The Last Guardian of Everness (War of the Dreaming 1) (10 page)

“It was going on and on.”

“Was the count forty-and-five? This is the sum of all evils the sea-bell warns against. If so, Acheron itself, the citadel of Morningstar, makes ready to rise up from the unfathomable deep.”

“I—I don’t know. It might have been that many . . .”

“Have the Guardians of Everness forgotten the art of counting? It is not difficult to master, for one who has fingers, for numbers lesser than ten, and has toes, a score. No matter. What sign did the Watch of Vindyamar dispatch?”

“I saw a black seagull, holding the lantern of the elfs.”

“That was mine, caught and tamed by me, and with a lantern only my art could craft, to show he came by me. Can you not see my sign came not
from Vindyamar? The Watch of Vindyamar would surely have sent to you a warning dream, and Nimue held up from the bosom of the waves a token of what talisman to ready, sword or ring or wand or cup, according in what form the attack would show itself, whether by war, or wind, by deceit or death. What sign were you shown? Are you not a Watchman of Everness? Were you not watching?”

Galen was almost in agony of embarrassment. Of all things, of all people, the one he wanted most to have think well of him was Azrael de Gray, the founder of his family, his house, and his order.

His grandfather had told him that there should have been a sign from Vindyamar, where the sea-bell was kept in a crystal harbor. Instead, thinking the black gull was the sign, he came here, only to be told, now, by the Founder, that Grandfather had been right all along.

But then that embarrassment turned to dread.

“Sign? There was no sign.”

“Ah. Then Vindyamar has been taken by the enemy.” There was something very cold in the way he spoke, a glitter in his eye Galen did not like. “This is cause for dread. The Watch of Vindyamar surely would not have failed to send a sign, upon which so much depends. Only treason could have undone them; only the Enemy has strength enough to overcome their virtue. The Three Queens must surely, by now, have been taken. To Nastrond, to horrible Nastrond, the shores made of murderer’s bones . . .”

The cold voice trailed into silence.

“Well—well—what do I do?”

Azrael bowed his proud head.

“There is nothing to do. The cause has failed. Return home and compose yourself how to perish gracefully and with aplomb. Suicide is nobler than the torture pits of Acheron.”

“There must be something we can do!”

“Only a display of the Talismans will frighten the vanguard of the Darkness. If the vanguard should prevail, nothing is left except to wake the
Sleepers and call the end of time on Earth. Do you know where the Talismans of Otherworld are kept?”

“N—no.”

“Nor do I.”

“Who does know?”

“The Three Queens of Vindyamar. Who, if they have not sent you a token calling you to war, we must presume taken, or slain.”

Galen stood on the chain for a long time, staring down between his feet. A dizzying, vast nothingness, darker than midnight, sank endlessly down away from him.

It did not seem any darker, any deeper than the sinking feeling inside of himself. The words of Azrael de Gray echoed in his imagination:
taken or slain
. . .

Galen suddenly looked up. “If they were taken, where would they be taken to?” He had straightened up; his voice was clear and sharp. “If they are prisoners, who is guarding them? Where?”

Azrael said softly, ‘Aha. Now the youth asks a question worthy of a man.”

VIII

Azrael spoke in a low, solemn voice, so that Galen had to lean close to hear him. “Few know where Nastrond lies, which is the harbor and waymeet of the dreaded selkie-folk: but that hidden place is known to me. No matter where next they might take the Three Queens who are their prisoners, whether to sunken and sunless Acheron beneath the sea, or to the frozen northern atolls of Heather Blether, or to the windowless domes atop the bleak plateaus of Uhnuman on the far side of the moon, the seal-men would first take any captives, fair or foul, to Nastrond’s shore. For they go by secret routes into countries beyond the sphere of the moon, into the forbidden
upper night, where mankind may not go, not even in dreams; and to this end, the Selkie must propitiate and praise the bloodthirsty and inhuman gods that guard the realms where sane men dare not venture, and bribe them to overlook that forbidden voyaging. Each captive must be prepared, woven into song like a caterpillar in its silks, so that the song of the selkie, full of horror as it may be, will keep the victim’s ears clogged with sounds to drown out the singing of that which lives beyond the ordered sphere of fixed stars. (They say no man has heard the inhuman music from beyond, and returned sane from such overreaching wayward dreaming, except the dreamer Kuranes, and even he was not permitted to return to his body back on earth, which died, but was given the timeless and enduring citadel of Celephais in the clouds above in the inland sea for his kingdom, both as consolation and reward for the brave resisting power of his soul and sanity.)

