by Kate Elliott
Like the storm, the daimone receded before her. It did not walk; neither did it fly. Like the wind, it simply moved across the land. Its humanlike shape bulged and shrank in conformity to its own nature or to the weather in some far-off clime. It moved up the hill on a muddy footpath, though it left no imprint of its passage except the disturbance in the air that was its presence. She followed, wondering what had become of the mule and the old laborer who had led her and Heribert up to this abandoned cottage. It was very very cold, far too cold to stay in the heights overnight. The laborer, cowed by her importance, had asked no questions and had himself no answers to give her, though she had compelled answers from him; he was as stupid as the beasts he shepherded.
They walked until Heribert coughed as he labored upward and even Antonia felt winded. The daimone, of course, showed no sign of strain; it could easily have outpaced them, but did not. Antonia wondered if such creatures felt impatience. Was it without sin, as all humanfolk were not? Or was it beyond salvation, soulless, as some in the church claimed?
They crossed a field of rubble.
“It’s an old fort,” said Heribert, his words more breath than voice; he coughed more frequently as they climbed higher. But she heard spirit in his voice. Old buildings were his passion; had she not forbidden it, he would have left her to train as an architect and builder in the school at Darre or traveled even as far as Kellai in Arethousa to become an apprentice in the schools there. But if he went so far away from her, then she could not watch over him. Now, of course, he never questioned her at all.
He paused, leaning on dressed stone tumbled to the ground, and surveyed the ruins. “It is an old Dariyan fort. I recognize the pattern.”
“Come,” she said. The daimone had not waited; it coursed ahead like a hound that has scented its prey. “Come, Heribert.” With a wrench, he pulled himself away from this strange ruin, an old fort lost—or abandoned—in such desolate country.
They climbed and, in the odd way of slopes in such country, ground that seemed level ahead proved to be the crest of a hill. Coming over it, they saw in the vale below a ring of standing stones.
“A crown!” breathed Heribert. He stared.
Antonia gazed with astonishment. Broken circles she had seen aplenty; they were well known in the border duchy of Arconia at whose westernmost border stood the city of Mainni—across the river to the west of the cathedral lay the kingdom of Salia. But this circle stood upright, as if it had been built yesterday. It did indeed have a superficial resemblance to a giant’s crown half buried in the earth, but that was peasant superstition, and Antonia despised the credulity of the common folk.
The daimone surged down through bracken; bare twigs whipped at its passing as if a gale had torn through them. She sent Heribert to find a trail, and on this paltry track—the poor lad had to beat back as much undergrowth as if there had been no path at all—they descended into the vale. Down in the bowl the wind slackened to silence, and the undergrowth gave way to a lawn of fine grass clipped as short as if sheep had grazed here recently.
The daimone circled the standing stones and paused before a narrow gateway made of two upright stones with a lintel placed over them. Air boiled where the creature stood, like a cloud of translucent insects swarming. Antonia halted just far enough away from it and looked in through the flat gateway toward the center of the stone circle. She felt, in her bones and as a throbbing in the soles of her feet, the power that hummed from the circle. The ground here was impossibly flat, as if it had been leveled by human labor—or some other force.
Heribert gazed at the sky, then at the circle, and whispered, “It’s the eastern-facing doorway. Does that mean something?”
“Of course it means something,” she said. “It means this doorway looks toward the rising sun, perhaps at midwinter or midsummer.”
He shuddered. As the sun set behind the hills opposite them, west across the eerie architecture of stones, it threw long shadows out from the stones that made weird patterns, almost like writing, on the short grass. The rising moon, its pale face lifting above the distant mountains, heralded night.
Enter by this gate, said the daimone.
“Certainly,” said Antonia graciously. “I will follow you.”
I go no further. I cannot enter the halls of iron. My task is done once I have guided you here.
“If we choose not to go?”
It vanished. One moment its disturbance roiled the air, the next the sun slipped down below the hills and the moon breathed paler light across a landscape empty of wind or the pulsation of air that had marked the daimone’s presence.
“What do we do?” whimpered Heribert, shivering harder. “We don’t know what’s in there. How could anyone drag such huge stones up these foothills?”
“We enter,” said Antonia calmly. “We have no fire, no food, no shelter. We’ll freeze out here. We have chosen to put ourselves at the mercy of our mysterious correspondent. We must go forward.” And take our revenge for this insulting treatment later, she finished in her own thoughts. Such sentiments she could not share with poor, weak Heribert.
She did not wait for him to go first. They would be here all night while he gathered up his courage. “Take hold of my cloak,” she said, “so that we can by no means become separated.”
“But it’s only a stone circle. We’ll freeze—!”
When she walked under the threshold, the heavy stone lintel almost brushed her head; Heribert had to duck. But they did not come out into the empty center of the circle with the twilit sky above them and tattered clouds blowing past the rising moon.
Once under the circle, once circled by stone—below her feet, above her head, and on her right and left—they crossed into earth without any obvious transition. They walked into a darkness relieved only by a pale globe receding before them—the constant moon—and yet when she put her hands out to either side she pressed stone walls, ragged to her touch. Stone made a ceiling above them, and smooth paving led their feet forward into the hidden dark.
