“What—”
“That’s why I caused trouble this morning. The spells seem very simple, elementary. Extinguishing a flame, like this—” He concentrated, letting the flame of a single candle from the branch in front of them burn in the dark of his mind, then fade as he drew the darkness over it. The candle went out. Burne blinked. “—is not difficult. That’s all I was trying to do this morning.”
“Then why did you break all those mirrors?”
“Because the spell in the book dealt with mirrors, not candles. But it said candles. And fire. So I was confused.”
“So am I.”
“I suspect all the spells are like that. They are in some unknown mage’s private language. I must understand the language to work the spells.”
Burne grunted. “I suppose you can’t just forget about the book.”
“No.”
“All this sounds far more dangerous than it’s worth.”
“You sent me to Chaumenard,” Talis reminded him. “How much is sorcery worth to Pelucir?”
“Not your life.”
Talis shook his head quickly. “There’s no question of that.” He touched his lenses, evading Burne’s skeptical gaze. “Mages don’t kill each other with books. I’ll be careful.”
“No.”
“Burne, I won’t stop trying to use this book. It’s too tantalizing. I’ll go back to Chaumenard if you want—”
“No.” Burne shifted, and changed tactics. “Anyway, the keep must be a rotten husk by now. You’ll break your neck in there. It’s probably full of bats and rats along with ghosts and bitter memories.”
“That’s another curious thing. If the keep did generate its own strange magic during the siege, I want to explore it. It may be a source of power that could be used to defend the castle. Sorcery not connected to any mage, but to the heart and life-blood of Pelucir.”
Burne’s brows knit. “I don’t understand.”
“I will. If you let me try.”
The King was silent, frowning at the salmon bone. He made a decision; disapproving of it, he became abrupt. “You will at all times be guarded.” Talis, surprised, did not argue. “If you come to harm, between that benighted book and the bewitched keep, I’ll never forgive you. But at least, if you’re guarded, I’ll know what became of you.”
“Nothing will happen to me,” Talis promised.
He took two guards and the spellbook to the keep after breakfast. The guards, too young to be veterans of Hunter’s Field, followed him grimly, tense and pale, as if they expected to find both the sorcerer and the sorcery from the legendary battlefield at the top of the keep. The thick door, closed but unlatched, opened easily; children, Talis guessed, looking for ghosts. Not being so adept at making fire as putting it out, he carried a torch. Light pushed at the filmy darkness within, but did not fully penetrate it. The narrow windows, even those facing the sun, were oddly opaque.
Something pale glided silently along the edge of the light. “Ghosts,” he heard a guard whisper. The chipped flagstones were stained with blood. “The warriors came here,” the other said softly, staring at the floor, “to get away from It.” Their swords were drawn. Talis looked up, saw in a gentle crosshatch of faint, dusty light, high above, more white ghosts stirring along the rafters and rotted planks of the ruined middle floor. They questioned him distantly: Who? “Owls,” he said to the guards, who looked at him doubtfully; they did not believe in owls. Ghosts, Talis thought, would have smelled less rank. He pushed into the darkness, found steps finally, worn stone shadowed with the footprints of wounded warriors fleeing Hunter’s Field. The steps seemed to build themselves, one after another, under his descending foot; they angled endlessly upward along the walls. Even passing through the dim light in the middle floor, Talis could not see what lay beyond it. The steps darkened again; he heard a muttered word behind him. Finally he saw an end: a rectangle of black floating within four streaks of pale light. The door leaped suddenly quite close, in another step or two; his torch fire nearly singed it. He dropped the torch into a sconce on the wall and found a face in the door opening its eyes to gaze at him.
It was little more than knotholes, cracks and bubbles of pitch that the door had assembled into a rather dour sentinel, but one guard nearly lost his balance and tumbled back down the steps. “Sorcery,” he spat like a curse, and the face looked mildly affronted.
“It’s only wood,” Talis said absently. Behind the door, he sensed, lay the dark heart of the keep’s sorcery: its memories and its power. He touched the latch. “Stay here.”
