The Crow

by Alison Croggon

  Saliman stared down at the table. "I suppose you have con­sidered whether there is an informant in our midst."

  "Aye." Hem couldn't see Hared's face, but his tone sent chills down his back. He would not like to be the traitor Hared uncovered, he thought; there would be no mercy. "But I trust all those in Nal-Ak-Burat, at least."

  Despite himself, Hem was listening hard, and now Hared looked up at him. He busied himself with his breakfast, trying to look as if he had not been eavesdropping.

  "Good morrow, lad," said Hared. "Saliman has told me of some of your adventures. We have seen those deathcrows, but only far off. We need someone with birdlore here: our chief birdmaster was killed only two days ago."

  Scarlet, Hem nodded. "I like birds," he blurted out.

  "Don't mind Hared," said Saliman. He seemed to be amused by Hem's awkwardness, which only made the boy feel more embarrassed. "He is as tough and twisted as an old olive tree, but you could not have a better man at your back in a tight spot."

  "Oh. I'm sure," said Hem. An awkward silence fell, and he spooned up the rest of his dohl as quickly as he could.

  "The dogsoldiers don't seem to be able to smell children," said Hared thoughtfully. "Our soldiers have noticed that much. And young Hem seems a smart lad. Perhaps the boy could spy for us. I have been wondering about those child armies – "

  "Hem will do no such thing," said Saliman sharply. "Do not think of it, Hared. He has not the skills."

  "Skill can be taught."

  Hem looked up into Hared's cold gaze, his heart quickening.

  "I wouldn't mind doing something like that," he said slowly. "I would like to do something. Zelika would, too. I mean, if you think I could help..."

  "I do not wish you to walk into harm's way, Hem," said Saliman.

  "There's nowhere out of harm's way," Hem answered bitterly. "Except here, maybe. And I can't live underground for the rest of my life." Suddenly he was overwhelmed by a longing to feel the warmth of the sun on his skin, to breathe wind that smelled of grass and trees, rather than the cold, unchanging air of underground. "I haven't seen the sunlight for so long."

  Saliman looked displeased, but said nothing further, and the conversation moved on to other topics. Hem, feeling a little more at ease now that Hared wasn't treating him as a potential traitor, furtively took the opportunity to study him. He found the Bard both fascinating and repellent; there was something in his face, a pitilessness edging to cruelty, that chilled him. It was difficult to work out Saliman's attitude toward him; he clearly trusted him, but Hem thought that he did not regard him as a friend.

  Hem learned that the network of caves beneath Savitir extended through Nazar almost to Den Raven, and were used by the Bards to gain information that was sent on to trusted Bards in Annar, or used to mount minor attacks on the Black Army behind their front lines. A resistance was gathering shape even as the Nameless One consolidated his power in the Suderain.

  "Our only power is in knowledge," Hared explained. "We are not many, but among our numbers we count some of the most skillful Bards in Edil-Amarandh; we may lose now, but we struggle so there is hope for the future. We are entering an age like the Great Silence, when the Nameless One held sway over all our world, and the Light was kept in just such places as these. All the same, our recent losses hit hard."

  Saliman nodded abstractedly. "There are many levels to this struggle," he said. "Remember Maerad's foredream, Hem? The voice that spoke to her out of the Shadow, and said: I live in every human heart?" He shot a piercing glance at Hared. "The time has come for every person to choose where they place their faith: and that choosing may be more difficult than it seems."

  "What do you mean?" asked Hem, bewildered by the sudden change of tack.

  "It may be a question of whether to use the weapons of the Dark in order to worst the Dark, or whether it is better to be defeated, with all that defeat means."

  "Your riddles are meaningless, my friend," growled Hared. "This is the problem with most Bards. It's so easy to debate right and wrong, while our house collapses around us. I do not think in such terms."

  "I know that, Hared," said Saliman softly. "Our situation is desperate indeed: I understand that as well as you do. But how can we say that we fight for the Light, if we show ourselves no better than the Dark?"

