by Carol Berg
“I’m no Registry man, brutish or other,” I said. “But I must know what this place is.”
“The Fathomless Pool has belched thy carcass up in the farthest backwater of the Sky Lord’s realm. May it be to thy sorrow of and that of all thy kin.” He tried, without success, to buck me off.
“Tell me, poison tongue. Is this the land called Sanctuary?”
“Pssh! No.” His scorn could have etched steel, but his feeble resistance relented.
“Go on.”
He pressed his forehead into the ground, his breath coming in great wheezes. “So thou’rt he. The one she told of. The Remeni. The incomparable Deliverer. ’Tis unfortunate the deliverance comes a few decades too late.”
“You know Safia!” I released his hands and scrambled off him. “Incomparable, no, but indeed I’ve come to help if I can. What do you mean, I’m too late?”
“Look round, Remeni-son. Excuse if I don’t join thee.” He remained prone as I stood up.
The pool, the starving man, and I were located on a broad, windy hilltop. The mostly level turf was lumpy and broken. Eight or ten stone benches had once ringed the pool. One was usable, three were cracked and fallen, the others rubble. And beyond . . . Goddess Mother!
I scrambled over and between the benches and a tilted slab to the edge of the steeps, where the hill fell away. A few scattered fires winked amid a sea of dark. Jagged shapes blocked the stars, hinting at what daylight would show. This was not Sanctuary, but the city portrayed in the Marshal’s window . . . or its bony carcass. Atop the hill twin to this stood the citadel, bathed in pale luminescence, two of its three round towers fallen. Huge trees grew where fields and pastures and hay meadows should have spread like an apron before the hillside city, as if the countryside were besieging the human-built works.
All was silence and sadness. Ah Goddess Mother, only now that I paid attention did I feel it borne on the wind . . . a cold and weighty grief deeper than the waters of the Fathomless Pool. And beneath it all simmered a subtle fury that I recognized only because it mirrored the smoldering fire in my own belly. Bitterness. Betrayal. Of all things, I wished to call on my bent, to touch this ground and learn of its mysteries. But I dared not. I’d been warned.
The starving man was using a fallen slab to help him rise. It was one of four or five scattered about the hilltop. Others were overgrown like grave mounds or crumbled as if a giant’s fist had crushed them.
I offered him my hand, but he refused it. “I’ll keep moving on my own two feet for as long as I’m able. And for as long as I’m able—if thou’lt pardon me, Sorcerer Remeni—I’ll not take the hand of thy kind.”
“I was brought up in a Registry family, but I’m no longer one of them.”
He got himself up and sat on the tilted stone, panting.
“This was the place of the standing stones,” I said.
“Aye. The holy place,” he said, dry as chaff. “The gate to Sanctuary. The place where pride and hope and friendship came first to exaltation, then to grief.”
I needed to know more of that, but seeing him . . . hearing his despair . . . fear hollowed my belly. “Where are they?” I said. “The group of Cicerons—Wanderers—who came through the portal two years ago. The Dané sentinel said they were safe.”
“Safe, yes, for the nonce. Hidden in the citadel. They brought food with them. And they were accustomed to forgoing magic. Ironic, isn’t it, that we’d been waiting for them to bring magic to save us? They told what’s happened to them all these years—centuries, they said, though we’ve seen but eight-and-twenty. Centuries of running, extermination, forgetting. Hope died the night they came. Well, it did for those whose romantic notions had not been starved out already.”
“But I thought—” Clearly much that I’d inferred from the portal in Osriel’s cave had been wrong. “If you know who I am, then you know I sent the others, believing, as they did, that they would find Sanctuary—a place of safety and benevolent companionship with the Danae. But this is Xancheira—a human city—not Sanctuary, though you speak of mere decades, not centuries, which tells me that time spends differently here, and no one’s laid an eye on your city all this time.” Not even Morgan and her kind. “Where, in the name of all gods, are we?”
“’Tis not my place to tell stories. If you’re to be trusted, our lady will tell thee.”
“The Danae sentinel, you mean?”
