“But I have sung for you now,” she whispered, and put her arms about its neck. “Here I am now.”
The Manteceros shuddered, and Garth wondered if it was close to tears. For the long minutes that the girl and the Manteceros clung close, he studied the strange creature that Maximilian had set him to find.
The Manteceros was every bit as ugly as the royal emblem depicted it. Shapeless head, bloated body, trunk-like legs ending in ungainly feet that were merely slight thickenings of the legs they protruded from. Everything, from its pock-marked skin to its stiff mane and square-nailed feet, was coloured in various shades of blue. Even its teeth, when Garth finally managed a glimpse of them, were blue-tinged.
And about it all hung an immense aura of sorrow—yet a sorrow tinged with wisdom, and Garth could not help wondering if its wisdom had caused its sadness.
Is the sum of all knowledge, he suddenly thought, utter despair?
“I must ask,” the Manteceros finally, regretfully, said, “what has disposed you to seek me now.”
“A sadness,” Ravenna said, stepping back.
“I am not surprised,” the Manteceros said. “Nothing but anguish surrounds me.”
“Garth?” Ravenna motioned with her hand, and Garth stepped forward. “Garth? Will you tell the Manteceros why you seek it?”
The Manteceros fixed its all-knowing eyes on Garth, and the youth had to clear his throat before he could speak.
“Manteceros.” Garth hesitated, then bowed jerkily from his waist. He wasn’t sure how to treat the creature, but he was the emblem of the royal House of Escator, and in itself that made the Manteceros worthy of respect.
The Manteceros acknowledged the bow with a slight movement of its head.
“Manteceros, I have come to ask that you step back into the world of living creatures.”
The Manteceros’ nostrils and eyes flared alarmingly. “Oh, I don’t know about—”
“Please!” Garth extended his own hands in appeal. “The true king of Escator lies trapped in the Veins, denied his throne, and denying even the existence of the open sky and the fresh air.”
“A king sits the throne,” the Manteceros said slowly, eyeing Garth carefully. “I remember his claim well. He had the blessing of the king just dead.”
“Cavor,” Garth said. “Yes, Cavor currently sits the throne. But Maximilian is the true king, and he needs to be rescued. Manteceros, will you step forth and aid him?”
“Oh, certainly not!” the Manteceros cried. “Not without due cause.”
“Due cause?” Garth asked, stunned. “What do you mean ‘not without due cause’?”
“I think,” Ravenna said carefully, looking between Garth and the Manteceros, “that what the Manteceros means is that a king already sits the throne, and he needs due cause to step back into the land of wakefulness. Due cause…a rival claim?” She raised her eyebrows at the creature.
“Precisely,” the Manteceros agreed. “Due cause means another claim. If someone else claims the throne then I shall be required to respond to it.”
“You mean you’re not going to do anything to rescue Maximilian?” Garth cried, appalled.
The Manteceros furrowed its brow. “Who did you say?”
“Maximilian!” Garth muttered, trying to keep his temper under control.
“If he hasn’t claimed,” the Manteceros said with great finality, “then I’ve no reason to know him. Now Cavor,” its eyes brightened momentarily, “was an upstanding man. Fine claim.”
“Maximilian has your mark tattooed on his right arm—with blue ink,” said Garth, sure this would convince the Manteceros.
“Any competent artist could carve that in,” the Manteceros responded.
“But the ink!” Garth cried.
“Garth,” Ravenna murmured, slipping to his side as gracefully as a breath of breeze. “Please, try to understand. If there is a rival claim, then the Manteceros will have to come forth.”
“Absolutely,” the creature agreed, its eyes narrowing as it gazed at Ravenna and Garth.
“But meanwhile Maximilian labours underground and I have no way of getting him out.” Garth’s shoulders were very tense, and Ravenna rubbed them gently.
“We’ll find a way,” she whispered almost inaudibly. “And then he can claim.”
“And how does one claim?” Garth asked, not mollified. He had believed the Manteceros would leap at the chance of rescuing Maximilian.
