Old Soro’s glittering eyes regarded Cal-raven. “Trust me.” The instruction came in a cavernous whisper through that thick weave of beard. “Your own understanding will not get you to the top in time. Give me your sword. I’ll show you a straight, clear path.”
Cal-raven laughed. “My sword? I need my sword. Especially if the Seer’s coming after me.”
“You’re afraid. I heard you call for the Keeper.”
His hand was on the sword hilt, but he could not decide whether to draw it in defense or cooperation. “The Keeper’s kept me safe this far. It won’t fail me now. So I don’t need your help.”
“A claim like that requires a lot of faith.”
“I don’t need faith. I’ve seen the answer.”
How did he get ahead of me? He’s not even out of breath.
“You seem to have everything figured out.” Soro seemed burdened beyond the weight of that hunch on his back. Cal-raven tightened his grip around the hilt.
Soro snapped off the crooked branch he’d been holding to keep his balance. Then he reached the hooked end of the branch toward Cal-raven and sent a water flask sliding down its span to swing by its strap at the end. “Drink.”
Need overpowered suspicion. Cal-raven took the flask and drank deep.
The fierce, cold purity of the well water shook him. At once the stars burned brighter. The water carried the smell of stone passages deep beneath the earth. His ears were battered by the sound of his heartbeat. As he drew the flask away from his face, the scent of the Cragavar north of the crater filled his nostrils, borne by the wind coursing southward.
Even before he hung the flask back on the hook, he asked, “How did you get here ahead of me? I’m exhausted, but you aren’t even out of breath—”
“I know it’s unlikely, but perhaps I know a few things about climbing Tammos Raak’s tower—things that even the king of Abascar might find useful.” In a hissing spill of ash, Soro jumped down to land hard on the tree’s trunk beside Cal-raven, the branch in his hand like a walking stick. He drew in a deep wheeze and sneezed.
Cal-raven waved the cloud of Mawrn away from his face.
“Let me show you something.” Soro smiled, and Cal-raven could see stitches across the dark wood of that masklike face. “Ready?” He raised his makeshift staff as if he would strike.
Cal-raven drew his sword.
“Consider this a second chance.” Soro brought the branch down and plunged its sharp, broken end through the soft bark between them.
Cal-raven heard a sharp crack. The solid foundation of the ancient tree shuddered. Breaks branched out like veins, splitting and fragmenting the petrified surface. He cried out. Soro leaned on the branch, widening the gap in the bark. The ground collapsed beneath Cal-raven.
In a rain of debris, he fell through the rotten marrow and landed against a wall of dry, spongy wood in the starcrown’s core. He began to slide, along with a river of rubble, down an open burrow within the tree, and he clawed at the honeycomb surface. As he grappled, his foot found a ledge—a bar of wood nailed into the wall. A step.
If there’s one, there must be…yes, another.
He laughed, shaking his head.
When the rush quieted, he looked up through the break Soro had opened. The stars were wild with light. There was no sign of the hunchback.
He looked ahead through the tree’s dark hollow. Although the way was narrow, the air foul, and the walls chattering with insect life, his path through the core of the tree was now straight and unimpeded. Through translucent curtains of cobwebs, he beheld a warm crimson glow, a sphere of light far away.
“Perhaps the darker path was the better one,” he muttered.
His hand found the farglass still bound to his belt. Then he cursed, for the sword sheath was empty. The blade was lost, buried somewhere below in the dark heart of the starcrown.
He began to climb. And the more he strove, the more strength he found. With every grasping lunge upward, his hands pushed through crumbs of rotten wood and rotbeetles to find another hold. Along some stretches he found dangling ropes of ivy—ivy!—heavy with clusters of bittergrapes. There was life to be found in the dark’s hanging garden.
His thirst quenched, he thrilled with life, sure that he would find the top before the moonrise.
When at last Cal-raven leapt up into the open maw of the starcrown’s fallen roots, he fell forward onto a bed of wind-stripped grass. Wind from the north roiled in this cave, beneath the flare of unearthed roots. He thought of a story he had invented as a child—a tale of being swallowed by a dragon but fighting on within its belly and refusing to give up.
