by Greylady
“Where is it?” he said eventually.
Eskra extended one long index finger and pointed it straight down. “In the crypt beneath the old high citadel. Where else? Whether you believe the chronicles or the stories, after all the death around this place no-one would be rash enough to take it away. Are you sure you want to?”
“Yes. Even if I had another choice.”
“Which you don’t.”
“Exactly. Shall we go?”
“To the crypt?”
“Where else?”
“A girl can always hope. Even when it’s a waste of time…”
She knew where to find the entrance to the crypt so easily that Bayrd almost asked her how; and how many times she had been up to Dunarat’s ruins before the coercion of an armed escort forced back this latest time. But he kept his mouth shut. For all her declarations of how safe and deserted the place was, she moved with a wariness that made Bayrd glad he had thought to bring his shortsword and his axe.
“Here,” she said, pointing. At first and even second glance, the place she indicated looked no different to any other cavern made by the fallen blocks of masonry lying beside or on top of one another. There were hundreds and maybe thousands of those scattered across the all too spacious site of the old fortress. How Eskra had ever found it, how she had even known the location of the citadel and thus where to start to look, was just one more mystery that only another wizard could understand. As an untrained and very amateur sorcerer, Bayrd didn’t even try. Instead, when he peered at and into the cavern, he could even see where the sunlight reflected from the melt-shiny slab of solid stone that formed its rearmost wall. The place was only slightly deeper than the shelter they had just left, a shelter which last night had just been big enough for Bayrd and his gear and two horses. But then Eskra stooped, rummaged beneath the snow until she came up with a pebble, and lobbed it in a lazy underarm beneath the arch of stones and into the small cave. It curved only slightly in the air before coming down again, but just where sense suggested they would hear the clatter of its impact on the ground, it vanished without a sound.
The clatter, when it came that deceptive instant later, was hollower and more distant than it should have been, repeating and diminishing at short intervals in the unmistakable rhythm of something bouncing down a flight of steps, until it stopped or dropped beyond the range of hearing and the silence fell again.
“This isn’t the funerary entrance,” said Eskra by way of explanation. “Far too steep and narrow for people carrying a coffined body. The proper gate is out there somewhere. Choked by the roots of trees by now. Or collapsed completely. No-one knows exactly where. Even though they’ve been rummaging up here for an hundred years or more. Ghosts or no ghosts,” she added with a grin. “The lure of Lord Ared’s gold can be a wonderful anodyne for fear.”
“Gold, eh?”
“Forget it. There isn’t any. The Old Ones were a practical people. Folk tend to forget that.” Another quick grin, the cheery flash of teeth that lit up her whole face just when he had grown accustomed to an expression of cool stillness. “Why should they leave any treasure lying about the place? They didn’t even leave the fortress standing. And enough years have passed for anything they didn’t take away to have been found long since.” She unbuckled the flap of her satchel and delved inside for a moment – Bayrd could see the cloth or leatherbound spines of several elderly books – before she withdrew a wooden baton gripped firmly in one hand.
He looked at it at first with interest, and then with barely concealed disapproval. If that was a wizard’s staff, it was a great deal less imposing than he had been led to expect. Instead of a great thing as tall as a spear, all cunningly graven with symbols of power – though he conceded that putting such a thing into a small satchel already crowded with books might have posed problems even to a wizard – it was just a slender, polished stave of blond wood no longer than his forearm, its only suggestion of patterning the dark brindle which ran with its grain, and an odd twist to the wood that suggested it had been spiralling around something as it grew. Eskra caught his expression and pursed her lips in feigned annoyance. “You don’t like it?” she said.
Bayrd shrugged one shoulder; it wasn’t worth two. “Let’s just say I’m not impressed.”
