The Beggar King (23 page)

“I started thinking maybe he's a time-keeper, cuz I heard stories about them, though I hadn't known them to live in the forest. And the banging kept on and on, loud and hard, so hard it made sparks.

“And then I saw the blackened place where he'd lit a fire, and scores of dead birds strung up from branches. And I could just see the sister moons up between the trees, the lighter and the darker, and he was staring up at them and I knew which one he was watching. “He's tryin' to wake the vultures,” was what I was telling myself, “He's tryin' to wake those black-winged guardians of the undermagic,” and oh how I wished for one of my sisters to be there with me because now I was petrified. And then he saw me, and he asked me to come to him. And I ran. I ran so fast, I didn't even care where, and finally I found my path, and I took it home. But I guess I wasn't fast enough.

He came to me later, many years later, in the marketplace, on a Merrin day in winter.” Her voice became a low growl. “He told me he was the Beggar King and then he disappeared right before my eyes. Told me to tell you all about it, and so I did, I told it to my family because I trusted ‘em and I knew they would help me if I were in trouble. But that's not what ye did. Ye called me crazy.” Her bottom lip trembled and her eyes filled. “He figured it'd be like that, that there wouldn't be a soul in the world who'd believe what I said.

“It was the brass door he wanted. He knew I could open it if I wanted to. He offered me anything. Offered me the undermagic. Scared me half-silly, it did. But I wouldn't take nothing from him. I decided then and there, I wouldn't practice any magic, ever. Cuz I knew it wouldn't have taken much for him to get hold of me. One taste of that sort of power and yer done for.

“That was what ye called madness. That was what left me changed, what had Mumma dragging me off to healers and whatnot and them finding nothing wrong with me. You didn't listen,” she said, pointing a finger at each of her sisters in turn. “You didn't believe any of it. Left me to myself. Sent me yer damned fruit baskets. Blast ye all to the depths. And now he's come back and found himself another one, a willing one, one with more need of his gifts than I ever had.”

“Oh wretched gift,” moaned Appollonia.

Willa scratched her head and wood chips fell onto the floor. Petsane glared at her but Willa didn't pay her big sister any mind. “He wants his kingdom and he means to have it, no matter what the cost.” She stopped and scanned the room as if something had suddenly occurred to her. “Where's the boy? Who's been set to watch over him?”

They all looked at one another.

“Blasted bells,” she exclaimed. “No one's keeping an eye on him? Go and fetch him, ‘Phira, right away. Ain't safe leaving him alone, not with that sorcerer roaming the streets.”

Ophira took the stairs two at a time.

“He's gone,” she hollered. She stood at the head of the staircase. “I left him in the guest room. He wasn't supposed to go anywhere. He promised me.” And she covered her face and wept.

Willa fixed on Sarmillion. “Has the boy been up there tonight?”

“Where?” asked Sarmillion with an innocent pout.

“Ye know damned well where. The brass door. Has he been back since we spoke?”

“Well,” said Sarmillion, “he might have passed it by. But I had nothing to do with it, I can assure you.”

Willa stared at him until sweat formed on his brow. “I never met a more careless undercat in all my life.”

“He didn't follow the rules,” said Sarmillion. “It wasn't my fault.”

“You encouraged him, didn't ye? Isn't that yer fault? Told him he needed the undermagic, that there was no other way — when I told ye there was.”

“Yes, well, that might have been a small mistake on my part.” Petsane elbowed her way to the centre of the room, the stew spoon high. “What do ye mean by a small mistake, underkitty?”

“I told him,” Willa said. “I warned him well, so don't blame me.”

The undercat pressed a pointed tooth against his lip as Petsane stood next to her little sister and shook her head. “Ye can't trust them undercats for nothin'. I could have seen it coming. Now we're into it with both boots on.”

“But I've almost finished writing out the prayers,” said Sarmillion. No one seemed to be listening.

Ophira had found her way down the stairs and grasped Willa by the arm. “I can go after him. They let me into the palace without question. I know where he's gone. Maybe it's not too late.”

Willa gently loosened her grip. “That ain't our way, dear ‘Phira, to go running after things. A seer thinks things through, and then she sees. At least we got our gathering, and that's something.”

