Raven's Ladder

  The creatures leapt from the brambles and seized him. His sword never escaped the scabbard.

  He had a moment to think of Lesyl, interrupted in her song, looking up to receive unexpected news, the hewson-pipe coiled beside her.

  Hot limbs wrapped around him, and his feet left the ground. The creatures were shelled, bone-tough, their bellies cushioned with bundles of hair. He struggled, limbs flailing. He was falling skyward, upside down. The pressure did not increase. Nothing pierced or stung or bit. The ground, faintly chalked in moonlight, spread like the sky over his head, and beyond his feet the heavens glittered like Deep Lake at midnight. The creatures held him suspended, their vast canvases snapping in the wind as if they were wings.

  And then he saw that they were wings, spread out from a towering creature.

  His captors were not animals at all but hands. He hung unharmed in the clawed clutches of a monster and was carried up toward its massive equine head.

  Its eyes, glassy spheres full of stars, were fixed upon the northern horizon. Flames lined its nostrils. Its mane wavered as if it were creating, not surrendering to, the night wind. And the scales on its golden neck caught more than moonlight.

  A helpless toy in its hands, he watched its attention turn to him, and his fear turned to confusion.

  He recognized this creature. This shape had been fixed in his mind since he first drew breath. It had moved at the edges of his dreams. In nightmares it had come when he cried out for help, and sometimes when he could not call at all. During the long days of learning, he had pillaged his father’s history scrolls and hunting journals for evidence.

  Nothing had prepared him for this. The creature drew in a cavernful of air, the shield-plates of its chest separating to reveal a soft lacework beneath. It held that breath. He knew it was reading him, reading the night, the skies. Then the curtains of its eyelids came down.

  Are you kind? he thought. Dreams…speak true. Let the Keeper be kind.

  The creature was stranger than anything he had sculpted when imagining its shape and dimensions. He felt embarrassed by his simplistic appeals, his feeble prayers. He was a mouse in the talons of a brascle, and as the creature reared up on the pillars of its hind legs, wing upon wing upon wing unfolding from its sides like sails on a great ship, he waited for judgment.

  A sound like deep recognition ran tremulous through its form. Cal-raven thought it spoke his name—not the name given by his mother, but the name given by the powers that had crafted him—and every thread of his being burned with attention. As the eyes opened again, the stars within were moving.

  It exhaled a scattering of sparks, but gently. The sound was like the Mystery Sea, roaring as it received the river flowing out through the Rushtide Inlet.

  The air about the creature shuddered. A wave of noise beyond the range of Cal-raven’s hearing stunned him, conveying a word as clearly as if the creature had spoken. He would not, in the aftermath, know how to translate such a word. But it provoked in him an immediate resolve, a reverent promise.

  He would follow. What else could one do when commanded by the Keeper?

  Smoke and spice clouded the air and dizzied him. He was passed from clawed hands at the edges of the creature’s wings to one of its enormous, rough-fleshed feet, which held him like a woman’s hand cradling a bird. The creature set him down within a footprint on the path, and a wind whirled fiercely about him. Squinting up through the storm, he saw that the creature had taken flight.

  In the space of a sigh, it was gone, a succession of lights darkening across the sky, northward over the Cragavar forest. Cal-raven lay helpless and numb like a discarded doll in the Keeper’s footprint.

  Breath burst back into his lungs. He heaved, folding and fighting, a bird shaking away the shards of a shell.

  It came when I called.

  Never more invigorated, never more single-minded in purpose, he smiled back toward the cliffs. He had been changed.

  In that moment everything changed for House Abascar as well.

  It began with a jolt, not a tremor.

  Tabor Jan had been yawning as he reclined atop a boulder and counted the brightening stars. Sleep, out of reach for many nights, had seemed almost possible.

  But then the ground beneath him bucked like a furious steed. He scrambled to the path, unsheathing his sword as if he might smite the earth in reprimand. From deep within Barnashum came a sound like hundreds of drums. The shaking intensified. The refuge exhaled clouds of dust through shielded entryways.

  “Not part of the plan,” he muttered.

  Rubble spilled down the cliffs in the quiet that followed, dust sighing into the thickets below.

