'There is a reason for everything,' said Talus. 'Even death.'
'Death comes for a reason?' said Arak.
'I believe so.'
'It's hard to believe it.'
'Yes, it is.'
'Death brings more than just grief,' said Bran. 'It brings a need to know the truth. A need to close ... Talus, how did you describe it to me?'
'To close the past,' said the bard.
'Closing,' murmured Arak.
'Knowing the truth closes the door that lets in the darkness,' said Talus. 'This is something time has taught me. It is why I do what I do.'
'And what's that?'
'I find truth where there appears to be none.'
'So ... you will help?' said Arak. 'You will work to make this right? To make this man answer for what he has done?'
'I will work to uncover the truth. If that is what you consider to be "right", then the answer to your question is yes.'
Arak leaped to his feet, suddenly grinning. 'That's all I wanted to know!'
With that, he ran off into the throng.
'Poor boy,' said Bran. 'He's lost.'
'Death brings trials, Bran. You know that.'
Despite the blazing heat of the fire, Bran shivered. 'Yes,' he said, 'I do.'
CHAPTER EIGHT
As the evening went on, fermented drinks were passed around and the proceedings grew increasingly unruly. At a wink from Talus, Bran started groaning and rubbing his belly. Tharn's change of heart meant he no longer needed a guard so nobody protested when he made his excuses and retired from the arena.
He went straight to the cairn.
Talus had already taken great delight in explaining to Bran about the cairn's design.
'It is cunningly built,' the bard had said. 'Its walls shape any sounds that are made inside it.
Imagine! A simple footstep becomes the grunt of a sleeping giant. A single human voice swells up until it becomes the roar of an angry mob.'
Well, that explained how Mishina, simply by banging his staff on the the floor, had set up that unnerving barrage of echoes. Bran consoled himself that at least this time he'd be alone. He would move carefully, making no sound. That way, the cairn would remain silent.
He was wrong.
As soon as he reached the shelter of the entrance stoop, Bran heard it: an immense, liquid moaning.
The sound was so deep in pitch it was scarcely sound at all. It flowed out of the cairn like thick tar.
When the wind gusted, it grew immeasurably louder.
Bran quickly decided the wind was the cause of it: the air moving past the mouth of the cairn made a hooting sound, like a hunter blowing air across his cupped hands to mimic the call of an owl.
It was a deduction worthy of Talus himself.
It didn't make Bran feel any less terrified.
He loitered outside the entrance. If he was going to run away, now was the time to do it. Everyone was busy at the feast; the rest of the village was deserted. Bran was confident he could find his way back through the maze. He'd even worked out that the tide would be low enough for him to cross back over the causeway.
But that would mean letting Talus down.
Did that matter, when he was planning to leave his friend anyway?
He continued to dither until eventually someone spoke in his head. It was a voice that came to him occasionally, usually in times of great trial when the weight of the world seemed to press down hard on his tired bones.
It was Keyli's voice.
'Stay, Bran,' she said. 'You can't leave him without saying goodbye.'
Bran set courage against fear and stepped inside the cairn.
Here the sound was a hundred times worse. The curved walls scooped up the drone of the wind, amplified and twisted it, gave it words where before it had none. Made it a dire song. The roar of the gale was an ocean through which swam the voices of the dead.
Bran shuddered. He shook snow from his bearskin and peered into the gloom. The light was terrible. The bright moon had guided him this far; now he was practically blind.
Slowly, shapes materialised: the regular uprights of the stone stalls; the mounds of desiccated bones; the slumped mountain that was the dead king's slowly thawing body. The tiny door Talus had sent him here to open looked very far away.
Thunder boomed outside. The cairn swallowed the sound whole, compressed it, smashed it against the sides of Bran's head. He dropped to his knees, pressed his hands to his ears. The thunder became the war-cry of an army of wrathful ghosts.
'No!' Bran shouted into the darkness.
The cairn ripped his one word into a thousand pieces. He was drowning in echoes.
No no no!
