The fortress looked unchanged, the metal-grey waters of the lake giving no indication that a man had drowned there. The windows were blank beautiful eyes. She didn’t need the flute, because the wide doors were open as a mouth.
Don’t be a coward, not now. She climbed the steps, but once she was inside, it took all her self-control not to back out. She remembered coming in and seeing long passageways lead to the left and right, but now there were arched doors on all three sides of the entrance hall. Iron rings hung from them, but she wasn’t about to try pulling on those.
Especially since the fortress was so silent. She hadn’t noticed that before, because she had been playing—and the susurration of the people’s breathing had filled any spaces in the melody—but now she wondered where the garrison was. Chances were, they’d discovered the trick she had pulled and were waiting to ambush her.
She thought of Vinsen. That stiffened her spine and her shoulders went back. Putting the flute to her mouth, she started the coda to “Hymn of the Hunter”, the swift escalating tempo building up to the shattering finale. Before she could reach that, the door before her edged open.
Relieved, she lowered the flute and put her fingertips to the door to push it an inch or so ajar. She was so much on alert that when the door clinked against something, she jerked back, but there was no movement or further sound. Cautiously she glanced in.
Clothes were strewn just within the doorway, and beyond them was the gleam of well-kept armor—except the armor lay on the floor, empty as an eggshell. If that was a trap, it was the strangest bait she had ever seen. She pushed gently at the door again. When it opened, there was a quiet ssshh she knew was snagged clothes being trailed over the floor.
She stepped in, unable to believe what she was seeing. Was the fortress’s garrison preparing to leave the place and gathering all their spare clothes to pack together? Bleakhavener customs were so strange, anything was possible. But then where were—
“Come forward.”
The command made her jolt. She looked up and saw a man sitting alone on the flat top of a stepped pyramid perhaps twenty feet from her. What unnerved her was how clearly she had heard his voice. The hall had excellent acoustics or he was using the Faith.
Either way, she had no intention of obeying. She spun around, only to find there was no more door. Behind her was a sheet of ice smooth as a mirror, and a distorted reflection showed her the man getting to his feet.
She turned back, forcing her arms to drop casually as if the flute was nothing important, a trinket she had picked up along the way. Whoever the man was, if he commanded more of the Faith than she did, that wouldn’t be a battle she could win. She had to play along until she had an advantage.
She started to ask him who he was, and she saw his face. As he’d risen, the hood of a fur cloak had fallen back and a blaze painted itself down the right side of his face. Then unseen hands erased it, adding it on the proper side in the next moment. His jaw jutted and receded. His flesh seemed to be nothing more than soft clay over bones that kept growing in different configurations.
He didn’t seem aware of it. “I told you to come here,” he said, and she had the impression he didn’t normally repeat himself when it came to orders. Except if he was the castle’s master, where was the rest of the garrison? Why had they abandoned him, leaving their clothes behind?
The man took a step down and then another, moving without speed but narrowing the distance between them inexorably. His eyes changed color too, from grey to brown to an acid green. Maggie backed away until her shoulders hit the solidity of the wall. The garrison wouldn’t have just left him, certainly not without their armor and weapons.
Cannibals, remember? Keet said in her memory. A different form of it this time, leaving the empty peels behind. The man took the last step down.
“Greoc Rund.”
Vinsen’s voice rang out as he stood up from one of the high galleries that ran the length of the hall. Maggie’s heart surged, but the man barely paused before he continued towards her. As if he’d correctly pinpointed Vinsen’s location from the sound of his voice and knew Vinsen could never stop him before he reached her. No stairs led down from the gallery.
“You may use my title.” He threw the words back over his shoulder. “Eldred. I take it you’re Captain Solarcis?”
Without waiting for an answer, he was on her. One hand closed around her wrist and wrenched her free arm up behind her back, twisting it at an angle that made her stifle a cry. She heard a splitting sound, and thought it was her arm breaking.
