“No—more—tasks?” Caliban said slowly.
“Sluggard-wit,” Ariel hissed, “what hast thou done, to so displease our Master—”
“Nay, nay, you have served well, both and always,” Prospero said heavily. “This night shall I renounce sorcery, and ne’er more Summon Sylph and Sammead to my bidding. The hour’s come: I cannot eke it longer.”
So saying, he turned from the small, uncertain dust-devil that was Ariel and the stony mass of Caliban, and he paced to the edge of the Spring. He laid one hand upon the bark of the great tree that gripped the Spring in knotted roots, roots that stretched over and pierced through a worn shield-shaped stone that capped the rocky isle. “I have in mind to make,” he whispered to the tree, “some alterations in our life,” and recalled a long summer’s afternoon when Freia had gainsaid his plans, her protest rounded with the sleep of sorcery he had laid upon her. Did he regret? Nay, he swore to himself, and hurried on to his work, his last best work.
Well: the tree waited; the Spring bubbled quietly up and sank back to earth; the moon had passed the fifth degree of her ascent and floated toward zenith. Let it be done quickly. Prospero stood on the hilltop, above the Spring, and lifted his staff, drawing a quadruple-circle in the air. He spoke a Summoning, and a Salamander swirled and roared above him, stretching and straining to escape. Now Prospero, holding staff and Salamander aloft, an oriflamme above him in the darkness, went quickly down the slope to the cave which stood, its door ajar in the dark.
Prospero paused and shouted “Freia!” at the cave-mouth, a quick suspicion touching him; but nay, she was not there, she had bided at the mainland with her brother, though he’d feared she would disobey yet again and return here against his word. The cave was empty, but not empty: within were assembled all his books, his notes and works of craft and Art, his sorcery complete. Would it not destroy him to destroy it? He hesitated, and the Salamander roared and writhed.
Yet an oath-breaker’s end would be worse than to endure without sorcery. Prospero closed his eyes a moment and lowered the staff. “Dost see the Bounds within this cavern,” he said to the Salamander.
“Issseeeeeee,” it sizzled.
Prospero’s hair was frizzling with the heat.
“Within those Bounds mayst burn,” he said, “and when thou hast devour’d all within, destroyed all to the bare stone of the walls, be thou dismissed, replete with that which lies within the Bounds and no more.”
“Sssssooo,” it sizzled, and Prospero swung the staff and cried a word of release, hurling the Salamander into the cave. It exploded, an incandescent ball of white heat. By the harsh light he saw books and instruments knocked down by the explosion, saw his winged table and his chair—ah, the table, the chairs, he should have taken them away, too late—Freia’s chair carved with flowers, that he had made for her—they charred and coaled and burnt, and the books glowed and ashed, and the astrolabe and geoplane melted—
Prospero fled, his heart wrenching in his breast, striding back up to the Spring; the zenith was nearly upon him, he must be a true sorcerer this night or all was naught. He put the sight of his burning library from him and concentrated on the future. The Salamander’s roar was a dull throb in the air and its furnace-glow lit the end of the isle, casting misshapen shadows of the rocks and stumps out to the waters.
The sorcerer turned his back to the cave and addressed the Spring and the tree. Winds were beginning to rise, odds and ends of gusts tugging his cloak or chilling, then warming, his face and hands: winds breaking free from the Salamander’s destruction. Prospero muttered a few words, shooing the liberated airs away. The moon soared into her sixth degree above him. He lifted his arms and his head, and his staff stood of itself above the Spring, the silver double-spiral that wound from heel to top beginning to glow in the Spring-light as the staff turned slowly around and around like a spindle.
“By this hallowed Spring I stand and by it I command thee, staff, made by mine Art, be unmade by mine Art, be changed by mine Art to this standing tree’s heart …”
Prospero gestured, herding the staff, continuing his invocation; light rained up from the Spring, scattered by the staff to brighten the moon and the undersides of the tree’s trembling leaves. The staff seemed to swell, its silver coils shrinking and stretching in the brilliant light, and it hovered beside the tree now, spinning faster and faster. Prospero’s hands shone. He added to his invocation. “By this hallowed Spring I stand and by it I command thee, tree, nurtured by Spring, be changed by Spring …”
The tree took on a faint luminescence. It expanded within the glow, then filled the glow, and the glow moved outward and the staff disappeared, merging into the tree. It formed a brilliant streak in the heart of the wood, which streak now turned but slowly, ponderously, weighty with sorcery. Prospero closed his eyes as the tree’s swelling substance engulfed him. It moved over the Spring, and the Spring became a tree-shaped fountain, no longer shining softly and spilling water but drawn to the cresting moon above, a column of swirling light.