“Tsk. Typical of a man. It’s not the size that counts. It’s what you can do with it.” She spoke no spell, but suddenly the little stave flared as bright and then brighter than the finest of lamps. “Like that, for one. Now we can see where we’re going.” Bayrd, still blushing from the deliberate innuendo even while he grinned inwardly at what might have prompted it, pulled the axe from his belt and moved to pass her, but Eskra waved him back. “Very courteous and very protective,” she said. “But I know the way. So this time at least, ladies first.”
She, and then rather too quickly, the light that she carried, disappeared downward and out of sight. Bayrd waited for a few seconds so that he wouldn’t step on her heels, and then followed. The first step, and then abruptly and all together the second, third and fourth brought home to him just how steep this staircase was, and as he fought with flailing arms to retain his balance and keep from tumbling the rest of the way to the bottom, he was heartily relieved that Eskra had gone first.
“Carefully now,” came her voice, already in so short a time well below him. “The first few are very steep—” Tell me something I don’t know already, thought Bayrd, leaning back against the rock wall to get his breath back “—but after that it levels out and gets easier.” Thank you, he thought, and grinned down into the darkness.
Once they had descended past the dangerously steep section, by which time Bayrd had come even more to appreciate the light glowing from Eskra’s small spellstave, he drew level with her and looked around. “They may have built the walls and towers above all this,” he said, “but they can’t have been digging out the cavern at the same time. It’s too big. It would take more men than anyone could spare. This place must have been here already.”
“Well spotted,” said Eskra. “It probably was. One good reason to put a fortress on top of it. The old lords of Elthan—” Bayrd couldn’t help noticing that she made no mention of Prytenon or Cerenau, “—were no fools. They would take a natural feature like this one and put it to their advantage. A network of caverns like these must have been a real find.”
“A network?” said Bayrd, looking around him. Eskra’s light, bright though it was, illuminated only those parts of the cave where they were standing. The rest was utter blackness.
“Yes. Network. And an extensive one. You might have guessed already.” She looked about her, and smiled slightly. “I’ve been here before. This entire hill is a honeycomb. It’s limestone, like most of the land around here. Right up to the Blue Mountains in the west. Good, solid rock. But that can cut it like a knife in cheese.” She gestured at a stream of water running down the cavern wall not far from where they stood. “A damned slow knife and damned hard cheese. But given enough water and time it can cut, carve and hollow out the hills. Until you get somewhere like this.”
She raised the spellstave high overhead, and for just a few seconds its light drove away the darkness for as far as the eye could see. Moisture and crystal encrustations glittered back at them, a decoration for the walls of echoing vaults that could have served as feast-halls for hundreds. Long fangs of rock hung from the high ceilings or rose in spikes from the floor, and where they had met, and joined, and continued to grow, they reared up in sleek, gleaming columns. Wide, dark pools of water gave back the reflection over and over again, distorted now and then by slow concentric ripples from the drops that had been falling for uncounted centuries…until at last Eskra let the light die down and the long night return. “And there might,” she said softly in the shadows, “be even bigger caverns underneath the mountains.”
Bayrd digested that scrap of information in silence. Bigger than this…? It would be a place so vast that it could swallow half a town. Never mind bu
ilding a fortress on top of it, a man could live guarded by the mountains themselves, the very walls of the world, and he could construct anything he pleased inside the caves, and never in his life run out of room.
Eskra broke into his thoughts again. “Feel the air?” she said.
“It’s cold,” said Bayrd. “That’s hard to miss.”
“And it never grows warm. This is only the second time that I’ve been here in winter. But I’ve been here in spring and the heat of high summer. It’s never warmer. Never colder. A good place for storing your siege-supplies.” She snickered a wicked little laugh that ran echoing away into the dark. “As well as your honoured relations.”
“At least it’s not cold enough for the water to freeze.” Bayrd dabbled his fingers thoughtfully in the little stream without concern for what the water might do to the metal of his gauntlets.
“Just so. As I say, a gift to any fortress-builder. Somewhere for provisions, and a place where the years have carved huge cisterns filled with fresh water. Taste it – it’s cold, but very good.”
