Considerably paler, the magister was nonetheless unshaken. “My lord,” he began again. “I would like to perform a few small demonstrations …”
“Be my guest,” Gabriel said. He smiled in what he hoped was a companionable way while trying to quell his shaking hands.
“Bin Maymum and I are astrologers,” he said. “We watch the stars. And both of us have read our Dame Julia.” He cast his cantrip, and a screen materialized, a glowing, rich black like his robe, and on it hung the stars, like crystals strewn on cloth. “My lord, when I heard that you were in the Antica Terra, I wanted to meet you; but in Venike I understood that you had a schedule; a timetable.” The man touched his nose frequently, an odd tic, and used an eating knife to point at his image of the heavens.
“You are not from Ifriquy’a,” Gabriel said, leaning forward.
“No, my lord. I am a gentleman of Gilan; perhaps the farthest eastern kingdom held by humans. We are the border with the Wild, just as we hear you are in Ilba.”
“Alba,” Gabriel said automatically, and then he thought of Blanche. How we love to correct each other, we humans, he thought.
“My king, Rostan Dabbaj, is a great knight and a great warrior.” The easterner’s hair and his pale good looks were explained; he didn’t look like an Ifriquy’an.
The Yahadut scholar frowned. “Surely not the easternmost,” he said. “Surely the easternmost is Qu’in.”
Al-Shirazi frowned at being interrupted. “It is centuries since we have heard anything from Qu’in,” he said.
“Perhaps my people have better communications than yours,” Bin Maymum said.
“I am sorry to say I have never even heard of Gilan,” Gabriel said, wishing they would get on with it. He cast a withering look at his wife, who returned an arched eyebrow. “But I do have a timetable,” he said with a hand gesture that any company officer would have known for “hurry this up.”
“Yes,” al-Shirazi said. “I heard in Venike, and again from Dama Sukeh, that you think the gates open in … well, now … ten days.”
Gabriel nodded. Suddenly he could not breathe.
“My lord,” the Yahadut said. “I have come from Iberia, and my people, as a rule, do not meddle in the affairs of princes. And Dame Julia was a woman of extraordinary genius, the very queen of all our philosophy. But you should have asked someone to repeat her observations with modern instruments. Our ability to see into the Aeternium, the aethereal of the magisters, is incomparably better than it was two hundred years ago. For example …”
Gabriel was on his feet. “Just tell me,” he said.
The two magisters looked at each other. “We’re not sure,” al-Shirazi said. “But it’s more like a range of probabilities than a finite reality, which, in a way, is an allegory of the whole of—”
Gabriel slapped his open hand on the table. “Gentlemen,” he said firmly.
The Yahadut shrugged like a chef who will not be hurried. “There are aspects of this question not easily adaptable to a military schedule,” he said. “What is being? How do I make a timetable from an astronomical metaphor?”
Gabriel was too tightly wound. He went into his palace and counted to fifty. He looked at the magnificent tiled wall fountain he’d lifted, metaphorically, from Al Rashidi’s dying mind, and he caressed it with his unembodied hand. He needed to unpack it; it hung in blackness in a space behind Harmodius’s mirror, and despite the brilliant colours of the tiles, it was as if it was black and white in a universe of colour, because he had not yet accepted it.
Back in the real, Gabriel managed a sigh. “Gentlemen, I have a busy day. If my schedule is wrong, correct me. But get on with it.”
Bin Maymum shrugged again. “We do not wish to be wrong,” he said. He shuffled his feet. “Honestly, I hoped that by the time I found you, one of your own magisters would have seen it …”
“Unless we’re wrong,” al-Shirazi said. “But if we are wrong, we have made the same errors together, thousands of leagues apart.”
“Gentlemen!” spat Blanche. She had one of Gabriel’s hands in hers.
“Eight days,” the Yahadut said.
“The twenty-sixth of September,” the Gilan astrologer said. “At five seventeen in the morning, local time, in Arles, according to your cathedral clock, which is a little slow.” He looked at the Yahadut. “Except …”
“Except that there is an alternate solution,” Bin Maymum said. He shrugged again. “Perhaps the gates do not open for three years. Or one hundred and nineteen.”
