by Alison Baird
DAMION COULD NOT SAY why he went to the ruins. Something called to him: a yearning, formless yet insistent, directed his steps. Ahead of him lay the bleak broken walls and exposed foundations overgrown with vines, and an evocative scent of greenery and old damp stone blew toward him on the night breeze. He halted, breathing it in. As a boy he had come here to play, pretending to be a knight riding to challenge an evil warlord, or rescue a damsel in distress. All the lost desires of childhood returned to him on that cool, vernal air. He thought of his father, and wondered if he had cherished similar dreams as a boy—dreams that had endured into adulthood, if old Ana’s guess about his paternity was correct. He stepped through a crumbling archway, onto grass-grown paving stones. Weathered walls and the shell of a tower rose before him into the night; the figure of a stone dragon perching on the battlements snarled down upon him with its broken fangs. This old boyhood haunt should feel safe and familiar, but in the darkness it took on an inexplicable menace. As he stood there he heard a sound that made him pause, suddenly alert: a horse’s hooves clopping on stone. It came from the old Elei road.
Some extra sense, newly awakened, warned him in time. He dodged swiftly out of sight behind a collapsed wall.
From the shadows beyond the broken curtain wall came the horse and its rider. Both were a strange sight. The horse was arrayed like a war-steed of olden times, with flowing dark caparison and armor of steel, so that only its black neck and legs and its long streaming tail showed. The rider was also armored, in greaves and gauntlets and cuirass of steel under a black surcoat. Emblazoned on surcoat and shield was the device of a dragon rampant.
The ghost prince! Damion thought, astonished. Someone is impersonating him again. But what is that white thing he’s carrying?
It looked like a half-unraveled bolt of white cloth, trailing over the horse’s flank. Then as rider and mount drew nearer Damion saw the limp figure of a girl draped over the saddle’s pommel, her white postulant’s dress shining faintly in the moonlight. Her torso was propped against the knight’s chest. Long braids of fair hair hung from her lolling head.
“Lorelyn!” Damion cried. Abandoning all caution, he sprang to his feet. The horse snorted and shied. Its rider pulled it to a halt, and man and mount in their archaic armor stood still for a moment, gleaming and impossible under the moon and stars.
With a yell Damion ran at the rider and seized hold of Lorelyn’s dangling arm. She showed no sign of life at his shout or touch. Was she in a faint—or dead? “Let go of her!” Damion shouted as he struggled to pull the limp body from the other man’s grip. Whatever else he might be, he was no insubstantial spirit: Damion could not break the hold of the metal-clad arms. He glared up at the faceless head and the moon’s light, probing the eye-slits of the knight’s visor, reflected back from two pale, glowing eyes.
Damion recoiled, his rash fury turned to fear—too late. A heavy gauntleted arm came down on the back of his head even as he tried to swerve away. There was a burst of light behind his eyes, and then a darkness that came rushing up to meet him.
HE REVIVED WITH A THROBBING pain in the back of his head. Groaning, he stirred, feeling hard stone beneath him. His eyes flickered open. He was lying on the ground, in some vast, dark space where red light threw shadows on walls of rough-hewn stone. The light came from leaping tongues of flame, before which dark demonic silhouettes bustled to and fro. The air was acrid and thick with smoke, and his bleary eyes smarted as he gazed about him.
He never had believed literally in the Pit of Perdition . . .
At the sound of his groans one of the figures approached him, kicking him in the ribs with a booted foot that felt all too real. “Get up,” the demon ordered.
Damion grunted in pain and struggled to his feet. His senses cleared, and he saw that he was in a large, tunnel-like chamber with walls of coarse masonry. The infernal bonfires resolved themselves into the flames of torches bracketed to the walls. The catacombs? As he stood, clutching his aching ribs, two men came forward, pinioned his arms behind him, and dragged him toward the back of the chamber, where other figures milled about. He saw about a dozen men and women, their faces half shadowed in the fitful torchlight. Were these Nemerei?
“Let me go,” he rasped. They ignored him.
