Vault Of Heaven 01 - The Unremembered (64 page)

Tahn touched the poultice still wrapped about his neck. But rather than explain that he feared this creature more than he had the tracker, he simply nodded. “Next time.” He peered around the corner of the low stone gravehouse and searched carefully for any movement. Nothing. Holding an arrow half drawn, Tahn led them through the cemetery to the low retaining wall separating the earth of the dead from the abandoned city.

The first buildings they encountered were houses, most of them single-story structures. Near the walls rested a few produce baskets and water barrels, blown by winds and chewed in the mouths of rats and whatever life now occupied the dead city.

Under the cover of darkness, Tahn skulked slowly, Sutter at his side. Each gaping window, opened door, and alleyway brought him to a stop, where he expected a face or arm to sweep out of the shadows. Sutter huffed air out his nose in exasperation, but Tahn did not rush. Farther on, the buildings rose two, three, four stories, blocking more starlight and blurring the edges of the buildings in deep shadow.

“There is no point to this,” Tahn whispered. “Let’s bed down for the night, and leave at first light.”

“As long as we find one of these grand old houses to sleep in,” Sutter said. “I’ll be the lord of the manor.”

Tahn shook his head. “Let’s get the horses.”

After retrieving their mounts, they returned to the same street. Tahn pointed to a towering building on their left. Dim light showed a series of windows empty of glass or shutters. Nor did it have a door, the wood apparently gone to termites or rot.

Tahn crept inside, trying not to let his heels fall and make too much noise. Sutter stepped more noisily, but paused to produce a candle from his pack and light it. The room looked like a cavern: ceilings the height of two men, rough chunks of stone fallen from the walls, the lonely smell of dust blanketing everything. Bits of glass lay strewn near the windows. A few paintings dressed the walls, appearing to have become sepia-colored from endless days. And a handful of broken tables and chairs littered the floor in jumbled masses, broken and marred.

After hobbling the horses in an adjacent room, Tahn headed for an inner wall. There, he swept the rubble aside with his boot and sat with his back against the firm rock. Sutter sat beside him, laying his sword across his legs and exhaling tiredly.

“Is this the adventure you wanted?” Tahn whispered.

Sutter emitted a single, low chuckle. “You forget, Woodchuck, I didn’t see your grave robber.”

Tahn pulled his cloak tighter about him as the chill of night set in. “I’ll see if he can tell me how I might bury you without arousing suspicion.”

“Wouldn’t do you a bit of good, Woodchuck,” Sutter said, dousing the candle and closing his eyes. “I have the skills to dig myself up from the roots. Probably find myself a meal along the way.”

Nails fell asleep fast, leaving Tahn with the darkness. How much more comfortable he would have been knowing Mira watched nearby. He fingered the outlines of the sticks stuffed in his cloak and wondered if the others had reached Recityv yet, wondered if they had escaped the dark clouds at the north face.

His mind turned and raced with the images and events of his life just since Northsun. He huddled against the wall, staring through the empty, darkened window at the abandoned streets. So many unfamiliar things swam in his mind and in his eyes, he soon had no power to discern if he were awake or asleep, dreaming.

*   *   *

His feet dragged over the harsh terrain, carving shallow furrows in the dusty trail. The height of the sun put it near the meridian. Its heat fell like the yoke of a peddler’s wagon on his shoulders. No wind stirred. There was only the painfully patient smell of aging sage and earth left baking under a cruel sun. The horizon wavered with heat, blurring the dips and rises in the land.

Tahn stumbled, catching himself with his hands on the hot ground. He allowed himself to kneel and rest, raising weary, half-shut eyes to the glare of light from a pale blue sky. The firmament appeared washed and bleached and absent of clouds. Images began to turn in his vision: Pages fluttering in the wind; a woman with a child still wet from birth; seats covered with soft cushions hand-sewn with plush red fabric arranged in a series of shallow arcs facing a podium. Suddenly he felt very cold. Tahn fixed hateful eyes on the greater light.