  “Cal-raven,” he said. Another name came to mind. Brevolo.

  Then came a distant cacophony of voices. Rivers of people were rushing out onto the open ledges.

  Even as he scanned the scene for the woman he loved, Tabor Jan pushed his way through the crowds, shouting to soldiers that their first priority was to find Cal-raven.

  Hagah bounded suddenly into Tabor Jan’s path. The soldier seized the dog’s flabby neck. “Hagah—Cal-raven!”

  Thrilled by the command, the dog turned as if jerked by a chain and almost threw himself off the cliffs. It was all the captain could do to keep up with him.

  He found himself running toward the sound of triumphant yelps beyond the base of the cliffs. Dog had found master. The king was alive.

  Kneeling among the brambles, Cal-raven embraced Hagah, blinking as if he’d been knocked silly by a falling stone.

  “Are you hurt?” Tabor Jan scanned the shadowed ground.

  “Didn’t you see it?” Cal-raven pointed north toward the Cragavar.

  “See it? I felt it. I think they may have felt it in Bel Amica. We may have cave-ins. I’m taking you back.”

  “No, not the quake,” said Cal-raven, exhilarated. “Didn’t you see it?”

  Tabor Jan braced himself. “See…what?” Then the exuberance of Cal-raven’s expression triggered a spasm of alarm. “No! Don’t say it!”

  “But Tabor Jan, I saw—”

  “Swallow that story, my lord!” He would have preferred a beastman sighting. “Don’t speak of it to the people. Especially not tonight.”

  “Not tonight! What could bring them more comfort than to hear—”

  “If the grudgers hear you respond to this quake with some wild description of a phantom on our doorstep—”

  “Grudgers attacked me tonight.”

  “Did you see their faces?”

  “No, but I became acquainted with their arrows.” He laughed. “I also became quite familiar with the Keeper. Nose-to-nose, in fact.”

  Tabor Jan scowled. “I haven’t slept for so long I’m having nightmares while I’m awake.”

  “It pointed me north, Tabor Jan! We’ve got to ride—”

  “We’ll ride tomorrow, Cal-raven. Just as you planned.” He urged Cal-raven back toward the cliffs, and they clambered over piles of rubble newly shaken from the heights. A tumult of voices filled the sky.

  Hurrying down a steep ridge, an enormous guard came stumbling to meet them.

  “Bowlder, how many are hurt?”

  “Cave-in!” he wheezed. “Must…dig out…three people.”

  “I assume you’ve called for Say-ressa. Without her healing hands we…” Tabor Jan stopped, stricken as he read Bowlder’s expression.

  He turned to Cal-raven, but the king was strangely preoccupied with the moon above the northern horizon.

  2

  TO SAVE THE KING

  Wynn had made up his mind a few hours before the quake. He would take one of Abascar’s horses and follow King Cal-raven on his secret search for House Abascar’s next home.

  You wouldn’t assign stable sweeping to a tracker or a hunter. I’ve got to show the king I can ride among his best.

  Pacing in front of the stalls, he considered the vawns and horses that hadn’t been chosen. Their stalls were closed, their large, clawed feet visib
le below wooden doors.

  The stew of smells was stifling—bramblegrass and ivy, fresh scrap-apples for bribing the animals, vawn dung and horse manure. He sneezed.

  The sneeze was answered by a sharp slam of a horse’s hoof against wood. He recognized the scarred black mare by the color of her ears above the stall gate. Small but sturdy, she had a broken lip and a hide that appeared to have been raked by fangbear claws.

  She wasn’t the horse for stealth. But that seething, that eagerness—Wynn knew he’d found his volunteer.

  Ten nights earlier—Wynn had counted them—the king had come to examine the steeds and to check the condition of his leg shields and woods-cloak. He had dismissed this mare with an affectionate comfort. “Someday. But you’re not ready yet.”

  Wynn had propped the shovel against the feeding trough and tiptoed after the king as he left. Turning a corner, he found the corridor empty and the stone wall rippling back into a solid barrier again.

  He’s planning to leave.

