Torchlight flickered beyond the stone archway. Ten warriors in mail and crimson robes preceded Dar Antomír. They approached the altar table, solemnly bowed before it, and stood on their knees encircling the aspens, swords drawn and placed into the ground point-down. Dar Antomír met Otar Kalún inside the circle and kissed him three times on the cheeks. Both then bowed to the altar.
The tenors wailed over a drone in the basses, massive as a full spring torrent. The words of the ancient hymn echoed crisply in the cold air.
“O, gentle light of Adonais and his numberless hosts, radiant and glorious. From the rising to the setting of the sun, you illumine the mountains and valleys. Shine out for us wandering in darkness, show us the merciful gaze of morning. O Lord Adonais, we praise and glorify you until the Endless Age.”
The crowd joined in with a rumbling noise at once dissonant and moving. Voran felt no longer merely himself, as though the minuscule creature he called “himself” was nothing but a stone in a much larger edifice, a tower reaching with song and flesh and bone to the Heights. He felt small, but also part of something majestic and glorious, a note in a complex harmony that rose to the ears of Adonais himself.
The hymn was twice repeated, ending in a long, groaning note of lamentation. Silence prevailed as Kalún chanted alone in his watery voice. The words were completely unintelligible. Voran’s ecstasy crashed to earth. Why must the chief cleric of Vasyllia always be such a terrible celebrant of the mysteries?
When Kalún’s mumbling ceased, he turned around to face the people.
“People of Vasyllia,” he said. “It is not the day for the Summoning. But our beloved sapling is already fading. Let us all come together in prayer so that we, your priests, may find the inner strength to call down fire from the Heights, as our forefathers did in the days of Lassar the Blessed.”
Voran’s stomach soured. That wasn’t right. It wasn’t the priests who had summoned the first fire. Not according to the Old Tales. It was the Harbinger. What was Otar Kalún up to?
The priest led the procession back through the middle of the Temple and out into the main square. In the evening darkness, the mansions of Vasyllia’s third reach—all lit with lanterns—were like jewels lit on fire. Above them, the twin waterfalls fell in perfect lines framing the palace, which from this vantage point looked like it floated in the air directly above the sapling. The sapling! Its upper leaves were no longer aflame. The flames that remained in the lower part of the tree were bluish, barely moving.
One gust of winter wind, and the whole tree would go out. Voran was sure of it.
The procession arrived at the tree, and everyone fell silently to their knees. Only Otar Kalún stood, visible to all in the center of the square.
“As you visited our fathers in their darkest time,” he intoned, “so heed our request on this day, Adonais, though it is not the day allotted for your grace. Send down fire. Let it illumine our hearts and give life to the eternal tree of Covenant.”
The chanting rose again, bleak and stark in the night. Kalún circled the tree, mumbling to himself with arms raised.
A huge gust of wind lashed the Temple from the summit, as if Vasyllia Mountain had opened its maw and begun to blow with all its might. The remaining fire on the tree sputtered and died, as did most of the lanterns in the city. Darkness seemed to pour over the assembled crowd.
Another omen, thought Voran, his hands shaking with more than mere cold.
“People of Vasyllia!” roared a voice in the half-darkness. “Your hearts are nothing but stone. Do you think you can buy the Heights’ favor by forcing the hand of the Most High?”
The Pilgrim stood to the right of the aspen, impossibly tall, arms held high. He glowed with a golden light.
“It is not too late, Vasyllia. You can win back the regard of the Heights. Behold! All Nebesta sprawls at your feet, but you do not give her entry. Take her children’s care into your hands.”
Many moaned with fear, and many more cried out in agreement. But an angry throng surged at the Pilgrim—mostly young men. They dragged him, screaming, stomping, spitting on him as they dragged him back into the Temple, to try to throw him off the edge of the Temple Plain. Voran rushed forward, but there were too many of them. The mass surged, pushing down whatever was in its way, closer and closer to the far end of the Temple.
