by Anthony Ryan
I cleared tearful eyes to see Toria doubled over, disgorging a mix of brandy and grit, before my gaze swung to the passage. The only light came from the single torch in a stanchion hammered into the wall. Its light was too weak to discern anything in the depths of the tunnel, but from the continuing clatter and hiss of falling stone, I divined that our discussion of a few moments ago was now probably irrelevant. Escape was now as distant as the stars on a clear night. However, on this occasion, for once my pessimism was to prove unfounded.
“What a remarkable thing.” Carver stood in the vertical shaft, staring at the inky blackness above, fingers teasing his thick beard in contemplation. It had taken a week of arduous toil to clear the dislodged stone from the tunnel, some of the larger boulders having to be broken up before they could be dragged away. It had all been piled up in the Shrine to Martyr Callin. So much displaced rock appearing above ground all at once would be sure to arouse the suspicion of the sentries on the wall. We had expected to find the tunnel itself choked with yet more debris but instead discovered it now intersected yet another chamber, narrower than the others but extending to a much greater height than any so far found.
“Any notion of how high it goes?” Brewer asked, raising his torch, which only illuminated yet more damp rock with no sign of a ceiling.
“Difficult to say,” Carver said, stroking his beard for a moment longer before throwing his head back and casting a hearty shout into the gloom. His voice echoed but not for as long as I expected, the shout rebounding at us with an eerie clarity and swiftness.
“Sounds like it narrows a good deal after thirty feet or so,” Carver concluded. “And I reckon we’re only fifty feet belowground here.”
Besides Carver, Brewer and myself, Sihlda was the only other congregant present and I noted that she failed to partake in the resultant sharing of meaningful glances. Instead, she stood with her arms crossed, head lowered and a deep frown on her brow, her features betraying none of the surprised joy I saw on Brewer’s craggy visage.
“Scaling this won’t be easy,” Carver went on, running a hand over the chamber’s moist wall. “Still, it’s possible with a good supply of timber to craft ladders. If we can get hold of more nails, I can craft them into brackets to secure them to the stone—”
“How long?” Sihlda cut in, her frown still in place.
“That all depends on supplies, Ascendant.” Carver spread his hands in apology. “If we have everything we need it could be done in a couple of weeks.”
“Weeks,” Brewer repeated with a laugh, the smile abruptly slipping from his lips at a sharp glance from Sihlda.
“Calculate what is required,” she told Carver. “Be exact and as sparing as you can.” She stared hard at him and then Brewer, her voice taking on a rare note of command. “Say nothing of this to the others. If they ask, tell them work on the tunnel is halted for now, until we know it’s safe.”
She continued to stare until both men responded with grave expressions of agreement. “Alwyn,” Sihlda said, turning away. “Come with me.”
Ascendant Sihlda’s chamber sat close to the shrine’s entrance, a cramped alcove furnished only with a sackcloth mattress and a small writing desk. The desk had been crafted for her by a carpenter consigned to the Pit by virtue of having done bloody murder to both his wife and his lord’s son after discovering them mid-tryst. One of Sihlda’s early congregants, he had, before expiring from black lung, fashioned various items of impressive craftsmanship from what spare wood he could gather. The desk was by far his greatest and most cherished achievement, one I appreciated just as much as the Ascendant for it was at this desk that she had taught me letters.
“Fetch some water, and all the ink you have left,” she told me as we made our way to her chamber. “I have an account to dictate and it may take some time.”
With the requisite items gathered I sat on the mattress and assembled the desk, feeling the habitual pulse of delight at the ingenuity of its design. At first glance it appeared just a plain, varnished box, hinged on one side. A few deft movements transformed it into a desk complete with stubby legs at each corner, an inkwell and a leather writing surface angled to just the right tilt for comfortable penmanship. I had long resolved that whatever my manner of departure from this place, this desk would be going with me.
