Osric turned to the door. “We’ll need to lift it before opening,” he said, taking hold of a prominent horizontal bar. Merter and Fergal took places beside him, and counting down, they heaved and drew the door back. It did not scrape along the floor, but the hinges sent out a screech that shook the building to its foundations and echoed off all the cold stone and rusted iron in the fortress. They stood in shock for a moment, looking out into the empty courtyard as the sounds fluttered and died away.
Culver seemed the least affected. His expression was untraceable as he stepped through the doorway, led them down the stairs and across the flagstones. The courtyard was enclosed on all sides. Beyond the surrounding roofs, rose a daunting forest of buildings and towers. Near the middle of the courtyard, rusted manacles were fixed to the ground, suggesting that the royal entertainers had catered for savage appetites.
Immediately to the left was a stable and, to the right, a larger building that looked as if it might be a small armoury, perhaps dedicated to the tournaments – or tortures – that had taken place here. Aedan tried to peer through the open door, eager to catch a glimpse of ancient tools and weapons, but the interior was too dark. He realised with discomfort that anything within would be able to see him clearly.
Here and there were scattered possessions that seemed to have been dropped in flight – a barely recognisable shoe, a rusted spear, a shattered vase, an overturned cart, some ragged shreds of what might once have been cloth … and a crown!
It was dirty and stained, but that didn’t keep the torch light flaring in the many-jewelled gold surface. One central stone glowed so richly it was as if it had a light of its own – a brilliant fiery radiance that became smoky and bronzed towards the edges. He had never imagined a jewel like this. Beside it, the other stones and even the gold looked like the cheap quartz and tin of children’s trinkets.
The dancing light in the stone called to him, drew him in. It was easy to picture how this could change his fortunes. He would not need to depend on Osric for his fees or on Borr and Harriet for his mother’s lodging. Malik would no longer be able to look down on him; and he would have the resources to put Iver in his place and even to deal with his father. He would buy his freedom. And he would have standing in society. Even men like Dresbourn would be forced to respect him …
“Aedan!” Fergal called.
Aedan realised he had stopped and been left behind.
“There will be plenty of that, but knowledge is our treasure. And remember that the spoils of a commissioned quest belong by rights to the prince.”
Aedan tore his eyes away from the dazzling gem and trailed after the group, feelings rioting in his chest.
Why should they have to tell the prince? Was it necessary to be truthful to a liar? Wasn’t it only fair to deceive one who had deceived them?
When he caught up, Liru glanced at him, her dark eyes clear and sharp.
“You are thinking about taking it and keeping quiet?” she said.
“No.”
She stopped, turned around and faced him.
“Maybe,” Aedan said. “I don’t know. Why do we owe the prince anything?” They resumed walking.
Liru spoke softly, “For me, it does not matter. My house is already very rich. For you, I think you would become poorer.”
“Poorer? Have you lost your mind?”
“Poorer because you would give away your honesty. You would have to lie.”
“But the prince lied to me.”
“And so you would become like him.”
Her words struck like one of Hadley’s blows with the quarterstaff. He recognised the greed clawing inside him, pleading to have its way, begging him to justify taking the crown. Burkhart, too, would have had some means of justifying his actions.
Aedan walked on in silence, embarrassed and angry.
Enclosing the far side of the courtyard was a wall with a gate standing open, and a gallery where royals had most probably been entertained. To the right of the gallery was a flight of stairs that led them to a broad arched bridge. They kept low as they crossed the bridge, pushing aside some heavy fronds of ivy that dangled from a branch of the giant creeper.
Aedan glanced up at this twisting plant with its pillar-like arms that reached out over the city. The intricate shapes that its tendrils formed in the air and against the stone wall were unlike any he had seen before. They almost looked like symbols. He wondered if this creeper shared a secret with the pearlnut tree at Badgerfields, though it did not give him the same feeling. Instead of putting his ear to the thorny bark, he resolved to keep his distance at all costs.
Fergal stopped at a wide landing before double doors that were almost a foot thick and stood slightly ajar. These doors led into the enormous round tower that could be seen from leagues around. It was easily as wide as the main buildings of the keep and several times as high. While the men worked at opening the door enough to allow them in, Aedan approached the wall and looked out into the silent maze of streets.
As with the giant statues, everything here was constructed on an imposing scale. All the buildings were large and impressive, none standing under three stories, and some, like the towers, rising to great heights. The result was that the streets remained shadowy.
In these shadows were many dark objects that lined the roads. They almost looked like broken tree trunks. In one place he thought he recognised the white spidery lines of a skeleton, though he was not sure if he was seeing that with his eyes or his memories – the graveyard images from his first visit to Kultûhm kept fluttering through his mind. One thing that was not caused by memory or imagination was the smell. He noticed Merter was also sniffing the air and looking around.
“That is not the smell of abandoned stone,” he said.
“Could it be wolf droppings?” Aedan asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Reminds me of a rat’s nest.”
Merter did not answer but moved away from the door and peered down into the shadows of the deserted road.
The door shifted with a slight creak and the others slipped inside. Merter took a careful look around before following.
