by Tad Williams
A moment of silence passed before the answer came. "It's me, Mama Opal."
"Flint? What are you doing, boy?" She elbowed herself up out of the narrow cot and felt for the warmstone. When it was in her hand it began to glow a faint pink, enough to let her see around the room. To her dismay, Flint stood before her dressed not in his nightshirt but in daytime clothes and boots, a cloth sack in his hands.
"What in the name of stone and stonecutting are you doing? What is that sack for?"
"I was only putting some food in it. Some bread and a few dried winter mushrooms."
"What…? Oh, I see-you're going somewhere, or at least you think you are." She sprang out of bed and put herself between him and the door to the monks' dormitory where they slept. "But I won't let you."
Flint looked at her, his expression calm but solemn. "I have to, Mama Opal. Please let me go."
"Go where? Why do you do this to us, boy? To me? Haven't we been good to you?"
He flinched as if something hurt him, surprising her. "Yes. You have been better to me than anyone else ever has! I'm not running away, Mama Opal, or getting into trouble. I've just realized that there's something I must do. It… came to me."
"What came to you?"
"I… I can't tell you. Because I don't entirely know. But I know where it starts, and this is it. I must go."
Opal was close to despair, her anger melting away as fear supplanted it. "But where? This is foolishness, child! Where could you go? There's a war outside! The southerners might come down on us any moment with swords and spears. You'll be killed!" She came toward him, her hands now clasped before her breast. "Don't say such things, my rabbit. You're not going anywhere. Come back to bed. Sleep-it will all look different in the morning. You had a dream, that's all, and it seems very real."
"No." His voice was not cold, but neither was it comforting. "No, Mama Opal. This is the dream. And I am beginning to wake."
"Why couldn't Chert be here…?" Flint was taller than she was now, but it didn't matter: the thought of trying to restrain him had never seriously crossed her mind. She threw her arms around him. "Please, my sweet boy, my son, don't do it. Don't go. I've already had to see your… to see my husband off on another bootless errand…" Tears spilled down her cheeks.
The boy put his arms around her in an awkward embrace. "I'm sorry, Mama Opal, but I have to."
She leaned back a little and looked keenly, sufferingly at his face. "You're not like anyone else, are you? It's no use trying to make you something you're not." She laughed, a bitter, heartbroken sound. "I'll never see you again. The Elders gave you to me only to snatch you away again-a sort of joke."
"You will see me again." The confusion had left his voice. "I promise that. And you have done so much more than you know. You have saved me."
She stepped away from the door. "Go on, then. I've never been able to stop either you or Chert from doing what you must. Can you really not tell me where you go?"
He shook his head. "I don't know. Not yet. But I will know soon. Be brave, Mama."
She had long ago set down the warmstone; deprived of her hand and its coursing blood, its light had by now all but faded. Only the faintest rosy glow touched Flint as he opened the door into the hallway and stepped out into the echoing darkness.
Through the last several days Qinnitan had heard the fighting only distantly, as though somewhere in the endless, rocky deeps two ghost armies were fighting and re-fighting some ancient battle. When they passed through large caverns, the screams and shouts came to her unexpectedly, carried on the confused currents of air that drifted through the labyrinthine tunnels, and for a terrifying moment it seemed that soldiers were dying only yards away, around the next bend. She could not help thinking of the covered colonnades around the marketplace where she had run as a child, where in certain places you could hear the whispered bickering of merchants halfway around the square.
How had that little girl-barefoot and laughing, chasing her neighbors through the bazaar-become this pathetic thing, a caged creature that would never again see the sunlight, like the birds the copper miners carried down into the darkness with them?
The gods are punishing me-but I did nothing. It filled her with fury. I am innocent of any wrong and so was poor Pigeon! It is the gods themselves who have done this to me!
