“What do you know of the Shield?” Tabitha asked. “It is real, isn’t it?”
“The Shield? Yes, it is real enough, though nobody can claim to understand how it works. From what I can gather in the early histories, the Gyre of Wizards left the Shield to protect Eyri from the scourge of chaos which was ruining the mythical realm of Oldenworld. It is a magical construction. Maybe you can understand it better than I, Tabitha. However, it prevents our passage beyond Eyri, and prevents anything else getting in.”
“So if Bevn finds a way to bypass the Shield, he will find great peril beyond it?” Tabitha asked.
Not only that, Tabitha realised, but he would also allow it in. In leaving, he displayed his ignorance of Zastor’s prophecy, that the crown had to remain in Stormhaven for the shield to remain intact. What would come upon Eyri from the lands beyond the rim? The vicious fighting Lûk, the marauding Hunters, the massive savages, all of them were mentioned in the legends Tabitha had read, with hideous and fearsome creatures that would frighten grown men to death just to look upon them. But what then of the Morgloth? She had seen them. She knew they were real enough, so what part of the legends could she discard? All of the ancient foes could still exist. The chaos could be real.
“And the other verses that deal with the Kingsrim?”
May spun the Revelations on a few rolls.
where the trail that ends with painful knees
above young shadows of Zunskar in the trees
there lies the weakest seal, and so where swords fell down
shall pass the one who bears the ragged crown
“Oh, I understand this one now,” said May. “Swordmaster Vance mentioned they’d lost Bevn at a pass above Llury? There are no real passes, but there is the Penitent’s pass, a trail that pains the knees. It is to the west, where the young shadows of the Zunskar are in the trees. Botheration! I should have solved this one. We might have caught the Prince in time.”
“But the Zunskar mountains are to the east, aren’t they?”
“Yes, but their young shadows would be at dawn, and that would be cast across the realm, onto the western peaks above Llury and First Light. So this verse tells us the shield is weakest at dawn, upon the Penitent’s pass.”
“Why is it called the Penitent’s pass?”
“Penitent means kneeling. That pass is an ancient memorial. The First Swordmaster Stevenson drove the last of the savages there for their final stand. The legend has it that they were gripped by an overwhelming fear and knelt before him, but when he advanced to retrieve their surrendered weapons, Stevenson and his men felt the strange burden too, a weight of enchantment which grew heavier with every passing moment. The savages were crushed to the ground, and yet still they tried to fight. Stevenson’s men faced them on their knees. When the fighting was done at last, they crawled from that high place, even though they were victorious. Stevenson built a cairn to commemorate those fallen in battle, and to warn wayfarers of the peril in the pass. The memorial marks the end of the trail now. If it is a pass, it has never been used in our time.”
Shall pass the one who bears the ragged crown. Wry Tad did not call him the king, merely the bearer of the crown, so he had foreseen something? He had known the crown would be stolen. Did he have a part to play in the prince’s escape from Eyri? Was this a riddle he was laying for his apprentice to follow?
Tabitha didn’t know, but the answers would surely be somewhere in the text. She wanted to roll it right to the beginning, and pore over every verse. The prophecy was a wonderwork. She would never be able to read it all. Such a study would take years. The last verse confirmed that Bevn had gone beyond Eyri. Every day he would be getting farther away. She had no time to waste.
But if she was going to follow the Prince, she needed to know what to expect. She needed to know about the world beyond Eyri, who inhabited it, who ruled it. She began combing the Revelations for facts. Hours passed, and night descended upon the palace. A servant brought a platter of finger-pies, but most of them were ignored. The oil burned low in the lamps, and a guardsman replenished it. The air grew stale and thin, and the chill came out of the bones of the palace to carpet the floor in silence. The sounds of the last activity in the palace faded away.
“You still awake, Tabitha?”
“Mm.”
“You stopped turning the rollers long ago.”
The taste of dry pastry filled her mouth. She needed sleep, she had been up for too long, with Maybelle at her side. They had to stop.
