There were voices in that canyon as well, sounds he had never heard from human throats.
In desperation, he scanned the darkness for something unscathed, something that had not been consumed by this ravenous and bottomless appetite. All he saw was Ark-robin’s drive to save what could not be saved, a boldness to go forward and risk his life to save another’s. He had not noticed this color in the captain before. But now he realized it had always been there, winding through the arrogance and the cruelty; once dormant, now awakening in the heat.
Seizing upon the captain’s quest, the ale boy surfaced from his strange meditation and, gasping in the immediate details of his circumstance, remembered the closeness of the precipice, the sound of beastmen in a murderous rage below. He tasted the bitterness of ash between his tongue and his teeth.
Two of Ark-robin’s soldiers unfastened their bows, set their jaws, and unsheathed a fistful of arrows.
“Like wolves hunting injured prey,” growled Ark-robin. “The beastmen don’t ask how Abascar’s been hurt. They just pounce.”
“What do they want here, Captain?”
“Don’t be dense, Wolftooth. Their poison has given them a taste for little more than murder and pillage.”
He turned with a shuddering breath and looked back into what had been the neighborhoods of Housefolk, and the ale boy could read the creases on his brow. Somewhere the captain’s wife and daughter were lost in all of this.
As the captain marched into the dark clouds below, the ale boy followed, descending a crooked path to one of the few remaining bridges that crossed a great cavern from one Underkeep station to another. For a while they were engulfed by smoke, as if moving through a storm of black-robed ghosts, the gleam on Ark-robin’s sword just another light in the sea of Abascar’s myriad fires. The soldiers followed him, arrows readied.
The ale boy took one last look up at the sky, one last glance back at the gate.
An old woman, so frail and small it seemed impossible she had survived at all, passed them on the path. She ignored the captain when he tried to stop her. In one hand she carried a torch, and with the other she pulled a long bundle of multicolored garments from the Underkeep, their vivid hues smudged with soot. Ark-robin would have pursued her had he not been silenced by what followed: two children dragging a much different sort of burden—a man, probably their own father, still and lifeless. The smaller child, a girl, looked at the ale boy with sad, frightened eyes, her hair wretched with dust and debris. For a moment he thought it was Auralia. But no; Auralia would be much further down, much deeper.
In the dungeons.
Still they descended, walking on a thin arch of stone and earth that spanned the canyon, reaching into the space that had once been the palace cellars.
He pressed his sleeve to his face, stepping lightly for fear too heavy a footfall would snap the arch. How to get to the dungeons from here, he could not imagine.
And then—the strangest sensation—an evening wind gusted through the chasms, brushing aside the black clouds. The sight before them was spectacular and terrible.
The palace lay ahead, tilted, like a sinking ship, one side buried in earth, the other suspended toward the sky. The domes were broken, dissolving into ash. The towers had snapped at their bases. The windows were curtained with flame. Scars of soot and soil marred its once pristine surfaces. Walls had fallen in here and there, leaving hollows like open wounds.
“No!” Ark-robin roared, running down to the place where the bridge met the earth. The boy knew where Ark-robin was heading; there was a crooked window not far above the place where palace merged with earth. The captain was going in to find the king.
The gust of wind faded, the smoke returned, and Ark-robin and his men disappeared. The ale boy followed, slowly, gingerly, hanging on to the edges of the bridge. A few steps later the span broadened, and he pressed his hands to the wall of earth. The glow of the window high above him was faint through the smoke.
Ark-robin and the others had climbed in.
He was too scared to climb and was about to start back across the bridge when three hulking shadows emerged, stalking like predators. “Beastmen,” he said, and a strong hand grasped him by the back of his collar and dragged him up, up, up into a golden corridor.
Ark-robin set the boy down, grasped his shoulders, and said gravely, “Stay with me. Stay close. Do you understand?”
“Why, sir?”
“It’s…it’s complicated.”
