by Tad Williams
As he strode away, he thought he heard Inch call something after him, but when Pryrates turned, the forgemaster was staring instead at the water wheel’s thick spokes passing in a never-ending circle. The clatter of hammers was sharp, but still Pryrates could hear the ponderous, mournful creaking of the turning wheel.
Duke Isgrimnur leaned on the windowsill, stroking his new-sprouted beard and staring down at the greasy waterways of Kwanitupul. The storm had passed, the sprinkling of bizarrely unseasonal snow had melted, and the marshy air, though still oddly cool, had returned to its usual stickiness. Isgrimnur felt a strong urge to be moving, to do something.
Trapped, he thought. Pinned down as surely as if by archers. It’s like the damnable Battle of Clodu Lake all over again.
But of course there were no archers, no hostile forces of any kind. Kwanitupul, at least temporarily freed from the cold’s grip and restored to its usual mercenary existence, paid no more attention to Isgrimnur than it did to any of the thousands of others who occupied its ramshackle body like so many busy fleas. No, it was circumstance that had trapped the former master of Elvritshalla, and circumstance was right now a more implacable enemy than any human foes, no matter how many and how well-armed.
Isgrimnur stood up with a sigh and turned to look at Camaris, who sat propped against the far wall, tying and untying a length of rope. The old man, once the greatest knight in Osten Ard, looked up and smiled his soft, idiot-child’s smile. For all his white-haired age, his teeth were still good. He was strong, too, with a grip most young tavern brawlers would envy.
But weeks of constant effort on Isgrimnur’s part had not altered that maddening smile. Whether Camaris was bewitched, wounded in the head, or simply deranged with age, it all came to the same end: the duke had not been able to summon forth even a flicker of recollection. The old man did not recognize Isgrimnur, did not remember his past or even his own true name. If the duke had not once known Camaris so well he might even have begun to doubt his own senses and memory, but Isgrimnur had seen John’s paramount knight at every season, in every light, in good times and evil times. The old man might no longer know himself, but Isgrimnur was not mistaken.
Still, what should be done with him? Whether he was hopelessly mad or not, he should be helped. The most obvious task was to get the old man to those who would remember and revere him. Even if the world Camaris had helped build was now crumbling, even if King Elias had laid waste to the dream of Camaris’ friend and liege-lord John, still the old man deserved to spend his last years in some better place than this backwater pesthole. Also, if anyone yet survived of Prince Josua’s folk, they should know that Camaris lived. The old man could be a powerful emblem of hope and of better days—and Isgrimnur, a shrewd statesman for all his bluff disavowals, knew the value of a symbol.
But even if Josua or some of his captains had somehow survived and regrouped somewhere to the north of here, as Kwanitupul market rumor suggested, how could Isgrimnur and Camaris reach them through a Nabban full of enemies? How could he leave this inn in any case? Father Dinivan, with his dying breath, had told Isgrimnur to bring Miriamele here. The duke had not found her before being forced to flee the Sancellan Aedonitis, but Miriamele might already know of this place—perhaps Dinivan himself had mentioned it to her! She might come here, alone and friendless, and find Isgrimnur already gone. Could the duke risk that? He owed it to Josua—whether the prince was living or dead—to do his best to help her.
Isgrimnur had hoped that Tiamak—who in some unspecified way was an intimate of Dinivan’s—might know something about Miriamele’s whereabouts, but that hope had been immediately dashed. After much prodding, the little brown man had admitted that Dinivan had sent him here as well, but without explanation. Tiamak had been very preoccupied with the news of the deaths of Dinivan and Morgenes and afterward had offered nothing helpful to Isgrimnur at all. In fact, the duke thought him somewhat sullen. Although the marsh man’s leg was obviously painful—a cockindrill had bitten him, he said—still Isgrimnur thought that Tiamak could do more to help solve the various riddles that plagued them both, Dinivan’s purpose uppermost among them. But instead he seemed content just to sulk around the room—a room paid for by Isgrimnur!—or to spend long hours writing or limping along the wooden walkways of Kwanitupul, as he was doubtless doing now.
