Cadrach’s words had become heavy and slow, and when at last he paused, Miriamele thought he might be falling asleep. But instead, when he spoke again there was a terrible hollowness to his voice. “Better they had kept us all out. Better that the League itself had fallen back into the dust of history.”
When he did not speak more, Miriamele straightened up. “What do you mean, Cadrach? What could you have done that was so bad?”
He groaned. “Not me, Princess—my sins came later. No, it was in the moment we brought that young priest into our midst … for that was Pryrates.”
Miriamele sucked in a deep breath, and for a moment, despite her warming feelings for Cadrach, felt the web of some terrible conspiracy gathering around her. Were all her enemies in alliance? Was the monk playing some deeper game, so that now she was in his hands utterly, adrift on an empty sea? Then she remembered the letter than Gan Itai had brought her.
“But you told me that,” she said, relieved. “You wrote to me and said something about Pryrates—that you had made him what he was.”
“If I said that,” Cadrach replied sadly, “then I was exaggerating in my grief. The seeds of great evil must have been in him already, otherwise it could never have flowered so swiftly and so forcefully … or such is my guess. My own part came much later, and my shame is that although I already knew him for a black-souled and heartless creature, I helped him anyway.”
“But why? And helped him how?”
“Ah, Princess, I feel the drunken honesty of the Hernystiri on me tonight without even tasting a swallow of wine—but still there are things I would rather not tell. The story of my downfall is mine alone. Most of my friends who were near me in those years are dead now. Let me say only this: for many reasons, both because of the things that I studied, many of which I wish I had left alone, and because of my own pain and the many drunken nights I spent trying to kill it, the joy that for a time I found in life soon faded away. When I was a child, I believed in the gods of my people. When I was older, I came to doubt them, and believed instead in the single god of the Aedonites—single, though He is dreadfully mixed up with Usires His son and Elysia the blessed mother. Later, in the first blossoming of my scholarship, I came to disbelieve in all gods, old and new. But a certain dread gripped my heart when I became a man, and now I believe in the gods once more … Ah, how I believe! … for I know myself to be cursed.” The monk quietly wiped his eyes and nose on his sleeve. He was sunken now in a shadow even the moonlight could not pierce.
“Cursed? What do you mean? Cursed how?”
“I do not know, or I would have found some hedge-wizard to grind me up a powder-charm a long time ago. No, I am joking, my lady, and a bleak joke it is. There are curses in the world no spell can dismiss—just as, I presume, there is good luck that no evil eye or envious rival can overthrow, but which can only be lost by its possessor. I only know that long ago the world became a heavy burden on me, one that my shoulders have proved too weak to bear. I became a drunkard in earnest—no local clown who drinks too many pots and sings the neighbors awake on his way home, but a chill-spirited, heart-lonely seeker of oblivion. My books were my only solace, but even they seemed to me full of the breath of tombs: they spoke only of dead lives, dead thoughts, and worst of all, dead and juiceless hopes, a million of them stillborn for every one that had a brief butterfly moment under the sun.
“So I drank, and I railed at the stars, and I drank. My drunkenness sent me down into the pit of despond, and my books, especially the volume with which I was then most deeply involved, only made my dread worse. So oblivion seemed even more desirable. Soon I was not wanted in the places where once I had been everyone’s friend, which made me even more bitter. When the keepers of the Tethtain Library told me I would no longer be welcomed there, I fell down as into a deep hole, a season-long riot of black drunkenness from which I awoke to find myself by the side of a road outside Abaingeat, naked and without a cintis-piece. Clothed only in brambles and leaves like the lowest beast, I made my way by night to the house of a nobleman I knew, a good man and a lover of learning who had been, from time to time, my willing patron. He let me in, fed me, then gave me a bed for the night. When the sun rose, he gave me a monk’s gown that had belonged to his brother and wished me good luck and Godspeed away from his house.
