A thought came to him suddenly, an idea so wild and mad that he frightened himself. He looked up at the sky, trying to guess how much time remained until dawn. By the chill, empty feel of the air, he felt sure the sun was at least a few hours away.
Who was most likely to have taken Bright-Nail from the mound? Pryrates, of course. He might not even have told King Elias, if that suited his purposes. And where would it be if that was true? Hidden in the priest’s stronghold—in Hjeldin’s Tower.
Simon turned. The alchemist’s tower, unpleasantly squat beside the pure sweep of Green Angel, loomed over the Inner Bailey wall. If there were lights inside, they were hidden: the scarlet windows were dark. It looked deserted—but so did everything else at the center of the great keep. The whole of the Hayholt’s interior might have been a mausoleum, a city of the dead.
Did he dare to go inside—or at least try? He would have to have light. Perhaps there were extra torches or a hooded lantern he could use somewhere in Green Angel Tower. It would be a fearful, terrible risk....
If he had not seen Pryrates leaving with his own eyes, if he had not heard the red priest talk of riding to Wentmouth, Simon would not even have thought of it: just the idea of making his way into the ill-omened tower when hairless, black-eyed Pryrates might be sitting inside, waiting like a spider at the center of his web, made his stomach heave. But the priest was gone, that was undeniable, and Simon knew he might never have such a chance again. What if he found Bright-Nail?! He could take it and be gone from the Hayholt before Pryrates even returned. That would be a satisfying trick to play on the red-robed murderer. And wouldn’t it be fine to ride into Prince Josua’s camp and show them Bright-Nail flashing in the sun? Then he would truly be Simon, Master of the Great Swords, wouldn’t he?
As he moved quickly and quietly across the bridge, he found himself staring at the bailey wall before him. Something about it had changed. It had grown... lighter.
The sun was coming up, or at least as much of the sun as would appear on this gray day. Simon hurried a little. He had been wrong.
A few more hours, eh? You’ve been lucky. What if you‘d been rattling around outside the door of Hjeldin’s Tower, when the sun came up? Mooncalf, still a mooncalf.
Still, he was not entirely unrepentant. Knights and heroes had to be bold, and what he was considering now was a bold plan indeed. He would simply have to wait until tomorrow night’s darkness to accomplish it. It would be a marvelous, brave thing to do.
But even as he hurried back toward his hiding hole in Green Angel Tower, he wished his friends were around to talk him out of it.
The sun had set a few hours before. A fine drizzle was descending from the night sky. Simon stood in Green Angel Tower’s doorway and prepared himself to step out.
It was not easy. He was still feeling weak and hungry, although after sleeping the day away he had found the remains of someone’s supper, a crust of bread and a scanty rind of cheese, on a plate in an alcove off the tower’s antechamber. Both bread and cheese were dry, but still seemed only hours old, not days or weeks; even as he gobbled them down he had wondered whose meal it had been. Did Barnabas the sexton still care for the tower and its great bells? If so, he was doing a poor job.
Thinking of Barnabas had made Simon realize that not once in the time he had returned had he heard Green Angel’s bells. Now, as he stood in the doorway of the tower, waiting for darkness, the thought came to him again. The great echoing cry of the bronze bells had been the heartbeat of the Hayholt as he had known it, an hourly reminder that things went on, that time passed, that life continued. But now they were silent.
Simon shrugged and stepped out. He paused to cup his hands beneath a stream of rainwater running down from the roof, then drank thirstily. He wiped his hands on his breeches and stared at the shadow of Hjeldin’s Tower against the violet sky. There was nothing left to do. There was no reason to wait any longer.
Simon made his way along the outer perimeter of the bailey, using the cover of the buildings to keep himself hidden from any eyes that might be watching. He had almost walked into the arms of Pryrates and the soldiers the night before; despite the seeming emptiness of the keep, he would take nothing for granted. Once or twice he heard wisps of conversation drift past, but he saw no living people who might have been responsible. A long, sobbing laugh floated by. Simon shivered.
As he moved out around the edge of one of the out-buildings, he thought he saw a flicker of light in the tower’s upper windows, a momentary gleam of red like a coal that still hid smoldering life. He stopped, cursing quietly to himself. Why should he be so sure that just because Pryrates was gone, the tower would be empty? Perhaps the Norns lived there.
But perhaps not. Surely even the priest needed servants to look after him, to sweep the floors and light the lamps, just as Simon had once done for Doctor Morgenes. If anyone moved inside the tower, it was likely some terrified castle-dweller forced to labor in the red priest’s stronghold. Perhaps it was Rachel the Dragon. If so, Simon would rescue her as well as Bright-Nail. Wouldn’t she be astonished—he would have to be careful not to frighten her too badly. She must have wondered where in the world her wayward scullion had gone.
Simon turned before he reached the tower doors and clambered into a patch of ivy growing along the bailey wall. Hero or not, he was no fool. He would wait to see if there was any sign the tower was occupied.