  Wynn had scrambled back to the stable, climbed inside an empty feed bag, hopped to the edge of the narrow dung chute, and slid down, straight out through the cliff wall into the night. Gagging on the stench, he clambered out of the filthy sack into the cloud of rejoicing dungflies.

  Behind an abandoned harvest wagon with a bad wheel, he spied a riderless vawn steaming, panting, and digging the ground with clawed hind feet.

  The king stood with a boulder raised in the air. He reminded Wynn of a bittlebug he’d once watched carry a hunk of biscuit. Cal-raven bent his knees, then shoved the boulder skyward.

  The stone rose, then descended to alight on the fingertip of a man Wynn hadn’t noticed—a short, broad-shouldered fellow. The stranger pushed back the hood of his green cowl, laughing. The boulder spun on his fingertip. As it did, it took different shapes—a dragon with its wings spread, a raging three-horned limbaw, a woman of exaggerated shapeliness.

  Then the man had pointed at the sky, and the stone reshaped itself as a spinning top that ascended into the air and moved toward Cal-raven in a slow, smooth glide. The king laughed, waiting for it to come within reach, then jumped and smashed it into a shower of sand.

  The stranger was Scharr ben Fray. Wynn had no doubt.

  He’d heard his father, Joss, and his mother, Juney, talk about this stone-mastering mage. The story of his exile from Abascar was legend: Queen Jaralaine had banished him for teaching Cal-raven stories of the Keeper as if they were truth.

  Wynn held still, breathing dung reek and spitting out flies. A few words caught his ear: Go north. Ladder of Ravens. Mawrnash. Mawrnash, a place his parents had carefully avoided on the merchant routes near the Cragavar forest’s northwestern edge.

  Scharr ben Fray embraced Cal-raven as a father embraces his son, then climbed into the saddle and leaned over to offer one last exhortation. Eleven days, Wynn heard. Then the mage was borne away in swift, silent strides, the vawn’s tail lifted high to keep from stirring up dust or noise.

  Cal-raven had walked to the wall, put his hands against it, and paused.

  “Wynn,” he had said, “have you heard? The guards have seen viscorcats prowling around here. They’re hungry, for there’s nothing to hunt. Promise you won’t breathe a word of what you’ve heard. Or I’ll leave you for the cats.”

  “My lord,” Wynn choked.

  Back inside, night after night, he had endured the burden of brooms, shovels, and filth, gnawing on his resentment, counting down the days until Cal-raven’s departure. Abascar’s people were generous. But they were not Wynn’s people. The merchants’ life had taught him to live unencumbered by commitments. And he scolded his little sister, Cortie, when she shadowed a kindhearted woman called Merya and began to call her Mum.

  He wanted to shout at them, just as his father had berated him between strikes of the lash. Think you know better than me? I’ve crossed the Expanse. I’ve lived in the wild.

  Bang! The horse kicked at the stall gate, jolting Wynn from his thoughts.

  “We’ll follow the king, you and me,” Wynn whispered toward the animal’s ears, “but we’ll make it look so easy, he’ll end up following us.”

  He was familiar with this feeling—the fits of fright and zeal before a secretive escape.

  Once, along the merchant roads, he had drawn in a deep breath of night and tiptoed a vawn through curtains of rain, closer and closer to freedom. When the storm muffled the bullfrog of his father’s snore, he kicked the vawn to a gallop.

  But concern for Cortie had caught him on the Throanscall’s banks, a hook at the end of a far-cast line. She was beautiful and fragile. His mother had protected her as if she were a rare greenbird’s egg, hoping the family would earn enough treasure to buy themselves into Bel Amica, where the girl could grow up in peace. To Pop she was just another pair of hands. Wynn had pictured her waking without him, rising with double the chores. He turned the vawn around and ventured back through the storm, spitting. Sure enough, his father stood waiting, that belt of twisted horsetail hair so much heavier and harsher for the rain.

  Tonight that memory gave him pause. But if he could win a respectable position among Abascar’s people, he might collect enough prizes to buy himself and Cortie a place in House Bel Amica.

  The mare’s breath puffed through the slats.

  “Don’t be scared,” said Wynn. “We don’t need any of them. Tomorrow we’ll run.”