Bayrd pushed his helmet back and let it hang between his shoulderblades from its straps, then leaned forward carefully to taste the water. Eskra was right, it was good; clean, fresh and sweet – although icy enough that his teeth ached from the single mouthful and his lips briefly lost all feeling. “If Dunarat hadn’t been destroyed,” he said, “this would have been a place where fifty well-armed men could hold off an army.”
Eskra turned to him and grinned, one side of her face in shadow and the other bleached bone-white by the light beside it, the lines of her smile carved deep and black. “Good man,” she said. “History says one thing. The children’s story says another. I suspect you’ll find the truth hiding somewhere in the middle. Lord Ared was ambitious. Hence his marriage. They both agree on that though they phrase it in different ways. He was popular and well-trusted. Otherwise no lord would ever have granted him the right to build a place like this. And then someone had second thoughts. The High Lord himself perhaps. Or one of his well-placed retainers suggested that a man with such ambition as Ared had displayed – and with a fortress that promised to be impregnable once its fortifications were complete – was too ambitious to remain alive. So they trumped up a charge and killed him.”
Bayrd nodded slowly. “That would explain the wife and child.”
“Now you know something that I don’t. It sounds nasty. But this whole subject is a nasty one. Tell me more.”
“It was a common enough practice long ago,” he began, then hesitated as he remembered an ugly incident eight years ago in Kalitzim. “And maybe no so long ago at that. If you have reason for a blood-feud, well and good. If you have plenty of supporters willing to back you in law or in combat, even better. But when you defeat your enemy, kill his whole family down to the child that was born today. Children grow, and they learn the meaning of revenge, and you can never be secure while one of them is breathing.”
Eskra looked at him thoughtfully, and held the light a little higher as she judged his mood. Then she nodded, and smiled a little, a thin, sympathetic, understanding smile. “And this is the man who called me ruthless. Truth has to be a little ruthless. Otherwise it gets softened from what people need to hear to no more than they want to hear.”
“I understand that duty well enough. When I’m not about my clan-lord’s business, wandering the wilderness in wintertime looking for wizards, and hiding from lord’s-men or fighting them—”
“And rescuing young women,” added Eskra. “I leave out almost falling down the stairs on top of them.”
“—I am Lord Gerin ar’Diskan’s Bannerman and Companion.”
“I understand ‘bannerman’ clearly enough. But the honorific form of the word ‘companion’? What does that mean?”
“I listen, and I don’t repeat what I hear; I give him my opinions on matters where no-one with anything to gain would dare; and I correct him when he can’t see that’s he’s wrong. It’s an honourable duty, and one which carries much respect.”
“You tell the truth,” said Eskra with approval. “You tell him what he needs to hear whether he wants to hear it or not. And you don’t sweeten what you say. Yes?”
“More or less, yes.”
“Then if that’s your honourable function, with all the rights and privileges that I presume go with it…”
“Less of those than you think,” Bayrd pointed out, though sounding cheerful enough about the fact that Eskra could surely tell how little it mattered to him.
“So. But do you tell good lies or bad lies? Or are you ever permitted to tell lies at all.”
“Truth is sometimes difficult, but preferable. Though every now and again,” he grinned quickly to cover a sudden feeling of unease at the way her line of questioning was trending, “it can get skewed a little. Or small, unimportant parts of it fall out.”
“Good. Then tell me something. Just as you would tell it to your lord as his honoured Companion. Without skewing, even slightly, and with all the parts in place. What do your people really think of sorcery and the Art Magic? Behind any smiles of welcome, what will they really think of me?”
