corridor.
“… T’si e-isi’ha as-irigú …!”
He reached a trembling hand out to the wall again and felt only stone, damp and night-cold. The wind fluttered his clothing—the wind, or a murmuring, insubstantial crowd. The feeling of the gray sword was very strong.
Guthwulf hurried through the castle corridors, trailing his fingers as lightly as he could over the frighteningly changeable walls. As far as he could tell, he was the only real living thing in these halls. The strange sounds and the touches light as smoke and moths’ wings were only phantasms, he assured himself—they could not hinder him. They were the shadows of Pryrates’ sorcerous meddling. He would not let them obstruct his flight. He would not stay prisoned in this corrupted place.
The earl touched the rough wood of a door and found to his fierce joy that he had counted truly. He fought to restrain a cry of triumph and overwhelming relief. He had reached the small portal beside the Greater Southern Door. Beyond would be open air and the commons that served the Inner Bailey.
But when he pushed it open and stepped through, instead of the bitter night air the earl had expected, he felt a hot wind blowing and the heat of many fires upon his skin. Voices murmured, pained, fretful.
Mother of God! Has the Hayholt caught fire?
Guthwulf stepped back but could not find the doorway again. His fingers instead scrabbled at stone which grew hotter beneath his touch. The murmurs slowly rose into a drone of many agitated voices, soft and yet piercing as the hum of a beehive. Madness, he told himself, illusion. He must not give in. He staggered ahead, still counting his steps. Soon his feet were slipping in the mud of the commons, yet somehow at the same moment his heels clicked on smooth tiles. The invisible castle was in some terrible flux, burning and trembling one moment, cold and substantial the next, and all in total silence as its tenants slept on, unaware.
Dream and reality seemed almost completely interwoven, his personal blackness awash in whispering ghosts that confused his counting, but still Guthwulf struggled on with the grim resolve that had carried him through many dreadful campaigns as Elias’ captain. He trudged on toward the Middle Bailey, stopping at last to rest for a moment near—according to his faltering calculations—the spot where the castle doctor’s chambers had once stood. He smelled the sour tang of the charred timbers, reached out and felt them crumble into rotted powder beneath his touch, and distractedly remembered the conflagration that had killed Morgenes and several others. Suddenly, as though summoned up by his thoughts, crackling flames leaped all around him, surrounding him with fire. This could be no illusion—he could feel the deadly blaze! The
heat enclosed him like a crushing fist, balking him no matter which way he turned. Guthwulf gave a choked cry of despair. He was trapped, trapped! He must burn to death!
“Ruakha, ruakha Asu’a!” Ghostly voices were crying from beyond the flames. The presence of the gray sword was inside him now, in everything. He thought he could hear its unearthly music, and fainter, the songs of its unnatural brothers. Three swords. Three unholy swords. They knew him now.
There was a rustle like the beating of many wings, then the Earl of Utanyeat suddenly felt an opening appear before him, an empty spot in the otherwise unbroken wall of flame—a doorway that breathed cool air. With nowhere else to turn, he threw his cloak over his head and stumbled down into a hall of quieter, colder shadows.
PART ONE
The
Waiting Stone
1
Under Strange Skies
Simon squinted up at the stars swimming in the black night. He was finding it increasingly difficult to stay awake. His weary eyes turned to the brightest constellation, a rough circle of lights hovering what seemed a handsbreadth above the gaping, broken-eggshell edge of the dome.
There. That was the Spinning Wheel, wasn’t it? It did seem oddly elliptical—as though the very sky in which the stars hung had been stretched into an unfamiliar shape—but if that wasn’t the Spinning Wheel, what else could be so high in the sky in mid-autumn? The Hare? But the Hare had a little nubbly star close beside it—the Tail. And the Hare wasn’t ever that big, was it?
A claw of wind reached down into the half-ruined building. Geloë called this hall “the Observatory”—one of her dry jokes, Simon had decided. Only the passing of long centuries had opened the white stone dome to the night skies, so Simon knew it couldn’t really have been an observatory. Surely even the mysterious Sithi couldn’t watch stars through a ceiling of solid rock.
The wind came again, sharper this time, bearing a flurry of snowflakes. Though it wracked him with shivers, Simon was thankful: the chill scraped some of his drowsiness away. It wouldn’t do to fall asleep—not this night of all nights.
So, now I am a man, he thought. Well, almost. Almost a man.
Simon drew back the sleeve of his shirt and looked at his arm. He tried to make the muscles stand up, then frowned at the less than satisfactory results. He ran his fingers through the hair on his forearm, feeling the places where cuts had become ridged scars: here, where a Hunë’s blackened nails had left their mark; there, where he had slipped and dashed himself against a stone on Sikkihoq’s slope. Was that what being grown meant? Having a lot of scars? He supposed it also meant learning from the wounds, as well—but what could he learn from the sort of things that had happened to him during the last year?
Don’t let your friends get killed, he thought sourly. That’s one. Don’t go out in the world and get chased by monsters and madmen. Don’t make enemies.
So much for the words of wisdom that people were always so eager to share with him. No decisions were ever as easy as they had seemed in Father Dreosan’s sermons, where people always got to make a clean choice between Evil’s Way and the Aedon’s Way. In Simon’s recent experience of the world, all the choices seemed between one unpleasant possibility and another, with only the faintest reference to good and evil.
The wind skirling through the Observatory dome grew more shrill. It put Simon’s teeth on edge. Despite the beauty of the intricately sculpted pearlescent walls, this was still a place that did not seem to welcome him. The angles were strange, the proportions designed to please an alien sensibility. Like other products of its immortal architects, the Observatory belonged completely to the Sithi; it would never feel quite comfortable to mortals.
