by Ian Irvine
Finally he found a tunnel that ended in a chamber the size of a ballroom, cut into solid rock. It was high up and dry, but empty. Above he could feel the weight and the ages of Havissard pressing down on him, could sense the protection too. This was it! The solid rock above was many spans in thickness, and the protection weakest because it did not need to be strong here. If there was any way in, this was where it would be, up through ten spans of solid rock.
Mendark set his lightglass down on a shelf cut into the stone. From a brass box lined with velvet he took a spheroid the size and shape of a large egg. It was black, but when he held it to the light all the colors of the world and the sky danced there. It was a single piece of black opal, polished to the smoothness of agate. Mendark blew the dust off the rock shelf and set the opal down carefully beside the glass.
Now from a leather pouch he took a series of rings, like a puzzle ring that could only be put together in one way. But these rings, of which there were seven, were the size of bangles, and there were several possible solutions. They were made of silvery platinum.
Mendark put his fingertip to the opal, leaving a glowing red mark there. He exerted all his mind and will on that multi-colored spot, and when his senses were focused to a beam so tiny that it might have cut metal, he sought up through the weight of rock above, for Havissard. He found it at once and traced a path through it, seeking some throbbing subterranean thing that empowered the protection of the fortress. Eventually he identified that as well, though it was high up, too far to reach or visualize clearly, much less to break. He would have to try the more perilous way.
His all-seeing had given him an inkling of the nature of the protection, but he would have to know it much better before he could try this other way. So he spied it in and out and all around, and while he did so he was working on a solution to the puzzle ring, one that could be tuned to this protection and it alone. Then, as his seeking roved to and fro inside Havissard, it found something: a prickling aura leaking from what was hidden there. Mendark exulted. It was the Aachan gold, concealed by Yalkara long ago; he knew it instantly! He could not tell its location from here, but it would not be hard to find once he got inside. Tonight he would hold it in his hand. Then let his enemies tremble, Rulke especially.
But first he had to know the shapes and spaces of this protection as well as he knew his own mind. He kept on with his sensing and mapping. To compass this spell about and about, and keep all that he’d learned of it in his mind at once, would be a task worthy of the tellers. His own tale, and after this he would require Llian to tell it, would not just be any Great Tale. It would be the greatest of the Great Tales, and he, Men-dark, would be known as the greatest figure in all the Histories of Santhenar. He allowed himself to dream for a moment—it was a longing he felt more and more as he approached the end of his days.
It was hard. Three times he had to break off his working and lie on the floor while the aftersickness burned him up. Three times he was sure that he would never complete it and every nerve shrieked at him to give it away. Never! he told himself—this is your last gasp, and if you win it will pay for all. The gold! The Gold!
He forced even harder on the fourth try, blacking out momentarily. Coming to, Mendark found himself lying on the dusty floor again, wondering who he was and what he was doing here. Then something in his still-writhing fingers clicked into place and he looked down to see that the puzzle ring was solved, seven melded seamlessly into one in a way that he had never imagined. The first part of his working was done. The day went well. The solution was at hand.
No time to rest. Mendark flipped the completed ring over the opal. It wobbled down to make an annulus about the center. The glowing spot began to move around the surface of the opal and to spread out until the whole stone glowed with color. The same colors sparkled on the walls and floor of the cavern until it was as bright as day.
Mendark spoke a word, spun the opal on its base like a top and the colors whirled and shifted, weaving a cage of light around him. He touched the ring with his fingers. The opal stopped spinning; the cage solidified into a sphere. He spoke another word, holding opal and ring up with out-stretched hands. The sphere of light lifted, revolving slowly like a soap bubble, shimmering like a bubble too, and pulled him up toward the roof.
The top of the sphere passed straight through the rock. Mendark held his breath, knowing that if his working had failed the bubble would squash him to a smear against the roof. But it carried him with it, pulled him right into the rock, into the greatest darkness that could possibly exist. His mind could not encompass what was happening. It resisted all the way, and he could feel the rock dragging all the way through him, filling every atom of him with itself. Then with a thump he came up against something impenetrable that he’d thought he had already overcome—the protection!
Mendark panicked. It was unbreakable! Solid rock filled his mouth, his lungs, his eyes and belly and bowels. Claustrophobia overwhelmed him. He was going to die here, forever trapped in this geologic prison.
No! his mind screamed, for his mouth was full and his lips embedded in granite and his lungs were petrified.
The whole of reality shuddered as, it seemed, his powers interacted with someone else’s. The living rock rang like a temple bell, its very atoms wobbling through him and back the other way, a jelly the size of a mountain. Mendark could not even twitch his lip, but his mind screamed the most powerful opening word of all.
Suddenly the native rock began to slide past as though it was jelly. He spat it out of his mouth, wrestled with his courage. His mind swarmed with visions—two women on a rope platform above a river. Then the platform rocked wildly and they were gone. Suddenly he was through. He was inside at last! The place was thick with strangeness; the reality that he understood seemed to have little meaning here. But he was in, inside the lowest basement of Havissard. He stood up, but only for a moment. Aftersickness had never been this bad. The opal and the ring slipped from his hand to roll across the floor. The lightglass smashed and went out. He fell down and knew no more for a day.
