The Language of Stones

by Robert Carter

  By now, Will could hardly move, so tightly was he locked among the hundreds of heaving, wrestling men. Overhead, further gouts of contending flame roared in purple and blue. The fire drakes had grappled then become locked in stalemate. He pictured Gwydion standing rooted in the earth, gathering all his power to hold immobile the malevolence that Maskull was trying to hurl from the tower. Thus were wizard and sorcerer both cancelled from the fight, and it was plain that unless the power of the Doomstone was broken the battle would go on until thousands lay dead.

  Will knew what he must do. He dared to open his mind, and found the strength to fight his way out of the crush until he was free.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE SARCOPHAGUS OF VERLAMION

  By the time Will broke away he had been carried close to the chapter house walls. They were twice the height of a man and unclimbable, so he ran to the great gates and found them shut tight.

  All around the stone arch was carved the mysterious motto of the Fellowship:

  And in the middle of the door there hung down a great handle – it was cast in brass, life-size and formed into the shape of a man’s arm. Will banged on the gates, pushed uselessly at the cover of a small, barred hole set within the gate.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘Sanctuary!’ he shouted, his voice breaking on the word. ‘I claim the sanctuary of the Fellowship!’

  It was the dread formula that Gort had once told him, the one that the Fellowship could never ignore.

  ‘You must admit me! You must!’ he cried.

  For a moment Will thought his efforts would fail. But then, horrifyingly, the handle reached out and grabbed him by the wrist. Then the gate cracked open, first a finger’s width, then wider, pulling him in with it.

  He tore at the brazen grip, fearing that he would be delivered into the hands of those posted to guard the gate. But this was no ordinary day and the two garbed Fellows he saw there were in no state to do their duty. They were rolling on the ground, twisted up in their own robes, their red hands clutching like claws, screams strangling in their throats.

  The brazen arm flung him towards them as the gate slammed itself shut. Will stared at them. The ghastly, eyeless faces of the two Fellows struck horror through him, and he scrambled to his feet, heading now towards the soaring building.

  He saw that he had been thrust into the main yard of the chapter house. Here the sound of battle was muted, but in its place was a terrible whine.

  Close to, the great chapter house of Verlamion was a staggering sight. It was made of stone and ancient Slaver bricks, its walls set with pinnacles and towers and pierced by tall casements glazed in a maze of black glass. He looked up at those blind windows and it seemed that a brown glow came from inside – a brown glow and a terrible discord of sound.

  The whine grew louder as he tried to feel where the three ligns crossed. He dared not open his mind further, for here the power of the lorc was like a fiery furnace. As he ran towards a widely spreading tree the ground shook and a shower of needles and seed-cones fell to the ground all around. He stumbled over roots and broken pavement, knowing now that the place he sought must be inside the chapter house itself.

  He ran up to the huge doors, and burst in through the entrance, but once inside an awesome sight halted him. Before him, in the vast space of the lower house, the entire assembly of Fellows was gathered together. Hundreds of them knelt in rows on the stone floor, their black hoods thrown back, their disfigured hands pressed over their eyes, and their mouths held open. All were howling just as those at the gate had howled. If Will had not been halted by what he had seen previously, now came a sight to stop his heart, for in the candle-blackened roof were dozens of carved figures, winged creatures, half-man perhaps, yet bat-winged, needle-toothed and gruesome.

  But how could they be carved, when their hideous faces snarled at him and their eyes followed him so hungrily?

  They made no move towards him, rather they clung closer to one another at the sight of him as if in fear. The high walls were thick with greasy soot, and as he forced himself to venture further into the chapter house the stench of burning animal fat made him gag and retch. Incense burners filled the air with an acrid perfume. Thick candles flared in their tens of thousands, their light vainly illuminating the filthy interior. Pillars, walls, screens – all were ornately carved and richly painted, but what they showed were scenes of unimaginable torture and suffering.

