The Wicked Day (43 page)

Who made this thing? Why? What were they guarding against?

But Jute could not linger on that thought. He had only so much concentration left. He saw the duke of Harlech out of the corner of his eye. The old man stood like a statue. Torchlight shone on one side of his face. The other was lost in darkness. Light glinted on one eye. The passageway was silent behind him.

“Walk past me,” said Jute, his voice barely a whisper. “All of you. Get at least fifty feet in front of me. Do it. Now. I can’t hold this much longer.”

He closed his eyes. The few words had almost been too much. He was not aware if the duke had heard him. He was not aware if they were walking past him. The sky filled his mind. He couldn’t feel his body anymore. The ward slammed up toward the stars. It was strange. He couldn’t see the spell, but he could sense it rushing through the sky. He could hear its words now. A low continuous murmur wavering on the edge of melody. There was almost beauty in it. Seconds flickered by, or perhaps they were mere hours, and still the ward surged through his mind. He could not think any longer. His body took a step forward. His boot dragged across stone. Another step. The ward howled up into the sky. Another step. And then there was only silence and darkness. He opened his eyes.

The men of Harlech stared at him, crowded into the narrow passageway. Their faces were weary, streaked with dirt and dust. Dried blood caked on Rane’s forehead. The flames of the torches burned steady and motionless.

“I won’t ask who sneezed,” said Jute, trying to smile.

“What was that?” said the duke. “I felt something in my mind when you stopped. Something old.”

“I felt it too,” said Rane. “It was not friendly, whatever it was.”

“It was a ward. At least, a thing similar to a ward, if a mountain lion is similar to a housecat. It’s directional, so we’re safe on this side of it. Quite a spot for it. Most people would be hurrying along, not expecting any wards until they neared a proper doorway or a split in the tunnel.” Jute shivered. “It almost got us.”

“But it didn’t,” said Rane. He shrugged, his hand moving to the hilt of his sword and then away. “That’s the important thing. That’s always the important thing.”

They proceeded more cautiously from that point. Other passageways began appearing with increasing frequency. Other corridors stretched away into the impenetrable darkness from the one they followed. Doorways were cobwebbed over with dusty draperies of old spiderwebs. The stonework began to change. More carved pillars and arches supported the stone slabs of the ceiling. Gargoyles and serpents and odd, fanciful creatures perched on stone outcroppings, frozen in mid-snarl and staring down at them with blind eyes. They walked by walls carved with words in such strange and lovely flowing lines that they seemed more like flowers than characters. The duke wantd to pause there, for he was a man who loved learning, but Jute hurried him along, whispering that, sometimes, it was safer not to stare at a thing for too long. After all, it might wake up.

Jute knew they were getting closer. It wasn’t from the look of where they were, even though there were things, here and there, that looked familiar. It was the murmur on the edge of his thoughts. Wards. Countless wards. The wards in the university ruins. Whispers upon whispers, voices mumbling and sighing the old words of long-dead wizards. Words guarding and watching and waiting for any intruder foolish or brave enough to try their defenses. The more Jute listened to them, the closer they got with each successive step and the more distinct the voices of the wards became. He listened with astonishment, for he had never been able to hear wards in such a way.

And that is because you become more of me
, said the wind in his mind.
More of me, and me more of you. Listen with my ears and you shall hear the stars in the darkness, the sun on his trail, the ticking of time.

The voices gained more definition until, at least with some of them, they revealed the names of their weavers as well as the words of their weaves. The names and voices fell through his mind. They spoke in dead languages, in old languages, in mixtures of known and unknown tongues, in the accents of the north and south, the rough voice of the mountains, the smooth lilt of Vo and Vomaro, the dryness of Harth.

