The Summer Palace

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Here, he was as close to being a priest as anyone had ever been. There had never been Uplander priests or wizards—and the ler weren’t telling him why. Could it really have just been the ara?

  They had also mentioned the hot summer sun, but Sword had never before heard of the sun suppressing spirits—well, except the spirits of darkness and cold. Were all the ler up here ler of darkness and cold?

  That made no sense. Everything had a spirit. In humans they were called souls, but they were all spirits, all ler.

  Well, perhaps things were different up here, in the thinner air, on the endless open plain so unlike the wooded hills where Sword had grown up.

  “I can see you’re there,” he said to the lights. “I wish you would answer my questions.”

  Ask the right ones, then.

  Sword grimaced. How was he supposed to know which were the right questions, if the ler didn’t tell him?

  “Is it morning?”

  No answer came.

  He sighed. He got to his feet, wrapping himself in the blankets, and headed for the stairs.

  Then he stopped. What did it matter whether it was day or night? He could keep any schedule he chose while he was down here beneath the ground. He wasn’t sleepy, so why should he bother going back to sleep even if the dawn was still hours away?

  “Where would be the best place to dig a tunnel?” he asked the air.

  That is a good question.

  The lights moved, then gathered together to form an arrowhead, pointing him toward one of the stairways leading down to a cellar storeroom.

  “In there?” he said, following.

  In there.

  He took a moment to pull on his breeches and boots, and don his velvet cloak, before following the glowing indicator, and took a lit candle, in case the ler did not give enough light. At the foot of the steps he pushed open the storeroom door and peered in.

  The ler were now clustered on the rear wall of the storeroom, circling an area on the lower left corner. Sword approached cautiously, set his candle on a nearby shelf, then knelt and prodded at the stonework.

  Sure enough, he found two large blocks were loose. Guided by the shimmering ler-light, he used a knife to pry them out, revealing a small hollow in the stone beyond—and at the back of that hollow were cracks.

  Dig here. We will guide you.

  He sat down and began thoughtfully exploring the hollow with his fingertips, trying to judge how many more blocks he would need to remove from the wall, and what tools would be best for the job.

  [ 14 ]

  Day by day the weather grew steadily colder, quickly becoming colder than anything Sword had ever experienced before, and every few days more snow fell. He gave in and started his first fire in the kitchen hearth on his fourth day in the palace, burning scraps and the fragments of a bureau drawer.

  He spent little time above ground; instead he focused his attention on digging his tunnel, talking to ler both while waking and asleep, and keeping a careful eye on his limited supplies of food, water, and fuel. He made expeditions out to the terrace or garden to gather snow to melt roughly every other day, and collected flammable furnishings from the upstairs rooms to keep his fire burning, but otherwise he stayed down in the kitchens and cellars. Much of the time ler gave enough light that he was able to conserve his supply of candles.

  Gathering water grew steadily easier as more snow accumulated outside; after a month or so he was able to just scoop each pan or bucket full and hurry back down to his warm little haven. Snow also drifted into the rooftop cistern—Sword was never sure whether it was open on top, or whether there was a system of gutters feeding into it, but every so often he would try the taps and find the supply renewed. Sometimes after a big storm he could get by with the trickle from those, and go several days without going outside to collect snow.

  Most of his waking hours were devoted to the tunnel, which gradually extended out from the cellar storeroom. Since he had found no actual picks or shovels, he worked on it using whatever tools came to hand—a fireplace poker, a butcher knife, an iron spoon. Most of all, though, he worked on it by coaxing the ler of stone and earth to help him.

  This turned out to be easier than he had expected, and he gradually wormed the reasons for that out of the spirits that were aiding him.

  The Barokanese workmen who had dug out the palace cellars in the first place had not asked the ler for help; instead they had simply hacked away at the earth without any acknowledgment at all that it was a living thing worthy of respect. They had worked only in warm weather, when ara were everywhere and ler could do little to defend themselves, and furthermore they had all worn heavy protective clothing layered with ara feathers. From the descriptions, Sword got the impression that the whole operation had been similar to the road crews that had cut paths straight through the wilderness between the towns of Barokan.

  This had been disruptive and even painful for the ler, and they did not want a repetition.

  Sword had been polite and respectful so far, which they found a very welcome change, but they also knew that he could probably wrap himself in feathers and start hacking at his tunnel anyway if they did not cooperate. Better, from their point of view, to help him than to fight him, so the stone and earth sometimes seemed to crumble at his slightest touch.

  That they might have killed him by bringing the unfinished tunnel down on his head did not seem to occur to them, and Sword was not about to bring this oversight to their attention.

  He did talk to them about what they wanted, what the palace workmen had done to them, what form their revenge might take if they ever had an opportunity, and as they conversed the stone seemed to almost melt away before him, as the ler guided his every blow and caused every crack and fracture to spread wildly.

  Unless everything they said was exaggeration and lies, they obviously could collapse the tunnel at any time, and eventually Sword could not resist asking, “Could you break the palace foundations if you wanted to?”