He recalled his struggle with the armored man, wondering for a moment if it had been a nightmare. It was all impossible—absurd: a scene out of boyhood fantasies. The evil knight riding into the castle keep; the damsel in distress. And himself, like one of the youthful heroes in the faerie tales, straying into the midst of a perilous adventure . . . But his head still throbbed where the knight had struck him. “Where is she? Where’s Lorelyn?”
The large man who had kicked him answered: “Mandrake has her.”
“Mandrake? Who’s he? I want to see Ana,” he said.
Jeering laughter greeted this demand. “Small chance of that,” chortled one shadowy figure.
“She knows me. Tell her I want to speak with her!”
“And why would we go to Ana?”
“She’s your leader, isn’t she?”
The man snorted. “That old hag? We’ve naught to do with her.”
He stared. “Then you’re not Nemerei?”
“The Nemerei? They’re no friends of ours.”
“Who are you?” he croaked.
Another man approached, thin and unkempt, and smirked at Damion. The smirk shifted into a laugh, showing yellowed and rotting teeth. Suddenly Damion understood. “You—you’re the ones who have been burning the farmers’ barns, attacking their livestock. But why?” he cried. There was no reply from the shadowy figures, but no denial either. Damion fought to keep his voice steady. “Look here. I’m a priest of the Faith, I’ve nothing to do with you people.”
“Oh, haven’t you?” returned the thin man implacably. “Wasn’t it you who brought the scroll out of the Archipelagoes? And then gave it to old Ana? And what were you doing wandering about the ruins in the early hours, eh? Looking for your precious Lorelyn?” He thrust his face close to Damion’s, laughing. The breath from the gap-toothed mouth was foul.
“You’d better let her go, and me too, or you’ll be in trouble with the authorities.” He tried hard to force a stern note into his voice.
The man shook his shaggy head. “Oh, no—you’ve seen our gathering place now. You know too much.”
Damion opened his mouth to protest, then shut it again. These people were utterly mad; there was no point in attempting to reason with them. Someone would surely come looking for him when he was found to be missing . . . Then with a sickening lurch of the heart he recalled his letters to Abbot Hill and the Patriarch, still lying on his desk in plain sight: the letters in which he declared his intention of leaving the Academy and his vocation. Would the abbot, on reading them, assume that his wayward chaplain had simply run off as Lorelyn had done, leaving the letters there for him to find?
Damion’s brief burst of confidence wilted. All he could hope was that Ana and her Nemerei might find out about his capture, and alert the abbot. Until then, he must wait—and hope his captors did not decide to turn their savage impulses on him.
Hours passed as he sat there, head on knees, half dozing. All the night, and perhaps most of the following day, dragged past. In time his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light. By the flickering glow of the torches Damion could see that he was in a long tunnel-like chamber with curved roof and walls, vanishing at either end into darkness. On the nearer wall a crude symbol was daubed in black paint: a crowned dragon, curled into a circle with its tail in its mouth. The Vormir was sometimes represented this way, as the uroboros serpent whose circular body symbolized infinity. But it was not usually shown with a crown. This must be the emblem of Modrian-Valdur, the self-consuming Dragon.
He stared at it as if mesmerized. The books on sorcery he’d read touched upon the cult of Modrian. Some scholars held that the fallen archangel, the traitorous “Fiend” of the Faith, was once a god of the ancients.
But then his worship was banned for its cruel rituals, and Modrian was struck from the old pantheon. This, the scholars suggested, was the origin for Modrian’s mythical “expulsion from Heaven.” In the Antipodes Modrian became closely linked to the Zimbouran god Valdur, whose rites were similar: hence the later belief that the two gods were one. If a Nemerei coven still existed in modern-day Maurainia, then why not a Modrianist one? It was not impossible. If this were such a coven, its followers and Ana’s would be bitter enemies. For both believed in the Tryna Lia: to the Nemerei she was a messiah figure, but to the Modrianists their worst foe, the adversary of their own dark god. Certainly both groups would be interested in the scroll, which spoke of the Star Stone’s supposed location and the powers it would bestow on either Princess or dark Prince. And what of the Zimbourans—were they allied with the Modrianists, or did they view them as rivals for the prize, or did they not know of them at all . . . ?