Blinking her vision clear, she concentrated on staying motionless, not struggling, because she was afraid he’d do worse if she did. But in the moments it had taken him to reach her, Vinsen had hooked the prongs of a grappling-iron into the filigree side of the gallery and swung down the rope. The entire gallery shattered—that was the sharp snap she’d heard—but he had almost reached the floor, and he dropped, rolling to get away from the falling ice. He was on his feet again at once.
“Leave her,” he said. “We’ve been fighting through proxies long enough. If you want to kill someone, try me. Or do men scare you too much?”
Greoc Rund laughed. “What sort of a fool do you take me for? I know how she stole my people out of my house.” He wrenched the flute out of Maggie’s grasp. “It’ll never happen again.”
He closed his fist, and the flute snapped. A pang wrenched her chest. If he had given her the choice between that and having one of her fingers broken, she would have sacrificed the finger.
“We know a few things as well.” Vinsen strode to the base of the pyramid and picked up a fallen spear. “Like how you failed to revive the Tree and then lost it. Being stolen from seems to happen quite often to you.”
That time Greoc didn’t laugh. Instead his hand tightened on Maggie’s wrist until she had to clench her teeth so she wouldn’t make a sound. “You want to die painfully.” His voice was taut. “I’ll oblige you.”
“How, exactly?” Vinsen wedged the point of the spear into the mortar between the mosaic tiles, leaning his weight on the shaft. “Your power doesn’t affect Denalaits as it does Bleakhaveners.”
A whipcrack sound ricocheted through the hall, and the ceiling over Vinsen’s head crashed down. He flung himself aside just before it could strike him. Masonry and ice went up in a cloud of dust and splinters as Vinsen caught at a corner of the white-stepped pyramid to stay on his feet.
It took a moment before Maggie could breathe again. “Leave him alone,” she said, turning her head as best she could, though she didn’t want to see the man’s face working and changing any more than she’d wanted to see the blank non-expressions of the children. Bleakhaven seemed to be a study in extremes. But watching Vinsen be killed before her eyes would be much more painful than whatever Greoc could do to her. “If you kill him, you’ll never find out where they are.”
“I don’t need them.”
“Oh, that’s right.” She could just make out Vinsen climbing the steps of the pyramid, and she wanted to distract Greoc from that. “You used everyone else, in a worse way.”
His fingers dug into her wrist like an iron vise being twisted shut. “What happened to them was your doing. If you hadn’t stolen—”
Abruptly he broke off, his grip loosening a little. When his voice pealed out, it was in a shout that thundered through the hall. “Get away from that!”
Maggie turned her head just as Greoc flung her away. Her shoulder struck the wall, but she forgot the pain when she saw Vinsen reach the summit of the pyramid.
The step of the Faith. The words whispered themselves in her mind. That was why Greoc had been seated there when she had first seen him, why the pyramid had been built that way. But Greoc had far more control over the Faith, and would use that against Vinsen.
“Get off that step!” she shouted, but he stood where he was, watching her an
d Greoc warily. Greoc’s control over the Faith, she realized, was now so complete that he could stop even sounds from being heard.
He didn’t move except for the constant changing of his features, which meant she couldn’t tell whether he was angry or afraid. Though when his mouth twitched and opened slightly, she thought he might have been trying to smile.
“It’s an abomination,” he said, in a voice that sounded like a waterfall of sand, “seeing an animal crouched on the most sacred of places. But as the Faith uplifts the lowest, it will purify you from the mind outwards.”
The gathered power in the hall crackled like lightning. And the hall, like Greoc Rund’s face, reshaped itself.
The walls were gone as if they had never existed. Grass sprouted around Vinsen’s boots. The air was cool and misty, smelling of trampled earth and horse dung, and instead of the constant muted glow within the fortress, he saw an indistinct dusk. Though he could read the stone milestone that stood across the well-worn dirt road from him.
Revery, seven miles.
