He rubbed his eyes and then opened them again: the plate still stood in the niche by the stair landing, chest-high. On it, arranged as prettily as at a royal banquet, was a small green apple, an onion, and a heel of bread. An unadorned bowl with a cover stood beside it.
Simon shrank back, looking wildly from side to side. Who would do such a thing? What would make someone leave a perfectly good supper in the middle of an empty stairwell in the depths of the earth? He raised his guttering torch to inspect the magical offering once more.
It was hard to believe—no, it was impossible. He had been wandering for hours since leaving the great pool, trying to stay on an upward course but not at all sure that the curving bridges, downsloping corridors, and oddly-constructed stairways were not taking him even further into the earth, no matter how many steps he climbed. All that time the flame of his torch had been growing fainter, until it was little more than a wisp of blue and yellow which might be blown out by any errant breeze. He had all but convinced himself that he would be lost forever, that he would starve and die in darkness—and then he had found this ... this miracle.
It was not just the food itself, although the sight of it filled his mouth with saliva and made his fingers twitch. No, it meant there must be people somewhere nearby, and likely light and fresh air as well. Even the walls, which were rough-cobbled human work, spoke of the surface, of escape. He was as good as saved!
Hold a moment. He caught himself with hand outstretched, almost touching the skin of the apple. What if it’s a trap? What if they know someone is down here, and they’re trying to lure him out?
But who would “they” be? No one could know he was down here but his friends and the bestial diggers and the shadowy ghosts of the Sithi in their dream-castle. No, someone had brought supper down here, then for some reason had walked away, forgetting it.
If it was even real.
Simon reached, ready for the food to vanish, to turn to dust ... but it did not. His hand closed on the apple. It was hard beneath his fingers. He snatched it up, sniffed it briefly—what did poison smell like, anyway?—and then took a bite.
Thank you, merciful Usires. Thank you.
It was ... wonderful. The fruit was far from ripe, the juice tart, even sour, but it felt like he held the living green earth in his hand again, that the life of the sun and wind and rain was crisping between his teeth and tongue, running down his throat. For a moment he forgot all else, savoring the glory of it.
He lifted the cover from the bowl, sniffed to make sure it was water, then drank it down in thirsty gulps. When the bowl was empty, he grabbed the plate of food and darted back down the corridor, searching for a place to hide and eat in safety.
Simon fought with himself to make the apple last, even though each bite seemed like a year of his life given back to him. When he had finished it, and had licked every bit of juice from his fingers, he stared longingly at the bread and onion. With masterful self-control, he tucked them both into the pockets of his breeches. Even if he found his way back to the surface, even if he was near some place where people were, there was no guarantee he would be fed. If he came up within Erchester or one of the small villages along the Kynslagh, he might find a place to hide and even some allies; if he came up in the Hayholt, all hands might be turned against him. And if he was wrong about what the plate signified—well, he would be grateful to have the rest of the meal when the thrilling effect of an entire apple wore off.
He picked up the torch—it was even dimmer now, the flames a transparent azure—and stepped back out into the corridor, then paced forward until he reached the branching place. A chill passed through him. Which way had he turned? He had been in such a hurry to put distance between himself and anyone who might return for the food that he had acted without his normal care. Had he turned left, as he should have? Somehow that did not seem correct.
Still, he could do nothing but trust to the way he had done it so far. He took the rightward branching. Within moments, he became convinced that he had chosen wrongly: this way led down. He retraced his steps and took another of the corridors, but this one also sloped away downward. A few moments’ examination proved that all the branches went down. He walked back toward where he had eaten the apple and found the stem he had dropped, but when he held the guttering torch close to the ground he saw that the only footprints on the dusty floor led back the way he had come.
Curse this place! Curse this mad maze of a place!
Simon trudged back to the branching. Something had happened, it was clear—the tunnels had shifted again in some strange way. Resigned, he chose the downward path that seemed least steep and started on his way again.
The corridor twisted and turned, leading him back into the depths. Soon the walls again showed signs of Sithi work, hints of twining carvings beneath the centuries of grime. The passageway widened, then widened again. He stepped out into a vast open area and knew it only from the far-ranging echoes of his bootheels: his torch was little more now than a smoldering glow.
This cavernous place seemed as high-ceilinged as that which had held the great pool. As Simon moved forward and his eyes adjusted to the greater dimensions, his heart lifted. It was like the chamber of the pool in another way as well: a great staircase ran upward into the darkness, following the curve of the walls. Something else gleamed faintly in the middle of the chamber. He moved closer, and the dying light of his torch revealed a great circle of stone that might have been the base of a fountain; at its center, set in black earth but stretching up to many times Simon’s height, was a tree. Or at least it seemed to be a tree—there was a suggestion of humped and knotted roots at the bottom and amazingly tangled branches above—but no matter how close he held the torch, he could see no detail of it, as though it were draped in clinging shadow.
As he leaned nearer, the shadow-tree rattled in an unfelt wind, a sound like a thousand dry hands rubbing against each other. Simon leaped back. He had been about to touch it, certain it was carved stone. Instead he turned and hurried past it to the base of the winding stairway.
