They were underground, moving through blackness; they were tiny, scuffling through a tunnel fit for rats. But that was not the whole story. The world felt strange. The deeper down they traveled, the more squeezed Innocence felt. There was a sense of disorientation that was strangely familiar, though he could not place it. Then as they emerged into a realm of eerie lights of many colors, Innocence’s memory returned to him with such force that he almost spoke of it to his captors.
But when he looked at his nearest captors in the bizarre lighting, hit by blues and reds and yellows flashing from all directions, he did not see young women. He beheld great spherical tangles of yarn comparable to his own size, taking on whatever primary color was lighting them most strongly, their ends flayed in several directions like those of many-armed sea creatures. Only Very Wise Cross Girl still appeared human.
The tentacles that touched him still felt like hands, and indeed the points of contact split into five smaller tendrils resembling fingers. It was that small detail, after everything else, that finally made Innocence yelp and close his eyes. His screech was unbecoming for either a bold man of Kantenjord’s tales or a superior man of Qiangguo’s classics.
When he opened his eyes again, all the girls were girls again, though Innocence eyed their swishing cow’s tails with fresh alarm. Only Very Wise Cross Girl lacked one. Her companions giggled at his discomfort, while she said, “Now you’ve spied the uldra-girls sideways, as we entered our world.”
“Your world? Are we beyond Earthe?” For he’d remembered the sensation that reminded him of the feeling of moments before. It had been somewhat like the transition between the Scroll of Years and the world of his parents.
“Not outside, but it’s a good guess. We’re more inside, you see. Not just under the ground but between the folds of reality’s skein. Welcome to the steading of Sølvlyss.”
By now Innocence’s eyes had adjusted enough that he could appreciate the cavern before them. He couldn’t trust his conceptions of size anymore, but it appeared to be a space miles across, with a jagged ceiling thousands of feet overhead, misty with small clouds. That he could appreciate the view at all was the work of immense outcroppings of crystal scattered upon walls and ceiling, each shining region blazing with its own primary color. Where the colors met in proximity, mixed hues appeared, and thus the cavern seemed painted by an exuberant artist obsessed with rainbows.
Under his feet was not stone but soil, covered in golden grass. The meadow filled the cavern, interrupted by hills of the shining crystal, by several shimmering streams, and by a rocky hill in the distance, rising beside the cavern’s far wall. Upon these heights stood a turreted castle whose construction seemed to be all of silver, giving an impression of gigantic cups, coins, and blades. A drawbridge shaped like a vast dagger jabbed across from a tunnel in the rock, crossing a turbulent stream.
Innocence didn’t feel drugged any longer and thus lacked that explanation for what he saw. He lurched away from the girls’ clutches, and they let him go, evidently feeling he was thoroughly trapped. Looking back, he had to agree: the tunnel behind them had disappeared.
“Very well,” he said, in what he hoped was a firm, proud voice. “You’ve got me. What do you want with me?”
There commenced more of the discomfiting giggling, but “Earl Morksol wants you,” said the tail-less girl, the only one who’d yet spoken any words.
“I suppose he’s in the castle?” Innocence managed to say. “Lead on.”
They laughed at that too. He forced a smile on his face and walked along with false merriment.
Here and there the girls waved at farmers and shepherds. A few were cow’s-tailed women, but most were different varieties of the hidden folk. The majority were slight, slender humanoids with translucent skin, through which could be viewed peculiar organs resembling many-faceted jewels, as if in murky specimen jars. This type of folk took on the dominant color of their surroundings, and it was as though living fragments of rainbow waved them on. There were less common varieties, such as gray, wizened beings who looked as though all color had been drained away, leaving a cold core of purpose; these nodded gravely when Innocence’s escorts passed. And there were others who looked like human adults but with a child’s stature, with hair like lichen, bramble, or moss peeking from underneath conical hats of red, yellow, or blue.
And sometimes he apparently saw some of the inhabitants “sideways,” for he spotted balls of living yarn of variable stature, from pebble-sized to boulder-sized to a hazy shape in the distance that rivaled the castle, and from which he quickly averted his eyes. When he nerved himself to look again it was gone.