Isgrimnur was about to say something to silent Camaris when there was a knock at the door. It creaked open to reveal the landlady, Charystra.
“I’ve brought the food you asked for.” Her tone implied that she had made some great personal sacrifice instead of merely taking Isgrimnur’s money for grossly overpriced bed and board. “Some nice bread and soup. Very nice. With beans.” She set the tureen on the low table and clanked down three bowls beside it. “I don’t understand why you can’t come down to eat with everyone else.” Everyone else was two Wrannaman feather merchants and an itinerant gem cutter from Naraxi who was looking for work.
“Because I pay not to,” Isgrimnur growled.
“Where’s the marsh man?” She ladled out the unsteaming soup.
“I don’t know, and I don’t think it’s business of yours, either.” He glowered. “I saw you go off with your friend this morning.”
“To the market,” she sniffed. “I can’t take my boat, because he—” hands full, she waggled her head in the direction of Camaris, “—never fixed it.”
“Nor will I let him, for the sake of his dignity—and I’m paying you for that, too.” Isgrimnur’s sour temper was rising. Charystra always tested the boundaries of the duke’s chivalry. “You are very quick with your tongue, woman. I wonder what you tell your friends at the market about me and your other strange guests.”
She darted an apprehensive look in his direction. “Nothing, I’m sure.”
“That had better be true. I gave you money to keep silent about ... about my friend here.” He looked at Camaris, who was happily spooning oily soup into his mouth. “But in case you think to take my money and still spread tales, remember: if I find you have talked about me or my business ... I will make you wish you hadn’t.” He let his deep voice rumble the words like thunder.
Charystra took a step back in alarm. “I’m sure I haven’t said nothing! And you’ve no cause to be threatening me, sir! No cause! It’s not right!” She started toward the door, waving the ladle as if to fend off blows. “I said I wouldn’t say anything and I won’t. Anyone will tell you—Charystra keeps her word!” She quickly made the sign of the Tree, then slipped out into the hall, leaving a spatter of soup spots on the plank flooring.
“Hah,” Isgrimnur snorted. He stared at the grayish fluid still rippling in the bowl. Pay for her silence, indeed. That was like paying the sun not to shine. He had been throwing money around as though it were Wran water—soon it would run out. Then what would he do? It made him angry just to think about it. “Hah!” he said again. “Damn me.”
Camaris wiped his chin and smiled, staring at nothing.
Simon leaned around the standing stone and peered downward. The pale sun was nearly straight overhead; it knifed down through the undergrowth, revealing a flicker of reflection on the hillside.
“Here it is,” he called back, then leaned against the wind-smoothed pillar to wait. The white stone had not yet shed its morning chill, and was even colder than the surrounding air. After a moment, Simon began to feel his bones turning to ice. He stepped away and turned to survey the line of the hill’s edge. The standing stones circled Sesuad’ra’s summit like the spikes of a king’s crown. Several of the ancient pillars had fallen down, so the crown had a somewhat bedraggled look, but most stood tall and straight, still doing their duty after a span of un-guessable centuries.
They look just like the Anger Stones on Thisterborg, he realized.
Could that be a Sithi place, too? There were certainly enough strange stories told about it.
Where were those two? “Are you coming?” he called.
When he received no answer, he
clambered around the stone and made his way a short distance down the hillside, careful to keep a solid grip on the sturdy heather despite the resultant prickling: the ground was muddy and potentially treacherous. Below, the valley was full of gray water that barely rippled, so that the new lake around the hill seemed solid as a stone floor. Simon could not help thinking of the days when he had climbed to the bellchamber of Green Angel Tower and felt himself sitting cloud-high above the world. Here on Sesuad’ra, it was as though the entire hill of stone had just now been born, thrusting up from the primordial muck. It was easy to pretend there was nothing beyond this place, that this was how it must have felt when God stood atop Mount Den Haloi and made the world, as told in the Book of the Aedon.
