by Tad Williams
Even as a young girl, Miriamele had become used to the variety of different looks she inspired among her father’s courtiers—irritation from those who considered her an impediment to their affairs, pity from those who recognized her loneliness and confusion, honest calculation from those who wondered who she might marry someday, or whether she would grow into an attractive woman, or whether she would be a pliable queen after her father’s death. But never until that moment had she been examined with anything like Pryrates’ inhuman regard, a stare cold as a plunge in ice water. There seemed not the slightest bit of human feeling in his black eyes: she had known somehow that had she been flayed meat on a butcher’s table his expression would have been no different. At the same time, he had seemed to see right into her and through her, as though her every thought were being made to walk naked before him, squirming beneath his inspection. Aghast, she had turned from his terrible gaze and fled down the corridor, inexplicably weeping. Behind, she heard the dry buzz of the alchemist’s voice as he began to speak. She realized she meant no more to this new intimate of her father’s than would a fly—that he would ignore her with never another thought, or crush her without a qualm if it suited his purposes. To a girl raised in the nurturing certainty of her own importance, an importance that had even outlasted her father’s love, it was a horrifying realization.
Her father, for all his faults, had never been a monster of that sort. Why, then, had he brought Pryrates into his inner circle, so that eventually the devil-priest became his closest and most trusted advisor? It was a deeply troubling question, and one for which she had never discovered an answer.
Now, in the gently pitching boat, she struggled to keep her voice steady. “Tell me what happened, Cadrach.”
The monk plainly did not want to start. Miriamele could hear his fingers scratching quietly against the wooden seat, as though he searched for something in the darkness. “They found me in the stable of an inn in south Erchester,” he said slowly, “sleeping in the muck. The guardsmen dragged me out, then threw me in the back of a wagon and we rode toward the Hayholt. It was during the worst year of that terrible drought, and in the late afternoon light everything was gold and brown, even the trees stiff and dull as dried mud. I remember staring, my head ringing like a church bell—I had been sleeping off a long bout of drinking, of course—and wondering if the same dryness that made my eyes and nose and mouth feel as though they were packed with dust had somehow leached away all the colors of the world as well.
“The soldiers, I’m sure, thought I was nothing but another criminal, and one not fated for a long life beyond that afternoon. They talked as though I were already dead, complaining about the onerous duty of having to carry out and bury a corpse as fetid and unwashed as mine. A guardsman even said he would demand an extra hour’s pay for the unpleasant labor. One of his companions smirked and said: ‘From Pryrates?’. The braggart fell silent. Some of the other soldiers laughed at his discomfort, but their voices were forced, as though the mere thought of demanding anything from the red priest was enough to spoil the day. This was the first time I had any inkling of where I was going, and I knew it to be a great deal worse than simply being hung as a thief or a traitor—both of which I was. I tried to throw myself out of the cart, but was quickly pulled back in again. ‘Ho,’ one of them said, ‘he knows the name!’
“‘Please,’ I begged, ‘do not take me to that man. If there is Aedonite mercy in you, do anything else with me you like, but do not give me to the priest.’ The soldier who had last spoken stared at me, and I think there might have been some pity in his hard eyes, but he said: ‘And bring his anger down on us? Leave our children fatherless ? No. Bear up, and face it like a man.’
“I wept all the way to the Nearulagh Gate.
“The cart stopped at the iron-banded front door of Hjeldin’s Tower and I was dragged inside, too weak with despair to resist—not that my wasted body would have served me for much against four armed Erkynguards. I was half-carried through the anteroom, then up what seemed like a million steps. At the top, two great oaken doors swung open. I was shoved through like a sack of meal and fell to my knees on the hard flags of a cluttered chamber.
