The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  “I’ll see you in a few years,” she said, and kissed me.

  “Please stay in touch,” I said.

  She patted my cheek. “I’ll be unavailable, but when I can, I will.” In practice, she had sent one letter by way of a sour-tempered black bird which had flapped away slowly after discharging his errand, and I had heard no more.

  My faithful Virgil was getting a bit restive himself. He didn’t consider that entertaining me was part of his job description, and my Hooded Owl Brahms, though he was happy to play games like catch-the-mouse or ring-toss, was a more nocturnal creature and thus more inclined to glide away when he’d had his fill of athleticism, perching at the top of the Core for a comfortable doze when I’d exhausted his energy and patience.

  Brahms had, in fact, just done that, and Anselm had just wordlessly offered me letters to sign, which I’d signed, and lunch had just been eaten—in fact it was early afternoon on the third day of our being snowbound by this freak storm, and I realized I was at the end of my string.

  Not that I wasn’t occupied by business and catching up on postponed chores of government—I had cabin fever, as my uncle would call it.

  I sat at the table reassembling the wing bones of my lunch and began to feel the smallest bit put-upon. It was so difficult to get around, I couldn’t even invite people over for dinner. Utrachet had been caught up North by the lousy weather and was probably stuck there in a village tavern. I was bored, and I sat and tried to think of things to do.

  Fly a kite. Indoors. No, that would just annoy people—I could stir up a wind with sorcery easily, but the place was drafty enough already.

  Chess with myself? I had little taste for it. I always knew what my next move would be.

  I could practice fencing. I’d done that four hours a day, every morning, religiously, since being Gaston’s squire. I had a superb fencing-master, Dresmayer Tilas, whom I had recruited from an obscure, filthy city off the Road, but he had his other students in the afternoon and I didn’t want to try his good humor.

  Music. No. Poetry, writing of. No. Lover: stuck in Ollol by the snow—which was too bad, because being snowbound with Rhuil would have been anything but dull. Snowman-building, no; experimental cookery, no; reading, no; bird-harassing, done for the day; sorcery, to what end? No …

  I yawned. I could always go to sleep. I’m usually good at that.

  Virgil pushed open the door and plopped onto the table.

  “I am bored and see no remedy,” I told him.

  He groomed himself.

  “I bathed already today, thank you. Have you any other suggestions?”

  He looked right at me, into my eyes, and then fluffed and smoothed his feathers and flipped his wings, making for the door.

  It seemed he did have an idea. Interested, I followed him.

  Virgil, in beautiful, deliberate curves, spiralled down the Core around and around the stairs and walkways. I went down the regular way, watching him; he always stayed on the same level as I was on myself, keeping up with me as I descended quickly. At the bottom, I glanced around for him and didn’t see him at first.

  The guards at the door to the Black Stair, though, were both looking up and back, over their shoulders. Virgil sat on the pediment over the door, waiting for me on top of the carven gryphon’s head.

  Down? I wondered, and nodded to the guards, who stood aside while I unlocked the door. Virgil, feather-light, dropped to my left shoulder and nibbled my ear affectionately. With a minor Summoning I got an ignis fatuus to light us down the stair and then closed the door.

  It boomed in the blackness. I had only been down here a few times: to drink of the Spring and later to do advanced sorcery work with Dewar. Now, as I began going down the stairs in the pillar, my ignis starting glints of reflections from the rough black stone, I realized that I’d never descended alone. I recalled the huge, cavernous space, vaulted, arched, pillared, and frowned to myself. There were sections called the Maze and the Catacombs. The Maze, allegedly, shifted position—or rather, once you were in it, it shifted around you, changing. The Catacombs are what everything that isn’t the Maze are called. I’d never been in the Maze, and I wasn’t sure where it was supposed to be; the Catacombs aren’t proper Catacombs providing a repository for the dead, just … space and pillars and high-vaulting arches and occasional walls.