Now they neared the fortress, guarded by a stream that surged and retreated and expanded again like the edge of an ocean, for all that it was but twenty feet across. Upon the dagger-shaped drawbridge stood two warriors in strange armor that appeared to be tinted glass. As they were the transparent sort of denizen, Innocence could almost see right through them. The guards asked for no explanation but pointed toward the open gate with swords embossed with swirling geometric designs, each gleaming in the land’s wealth of colors.
The castle itself was filled with servants clad in the richest of silks waiting upon a handful of nobles dressed in peasant clothes. The girls greeted these latter, and soon they had an entourage escorting them into a throne room. The throne was carved from an immense dead tree, twisting in designs recalling dragons, wolves, sea serpents, and beasts harder to identify. Upon it sat one of the wizened gray folk. He wore a simple brown robe tied with a golden rope, and a wide-brimmed straw hat.
“So this is him?”
“Yes, Father,” said the tail-less girl.
“Let’s see his hands.” Innocence’s captors spread his fingers and lifted his palms for the old fellow to see. There seemed little point in resisting.
“Hm. Very well, release him.” Freed, Innocence stretched his arms and clenched his fists. “So, daughter, would you have him?” said the fellow on the throne.
The girl smiled. Innocence felt conflicted feelings. “He’s too young yet,” she said. “He should plow a field for a while first. Four years, I think. But we could get engaged right now.”
“Wise,” said the lord. “Boy, what is your name?”
“I am Askelad,” Innocence managed to say, bowing in the manner of Qiangguo. “What is this place? Who are you people?”
“You are in Sølvlyss, and I am Earl Morksol. We are called by the Kantenings the uldra, and by the Swanlanders and Eldshoren the delven, though on the Spiral Sea we are often the fata. Yet many will simply say ‘the hidden folk.’”
On impulse, Innocence asked, “Do your people live in Qiangguo? Do some of your girls resemble foxes?”
“Qiangguo, Qiangguo . . .” The earl scratched his chin. “It seems to me we do have relations in such a land, though we are long out of touch. As for foxes . . . in adolescence we have some in-betweenness about our forms, as with my daughter’s friends the dairymaids. Perhaps in the land you name, our youth are fond of foxes. We are quite variable. Once we were nearly as limited as you, when we dwelled on the opposite side of the coin that is the Earthe. But when a great catastrophe drove us into the underground places, we wandered far in darkness and learned strange talents. Bereft of light and open air, we opened passageways into realms that had both, though we had to change ourselves to suit the new environments. Even when we reached your side of the Earthe, many of us still preferred the hidden places under the skin of reality. We still have cousins who live much as you do, in singular forms, out in the open. We call them sky-delven, and they in turn call us the deep-delven, though in these isles we prefer to say ‘uldra,’ as the Kantenings do.”
Innocence was regaining his composure. It was easier to find his words while speaking with the earl; he was free of the stammering that seemed to plague him around every young woman but A-Girl-Is-A-Joy. “But if that’s all true then what do you want with me? I am human. I do not belong in these strange
spaces.”
“From time to time in our long existence, we become untethered from reality. Uldra and whole uldra-realms can flit into the cosmic void, and what becomes of them, none can say. Adding human presences to our lands helps guard against this. Adding human blood to our lines is effective too. It also guards against a difficulty we have with metal; the more human blood in our lineage, the better we can cope with the poison metal brings to us. You are quite mundane.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, future son-in-law, that you are both ordinary, and that you are ‘of the world,’ tying us more thoroughly to the here and now.”
“Future son-in-law. So . . . I am supposed to . . . marry . . . um, her.” There were squeaks of suppressed hilarity nearby. “Because I’m . . . mundane.”
“You both are! My adopted daughter here is a changeling, human in form, though uldra in mind. Together you can make many princes and princesses to give our realm many sources of human blood. But that’s not all there is to it, boy. You have a power within you, something we’ve not seen in generations. Power that could wake dragons. Maybe you are the Runemarked King. Maybe not. But you will remain our guest. Alfhild, do you plight your troth with this lad?”