He burst into acid-laced laughter. “Hardly. Safia is smitten with a dead man. Truly, she is the most sensible of all her kind, but I’d advise thee to rely on no more than two words of her every three. I speak of the Lady Signé, she who rules the living and dead of the vanished Duchy of Xancheiros. She who races up the path even as we speak.”
He spoke with a despairing lightness, but as my waterlogged ears picked up the soft pelting of feet on grass, he slid from the bench he’d attained with such difficulty down to one knee, faced in my direction, and laid his fist on his heart. “Lady.”
I spun around and had just enough time to glimpse a youth bearing a lantern pause at the verge of the hill before a second, smaller person came up behind him, screamed “ohhhhhhh,” and barreled straight into me. All I could see of this one—a girl—was her dark head, which came only to my shoulder. The rest of her seemed to be all arms, thrown around me, touching, poking, patting. I tried not to flinch when she whacked the wound in my back.
“Oh, Luka! Merciful Goddess! Holy Deunor! All these months I told them you’d come. I never lost faith, but they are in such a terrible state, and Signé and Siever and all the rest so brave. You must help them. No one believes you can, but I told them that your magic is so powerful and so beautiful it made me weep every night in my bed. I know I never told you that, but if anyone can help, I know it will be you. Though they say we must use no magic here, just as we must keep hidden in the citadel and eat none of the food provided. But how in the Mother’s heart will you get us out, if not with your magic?”
I was yet floundering, my hands sticking out like a scarecrow’s limbs, unsure whether to touch her . . . to speak . . . to retreat . . . when the girl’s babbling stopped. She peered upward, her head tilted to one side, puzzled. Dark-eyed, slight, and so very young. “Ancieno?”
Ancieno . . . elder brother. Indeed I felt ancient and foolish and wretched. Though I knew who she must be, she was a stranger.
“Luka?” She reached for my mask, and I flinched.
She snatched her hands away and stepped back, her eyes grown huge. “So like . . . but not.”
Her gaze raked every quat of me before settling again on my mask. “Who in Magrog’s fire are you? Where is my brother?”
“Step away, Juliana. I told you not to come.” The woman’s reprimand was commanding, though her low voice put me in mind of river currents, strong and steady beneath the raucous sea tides in the estuary.
There was no third person come. It was the one holding the lantern who spoke—no youth, but a woman, though her hair was hacked off to her ears and her garments were the shirt, jaque, and breeches of a man. She didn’t hold the lantern high enough to reveal her face, but I saw enough to leave me wary. Bands of silver circled her wrists.
“Identify yourself, sorcerer, and state your purpose. Tell us why my friend now doubts you are the person she thought. And I’d advise you believe her warning that using magic here bears unhappy consequences.”
No mistaking her authority. I inclined my back and touched my forehead. “Honored Lady . . .”
Then I laid my open palm on my breast as a family member would do.
“. . . and serena pauli.” I used the formal address for younger sister because my tongue refused to speak the intimacy of the girl’s name. “I am the man born Lucian de Remeni. But for reasons I’ve no time to explain just now, I am also . . . not he. Through strange effects of my magical bents, I’ve spoken several times to a Danae sentinel w
ho calls herself Safia. She believes I can aid those trapped here—though I’m sorely confused about where here is.”
Urgent for them to believe me, I removed my mask.
“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to find a way,” I continued, feeling naked before their stares. “Even that was happy chance. But I feel the grief and sorrow bound in this land, and believe me, I’ve come to help make things right if I can. I’ve just no idea how.”
“Goddess, Luka, what’s—?” My sister’s hand flew to her mouth. But even as her eyes welled with tears, her back straightened and her chin lifted, and she stepped back and to one side. “Pardon my intrusion, my lady.”
“I am Signé de Tenielle,” said the woman, passing the lantern to a scrawny, breathless woman who’d just come up the hill behind her. “My brother, Benedik de Tenielle, is the second Duc de Xancheiros.”
