“And I’m doing well, too, Balor,” the doctor said.
“They wouldn’t tell us anything,” Finn said. “We didn’t know what had happened to you.”
“We’re all right,” Will said, glancing at Hawk, who had stayed close to his side. “Before you were captured, did you see what happened to Shade?”
“No, but we’ve heard wolves since we’ve been here,” Finn said. “They’re keeping them somewhere in the lower halls of the fortress.”
“I think they must have Shade,” Will said. “We have to find him.”
He looked around the stone chamber and his hope fell even further. There was a round wooden lid in one corner, over what he guessed was the latrine. The walls were bare stone stained with damp and the only light came from a small barred grate near the ceiling. The room smelled of long neglect.
“The fact that we’re still alive suggests these Stormriders want something from us,” Finn said.
“To fight for them, that’s my guess,” Balor said. “Like they took the Horse Folk warriors. Well, they’ll have a fight on their hands all right, when I get these manacles off.”
“Did they give you anything to eat?” Alazar asked.
“Some thin soup,” Balor said. “It had a nasty aftertaste. Gahh. Nightbane food.”
“They’ve drugged or poisoned it with something,” Alazar said. “Did you notice anything else, other than the taste?”
“Come to think of it, I felt a little … odd afterwards,” Balor said. “I thought it was because I was still hungry. When you’re this size, broth doesn’t get the job done.”
The floor began to shudder under their feet and they braced themselves against the chamber walls. For a moment it seemed as if the entire fortress was shaking itself apart. Slowly the tremors lessened, then finally stopped.
“This place is falling apart,” Balor said. “Bits and pieces of it have been breaking off ever since they brought us here. And the way it leans. You’d almost think someone picked the whole blasted thing up and dropped it.”
The wildman turned suddenly to Will.
“That story your mother told you, Will,” he said, “about Lightfoot and this Captain Stormcloud. How did it end?”
Will touched his hand to the cold stone wall.
“It didn’t,” he said.
They sat waiting in the cell for what seemed like hours. Every now and then they would hear rumbling, and feel the stone shudder beneath them. At last there was a sound of feet in the corridor outside and the door was unlocked and groaned open. This time there were four other mordog besides Grath, and the two door sentries. The prisoners were marched out of the cell, Balor still manacled. One of the mordog took Hawk and began to lead him away from the others.
“Lightfoot!” the boy cried, struggling against the mordog’s grip on his arm.
“Where are you taking him?” Will shouted.
“Let the boy stay with us,” Finn said.
The mordog did not reply, and Hawk was hurried out of sight. The last Will saw of him was his frightened eyes.
Will and the others were herded along another narrow, winding corridor that rose steadily upwards, then out onto a staircase that was open to the air because part of the wall had crumbled away. They were looking down into the inner part of the fortress, Will realized. As with the chambers and corridors, the tilted courtyard had been reshaped into a series of terraced spaces connected by staircases. The sun was setting in a haze of smoke and dust, but shed enough light to bathe the upper walls in a warm amber glow.
The stairs led back inside the fortress and to another short corridor. At the end was a doorway flanked by two more sentries, and inside it a spacious hall. At one end of the room a large arch-shaped opening looked out into the sky, with a narrow lip of stone that jutted out like one of the mooring platforms, but smaller and probably meant as an observation deck. There was nothing to see through the archway but dark churning cloud, though Will knew that they must be facing the smoke-filled valley.
A tall figure wearing bright mail and a dark red cape stood at the archway looking out into the gloom.
“My Lord,” Grath murmured.
The figure raised a hand but did not turn. All of their escort except for Grath bowed and left the hall.
“Unbind the wildman.”
“Yes, Lord.”
Grath took off Balor’s manacles and shoved him forward.
“That’s more like it,” Balor growled, rubbing his wrists. “Maybe some of you aren’t cowards.”
The figure at the archway turned and looked at each of them. He was a tall man with dark hair, but they could not see his features well in the fitful light. A mask of leather covered the left side of his face. He took a few steps forward, and Will saw that his gait was stiff and laboured. Around his neck, on a thick chain, hung what looked like the iron tip of a spear, or an arrowhead, of dull black metal.
“You’ve come a long way, travellers,” the man said in a rough, rasping voice. “To the end of the world, in fact.”
Finn stepped forward.
“My name is Finn Madoc. My companions followed my lead, and they are blameless in whatever it is you have held us for. Let them return home.”
“Home,” the man said with what sounded like scorn. “And where would that be?”
“Far to the south.”
“A country with no name, then?”
Finn stayed silent.
“Perhaps you’ll tell me what brought you here.”
“Your men did,” Balor said, stepping forward. “I assume we have the pleasure of addressing the mighty Sky Lord. We had no dealings with you and our business was our own, and yet your skyship crew took us captive.”
“You are strangers, found among those whom we protect. It was the duty of my Stormriders to bring you here. And now I would like to know what you were doing in our lands.”
“We were on a scouting mission,” Finn said. “Rumours of war in the north reached our country, and we were sent to find out what we could.”
“A scouting mission,” said the Sky Lord in a sceptical tone.
