The Heir To The North

by Steven Poore

  “Hold the light still, please,” Karak said at last. He looked up from beneath lowered brows, his eyes alarmingly pin-bright. “This script is difficult enough to read as it is.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cassia replied. She changed position again, using one arm to support the other. This was not what she had expected to be doing. Perhaps this whole adventure was a waste of time and energy. If she hadn’t listened to Arca’s far-fetched yarn, she might even have stumbled across the warlock’s townhouse by now!

  Her mind drifted, rising from the depths of the city’s archive to float over the temple district. She imagined that the clouds had passed over, and the sun now warmed the stones of the streets and markets. Meredith would be stalking through the crowds, men and women parting before him like waves against a steadfast rock. Cassia still did not know how he and Baum spent their days, or how they had organised their own search for Malessar, so her fantasy fell short quickly, reverting to the same image over and over again. After a while Meredith’s face gained a smile and he reached out a hand to her, just as he had done in the tavern’s yard . . .

  “Wake up, boy.”

  It was not Meredith’s hand that shook her arm. She jerked upright and managed to catch the lantern just before it fell from her fingers to smash upon the floor.

  Karak took the lantern from her firmly, and set it down on the edge of the nearest shelf, as far from the dust-covered scroll cases as possible. “That would have been interesting,” he said. “In any case, it disproves one hypothesis.”

  She was still too dozy to understand what he meant, and her confusion must have shown in her eyes, as the corner of Karak’s mouth quirked upward. “Every single boy I have employed so far falls asleep on the floor halfway through the day. A small number of men here have speculated on whether the same would happen to a girl.”

  Cassia checked over her shoulder in alarm, but she saw nothing at the edge of the lantern’s dim light. Out there in the dark, however . . . she shuddered and prayed nobody was near enough to have heard.

  The scholar had already turned back to attend to the lantern. The light flickered and then brightened, revealing more of the tight corridor; Cassia could have believed that it went onwards into the dark forever, if she had not known that this was built into the base of the hill. But what if there were archives even further down, beneath these ones? She chased the thought away quickly.

  “The air does not move well down here,” Karak said. “That affects some more than others. What I need is not here. We must move on.”

  He passed the lantern back to her. Cassia had enough time to notice that it was indeed burning brighter and hotter before she had to hurry after him. She didn’t want to be left alone here.

  “Sir – sir, what is written on these?”

  Karak paused so abruptly she almost thumped him with the lamp. “These ones here? Who knows? Most of these have not seen daylight for hundreds of years. There was a filing system, once, but it was eaten by mice.” There was a note of disgust in his voice. “That was a time when even the librarians of the Castaria did not value the knowledge they held.”

  He shook his head, lost in his own thoughts. “Since you are somewhat closer to the ground than I am, boy, perhaps I can put your enquiring mind to good use.” With a fingertip he drew a glyph in the grime that lined the nearest shelf. To Cassia’s eye it looked like a pair of inverted V shapes, one stepped in front of the other. Those shapes were intersected by a sharp horizontal arrow. “If you see this mark upon any of the cases, shout out immediately. It will mean we are close to what we seek.”

  It was dull, fruitless work, but it kept her busy for long enough that she did not recognise until deep into that evening why he had set her that task. It meant that Karak could work undisturbed by questions. That realisation, in the middle of her practice against Meredith, caused her to lose both her concentration and her footing as the Heir to the North effortlessly cut beneath her guard. The pain of the landing served to emphasise her own bitter thoughts. I’m a fool. A fool, useless, and out of my depth.

  “Your thoughts are elsewhere,” Meredith said as he reached down to help her to her feet.

  “Of course they are,” she snapped, “or else I’d have put you on the ground already.”

  One of the subtle smiles Meredith was increasingly fond of began to form upon his lips. It still looked unnatural, as though an outcrop of rock had learned to express itself, but it was enough to take Cassia’s thoughts from her chores at the library. She had found herself wanting to see that smile more and more, and it had even made its way into her dreams. Something else that discomfited her as much as she desired it.

  “Then put me there,” Meredith said. “If you can.”

  He was making fun of her! I’ll teach him . . .

  One rolling lunge brought her staff back to hand and she came up swinging.

  q

  On the third day she finally plucked up the courage to ask the one of the questions at the forefront of her mind. “What did you mean, sir, that there is no god of knowledge?”

  Karak did not answer for a moment. Instead he paced further down the passage and held the lantern out around the corner, staring intently down the dimly-lit archives. As the light retreated and darkness closed in around her, Cassia held onto the nearest shelf. It was reassuringly solid, even if the wood was cold.

  The scholar seemed satisfied with whatever it was he looked for. He came back and hooked the lantern onto a peg that jutted out from the uppermost shelf. “The gods are not rational beings,” he said, lowering his voice to confidential tones. “In fact, they are exactly the opposite. They are primal and emotional. There are gods of anger, of joy, of love, and desire. Gods of war, of luck, and of fate. They are all of the heart, not of the head.”

  That did not sound quite right to Cassia. “But Periandir is a patron of great harvests, and Meteon weighs the waters of the river.”