  Contrary to popular belief, we store no wine beneath the Citadel proper—the old tower. The wine cellars are under the kitchens, and one doesn’t go down nearly so many stairs to reach them.

  A prickle of interest went through me. I smiled.

  “Excellent idea, Virgil.”

  He clucked, pleased.

  We spent the next days exploring. I couldn’t understand why I’d never thought of it before. I’d spent my childhood and youth climbing on, crawling in, and investigating every nook and cranny of the Citadel and the Island, rooftops down, and it seemed amazing that I’d never thought of exploring the Catacombs, even when Dewar and I were working the Spring. I supposed the air of sanctity and respect around the Spring had put me off. And possibly the guards wouldn’t have let me down there anyway. Mother had at various times put several areas off-limits, including the top of the Citadel proper, and certainly she’d not want me getting lost down in the darkness. Dewar had explained why the Spring was where it was and what the function of the Citadel tower was in relation to it, but that was academic, almost a civil engineering comment on Argylle’s structure. We’d never come down here to see the Source of Argylle during that part of his ad hoc curriculum.

  The Spring lies deep underground among the massive black pillars that bear the Citadel, and, I fancy sometimes, all of its Island in the broad Wye or even all of Argylle. The Spring is a darker spot in the black floor, an upwelling of … it looks like water, and the wholly insensitive might call it water, but it is more and less than water, even as Landuc’s Well is more and less than fire. The Spring itself, to look upon, is perhaps a dozen feet across, perfectly black except when it is not, and without clear-cut boundaries. Gradually it solidifies into the floor, which is made of gigantic paving-stones, and it is the Source of All that is not Pheyarcet, Phesaotois, or the Void.

  I liked the primal darkness. It whispered around me, and I could feel the energy from the Spring, sheets and currents of it, pouring out into the world, unrestrained in a way so different from Landuc’s Well which is channelled and tapped and forced to a form—I cannot describe it. The feeling of vitality, of power, is several orders of magnitude stronger than it is even a relatively short distance away in the Citadel itself.

  The second day I went down, I took lunch with me and prowled here and there, wondering at the gigantic blocks of stone—who had put them there? Why? When? Had Prospero built the place? I had never thought to ask, and no one had ever said. The stones fit together perfectly; they were all of precisely the same dimensions, as far as I could determine, and they were all of that same black stone that I’d seen nowhere else in Argylle save here and in the Great Hall where the Black Chair sat.

  Each day I would go to the Spring and then walk away from it in a different direction. Virgil would accompany me, noiselessly flying through the darkness like a bat, coming and going on air currents and others. The massive columns, made of curved blocks of the black stone, reached up like the trunks of the mightiest trees of Threshwood, spreading vault-ribs instead of branches. There were no sounds save those I made; Virgil moved noiselessly on his muffled wings. My light cast hard black shadows on blackness. The air was cool; the Spring rushed past me and I became so habituated to its strength that to ascend the Black Stair again at the day’s end was like decompressing after diving deep in the ocean. I forgot about the snow and my boredom; instead, I wandered in a dazed, appreciative dream though my own cellars where I had never been, until I found the door.

  I found it in a corridor that led I knew not where, a corridor set in an arcing section of wall that also enclosed or excluded I knew not what because I had walked a
long and along it for hours and found nothing but wall to my one side and the pillared, vaulted dark to my other. The corridor had been welcome relief; I’d started down it and scarcely a hundred steps on found the door, the only door I’d ever met down there, more than twice as tall as I was and about eight feet wide.

  It was strong-looking and I stood in front of it for a long time, studying it. It showed no lock or bar. It perplexed me, and I spent the rest of that day seeking to open it without success. Over the following days I tried all of the many ways I knew to open doors and none affected its closedness. Virgil watched or dozed on my haversack on the floor or assisted me as I tried spells of many different kinds, and they did nothing either. I couldn’t mark it with an axe or a blade. Fire didn’t scorch it. It didn’t make anything but a hard, solid thud when I kicked or hit it.