“We are knights of the Errantry,” Balor said loudly before Finn could stop him. “My name is Balor Gruff. Remember it. I come from a land called the Bourne. The boy is my apprentice. He was supposed to return home with the doctor here. Let him go, and the other lad as well, the Horse Folk boy. They’re no warriors.”
“Knights of the Errantry,” the Sky Lord said, his eyebrows rising. “I never would have guessed.”
“You’ve heard of us, then,” Balor said. “Which means you know what we’re capable of.”
“Balor,” Finn said warningly.
“Oh, I know it all too well,” the Sky Lord said with what sounded again to Will like a hint of scorn. “I also know that you didn’t come here on any scouting mission. I think you were searching for someone.”
No one spoke.
“The others came with me out of friendship,” Finn said at last. “I came seeking news of a man named Corr Madoc. He left the Bourne ten years ago, but we found out only recently that he may have come this way with his followers.”
The Sky Lord nodded.
“I see. And what was this Corr Madoc doing here?”
“He was hunting a band of Nightbane who raided our land and killed some of our people.”
“So he was seeking vengeance.”
“It was a reckless action, not condoned by the Errantry. He had fifty men with him, and not a word has been heard of any of them since. Their families don’t know if they’re still alive.”
“So this Corr Madoc, this hunter of Nightbane, if he returned home, would he be hailed a hero?”
“He wounded a young man on his way out of the Bourne, a young man who tried to stop him from taking horses that belonged to the Errantry.”
The Sky Lord was silent for a long moment.
“The young man lived?” he said at last.
“He died later of his wounds. When my brother return
s to Fable, he will have to face the consequences of that act. I would expect no less of him. He was always impulsive and angry, but I know he would wish to do what’s right.”
The Sky Lord turned back towards the archway. He clasped his gloved hands behind his back.
“Perhaps after ten years, one’s idea of what’s right may change,” he said.
“Do you know what happened to him? Is he here?”
“The man you seek, the one called Corr Madoc, is dead. You’ve come here in vain.”
Finn hung his head for a moment, then raised it again.
“Can you tell me how he died?”
The Sky Lord reached up, undid the buckles on his mask. He turned to them again and Will saw his face was that of a man of thirty or so. A deep, livid scar ran down the left side of his face. His left eye was an empty socket.
“Corr Madoc put on this mask,” the man said. “That is how your brother died, Finn. And how the Sky Lord was born.”
There are fires that wander, and fires that shoot like an arrow to their goal.
– Sayings of the Hidden Folk
ROWAN WALKED WITH RIDDLE through the dark. A few faintly glowing droplets of rain came out of blackness above and fell away into blackness below her feet, so that it seemed she was walking on nothing but darkness. The droplets fell with a soft patter on her cloak and hood. She should have been in complete darkness, but the raindrops seemed to cast a faint light as they fell.
“Will we find the toymaker here?” the cat asked.
“I don’t know,” Rowen said, clutching her cloak tightly around herself. She was not cold, but the emptiness and silence had been working on her, making her more uneasy with each step. When she stepped into the raincabinet she had expected to walk through the slashing curtain of rain in an instant, as she had before. But this time there was only the darkness, and these few drops of rain. It was as if she had passed through the curtain and come to … nowhere. She was only certain she was still in the Weaving at all because there was the same wavery, fluid quality to this place, like walking underwater.
“Grandfather never had the chance to show me how to find someone’s thread in the Weaving,” Rowen said, more to herself than to Riddle. “There’s supposed to be more than just rain.”
She realized she needed to hear her own voice, to be certain that she was still herself, that she wasn’t about to stumble into a story again, with glass slippers or wicked stepmothers or worse things. Her grandfather had told her the Weaving changed according to what a person was thinking and feeling. She wondered now if this place was so dark and empty because that’s how she felt inside.
“I don’t even know what I should be looking for,” Rowen went on. “Grandfather said it was like footprints in sand. But there’s nothing like that here. Nothing.”
She halted suddenly. It seemed foolish to keep walking through the dark when she had no idea where she was going, or if she was going anywhere at all.
She had a sudden thought, and looked down at the cat.
“Does this place seem familiar to you?” she asked.
Riddle gazed around, his yellow eyes wide.
“Riddle walked in dark like this before,” he said slowly. “A long time ago. But …”
“But what?”
“When Riddle walks backwards in his mind, backwards as far as he can go, he comes to this dark.”
“Backwards … you mean when you remember. This is the first thing you remember?”
“Yes. Now that Riddle is back inside the dark he remembers there was something before it. There was light before the dark, and Riddle was warm.”
“Do you remember anything else about the light?”
“It was all around Riddle. It was like the colour of this one,” he raised one of his tawny paws, “only more so.”
“More so…” Rowen murmured. “You mean brighter?”
“And darker, too.”
“I don’t understand. The light was brighter and—”
“Like this one, but brighter and darker. And all around.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“That was Riddle. That is Riddle.”
Rowen sighed. She closed her eyes, raised her face to the rain. The droplets fell like cold needles on her skin.
Then she looked at the cat again.
