Raven's Ladder (37 page)

“Oh, we have a destination,” she assured him, bringing them at last around the eastern side of the rock. “Isn’t that what you’re concerned about these days? Destinations?”

Descending into a courtyard, they approached a great glass cone set into the rock. Panels of glass on its side blazed with reflected sunlight.

“When you last visited, the glassworks were impressive. Since then, they’ve been transformed. There’s nothing like them in the sunrise.”

“I don’t have time for a tour.”

“Cal-raven,” she said firmly, “I’m saying good-bye to you today. You’re leaving Bel Amica soon, but if I wait until then, I’m likely to change my mind. And that would be a disaster. You, Partayn, Cyndere—you are people of your word. And I would be the same. If I fail and decide to pursue you, you had better run.”

He seemed frightened, even though he tried to laugh it off.

“While I stay true to my family, you had better fulfill your own vows. I want to see New Abascar someday, Raven.” She paused. “Cal-raven. When I met you, you gave me something beautiful. It’s my turn to give something back to you.”

She raised her hand to knock, but the door opened before she could strike it.

“King of Abascar!” There, dressed in a white gown that sparkled with glassy dust, was that excitable girl who had called herself Obrey. “Don’t just stand there! Come inside!”

S
ee? See?”

Obrey flicked the glass stars that hung from her ears, which stuck out from the white cloth that wrapped her head. Then she rustled the strands of her leafy skirts that were made from long strips of soft-edged glass. “I made these here.”

The glassworks’ reception room was a dizzying cocoon made of mirrored fragments. Alive with the light descending through openings in its shell, some pieces cast back truth, while others distorted it. Grey-feathered cooeys strutted around, puffing out purple chestfeathers, impressed with their reflections. Others flew at their images, flaring feathers and chirping challenges. Cal-raven would have laughed had he not observed how many of these head-bobbing fowl dragged broken wings.

Finding his balance, he stepped into an adjoining corridor and stopped in front of a full-length mirror. “Bloody gorreltraps.” He pinched the space between his eyes. “I look like I’ve been attacked.”

He turned and discovered that he was surrounded by versions of himself. In one, his eyes bulged hugely from his head. In another, he was narrow and bendy. He could regard himself as a muscular brute like Bowlder or as an ancient sage with withering flesh. Opening his mouth to speak, he stopped, for a particularly corpulent variation yawned a deep cave lined with massive, crooked teeth.

“Funny, huh?” said a hundred Obreys.

“And scary,” he answered. He glimpsed another reflection from an adjoining passage, and he reached up to touch his face. “My scars. They’re gone.”

“Come outta there,” Obrey murmured, and this time there was no pleasure in her voice. “Seers’ mirrors. They’re liars. Come with me. We’ve been making you something.”

“Are you a glassmaker?”

“My grandfather was a gemstone miner up north. He made all kinds of glass there. But one day the Seers found him.”

“The Seers brought you here?”

Obrey was running ahead of him now, and it seemed the girl walked right into—and
through
—the wall. He stopped. As her image grew smaller, he decided that it was a corridor, not a wall. He tried to follow her, holding out his hand in suspicion, and his fingertips pressed against a solid pane of glass.

“This way.” Her voice came from the other side of the corridor, and he saw her running away. He started after her, realizing how quickly one could get lost in these illusions. He could hardly move. He wanted to just stand and stare at the shifting reflections, which offered him images from places all over House Bel Amica.

He was drawn to the sight of soldiers on horses. Abascar soldiers had depended on vawns, for most of their rides were in regions of forest. He had never seen so many horses nor such fine armor for those steeds, ready as if for war. Commanding their attention on a magnificent battlehorse was a man whose face was bandaged except for patches around his eyes. Framing that face, his mane was striped yellow and black. But the eyes that burned through all this—the eyes were red as if lit from within.

“Hello, Ryllion,” Cal-raven murmured. “We meet at last.”

“Good morning, Cal-raven.”

He turned.

At first it seemed that five Cynderes approached him from different panels of glass, each wearing a revealing gown as if dressed for some courtship dance. She was younger. Those bruises of grief beneath her eyes had been erased. Her teeth gleamed with unnatural whiteness. Her lips were swollen and red. Her eyelashes were thick and dark. He glanced from one picture to the other, uncertain.