“My lord Talis, the King—”
“It’s worse inside,” Talis said, touching his lenses. They swam with sudden fire. He smiled. The guards sat down heavily on the stairs. “If you need me,” he added, “I’ll hear you.”
He closed the door quickly behind him, seeing moving shadows on the walls. The room looked larger than it should have been. The stone walls were sealed against the weather by straw and clay and whitewash dimmed by smoke. Light from the torn roof and the single large window drew the shadows clear: He watched, transfixed, as an armed man drew back an arrow, then dropped both arrow and crossbow as a sword falling out of nowhere cut off his hand. The air seemed suddenly heavy to breathe, as if it had filled with smoke and too much heat from the thick, cold hearth. Another shadow roamed restlessly across the walls, stopped to look out the window, and ducked back; Talis saw a bolt of fire hurtling toward the window out of the placid empty field. The window moved.
He blinked. So had the window, dodging the ghostly fire. It looked over the herb gardens now, in the back of the kitchen. He turned, trembling slightly; the silence within the room seemed strained, as if at any moment the scream of the man who had lost his hand would break through the boundaries of memory and become real. He felt the sweat on his face; he took off his lenses, rubbed his eyes with his wrist. He looked for some place to set the book. Table, he thought, uprighting an overturned stool. A bucket to catch rain. A mirror, unbroken. Candles. He stopped thinking then, overwhelmed by the sudden, terrible despair and fury that seemed to flow into him from the stones under his feet, the walls around him. Look, the keep said to him. See. This happened.
“Yes,” he whispered, “yes,” and sorrow shook him, an ache such as he had never felt in his life for the death of a king he never knew. He stumbled to the door, leaned against it until his breathing calmed and nothing in his expression would alarm the guards.
He had various implements, pieces of furniture, and whatever might be useful brought up as far as the door. He would permit no one to enter the room. The window shifted randomly during the day, as if it fled a bombardment of stones, or glimpsed a stealthy, moonlit movement. Perhaps sensing his own calm among its memories, the keep seemed to grow more peaceful. Fewer shadows wandered across the walls; the tension of silent cries within the air lessened.
He tried no more spells that day, fearing Burne’s wrath if something else went awry. But he stayed so long reading the book, trying to find a link between mirror and fire, what words might mean what, that twilight stole into the wood the window framed, and the guards, hearing the evening fanfares, thumped nervously on the door.
“My lord Talis, the King commands your presence in the hall.”
Burne got his presence, but Talis was so absent-minded, scarcely seeing the faces around him, that the King said explosively, “If it’s that disturbing, that bat-ridden tomb, I’ll have it sealed shut. You look like a ghost.”
Talis drew his thoughts out of the keep hastily, and applied himself to being as sociable as possible, causing, before the evening’s end, at least three different rumors of impending marriage. Burne seemed pleased. But his mistress, a kindly and discerning woman, saw Talis’ effort and said gently to him as they retired to their chambers, “Don’t let the King worry you. Love takes time; it will recognize itself. Burne knows that. He is trying to put the past behind him, but he can’t do that using your future. Be patient.”
Talis returned to the keep before sunrise. The face in the door opened an eye as he opened the door, then went back to sleep. Most of the castle still slept. Only the kennels and stables were rousing, and the kitchen, for guests would be gathering that morning to hunt with the King. Talis, far more interested in the mysteries in the spellbook than in running down animals and slaying them, hoped his brother would not notice his absence. The window gave him a view of the field and the distant wood, a mist of green and shadow, where night still lingered beneath the golden oak and the birch whiter than bone. The sun and the hunters would waken it, sending great flocks of startled birds wheeling out of the trees. Now the wood dreamed. So did the castle. Talis opened the book.
The sun rose without catching his eye, for the window had shifted to overlook the formal gardens and fountains. Talis had risen also, tantalized by a spell. It seemed effortless: To Open a Latched Door Across a Room. Talis eyed the door and then the book. The spell, he knew would have nothing to do with a door. More likely, it had to do with boots or wind. But, he reasoned, if he found what the spell in reality did, he could match the reality with the words, and prove that in this particular mage’s teasing code door meant wind.