I’ve climbed up through its throat. I’m sitting in its open mouth.
He rested on all fours, sucked in chestfuls of cold night air, and enjoyed the exhilaration of the well water’s enchantment.
I’ve made it to the top, Scharr ben Fray, by a passage kept secret even from you. For once, I know something you don’t.
He gazed out through the hanging tendrils of ancient roots and took in the view of the world below and beyond—the forested spread of the North Cragavar. Beyond that he saw the darkness of Fraughtenwood and then the rising land that became the mountains of the Forbidding Wall. Wind whipped back his thin braids and blasted dust from his face until his skin burned.
Between Cal-raven and the opening, a table waited like an altar for a sacrifice. Chalky, uncrushed boulders of the Mawrn rested on its round surface, holding down a heavy cloth that rippled like a skirt. Perching on the table’s edge, the cleverjay regarded him with one eye, then the other.
He crept past the table and glanced down over the lip of the cave’s mouth. It was a long drop to the ground where this tree had been planted. But some of the starcrown’s roots still stretched downward, robust as pillars, anchored in the slope of the crater’s outside edge.
It hasn’t given in. Somehow this fallen tree’s still drawing life from this ground. Like Abascar. He looked toward the rising moon. Already a bold red gem rested between two of the Forbidding Wall’s fangs. I’ll raise a new kingdom yet.
The cleverjay tapped at the tablecloth.
He sat down and unsheathed the farglass.
The cleverjay screeched, impatient. She flew at the Mawrn rocks as if they threatened her until they lay vanquished, crumbling into powder on the cave floor.
The table. That’s what Scharr ben Fray wanted me to see.
The bird paused, dusted her beak, eyed him intently, then carefully pronounced a new word: “Window.” She scratched at the black tablecloth like an aggravated bull before a charge.
Cal-raven stood, drew the tablecloth away, and cast it aside. It flew, full of wind like a ship’s sail, and spread itself flat against the cave’s back wall.
The bird alighted on the tabletop—a large round pane of glass. “Window.”
Cal-raven leaned over to look through it but saw only the stone column that supported it. “Window?” He took hold of the edge and rattled it. “It’s… loose.” Lifting the heavy pane away from the pillar that supported it, he held it up, and looked through it.
The glass presented a warped, distorted image of the back of the cave. The view made him dizzy. He set it down on its edge and looked at the bird, who now pecked about the exposed surface of the stone column.
A groove, wide as Cal-raven’s thumb, cut straight across the column’s flat surface.
“Ah.” He lifted the tabletop and set it upright, neatly snapping the edge into the column’s groove.
“Ha-ha!” cackled the cleverjay, hovering in place.
“Window,” Cal-raven pronounced, brushing off his hands. Then he took a few steps back and said, “Oh. Oh, yes.”
The glass magnified his view of the northern mountains so that they seemed to rise right in front of him.
Standing on its high curve, the cleverjay clucked proudly. “Look,” she said.
Cal-raven studied the distorted picture, eyes tracing jagged mountain peaks that towered l
ike an array of charred chimneys draped in a swirling blanket of cloud. Soon moonlight would spill over that blanket, revealing the details of those severe mountainsides.
“So the Seers watch the North. Why? What do they see? Is that why Tammos Raak fled to this place when he was in trouble? Maybe he could see something. Oh, listen to me,” he snorted, “talking about these stories as if they were true.”
The blurred silhouette of the Forbidding Wall seemed so close he felt he could touch its sharp peaks. And as he watched, a bright line burned across the cloudy tide beyond the mountains. It thickened and, as if spilling over a dam, poured between the towering peaks and painted the spaces between the mountains in crimson, then rushed down toward Fraughtenwood. What had seemed an impenetrable wall now revealed passages winding through rank after rank of heightening mountains.
“Where are you?” His whisper puffed white dust swirling into the air, fragments that, when magnified by the glass, looked like tiny moons—colorless, pockmarked, and cold.
He leaned closer. Through the blur of the magnified specks, he looked to the threshold of the Forbidding Wall. A strange symmetry drew his attention: a row of vertical lines like bright spears of an advancing legion, their tips pinpoints of light in a row, close together, almost imperceptible. Their perfect arrangement was consistent and, thus, unnatural. It was something made by men.