The sound intensified. Thunder crashed again and again. The storm had eaten him. Bran pinched his eyes shut and tried to wish the noise away.
'Please stop!' he shouted.
Stop stop stop!
The floor shifted beneath him, trying to tip him over. The air grew thick, wrapped itself around him like a tongue and squeezed. The ceiling descended. He couldn't breathe. He could barely think.
'I can't do it!'
Do it do it do it!
Then Keyli said, 'You can.'
The instant he heard her voice, the cairn relaxed around him. He floated in space, in the sound. The sound gathered him up, carried him high into the storm. The wind turned him over and over, spinning him until he was dizzy and sweeping him off to another time, another place, another storm ...
Bran stands on weed-slick boulders as waves hurl themselves high over his head. The furious ocean stretches before him, alive in the tempest. At his back, behind the marram dunes, squat the low huts of Arvon, his home. The huts are filled with slumbering people. The sleepers are oblivious to the drama playing out on the rocky shore and so, as far as Bran is concerned, they might as well be dead.
Behind the Arvon huts rise the white-capped grey mountains known as the Nioghe. The mountains crowd the coast as if eager to drown themselves. Like the people of Arvon, they're as still as the dead.
The sky, however, is alive. More: it's filled with fire. The stars have left their places and are shooting across the heavens. They leave thin white scratches in the night, as if big cats are trying to claw their way through from the other side of the black. It's quite a sight to behold. But Bran has no time for the sky. There's a boat on the raging water. Keyli is in the boat. Her mouth is agape, but Bran can't hear what she's screaming. He has no idea why she's out there. All he knows is that earlier that evening they fell asleep in each other's arms as they always did, and that he awoke in the middle of the night to find her gone. He rose, panic in his breast, and followed her tracks to the shore.
He has no doubt that it was great Mir, guardian of the ocean, who roused him from his sleep, Mir who called him across the dunes to this place, to witness his beloved wife dying in front of him, Mir, who's watched over Bran his whole life, bringing him and his wriggling catches home safe through even the worst winter storms.
Mir, who now thinks it sport to stamp out Keyli's life right in front Bran's unbelieving eyes, with no more regard than a cruel child stamping his heel on an ant.
A fresh trail of light streaks across the night sky, wider than the rest. It's not thin and white but yellow and jagged. The flying fire is getting closer.
As the yellow light fades, Bran finds he's no longer alone on the shore. A man is standing with him: a tall stranger dressed in motley robes. His head is bald. The stranger shouts and points.
'What?!' Bran yells.
'Rope!' says the stranger.
Bran sees it: one end of a rope thrashes in the waves. The other end is tied to Keyli's boat. If he could only grab the rope, he might be able to pull her back to the shore. Pull the woman he loves to safety.
He glances behind him. There is nobody else around. The dunes are a blank and the mountains don't care.
Bran crouches, nearly loses his footing on a treacherous, weed-covered rock. The rope dances
just out of reach in the foaming water. He stretches for it with both his good, strong hands.
He misses.
The stranger leaps past him. The stranger jumps into the churning waves, sinking instantly up to his shoulders. He seizes the rope and hurls it at Bran.
Bran catches the rope. It's coarse and sodden. Keyli is still screaming. The sea picks up the boat and flips it over. Keyli flies from it into the water.
'Keyli!' Bran shouts.
Her white hands emerge from the waves and cling to the upturned boat. It's a good boat - Bran made it himself. But the storm is tearing it apart.
The stranger tries to pull himself back on to the rocks. His hands keep slipping on the weed and his bald head keeps going under. Bran grips the rope and starts to pull. The sea tries to suck the rope out of his hands, but Bran is strong, both his hands are strong, and he's pulling with all his heart, and the weight of all his life behind him, and the weight of all his life to come.
At first the boat resists. Bran howls and pulls and eventually the boat begins to come, and Keyli comes with it. Bran sees her face in agonising glimpses, now white in the water, now eclipsed by the cruel swell. He sees her hands, each slender finger making its own good grip on the sealskin hull of the boat. She's holding tight, and so is he. He's strong enough to do this, everything's going to be all right.
