Last King of Osten Ard 02 - Empire of Grass

by Tad Williams

  But though he wanted very much to hear what Sir Zakiel had to say, Simon found himself struggling to think of anything but his own memories of the Norns, of those white, inhuman faces that had haunted his dreams for so many years.

  My worst dreams have become real. No, not the very worst, he reminded himself, and made the Sign of the Tree to keep ill fortune at bay. Miri and Morgan are still alive. They will come back to me.

  * * *

  It was all Pasevalles could do to keep his face expressionless as he bade goodbye to the king and others and left the throne hall. It felt as though a great, pulsing fire was burning in his spine and boiling his brains, and he could barely keep his hands from twitching.

  Resist the anger, he told himself. It will not serve you well. He wanted the clarity of high places, of a Godlike view. He was furious and frightened by what Tiamak had said, how close to the mark the little man had come. The Wrannaman had all but told the king and other nobles that someone inside the Hayholt must be helping their enemies.

  He walked for a short time on the castle walls, using the pretense of inspecting the fortifications, but even that high vantage point could not ease his restless, unhappy thoughts. He was so close to victory—so close! And yet each hour that brought him nearer to his goal also left him more exposed. A failure at any point in the chain and he would stand revealed. The thought of punishment did not frighten him, but the idea of failure, of revenge uncompleted, burned and burned until he wanted to cry out. He abandoned the walls to return to his working chamber in the Chancelry.

  As he approached it, though, one of his pages ran out to tell him that Father Boez was waiting to speak with him. Pasevalles instantly turned away and headed toward the residence instead, wanting nothing to do with the priest, who seemed obsessed with the smallest details of the castle’s financing since he had replaced Gervis, and had more discomforting questions than a centipede had legs.

  It was Tiamak, though, who filled his thoughts. If the little man were not so close to the king he might have removed him long ago, but there had always been too many obstacles, not least of which was the Wrannaman’s own caution. He considered briefly whether Lady Thelía might be an easier target, but could not convince himself that it would not cause more harm than help. A widowed Tiamak would have even less to lose, and might give more of his thought to uncovering the traitor he had clearly begun to suspect.

  Pasevalles even contemplated simply going to their chambers one night and removing both of them from the game board once and for all, but knew that was his frustration speaking. He had not come so far only to fail because of obvious mistakes. He had spent two decades making himself both indispensable and above suspicion.

  As he made his way toward his own chambers, he came upon a young maid on the landing of the stairs. A large basket of clothes sat on the floor before her as she sat with her hands on her knees, catching her breath. When she saw him her reddened face colored even more deeply, and she leaped up and made a clumsy courtesy.

  “Oh, my lord! Forgive me!”

  “Are you unwell, my dear?”

  “No. It’s just that the basket is so heavy. I was only resting for a moment.” She grabbed at the handles and began to lift it.

  “Stop, young lady, you will harm yourself.” He paused, considering. The last people who had passed him on the stairs as he climbed were long gone and there was no one else in sight. “I will offer you a bargain. First, what is your name?”

  “Tabata, my lord, and it please you,” she said and made another courtesy, this one a bit more steady. Her face was round but pretty beneath the flush.

  “Well, Tabata, here is my bargain. I need your help with something upstairs. If you will lend me a few moments’ assistance, afterward I will carry that heavy basket for you wherever it needs to go.”

  “No, my lord, I couldn’t let you!”

  “Of course you could. Favor for favor—that’s fair, isn’t it?”

  Her look became a bit more guarded. “What sort of help do you want from such as me?”

  “Nothing difficult, my dear. You may even find it a pleasant diversion from your ordinary work—you work hard, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, though I shouldn’t say it. The Mistress of Chambermaids works us terrible hard sometimes, especially when the weather is hot like this.” She swept a damp lock of hair from her forehead.

  “Then leave the washing here and come with me. No, I have something I must quickly do first. Go on up to the top floor and wait for me. Go on, child, hurry. I am a busy man, and I don’t have the whole day.”

  Still looking a little uncertain, Tabata made her way up the stairs. Pasevalles waited until she had reached the next floor, then bent and picked up the basket and carried it downstairs. He left it on the first floor near a doorway that opened out onto the gardens, then made his way back up. As he had hoped, his thoughts were already cooling, the rage that had blasted his composure almost gone. It happened sometimes. No great work could be achieved without the occasional moment of relaxation and release.

  She was waiting in the hall on the top floor, looking around as though she had never seen it before.

  “Has anyone else come up?” he asked in the tone of one who doesn’t much care.

  “No, my lord. Just you.”

  Pasevalles reached up to light the torch he had brought from downstairs at the wall sconce. “Ah. Well, I wanted to show you this room at the end. It is a dusty fright, and with Countess Yissola bringing only Heaven knows how many servitors from Perdruin, we will need all our rooms ready.” He opened the door for her, then closed it behind them.

  Despite being a chambermaid, Tabata seemed a little surprised to be asked to do chambermaid work, but she did her best to seem willing. “Oh, it is not too bad, my lord. I could do this all for you within the hour.”

  “I want to show you something else first—have you been in this room before?”