“The first thing I thought, Princess, was that I had tumbled somehow into a lake of blood. The entire room was scarlet, every niche and cranny; my very hands held before my face had changed their color as well. I looked up in horror to the tall windows. Every one was fitted from top to bottom with panes of bright red glass; the setting sun streamed through them, dazzling the eye, as though each window were a great ruby. The red light stripped everything inside the room of color, just as evening does. There seemed no shades but black and red. There were tables and tall, leaning shelves, none of which touched the chamber’s single curving outer wall, but instead were clustered toward the middle of the room. Every surface was draped in books and scrolls and ... and other things, many of which I could not bear to look at for long. The priest has a terrible curiosity. There is nothing he will not do to discover the truth about something—or such truths as are important to him. Many of the subjects of his inquiries, mostly animals, were locked in cages stacked haphazardly among the books; most of them were still alive, although it would have been better for them if they had not been. Considering the chaos in the center of the room, the wall was curiously uncluttered, naked except for certain painted symbols.
“‘Ah,’ a voice said. ‘Greetings, fellow Scrollbearer.’ It was Pryrates, of course, seated on a narrow, high-backed chair at the center of this strange nest. ‘I trust your journey was a comfortable one?’
“‘Let us not bandy words,’ I said. With despair had come a certain resignation. ‘You are a Scrollbearer no longer, Pryrates, nor am I. What do you want?’
“He grinned. He was in no mood to speed what was, for him, an enjoyable diversion. ‘Once a member of the League, always a member, I should think,’ he chuckled. ‘For are we not both still intimately concerned with old things, old writings ... old books?’
“When he said this last, my heart stumbled in my chest. At first I had thought he wanted only to torment me, to take revenge for his ousting from the League—although others were more responsible for that than I was; I had already begun my slide into darkness when he was forced out. Now I realized he wanted something quite different. He plainly desired some book he thought I had—and I had little doubt as to which book that might be.
“I dueled with him for part of an hour, using words as a swordsman does his blade, and for a while held my own—the last thing a drunkard loses, you see, is his cunning: it outlasts his soul by a long season—but we both knew that I would give in at the end. I was tired, you see, very tired and sick. As we spoke, two men came into the room. These were not more Erkynguardsmen, but rather somber-robed, shaven-headed men who had the dark-haired, dark-skinned look of southern islanders. They neither of them spoke—perhaps they were mutes—but nevertheless, their purpose was clear: they would hold me so that Pryrates might have his hands and attention unimpeded as he moved on to more strenuous means of negotiation. When the two grabbed my arms and dragged me close to the priest’s chair, I gave up. It was not the pain I feared, Miriamele, or even the other soul-horrors that he could have inflicted. I swear that to you, although why it should matter I don’t know. Rather, I simply no longer cared. Let him have what he would of me, I thought. Let him do what he pleased with it. It was not, I told myself, as though this sin-blackened world might receive undeserved punishment ... for I had dwelt in the depths so long that I saw nothing left that was good but nothingness itself.
“‘You have been making free with pages from a certain old volume, Padreic,’ he said. ‘Or do I remember that you call yourself something different now? No matter. I need that book. If you tell me where you keep it hidden, you will walk free into the evening air.’ He gestured to the world beyond the scarlet windows. ‘If not ...’ He pointed at certain objects that were lying on the table close by his hand, objects already filth
y with hair and blood.
“‘I do not have it anymore,’ I told him. That was the truth. I had sold the remaining few pages a fortnight earlier: I had been sleeping off the last of the proceeds in that noisome stable.
“He said: ‘I do not believe you, little man,’ then his servants did something to me until I screamed. When I still could not tell him where it was, he began to take a more active hand himself, stopping only when I could shriek no longer and my voice was a cracked whisper. ‘Hmm,’ he said, scratching his chin as though aping Doctor Morgenes, who would often muse that way over a deiicate translation. ‘Perhaps I must believe you after all. I find it hard to think that offal such as you would stay silent on purely moral grounds. Tell me who you sold it to—all the pieces.’
“Damning myself silently for the murder of these various merchants—for Pryrates, I knew, would have them killed and their wares confiscated without a moment’s hesitation—I told him all the names I could remember. When I hesitated, I was helped along by ... by ... his servants....”