Implements, the book said. One gold cup. A large bowl of water. A candle lit in a holder made of gold.
He had brought them all into the keep: They were familiar requirements. He poured water from a bucket into a porcelain washbasin, and lit the candle. Beeswax scented the air; he had a sudden, wistful memory of spring in the high meadows on the mountains. He cleared his mind, concentrated.
Hold the cup upside-down above the water, the book instructed, so that gold reflects water and water reflects gold, reflection reflecting reflection. Stand the candle in water between them, so that fire, gold, water, lie within the hollow of the cup.
Repeat these words thrice. Backward.
Talis, holding the cup steady above fire, gold, water, hit a blank: The spell ended there. What words? he wondered, and was illuminated.
“Drawkcab,” he said without much hope. “Ecirht. Sdrow. Eseht. Taeper.”
He felt a stirring in the air around him, as if the keep, alarmed at the strange sorcery, watched him. “Drawkcab,” he repeated, and thought he heard an echo, an unfamiliar voice, urgent, intense. “Ecirht. Sdrow. Eseht. Taeper. Drawkcab,” he began a third time. “Ecirht. Sdrow. Eseht.” He heard a scream then, faint and distant, a memory tearing into time, and his face tightened. “Taeper,” he finished grimly, and light exploded out of the water.
The cup spun out of his hands, flew across the room and flattened itself against the far wall. The light, humming dangerously, left a white streak across Talis’ vision, hit the ceiling at an angle, then arced out the window, which had moved again, attracted perhaps by the trumpets calling the hunt to order below.
Talis heard a tortured squeal from the trumpet, and the thunk of metal against stone. The noise of the dogs drowned human voices, but he could make out, in the second before he located his bones and could move, an isolated shout here and there among the frenzied howling. “Burne,” he breathed, horrified, and flung himself at the window, clinging to it before it could move again. He leaned precariously over the edge, catching his lenses and then his balance as he looked down.
Burne was staring at a bolt of white fire burrowing mole-like into the ground in front of his horse. The horse, a favorite hunter, trembled in every muscle, but did not throw its rider. The trumpeter, sitting dazed among the hounds, had not fared so well. Servants bearing trays of spiced wine and hot brandy had flung them into the air, splashing themselves; goblets rolled among the hounds. The hounds whimpered and bayed at the light, horses fought to bolt; everyone else seemed frozen—hunters, musicians, kennel-masters, servants, dog-boys and the King—all staring at the light as, with a kind of mindless frenzy, it buried the last of itself underground.
The faces lifted then, to stare at Talis.
He saw only one: his brother’s. It was a furious, glowing thing, a little, Talis thought, like the light he had created. He could not hear Burne well, above the racket the hounds made, but he caught the drift: What had he learned in two years at Chaumenard, and why had Burne bothered to send him there, and why had Burne even bothered to survive the winter siege, only to live to be killed by his own brother? Then he added something that caused Talis to hang even more perilously out the window, trying to hear. The hounds, having frightened away the light, began to quiet; the King’s voice came clear.
“—out of that keep. It’s a nightmare of foul memories and I want you down among people instead of ghosts, before you get as crazed as it is—”
“It’s not the keep,” Talis shouted back. “Burne, it’s just the book—”
“Then throw it down! I want the book burned and the keep walled shut—”
“Burne, listen to me—”
“You nearly killed me!”
“It was an accident!”
“You accidently missed me?”
“No!”
“Then what were you trying to do?”
“Open a door!”
“With a lightning bolt?”
“Burne, please listen! Wait—I’m coming with you—”
The King refused to discuss the matter. Talis, mounted, and armed to kill anything that moved, caught up with Burne halfway to the wood. Everyone else seemed eager to ask him about the incident, to tease, to tell him what they were doing and saying the moment lightning leaped out of the keep and nearly hit the King. But lightning wasn’t the word for it—it was more like something living, a strange being made of light with an urge to bury itself alive. And the odd noise it made. The hum. Like some vast, vibrating string. Thrum.