He huddled, holding his knees. The bulk of the tower overhead, its blunt dark stones, made him uncomfortable. It was hard not to feel it waited for him like a giant feigning sleep, anticipating the moment when Simon would come within reach....
Time seemed to pass very slowly. When he could stand the waiting no longer, he dragged himself out of the ivy, which seemed to cling more strongly than it should. No one had come near the doorway; no one was moving anywhere about the Inner Bailey. He had seen no more lights in the windows, nor had he heard anything but the moaning of the wind in the towertops. It was time.
But how to get in? There was scarcely any chance he would be able to unlock the huge black doors—someone as secretive as Pryrates must have bolts on his fortress gateway that could keep out an army. No, it would undoubtedly take climbing. The gatehouse that stood around and over the front door was probably his best chance. From the top of it he could perhaps find a way up to one of the upper windows. The stones of the walls were heavy and crudely set: climbing holds should not be too difficult to find.
He ducked into the shelter of the gatehouse and paused for a moment to look at the black timbers of the front doors. They were indeed massive—Simon guessed that even men with axes would not penetrate them in anything less than half a day. Testing, he grasped one of the massive door handles and pulled. The right side door swung out silently, startling Simon so that he stumbled backward, out into the thin rain.
The doors were open—unlocked! For a moment he wanted only to run, certain it was a trap set just for him; but as he stopped, hands raised as though to ward off a blow, he realized that was unlikely. Or perhaps there were more certain protections inside... ?
Simon hesitated a moment longer, his heart rattling.
Don’t be a fool. Either go in or stay out. Don’t stand around in the middle of everything waiting to be noticed by someone.
He clenched his fists and stepped through, then pulled the door shut behind him.
There was no need yet for the torch in his belt, which he had refurbished with oil from one of Green Angel Tower’s storage rooms: one already burned in a bracket on the wall of the high antechamber, making shadows shiver in the corners. Simon could not help wondering who had lit it, but quickly dismissed the useless thought: he could only begin looking, try to move quietly, and listen for anyone else who might be in Hjeldin’s Tower with him.
He walked across the antechamber, dismayed by the loud hiss his boot soles made rubbing on the stone. Stairs led upward along one wall to the highest, darkest parts of the tower. They would have to wait.
>
So many doors! Simon chose one and opened it gently. The torchlight bleeding in from the antechamber revealed a room filled entirely with furnishings made from bones that had been tied and glued together, including one large chair which had, as if in mockery of the High King’s throne, an awning made entirely from skulls—human skulls. Many of the bones still had bits of dark dry flesh stuck to them. From somewhere in the room came the fizzing chirp of what sounded like a cricket. Simon felt his stomach rising into his throat and hurriedly shut the door.
When he had recovered a little he took his own brand and lit it from the wall torch. If he was really going to look for the sword, he would have to be able to see even into the dark corners, no matter what he might find there.
He went back to the bone room, but further inspection turned up nothing but the dreadful furnishings, an incredible array of bones. Simon hoped some of them were animal bones, but doubted it. The insistent buzz of the cricket drove him out once more.
The next chamber was filled wall to wall with tubs covered by stretched nets. Things Simon could not quite make out slithered and splashed in dark fluid; from time to time a slippery back or an oddly-terminated appendage pushed against the netting until it bulged upward. In another room Simon found thousands of tiny silvery figures of men and women, each carved with amazing accuracy and realism: each little statue was a perfect representation of a person frozen in a position of fear or despair. When Simon lifted one of them, the shiny metal felt slippery and strangely warm against his skin. A moment later, he dropped it and backed quickly out of the room. He was sure he had felt it squirm in his grip.
Simon made his way from one room to the next, continuously disturbed by what he found, sometimes by the sheer unpleasantness of the priest’s possessions, sometimes by their incomprehensibility. The last room on the ground floor contained a few bones as well, but they were far too large to belong to anything human. They were boiling in a great vat that hung above an oil flame, filling the damp room with a powerful but unrecognizable stink. Viscous black fluid ran in oozing drops from a spigot on the vat’s side into a wide stone bowl. The fetid steam swirling up made Simon’s head reel and the scar on his cheek sting. A quick search discovered no trace of the sword, and he retreated gratefully to the relatively clean air outside.
After hesitating a moment, he climbed the stairs to the next level. There was undoubtedly more to be discovered beneath the tower, down in its catacombs—but Simon was in no hurry to do that. He would put such a search off for last, and pray that he found the sword before then.
A room full of glass beakers and retorts much like things Morgenes had possessed, a chamber whose walls and ceiling were draped with inordinately thick spiderwebs—his search of that one was brief and perfunctory—another which seemed an indoor jungle full of trailing vines and fat, rotting blossoms, Simon passed through them all, feeling more and more like some peasant boy from a story who had entered a witch’s magical castle. Some of the chambers had contents so dreadful he could do no more than peer for a moment into the shadowed interior before shoving the door closed again. There were some things he simply could not force himself to do: if the sword was in one of these rooms, it would have to remain unrescued.