“No need for finery,” Sihlda told me as I began to set out the date at the top of the page as was customary whenever she dictated something. It was my habit to embellish the letters with elaborate swirls and a filigree or two while she composed her thoughts. Today that did not appear to be necessary.
“I believe an unadorned hand will work best for this,” she added with a smile. “A testament should be a sober document, don’t you think, Alwyn?”
My quill made an ugly scratch on the paper, bringing a muffled curse to my lips as I tried to blot it away. Paper was an expensive item in the Pit, requiring much bartering with the guards or some risky purloining from Lord Eldurm’s chambers. “Testament?”
“With the hour of liberation at hand, it seems the opportune moment.” She paced back and forth in the chamber entrance, as was her habit when dictating. The calmest of souls at most times, the act of expressing her thoughts was the only thing that seemed to cause her particular agitation. “The flight to Callintor will be fraught with risk, and I am not so young.”
“You’ll get there,” I promised, voice hard and very serious. “Even if Brewer and I have to carry you all the way.”
“And I’ve no doubt you would.” She smiled again but it was a brief thing, so unlike the serene half-curve of her lips I had seen so often. “Tell me, Alwyn,” she went on, running a stiff hand over the tight-bound, grey-black mane of her hair, “how do you imagine I came to be here? You must have formed some notion after all this time?”
Finding her gaze uncomfortably direct, I returned my focus to the paper. The ink stain was small but annoying in its permanence. Depending on the outcome of our escape, it was possible I would get the chance to render a more finely crafted version of this document, but the precious original would remain forever besmirched. I hoped the lack of an answer might prod her to forsake her question, but she continued to stare in silent command until I consented to respond.
“Toria thinks the Covenant contrived to have you sent here,” I said. “She thinks you scared them with your piety and they feared that in time you would become the first new Martyr for many years.”
“Oh.” Sihlda pursed her lips in faint surprise. “Then Toria is clearly capable of more insight than I assumed. That was remiss of me. On this occasion, however, she is wrong. And I didn’t ask for her thoughts, but yours.”
Another silence filled with the same commanding stare. “You hear a lot of stories in the Pit,” I said finally. “Stories of betrayal and innocence. ‘My brother stole my inheritance but I didn’t kill him’; ‘I never left the tavern with that wench who wound up naked and dead in the river’; ‘All my neighbours lied about me killing that merchant so they could steal my land’. On and on it goes, and all of it a steaming mound of cow turds. In four years, I’ve yet to meet a soul who didn’t deserve to be here, one way or the other.”
For a second her old serene smile returned. “Then at least my estimation of your insight was accurate.” She resumed pacing and flicked a hand at my poised quill. “Don’t write until I tell you.” After pausing for a short breath, she continued in a clear voice but pitched low so it didn’t echo in the shaft.
“Toria was partially right,” Sihlda began. “There were those in the lofty reaches of the Covenant’s hierarchy who did in fact fear the eventual martyrdom of a woman who had risen to the rank of Ascendant before her thirtieth year. However, much, I’m sure, to their satisfaction, I would soon thereafter prove their fears unfounded.
“I began my service in northern Althiene. Born to a respectable and somewhat affluent family of cloth merchants, I had the leisure in my youth to go where my curious mind compelled me. I was also gifted
with an inability to forsake a soul in need. These two attributes naturally led me to the doors of the local shrine and, in time, to beseech the Aspirant there to grant my unworthy self the honour of taking orders as a Supplicant. An aged fellow with a trio of equally aged lesser clerics, I believe he said yes just to have someone about the place capable of scrubbing the floor. I, as is ever my wont, had more in mind than mere drudgery.
“There were many sick and infirm folk about the town and the surrounding farms and I took it upon myself to visit them, ministering to their souls while also providing sustenance and comfort to their bodies. At first the Aspirant took a dim view of my largesse with the shrine’s accumulated tithes but became mollified by the gratitude shown by the townsfolk and the churls. Gratitude will bring in yet more tithes than merely allowing adherents to grovel before the altar once a week. But it wasn’t just that I ministered to the sick. I could speak, you see. Speak in a way that will command the ear and the eye, and hold them for hours if the words flowed well. And flow they did. From the scrolls to my heart and then out through my mouth. I spoke and many listened.
