by Tad Williams
Chaven shook his head kindly as he held the door, but Chert thought he looked a little discomposed.
After checking to make sure none of his servants were in sight, the physician let Chert and the boy out through the observatory-tower’s front door. For reasons he did not quite know himself, Chert had decided to go back above-ground, out through the Raven’s Gate. The guard would have changed at midday and there should be no reason for those on duty now to doubt that their predecessors questioned Chert closely before letting him and his young charge into the inner keep.
“What did you mean about the owl?” Chert asked as they made their way down the steps.
“What owl?”
“You asked that man where the owl was, the owl that had been in his room.”
Flint shrugged. His legs were longer than Chert’s and he did not need to look down at the steps, so he was watching the afternoon sky. “I don’t know.” He frowned, staring at something above him. The morning’s clouds had passed. Chert could see nothing but a faint sliver of moon, white as a seashell, hanging in the blue sky. “He had stars on his walls.”
Chert recalled the tapestries covered with jeweled constellations. “He did, yes.”
“The Leaf, the Singers, the White Root—I know a song about them.” He pondered, his frown deepening. “No, I can’t remember it.”
“The Leaf . . . ?” Chert was puzzled. “The White Root? What are you talking about?”
“The stars—don’t you know their names?” Flint had reached the cobblestones at the base of the steps and was walking faster, so that Chert, still moving carefully down the tall steps, could barely make out what he said. “There’s the Honeycomb and the Waterfall . . . but I can’t remember the rest.” He stopped and turned. His face beneath the shock of almost white hair was full of sad confusion, so that he looked like a little old man. “I can’t remember.”
Chert caught up to him, out of breath and troubled. “I’ve never heard those names before. The Honeycomb? Where did you learn that, boy?”
Flint was walking again. “I used to know a song about the stars. I know one about the moon, too.” He hummed a snatch of melody that Chert could barely make out, but whose mournful sweetness made the hairs lift on the back of his neck. “I can’t remember the words,” Flint said. “But they tell about how the moon came down to find the arrows he had shot at the stars . . .”
“But the moon’s a woman—isn’t that what all you big folk believe?” A moment of sour amusement at his own words—the boy was but Chert’s own height, even a little shorter—did not puncture his confusion. “Mesiya, the moon-goddess?”
Flint laughed with a child’s pure enjoyment at the foolishness of adults. “No, he’s the sun’s little brother. Everyone knows that.”
He skipped ahead, enjoying the excitement of a street full of people and interesting sights, so that Chert had to hurry to catch up with him again, certain that something had just happened—something important—but he could not for the life of him imagine what it might have been.
6
Blood Ties
A HIDDEN PLACE :
Walls of straw, walls of hair
Each room can hold three breaths
Each breath an hour
—from The Bonefall Oracles
SHE DID NOT MAKE her dwelling in the ancient, labyrinthine city of Qul-na-Qar, although she had long claim to a place of honor there, by her blood and by her deeds—and by deeds of blood as well. Instead, she made her home on a high ridgetop in the mountains called Reheq-s’Lai, which meant Wanderwind, or something close to it. Her house, although large enough to cover most of the ridge, was a plain thing from most angles, as was the lady herself. Only when the sunlight was in the right quarter, and a watcher’s face turned just so, could crystal and skystone be seen gleaming among the dark wall stones. In one way at least her house was like great Qul-na-Qar: it extended deep into the rocky ridge, with many rooms below the light of day and a profusion of tunnels extending beyond them like the roots of an old, old tree. Above the ground the windows were always shuttered, or seemed that way. Her servants were silent and she seldom had visitors.
Some of the younger Qar, who had heard of her madness for privacy, but of course had never seen her, called her Lady Porcupine. Others who knew her better could not help shuddering at the accidental truth of the name—they had seen how in moments of fury a nimbus of prickly shadow bloomed about her, a shroud of phantom thorns.
Her granted name was Yasammez, but few knew it. Her true name was known to only two or three living beings.