Within, Prospero’s arms were above his head, and he felt himself becoming tree-substance, the heavy element within him seeking union; he resisted and cried to the Spring, and the Spring began to sink, or the hill to rise, informing the tree-shape with the stone of the hill, enclosing the Spring.
The staff moved around and around Prospero now in a tight orbit. The tree’s rotation was ponderous and gradual, slowing as its substance changed from wood to stone, yet still it swelled around Prospero. The Spring rushed upward and outward, sinking, the substance of the hill flowing and the Spring brightening and concentrating as it did.
“… wood to stone,” Prospero was shouting in the stream of the Spring, “strengthened by all mine Art borne within my staff to tower’s heart …,” but he could not hear himself, only what he thought he said, and he was no longer sure where in the spell he was, carried on and down by it as its deep boneshaking music plummeted away from the moon. He shouted descriptions, visions, and charms; he recited every spell he had ever known, recalled and forgot them one after the other, gathered all the power he could grasp to him and spent it, pouring his sorcery into the earthly construction that ground and groaned around him.
One last thing—
“… do I loose thee, Ariel, and never shall place Bound on thee again, go where thou list, do what thou wilt; and thee Caliban do I likewise unbind from the form which I shaped upon thee now to go where thou list, do what thou wilt—”
The Spring cried a single sweet high note and ebbed rapidly, dragging him with it. Prospero felt himself fall and he felt the sorcery explode around him, and the only light in the darkness of the world was the Spring.
“Master?” whispered Ariel, pushing a breeze before him as he wound around and around a long spiral darkness. But it went down and down, and Ariel misliked the oppression of earth around him. The Sylph whispered, “Go where thou list, then, Ariel,” and whisked about, hissing in the stone passageway, up and out, higher and higher, starward and beyond.
“Master,” murmured Caliban, throwing off the hateful constraints of the crude humanoid shape into which Prospero had forced him, and he dove down, flying in his cold element as rapidly as Ariel, away from the Spring and its clammy constraints, away from Prospero’s long chores—away from the Lady, from flowers—a geode popped as he passed, and Caliban chortled at its sharp-budded crystals, and he thought of taking it to the Lady. But the depths called him; he was already deeper than ever he had delved since Prospero had Summoned and enmeshed him. He went down.
The moon slid down her arc and away behind the mountains; the stars ticked in circles above. Freia slept in a chair by an unshuttered window, her head on the rough wooden sill, an old cloak wrapped around her. The midnight lights and explosions had been too alarming to permit rest. The people Prospero had made, the Argyllines, huddled in frightened knots in their houses by cowering fires, afraid of the sorceries and strangeness that flowed around them in the dark. Freia watched,
trembling, and behind her Dewar snored raspily, oblivious of the destruction and danger in the world. Wild, brief windstorms blasted and thundered over the town, then gusted and screamed away to all points of the compass; patches of rain, fog, and snow of every description whipped past Freia’s window. Swift clouds skimmed over the moon and cleared it again, so that the light twisted and changed too much for her to see anything. Shutters banged erratically on the wall nearby, and from the forest came splintering and crashing sounds: great trees were falling. Things smashed into the side of the house, then were blown onward. Her ears ached and rang and popped with the noise, and her eyes stung with wind-carried grit and dirt.
A final explosion had deafened her and thrown her to the floor; when she stood, ears ringing, the great bubble of fog and light that had covered Prospero’s isle was gone and so was the ruddy-gold glow from the cave. She had guessed that he had lit a fire there and burned all his things, his things and a few of hers too that she had not thought to take away; but they belonged there, for that was home: her chair, her feather-bed, her little bark box of stones with water-worn holes in them. And then the prickling, singing feeling of the Spring coming out and out had distracted her from the pyrelight, and the shifting occluded shapes in the Spring-light, and the trembling of the earth.
