Another day passed this way, and then another. Each morning, just before dawn, the Old Man would ask Mark to stare into the fire and tell him what he saw; when Mark said he saw nothing, the Old Man beat him and would not speak to him again. The day would break and the shadows would fade from the room. Sometime in the morning he would point outside and Mark would go to gather firewood, and then return. Shafts of sunlight crept across the floor, now slender, swelling, now long and wide, now slanting, narrower, gone. At twilight the Old Man would pull a chestnut from the fire and crack it open with his teeth, and give it to Mark to eat. Mark was never hungry, but he ate what he was given, though the nuts were often rotten, or burned and hard.
As time went by his mind grew hungry. He looked for firewood everywhere: in the stables, the Hall, the palace. He peered through every window and opened every doorway: all except the door to the Tower, which the Old Man forbade him ever to pass. Soon he knew the whole ruined Keep by heart, every passage and every room, every tree in its orchard, every skeleton in the ditch around its walls. At last, when he had explored the buildings and the grounds and the woods around, he gave up his journeys. He gathered a great store of brush into the main courtyard, and did not leave the castle any more.
He dreamt of the morning he would see something in the fire, and the Old Man would be glad, and speak words of praise to him, and begin his teaching. But as the days wore on Mark grew more desperate, feeling the Old Man must soon weary of his stupidity, his ignorance. At last in desperation he lied, and claimed to see a crown of flame hidden in the fire.
The Old Man beat him, but no worse than usual.
Mark began to think that with luck he would guess what the Old Man wanted him to see. He spent each day absorbed in speculation, imagining and discarding one possibility after another, testing each out in his mind, sneaking glances at the Old Man, trying to guess what he was waiting for.
At first he tried simple things: after the crown a throne, a sword, a goblet, a maiden, a white charger, a castle, an army, with banners. Soon his imagination grew: he saw dragons, devils, horrors out of nightmare, elfin feasts, scenes of the past and future. He told elaborate stories that grew from one day to the next, thinking that perhaps the Old Man was looking for a tale, an image, a legend of long ago. He made up songs and claimed to hear them in the hissing flames, the popping embers.
One night, heart almost stopping, he saw Gail in the flames.
The Old Man beat him, as always.
He saw Valerian then, and Lissa, and Sir William and Duke Richard and Deron and Astin and Vultemar and Anujel and Lord Peridot and his mother and so on through all the people of his life; and as he saw each one, they seemed to drop from his memory, consumed like moths by the fire.
Finally he could see no more. In three days he had moved only to bring in brush for the fire; when the Old Man beat him he lay in his spot by the grate and did not flinch. “Cum,” the Old Man said, with a voice like a coal popping, “look into my fire and tell me aught you see.”
Mark stared dully, unmoving, from his place by the grate. “Ashes,” he said.
The silence lengthened and no blow fell. A wild hope flared in Mark’s heart that he had passed the test at last, that his days (weeks? months?) of stupidity would be forgiven.
The Old Man turned his back on Mark. “Cum,” he said coldly. “Tha hast work to do.”
The Old Man led him to a forge. “Tha hast worked a smith before. Here be fire and water, an anvil and iron. Each day tha’lt cum here and light the fire until it blazons. Then shalt tha beat oncet on the iron. An I hear a second stroke, I’ll heave tha from hence and teach tha nought.”
“What am I making?” Mark asked.
The Old Man’s voice was hard as December. “A sword.”
“One stroke a day! How can I ever—”
The blackthorn staff leaped out and struck him in the stomach, so hard it made tears spring to his eyes. He could not speak for days; he carried the ache much longer, like a rat that gnawed his belly.
Each day he came to the forge and lit the fire. Then he pulled upon the great bellows until the flames roared and the iron began to glow, like a red serpent in black skin. And each day he hammered down a single stroke.
The days passed very slowly. The fire’s heat toughened his skin, and his broad shoulders grew broader from pumping the great bellows.
And each day, as he woke in the darkness before dawn, he saw his father again, bending, leaving, gone. And the Old Man kept his back turned, and he never spoke.
Until one day he said, “Art tha yet eager to ’prentice on me? Dost tha wish to be more swift about thy making?”