“Simple,” the Manteceros said. “Listen:
‘In crystal do drown me,
And drape me with truth.
Draw death up about me,
Loose blood o’er the silk.
With courage beneath me,
Let light bind me tight.
Find one who will name me—
One more to add weight,
Then show me inside,
The green shadowed parlour.
With the ring of my fathers
I carve deep into stone,
Trace life into lines,
Turn floor into bone.
Who comes to Claim?
Who dares the Dream,
And, daring, ------’”
“What?” Garth whispered. How was anyone supposed to make sense of that?
“That’s all there is,” the Manteceros snapped, baring his teeth. Ravenna moved away from Garth slightly, and the Manteceros relaxed and continued. “I’m growing tired of this addled tale about Maximilian trapped beneath ground. I don’t care if he has got my mark engraved on his arm. I don’t care unless he can present a claim. Now, Ravenna, would you like to stroke my nose again?”
Giving Garth a final, cautionary glance, Ravenna stepped back to the Manteceros and stroked its nose. The creature shivered in pleasure and leaned closer to the girl.
“If Maximilian claims,” she asked softly, “will you step forth?”
“Oh, assuredly,” the Manteceros replied.
“And will you test Maximilian and Cavor? Administer the ordeal?” Garth asked, his voice tight.
The Manteceros glanced at him. “You’re a well informed boy, for all your ill manners,” it said thoughtfully. “Well, if this Maximilian lays claim to the throne with Cavor still firmly in place, I suppose I’ll have to.”
Ravenna, her hand still on the Manteceros’ nose, looked back at Garth. “Then we have no choice,” she said, her voice soft but clear. “We must rescue Maximilian and persuade him to lay claim to the throne of Escator.”
“And then the Manteceros will see that Maximilian is the true king of Escator.” Garth glared at the Manteceros, as if daring the creature to contradict him.
The Manteceros’ mouth twisted humourlessly. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”
It nuzzled at Ravenna’s shoulder, then turned and lumbered away into the mist.
During the shift the man chained to Lot No. 859’s left ankle collapsed and died as he coughed his gloamfilled lungs out. The guards called a brief halt as they unshackled the man, and Lot No. 859 sank gratefully to the rock floor, unmindful of the broken gloam lying about.
He flinched as the guard’s chisel slipped from his ankle ring and gouged a deep cut into his flesh, but he had learned to ignore such pain and inconvenience, and merely turned his head to the right, enjoying his privacy.
The chains fell away and Lot No. 859, although closely guarded, sat free of any encumbrances as the dead man was dragged away to the nearest shaft to be dropped into its pitted depths.
A feeling of nausea filled him, and he looked frantically about, convinced that the guards had left him to moulder here alone.
Lot No. 859 had a horror of being left alone—free—in the dark. But in the next instant a guard loomed with a length of chain in his hand and a new man attached to its other end. Lot No. 859 breathed in relief. He hated being unchained. Hated the feeling of space and freedom it entailed. His teeth gleamed momentarily as he felt himself being shackled to his new companion.
As the guards ordered the gang back to w
ork, the old scar on his arm burned, and Lot No. 859 absently scratched it. Recently it had begun to bother him.
But even that was soon forgotten in the welcome swing of the pick and the bunching and relaxing of his muscles.
About him the gloam dust swirled.
In the Throne Room of the palace at Ruen, Cavor cursed low and viciously as he felt the abscess covering his mark burst and soak the bandages covering his arm. He barely managed to get through the remainder of his audience with the ambassador from the Eighth of the Eastern Kingdoms, then he hurriedly left the chamber.
“Where is Oberon Fisk?” he shouted at the guard. “Send for my physician immediately!”
“Damn!” he muttered as he slammed the door to his personal apartments behind him, “and damn again! Why won’t the thing heal?”
“When he finally went to bed that night, his arm packed in herbal powders that did nothing to relieve the pain, Cavor dreamed badly. He dreamed he was lost in a dark place, lost with no companions and with no chance of finding his way out. As he slept, his left arm groped across the bed sheets until he woke his wife.