No, he thought, trying to ignore the dull pain in his heart. It was an illusion, nothing more. Except when he looked down, he stood just off the road, where a traveler might not notice him among the shadows.
Especially if that traveler was tired from a long week of work, thinking only of going home to Pike Lake, home to his wife and son with his pay in his pocket.
The money had been taken, but it had never mattered to Vinsen, not a tenth as much as losing his father. He glanced down the Revery road, and just as he had expected, a man was on it. In the twilight, Vinsen couldn’t see the man’s face, but he longed to do so. One look. He didn’t have a picture of his father, not even in his mind—he’d been too young, and the memory had faded until there was less left than the tall shadow coming closer. Just one look.
Before he could step out from where he stood, a movement behind the milestone marker caught his eye. Another man crouched there, a knife sliding free of a sheath with a soft rasp. The second man peered out from behind the marker like a snake slipping its head from a burrow, and Vinsen recognized him.
The fury that roared up from the depths of his chest was blinding in its intensity. Vinsen heard his own hoarse breathing, the thudding of his pulse in his ears—but the rawness of his reaction saved him. For a moment he was too paralyzed with rage to run forward and stop the murder. That was all the time his better sense needed to catch up with him.
“No.” He didn’t recognize his voice, but he had regained control over himself. He knew what Greoc Rund had wanted—all the grief and anger he’d buried for too long. Perhaps because the Faith was hungry and wanted to feed on him, perhaps just to make him rush off the top of the pyramid. “No. Too blatant. You overreached yourself. I don’t believe that’s how it happened.”
He drew in a long breath and looked down at the grass swaying in the evening breeze, because illusion or not, he didn’t want to watch his father die. “And even if that is what he did, I couldn’t change it.”
Night fell, hiding the grass, and Greoc’s voice spoke out of the darkness, patient as a wolf following its prey. “But you hate him, don’t you?” he said. “Was this why?”
The ground beneath Vinsen’s feet turned dry, packed hard. He saw nothing around him, but he smelled earth and stored carrots, deep and musty. The root cellar.
He’d always known that the one thing his mother wouldn’t endure was a bruise, so his stepfather had found other ways to let him know he wasn’t wanted in their family—like putting him out of sight and out of mind. But that wasn’t likely to scare him now; he’d spent too much time there as a child for it to do so.
Out of the darkness came the skitter of little claws running over wood. Vinsen tensed. It came from behind him, and he forced himself not to turn. He smelled a warm, animal pungency and the scraping, scratching sounds came closer. They surrounded him now, on all sides.
It’s an illusion. It’s not real. He tried to think of something else, anything else, but the effort failed when whiskers brushed the palms of his hands and hot breath wafted across his ear. At any moment they would start to bite. He didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to be afraid, but that was happening anyway.
They all followed a piper into the sea, didn’t they?
Joama had said that. Whether it would work or not, it reminded him of Maggie, and he imagined her in the darkness, golden eyes like two candles lighting the way. Smiling, she lifted her flute to her mouth and played.
The coarse-furred bodies stopped moving, and their chirring was silenced. Maggie walked away, still piping. Slowly at first, in ones and twos that swelled to a swarm, the rats followed her and beyond, Vinsen saw the ocean.
Before he had time to feel relieved, the tide leaped up. Maggie was gone and the rats disappeared like grains of sand. Vinsen locked his legs, bracing his feet apart, and let the raging water wash over his head. He sank leagues deep, down to the lightless stretches of the ocean, but this was the kind of illusion that had no power to move him, because there weren’t too many sailors afraid of the—
He knew the wreck lying on the seabed before he saw her name in flaking paint on her stern. Something had staved in one side of the hull. But the interior of the ship glowed as though all her lanterns had been lit, and the bones of his crew lay scattered, pale and smooth under the rotting remnants of their clothes. Like parts of a strange instrument that had been pulled apart, the bones lay tumbled where fish had moved them, but every skull turned towards him.