I am Kennen the Younger of Ballantre. With my name this weave does commence. Here, is the knot. You, the wolves of Wivern Run. I call you. I hold you by my name forevermore. Bound in form, in fur, and in fang. Bound in this stone. This stone. This stone that is named thus and here. You shall tear and rend. Rip and bite. Slash and kill. Bound. I name you as you are, as you were, as you shall be. Suffer no stranger to approach. Suffer them not, o wolves of Wivern Run. Bind and bound you are.

I am Merca Vale, and I found the memory of dragon’s fire hidden in the forest shadows. The sixth name of fire. So do I bind the fire in the sixth step of this staircase. Listen well, stone. Listen for the breathing of the intruder, the stranger, the enemy. Bring forth the fire.

I am Nin, the shepherd’s son. I was born among the ice fields of Morn. I weave with the thirteen names of ice. To freeze, to shatter, to splinter, to reach into the darkness and steal the cold of Daghoron’s shadows. Step here, stranger. Step into my weave and so stand still forever.

I am Forlana Forl, of the desert people. . .

I am Gavindre the Lame. . .

I am. . .

I. . .

“Are you all right?”

Jute blinked. He blinked again, and the tumult of voices in his head died away to a murmur. The duke of Harlech was looking at him strangely.

“I’m fine. We are getting very close, I think.”

They came to a place where the passage ended and they could go no further. They stood in silence. Rane raised his torch high. The light fell on a rubble of stones, a collapse of pillars and masonry and dust. The ceiling was shattered through, revealing the dim and choked view of huge, hewn stones. A trickle of water emerged from among the rubble to flow along the floor before it disappeared down a crack.

“Well,” said Rane tiredly, “I hate to say it, but this looks like a dead end.”

“No.” Jute knelt down and touched one of the loose stones at the edge of the rubble. He dipped his fingers in the water. He could feel something in it—a memory of how it had been, the recollection of standing silent and deep among other stones for a thousand years, edged and trimmed with plaster.

“No,” he said. “This is the right place. There was a well below us when we dropped down from the floor above. This is where we came through when we fled the ruins.”

“Not with all this rock here,” said the duke. “Though I suppose the wind could blow through the smallest spaces.”

“It came crashing down behind us. We were in a hurry, and there was something after us. Severan—a scholar, a wizard—one of the two—he said something, a spell of some sort, and the whole passage collapsed behind us.”

“You did say Severan, didn’t you?” The duke stared at him.

“Yes. He saved us all that day.”

“And where is this Severan now?”

“I don’t know.”

Jute was not sure how long it took them to dig through the rubble. Hours, at least, but it seemed longer. It might have been a day. A day and a night, shifting the stones in the shadows and the meager light of the torches. It might have been longer. The air became full of dust as they moved the stones. They could taste the grit on their tongues and against their teeth. There was a whispering and a muttering all around them as more and more wards became attuned to their presence.

“And that’s not the worst of them,” said Jute quietly. “There are several others—three, I think—somewhere near us. They aren’t making noise, but they’re definitely listening to us. We don't want to wake them fully.”

“Wizards and their wards,” said Rane. Sweat streamed down his face as he hefted an enormous stone. “I’ve never liked wizards. They tamper with things. Push things out of balance. Look under rocks when they shouldn’t.”

“Someone has to,” said his father mildly.

Jute stepped back and wiped his brow. They had made good progress. The pile of rubble was beginning to resemble a staircase. A huge staircase, of course, with teetering bits and rough steps, but definitely a staircase. It reached up to the ceiling and then continued on through the shattered slabs there into the darkness above. The men were working in a line now, handing the stones down from man to man, down the staircase to be stacked in a pile further along the passageway. The relay of stones suddenly stopped. The men standing at the top of the stairs were motionless. Dust drifted down.

“What’s going on?” said the duke.

Jute could feel a shift in the air, a gentle push against his mind. Something had woken up. He ran up the stairs. His feet lightened with each step. Part of his mind called out to the wind, threading a breeze through his body so that he no longer weighed anything. He reached the top. There was barely room for him to stand. The man standing there edged over a few inches.

“Look up,” said the man quietly.