“Yes,” said the earl’s daughter.
“Don’t I get a say in this?” Innocence asked.
“No,” was Alfhild’s matter-of-fact answer.
“You are a hostage prince,” said the earl, not unkindly, “but you lack a country, and there is no one to ransom you. Prepare a feast!”
Innocence got no more answers from Earl Morksol, and in the midst of the hidden folk’s sudden rushing about and bellowing about icemeat and frothfish and shroombread and sweetgreens, he paradoxically found himself alone in the chaos. Even Alfhild ignored him, though her friends provided him with new peasant garb to slip over his nightclothes—white shirt and stockings, red vest, black pants, and shoes—before they too danced away in the general bustle.
They truly thought him incapable of escape. Maybe they were right. He shivered, a captive guest abducted in the dark of the morn. Would Nan and Freidar try to rescue him? Had they any notion how?
He shuffled into a corner framed by an empty suit of glass armor and a tapestry depicting a bizarre assortment of uldra forging a huge magic axe. He couldn’t hope for outside escape. His guardians were helpful, but they were mortal. He needed Deadfall now, but there’d been no word of the magic carpet in all his time in Fiskegard.
Nevertheless he was supposed to have power. Earl Morksol confirmed it. It seemed unfair to be captured over a power he had no ability to use.
He grappled with his own panic, seized that feeling of unfairness, and envisioned it as an axe driven through the flesh of reality.
I am Innocence Gaunt! Chosen of the chi of the Heavenwalls! I have escaped from the Scroll of Years, the Karvaks, and the moon! Even in this mad place, I am who I am!
Where before, on Fiskegard, there was no response to his plea, here in Sølvlyss the castle rumbled and shook. Innocence felt a tingling in his skin. He did not know how to control his power, but the land responded.
He smiled.
Now the gyrating indifference of the uldra ceased, and the simply dressed nobles and beautifully garbed servants stared at him. The glass armor next to him swiveled and brought a sword to bear; for it had been inhabited the whole time by one of the translucent folk. Innocence had been too preoccupied to notice.
Innocence remembered his training. He slipped close to the glass knight, inside the reach of the sword, in the maneuver known as Sly Fox. Immediately he pivoted to perform Pinching Lobster upon the sword-arm, while employing the Grass-Cutter Kick to topple the uldra, who went down in a clatter. Innocence yanked the tapestry from the wall and covered the knight. He fled for the gate.
“How can you leave me?” demanded Alfhild, the earl’s daughter. “After all we’ve been through together!”
“Delightful!” Innocence yelled back, nearly losing his balance on the sharp-edged moat bridge. “But I think it’s too early for betrothals!” Two more glass knights stomped over from the far side, and Earl Morksol and Alfhild advanced from the nearer. He looked down at the moat and saw its waters surging as though he beheld wavetops of the deepest sea.
“You ate from my hand,” said Alfhild. “It might be too early for betrothals, but it is too late for escape.”
“To eat of our food,” said Earl Morksol, “is to partake of our reality. You cannot leave.”
“It was only a morsel,” Innocence protested.
“To eat is to eat,” said the earl.
“Enough,” said Alfhild, advancing, enraged. She was no longer quite so fetching. “I will slap the mischief from you, boy.”
Her words unlocked something within him. Like a song heard from far over the hills, he remembered being very small, and his mother telling him stories. In one of them, the daughter of the Earthe itself was trapped in an underworld, bringing her mother into a despairing winter. The daughter might have escaped for good, but she’d unthinkingly eaten a few pomegranate seeds underground. She must always return for part of the year, and thus the world had to endure the cold for a time.
But she had escaped.
If they were so sure they had him, he wondered, why were they so set on serving him a feast?
Innocence called out, “I will return to my world, even as will the spring.” He leapt.
Entering the moat was like resuming his plunge from the moon into the sea. He sputtered and struggled for breath.
