by Tad Williams
The king’s words hung in the air, seeming so much the stuff of madness that for a moment Guthwulf felt sure he was dreaming. As moments passed and the chill room did not waver into some other shape, he had to force himself to speak once more.
“I don’t understand.”
“Nor should you. Not yet.” Elias leaned forward, his eyes bright as lamps burning behind thin green glass. “But someday you will, Guthwulf. I hope you live to understand everything. At this time, though, I cannot let you interfere with Pryrates, so if you feel you must leave the castle, I will understand. You are the only friend I have left. Your life is important to me.”
The Earl of Utanyeat wanted to laugh at such a bizarre statement, but the sense of sick unreality would not leave him. “But not as important to you as Pryrates?”
The king’s hand leaped out like a striking serpent, fastening on Guthwulf’s sleeve. “Don’t be a fool!” he rasped. “Pryrates is nothing! It is what Pryrates is helping me to do that matters. I told you that there were great things coming! But there will be a time first when things are ... changing.”
Guthwulf stared at the king’s feverish face and felt something die within him. “I have sensed some of the changes, Elias,” he said grimly. “I have seen others.”
His old friend looked back at him, then smiled oddly. “Ah. The castle, you mean. Yes, some of the changes are happening right here. But you still do not understand.”
Guthwulf was not practiced in patience. He fought to hold down his rage. “Help me to understand. Tell me what you do!”
The king shook his head. “You could not possibly make sense of it—not now, not this way.” He sat back again, his face sliding into shadow once more, so that it almost seemed as though the great fanged and black-socketed head was his own. A stretching silence followed. Guthwulf listened to the bleak voices of ravens in the courtyard.
“Come here, old friend,” Elias said at last, voice slow and measured. As Guthwulf looked up, the king slid his double-hilted sword part way from its scabbard. The metal gleamed darkly, black and crawling gray like the mottled belly of some ancient reptile. The ravens abruptly fell silent. “Come here,” the king repeated.
The Earl of Utanyeat could not tear his eyes from the sword. The rest of the room became gray and insubstantial; the sword itself seemed to glow without light, to make the very air heavy as stone. “Will you kill me now, Elias?” Guthwulf felt his words grow weighty, each one an effort to use. “Will you save Pryrates his trouble?”
“Touch the sword, Guthwulf,” Elias said. His eyes seemed to shine more brightly as the room darkened. “Come and touch the sword. Then you will understand.”
“No,” Guthwulf said weakly, but watched with horror as his arm moved forward as if by its own will. “I don’t want to touch the damned thing...” Now his hand hovered just above the ugly, slow-shimmering blade.
“Damned thing?” Elias laughed, his voice seeming far away. He reached out and took his friend’s hand, gentle as a lover. “You can’t begin to guess. Do you know what its name is?”
Guthwulf watched his fingers slowly flatten against the bruised surface of the sword. A deadening chill crept up his arm, countless icy needles pricking his flesh. Close behind the cold came a fiery blackness. Elias’ voice seemed to be falling away into the distance.
“... Jingizu is its name ...” the king called. “Its name is Sorrow ...”
And in the midst of the dreadful fog that enwrapped his heart, through the blanket of frost that covered and then entered his eyes and ears and mouth, Guthwulf felt the sword’s dreadful song of triumph. It hummed right through him, softly at first but growing ever stronger, a terrible, potent music that matched and then devoured his rhythms, that drowned out his weak and artless notes, until it had absorbed the entire song of his soul into its darkly triumphant tune.
Sorrow sang inside him, filling him. He heard it cry out with his voice, as though he had become the sword, or the sword had somehow become Guthwulf. Sorrow was alive and looking for something. Guthwulf was looking, too: he had now been subsumed in the alien melody. He and the blade were one.
Sorrow reached for its brothers.
He found them.
