by Tad Williams
I’m going to be Qinnitan, the girl the autarch noticed and plucked out of their midst. They’re going to talk about me at night. They’ll wonder if it ever might happen again, to one of them. They’re going to think it’s a wonderful, romantic tale, like Dasmet and the Girl With No Shadow.
“Don’t forget about me,” she said suddenly.
Duny stared at her in amazment. “Forget about you? Qin-ya, how could we ever . . . ?”
“No, I mean don’t forget about the real Qinnitan. Don’t make up silly stories about me.” She stared at her friend, who for once was shocked into silence. “I’m scared, Duny.”
“Getting married isn’t so bad,” her friend said. “My older sister told me . . .” She broke off, eyes wide. “I wonder if gods do it the same way people do . . . ?”
Qinnitan shook her head. Duny would never understand. “Do you think you could come visit me?”
“What? You mean . . . in the Seclusion?”
“Of course. It’s only men who aren’t allowed in. Please say you will.”
“Qin, I’ll . . . yes! Yes, I’ll come, as soon as the Sisters will let me.”
She threw her arms around Duny. Mistress Chryssa was standing in the doorway of the acolytes’ hall, letting her know that the soldiers were growing impatient outside the temple. “Don’t forget about me,” Qinnitan whispered in her friend’s ear. “Don’t make me into some . . . princess.”
Duny could only shake her head in confusion as Qinnitan took the sack with her pitiful array of possessions and followed the chief acolyte.
“One more thing,” Chryssa said. “Mother Mudry wishes a word with you before you go.”
“The . . . oracle? With me?” Mudry could hardly know Qinnitan at all. They had never been any nearer to each other than a dozen paces since Qinnitan had come to the Hive. Did even that august old woman desire to curry a little favor with the autarch? Qinnitan supposed she must. But the nicest thing he said about me was that I wasn’t ugly. Doesn’t give me much power to get favors done, now does it?
They walked through the darkest part of the Hive. The sleepy murmuring of the bees washed in through the air shafts high in the walls—there was nowhere in the Hive their song could not be heard. If the bees noticed the departure of one of the younger acolytes, it didn’t seem to bother them.
The oracle’s room smelled of lavender water and sandalwood incense. Oracle Mudry sat in her high-backed chair, her face lifted expectantly toward the door, blind eyes moving behind the lids. She reached out her hands. Qinnitan hesitated: they looked like claws.
“Is that the child? The girl?”
Qinnitan looked around but Chryssa had left her at the doorway to the inner chamber. “It’s me, Mother Mudry,” she said.
“Take my hands.”
“It’s very kind of you . . .”
“Hush!” She said it harshly, but without anger, a warning to a child not to touch a naked flame. Her cold hands closed on Qinnitan’s ringers. “We have never sent one to the Seclusion before, but Rugan tells me she thought you . . . unusual.” She shook her head. “Did you know that it was all ours, once, girl? Surigali was the Mistress of the Hive, and Nushash her cowering consort.”
Qinnitan had no idea what this meant, and it had been a long and confusing day. She stood silent as Mudry squeezed her fingers. The old woman paused as if listening, face lifted to the ceiling, much as earlier that day the autarch had stared at nothing while deciding to have a man’s bones shattered because he had coughed. The old woman’s hands seemed to grow warmer, almost hot, and Qinnitan had to force herself not to pull away. The oracle’s lined face seemed to grow slack, then the toothless mouth fell open in a gape of dismay.
“It is as I feared,” Mother Mudry said, letting go of Qmnitan’s hands. “It is bad. Very bad.”
“What? What do you mean?” Did the oracle have some knowledge of her fate? Was she to be slain by her husband-to-be, as so many others had been slain?
“A bird will fly before the storm.” Mudry spoke so quietly Qinnitan could barely hear her. “Yet it is hurt, and can scarcely keep wing. Still, that is all the hope that remains when the sleeper awakens. Still, the old blood is strong Not much hope at all . . .” She swayed for a moment, then stopped, her face turned straight toward Qinnitan s. If she had been sighted, she might have stared. “I am tired, forgive me. There is little we can do and it is of no use to frighten you. You must remember who you are, girl, that is all.”
Qinnitan had no idea if this was how the old woman usually behaved, but she knew the oracle was indeed frightening her, whether she wanted to or not. “What do you mean, remember? That I’m a Hive Sister?”
“Remember who you are. And when the cage is opened, you must fly. It will not be opened twice.”
“But I don’t understand . . . !”
Chryssa put her head in the door. “Is everything all right? Mother Mudry?”
The old woman nodded. She gave Qinnitan’s hand one last leathery squeeze, then let go. “Remember Remember.”
It was all Qinnitan could do not to cry as the Chief Acolyte handed her back over to the soldiers and their captain, silently glowering Jeddin, so they could conduct the new bride-to-be away to the hidden fastness of the Seclusion.