The lady’s high house was called Shehen, which meant “Weeping.” Because it was a s’a-Qar word, it meant other things, too—it carried the intimation of an unexpected ending, and a suggestion of the scent of the plant that in the sunlight lands was called myrtle—but more than anything else, it meant “Weeping.”
It was said that Yasammez had only laughed twice in all her long life, the first time when, as a child, she first saw a battlefield and smelled the blood and the smoke from the fires. The second time had been when she had first been exiled, sent away from Qul-na-Qar for crimes or deeds of arrogance long since forgotten by most of the living. “You cannot hide me, or hide from me,” she is said to have told her accusers, “because you cannot find me. I was lost when I first drew breath.” Yasammez was made for war and death, all agreed, as a sword is made, a thing whose true beauty can only be seen when it brings destruction.
It was also said that she would laugh for the third time only when the last mortal died, or when she herself took her final breath.
None of the stories said anything about the sound of her laughter, except that it was terrible.
Yasammez stood in her garden of low, dark plants and tall gray rocks shaped like the shadows of terrified dreamers, and looked out over her steep lands. The wind was as fierce as ever, wrapping her cloak tightly around her, blowing her hair loose from the bone pins that held it, but was still not strong enough to disperse the mist lurking in the ravines that gouged the hillside below like claw-scratches. Still, it blew loudly enough that even if any of her pale servants had been standing beside her they would not have been able to hear the melody Lady Yasammez was singing to herself, nor would they even have believed their mistress might do such a thing. They certainly would not have known the song, which had been old before the mountain on which she stood had risen from the earth.
A voice began to speak in her ear and the ancient music stopped. She did not turn because she knew the voice came from no one in the stark garden or high house. Secretive, angry, and solitary as she was, Yasammez still knew this voice almost better than she knew her own. It was the only voice that ever called her by her true name.
It called that name again now.
“I hear, O my heart,” said Lady Porcupine, speaking without words.
“I must know.”
“It has already begun,” the mistress of the ridgetop house replied, but it stabbed her to hear such disquiet in the thoughts of her beloved, her great ruler, the single star in her dark, cold sky. After all, this was the time for wills to become stony, for hearts to grow thorns. “All has been put into motion. As you wished. As you commanded.”
“There is no turning back, then.”
It almost seemed a question, but Yasammez knew it could not be. “No turning back,” she agreed.
“So, then. In the full raveling of time we will see what new pages will be written in the Book.”
“We shall.” She yearned to say more, to ask why this sudden concern that almost seemed like weakness in the one who was not just her ruler but her teacher as well, but the words did not come; she could not form the question even in the silence of shared thought. Words had never been friends to Yasammez; in this, they were like almost everything else beneath the moon or sun.
“Farewell, then. We will speak again soon, when your great task reaches fulfillment. You have my gratitude.”
Then Lady Porcupine was al
one again with the wind and her thoughts, her strange, bitter thoughts, in the garden of the house called Weeping.
The longer, heavier sword skimmed off Barrick’s falchion and crashed down against the small buckler on his left arm. A lightning flash of pain leaped through his shoulder. He cried out, sagged to one knee, and only just managed to throw his blade up in time to deflect the second blow. He climbed to his feet and stood, gasping for breath. The air was full of sawdust. He could barely hold even his own slender sword upright.
“Stop.” He stepped back, letting the falchion sag, but instead of lowering his own longer sword, Shaso suddenly lunged forward, the point of his blade jabbing down at Barrick’s ankles. Caught by surprise, the prince hesitated for an instant before jumping to avoid the thrust. It was a mistake. As the prince landed awkwardly, the old man had already turned his sword around so he clutched the blade in his gauntlets. He thumped Barrick hard in the chest with the sword’s pommel, forcing out the rest of the boy’s air. Gasping, Barrick took one step backward and collapsed. For a moment black clouds closed in. When he could see again, Shaso was standing over him.
