Raven's Ladder

  He pulled his hand from the bucket. Colors brightened steadily all around him. He noticed bright ribbons on a workshop table—gold, red, and green—and something that looked like an enormous purple kite. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really must leave.”

  “Yes,” she hissed. “Yes, you must. The Mawrn has told her you’re here. She’ll be angry.” She closed her eyes, and through her frail eyelids, she still seemed to be staring. “There will be beatings tonight.”

  He flexed his hand. The pain was gone, drawn out like the thorn itself. He looked at the bucket. He looked at the woman. The drink had quieted her quaking. Her voice, still shrill and birdlike, was no longer broken into stammers. He looked at the cup she had filled for him.

  “There.” She pointed to the northern wall, to the dark, barred gate. “That’s what you want.”

  “How do I know this isn’t a trap?”

  She swiped her hand across the table. Dust billowed into the air. “Mawrnash is a trap. The dust is all over you. When it gets its tiny claws into your skin, your lungs, your mind, all the Seer has to do is close her eyes. It’s their power, man of Abascar. She sees you clearly.”

  He had heard such rumors before. This time they did not make him laugh.

  “That is why I never escape,” she sighed.

  He reached for her this time. When he took hold of her arm—such a fragile bone within that sleeve—he felt heat and something more. The humming pulse of resilient life. “What is your name?”

  “Call me Gretyl.”

  “I’ll help you, Gretyl,” he said. “I hate the Seers as much as you do.”

  “No,” she laughed, looking toward the balcony door. “You won’t. But Old Soro’s here with me. Panner Xa thinks he’s just another servant. But he’s going to rescue me. He told me so. He went out one day and came back with water. Strange water from deep beneath Mawrnash. It helps. Soon I’ll be strong enough.”

  “What is he?”

  “Soro? He’s a kite-maker. Wandered in here, just like you, one night while Panner Xa was gone. Said he came down from a mountain workshop to look for his family. Said they’d been taken from him. There’s more, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  Cal-raven picked up one of the stray shrillow feathers from the tabletop. It was hot as a candlewick, and he dropped it. The water. What has it done to me?

  “I asked him to take me back with him,” Gretyl sighed. “Told him I could help him make his kites. He won’t do it. Says it’s against the rules, whatever that means.” She shook her head. “He’ll have new scars tonight.”

  “I’ve got to get you both out of here.” He dusted off his sleeves and shoulders. “But first I must do what I came to do.”

  Gretyl took up a crooked walking stick, awkward as a newborn fawn on her spindly legs. “Let me show you something.”

  On the balcony, under a night sky newly brushed with crimson, Cal-raven watched Old Soro raise his cupped hands as if in prayer to the rising red moon. His head was bowed, hair falling over his face, and he breathed deeply and heavily through his nose, just as Cal-raven’s father had when deeply asleep in his chair before the fire.

  “Now,” said Gretyl, seeming unconcerned at how the platform groaned beneath their weight, “we are standing at the top of Tammos Raak’s tower. The very starcrown tree he climbed.”

  Cal-raven laughed, for they were not far from the ground. He searched the dark, straining to discern the reddening contours of the landscape. “I don’t think you understand. I’m supposed to climb a starcrown tree. All the way to the crown.”

  “And this is where you start. Look. The Seer has built her house into the top of Tammos Raak’s tree.” Gretyl gestured to the dark ridge from which this white dome, this crystal shell, emerged like a skull at the end of a spine. The ridge ran off into the dark, then rose up the curving incline of the crater all the way to the rim. “That’s it. What’s left of Tammos Raak’s famous starcrown tree,” said Gretyl, “lying where it fell.” She pointed up to the crater’s northern edge. “There, the tree’s very roots, right on the bowl’s brim. When the trouble came and the forest was destroyed, the tallest star-crown was the last to fall. It fell inward, across the rest of the ruined forest.”

  This great ridge of earth. This line of broken pieces. It was a toppled, shattered column—a tree that once stood as broad as fifty marrowwood trees bound together and as tall as seventy stacked root to crown.