Gabriel felt as if he’d taken a heavy blow to the head. His knees were weak, and there was a ringing in his ears.
“Sweet saviour,” he said. “Jesu Christe.”
Blanche looked at him.
He was biting his lip.
“What if the gates don’t open?” Michael said.
“Gavin is left to fight Ash alone,” Gabriel said.
Chapter Seven
The Adnacrags—Aneas Muriens
Aneas was fussing with the stump of his ear. He was vain; and it hurt more than any wound he’d ever taken, including the three broken ribs that ached like the cold grasp of death every time he took a deep breath or laughed or coughed, and the hole in his head that he couldn’t describe even to himself. He was standing in a tiny cabin in the stern that had been cleared for him; perhaps the first mate’s cabin. It was dark, lit by a scuttle to the brilliant sun outside, and he had borrowed a small mirror of Venikan silver from the captain, who seemed to be a very wealthy man.
There was a knock at the flimsy partition, and Aneas turned, ducking his head, and tapped his wounded ear hole against the overhead deck beam, and cursed.
The knock came again, more insistent.
Aneas opened the door. Gas-a-ho nodded. “May I come in?” he asked and pushed past.
Aneas frowned, at least in part because he was naked. But he wasn’t thinking well.
Gas-a-ho pushed him down on the bed and tilted his head to the light of the scuttle. He cast; there was a fringe of green light at the edge of Aneas’s consciousness.
“The wound will not heal faster if you mess with it,” the shaman said. “I need you to let me in.”
“In?” Aneas asked.
Let me in, the Outwaller shaman said as his fingers touched the wound again.
Aneas’s eyes snapped open. He retreated into his memory forest, and stood a moment under a tall maple he had known all his life, on which hung a myriad of artifacts. In the aethereal, he was not naked; he wore deerskin hose and quillwork garters and a long shirt of embroidered linen. Then he extended a hand; the other hand held a small flint knife.
Gas-a-ho was smaller in the aethereal, and had the head of an owl, which was deeply disconcerting to Aneas.
He looked around, and made a soft sound of approval.
Aneas nodded. “I do not allow many in here,” he admitted. He let the flint knife dissipate. “Something is wrong here.”
Gas-a-ho opened his beak and made a raucous noise. “Brother,” he said. “You took more than a bump on the head. You were dead. Among my people, you would take a new name and perhaps a new wife. You have been to a far country, and we need to know that the man who returned is the same.”
Aneas was looking at his tree. It was the same tree, and yet it was not; there were scars in the bark, and a shadow hung in the tops. But worst of all, there were things that should have been hanging on the tree that were gone, and other things were hanging in their stead.
“How can I be a different person?” Aneas asked.
“How can you be the same?” Gas-a-ho asked. “You were dead. I lost you, brother. You weren’t alive anymore. Irene fetched back a corpse.”
“Irene,” Aneas said softly.
“Listen to me,” Gas-a-ho said. He was looking carefully at Aneas’s tree, at the field of raspberry bramble beyond, at signs of use and signs of casting and remnants of memory, sniffing like a hunting dog. “Do you feel anything … strange … from Looks-at-Clouds?”
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Aneas thought, and wisps of cloud trailed across the sun of his mind.
He was afraid.
Gas-a-ho shook his head. “I am not the gods, to play with your mind. But something here is very wrong.” He reached a human hand into the brambles and pulled out an old deerskin quiver. The thorns caught on it, but the deerskin was tough.
“That was my father’s!” Aneas said, and took the quiver. He was sure it had been hanging on the tree, and he found a broken branch close to the ground.
Gas-a-ho was poking in the brambles. “Something is very wrong with Looks-at-Clouds,” he said. “Or at least, Irene and I think so.” He found an arrow, and then another, and then a third, and Aneas, obediently, slid them into his father’s quiver.
Gas-a-ho was deep in the brambles by then.
“That should all be pine needles and rocks,” Aneas said. “There are no …”
“There’s a trail,” Gas-a-ho said.
Aneas followed the shaman. He was aware, at some remove, that what they were doing was very dangerous.
