PROLOGUE (35 page)

She needs help so desperately and she does not know where to turn.

Through the endless twisting halls she seeks the gateway that will lead her to the old Aoi sorcerer.

There!
Seen in shadow, in a dark dry corridor walled in stone, she sees two people walking, searching as she is.

There!
A boy sleeps with six companions, heads pillowed on stone, feet and knezs covered by heaps of treasure, armbands of beaten gold, rings, gems, vessels poured out of the silver of moonlight, and smooth scarlet beads that are dragon's blood turned to stone with exposure to the air.

There!
Creatures move and crawl among the tunnels, misshapen knuckles tamping down soil clawed from the dank walls. Like the Eika, they seem fashioned more of metal and soil than of the higher elements, trapped forever by the weight of earth that courses through their blood and hardens their bones.

When she at last finds the burning stone that marks the gateway to the old sorcerer, he no longer sits beside it rolling strands of flax into rope against his thigh. He has left that place, and she does not know where to find him. But she has to keep looking. Because he is one of the Lost Ones, he is not human and surely therefore not bound to human concerns, to human intrigues and jealousies, to human lusts for power and possession. He might know the answer. He might know the pattern of the paths she must unravel.

Perhaps Da left her a message here, secreted in the labyrinth in such a way that she alone can find it. He must have prepared for this, knowing he might be gone and that she yet lived. Behind the locked door in her tower in her City of Memory there burns a fiery light; is it Da's magic, hidden away? Is it the living manifestation of the spell he cast over her? If she had the key, could she open the door? Did Da hide the key here, somewhere in these halls whose pathways she cannot trace unless she explores them?

And yet, what will happen if she does unlock the door?

A whisper of breath touches the back of her neck. She shudders. Her back stings as if, simply by closing in on her, the creature blisters her with its poisonous intent. Is this what Da felt? Some
thing
always getting closer, always coming up behind him? Did he know it would kill him in the end?

She begins to run through the halls seen in the vision made by fire, although on the realm of earth her body sits silent and still in front of a roaring camp fire. But the creature is stronger than she is, here, in this place. It knows these paths, and it is looking for her.

"Liath."

It knows her name.
She flees, but there is nowhere to go. Da used his magic to conceal her from their eyes on the realm of earth, but
here
she is vulnerable to their sight
—

and
there,
where she is hidden from them, she is vulnerable to Hugh.

Fear leaps and burns in her heart like wildfire. She is lost. Gasping, weeping, she forces herself to stop. She turns to face what stalks her, but she sees no
thing,
no shadow, no creature or human form; yet she knows it has marked her and that it closes in. It wants her. The air itself carries the sound of her breathing, the simple heat of her being, to the ears of that which listens for her.

This
—
one creature or many working in concert
—
killed Da.

She feels their breath like air stirred by an arrow, an arrow whose sharp point seeks her heart. In this place, she has no weapons.

Nay, she has
one
weapon here: the gift given to her by the old Aoi sorcerer.

"Ai, Lady," she breathes, a prayer for strength. Closing her hand around the gold feather, she escapes the maze.

SIDE paths fainter than the breath of a dying baby teased Antonia's vision, but she could catch only glimpses of what lay down their paths: halls piled with treasure; a sleeping boy; a young woman running in fear; the fading image of an old, old monk with one hand laid tenderly upon a book while the other lifts to ward off the clutching fingers of daimones whose insubstantial hands reach right inside his body for whatever secret he has hidden within his heart. A hound barked. An owl hooted and struck in the depths of night. A man
—no man, but an elven prince armed in the style of the ancient Dariyans—fought to save a burning fort from the assault of the savage Bwrmen and their human allies. A dragon slept in enchanted sleep beneath a ridge of stone. A young man sat in sunlight and surveyed the quiet sea. Did she recognize him? The vision was too brief for her to look more closely.

Were these glimpses of the past or the future or the present?

She could not know. She was entirely lost; she knew that she existed only because her son dragged at her cloak. At least his terror was so great that he was mercifully silent rather than gibbering prayers and psalms.

God would see them to safety, or God would see them dead.

If the first, then certainly she would discover the secrets of this place and bind to herself the knowledge of how to coerce daimones down from the upper air and lead unsuspecting souls into a prison as torturous as this. She fully expected the Abyss to open at her feet at any moment and give her a gratifying vision of the punishment of the damned.

If the second, then she was content to know that her soul
—and that of her son, of course—would ascend as did the souls of all the righteous to the Chamber of Light beyond the seven spheres.

Stairs opened before them. Wind brushed her face. The pale round moon wavered before her eyes, high above, and she realized with a start that she was looking up the stairs to the world above, to an actual night sky now shot through with stars. Behind her, Heribert moaned slightly as she had heard laboring women do when the child was, at long last, finally and safely birthed.

She shook him off brusquely and climbed the stairs. He came up so close behind that his boots clipped her heels but, this once, she did not berate him for his carelessness. She sensed that at long last they had come to the place where she would learn what she wanted to know.

The stairs brought them up out of the earth into the center of a small stone circle, seven stones placed equidistant from each other on a grassy sward. Beyond, like hulking beasts against the heavens, three mountains loomed. They had not returned to the first stone circle, that was obvious, but Antonia guessed they still walked among the Alfar Mountains.