Qinnitan moved closer to the hardwood bars of her prison and pressed her face against them. She could dimly see the northern king's cage a few yards away, swaying on the shoulders of a half dozen bearers just as hers did. The feet of the men carrying the cages crunched on the path of broken stone the autarch's slaves had prepared. Sulepis had commanded a wider road be built down into the earth despite all his haste, simply so that he and his men could travel more comfortably. Qinnitan had seen some of the tons and tons of stone being carried out past her. It numbed her thoughts, this willingness to put a thousand men to work for days, killing dozens in the process, for a path that would be used once.
"Do you like our road, King Olin?" she called out.
"Is that you, Mistress Qinnitan?" They had talked a few times, whenever their cages were near enough. Her command of the northern tongue had improved during her time in Hierosol. She was embarrassed by how wordless she had been at their first meeting.
"Who else?"
She heard him laugh a little. Some of his bearers looked up at her, their faces full of resentment that the prisoners should talk and joke while they worked so hard.
But I think you would not really change places. Out loud she said, "The Golden One makes a big road down into this mountain. Doesn't he fear the mountain will fall on him?"
"He doesn't seem to fear anything," said Olin. "In another man I might admire that, but I think your Golden One does not believe anything can happen except that which he desires."
"Not my Golden One," she said. "He is a pig-a mad pig!" She repeated it even louder in Xixian for the benefit of the bearers. Several of them stumbled in frightened surprise.
"I wish you would not do that," Olin said.
"Why? What can Sulepis do?" And at that moment she truly did not fear him or any tortures he might use on her. "We are as good as dead. Even the autarch cannot kill us more than once!"
"It's not that. Whatever you said made the men carrying me almost drop me down this ravine. You likely cannot see it from where you are. In any case, I would prefer not to die that way."
Because you are afraid you would be leaving me to be the sacrificial goat in the Golden One's ritual. That was what he meant, she knew. But she only said, "I apologizing, King Olin. I try not to do it again."
They bumped along for a little while before she said, "Once you say I remind you of your… daughter? Is that the word? Your girl-son?"
He laughed again. She could not quite see him now. The nearest torch was behind him, and his face was in shadow. "My girl-son. It is funny you say that, because she has never liked having to wear women's clothes."
"Truly? She is like a man?"
"Only in that she wants to use her own wits instead of relying on a man to think for her." Olin's voice warmed. "You would like her. From what you have told me you two are much alike. Like you, she has escaped from her enemies again and again."
"You have pride of her."
"Yes, I do. And of her brother, too, although I haven't told you about him. He was given more to bear than any grown man should carry when he was only a child." The king went silent for a little time. "I have done him wrong, Qinnitan. That is my greatest sadness. I don't fear death, but I hate that I will not see them again."
"Until Heaven."
"Of course. Until Heaven."
Qinnitan woke from a thin sleep when the bearers set down the heavy cage, groaning and mumbling like oxen given the tongues of men. The torchlight showed they were in a strange, narrow passage, the roof only a few arm's lengths above Qinnitan's head. The paramount minister himself, Pinimmon Vash, as old and shriveled as a piece of sandal leather lost in the desert, was givin
g out orders to the soldiers guarding her and the northern king.
"I apologize, King Olin." Vash spoke the northern tongue as though he had been raised with it. "But here we must descend many steps and move through many narrow spaces. The cage and its bearers will not fit. I fear you must walk."
"But I will still be bound," Olin said.
"Regrettably, yes, your hands will be tied. After the recent incident… well, you understand." Outwardly Vash seemed bored and formal, but there was something else in his manner as well, an odd brittleness. Was he afraid of these crushing deeps, so far beneath the sunlit surface, or was there something else? Although Vash hid it well, Qinnitan, who had been well schooled in the constant smiling deceptions of the Seclusion, thought Paramount Minister Vash seemed almost to be afraid of Olin. But why would that be? Clearly, despite his one attempt on the autarch's life, the king was no longer a threat, any more than she was.
"Of course," Olin said, and there was something subtle beneath his words as well. "What else can you do? None of you wish to see anything happen to the Golden One."
He was goading the old man, she could tell-but why? Over what?