'Do all you can,' says the stranger. His voice is filled with water. His head sinks beneath the waves and doesn't come up.
Bran screams and pulls. If only he can be quick enough, he can save both Keyli and the man who came to his aid. He wedges his feet into the deepest crevice he can find and pulls.
It's then that the stars stop flying and begin to fall ...
'Enough!' Bran shouted. He clamped his hands hard to his ears, took a tottering step back towards the cairn's entrance. Incredibly, the sound of the twin storms—both the one outside the cairn and the one inside his head—faded completely away. Bran stood, shaking, unbelieving, lost inside a bubble of sudden silence. What trickery was this?
Cautiously, he took a single step forwards. The thunder rumbled again; the echoes of his own shouting returned.
When he took a step back, the sounds died away to nothing.
Bran forced himself to relax. Talus had told him of such things, though he'd never actually encountered them. Builders so clever they could make chambers that turned sound into alternating stripes of fury and calm. Here was the proof of it.
Gradually Bran's heartbeat slowed. He often dreamed about Keyli's death—had dreamed about it a lot lately, in fact. Never had he relived it so intensely as he just had in the cairn. This was a place of death.
Maybe the whole island was.
He waited while the dread drained away. Slowly, his memories of that awful night—of the storm and the fire-filled sky—sank back down into their hiding place. Now that he understood what made the sound act the way it did, it had no power over him. It was just noise.
He stepped forward through the alternating bands of sound and silence towards the little doorway awaiting him at the end of the cairn. As he advanced, he found himself thinking back to the story Talus had told in the arena. The tale of the feathered giant was odd—not one Bran had heard before. He couldn't decide if it was meant to be happy or sad. He supposed it was both.
He reached the end of the cairn. The ceiling was incredibly low here, forcing him to crawl.
He raised his good hand—it was trembling—to the little door. The stone was comfortably cool. This was one of the cairn's silent spots, and Bran felt curiously at peace. He bent his fingers round the edge of the stone and set his weight against it. Just as he was about to push it aside, he spotted something sticking out from beneath it.
The object was difficult to make out in the darkness. He thought it might be a bird's quill - or was he was still thinking about the feathers from Talus's story? There was only one way to find out. Bran heaved at the little door. It slid aside with surprising ease. As it moved, he closed his eyes, not wishing to see what lay beyond.
Blind, he reached down and fumbled on the floor. At first he felt nothing. Then his fingers stumbled over the object he'd seen. It was hard and spindly. He picked it up and stuffed it into the pouch he carried at his waist. Then he slid the door shut.
Only then did he open his eyes.
He stared at the little door, glad it was sealed again. What might he have seen had he looked? Spirit eyes staring back at him, the eyes of someone dead?
Keyli's eyes?
Part of him believed there was nothing there, that the door was just a simple dam holding back the natural earth beyond.
Part of him believed he'd narrowly avoided catching a glimpse of the afterdream.
He choked back a sob. He'd already revisited the past once this night. He had no intention of doing so again. He'd come here for a single ordinary reason: to find whatever it was Talus had sent him for. Now it was done. All that remained was for him to go back the bard, hand it over and say his goodbyes.
Lightning shattered the darkness beyond the entrance to the cairn, turning the night-dark doorway briefly into a stuttering, snow-veiled square. Bran held up what he'd found. Blue flashes chased across the thing's contours, describing its shape in exquisite detail.
It was a bonespike, but one much longer and thicker than the bonespike Fethan carried round his neck. Its smooth sides were blackened with a sticky substance. Bran was certain it was blood.
He was holding the murder weapon.
Bran made for the exit. On the way he brushed against the corpse of the frozen king. Fresh thunder crashed outside. He bit his lip to stifle a scream. He covered the last few paces at a run.
After the strange acoustics of the cairn, the sound outside was clean and somehow wholesome. Bran raised his face and drank it in. The thunder held itself in check, exposing the roar of the ocean. The storm had whipped it to a frenzy. He wanted to be off this cursed island right now.