Heribert caught in his breath and tugged at her cloak. “We’re in a tunnel!” he gasped.
“Come,” she said, more impressed than afraid. “This is powerful magic. Let us see where it leads us.”
2
THERE are spirits burning in the air with wings of flame and eyes as brilliant as knives. They move on the winds that blow above the sphere of the moon, and now and again their gaze falls like the strike of lightning to the earth below, where it sears anything it touches. Their voices have the snap of fire and their bodies are the conjoining of fire and wind, the breath of the sun coalesced into mind and will.
All this she sees inside the vision made by fire. Here she runs as would a mouse, silent and watchful, staying in the shadows. She braves the unknown passageways and the vast hidden halls where other creatures lurk. This skill alone—that of seeing through fire—Da did not strip from her, or perhaps the skill manifested only because Da died. It may be all that saves her, if she can learn to use it to spy on those who seek her out, to hide herself from whatever—whomever—murdered Da.
It may even be that someone who also can see within the vision made by fire can help her. Can save her.
Ai, Lady, no one can save her. Hugh has returned, as he promised he would. How foolish she was to think she had escaped him. All this time she thought she had at last won free of him, but she cannot now and never will be free of him on the realm of earth where his power is vast and hers insignificant, only here, in the vision made by fire, where he cannot follow her. And in the vision made by fire, other things stalk her.
She needs help so desperately and she does not know where to turn.
Through the endless twisting halls she seeks the gateway that will lead her to the old Aoi sorcerer.
There! Seen in shadow, in a dark dry corridor walled in stone, she sees two people walking, searching as she is.
There! A boy sleeps with six companions, heads pillowed on stone, feet and knees covered by heaps of treasure,
armbands of beaten gold, rings, gems, vessels poured out of the silver of moonlight, and smooth scarlet beads that are dragon’s blood turned to stone with exposure to the air.
There! Creatures move and crawl among the tunnels, misshapen knuckles tamping down soil clawed from the dank walls. Like the Eika, they seem fashioned more of metal and soil than of the higher elements, trapped forever by the weight of earth that courses through their blood and hardens their bones.
When she at last finds the burning stone that marks the gateway to the old sorcerer, he no longer sits beside it rolling strands of flax into rope against his thigh. He has left that place, and she does not know where to find him. But she has to keep looking. Because he is one of the Lost Ones, he is not human and surely therefore not bound to human concerns, to human intrigues and jealousies, to human lusts for power and possession. He might know the answer. He might know the pattern of the paths she must unravel.
Perhaps Da left her a message here, secreted in the labyrinth in such a way that she alone can find it. He must have prepared for this, knowing he might be gone and that she yet lived. Behind the locked door in her tower in her City of Memory there burns a fiery light; is it Da’s magic, hidden away? Is it the living manifestation of the spell he cast over her? If she had the key, could she open the door? Did Da hide the key here, somewhere in these halls whose pathways she cannot trace unless she explores them?
And yet, what will happen if she does unlock the door?
A whisper of breath touches the back of her neck. She shudders. Her back stings as if, simply by closing in on her, the creature blisters her with its poisonous intent. Is this what Da felt? Some thing always getting closer, always coming up behind him? Did he know it would kill him in the end?
She begins to run through the halls seen in the vision made by fire, although on the realm of earth her body sits silent and still in front of a roaring campfire. But the creature is stronger than she is, here, in this place. It knows these paths, and it is looking for her.
“Liath.”
It knows her name. She flees, but there is nowhere to go. Da used his magic to conceal her from their eyes on the realm of earth, but here she is vulnerable to their sight— and there, where she is hidden from them, she is vulnerable to Hugh.
Fear leaps and burns in her heart like wildfire. She is lost. Gasping, weeping, she forces herself to stop. She turns to face what stalks her, but she sees no thing, no shadow, no creature or human form; yet she knows it has marked her and that it closes in. It wants her. The air itself carries the sound of her breathing, the simple heat of her being, to the ears of that which listens for her.
This—one creature or many working in concert—killed Da.
She feels their breath like air stirred by an arrow, an arrow whose sharp point seeks her heart. In this place, she has no weapons.
Nay, she has one weapon here: the gift given to her by the old Aoi sorcerer.
“Ai, Lady,” she breathes, a prayer for strength. Closing her hand around the gold feather, she escapes the maze.
3
SIDE paths fainter than the breath of a dying baby teased Antonia’s vision, but she could catch only glimpses of what lay down their paths: halls piled with treasure; a sleeping boy; a young woman running in fear; the fading image of an old, old monk with one hand laid tenderly upon a book while the other lifts to ward off the clutching fingers of daimones whose insubstantial hands reach right inside his body for whatever secret he has hidden within his heart. A hound barked. An owl hooted and struck in the depths of night. A man—no man, but an elven prince armed in the style of the ancient Dariyans—fought to save a burning fort from the assault of the savage Bwrmen and their human allies. A dragon slept in enchanted sleep beneath a ridge of stone. A young man sat in sunlight and surveyed the quiet sea. Did she recognize him? The vision was too brief for her to look more closely.
