Silent Hall

by NS Dolkart

  The fairies’ skin surprised her. She could hardly believe that these beings had been given a name that only fit them for a few hours each day. It felt silly to even think of them as fairies at this point. She would have to devise a more appropriate name for them. Changelings, perhaps.

  After nearly half an hour, Narky woke up and asked for water. Hunter was relieved to set him down – it was a marvel that he had managed to carry Narky this far. The elves threw Narky a waterskin, which he promptly failed to catch. He sighed and picked it up off the ground.

  If the children had been wary of Phaedra, they were terrified of Narky. The one-eyed black man loomed like a monster in their eyes, and they all did their best to avoid walking beside him. Narky didn’t seem to mind. He slogged after the fairies without a word, head bowed, and did not even look at the children.

  Phaedra wondered at his secrets. In answering the elf captain’s riddle, he had admitted that justice would mean his death. Why would it? Was it for the same crime that he had committed against Ravennis, the one that had nearly killed him already? Or was Narky’s past so sinister that his repentance to Ravennis would not suffice?

  It worried her. She was starting to like Narky. Yes, he could be rude in conversation, but at least his eyes never glazed over when Phaedra spoke. What if he was secretly a rapist, or a murderer? She had always thought of him as a private person, but now she had to admit that he was altogether secretive. The boy never spoke of his life before the boat. He had never told them what sin had sent Ravennis’ messengers after him, and he had called Psander a blackmailer. With what was she blackmailing him?

  She couldn’t ask him. There was so much she couldn’t ask. Her mind was bursting with questions – for Narky, for Bandu, for the fairies – but she couldn’t ask any of them. Narky was silent and brooding, and Bandu and Criton had vanished into the forest. Phaedra was too afraid to ask the fairies anything, after what they had done to Narky.

  After a second hour of walking, the children began to stumble and lag behind. They were just too small; their little legs had to move twice as quickly as the islanders’ in order to keep up. The fairies grinned down at them maliciously, as if relishing the punishment they were about to inflict. Some of the children began to cry. In response, Hunter picked up a sobbing little boy and sat him upon his shoulders. That ended the sobs for a time, but it hardly made the journey easier: soon all the children wanted rides on Hunter’s back.

  Luckily, the fairies did not force them to go a full third hour without rest. Phaedra couldn’t have made it that far, with her uneven gait. As it was, pain radiated from her hips up through her back and all the way to her neck. She was surprised she hadn’t collapsed yet. But now, after maybe a half hour of Hunter switching between different children on his shoulders, they were all allowed to sit and rest their legs over a meal of water and an unfamiliar green fruit. The fruit had a thick spongy peel, and the inside came apart in large sections. The fruits were barely sweeter than lemons, and at first the children refused to eat them. They relented when they saw Raider Two reach for his sickle.

  Since encountering Hunter’s generosity, the children were beginning to look at Phaedra differently as well. She was no longer suspect in their eyes, but a potential friend and benefactor. But they still avoided Narky, who only scowled when he saw them.

  “How far is it?” one of the girls asked their captors.

  “Ten thousand steps,” said the elf captain.

  “Twelve thousand shuffles,” said the one called Raider Four.

  “At our pace,” said the angelic Raider Eleven, “only ’til noon.”

  Phaedra thought Raider Eleven must be even more beautiful in the daytime than she had been at night. Her flawless black skin contrasted strikingly with her silver clothes, and gave her an appearance that was more divine than human. She looked like a cruel goddess.

  The green fruit could hardly be called filling, but soon the travelers were once more on the move. At first their pace nearly matched the one with which they had set out, but soon the many little legs began to give in, and the children started looking even at Phaedra’s shoulders as potential resting places. Phaedra was forced to refuse their pleas: her ankle bothered her already, and her limp was having an impact on her hips and back as well. She wished the islanders’ horses had passed through the Gateway with them.

  Her heart sank when she realized how much had been left behind with the horses. The tents, their blankets, their food. Flints and torches. Even if the fairies let them go, how would they ever survive in the wilderness?

