Keeper of the Keys

by Janny Wurts

  Fire obliterated the scene, then smoke smothered flame into shadows.

  'To question is to die, Ciengarde,' cried the voice of recent memory.

  Jaric sweated on his bed of furs. The dark closed over his mind like a pool, and somewhere a very young girl screamed once in terrible agony.

  Soon after, the vision lost coherence. Jaric tossed, adrift in a half trance between waking and sleep. Dimly he was aware of hands that raised him up, forced broth between his locked teeth. Once, when the falls danced white-etched in the lightning of a late-season storm, he sensed the seeress at his side, the Sight she had gained in place of vision trained intently on his face.

  His lips shaped speech with great difficulty. 'Was that your sister, or mother, who failed the old one's legacy?'

  The Lady gave no answer.

  Jaric drew a ragged breath. Though uncertain whether the storm-lit figure was a dream, an apparition, or a delusion born of strong drugs and poison, he persisted. 'Someone close to you died. If you suffered the old one's inheritance in her stead, and my actions are to blame, I am sorry.'

  The hill priestess stirred, the sigh of her knot-worked robes all but lost in the rush of the falls. 'Power cannot bend to sorrow, Ciengarde.'

  Jaric wrestled for strength to sit, but fingers reached out and bore him down. His helplessness that moment became a torment worse than pain. 'Is threat to Landfast, to Keithland, to every living tribe under your protection not cause enough? Lady, I must know. What became of the Keys to Elrinfaer?'

  His plea met implacable silence. Whether out of pique, or the inborn distrust of her kind, the seeress departed without reply. Dreams closed once more over the mind of Ivainson Jaric.

  * * *

  When next he awakened, he remembered, and did not ask again. Hillfolk came and went, tending his daily needs and changing his fouled dressings. The wounds in his shoulder gradually ceased to fester, and his intervals of delirium receded before increasing hours of lucidity. Yet the crippling weakness lingered. Jaric lay all but motionless, his senses filled with the crash and tumble of falling water. Two thoughts turned in his mind: had he claimed his inheritance sooner, his present suffering might have been avoided; since he had not, in his frailty only one argument remained that could force the seeress to break silence.

  For all his determination, a week passed before he was able to try. Even then, he had to wait for the brief interval when the eldest of several healers assigned to watch over him fell asleep. At the first of her wispy snores, Jaric rolled on his good side. He tossed off the suffocating furs. The Thienz venom had left him devastatingly weak; the slightest movement left him breathless, his forehead slick with sweat. Still he drove himself, quivering, to his knees. There he paused, while dizziness sucked at his balance. He waited, eyes closed, for the vertigo to subside, which took a fearfully long time.

  Perspiration cooled on his body and made him shake. Jaric bit his lip, forced his unwilling limbs to bear weight. The grotto wall lay barely two paces away; yet he reached it gasping as if he had run an endurance race. The curtains of the falls tumbled not an arm span distant. Backlit by moonlight, the water shimmered like faery silver, elusive and cold and forbidden. Jaric dragged himself upright against the stone and inched his way to the ledge.

  Spray showered over him like needles of ice. Jaric licked his lips for the clean, wild taste of it. His knees were trembling. Beyond his feet the water poured in thunderous, downsweeping torrents into darkness. Defying vertigo, Jaric watched droplets bounce off his toes and whirl unseen over the brink. A mapping text read long ago in the Kielmark's library claimed Cael's Falls dropped three hundred feet into a cauldron carved into rock. A second, newer work claimed the drop to be triple that. With a scholar's curiosity, Jaric wondered which was true.

  A sharp intake of breath cut short his reverie. Rough hands caught him back from the ledge, and he toppled in a heap at the feet of the Lady of the Spring. She wore no veil. Half-healed blind eyes seemed to sear him with reproach.

  'Ciengarde': the word pure anger at his recklessness; had he fallen, the future of humanity would have found oblivion with him.

  'Tell me what I need to know,' demanded Jaric, though he had spent all his strength, and that moment could barely manage speech.

  The seeress stamped her foot. Attendants rushed into the grotto, and at her command, they half carried, half dragged Jaric back to his furs.

  When he woke the next morning, a pair of clan warriors armed with axes stood guard at his feet. Humiliated, and wretchedly infuriated by his failure, Jaric shouted out loud to the seeress, who was not present, but who assuredly was listening. 'Am I a prisoner, then?'