  This, if he was to believe Gretyl’s claim, was the tower Tammos Raak had climbed in final desperation, the tree that had then come down, along with all its proud species, when a mysterious flash seared the sky and scorched the earth.

  The more he stared, the more he could see the truth of it.

  “This, where we stand, was once the treetop that touched the sky. And there.” High above them at the rim, an array of roots splayed out like the headdress of some wild forest king.

  “The crown,” Cal-raven gasped. “It’s not the treetop but the roots.”

  It would be like climbing a mountain—to cross from this moon-silver hut to the high ground where the base of the tree was half torn from the soil.

  Gretyl’s grin was almost vicious with delight. “You won’t have much time. Panner Xa’s coming home soon.”

  As if to encourage him, ravens appeared, threading through the sky. They settled on various branches along the incline of the fallen tree and called to him.

  The Ladder of Ravens. What an intolerable trickster you are, Scharr ben Fray.

  He raised his farglass as if he might discover some clear path through the obstacles. “If I’d known, I would have taken a vawn around the crater and climbed up from the other side.”

  “There’s a better way,” she whispered, looking at Old Soro.

  At that the old man drew his raised hands down, pressed them against his breast, and then shoved them out, spreading his fingers and flinging the shrillow’s crumpled form into the darkness. The ravens were silent, surprised. Then a fluttering cry like a laugh fell from above. Diving from the sky, the shrillow appeared, darting in wild figures about their heads.

  “I thought it was dead,” Cal-raven laughed.

  “I told you,” Gretyl whispered. “He’s good at making things fly.” She stopped, cocked her head, then snapped her fingers. “The Seer’s on her way. Come back inside. Soro, will you open the gate?” Shrugging, she leaned in to Cal-raven’s ear. “He’s like this. Doesn’t help unless you ask him.”

  Old Soro dropped the dark gate’s heavy crossbeams to the floor. Then he gripped the gate’s edge with his massive hands and grunted as he pulled.

  Cal-raven marveled at those hands, those arms, and their strange, fibrous flesh. Old Soro seemed crafted from the stuff of the forest, as if his whole body were a costume.

  With a gasp, the gate came open, snarling along the filthy floor. Cal-raven recoiled from the stench of rotten wood.

  “In you go,” Gretyl urged.

  Old Soro half turned—the closest he had come to facing Cal-raven. Within the frame of a ragged, braided mane and a bushy, braided beard, a dark face returned his gaze. Or was it a mask? That bold and noble nose, those cracked and wounded lips—they might have been a woodcarving, adorned with eyes of black glass, inscrutable.

  “Go, Raven,” said the weary giant in a voice like boulders breaking.

  The name caught Cal-raven by surprise. “Who are you?” he growled back. He had not identified himself. Even if he had, he would have introduced himself with his full and proper name. Old Soro had addressed him as an intimate friend or family member, speaking only the half of his name that his mother had given him. In Abascar such a privilege had to be granted, or it was a sign of disrespect. “Are you ignorant of Abascar custom, kite-maker?”

  Old Soro laughed wearily—that musical wheeze-box sound again—and shook his head.

  Gretyl cleared her throat. “Please, now, please-please-please. Your time’s running out.”

  Cal-raven, watching the
hunchback carefully, spoke to Gretyl. “You’ve been generous. But I’ll climb the tower just the way my teacher instructed me. My teacher’s always right.”

  “The Mawrn,” Gretyl squeaked.

  All around the chamber dust was lifting from surfaces—swirling over jar lids, whirling into tempests across the floor. “The Mawrn, it knows. She’s coming. Go, King of Abascar! Which-which-whichever way you desire, go now!”

  Cal-raven rejected the open gate. He leapt back up the stairs to the balcony instead. Stepping out into the crater’s cold air, he felt the strain of an invisible cord newly strung. “I’ve made you a promise, Gretyl,” he said. “In the meantime call for the Keeper. It’ll watch over you.”

  Gretyl seemed not to hear him, shrinking into her shroud.

  Old Soro, meanwhile, sighed, pushing the dark gate closed.

  10

  THE REVELHOUSE

  In everything, Jes-hawk was an archer.