  The sun was high in the sky when the captain let them rest once more, in a shady grove between hills. “Rest and prepare yourselves,” she said. “We shall arrive within the hour, and then the real games will begin.”

  Hunter lowered a girl called Delika from his shoulders, and they all sat down heavily on the moss. Delika was the most gregarious of the girls – it was she who had asked the fairies how much further they had to go. The children’s personalities were starting to emerge through their masks of fear, so that Phaedra was beginning to get to know them. The other girls were Tella, whose twin was Tellos, Adla, Temena and Caldra. Tella was a shy one, too shy even to ask Hunter for a ride. She gazed up at him with awe and envy as the others took their turns, but still she said nothing. She and her brother were olive-skinned like the Atunaeans or the Parakese, and her hair was straight and long.

  Temena and Adla turned out to be sisters, though it was hard to tell which was the elder. They couldn’t have been more than a year apart. They were the shortest of the girls, and the skinniest. Phaedra doubted they had ever been well fed.

  Caldra’s name and yellow hair identified her as belonging to a mountain village. She was slender and graceful, and her voice was high and light. Before today, Phaedra would have said she was like a little fairy.

  Then there were the three boys: Tellos, Rakon, and Breaker. Tellos spoke a good deal more than his sister, enough for Phaedra to detect an Atunaean accent. He was somewhat ill mannered, always pulling at Hunter’s shirt and demanding to be next, but he had such an adorable little face that Phaedra found him charming anyway. Rakon was the youngest of the children, and the one who needed rides most frequently. He had very dark hair for such light colored skin, which to Phaedra’s mind made him look sickly. Breaker was a fisherman’s son who seemed used to spending time without his parents. He was a sweet, quiet boy, which was practically a miracle considering his name. Phaedra wondered what his parents could have been thinking, giving a boy a name like that.

  Phaedra spent their brief respite getting to know the children, telling them stories about the islands and their relations to the continental cities, and hoping that they would get over their fear of black skin. Hunter’s rides had been priceless in that regard, opening them up to the possibility of trust and friendship. Talking to them gave Phaedra something to do besides worry.

  After a few short minutes of rest, the fairies pushed them onward. They crested the hill, and then another, and finally found themselves looking down upon Castle Illweather.

  The castle was like no structure Phaedra had ever seen. The stones, if there even were any, were so covered in moss, ivy and tangled vines that not a spot of gray was visible anywhere. The castle seemed to have been built – or, rather, grown – in a pentagonal shape. Where the corner towers should have stood, there were instead five massive trees. Even the lowest branches of these towered above the ground, many of them integrating into its walls and roof. Above the castle hung a single, angry stormcloud that twisted and swirled, but never swept on. Ill weather indeed.

  The elves drove them toward the gate – or toward the place where a gate ought to have been. There was no true gate here, only a portcullis of writhing vines. The sight reminded Phaedra of Bandu’s caper bushes.

  They reached the vines, and the elf captain called for them to halt. When she spoke, it was to the castle itself. “The captain of the Illweather Raiders requests entrance,” she s
aid.

  The living gatehouse creaked and groaned horribly, to which the fairies listened with patience.

  “We bring with us eleven godserfs,” said the captain. “Three are old.”

  Again, the gatehouse creaked and rustled in disapproval.

  “That decision is neither yours nor ours to make,” the captain said, apparently in response to the rustling. “We will let the prince decide.”

  The gatehouse accepted her words with a reluctant groan, and the vines whipped apart from each other with a great cracking sound. Phaedra shuddered. The gaping passage that lay ahead felt ominously alive. It was not just letting them in, she thought, as they advanced down the passage: it was swallowing them whole.

  Inside, the halls of Castle Illweather were dank and smelled of fungus. A blanket of mushrooms on the floor looked very much like blueglows, except that these mushrooms emitted a pale green light and did not seem to be growing out of corpses. As the fairies led them through the castle, Phaedra noticed their skin reacting to the darkness by turning a luminescent white again. Interesting.