“All your glory and still I shiver here.” He breathed and saw the plume of breath that winter air might show.

“Ah, you do understand,” a familiar voice said softly.

Tahn whipped around at the intrusion.

Behind him an elegant-looking man stood posed as though for a portrait. Heavy white robes hung in several layers from his shoulders, fastened at his throat with a silver pin, a ring with a small disk somehow fixed at its center. His hair hung in silken white strands, his hands nearly the same color.

“Understand what?” Tahn asked.

“You said you shiver here,” the man continued. “Why are you cold, Tahn, with the perspiration of heat upon your brow? Do you choose to be cold? Do you choose to be here?” The man cast vengeful eyes in a wide scan of the world around them.

Tahn followed his stare, then brought his eyes back to the smooth skin of the stranger. “I don’t know,” Tahn replied.

“How pitiful,” the man mocked. “Dutiful and ignorant. You are dangerous, Quillescent, but only to yourself.” His eyes flared with indignation. “I am done with these games, melura! Done with the feeble antics of vain men stuffed on the power I made possible for them. Nobility? Hah. It is at an end, melura, do you understand? You may live in ignorance of what they do, a blind servant to do another’s bidding, but the shadow of your ignorance freezes your blood even now. I hold the keys, melura. Your threat to me becomes more diluted every hour, every day, and with every age.”

Tahn struggled to understand what the man said. But his mind slipped and failed. His skin continued to grow cold, chills raising goose bumps as the sun rose toward its zenith. Conflicting smells of warm rocks and cold fingers combined in his nose. He fell upon the ground and tried to crawl from the man’s presence.

“Upon your belly will you go then, melura?” he chided. “Or shall I save you?” The man waved a hand and a small spark ignited in a dead tangle of sage roots. “The tinder will be spent in a moment. How shall you nourish the flame, boy?”

Tahn watched the flame gutter. Desperation seized him. He felt sure he would die if he could not build a fire against the cold that emanated from the man. Tahn stretched one hand toward the flame, the constriction of his muscles from the wintry air making him unable to even fully extend his arm.

“Will and Sky!” he screamed.

The man laughed harshly. “Again, child, I don’t think your cry has reached as high as you’d like.”

Tahn distantly heard the mocking laughter as his mind raced to the need of fueling the flame. He clutched at the rough ground, trying to pull himself forward. His fingers clawed through the dusty earth, scarcely moving him closer to the dying flame. Then a thought lit in his mind. He reached within his cloak and drew out the sticks given him by Edholm. Without hesitation, he tossed them into the small flame.

Behind him the man wailed in a triumphant laugh that shot roughly from his throat. The sound of it shimmered in the air like bright, fiery ridicule.

Tahn did not care. He watched the sticks, forgetting their hidden notes, and hoping they would catch. The bitter cold wracked his body. With brittle hands he clawed at the ground, inching closer to the fire. His limbs were turning numb, and he flapped them uselessly.

“How important they must have been,” the man said through dark laughter.

Tahn tried to shout his defense. His tongue clucked, thick and numb from the cold.

The man hunkered down before him, his breath steaming in the air, though somehow the sun still shone in all its strength. “It should leave a lasting impression with you, Quillescent.” He pointed to the scrivener’s sticks burning coldly just beyond Tahn’s grasp. “Consider it when all the secrets begin to unravel in your mind, and give you a taste of the dust you willingly race toward.” The man then picked up one of the flaming pieces of wood, the fire burning him not at all. “You are no more than this stick, no more than the contents hidden up within it.… Just as easily cast upon the flame … just as easy to burn…”

The laughter returned as the man stood. Tahn could no longer hold up his head, collapsing, chin first, into the earth. He managed to turn over and peer up, wanting to defy the man if only in a look.

The man was gone.