“Usually the Martyrs’ Day supplications were reasonably well attended affairs, but dull and as brief as the Aspirant could make them, for no one likes to stand before a bored audience impatient for release. But after my first sermon the shrine became notably fuller. The following week they were lining the walls and crowding the door. After that, I began preaching in the field outside and soon that proved too small, so large were the crowds come to hear the word of Supplicant Sihlda.”
She stopped talking, her forehead creasing in both remembrance and puzzlement. “In truth, I have never truly understood it, their need to flock around me so. At the time, I liked to think it simply the truth of the Covenant’s message, ancient and unaltered but now spoken by a new voice. Also, fear of the Second Scourge is ever a potent draw. But now, after many years of pondering, I’m not so sure. It saddens me to say it, but I think some are bestowed with the gift of snaring the souls of others with words alone. Don’t mistake me, Alwyn. I see nothing… unnatural in this gift. Think on all the history I have taught you and I’m sure you can identify several luminaries who surely possessed the same ability. I would also wager, if it were not beneath an Ascendant’s dignity, that the Pretender must possess some similar facility, else how could a man of such low station have gathered so many to his banner?”
She smiled tightly, shaking her head. “No matter. You must stop me if I stray into conjecture again. To return to my tale it will suffice, for the sake of brevity, to relate that within two summers of taking orders as a Supplicant, my increasing following saw me raised to Aspirant and given my own parish. The fact that this new parish was quite some distance from my current one should have raised some suspicions in my mind, but harbouring ill thoughts towards the Covenant was beyond me in those days. So, off I went, travelling difficult roads and traversing marsh and bog until I found myself at the Shrine to Martyr Lemtuel. You recall his tale, I hope?”
“The first Martyr of the northern shore,” I replied dutifully. “Flayed to death for preaching Covenant lore to heathens who worshipped the Ascarlian gods.”
“Quite so. And, having flayed him, the heathens threw his body into a bog in the duchy of Cordwain. It was eventually recovered many years later and found to be in a remarkably preserved state and a shrine duly constructed to house it. This was where the Covenant chose to send me, a holy place to be sure, but also a place beset by swarms of ravenous bugs in the summer and thick blankets of freezing fog in the winter.
“I realised later that my parish had been selected on the assumption that few of my growing flock would choose to follow me there, an assumption that proved to be mostly correct. Some followed, of course, a few dozen out of the many who had previously clustered in rapt multitudes to catch my every word. The Shrine to Martyr Lemtuel should have been my prison, a handily chosen spot where an overly popular upstart Aspirant could be counted on to waste her days in isolation, if not fall victim to a fortuitous fever. Instead, I turned a prison into a haven, with a good deal of help from the curiously unrotted corpse of Martyr Lemtuel.
“It is common for the lame and sick to drag themselves along the Trail of Shrines hoping to be healed by the mere sight of divine remains, a practice I have always found both mercenary and disgusting. The notion that the bones of Martyrs possess healing properties is found nowhere in the scrolls and, while the Covenant offers guidance for the leading of a good and healthy life, its province lies primarily with the soul, not the body. My preaching on such matters was surely one of the things that saw me consigned to such a remote parish. Due to its remoteness Lemtuel’s shrine is one of the least visited places on the Trail, but even so every so often a few pilgrims would wend their weary, stumbling way to our door. I learned from the Supplicants that almost all tended to leave disappointed, their various maladies uncured and their spirits denuded by disappointment and the prospect of a return journey through the bog. Some would inevitably drown in the fog-shrouded waterways after losing their way or succumbing to exhaustion.