As he circled around the perimeter of the chamber, picking his way up the steps by fading torchlight, he was still intensely aware of the tree standing at the room’s center. He could hear the breathing sound of its leaves as they moved, but he could feel its existence even more strongly; it was as palpable in the darkness as someone lying beside him in a bed. It was not like anything he had felt before—less starkly powerful than the pool, perhaps, but somehow more subtle, an intelligence vast, old, and unhurried. The pool’s magic was like a roaring bonfire—something that could bum or illuminate, but would do neither unless someone was present to use its power. Simon could not imagine anyone or anything using the tree. It stood and dreamed and waited for no one. It was not good or evil, it simply was.
Long after he had left the base of the stairway behind him, he could feel its living presence.
The light from his torch grew less and less. At last, after he had climbed some hundreds of steps, it finally died. Having anticipated its passing for so long did not make the moment any less dreadful: Simon slumped down and sat in complete darkness, too tired even to weep. He ate a mouthful of bread and some onion, then squeezed some of the last of the water from his drying shirt. When he had finished, he took a deep breath and began to crawl up the stairs on his hands and knees, feeling before him in the blackness.
It was hard to tell whether the voices that followed him were phantoms of the underground realm or the chattering of his own drifting thoughts.
Climb up. All will be ready soon.
On your knees again, mooncalf?
Step after stone step passed beneath his hands. His fingers were numb, his knees and shins aching dully.
The Conqueror is coming! Soon all will be ready.
But one is missing!
It does not matter. The trees are burning. All is dead, gone. It does not matter.
Simon’s mind wandered as he clambered up the winding track.
It was not hard to imagine that he had been swallowed whole, that he was in the belly of some great beast. Perhaps it was the dragon—the dragon that was spoken of in the inscription on his ring. He stopped and felt his finger, reassured by the feel of the metal. What had Binabik said the inscription meant? Dragon and Death?
Killed by a dragon, maybe. I’ve been swallowed by one, and I’m dead. I’ll climb around and around inside it forever, here in the dark. I wonder if anyone else has been swallowed? It’s so lonely....
The dragon is dead, the voices told him. No, the dragon is death, others assured him.
He stopped and ate a little more of his food. His mouth was dry, but he did riot take more than a few drops of water before resuming his four-legged climb.
Simon stopped to catch his breath and rest his aching leg for perhaps the dozenth time since entering the stairwell. As he crouched, panting, light suddenly flickered around him. He thought wildly that his torch had blazed again, until he remembered that the dead brand was stuck beneath his belt. For a startlingly beautiful moment the whole stairwell seemed full of pale golden light, and he looked up the shaft into infinite distance, up past a shrinking spiral of stairs to a hole that led straight to heaven. Then, with a silent concussion, a ball of angry flame bloomed in the heights above him, turning the very air red, and for a moment the stairwell became hot as forge fire. Simon shouted in fear.
No! the voices screamed. No! Speak not the word! You will summon Unbeing!
There was a crack louder than any thunder, then a blue-white flash that dissolved everything in pure light. An instant later everything was black once more.
Simon lay on the stairs, panting. Was it truly dark again, or had the flare blinded him? How could he know?
What does it matter? asked a mocking voice.
He pressed his fingers against his closed eyelids until faint sparkles of blue and red moved in the darkness, but it proved nothing.
I will not know unless I find something that I know I should be able to see.
He had a hideous thought. What if, blinded, he crawled past a way out, a lighted doorway, a portal open to the sky?
Can’t think. I’ll climb. Can’t think.
He struggled upward. After a while he seemed to lose himself entirely, drifting away to other places, other times. He saw Erchester and the countryside beyond as they had looked from the bellchamber atop Green Angel Tower—the rolling hills and fenced farms, the tiny houses and people and animals laid out below him like wooden toys on a green blanket. He wanted to warn them all, tell them to run away, that a terrible winter was coming.
He saw Morgenes again. The lenses that the old man wore glinted in a beam of afternoon light, making his eyes flash as though some greater-than-ordinary fire burned within him. Morgenes was trying to tell him something, but Simon, young, stupid Simon, was watching a fly buzzing near the window. If only he had listened! If only he had known!
And he saw the castle itself, a fantastic hodgepodge of towers and roofs, its banners rippling in a spring wind. The Hayholt—his home. His home as it had been, and would never be again. But, oh, what he would give to turn Time in its track and send it rolling backward! If he could have bargained his soul for it ... what was a soul worth, anyway, against the happiness of home restored?
The sky behind the Hayholt lightened as if the sun had emerged from behind a cloud. Simon squinted. Perhaps it was not spring after all—perhaps it was high summer... ?
The Hayholt’s towers faded, but the light remained.
Light!
It was a faint, directionless sheen, no brighter than moonglow through fog—but Simon could see the dim form of the step before him, his dirt-crusted, scabby hand flattened upon it. He could see!
He looked around, trying to determine the source of the light. As far as he could see ahead of him, the steps wound upward. The light, faint as swamp-fire, came from somewhere above.