27
* * *
HAVISSARD
Mendark woke in darkness. Feeling around, he impaled one finger on a shard of the lightglass. That led him to the rest of it, but it could no longer be coaxed to life. Fortunately he had another in his pack, though it was a long time before he remembered it. His brain did not want to follow the simplest directions. He’d done too much. His much-renewed body was giving out too soon. Mendark knew he’d be lucky to make it back to Thurkad.
The slow seepage of dust had covered everything; there was not even a spider’s web or trail of rat to be seen. He worked his way up through the basements and dungeons, searching for that perilous something, surely the Aachan gold, that he had sensed from outside. It promised to be a tedious task, for Havissard was huge. But Mendark was so hyped up, so close to his goal that nothing could quash him. Just a few hours and he would have the gold. No need to fear Yggur any longer, or Rulke, or anyone. Being a sensitive, he was sure that he could use the flute if he could only make it. And Tensor knew how. Tensor had been his friend for a thousand years. Tensor would forge it to atone for his crimes. Then the secret of gates would be his!
Mendark spent the best part of his second day searching before he sensed that the gold was near. Quartering that floor, he saw the most unexpected thing of all: fresh footprints! There were two sets, both coming and going, one smaller than the other. Quite small. A faint haze of dust lay in the air here. Following the prints he came upon a door, half-open, through which light showed. He stepped softly through, staff upraised.
Shelved from floor to ceiling were row upon row of journals, bound and clasped and, it appeared, numbered, though not in any script that he could read. He took one or two of them down: a version of the secret Charon script, he discovered. They showed no sign of the years—no rat holes, worm marks or such, though the earlier ones were worn, the bindings stained and scarred. A stone bench ran t
he length of the wall on his left, while the room was revealed to be L-shaped, the bench extending beyond the corner.
Mendark put his head round the corner. A woman was seated at the far end. She was bent over a book; a small pack sat on the dusty floor. The woman was small, with stark white skin and incongruously black hair. She wore a loose-fitting blouse and pantaloons, both of fine gray material, and gray boots.
He stood staring at her for almost a minute, wondering who she was and how she came to be here. What could have brought the two of them here, surely the only ones to enter Havissard since Yalkara’s departure, at exactly the same time? How had she got in? Was that strange warping sensation that he had felt, her working? Was that what had allowed him entry too? The woman was familiar in some way that he could not identify, some idiosyncrasy of manner that he knew.
Suddenly she leapt to her feet in alarm. Throwing an arm up, she cried out a word. The air between them shimmered and grew thick. He tried to ward her away but his feet were welded to the floor and his tongue swelled to fill his whole mouth. He could not speak, could not even breathe. She spoke another word and monstrous things appeared, vulgar creatures with spiked clubs. They leapt at him.
Mendark shook his head, but he could not clear the cobwebs that were slowly tangling and filming over all his senses. He knew that the creatures were just illusions that could not harm him. He tried to wave them away but his hands were feeble, uncontrollable appendages. The illusions struck at his head with their maces, then he went blind, choked on his tongue, his legs turned to butter and melted and he fell on his face in the dust.
The woman fled as though pursued by her own phantoms, not noticing that her book had fallen to the floor.
Mendark woke with another frightful headache, once more in total darkness. He couldn’t move, at first. His body was failing rapidly now. He groped around for his globe but it was gone, rolled across the floor, and took ages to find. When he did so Mendark found that it was cracked, with a large chip out of one side. He touched it to life but the light was feeble, fluttering, occasionally flaring up to a splintered glare that made his head ache worse than ever, at other times dwindling to a spark in the depths of the crystal. He sat down, suddenly afraid. If it failed he would never find his way out.
He wondered who the woman had been. He had been on his guard, had surprised her, yet she had broken his defenses as if they were not there, overcoming him with illusions so strong that even he had not been able to protect himself against them. What had she come for? What if…?
He prowled the room. The inscriptions on the back of each journal were in a script that he knew to be Charon. Though unable to read it, he recognized that the journals were numbered in order. He took one down, then another from a different section. They might have been year books, though not a single word could he decipher. He had no reason for taking any of them. His foot touched a small, slim volume lying in the dust, the book she’d dropped as she fled. He put it securely in his own pack.
Following the tracks, which cut straight through a labyrinth of corridors, Mendark soon lost all sense of direction. He was well beyond the area that he had earlier mapped. There was no dust in the air now. She was long gone.
Mendark followed the tracks, sometimes one set, sometimes two, for hours. They disappeared as he entered a section where the dust was scanty. Beyond he suddenly found himself in a bedchamber where the dust was untracked. It contained a low wooden bed, a cupboard on which sat a storm lantern and several books, all covered in dust. A desk on the other side of the room was also piled with books and journals. The bed had a red velvet cover. A scroll lay on it, or rather a piece of thick writing paper rolled up and held with a silver band. Beside it sat a small package wrapped in foil made of beaten silver.