  “Once or twice to clean when I first came.”

  “Well, I wager you haven’t seen this.” He went to the hidden door beside the fireplace, pulled down the sconce, then gave a push. The door swung open almost silently despite its great weight, revealing the darkness beyond. He turned and saw her staring, eyes and mouth both open wide, her pink flush gone and her skin suddenly pale.

  “By our Lady, what is that?” she said.

  “Come and see.” When she did not move, Pasevalles went toward her, still smiling. “It is truly most interesting, Tabata. You would never guess what’s down at the end of this passage.”

  “No, I can’t do it, my lord—they make me terribly frightened, places like that. I just can’t.”

  “Oh, yes, my dear.” His thoughts were clear now, clear as air, clear as ice. He could see everything—imagine everything, his plan laid out before him like a palace of transparent, shining adamant. “Yes, you can.” And with that, he grasped her arm and covered her mouth and dragged her toward the waiting dark.

  39

  The Place of Voices

  “I know this stretch of water,” said Tanahaya. “We have almost reached the first gate.” It was the first time she had spoken to Morgan in hours.

  He had been silent too. He was still full of shame about the night before, and every time he opened his mouth to say something, the memory of his foolishness leaped up to mock him. “Gate?” he said after a few moments. “On a river?”

  “In a sense.” She seemed determined to act as though his mistake had not happened, but that only made Morgan feel worse, as though he were a child or some animal that did not know better. “In truth, the gates are bridges over T’si Suhyasei—roads once rang along both its banks—but those who came to Da’ai Chikiza on boats called them gates. The first one we will see will be the Gate of Cranes.”

  Morgan watched the trees slip by on either bank. As the sun neared noon the light plunged between the trunks all
the way to the forest floor: they seemed to be traveling through a vast, columned church without walls. Other than the vigorous splashing of the river, Morgan could hear only birdsong and scolding squirrels, and that was good. He could think of nothing to say that seemed worth saying, and nothing that Tanahaya might say that would make him feel any less of a fool.

  From the position of the sun, Morgan guessed it was an hour or so after midday when they finally reached a slender, curved bridge of translucent stone netted in ivy and the branches of thicker plants, its carvings almost obliterated by time and weather. A large stone bird stared down blindly at them from the span’s highest point above the river. The Sitha might have called it the Gate of Cranes, but the bird’s long beak and the spreading wings had long since worn away; Morgan thought it looked more like a lump of clay waiting to be shaped by a potter’s hands into something finer.

  They passed beneath several more of these stone bridges, not one exactly the same as another. Tanahaya recited their names in turn—Tortoise, Rooster, Wolf, Raven, and Stag, though the Gate of Stags was now only a tumble of ruined stones on either bank, and the Gate of Wolves had lost enough stones that it looked as though it would soon follow the Stags into the river.

  Morgan had lost count of how many gates they had seen when they reached a bridge whose tan, blue-seamed stones must have been harder than those of the others. The details had not been worn away by water and wind: the sharp little beak of the carved bird atop the bridge was open in song, its edges well defined, even the round eye clearly visible.

  He turned to Tanahaya to ask her if this one was newer than the rest, but was stopped by her expression: her angular face and half-lidded eyes made her look like someone asleep and dreaming. Suddenly she began to sing, an odd, almost haunting melody with words he could not understand and a tune that went in circles, wandering back across itself with only slight differences, over and over.

  Then, as suddenly as she had begun she fell silent and steered their little boat toward a cracked stone pier that jutted out at a bend in the river.

  “We will leave the boat here,” she said. “Be cautious. The landing is old, as old as the bridges. Test it carefully before you put your full weight on it.”

  “That song you were singing,” he asked as he carefully climbed out onto the stone platform and from there to the overgrown bank, thick with bracken and wild strawberry. “What was it?”

  “It was a song about Jenjiyana of the Nightingales—the gate brought it to my mind. Queen Utuk’ku’s son Drukhi was killed by mortals. His wife was Nenais’u, Jenjiyana’s daughter, and Jenjiyana mourned the loss of her child no less fiercely than Utuk’ku mourned hers, but without anger. Jenjiyana lived long at Tumet’ai in the north, until the ice and snow came and devoured that city and the Zida’ya left it behind. But always afterward she dressed in the heavy gown she had worn in that cold place, as if time for her had stopped when her daughter died. The song says:

  Dressed in billows,

  Mournful white cloud

  Soft without rain

  But still it weeps

  Mournful white cloud

  Carried by the wind

  Carried by grief

  Where will you wander?

  She made a gesture, the fingers of both hands spread with her thumbs touching. “It is only a small part of a longer whole. I cannot make it sing in your tongue. That is my fault, not yours. Follow me now. You will see something worth seeing.”

  She led him around the bend. Although the riverbank seemed a little flatter in places, as though there might once have been a path, most was so overgrown with knot-rooted trees and thick underbrush that he hardly paid any attention to where he was being led until Tanahaya stopped him with a hand on his arm and said, “Look! You have come to the Tree of the Singing Wind. Very few mortals can say that.”

