Raven's Ladder (11 page)

“See what, exactly?”

“That’s just it. You need to see it for yourself, my boy. If you don’t, fear will get the better of you.”

He rehearsed his teacher’s instructions again.
Mawrnash. While the red moon is high, find Tammos Raak’s tower. Climb to the crown
. The instructions confounded him.
The great starcrown trees burned to ash. How can I climb a tree that has fallen?

He ascended a rise and arrived in a wide space between trees. There he examined yet another footprint, a seven-toed signature. He waited.

His companions ascended behind him, regarding him with worry. Their vawns slowed, panting, and snuffled at the ground. He flung out his arms, triumphant at his discovery. “Scharr ben Fray promised me that the path would be clearly marked. Birds that call my name—that’s what he intended. But this? The Keeper’s tracks? Even he would be surprised. This is what I’m meant to do.”

“You mean to lead us even farther from Barnashum?” Snyde snapped. “I appeal to your memory. You once rode away from House Abascar, and the ground collapsed beneath it. Five nights ago you ventured outside Barnashum’s refuge, and a quake shook the Blackstone Caves. Now here you are, several days’ ride from the people who call you king. And you propose to keep on riding? Basing your decisions on vague and muddy impressions?”

Cal-raven went very still. “Jes-hawk, relieve Snyde of his reins. He’ll be heading home to help the people who concern him so fiercely.”

“Wait!” Snyde sputtered. “I cannot go back alone!”

Jes-hawk, smiling, brought his vawn alongside Snyde’s. The old man clung to his reins in desperation as Jes-hawk reached across to tug at them. Their vawns grumbled. A well-placed boot toppled Snyde from his vawn, and when he rose, he was costumed in mud.

“You’ll have time on the walk back to think about the benefits of loyalty and the disadvantages of treachery.”

“Treachery?”

“Shall we do this now?” Cal-raven spurred his mount forward so that
his boot was close to Snyde’s face. “Tabor Jan and I knew someone in Barnashum was plotting against me. On the night of the quake, grudgers attacked me in the Hall of the Lost. I counted six. After the quake, five soldiers went missing. I think they fled, but their leader stayed behind to watch for another opportunity.”

Snyde tried to wipe the mud from his face with his sleeve but succeeded only in smearing it.

“Where did your five little helpers go, Snyde?”

“You’re insane.” Snyde bit off the words.

“Stonemastery is a marvelous gift. You can open windows in solid walls and hear your own people conspiring to kill you. We planned to bring all six of you out to the woods and deal with you. But you came after me sooner than I’d expected.”

Snyde looked searchingly to the others. “What’s he talking about?” They regarded him with scorn. “What an abhorrent, presumptuous—”

“Where did the other five go? Are we going to see them somewhere along the way?”

“We all know your willingness to believe incredible things. But this”—Snyde waved his arms—“this is incredible.” He seemed to be stretching, loosening up, as if preparing to make a grab for the knife strapped to Cal-raven’s ankle.

Jes-hawk notched an arrow into the groove of his caster. “How did you know I was outside Barnashum when the quake struck?” Cal-raven asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“You just told me that on the night of the quake I ventured outside. No one knew that…except my pursuers and the captain.”

Warney had wasted no time. He now sat astride Snyde’s vawn, backing it slowly away.

“You surround yourself with crooks and disregard those who protected your father from false counsel.” Snyde clenched his teeth but kept on. “Your people disrespect you, and you tolerate it. You attend to dreams and follow signs left by a dangerous man your father had the good sense to banish. And a disloyal witch enchants you with music unfit for a king—songs about
trouble, doubt, even pity for beastmen. Where are the songs that exalted House Abascar and taught our children who to despise?”

“Lesyl sings the truth. That’s the foundation of New Abascar. And you speak of crooks? You swore allegiance to my father when he appointed you ambassador. By those vows you are bound to serve his successor. But you’ve mocked me. You’ve planned my assassination. And you complain of crooks? That you climbed to such favor proves how flawed my father’s house had become. What shall we do about you?”

Cal-raven reached out swiftly, clasped the line of tarnished medals on Snyde’s tunic as if they were a fistful of coins, and stripped them from his jacket.

Snyde cried out in shock. Then he lunged, seizing the knife.