  Of course. We could shake the earth itself. We could shatter stone and tumble the walls. We could break the cliff and send this place falling to the lands below.

  “Why haven’t you?”

  There was no immediate reply; instead a ler guided his hand to strike at a rock just so, and another section of tunnel wall tumbled in at his feet.

  After a moment, though, words came.

  What would they do in response, if we did?

  “I don’t know,” Sword admitted, as he used both hands to shovel debris into a bucket, to be hauled back out and dumped.

  Neither do we, and we fear what might happen.

  Sword nodded. “I understand.”

  He discussed other matters with the various ler as well, whether in the tunnel, or in the kitchens, or out in the open gathering snow. He was never able to simply sit down, ask all his questions, and get direct answers, but over the course of the winter he gradually pieced together most of it.

  The Uplander ler really were different from Barokanese ler in several ways—almost none of them were tied to specific places, and the ler of living things here, other than humans and ara, were weak and vague, while the land itself was powerful. And where most land in Barokan wanted to put forth life, the Uplands considered life to be an aberration, something barely to be tolerated.

  That the dominant life on the high plains was the bird called ara probably had something to do with that; Sword learned that not only did ara feathers block magic, but the ara themselves, and everything about them, served to weaken and quiet ler by their mere presence. When entire flocks were running across the land, the land was beaten insensible.

  And as for humans, they lived with the ara, they ate ara meat and wore ara feathers and made tools from ara bone and clothes from ara hide.

  Long ago, when ler had tried to speak to the Uplanders, they had asked that the humans put aside their feathers and hides and bones, and the Uplanders had taken this as a sign of weakness. They had built their entire cult
ure around exploiting ara, and were not inclined to give up these proofs of their mastery over their environment. Instead, they had rejected magic, or any other dealings with ler, as weak and unmanly. The Barokanese had their priests and wizards, and to the Uplanders this became one more demonstration of their own superiority, that they had not stooped to dealing with these feeble spirits as the Lowlanders had.

  But it was only when the ara were present that the Upland ler were weak. When the birds migrated south, the ler flourished anew, and did what they could to assert their power. Neither humans nor ara liked cold or wind or snow, so each year, as soon as the ara were gone, the ler plunged the Uplands into the deepest, coldest, bitterest winter they could create. They chased the humans from the plains, drove them to take shelter down in Winterhome, and kept them away until the returning ara disrupted the spell.

  “Why did you talk to me, then?” Sword asked.

  You put aside the feathers. You were here after we brought the snow down. You were alone in this alien structure. We were curious.

  Not all of us thought it wise, said another “voice.”

  Sword decided not to pursue that line of questioning, since his relationship with these ler was still delicate. Instead he concentrated his attention on digging his tunnel, attending to essentials—digging, keeping himself warm and fed, and of course his daily hour of sword practice. Sometimes when he could not face another hour of toiling in the tunnel, and more urgent needs were met for the moment, he would also work on expanding his wardrobe, making himself new clothes from draperies and linens, or from the few garments left in bedroom drawers, using a broken bit of a paring knife as his needle.

  The days wore on. He was always cold, even when huddled by the hearth, as he did not dare build a really big fire—the smoke might draw unwanted attention, and he hated seeing the fine palace furnishings burned, so the kitchens were never truly warm, and the rest of the palace was always bitterly cold. Begging the ler to relive the chill only annoyed them; that was one topic on which they were not willing to listen to him at all. They wanted the world as cold as they could make it.

  The tunnel was relatively warm, though, even without a fire; the stone and earth kept out the wind and cold, and his candles and his own body heat warmed the tunnel air somewhat. Still, even there, he was never actually warm.

  He was always hungry, because he needed to ration out his cheese and jerky carefully if he intended to survive until the ara returned.

  He was often thirsty; it was really astonishing how little water a pot of melted snow yielded, and the trickle from the pipes was inadequate, at best.

  The tunnel grew, slowly but steadily, winding out from the storeroom wall, following the path the ler of stone and earth assured him was the easiest digging while being safe against collapse. It varied in size and direction; sometimes he could barely squeeze along it, wiggling on his belly, and had to back out on his belly as well, pulling each new load of broken stone, as there wasn’t room to turn around. In other parts he could stand upright, as long as he kept his head bent. Usually he brought a candle in with him; in places where he was unsure there was enough good air for both himself and a flame, or where there was nowhere to place a candle that was not at risk of being knocked over by his tools or elbows as he worked, he would ask the ler to light the way for him, and if they agreed, he would work in their faint and eerie glow.

  When a candle would not fit and the ler did not cooperate, he worked in the dark, by feel, letting the spirits in the stone guide his hands.

  As he dug he wondered where the tunnel would come out, and whether his creation would really be any use to him. If the palace staff looked in the cellars and found the inside end, blocking it would be easy—the narrow parts were so very narrow! Despite what the ler told him, he also suspected that some stretches would be easy to cave in.

  And just getting inside the palace would hardly ensure access to the Wizard Lord. He would be in the cellars, and would need to somehow get through the kitchens and up into the staff corridors without being stopped.