“There was disgust in his eyes that morning, Lady, a kind of loathing that I pray you never see in the eyes of another person. He knew of my habits, you see, and my tale of abduction and robbery did not fool him. I knew, as I stood in his doorway, that I had passed beyond the walls that surrounded my fellow men, that I was now as one unclean from plague. You see, all my drinking and wretched acts had only done this: it had made my curse as plain for others to see as it had been to me long before.”
Cadrach’s voice, which had grown more deathly during this recitation, now trailed off in a hoarse whisper. Miriamele listened to him breathing for a long while. She could think of nothing to say.
“But what had you actually done?” she tried at last. “You speak of being cursed, but you hadn’t done anything wrong—besides drinking too much wine, that is.”
Cadrach’s laugh was unpleasantly cracked. “Oh, the wine was only to dull the pain. That is the thing with these stains, my lady. Though others, especially innocents like yourself, cannot always see them, the stain is there nevertheless, and others sense it, as the beasts of the field sense one of their number who is sick or mad. You tried to drown me yourself, didn’t you?”
“But that was different!” Miriamele said indignantly. “That was for something you did!”
“Never fear,” the monk murmured. “I have done enough wrong since that night by the road in Abaingeat to justify any punishment.”
Miriamele pulled the oars in. “Is it shallow enough to drop the anchor?” she asked, trying to keep her voice calm. “My arms are tired.”
“I will find out.”
While the monk rooted the anchor out of the hold and made sure that its cord was tied firmly to the boat, Miriamele tried to think of something she could do to help him. The more she made him talk, the deeper the wounds seemed to be. His earlier good cheer, she sensed, was nothing but a thin skin that had grown over these raw places. Was it better to make him speak, when it was obviously painful, or simply to let it go? She wished that Geloë were here, or little Binabik with his shrewd and careful touch.
When the anchor had splashed over the side and the rope had fizzed down into the depths behind it, the two of them sat quietly for a while. At last, Cadrach spoke, his voice a little lighter than it had been.
“The cord only played out twenty ells or so before it struck bottom, so we may be closer to shore than I had thought. Still, you should try and sleep again, Miriamele. The day will be long tomorrow. If we are to reach shore, we will have to take turns at those oars so we can keep moving all day.”
“Might there not be a ship around somewhere that might see us and pick us up?”
“I don’t know if that would be the luckiest thing for us. Do not forget that Nabban now belongs utterly to your father and Pryrates. I think we will be happiest if we can make our way quietly to shore and disappear into the poorer parts of Nabban, then find our way to Xorastra’s inn.”
“You never explained about Pryrates,” she said boldly, inwardly praying that it was not a mistake. “What happened between the two of you?”
Cadrach sighed. “Would you really force me to tell you such black things, Lady? It was only weakness and fear that led me to mention them in my letter, when I was frightened you would mistake the Earl of Eadne for something better than he was.”
“I would not force you to do anything that would hurt you more, Cadrach. But I would like to know. These are the secrets that are behind our troubles, remember? It is not the time to hold them back, however bad they are.”
The monk nodded slowly. “Spoken like a king’s daughter—but spoken well. Ah, gods of earth and sky, if I had known that one day I would have
to tell such stories and say ‘that is my life,’ I think I would have pushed my head into my father’s kiln.”
Miriamele made no reply but pulled her cloak tight. Some of the mist had blown away, and the sea stretched away beneath them like a great black tabletop. The stars overhead seemed too small and chill to give off light; they hung unsparkling, like flecks of milky stone.
“I did not leave the fellowship of ordinary men completely empty-handed,” Cadrach began. “There were certain things I had obtained—many of them legitimately, in my early days of scholarship. One was a great treasure which no one knew that I had. My possessions—those I had not sold to buy wine—remained in the care of an old friend. When it was decided I was no longer fit for the company of those I had known, I took them back from him … against his protestations, for he knew I was not a reliable keeper. Thus, when times became particularly bad, I could usually find a dealer in rare manuscripts or church-forbidden books and—usually at prices so low as to approach robbery—get some money in exchange for one of my prized books. But, as I said, one thing that I had found was worth a thousandfold more than all the rest. The story of its getting is a night’s tale in itself, but it was for long the one thing with which I would not part, however desperate my circumstances. For you see, I had found a copy of Du Svardenvyrd, the fabled book of mad Nisses, the only copy that I have ever heard to exist in modern days. Whether it was the original I do not know, for the binding had long since disappeared, but the … person from whom I obtained it swore that it was genuine; indeed, if it was a forgery, it was a work of brilliance in itself. But copy or no, it contained the actual words of Nisses—of that there was no doubt. No one could read the dreadful things that I did, then look at the world around him, and disbelieve.”