Presently he became aware that his captors were holding an urgent debate, trying to decide what should be done with him. He wondered if there was any point in trying to run for it, and quickly dismissed the idea. He listened anxiously. It appeared that the witches, or Modrianists, or whatever they were, had to leave the tunnels in a hurry: someone had found out about them. The word “Patriarch” was mentioned several times, though he could not catch all of what was said. At last the large brutish man said, “There’s only one thing to be done, and you know it. The priest can’t go with us. Mandrake must take him.”
“He’s still out on his rounds,” said another man.
“He’ll be back before long. Put the priest down the hole: Mandrake will find him soon enough.”
Mandrake again. Who is Mandrake? Damion wondered as two large ruffians seized hold of his arms and dragged him bodily down a passage leading from the main chamber. And what’s “the hole”?
The catacombs were far more extensive than he had realized. It was like walking in an immense rabbit warren or mole-burrow, with tunnel after tunnel opening out of one another. As they left the paved passages behind and descended a narrow rough-sided one gouged from living rock, Damion began to be feel something akin to panic. All that intolerable weight of earth and stone seemed precariously poised above his head, pressing down upon him. The flames of the men’s torches burned low in the still, sepulchral air. It might have been some pagan netherworld in which they walked, far removed from the lands of the living.
At last they entered a large, cavelike space, in whose rock floor gaped a hole large enough to cast a man into. His captors led Damion toward its black mouth. “In there,” one of them ordered, shoving him in the back.
He shrank from the pit’s edge. “What’s down there?” he asked.
Without further ado they grabbed his arms and hurled him into the hole. He yelled: but the drop was not as far as he feared, and he landed safely on his hands and feet. For a moment he saw the torchlit faces of the two men above him, peering down through the mouth of the hole. Then they made off in the direction from which they had come—in haste, almost as though they were afraid. The light of their guttering torches dwindled and vanished, leaving him in pitch darkness. He could not even see his hand when he raised it before his face.
The floor of his oubliette was apparently of natural rock, rough and uneven. In the distance he could hear water-droplets falling into some hidden pool, the hollow echo conveying to him the impression of a vast space, broader and higher than he had at first thought. He started walking forward, slowly, and barked his shin on a tall upright stone. His grunt of pain and surprise reverberated through the cavern. He stood still then, afraid to move lest he stumble upon some crevasse in the floor and fall in. Horror filled him—horror of the dark, with its treacherous concealment of dangers: pits, precipices, lurking beasts. Horror of the dark itself, blinding, enfolding, pitiless.
Carefully he sat down again on the hard ground and, with his back against another tall upright rock, rested his still-throbbing head on his knees.
What have I gotten myself into? And where is Lorelyn?
SOMEONE WAS CALLING HER NAME.
The voice that was not a voice summoned her insistently, through the dark space that lay behind her thoughts. It was not vague and muffled like all the mind-voices she had previously known, but clear and precise: every word came to her as distinctly as if it were uttered close to her ear. She moaned, stirred, felt the softness of a bed beneath her.
Lorelyn, the voice called.
Lorelyn opened her eyes. A web of yellow light glowed before her, coalesced, resolved itself into the flickering flames of several candles. They were distributed about the interior of a large room, resting in candlesticks on tables or burning in wall-sconces. She lay on a bed with a heavy red-curtained canopy, looking out through a gap in the hangings. She thrust them aside and leaped to her feet. The room was cluttered with objects: painted screens, vases with coiling dragons on them, chests of brass or carved wood. The walls were built of great blocks of stone, and hung with tapestries. There were no windows. Her satchel lay on the floor, next to the bed. There was no one else in the room with her, yet still she felt a presence.
“Where am I?” Lorelyn demanded, out loud.
And the voice answered her. Do not be afraid, it said—or rather, thought—in her mind.
But for perhaps the first time in her life, Lorelyn was truly afraid. She rubbed her temples, trying hard for a moment to remember. Then she recalled the black knight on horseback, and looked wildly about the dim-lit room. “You . . . you’re the same person Father Damion and I saw in the chapel.”
