The Dragonbone Chair

by Tad Williams

  Finally he opened his eyes again, and seemed to focus on Hengfisk. The Rimmersman took Langrian’s hand in his.

  “Hen…Hen…” Langrian croaked. Hengfisk pressed the damp cloth against the skin.

  “Don’t speak, Langrian. Rest.”

  Langrian turned his eyes slowly from Hengfisk to Binabik and Simon, then back to the monk. “Others…?” he managed to say.

  “Rest, now. You must rest.”

  “This man and I are agreeing at last on something.” Binabik smiled at his patient. “You should take sleep.”

  Langrian appeared to want to speak more, but before he could his eyelids slid down, as if heeding advice, and he slept.

  Two things happened that afternoon. The first occurred while Simon, the monk, and the troll were eating a sparse meal. Since Binabik had not wanted to leave Langrian there was no fresh game; the trio made do with dried meat and the products of Simon’s and Hengfisk’s foraging, berries and a few greenish nuts.

  As they sat, chewing silently, each wrapped in his own very different thoughts—Simon’s an equal mixture of the horrid dream-wheel and the triumphant battlefield figures of John and Camaris—Brother Dochais suddenly died.

  One moment he was sitting quietly, awake but not eating—he had refused the berries Simon offered him, staring like a mistrustful animal until the boy took them away—and a moment later he had rolled over on his face, quivering at first and then pitching violently. By the time the others could turn him over his eyes had rolled up, showing a ghastly white in his dirt-smeared face; a moment later he had quit breathing, although his body remained as rigid as a spar. Shaken as he was, Simon was certain that just before the final passion he had heard Dochais whisper “Storm King.” The words burned in his ears and troubled his heart, although he did not know why, unless he had heard them in his dream. Neither Binabik nor the monk said anything, but Simon was sure they had both heard.

  Hengfisk, to Simon’s surprise, wept bitterly over the body. He himself, in some strange way, felt almost relieved, a bizarre emotion that he could neither understand nor quell. Binabik was as unreadable as stone.

  The second thing happened as Binabik and Hengfisk were arguing, an hour or so later.

  “…And I am agreeing we will help, but you are upon the wrong ledge if you think to order me.” Binabik’s anger was tightly controlled, but his eyes had narrowed to black slashes beneath his brows.

  “But you will only help bury Dochais! Would you leave the others to be food for wolves?” Hengfisk’s anger was not at all controlled, and his eyes pushed out, wide and staring in his reddening face.

  “I tried to help Dochais,” the troll snapped. “I failed. We will bury him, if that is what you wish. But it is not my plan to be spending three days to bury all of your dead brethren. And there are worse purposes they could serve than ‘food for wolves’—and perhaps did while living, some of them!”

  It took a moment for Hengfisk to work out Binabik’s tangled speech, but when he did his color grew even brighter, if such was possible.

  “You…you heathen monster! How can you speak ill of unburied dead, you…poisonous dwarf’”

  Binabik smiled, a flat, deadly smile. “If your God loves them so, then he has taken their…souls, yes?…up to Heaven, and to be lying around will do harm only to their mortal bodies…”

  Before another word could be spoken, both combatants were startled out of their dispute by a deep growl from Qantaqa, who had been napping on the far side of the fire pit, beside Langrian. In a moment it became clear what had startled the gray wolf.

  Langrian was talking.

  “Someone…someone warn the…the abbot…treachery!…” The monk’s voice was a harsh whisper.

  “Brother!” Hengfisk cried, limping quickly to his side. “Save your strength!”

  “Let him speak,” Binabik replied. “It might be saving our lives, Rimmersman.”

  Before Hengfisk could respond, Langrian’s eyes were open. Staring first at Hengfisk, then at his surroundings, the monk shuddered as though with a chill, despite being wrapped in a heavy cloak.

  “Hengfisk…” he grated, the…the others…are they…?”

  “All dead,” said Binabik plainly.