“I have heard of it,” said Mirimele. “Who was Nisses?”
Cadrach laughed shortly. “A question for the ages. He was a man who came out of the north beyond Elvritshalla, from the land of the Black Rimmersmen who live below Stormspike, and presented himself to Fingil, King of Rimmersgard. He was no court conjuror, but it is said that he gave Fingil the power that enabled him to conquer half of Osten Ard. That power may have been wisdom, for Nisses knew the facts of things that no one else had ever dreamed existed. After Asu’a was conquered and Fingil died at last, Nisses served Fingil’s son Hjeldin. It was during those years that he wrote his book—a book that contained part of the dreadful knowledge he had brought with him when he appeared in a murderous snowstorm outside Fingil’s gates. He and Hjeldin both died in Asu’a—the young king by throwing himself out the window of the tower that bears his name. Nisses was found dead in the room from which Hjeldin had leapt, with no mark upon him. There was a smile on his face; the book was clutched in his hands.”
Miriamele shuddered. “That book. They spoke of it at Naglimund. Jarnauga said that it supposedly tells of the Storm King’s coming and other things.”
“Ah, Jarnauga,” Cadrach said sadly. “How he would have loved to see it! But I never showed it to him, nor to any of the Scrollbearers.”
“But why? If you had it, even a copy, why didn’t you show it to Morgenes and the others? I thought that was just the sort of thing that your League was for.”
“Perhaps. But by the time I had finished reading it, I was no longer a Scrollbearer. I knew it in my heart. From the moment I turned the last page I gave up the love of learning for the love of oblivion—the two cannot live together. Even before I found Nisses’ book, I had gone far down the wrong paths, learning things that no man should learn who wishes to sleep well at night. And I was jealous of my fellow Scrollbearers, Miriamele, jealous of their simple happiness with their studies, angry with their calm assurance that all that could be examined could be understood. They were so certain that if they could look closely enough at the nature of the world they could divine all its purposes … but I had something they did not, a book the mere reading of which would not only prove to them things I had already suggested, but would crumble the pillars of their understanding. I was full of rage, Miriamele, but I was also full of despair.” He paused, the pain clear in his voice. “The world is different once Nisses has explained it. It is as though the pages of his book were dipped in some slow poison that kills the spirit. I touched them all.”
“It sounds horrible.” Miriamele remembered the image she had seen in one of Dinivan’s books, a horned giant with red eyes. She had seen that image since, in many troubling dreams. Could it be better not to know some things, to be blind to certain pictures and ideas?
“Horrible indeed, but only because it reflected the true terror that lurked beneath the waking world, the shadows which are the obverse image of sunlight. Still, even such a powerful thing as Nisses’ book eventually became nothing more to me than another instrument of forgetting: when I had read it so many times that it made me sick even to stare at it, I began to sell its pages off, one by one.”
“Elysia, Mother of Mercy! Who would buy such a thing?”
Cadrach chortled harshly. “Even those who were sure it was a deft forgery stumbled over themselves in their haste to take a single page from my hands. A banned book has a powerful fascination, young one, but a truly evil book—and there are not many—draws the curious as honey lures flies.” His laughter grew for a moment, then was choked off in what sounded like a sob. “Sweet Usires, I wish that I had burned it!”
“But what about Pryrates?” she prodded. “Did you sell pages to him?”