Mark spoke the truth, waiting to be beaten. “Aye.”
“Fair enow. Now mayst tha strike the iron thrice each day; but tha must never step out o’ doors. From now will I gather wood.” And though many days (weeks? months?) had passed since Mark had felt the world’s wind on his cheek, it galled him that the Old Man should take away his right to go outside. But the dark drive to make his sword was greater than his thirst for light and air. From that day forth he never felt the wind; but his anger rolled from him like sweat as he pumped the bellows and struck his iron. Slowly, slowly, the iron’s shape began to change, but Mark knew it would never be a sword within his lifetime.
Then one day the Old Man said, “How goes thy making? Wouldst tha crave to go more swiftly still?”
“How much swifter?” Mark replied bitterly. “Five strokes? Ten?”
“Tha mayst labour at forge as tha will—an tha oath to never see the sun. Tha’lt sleep here, aface of forge, waking ony in darkness, walking ony in shadow: no light to thine eye but embers and hot iron.”
A sudden fierce desire blazed up in Mark to see sunshine, hear birdsong, smell grass wet with dew. If he agreed to the Old Man’s terms, his world would hold only darkness and fire, iron and ashes. He knew he could not live like that.
Yet hunger drove him. “I’ll do it,” he said.
From that day forth he woke at night and slept through the day. He closed the forge door; there were no windows. He woke without knowing morning: slept without seeing sunset. His world was the stink of hot iron; the roar of flame; sweat; the taste of ashes. He knew no more than what the iron knew, felt nothing but what it felt. He worked fiercely, day after day; his chest deepened and his strong arms grew stronger still from hammering. And with every stroke he beat hate into the iron: hate for the Old Man who kept him penned in a lightless prison. When he woke, he burned with rage: when he slept, he dreamt of murder.
He made the pommel first. When it was almost done he put it in the flames until it began to smoulder with a dull red glow. With tongs he swiftly plucked it out, and scored it all around with the black dagger, leaving a single line spiralling from the butt up to the pommel’s top. This was the grip, the striving of his life, circling ever upward without rest.
Then he made the hilts, a plain iron bar to keep his hands from sliding up the blade, and keep a foe’s weapon from sliding down. Grimly he laughed at the joke: he was Shielder’s Mark; yet his father had left him no shield. The hilts on his sword would be all his protection.
The blade he fashioned last, long and straight and black. When he was done he smashed it against the anvil and it shattered. He picked up the pieces, and began again. The next time the blade was stronger, and did not break against the anvil, but the black dagger cut his sword in half as if cutting cheese. A third time he fashioned the blade; and this time the dagger could not mar it.
Then he worked to give the blade an edge. When he was done, he tore a strip from his shirt. It only took the lightest pressure against the edge to make the cloth split, but Mark was not satisfied, and went to work again. The next time he merely dropped the strip of cloth onto the upturned blade. It fell cleanly into two pieces and fluttered to the ground. Still it was not enough. The third time he dropped a strip of cloth upon the blade it fell in one piece to the floor. Only when Mark squatted to pull on one edge w
ith a finger could he tell it was in two halves.
He fitted the blade into the pommel, the hilts across them both, and joined all parts together. Then he called the Old Man, and said that he was done.
“Give me the dagger,” the Old Man said. “Now name thy blade.”
Mark held the weapon in his hand: a thing of darkness, made of iron, sweat, and bitter hate; the cruel hiss of coals, the bellows’ dragon-breath. “Its name is Ashes,” Mark said, for this was the teaching the Old Man had given him.
The Old Man plucked Ashes from his hand, and dropped it with a clatter to the floor. “It’s not enough,” he said, turning for the door.
Mark boiled with rage. Ashes was his child, his life for an endless term of hell. It was all his darkness: pure as rage, strong as hate, sharp as grief.
The next thing he knew he was standing with Ashes in his hand, its point at the Old Man’s bald head, just where the white scar seamed his ancient scalp. “It is enow,” Mark hissed.
“I say it is not.” The Old Man’s words were dry as bones.
“It is enow!” Mark screamed. “Turn around. Turn around and look at me! Or by God I’ll kill you where you stand.”