  The Rimmersman shot him a hateful glance. “Usires has taken them back, Langrian,” he said. “Only you were spared.”

  “I…I feared it…”

  “Can you tell us what happened?” The troll leaned forward and put another damp cloth on the monk’s forehead. Simon could see now for the first time, behind the blood and scars and sickness, that Brother Langrian was quite young, perhaps not yet twenty years of age. “Do not tire yourself too much,” Binabik added, “but tell us what you know.”

  Langrian closed his eyes again, as if falling back into sleep, but he was only marshaling his strength. “There were…a dozen or so men who came…came in, sheltering from…off the Road.” He licked his lips; Binabik brought the water bag. “Many large…parties are traveling these days. We gave them to eat, and Brother Scenesefa…put them up in Traveler’s Hall.”

  As he drank water and talked, the monk seemed to slowly gain strength. “They were a strange lot…didn’t come down to the main hall that night, except the leader—a pale-eyed man who bore…an evil-looking helm…and dark armor—he asked…asked if we had heard word of a party of Rimmersmen coming North…from Erchester…”

  “Rimmersmen?” said Hengfisk, frowning.

  Erchester? thought Simon, wracking his brain. Who could it be?

  “Abbot Quincines told the man we had heard of no such party…and he seemed…satisfied. The abbot seemed troubled, but of course he did not share his worry with…we younger brothers…

  “The next morning one of the brothers came in from the hill-fields to report a company of riders from the south…the strangers seemed…very interested, saying that it was…the rest of their original party come to meet them. Their pale-eyed leader…took his men out to the great courtyard, to greet the new arrivals—or so we thought…

  “Just as the new company had crested Vine Hill and been sighted from the abbey—they looked to be only a…head or two fewer than our current guests…”

  Here Langrian had to stop for a moment’s rest, panting slightly. Binabik would have given him something to make him sleep, but the injured monk waved away the troll’s offer.

  “Not much…more to tell. One of the other brothers…saw one of the guests come running out, late, from Traveler’s Hall. He had not finished donning his cloak—they were all cloaked, ‘though the morning was warm—and beneath it there was the flash of a sword blade. The brother ran to the abbot, who had feared something of the like. Quincines went to confront the leader. Meanwhile, we could see the men riding down the hill—Rimmersmen all, bearded and braided. The abbot told the leader he and his men must put up, that Saint Hoderund’s would not be the site of some bandit struggle. The leader pulled his sword out and put it to Quincines’ throat.”

  “Merciful Aedon,” breathed Hengfisk-“A moment later we heard hoofbeats. Brother Scenesefa suddenly ran to the courtyard gate and shouted a warning to the approaching strangers. One of the…‘guests’…put an arrow in his back, and the leader slit the abbot’s throat.”

  Hengfisk stifled a sob and made the sign of the Tree over his heart, but Langrian’s face was solemn, emotionless; he continued his narrative without pausing.

  “Then there was carnage, the strangers leaping onto the brothers with knife and sword, or pulling bows and arrows from places of hiding. When the new arrivals came through the gate it was with their own swords drawn…I suppose they heard Scenesefa’s warning, and saw him shot down in the gateway arch.

  “I do not know what happened then, for all was madness. Someone threw a torch upon the chapel roof, and it caught afire. I ran for water as people screamed and horses screamed and…and something hit me on the head. That is all.”

  “So you do not know who was in either of these two warring bands?” Binabik asked
. “Did they fight with each other, or were they being partners?”

  Langrian nodded seriously. “They fought. The ambushers had a much more difficult time with them than they did with unarmed monks. That is all I can say—all I know.”

  “May they burn!” hissed Brother Hengfisk.

  “They shall.” Langrian sighed. “I think I must sleep again.” He closed his eyes, but his breathing did not change,

  Binabik straightened up. “I think I will be walking a short ways,” he said. Simon nodded. “Ninit, Qantaqa,” he called, and the wolf leaped up, stretched, and followed him. He had vanished into the woods within moments, leaving Simon with the three monks, two living, one dead.