Cadrach suddenly broke into deep, chesty sobs. Miriamele heard him trying to repress them, then he broke off in a fit of coughing. She leaned forward and caught his cold hand, squeezing hard to let him know that she was there. After a while, his breathing became more regular.
“I am sorry, Princess,” he rasped. “I do not like to think of it.”
There were tears in Miriamele’s eyes as well. “It’s my fault. I should never have made you talk about it. Let’s stop, and you can sleep.”
“No.” She could feel him shaking. “No, I have begun it. I will not sleep well in any case. Perhaps it will help me if I finish the tale.” He reached out and patted her head. “I thought he had gotten everything from me he could wish, but I was wrong. ‘What if these gentlemen no longer have the pieces I need, Padreic?’ he asked. Ah, gods, there is nothing fouler than that priest’s smile! ‘I think you should tell me what you remember—there is still some wit left in that wine-soaked head, is there not? Come, recite for me, little acolyte.’
“And tell him I did, every bit and every line that I could recall, the order as tumbled as you would expect from a creature as wretched as I was. He seemed most interested in Nisses’ cryptic words on death, especially something termed ‘speaking through the veil,’ which I gathered to be the rituals that allow one to reach what Nisses had called ‘songs of the upper air’—that is, the thoughts of those who are somehow beyond mortality, both the dead and the never-living. I disgorged it all, aching to please, with Pryrates sitting there nodding, nodding, his shiny head gleaming in the strange light.
“Somehow, in the middle of this terrible experience, I noticed something strange. It took a while, as you can imagine, but since I had begun to talk freely about my memories of Nisses’ book I had been left unharmed—one of the unspeaking servitors even gave me a cup of water so that I could speak more clearly. While I rattled on, answering Pryrates’ every question as eagerly as a child at its first holy mansa, I noticed something disturbing about the way the light was moving across the room. At first, in my weary, pained state, I was convinced that somehow Pryrates had managed to make the sun roll backward in its tracks, for the light that should have been passing from east to west across the bloody windows was slipping the other way instead. I mused on this—at such times, it is good to have something to think about other than what is happening to you—and realized at last that the laws of heaven had not been countermanded after all. Rather, it was the tower itself, or at least the topmost section where we were, that was spinning slowly sunward, a little faster than the passage of the sun itself—so slowly that, when combined with the sameness of the tower’s uppermost story, I would guess that none have ever marked it from the outside.
“So that was why nothing was allowed to lean against the stones of these chamber walls, I thought! Even in the extremity of my pain and terror, I marveled at the huge gears and wheels that must be moving silently behind the mortar or below my feet. Such things were once a joy of mine—I spent many hours of my youth studying the mechanical laws of the spinning globe and the heavens. And, the gods help me, it gave me something to think about beside what had been done to me, and what I, in turn, was doing to my fellow men.
“Looking around the circular room as I continued my prattling, I saw for the first time the subtle marks incised in the red window glass, and how those marks, thrown forward as faint lines of darker red, crossed over the strange symbols marked all around on the tower’s interior wall. I could think of no other explanation but that Pryrates had turned the top of Hjeldin’s Tower into some kind of vast water clock, a time-keeping device of fantastic size and intricacy. I have pondered and pondered, but to this day I still can think of nothing else that fits the facts as well. The black arts in which Pryrates has become involved, I suppose, have made hourglass and sundial unhelpfully imprecise.”
Miriamele let him pause for a long time. “So what happened, Cadrach?”
Cadrach still hesitated. When he resumed, he spoke a little more swiftly, as though this part was even more troubling than what had preceded it. “After I had finished telling Pryrates all I knew, he sat thinking for the time it took the last sliver of the sun to drop out one of the windows and appear at the edge of the next. Then he stood, waved a hand, and one of his servants stepped up behind me. Something struck me on the head and I knew no more. I woke up lying in a thicket in the Kynslagh, my torn clothes stained with the fluids of my own body. I believe they thought me dead. Certainly Pryrates did not believe me worth any more effort, not even the effort to kill me properly.” Cadrach stopped to take a deep breath.
