The Seventh World Trilogy omnibus

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  So it was to Harutek’s surprise that Cratus took them there. The road before the coliseum gates was still wrecked, torn up by the emergence of Pravik’s warriors—and the Darkworld’s, led by Caasi—from underground. The earth and stones still showed stains of red blood and streaks of gold where the Ploughman’s Golden Warriors had fought. The sight pricked at Harutek’s conscience. He had fought on a very different side then.

  Beyond the torn ground, the gates were shut. But as they picked their way over the ruins toward the doors, the slow creak of hinges met Harutek’s ears. The sound made his skin crawl. A smell met him from within the coliseum—death, disease, starvation. This place had nearly been the sight of a holocaust. Now it was a silent, unnerving memorial of Lucien Morel’s last act of madness as a sane man.

  Within, Harutek expected to find nothing but an empty stadium floor, with its walls and rows of seating stretching up endlessly all around them.

  That was not what opened to his eyes as he entered.

  The walls and rows of seats were indeed empty. No spectators had come here since the games before the persecution of the Gypsies. They were shadowed and silent.

  But the floor of the coliseum was not empty.

  Instead, torches burned in concentric circles, light beckoning them toward something in the center. Harutek approached slowly and relinquished his torch as a robed servant came to take it from him. There were others here as well—silent figures in dark robes, some, like the servant, hovering around the edges of the circle, and others waiting at the center.

  “Come,” Cratus said again.

  This time he led them into the spiraling lights. Harutek followed him, his Darkworld soldiers wide-eyed but silent behind him.

  The lights made everything outside the circle disappear into darkness. The robed figures who darted in and out seemed unearthly, creatures of shadow, even though Harutek knew they were simply servants and soldiers. But when Harutek was halfway to the center, they began to chant, and the eerie sound made his skin crawl.

  They stepped out of the ring of torches and into the center. A man lay there upon a black bier.

  A dead man.

  Harutek stepped forward, eyes wide in horror and disgust. The man appeared to have been perfectly preserved. How long he had been dead was anyone’s guess. Likewise, his age was unidentifiable. His hair was close-shaven. The face was pale, with dark circles under the eyes, his cheeks sunken and shriveled. He looked as though he had undergone some horror at the end—and yet, underneath that, he had once been handsome.

  He wore the black robes of the Order of the Spider.

  “This is your power?” Harutek asked, his voice deliberately loud to shake off the atmosphere of the place. “A dead man?”

  He heard hisses and murmurs from the cloaked figures who were gathering now among the torches, just out of sight.

  “He has been dead two years,” Cratus said.

  “He is well preserved,” Harutek said.

  “We have not preserved him,” Cratus said.

  The words took a moment to sink in. Harutek faced him with a frown. “What are you telling me?”

  “Some other power keeps him,” Cratus said. “In life he was called the Nameless One. So completely had he surrendered himself to the Blackness that he had lost his name. Somehow he was killed here in this very coliseum. No one knows how. His appearance is strange, as though he had fallen ill—he was a strong man in life. But since his death he has not even begun to decay. The Blackness keeps him.”

  Harutek let his eyes flicker from the dead man to the torches and the robed servants. “As do you,” he said. “Why this memorial?”

  “We thought we might have need of him,” Cratus said.

  “What use is a corpse?” Harutek kept his voice deliberately steady.

  “There are ways to raise the dead,” Cratus said. “And to restore them to their former power.”

  Harutek just stared at him. Then, slowly, he turned to go. “I have seen enough,” he said.

  “No, my friend,” Cratus answered. “You have not seen anything. You wanted to know how I could defeat the witch. Now I tell you. With her own power. With the Blackness.”

  Harutek turned back, his breath coming faster now with what he recognized as fear. “You cannot use the Blackness!” he said. “You are a soldier, not a sorcerer. This is the time of men, Cratus, not of the powers beyond us. That is what I have been fighting for—freedom from all this—this superstition!”

  The chants of the waiting men grew louder. They were closing in. Harutek’s soldiers clustered behind him. Their eyes were as wide as their prince’s.