Unsettled, Simon got up and began to pace, the faint echo of his footsteps lost in the noise of the wind. One of the interesting things about this large circular hall, he decided, was that it had stone floors, something the Sithi no longer seemed to utilize. He flexed his toes inside his boots as a memory of Jao é-Tinukai’i’s warm, grassy meadows tugged at him. He had walked barefoot there, and every day had been a summer day. Remembering, Simon curled his arms across his chest for warmth and comfort.
The Observatory’s floor was made up of exquisitely cut and fitted tiles, but the cylindrical wall seemed to be one piece, perhaps the very stuff of the Stone of Farewell itself. Simon pondered. The other buildings here were also without visible joint or seam. If the Sithi had carved all the buildings on the surface directly from the hill’s rocky bones, and had cut down into Sesuad’ra as well—the Stone seemed shot through with tunnels—how did they know when to stop? Hadn’t they been afraid that if they made one hole too many the whole rock would collapse in on itself? That seemed almost as amazing as any other Sithi magic he had heard of or seen, and just as unavailable to mortals—knowing when to stop.
Simon yawned. Usires Aedon, but this night was long! He stared at the sky, at the wheeling, smoldering stars.
I want to climb up. I want to look at the moon.
Simon made his way across the smooth stone floor to one of the long staircases that spiraled gradually up around the circumference of the rooms, counting the steps as he went. He had already done this several times during the long night. When he got to the hundredth step, he sat down. The diamond gleam of a certain star, which had been midway along a shallow notch in the decayed dome when he made his last trip, now stood near the notch’s edge. Soon it would disappear from sight behind the remaining shell of the dome.
Good. So at least some time had passed. The night was long and the stars were strange, but at least time’s journey continued.
He clambered to his feet and continued up, walking the narrow stairway easily despite a certain light-headedness that he had no doubt would be cured by a long sleep. He climbed until he reached the highest landing, a pillar-propped collar of stone that at one time had circled the entire building. It had crumbled long ago, and most of it had fallen; now it extended only a few short ells beyond its joining with the staircase. The top of the high outer wall was just above Simon’s head. A few careful paces took him along the landing to a spot where the breach in the dome dipped down to only a short distance above him. He reached up, feeling carefully for good fingerholds, then pulled himself upward. He swung one of his legs over the wall and let it dangle over nothingness.
The moon, wound in a wind-tattered veil of clouds, was nevertheless bright enough to make the pale ruins below gleam like ivory. Simon’s perch was a good one. The Observatory was the only building within Sesuad’ra’s outwall that stood even as high as the wall itself, which gave the settlement the appearance of one vast, low building. Unlike the other abandoned Sithi dwelling places he had seen, no towers had loomed here, no high spires. It was as though the spirit of Sesuad’ra’s builders had been subdued, or as though they built for some utilitarian reason and not pure pride of craft. Not that the remains were unappealing: the white stone had a peculiar lambent glow all its own, and the buildings inside the curtain wall were laid out in a design of wild but somehow supremely logical geometry. Although it was built on a much smaller scale than what Simon had seen of Da’ai Chikiza and Enki-e-Shao’saye, the very modesty of its scope and uniformity of its design gave it a simple beauty different from those other, grander places.
All around the Observatory, as well as around the other major structures like the Leavetaking House and the House of Waters—names that Geloë had given them; Simon did not know if they were anything to do with their original purpose—snaked a system of paths and smaller buildings, or their remnants, whose interlocking loops and whorls were as cunningly designed yet naturalistic as the petals of a flower. Much of the area was overgrown by encroaching trees, but even the trees themselves revealed traces of some vestigial order, as the green space in the middle of a fairy-ring would show where the ancestral line of mushrooms had begun.
In the center of of what obviously had once been a settlement of rare and subtle beauty lay a strange tiled plateau. It was
now largely covered with impertinent grass, but even by moonlight it still showed some trace of its original lushly intricate design. Geloë called this central place the Fire Garden. Simon, comfortably familiar only with the workings of human habitations, would have guessed it to be a marketplace.
Beyond the Fire Garden, on the other side of the Leavetaking House, stood a motionless wavefront of pale conical shapes—the tents of Josua’s company, grown now to a sizable swell by the newcomers who had been trickling in for weeks. There was precious little room left, even on the broad tabletop summit of the Stone of Farewell; many of the most recent arrivals had made themselves homes in the warren of tunnels that ran beneath the hill’s stony skin.
Simon sat staring at the flicker of the distant campfires until he began to feel lonely. The moon seemed very far away, her face cold and unconcerned.
He did not know how long he had been staring into empty blackness. For a moment he thought he had fallen asleep and was now dreaming, but surely this queer feeling of suspension was something real—real and frightening. He struggled, but his limbs were remote and nerveless. Nothing of Simon’s body seemed to remain but his two eyes. His thoughts seemed to burn as brightly as the stars he had seen in the sky—when there had been a sky, and stars; when there had been something besides this unending blackness. Terror coursed through him.
Usires save me, has the Storm King come? Will it be black forever? God, please bring back the light!
And as if in answer to his prayer, lights began to kindle in the great dark. They were not stars, as they first seemed, but torches—tiny pinpoints of light that grew ever so slowly larger, as though approaching from a great distance away. The cloud of firefly glimmers became a stream, the stream became a line, looping and looping in slow spirals. It was a procession, scores of torches climbing uphill the way Simon himself had climbed up Sesuad’ra’s curving path when he had first come here from Jao é-Tinukai’i.