Two shining forms were there, just beyond his reach. Guthwulf longed to be with them, to join his proud melody to theirs, so that together they would make a music greater still. He yearned, a bloodless, warmthless desire, like a cracked bell straining to toll, like a lodestone aching for true north. They were three of a kind, he and these other two, three songs unlike any the world had heard—but each was incomplete without its fellows. He stretched toward his brothers as though to touch them, but they were too far away. Mere distance still separated them. No matter how he strained, Guthwulf could not bring them closer, could not join with them.
At last the delicate balance collapsed, sending him plunging down into an infinite nothingness, falling, falling, falling ...
Slowly he came to himself again—Guthwulf, a man born of woman—butstill he fell through blackness. He was terrified.
Time sped. He felt graveworms eating his flesh, felt himself coming apart deep within the black earth, rendered into innumerable particles that ached to scream without voices to do so; at the same moment, like a rushing wind, he flew laughing past the stars and into the endless places between life and death. For a moment the very door of Mystery swung open and a dark shadow stood beckoning in the doorway ...
Long after Elias had sheathed the sword, Guthwulf still lay choking on the steps before the Dragonbone Chair, his eyes burning with tears, his fingers helplessly flexing.
“Now can you understand?” The king said, beaming with pleasure as though he had just given his friend a taste of a singularly splendid wine. “Do you understand why I must not fail?”
The Earl of Utanyeat got slowly to his feet. His clothes were soiled and spattered. He turned wordlessly from his liege lord and staggered across the throne room floor, pushing through the door and into the hallway without looking back.
“Do you see?” Elias shouted after him.
A trio of ravens fluttered down to the windowsill. They stood close together, their yellow eyes intent.
“Guthwulf?” Elias was no longer shouting, but still his voice carried through the silent room like a tolling bell. “Come back, old friend.”
“Look, Binabik!” Simon cried. “What are those birds doing?!”
The troll followed Simon’s pointing finger. The ravens were wheeling madly about the sky overhead, flying in long, looping circles.
“They are upset, perhaps,” Binabik shrugged. “I do not have much knowledge of the ways of such things ...”
“No, they’re looking for something!” Simon said, excited. “They’re looking for something! I know it! Just look at them!”
“But they are not leaving the air above us.” Binabik raised his voice as the ravens began to call back and forth, their croaking voices sharp as blades in the still air.
Sludig had reined up his horse, too, and was staring up at the strange exhibition. He narrowed his eyes. “If this is not some deviltry,” he said, “then I am not an Aedonite. The raven was Old One-Eye’s bird, back in the dark days ...” He trailed off as he saw something new. “There!” he said, pointing. “Is that not some other bird they are chasing?”
Now Simon could see it too: a smaller gray shape that flitted among the black ones, darting wildly, now this way, now that. At every turn it seemed to find one of the larger birds already there. It was tiring, Simon could see plainly, its loops becoming ever more ragged, its escapes narrower.
“It’s a sparrow!” Simon cried. “Like the ones Morgenes had! They’re going to kill it!”
Even as he spoke, the swooping circle of ravens seemed to sense that the quarry was nearing its limits. The whirling funnel contracted and the croaking voices rose as if in triumph. Then, just when it seemed the hunt was over, the sparrow found an open space and burst free of the black ring, darting unevenly towar
d a stand of fir trees half a furlong away. The ravens, shrieking, whirled in pursuit.
“I do not think it chance that such a bird should be here,” Binabik said, unscrewing his walking stick to shake free his pouch of darts. “Or that the ravens would be waiting with such patientness just where we are.” He grabbed Qantaqa’s hackles. “Chok, Qantaqa!” he cried. “Ummu chok!”
The wolf sprang away, churning the snow beneath her broad paws. Sludig dug in his heels and his mount leaped after her. Simon, cursing beneath his breath, wrestled for a moment with Homefinder’s reins. By the time he had them sorted out, she had decided to follow Sludig’s horse anyway. Simon clung to her neck as they pounded over the uneven snow, hoof-churned sleet burning his eyes.
