They ended up being heavily indebted to Phaylan’s quick thinking, for although only marginally faster than they themselves could have walked, the oxen drew the wagon without let. As with the tortoise and the hare, it doggedly brought them out onto the Vale of Plenty as the sun majestically descended towards dusk.
With the countryside fast darkening, the oxen were soon called to turn through a long and newly opened gap in an ancient hedgerow, then on into a large field freshly strewn with grey aggregate. There were already a number of similar wagons there, all equally laden, their wheels stoutly chocked, standing silently side by side down the middle of the field.
An adjoining field was thronged with loose oxen, its balding grass littered with hayracks and peppered with dung, but it was what lay beyond that intrigued them. Half-hidden behind bounding trees lay a regimented array of canvas shelters.
Their driver called his beasts repeatedly, turning them carefully on a huge arc until the wagon rocked to a yielding halt beside the others. The aggregate beneath its wheels crunched and creaked and squeaked. The driver then pointed out the shelters before turning to tend to his animals.
A canteen was soon found amongst them, packed full of withdrawn drivers, concentrating only on getting their fill. They were friendly enough, agreeable, but just too tired to chat. It wasn’t long before the benches began to thin as beds were sought in the adjoining shelters, and where their own party wasn’t long in following on.
Strangely enough, Nephril had his first full and deep night’s sleep in centuries. It meant he awoke when all the others had already risen, and so he had to rush to gain the wagon before its oxen strained to draw it from the field, once more out onto the Lost Northern Way.
The morning had started out dank and drear, persistent rain later driving in across the Vale from the east. It drenched them all, exposed as they were on the wagon, and so they all became steadily more sullen. The rain also cast veils across their view, keeping the approaching castle long hidden from sight.
It took the junction for the Ambec Village to reveal how close they’d come, but even now, only a league or so from the Great Wall, the castle remained hidden. If anything, the rain had got heavier, greyer and far more depressing.
Nephril’s heart lifted, if only because of a rather minor joy. He could smell the Eyeswin River somewhere ahead, something he’d not experienced in such a long time.
He lifted his newfound nose to the air, feeling sharp pricks of rain on its now smooth skin. He smiled contentedly for the moment as he breathed in deeply. Yes, there was the flat, metallic smell of water, tumbling over pebble and rock, pushing through long, waving weeds. There was the smell of sodden earth and the richly verdant moss that coated the river’s smoothly worn boulders. So much exquisite detail once long forgotten by his age-worn senses.
As he began to wonder just how long Grunstaan’s embrace would last, Penolith gently took his arm in hers, snuggled up close and smiled warmly into his heart. She said nothing, but didn’t need to. Her presence was enough, enough to make him confident despite Leiyatel’s waning embrace.
Then he felt it, felt the disparity, how at odds the two were; Grunstaan’s overpoweringly alien verve, Leiyatel’s sympathetic but wan familiarity. The same but different! Of one form but disparate in feature, twain of the same nature.
Surely, yes, surely so, Nephril thought. If I can feel it then so too must Leiyatel. Is that what she feared, what horror Storbanther’s humanity revealed to her?
“Perhaps so,” Penolith said, “but how, my dear, could she have seen it unless through you?”
Nephril’s face was coursed with rain, its vapour redolent of the river’s own. His eyes had been closed, the more so to heighten his senses, but when he opened them, he saw only Penolith’s radiant face, as though he were seeing Leiyatel herself.
Nay, mine heart-felt joy, he thought, more than mine own knowing has come from Nouwelm, something far more tangible, far more evident to Leiyatel’s simple gaze. He thought no more, only continued to smile, as though bathed in an inviolable knowing, and she smiled back her acceptance although hidden against his chest.
Sometime into the early afternoon, the wagon rumbled onto the bridge over the Eyeswin, the gate’s Sentinel Towers soon looming from the mist and mizzle, filling the view with their octagonal, grey rise. The oxen seemed to know their journey’s end for they tossed their heads and occasionally kicked, as though not in joy but in relief.
The wagon drew narrowly between the towers’ squeeze and began a lazy arc without need of the driver’s calls, swinging the wagon complainingly about between the gate’s outstretched arms. Of all that Nephril had seen in these past few days, it was the one here that most jarred.