“And how I came to know this brings me no happiness to tell, for I spoke with a creature only somewhat human and made terrible bargains with him, and this creature came to me because I saw a thing in the darkness.

“I have seen a thing unknown to any others, be they men awake or men wrapped in dreams, or men passed into the greater dreaming of true death; for the malice of the jail keepers of Tirion puts my small cage upon a longer chain by far than all the others, so that, by dawn, I am thus so much nearer to the burning breath of sun when he comes up from underfoot, and so that, by dusk, I am thus so much farther from his warmth, and deeplier dipped into the cold abyss below.

“By this, I have seen farther down into the gulfs beyond the world’s end, farther even than my fellow prisoners here, farther, I suspect, even than the nadir-astronomers who peer so timidly athwart the brink above us with their telescopes and mirrors. They are too near the sun to see full ways into the gloom. In dark solitude, dark wisdom grows. For I have seen from whence the Black Ships come.

“Do I need to tell you of the Black Ships, young man? Every seaport in the lands of dream has been visited by them at one time or another; seaports made of crystal or of cloud, elf ruled, loyal to Mommur, next to
oceans of light; and seaports made of brick and wood, inhabited by what we would recognize as men; and the great fortified iron headlands of Nidvellir, next to oceans made of boiling rock; all these, through all the cycles and aeons of recorded time, have feared the Black Ships, and never known from what quarter of the world they hail, or what level of the dreaming. But I know. They come not from earth, but beyond it.

“Once and twice and thrice I have seen them, monstrously huge, sailing up toward earth from this chasm, weightless as thunderclouds, their expanse of sails adrip with ice and swollen with nameless winds from far below. Their lanthorns burn with elf-light marsh gas, or the glow which fireflies carry in their tails, as they rise up. And across the gulfs of night air, sometimes I would hear lonely wailing voices raised in song, hymns to darkness and pain, paeans to the joy one finds in other’s sufferings; and this singing from the ships was interspersed with eerie barking laughter, harsh commands, and the cracks of whips and cries of pain; and no voice of them was human in its tone or timbre.

“Whenever any of these ships rose up, she would reach a certain height below the level of the world’s brink, and would at once all douse her lights and singers gag; and silenter than moths would float, by careful courses plotted to ascend through the night sky only by the darkest zone, far from constellations, that her passage might not occlude any star, nor give a warning of her silent running to the militia in Tirion below.

“Made bold by desperation or despair, I began to sing the uncouth hymns I had heard when next I saw a Black Ship rising up; nor did I fall silent when the Ship doused all her lights, but louder called forth, shouting blasphemies upward toward my slumbering jailers.

“The Black Ship struck sail and hung adrift, lamps black, off the southern point of Orion, past Rigel, which even then was level with the world’s horizon. A pilot boat was lowered, and dark hunched shapes, bent over muffled oars, rowed this boat across the gloomy air down toward me.

“The pilot boat came to where my cage hung in midair, and I saw the tall shape in the stern was manlike but had no human face. Above his lace
cravat and below his tricorn hat, I saw his nose was whiskered like a cat, his eyes were liquid, large and dark; merry, beastlike eyes, full of cruelty and laughter; his pelt was black and shone. And when he spoke, his sharp fangs were white and clean like the teeth of a fox. His warm breath smelled of fish chewed raw.

“He raised a hand in greeting, and I saw, out from the lace cuff of his heavy seaman’s coat, a clawed paw, black and furry on the back, pale of palm, with webs of black membrane stretched between the finger joints.

“He chuckled and snorted when he saw the cruel torture of my imprisonment, and lightly touched the jagged teeth which line these bars, and said, ‘The folk above are fishing. They have left you dangle here as bait to the leviathans which lumber in the unnamed nether oceans into which these icy waters plunge. But I think you are too small a morsel to tempt those jaws to swallow up these many hooks. Hah! Are you so friendly with the fishermen above that you must squeak and squall when we are preparing our nice surprise to penetrate their rude blockades? You must be discreet, my scrawny mouthful, or the kindly men who put you here will lose the opportunity to fish with live bait.’