“Where are you?” he muttered. “Where? Why aren’t you there?”
And when he had finally found his way free from that dark lost place, he dreamed he stood once more before the Manteceros to lay claim to the throne of Escator.
This time, however, the Manteceros did not automatically nod its head.
Instead, the creature frowned and shifted uncomfortably from side to side on its stumpy legs, and looked at something—or someone—standing behind Cavor’s right shoulder.
“Oh,” it muttered irritably, “I don’t know about that.”
TWELVE
THE ORDER OF PERSIMIUS
The next few months were the most frustrating of Garth’s life. Every nerve in him screamed that he had to get back to the Veins and rescue Maximilian—would he survive the year?—yet there was no reason for him to go, and even less opportunity, until his father was again summoned for his yearly three weeks’ work. Garth spent the time learning as much of his craft as his father could spare the time to teach him, knowing instinctively that Maximilian would need every help that he could provide—especially if he were to recover from his belief that there was no life waiting for him beyond the hanging wall. Joseph, as Nona, wondered at their son’s single-minded determination, but assumed it was only part of the process by which a youth began his transformation into a man.
Garth saw Ravenna on many occasions. Joseph sent him back to the marshes only one more time, at the beginning of winter when Venetia sent word she needed new stocks of herbs, but Ravenna slipped quietly into Narbon whenever she knew Garth would have a morning or afternoon free. As the weather closed in she took to wearing a dark grey cloak, pulling the hood well over her face, and no one realised that a marsh girl wandered the streets—some may have tried to have the watch remove her if they’d known. She still wore no shoes, and sometimes Garth’s heart clenched when he saw her cold and blue toes peeking from under the trailing hem of her cloak, but Ravenna refused any offer he made to buy a sturdy pair of boots for her.
“Marsh women wear no shoes,” she would say. “The dream paths are hard to walk when we have no intimate contact with their soil.”
Huddled underneath a dry overhang in the back alleys of the wharves or the marketplace, they talked endlessly about Maximilian. Ravenna questioned Garth closely about his every minute in the Veins—not only about Maximilian himself (and Ravenna apparently couldn’t hear enough about the man), but about the shafts and tunnels of the Veins, their proximity to the sea, and even the very feel of the air inside.
“Why do you want to know that?” Garth asked one day as they sat underneath the verandah of an abandoned warehouse along the wharves. The wind blew off the sea sharp and cold, and both were huddled deep into their cloaks.
“We have to get Maximilian out from the Veins,” Ravenna began.
“We?” Garth asked archly.
“And what plan do you have to rescue him?” Ravenna snapped, and Garth coloured slightly. Every so often Ravenna made him feel like a boy barely able to leave the safety of his mother’s skirts.
“And I suppose you have the perfect plan,” he retorted.
She pursed her lips and regarded him with her great grey eyes; Garth sometimes thought they were beginning to lighten to the same shade as her mother’s, but in this light they appeared as dark as ever.
“Perhaps I do. No, wait! I have to think more on it…but you will need me there. You can’t do this on your own.”
Garth sat silently for a few minutes, trying to dampen his resentment. “Your mother will let you go to the Veins?” he asked eventually.
“My mother trusts me,” she replied simply, folding cold white hands over her knees, “and has confidence in me. Besides, we are of an age, Garth Baxtor. If your father lets you go down the Veins, then why shouldn’t my mother do likewise?”
“It’s no place for a girl,” Garth grumbled, protectiveness overcoming resentment.
“Maximilian is going to need both of us,” Ravenna said quietly, and took one of Garth’s hands.
Garth forgot Maximilian at the feel of her fingers. “Ravenna!” he cried. “Your hands are like ice! Come on, we’ve got to go somewhere where you can warm up.”
“Where? Your mother’s kitchen?” Ravenna knew Garth still had not confided in his parents, and a small smile hovered about her mouth as she wondered how Garth would explain a marsh girl to his mother.