Tabitha knuckled her eyes. She couldn’t think clearly anymore. That was a sure sign. If she used her skills as a wizard and drew clarity from her ring, she might see everything and understand the patterns in the words. If only she could lay the Revelations out on the floor, and see all of the prophecy at once. Every time she wanted to cross-reference a verse, she had to roll the first one away, and it became consumed in the gyrating cartridge. She had memorised some of the important verses, but it felt as if her brain was overflowing. The words made whispers in her mind, echoes which competed with one another, all in the Riddler’s jocular voice.
“I feel like a village square after market day, too trampled by the feet.”
“Maybe it’s time for bed,” May said. She had wrapped herself in blankets, and was leaning heavily on the arm of her chair. Her voice was weak and her eyelids heavy, but she had not abandoned her task as historian. She knew how important Tabitha’s research was.
Tabitha couldn’t leave until she had filled the gaps in her knowledge, but the meaning of the verses seemed to be elusive. They teased her mind with possibilities. Just when she thought she had isolated the truth, a new interpretation of the words came to mind, and she was sent off on another diversion through the lore. This was the Riddler at his best, and just like Twardy Zarost, the words were disturbing, challenging, shifty. She felt no closer to understanding the world beyond Eyri, though to be fair she had learnt of many names and places, like Moral kingdom, and Kaskanzr, the Winterblade mountains, Highbough and Kinsfall, and the downs of Koom. But they were meaningless without a map, and it wasn’t what she needed to know. She wanted to understand the Shield, and how to pass through it. She wanted to prepare herself for what she might face in the land called Oldenworld, the ‘wildfire’ which seemed to wind through so many of the verses like a malignant vine. And above all, she needed to find something to guide her to the place of heat and salt and sweat, where the buildings grew upon one another into the air and the horns blared upon the Goddess.
“One last try. Can you remember where it mentioned the three brothers?”
Under May’s guidance, the Revelations spun, blurred, spun, blurred and stopped. Tabitha tried to focus, but she was too tired, and the words seemed to swim across the paper. She put her hand on the page to hold the words still, and looked through the page.
three brothers, ’midst fire and smoke and blight,
all of Oldenworld scoured by their dreadful sight
the sky bleeds with wildfire seeds and beasts unholy roar
until the Pillar in the lowlands claims life evermore
Then a strange thing happened. The prophet’s vision rushed at her as if it had leapt from the page, a sudden assault of light and sound. In an altered instant, she saw a red and bleeding sky. Wind threw her hair awry. The roar of beasts, horns and clashing metal filled her ears. The air was thick with smoke, and it was wet, and hot. Tight balls of lightning seared the low clouds, and where the charge struck ground it bloomed silver and rippled like boiling liquid. The wind pulled a shroud of dirty rain aside, and before her was a tower, a lopsided veined megalith that pointed at the sky like a rude and broken finger straining against the ropes of its cancerous tendons. So haphazard was its construction that it should have fallen upon its own weight. It was almost organic; it seemed to move and shift like a nightmare of melting wax forced to remain upright. The best stonemasons in Eyri could not have made such a pillar, no matter what mortar they used. It should have been a
pile of rubble, and yet it stood, huge and grey-streaked, encrusted with windows and defying every principle of balance and order. Tabitha clenched her stomach against the nausea of its hypnotic attraction. It was more than just a building. It housed a presence. Someone waited there within that awesome shape. Someone watched.
She jumped back in fright.
The instant of vision shut like a slamming door, and it was silent again.
Tabitha took a slow, shuddering breath.
The words had encapsulated the vision, she realised. The sights and sounds were held within the writing in the same way a familiar smell could contain a memory. The words sparked the vision. They took one closer to seeing the truth. It was wrong to only interpret the verses of the Revelations literally. They were supposed to be experienced.
May touched her gently. “You all right?”
She knew where she had been. Ethea was in that place, close by, chained and helpless. The Pillar. In the lowlands.