  Everywhere there were images of pain: marble statues of starving men, golden paintings of pierced and bleeding flesh, skulls and skeletons broken and scattered, even the aisles were paved with gravestones, so that the bare feet of the Fellows would be reminded of death as they passed to and fro upon the ground.

  This is how they spend the tithe, Will thought, angered by the sight. They take food from children’s mouths and turn our wealth into candles. Candles that burn only to light up these ghastly treasures! Treasures they can’t even see! Can this truly be all that happens to the tribute gathered according to the Iron Rule? No wonder there’s black glass in all their windows. No wonder, for who would tolerate the Fellowship in town or country if the truth was known?

  The ground trembled again, moved sickeningly beneath his feet, as if the building itself had noticed the intrusion. But not so the Fellows. They paid him no heed at all as he ran among them. Their hands and arms were red and scaly, waving in the air as their open-mouthed dirge rose up in a tower of ugly sound. It filled the tall, dark space above. The singers were enthralled by their own song, or perhaps they needed to block from their minds the competing whine that came out of the eastern end of their vast house.

  The way forward seemed clear, but as Will went deeper among the blind faces some of them twitched and others turned towards him as if sensing an offence had been committed. He easily evaded their weak grasps, but more and more of them began to rise up from their dark devotions to grope towards him. Soon he found his intended way blocked. He clambered out from among the lines of Fellows into an open aisle, fearing that if just one of them was to lay a firm grip upon him he could soon be overwhelmed.

  He dashed down the aisle, darted past golden tombs and stone memorials to death, as the Fellows felt their way towards him with grasping, outstretched claws. Their mouths slavered, their voices gibbered in unison. Dozens had joined the pursuit. They came towards him and the horror of their wasted faces and raw hands was fully revealed. Will groaned as he saw the staring eyes that had been painted on their sunken eyelids – horrible parodies of what once had been. He backed up another half dozen paces. His pursuers were neither strong nor swift, but they were growing in number, and they were surely relentless. When he hunted about for a way to go, he saw there was no alternative. Every way led him deeper into this most sacred heart of the chapter house – and here lay only death.

  He turned, ran, turned again. The last path led him into a hidden dead-end, for here was the Martyr’s shrine. It stood bathed in candlelight and glowed in a fog of crimson incense, set about with even more candles than those which lit the torture pictures of the lower house. The shrine was a huge monolith of intricately carved stone, rising up in flutes and pillars and set about with swags of cloth of gold. But it was also fenced with iron spikes, for inside lay the alabaster statue of the Martyr himself.

  Grim-faced and impressive, this was Swythen, lying upon his deathbed. Will looked about despairingly. The deadly emanations were coming from the shrine itself! There were holes in the base, and an intense light blasting out. Gwydion had said the Fellows maintained a secret place here into which deformed and diseased limbs were thrust for healing. Will now saw the power that lay behind such hopeless cures – the numbing persuasion of the battlestone. And he saw too why the Fellowship maintained such practices – doubtless the report of miracles drove many who were in pain to surrender themselves and all their worldly wealth.

  This flashed through Will’s mind as he stared about like a cornered fox. Now there was no escape. Above hi
m the tall windows soared, obsidian, black glass, decorated with scenes of vile mutilation. Their dismal brown light threw cruel patterns across all that it touched. The windows themselves were impassable. There were iron bars in them that made the spaces too small to get through.

  Shafts of brown light played upon the crowd of moaning monstrosities as they crept forward to take their revenge. They had already formed a wide semicircle around him, a groping mob that stretched back along the aisle. Weaponless, he could not plunge into them with any hope of cutting a way through. Ahead of him, hands were thrown out ready to seize him. Behind him, there lay only a great stone plaque and behind that a wall.

  Dizziness shook him and he fought back the pain that was now flooding up into his head. But his thoughts stayed sharp and he saw his chance. He edged as close to the approaching hands as he dared, then ran straight at the wall.