12
Sleeping in Stone
ON THE LONG AFTERNOON:
What are these that have fallen?
They sparkle beside the trail like jewels, like tears
Are they stars?
—from The Bonefall Oracles
Chert watched Mica and Talc dressing the stone on the wall above the tomb. The Schists could be clannish, and since they were Hornblende’s nephews, he had thought they might give trouble to their uncles replacement, but instead they had been nothing but helpful. In fact, his whole crew had been exemplary—even Pumice was doing his work with a minimum of complaining: whatever they might not have liked about the original job, they had swallowed it for the sake of getting the prince regent’s tomb ready. And a good thing, too. The only light where Chert stood were the torches in the stone wall sconces—four of the sconces new-carved—but he felt certain the morning sun must already be creeping above the eastern battlements, which meant only a few hours remained until the funeral.
It had not been easy, any of it, and Chert could only thank his Blue Quartz ancestors that it had been a comparatively small task, the construction of one new room, and that they were working mostly with limestone. Even so, in some cases they had been forced to cut corners—or not cut corners, to be more accurate, the new chamber was oddly shaped and still un finished on the far end where a low tunnel opened into farther caverns, and they had dressed only the wall into which the prince regent’s tomb had been cut Lumps of hard flint still floated like islands in all the finished walls, and most of the carvings would have to be completed later as well. There had barely been time for Little Carbon to decorate the tomb itself and the wall just around it, but the craftsman had done a fine job despite the haste, turning a raw hole in the bones of the Mount into a sort of forest bower. The stone plinth on which the prince regent’s coffin would he seemed a bed of long, living grasses, the tree trunks and hanging leafy branches carved into the walls of the crypt had been crafted with such delicacy that they seemed to fall away into the distance, row upon row Chert almost felt he could walk into the carving toward the heart of a living forest.
“It is splendid,” he told Little Carbon, who was doing a last bit of finework on a group of flowers in the plinth. “No one will be able to say that the Funderlings have not done their part and more.”
Little Carbon wiped dust from his sweaty face. He looked older than his true age—he was only a few years married, but already had the wizened features of a grandfather and white in his beard that did not come from limestone dust. “Sad job, though. You’d have thought this was to be my son’s to do, or even my grandson’s, not mine. He went too young, the poor prince. And who’d have believed that southerner fellow would have don
e it? After all these years, he seemed almost civilized.”
Chert turned and called to the others to hurry with pulling down the scaffolding Mica and Talc were on the ground now and nearly done, but the work gang still had to plaster the holes where the scaffold beams had been driven into the walls, and it needed to be done soon. Nynor the castellan had a dozen men and women waiting to fill the Eddon family crypt with flowers and candles.
Little Carbon squinted at a stone bloom, gave it a couple of last pokes with his chisel, then began working it with a pohshing-stick. “Speaking of sons, where’s that one of yours?"
Chert felt an odd mixture of pride and irritation to hear the boy referred to as his son. “Flint! I sent him out before you got here—he’ll be playing upground. All his messing about was going to send me mad.” Which was only part of the truth. The child had been acting so strangely that it had frightened him a little. In fact, Flint had been acting up so much that for a few moments Chert had feared it might be bad air leaking in through the cavern end of the tomb—breath of the black deep his people called it, and it had killed many a Funderling over the years—but none of the others had been affected. It had quickly become clear that the boy’s behavior was odder than even a pocket of bad air could explain he seemed both drawn to and afraid of the dark opening at the end of the tomb, grunting to himself as he peered into it like a much younger child—or even like an animal, Chert had thought fearfully—and singing snatches of unrecognizable songs. But when he had pulled the boy away, Flint had answered questions with no less reticence than usual, saying that the sound of the cavern beyond frightened him, whatever that meant, that he could hear voices and smell things.
“Things I don’t understand,” was all he would or could offer by way of explanation, “that I don’t want to understand,” but when Chert had grabbed a chunk of glowing coral and got down on his knees to poke his head into the raw, unworked limestone cavern beyond, he had found nothing unusual.
With a pressing job and the memory of what Cinnabar had said about the men’s restiveness fresh in his thoughts, Chert had made up his mind quickly. He didn’t want the boy kicking up a fuss and putting the men off their work, so he had taken Flint up the stairs and told him to stay inside the boundaries of the cemetery, but under no circumstances to go out of sight of the top steps of the tomb. With Chert’s men carrying limestone chips out of the mound in wheeled barrows all day, he had thought the boy could not get into too much trouble without being noticed.
Thinking about it now, as Little Carbon used a wet rag dipped in fine sand to scrape away a few last imperfections, Chert realized that he hadn’t heard or seen anything of the boy in some time, although he would have expected him to have come back down by now looking for his midmorning meal. He called a few last suggestions to the men tugging apart the scaffolding, patted Little Carbon on the shoulder, then stumped off to see what the child was up to.