“Curse you!” Barrick wheezed. He kicked out at Shaso’s leg, but the old man stepped neatly away. “Didn’t you hear? I said stop!”
“Because your arm was tired? Because you did not sleep well last night? Is that what you will do in battle? Cry mercy because you fight only with one hand and it has wearied?” Shaso made a noise of disgust and turned his back on the young prince. It was all Barrick could do not to scramble to his feet at this display of contempt and skull the old Tuani with the padded falchion.
But it was not just his remaining shreds of civility and honor that stopped him, nor his exhaustion; even in his rage, Barrick doubted he would actually land the blow.
He got up slowly instead and pulled off the buckler and gauntlets so he could rub his arm. Although his left hand was curled into something like a bird’s claw and his forearm was thin as a child’s, after countless painful hours lifting the iron-headed weights called poises Barrick had strengthened the sinews of his upper arm and shoulder enough that he could use the buckler effectively. But—and he hated to admit it, and certainly would not do so aloud—Shaso was right: he still was not strong enough, not even in the good arm which had to wield his only blade, since even a dagger was too much for his crippled fingers.
As he pulled on the loose deerskin glove he wore to hide his twisted hand, Barrick was still furious. “Does it make you feel strong, beating a man who can only fight one-armed?”
The armorers, who today had the comparatively quiet task of cutting new leather straps at the huge bench along the room’s south wall, looked up, but only for a moment—they were used to such things. Barrick had no doubt they all thought him a spoiled child. He flushed and slammed down his gauntlets.
Shaso, who was unstitching his padded practice-vest, curled his lip. “By the hundred tits of the Great Mother, boy, I am not beating you. I am teaching you.”
They had been out of balance all day. Even as a way to spend the tedious, stretching hours until his brother convened the council, this had been a mistake. Briony might have made it something civil, even enjoyable, but Briony was not there.
Barrick lowered himself to the ground and began removing his leg pads. He stared at Shaso’s back, irritated by the old man’s graceful, unhurried movements. Who was he, to be so calm when everything was falling apart? Barrick wanted to sting the master of arms somehow.
“Why did he call you ‘teacher’?”
Shaso’s fingers slowed, but he did not turn. “What?”
“You know. The envoy from Hierosol—that man Dawet. Why did he call you ‘teacher?’ And he called you something else—‘Mor-ja.’ What does that mean?”
Shaso shrugged off the vest. His linen undershirt was soaked with sweat, so that every muscle on his broad, brown back was apparent. Barrick had seen this so many times, and even in the midst of anger, he felt something like love for the old Tuani—a love for the known and familiar, however unsatisfying.
What if Briony really leaves? he thought suddenly. What if Kendrick really sends her to Hierosol to marry Ludis? I will never see her again. His outrage that a bandit should demand his sister in marriage, and that his brother should even consider it, suddenly chilled into a simpler and far more devastating thought—Southmarch Castle empty of Briony.
“I have been asked to answer that for the council,” Shaso said slowly. “You will hear what I say there, Prince Barrick. I do not want to speak of it twice.” He dropped the vest to the floor and walked away from it. Barrick could not help staring. Shaso was usually not only meticulous in the care of his weapons and equipment, but sharp-tongued to any who were not—Barrick most definitely included. The master of arms set the long sword in the rack without oiling it or even taking off the padding, took his shirt from a hook, and walked out of the armory without another word.
Barrick sat, as short of breath as if Shaso had struck him again in the stomach. He had long felt that among all the heedless folk in Southmarch, he was the only one who understood how truly bad things had become, who saw the deceptions and cruelties others missed or deliberately ignored, who sensed the growing danger to his family and their kingdom. Now that proof was blossoming before him, he wished he could make it all go away—that he could turn and run headlong back into his own childhood.
After supper Chert’s belly was full, but his head was still unsettled. Opal was fussing happily over Flint, measuring the boy with a knotted string while he squirmed. She had used the few copper chips she had put aside for a new cooking pot to buy some cloth, since she planned to make a shirt for the child.