“Never!” Cadrach almost shouted. “Even then, I knew he was a demon. He was forced out of the League long before my own downfall, and every one of us knew what a danger he was!” He recovered his composure. “No, I suspect that he merely frequented the same peddlers of antiquities that I did—it is a rather small community, you know—and that some scraps made their way into his hands. He is tremendously learned in dark matters, Princess, particularly the most dangerous areas of the Art. It was not difficult, I’m sure, for him to discover who had possessed the powerful thing from which those pages came. Neither was it hard for him to find me, despite the fact that I had sunk myself as deeply into shadows as I could, bending all my own learning into making myself unimportant to the point of invisibility. But, as I said, he found me. He sent some of your father’s own guardsmen after me. You see, he had already become a counselor to princes—or in your sire’s case, kings-to-be.”
Miriamele thought of the day she had first met Pryrates. The red priest had come to her father’s apartments in Meremund, bringing Elias information about events in Nabban. Young Miriamele had been having a difficult time speaking to her father, struggling to think of something she could tell him that might make him smile even for a moment, as he often had in the days when she was the light of his eye. Matters of state providing a useful excuse for avoiding another uncomfortable conversation with his daughter, Elias had sent her away. Curious, she had caught Pryrates’ gaze on her way out the door.
Even as a young girl, Miriamele had become used to the variety of different looks she inspired among her father’s courtiers—irritation from those who considered her an impediment to their affairs, pity from those who recognized her loneliness and confusion, honest calculation from those who wondered who she might marry someday, or whether she would grow into an attractive woman, or whether she would be a pliable queen after her father’s death. But never until that moment had she been examined with anything like Pryrates’ inhuman regard, a stare cold as a plunge in ice water. There seemed not the slightest bit of human feeling in his black eyes: she had known somehow that had she been flayed meat on a butcher’s table his expression would have been no different. At the same time, he had seemed to see right into her and through her, as though her every thought were being made to walk naked before him, squirming beneath his inspection. Aghast, she had turned from his terrible gaze and fled down the corridor, inexplicably weeping. Behind, she heard the dry buzz of the alchemist’s voice as he began to speak. She realized she meant no more to this new
intimate of her father’s than would a fly—that he would ignore her with never another thought, or crush her without mercy if it suited his purposes. To a girl raised in the nurturing certainty of her own importance, an importance that had even outlasted her father’s love, it was a horrifying realization.
Her father, for all his faults, had never been a monster of that sort. Why, then, had he brought Pryrates into his inner circle, so that eventually the devil-priest became his closest and most trusted advisor? It was a deeply troubling question, and one for which she had never discovered an answer.
Now, in the gently pitching boat, she struggled to keep her voice steady. “Tell me what happened, Cadrach.”
The monk plainly did not want to start. Miriamele could hear his fingers scratching quietly against the wooden seat, as though he searched for something in the darkness. “They found me in the stable of an inn in south Erchester,” he said slowly, “sleeping in the muck. The guardsmen dragged me out, then threw me in the back of a wagon and we rode toward the Hayholt. It was during the worst year of that terrible drought, and in the late afternoon light everything was gold and brown, even the trees stiff and dull as dried mud. I remember staring, my head ringing like a church bell—I had been sleeping off a long bout of drinking, of course—and wondering if the same dryness that made my eyes and nose and mouth feel as though they were packed with dust had somehow leached away all the colors of the world as well.
“The soldiers, I’m sure, thought I was nothing but another criminal, and one not fated for a long life beyond that afternoon. They talked as though I were already dead, complaining about the onerous duty of having to carry out and bury a corpse as fetid and unwashed as mine. A guardsman even said he would demand an extra hour’s pay for the unpleasant labor. One of his companions smirked and said: ‘From Pryrates?’, and the braggart fell silent. Some of the other soldiers laughed at his discomfort, but their voices were forced, as though the mere thought of demanding anything from the red priest was enough to spoil the day. This was the first time I had any inkling of where I was going, and I knew it to be a great deal worse than simply being hung as a thief or a traitor—both of which I was. I tried to throw myself out of the cart, but was quickly pulled back in again. ‘Ho,’ one of them said, ‘he knows the name!’