The ravens were circling the copse like a swarm of black bees. Binabik, in the lead, vanished among the close-standing trunks. Sludig went just after, his spear now in his hand. Simon had a moment to wonder how the Rimmersman would kill birds with a heavy spear, then the line of trees was looming before him as well. He pulled up on the reins, slowing his horse. He ducked his head beneath a low-hanging branch, but was not fast enough to avoid a clump of snow falling into the loose hood of his cloak and slithering down his neck.
Binabik stood beside Qantaqa at the center of the copse, the hollow tube to his mouth. The troll’s cheeks puffed; a moment later a large black bundle fell down through the branches overhead, flapping in a slow circle on the white ground before it died.
“There!” Binabik said, gesturing. Sludig poked upward with his spear, rattling its point among the tree limbs as Qantaqa gave vent to a sharp, excited bark.
A black wing skimmed by Simon’s face. The raven struck at the back of Sludig’s head, its claws scrabbling impotently against the metal of his helm. Another one swooped down from above, squawking, whirling about the Rimmersman’s arms as he plied the spear.
Why aren’t I wearing a helmet? Simon thought disgustedly as he raised his hand before his suddenly vulnerable eyes.
The little copse raged with the angry voices of birds. Qantaqa had her front paws up on a tree trunk, shaking her head from side to side as if she had already caught one of them.
Something small and still as a tiny snowball dropped from the tree overhead. Binabik fell to his knees at the Rimmersman’s feet and cupped it in his hands.
“I have it!” he cried. “Let us be going into the open! Sosa, Qantaqa!” He clambered onto the wolfs back, his hand now tucked inside his jacket. He had to duck beneath the onslaught of one of the ravens; the haft of Sludig’s spear whistled through the space his head had just vacated, smacking the bird like a club, shattering it into a puff of dark feathers. A moment later the wolf had carried Binabik out from beneath the trees. Simon and Sludig quickly followed.
Despite the angry voices of the birds behind them, the open ground outside seemed remarkably still to Simon. He turned to look back. Hard yellow eyes stared from the uppermost branches, but the ravens did not follow.
“You saved the bird?” he asked.
“Let us be riding farther away,” Binabik said. “Then we will look to what we have.”
When they stopped, the troll took his hand from beneath his skin jacket. He opened it slowly, as though not sure what he might find there. The bird nestled inside was dead, or nearly so. It lay on its side unstirring, its ragged wounds striped with blood. There was a shred of parchment about its leg.
“I was thinking this could be,” Binabik said, looking over his shoulder. The dark silhouettes of a dozen ravens sat like hunch-shouldered inquisitors in the nearest tree. “I am afraid that we are more late than we should have been.”
His small finger unfurled the parchment. It had been chewed or torn until but a part of it remained. “A fragment, only,” Binabik said sadly.
Simon looked at the tiny runes dotting the ragged strip. “We could go back to the trees and look for the rest,” he said, disliking the idea mightily even as he said it.
The troll shook his head. “I have a sureness that the rest has found its way down a raven gullet—as would this scrap, too, and the messenger, if we had been later still.” He squinted at it. “Few words am I making out, but I feel no doubt it was meant for us. See?” He pointed at a minute squiggle. “The circle and feather of the League of the Scroll. It was sent by a Scrollbearer.”
“Who?” Simon asked.
“Patience, Simon-friend. Perhaps the remaining message will tell.” He held the curling strip as flat as he could. “Two bits only can I read,” he said. “This, saying: ‘... ry of false messengers,’ and this: ‘Make haste. The Storm is spr ...’ Then it is signed below with the League’s mark.”
“False messenger,” Simon breathed, dread creeping through him. “That was the dream I had in Geloë’s house. Doctor Morgenes told me to beware the false messenger.” He tried to push away the memory of that dream. In it the doctor had been a charred corpse.
“‘Be wary of false messengers’ is then what it is likely meaning,” Binabik said, nodding his head. “‘Make haste. The Storm is spr ...’ Spreading, I am supposing.”
The great fear Simon had kept suppressed for several days came crawling back. “False messenger,” he repeated helplessly. “What can it mean? Who wrote it, Binabik?”