  Deeper and deeper into the castle they went, twisting this way and that between walls of knotted roots and clinging fungus. They did not come across any more elves, but Phaedra sensed them nonetheless, waiting in hungry anticipation, just out of sight. Or perhaps it was the walls that waited.

  Hadn’t one of the Elkinaran sages claimed that the first world fell apart because of an excess of love and goodness? Too much love and goodness. The thought almost made Phaedra laugh.

  What would the fairy prince choose to do with her and the others? Would he have them enslaved? Executed? To what degree were the fairies bound by the rules of Bandu’s riddle game? It was supposed to protect the Godserfs for eleven days, but the fairy captain had taken Narky’s eye anyway. Obviously the elves could still harm them. What couldn’t they do? Could they just not kill the humans? What if Narky died of an infection?

  Surely, Bandu wouldn’t have suggested the riddle game unless it had some kind of power over the fairies. Perhaps they would learn more when they came before the prince.

  But they never did come before the prince. Instead, the elves brought them to a large windowless room, its only entrance guarded by a gigantic, wicked-looking thorn bush. The bush parted down the middle when they approached, flattening its spiky branches to the sides of the entryway to let them enter. As soon as all the humans were inside, the branches sprang back to block the passage.

  “Rest now, sweet little ones,” said the captain. “We will return as soon as our prince has spoken.”

  With the thud-thud of hooves slowly fading away, Phaedra turned back to the cluster of frightened children. Sweet little ones… those words made her shudder. She couldn’t help but feel that the fairies meant them literally.

  38

  Hunter

  They sat for an hour or more, awaiting their captors’ return. Phaedra tried to teach the children a game to keep them occupied, but she explained it poorly and they became restless and frightened again. Hunter lay on his back with his eyes closed, listening to Phaedra’s winding explanations and wishing his whole body didn’t ache so. Offering to carry little Rakon had seemed like such a good idea at first, but what had Hunter known? Once he had offered a ride to one…

  He hoped his back would recover soon, but somehow he doubted it. He suspected that it would ache for at least the next day or two, and quite possibly longer. It was a frightening thought. The fairies would never willingly let them go, so if they wanted to survive, they would have to break out somehow. How would Hunter run or fight if his whole body was stiff?

  He wished he still had his sword, though he doubted he would have been able to fight their way to freedom. The elves bore their weapons confidently, and those elvish sickles did not strike him as ornamental. The sharply curved blades extended from shafts almost three feet long, making them well designed for one-handed use when mounted in battle or two-handed use on foot. They were practical and deadly. Hunter might know nothing about elves, but weaponry was another matter.

  He didn’t really expect to break free. He longed for his sword because sharpening it had always calmed his nerves. Without it, all he could do was lie there and try not to go mad with fear.

  He opened his eyes and took a good look around. This room was damp and alive, its floor covered in a bed of moss and mushrooms. There was a gurgling pool of water at the far end, fed by some subterranean spring. The walls were made of dirt and roots – roots so thick and tough that Hunter doubted he could have cut his way out even if the elves had left him an ax. With a sudden thought, he rose to his feet again, walked over and thrust his arm into the pool of water. No, it was no good. The deeper parts were not nearly wide enough for a body to slip through. Even that most dangerous of escape plans was impossible.

  The thorn bush rustled and parted and all eleven raiders entered, sickles in hand. Hunter jumped up with a jolt. He had not even heard their footsteps!

  “The feasting games begin tonight,” the captain announced. “They will last eleven nights, and on the twelfth, one of you shall be named Apprentice, and another, Feast.”

  She turned to the islanders. “You are too old for feasting, but neither shall you be servants. Our Prince has decreed that on the twelfth night, when your victory in the riddle game is but a memory, you are to play the game of wounds for the feasting crowd whilst Illweather drinks your lifeblood. Come now, little ones.”

  The elves ushered the children out of the room.

  “Well, great,” said Narky, finally breaking his silence. “So they’re going to kill us, after all. Glad Bandu made such a difference.”