“Burne,” Talis pleaded, but the King only showed him a tight-jawed profile.
“No.”
The hounds, loosed, streaked toward the wood. The King urged his hunter into a canter. Talis, hesitating, looked back at the keep. Riders fanned around him; trumpets and horns called a warning to deer and hare, boar and bird. The single eye at the top of the keep looked back at Talis, opaque with memory or light. He had a sudden, crazed image of himself barring the doors from within and letting Burne lay siege against him. But Burne would never forgive him, and there was nothing he could do in the keep that couldn’t be done elsewhere. Yet it drew at him, massive and ancient, dark with the ash of siege fires, as full of memories as the heads of warriors who had survived the night. It was a mystery, like the spellbook, which, Talis reminded himself, he should go back and rescue. He glanced at the riders disappearing into the trees and decided to try once more to persuade Burne.
He galloped after the hunt.
He heard the trumpets cry of a deer in two different places, it seemed. He followed one, saw the flicker of gold and scarlet and royal purple among the leaves; the riders were farther away than seemed possible. The trumpets sounded again, and then the gentle, silvery horns called of hare. Hounds belled everywhere, from every direction, though he saw none of them. He rode quickly, recklessly, to catch up, listening for the trumpets, for Burne would pursue the hart before the hare. A lacework of birch leaves brushed across his eyes; he ducked down, riding low beneath the outstretched boughs of oak, and far too quickly. But as fast as he rode, the hunt seemed to recede even more quickly away from him.
He heard the horn again, distant, teasing, and then suddenly close, and from another direction. The hunters had apparently scattered throughout the wood. He turned first toward one fanfare, then the other; he could see nothing but trees, the moving shadows of windblown leaves. He galloped through the shadows, bewildered and careless, and then across a shallow stream, its water slow and heavy with moss-capped stones. He felt his horse stumble, catch itself, and he straightened a little, pulling on the reins. The long limb of an oak stretched across the far bank caught him in the chest, lifted him out of the saddle, and threw him into the stream.
The world went black. Then he dragged his eyes open, unable to breathe, not knowing if he
lay in air or water. He found air finally, pulled it in, trying to blink away the strange mist of green that had enveloped him. Leaves, he realized slowly: He had lost his lenses, and the world had blurred. Little explosions of pain flared in his knee, his ribs, one shoulder, the back of his head. He lay on his back in water and frog-spawn and long, slimy ribbons of moss. He groaned, and groped for his lenses, raising himself piecemeal among the stones, finding everything battered, but nothing unworkable. He fished his lenses out of the moss and put them on. One lens was shattered.
He cleaned the other, and found his boar spear, a few broken arrows and the sheath at his belt full of nothing but water. He groped again, found his hunting knife. He pushed himself to his feet with the spear and hobbled out of the water. His horse had vanished, which surprised him, since it was of stolid temperament and disinclined to startle. He stood on the bank, balanced against the spear to take the weight off his knee, and listened for the hunt.
The wood was soundless.
He heard no trumpets, no barking hounds, no hooves, no voices, not even disturbed birds complaining above the trees. Not even the leaves moved; they might have been carved of stone in the still air, though on the ground, his bemused eyes told him, their shadows moved.
A horn sounded, a single, sweet note.
Three deer as white as snow with eyes of gold and shadows of gold ran through the trees in front of him.
He heard himself make a sound; the hair pricked on the back of his neck. He tried to move; he could only grip the spear more tightly to keep from falling. The deer flickered noiselessly away into the trees, shadows flowing like sunlight across everything they touched.
Three hounds as white as bone, with eyes and shadows as red as blood, ran soundlessly through the trees in pursuit of the deer.
He tried to turn himself invisible; the only thing he managed, in that upside-down world, was to erase his shadow. His hands slick on the boar-spear, he turned desperately to stumble away, hide himself from what would come. But he could not move quickly in or out of the vision, and what came next came fast.
The Book of Atrix Wolfe Page 5