“I've done a good job, remembered all the words and everything,” said Sarmillion.

“How about ye do yer thinking with a billy grain biscuit?” Petsane said to Willa. And she went to the stove, cut a hot biscuit in half and buttered it, and brought it to her sister.

“Not all magic is the undermagic, Sister,” said Petsane in a hushed tone. “We got good power at our fingertips, power we can use to help folk. You, too. Ye got to take back what ye were born with.”

“I been so afraid of it,” Willa said.

Petsane patted her gently on the back and said, “Foolishness, girl. You got a good heart. We all know that. Even if ye do wear them damned boots.”

The two sisters studied each other openly now and Willa swallowed hard.

“Bring the candles over here, Cantare, and start singing,” Petsane said. “We got a long night ahead.”

Twenty-Two
J
UST A
C
ANDLE

W
HEN
J
ORDAN
OPENED HIS EYES, HE
was on the dirt path and the candle was no longer in his hand. He coughed and almost gagged. There was an intense smell of garbage, or maybe it was a decomposing animal, he couldn't be sure. As his eyes adjusted to the scant light, he could make out the black skeletons of bare trees. They lined either side of a track that was slippery with greasy-looking water.

“On your feet, boy. They're waiting. Quickly now. They've waited a thousand thousand years for this.”

Jordan stood, and had to grab hold of the Beggar King's arm to keep from falling over. The older man laughed. “It's like high altitude,” he said. “You'll grow accustomed to it. Before long, it will be the world you left behind that will sicken you.”

Above them were no moons or stars, no light at all. Ahead lay darkness. The living world was far behind, like a dream Jordan had had but couldn't quite remember.

“Let go my arm, now. Stand on your own two feet and be a man. That's why you're here, isn't it, carver's son? You're a Loyalist. Buck up.” He wrenched Jordan's hand away and Jordan stumbled to the side of the path and retched.

“You milksop! Are we going to flinch, then, when it comes down to it? You disappoint me, boy. You told me you had the blood for this. We'll make a man out of you before the night is done. Any wood can be turned if you push hard enough.”

Jordan's feet seemed to know where they were going even while he didn't. Every step forward was frightening; every step blind, yet sure. He did not walk the path, yet it moved beneath his feet.

The darkness was now so thick it was a stifling blanket, but it brought no warmth. There was frost in the silent air and Jordan could see every puff of his breath.

Once when a horse had died at his Uncle Eli's farm, its death had somehow gone unnoticed, and flies had gathered and the crows came and the living horses stayed on the far side of the pasture. His father had warned him not to look but he had to, and there was a rancid stench of decay that had taken him days to wash out of his clothes. It had been there, too, on Jordan's sixteenth birthday when he'd placed sasapher flowers at the holy tree and said a prayer for a dead man whose eyes had been plucked by crows.

The Beggar King stopped. “Here is your Cirran mystery of death — not quite the way they teach it to you in school, eh boy? The truth is pitiless and it lasts forever.”

Jordan's sandal-shod feet were sinking into freezing mud. He sensed a crowd nearby but it took his eyes a moment to make it out. At first he thought they were vultures, but then no, they were more like people, lined up single file. Soon he could make out bald red heads with a fringe of long hair, and on their backs beneath tattered black robes were bumps that might have been wings. And yet they were people: two arms, two legs, bare human feet. And each held an unlit candle.

“They've slept for an unconscionable long time,” said the Beggar King. “The Great Light has not been merciful to these poor folk. Look how they're drawn to our steady light — like moths,” and it was true, the vulture people drew ever closer and Jordan could smell oily feathers. Some of them reached out and touched him with sharp claw-like hands.

“They want life, Jordan. In exchange they will allow us a share in the undermagic, for they are its guardians. It's a fair bargain, wouldn't you say? They serve us, we serve them. You always serve something in life, isn't that so? Whom do you serve, carver's son?”

Jordan tilted his head in confusion.

“Watch. I shall light their candles and wake them. See if they do not give you the power you desire. Then you can decide how to answer my question.”