  The services for Dochais were brief and spare. Hengfisk had found a winding sheet in the ruins of the abbey. They wrapped it around Dochais’ thin body and lowered him into a hole the three able-bodied folk had dug in the abbey’s cemetery, while Langrian slept in the forest with Qantaqa for a guardian. The digging had been hard work—the fire in the great barn had burned the wooden handles from the shovels, leaving only the blades to be wielded by hand—straining, sweaty work. By the time Brother Hengfisk had completed his impassioned prayers, coupling them with promises of divine justice—seeming to forget in his fervor that Dochais had been far away from the abbey when the murderers had done their work—it was the darkling tag-end of afternoon. The sun had dropped until there was nothing left but a bright residue along the crest of Vine Hill, and the grass of the churchyard was dark and cool. Binabik and Simon left Hengfisk crouching at the graveside, goggle-eyes tightly shut in prayer, and went to forage and explore around the abbey lands.

  Although the troll was careful to avoid as much as possible of the scene of the tragedy, its results were so widespread that Simon quickly began to wish he had returned to the forest camp to wait with Langrian and Qantaqa. A second hot day had done nothing to improve the condition of the bodies: in their bloated, swollen pinkness Simon saw an unpleasant similarity to the roast pig that crowned the Lady Day table at home. A part of him was scornful of his weakheartedness—hadn’t he already seen violent death, a battlefield full in a few short weeks?—but he realized as he walked…trying to keep his eyes ahead, to avoid the sight of other eyes, glazed and cracked by the sun…that death, at least for him, was never the same, no matter how veteran an observer he had become. Each one of these ruined sacks of bone and sweetbreads had been a life once, a beating heart, a voice that complained or laughed or sang.

  Someday this will happen to me, he thought as they threaded their way around the side of the chapel,—and who will remember me? He could find no ready answer, and the sight of the tiny field of grave markers, their tidiness cruelly lampooned by the sprawled bodies of slain monks, offered him little comfort.

  Binabik had found the charred remnants of the chapel’s side door, areas of sound wood showing through the coal-black surface like streaks of new-cleaned brass on an old lamp. The troll poked at the door, knocking loose burned fragments, but the structure held. He gave it a more vigorous poke with his stick, but still it stuck closed, a sentry who had died on watch.

  “Good,” Binabik said. “It is suggesting we may wander inside without the whole structure crashing upon our heads.” He took his stick and poked it in through a fissure between door and frame, then used it like a mason’s prybar, pushing and levering until, with a little help from Simon, it sprang open in a shower of black dust.

  After working so hard to open a door, it was truly strange to enter and find the roof gone, the chapel as open to the air as an unlidded cask. Simon looked up to see the sky framed above him, going red at the bottom and gray at the top with the onset of evening. Around the top of the walls the windows were blackened in their frames, the leading twisted outward, spilling its sooty glass as though a giant hand had pulled off the roof, reached down through the beams and poked out each window with a titan finger.

  A quick survey turned up nothing of use. The chapel, perhaps because of its rich draperies and hangings, had burned to the walls. Crumbled ash sculptures of benches and stairs and an altar stood in place, and the stone altar steps bore the ghost of a floral wreath, a perfect, impossibly delicate crown of paper-thin leaves and diaphanous gray ash-flowers.

  Next, Simon and Binabik made their way across the commons to the residences, a long low hall of tiny cells. The damage here was moderate—one end had caught fire, but for some reason had burned out before the conflagration had spread.

  “Be looking especially for boots,” Binabik said. “It is sandals these abbey men wear mostly, but some of them may occasionally need to ride or travel in cold weather. Some that are fitting you are best, but in necessity settle for too large rather than too small.”

  They started at opposite ends of the long hall. None of the doors were locked, but they were distressingly bare little rooms, a Tree on the wall the only decoration in most. One monk had hung a flowering rowan branch above his hard pallet; its jauntiness in such spare surroundings cheered Simon immensely, until he remembered the fate of the room’s resident.