Culver and Fergal led the way down a broad ramp to a wide stone door. They looked, prodded, shoved and conferred. Fergal broke the silence. “We feared as much. There’s a secret to opening this door that we do not possess. We will need to use a smaller entrance. Unfortunately, the only way to reach it is by climbing ten floors up to the council room – very deep floors I might add – and then descending again using a narrow turret staircase that links the counsel room and archive room.”
They turned onto a wide spiral stairway and began to climb.
After one turn, Aedan stopped. The noise of feet ahead of him made it difficult to hear anything, but for a moment there had been just a hint of sound.
“What is it?” Merter asked, coming back.
“I’m not sure. It sounded almost like – like shouting.”
They waited for the noisy steps of the others to move ahead, but when they listened again, all was silent. While catching up to the others, Aedan noticed with concern that a river could not have left a clearer trail across the dusty floor. With a track like this they would not be able to hide if it became necessary. Fergal need not have bothered with the pebbles.
At the tenth floor, they reached a passage that led past several chambers. At the end of the passage was the council room.
The large room was semi-circular, the curved side being the outer wall of the round tower. The many windows gave ample light and made the space airy. Aedan looked around. A few leather maps had hung from the walls, but these were now largely decomposed, eaten by insects or torn by wind that moved freely through the broken shutters. Ornamental weapons were mounted on walls – spears, axes and swords, mostly rusted to frailty, except, as Aedan was fascinated to see, a few bronze weapons that had developed that pale, sea-green corrosion, beneath which he knew they would still be strong.
He walked
around a large central table and approached one of the windows, looked out, and caught his breath. Not even Burkhart’s council room commanded a view like this, and he was not even half way up the great tower. Ahead of him, Lake Vallendal was more like a sea reaching far out into Thirna, its western shore well beyond the reach of any eye. To the north, somewhere in the distance, was his home. But he knew, as the thought reached him, that the Mistyvales was his home no more.
He leaned out into the window, resting his torso on the deep windowsill, and looked south. The mountains of the DinEilan range were as majestic as ever, but the giants on the plain were now well beneath him. He could also see the tops of the fortress walls and marvelled at their width. Along their surfaces – more like roads than allures – were occasional mounds of wood and iron that he assumed to be the remains of catapults or carts. The breadth of the walls would have allowed these to move and pass each other with room to spare.
Far below, the labyrinth of streets unfolded. Kultûhm was not just some mountain retreat. It was a fair-sized city. Getting lost among the buildings would be easy. Looking across to the main gate, he saw the front courtyard. It was a good distance away, but his memories of it were still near.
Harsh sounds of something being struck brought Aedan back into the room. Osric, Culver and Fergal had moved around the central table and were standing before a door. The heavy oak was braced with rusty but tenacious iron, and it held fast against the kicks directed at it.
“We need the key,” said Osric.
“This lock would not turn,” said Fergal, “key or not.”
Osric was not listening. “There, that’s a key that should fit.” He strode across to a snarling statue of polished granite, a violent-looking man standing with feet splayed and arms akimbo. “It will take all of us to lift it. Come along.”
They gathered around and took their places.
“Don’t you start getting used to this,” Fergal said to Aedan, bringing a few puzzled looks.
They tried swinging gently at first, but that produced nothing more than dust. Then they took a run-up and hit the door with enough force to burst the unseen hinges. The whole structure collapsed forward with a whoosh of air and a clatter that echoed down the spiral stairway.
Merter was at the windows immediately, searching for movement, listening for any hint of sound. Aedan did the same on the other side of the room.
“Nothing,” Merter said after a while, but he looked uneasy. He walked across to Aedan and peered out the neighbouring window. “We are moving too noisily,” he growled. “And we are leaving tracks that a common soldier could follow.”
Aedan kept glancing behind him as he moved towards the dark stairwell. He did not like having his back to the open door by which they had entered. He waited with Merter at the top of the stairs until the sound of descending feet had died away. They listened, but all was silent.
“That crown would not have remained in the courtyard if the stories about this place were all imagined,” Merter said. “Keep alert, boy. Our luck may not hold much longer.”
It was a long and slow descent, and Aedan found it increasingly difficult to draw breath. The air in here had not been circulated. It was the forgotten air of another time held captive to grow thick with damp and with the smells of decayed wood and little forests of silent fungi.
At the bottom of the stairwell there was another door, this one of iron. But though the door was strong, the hinges had rusted to a papery softness and one heave from Osric’s shoulder was enough to push it down. As the light of torches flooded the space, the whole party gasped.
It was not the little archive chamber they had expected, but a great hall, larger even than the banquet hall that they had first entered. Many columns and arches supported a high ceiling, but more striking than the fine architecture and remarkable size were the reflections. Everything here was covered in clean tiles that sparkled and reflected the torches like dew on a spring morning. Light porcelain – some white, some sky-blue – made it feel as though the chamber’s roof was open to the air above.
Oil lamps and sealed oil jars were discovered and put to work, providing far better illumination. The many lamps were mounted against golden reflectors which cast a soft dreamy light through the whole chamber.
