by neetha Napew
I shifted closer to the Fool. His body trapped my warmth on that side of me. I was so terribly tired and hungry. With one of my new weapons, I chiseled a bit of ice from the wall and sucked on it for water. I put the Elderling light-box back in the Fool’s pack. I found the piece of bread he had left me and ate it. It was very good and very small. Then I rested my head on top of the Fool’s and closed my eyes for a moment. I suppose we slept.
My own shivering wakened me. I felt as if my bones were trying to rattle themselves out of their sockets. It hurt to unfold myself. The Fool slowly slid down to lie on the ice as I beat my arms and stamped my feet, trying to find feeling in them again. I knelt beside him and pawed at him with hands that were too stiff to work well. He was an awful color. When he groaned softly, I sighed with relief. “Get up,” I told him. I kept my voice down, cursing us for having slept so foolishly in such an exposed place. If anyone had come up those stairs, they would have found us unaware and cornered. “Come on. We have to move. We still have to find a way out of here.”
He whimpered and curled up more tightly. I prodded at him, feeling both anger and despair. “We can’t give up now. Get up, Fool. We have to go on.”
“Please.” He breathed the word. “A quiet death. A slide into it.”
“No. Get up.”
He opened his eyes. Something in my face must have told him I would not leave him in peace. He unfolded himself, as stiff and wooden as the puppets he had once carved. He held his hands up before him and looked at them stupidly. “I can’t feel them.”
“Get up and moving. They’ll come back to life.”
He sighed. “It was such a good dream. I dreamed that we both died here and it was all over. There was nothing more we could do, and everyone agreed that we had tried and it wasn’t really our fault. They spoke kindly of us.” He opened his eyes wider. “How did you stand up?”
“I don’t know. Just do it.” I did not feel patient.
“I’m trying.”
As he made his efforts, I told him what I had discovered at the end of the tunnel. I showed him the tools I had taken, and he shuddered. With every word I spoke, he came back to himself a bit more. Finally, he got to his feet and took a few shuffling steps. We were both shaking with the cold but I had recovered some feeling in my hands. I chafed his roughly, despite his gasps of protest at the pain. When he could open and close his hands again, I handed him a knife. He clutched it awkwardly, but nodded when I told him to keep it ready.
“Once we get down the stairs,” I said, blithely ignoring how difficult that might be, “we’re going to have to follow the main corridor. It’s our only hope now.”
“Fitz,” he began earnestly, and then at my look, he stopped. I knew he had been going to tell me how hopeless it was. I took a long farewell look at the dragon. He was dormant again, beyond the reach of my Wit to detect his life.Why, I silently asked him.Why are you here and why must Elliania have your head? Then I turned my back on him, and the Fool followed me as we began our long descent of the stairs.
It was, if anything, more miserable than the ascent had been. We were still tired, hungry, and cold. I lost count of how many times I slipped and fell. The Fool, bereft of his usual grace, stumbled alongside me. I kept expecting that we would encounter someone coming up to torment the dragon, but the stairway remained blue, cold, and silent, and completely indifferent to our suffering. When we grew thirsty, we chipped bits of ice from the wall to suck on. It was the only creature comfort we could offer ourselves.
Eventually we reached the bottom. It seemed almost sudden when we turned that part of the spiral that exposed the waiting corridor to us. Breath bated, we crept down to peer around the last corner. I sensed no one, but our discovery of the Forged Ones in the dungeons had reminded me that there were dangers my Wit could not make me aware of. But the passageway was wide and empty and silent. “Let’s go,” I whispered.
“It won’t lead us out.” The Fool spoke in a normal tone. There was an unhealthy duskiness to the gold of his skin, as if life were already retreating from him, and his voice was dead. “This hall leads to her. It has to. If we follow it, we are going to our deaths. Not that we have many alternatives. As you pointed out before, sometimes all your choices are evil.”
I sighed. “What do you suggest then? Go back down to the water’s edge and hope someone comes with a boat and we can kill him before he kills us? Or go back to the Forged Ones and give ourselves to them? Or go all the way back to the ice fissures and the dark?”