It was I. Yes.
The ghost prince. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “You’re a spirit, aren’t you?”
No. I am real—as real as you are. There is no ghost, and never was. That was only a hearth-tale. I disguised myself as a ghost to make people fear me.
“But why?” She spun around, staring into the shadows beyond the candles. “Who are you? Where are you? I don’t see you.”
Because I am not in the room with you. But I am not far away. I am coming: before long you will see me.
“What is this place? Where am I?”
For your own safety, I cannot answer that.
“Let me go.”
Not yet. You are in danger, Lorelyn. Because of your special abilities there are many people who will wish to do you harm, and others who will try to make use of you. But have no fear: as long as you stay with me you will be safe. I will be your protector, your friend. Now, I have left you a meal: you see the covered dishes, there on the table? Trust me: I will provide for all your needs.
She raised her chin, trying to feel brave. “I won’t stay here. I’ll not be shut up again. Why is everyone always trying to keep me locked away? I won’t stand for it, I tell you—I’ll escape!” she shouted at the darkness.
The voice seemed amused and indulgent rather than angry. You may try if you wish. But you will find it impossible.
9
Jomar
AILIA STARED OUT THE common-room window, feeling utterly miserable. It was midafternoon, but the day was so dark that it seemed much later: a mist had come down from the mountains, blotting out the sun and the countryside. She could not even see the Academy or the ruins from here. It was like looking out on a blank gray void.
“Has there been no word yet?” she asked anxiously as Arianlyn entered the room.
“I’m afraid not.”
“They’ll never find her in this,” said Janeth. “They’ll have to wait for it to clear.”
“But it’s been foggy all day. Who knows when it will clear? And she might be lying somewhere in the fields, hurt—” Ailia’s voice cracked with worry.
“Oh, stop twittering, Ailia!” said Janeth irritably. “They would have found Lorelyn by now if she had been hurt. She’s far away from here, I’m sure. Remember what her note said.”
Sister Faith had shown them all the little piece of paper with its untidy scrawl when she questioned them about
Lorelyn last night. The pathetic words were still seared upon Ailia’s mind, deep as a brand. “I knew she wasn’t happy, but I never believed she would actually run away,” Ailia moaned. “Poor Lorelyn. Where in the world could she have gone?”
Lusina laughed without humor. “The question isn’t where she’s gone, Worm. It’s with whom.”
“What do you mean?” Ailia demanded.
“Think! Who else is missing from the Academy?”
Belina’s usually rosy face had gone very pale. “Father Damion.”
It was true: Damion had not been in chapel that morning. One of the village priests had taken the service in his place.
“Is that why Patriarch Norvyn is here at the Academy?” asked Arianlyn. “But why has he brought all those men with him?”
“That I couldn’t tell you. But I know Damion left the Academy last night,” declared Lusina. “There’s a rumor going round the men’s dormitory: they say he just ran off, leaving a note for the abbot. The monks and magisters are all being very close-mouthed about it, but the boys have heard things. He’s been unhappy in his vocation for some time now, they say, and he’s given up on it at last. He’s left for good.”
“I don’t believe it!” Belina cried in dismay.
“No?” Lusina grinned. “Ferrell Woods told me he actually saw Father Damion walking away over the fields last night. And he was dressed in a shirt and trousers. Now, where was he going so late, dressed like that, and why didn’t he return?” she demanded.
“Maybe he was searching for Lorelyn,” Ailia suggested, trying to quell the growing dismay in her heart. “And it was too hard to walk the countryside in a long robe.”
“Or maybe he ran off to join her.” Lusina sniggered. She aimed her words at the tearful Belina, deliberately tormenting her, and did not see Ailia’s stricken expression. “They must have been planning this for some time, he and Lorelyn. He’s in love with her, of course: the young maiden he saved from the perilous Archipelagoes! Now he’s going to save her from the cloister and the veil. How romantic!” She leered at Belina. “‘I’m sorry, but I was never meant to be a nun!’” From her mocking mouth the words were odiously suggestive.