  Hared's lips tightened into a thin, unforgiving line, and an expression of mortal offense flashed over his face. In the accompanying silence, Hem looked from Bard to Bard, feeling suddenly alarmed. For a moment the tension that flared between them made him wonder if knives would be drawn. They seemed to be arguing, but he had no idea what about: perhaps earlier, before he came into the room, they had been debating some tactic of which Saliman deeply disapproved.

  Hared laughed, and the moment passed as if it had never been. "You ask difficult questions," he said. "I suppose that is your special gift. I respect you for it, Saliman. But I tell you, there are times when choice is beyond us, and we must do what we must."

  Saliman smiled, but with an underlying grimness. "There is always a choice, my friend," he said heavily. "There is always a choice."

  XIV

  THE SKYLESS CITY

  It was some time before Hem breathed open air again. By then, living underground seemed almost normal; even Ire had regained his usual insouciance, and had become a favorite of the Bards at Nal-Ak-Burat, despite the almost immediate resumption of his bad habit of thieving bright objects.

  Within a day, Hem had met everyone in the small commu­nity that based themselves in the underground city. There were about sixteen Bards, as well as the six small children, who were kept there, as Zelika had said, because there was nowhere else to go. The children were mainly cared for by a Bard called Nimikera of Jerr-Niken, a silent woman who had been injured in some recent incident; the top of a vicious, barely healed scar was visible on her neck, running down toward her breast, and she walked with a bad limp.

  The Bards in Nal-Ak-Burat were only a small part of a net­work working behind the lines of the Black Army; most of them hid in the honeycomb of caves that ran beneath Savitir and Nazar. Saliman told Hem that their true number was kept secret; only the leaders – the five Bards they had met on their first encounter – knew the true extent of the resistance. This was to protect the network if any were captured by Imank's forces.

  "There is a chance that Hulls could scry them against their will, and find everything they know," Saliman explained. "So it is politic that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, lest we lose both."

  Hem had been scried during his short stay in Norloch, vol­untarily opening his mind to that of another Bard's. The thought of such an invasion, made without permission, made him shudder. "But what if Hared or someone were captured?" he asked. "Wouldn't the same thing happen?"

  "Do you remember how Dernhil killed himself, rather than be scried by Hulls and betray Maerad?" said Saliman. "That is the last defense. And Hared or any of the other Bards would do exactly that, if they were captured. But still, it is easier to keep a secret if you don't know it in the first place."

  Hared had again raised the question of Hem working for the Bards, and Hem, both excited and daunted by the prospect, had talked it over with Zelika. Initially, to his surprise, she was dubious.

  "I don't know, Hem," she said. "What could we do? Perhaps it is better to do as Saliman says, and to stay out of danger."

  Hem was so taken aback by Zelika's change of heart that he didn't know what to say. "But you want to fight the Black Army, don't you? Don't you want revenge for your family? To help the Light? You're the one who went to join the attack in Turbansk, not me – "

  Zelika avoided Hem's eye as she answered. "Yes, I did," she said. "And I learned my lesson. I am probably more use here, helping with the babies." Even as they spoke, she was dandling Banu on her lap.

  "But Hared says this is a way we might help," said Hem.

  "And what does Saliman say?"

  Hem was silent. Salim
an was against the idea, and angry with Hared for speaking to Hem about it without his consent; as Zelika knew very well, it had been a subject of contentious argument between the Bards. "But if we can help..." said Hem, waving his arms around with frustration. "If we could do something – Hared says we can help in ways that others can't."

  Zelika put Banu down and looked soberly at Hem, her head on one side.

  "That may well be true, but I don't trust Hared," she said. "I mean, it's not like he's a traitor or anything. It's just that he doesn't care about us; if we died, he would think it perfectly fine as long as he got the information he wanted. And even Hared admits it's dangerous work."

  "But there's nowhere that's not dangerous – " Hem began to argue, but Zelika interrupted.

  "Hem, I don't feel anymore that I want to die. Saliman wouldn't get so cross about it if he thought we would be all right. And it's not as if he exactly coddles us. After all, he let us stay in Turbansk, which was hardly safe."