Silence had come after that final explosion, but Freia had watched still, and had fallen asleep on watch curled tense and tight, her hands fists. The sun warmed her hair and she relaxed a little, drawing an arm beneath her head, and she slept on until the light was fully day-bright, dreaming of explosions and dark dungeons.
“Lady!” called someone into her dream.
Freia woke with a quick, frightened wrench.
“Lady,” Scudamor said more softly, “Lord Prospero—where is he?”
“I don’t know,” she said, wiping huge grit-grains from her lids. Her eyes hurt, sandpapered and salted. “He doesn’t tell me,” Freia said to Scudamor. “Didn’t he come back?”
“From the isle? No, Lady Freia,” Utrachet said from the door, a stage whisper.
She couldn’t think; she was so weary she wanted to push Dewar from the bed and lie down. “We must go look, he might be hurt—the fires,” she suggested disjointedly.
They nodded, and Freia followed them out. Why did she ache so in every bone, every muscle, as if she had been wrenched from head to foot? She stumbled on a step, and Scudamor caught her arm and kept her from falling. Utrachet rowed them to the isle, just the three of them in a flat-bottomed rowboat, his chin on his shoulder as he pulled. Freia half-lay in the bow, pillowing her head on her forearm, and nearly dozed before the boat scraped gravel at the landing-beach.
“Lady, should we look in the tower?” Utrachet asked.
“Tower?” she repeated, clambering out of the boat.
“The tower,” Utrachet said, and pointed.
Freia looked and gasped. She had been so tired as to be blind to anything more than an arm’s-length away, but here on the rocky shore of the isle she could not miss the tower.
The island’s shape had changed. The tall stone outcrop from which had sprung the Spring, to which had clung a film of soil and shrubs, was gone. In its place was a low rise, gentler and bare of trees. Bare of tree—the great tree was gone, too, the Spring’s companion, and in its place stood a mighty tower, the kind of tower Freia had seen in Landuc’s fortresses. Prospero had described such things to her, before ever she laid eyes on them, when they had been mentioned in such works of poetry, history, or literature as he had seen fit to set before her. In Landuc, where everything had been strange, where everyone seemed to be immured in hollowed-out stone, such towers, variously tall or squat, round or square, had been scattered everywhere, on nearly every sizable hill. Prospero had been prisoned in such a tower, in a castle on a stony mountain. Here, this tower hung over them, louring and dark, casting a shadow as hard-edged and empty as the blank blade of a knife.
She gaped.
Sheer, high, stark, the tower stood there as if it had plummeted from heaven.
Prospero had made it, Freia knew. He had done this thing, had removed the last lovely tree from her island and stuck this stone monstrosity in its place with his magic, a last evil thing to create in the world before he gave up sorcery forever. With the candor of exhaustion, Freia was suddenly glad that Prospero had lost his Art. Now he would always be Papa, her father, no more to throw sudden sleeps over her when he tired of her company, no more to raise storms, nor summon creatures and visions fair or monstrous, no more to vanish and reappear without a word of reason. There were so many things to do in the world besides sorcery, and he had never had time for them. Perhaps now he would let her guide him to the cliff in the Jagged Mountains where the gryphon’s nest was, to the ocean-wide plain below the flat-topped hills where teeming uncountable curly-horned deer grazed, to the swamps in the north where the beautiful blue-and-white birds fell to the water like pieces of broken sky.
But where was Prospero? Nowhere on the island. Without speaking the searchers stalked the tower, circling round and round and drawing nearer. Freia looked for the rivulet that had been the Spring’s overflow, but it was gone; the ground was so altered that she could not even find its course. They went three times around the wall at last, Freia leading, and halted at the stone doors.
Freia put her hands on the doors. At that light touch, the two thick halves swung easily inward. Coolness rushed out from the dim interior. She stood uncertain on the threshold. The place was alive, yet not alive; though made of stone, it breathed and stirred with life: like a forest, but unlike. There was no feeling of danger, but she was afraid.