Vinsen watched, too numbed to feel anything.
You lived while we died. One skull spoke, its voice toneless and hollow. You enjoyed the sun and drank wine while we rotted and fed the fish.
There were fresh bodies among the long-dead ones. Jak Tuller was the closest, blood forming an ink-dark cloud around him, and Vinsen couldn’t recognize the man who had been mauled by the bear, but they spoke too. We trusted you and you led us to our deaths. Now pay your debt to us.
His crew, the people he’d been charged to lead and protect, and he hadn’t even had the chance to give them a proper burial. Vinsen moved closer, slowly because of all the water around him. He would have given almost anything to bring them back, to make up for their deaths.
You did this to us in life, so do one last thing for us. Come to us. Come.
He took one last step towards them.
Maggie dragged her attention away from the wreck. It wasn’t real, so there had to be a way to shatter the unreality. Except Vinsen wouldn’t hear her even if she screamed.
The illusion was so perfect she saw nothing of the hall. She lay on the ocean’s floor too, soon to join the dead men. Greoc stood a few paces before her, watching greedily, and she thought if the Faith was fed by deep and genuine emotion, it was being served a banquet at that point.
She went flat in the mud, arms spread as she felt for anything within reach. A cloud of silt went up and deep-sea worms wriggled over her hands, but her outstretched fingers touched something else, incongruously dry so far below the ocean. The furs beneath her hand were faintly warm, as if they held the last residue of whoever had worn them. They were also close enough to the door that she didn’t need to move—and attract Greoc’s attention—to search them.
Her fingers curved around something hard, the hilt of a weapon. When she drew the dagger, her hand rose from the muck of the seabed and brought out a treasure fallen too recently to rust.
Without pause, because Greoc might sense either fear or fury, she threw herself across the floor at him. She sank the blade into the back of his ankle with all her strength.
The sea vanished. She was in the great ice-and-marble hall again, though if she had hoped to cripple Greoc, it didn’t work. He spun around, staggering only a little, and the movement wrenched the knife out of her grip. She tried to scrabble back, but he was too fast.
The backhanded blow was
so hard she thought all the bones on that side of her face had broken. A hot coppery taste filled her mouth from where her teeth had gone into her tongue. She blinked her vision clear, in time to see Greoc pull the knife out of his leg. Only a drop or two of blood fell to the floor, as if he healed far too quickly for such a small injury to have any effect.
This is it, then, she thought through a daze.
Except behind him, Vinsen paused on the edge of the topmost step. His hand dipped to his pocket, and he flung something to the floor, something that rolled across the polished surface until it was only a few feet away from Greoc. For a moment Maggie forgot about him and the hurt in her face, because she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Half an apple, already turning brown. What was that supposed to—
The seeds sprouted, roots sinking fast between the tiles of the mosaic. A tree sprang up, leaves unfolding and flowers opening simultaneously. They gave off the scent of all of summer’s sweetness. Greoc turned, just as the flowers became fruits that hung from the branches like drops of molten gold.
He stared at the tree as if transfixed, and Maggie couldn’t look away either. One bite of that fruit—one bite which would taste better than raw ripe apples—and she would never know age or death. The tree’s leaves glistened with dew.
“That was what you wanted.” Vinsen’s voice broke the spell. “What you would have sacrificed anything for.”
Greoc slashed down. The dagger sank into the trunk of the tree and it was gone, but Vinsen only moved down one level of the pyramid.
“This is the step of rejoicing, isn’t it?” he asked.
Greoc stared at him. “Ruay told you that?”
Vinsen actually smiled, as though the step had taken away all the pain that Greoc had tried to draw out of him. “No, the Faith did. When the abyss looks into you, best not to close your eyes.” He took another step. “And this one? Instruction. So I’ll instruct you now—you didn’t know my father or my crew at all. They would never have held me to blame for their deaths. And they would have wanted me to do the best I could with my life, rather than join them.”
The Coldest Sea Page 23