“Do you like our mirrors?” she asked.

It was someone else’s voice.

It was the queen.

The masks had come off. Standing in her courtroom, Cal-raven had not seen Thesera’s face because of the ceremonial, painted shield she held in front of it. The queen seemed younger than her daughter, and her voice was like a melody accompanying some seductive dancer’s steps.

“I walk here every morning to give attention to all that belongs to me,” she said. “Let me show you a view of the islands. Our glass can bring them closer than any Abascar farglass. It’s as good as being there.” The sound of her gentle footsteps whispered to him from all around. When she lifted her hand as if to reach for him, he flinched and did not know which direction might give him an escape.

“A good place for a watchman,” she said. “You can find almost anyone who concerns you. Even better, they do not know you’re watching. I love to watch Ryllion.” She spoke with lascivious enthusiasm. “There’s a certain… ferocity in him.”

“My lady.” Cal-raven dropped to one knee and bowed. This relieved him of having to decide which image was really the queen. “I must address my people. I ask for an assembly tomorrow. The time has come for Abascar to move on. Autumn is coming.”

She laughed. “What a shame to move on just when the fun is about to begin. Tonight’s parade begins a week of revels in honor of my birthday. On the last day I’ll sail away on our greatest ship, the
Escape
, to visit the islands my husband discovered. Our house is full of hope right now. We can cast off the problems of the past and be the house we were meant to be. Explorers from all around the Mystery Sea will present their newest discoveries as gifts. You’ll see things you’ve never imagined. Let your people rest awhile longer, King of Abascar. Look there.”

Five queens gestured, and he glanced about, bewildered, until she described the scene he should be seeking. “One of your own has joined our glassmakers. He has an eye for it.” She laughed. “A sharp eye for fractures. He will help us perfect a new gallery of mirrors.”

He could not find the person she described.

“Come. I’ll show you something more. An unpleasant sight, to be sure. But you were a soldier once. You have seen this kind of thing before. See?
Those are the carcasses of beastmen. Cartloads of them. Ryllion is cleansing the forest of those who resist the Seers’ endeavors.”

“What endeavors?”

“You haven’t heard? They aim to capture, tame, and train the beastmen to fight their own kind for us. Deuneroi dreamed of ending the curse. Ryllion is finding a way that will not cost us any soldiers’ lives.”

As she led him, her voice began to fade. Her reflections went out one by one as if someone were blowing out candles. Then she was gone altogether. And he was lost.

He stepped into a vast, open space and felt a great relief. For this was a space not of mirrors but windows.

He was in the high-ceilinged cone at the center of the glassworks. The brightening sunrise cast a gradation of pink, red, and purple against the failing night sky. This conflict played out on the curvature of the cone, and he walked forward staring up, transfixed. Pillars that supported the cone were also made of glass, and as he passed, small dark shapes within the pillars floated and darted about in swarms and schools.

Obrey was there, watching the drifting shadows. “Aha!” she said. “I thought you were playing Seek and Go Hiding.”

“How do they feed the fish?” Cal-raven pressed his hand to the glass, trying to get a clear view of the creatures.

“There are no fish.” Obrey knocked against a pane. “It’s a trick. Look.” She took him to a broad table where samples of glasswork were displayed. “Those glass bells will summon hoverbirds. Those will soften headaches. Those call dogs. These float-bubbles help our fishermen throw nets that will catch whole schools on the sea. Here’s a glass teapot, made for Queen Glyndere, Thesera’s mother. She’d take tea only from a glass teapot because she said that water tasted better boiled in glass. And here—this old stained-glass window opened and closed in the captain’s quarters of King Helpryn’s ship.”

Cal-raven marveled at the intricate scene depicted on the small glass disc—a soaring eagle with a crown on its head, snatching a fish from a curling wave. “I thought King Helpryn’s ship was lost.”

“Sailors found some wreckage. Hard to believe that the window was not destroyed.”

They walked across a crystal blue floor with the contours of rolling ocean waves. Cal-raven knelt to touch it. “It’s like walking on the sea.”