“I think—” he began uncertainly, and then stiffened. I whirled to see what he pointed at behind me. “The Black Man!” he gasped.
It was he, the same person Thick and I had glimpsed before. He stood at a turning in the wide corridor before us, his hands crossed on his chest as if he were waiting for us to notice him. He was dressed all in black: tunic and trousers and boots. His long hair was as black as his eyes and skin, as if he had been made of all one substance and clad in it, too. And as before, he made no impression on my Wit. For just a moment, he stood and stared at us. Then he turned and swiftly strode away. “Wait!” the Fool cried after him and sprang to the chase. I do not know where he found the energy or agility to run. I only know that I thudded after him, my numb feet shocking me each time they jolted on the icy floor. The Black Man glanced back at us, and then fled. He seemed to run without effort, and yet he did not outdistance us. His feet made no sound.
The Fool ran fleetly for a time and I pounded along behind him. Then his last burst of energy left him, and he suddenly lagged. Still the Black Man did not outdistance us. He remained ahead of us, in sight but unreachable, a taunting phantom. Despite the deep breaths I took as I staggered along beside the Fool, I caught no scent of him.
“He’s not real! He’s magic, a trick of some kind.” I gasped the words to the Fool, wanting to believe them.
“No. He’s important.” The Fool’s breath was ragged and he more stumbled than ran now. He caught at my sleeve and leaned on me briefly, then forced himself up and on. “I’ve never felt such significance in a man. Please. Help me, Fitz. We have to follow him. He wants us to follow him. Don’t you see that?”
I saw nothing save that we could not catch him. We went panting and reeling after him, never catching up yet never losing sight of him. The corridors where he led us grew wider and more elaborate. Vines and blossoms decorated the frozen lintels of the arched entryways we passed. The Black Man did not look to left or right, and gave us no time to do so. We passed a garlanded basin of ice that cupped a sculpted fountain, an arched spray of water trapped in stillness. We traversed the spacious and elegant corridors of a magnificent palace of ice, and saw not a soul nor felt a breath of warmth.
We slowed to a lurching walk, interspersed with a few charging steps to keep him in sight each time the Black Man turned a corner. Neither of us had breath for questions. I do not think the Fool thought of anything except catching him. Useless for me to ask why. Even if I’d formed the question, the Fool would not have answered it. My mouth was dry, my heart thundering in my ears, and still we pursued him. He seemed to be sure of himself as he threaded the warren of passageways. I wondered where we were going and why.
Then he led us into the ambush.
So it seemed to me. He had again chosen a turning, and as the Fool and I hastened our lagging steps to keep him in sight, we turned a corner and ran full tilt into six men-at-arms. I caught one last glimpse of the Black Man, far down the hall. He halted, and then as the men-at-arms yelled in surprise and fell upon us, he vanished.
There was no question of defending ourselves. We had run too far, on too little food, water, and sleep. I could not have fended off an angry rabbit. As they seized the Fool, all life seemed to go out of him. His knife fell from his nerveless hand. His mouth sagged open but he did not even cry out. I plunged my blade into the wolf-hide tunic of the first man who leaped on me. There it stuck as he bore me down.
The back of my head bounced off the i
cy floor in a flash of white light.
chapter21
IN THE REALM
OF THE PALE WOMAN
The religion of the White Prophets has never had a strong following in the north lands, yet for a time it afforded a most amusing pastime to the nobility of the Jamaillian court. Satrap Esclepius was quite enamored of the books of prophecy, and paid great sums to traders who could bring him copies of those rare manuscripts. These he entrusted to the priests of Sa, who made yet more copies of them for him. It was said that he often consulted them in this fashion. He would make an offering to Sa, pose his question, and randomly select a passage from one of the manuscripts. He would then meditate on that passage until he felt he had resolved the question.
The nobility of his court, ever anxious to mimic their ruler, soon procured copies of the White Prophecies for themselves and began to use them in like fashion. For a time, the pastime enjoyed great popularity until the head priest of Sa began to decry it as being a portal to idolatry and blasphemy. At his insistence, most of the scrolls were gathered and either destroyed or consigned to the restrictive care of the priesthood.