Jes-hawk’s arrow found its mark, its feathered end protruding from the attacker’s ankle. Snyde stumbled backward. The knife fell. He tumbled down the slope and, clutching at his ankle, came to rest among the roots of a gnarled coil tree.

“Snyde ker Bayrast,” shouted Jes-hawk, “I denounce you as guilty of conspiracy to kill the king.” He notched another arrow to the caster. “No trial is necessary. We all witnessed that you took the king’s weapon and threatened his life.”

“My father’s law,” said Cal-raven quickly, “demands execution. But this isn’t House Abascar. I’ll leave your sentence to a higher authority, the master of this territory.”

Snyde’s reddening face resembled nothing more than an infant’s in a petulant outcry. “What authority?”

“May the Keeper show you patience that you might learn from your mistakes, as I hope to learn from mine. Go home. Of course, you don’t believe in the Keeper, do you?”

As Cal-raven turned his vawn about and rode on without another word, starlings crossed the sky, drawing night like a sheet behind them.

“You’re a disgrace!” came the ambassador’s roar behind them.

“Shall I silence him?” Jes-hawk raised his caster.

“No. We’ll see how far his divided mind will take him.”

S
traying from the sight of the stag hunters, young Cal-raven, only eleven years old, prodded his horse off the trail.

A sharp chill had daggered him from the shadows of that dusty, overgrown rise to his right. It was summer. What was this sudden river of winter flowing over the hill? Moving through violet trees, he found a sort of stair—an old mudslide’s hard, rippled clay—to carry him up and over the ridge.

As he reached the top, his father joined him. Bracing for reprimand, he was surprised. “You are your father’s son,” King Cal-marcus boasted. “Such curiosity. But you must avoid this place, both for its history and its deathly air, even though it calls out to descendants of Tammos Raak.”

“Something’s wrong, Father.” Cal-raven shivered.

“It’s winter here.”

“It’s the dust. Ice that doesn’t melt.”

They stared across a vast white crater, a bowl full of wasteland.

“They call it the Mawrn. No one really knows what it is. It can’t be found anywhere else in the Expanse. Look there, at the way the crater’s edge stands jagged against the sky. My grandfather called it Two Giants. Trace that side and this, and you’ll see the outline of two people lying down.”

“Yes. Their foreheads meet.” Cal-raven pointed across the crater. “And where we’re standing, their toes touch. But why is this here? How’d it happen?”

“Did Scharr ben Fray never tell you the story of Tammos Raak’s escape?”

“Many times. Tammos Raak’s children rebelled in the house of Inius Throan. They all wanted his crown. He fled, and when they caught up to him, he climbed the tallest starcrown tree. Then something happened.”

“Yes, but what? Some say they burned the trees to catch Tammos Raak. And this crater’s full of toppled starcrown trees. But this—the Mawrn…” His father rubbed his thumb across his forefinger. “It isn’t really ash, is it?” Reaching to tousle his boy’s hair, he laughed. “Maybe you’ll solve this mystery someday, Raven. Still, promise me you’ll never let the question draw you down into that pit.”

Surveying the dusk-dim ground, Cal-raven was again troubled by the violence of the scene. The trees appeared to have been shattered and half buried by some tremendous plow. Boughs, trunks, and roots—all painted with bone white dust—seemed paralyzed in anguish.

“What is it?” Jes-hawk rode up and, gazing over the white cavity, whistled a long falling note through the window of his smile’s missing tooth.

Cal-raven unsheathed a farglass. Gazing through its lenses, he sifted the view for one great tree still standing. But there were no straight lines here. What appeared to be dragons made of dust crawled, wrestled, and leapt about the ground below.

Turning the scope, he considered the crater’s western wall. A cloud branched upward against the blue of evening like an ink-black coil tree. A constellation of lanterns and torches was awakening along that stretch—buildings connected by paths that spilled down to a complex of platforms deep in the crater.

In the dim light he saw high-reaching beams turning on pivots. From the beams, ropes carried miners and supplies down into dark pits as if to bait underground monsters. One of these cranes reeled in a pallet crowded with buckets, which were loaded onto wagons that crawled like beetles to an illuminated structure, its windows aglow. A chimney spewed smoke, drawing a line against the bleached landscape.

“A mine?” Jes-hawk shook his head. “What do they dig beneath cold ash?”

