Shadowheart (17 page)

The merchant shook his head. “I have stayed upon the road, so I have seen little out of the ordinary. But I have seen enough. Riders on the hillside by evening, dressed in the old, old way, with armor that gleamed like moonlight. A flock of women speeding across the grass at midnight, in a place no woman would dare show herself, let alone run naked. Yes, I’ve seen some strange things, Pilgrimer, and heard others that I had no wish to see at all. And the dreams that come to a man these days when he travels in the north . . . ! Night after night I have woken in a sweat, sometimes crying out so that my helpers hurried to my side, thinking me deathly ill or stung by a serpent. There are voices that echo in the hills and in the forest deeps, and shadows that move when there seems no light to throw them ...”

“Enough!” said Theron, shuddering. “No more tales, thank you. I have scarcely the courage to stay here all tonight, let alone to go forward.”

“It is not all terrible,” the merchant said suddenly. He stared into the flickering fire. “There is . . . sometimes . . . a kind of beauty in things I’ve seen . . . or almost seen ...”

But Theron had no urge to discover such strange, unhomely kinds of beauty, and began to think about when the time might come to turn back.

 

The boy, Theron had finally learned, was named Lorgan. It was a Connordic name, although the boy said he had lived in Oscastle all his life until now.

“How did you come to be traveling with the stranger, lad?” Theron asked one night over the stewpot. In comparison to the night the merchant had joined them, this was much thinner fare indeed, closer to porridge than a stew, since there had only been enough dried fish to flavor things, but it was warm and the fire was bright and that meant something when you were half a day off the South Road in the lonely woods.

“Told you. He asked me.” The boy scooped out some more stew with the crust of hard bread.

“What about your ma and da? Didn’t they mind, you going off?”

“Dead.”

“What happened?”

Lorgan looked up at him in puzzlement as if it was some kind of strange, foreign custom to ask a child about his parents. “Fever took ’em.”

Getting answers was like trying to lift a bucket with a feather. “And what happened to you? Where did you live?”

The boy shrugged.

“And then he ...” Theron nodded his head toward the hooded man, who as usual was sitting by himself away from the others, his head down on his knees as though he slept, although from here Theron could hear him mumbling, “. . . he paid you to go with him? To help him?”

The boy shrugged again. “Said he needed eyes and ears. And someone to talk loud for him, because his throat’s so sore hurt.”

“What happened to him? Did he tell you?” The stranger was so miserly with showing even an inch of skin that Theron still half-feared he might be a leper, for all his reassurances.

“He was dead. He told me so.” Lorgan scoured the last of the stew from the pot and sucked his fingers, restless as an animal, ready to move now that he had fed.

“He can’t have been dead and be alive now. That doesn’t happen. Nobody comes back from being dead except the Orphan. Nobody can do it.”

“The gods can do it,” the boy said, licking his lips and chin for anything he might have missed.

“You’re not trying to tell me he’s a god, are you?”

“No. But they could have made him alive, couldn’t they? The gods can do what they please.” The boy shrugged one last time, then went off to throw rocks at trees until the last of the light was gone. The conversation was clearly over. Theron had to admit to himself that he couldn’t prove the child wrong—the gods, it was said, could certainly do anything they wanted. It was just that helping mortal men didn’t seem to be something they wanted much.

 

It was just across the border into Southmarch, in the Vale of Aulas where the forests grew so thick on either side of the road that the sun only appeared just before noon and vanished shortly thereafter, Theron Pilgrimer saw real fairies for the first time. It was not quite dark, and he was walking back toward the camp with wet boots on his feet and his arms full of mallow roots he had dug up at the edge of the stream when he saw something moving across the forest track before him. In some way, the figures seemed quite ordinary, so much so that for a heartbeat or two Theron did not even wonder why a procession of men dressed in black would be walking slowly across a deer path deep in the Northern Whitewood. Then he saw that these men were as small as children, barely half his own size, and the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck rose. They were dressed in black cloaks and odd, wide-brimmed hats, and just behind them, crossing the path as he stared, came a wagon drawn by two black-and-white-spotted boars—a coffin-wagon bearing a single, unlovely wooden box. As the pigs snuffled at the ground, the wagon rolled to a stop, and the driver, dressed in black like the others, turned to look at Theron. The little man’s face was pale and round and too large for his body. It was all Theron could do to hold his urine. He felt certain that if the little men made the slightest move toward him, he would faint dead away, but the driver only stared at him incuriously for a moment, then shook the reins and urged his grunting steeds forward. Within moments, the funeral procession, if that was what it was, had vanished into the forest.

Theron was still shaking when he got back to camp.

The guards who accompanied the lord protector and Tinwright on their mysterious errand out of the residence were big, hard-faced men wearing the Tollys’ Boar and Spears—Hendon’s personal soldiers. Even more disturbing to Matt Tinwright was that Tolly was clearly leading this little procession back to the place where Okros had died, the Eddon family vault near the Erivor Chapel.

Tinwright didn’t like graveyards. His childhood years living next to one in Wharfside had given him many bad dreams—the stone crypts like little houses always made him think about their invisible residents, and his father’s stories about a time when heavy rains had washed bones out of the graveyard right into Wharfside’s main street had only made the nightmares worse. Still, he had no choice but to follow.

Tinwright couldn’t help wondering why they were entering the vault from outside, through its ceremonial entrance instead of through the narrow stairwell that wound down from the Erivor Chapel itself, so that the family might lay flowers or otherwise commune with their departed ancestors.