  But it was something to do, and it might be useful. It kept him busy, and it kept him fit, as sitting huddled in the kitchen, picking at draperies with his improvised needle, would not.

  More sword practice would probably have served these purposes just as well, but he preferred working on the tunnel to increasing his daily workout; it gave his life a little variety.

  One day, after he had done his hour of swordwork and added another few inches to the tunnel, he looked at his supper.

  The wheel of cheese was slightly more than half gone. The jerky had turned black and tough as it aged, and needed to be gnawed for several minutes now, and he was fairly certain he had consumed more than half of that, as well. The diet had long since become so monotonous that eating lost almost all its pleasure, and Sword suspected that the lack of variety was damaging his health, as well.

  “How long have I been here?” he asked. “How long until the birds return?”

  Forty days have gone; at least fifty, perhaps sixty remain. Perhaps more.

  That was what Sword had feared. He stared down at his food.

  “I don’t have enough,” he said.

  Nothing answered.

  He looked up at the arched ceiling. “I need more food,” he said.

  No words came, but he sensed a vast indifference.

  He looked down again.

  There was no other food in the Summer Palace; he knew that. This was everything. He might perhaps get a little nourishment by chewing leather or candle wax, but probably not enough to matter.

  The plains outside were covered by about two feet of snow. The ara were gone. Whatever other animals lived here—he knew there were some—were holed up for the winter, probably hibernating, and he had no idea how to find their lairs. There were undoubtedly any number of edible plants under the snow, but he didn’t know how to find them or recognize them; all he had seen in the immediate area were trees and grass, and he couldn’t eat those.

  If he stayed here, there was a very real possibility he would starve.

  Anywhere else in the Uplands would be even worse; not only would he have no more food, but he would freeze to death well before he could die of hunger.

  Down in Barokan there was plenty of food, he was sure. He remembered cakes and cheese and dried fruits of every sort, thick rich barley bread, foamy beer, bacon and beef; his mouth watered at the thought of all that food, all that glorious food he had taken for granted every year of his life. Even pickled cabbage, a winter favorite of his mother’s that he had never liked, seemed wonderful in retrospect—how could he have ever turned up his nose at anything so delicious?

  It was all waiting for him, down at the bottom of the cliffs.

  And so were the Wizard Lord’s guards.

  He frowned, and walked away from the table, his hands clutching at each other behind his back.

  If he starved to death up here, and the Wizard Lord’s staff found his frozen remains, that would be an ignominious and pointless end to it all. If he were to fight his way through the guards, he might at least have a chance of killing Artil im Salthir. And back in Barokan he would have his magic again, the magic that had let him defeat two dozen soldiers at once. He might get through the guards, if he caught them by surprise, and if the Wizard Lord was home. Artil could fly, could order wind spirits to carry him aloft, so Sword would need to catch him somewhere he couldn’t just fly away, but . . .

  But what?

  This was madness, he knew. He had thought this all out in the autumn, when he was well fed and thinking clearly, and he knew that descending the cliffs was suicidal—but there was all that food down there, and nothing up here but dry cheese and stringy, tasteless jerky.

  He pulled on a woolen vest he had made from a blanket, and donned his velvet cloak over that. Then he stopped, looking at the down-filled coat he hadn’t worn in months.

  “I need more food,” he said again, and again, there was no res
ponse. He could feel ler nearby, listening; he could feel the life in the thin air and the stone walls, but nothing answered him.

  If he tried to leave, tried to climb down to Barokan, what would the Upland ler do? Perhaps he should wear his ara-hide clothes, and his ara-down coat. Especially since, once he got down to Barokan, he would need to worry about the Wizard Lord’s magic.

  Of course, with the Seer dead, the Talisman of Warding no longer functioned, and the Wizard Lord would not instantly know where all the Chosen were, even without any ara-feather protection—but Artil had other magic. Not only might he have devised ways to find the Chosen using the other Great Talismans, but he had been a wizard long before he was Wizard Lord.

  Sword peeled off the velvet cloak and donned his ara-down coat.

  He could feel himself separate from his surroundings. The air around him was still alive, but it was as if he were watching it through glass, instead of seeing it directly, or as if he were listening through thick cloth instead of bare ears. He hesitated.

  Yes, he might need this protection. He pulled the coat around him and buttoned it. Then he picked up the single candle that lit the kitchen, and started up the western stair.

  When he emerged from the windowless passage into the little dining salon by the terrace he blew out the candle and tucked it into an inside pocket; it was dusk, the sky darkening swiftly, but there was still more than enough light for his dark-adjusted eyes. He pulled his cloak tightly around himself, and stepped out onto the terrace.

  The overhanging eaves had provided some shelter here, but the snow had drifted everywhere; his boots sank into a foot or so of fine powder as soon as he was past the door. A fierce dry wind pressed him back, snatching the moisture from his face; he felt as if his skin were being drawn taut over his cheekbones, and the tears were sucked from his eyes.

  For an instant he wondered whether the wind was directed at him, trying to keep him inside the Summer Palace, but then he decided he didn’t care. He blinked, and pushed on, out toward the railing, where the palace overlooked Barokan.