They took her out first as a hostage against Olin's good behavior. Occasionally she could hear the dull roar of men fighting nearby, louder than the ghost murmurs that sometimes floated to them. So the battle was close, Qinnitan thought; that meant that enemies of the autarch were also close by. Was there any chance she could escape? She would gladly take her chances in the dangerous confusion of the fighting.
But such a chance was not to be. The soldiers handled her as though she were a captured killer: they tied her hands firmly behind her back and looped a cord around her neck before bringing her out of the cage. When they had her surrounded with soldiers, one holding each arm and one behind her, they just as carefully removed Olin from his cage.
"I feel like Brann's white bull," he said. "Fed and cozened all year only to have his throat slit on Orphan's Day." His face was ashen. "May Lord Erivor's mercy cover us all."
A chill passed through Qinnitan, and it was all she could do to keep upright as the soldiers led her into the narrow passage and down the ancient, rounded steps into a darkness even the torches could not fully illumine.
"Chew, man, chew! Curse you, I told you this must be done." Tolly shoved another piece of the gritty black bread at Tinwright. "Swallow it and take more. Blood of the Brothers, are you weeping?"
Matt Tinwright wasn't precisely weeping. Tears had welled in his eyes because he was choking and he could barely breathe. The black bread, tinted with cuttlefish ink and baked without salt or leavening, was foul and dry, and his mouth was so full of it that when he coughed pieces flew out like cinders from a fire.
"Just be grateful I couldn't find a black dog," Hendon Tolly said, "or I would give you a meal that would make you weep for true. Now pull on those grave rags-Okros said the summoners must dress thusly to speak to the dead lands beyond."
But Okros died like a mouse half-eaten by a cat, Tinwright thought miserably. There was no escape from this. Any way he turned, bleak horror waited. Elan stood swaying between two guards with her face a shuttered window, so pale she might have been one of the newly dead herself, evicted from one of the coffins that lined the vault's six walls. The infant prince Alessandros, destined for sacrifice, was sleeping restlessly in Tinwright's arms, exhausted by his own tears.
Matt Tinwright was trapped as no one, not even the sacred Orphan himself, had ever been so utterly trapped, and no bright goddess would step in to save his soul as Zoria had rescued the Orphan's. Tears? The ocean itself did not contain enough salt and water for all the tears Matt Tinwright ached to shed.
The garments one of the guards now pulled out of a bag stank so badly of decay that he dared not guess where they had been obtained. As Tinwright dragged them on, rotted fabric tearing at each pull, Hendon Tolly wrapped himself in a much more presentable black cloak, although it, too, gleamed with pale mold and smelled of the grave. Tinwright could not bear to think of what was about to happen. He finished wrapping the cerements around him and stood, hopeless and miserable, waiting dumbly for Tolly's next order.
"Bring me one of the coffins out of the wall," the lord protector told the soldiers. "There-one of the old ones. That will be our altar."
His guards went to the dusty box he had chosen and extricated it from its niche, then carried it to the center of the vault with a marked lack of enthusiasm. Elan M'Cory didn't speak, but her mouth tightened at the sight of it and she turned her face away. Tolly took the baby from Tinwright and laid him on his back atop the featureless lid with as little care as if the child were a sack of meal. Alessandros whimpered but remained asleep. Hendon Tolly then commanded one of the other soldiers to remove the mirror from its wrappings and place it on the stone floor beside the makeshift altar.
"Now read from the book, poet!" Tolly said. "The page is marked by a ribbon. Read!"
If he only looked at the page of the book Hendon Tolly had given him, Tinwright decided, if he only read the words that marched across the page, though they squirmed before his eyes like insects, he would almost be able to pretend that all was well. If he did not look at the hideous demons and monsters cavorting in the margins of the pages, drawn with too much gleeful indulgence to be the work of any gods-fearing scribe, if he looked at nothing but the words themselves and ignored the death that was all around him and the madness in Hendon Tolly's every word and, worst of all, the knowledge that in mere moments he would be forced to do something so unspeakable that his soul would be damned to the deepest, darkest pits of Kernios' gray realm for as long as time itself existed… well, then he could almost pretend that what he was doing made sense…
"Curse you, you crawling peasant scum!" Tolly was almost jumping up and down with rage; a little bubble of white spittle had appeared at the corner of his mouth. "Read, curse you! Read it aloud! It is an invocation. It is meant to open the way to the land of the gods! Read!"