“Give me the torch.” Hendon Tolly reached out and took the burning brand from one of the guards. “Poet, you carry the mirror.”

A guard handed him the heavy bundle—rather eagerly, Tinwright thought. The stairway down into the vault was narrow and surprisingly steep; he had to concentrate just to keep his balance. As he reached the bottom, he avoided looking as long as he could at the spot where Okros had lain, but that was precisely where Tolly was headed. To his relief, the physician’s body was gone.

Tolly slid the torch into a bracket, then took the bundle from Tinwright and began to unwrap it.

Matt Tinwright had been far too frightened to examine the vault the last time he’d been inside it. The stonework was spare but graceful, the walls honeycombed with niches, each filled with its own stone sarcophagus. Beside the stairwell up to the Eddon family chapel there was at least one door that led back from the chamber in which they stood, presumably to other catacombs.

Tinwright’s father had once told him that the royal vault of the Broadhall Palace in Tessis was so famous for its size and grandeur that people called it “The Palace Below.” It was even a popular trysting-place for courting couples because it had so many quiet nooks and corners. Tinwright could no more imagine a couple choosing to bill and coo in the Eddon vault than in a butcher shop. This place took its spirit from the ruling family’s gloomy, Connordic side; in this dark stone chamber, death was not the beginning of a glorious afterlife; it was simply the end of this life.

“There.” Tolly had unwrapped the mirror and set it on top of a monument, letting it lean slightly against the wall. It was obviously an unusual object. For one thing, it had a slight but unmistakable outward curve from left to right. Also, the frame itself had been painted over so many times in so many dark shades that whatever carvings were underneath had been obscured and the frame had the look of something grown, not built. ““Now it is time for you to play your part, poet.”

“But . . . but what
is
my part?” Was there any chance he could simply run for it? Quick as Hendon Tolly was, it would still take him a moment to draw his sword—how far up the steps could Tinwright get by then? And would the guards be ready to stop him? What if Tolly called to them? He realized with a very uncomfortable looseness in his bowels and tightness in his chest that he didn’t dare to risk it. Maybe Okros had been unlucky. Maybe something would happen that would take the lord protector’s attention and allow Tinwright a better chance to escape.

Tolly took a step toward him, and even though Tinwright was taller than the lord protector, he felt as though he were looking up at Hendon’s glare from the bottom of a hole. “Listen carefully, you witless blatherskite. I must know if you can take that dead fool Okros’ place for the summoning ritual—Midsummer is only short days away. If you
cannot
help open the way to the land of the gods, I’ll have to find someone who can. You would then be useless to me, of course, so if you want to last a little longer, I suggest you serve me well.” Hendon Tolly passed him a book covered in tanned leather. Tinwright looked at it with horror. “Just open it, you white-livered fool,” Tolly growled. “That is cowhide that binds it, not human flesh. It is Ximander’s book—even you must have heard of that. Open it!”

Reluctantly, Tinwright did. He had not read ancient Hierosoline in years, but his schoolteacher father had made certain his son could read the old, great books. If he had not been so terrified, it might have been an interesting experience—he had heard of Ximander’s famous book and its strange predictions and tales, but he had never seen it. The actual title appeared to be,
“A Diversitie of Truthfull Thinges, from the pen of Ximandros Tetramakos.”

“Here,” Tolly said. “I will show you the page. You will read, and only read, until I tell you to do something different.”

“Read out loud?”

“Yes, fool. You are not reading for your pleasure, you are invoking a goddess.”

“A goddess . . . ?” Tinwright swallowed. Was Tolly serious? Did he truly think he could speak to the gods as though he were one of the Oniri, the sacred oracles that carried the gods’ words to a waiting world? But the oracles were blessed folk, beloved of the gods, men and women of such purity and piousness that they could touch the will of Heaven itself. Hendon Tolly was a murderer, a rapist, and usurper.

Tinwright did not, however, point any of this out.

“Read this, Lord?” To his dismay, the language was nothing so ordinary as ancient Hiersoline, but instead some strange, unreadable tongue he had never seen before. “I do not know these words. ...”

“Stop sniveling and get to it,” Tolly said. “Make the best sense of it you can. You are not charming empty-headed women here, but speaking words of power.”

Tinwright cleared his throat. He could feel the stone walls looming close around him, and perhaps even the souls of the royal family’s dead watching him with dislike, but there was nothing to be done but to read Hendon Tolly’s nonsense aloud.

 

 

As Tinwright read, a strange thing began to happen. The words of Ximander’s incantation, couched in some awkward, antique desert tongue, began to seem more and more familiar, like a melody from childhood, until Matthias Tinwright began to understand what it was saying, as though the language of the book had somehow changed to his own tongue even as he read it.

 

 

The light from the torch dimmed abruptly, as if someone had plucked it from its sconce and was walking away. Tinwright felt himself falling forward, not into the mirror that still stood before him like a window frame, but falling nonetheless, his body almost completely lost to him, his thoughts drawn into the reflection of his own face in the mirror’s dark surface.

Except that the reflection was changing, Tinwright realized. Fear dug at him. Somehow the walls of the crypt had all but vanished, although he thought he could still dimly see them. The floor was entirely gone, replaced by a carpet of green grass and the gnarled but slender gray trunk of a tree. It was an almond tree, branches festooned with white blossoms like small stars.