Ark-robin led the boy by the hand, slipping on the tilted floor of the smoky chamber.
They found an adjoining corridor where the ground was almost level. The three soldiers wore blank expressions, moving with mechanical precision as if these rehearsed maneuvers were lifelines to sanity. The archers knelt behind shields, arrows to bows; behind them a swordsman crouched with blades catching and casting light.
Ark-robin strode into the stifling smoke and began to roar like a bear in full attack. The ale boy sensed that something in the captain was dying as he left his men behind to face the beastmen. In any other circumstance Ark-robin would have stood with them and fought, but his duty to the king overruled his emotions. Behind them, the twang of a bowstring sang, answered almost instantly by a shriek, a piercing horror that went on and on, soon matched by others in a sickening dissonance.
“My life,” the captain muttered. “My life, protecting this house. And now this.”
Ark-robin suddenly lurched as if struck from behind. He fell upon the ale boy. Rocks gouged the boy’s cheeks, just inches from a curtain of roaring fire.
He pulled himself away, the ground burning his hands and knees. A moment later he found himself crawling over the captain, who was closing his hands around an arrow hewn from something black and porous like bone. It had entered his leg just below the knee and protruded behind with a jagged metal barb. He choked on airborne debris and let a sob break free, watching as the captain snapped off the forked tip and pulled out the arrowshaft.
“Will you die?”
“Not from this,” spat the captain, as if commanding his own body to obey. He pulled off his cape, breastplate, and shoulderguards and ripped his tunic free. The boy could see that the captain had suffered many other wounds; his chest was painted with darkening blood. “What sort of bad dream is this, a house so heavy that it sinks into the earth? Curse this Underkeep and all it contains.” Suddenly Ark-robin was laughing. “There you are, wretched Queen Jaralaine. Your house will be talked about in Bel Amica and remembered in House Jenta. Your monument will be seen all across the Expanse.”
“We can escape,” the boy said, feeling a mysterious urge to comfort the captain. “I can get us out.”
“The map has changed a bit, boy.” The captain wrapped the strips around his leg and knotted them tightly, clenching his teeth until they looked as if they might shatter. “This is it. This is the test.”
“Test, sir?”
The captain seemed to be repeating things he had heard many times before. “Here’s a soldier’s lesson for you, boy: Every man lives for a moment of testing, a moment when you have nothing but your own resources. In that moment you discover either you have what it takes or you don’t.” Ark-robin gave the boy a strange, suspicious look. “But that’s a shame, isn’t it? We’re all going to fail. We don’t have resources enough. Unless…unless we all have the help you had once upon a time.”
The ale boy was suddenly afraid of something else, something looming behind the captain’s words.
“If you know something, boy, anything else that can help us here, tell me now.” He had the fierce gaze of an interrogator, but he seemed to be looking through the boy into some other time and place.
“Do you mean about the Underkeep?”
“I mean about your mysterious guardians. Where are they this time?”
“Guardians, sir?”
The second archer’s voice rose in agony, stuttering cries of pain from the corridor behind them and then stopping short.
/> “Stand up, Wolftooth,” Ark-robin muttered. He wrapped another strip of torn tunic around his wound. “Oh, I am feeling the lateness of things.”
The ale boy watched a burst of darkness and sparks in the center of the flames as a piece of the corridor fell away.
“Don’t you find it strange,” the captain continued gravely, “that we are here again, you and I, surrounded by flames and shadows?”
Again, that mysterious terror.
“The king agreed to cover up that I was anywhere near that fire. It’s never good to be second in command when the first in command goes down. Everybody suspects you. Some thought I murdered your parents. You probably don’t remember. But your father, Tar-brona, was my mentor. I tried to save him. I failed.”
The ale boy, on his hands and knees, blinked and shook his head.
“You were only a day or two old. There were gifts all over your house. A thief came through the window. Bumped the lantern.” Ark-robin pushed himself to his knees. Sweat ran in streams through his wild hair and dripped to the ground. He pulled his armor back on, pressed his helm back onto his head.