Tinwright swallowed. It felt as though something as large as a fir cone had lodged in his throat. "The sky is heavy, it is raining stars. The arches of the sky are cracking; the bones of the earthgod tremble; The Seven Gray Birds are struck dumb by the sight of me, As I rise toward the sky, I am transfigured into a god, Who throws down his father and eats his mother! I am the bull of the sky. My heart lives off the divine beings. I devour their intestines where their bodies are charged with magic…!"
He gained a little strength as he went, not because his heart had grown any less leaden, but because the rhythm of the words themselves caught him up, a cadence as powerful as the pace of a marching army. "I eat men and gods! I swallow their magic power! I relish their glory! The large ones are my morning meal The middling I eat at noon The small I save for supper, and those who are too old I burn for my incense! I appear in the sky and I am crowned as Lord of the Horizon…"
When he had reached the end of the passage, Tinwright stumbled on without realizing it, reading a few more words before Hendon Tolly angrily struck him on the side of the head, a stinging blow that almost made Tinwright drop the ancient book.
"Dog! Now take up the knife, and when I say it is time, make the sacrifice. The mirror must be smeared with the blood-that is what Okros said. But do not slit the creature's throat until I say the proper words!" Tolly thrust the dagger into Tinwright's unwilling hand. "Take it and hold it close. We are drawing near the hour when that cursed Xixian dog will be performing his own ritual. We must bargain with the gods before he does!" Tolly's voice suddenly rose in a peal of laughter that was as frightening as anything else that had happened so far-a note of pure madness. "Oh! Oh! Can you imagine the autarch's rage when he finds that I have broken into Heaven first-that I have stolen everything he coveted?"
"Don't do it, Matt!" Elan's voice was as ragged as Tinwright's stinking grave-clothes. "Not the child! My life, your life-nothing is worth such a crime…!"
He could not bear to listen to her. Each word felt
like the sting of a whip. He lowered the knife until it touched the baby's throat. At the feel of the cold metal, little Alessandros woke and began to cry again and Tinwright hurriedly lifted it so he didn't accidentally cut the infant's soft skin. He could not bear to look at the squirming baby, so he closed his eyes.
Nothing, he told himself. Nothing I can do. Nothing. It might as well not be happening. I could be asleep. All a dream. He groped for the child's heaving chest until he found it, let the fingers of his free hand rest gently upon it. Nothing.
Hendon Tolly was reading now, more words from before history, last uttered in the days of the unmourned Shadow Lords or chanted over a rock tomb in the southern forests when Hierosol itself was yet to be. "Those I meet are swallowed raw! I have broken the joints of gods; Their spines and necks; I have taken away their hearts…"
It was more than an invocation they had been reading, Tinwright dimly realized, it was a challenge-a challenge to the gods themselves, the death-song of some heathen king who claimed that the grave would not hold him, that the gods themselves would not be able to restrain him.
He could hear something else behind Tolly's words, a soft sound that nevertheless was coming from all around him, quiet bumping, scratching, as though in every box in the great vault something was stirring into movement. "I have swallowed the great crown! I have swallowed the scepter of rule! I have consumed the heart of every god! My life will not end! My limit is unknown and unspoken…"
Matt Tinwright opened his eyes. He could see nothing except the flickering of the torches, which bent in a sudden draft, but the soldiers were staring around wildly. The scraping grew louder, as though rats were gnawing their way out of the walls. Two of the guards suddenly bolted for the next chamber. Hendon Tolly watched them go, his eyes bulging with rage, but his chant was growing louder and it seemed he did not dare to stop. "Give me the eyes of He Who Stares! Give me the bones of He Who Builds! Give me the heart of He Who Rules! Give me the wisdom of He Who Defines! And give me She Who is Most Beautiful to be my woman…!"