  "Yes, I know." Hem pushed his fingers through his hair. He didn't understand why he was so attracted to the idea of help­ing the Bards in their perilous work against the Black Army. He just knew that when Hared had suggested the idea, his heart had jumped in his breast with a mixture of fear and excitement. Somehow, he felt he could do this work, and do it well. He was tired of feeling useless in the struggle against the Dark.

  But aside from that, a deep anger had begun to smolder inside him. He thought of how the Dark had blighted his life, almost from the moment he had been born; how the School that should have been his home had been burned to the ground, his family captured and slaughtered; and how he had been kid­napped by Hulls and put in the orphanage. His childhood had been stolen by the Nameless One, as surely as if he had burned the School and murdered his father with his own hands. And now his second home, Turbansk, lay in ruins like the first. He had no prospect of any other, apart from refuges like Nal-Ak-Burat.

  Nightmares had begun to torment him again. He would wake in his small room gasping and drenched in sweat, fending off half-remembered visions of the ceremony the Hulls had held to turn him into one of them, when they had ordered him to murder another boy from the orphanage called Mark. Hem hadn't known him well, but he quite liked him. His anguished, terrified, despairing face haunted Hem's waking hours. This was the Dark, he thought. This was its essence: the terror that stamped the faces of the innocent, the wanton cruelty that joyed in this terror, the horrifying indifference. He hated it with all his heart; and he wanted to do what he could to defeat it.

  He looked up and saw that Zelika was contemplating him with what he felt was an uncomfortably sharp perception. "I don't want to die, either," he mumbled. "But I can't stay here, doing nothing. I'll go mad."

  "Help me with the babies, then," said Zelika. "It's time for them to eat."

  "That's not what I meant," he said petulantly. But all the same, he followed her to the galley and ladled food out into bowls, puzzling over this new Zelika. She glanced at him as she fed Banu.

  "I know what you're thinking," she said.

  "Do you?" said Hem, with a touch of belligerence. "You're wondering why I don't want to fight."

  "Well, yes..."

  "It was the Second Gate. The Gate of Dreams, when we had to remember to get through." Hem nodded.

  "I saw the gate to my home, in Baladh. And you know, for a little while I really thought it was there." A longing woke in her voice. "I thought that if I ran through, I would be in Baladh again, with my little brother, Arlian, running up to me so I could pick him up. I thought I could sit with him by the pool of water lilies, and look down at the golden fish. We had a lot of fish, and they were so beautiful..."

  Zelika's voice wavered, and she wiped Banu's face briskly before she continued. "I'm not used to magery," she said. "I didn't understand that it would just vanish when I passed through. Saliman explained it all. But, I don't know, after that... I felt a bit different."

  Hem thought of the orphanage gate he had passed through in the Gate of Dreams, and then of Saliman's warning that he should choose his memory carefully. Perhaps he had chosen badly. Perhaps he had unwittingly brought into the city of Nal-Ak-Burat something of the anger and despair he had felt in Edinur, just as Zelika had found a fleeting vision of the peace of her lost home. Maybe that was why he felt such a desire to avenge himself against the Dark. But the thought did nothing to dispel his restlessness.

  Over the next few days, Hem and Zelika spent their spare time exploring Nal-Ak-Burat. Saliman reluctantly gave them permission, but told them to stay away from the northern and southern Gates, and to be careful – it was easy to get lost, and to end up wandering for hours through a maze of stone. And some places were perilous: there were stairways that wound up great cliffs that, if they had ever had handrails, now lacked them. A careless step could mean a fall of thirty spans or more.

  At first they confined their forays to the huge square and its surrounding alleys, which covered a large flat area that made up the heart of the city. It was easy to see why the Bards had chosen their current building – it had obviously been some kind of palace, where many people had lived, and was built to a human scale. The other buildings that flanked the south side of the square, some of them carved deep into the rocky walls, made the children feel like ants. They walked through rooms so high that the ceilings – if they existed at all, for there was little need for roofs underground – vanished into shadow high above their heads, while before them columns marched in unvarying rows, dwindling into the distance.