Arms folded across her leather jaque, she strolled toward me. The woman with the lantern stayed close behind, as if she knew her mistress wished to get a better look at me without offering the same privilege. All I could glimpse of the woman Signé was thick, cropped hair the color of old honey and one light-sculpted cheek. That cheek was smooth . . . young. She was slim in her men’s clothes, but no starveling waif.
“And your lineage?” I asked. Was this possible?
“Our father Gaiern ruled the lands of Xancheiros for one-and-thirty years,” she said, stiff and resentful. “He was named the First Duc by Caedmon King and died at the hands of the Southern Registry, defending his lands and people until our magic and our friends of the long-lived could get the rest of us away to safety. Do not expect we’ll trust anyone Registry-born.”
Holy Deunor, it was all true. These were the actual survivors of Xancheira, not descendants hidden by magic for two hundred years.
“I expect nothing, lady. And I swear I mean you no harm. The sentinel Safia believes I can be of assistance . . . in whatever way you need assistance . . . and she spoke of urgent necessity. That you could be the very survivors of the horror at Xancheira, that the city itself exists, even ruined . . . is astonishment to me.”
She leaned her back against a slab. “Our diviners warned us of the danger coming from the Southern Registry, and we prepared carefully for that day. Alas, circumstances—misjudgments, misunderstandings, but mostly the cruelties of passing time—have left us and our friends in a very difficult pass. I doubt a Registry-nurtured portrait artist can remedy it.”
Her tongue was not tainted with bitterness, as the man’s was. She was merely blunt and brittle, like grapevines cut back to await an end to our everlasting winter and then frozen dead.
She peered into the night behind me, where slow steps brought my rescuer to join us. “Siever, has he injured you?”
“Nay. But whoever this fellow is, he can easily outmatch a starveling. That’s a starting place for a deliverance, I suppose, or whatever he’s here for.”
The dying man, tall and rail thin, halted beside my sister. She offered her hand to steady him, but he declined. He bent down close to her ear, but did not whisper, “Thy description was somewhat inaccurate when it comes to his skills in the area of physical conflict, young woman. If thou hast underrated his magic as much, perhaps he can do more than we expect.”
The lantern light revealed an intelligent look and a grin of twisted humor. But his dull hair was sparse, and his skin patchy and peeling, almost transparent. Were he any more ill, his bones would poke right through it. Yet he retained more life in his despair and dying than did his mistress.
A distant horn call split the night, setting all four of them alert.
“Siever, escort Juliana and Celia back to the citadel. Tell the Wanderers their deliverance is at hand, though with Kyr hunting, we’ll not dare move them tonight. I’ll be along.”
“Signé, do not stay out.”
“No, my lady! We’ll never leave the rest of you behind!”
The man Siever and my sister blurted their denials as one.
“I’ll speak to Remeni before he leaves,” said the woman, unrelenting. “The hunters won’t bother me; Kyr knows I’ll not leave without Benedik. And Juliana, you cannot be seen. Tell Hercule and the others of your brother’s coming.” She shifted her attention back to me. “You will take your sister and her companions back to where they belong, yes? If not tonight, then another time very soon?”
“If they want, certainly, and if I can, but—”
My sister stepped boldly between the lady and me. Confusion and whatever else was in my mind and on my tongue flitted away.
Somber, the girl touched my cheek and peered with such intensity my skin grew hot. “They did something to you, didn’t they—those vile curators? It’s as if you’re encased in armor. But hearing you . . . Of course it’s you.”
She seized my hand and planted a ferocious kiss. Whirling about, she gently accepted Siever’s proffered arm. With the lantern woman leading the way, they started down the hill. There was no illusion about who was escorting whom back to their citadel.
Speechless, I watched them go. I’d told myself I had to make my sister real. But Juliana needed no making. A spark of a girl, indeed, her light made even more extraordinary in this dark place.
As the torchlight vanished down the hill, the woman Signé unsheathed the blade of hostility and brandished it my way. “Is what she said true? From all I’ve heard, the two of you were as close as brother and sister can be, yet you look on her as a stranger. If you’ve been tainted . . . if you carry some geas to finish the work begun on that day my father and my city died . . . tell me now. For the rest of us death and ending is already accomplished, but I’ll not have a Registry plot destroy these newcomers who yet have some hope of life.”