He felt Ashes, cold and heavy in his hand.
How simple, how simple it would be. All he had to do was kill the Old Man and walk away. He could know sunshine again, and open air, and sky.
He hated the Old Man; hated his dry voice, his hard bones, his blackthorn staff, his walk, his cruel laugh. The Old Man was evil and his touch was unclean. “You robbed me,” Mark hissed. “I had a world to look at and you made me see ashes.”
The Old Man said, “All there is, is ashes.”
At that moment Mark hated the Old Man selflessly, entirely, utterly.
He hated him almost as much as he hated his father.
“I gave you everything,” he cried.
The Old Man said, “Tha’rt nae worth loving. An thy own father could not love tha, how could I?”
A great shudder ran through Mark’s body. The shock of pain was so great he thought he would die.
But in that instant, before he knew he was still alive and began to swing his sword to crack the Old Man’s skull, some part of the old Mark, a part that had never quite died, held his hand, trembling, for one fraction of a moment. Why? Why is t’Awd Man so cruel? What does he want from you?
He wants to die.
He wants to die.
T’Awd Man is trying every way he knows to make you kill him. And it isn’t hard, because you’ve hated him for weeks (months? years?). He’s beaten you, stroke by stroke, into a long black weapon wi’ blade as sharp as grief.
“I can kill,” Mark said slowly. “You’ve taught me that.” Slowly he dropped his arms, until his swordpoint scraped against the stone floor. “But I won’t do it for any man’s bidding but my own.”
The Old Man turned, eyes bright with fury. “It is the ony way! Hast tha learnt nought after all? Tell me, what dost tha see i’ the fire?”
“Ashes.”
“Ashes!” the Old Man cried.
“…But there are also faces in the flames,” Mark said softly.
What was it Val said? Look for joy. That must be your candle, when the darkness falls.
God was in running water, you said to him, and wind. He thought of the river behind his Keep, racing through rapids, or pooling under willow-wands. Each fishing hole a cup of shadows. He remembered the hissing rain on the road from Swangard, their sudden booming footsteps as they crossed a plankboard bridge; farm windows in the distance, lamplit yellow squares of human hope.
He thought of Gail for the first time in what seemed like years. Remembered her, flushed and quivering and ready to punch him if he laughed, giving him that monstrous pink hat. Remembered her too as he’d seen her first, standing by the throne with her vixen’s face and narrow laughing eyes. He held her like a match before his eyes, her and Val and Lissa too, and the wind that had billowed up behind him when he broke the Ghostwood’s spell, and the infinite blue and empty hawk-specked sky over Borders. His home.
“There are faces in the fire, Old Man, and crowns and swords and elfin feasts. If you listen, you can hear their songs. There is more to life than ashes: I don’t think yours is all the wisdom there is.”
“Perhaps not,” the Old Man replied, his gaunt face raised. “But it is wisdom I have earned.” He gazed at Mark, frail and unimaginably old. “Tha buys wisdom not only from the sins tha suffer, boy, but from the sins tha commit.”
Bitter then was the voice of Hedrod’s Son. “An endless time I waited for my sons to cum and tak my teaching from me, but they did not. Tha’rt the ony son I am ever like to have, Shielder’s Mark. Ashes is the ony wisdom I am master of; I taught it all to tha.”
“It’s what you had to give,” Mark said. “I won’t turn it down.”
“I thought it would change all, when tha stole the black blade Aron used to dam Hedrod my father and all magic else. The spell would be broke and he would be loose again, and he would cum for me at last, in hate or love, and free me from this cursed Keep. But he did not cum. He chose to raise his armies, reclaim his crown, rip tribute from the living: but he did not cum.” The Old Man’s eyes glittered with hate and fear. “Glad I am I murthered him! That I’ll not repent! How can a son absolve his father for not loving him?”
Hedrod, Mark thought. That must be the Ghost King! And this Old Man must be Hedrod’s son; the Prince who murdered him all those years ago. Mark’s mind was racing, trying to make sense of the Old Man’s words. What was that about raising armies? It must have been Hedrod who appeared before Duke Richard, to lay claim to his ancient territories.