“Stay with me, May. I need you now more than ever.”
She slid her hand down the page, feeling the rippled texture pass under her fingers.
across Oldenworld shall his Wildfire spread
massing Chaos upon every caster’s thread
ending the work of the wise and the ordered
’til Eyri alone stands protected, shield-bordered.
hold still your tongue when you translate –
each founding letter of these verses eight
uncovers the provoking name of that capricious-headed
Sorcerer of the silver fire, thrice-dreaded.
After reading the words, she tried to see through them again, as she had before.
Nothing happened. The words were silent. They kept their secret.
She willed herself into the page, through the network of inked letters, striving for the vision behind them, but she was denied, as if it was a closed iron gate and there was a key she had yet to find. She shook her head to clear her thoughts then pored over the writing more carefully.
Sorcerer—it was a new word for her, although she guessed that a sorcerer would be a great magic-user. She wondered what the difference was between a sorcerer and a wizard. She had the dreadful suspicion that of the two, the sorcerer wielded more power. And why was he thrice dreaded? She read the verses again, and lingered on the last few lines. “Each founding letter of these verses eight.” It was a clue to a riddle.
Tabitha scanned the left margin of the verses, to find the name, the name she should not speak, the name of the Sorcerer.
Ametheus.
As soon as she saw the word, the vision came at her, hard, fast and furious.
She was in the Pillar in the lowlands, this she knew, for beyond the strange misshapen windows was that same blood-red sky which spat knots of silver charge through sheets of windblown rain, but the ground, before so close, was now far below. The clouds’ ragged bottoms dragged by the windows, and through the gaps between them she could make out a great expanse of water: restless, green and foam flecked. Through another stretched window she could see rumpled land, tilted at an awkward angle.
The roof hunched low over her head, a knuckled surface of glass, as if many globes of random size and colour had been glued together above her, a glistening collection of gelatinous eggs. Suddenly a face filled the closest globe, a distorted face with wide-set eyes and bulbous nose, and she instinctively cowered away from its intrusive stare, but it swirled upon itself and became a pile of leaves then a stretch of desert sands. All the globes held scenes within them, she realised: shifting faces, crowds, beasts, villages, landscapes and starscapes, and some that only showed a soup of sullied colours.
The wide chamber smelled potent, not a truly bad smell, but not good either, like a brewing-house, or a tannery, a mix of growth and decay where neither reigned supreme. The continuous disturbance in the air left a spicy metallic tang in her mouth. Magic, she realised, like the taste of her ring, only ... hotter. She drew a sharp breath as she realised she was not alone.
At a central window, his back toward her, stood a large figure in a divided robe. Tabitha had a horrible sense of falling inward toward that figure, as if the floor she stood upon heaved beneath her feet, and yet at the same time her eyes slid away from the man, even as she was drawn to concentrate on him. The conflict of rejection and attraction disturbed her mind worse than it did her body. Reality itself seemed to be shifting around the large figure.
He bunched his wide shoulders as if readying himself for something. His face was obscured by his headpiece, a crown with flared metal wings that came down to his collar, a glinting red metal, like that used in the helmet she had seen upon the bare-chested man who had killed the dove in the sacrificial pit. The back of his head was covered with a loose fold of black silk with spiralled silver patterns upon it. He spread his hands like a bird taking flight, and the knots of silver fire wriggling through the sky turned and streaked outward, away from the humid tension of the Pillar, away from the Sorcerer.
“Ametheus,” she whispered to herself.
He turned his head slightly toward her, as if she had spoken louder than she’d meant to. His eyes searched the room, as if he could not quite make out who was there. His face, bracketed by the engraved strips of red metal, was smooth and youthful, dark browed and intense.
“I see the future, not you!” he shouted, and lunged toward her with an outstretched hand.
She fell back, struck in her chest by the Sorcerer’s repulsion, as if he had gathered the bonds of gravity itself and hurled them against her.
The instant of prophecy snapped shut. She windmilled her arms in a vain attempt to regain her balance, and sat hard in her chair.