It is rumored, however, that the Satrap’s fondness for the writings was instrumental in winning the aid that he offered to a young boy of strangely pale mien who wrangled his way into a hearing with the Satrap. Impressed by the lad’s ability to quote from the sacred writings, and persuaded that his help to the boy had been foretold by several verses the lad interpreted for him, the Satrap responded by granting him a free passage on one of the slaving ships then bound for Chalced.
— “CULTS OF THE SOUTHLANDS,”AUTHOR UNKNOWN
I came back to consciousness twice before I could hold fast to it. The first time I was being dragged, one man to each arm, down an icy hallway. The second time, I became aware that I was on my belly and someone was firmly binding my wrists behind my back. The third time, I was again being dragged by my two guards. This time, I clung stubbornly to wakefulness, however painful. We had entered a palatial throne room. It had been hewn from the icy interior of the glacier, and the fat fluted columns that had been left to support its lofty ceiling were blue. On the walls carvings in bas-relief celebrated a woman repeatedly, in one lofty tableau after another. She was shown with a sword in her hand, on the bow of a ship with her hair streaming in the wind; she stood over her crushed enemies, her foot upon one man’s throat; enthroned, she pointed a finger of judgment at the wretches who cowered before her. All of the figures were many times life-sized, towering above us, wrathful and implacable. We had entered the realm of the Pale Woman.
Yet even here, in the heart of her kingdom, she had a rival. In the glassy ceiling of the chamber, behind the blue blurring of thick ice, I glimpsed finally the complete outline of the one I had come so far to see. Our winding path through the corridors had taken us beneath the dragon. I thought I could even glimpse a brighter rectangle of light that might have been our feeble excavation efforts. I wondered if, above us, our friends still labored to chip through the ice to the trapped dragon. Useless to scream out to them; it would have been like trying to scream through not one, but three or four castle walls.
Scores of the Pale Woman’s followers had gathered to watch us brought before her. Immense white globes, suspended from frost-encased chains, lit the hall with an unnatural blue-white light. Heavily clad in furs and skins, her Outislander warriors seemed like dwarves in the overwhelming immensity of the ice palace. They were silent, their faces stoic as we were dragged past them. Their clan tattoos had been obliterated by black blotches. A few wore some sign of regard for their new liege, in the form of dragon or serpent tattoos. They regarded us without pity or hatred or even much curiosity. They did not seem fired with hatred or passion of any kind. The deadness I saw in them went beyond resignation to the beastlike tolerance for suffering that is usually attributed to abused animals. Even my Wit-sense of them was dampened. I wondered if she had discovered some lesser form of Forging, one that tore away their connections to humanity but left them enough fear of her to make them obedient. One of them I recognized. The woman Henja, who had been the Narcheska’s servant at Buckkeep, was as uninterested as the rest of them. I turned my head to confirm it. Yes, it was she. Since she’d left Buckkeep Castle, I’d glimpsed her once in Buckkeep Town when the Piebalds nearly killed me, and again when she had spied on the Prince and the Narcheska riding ponies on the hillside of Mayle Island. How did she fit into all of this? I could not make her role clear to myself, but I knew with sudden certainty that she had always been the Pale Woman’s tool. Danger threatened my prince as surely as it did me.
I managed to get my feet under me, but I could not keep up with the quick step of my guards. I stumbled between them, and when they finally halted and forced me onto my knees before her, I did not resist. My head was still spinning. I would rest in whatever posture I could, and find my strength in blessed stillness. I tried to turn to look at the Fool, but had only a glimpse of him, head lolling, as his guards held him in a limp obeisance before their ruler. Then a stinging slap from one of my wardens brought my eyes back to my captor.
She was white, as the Fool was once white, and her hair floated unbound around her shoulders. Her eyes were colorless, just as the Fool’s had been when he was a boy. Her face was his, softened to a woman’s countenance. Her beauty was unearthly, cool as the ice that surrounded her. She sat on overlapping furs, white bear, white fox, and ermine with dangling black tails, on a throne chiseled from ice. Her robe of purest white wool did not conceal the womanly curves of her body. About her throat she wore a necklace of flowers carved from ivory. Diamonds sparkled in their centers. Her long-fingered hands rested in idle relaxation on the fur-draped arms of her throne. Her fingers were ringed with silver, all set with glistening white stones. She looked down at us, held on our knees before her, and appeared neither pleased nor surprised. Perhaps, like the Fool, she had always known it would come to this.