  “Superstition? You know better than that,” Cratus said. “Do you think the Order existed all these years without teaching us anything? The High Police have always existed in their shadow, called upon to do their bidding time and again. The Nameless One himself led a contingent of my own men into the north to capture a Gifted woman there. Do you think we learned nothing from them? We have secret societies of our own. Knowledge of our own. Knowledge and power far greater than what men alone can possess. You would be a fool to reject it.”

  Harutek shook his head. Anger and terror were welling in him, but part of him knew it would be foolish to run.

  And another part of him did not want to.

  All his life the priests had taught him of powers and creatures that shaped the destiny of men. He had believed them, doubted them, hated them, fought them.

  Now he found that he wanted to see for himself the power they had painted as the enemy.

  He folded his arms and stepped back as the chants took on a new pitch and the robed servants began to form shapes around the bier where the dead man lay. With a word, Harutek directed his men to sheath their swords. Then he met Cratus’s eyes and said, “We shall see.”

  Four candles stood at each corner of the bier. Cratus held up his own torch and uttered several words in a tongue Harutek did not know. The flame turned from natural orange to blue, and Cratus lit each of the candles. He held up his arms, and two of his servants brought a black robe and dressed him in it.

  The dark sky above him was beginning to whirl, slowly, the air itself visibly moving like troubled water. Harutek’s eyes were drawn up. He watched the strange sky instead of Cratus as the rite continued, as someone cried out, as blood was spilled.

  His eyes widened. Two great clawed hands were moving the clouds aside like pieces of a veil, and a face stared down at him.

  He heard the words deep inside.

  I have come!

  The blue light of the candles flared into a great flame that engulfed the bier and the men standing nearest it. Cratus cast himself backward just in time, but the heat burned the skin of his face and hands. He shouted. The robed men were shouting and falling away. This was not what they had expected.

  The flame burst skyward in a pillar that looked as if it would split the world in two.

  And then it fell, and there was only a burning bier and a few blackened bodies on the ground—and standing before it, the man who had been called the Nameless One.

  He was alive, his flesh was filled out and strong again, and his eyes were black—deep black, and gleaming with a look that was not human and never had been.

  Harutek knelt, as did his men, as did Cratus, strangled with fear. Harutek recognized the expression on the risen man’s face.

  He had just seen it looking down from the sky.

  The creature who stood before them in the guise of a man laughed. He bent down and took Cratus by the hood of his cloak, drawing him up until the general’s terrified eyes met his.

  “Greet me,” he said.

  “Greetings, Nameless One,” Cratus stammered.

  The creature threw him down. “That is no longer my name,” he said. He stretched his long fingers, flexed the arms beneath his black robes. “This was the Nameless One. But I am something different.”

  Harutek screwed his eyes shut. The words fell on his ears despite his deni
al. He heard the creature proclaim itself.

  Morning Star had returned.

  * * *

  Chapter 13: The Calling of the Clann

  That night, the newcomers to the Green Isle were welcomed into the home of the Clann O’Roarke. They gathered around a bonfire outside a big thatched cottage. In the shadows beyond the fire, sheep bleated from fenced pens, and rose vines climbed low-roofed stone barns, their flowers perfuming the air. Several children laughed and chased each other in the darkness. The young men and women of the clann sat around the fire with their guests.

  There were several young women, and both Nicolas and the Ploughman were more than usually focused on the flames. Thinking of Marja and Libuse, Maggie knew. Her heart went out to them. Miracle was Michael’s wife—Northern, judging from her accent and striking appearance. The others were his sister and cousins. Shannon, the sister, was remarkably like Michael and close to him in age. The other girls were younger—Lilac, Cali, and Jenna—except for one old woman they all called Grandmother. Jack, Archer, and a dark-haired fellow named Stocky finished the male portion of the tiny clann.

  Lilac, with dark hair and quick blue eyes, settled by the fire next to Maggie and wasted little time getting to the point. “Why have you come here?” she asked.