Jiriki had told Simon about the coming of the Gardenborn to Osten Ard. In those days, the Sitha had said, most of the world had been covered in ocean, just as the west still was. Jiriki’s folk had sailed out of the rising sun, across unimaginable distances, to land on the verdant coastline of a world innocent of humanity, a vast island in a great surrounding sea. Some later cataclysm, Jiriki had implied, had then changed the face of the world: the land had risen and the seas had drained away to east and south, leaving new mountains and meadows behind them. Thus, the Gardenborn could never return to their lost home.
Simon thought about this as he squinted out toward the east. There was little to see from atop Sesuad’ra but murky steppes, lifeless plains of endless gray and dull green, stretching to where vision failed. From what Simon had heard, the eastern steppes had been inhospitable territory even before this dread winter: they grew increasingly barren and shelterless the farther east of Aldheorte Forest one went. Beyond a certain point, travelers claimed, even the Hyrkas and Thrithings-folk did not journey. The sun never truly shone there and the land was sunken in perpetual twilight. The few hardy souls who had crossed that murky expanse in search of other lands had never returned.
He realized he had been staring a long time, yet he was still alone. He was just about to call again when Jeremias appeared, picking his way carefully through the brambles and waist-high grass toward the edge of the hill. Leleth, barely visible in the swaying undergrowth, held the young squire’s hand. She seemed to have taken a liking to Jeremias, although it was shown only by her constant proximity. She still did not speak, and her expression remained perpetually solemn and abstracted, but when she could not be with Geloë, she was nearly always with Jeremias. Simon guessed that she might have sensed in the young squire something like her own pain, some shared affliction of the heart.
“Does it go down into the ground,” Jeremias called, “or over the edge?”
“Both,” said Simon, pointing.
They had been following the path of this spring from the point where it appeared in the building Geloë had named the House of Waters. Issuing mysteriously from the rocks, it did not drain away after pooling at the base of the spring—where it provided fresh drinking water for New Gadrinsett, and thus had become one of the centers of gossip and commerce for the infant settlement—but rather gurgled out of the little pond in a narrow streamlet, passing out of the House of Waters, which was at one of the highest points on Sesuad’ra, then running across the summit as a tiny rivulet, appearing and disappearing as the features of the ground changed. Simon had never seen or heard of a spring that behaved in such a way—who had ever heard of a spring on a hilltop, anyway?—and he was bound and determined to discover its path, and perhaps its origin, before the storms returned and made the hunt impossible.
Jeremias joined Simon a little way down the hillside. They both stood over the swift-flowing rivulet.
“Do you think it goes all the way down,” Jeremias gestured to the vast gray moat around the base of the Stone of Farewell, “or does it go back into the hill?”
Simon shrugged. Water that sprang from the heart of a Sithi sacred mountain might indeed pass back into the rock once more, like some incomprehensible wheel of creation and destruction—like the future approaching to absorb the present, then quickly falling away again to become the past. He was about to suggest further exploration, but Leleth was making her way down the hill. Simon worried for her, although she herself seemed to pay little attention to the hazardous trail. She could easily slip, and the slope was steep and dangerous.
Jeremias took a couple of steps up and reached for her, catching her under her thin arms and lifting her down to stand beside them. As he did so, her loose dress rode up, and for a brief moment Simon saw her scars, long inflamed weals that covered her thighs. They must be far worse on her stomach, he reflected.
He had been thinking all morning about what he had heard in Leavetaking House about the Great Swords and other things. These matters had seemed abstract, as though Simon, his friends and allies, Elias, even the dreadful Storm King himself, were no more than pieces on a shent board, tiny things that could be considered in a hundred different configurations. Now, suddenly, he was reminded of the true horrors of the recent past. Leleth, an innocent child, had been terrorized and savaged by the hounds of Stormspike; thousands more just as innocent had been made homeless, been orphaned, tormented, killed. Anger suddenly made Simon sway on his feet, as if the very force of his fury might knock him stumbling. If there was any justice, someone would pay for what had happened—for Morgenes, Haestan, Leleth, for Jeremias with his now-thin face and unspoken sorrows, for Simon himself, homeless and sad.
Usires have mercy on me, I would kill them all if I could. Elias and Pryrates and their white-faced Norns—if only I could, I would kill them with my own hands.
“I saw her at the castle,” said Jeremias. Simon looked up, startled. He had clenched his fists so tightly that his knuckles hurt.