  Rigorous in discipline, precise in thought and aim, he drew his attention taut. Given a target, he refused to miss. And in the moment before he fired, there was a tension, almost as if he expected the target to fire back.

  While his companions hurried toward the revelhouse glow like prisoners toward an escape, he stared at its front door and planned how they would pass through it.

  As the company approached, they were dutifully welcomed. One young woman promised she’d stable the vawns, then paused and cupped her hand in automatic expectation. Jes-hawk dropped small chips of blackstone from Barnashum into her palm, and she was surprised, clearly calculating what she might get for such material in trade.

  Krawg and Warney stumbled toward the revelhouse as if already drunk. Jes-hawk shouted after them to wait, but they blithely waved him off.

  “Gonna be like shooting at a target in a windstorm,” he muttered, chewing a gob of root-gum.

  At the door the sleepy guard yawned, “You’ll answer for your friends, or I’ll have ’em thrown out. State your names, purposes, and places of—”

  “Abascar survivors,” Jes-hawk declared. “Before the collapse we apprenticed for merchants. Now we’ve struck out on our own, a company ready to clasp hands, bond in blood, make and stake our claim.”

  “It’s a hard life,” sighed the guard. “But then, life was especially hard in Abascar. Least, that’s what they always say in Bel Amica.” He eyed Jes-hawk as if measuring his temper. When the archer didn’t respond, the flicker of alertness faded. “Welcome to the Mawrnash Mine. It’s a place for hard work, not trouble. It’s almost moonrise, so you’re just in time for the casting.” Jes-hawk nodded.

  “And since you’ve never heard of that—casting’s when the hostess puts out coins. All the chips are fish-side up. At the whistle each miner turns a coin. Those who have the mark of highest value become the first wave of workers into the mine on the next shift.”

  “Fair system,” Jes-hawk grunted. “Leave it to luck.”

  “Luck? Leave it to the moon-spirits.” Condescension dripped from the guard’s every line. “They can see which of us wants to find a fortune, and they reward unclouded desire.”

  “You’ve learned your religion well.”

  “And you had better too.” The man’s humor had soured. “Our Seer doesn’t take too kindly to those who mock our faith.”

  “I mean no disrespect, but will my company find welcome here?”

  “The main room’s for the miners. But there are a few quieter rooms along the side for merchants and travelers. We see all kinds. Many stay to try their hands at mining. The Seer pays well. Our doors are open to you. Not because we trust you, mind. Our Seer—she sees everything that happens here.” His grin showed what teeth he had left. “You’d do well to tell your company that.”

  The revelhouse shook with noise. When Jes-hawk stepped inside, he found that the raucous laughter and the rumbling of boots on a wooden floor came from drunkards in the throes of disorderly dance, driven by cacophonous percussion.

  There was no shape or harmony to their dance. In storytelling and other forms of art, each Bel Amican worked alone to draw attention to his own particular style. They danced and sang at—not with—one another, each person a whirlwind of his own invention.

  Moving through the tumultuous crowd, Jes-hawk felt as if he had been immersed in ale, for the tint and tang of beer saturated the air. Colors were muted, everything brushed with gold. Light spilled from torches, candles, and the two roaring fireplaces set into columns in the center of the space. That light reflected and refracted from mirrors hung throughout the room.

  Krawg and Warney were lost in the crowd, so Jes-hawk moved straight for the bar and stood next to a miner who was pondering seven empty, sticky glasses. The Mawrn clung to the miner’s bald head and eyelashes, clotted in the corners of his eyes, and powdered his mustache and beard like a spill of flour swept up in a baker’s broom. Propping himself up on the bar, he wheezed an incomprehensible greeting and clasped Jes-hawk’s hand, not like a friend, but like a wrestler.

  “Runekere. Mine overseer.” An eighth glass appeared before him, full to the brim. “Look like you never mined a day in your life.”

  “Merchant. And archer. For hire.”

  “Abascar. Can tell it by your talk. Need fast currency? Panner Xa thinks she sees everything, but I see miners stuffing their pockets and sealing dust between the layers of their cloaks. Could use a sharp-eyed shooter to catch ’em in the act.”