“I know!” Garth said, a smile lightening his own face. “Why don’t we try the library? Perhaps we can find the answer to that riddle the Manteceros gave us about making a claim on the throne.”
Ravenna let Garth pull her to her feet. “But you said that you and that monk—Harrald?—had searched every scroll and book that might prove remotely useful and yet found nothing.”
“Ah, yes, but,” Garth said, full of enthusiasm now. Why hadn’t he thought of this earlier? Briefly his free hand played with the medallion as it lay under his tunic.
“But…what?”
“But then I hadn’t heard the verse the Manteceros taught us. I haven’t looked for that in the library before now. Come on!”
Letting his enthusiasm pull her along the all-but-deserted back alleyways, Ravenna still protested. “Will they let me in? A marsh girl?”
“They’re a friendly bunch,” Garth said, waving the matter off, but Ravenna still wondered. Friendliness often faded as fast as a droplet of dew under a blazing sun when confronted with the townspeople’s prejudice about the marsh folk.
But all that the chubby elderly monk who greeted them in the foyer did was look both Garth and Ravenna up and down—seeming to disapprove of both of them—request that they wipe their feet and shake out their cloaks before they entered the main hall itself, then led them through.
“Is Harrald here?” Garth asked hopefully, glancing about the aisles. “Harrald has a winter fever,” the monk said, leading them to a spare table and indicating they should sit down.
“Oh? Perhaps I could help?”
The monk smiled a little patronisingly. “We have the best medical help for Harrald that coin can buy, young man. I doubt that you could do anything.”
Ravenna turned her head aside, hiding the small smile that flitted across her face.
“Now,” the monk folded his hands across his ample belly. “How can I be of assistance?”
Garth opened his mouth, then closed it again. He didn’t think this monk would be as sympathetic to his quest for information about the legend of the Manteceros as Harrald had been—and Garth was curiously reluctant to mention the Manteceros in front of the man.
“Could I have the scroll called A Calendar of Ordeals and Tests?” he asked eventually. Surely the Manteceros’ riddle would be in there.
“What do you want with that old thing?” the monk asked, his brow furrowed. “And can I trust you with it? It’s very ancient, and—”
&
nbsp; “I’ll be careful,” Garth said, trying to look as responsible as he could, glad that he’d kept his brown hair short and free of curls. “I know its value and I’ll look after it.”
“Well,” the monk hesitated.
“We will be careful,” Ravenna said carefully, and Garth thought he saw her eyes flash briefly.
“Well,” the monk grumbled irritably, “why didn’t you say so? I’ll fetch it now.”
Garth ignored the retreating form of the monk and stared open-mouthed at Ravenna. Dark circles had appeared under her eyes, and he could see that her mouth trembled. “Are you all right? What…what did you do?”
“Nothing, Garth,” she said softly, and patted his arm. “Nothing. A small trick, that’s all.”
“But you look awful!”
“I’ll be all right in a few minutes, Garth. Really. Look, here comes the monk now.”
The monk carefully placed the scroll down before Garth. “You will be careful, won’t you?” he asked, doubt returning to his face.
“Trust us,” Ravenna said.
“Of course!” the monk cried, and he stalked away, his shoulders stiff with indignation.
At Garth’s side Ravenna’s entire body trembled, and he took her hands, concern in his eyes.
“Ravenna!”
“I’ll be all right,” she whispered hoarsely. “Now, look in the scroll!”
Garth held her hands for a heartbeat longer, then her eyes recovered some of their temper and they flashed dangerously.
Garth hastily let her hands go, lest she bewitch him as well. “I suppose you think to disable every guard between the entrance to the Veins and Maximilian with that little trick,” he mumbled. “Or will your Lord of Dreams take them so deep within his realm they will never wake again?”
She took his jibe good-humouredly, and her expression softened. “Drava would not concern himself with such mundane chores,” she smiled, then waved at the scroll. “Come on. Does the scroll tell us anything?”