As the light grew, the far wall was revealed. It was covered with paintings that were so masterfully done they seemed almost to move – boughs dipped, grass swayed, chests breathed, and eyes looked out and watched as closely as they themselves were watched. There was writing on sections of the wall too, but none that Aedan could read. These were runes he had never seen before, but they were as exquisite as the paintings.
Culver was standing before the wall, his narrowed eyes consuming the details. Aedan wondered what the esteemed chancellor could see that escaped the rest of them, but he dared not interrupt. This was now the great learned man’s place and he suspected that anyone who bothered him would be sorry indeed.
“Culver,” Fergal mumbled absently while running his eyes over the shelves. “As soon as you’re done with your gawping, be so good as to make your way over here.”
Aedan and Liru stared.
A hundred little details suddenly fell into place and Aedan saw what had been in front of him all this time. “Culver is your assistant!”
Fergal drew himself out of his thoughts and glanced up at them. “Exposed then, are we?” he said with a touch of humour in his voice. “I doubted we’d be able to keep the ruse going on a journey like this. Yes, quite so. He takes the recognition and, along with it, all the attendant administration and formal duties. That way I can devote myself to the business of knowledge. A far better arrangement. And if you speak of it you will find yourselves chained to reshelving trollies in some forgotten library for the remainder of your days.”
Aedan doubted the threat was sincere – no one would believe them even if they did speak of it – but decided, nevertheless, to heed the warning.
Culver joined them, his superior manner gone, thrown off like a discarded cloak. For the first time that any of them had seen, he looked at them and actually smiled. It was almost shy, even apologetic. In that instant Aedan understood that the cold, imperious air had been no more than an act. No wonder he had seemed so inhuman.
Humming to himself, Culver turned and fell in beside his master, sorting through racks of clay tablets. These tablets must have filled a thousand shelves which projected out from the walls and lined several alcoves.
A thought dropped into Aedan’s mind. Could it then have been Fergal whom Giddard had once referred to as the powerful supporter, someone other than Osric who had seen great potential in him? It was an interesting idea. Maybe one day he would ask Fergal himself. Setting the thought aside, he walked over to a shelf of clay tablets.
As before, he was unable to read the symbols. The shapes were not really pictures, but there was something more representative about them than simple lettering. He remembered now that he had once seen writing like this. The image returned to him – an engraved pillar beside that aged stone bridge in the north of DinEilan.
He studied one of the tablets, trying to find a repeated symbol. The search took him all the way to the end before he found a recurrence – an orb with wavy lines cutting through the right-hand arc. But a closer inspection revealed it to be slightly different to the first – rounder, with an extra wavy line. It did not seem possible for these to be letters of an alphabet; there were too many. Were they words, or maybe ideas? He compared the two symbols again. Conditions in the lake – choppy and choppier? Or partial cloud cover and more complete cover? He wondered how many of these symbols there were and how anyone could remember all of them.
“It’s Gellerac,” Fergal said, without taking his eyes from the tablets he was shuffling. “It was the language of the first literate inhabitants and the greatest innovators our land has known. The language sounds as coarse as rocks falling down a gully, but the words have great depth. Perhaps that’s why the scribes
so loved to press their thoughts into clay.”
Aedan had no idea how Fergal could speak Thirnish and read Gellerac at that same time, but it was clear that the task was presenting little difficulty.
“Here,” said Culver. “First sighting of the Darat.”
“I have the details of the second siege, and here the third, so the timeline moves from right to left. Hopefully. Otherwise this could take a year.”
They moved to the far left and began to search tablets.
“Inauguration of King Vrothk,”
“The three year drought.”
“Encounter with the Orunesh.”
“Various building projects, commissioning of the twelve statues.”
“Ah, here’s something. Unnatural storms.”
The two men began to work through the shelf of tablets, placing the relevant ones on a marble desk.
Talk came to an end; time passed in a respectful hush, punctuated only by the clinking of clay. Merter hovered near the entrance and disappeared up the stairs every now and then.
After what must have been several hours, Tyne set about preparing a light meal from provisions she had brought. Neither Fergal nor Culver showed any interest.
Aedan was growing monumentally bored. He decided no harm could come from a better investigation of the chamber, so he took a lamp and headed over to inspect the giant paintings. At first, what he saw looked like a beautiful storm front, but then he began to look more closely. The sky was split between night and day, and from rich-looking clouds, a spear of lightning drove downward, solid, fuller than the usual spidery bolts from thunderheads.
It was not any storm; it was the storm. The same that had caused rumours to flood Thirna. The same that had shaken Castath and provided substance for years of superstition and rumour. The same from which he had once heard his name spoken.
Looking at the image that rose before him was, in a way, like looking at the storm itself. Something of its power was here too.
At the base of the lightning, a slight flaw caught his attention. It was the point at which the bolt met the earth, where enormous trees grew. The image was broken here by a section of unpainted, lumpy plaster. It looked like a hasty patch-up. Aedan touched it and the plaster crumbled away, revealing a fist-sized hole. He looked around to make sure that Fergal hadn’t noticed. Inside the cavity something glinted.
Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) Page 59