Two ranks of warriors appeared and rammed the crowd from either side of the Temple, coming into the open space from the darkness of the red-barks, where they had been silently standing guard. Swords drawn, they beat down the mob. They surrounded the bloody Pilgrim and carried him back toward the square. A wall of people surged to block their way, and only when the priests with their oak staffs joined the warriors did the wave crest and fall back toward the archway. The warriors rushed to the third reach, leaving trampled humanity in their wake.
Vasyllia is fallen, thought Voran. It is too late.
Know this, my dears. Our realm is full of doorways. Doorways into other realms. You may have seen them sometimes. A curtain of water falling where there is no waterfall. A metal gate standing in the middle of a field. A pool of water in the middle of a desert. Do not enter them. If you do, you will be taken to a perilous place, the Lows of Aer. If you ever come out again, it will be to a different place entirely! Many are the children who have entered the Lows. Few have come back…
-From “A Child’s Retelling of the Sirin’s Tale” (Old Tales, Book VI)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Changer
The day that Voran and his companions left Vasyllia, it began to rain—a steady, insistent kind of rain that chilled deeper than snow. It never stopped long enough for the three travelers to dry their clothes, and soon they gave up altogether. Saddle sores became an ever-present reality, despite the cold. Voran forgot to take the necessary precautions, for which he silently cursed himself in language he never used in public. Judging by Mirnían’s stiffness, Voran was not the only one. Dubían merely sulked. In their mutual discomfort, all remained silent.
Mirnían’s guard of ten warriors traveled with them for the entire first day. But they were not trained woodsmen. They were slowing Voran down, and their racket could be heard for miles. After conferring with Dubían and Voran, Mirnían ordered them to return to Vasyllia. Voran knew what Dar Antomír would think about Mirnían’s decision. He also knew how little Mirnían cared about that.
It took them three days to reach the place where Voran bonded with Lyna. Voran hoped that he would see her again, though his rational mind told him that was unlikely. There was no change in his inner flame, no surge in his yearning as they approached. If anything, the closer they came, the less he felt anything, as though something were dulling his emotions from without.
“Why can’t it make up its mind?” roared Dubían, face red as his beard. “I can understand rain; I can understand fog. I hate both of them, but at least I can understand them. This…this is like sweat. It’s not raining, it’s sweating!”
Voran pushed his exhausted charger up through a cleft between two tree-crowned hills. When he came to the other side, he hoped to see clear indications of the pilgrims’ passage through that region.
“Voran, what is it?” asked Mirnían.
Voran could not understand. There was no sign of the pilgrims. Nothing. Until that moment, their trail—old food-scraps, strips of torn fabric hanging on black hawthorn, trampled earth—was unmistakable. But here, in the place where he last saw them, their trail veered off the road toward a wood, where it vanished.
Mirnían laughed. Dubían looked near to tears. Voran wanted to vent his frustration by hacking down the nearest tree with his sword.
“Well, now what?” said Mirnían pointedly, as though this was all Voran’s fault.
“I don’t know,” Voran said. “It’s too late to go on in any case, especially if we’re going into those woods. The morning is wiser than the evening.” Or at least I hope so.
“I knew you would have some sort of inspirationa
l nonsense from the Tales, you fool,” burbled Mirnían. He walked off, head down and shoulders slumped. His words stung Voran like the slap of a birch-switch.
As their mounts munched on the last few greens remaining among the ascendant browns, Voran gathered wood for the fire. Like the insistent buzzing of a fly, he felt Mirnían’s anger, though the prince pointedly refused to look at him.
In the failing light, swarms of swallows kept him company. They wheeled low, almost at ground level. It’s going to rain, thought Voran. But the sky was already planted with stars, and no cloud obscured their glint. Neither was there any heaviness in the air. And yet, the birds seemed weighed down. There was something chaotic about their flight, nothing elegant about their circles. A few almost flew into each other, and there was none of the usual playfulness in it. Voran shivered with unease.