For more than a millennium, that guarded space had lain unchanged, had witnessed little more than wild beasts and birds. Now it was a mess of labour. There were freshly erected cranes and hoists, block and tackle, lever and lanyard and lift, and a whole throng of industrious figures manhandling it all. It was hard at first to see what was going on, but order did slowly impinge on Nephril.
Wagons full of lumber were drawn up across the space, in varying degrees of unloading, with smaller carts and carriages beside them. The buzz of saws gave the clue to how such delivered bulk found its way into the array of small conveyances. Rip and circular, engine and hand, driven and drawn, the mighty forest giants were methodically reduced and reloaded, and then borne away through Dica’s narrow streets.
Great care was needed alighting into such an unaccustomed and teeming chaos of threatened trips and crushes, and passing through its hectic bustle of novel labour towards the gatehouse. The great gates had long been secured by nothing more than age-long disuse, but their stout rebuttal had recently been breached, a hacked and charred opening now giving passage for carts and carriages.
They were about to follow a handcart through when Drax’s voice cut to them across the tumult. “Hey! Lord Nephril? Over here!”
They stopped, smartly sidestepped a following carriage and spotted Drax, descending a short flight of steps from a small door beside the gates. He was soon before them, his face beaming and his eyes full of joy.
“By the Certain Power, am I relieved to see you all back safe and sound. Come on. Come on in, quickly, follow me.” Without looking back, he turned and retraced his steps, drawing them from the raucous din into the quiet confines of the gatehouse.
47 Of a Darn Unpicked
The smell of the Eyeswin, carried within the sodden, sliding veils of mist now drifting past the open window, made it feel as though their high vantage was upon the very banks of the river itself. Had it not been so quiet, only the odd muffled sound coming up from the hall below, Drax and Nephril could so easily have believed it.
It may have been those faint rising sounds, or perhaps the room’s hollow-sounding contrast with the moisture-deadened air without, that finally dispelled the idea. It mattered little in fact for the rapidly deepening mist gave no one place any better vantage than another.
Even had the events that Drax was now trying to bring himself to describe been plainly in view, it would have added little for Nephril. Drax’s earnest retelling made them come alive vividly enough.
Drax had looked haunted since their surprise encounter at the gate. It was understandable, for what Drax had witnessed a few days earlier quite simply beggared belief. Even in their room’s secluded privacy the retelling didn’t prove easy, especially given its very strange ending.
Here, in a small, dusty and derelict room high above the sconce, and leaning on its cold windowsill, they both unseeingly peered out into what was fast becoming dense, grey fog. Below, beneath the quickly vanishing sheen of the hall’s slate roof, Nephril’s party were even now settling themselves in for the night.
Nephril watched a thin plume of smoke wriggle free of the hall’s near chimney as he patiently waited on Drax’s story. A subdued curse, Phaylan’s Nephril guessed, presaged a cloud of sparks that briefly danced within
the smoke. Their flickering motes reflected in Drax’s dead eyes, Nephril realising now how dark it was becoming.
“Passed me coming out of the Guardian’s Residence,” Drax at last said. “It wasn’t the fact he cut me dead but the disturbing look in those uneven eyes of his.” Life seemed to flood back into Drax’s own, and he turned to Nephril. “Made the hairs on my neck stand right on end it did, and with just a glance at that. Knew then something was up.”
Drax told how he’d followed Storbanther across Galgaverre, not an arduous task in itself given how malformed Storbanther had remained, his gait oddly waddling like a skinny duck. Drax had had no need of stealth either, for Master Scaedwera had seemed oblivious to all but his own pressing journey.
He’d led Drax to an obscure corner of the installation, to a little used ramp that vanished broadly beneath Galgaverre’s western wall. Not far in, dimly lit by intermittent red lights, Storbanther had stopped before a blank wall, seemingly the ramp’s abrupt end.
It had been hard for Drax to see exactly what Storbanther had done there, other than placing a hand against the dully glinting wall, but within a minute or two Drax had felt a gentle breeze at his back. The wall then silently swung up into the ceiling. Storbanther had smartly stepped on towards a distant slit of light before the wall swung back into place, sealing the way.