He'd find shelter on the mainland. A cave perhaps, or the hollow trunk of a fallen tree.
A new sound came to him, riding over the smash of wave on rock: human cries, and the sound of splintering wood.
In front of Bran was a narrow, winding path leading away from the cairn—away from the village altogether in fact. He guessed it led to the island's western beach.
The cries came again.
Stuffing the bonespike that had killed Hashath into his pouch, Bran started running along the path.
CHAPTER NINE
The path led Bran up a steep slope through a twisting slalom of icy rocks. The wind whipped fresh snow against his face. The cold bit his ears, the tip of his nose.
Men he couldn't see shouted for help.
The slope reached its peak and started to descend. The change was so abrupt that Bran's feet shot from under him. Just for a moment, he felt as if he was flying. Then he was down again and sliding on his backside over slick ice, finally landing on a beach of pebbles that clattered together like thousands of tiny bones. The wind continued to hammer him, its monumental roar competing with the crash of the waves on the shore.
An eerie orange light burned through the swirling snow, illuminating a sweeping curve of shingle studded with craggy boulders. Looming over the beach was a tremendous weather-torn cliff.
The sun had set long ago. Where was the light coming from?
The shouts were much louder now. Bran picked himself up and pressed on. The wind was so strong he had to lean into it to stay on his feet. The shingle sucked at him; he plodded with giant, unsteady steps, like a man wading through a swamp. At last he reached the waterline, where a slender rock pointed like a gigantic finger at the sky.
A boat was wallowing in the shallows. Its hull was smooth and grey. Its prow rose high; at its peak was the carved likeness of a wolf's head. A hollow bowl sat between the animal's ears. Flames licked from the bowl. So that was the source of the light.
The boat was on the brink of disaster. Huge waves hurled it a
gainst first one boulder then another. Over the sides of the hull, the faces of men now flickered into view, now vanished: the boat's crew, trying desperately to steer their vessel safely to shore. Their faces looked deformed, monstrous even; or perhaps it was the eerie light. Oars thrashed, but Bran could see it was hopeless.
Trapped in the chasm between the rocks, the boat had fallen victim to an endless churning whirlpool. Mir, the spirit of the sea, was angry.
Lightning connected the clouds. Bran flinched. This was too much like that other storm, that other night. Keyli's face had come and gone from view just like the faces of the boat's desperate crew, alternately exposed and concealed by the waves. Maybe he'd passed through the doorway after all, and here he was in the afterdream, where death ruled all ...
'Help us!'
The voice cut through the storm: the cries of the many distilled into a single desperate plea.
Bran cupped his hands, the good and the bad, around his mouth. His beard was sodden.
'Row back!' he shouted.
The sea seized the boat and tossed it against the rocks. The hull shuddered along its entire length. Suddenly Bran understood that the boat was immense—bigger than any he'd seen. Big enough to hold at least twenty men.
He flapped his hands. 'Go back!'
He had no idea if they heard him. Then one of the oars flailing over the side of the boat started to press against the waves rather than with them. All instinct would be telling these men to beach the boat before it was wrecked; someone on board, on hearing his cry, had found the courage to do the exact opposite.
'Throw a rope!' Bran moved his arms, miming the act of catching and pulling. Could anyone see him?
The answer came in the form of a coiling snake-shape lashing out of the murk. It cut into the sand ten paces away from where Bran stood. At once it started slithering back towards the water's edge. Bran chased it, managed to grab it just before it vanished into the waves.
So like his dream.
The boat was retreating now, crawling back out of the whirlpool that had been holding it captive. But escape meant returning to the open sea, where the storm would sink it for certain. The rope snapped tight, threatening to drag Bran into the water. He set his weight against it, tried to wrap the rope round the finger of rock. It would make a perfect anchor, if only he could secure it. His heels scrabbled in the shingle. The rope began to slip through his good hand, burning it.
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