One by one the vulture people came to the Beggar King and he lit their smaller candles with his bigger one until the entire place glowed with unmoving light. Jordan now saw that he was standing beside a river so wide he could scarcely make out the far shore. Objects floated in the water. He couldn't tell what they were until a bloated human head bobbed up and went under again. And then he knew — they had come to the River of the Dead.

A vulture person approached, holding an unlit candle towards him.

“I can't — I can't light it,” he said.

“He's giving it to you,” said the Beggar King. “It's the undermagic. It's your power. Take it. Go save your people while there's still time.”

The candle shook so badly in Jordan's hand the Beggar King could not even light it.

“Not a man yet, I see,” said the sorcerer, his small black eyes glowing in the candlelight. “Hold still.” And he gripped Jordan's arm so tightly to steady it Jordan cried out in pain.

Once the candle was lit, Jordan's sickness abated immediately. He stood for a minute, while his lungs eased, and just breathed.

“What are you waiting for?” cried the Beggar King. “Move along. And keep that candle hidden in your pocket. Don't let anyone see it.”

“But . . . ”

“It won't burn you, carver's son. It's not that sort of light. Safe passage,” he said with an odd smile, as Jordan returned to the world.

Twenty-Three
A Y
ELLOW
S
QUARE OF
C
AKE

W
ITH THE LIT CANDLE IN HIS
pocket, the world changed. Jordan could see the hard-shelled beetles that hid between the cracks of stone in the palace walls. He could hear Brinnian Landguards singing their drinking songs all the way over in the dining hall. He set off down the corridor at a run, reveling in the sweet effortless flight of his feet over the rough stone floor. Somehow he'd have to get out of the palace unseen. It wouldn't do any good if he were captured now, after all this. No sooner had Jordan formed the thought when before him appeared a door which opened onto a deserted courtyard.

“Command it, and it shall be done for you,” said a voice inside him. Jordan laughed.
Very well
.
Take me to the Omar Bazaar
. And it happened, he was in Omar. The light from a still-open tavern formed a shimmering rectangle on the cobblestones.

“Great Light!” As soon as he spoke those words, his lungs felt tight and he gulped for air.

“Take me to Utberg,” he sputtered. “Speed my journey and bend every natural law to get me there at once.” In an instant, his feet were sinking into dry brown sand.

He took a minute to rest, doubled over in cramps. It felt as if he'd been squeezed through a small hole. He was standing in a bleak, barren landscape made of sand dunes and broken only by the occasional patch of rough yellow stubble that might once have been grass. Not a single tree could be seen in any direction. In the endless early-morning blue sky, not one bird.

“They say a traveler unaccustomed to the landscape of Ut can go mad inside of a week,” Grandma Mopu had said, and now Jordan understood why.

“Utberg, I said,” he spoke into the emptiness, but nothing happened. “The prison camp. Where are they keeping the Cirran prisoners?” Perhaps that was where he was, five miles northeast of Utberg. Now what? He chose a direction at random and set off with long, swift strides.

The furrows and stubble made him feel as if he were walking across the face of an old man. He scrambled up one dune, down another, as the sun rose higher and the heat grew more insistent.

He learned to stay away from the yellow grass, for the snakes hid in there, and they were long and colourless and as silent as thoughts. Jordan's ears were alert to other movement too, for he remembered Grandma Mopu's warnings about the bands of nomadic thieves.

Finally he saw a familiar silhouette: one lone black tree, leafless and pressed against the sky as if branded into it, upon a hill that rose higher than the others. He increased his pace until he'd reached the top and leaned against the dead tree to catch his breath.

And there, stretched before him, was a substantial view of the landscape with the blue waters of the Octavian Ocean shining to the south. Sunlight gleamed off metal roofs at the shore. It was a town. He also saw a trail through the sand and dry grasses that seemed well traveled.

He picked his way down, while crows perched upon thorny bushes fixed him with their black beady eyes. After an hour's descent, he found himself on the outskirts of the town, where the clay houses had rounded roofs that didn't look strong enough to withstand a rainstorm, if ever it rained here. A street shimmered in the distance and Jordan could make out two Brinnian Landguards.