“You must do the honorable thing!” Morksol called down. “Does it not say in your Swan scripture that to look upon a woman with desire is morally the same as having relations with her? You have looked upon my daughter, eaten from her fingertips. You belong to her.”
It’s not my Swan scripture, Innocence thought, and found the strength to swim. He thought of the sage of Qiangguo who said, “Only one of virtue truly has the discernment to love and hate people for who they are.” He might not be a man of virtue, but he had reason to hate, not love, his captors. Anger urged him on. He might be commencing manhood, but it would be in his own time, on his own terms.
He’d noticed that this ocean-like stream did not fully envelop the castle of Sølvlyss but had a horseshoe shape, emerging from and returning to the walls of the great cavern. And it was his hunch that it was easier to cross from this place to his own world at the cavern edges. Otherwise why wouldn’t Alfhild’s passageway have led directly to her father’s castle?
Of course, by the same reasoning, if this border had led to Fiskegard, Alfhild would have used it. He’d probably not be returning to the Pickled Rat. No help for it.
He swam, throwing his full strength into the act, and at last reached a place where the water surged into the rock. He sensed glass knights upon the nearby shore. The current carried him into a small cave, where it battered him against an opening he could not pass. He called upon the power in him, this time not with language but with wordless rage. He stretched out his arms and shoved, willing the structure of the place to shatter.
The land shook. With desperate fury he found words. He called upon all the gods and holy ones he could think of, the Swan, Torden, the Painter of Clouds, the Celestial Emperor, the Undetermined. He murmured the name of Joy.
He screamed for his mother.
Through the rumble of an earthquake, he heard other screams as well. Above all the wailing rose the voice of Earl Morksol. “Very well! I will not accept the damage you will wreak within Sølvlyss! If you must escape down this path, escape you will! But you may find captivity was far more pleasant, young fool!”
There was a sensation as of wrestling with a fierce opponent who suddenly quits the match.
Innocence plunged into a strange darkness. Disorientation snuffed his consciousness.
When he came to, he lay soaked in his uldra-given garb beside a gigantic gray boulder, a solitary feature upon a wide brown plain of scrubland that looked nothing
like either Sølvlyss or Fiskegard. Hills gave way to mountains in the distance, palomino with white snow and dark rock. A deep blue sky was similarly divided by swirls of white cloud. The wind moaned. He rose. All the feeling of power had fled him, and he leaned against the boulder, shivering, spent. He did not know where he was, when it was, or even what size he was. He could be sure of only two things.
He was his own master. And if he could not find shelter soon, he would shortly freeze to death.
CHAPTER 3
RUNEMARK
At first Al-Saqr raced over the lands tributary to Amberhorn and beyond into woodland borderlands of walled towns and chieftains, neither commanded by the mighty Eldshore nor the nomads of the Wheelgreen. Even with the need to zig and zag to avoid mountains and pursuit, progress was far swifter than a similar journey on foot. Yet to Gaunt it felt as though all the world crowded between them and Innocence.
On the evening of the first full day after Amberhorn, when it was clear they’d evaded the city’s wrath, Gaunt joined Bone in entering the world of the Scroll of Years. Gaunt took the scroll from Snow Pine and put her hand upon Bone’s.
“Say hello for me,” A-Girl-Is-A-Joy said.
“You only emerged this morning,” Gaunt said.
“But it’s not the same morning for them.”
Gaunt let the painting’s power pull them inside, and the gondola of Al-Saqr vanished.
In the world of the scroll it was a misty daytime, not a clear rosy evening. Spindly mountains rose out of a sea of white cloud, and amid the gnarled trees of one such mountain stood the pagoda of a nameless monastery of the philosophy—or religion, or society—called the Forest. Gaunt and Bone drifted hand in hand, like two falling leaves whose stems were accidentally intertwined, until they settled onto a wide ledge beside a mountain path. A trio of leaning trees, stretching their branches into the abyss, protected them from falling into the fog. Trees on nearby mountains stretched similarly, as though beckoning.
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