“By Har-baron’s severed arm.”
He began to count, and in his excitement he forgot to breathe. Thirteen. Thirteen.
“One more,” he whispered, stepping from side to side, trying to find a patch of the glass that would show him a clearer view. “Show me one more.”
He could see, even from here, that this line of bright towers disappeared behind a rocky ridge. “There must be another.” He straightened and looked at the dome of the half-risen moon. “There must be fourteen. Inius Throan. Fourteen bells in fourteen towers.”
His hand brushed the farglass in its sheath. What might I see if I could look even closer?
He set the farglass down on top of the stone pillar, its open end flat against the glass pane. Then he leaned down and looked through the viewpiece.
I told you the legends were true, Scharr ben Fray would smugly say. Think of it. Gardens, just waiting to be reawakened. Walls, impenetrable. A throne. I can already see you there.
He drew out all of the farglass’s lens discs. Then he began to restore and remove each lens, one at a time, to test the combinations. Each variation sharpened certain aspects of the view, enhancing the texture of the rough mountainsides, magnifying the light, or blurring those slopes to reveal flocks of birds or clouds of dust carried along on the winds that rushed down from the north.
He leaned away from the scope, left it resting against the great glass disc, and let his eyes take in the spreading crimson flood.
His teacher’s lessons rose from the past, loose pieces of a puzzle finally fitting into place. Dangers haunt Fraughtenwood, and beyond the threshold of the Wall, it’s worse. But the stories of Inius Throan, that first house of the escape, tell us of wonders. The city became deserted only when Tammos Raak’s children turned against one another. They descended into the Expanse to stake their claim, to follow their hearts and shape kingdoms that would fit their desires. They wanted more than he could give them.
“But now. Inius Throan lies open. Empty. Waiting. Father, you should see it. Like a king’s crown waiting to be claimed.”
“In-ee-us,” chirped the bird. “In-ee-us.” Then, apparently satisfied, the cleverjay disappeared into the night, uttering a farewell that sounded like scorn. One grey feather remained on the air, drifting slowly into Cal-raven’s hand. He absent-mindedly threaded it into one of the braids that ran back over his ear.
Somewhere behind him in the starcrown’s throat, a dull thud reverberated. He glanced over his shoulder. The Seer. She’s coming after me at last. And it seems I have to figure out my escape on my own. His hand sought the hilt of his sword. It was gone. He turned to face the burrow that had led him here.
As he did, the air in the cave suddenly changed. A glow shimmered in the air, swirling slowly.
“Auralia.” Cal-raven fell to his knees.
It was as if the threads of Auralia’s magnificent cloak had unraveled to float in the air. Colors he had seen only once before, shining in the Abascar dungeon, clouded in the open space and danced against the canvas of the dark tablecloth at the back of the cave.
His gaze traced those strands, finding that they wound together, streaming from the eyepiece of the farglass. A ray of moonlight, shining across the clouds above the Forbidding Wall, had struck the window and passed through the scope’s lenses, breaking apart and expanding into the cave, a web of luminous filaments.
Cal-raven exhaled the breath he’d been holding, exhilarated. Scharr ben Fray did not anticipate this. He scrambled back to the scope. Where do they come from? The moonlight had set fire to the surface of the thick country of cloud. Something within that blazing miasma caught the light. High above the mysterious towers and the mountain peaks, it lit up like a splinter of the sun, firing a fierce beacon straight to this—the place where the tower of Tammos Raak once stood.
That beam, passing through the pillar’s glass pane, suddenly proved too intense for the lenses of Cal-raven’s scope.
They shattered.
Cal-raven felt a fragment of light shoot straight as an arrow into his vision. The burn cut deep into his head. He staggered away from the farglass, grasping at his left eye.
A voice cut through the cooling air, a hiss in the starcrown’s ancient throat. “Tressssspassser.”
Cal-raven grabbed the broken farglass, then stumbled, half blind, to the edge of the starcrown’s root-lined cave. He blinked down at the long, wind-blasted slope of the crater’s outer edge. Through the fire in his head, he could not see what waited for him.