The Old Man backed toward a door that led into the heart of the Keep. His lips twitched, and the black dagger in his hand swayed and trembled. “A thousand years have I burned my eyes on ashes, held by Aron’s spell. Waiting, waiting. But now I wait no longer!” he cried. And turning, he fled within the Keep. Mark started after him.
At that moment came a sound so utterly strange that for the longest time Mark could not recognize it. Only gradually, like dawn finally coming up out of the blue darkness before morning, did he realize it was another human voice. And it was calling his name.
Swiftly he turned and flung open the other smithy door, the one that opened onto the courtyard. Outside it was the last hour before dawn. The night was cool and unimaginably fresh after a lifetime before the forge.
Mark halted, stunned by the touch of open air. Overhead, morning stars blinked in a paling sky.
“Mark? Is that you?” Val stood fumbling for a weapon at his side, eyes blinking with fear.
“Good God!” Mark cried. “Next pigs will turn to peacocks! Valerian is wearing a sword!”
“Not to much purpose,” Val gasped, letting his scabbard dangle.
A thin figure went hurrying across the eastern wall and disappeared into the Tower. “There he goes!” Mark cried.
“Wha—?”
“Come on!” Mark yelled, and they were off, pelting across the courtyard. “T’Awd Man means some devilment.”
The oaken door at the base of the Tower was a lattice of rotting boards held in place by iron bands and a great iron padlock on a chain. Mark raised Ashes above his head and burst the bands asunder with a single terrific stroke. He kicked the door open. Piles of rubble lay inside, spattered with bat droppings, dead leaves and smashed glass. The air was thick with the smell of death and decay. A coil of stairs rose up inside the wall like a stone serpent: overhead, the sound of a tapping staff dwindled into the darkness.
Mark glanced at his friend, who stood on the edge of that desolation, pale and blinking. Valerian’s sword wavered like a feather in his hand. “You don’t have to come, Val. This isn’t scholar’s business.”
“This isn’t anyone’s business,” Val gulped. “But I didn’t come into the Ghostwood to let you go up those stairs alone.”
Gravely Mark nodded.
Together they plunged in
to the darkness. Mark took the stairs three at a time, holding Ashes in his right hand while with his left he felt for the wall.
The footsteps above him stopped. A bolt drew back and a door creaked open. Sounds pelted down like hail: glass smashing, tiles bursting, iron chopping against wood or bone, the Old Man’s shrieks.
Mark charged into the topmost chamber of the Scarlet Tower, then stood, watching the Old Man in amazement. “Here I am!” cried Hedrod’s Son. “I will hide no longer!”
Once this had been a chamber of dark knowledge. Now books lay scattered along the floor, their covers slashed and rotted. “Cum, cum tha bastard, tha King of Kings! Drop a cloak of flesh around thy black heart and cum to me!” The Old Man swept a row of glass jars from a table: dark pulpy bodies oozed from them, stinking horribly, and quivered on the floor.
The mummified corpse of a young boy drooped from a pillar where it had been tied. A web of black rags hung around its shoulders. The Old Man danced among the rubble, slashing wildly at the corpse. At its feet crouched a wide copper basin, spattered with dried blood. “Listen to me!” the Old Man howled. “Listen to me!”
A voice grim and low said, “I hear.”
“Oh shite,” Mark said weakly.
A shadow took shape at the far end of the room, behind the pillar where the sacrifice was bound. The air seemed to thicken, the stink of death to weave itself into a form, a tall man, old and terrible. Fear clung to him. The scar on Mark’s right palm opened like a door and magic whirled through it like a cold, damp wind: he felt his skin creep with dread.
something in the house
O god he wanted to throw himself back down the stairs, jump from the window, do anything but meet its face, anything but look beneath its crown into its terrible eyes.
The fingernails of the Ghost’s left hand clicked against the pommel of a long grey sword. His right hand rested on the dead boy’s thin shoulder. “Who dares call?”
The Old Man stood still at last, his thin chest heaving, the black dagger shaking in his hand. His eyes flicked quickly at Mark. “Hast tha cum to learn another lesson then?” he said, with a queer, cackling gasp, half mad with fear. “Allow me to present my honoured father.”