“I was the house defender, second only to your father. We often met at night to discuss plans. I was on my way when I heard screams. I saw the thief and tried to catch him. Radegan…that blasted Radegan. If he didn’t die in Maugam’s pit, he’s burning now. At last, a fitting punishment.” Ark-robin choked on bitter laughter and smoke. “Is that what this is? Punishment?”
The ale boy wanted to ask the question that wavered there. And then he didn’t want to know.
The answer came anyway. “I heard your parents calling your name. They couldn’t get through to you.” Ark-robin forced himself to stand, weakened by the withering heat of the furnace a few steps behind them.
Still, nothing came through the smoke at the tunnel’s entrance, nothing but a scuffling sound and something like a wild dog’s growl.
“I tried, but I could not save Tar-brona or your mother,” the towering soldier said, looking down at the kneeling boy. “I gave up and ran. But then I heard your cry. I could not leave empty-handed. I wanted to save something. Your cradle was blazing, but something was draped across you. A dark, glittering sheet. You were shielded by…I was never going to speak of this! All huddled about your bed…they wore strange robes. The fire didn’t burn them.”
Northchildren. The ale boy felt the urge to run into the fire. Ark-robin’s story entered him like a phantom clutching keys and moving to a door he had locked. He did not want to know what came next.
“They stepped aside when I approached. I thought I was going mad. Smoke in my lungs, delirious. But I reached through and lost two fingers in the fire. The strangers formed two lines and cleared a path for me through the fire. And I carried you out.” He flexed his three-fingered hand. “Told everybody I’d lost those fingers to a beastman.”
Ark-robin held out his bare hand.
As he stared at the captain’s hand, the ale boy could also see the hand of that nameless phantom reaching through time, clutching those fiery keys. He remained still, paralyzed. And then, moved by a need greater than his fear, he lunged forward and gripped Ark-robin’s scarred hand with both of his own.
Relief swept through him, carrying away the ache.
Another howl pierced the thunder. It was the last of Ark-robin’s swordsmen. The ale boy had heard men die at the claws of beastmen before. They always cried like children.
Captain Ark-robin pulled his hand away, carefully planted his feet, wincing through what must have been unbearable pain. “Your guardians, boy. If you know how to call them, this is the time. You’ve got to get out of here.”
“I don’t think the guardians are coming,” the ale boy said, not knowing why. “I can take us through. I can get you out, Captain.”
Ark-robin, turning to consider this, gestured to the flames. “The king is in there. It’s my duty to defend him. If you know a way to get out, then go. This is my place. This is my thread, right to the end. Never had a son, alas. But my daughter, my magnificent daughter.” He took two impressive strides forward, his wounds seemingly forgotten. “She would have been queen. She would have been queen.”
My thread. The ale boy was startled by the words. They reminded him of something. He looked back into the flames. Auralia.
“Why?” he asked in a rush. “Why didn’t you tell me who I was? Why didn’t you tell anybody?”
“Cal-marcus’s advisors…some of them were eager to find evidence that I set the fire. They wanted to replace me with someone they could control. I told the brewers I pulled you from a burning barn. I mentioned fire, you see. To explain your scar. Nobody asked any questions.”
And then he put a hand on the child’s soot-dusted, tangled hair and stood there for a long moment. “Tar-brona,” he said, his voice strangely weakened, “was so proud the day you were born. I sometimes wish that I’d…” He stopped abruptly, shook his head, and cleared his throat. Before turning to meet the advancing threat, he reached to his breast, took the band of medallions that measured the achievements of his career, pulled the pin free, and fastened the band to the ale boy’s tunic.
And then he drew his long blue cape around the ale boy’s shoulders. “Pull this over yourself, lie flat, and perhaps the monsters won’t notice you.” He walked forward into the smoke, and the ale boy heard him mutter to himself, “What I would have given. A room in the tower. A view of the woods.”