  “Eleven days is a long time,” Hunter said. There was at least some hope of escaping. Bandu and Criton would come to their rescue…

  And then they would be caught and killed. These fairies were not like the soldiers in Anardis: they had experience with magic, and powerful magic of their own. At most, Bandu’s powers were a shadow of theirs. How could he ever expect Bandu or Criton to defeat a living castle full of elves? The best thing to hope for was that the two of them would stay away from this place, and maybe even live to find a way home.

  “This place is horrible,” moaned Phaedra. “I wish… this place is horrible.”

  “It’s even worse than the stories made it sound,” said Narky, wincing and putting a hand over his eye covering. “They don’t just use kids as slaves, they eat some of them. And I thought Psander was bad.”

  “I think,” Phaedra said, “that the absence of the Gods drove them mad.”

  “Maybe it drove them madder,” Narky replied, “but if they weren’t trouble to begin with, how come the Gods abandoned them?”

  Hunter thought about that. “Maybe they were too magical,” he said.

  Phaedra nodded. “That’s certainly possible. I think their nets are made out of the sky, just the same as the mesh between the worlds. With magic powerful enough to manipulate the mesh, the Gods might have seen them as a threat.”

  “If They find some humans threatening,” Narky said, ruefully, “the fairies must have terrified Them.”

  “Narky!” cried Phaedra.

  He sat up. “What?” he said. “They’ve abandoned this world, Phaedra. They’re not watching here, any more than at Silent Hall. Except here the wards are foolproof, because the Gods put them up Themselves.”

  Phaedra sighed. “I don’t understand you,” she said. “You pray to Ravennis when you need something, but when you think no God is watching, you blaspheme against the whole pantheon!”

  “That’s true,” admitted Narky, turning contemplative. “That’s not very good repentance, is it? Why did Ravennis even spare me? I’m a lost cause.”

  The Gods were mysterious beings, Hunter thought. That was what Father used to say. Father, whom the mysterious Gods had not spared.

  “What kind of horrible games do you think they’re playing with the children?” Phaedra asked.

  “I don’t know
,” said Narky. “I don’t want to know.”

  “I wonder if Bandu won the games,” Hunter said, thinking aloud.

  “What?” asked Narky.

  Hunter fingered his empty scabbard. “The captain said when the games are over they’ll name one child their apprentice. If they teach their apprentice magic, that could be how Bandu learned.”

  “Could be,” said Narky, shrugging noncommittally. “I’d like to know how she got away from them when she was that young.”

  “They might have let her go after a few years,” Phaedra suggested. “It sounds like that’s what happened to the sage Katinaras as a boy. The elves keep calling us old, so they must bring all the children back after a while – the ones that are still alive, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” said Narky. “Psander said the sage was, what, ten or something when the fairies sent him home?”

  Phaedra nodded. “Nine, I think. He was six when he left.”

  “Right,” Narky went on, “but she doesn’t talk anything like the fairies, does she? She talks like someone who hasn’t had to say anything to anyone for a really, really long time. Ten years, maybe. I think she escaped from here on her own somehow, not too long after she got here. I don’t think they brought her back on purpose.”

  Phaedra didn’t answer. When Narky got to thinking, he was smart. Being here with these fast thinkers made Hunter feel like a clod. He’d felt this way around Phaedra and Narky before, but not so strongly. Maybe having Bandu around had made it easier not catching onto things too quickly. Now he felt alone in his struggle to keep up.

  “Could you tell us a story?” he asked Phaedra. “Anything that’s not about fairies.”

  Phaedra nodded. “I’ll tell you more about the sage Katinaras. He didn’t live on Tarphae all his life, you know. When he was still young he sailed eastward, visiting all the islands of the archipelago and collecting myths and oral histories. He went as far as the land our ancestors came from, the great continent across the ocean. When he came back and told the people what he had learned, they rejected his teachings and cried for his blood, and he had to flee Karsanye. But the king respected his knowledge and had him secretly brought back to live in the palace, writing his philosophies out of reach of the mob.”