  “In those aspects, yes,” Karak agreed. “But Periandir is, at his deepest roots, little more than a totem of fertility. These gods are earthed, grown in the fields of mankind.”

  She struggled with that concept while he opened another case and passed it to her so he could examine the contents. “So you say they are not real?”

  The scholar’s brows peaked in clear surprise. “Ha! Be careful where you ask that question, boy. Even here, men are superstitious and live in the grip of the gods. No, I do not deny them. I am a rational man, not a stupid one. The gods play with us all, and more fool us if we try to get involved. My own theory is that they have been afflicted with base human emotions even as they have affected us. Not a theory that makes me popular with priests of any temple or discipline, by the way. You came from the North – you should know as well as anybody how close to our own world the gods dwell.”

  She spent some time mulling over his words. “But, sir, that still does not explain why there is no god of knowledge.”

  There was a flicker of annoyance in Karak’s eyes, but it disappeared as quickly as it took for him to blink. He sighed and hefted a case in one hand. “No, it does not. What do you think the answer is, boy?”

  How am I supposed to be able to even guess at such an answer? She shook her head in apology and Karak returned his attention to the scroll.

  “Well, if you could answer that question,” he said, “you would accomplish more than all the learned scholars in this institution together have done in their entire lives. The real answer, I’m sure, is that nobody knows.”

  “The gods should know.” By now Cassia had become irked by Karak’s lofty attitude and the words slipped out before she could stop them. “Why hasn’t anybody asked them?”

  Karak did not take offence; in fact he appeared amused by the thought. “I dare say somebody has. What answer they received, however – if they even got an answer at all . . .” He lowered his voice still further, even though it was evident nobody else was near enough to hear them. Cassia had to move in close to hear him clearly. “The trut
h of the matter, I suspect, is that knowledge requires questions. Tests. Proof and disproof. There is no god I can think of who would be happy to see his worshippers questioning the tenets of their faith, questioning that god’s very existence. That, I think, is why there is no god of knowledge but man himself.”

  “But you know a lot about the gods,” Cassia said.

  “Enough to know that they are vengeful and unforgiving, Cassia. Leave them be while they cannot hear you.”

  q

  It was impossible to measure the passage of time other than by the frequency with which she had to refill and relight the lantern, and she quickly discovered that time warped cruelly here in the cellars of the library. Several times she convinced herself that the day was ending and she should hurry back to the Old Soak before the library’s gates were closed, only to find that the sun still sat high above the horizon, autumnal light slanting down across the city. But she had always prided herself on being a quick learner, and by the fifth morning she was certain she knew how much oil, and how many wicks, she would need for the day.

  Even the library’s custodians were becoming used to her presence and she breathed much more easily when she queued with Karak to descend into the archives each day. It seemed strange there were not more scholars rooting through the darkened shelves. Even though errand boys disappeared down the steps before her, she never encountered them in the tunnels. There, apart from faint voices in the stale air, she was alone inside a flickering globe of light with Karak.

  He was abrupt and obtuse, and fond of his own private jokes, but perhaps because they shared the biggest joke of all – that Cassia was no errand boy – she found herself more comfortable around him than she was with Baum. And Karak seemed to enjoy her presence, on more than one occasion he had slipped and used her real name, although thankfully never in the presence of the library’s elders or the boys who skittered through the colonnades like startled rats.

  There was a weight tugging at her thoughts, however. The days were passing, each faster than the last, and Baum was ever more certain the warlock would emerge from his hiding-place to escape to the warmer lands of Galliarca and Stromondor. But Cassia had still come no closer to finding either Guhl’s scroll case or the warlock himself. Not an hour went by that she did not wonder whether Arca had told the truth. Perhaps he misremembered. Perhaps it had happened to someone else. That was quite likely, some men adopted common tales as their own, changing details to suit their own circumstances, though they were never told as anything other than pale copies in her view.

  Perhaps he just lied.

  There were thousands of documents in this archive, all sealed against the elements inside cases that had blackened with age. She couldn’t even tell how far beneath this hill the tunnels reached, but she was certain she hadn’t seen half of them yet.

  “Have you run out of questions?” Karak asked, shocking her out of her thoughts. “I will be disappointed if that is the case.”

  She toyed with the idea of asking him outright about Malessar’s scroll case. He knew so much about the library, after all, that why wouldn’t he know where to find it? But discretion won the day. “Would you like me to ask more questions?”

  That drew a smile from him. “No, for my part. I feel I must have struck the most uneven bargain known to man. Never have I given so many answers for so little payment!” His smile took the sting from his words. “But the company is pleasant. Perhaps you might grace these mean passages with a tale or two?”

  Cassia blinked in surprise. It was the last thing she had expected him to ask. Her mind froze – what story would a scholar want to hear?

  Karak looked down at her. “You’ve come from the North,” he reminded her. Not a day went by that he did not comment on her origins, a trait that was starting to bother her a little. It made her think of Pyraete, and of Meredith, and the way that time was running out in their search for the warlock. “What about the Call to the North? Do you know that?”