“You would think that I would have been deliriously happy to be alive, to have survived when I did not expect to, but all I could do was crawl deeper into the underbrush and wait for death. But those were warm, dry days; I did not die. When I was enough recovered, I made my way down into Erchester. There I stole some clothing and some food. I even bathed in the Kynslagh, so that I could go to into the places where wine was sold.” The monk groaned. “But I could not leave the town, although I burned to. The sight of Hjeldin’s Tower looming up above the Hayholt’s outwall terrified me, but still I could not flee: I felt as though Pryrates had pulled out a part of my soul to keep me tethered, as though he could call me back any time he wished and I would go. This despite the fact that he clearly did not care if I was alive or dead. I remained in the town, thieving, drinking, trying without success to forget the terrible, treacherous thing I had done. I have not forgotten it, of course—I will never forget it—although I eventually grew strong enough to wrench myself free of the tower’s shadow and flee Erchester.” He looked for a moment as though he might say something more, but shuddered and fell silent.
Miriamele again clutched the monk’s hand, which had been scraping fretfully at the wooden bench. Somewhere to the south a seagull raised its lonely cry. “But you can’t blame yourself, Cadrach. That is foolish. Anyone would have done what you did.”
“No, Princess,” he murmured sadly. “Some would not have. Some would have died before telling such dreadful secrets. And more importantly, others would not have given up a treasure in the first place—especially a dangerous treasure like Nisses’ book—for the price of a few jugs of wine. I had a sacred trust. That is what the League of the Scroll is meant for, Miriamele—to preserve knowledge, and also to preserve Osten Ard from those like Pryrates who would use the old knowledge for power over others. I failed on both those counts. And the League was also meant to watch for the return of Ineluki, the Storm King. There I failed most miserably of all, for it seems clear to me that I gave Pryrates the means of finding that terrible spirit and interesting it in humankind once more—and all this evil I accomplished simply so I could guzzle wine, so I could make my already dim brain a little darker.”
“But why did Pryrates want to know all that? Why was he so interested in death?”
“I don’t know.” Cadrach was weary. “His is a mind that ha
s gone rotten like a piece of old fruit—who knows what strange prodigies will hatch from such a thing?”
Angry, Miriamele squeezed his hand. “That is no answer.”
Cadrach sat up a little straighter. “I’m sorry, my lady, but I have no answers. The only thing I can say is that from the questions Pryrates asked me, I do not think that he was seeking to contact the Storm King—not at first. No, he had some other interest in, as he called it, ‘speaking through the veil.’ And I think that when he began to explore in those lightless regions, he was noticed. Most living mortals who are discovered there are destroyed or made mad, but my guess is that Pryrates was recognized as a possible tool for a vengeful Ineluki. From what you and others have told me, he has been a very useful tool indeed.”
Miriamele, chilled by the night breeze, crouched lower. Something in what Cadrach had just said tugged at her mind, asking to be examined. “I want to think,” she said.
“If I have disgusted you, my lady, it is only reasonable,” He seemed very distant. “I have grown unutterably disgusted with myself.”
“Don’t be an idiot.” Impulsively, she lifted his cold hand and pressed it against her cheek. Startled, he left it there for a moment before pulling it back again. “You have made mistakes, Cadrach. So have I, so have many others.” She yawned. “Now we need to sleep, so we can get up in the morning and start rowing again.” She crawled past him toward the boat’s makeshift cabin.
“My lady?” the monk said, surprise evident in his voice, but she did not say anything more.
Some time later, as Miriamele was drifting toward sleep, she heard him crawl in beneath the oilcloth shelter. He curled up near her feet, but his breathing stayed quiet, as though he, too, were thinking. Soon, the gentle smack of the waves and the rocking of the anchored boat pulled her down into dreams.