“What?”
“Leleth.” Jeremias nodded at the child, who was smearing her dirty face as she stared out across the flooded valley. “When she was Princess Miriamele’s handmaiden. I remember thinking, ‘what a pretty little girl.’ She was all dressed in white, carrying flowers. I thought she looked very clean.” He laughed quietly. “Look at her now.”
Simon found he did not want to talk about sorrowful things. “And look at you,” he said. “You’re one to be talking about clean.”
Jeremias would not be distracted. “Did you really know her, Simon? The princess, I mean.”
“Yes.” Simon didn’t want to tell Jeremias that story again. He had been bitterly disappointed to find Miriamele was not with Josua, and horrified that no one knew where she was. He had dreamed of telling her his adventures, of the way her bright eyes would go wide as he told her of the dragon. “Yes,” he repeated, “I knew her.”
“And was she beautiful, like a princess should be?” Jeremias asked, suddenly intent.
“I suppose so.” Simon was reluctant to talk about her. “Yes, she was—I mean, she is.”
Jeremias was about to ask something else, but was interrupted. “Ho!” a voice cried from above. “There you are!”
A strange, two-headed silhouette was looking down at them from beside the standing stone. One of the heads had pointed ears.
“We’re trying to find out where the spring comes from and where it goes, Binabik,” Simon called.
The wolf tilted her head and barked.
“Qantaqa thinks you should stop your water-following for now, Simon,” Binabik laughed. “Besides, Josua has asked all to be returning to the Leavetaking Hall. There is much to talk about.”
“We’re coming.”
Simon and Jeremias each took one of Leleth’s small cold hands and clambered back up toward the hillcrest. The sun stared down on them all like a milky eye.
All who had been gathered in the morning had returned to Leavetaking House. They talked quietly, perhaps overawed by the size and strange dimensions of the hall, so much more unsettling when it was not filled with a distracting crowd as it had been the night before. The sickly afternoon light leaked in through the windows, but with so little strength that it seemed to come from no direction at all, sme
aring all the room equally; the meticulous wall-carvings gleamed as though by their own faint inner light, reminding Simon of the shimmering moss in the tunnels beneath the Hayholt. He had been lost there in choking, strangling blackness. He had been in a place beyond despair. Surely to survive that meant something. Surely he had been spared for a reason!
Please, Lord Aedon, he prayed, don’t bring me so far just to let me die!
But he had already cursed God for letting Haestan perish. It was doubtless too late for making amends.
Simon opened his eyes to find that Josua had arrived. The prince had been with Vorzheva, and assured them all that she was feeling better.
Accompanying Josua were two who had not been at the morning council, Sludig—who had been scouting the perimeter of the valley—and a heavyset young Falshireman named Freosel, who had been chosen by the settlers as constable of New Gadrinsett. Despite his relative youth, Freosel had the wary, heavy-lidded look of a veteran street fighter. He was liberally scarred and two of his fingers were missing.
After Strangyeard had spoken a short blessing, and the new constable had been cautioned to hold secret the things he would hear, Prince Josua stood.
“We have many things to decide,” he said, “but before we begin, let me talk to you of good luck and of more hopeful days.
“When it seemed that there was nothing left but despair and defeat, God favored us. We are now in a safe place, when a season ago we were scattered over the world, the castaways of war. We undertook a quest for one of the three Great Swords, which may be our hope of victory, and that quest has succeeded. More people flock to our banner every day, so that if we only can wait long enough, we will soon have an army that will give even my brother the High King pause.
“Our needs are still great, of course. Out of those people driven from their homes throughout Erkynland, we can indeed mount an army, but to overcome the High-King we will need many more. It is also certain that we are already hard-pressed to feed and shelter those who are here. And it is even possible that no army, however large and well-provided, will be great enough to defeat Elias’ ally the Storm King.” Josua paused. “Thus, as I see it, the important questions we must answer this day are three: What does my brother plan to do? How can we assemble a force that will prevent it? And how can we retrieve the other two swords, Bright-Nail and Sorrow, that we may have a hope of defeating the Norns and their dark master and mistress?”