  Finally I gave it up, made note of the damned thing and its location, and plodded back upstairs. The snow stopped, and the sun came out and shone on the people shovelling, scraping, and sweeping, and I found other things to do. There were many: we had problems with piracy and banditry at the Errethon border, spring drought, disagreements among every group everywhere, incursions into the settled areas by the wild things from the woods and wastes, and poor crops to cap all. I coped with them all frantically, wishing my mother would take pity on me and return. It did seem as if all the difficulties had waited until she took her holiday.

  Uncle Dewar was as intrigued by the door as I was, but he took it far more to heart. He muttered and paced, tried many of the things I had on it including an axe, and finally said we ought to ask his sister, if that were acceptable to me.

  “Fine,” I said. “Why would I object?”

  He shrugged. “You might feel this is a private mystery.”

  “Wouldn’t Prospero know? It’s his Citadel.”

  “He might at that, but he hasn’t been around much to ask.”

  The tensions and bindings between Prospero and his children are difficult to trace or understand. From his tone and inflection, I got the impression that Dewar thought his father’s absence was somehow calculated to offend. It seemed safer to avoid the subject. “Then I’ll ask, or you can ask, Mother when she comes home. Have you had word from her lately?”

  “No,” he said, “she said she would be unreachable, if you recall.” He picked up most of the gear we’d been using, and, with a last glare at the door, started away. I collected the rest and followed him and the light.

  As it turned out, Mother stayed unreachable for the next six years. At the six-year anniversary of her departure, Prospero declared he was concerned because such a silence was unlike her. We all began searching for her. After two years of fruitless searching my siblings had mostly given up, and shortly after that—a couple of months after Dewar finally returned without luck, on the edge of depression—Mother came home without announcement or fanfare.

  At that time, or rather, a month or so later, Dewar took her down into the Catacombs and showed her the door. She didn’t like it; it was not hers, she did not remember it being there, and she had Hicha the Archivist search for the maps Freia had made long, long ago of that place under the world. Then Mother went away again, after telling me I was doing very well but adding a long list of areas and specifics in which I could do better. She went with Gaston this time and let it be known that she did not want to be interrupted, although she did send notes via Gaston, who returned from time to time alone.

  The problems I had been having before, both political and natural, worsened steeply in that year. When Gaston came round late that autumn to collect the news and leave me a note from Mother with a couple of books on economic forecasting she thought I might benefit from reading, I told him I was feeling overwhelmed. Prospero was in Errethon, skirmishing in the Jagged Mountains with brigands and the hideous beasts which had infested the forest, and Dewar was off in some pocket-world or other of his in an uncharacteristic foul temper.

  Gaston must have told Freia that I was running under heavier weather than expected, because twenty days after he left they both returned together. I ceded the Chair gratefully to her; she listened to my report of woes and disasters calmly and told me she could not stay for long at a time, but that she would stay for a few days now and speak to me with Summonings often until we had gotten Argylle back on course. And, with her unerring gut instinct, one of the first things she wanted to address was the problem of that door.

  Hicha found the maps, though not all of them. Mother had been thorough in her cartography, but the documents dealing with that section of the Citadel were missing. When she realized this, she Summoned us to a meeting: Prospero, Dewar, and me.

  We sat around a table with crinkly old maps and smooth young wine, and I described how I had found the door.

  “I’m sure I never put anything like that down there,” Dewar said. “As sure as I can be,” he added, muttering.

  Freia cleared her throat, directing our attention from Dewar. “I know it is not mine.” My mother, her brother, and I all looked now at Prospero.

  “No, none of my making,” he said. “Nor do I see your hand there, Dewar; though knowledge of the deed might have left you, it was a hallmark of your state that you shunned the Spring and would not approach it so nearly as this would require.”

  “True,” he said curtly.