  The walls were most often decorated with murals similar to those they had seen in the entrance room to the palace, and they spent hours examining them. Some, in the inner rooms, were astoundingly well preserved, with colors almost as bright as they must have been when they were first painted. They told inscrutable stories: here a king was bowing to a giant heron, offering the bird what seemed to be a platter of fruit; there a line of men were chained together, being led by the same king in a war chariot, while behind them walked a giant cat plumed with feathers. Another picture showed what seemed to be the same prisoners being killed: a figure in a robe held a long knife, with which he was cutting the throat of one, while the others stood in a row behind him, as if they were next. Hem and Zelika passed by that scene quickly. In the next picture, a man stood with his arms outspread, and leaves grew from his limbs, as if he were transforming into a tree. Fascinated, Hem and Zelika traced the outlines of the runes that interleaved the pictures, wondering what they meant.

  "Perhaps that one," said Hem, indicating the tree man, "is an Elidhu. A wood Elidhu. Maerad says they can change their form."

  "I thought Bards could change, if they wanted to," said Zelika, looking curiously at Hem.

  "No. They can seem to change – that's easy."

  "Can you do that?" asked Zelika. She had never been very interested in Bardic magery, but her experience at the Gate of Dreams had sparked her curiosity.

  "Of course I can!" said Hem, slightly indignantly. Glimmer-spells were the least of enchantments, and even though he had paid small attention at the School of Turbansk, he could do illu­sions. He thought for a moment, then looked down at his hands. As Zelika watched, she gasped: green tendrils shot out of the ends of his fingers, and out of his arms and legs. As she watched, Hem burst into leaf before her eyes.

  "I didn't know you could do that," said Zelika, with a new respect in her voice.

  Hem lifted his hands, and the leaves vanished. "Any Bard can," he said dismissively. "The only problem is, it doesn't work on other Bards, unless they agree, of course. Or Hulls. So you can't fool Bard eyes."

  "Well, maybe the tree man is a Bard."

  "Maybe. Some kind of Bardic people lived here, for sure. This place is stiff with magery; you can feel it everywhere. It's woven into the very walls. But it's strange. You can feel it's very old, and it's like those pictures – you can't read it."

  "Might it be dangerous, do you think?" asked Zelika in a low v
oice. "They killed people. And who were the dead, in the First Gate?"

  Hem remembered the First Gate with a shudder. "All magery can be dangerous," he said, after a pause. "That's why Bards go on and on about the Balance. You don't have to be a Hull to do things that you might regret. But I'm not sure Bards could use this magic; it's too strange. Maybe if we could read the runes, they might explain something. I wonder what this place was for?"

  They looked around at the massive chamber. It was impossible to guess its use; maybe it had been some kind of throne room, or a meeting place for the people of the city. At one end there was a dais, raised the height of a man above the rest of the room; but like everything else, it revealed nothing, resonant with a massive significance that no one now could understand.

  "Maybe it was a temple of some kind," said Zelika.

  "A temple?" Hem looked inquiringly at Zelika; such things were unknown in Annar.

  "A place where people came to worship their gods."

  "You mean, like Elidhu? But people don't worship Elidhu..." began Hem.

  "In some places, people make shrines," said Zelika. "And they pray to their gods for help, if they need something."

  Hem looked confused. "Why don't they ask a Bard for a charm, then?" he asked. "That's what people usually do. When Bards are around, that is."

  "It's not like that. They believe in their gods, and they wor­ship them. It's kind of... how they explain the world. And how they work out good and bad."

  "Do you know anyone who does this?" asked Hem, aston­ished.

  Zelika looked at him slyly. "It's not so strange. Don't Bards worship the Light?"

  "Well, they... they don't exactly worship it," said Hem care­fully. "It's more about the Balance, and things like that – about how you act." He shook his head; this conversation made him feel slightly dizzy. "Do you know anyone who does it?"

  "I knew some who worshipped the Light, in Baladh," said Zelika.