  At the last moment he jumped, jammed his foot into the lip of the stone plaque and sprang up and off the wall just far enough out to make a grab for the big wheel that hung on chains above the south-eastern aisle. The great candleholder shook as he thrust his arm through it. He swung precariously, then began to lever himself up. A great shower of hot fat spilled out of ten dozen thick candles, making the Fellows below flinch away.

  Will hauled himself up onto the swinging wheel and stood on its rim, balancing himself by one of the three chains that disappeared far up in the darkness above. As the wheel swung, Will bent his knees and bore down with his weight. Soon he had worked the arc of the swing up enough to worry him that the chains might not hold. The swing carried him up almost as far as the windows, then swiftly down across the heads of the enraged Fellows, then up again towards the bars of a tall, iron screen. He was the bob of an enormous pendulum that cut back and forth through the air.

  All around the Martyr’s shrine there stood an opentopped cage that formed an exclusive enclosure, and inside it the powerful Elders knelt in a parody of piety. They were distinguished from the lesser Fellows of the lower house by their great age and costly garb, but they too knelt with their palms pressed over their empty eye-sockets and their mouths agape. The most repulsive of them all Will took to be Grand High Warden Isnar, who grovelled on his knees before an empty throne.

  There was no other way to save himself. At the top of the next swing, Will leapt up and launched himself at the screen that enclosed the shrine. He clung on and scaled it like a tumbler, climbing until he was three or four times the height of a man above the ground. As he hung precariously close to the top, his fingers grasping oily, black wrought iron, he felt his scryer’s hazel wand slip from his waistband. It fell and a Fellow’s blotched hand found it, but though he dropped it again quickly as if it burned, others fell upon it and fought one another to tear it to pieces.

  There were hundreds of sightless faces turned towards him now, hundreds of red fingers outstretched. The voices rose to deafen him. He was choking on tallow smoke, shielding his eyes against the red glare coming up from below. The light shafted through incense-laden air, half blinding him. But as he looked down, he could see tell-tale sparkles in the fabric of the shrine. Light glittered inside the stonework like powdered gems, like snail-trails glistening in the morning sun. Six tracks radiated from the sarcophagus. He had found the place where the three ligns met, the place where the Doomstone lay. But what now? The battlestone was encased in the sarcophagus of the Martyr.

  He felt the iron strap-work below him give. The screen began moving back and forth as some of the Fellows tried to climb up after him. He swung round the top and clung to the inner side of the cage, and when the crimson claws started to come through the bars, questing for his legs, he drew them up as far as he could. There was no more time to think what to do. In a moment the Fellows would lay their red claws upon him, he would be dragged down into torment and yellow fingernails would tear out his eyes.

  He began to wish that he had not leapt off the candle wheel. But as he looked down he saw, set into the floor beside the Martyr’s last resting place, a square hole. Surely that was big enough to let a man through, but it was covered with an iron grille. The bars stood enrayed now, as beams of red light shafted upwards from somewhere below.

  That was it!

  From his high perch he could see that, beneath the grille, a stone stair descended. It seemed there was a croft under the shrine.

  New-kindled hope blazed inside him, but then fear gripped him afresh as he looked down into the hole, for what if he dropped down and found the grille was fixed in place? But there was nothing else for it. He knew he would have to jump. The northern windows of the chapter house flared again with brown light, and he knew that at least Gwydion’s duel had not yet come to an end. He took hope from that, and committed himself to the drop.

  By now, the ache in his head had become almost unbearable, the noise a constant pain to his ears. He breathed deep and shook himself against the dizziness that was creeping over him, then he tried to wipe the sweat and grease from his face and hands in preparation. When he looked again his courage almost failed, for it was a long way down, but a dozen hands were groping up for his ankles, so he muttered a charm of protection and let go.

  The next thing he knew, pain jolted his knees and ankles. He was down and rolling over and over among the Elders. They writhed ecstatically in the shrine chamber as he fell among them, but before the nearest of them could stir from his raptures, Will had thrust his fingers into the iron grille and was pulling at it. It was heavy, but his second effort wrenched it up. He jumped down, and let it slam back down behind him.