“Unable to tolerate their plight, I instituted a rule whereby no pilgrim could leave until I was satisfied they were strong enough to make the return journey. I had a healing house built next to the shrine which soon attracted more than just pilgrims. Although remote, the Cordwain boglands are not without people – peat cutters and fisher-folk who harvest the channels near the coast. Hardy they are but, like all folk, not immune to sickness or injury. So they too came seeking help and, as is the role of the Covenant, I gave it to them. I had some healing knowledge and learned a great deal as the years passed, but I was always more than a healer and my capacity for winning over an audience had never faded.
“It took the better part of a decade but the Shrine to Martyr Lemtuel eventually became a decent-sized village under Covenant governance, a place where those sick in either soul or body came for healing, while others…” Sihlda’s voice trailed off at this point. Letting out a sigh, she leaned against the doorway to her chamber, head sagging. Suddenly she appeared far older, all the vitality that belied the creases in her face and grey in her hair seeping away to reveal just a tired woman, aged beyond her years.
When she resumed her narrative, her voice took on a new and unfamiliar depth of sadness. “Others,” she said, “came for redemption, the absolution that only the Seraphile’s grace can offer after making true and unstinting testament of our worst sins. One chilly morn at the turn of autumn to winter, there came three souls – two youthful knights escorting a young woman of fine and noble appearance and a belly swollen with child. Her mission was two-fold: the safe delivery of her babe, and the testament of her sins.”
Her eyes flicked towards me and she straightened, the weariness slipping from her as quickly as it had descended. “You can start writing now.”
And so I wrote as she talked, for the next hour my quill hardly ceased its track across the page. The resultant document stirs a shameful note in me when I think of it now for it does not resemble the work of a true scribe. There are frequent errors, many scratched-out words and much spattering of ink, for the tale she told caused my hand to twitch often, even tremble at times. When it was done, I had learned that my belief in the deserved fates of all inmates in the Pit Mines had been dreadfully naive.
“My thanks for your dedicated and diligent attention, Alwyn,” she said when I dotted the terminus of the final line. “I entrust this account to you alone. You will carry it from here and, when the time comes, make its contents known.”
“When?” I asked, eyeing the stacked pages as one might a coiled and hissing snake. “Make it known to who?” I had no doubts at all regarding the veracity of Sihlda’s testament and, thanks in part to her tutelage, had a fair notion of the consequences should it become common knowledge. She was handing me something of great power but also dire consequence.
“You will know,” she assured me. “Now,” she went on with a familiar b
riskness, “we must contrive a very special lie to convince Lord Eldurm to provide additional timber.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I found Lord Eldurm sunk into a mood that was both forlorn and, fortuitously for my purposes, highly distracted. He sat slumped behind his desk, which was littered with a more than usual number of sealed letters. All but one remained unopened, a short note from what I could glimpse of it as reading the inverted contents was difficult. Also, the script had the jagged, spiky quality that indicated a quickly scrawled missive, making decipherment tricky. I was, however, able to read the last line and the oddly clear signature: ‘Your eternal friend, Evadine.’
Lord Eldurm, it appeared, had received an answer to his declaration and found it severely disappointing.
“Timber?” he said, voice betraying only the slightest interest and gaze barely rising from the note.
“Yes, my lord,” I replied with restrained keenness. “So as to fully explore the newly discovered seam.” I nodded to the rock I had placed on his desk, a gnarled, ugly thing with patches of brown possessed of a metallic sheen. “Carver thinks there may well be a good deal more like this to find.”
Lord Eldurm blinked and found the energy to focus on the rock for a second. “Copper, eh?”
“Indeed, my lord.”
In fact, this lump of copper ore was the only one ever dug out of the Pit, unearthed by Brewer’s pick over six years ago and never reported to his lordship on Sihlda’s instruction. Carver opined that there was surely more to be found but there was no true means of discovering where except by chance or a greatly increased amount of digging. Given that copper fetched a far higher price than iron, Sihlda knew the discovery of a viable seam in the Pit would soon see an influx of additional inmates. Lords would send hordes of their dregs to win a share in such a prize rather than just the worst miscreants.