Though it was dazzling him a little, Bayrd was grateful for the brightness of the light. It turned his face to black and white; prevented any shameful blush or pallor being visible; and gave him a reason to turn his head aside while he tried to shape a truthful answer that was not also a hurtful one. This was the one question he had secretly dreading, so much that he had forced it to the back of his mind and paid it no further heed – so that now it had taken him completely unprepared. That she had asked him how he told his lies was no help now; for all he was aware, her training in the Art Magic would let her hear a lie even before he spoke it. He wanted to say something encouraging, but he could not. His own honour, his courtesy towards Eskra, his respect for – no, dammit, his love for her just wouldn’t let him. Better she know now. And in the event he had no need to say a word.
Eskra nodded. “The hesitation and the silence tells me everything,” she said. “I’ll help your people. I’ll accept the gold they offer me. And then I’ll leave this country. One thing. I’ll need enough to take me far away from here. My dear countrymen can be as cruel as children in the most ordinary circumstances. The way they deal with traitors and renegades…” she stumbled over the words, as if realizing for the first time how much it now applied to her, “…is even less pleasant.”
“The Houses will honour you,” said Bayrd, speaking slowly and biting off each word as though it was something solid. “They will honour you, and the families will show you respect.”
“Easy to say. Why should they? Who will make them? You?”
“I will. My clan will. My name will.”
“How? Why? Bayrd—” it was only the second time that she had used his name, just as he had awkwardly avoided using hers until granted permission to do so, “—Bayrd, why should they do these things?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I know. I think I know. But I have to hear the words spoken aloud.”
Bayrd took a long breath in a useless attempt to ease the nervous flutter in his stomach, and swallowed down a throat gone dry. “I offer you a name,” he said finally, “to shield you from what fools might say. My name. My hand. My heart. All of them are yours, to accept or to refuse.”
“But not to return to you?”
“I still have my honour. But my heart is in your hands now, and it was freely given.”
The light surrounding the spellstave dimmed and wavered as her concentration wavered. How much of this she had already guessed, Bayrd didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. That ignorance might, just might, make a refusal hurt less. Then the light flared up again. Eskra had come to a decision.
“I refuse nothing,” she said, and though her face impossible to read in the harsh illumination from the spellstave, her eyes were huge and glistening despite its glare. “But I accept nothing. Yet. We have known each other for just th
ree hours. That is not enough on which to base a lifetime. Your heart is safe in my keeping, Bayrd ar’Talvlyn. And your honour, too.” She gave him a watery little smile. “At least now I know. That should make the same question easier to ask in the future.”
“Somewhat easier to hear, at least,” said Bayrd, forcing a weak laugh and relieved that the tremor in his chest had not communicated to his voice. She was right, of course. Light of Heaven, why was she always right! Three hours of casual and businesslike acquaintance was nothing like enough. He and Mahaut had known each other for…oh, three whole days, before they finally and cheerfully acknowledged what all their friends had seen as inevitable from the very start. “Until the future, then,” he said, and gave her the cold, precise salute reserved for Commanders whose orders were unpleasant but correct.
And after that, with all distractions carefully set aside, they both went looking for the sword.
For all that she had called it the citadel’s crypt, there were no graves down here, and no memorial stones or cinerary urns. Dunarat-hold had not existed long enough for anyone to be interred with ceremony, and neither grief nor anger would have permitted the Lord Ared, Elyan his wife and their child to be buried here. Mother and child would have gone home to their family vault – and Ared, like as not, would have fed the crows. If you believed the history.
So why his sword had been put down here and left, and never stolen in all those years, was a question without an answer. That made sense only if you believed the children’s tale instead. A wizard-forged blade which had caused such tragedy was not a weapon any right-thinking warrior would want to carry at his side, much less entrust it with the guarding of his honour and his life.
If it had been a sword of more common make, then there was no reason why it should still be here – or why it should have been concealed in the first place. No matter what the stories said, an ordinary sword was like a poorly trained horse, willing to work for whoever put it to use and recognizing no one master above all the rest. The first man to take it after Ared’s death would have kept it, worn it and used it – unless there was some reason why not. The only reason was in the story, not the history.