Fire. Trembling. Change.
The scar on the ale boy’s forehead was burning. He reached for Ark-robin’s cape as he had been told to do, but the scar blazed even hotter, as though suddenly alive. He touched it, and it scorched his fingertips. He felt faint, drowning in heat. And yet he was not afraid. He had known he would fall into fire again.
Through the blazing haze traveling down the tunnel after the captain of the guard, the ale boy saw a flash of memory—the exiled mage in disguise, Scharr ben Fray.
“If you know the secret of passing through fire,” the mage had said, “there are many places only you can travel and a lot of things only you can know.”
The ale boy turned and stared into the blinding corridor.
As Ark-robin’s sword met the blades of the approaching beastmen, the sound was like the peal of a massive bell.
The ale boy could not bear to wait any longer. He plunged into the fire.
The phantom met him there. Vivid images rushed through his mind; he was seeing that fire again from so many years ago.
White. Blue. Gold. He sees nothing but light and color.
There is pain, but it is a distant thing, like a dull ache sensed through a heavy blanket of sleep.
There are echoes. Shouts. A man’s voice, panic and fear. A woman’s voice, anguish. A name cried out over and over.
A hand seizes him, pulls him up out of his blankets and his cradle, up through the fire. A man in gleaming armor, a large man with a beard, a man screaming, fierce. The stench of burning flesh. Pressed to the breastplate of the great armored man, the boy clenches his tiny newborn fists. He wails into the fire.
But as they push forward, he sees them. High walls of flame, pressed back to open a path. The soldier shouting as blood pulses from his red and blistered hand.
And then the memories dissipate.
He falls, or rather is caught by something like a net and then set on his feet.
There is a darkness ahead of him. It is not a door. It is a shape. It moves. It parts the flames, creating a path. He is pulled along in its wake. He has seen this shape before, underwater, deep in the lake, as he struggled to the surface toward moonlight.
He is in a great, charred space. All around, metal racks emanating smoke. He recognizes these bending, melting metal structures. This used to be the distillery. The smell he knows…blackening sugars, burnt liquors. The fire has devoured its fill.
He sees on the floor before him a twisted mass of ash, bone, and hair. He recoils, his eyes settling on a strange detail amidst the re
mains. An open jaw. Small hands, finger bones still curled into fists. A strand of pearls.
He lifts the jewels and stuffs them into his pocket.
There are tears in his eyes as he sees this first death by fire. He looks about for comfort. He finds only strange, blurred footsteps in the ashes.
A sound like drums and heartbeats draws his attention to a distant corner across the tilting floor to a huddled mass of quivering shapes. He remembers them. And he can see through them to the fallen woman with the silverbrown hair.
The figures kneel, gingerly touching the body. When they withdraw their hands, he sees they have taken hold of strange and shimmering threads. As they gather those threads, the body surrenders. Knots are undone. They drape a dark shroud across her. The shroud gathers a fullness and rises, joining them in a series of embraces. But the body of the young woman lies, smaller now, hollowed.
He approaches in his own cloud of smoke, offers a soot-smeared hand. It pierces the shroud of the newly robed figure, and he feels a warm, smooth, familiar hand grasp his. It is Auralia’s hand, though he sees her lying curled on the ground, like a child asleep.
The Northchildren draw back, watching, but he does not look at them. She opens her eyes, and they mirror the fire above her in the ceiling and beyond.
Her voice comes through the strange, shadowed shroud, as quiet and calming as it had been on the shore of the lake. “It’s you,” she laughs. “I shoulda known. You rowed ’cross the water to find me. And now you’ve come through fire.”
The shroud becomes more translucent as he stares, until he does not see a shroud at all. He sees Auralia. Her skin is full of the color he has only seen in her weaving, the color that contains all colors.
He lets go of her hand. As it slides free of the shroud, it is clean, all ashes wiped away.