“I told him scornfully that one such as he should not dare to threaten me. He laughed, describing the tortures to which he would put me, and leaned toward the bars with his saber. The weapon came within my reach.

“The next boat out from the ship carried a higher-ranking officer of their race and kept a respectful distance while they treated with me. I will not trouble you to tell you what oaths were sworn that night, nor to what dreadful powers; but I will confide that much secret intelligence I gained, greatly to the good of my cause, were I able to reveal it to my people. And the sea-men allowed me keep the saber and the seal-coat of my first visitor, nor did they dare come near enough to take his body down from where it hung on the cage bars. I ate well for nearly a month.”

Galen, listening, now looked at the bloodstains on the cage bars with new horror.

And then Azrael said softly to Galen: “Come closer.”

IX

Galen realized that he could turn and go away this moment and put himself far out of reach of this caged man, return to his grandfather, and have no more to do with these dark matters. And yet, if Galen did not even attempt to rescue the Three Queens of Vindyamar, if he did nothing, how could he ever be worthy of the Guardianship?

Galen leaned closer. The bloodstained hand of Azrael reached up and gripped his shoulder. Galen was astonished at how cold the fingers were, and how strong. The cold hand drew him down till his cheek almost touched the thorns of the bars. Galen stared at the hooks and saw teeth hanging inches from his eyes.

Azrael whispered, “The traitor is the Seal-King himself. His secret name is Mannannan. His emissary and go-between is Dylan of Njord, whom you shall recognize by such tokens as I shall describe. They would not dare to have harmed these Queens of ancient Vindyamar. The Seal-King will release the Three Queens to you; you shall discover the location of the Talismans from them. You will disguise yourself as a selkie using a dark art I have learned. Draw on this coat I give you; now you shall become a selkie yourself. . .”

6

The Song
of the
Selkie

I

Galen said to Wendy: “The founder gave me his instructions to find the shore of Nastrond. He had a seal-coat in the cage with him, and he handed it to me, saying that he was giving me a coat in return for the cloak I had given him. I had to get right up next to the cage before he would hand it through the bars to me. With it, I was supposed to be able to imitate the selkie and approach unnoticed.

“There was a certain selkie the Founder said had come to his cage, a counselor and lieutenant of the Seal-King. Azrael described a great white seal with a dappled coat, who, when he wore a man’s shape, was a silver- haired old man with a salt-and-pepper beard. He dressed in green and gray and wore a silver moonstone ring on his finger. The selkie’s name was Dylan,
son of Nereus of the House of Njord. There are three nations of selkie, coming from the Witch-City of Ys, from Atlantus, and from Cantriff Gwylodd. Well. You don’t care about that.

“So I asked how I could prove to Dylan that I came from Azrael, that it wasn’t a trick? Azrael said he would entrust me with the secret of his life, something he had learned from a necromancer to whom the selkie had introduced him. And then he plucks out of his coat—it almost looked like he pulled it right out of his chest, but he didn’t flinch or scream or anything—this little ball of crystal, that had this light inside of it, sort of a flower shape, but glowing and beating. It was about the size of a child’s marble.

“He told me to guard it carefully, and to have it when I came to Dylan; Dylan would recognize it for what it was, and this would ensure success for the cause to which Azrael had devoted himself. With my help, Dylan would see to it that those unjustly prisoned would be free, and those who must return to earth would do so. Those were his exact words.”

Wendy, listening to the story with great interest, rattled her bedsheets in a gesture of impatience, saying, “But why did you trust him? I thought the selkie were your enemies! Bad guys!”

“That’s true. But one thing was that, after all, one of the three storm- princes works for us, so why not a selkie?”

“Was that your idea?”

“Well, actually he said that to me. Azrael.”

“I would have asked him a lot more questions about who this Dylan was. I would have asked him who betrayed Vindyamar (I love that name!) Well? Didn’t you ask anything about any of this?”