Blowing off the dust, he unwrapped the package. Inside was a broad silver ring, beautifully inlaid with gold and platinum in swirling patterns like writing, though again in a script that he did not know. On the inside it was inscribed, in letters that he could read, Yalkara—Gyllias, and a symbol of eternity.
Opening the scroll, Mendark read a short message written in common speech, in silverpoint which had blackened over the centuries.
My dearest Gyllias,
Would that I could tell you face to face, but you are still not back and I can wait no longer. Faelamor attacked me again and this time she was very strong. She dealt me a wound which may well prove mortal. My only chance is to flee back through the gate to Aachan. Beware Faelamor!
Alas, my work is not done! I fear that it will never be completed now. But I beg you, take the Mirror and guard it well, against the possibility that someone will come to restore the balance that Rulke broke with the flute. I have locked the Mirror. Its secrets are hidden to all save the One who has the key.
Take this ring, which I made with my own hands, of ore that I mined and purified here at Havissard, gold and silver and platinum all. It is the key to Havissard, and a form of protection against my enemy, and a token to give you heart in the darkness, to remind you of my undying love.
It grieves me to go this way, but go I must.
Farewell forever,
Yalkara
Mendark was not easily moved, yet he wiped away a tear. Whoever Gyllias was, it was a gift that had never been received, for Yalkara had passed through the gate and her protection had immediately sealed Havissard off for three hundred years. Well, it was of no importance now, save as a historical sidelight that showed her human side. It would interest Llian. He examined the ring. It was a beautiful thing, but had no power that he could tell. He rolled up the scroll, thrust it through the ring and stowed them both in his pack.
Returning the way he had come, Mendark eventually discovered the tracks again. Hours later, with the globe fading, he found himself outside the library, and later still, back at his starting point. Was this another illusion, designed to trap him in a labyrinth of the woman’s own footprints? No, here they were, barely visible. They disappeared then reappeared, leading to another sparsely furnished bedchamber, back and forth in that place while his brain whirled with the effort of unraveling her path.
The tracks doubled back to the library, then one set went a different way, to a room where the plaster had been removed and a stone taken from the wall. He put his hand in the cavity, feeling a tiny prickling that disappeared almost immediately.
Mendark choked on bile. He wanted to break holes in the walls, to topple the towers of Havissard and watch them smash on the ground. The gold had been here, but it was here no longer. The woman had it. If only he had come here first! If only he had not lain helpless in the basement for a day. He could have wept. To have traveled so far and lose it by so little.
The regrets were useless, his great dreams now an embarrassment. No point in him even being here. Devastated, Men-dark took out the black opal spheroid and the seven-piece ring, set them up in a suitable place and tried to touch the opal to life. It did not respond; it was utterly dead. He fumbled with the seven parts of the puzzle ring, but it was lifeless metal too. His brain could not imagine how to put it together, much less that there was one unique solution that would open the way out of here. After hours of frustration he realized that it was hopeless. He’d have to find another way out or stay till he starved.
The wall lights did not work here. Sitting down wearily in the dust, Mendark searched in his pack for food, then touched the globe to darkness to preserve what remained of the light. What would he do when it failed? Exhausted, he made a meal of dry bread and cheese so oily that it had begun to drip in the heat, washed it down with stale water, lay on the floor with his head on his pack and slept.
He slept indifferently, troubled by strange dreams, and after only a couple of hours roused himself and continued. The globe ebbed down to a glow so dim that it barely illuminated only the tips of his fingers, and he had to walk crouched down to see where he was going. When even that light failed he tore the sleeve off a dirty shirt, twisted it into the form of a to
rch, smeared it with the oily cheese and struck sparks into it. After many attempts it began to smolder. He swung the torch around his head until there was a dull red glow, no more than his enfeebled globe had given out, barely enough.
Hours he stumbled on, eking out the light. The shirt and the cheese were consumed and he was halfway though a spare pair of breeches when he discovered that the air was cool on his cheek. Following this path, stopping every so often to reassure himself that he was not mistaken, Mendark eventually entered a scullery. The breeze was coming from a chute that must have been used to dispose of kitchen wastes. A way out, perhaps. Or perhaps a trap that he would never escape from.
He crawled into the mouth of the chute, slipped and began to slide down a steep, greasy tunnel. He pressed the toes of his boots against the sides but it made no difference. He couldn’t stop! He shot round a shallow bend toward a ragged light.
Mendark realized that it was the remnant of a wooden hatch that had once covered the outlet of the chute. His arms were trapped by his sides; he couldn’t even protect his face. He struck the hatch head first, smashing the wormy wood to fragments. A nail scored his shoulder, he plunged through something that stretched like rubber, opened just enough to let him through and snapped closed again. The ring having opened the way, the protection spat him out. Now he was flying through the air, arms beating like the sails of a windmill. It was a long way down; Mendark had time to imagine his fate—impaled on a tree or smashed against rocks. Then he saw that there were dense bushes below him.
Mendark thumped down into brambles that had not been disturbed for centuries. He slapped his hands over his eyes as the wicked thorns tore his clothes to shreds. The whole center of the thicket sank down like a funnel under his weight, a hundred thorns gouged him, then he stopped, hanging upside down in the middle of the brambles. Dusty leaves rained past his face.