  There was a brief, uncomfortable silence, because it is not really polite, in Argylle or anywhere else, to remind a man that he went over the edge of sanity into madness and lived there for a while, no matter how long ago it was. And Dewar had been … odd lately, anyway, following highly personal and highly charged interactions with the Countess Luneté of Lys and Freia which I could not follow, and which had worried me and frightened Freia. I hoped there would not be a quarrel. He had agreed only grudgingly to come to Argylle for this conference.

  Freia ended the awkwardness.

  “We ought to have a look at it.”

  Prospero lifted an eyebrow at her. “We?”

  “Dewar has seen it, Gwydion has seen it, and I have seen it. You have not. I think we should all go down there and focus our collective intelligence on figuring this out. I don’t like the idea of something … something not of our making in the Catacombs … I just don’t like it. Particularly considering the other things that have been happening. The monsters, the general unrest—you must agree, Prospero, something’s wrong. Somewhere. I never had such problems. It’s not Gwydion—it’s something else, and it’s just started while he was here … or perhaps it waited …” she added to herself, half-audibly.

  Prospero nodded reflectively, looking over the maps. “ ’Tis an ill chance that the maps beyond that place have strayed from Hicha’s keeping,” he said finally, “far more than I’m inclined to grant to time’s slow disordering of all things and blind, impartial Fortune.”

  “Obviously,” Dewar said. “Which is why I’m for going down there now and canvassing the area as thoroughly as we can.”

  “Good sense.” Prospero nodded. “And further, we should not take you with us, then,” he said to his daughter.

  “Oh?” she replied.

  “If this be dangerous—”

  “It is a matter pertaining to the realm,” Freia said, and her chin went up, “and I am not letting anyone delve into something that potentially important unless I am there.” She stared at her father, defiant, until my uncle broke the mood.

  “We don’t know whether it’s dangerous,” Dewar said indifferently. “It might just be one of those things.”

  “What things?” Prospero snapped.

  “Things. Part of the Maze, maybe. It may be that it’s drifting into that area of the Catacombs. Maybe it will engulf the Spring.”

  “That would present a challenge,” I observed. “Perhaps the Spring wants more protection for itself.”

  “The Spring is not personifiable,” Dewar said. “It doesn’t want things or do things; it exists.”

  My mother caught my eye and forestalled the embry
onic argument with a hair’s-breadth shake of her head. I nodded and looked at the piece of paper closest to me carefully. Dewar moved in his seat, fidgeting.

  “It’s grown too late to go questing below today,” Prospero said, “though one can say that it’s dark in the Catacombs day and night, still we’d be better fitted for the unknown when rested tomorrow morning. Let us meet then and all go together.”

  Freia nodded.

  “It’s the Day of Reflection,” I protested. I had plans for the holiday, the first day of the three which mark the end and beginning of the year.

  “No better day for such an investigation as this,” Prospero said.

  “Indeed, it’s singularly appropriate,” Freia agreed.

  “Eat a hunter’s breakfast, or we’d best bring lunch,” I suggested diffidently.

  “Well thought of; it may be quickly undone, or may be not,” Prospero agreed.

  Another brief silence, and Prospero rose just as Freia said, “I don’t think it is from the Spring.”

  “Everything here is from the Spring,” Dewar said in a fight-picking tone.

  “I mean, something the Spring has generated for itself. Or for us. It did not feel like that. It is a … a real barrier. Not a …” she hunted for words.

  “A straw man?” I supplied.

  “Straw wall. Whatever.” She smiled quickly, nervously.

  Prospero sat down again. “What feeling did it stir in you?” he asked me.

  I thought. “Resistance,” I said finally. “It felt … stubborn. It wasn’t about to give way.”

  “You?” He looked at Dewar.

  He dropped his obnoxious manner for a moment. “I found, and find, the idea of a locked door in our own cellar which resists us threatening.”

  Prospero looked at the maps again and the forefinger of his right hand tapped.