The troll shook his head. He tucked the sliver of parchment in his bag and then kneeled, scraping a hole in the snow. “It is a Scrollbearer, and there are not many now alive. It might be Jarnauga, if he still lives. There is also Dinivan in Nabban.” He laid the little gray bird in the hole and tenderly covered it over.
“Dinivan?” Simon asked.
“He is the helper of the Lector Ranessin, the head of your Mother Church,” Binabik said. “A very good man.”
Sludig, who had stood silent, suddenly spoke. “The lector is part of your heathen circle?” he said wonderingly. “With trolls and such?”
Binabik smiled a tiny smile. “Not the lector. Father Dinivan, his helper. And it is not a ‘heathen circle,’ Sludig, but a band of those who wished the preserving of important knowledge—for just such times as these are.” He frowned. “I am thinking of who else it might be who was writing this message to us—or to me, rather, for it is my master’s arts that likely drew the bird here to me. If not one of the two I mentioned, then I cannot be saying, for Morgenes and my master Ookequk are dead. There are no other Scrollbearers I know of, unless new ones have been chosen.”
“Could it be Geloë?” Simon asked.
Binabik thought for a moment, then shook his head. “She is one of the wisest of the wise, but she has never been a true Scrollbearer, and I am doubting she would use the League’s rune in place of her own.” He mounted up onto Qantaqa’s back. “We will think of the meaning of this warning as we ride. There are many messengers who have led us to this place, and many others we will doubtlessly be meeting in days and weeks to come. Which are false? It is a puzzle of great difficulty.”
“Look, the ravens are flying!” Sludig cried. Simon and Binabik turned to see the birds swarm up from the stand of trees like smoke, swirling in the gray sky before wheeling away into the northwest, their disdainful voices echoing.
“They have done what they were sent for doing,” Binabik said. “Now they are headed back to Stormspike, do you suppose?”
Simon’s cold fear deepened. “You mean ... the Storm King sent them after us?”
“I have little doubt that they were meant to keep that message from our eyes,” Binabik said, leaning forward to pick his walking stick from the ground.
Simon turned to follow the flight of the vanishing ravens. He almost expected to see a dark figure looming on the northern horizon, a burning red gaze in a faceless black head.
“Those storm clouds on the horizon look very dark,” Simon said. “A lot darker than they did before.”
“The lad’s right.” Sludig glowered. “That’s an ugly storm gathering.”
Binabik sighed. His round face was grim, too. “The last part of the message we all of u
s understand. The storm is spreading, in more than one way only. We have a long journeying ahead over open and unprotected country. We will need to go with all the speed that we can be making.”
Qantaqa started ahead. Simon and Sludig spurred their horses forward. Prompted by something he did not understand, Simon looked back once more, although he knew what he would see.
The ravens, now little more than black specks on the wind, were fading from sight into the dark swell of the gathering storm.
13
The Stallion Clan
The prince’s company came out at last onto the plains after nearly a month in the vast, ancient forest. As they broke through the last line of trees the grasslands opened before them, a floor of uneven turf shrouded by morning mist, merging seamlessly with the gray horizon.
Father Strangyeard sped his pace to catch up with Geloë. The witch woman was striding purposefully out onto the flatland, wet stems falling before her approach.
“Valada Geloë,” Strangyeard said breathlessly, “ah, this is a marvelous book Morgenes has written. Marvelous! Valada Geloë, have you read this passage?” He tried to juggle the loose pages, stumbled over a tussock, and only barely retained his balance. “I think there is something here of importance. Ah, how silly of me, how foolish—there are many things of importance. What a marvelous book!”
Geloë put her hand on Leleth’s shoulder, bringing the child to a halt. The little girl did not look up, but stood where she had stopped, staring out into the mists.
“Strangyeard, you will do yourself an injury,” Geloë said brusquely. She looked at him expectantly. “Well?”
“Oh, dear,” the archivist said. He tugged at his eyepatch self-consciously, almost losing his armful of pages in the process. “I didn’t want you to stop walking. I can read and still keep up.”