A hand, deathly grey, thrust up from the burrow and groped for a hold on the ground.
Cal-raven jumped.
13
A TRAITOR’S BARGAIN
Jiggerspit, I’m cold. And I don’t want to stay here.”
At Krawg’s complaint, Warney paused outside the revelhouse and draped his own cloak around his friend’s hunched frame.
“I smell rain comin’. Let’s get inside.” They limped along like brothers joined at the shoulder, their journey to the bunkhouse slowed by a herd of wild grubswine that crowded the avenue.
The bunkhouse host, a thin man with skin dark as a Jentan’s, blinked at them with runny eyes.
He’s heard of us, Warney thought. Already we’re “those troublemakers from Abascar.” He reached for excuses that had once helped the Midnight Swindler and the One-Eyed Bandit escape from Abascar guards. But Krawg produced a small leather pouch and handed it to the host.
Opening it, the host nodded. They moved inside.
“Ballyworms, Krawg!” Warney whispered. “What’d you give him?” Krawg managed a feeble smile. “When that blasted Seer picked me up, my hand found her pockets. Packed with Bel Amican moon coins.”
A familiar sensation of smug triumph warmed Warney like a swig of apple brandy. He hadn’t known Krawg to steal so much as a crumb in Barnashum. He could not remember the last thing they’d nabbed that hadn’t belonged to them—except Auralia.
He hauled Krawg across a mud-caked rug into a fireless fireside room. As they pushed through a crowd of miners, Warney and Krawg learned a great deal about Krawg’s performance.
Apparently Krawg had spoiled his chance by using language of the lowest sort. They ranted that “Abascar poor folk” were famously “muck mouthed.” A young woman squirming in an old man’s lap spat the word “Gatherers” like the husk of juice-weed. “I counted exactly seventeen utterances of kramm and six, maybe seven, of crolca. Should purge such talk from Bel Amican camps.”
“Offended, are they?” Krawg muttered. “And yet listen to them—all sneers ’n’ scoffing ’n’ judgment.”
Worst, Kr
awg’s story had spoken of sorcery and spells inconsistent with the moon-spirit religion. “That tale might send folk off to behave like tricksters, practicing dark arts and conjuring. String him up and flay him, I say.”
Only Warney could understand Krawg’s rasp, for the story had worn out his voice. “Haven’t they ever played make-believe?” Krawg coughed, spat. “Did they forget the hows and whys of makin’ stuff up?”
Trudging like weary rock goats up the steep staircase, they were buffeted by the insults. That ranting Abascar vagrant had broken every rule in the house, they said. He’d talked for too long. The story went places they hadn’t expected. Hadn’t he learned the formulas? Hadn’t he learned that people prefer happy endings? What kind of story stopped with a question?
“Jiggerspit, I’m cold,” Krawg growled again. “And I don’t want to stay here.”
“Still,” muttered a creaky miner who had stopped at the top of the stairs, “there was something there in the dirt of that story.” He watched Krawg and Warney ascend as if they were only a phantom of memory. “Some meaning under it. Or perhaps creeping along behind.”
“Well, out with it then!” said a younger version of the old man as he placed his foot on his elder’s hindquarters, grabbed his shoulders, and straightened him with a tug and a crack! “If you can’t spit out what your story’s about, where’s the sense in it? Shouldn’t punish listeners by making them…” He paused and thought for a moment. “By making them think!”
“In finer speech it might’ve made a finer tale.” The old man gave Krawg another curious glance.
“Nah,” said the younger. “You heard the room when he finished. Quiet as the grave. Not a whistle, not a stomp. So really, how good could it be?”
Warney urged Krawg farther down the hall to another stairway.
“Cold,” Krawg whispered. “Don’t want to stay.”
“Gotta ’gree with you there.”
As they walked, Krawg grew smaller and heavier for hearing the complaints. At the end of a crooked hallway, Warney opened a narrow door and found a three-bunk room crowded with broken pickaxe handles, coils of rope, and piles of discarded grey Mawrn sacks with broken seams. Flies drifted drunkenly over a mop bucket’s sludgewater.