Were these glimpses of the past or the future or the present?
She could not know. She was entirely lost; she knew that she existed only because her son dragged at her cloak. At least his terror was so great that he was mercifully silent rather than gibbering prayers and psalms.
God would see them to safety, or God would see them dead.
If the first, then certainly she would discover the secrets of this place and bind to herself the knowledge of how to coerce daimones down from the upper air and lead unsuspecting souls into a prison as torturous as this. She fully expected the Abyss to open at her feet at any moment and give her a gratifying vision of the punishment of the damned.
If the second, then she was content to know that her soul—and that of her son, of course—would ascend as did the souls of all the righteous to the Chamber of Light beyond the seven spheres.
Stairs opened before them. Wind brushed her face. The pale round moon wavered before her eyes, high above, and she realized with a start that she was looking up the stairs to the world above, to an actual night sky now shot through with stars. Behind her, Heribert moaned slightly as she had heard laboring women do when the child was, at long last, finally and safely birthed.
She shook him off brusquely and climbed the stairs. He came up so close behind that his boots clipped her heels but, this once, she did not berate him for his carelessness. She sensed that at long last they had come to the place where she would learn what she wanted to know.
The stairs brought them up out of the earth into the center of a small stone circle, seven stones placed equidistant from each other on a grassy sward. Beyond, like hulking beasts against the heavens, three mountains loomed. They had not returned to the first stone circle, that was obvious, but Antonia guessed they still walked among the Alfar Mountains.
Her second thought, unbidden and unwelcome, was that it was surely no longer late autumn. The air was clement, the night mellow and almost warm. But the moon remained full, much farther gone in the sky than it had been when they entered the first stone circle. They had walked beneath the earth, guided by the moon’s distant light, for many hours—and it was nearing dawn.
The stone circle stood on a low hill. Beyond, down the slope and half hidden by trees, stood several buildings. The sinking moon still gave enough light that she could make out the rest of the little valley: a copse of lush trees, a few neat strips of cultivated field, a vineyard, squat boxes for bees, a chicken shed, and the leaning wall of a stable set into the steep side of a mountain. A single lantern burned by the gate that led into the enclosure. A stream whispered, murmuring, in the distance. High cliff walls enclosed them, shutting out half the night sky in which stars dazzled, uncloaked by any sign of cloud.
A hand brushed her cheek and she started. “Heribert.”
He stood three steps behind her, too far away to have touched her. He seemed to have been struck dumb.
“Biscop Antonia.” The speaker stepped out from behind one of the stones and made the gesture that in the sign language of the convent signified Welcome. She gave no obeisance. “I am glad you chose to follow my messenger.”
“Who are you?” demanded Antonia, annoyed by her lack of deference. “Are you the one who has led us this far?” She had many more questions, but she knew better than to ask them all at once.
“I am the one who has brought you here, for I have seen your promise.”
Promise! Antonia snorted, but held her tongue.
“You may call me Caput Draconis.”
“The head of the dragon? A strange name, or title, to give oneself.”
“A strange road has brought us all here, and we must tread stranger and more dangerous paths yet if we are to succeed. You are not trained as a mathematicus?” The question was, in fact, a statement, waiting on Antonia’s acknowledgment.
“I know that the constellation known as the Dragon is the sixth House in the great circle of the zodiac, itself called the world dragon that binds the heavens.” Antonia did not like to be toyed with in this manner. She did not like to be reminded that others might know things she did not.
“So it is. And it wields its own power. But the stars do not in their movements gather as much power as do the seven erratica, which we know as the planets: Moon, Erekes, Somorhas, Sun, Jedu, Mok, and Aturna. I speak of the ascending and descending nodes of the moon, where that vessel crosses the plane of the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the path on which the planets move, which we also call the world dragon that binds the heavens. South to north the moon ascends across the ecliptic, and that is the caput draconis, the head of the dragon. North to south she descends, and that is the cauda draconis, the tail. Every twenty-seven days, in the sphere above us, the moon moves from caput to cauda and back again. In every movement we observe in the heavens, there is power to be taken and used.”
“And these are the secrets hoarded by the mathematici? By such as you?”
The woman lifted her hands, palms up and open, empty, to reveal that she needed no weapon cast of brute metal or grown out of earth in order to triumph over her adversaries.
“The teachings of the mathematici are forbidden by the church,” Antonia added.
“And you were being sent to Darre to stand trial before the skopos on the charge of maleficent sorceries whose use is forbidden by the church. I know of you, Antonia. I know your skills. I need them.”
“I tire of this portentousness,” said Antonia bluntly. “Did you compel the daimone? Can you teach me such power?”
“Indeed I can, and more besides. Your great talent is for coercion. I need that talent, for I only possess it in small measure.”
“You have drawn down and trapped a daimone! Is that, to you, possessing only a ‘small measure’ of talent?”
“For compulsion, yes. With the others I can draw down such creatures, but our ability to coerce them is sorely limited. The one you met we could only command to a single task—to find you and guide you to the circle by whose path you then came here. But I cannot, as you evidently can, command spirits and beasts to kill—unless it is already their own desire to do so.”