“Don’t look at me that way,” she told her husband. “I wasn’t the one who took him out and let him rip and dirty this one so badly.”
Chert shook his head. It was not paying for the boy’s new shirt that concerned him.
The bell for the front door rang, a couple of short tugs on the cord. Opal handed the boy her measuring string and went to answer it. Chert heard her say, “Oh, my—come in, please.”
Her eyebrows were up when she returned trailed by Cinnabar, a handsome, big-boned Funderling, the leader of the important Quicksilver family.
Chert rose. “Magister, you do me an honor. Will you sit down?”
Cinnabar nodded, grunting as he seated himself. Although he was younger than Chert by some dozen years, his muscled bulk was already turning to fat. His mind was still lean, though; Chert respected the man’s wits.
“Can we offer you something, Magister?” Opal asked. “Beer? Some blueroot tea?” She was both excited and worried, trying to catch her husband’s eye, but he would not be distracted.
“Tea will do me well, Mistress, thank you.”
Flint had gone stock-still on the floor beside Opal’s stool, watching the newcomer like a cat spying an unfamiliar dog. Chert knew he should wait until the tea was served, but his curiosity was strong. “Your family is well?”
Cinnabar snorted. “Greedy as blindshrews, but that’s nothing new. It strikes me you’ve had an addition yourself.”
“His name is Flint.” Chert felt sure this was the point of the visit. “He’s one of the big folk.”
“Yes, I can see that. And of course I’ve heard much about him already—it’s all over town.”
“Is there a problem that he stays with us? He has no memory of his real name or parents.”
Opal bustled into the room with a tray, the best teapot, and three cups. Her smile was a little too bright as she poured for the magister first. Chert could see that she was frightened.
Fissure and fracture, is she so attached to the boy already?
Cinnabar blew on the cup nestled in his big hands. “As long as he breaks none of the laws of Funderling Town, you could guest a badger for all it matters to me.” He turned his keen eyes on Opal. “But people do talk, and they are slow to welcome change. Still, I suppose it is too late to reveal this secret more delic
ately.”
“It is no secret!” said Opal, a little sharply.
“Obviously.” Cinnabar sighed. “It is your affair. That’s not why I’m here tonight.”
Now Chert was puzzled. He watched Cinnabar snuffle at his tea. The man was not only head of his own family, but was one of the most powerful men in the Guild of Stone-cutters. Chert could only be patient.
“That is good, Mistress,” Cinnabar said at last. “My own lady, she will boil the same roots over and over until it is like drinking rainwater.” He looked from her expectant, worried face to Chert’s and smiled. It cracked his broad, heavy-jawed face into little wrinkles, like a hammerblow on slate. “Ah, I am tormenting you, but do not mean to. There’s nothing ill in this visit, that’s a promise. I need your help, Chert.”
“You do?”
“Aye. You know we’re cutting in the bedrock of the inner keep? Tricky work. The king’s family wants to expand the burial vaults and stitch together various of their buildings with tunnels.”
“I’ve heard, of course. That’s old Hornblende in charge, isn’t it? He’s a good man.”
“Was in charge. He’s quit. Says it’s because of his back, but I have my doubts, though he is of an age.” Cinnabar nodded slowly. “That’s why I need your help, Chert.”
He shook his head, confused. “What . . . ?”
“I want you to chief the job. It’s a careful matter, as you know—digging under the castle. I don’t need to say more, do I? I hear the men are skittish, which may have something to do with Hornblende’s wanting nothing more of it.”
Chert was stunned. At least a dozen other Funderlings had the experience to take Hornblende’s place, all more senior or more important than he was, including one of his own brothers. “Why me?”
“Because you have sense. Because I need someone I can trust as chief over this task. You’ve worked with the big folk before and made out well.” He flicked a glance at Opal, who had finished her tea and was again measuring the child, although Chert knew she was listening to every word. “We can speak more of it later, if you tell me you will do it.”