The trail was far longer than it should have been, winding in and out of the brambles and crossing a small rivulet that seemed as brown as old blood. Aneas knew that his whole memory forest was not this big, and he knew, too, that all around them was very dark. He wanted to find his clear spring and his casting stone, and they were hidden.
“I am afraid,” Aneas said. “I cannot cast.”
The shaman turned. “Yes,” he said. “That is natural. But this is the thing for which I trained: to take people on spirit journeys. You were dead. Things have changed in here. You need to find whatever the trail wants you to find.”
They walked on, and the darkness pressed in, so that Aneas feared to raise his eyes above the muddy brown trail.
The brambles kept catching on his hands, until both of them were bleeding. The blood fell on the trail. The trail was soaked in blood.
“Spirit journeys are mostly safe for the young and inexperienced,” Gas-a-ho said. “The older you are and the more you have seen, the more dangerous these places are.”
The shaman paused. “I think this is as far as I go,” he said. He smiled, and for a moment, the smile and the man’s confidence warmed Aneas.
“Whatever awaits will be horrible,” the shaman said. “This isn’t some nice name quest where you find a turtle or a hawk. But we need you back; and whatever it is, you can deal with it. That I promise. Remember it’s only you. Only you.”
The shaman stepped back. The trail had become squelchy underfoot, and the shaman’s bare feet were red in the unreal light. They were in a fetid swamp, not a marsh now; and the swamp was a swamp of blood.
Aneas stepped past him, and walked on.
It wasn’t far.
He emerged into the clearing, and it was and was not his casting sanctum. The rock was the same; the tree, which seemed miles behind them, was there, although somehow they had come upon the pool from another direction. The tree was full of lichen, and now seemed dead.
The pool couldn’t be seen, because it was full of corpses.
In the aethereal, he knew them all. They lay in the real attitudes of the dead; crushed together like baitfish, pale and unlovely. There was Ghause Muriens, his mother; and there was Wart; and there, Ta-se-ho; and there was Ricar Fitzalan and there, de la Motte and there, Anthony the stable boy, his first love; the first death he’d ever caused. And there was Gabriel’s tutor, Prudentia; there was a pair of men he’d killed to protect a secret; there was a woman who had loved him, and whom his mother had turned to ash.
Perhaps seeing her made him understand that this was a dream—a construct in his own head—just as Gas-a-ho said.
He took some deep breaths.
Gas-a-ho appeared behind him. “What do you think you should do?” he asked calmly.
Aneas made himself look at the pile of corpses. “Clear the spring, obviously.”
Gas-a-ho nodded. “We’ll smoke together when you are done,” he said. “Irene is with us now, in the real. We cannot help you, but we are here.”
“The mind is not so very complicated, is it?” Aneas said bitterly.
Gas-a-ho shrugged. “Clean the spring,” he said.
Aneas went along the last of the swampy meadow, feet squelching in the blood. It seemed unfair that there was so much blood, or that it was so fresh, but the symbolism was obvious.
He reached down. Wart, the old Jack, was atop the pile. He got his hands under the man’s shoulders. Wart’s dead weight was horribly real; his head lolled bonelessly, his teeth clacked as his jaw snapped closed.
Get it done, Aneas thought.
He carried Wart all the way to the darkness. The darkness proved to be a cool dark of overhanging spruce trees; not nearly so terrifying, close up. Aneas laid Wart gently on the pine needles and turned and trudged all the way back to the pile of corpses. The second was Ta-se-ho; the old hunter weighed nothing, although the wound that killed him was a terrible ragged tear and a loop of his intestines came out and caught on the brambles. Aneas put the old man down and pushed the slippery stuff back into the wound, and because this was his mind, he put out his hand and closed the wound. Then he lifted the old hunter and carried him to the woods.
A little golden light fell on a patch of green grass, and there was no sign of Wart. His corpse was gone.
“Two can play at this symbolism game,” Aneas said bravely, although tears were rolling down his face, and a strange hope burned in his throat. He laid the Outwaller in the sun, and turned away, afraid even to watch.