  It seemed odd that a scholar from the south would want to hear the Call, but she could feel the first lines shuffling into place, ready to be said, at the mention of the title. “Some storyteller I would be if I didn’t know it,” she said, more boldly than she truly felt. Even if her father had counted it amongst his most popular tales, Cassia would have been hard pressed to keep it word-perfect all the way through. The Emperor’s Factors had tried for years to suppress the telling of the Call, and Cassia had only ever seen the whole text once, in Rann Almoul’s study. Norrow always improvised the parts his wine-soaked memory could no longer recall, and there were far too many of those. If this performance was not to be a disaster she would have to think damned hard and fast.

  Karak raised his brow in expectation, his head cocked to one side – like a hawk waiting for its prey to bolt. “Amaze me, then,” he said.

  q

  They were drawing an audience now, Cassia had noted in the fleeting seconds between her bouts. The Old Soak’s pot-boy, wide-eyed and limp as autumn’s dying flowers, stood at the corner of the stables, afraid to come any closer. The buildings that surrounded the inn had windows overlooking the yard, and these were packed tight, heads and shoulders leaning out precariously to watch the sparring. There were mutters and catcalls, and even wagers shouted between the tenements. They needled their way in, distracting Cassia’s attention from what she ought to be thinking about, and her cheeks burned with a heat that wasn’t entirely due to her exertions.

  She spun her staff up, jabbed out as she side-stepped past Meredith’s attack. He was so close his hair whipped across her face, and she breathed in his scent.

  Now all ye Northmen, will ye never be free?

  Shake off your shackles and shout in the air!

  Now she went to ground, having learned a fight could be won from the floor as well as on two feet. She used her staff to propel herself back to her feet, beyond Meredith’s reach, ducking away immediately. The man was so hellishly fast that he had to have been deliberately slowing himself when he first started teaching her.

  Like bright rivers that break from the banks that they run!

  Let –

  Meredith’s staff tapped her shin, enough to unbalance her and send her back down to the dirt. She skinned the knuckles of her left hand, but she didn’t have time to hiss a curse. It was her own fault for not giving this bout her full attention. The verses of the Call kept running through her head and, no matter what she did, she could not drive them out.

  A few cheers greeted her as she drew herself up again. Meredith had stepped back, his own staff held nonchalantly across his shoulders. The position forced the muscles of his upper body into shapes that distracted her yet further. Cassia directed her gaze down to his feet instead. Watch them, not him. See how he balances, see him poised to spring . . .

  He flowed into motion, one end of his staff cutting through the air with a sharp whistle, and she was already moving. She spun into his attack, arms tight against her body, and struck out at the last moment. To her shock her movement was stopped dead by something that should not have been there. Meredith, clamping her firmly into the crook of his arm to stop her falling over.

  She could not find the breath to protest. All she could do was to stare up at him, losing herself in those piercing brown eyes. She felt herself leaning back into his arm, yearning forwards at the same time . . .

  “What did you do there?” Meredith said. It took her a moment to realise that, by the tone of his voice, he’d had to repeat the question at least once already.

  “I . . . I wanted to get closer,” she managed. It was no lie.

  “You should not have beaten that form.” Meredith stared down at her with his brow creased, his eyes wide with surprise. “Nobody should ever beat that form. How did you do that?”

  He seemed in no hurry to let her go, but that was alright. Every line of his face, every strand of hair that hung down and brushed her cheeks, were imprinted indelibly upon her mind like the scars of a war. “I don
’t know.”

  She willed Meredith to lower his head further, to bring his lips closer to her own. A prince will kiss me! Surely such a kiss would set her nerves afire.

  But Meredith paused, seemingly frozen in position for a long moment before straightening up again and gently – but quite firmly – pulling Cassia upright. When he released her arm she felt unsteady, as though she had been in the sun too long.

  The innkeeper stood in the doorway, regarding them with a faint frown. “I never saw a girl fight like that before,” he said. “In fact I don’t think anybody ever saw that before. What next – give her a sword?”

  With her emotions so unsettled, Cassia could not hold her tongue. “Why not?”

  Ultess shook his head. “That’s just not right. Not here.”

  He disappeared back into the tavern, wiping his hands against his hips to clean them. Cassia shifted from foot to foot, her body boiling with unexpended energy. She looked across expectantly at Meredith, but the Heir to the North had reached for his shirt, his unspoken signal that the day’s training had finished.

  “But we still have time for more,” she pointed out. “The light is still good, and I’m not that tired . . .”

  Meredith smoothed down his sleeves, giving more attention to the dirt than to her. “No, but that is all for today. I have business in the city tonight.”

  That caught her interest. “Business? Have you found . . . him? Let me come with you, Meredith!”

  “No. I have not seen him, but Baum believes he is still here, and this work may be dangerous. Baum will not give you leave to join us tonight.”

  “How am I supposed to be able to make this history, if you don’t allow me to witness it?” The energy she felt was fast turning into frustration, caught like a hunting dog in a kennel, with nowhere to go. She had been in Hellea long enough to be able to judge the passing of days through the bells and prayers of the temples and the sudden surges of traffic through the squares and precincts, yet she had still seen only a small part of the city. Between the Old Soak and the library. And back again. It’s not fair. I’m a part of this venture as much as either of them!