“Wait. You’re saying that this light and dark … that this was you?”
“Riddle doesn’t know.”
“Can you show me? I mean, can you change into whatever it is you remember?”
The cat lowered his head.
“Riddle can try, but…”
“Just try. Show me what you remember.”
The cat raised his own head, as Rowen had done a moment before. His eyes blinked in the rain. Then suddenly he was on fire.
“Riddle!” Rowen cried.
Bright yellow flames were leaping and snapping all over him, seeming to grow out of the orange and brown bands on his fur, but his face remained as calm and inscrutable as possible. Rowen gaped at him, horrified.
“It does not hurt,” he said.
Slowly the flames died down and suddenly went out.
“That is all,” Riddle said.
He lifted a furry paw and licked it.
“I see,” Rowen said. “I still don’t know what it means.”
Disheartened and suddenly aware of how exhausted she was, she leaned on her grandfather’s staff. She had carried the staff with her into the raincabinet along with his spectacles, though she wasn’t sure why. Perhaps only to have something of her grandfather’s when she returned without him to this strange, frightening place. In her imagination she could see him as clearly as if he was standing beside her, walking along at his usual brisk stride, staff in hand, and there she was herself, following along, pestering him with questions. When, how, why… They had taken so many walks like that together.
Whenever they were about to set off somewhere he would tap his staff once on the ground. She couldn’t help but smile at the thought of that age-old habit of his. The sound of that tap on the tiles at the door of the toyshop was one of her earliest memories. It meant an adventure might be about to begin.
She held out the staff in front of her now. There was no ground under her feet that she could see, only more blackness with rain falling into it. But with a sudden impulse of hopeful defiance she thrust the staff downwards. With a crack it struck something hard and unyielding, and at the same instant a room took shape around her, just for moment, then sank into darkness.
Riddle said, “Oh.”
Rowen tapped the staff again, harder this time. The room reappeared and this time it stayed, though as with everything else in the Weaving, the walls and the furniture and the rugs upon the floor all shimmered slightly with that disturbing uncertainty, as if things were not entirely there until she turned her attention to them. But despite that strangeness she knew this place very well.
It was the library in the toyshop.
“This is the last place I saw Grandfather,” Rowen said, her heart pounding with new hope. “Maybe that means … this is the beginning of his thread. Wherever the thrawl took him, maybe the trail begins here.”
There was something else odd about the room, other than the shifting quality of the edges of things. It seemed smaller, or the ceiling seemed closer than she remembered. And then she understood: this was the room as her grandfather knew it. He was taller than her and she was seeing the room as it appeared to him. She touched her hand to the oak table in the middle of the room. It felt smooth, cold to the touch. So solid and real.
“The toymaker was here,” Riddle said. He was sniffing cautiously at one of the armchairs near the fireplace. “But Riddle doesn’t see any threads.”
“I’m not looking for a real thread,” Rowen said. “When Grandfather used that word he meant someone’s path through Story. Their life’s story, I guess. The places they’d been, and where they were going to. All of that is supposed to be here in the Weaving
.”
“So this isn’t what you’re looking for?” Riddle asked, and Rowen turned to see what he had found. The cat had wandered away from the armchairs and was sniffing something lying on the floor near the doorway. Rowen bent down beside him for a better look.
It was a small tangle of bone-white thread.
She found one end of the thread poking out of the tangle, but the other end… There was no other end. The thread snaked away from the tangle and she followed it with her eyes, seeing that it ran across the floor to the wall.
With true catlike curiosity, Riddle plucked at the tangle of thread with a claw. Like a tendril of white smoke, the thread parted at the touch and then slowly came back together.
“Don’t,” Rowen said sharply. The cat stared at her with unblinking eyes.
“We shouldn’t disturb it,” Rowen said in a softer tone. “I think we have to follow it.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said, but … I think we should follow this. I think it is a little bit of the thrawl. It’s the trail it left. And if it came from the Shadow Realm, then maybe this will lead us there, to where it took Grandfather.”
“It’s made of nothing,” Riddle said.
“No, not nothing. It’s like … a shadow of what was. It will show us the way.”
She wasn’t sure how she knew this, but all at once she was certain of it.
She stood up.
“Come on,” she said to Riddle. “Let’s go.”
Rowen walked across the room, following the thread at her feet. When she got to the wall she kept going and as she had suspected would happen, the wall gave way like the thinnest lace curtain. She felt something cold rasp faintly against her skin as she passed through and for a moment she could see nothing but vague shadows, then she found herself in the street. Although it had been the middle of the day when she went into the Weaving, here the light was dim and grey.
“Where are we?” Riddle breathed. She looked down to see he had followed her.
“I’m not sure,” she said.
This was Fable, but not the Fable she knew. The deathly silence, the sickly pale glow of the lamps lining the street, the grey vagueness of the buildings on either side … this was how her city would look, she suddenly understood, through lifeless eyes. She looked for the thread, but it was no longer beneath her feet. It was hovering above the ground at about the height of her breastbone, a faint white ribbon, so thin as to be almost invisible, but still it was there, snaking away into the dark.
The Fathomless Fire Page 24