  An ale boy interrupted them and asked what Jes-hawk wanted—wine, ale (brown or sunny), or a glass of something called Six Hard Slaps.

  “Shame about your house,” Runekere went on as if addressing a grand hall. “You Abascars, you shoulda turned to the moon-spirits. Our Seers came to see your drunkard king, you know. Tried to persuade him to accept our Bel Amican faith.”

  Jes-hawk accepted a clay mug of dark brew. “I remember. Long time ago.”

  Runekere clapped him on the back with such force that half of the drink washed out of the mug and across the dripping bar. “I know exactly how you feel. A man without a house. I may never see my wife and daughter again.” Every statement was somehow a cough and a shout at the same time.

  “Why not?”

  “They’re in Bel Amica, safe and sound. We’ve good position on the rock there. Views of the Mystery Sea. But I work here now. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

  “You like it here?”

  “Oh, my family, they enjoy what I send ’em. For me, it’s all about the thrill of the getting, you see?” The man rubbed his thumb across his fingertips. “Show me something that feels better than getting.”

  Jes-hawk turned his attention back to his drink. How long had it been since someone had poured him a mug of beer? “You should go home awhile,” he suggested. “Take some time to enjoy the rewards.”

  “What do you have?” Runekere seemed prepared to laugh at any answer.

  Jes-hawk shrugged and lifted his mug. “Nothing anymore.”

  “You’ll need equipment. To get equipment, you’ll need currency. To get currency, you’ve got to prove your worth.”

  Jes-hawk swallowed a smooth rush of the beer. “My worth to whom?” he asked.

  “The Seers.”

  The beer was blended with something that reminded him of lamp oil. “I thought a queen ruled Bel Amica.”

  Feigning severe conviction, Runekere said, “Queen Thesera rules Bel Amica, and I’m her loyal subject.” Then his face changed to a wry grin. “Ah, but who rules the queen?”

  “So, as long as we impress the Seers—”

  “They’ll buy your service, but it’s a bargain for what they give you.” Runekere grabbed a passing ale boy, slipped his hand beneath a shoulder strap that held up the boy’s trousers, and snapped it hard against his chest. An array of tiny glass vials pinned to that strap came alive with swirling clouds and splashing liquids inside them. “Potions and enchantments,” said Runekere, running his thumbnail down that row of vials as if plucking the strings o
f a harp—pung, pung, pung, pung, pung!

  The boy glared, then turned to Jes-hawk. “You wanna buy a sniff or a sip? Whatcha need? Cure for a sore head? Sleep for the night? Or a little something to make a lady sure you like ’er?”

  Jes-hawk thought of poor Tabor Jan, sleepless back in Barnashum. But he held up his hands and declined.

  A drunkard pushed in to the bar, separating Jes-hawk from the mine’s overseer. The brute wore little more than a leather loincloth, showing off his miner’s musculature. Every knuckle of the fist that he pounded on the bar bore a rune tattoo to spell out an obscenity. “Another!” he roared at the hostess.

  When the hostess came to answer him, Jes-hawk was impressed to find that she could stare the inebriate in the eye. “You know the rule,” she barked through gemstone teeth, her voice as rough as any man in the bar. “If I give you another and the Seer hears about it, she’ll chop off that hand before you can put down the glass.”

  The brute brought his fist down again as if trying to destroy the bar.

  The woman did not flinch. “Go sit down and wait for the casting.”

  Sulking, the brute threw himself into a corner.

  “Idiot,” said a man to Jes-hawk’s right. Draped in a ceremonial robe, slumped against the bar, he was small, his nose sharp and his chin receding, his eyes like bruises above even darker bruises. His expression appeared to be permanent, forever groaning “See what I mean?”

  “Cesylle,” he said and did not extend a hand. “Seer’s apprentice.”

  “Indeed.” Jes-hawk introduced himself, practicing his summary, and took another swig of the strange beer. But as he did, his attention was caught by a barmaid, a thin and worried woman with a garment cut low in the front, high in the back, with crescent cuts on her hips.

  “Like her?” sneered Cesylle. “Make a play, Abascar man. You’ll be lucky to get even an insult from that one.”