Her second thought, unbidden and unwelcome, was that it was surely no longer late autumn. The air was clement, the night mellow and almost warm. But the moon remained full, much farther gone in the sky than it had been when they entered the first stone circle. They had walked beneath the earth, guided by the moon's distant light, for many hours
—and it was nearing dawn.

The stone circle stood on a low hill. Beyond, down the slope and half hidden by trees, stood several buildings. The sinking moon still gave enough light that she could make out the rest of the little valley: a copse of lush trees, a few neat strips of cultivated field, a vineyard, squat boxes for bees, a chicken shed, and the leaning wall of a stable set into the steep side of a mountain. A single lantern burned by the gate that led into the enclosure. A stream whispered, murmuring, in the distance. High cliff walls enclosed them, shutting out half the night sky in which stars dazzled, uncloaked by any sign of cloud.

A hand brushed her cheek and she started. "Heribert."

He stood three steps behind her, too far away to have touched her. He seemed to have been struck dumb.

"Biscop Antonia." The speaker stepped out from behind one of the stones and made the gesture that in the sign language of the convent signified
Welcome.
She gave no obeisance. "I am glad you chose to follow my messenger."

"Who are you?" demanded Antonia, annoyed by her lack of deference. "Are you the one who has led us this far?" She had many more questions, but she knew better than to ask them all at once.

"I am the one who has brought you here, for I have seen your promise."

Promise!
Antonia snorted, but held her tongue.

"You may call me
Caput Draconis."

"The head of the dragon? A strange name, or title, to give oneself."

"A strange road has brought us all here, and we must tread stranger and more dangerous paths yet if we are to succeed. You are not trained as a mathematicus?" The question was, in fact, a statement, waiting on Antonia's acknowledgment.

"I know that the constellation known as the Dragon is the sixth House in the great circle of the zodiac, itself called the world dragon that binds the heavens." Antonia did not like to be toyed with in this manner. She did not like to be reminded that others might know things she did not.

"So it is. And it wields its own power. But the stars do not in their movements gather as much power as do the seven erratica, which we know as the planets: Moon, Ef-ekes, Somorhas, Sun, Jedu, Mok, and Aturna. I speak of the ascending and descending nodes of the moon, where that vessel crosses the plane of the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the path on which the planets move, which we also call the world dragon that binds the heavens. South to north the moon ascends across the ecliptic, and that is the caput draconis, the head of the dragon. North to south she descends, and that is the cauda draconis, the tail. Every twenty-seven days, in the sphere above us, the moon moves from caput to cauda and back again. In every movement we observe in the heavens, there is power to be taken and used."

"And these are the secrets hoarded by the mathematici? By such as you?"

The woman lifted her hands, palms up and open, empty, to reveal that she needed no weapon cast of brute metal or grown out of earth in order to triumph over her adversaries.

"The teachings of the mathematici are forbidden by the church," Antonia added.

"And you were being sent to Darre to stand trial before the skopos on the charge of maleficent sorceries whose use is
forbidden
by the church. I know of you, Antonia. I know your skills. I need them."

"I tire of this portentousness," said Antonia bluntly. "Did you compel the daimone? Can you teach me such power?"

"Indeed I can, and more besides. Your great talent is for coercion. I need that talent, for I only possess it in small measure."

"You have drawn down and trapped a daimone! Is that, to you, possessing only a 'small measure' of talent?"

"For compulsion, yes. With the others I can draw down such creatures, but our ability to coerce them is sorely limited. The one you met we could only command to a single task
—to find you and guide you to the circle by whose path you then came here. But I cannot, as you evidently can, command spirits and beasts to kill—unless it is already their own desire to do so."

"Is that what you want? To kill someone?"

The other woman smiled slightly.

"At what do you wish to succeed, Caput Draconis?" Antonia said, curious now. She hated being curious. It put her at a disadvantage.

"I want only that we might all become closer to God," murmured the woman.

"A worthy goal," agreed Antonia. The moon set, and with its passing came the first glimmers of dawn. A bird sang. Stars had faded. Clouds massed now at the second of the three snow-covered peaks that guarded one side of the little valley. Thin streamers of mist rose from the ground and seemed to coalesce into shapes with human limbs and human hands and half-formed human faces. But that surely was only a trick of the light.

"But I must know if you have the strength and the will to aid us," continued the woman, looking past Antonia to what stood behind her. "Some offering. Some sacrifice . . ."

Antonia knew at once, and a small fire of anger bloomed inside her. Such presumption! "Not that," she said. "Not him." She refused to show weakness by turning to make sure Heribert was still in one piece.

Now there was enough light for Antonia to see the other woman's face: pale of complexion, it had a certain distant familiarity about it
—but, as with the sparrows, she could not grasp how she knew it. She could have been as old as Antonia or as young as Heribert; no obvious sign of age, or of youth, marked her. Her hair remained tucked away in a scarf of gold linen. She wore a fine silk tunic dyed a rich indigo and leather shoes trimmed with gold braid. At her throat she wore the golden torque that signified royal kinship in the realms of Wendar and Varre and Salia. Though the granddaughter and niece of queens, Antonia had no right to such a symbol of her royal kinship. Karrone had been a principality allied to Salia not three generations ago, in the time of Queen Berta the Cunning. Berta had been the first of its rulers to style herself "Queen." Neither did the petty princes of the many warring states of Aosta wear the torque. They, too, could not trace their royal blood back to the forebears of the legendary Emperor Taillefer.