  On the sixth or seventh, Simon was startled when his pulling open the cell door was followed by a hissing noise and the blur of something whisking past his ankle. At first he thought an arrow had been shot at him, but one look at the tiny, empty cell showed the impossibility of such a thing. A moment later he realized what it was, and quirked his mouth in a half-smile. One of the monks, no doubt in direct contravention of abbey rules, had kept a pet—a cat, no less, just like the little gray scattercat he had befriended at the Hayholt. After two days locked in the cell, waiting for the master who would not return, it was hungry, angry, and frightened. He went back down the hall looking for it, but the animal was gone.

  Binabik heard him clomping about. “Is all well, Simon?” he called, out of sight in one of the other cells.

  “Yes,” Simon yelled back. The light in the tiny windows above his head was quite gray now. He wondered if he should head back to the door, finding Binabik on the way, or go back and look some more. He was interested at least in examining the cell of the monk with the contraband cat.

  A few moments later Simon was reminded about the problems of keeping animals shut in too long. Holding his nose, he looked quickly around the cell, and spotted a book, small but nicely bound in leather. He tiptoed across the suspect floor, hooked it off the low bed, and stilted out again.

  He had just sat down in the next cell to have a look at his prize when Binabik appeared in the doorway.

  “I am having small luck here. You?” the troll asked.

  “No boots.”

  “Well, it is fast becoming evening. I think I should be having a look around the Traveler’s Hall where the murderous strangers were sleeping, in case there is some object there that will tell us anything. Wait for me here, hmmm?”

  Simon nodded and Binabik left.

  The book was, as Simon had expected, a Book of Aedon, although it was a very expensive and finely-made book for a poor monk to have in his possession; Simon guessed it was a gift from a rich relative. The volume itself was unremarkable, although the illuminations were very nice—at least as far as Simon could tell in the fading light—but there was one thing that caught his attention.

  On the first page, where people often wrote their names, or words of salutation if the book was a gift, there was this phrase, carefully but shakily written:

  Piercing My Hearte there is A Golden Dagger;

  That is God

  Piercing God’s Hearte there is a Golden Needle;

  That is me

  As Simon sat looking at the words his newfound resolve was tested; he felt a wave wash through him, a staggering ocean breaker of remorse and fear, and a feeling of things that, though unseen, were nonetheless slipping heartbreakingly away.

  In the midst of his staring reverie Binabik popped his head through the door and tossed a pair of boots onto the floor beside him with a muffled clatter. Simon did not look up.

 
“Many interesting things there are at Traveler’s Hall, your new boots not least. But dark is coming, and I may take only a moment more. Meet with me before this hall, soon.” And he was gone again.

  After long, silent moments in the troll’s wake, Simon set the book down—he had planned to take it, but had changed his mind—and tried the boots on his feet. At other moments he would have been pleased to find how well they fitted, but now he just left his tattered shoes on the floor and walked down the hall toward the front entrance.

  The muted light of evening had descended. Across the commons stood the Traveler’s Hall, a twin to the building he had just left. For some reason the sight of the door across from him swinging listlessly to and fro filled him with vague fear. Where was the troll?

  Just as he remembered the swinging paddock gate that had been the first signal that all was not well at the abbey, Simon was startled by a rough hand grasping at his shoulder, pulling him backward.

  “Binabik!” he managed to shout, and then a thick palm was clamped over his mouth, and he was crushed back against a rockhard body.

  “Vawer es do üunde?” a voice growled at his ear in the stony accents of Rimmersgard.

  “Im todsten-grukker!” another voice sneered.

  In a blind panic Simon opened his mouth behind the shielding hand and bit. There was a grunt of pain, and for a moment his mouth was free.

  “Help me! Binabik!” he screeched, then the hand covered him again, crushingly painful now, and a second later he felt a black impact behind his ear.