Prospero had to be somewhere within. She must find him.
She turned to Scudamor and Utrachet. “He must be here. Wait for me.”
“Let me go with you, Lady, and Scudamor wait here for us both,” Utrachet said.
“No. If I don’t come back, you had better close the doors and, and stay away. This isn’t right. It doesn’t belong here. It’s dangerous.”
“If there is danger—” Utrachet began.
“We shall wait for you, Lady,” said Scudamor. “Today, tonight, tomorrow.”
Freia shrugged, abashed by his ready obedience. “It is up to you whether you wait or not.”
“We shall wait,” agreed Utrachet, unhappy.
She nodded and edged past the doors, suspiciously looking up at the lintel, at the doors, at the stone floor. Nothing moved but air, past her, as if the tower exhaled a long, chill breath of relief. Utrachet and Scudamor stood on the threshold, watching her.
Past the reach of the doors her eyes began to adjust to the dark stone. She saw another wall before her, a curving wall that seemed to be in the center of the empty space. She looked up; the space was higher than the doors; she couldn’t see where its ceiling was. It felt enclosed, though, not as though the whole tower were hollow all the way up.
“Prospero,” she whispered.
The whisper echoed, but not far.
Freia walked cautiously to the wall inside the tower; yes, it was curved, and she began to follow it around, but stopped. Away from the door, the darkness was so complete that she backed away and then half-ran to the door again, terrified of the stone-enclosed feeling: it was like Landuc, like the dungeons of Perendlac and Chasoulis where Ottaviano and Golias and the sorceress Neyphile had kept her, and her remembered fear and horror made her stumble in her haste to be away.
Utrachet and Scudamor met her, tense, ready to pounce on anything. Freia composed herself; some unconscious urge made her desire to show courage before them.
“There’s nothing there. It’s dark. It’s very dark. I, I need a torch.”
They all three left the open doorway and walked around the tumbled earth and rocks of the isle, looking for something she could make into a torch. No piece of suitable wood did they find, so Utrachet loped to the boat, rowed to the riverbank, and fetched back a lantern, one of the best in Argylle, made of pierced copper with panes
of thin-polished shell, and half a dozen tallow candles. On the threshold of the tower, Scudamor lit a little pile of tinder and touched the first candle’s wick to it, then placed the candle in the lantern. Freia nodded thanks and took it from him.
The doors hadn’t moved; the cool air was still pouring slowly past them. It smelled wet to Freia. She said, “Remember, don’t go in,” and left the Castellan and the Seneschal behind, forcing herself to walk around the rounded wall. The lantern-light was unheartening, weak after the sun’s brilliance. She circled fully around the tower, inside, then halfway again.
Exactly opposite the door was another door, set into the inner wall. It was open. There was nothing else. Freia lifted the lantern and saw that it was open because it could not be closed; there was no door in that doorway. Stairs led down and up, the same black stone as the tower.
The cold, moist air flowed from below, contradicting the behavior of proper air. Freia decided to go that way, and again she whispered “Prospero?” unanswered. So, deliberately slowly, her scuffed sandals slapping on her heels, she went down. Just a few steps took her out of sight of the doorway; that unnerved her so that she backed up to assure herself that it was still there, and still open, and it was, so she turned again and went unhappily down, against the current of air.
Sometimes her nose twitched as she descended: ghosts of scents drifted past. The sharp smell of crushed leaves, the dry, dusty scent of late-summer grasses, the rich scents of ripe fruits and turned earth, the salty decay-tang of the coastal marshes and the cold scent of the Jagged Mountains to the west, all these and others, unidentifiable, unaccountable, she smelled as she descended. She sniffed for Prospero, for the astringent herbal smell that combined with his sweat to make a lively, vivid aura around him, and she could not smell that at all. Her footsteps patted around her. She had not thought to note the number of stairs and she had no certain idea how long she had descended. The grade was easy, and her legs were more bored than weary.
The stairs coiled around and around. She stopped once and sat down, replacing her candle. That worried her. How long had she been here? Could these steps go down indefinitely? She was cold, and she had forgotten to eat in the turmoil of the morning.
The Price of Blood and Honor Page 5