A few of Nynor’s big folk were working in the outer chambers of the tomb, cleaning and preparing it for the burial procession, scrubbing soot off the walls where torches had burned, strewing rushes and neverfade blossoms on the floor. All these growing things filled the rock halls with a smell that reminded Chert of the days when he was courting Opal and took her upground to walk along the sea-meadows at Landsend. She had later told him that for a girl who had almost never been out of Funderling Town, it had been both exciting and frightening to stand looking down at the sea and that immensity of open sky. He remembered feeling an expensive pride—as though he had made it all for her.
But the scent of flowers and a few happy memories of his younger days could not change the nature of the place In niche after niche lay the mortal remains of the Eddons who had ruled Southmarch, of lives that might once have been grand or insignificant, but were all the same now. Still, when they were alive, someone cared for them, he thought. Their bodies were brought to this place by weeping mourners just as others would bring the murdered prince this day, then they had been left to sleep in stone until the machineries of time wore them away to dry dust and knobs of bone.
It did not make Chert fearful, although the Funderlings themselves did not bury their dead, but neither could he ignore the presence of so many finished lives. Some of the grander caskets, made in stone or metal to outlast the ages, had an effigy not of the occupant as he or she looked in life, although there were many of those, but of the occupant in death, withering and decaying, a style of funerary art from three centuries earlier. During those years after the plague, it seemed that many of the dying wished to remind the living just how transitory their good luck would be.
Why all the mystery? Chert wondered. These bodies of ours come out of the earth, come out of all we eat and drink and breathe, and they go back to earth in the end, whatever the gods may do with the spark that is inside us. But he could not be as blithe as he wished, and even though there were big folk busily at work in the catacombs around him, still he hurried Lately—even before the prince regent’s death—all around him had begun to seem tinged with the chill breath of mortality, a hint of the endings of things.
For once a child of stone was glad to see the raw daylight, but the lift in his spirits did not last long Flint was nowhere to be seen, and although Chert walked through all the graveyard and even into the gardens beyond, calling and calling, he could not find him.
*
Briony stood, naked and cold from the bath, looking down at her own pale limbs and hating the weakness of her womanhood.
If I were a man, she thought, then Summerfield and Lord Brone and the others would not seize at my every word. They would not think me weak. Even if I had a withered arm like Barrick’s, they would fear my anger. But because of the accident of my birth, of my sex, I am suspect.
The room was chill and she was trembling. Oh, Father, how could you leave us? She closed her eyes and for a moment she became a child again, shivering while the nurses bustled around her, drying her small body with flannels, the great house full of familiar sounds. Where does time go when it is used up? she wondered. Is it like the sound of voices that echo and echo in a long hallway, growing smaller and smaller until they’re too faint to hear? Is there an echo somewhere of that time when we were all together—Kendrick alive, Father here, Barrick well?
But even if there were, it would only be a dying echo, populated by ghosts.
She raised her arms. “Dress me,” she told Moina and Rose.
The thought of her father, the sudden urge to see him, or at least to hear his voice, had reminded her of something: where was his letter, the one Dawet dan-Faar had brought from Hierosol? Perhaps it was with some of Kendrick’s other effects—she had not had a chance to look through them all yet. But her father’s letter was not like other papers: she not only needed to see it, she wanted to, desperately. She would look for it after the funeral. Kendrick’s funeral.
The horror of what lay ahead made her knees weak, but she straightened, held herself firm. She would not show her ladies how fearful she was, how helpless and hopeless.
Rose and Moina were strangely quiet. Briony wondered if they were as overwhelmed as she was, or merely respecting her mood and the dread weight of the day. And what did it matter? Death made its own respect, one way or another.
They slipped on her chemise, working a little to pull it into place over her damp skin. The petticoat tied at the back with points, she was still barefoot and it pooled around her feet. Rose pulled the laces too tight as she tied the corset and Briony grunted but did not ask her to loosen it. She had learned that these formal clothes served a purpose: like a soldier’s armor, they gave an outward semblance of strength even when the body inside was weak.
But I don’t want to be weak! I want to be strong, like a man, for the family and for our people. But what did that mean? There were many kinds of strength, the bearlike power of someone like Avin Brone or the more subtle force Kendrick had possessed: her older brother had once thrown one of the bigger guards so hard in a wrestlin
g match that the man had to be carried away. Thinking of him made her breath hitch. He was so alive—he can’t be gone. How can a single night change the world?
But there were other kinds of strength, too, she thought as Moina and Rose helped her into the black silk dress stiff with black brocade and delicate silver-and-gold filigree. Father almost neper raises his voice, and I have never seen him strike a blow in anger, but only fools ever called him weak. And why are only men thought strong? Who has held this family together in the past days? Not me, may Zoria forgive me. It had not been Barrick either, or even the lord constable. No, it had been Briony’s great-aunt Merolanna, stern and set as the Mount itself, who had ordered life and made a little sense of death.