“I panicked a bit, Lord Nephril, I have to admit. I ran to the wall, and then up and down before it, pushing and prodding, searching for some secret switch or the like, but there was nothing, nothing at all.” He explained how he’d quickly despaired, knowing Storbanther to be stealing a hobbling march on himself.
“I needed to calm down a bit, not that I immediately knew it. Eventually, though, I did see sense and began to think straight, tried to reason my way through. When I leant against that wall, it struck me how odd it seemed. It appeared to glisten, as though coated in oil or camphor or something, but it felt dry and solid.”
He’d been about to bring his hands away when he felt the wall go hot, as though it had somehow finished tasting his own heat. “I can think of no other way of putting it, my Lord. It was as though it had felt enough of me and so knew to open, and it did, just that – opened. Almost sucked me through it did, it was so fast.”
Drax had found himself stumbling on into a broad but dark tunnel. Well ahead, against a bright but distant slit, Storbanther’s waddling silhouette had quickly drawn him on.
“After quite a while we came out above the moat, somewhere a fair stretch up Weyswal Way, opposite a pretty deserted part of Bazarral.” It brought to Nephril’s mind an old if little used term for the moat, the Quenching Sink.
Drax was now explaining how he’d watched Storbanther clamber down from the lip of the tunnel to the base of the wall, and to where he then uncovered a small boat. “All he did was slip it into the water, leap in and then pull himself across by a rope.”
“So how did thou manage to stay with him, Sentinar?”
“Well, as I was looking down watching him draw himself away, I heard a squeaking noise and soon spotted a pulley, jerking between the rope and the wall.”
Storbanther’s private ferry turned out to be tethered to a loop of rope, running through pulleys at either side. “Once he’d reached the far bank, he leapt out and scrambled up to Weyswal Way, without a second glance at the boat, as though it was never going to be used again. It didn’t take me long to draw it back for my own use, and I was soon back following him, not that far behind.”
Storbanther had ineluctably led Drax to the northern end of Weyswal Way, then out along close lanes and paths that soon rose into the Esnadales. They’d eventually come into a broad, flat-bottomed valley, one that came to an abrupt and steep head. Its narrow wall was cut with precipitous steps, like ladders, up which Storbanther had quickly climbed.
Nephril knew the way they’d taken. However, once up the head, Storbanther had found a different way through the Upper Reaches, and from the sound of it, had crossed the Scarra’s saddle more to the east. Drax confirmed it when he said they’d finally come down towards the Towers of the Four Seasons.
At this point in his tale, Drax noticeably changed, his voice becoming taut and higher. It was as though he now recounted a dream, one in which he’d chased a tireless demon over a darkening, nightmare terrain.
“I was fair following the wind, Lord Nephril, an elemental spectre, tireless and single-minded. It was fortunate his crooked limbs could make no better haste for otherwise I’d have been left behind for sure.”
His tale clearly placed them dropping down eventually onto the wide expanse of the Witness Terrace, had Drax but known it, where Storbanther - Leiyatel’s very own limb - had purposefully crossed towards the Farewell Gap.
Drax had been quite close behind by then, hot on Storbanther’s rhythmically slapping heels, almost mesmerised by their untiring persistence. With no let, no momentary backward glance or hesitation, Storbanther had simply passed straight through the gap and silently fallen from sight - gone in the blink of an eye.
Had it not been so dark, Nephril would have seen Drax’s face drain, his eyes flick erratically. In the ensuing heavy silence, Nephril heard Drax nervously lick his lips. Nephril gently placed a hand on Drax’s arm and squeezed it a few times, reassuringly.
“We were in the pass then, dost thou know that, mine dear Sentinar? In the pass, enjoying its final clemency.” Drax hadn’t really heard. “Setting camp as you saw the pearl fall, and in so doing remove its mend of Leiyatel.” Nephril peered out into the thickening fog. “I wonder what fear filled Leiyatel’s eyes then, eh, before she finally put them out.”