Her throne nestled in the coil of a curved and sleeping carved dragon. The black-and-silver memory stone of his body gleamed in a mountainous arch behind her throne and his folded wings were thick and heavy against him. He was not one single piece of stone, but rather blocks of it, probably painstakingly hauled here from the quarry at the other end of the island, and then fitted tightly together to form a continuous sculpture. The fine seams in the carefully matched stone were barely visible. The dormant dragon was immense, larger than Verity-as-Dragon had been, and yet still not as big as Icefyre. And he was incomplete, soft and slumped and without details, an unformed suggestion of a dragon rather than a reality. His blocky head on his curved long neck rested before the Pale Woman’s elevated throne like a step. His eyes were lidded. Even so, I shuddered at his cruel countenance. My Wit clamored with conflicting emotions, fear, hatred, pain, lust, and vengeance. All were trapped within the crudely worked stone.
The source of the dragon’s developing essence was plain. Several Outislanders, nearly spent, were chained against his flanks. The captives bore the marks of torture and privation; that would be how the Pale Woman wrung sufficient emotion from them to make them useful to her. Emotions and memories were what a Skill coterie fed into a stone dragon as they created it to hold their joined awareness. I could not understand how she could imagine a creature fed by the discordant memories of tormented wretches could become a sentient creature. What would unite them and give purpose to the dragon’s flight? The stone dragons I had seen had been works of single-minded devotion, the crowning glory of the coteries that had created them. Beauty had infused them, no matter how odd the shapes each coterie had selected to represent it. Even the Winged Boar had gained grace in flight. This creature of hers was a mosaic of stolen pain. What temperament would such a creature have? It was obvious to my Wit that the prisoners’ humanity had already been Forged away from them, stripped from their souls and forced into the dragon. What she fed it now was the dumb torment of creatures less than beasts. What sort of a dragon would he be, founded o
n pain and hatred and cruelty?
Between the sleeping dragon’s forepaws was another throne, also of ice and also draped with furs. The ice and coverings of that throne were corroded with filth and human waste. A caricature of a human was chained to it, manacled at ankles, wrists, and throat to rings sunk deep in the ice of the royal chair. The black crown he wore looked painfully tight, as if locked to his brow, and his royal robes were stained and tattered. He wore chains of silver about his neck, and the chains that restrained him had been set with jewels, mocking his captivity. His beard and hair were grown long and matted; his nails were yellow and crusted. The ends of his bare toes and fingers were black with frostbite. Discarded bones, picked clean of meat, littered the floor near his feet. Perhaps one was a human armbone. I looked away, unwilling to know what they fed him. He was Forged, but not completely. I could still feel his hate, and how it burned. Perhaps that was the only feeling left to him. And then, like a numbed limb returning to life, I felt an odd tingling of my Skill. I turned my head as if I could capture it, like a man straining after a sound. It came no more clearly to me, but I discerned the source of it. The mad king Skilled at me. His teeth were set in a yellow snarl and his sunken eyes were fixed on me. For an instant, I felt the full force of his Skilled hatred and it struck me like a blow. Then it was gone, not because I shielded myself, but because my ability to feel it faded again. I heaved in a panting breath, shocked at his Skill-strength. Perhaps Thick could have matched him in Skill-power; I knew I never could have.
I managed to lift my head and look back at the woman, and was startled to find her smiling at me. She had been waiting for me, letting me look my fill and reach my own conclusions. A long, graceful hand gestured at her captive king. “Kebal Rawbread. But I’m sure you guessed that only my failed Catalyst could be worthy of such a punishment, FitzChivalry Farseer. Oh, you need not look so aghast. I am only finishing what your Six Duchies dragons began. He foolishly ventured out, to draw his bow and fire at a flight of dragons overhead. But their mere passage above him sapped much of his intelligence. Not that he had much to begin with. He was a useful tool, for a time. He had cunning, ambition, and he knew the ways of war.”