  Ahead of him the river bent away to the right, its banks thick with buckram and bluebell and gently waving ferns, then vanished down a tunnel of close-leaning alders. But on the side of the river where they stood the forest did not grow so close to the bank, and the trees and plants took on strange, angular shapes. He stared for long moments before he realized he was looking not just at crowding trees and thickly twining ivy, but at a crumbling city that the wood had all but swallowed.

  Shapes now became visible all along the bank as his eye separated them from the engulfing forest—sections of roofless buildings, solitary doorways stitched with vines, and more ruined walls than he could hope to count. Here and there on the ground glints of pale stone peeked through dense mats of moss and fern. The city stretched far back into the forest, where he could make out the crumbling remains of slender towers. In places the spires still seemed to stand tall, though so enmeshed in ivy and snapdragons and vines that the underlying stone might have disappeared long ago, leaving only the leafy ghosts of the towers behind.

  “This . . . this . . . ?”

  “Is what remains of Da’ai Chikiza. One of our old cities—one of the Nine Cities of lore. After Tumet’ai vanished beneath the ice, this was considered the most beautiful dwelling of our people—lovely beyond even Enki e-Shao’saye in the eastern forest.”

  “What happened to it?” He felt a weight on his chest, as though the age of the place was squeezing out his breath, forcing his heart to race simply to keep him standing. “Where did they go? Why did your people leave?”

  Tanahaya shook her head. “It happened before I was born, but our chronicles say that something happened to T’si Suhyasei—to the river.” She gestured to the wide waterway. “It was the city’s life—that is why this place was named “Her Cool Blood,” after the river and the forest. But something happened near the time my people fled Asu’a, when the Storm King murdered his father and then died fighting the mortal Northmen. Many Zida’ya had retreated here, but the river suddenly ceased to flow. Then one day the river suddenly returned, swollen and raging, and flooded the city. Many of my people died, many more lost everything they had brought out of Asu’a or had saved from Tumet’ai. Most fled farther into the forest, vowing not to build anything again that they could not take down and carry with them. But as I said, all that was before my time.”

  “How old are you?”

  She looked at him carefully. To his immense gratitude, she did not smile. “Not so old by the standards of my people, although none of us live so long now that the witchwood is lost.”

  “That’s another question you didn’t quite answer.”

  She was silent for a moment. “I am a child of our Second Exile. I was born after my folk left Asu’a and the rest of our cities behind. But I was alive when your grandfather’s many-times-great grandfather Eahlstan Fiskerne first came with his river-wife to the castle in which you were born. Do you need to know more?”

  For the moment, Morgan was overwhelmed. The ancient, ruined city was daunting enough, but the idea that this young, womanly creature beside him was centuries old was even harder to compass.

  As they walked across the uneven ground toward the overgrown walls and empty doorways, Morgan caught his foot and fell into a patch of ferns. By the time he clambered upright again his fingers were sticky.

  “You must be cautious here,” said Tanahaya. “If you look where the undergrowth is not so thick, you can see remnants of what was here.” She pointed down to a place where he could see dull colors through the moss. She pulled loose a handful of vegetation and brushed away dirt to reveal broken tiles caught in a net of roots. Morgan could see bits of color, but could make out nothing of the faded figures or designs.

  “This was the Place of Sharing Out,” Tanahaya said. “The people of Da’ai Chikiza would gather here where the boats came in off the river, or sometimes to make festival. At Year-Dancing time the whole of this place would be lit with lamps of many colors, and boats on the river carried lanterns too. My master Himano told me once that it seemed to him
what it might feel like to stand high in the sky among the stars themselves.”

  Her voice had changed as she spoke, growing more distant, as though she spoke more to herself than to Morgan. When she looked at him again she smiled, but it seemed an expression more of weariness and self-deprecation than of pleasure. “It will soon be Year-Dancing again, but I wonder if the Zida’ya will come together this time. Jao é-Tinukai’i, our last gathering place for the whole of the House of Year-Dancing, is gone now. The witchwood is gone too. And our people are fewer now, and more scattered than ever.”

  Tanahaya led him deeper into the forested ruins, until the afternoon light was almost entirely filtered by greenery and the noise of the river faded to a distant murmur. Since so much of the city was in ruins, it was hard to tell whether the streets of Da’ai Chikiza had been broad, or simply that so many of the buildings had been pulled to pieces by time and storms and the marching forest. Morgan could make little sense of it as a city—nothing seemed to be set at a right-angle to anything else, and very large ruins stood next to some structures no bigger than a crofter’s hut.

  As they moved deeper, what seemed at first a clearing in the forest revealed itself to Morgan as an open space with ruined buildings on three sides, like the square in front of St. Sutrin’s cathedral in Erchester. In places tree roots had pushed up the ground, revealing fragments of broken tiles under the dirt and plants.

  “This was another gathering place,” she said. “It was called the Place of Voices, because the people would—”

  If she finished what she was saying, Morgan never heard it: at that moment, something struck him on the head—not a killing blow or even a vicious one, but hard enough to disorient him for a moment, so that he lost his balance and fell to his knees. As he was shaking his head and wondering what had happened, he realized that he and Tanahaya were both covered in a thick net of woven vines.