He got to his feet, swayed woozily for a moment, then began to walk upright once more. At first the angle seemed strange and he had to clutch the wall for support, but soon he felt almost human. Each step, laborious as it seemed, was taking him closer to the light. Each twinge of his wounded ankle was taking him nearer to ... what? Freedom, he hoped.
What had seemed an unlimited vista during the blinding flash of light now abruptly closed off above him. The stairs opened out onto a broad landing, but did not continue upward. Instead, the stairwell had been sealed off with a low ceiling of crude brick, as though someone had tried to cork the stair-tower like the neck of a bottle—but light leaked through at one side. Simon shuffled toward the glow, crouching so that he would not bump his head, and found a place where the bricks had fallen down, leaving a crevice that seemed just wide enough for a single person to climb. He jumped, but his hands could only touch the rough brick lining the hole; if there was an upper side, it was out of his reach. He jumped again, but it was useless.
Simon stared up at the opening. A heavy, defeated weariness descended on him. He slumped down to the landing and sat for a moment with his head in his hands. To have climbed so far!
He finished off the heel of bread and weighed the onion in his hand, wondering if he should just eat it; at last, he put it away again. It wasn’t time to give up yet. After a few moments of thought, he crawled over to the scatter of bricks that had crumbled loose from the ceiling and began piling them one atop the other, trying to find an arrangement that was stable. When he had made the sturdiest pile he could, he clambered atop it. Now, as he reached up, his hands stretched far into the crevice, but he still could not feel any upper surface. He tensed his muscles, then leaped. For a moment, he felt a lip at the upper part of the hole; an instant later his hands failed their grip and he slid back down, tumbling from the pile of bricks and twisting his sore ankle. Biting his lip to keep from shouting at the pain, he laboriously stacked the bricks again, climbed atop them, crouched, and jumped.
This time he was prepared. He caught the top of the hole and hung, wincing. After taking a few strong breaths, he pulled upward, his whole body trembling with the strain.
Farther, farther, just a little farther ...
The broken edges of brick passed before him. As he pulled himself higher, his elbows pushed against the brick, and for a moment it seemed that he would be trapped, wedged and left hanging in the hole like a game bird. He sucked in another breath, clenched his teeth against the pain of his arms, and pulled. Quivering, he inched higher; he braced himself for a short moment against the back of the hole, then pulled again. His eyes rose past the top of his hole, then his nose, then his chin. When he could, he threw his arm out onto the surface and clutched, pressing his back against the brick, then brought the other arm out as well. Using his elbows as levers, he worked his way up out of the crevice, ignoring the scrape of stone along his back and sides, then slid forward onto his chest and kicked like a swimmer until the whole of his length was lying on dank stone, safe.
Simon lay for a long time, sucking air, trying not to think about how much his arms and shoulders hurt. He rolled over on his back and stared up at another ceiling of stone, this one only a little higher above him than the last had been. Tears trickled down his cheeks. Was this to be the next variation in his torments? Would he be forced to pull himself up by sheer strength through hole after hole, forever? Was he damned?
Simon pulled the wet shirt from his breeches and squeezed it to get a few drops into his mouth, then sat up and looked at what was around him.
His eyes widened; his heart seemed to expand inside his chest. This was something different.
He was sitting on the floor of what was obviously a storeroom. It was human-made, and full of human implements, although none seemed to have been touched for some time. In one comer was a wagon wheel with two of its spokes missing. Several casks stood against another wall, and beside them were piled cloth sacks bulging with mysterious contents. For a moment, all Simon could think about was the possibility that they might contain food. T
hen he saw the ladder beside the far wall, and realized where the light was coming from.
The upper part of the ladder vanished through an open hatch door in the ceiling, a square full of light. Simon stared, gape-mouthed. Surely someone had heard his anguished prayers and had set it there to wait for him.
He roused himself and moved slowly across the room, then clutched the rungs of the ladder and looked upward. There was light above, and it seemed like the clean light of day. After all this time, could such a thing be?
The room above was another storeroom. It had a hatch door and ladder as well, but in the upper part of the wall there was a small, narrow window—through which Simon could see gray sky.
Sky!
He had thought that he had no more tears to cry, but as he stared at the rectangle of clouds, he began to weep, sobs of relief like a lost child reunited with a parent. He sank to his knees and offered a prayer of thanks. The world had been given back to him. No, that was not true: he had found the world once more.
After resting a few moments, he mounted the ladder. On the upper side of the hatchway he found a small chamber full of masonry tools and jars of paint and whitewash. This room had an ordinary door and ordinary rough plaster walls. Simon was delighted. Everything was so blessedly ordinary! He opened the door carefully, suddenly aware that he was in a place where people lived, that much as he wished to see another face and hear a voice that did not issue from empty shadows, he had to be cautious.
Outside the door lay a huge chamber with a floor of polished stone, lit only by small high windows. The walls were covered with heavy tapestries. On his right, a wide staircase swept upward and out of sight; across the chamber a smaller set of steps rose to a landing and a closed door. Simon looked from side to side and listened, but there seemed no one about but him. He stepped out.