His mother was the hardest. He didn’t even think that he felt he had killed her; hadn’t even registered such a guilt, but while he carried her slight, rotting form, stiff with rigor mortis and with the skin moving disgustingly over the hardened muscles, he thought of Orley; of his hatred for the man. Aneas was too intelligent to fail to understand himself.
He placed Ghause in the widened circle of sunlight, on what had become a mound. When he laid her down, he knelt by her awhile, and then he went back and got Fitzalan.
There was something particularly terrible about handling in death a body you had lusted for in life. Ands something disconcerting and paradoxical about the corpse; it was more decomposed than his mother’s. And the head was attached. Some of Richard’s rotting skin stuck to his; fluids leached out of his friend. The smell was so bad he choked.
He got Richard to the new meadow. He took time to lay the body out, tried to close his friend’s eyes, but that proved a bad idea. His gorge rose.
He turned with a muttered prayer and went back for Anthony.
He looked at Anthony for a while, too, wondering whether he’d loved the boy or simply wanted to strike a blow at his father. Who had certainly struck back. In the extended metaphor of his mind, Anthony looked exactly as he had looked when his father had ordered the boy killed. He was not decomposed at all.
“I knew,” Aneas said aloud. “I knew what he’d do.”
He went back and got Prudentia, and the others. All in all, there were an uncountable number of trips; some he held only as shadowy forms, others had a firm reality of decay and ordure; this, too, he understood.
The strangest was the slim figure that was clearly his own. Without a wound, and no sign of rot. He paused for a long time, trying to think if there was another message here, or some new action required, but in the end, he carried his own corpse to the new green mound in the cool green woods.
And then he was done, his task complete, and he stood in sunlight. The pool was clear; potentia bubbled from the ground under his stone, and the stone was clean except for one deep mark, as if of a footprint.
Gas-a-ho came and stood with him. The tree towered over the pool again; the brambles were gone as if they’d never been. The tree was in bud.
“Nice,” the shaman said. “Some people never manage it.”
“Are they real?” Aneas asked. “The dead people?”
Gas-a-ho looked at him, and his eyes sparkled. ?
??That’s up to you, isn’t it?” he asked. “Only you decide if other people are real.”
He took a medicine bag from around his neck and hung it on the tree.
Aneas sat by the spring. He dipped his hands in the spring, which was ops and not water, and washed his hands and arms of all the blood and filth. Fully visible across the meadow was a mound; it stood as tall as a man, covered in beautiful green grass, brilliant in the sun.
Gas-a-ho sat cross-legged by him. “It is good that you have placed them where you can see them,” he said. “You are a strong person. Can you work the ops again?”
Aneas reached into the pool and took potentia in his hand, and formed it.
“Good,” Gas-a-ho said. “But you are changed. You know that?”
“Yes,” Aneas said. “I was dead. Who am I now?”
“Who is anyone, ever?” Gas-a-ho said, but it was said with a sort of self-mocking humour.
And then Aneas was sitting in the real. Gas-a-ho had his hand; Irene had an arm around his shoulders. Nita Qwan handed him a lit pipe and he inhaled deeply of the smoke and shuddered.
He handed the pipe to Irene, and she drew deeply at it and passed it to Gas-a-ho.
Aneas took a deep breath.
Irene looked into his eyes, and he looked into hers.
“You saved me,” he said.
“We don’t have time for your thanks just now,” Irene said. “We think Looks-at-Clouds is possessed,” she said very softly.
Firensi—Tippit
Tippit’s horse was probably the best he’d ever had in a lifetime of making war. His horse was so good he enjoyed riding it; he rose in the darkness, already thinking of the joy of a canter. He didn’t usually name horses; they tended to die faster than he could be bothered to get to know them, but the horse he’d had from the Venikans was a big gelding from Ifriquy’a, with a small, handsome head and a beautiful temperament, and the gelding loved to run.
Which was good, because in the murky dawn he was galloping along a farm road with a dozen other company archers at his back.
The farm road was in Central Etrusca, almost fifty leagues south of the fields of San Batiste. He and his party had ridden all night; they had Short Tooth from the green banda guiding them.