  Yet when she answered his challenge, he started, for the roar of the falls had masked her approach. 'No prisoner, Ciengarde, except to the fate which binds you.'

  She stepped into view from the shadows behind his head, black-clad, and looking nothing like the child she actually was. Rooted in total acceptance of the powers which had torn her from youth, her poise was an embarrassment. Solemnly she extended his sword; knotted around the cross guard were the thongs of a familiar leather bag, darkened now with bloodstains. With a gesture of newfound respect, the seeress added, 'No prisoner, son of Ivain Firelord. Never that.'

  Driven by a wild surge of relief, Jaric reached for the weapon. He had been sixteen when he learned of his inheritance; seventeen when he assumed Anskiere's geas. Now, at eighteen, he had seen the greatest of his responsibilities ceded to the judgement of a twelve-year-old child whose courage left him disgraced. Jaric forced himself not to buckle. The weight of the steel bore down upon him and emphasized how thoroughly the Thienz venom had devastated his vitality. He let the cold length of the blade settle across his chest, then, with fingers that trembled, fumbled and felt the hard edges of Anskiere's basalt block. The Keys to Elrinfaer had been recovered. Drained with release, Jaric gripped the sword and its burden of wards until his hands went white. 'Thank you, Lady,' he managed at last in a whisper.

  The seeress watched with impassive, stony silence, as if a weight of sorrow measured her gift. Unmanned and desperate under the intensity of her gaze, and humbled by a debt he could not express, Jaric turned his face into the furs. She left finally without speaking, but the guards at his feet remained.

  Another week passed. The days all dawned grey behind the tumbling cataract of Cael's Falls. Jaric laboured at lifting his sword. Then as his hand began to steady, he tentatively attempted forms, while his guards commented in grunts upon his progress. Betweentimes they played at knucklebones, and for Jaric the rattle of the game pieces seemed to keep time to his pain. In time his persistence must have earned the clansmen's approval, for when the healers came to change the dressings on his shoulder, or feed him, or perform other less agreeable tasks, his guards offered him privacy by turning their backs. Night and day Jaric fought to recover the health the Thienz venom had sapped. Gradually his tissues began to heal; his pallor left him first, and then the debilitating tremble. Dexterity returned, and slowly, grudgingly, balance and the beginnings of strength. In time, steadied between the shoulders of the warriors, he was permitted to stand, and then with difficulty to walk.

  The moment he could cross the chamber unassisted, he demanded access to Callinde. The seeress denied him, until, by words and vehement gestures sketched upon the air, he made her understand that two fortnights' neglect should not be stretched out into three. His boat had fared poorly as a Thienz prize; ripped sails and rotted cordage might delay his sailing as surely as a relapse, and the demon hunters from Shadowfane would not wait to allow repairs.

  Yet five more days passed before the priestess granted grudging consent. Jaric arose on the following morning and neatly rolled up his furs. He donned his cleaned and mended clothes, and buckled on his sword. The two warriors assigned to attend him were barely old enough for beards. They flanked his steps as he left the seeress's grotto and made his way down a passage whose left-hand partition was a perpetual curtain of w
ater. The stone underfoot was glazed with damp, polished smooth by centuries of erosion. The wall on the right bore paintings of Kor's fall, and scenes of beast hunts and rituals whose meanings Jaric could only wonder upon.

  At last the corridor gave on to a ledge, and he stepped out into sunshine for the first time in thirty-seven days.

  The dazzle of reflection off the falls seared his vision. Blinking until his eyes could adjust, his shoulder pressed to the cliff face for support, Jaric made out a series of wooden rungs slotted into notches in the stone. The breeze smelled of balsam and leaf mould, woodsy scents familiar from Seitforest. Below, the falls roared and spattered off jutting shoulders of granite, to dash into lace-fine drifts of spume in a cauldron far, far beneath. To a sailor's eye, the second of the texts had listed the distance more accurately. Jaric swallowed, sweating to recall the time he had stood swaying on that brink, and the seeress's just anger in the moment she pulled him back.