  Shannon shot her a disapproving look, but Maggie answered. “I’m not sure,” she said. “The wind blew us here from Pravik, where we were prisoners.”

  “Prisoners of the emperor?” Cali asked, gasping.

  “The emperor is no more,” the Ploughman said. “He has gone mad and been replaced by his general, Merlyn Cratus. But Cratus wishes no one to know of it quite yet.”

  “Can it really be true?” Cali asked.

  “That one madman has been replaced by another?” Lilac asked. “Of course it can—especially in these dark days. But why were you prisoners there?”

  The Ploughman sighed. “It is a long story,” he said.

  “With one quick answer,” Nicolas said. He stood. Maggie knew the tone in his voice: he was getting ready to make a stir. “They were kept prisoner because they are Gifted,” he said, “and Cratus wishes to capture the Gifted and turn their power for his own use.”

  His words had the intended effect. Whispers and looks of concern darted around the circle. Miracle, whose hands Michael held, did not react.

  “Nor is he the only one,” Nicolas continued. “The Order of the Spider—”

  “We know about them,” Michael said. He stood. His wife looked up at him questioningly. “It is perhaps best that we do not discuss this,” the young chieftain said.

  Miracle shook her head, but the look on Michael’s face clearly told her to say nothing. She obeyed.

  “You ought to hear me out,” Nicolas said.

  Michael interrupted. “We will hear about the Order when it has to do with us. Then only.”

  “But this does have to do with you,” Nicolas said. “At least, it has to do with your wife. And myself, and Maggie, and the Ploughman, and any other Gifted who might exist in this world.”

  Huss cleared his throat. He was sitting close to the fire, warming his old hands. “The world may be full of the Gifted, but of those you seek, Nicolas, there are only six. You four, Virginia, and one more who is yet unknown to us.”

  “How do you know that?” Michael asked.

  “It is an ancient prophecy,” Huss said. “The Darkworld remembers it.”

  He let his words sink in and then answered the question the clannsmen did not ask. “A race of men who have dwelt beneath the earth for centuries,” he said. His eyes were troubled. “One of their princes, Harutek, betrayed us into Cratus’s hand—but many of them are believers in the King. The head of their priesthood told me of the Six. And Prince Harutek told Cratus. It is how he convinced him that Maggie and the Ploughman ought to be preserved alive.”

  “He told me he did it for our sake,” Maggie said. “To save our lives.”

  Huss sighed. “Maybe he did. Or maybe he is simply going the way of his ancestors: betraying what is right for the sake of what seems momentarily advantageous. But Harutek’s treachery does not change the prophecy.”

  His eyes flickered up from the fire and looked at each of the Gifted in turn. “Six there shall be,” he recited. “Six to see the seventh free. Six to know the coming day; Six to wake the fire. Warrior, Singer, Seer; Healer, Listener, Voice.”

  “Who is the seventh?” Nicolas asked.

  “The seventh,” Huss said, aware that all who gathered around the fire had grown silent, “is the King.”

  Michael cleared his throat. “Clannsmen, leave us,” he said.

  “But Michael—” Stocky and Lilac began in unison. Their voices blended as well as their dark hair and blue eyes—brother and sister, Maggie guessed.

  “Go, please,” Michael said. His expression was more beseeching than commanding. One by one, his family stood. Lilac held out her hand to Moll and Seamus, the smallest of the O’Roarkes, who had come tumbling in from playing in the shadows. “Come,” she said. “Uncle Michael will have something to tell us all soon, I think.”

  She shot her cousin a pointed glance and led the children away. The others followed, one by one, until only Miracle still sat by the fire with Michael and their guests.

  Michael looked Huss in the eye with a boldness that made them all nervous. “Now,” he said. “Speak of the King.”

  Huss smiled. “There is another prophecy, one more commonly abroad. Perhaps you also have heard it. ‘Take these Gifts of my outstretched hand; weave them together; I shall come.’ The prophecy speaks of all the Gifted, yes, but more specifically of the Six. They are here to be woven as one. And when they are, the King will come. That is what the prophecies, the stories, all taken together—that is what they point to. And that is why the wind brought us here. The Gifted are being united.”