“The floor was sculpted by Lengle, one of the best glassmaking teachers.”

As they moved through this high-ceilinged hall, he slowed to gaze up into a canopy of misty light where suspended inventions swayed slowly—flocks of glass geese flying in an arrowhead formation, their translucent bellies full of brilliant raindrops as if they had dined upon jewels.

Here the stained-glass walls were murals of ancient mountains. Or perhaps they were magnified views of faraway places—he was not sure. They were simple pictures, abstract, and yet clouds drifted, rivers glittered, trees swayed. As his eyes traced the jagged horizon, he thought,
I must not forget my vision. Fourteen bell towers of Inius Throan. They’re waiting for me
.

“King Helpryn designed this hall for the queen. She comes every day.”

“My mother had a garden,” Cal-raven began but then stopped.

A man of deeply fissured, crimson skin stood among the floor’s turbulent waves, studying Cal-raven thoughtfully as if considering him for a portrait. “Is this your special guest, Obrey?” He scratched his chin through a long, wispy beard that was swept back over his shoulder.

“He’s ready,” she laughed.

The old man winked. Then he turned, walked up over a wave, and descended out of sight.

“That’s my grandfather,” she said with deep affection. “Bel Amica’s master mirrorcrafter.”

“The miner. What’s his name?”

“Fritsey, I call him. You can call him Frits. He makes glass trees that actually grow and flower. He makes walls speak about what the very best eyes have seen. He makes faces that tell stories.”

They followed Frits’s progress and came to a railing where the ocean floor fell away. On a level below them, lights flared—seven ferocious fires, a line of ovens set inside a soot-streaked wall.

“Furnaces,” said Obrey.

They descended a stair of glass so white that it caught and purged the light, emanating an aura pure as snow under a blue sky. It led them halfway
to the workshop floor, where they turned onto a crescent-shaped balcony. They sat to watch the forgers work.

Three glassworkers fitted pieces of glass to long steel poles, then thrust those instruments into the open mouths of three furnaces. Their arms were reddened from the years of blasting heat. Their faces were shielded by cloth masks with thick glass discs that covered their eyes. They looked as determined and yet as vulnerable as the dragonslayers Cal-raven had seen illustrated in his father’s history scrolls. They withdrew molten shapes, blazing spheres that seemed to have been dipped into the cores of fiery stars.

The workers carried the rods to tables and set them down so their treasures hung suspended over the edge. Taking metal tweezers, they pinched the fiery pulp with one hand while rolling the pipes on the tabletop with the other. In this way they shaped and detailed the soft glass into spheres and cylinders, carving ridges and compressing slender lengths of stem beneath the bubbles that would become the bowls of chalices.

“They’re making goblets. And one’s for you.” Obrey poked his hip with her elbow. “It was Emeriene’s idea. She said you could choose an emblem for New Abascar.”

He thought for a moment, then drew a stone from his pocket. He plied the clay into a shape he had crafted hundreds of times. “This,” he said. “I want this figure upon it somewhere. The Keeper’s true likeness.”

“We can give you exactly that,” said Obrey. She took the figure and danced down the stair and onto the workshop floor, where she handed the figure of the Keeper to one of the glassworkers. Then she ran away through the workshop, stooping occasionally to pick through the jagged and colorful throwaways.

If
she were a few years older, I’d swear Auralia had returned from the ruins
.

He turned to a glassworker who sat farther down the bench. “Don’t you wish you saw the world the way she does?”

Even though her uniform cocooned her, the woman was clearly hypnotized by Obrey’s play, watching the girl through thick eyeglasses and wringing her white-gloved hands. He decided that the winding white cloth of her shroud was muffling her hearing.

A line of glassworkers pushed a train of carts across the workshop floor, containers full of large green spheres linked by heavy ropes that framed a fishing net. Distracted by the crooked stride of the man at the end of the line, Cal-raven jumped up and ran along the rail, down the stairs, and across the workshop floor. “Warney!”

Catching up to the parade, he grabbed the old man’s bony shoulder. But the face that turned and greeted him with a wide grin full of teeth gone wrong sent him stumbling backward. The man looking back at him had two eyes.

“I’m sorry. I thought you were. Warney?”