Instead, Tahn looked at the sun, which still seemed to beat down upon him with punishing heat though he could not feel it. The contradictions swam in his head: the ease with which he’d sacrificed the sticks entrusted to him; the familiar landscape known to him only in his dreams; and the almost recognizable shape of a cowled face he never fully saw.

*   *   *

The dream ended, and Tahn awoke in the darkness beside his friend and felt for the four wood sticks tucked into his cloak. They were there. He tried to regulate his breathing, slowly pushing away the images as he focused on the emptiness around him.

“Will and Sky,” he muttered, and knew he would get no sleep that night.

Tahn left Sutter sleeping and ambled through the first story of the building in search of a window facing east. Around the corner, a stair rose through shadows into the upper levels. Gossamer threads hung between the posts supporting the dust-covered stair rail. Tahn warily climbed through successive stories, the stairs ending after six flights and letting him out onto the roof.

Under a veil of starlight, Tahn could see the beauty of the hidden city. Its surface rose and fell across rooftops and streets silhouetted against the outer cliff.

Tahn faced east and started to recite the names of these stars. He knew them all like friends, friends met of necessity each morning. He couldn’t remember a time when he did not rise to see them. It was a quiet, peaceful time. Voices did not rush to fill the silence; his thoughts could run outward without interpretation, without resistance.

Tahn remembered sitting on the front stoop with Balatin and Wendra and trying to describe how far the sky went, the speculation soon becoming so preposterous and cumbersome that they all laughed and turned their attention to the light-flies and songs. But there were moments, Tahn thought, when that farthest point could almost be understood, almost glimpsed. He braced himself against a gentle breeze sweeping in from the tops of the cliffs and thought involuntarily of dawn.

The thought surprised him, and he briefly suppressed it, longing to entertain the stillness of his reflection and the cold, silent stars. The subtle glimmer suddenly offered a moment of hope. He peered again into the heavens and opened his mouth to speak, but in an instant his words were lost to him. He shut his eyes, and imagined again the image of the sun, elegantly slow as it rose into the eastern sky, the gradual strengthening of the light an unassuming, wakeful promise.

For a moment, in his mind, the two images dwelt together, night and day, and Tahn thought he heard the echo of laughter from his dream.

In a panic, he flashed open his eyes and saw the stengthening light at the eastern rim of the cliff. A wave of relief stole over him. He nodded a greeting toward the dawn and descended the stair the way he’d come.

As Tahn reentered the room, Nails woke. “Find anything good to eat?” he said, with a sour morning smile.

“I thought you’d dig us some roots from the graveyard,” Tahn answered. “Aren’t the plants there especially tasty because of their human fertilizer?”

Sutter smiled. “No, that’s around the outbuilding, Woodchuck. Graveroots aren’t crisp, they’re … fleshy.”

Tahn laughed in spite of himself. “Let’s get out of here.”

In the watery light of predawn, they stepped into the street. The sound of their mounts’ hooves clopped loud against the hard stone and morning silences.

“Hello, gentlemen,” a voice greeted them as they cleared the door.

Sutter pulled his sword in a clumsy movement, his eyes trying to fix on the owner of the voice.

Tahn nocked an arrow and made a full draw, bending at the waist and swinging his bow in a full circle. He could see no one.

“Those are not necessary,” the voice said. “If I’d wanted to kill you, you’d be dead.” A man stepped from between two of the buildings. “May I ask what brings you to Stonemount?”

Tahn considered his answer as he spied the jewel-encrusted sheath of a long curved blade hanging from the man’s hip. The fellow wore brushed leather breeches and tunic, with an embroidered belt done in scarlet colors of varying hue. Gold rickrack graced the collar and cuffs of his loose white shirt. On his head he wore a tricorne hat likewise garnished with gold thread, sitting at an angle on his head. His cloak—really more of a cape—was bright red, and gave Tahn the impression that the man cared more for fashion than warmth.