  Behind him a warrior spoke in dialect, asking whether he was afraid of heights. Jaric shook his head. Below, like a model made of matchsticks, lay a scattering of huts and gardens, and the inevitable beaten circle of earth where wagons and teams of horses were picketed. Cael's Falls was a shrine rather than a settlement. Tribes came to consult their seer, or to leave offerings of food and fur for the staff who remained in her service. Beyond lay forests broken by pale marshlands and the russet basins of reed pools baked dry by late summer heat.

  'How far is the sea?' Jaric inquired, in what stilted bits of dialect he had managed to master during convalescence.

  The warrior in front of him grinned, his teeth very white against his weather-tanned face. 'Follow.'

  Never certain whether the oblique answers of hillmen were the result of his poor pronunciation, or the perverse reticence of their kind, Jaric made his way down the ledge towards the rungs. The drop beneath was sheer. Not at all sure his strength would last the descent, he swung his weight out, over air, and laboriously started down.

  There were alcoves with railings where climbers could pause and rest. Curled panting and sweating into the topmost of these, Jaric cursed his Thienz-weakened body while the warriors who accompanied him lounged upon the rungs above and below, laughing at a joke between themselves. Long before the ache in his muscles subsided, the Firelord's heir forced himself to his feet. He finished the climb this time without stopping, though the effort half killed him. He collapsed in a heap by the pool at the bottom, whooping air into taxed lungs. The fingers of both hands spasmed uncontrollably, and his vision spun.

  'A fool for courage, you are,' said one of the warriors, but whether he spoke out in mockery or disgust, Jaric never knew. The next instant he was scooped up in sinewed arms. Struggling not to inhale the ornamental feathers which trailed from his bearer's wristbands, he felt himself deposited on the withies of a skin boat. The floor tilted crazily as the second clansman stepped aboard and shoved off. Then the current snatched the frail craft from the bank.

  Whirled dizzy, and further disoriented by a spinning view of sky and wind-tossed treetops, Jaric fought an unseamanlike urge to be sick. In time he recovered enough to notice the warriors paddling furiously, spray and sweat lending a patina to their bronze skins. The roar of the falls receded, replaced in time by another thunder as the coracle jounced and skated over the crosscurrents of a rapid. Jaric managed, between dousings, to sit up. 'How far is the sea?'

  'Not far, Ciengarde,' assured the warrior in the stern. He nodded forward.

  Jaric turned to look as the coracle ducked and shot like a pinched melon seed into shallows. He raised himself to the gunwale in time to see a wall of dry reeds coming straight for his face. He yelped, ducked, and managed not to fall out as the coracle rammed and braked to a stop in an explosion of cattail down.

  The warriors slapped their knees and laughed. Then, amid a confusion of gestures, they thrust broken reed stems into Jaric's hands and drew lots to determine who should drag the mired craft free.

  The loser claimed his reed was a liar. Half in frustration, and half carried away by the exhilaration of the first freedom he had known in weeks, Jaric leapt the thwart to do the job himself. He no sooner touched bottom than he sank to his waist in brown muck.

  The warriors stared at him, suddenly silent. Then the nearer one spoke. 'Ciengarde, we usually use the pole wedged under the seat for this labour.'

  'Oh, Kor's Fires,' exclaimed Jaric. 'Did your seeress tell you I'd perish at the touch of a little water?' And he shoved the coracle so hard that both of his escorts overbalanced and fell with a smack into the brackish water of the reed bed.

  They came up spitting mud, reeds pinched in the soaked draggle of their skin garments.

  'How far is the sea?' Jaric demanded.

  'Oh, very close,' said the nearest, and with a wicked gleam in his eyes, flipped the coracle back and keeled him over full length in the swamp.

  XVIII

  Fabled Isle

  The three occupants of the coracle reached the coast at noon, slapping at insects and scratching chafed patches where damp leathers had irritated their skin. By now Jaric wore one of the warrior's wristbands. The young man who had offered the gift had received in exchange the cuff torn off Ivainson's second-best shirt. Yet whatever ebullience had developed between clansmen and Firelord's heir during the coracle ride down the creek dissolved upon arrival at the estuary. The two warriors became broodingly silent from the instant they stepped ashore. While the gulls screamed and dived overhead, they sauntered on to the beach head, stripped, and without a word or a glance at Jaric, began to scour their muddy leathers clean with sand.