All three of them took turns trying to light the fire. All three failed. It seemed to break something in Mirnían’s resolve. Voran felt a wave of anger slap him a split second before Mirnían spoke.
“Voran, I have long wanted to ask you. You must have thought of this much over the years. Why do you think Otchigen murdered all those innocent people in Karila?”
Voran’s nails bit into his palm as he balled his fists. What a coward, he thought. Mirnían could find nothing to attack Voran with directly, so he struck in his soft place, in the place that he could not defend.
“You as well, Mirnían?” asked Voran, pushing the nails deeper into his palm, hoping the pain would keep the anger at bay.
Dubían tried to play conciliator. “Never mind what other people think.” He glared at Mirnían. “I’ve always been sure Otchigen was also killed in the wild, only his body was never found.”
“I don’t know,” said Voran. “Somehow, if he were dead, I think I would be more sure of it. No, he’s alive, but something prevented him from saving those people. It’s not an easy choice to willingly return home only to face judgment.”
Mirnían chuckled, clearly understanding Voran’s implication, but he said nothing.
“Voran, tell me. What sort of a man was Otchigen?” asked Dubían. “I would be honored to hear it from you. All the seminary rumors smacked of jealousy. He was a great man, and great men are not often liked.”
The unexpected kindness of the big man touched Voran.
“Everyone seems to think that my father was the Dar’s enforcer, a man who thought better with his axe than with his head. But they never saw him tell stories. Every evening he would gather us around the hearth. Some evenings it was something from the old tales, sometimes he told us of his youth. I loved it when he spoke of his first meeting with my mother. He had a particular way of speaking. It was almost in song.”
Like the Sirin. The thought struck him with unexpected revelation. He had always known it, but in some deep recess of the mind. Truly, there was something otherworldly about Otchigen when he told stories, leaning on one of the carved columns in their hearth-hall, always the same column. He would shed his years as he spoke, and every time he recalled his early days courting Aglaia, she would sit on her bench, rocking herself gently as she sewed something, pretending not to look at him. Her eyes looked different in those moments: they shone with intense color, revealing a wealth of shared remembrance, pride, and something deep, strong, poignant. The memory made Voran think of Sabíana.
Dubían put a hand as big as a cauldron on Voran’s shoulder in what he intended as a gentle caress. It nearly bowled Voran over.
“You must miss them very much,” whispered Dubían. There were tears in the big man’s eyes.
“Yes.” The tightness in his chest lessened for a moment, but as it did, the old yearning for Lyna flared up. He missed Lyna even more than he missed his parents, even more than he missed Sabíana. I’m so confused, he thought. Bonding with her was supposed to make the wistful itch disappear. She was supposed to order my inner world. Instead, I’m more lost than I ever was.
The morning was no wiser than the evening. At first light, Voran followed the trail of the pilgrims into the woods. As soon as he stepped into the trees, the trail vanished. But there was something else. Something crackling behind his ears, like a lightning bolt beyond his peripheral vision. Something wrong with the wood. It was not quite there.
Mirnían noticed it as soon as he joined Voran, a few minutes later.
“Did you feel that?” he asked. “What is wrong here?”
Dubían was more enlightening in his reaction. “There was a doorway here,” he said, with quiet certainty, “into the Lows of Aer.”
Voran nodded, while Mirnían shook his head and rolled his eyes.
“What do you mean was?” asked Mirnían. “Can these doorways move?”
Dubían smiled, clearly pleased at knowing something Mirnían did not.
“I thought everyone knew. Once entered, a doorway into the Lows shuts forever. Then you are forced to wander in that perilous realm, filled with all manner of strange beasts and people, until either you find another doorway, or you are forcibly taken out of it.”
“Do you not hear how ridiculous you sound?” Mirnían turned back to the camp.
“Wait,” said Voran. Something stirred inside him. They needed to go forward.