Sorcerer of the silver fire, thrice-dreaded.
Had Ametheus reached for her, or for the prophet in his act of committing the verse to the page? The Sorcerer’s touch lingered upon her skin like the sting that came as one warmed after too long in the snow. She rubbed her arms.
“Tabitha?” May was close beside her. Tabitha nodded to show May she was all right.
“What was that? There was a strange gust of wind that blew in your hair and passed me like a dervish.”
“That came from the Sorcerer.”
“How can he ... ?” May fell silent. Some things were beyond understanding.
“I saw him, but I don’t think he saw me. There is a lot more to the Riddler’s work than there seems to be.”
“The Riddler. You mean Twardy Zarost? What does he have to do with this?”
“He is Wry Tad, May. This is his work.”
“Oh.” May counted slowly on her fingers. “Zastor and Zarost, Twardy and Wry Tad. It’s the Riddler again? He is a perplexing man.” She gave a tired smile. “That reminds me, there’s one verse right at the very end which refers to the crown. Shall I?”
Tabitha stared at the heavy rolls of the Revelations. She didn’t want to meet the Sorcerer again, there might even be worse things than Ametheus in there. In fact, she was sure there were. How far would she have to go? The prophecy was like a never-ending river. At the end of every verse there was always another to be drawn toward. It might even be possible that when she had read all the verses, she would begin all over again, seeing them in a new way.
She would be lost for days in its study. It wouldn’t let her sleep.
“Last one,” Tabitha said. “The absolute last one.”
Maybelle spun the wheel, on and on, and Tabitha sensed time advancing as paper whispered onto the lower stack, until they came to the tail of the Revelations, where the trimmed end of the fine paper was bound to the lower roller with crisscrossed golden ribbons.
if the Riddler has gone when you first reach this sign
if the Crown has slipped from the right royal line
if the Ring has been claimed but your power’s run dry
then Time has been bent and the Ending is nigh
a slim thread of chance might twist through your doom
but
this Gyre-sheltered realm is more likely a tomb
so be quick, be so quick! and seek out the others
to mould a new world and deny the three brothers
And there, below the final words, a symbol had been drawn, like two tangled open-ended eights, or fish with interlocking tails. She recognised it from her apprenticeship; the heart rune, the mark of wizardry. The writing was intended for her. She was supposed to have read it. It was some kind of preparation, or an education. Or a warning.
The Riddler was gone. The Crown had slipped away, and her power was in jeopardy.
Tabitha jumped to her feet. She was dizzy with tiredness, but she knew that it didn’t matter.
The stakes were higher than she’d ever believed.
“I must find Garyll. We must go, we must go at once.”
11. THINKING OF GREATNESS
“People can be measured by two important things:
Unspoken thoughts, and humble beginnings.”—Zarost
Ashley Logán ambled along the street in the dark. Ahead, the imposing outline of a mural tower and its flanking ridge of battlements rose against the pale stars. The tower looked outward over the Stormhaven harbour, and inward over both the commercial half of the upper district and the Merchants Quarter below. There would be Swords up there, patrolling the wall.
He kicked a pebble across the paving stones. Maybe he could become a Sword. That would be a secure profession. Once he was a Sword, he would be paid monthly wages from the king’s coffers, and eat meals in the Swordhouses, and he would have that job until he retired. Even then, as a fullerman, he’d get a small retainer to see him through his fading years. Yes, he could see himself being a Sword. He liked the idea that criminals met with justice, and honest folk were protected. There was honour in maintaining the law, and so many men had been lost in the recent battle the Sword captains were recruiting hard. He might even get a preferential placement, because he had brought both the traitor Tarrok and the Rector Shamgar to the dungeons. The Swords would know of that. He had brought warning of Ravenscroft to Stormhaven as well, so the King might even put in a good word for him! He could become an Officer-of-the-Watch, or a Second-Sword, or even serve in a Captain’s Crossbelt.
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 14