Cal-raven pointed to a cluster of cabins, dark boxes on the bluff of the crater’s western edge. “That’s a Bel Amican way station.” He slipped out of the saddle, knelt, and let the silvery sand run through his fingers. “We’ve seen
this powder. And recently. Do you remember that Bel Amican Seer who said he would help us?”

“Do I remember the liar who led beastmen to attack us? Master, when I practice, I imagine he’s my target.”

“We recovered a box of this dust from a thief, and we returned it to that Seer. He treated it as precious. Mawrn. The Seers carry Mawrn. I think. I think they’re mining the dust itself.”

Jes-hawk’s gaze seemed fixed on the distant way station.

“You smell the hot meals. I know. But we didn’t come here for stew or soft pillows. We have people waiting for us.” Cal-raven flinched, bowing and casting his sleeve across his face as a breeze blasted them with the stinging white grit. His vawn groaned, agitated by the cold and frustrated that she could snuffle no grubs from this chalky ground.

“You’re going down there, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but I have no business with Bel Amicans. I’m looking for something else. A particular tree, if you really want to know. Or what’s left of it.”

“How do you expect to find it without interruption? They’ve seen us by now, surely.”

“Go back to the company.” Cal-raven eyed a feathered silhouette that waited patiently inside the edge of the crater, almost within reach, clinging sideways to a root that protruded from the gradual slope of the wall. “The ravens will show me the way.”

“I can’t let you—”

“When the Bel Amican welcome party arrives, introduce the company as travelers who have abandoned Abascar to seek a better fortune.”

“They won’t believe us. The best way to draw attention away from you is to go to that way station like reasonable travelers.”

“Kramm!” Cal-raven aimed a kick at the archer’s leg.

But Jes-hawk caught the king’s buckled boot of muskgrazer skin and pulled it right off his foot. He held it up as if threatening to cast it into the crater. “You know I’d rather go down into that cauldron of ash with you than sit among strangers with a glass of ale and wonder what’s become of you. Tell me you know that.”

“Bloody vawn crolca, Jes-hawk. I know it! You’ll have that hot meal. But
you must be the blandest of visitors. Tell boring lies. Laugh at their jokes. Stare into your bowl. Offend no one. Accept no challenges. If the Bel Amicans will rent you a room, pay for two nights, just in case. Plant an arrow in your window frame so I can find you when I come back.”

“When do we come looking for you?” Jes-hawk handed back the boot.

“You don’t.”

Eager to make progress while faint blue light still lingered on the western horizon, Cal-raven descended into the lifeless jungle. Binding a scarf across his nose and mouth, he followed the birds through unmoving swells of earth, vines, branches, and roots.

“Great Keeper,” he spoke through the cloth. “You came to me last time I ventured out alone. Come again. Show me where to go.” Nothing happened. Nothing moved, save for boughs that twitched without any wind and ravens darting through the dusty tangles.

Soon after the sky’s last notes of purple had dissolved into black, a blue glow caught his eye. He crouched down, peering through a dark web of boughs. The light was quiet, delicate.

He worked his way cautiously through the maze until he found a passage straight to a patch of ground shrouded in blue mist. Seizing the farglass, he fingered the notched edges of various lenses, pulling some from their slots along its wooden span, fitting others into place. When he found a combination that magnified the clearing, a memory surprised him.

I’ve seen this blue before, in the cloak that Auralia wore
.

Coiling out into the night air on fragile green stems, delicate blue flowers emerged from between the bulky stones of what appeared to be an ancient well. Steam spilled from the ring of stones, infused with light from the flowers. It beckoned to him like an oasis in the eastern Heatlands.

Suddenly a shadow stepped into the picture. Surprised, Cal-raven reached out to catch himself against the wall of branches. His hand closed tight around a bough, and a thick, sturdy thorn ran right through his palm and out the other side.

His cry caught in his throat, and tears sprang into his eyes. Pain lanced
his arm. He jerked his hand free and pressed its wound with his other palm. He rocked back and forth, then fumbled in the pocket of his jacket for a traveler’s bandage roll. When his left hand was wrapped, he raised the scope again with his right.

Enveloped in steam, the figure lifted a wooden cover, which brought from the well a new flood of cloud that filled the clearing.