The wood rose ahead of them for a short stretch up a hilltop. At the top of it, the trees ended like a bald patch. The downslope on the other side was a sheer wall of ragged slate. Voran climbed down, finding plenty of footholds to bear him. A few feet away from the ground, he jumped onto ground covered in dead leaves, but his foot slipped, and he realized that what he thought was flat ground was another slope, though not as steep. He fell in a cloud of brown and landed hard, his breath knocked out of him. When the stars stopped dancing in pairs with the dead leaves, he realized that he lay in front of a large cave. Something beckoned to him from inside.
“I’ve found something,” he called to his companions, who were still standing on the hill above him.
It was a natural cavern in the rocky hill, probably a shelter for wolves. Shards of yellow and brown bones seemed to confirm this. To Dubían’s great delight, there was dry wood strewn about aplenty. He set about to build a fire, and soon a weak flame sputtered to life.
For the first time in what seemed ages, their stiff hands prickled with warmth.
“Well, this is much better,” said Mirnían, flexing his finger over the flames. “The stories have got it all wrong. There is nothing glorious about questing. The only glory I want is a bath-house, a roaring hearth, and a piglet dripping on a spit.”
“You’re right,” said Voran, warming on the inside. “What would our exploits be called? The aimless wandering of three soaked froglings?”
Dubían threw his head back, opened his cavernous mouth—several teeth were broken or missing—and exploded in a torrent of laughter. It was so unexpected, and yet so natural, that both Voran and Mirnían laughed together with him until the tears flowed.
But they were far away from home in a distant part of Vasyllia, and they were at an impasse. It quickly sapped their mirth. Soon they were silent and tense again. Voran felt the inner stirring again, more intently this time, as if someone were looking at him. He turned around, but there was nothing there. Something was different, though. Was that rock on that ledge before? Voran couldn’t remember.
“I wonder how the Pilgrim is doing,” said Voran. “He was a big man, but that was quite a mob that attacked him.”
“Well, serves him right. What sort of a fool lectures a mob after a failed summoning? What was he thinking?” Mirnían chuckled.
“How can you be so callous? He is a Pilgrim. And he was our guest. Nothing can excuse that kind of violence. And in the Temple!”
“Oh, Voran. Always such a purist.”
“And what about you, prince? Always so presentable in public, so careful about your people’s needs. But as soon as anyone turns around, you laugh and scoff and throw them all to the ravens. Should you not actually care for your people if you are to
make an even passable Dar?”
“How dare you!” Mirnían’s face contorted with rage. “You, a traitor’s son, a spineless leech who depends on my father for everything. You have the gall to pass judgment on me? I should slit your throat right here.”
“Careful, Prince Mirnían,” growled Dubían, his hands hovering over his knife-hilt. “You go too far.”
“And you!” An angry vein throbbed in Mirnían’s temple. “Are you so blind that you take Voran’s side in everything? You think Voran saw the Sirin? You actually believe in some forgotten Covenant? Voran made all of it up himself. Apparently, the attention of the Dar’s own daughter is not enough.”
Voran’s hands trembled. He grabbed his knees until his knuckles turned white.
“Men like you pollute the earth, Voran. You sit on rocks and ponder questions with no answers, while Vasyllia crumbles around you. What have you ever accomplished? Everything you touch is blighted, and now even Sabíana withers under your caresses.”
Voran struck Mirnían with the back of his hand, then pounced on him and pinned him to the ground. He felt the point of Mirnían’s dagger tickling the skin under his right ear. Mirnían’s smile was feral. The feel of the metal thrilled and enraged Voran, and he reached for his sword.
Something rustled behind them. A shrieking, frenzied fear crushed Voran to the mud next to Mirnían, face-first. Every muscle froze, but tore at itself in a wild desire to flee. His heart pulsed hysteria with the blood through his body. His mind demanded that he fly from the unknown horror behind them, but his body was locked in place. He could not even speak. Damp with sweat, Voran willed with all the strength he could muster to turn his head out of the muck.
The Song of the Sirin (Raven Son Book 1) Page 11