  In the cramped passage below, the crimson brilliance was doubled and the whine became so immense that it tore at the roots of his sanity. As he approached the chamber he had to hold his hands before his face like a man battling through driving sleet. To advance against so loathsome a power as this seemed impossible. It was not just any battlestone; this was the Doomstone, a power that, even now, was consuming human lives by the hundred. Thousands were trapped within its compass. Thousands would have to die to quench its thirst for blood.

  But Will had not fought his way here to consider the Doomstone’s appetites. Though it probed him and tore at him he stood his ground, tight-lipped, and forced himself to look directly upon it. It rested upon a tomb, a great black slab, leopard-spotted, its blemishes shot through now with crimson radiance. It was the very lid of the Martyr’s grave.

  Abhorrent power streamed from the stone. It would have made the strongest man flee, but what saved Will as he inched closer was the stone-lore that he had already gained. He knew very well the vile feelings that were awakened in him. He recognized the horrors that crawled into his mind. Great magic would have to be invoked if he was going to destroy this stone.

  He heard laughing as the stone’s emanations flooded out. Madness streamed through him, a force trying to lever the lid off his mind.

  He halted and snarled at the roaring stone, and it seemed that he was surrounded by his enemy, that axes swept down upon him, that suddenly he was on his knees, his ribs ripping apart and his heart’s blood spreading out in a dark pool before him like Duke Edgar. Yet through all that ghastly vision, a tiny unassailable part of him held on, knowing the Doomstone’s ways, seeing it use his own fears and turn them into a weapon against him.

  When he forced one foot in front of the other, another panic swept suddenly over him. A vivid belief broke upon his mind that he could not stand up. But then he grasped the reason was that he was already standing up, and once he saw that, he was able to throw off the deadly fear.

  He struggled to approach another step, all the while his mind scrambling and shredding, but whatever fell away his resolve remained undimmed despite all that came at him. And as his screams echoed away he remembered how magic was dirtied by wrath and cowardice and all the other failings that men were prey to.

  And then the raging din stopped. Suddenly, there was silence. The madness was gone. It was as if he had struggled through into the eye of a stor
m, a place of calm and cold sanity in the midst of terrible carnage.

  He took another step forward and an avalanche of pain exploded inside him. A broadsword sliced him in two, the marish hag’s sucker fingers caged his face, he struggled against bursting lungs, his skeleton dissolved into maggots in the heart of a cursed yew, a mother and father he had never known called facelessly out of the shadows…

  He gritted his teeth against them all, knowing the time had come to plant his feet hard and begin to recall the words that Gwydion had spoken at the draining.

  ‘Aircill ur maesa bretharbhi,’ he began, adjusting the words of the true tongue to present circumstances. ‘Foscleiga ter criedhen mo!’

  At the sound of the true tongue the Doomstone began to shudder. Light leapt out of it like the bright burning flash of a predator’s eye. But Will was ready for the strange perceptions that the use of great magic brought. Gwydion’s words came to him, ‘Magic cannot be rehearsed. Like the firstborn child, magic just comes and is perfect.’

  The surge of empowerment lifted him and he gave a great shout. The power seemed like a hand passing into his flesh, gripping him by the spine, feeding limitless strength into him. He felt he could summon infinite power, and the arrival of that power as it rushed to his fingertips was all commanding.

  ‘Nai dearmhaida, lir-dah, teaor an gharbade saon echearitan…’

  The spell that formed in his mouth made him feel as if he could tear down the whole chapter house, rip it apart with his bare hands, grind it to grit. A flick of his wrist seemed enough to send flames high into the air. Nothing was beyond his power now. And no weapon, no matter how fearsome, could lay a mark upon him.

  But then a flash of insight came to him just in time. That’s the trap, he told himself. The pit that catches and consumes the unwary. That’s the snare that waits for those who venture to use magic dirtily. How many times has Master Gwydion said it? ‘Magic must always be requested, never summoned, always respected, never treated with disdain. Ask openly and honestly, for the honest man alone can speak words of power!’