The hole in the ceiling was choked with shattered slabs of stone, each bigger than the body of a man, tilted and wedged against each other. There was no way they could be shifted, unless it was with hammer and mallet. There was, however, a narrow passage through the center of them. Narrow, but surely wide enough to wriggle through. At first, Jute could see nothing except the stones and the darkness. But then he saw them. Several glimmers of light. No. It wasn’t light. Just touches of luminance, hardly more than spots of color a single degree removed from the darkness. After a moment, perhaps due to his eyes adjusting more, he saw several more of the spots, and then even more.

“They weren’t there before,” said the man standing beside Jute. “One moment, complete darkness up there, and then they just winked on.”

Jute stared at the spots of color. His mind feathered out and he closed his eyes. He could feel nothing hostile. His mind pushed out farther. There was something there. Minute touches of brilliance in his mind. A single sentence woven of ancient words looped in upon themselves. And then shattered into a thousand pieces. He knew what they were.

“Light,” he whispered. “
Lig
.”

The stars came to life in the darkness. A hundred stars winking into brilliance. At least, that’s what it looked like at first. But then they subsided into what they were. A hundred tiny shining stones. They shed light into the darkness and the darkness fled away. The hole in the ceiling was clearly visible now, a tangled, interwoven shambles of stone slabs and shards woven together like a giant vine leading up toward a grayer light.

“I think there’s a way up,” said Jute. “Up there to the right. We might be able to climb through the rocks.”

“What did you do?” asked the man standing beside him.

Jute shook his head. “If the light goes out, if it changes, just say the word light out loud.”

The wind stirred to life in his mind and nudged him forward. He climbed up a few feet into the wreckage of rock slabs. The wind nudged him again. He reached for a handhold, and his fingers closed on one of the tiny gleaming stones. It was smaller and thinner than a child’s fingernail. He dropped it into his pocket. The wind chuckled and then subsided into satisfied stillness in his mind.

“Pass the word along to the last in line,” Jute said to the man. “I want as many of those little stones as possible.”

The rest of the way was easy enough. The light guided their steps, showed them handholds and footholds. The men of Harlech moved up through the stones, through the collapsed girders of granite, the tumbled pillars. They followed Jute as he threaded his way up through the spaces. The men behind him mimicked his every move, his every handhold and foothold. Rane was the last in line. As he climbed, he gathered each tiny shining stone that he could reach and placed it in his pocket. No one spoke, other than a few muttered occasions of “light.” Each time the word was spoken, more of the tiny stones sprang to life around them. They shone around them, half-hidden by the slabs of fallen stone, but the light was enough to illumine their path.

Jute pulled himself up over one last slab and emerged up into a large, gloomy space. He had an impression of height and a cold, musty smell of closed-up places that had not been disturbed for a long time. The whispers of wards stirred uneasily all around him, above him, on all sides. Some were close, some were distant, but they were all familiar. He smiled. They were in the university ruins.

“Light,” he said, his voice clear.

More stars came to life. Tiny stabs of radiance. But this time they were scattered all around him. A thousand bits of light lying on the floor. He was in the mosaic room.

“Come on up,” Jute called down through the hole in the floor.

They all climbed up and stood around him in the cheery radiance of the room. They were a grim, stern lot, stinking of dried blood and sweat, heavy in their armor and their weapons, but they could not but smile when they looked at Jute standing among the tiny shining stones. The light shone in his eyes. Rane had collected a great many of the small stones. He handed them to Jute.

“Thank you,” said the boy. He grinned. “We made it.”

They emerged from the university into the dark and rainy hour before dawn. There was ice on the ground. Mioja Square lay before them. But it was a different place from what Jute had remembered. The square was crowded with tents, ramshackle huts, and lean-tos. Woodsmoke drifted up into the rain. The place was quiet for the most part, but here and there, a few solitary people crouched at fires, stirring the embers into life in preparation for their morning cooking.