“Why did he do it, Lord Nephril? Why? No, not why but how, how could he do such a thing, and without the slightest hesitation?”
“Keep this close to thyself, Sentinar Drax, dost thou hear? Tell no one. That be an order of thy superior, heed thee well. No one, I say, no one.”
Drax could only nod.
“I now know we must pay our respects tomorrow, there above the Garden of the Forgotten, at the Farewell Gap, where we need, strangely enough, to remember much but also understand a great deal more.”
48 Slip Away
Another early start! Yet another dark morning, making even their make-shift beds set on hard stone floors seem possessive, seductively enfolding their stirring limbs. Phaylan tended to wake at the same time each day, regardless of its yesterday’s labours, and so the enfolding darkness made him suspect something was amiss. Had a noise awoken him in that seeming dead of night?
It seemed more than likely for others were clearly stirring, yawns and grumbles swelling about their darkened sea. It was only when he realised how little urgency blew its surging tide that he remembered the previous day’s fog, and reasoned its current opaque rebuttal of the morning sun.
Likely to the best, he thought, this strangely heavy cloud still enshrouding the castle. It had at least hidden Dica’s overpowering impact from their Nouwelm guests, had eased them gently into its normally oppressive embrace. A lot still impressed and overawed of course, but it did at least mean that Dica’s sheer size hadn’t yet been loosed upon them.
The fog persisted well after they’d broken their fast, well into their chill, grey walk along Eastern Street. They followed Lord Nephril’s lead, keeping close behind him for fear of becoming lost. Phaylan watched, fascinated, as the vapour parted at their passing, leaving a brief clear tunnel through which they trod.
It was rare to see such fog in the realm, perhaps coastal sea-frets but not this thick soup of cold, damp air. To Phaylan, it was as though they walked between two worlds, the vast one without hidden by this possessive one within.
Eventually, a darkening ahead slowly marked their arrival at the Old Wall, one of the castle’s many overtaken ancient defences long consumed by Dica’s steady growth. Eastern Street ran through it, beneath a large arch in which a smaller gateway dimly appeared, and into which Nephril quickly slipped. A few dark, meandering flights of steps and a
long ramp soon brought them out onto the wall’s crenelated top, the grey fog now a little lighter.
“I managed to do a bit of digging last night,” Melkin said quietly to Nephril. “Found out the timber’s bound for the south, but the long way round, past the Lords Demesne and then south on the Graywyse Defence Road. They’re keeping well away from Grayden and Utter Shevling, though, for fear of the unrest.”
“Still turmoil there then?”
“Seems to have quietened a lot, but folk are still wary as you’d expect, although it doesn’t seem to have spread elsewhere.”
“Aye, so Drax was saying.”
“Did he say owt o’ Bazarral by any chance?”
“Only that all seemed no different there, not from a distance anyway, except the sky’s ochre stain of course.”
Melkin looked pained, prompting Nephril to say, “He has no better knowing than we, mine dear Steward. He has been wholly consumed with Galgaverre after all, and so has looked little beyond. Drax knows no more of what Crowbeater may hath been doing in thine absence, nor what pressure the guilds may have put him under.”
“But Drax met us at the gate, so he must have been out and about?”
“He only recently had cause to leave Galgaverre, so is truly none the wiser.”
They’d arrived at the wall’s junction with another, one that ran to the west and which they now followed. Their new pathway upon its top steadily rose, leaving the fog’s tattered and torn grasp falling below. Where the wall’s climb became even steeper and more open, they finally lifted out of the fog, revealing a most unusual sight.
For Nephril it evoked visions of the sea, reminded him of their escape across the tempestuous estuary. In Phaylan’s mind, though, it brought a more prosaic image of porridge!
The castle’s vast bulk rose ahead, leaving its lower spread of Uttagate and Cambray filled with what looked to be the very same - porridge. The occasional tower poked through its thick and decidedly cold-looking skin, held in a bowl formed by the Great Wall. Whoever had poured it there had been careless, though, for they’d spilt it onto the vales and dales beyond, to where it distantly gathered lumpily along the edge of the forest.
Of Weft and Weave (Dica Series Book 2) Page 41