Death accomplished . . . And Siever had said the Dané sentinel loved a dead man. My clammy flesh took on an even deeper chill.
“The Registry knows nothing of the doorway or those I sent here,” I said. “Only one man and one woman in all the world—neither of them Registry—know of my theory that the survivors of the massacre at Xancheira were given refuge in a place of myth called Sanctuary. But your man Siever said we were not in Sanctuary, yet you clearly exist in a time and place that are not the world I know. And now you speak of me going ‘back’ and of yourself as if you’re dead, though you seemingly breathe and talk and—” I had to hurry the asking before I felt too much the fool. “Lady, is this some byway of divine Idrium? Are you truly dead?”
“I am not a ghost, if that’s what you’re asking. You didn’t die to get here, did you? Your sister certainly did not.” Her mockery named me the idiot I felt. Which was a relief, to be sure.
“No. I’m yet living . . . I believe so.” Unless a ghost could feel the bite of the wind when he was drenched. “But this is all so inordinately strange.”
I scrubbed at my head and blew a long, slow exhale, unable to prevent a lapse into relieved prattle. “And if you truly aren’t dead, then the only problem with taking any of you back the way I’ve come is that I’ve no idea how to do it. I’m not even sure if I can get back myself. Do I just jump in? Drag a few people with me? How in Deunor’s light will I keep them all breathing?”
“You’ve found a path across a void in the foundation of the world.” Dismayed fury swallowed her humor. “How can you not know how to go back? Are you a liar or a simpleton?”
“I but opened a door!”
“What door? All paths that could take us to the greater world were destroyed—cut off—by the Severing. We built twenty gates to bring the Wanderers back to save us. But your sister and her friends used the only one of them that survived, and those paths cannot be used a second time. Celia said they found you in the pool, but that was clearly meant to deceive us; not even the long-lived can enter Sanctuary anymore.”
“This pool . . . this bottomless hole . . . leads to Sanctuary?” I retreated the few steps
and pointed at the stone-rimmed pond. I needed to ensure we were talking about the same place.
“It doesn’t lead there. It is Sanctuary.”
“This is madness. I came from an island fortress, once a hospice where our ancestors could be cared for if coming to the lands of Navronne had made their magic unstable or too intense.”
The woman had joined me beside the pool. “The House of Clarity. Aye. I know of it.” Her every word was a challenge.
“In an old part of the fortress is a door set within a bronze frame, the same kind of frame as the portal my sister and the Cicerons—the Wanderers—passed through, although the hospice portal”—the artwork had not been half so refined, the bronze scratched and thicker—“yes, the hospice one is definitely older. My magic unlocked that door; I fell through a void and then came near drowning in this pool.”
She held a thoughtful silence for so long, I wanted to shake her, duc’s sister or no. But when she spoke again, her blade of a tongue had lost a bit of its edge. “The long-lived say our magic . . . what we did to hide the city . . . destroyed Sanctuary. They hadn’t counted on that. I suppose”—she folded her arms around herself again, as if she were so full of things that needed saying, she could scarce keep to the subject at hand—“that somehow your magic bridges . . . Pssh. I don’t know. If you’ve no way back, then you’re a dead man as well as a fool.”
I tried to match her cooler tone. “How can a bottomless pool be Sanctuary?”
“Were you never taught how the long-lived exist? Of course you weren’t. Registry folk believe theirs the only power in the entire cursed world.” At least her exasperation named me a child, now, rather than an enemy. “For one season out of every year, the long-lived must exist as a part of the land—truly a part of it, leaving behind their bodily forms. Each of them has a special place in his or her tending. A sianou it’s called. It might be a stream or pool or grove, and their season of renewal is a blessing to them and to the place they inhabit. The refuge they call Sanctuary is such a place of renewal, but open to all of them, where they can recover from even the most dreadful injuries.”