  Left at a loss, and worn more than he cared to admit by the journey, Jaric finally searched out Callinde. She rested a short distance up the shoreline, beached dry above the tide mark. At first glance, little aboard her appeared amiss, but a stone's throw off her bow, between water and the ribbed detritus of weed left by the sea, lay a blackened patch in the sand. A great fire had burned there not long in the past. Abruptly Jaric felt a chill roughen his flesh.

  Sand rustled beside him. He looked up to find one of the warriors at his side. 'Tell me what happened,' Ivainson said softly.

  The clansman regarded him with expressionless eyes. 'This is not a thing for telling under the daylight, Ciengarde.'

  Wind blew, stirring Jaric's hair; the plumage stitched to his tribal wristband twisted right and left against his palm. The sun overhead suddenly seemed too hot, and the air, inexpressibly icy. 'Tell me,' he repeated. 'In the dark or the light, as Ciengarde I have the right to know.'

  The clansman bowed his head. As if signalled by the gesture, his companion down the beach shook sand from his leathers and arose. He walked still naked to his tribe fellow's side, and incongruously, Jaric realized they were brothers.

  'We wait, then, for the twilight,' said the elder.

  Jaric nodded, and without speaking strode off to tend Callinde. He spent the afternoon sanding away splinters where arrows and spears had scarred her planking, and scouring the odorous stains left by half-devoured fish heads. Then he set lines and sails to rights, and mended the worn shank of a stay. In time the sky reddened. As the sun sank beneath the western rim of the sea, a high, keening wail called him from his labours. The hillmen stood upon the beach, their shadows trailing across the blackened area where fires had burned not forty days before. They sank to their knees and squatted as the last sunlight died, and Jaric joined them. The cries of the gulls faded in the air. Twilight silvered the shoreline as, in words and stilted pictures scrawled in chilly sand, the heir of Ivain Firelord learned what the tribes of Cael's Falls had sacrificed to save him.

  The clansmen ended their account with a ritual song of lament. Then, unwilling to bed down in a place where blood had been shed, they arose and silently disappeared into the woods. Full dark had fallen. Jaric knelt motionless in the starlight beside the dead circle of ash. For a long time he listened to the rush and boom of incoming tide. Throughout he agonized for ea
ch and every life his reluctance had destroyed; the months he had tarried at

  Landfast searching for an alternative to his inheritance had been paid for by the deaths of thirty-eight men and women, and twelve children, without counting the old seeress's first successor, who had perished during her ritual of initiation.

  Jaric regarded the ashes, black as a pit in the darkness. Once he would not have understood the loyalty of the clans of southwest Elrinfaer, who had answered a summons that forced days and nights of travel with little food and no sleep, all for the sake of a stranger. That children had fallen ill under the hardships, and a wife had been left by the wayside in the throes of childbirth, could not be permitted to matter. The seeress had called the clans for a cause that brooked no delay. Jaric closed his hands into fists; the time was too late for regret. So said the young clansman who had recounted the struggle on the strand, where every tribe answerable to the shrine of Cael's Falls had stood forth to challenge the Thienz. The demons had guarded the Firelord's heir in force, and the powers they exerted upon the mind were by far too dangerous for a small band of raiders. Even children were needed to preoccupy the enemy. Unless Jaric was recovered alive, Shadowfane's triumph over humanity would inevitably follow, and even a single Thienz survivor might escape with the Keys to free the Mharg.

  Victory had come to the clans, but at cost. The old seeress had died breaking the hold upon Jaric's mind. Her second, surviving successor was gifted with great talent, but woefully undernamed. Much knowledge had been lost. Admitting this, the young clansman had shrugged. 'The sea will wear away the strongest shoreline, but Ciengarde must sail if the land is to remain fertile. Can a man abjure the will of the Presence, and live?'

  Jaric traced a finger through the ash that remained of the thirty-eight who had died, among them the father and the sister of the brothers who had escorted him to Callinde. He drew a shuddering breath, but did not weep for the young boy who later had run himself to exhaustion and death, to bring the herbs and minerals the Presence had named to the priestess, that an antidote for Thienz venom could be mixed to keep hope alive. Once the burden of such relentless sacrifice would have broken Ivainson Jaric. But not now; he had changed profoundly in the months between Landfast and his striving for the Isle of the Vaere. Now Jaric laid his palms upon gritty earth and quietly swore his oath to the dead. Callinde would sail at dawn.