  Michael still held Miracle’s hands, and with his thumbs he stroked them. He ducked his head as he spoke. “Professor, this battle is not new to us. My father, Thomas O’Roarke, was Gifted. Perhaps the first of the Gifted. The Order took note of him when he was still a young man and we were a much greater clann. They came here to sway him to their own ways and convince him to join them. He refused.”

  The flickering fire deepened the shadows in Michael’s face, and Maggie saw that he had stopped stroking Miracle’s hands and was just clinging to them now. “For some time they continued to try. At last they accepted their final refusal from him, came here, and killed him and my mother. They destroyed our lands and wiped out the entire older generation of the clann—all but Grandmother, who was with us children, hidden away in caves.”

  Nicolas opened his mouth to speak, but at a warning glance from Huss he stayed silent.

  “Years later, our children began to show signs of being Gifted. All of them—but most especially Archer, and a lad we have lost.” He stopped for a moment, swallowing hard. “The Order began to appear in the Green Isle again. I went north to Fjordland, seeking a safe place for us. I found Miracle.”

  He released her hands, and she placed one on his shoulder. They met each other’s eyes. He continued. “The Order was there in the Northlands as well. One called the Nameless One—”

  “But he is dead,” Nicolas interrupted. “All the Order is dead but one. Evelyn—”

  “I know he is dead,” Miracle said, stopping Nicolas short. Her Northern accent sounded especially foreign after Michael’s island lilt. “I killed him.”

  Nicolas was momentarily speechless. “You did?” he asked.

  “In Athrom, on the edge of the coliseum as he tried to destroy the Gypsies,” Miracle said. “His desire was to tear the Veil between this world and the Blackness. My Gift was not meant to kill, but I had little choice.”

  Nicolas’s mind raced. A memory pulled at him: the sight of the Nameless One wreathed in blue flame, with a woman in his grip—Miracle? The memory shook him. He had thought his own arrival in Athrom with the River-Daughter the final blow that had
won the battle in Athrom.

  “Well,” Huss said. “It seems you have been woven together before, and more than any of you knew.”

  “But the fight nearly destroyed us,” Michael said, his tone growing more intense. “And it nearly destroyed Miracle—not once, but twice. She has fallen into the hands of the Order before; of the Blackness itself. This is no small thing you ask, that she should enter this battle again.”

  “Michael…” Miracle said, but he ignored her.

  “Our fathers are dead, and so I am the father here,” Michael said. “Of everyone you saw seated by this fire. I am Miracle’s husband and a man who has already faced her loss. How can you ask me to give her up and endanger my family again? I have given myself to protect them.” His eyes bored into Nicolas.

  “My wife is in Pravik,” Nicolas said, his voice matching Michael’s in intensity. “And Pravik has been overtaken by the power of the Order. Do you hear me? My wife is there. Possibly dying of wounds earned while she tried to rescue me from the High Police. And my children—a boy, not two years old, and a newborn girl. I must go back for them. But I will not be strong enough on my own. Together, the Gifted can defeat Evelyn. We can be woven together as the prophecy says. If we are, power great enough to save us all will be unleashed. As it was, to a lesser degree, in Athrom. To protect the Gifted now is to doom us all. We must go to battle.”

  “We have had peace since Athrom,” Michael said. “That peace is precious to us. It means our lives.”

  “And this means mine,” Nicolas said. “And the Ploughman—his betrothed is in Pravik. And his people—hundreds of them. And perhaps all the world, for the Veil is still at risk of tearing. There is more at stake here than one family.”

  “Yes,” Huss said, his voice rumbling, an interruption that stopped the rising intensity of Michael and Nicolas. “There is a world at stake,” he said. “I have told you what the prophecies say.”

  He fixed his eyes on Miracle. “This choice must be yours, my dear,” he said. “You are one of the Six—you are the Healer. And that means you are tied to the King, and you must answer the call to bring him back into the world. Will you turn your back on that calling?”