  And then, the ground shook.

  For half a moment, a ghost loomed in Wynn’s imagination—his father, rising alive with the belt in his hand.

  Wynn ran from the stable up to the cave where children slept. Finding it empty, he staggered, steadying himself with the broom he still held fast, like a boatman with an oar but no boat, while the ground rolled in waves. He needed to see Cortie’s face, know she was alive.

  Emerging from the dust-choked throat of the Blackstone Caves, he plunged into the murmuring crowd. Boys and girls leaned into one another like anxious lambs on the ledge. Parents called for children. Guards shouted directions. Shattering blackstone shrieked deep within.

  As the crowd quieted, gossip spread like foam tossed over rapids. A chamber’s collapsed. Some have been buried.

  “What is it with House Abascar?” Wynn muttered, straining to hear names. “What is it with all the collapses?”

  He dropped the broom when he saw his sister. He caught her up just as the news took a terrible turn. Say-ressa, the healer, was among those buried inside when a wall became a cavalcade of rocks.

  “Why?” Cortie whispered, wide-eyed. “She’s the one who makes things better.”

  “Don’t worry,” he told her, worrying. “I’ll take care of you.”

  Cortie put her head on his shoulder. He thought she was crying, but then her tiny hand patted his back. “Don’t be scared, big brother,” she whispered.

  That’s when he realized he was the one who was shaking. “This is stupid,” he said. “Come on, Cortie. I’m finding you a safer place to sleep.”

  They tiptoed down into the dark, all the way to the armory’s piles of shields and plated armor. Cortie crawled into one of those hollow, burnished suits and hid like a cat.

  “Stay here tonight,” Wynn said. “Sleep here from now on. I don’t want to come back and find you’ve been crushed.”

  “Come back? Where are you going?”

  “Tomorrow night Cal-raven’s gonna…” He heard voices, soldiers approaching from the stable cave below.

  He seized a heavy metal shirt made for a massive defender—probably Bowlder—and crouched down within it. He watched reflections from the soldiers’ torches flicker in golden ripples all around. Peering out through the right-arm window, he counted six silhouettes. They carried quivers. And they were angry.

  In those urgent whispers, he learned about the ambush, the king’s escape, the quake’s interruption of their pursuit, and their intent to try again before they were found out. Soon.

  When the voices diminished, Wynn dared to
stick his head out through the suit’s open shoulder. The soldiers had set down their quivers and left a torch in a torchstand. Leaning into one another like hunting dogs, they were halfway up the corridor toward the crowds.

  “Conspiracy.” The word was delicious on his tongue. “Cortie, it’s a conspiracy.” He trembled with a sense of purpose, his head rising through the open collar. “This is it. I’ll show Cal-raven I’m useful. And he’ll never assign me to stable duty again.”

  In the shine of the armor where Cortie lay hidden, he saw himself—a small head and feeble arms emerging from this massive metal shirt. He jerked his arms inside and ducked down, troubled by the reminder of the distance between him and a full-grown soldier. Then he crawled out, a snail abandoning a shell. “I’m going after them, Cortie. I gotta find out who they are.”

  She blinked her eyes sleepily. “Pop says you should stay in the wagon,” she yawned.

  Dust floating on the air crackled as the torch’s flicking tongue caught and consumed it.

  There goes Wynn, thought Luci to her sisters. And then her smile boasted, I told you I’d find him.

  Luci’s identical sister Madi raised her chin in defiance. Foolish orphan. He’s just spying on the big folks again, jealous of anyone important. Let’s leave him alone.

  The triplets rarely spoke aloud to one another. Thoughts passed between them clearly, but they often confused which one was thinking, and their feelings rarely matched. This frequently left them looking pained as they wrestled in mental entanglement.

  Luci thrust out her lower lip. She would take a liking to any boy she pleased, and her sisters would have no say in the matter. You’re the one who wants to grow up and marry Cal-raven, she snapped in a wordless retort. Brushing off her weed-woven trousers, she stepped out from behind the stone slab that had fallen across the corridor just outside the armory. Following Wynn, she heard the quiet clatter of her sisters’ stonecrafted jewelry close behind.