One room that did not at first seem so dreadful held only a single small cot, oddly woven from a mesh of leather straps. At first he thought this might be the place Pryrates slept ... until he saw the hole in the stone floor and the stains beneath the cot. He left quickly, shuddering. He didn’t think he could spend much longer in this place and keep his sanity.
On the fifth floor of the priest’s storehouse of nightmares, Simon hesitated. This was the level at which the great red windows were set: if he moved from room to room with his torch, it was quite possible someone elsewhere in the keep might notice the moving flicker of light in what should be an empty tower. After some consideration, he set his torch in one of the high brackets on the wall. He would have to search in near-darkness, Simon realized, but he had spent enough time below ground that he thought he might be better suited for that than almost anyone except a Sitha ... or a Norn.
Only three chambers opened off the landing. The first was another featureless room with a cot, although this one had no drain in the floor. Simon had no problem believing that this was indeed Pryrates’ sleeping place: something in the stark emptiness of the room seemed appropriate. Simon could picture the black-eyed priest lying on his back staring up into nothing, plotting. There was also a privy, a strangely natural possession for someone so unnatural.
The second chamber was some sort of reliquary. The entire room was lined with shelves, and every inch of shelf space was taken up by statues. These were not all of a type, like the silver figurines on the first floor, but all shapes and sizes, some that looked like saint’s icons, others lopsided wooden fetishes that might have been carved by children or lunatics. It was fascinating, in a way. Had Simon not felt the terror of this strange tower all around him, the incredible risk he was taking just being here, he might have liked to take some time to look at the bizarre collection. Some were made from wax and had candle wicks protruding from the heads, others were little more than conglomerations of bones and mud and feathers, but each was recognizably a figure of some sort, although many seemed more animal than human. But nowhere was there anything like a sword. The eyes of some of the images seemed to follow Simon as he backed out again.
The last and largest room was perhaps the red priest’s study. Here the great scarlet windows were most visible, since they covered a large part of the curved wall, although with night sky outside they were dark. The room itself was littered with scrolls and books and a collection of other objects as haphazardly odd and dispiriting as anything he had seen in any of the other chambers. If he could not find the sword here, his only hope was the catacombs beneath the tower. The roof above was full of star-gazing equipment and other strange machinery—he had seen that late in the afternoon from one of Green Angel Tower’s narrow windows; Simon doubted there would be anything so valuable hidden out there, but he would look anyway. No sense avoiding anything that might save him a trip down below Hjeldin’s monument....
The study was thick with shadows and extremely cluttered, almost the entire floor covered with objects, although the walls were curiously empty of furnishings or anything else. At the room’s center a high-backed chair faced away from the door toward the high windows. It was surrounded by free-standing cabinets, each one overflowing with parchments and heavy bound books. The wall beneath the windows, Simon saw by the faint torchlight, was covered in pale, painted runes.
He took a few steps toward the wall, then stumbled slightly. Something was wrong: he felt an odd tingling, a faintly nauseating unsteadiness in his bones and his guts. A moment later, a hand shot out from the darkness of the chair and fastened onto his wrist. Simon screamed and fell down, but the hand did not let go. The powerful grip was cold as frost.
“What have we here?” a voice said. “A trespasser?”
Simon could not yank himself free. His heart sped so swiftly that he thought he would die of fear. He was pulled slowly back onto his feet, then tugged around the chair until he could look into the pale face that gazed at him from its shadows. The eyes that met his were almost invisible, faint smears of reflected light that nevertheless seemed to hold him just as strongly as the bony hand on his wrist.
“What have we here?” his captor repeated, and leaned forward to stare at him.
It was King Elias.
17
An Ember in the Night Sky
Despite the urgency of his errand and the dull ache of his tailbone, Tiamak could not help pausing in wonder to watch the proceedings on the broad hillside.
It occurred to him that he had spent so much of his life reading scrolls and books that he had found very little chance to experience the sort of things about which they were written. Except for his brief stay in Ansis Pellipé and his monthly forays to the Kwanitupul market, the hurly-bur
ly of life had not intruded much on his hut in the banyan tree. Now, in this last year, Tiamak had been caught up in the great movements of mortals and immortals. He had fought monsters beside a princess and a duke. He had met and spoken with one of the legendary Sithi. He had seen the return of the greatest knight of the Johannine Age. Now, as though the pages of one of Doctor Morgenes’ dusty volumes had taken on magical life, he stood beneath cloudy skies watching the surrender of an army after a life or death struggle in the famous Onestrine Pass. Surely any scholar worth his quill pen would give everything he had to be here.
Then why, Tiamak wondered, did he feel such intense longing to see his banyan tree again?
I am as They Who Watch and Shape have made me, he decided. I am not a hero, like Camaris or Josua or even poor Isgrimnur. No, I belong with Father Strangyeard and the others like us—the small, the quiet. We do not want the eyes of people on us all the time, waiting to see what we do next.
Still, when he considered some of the things he had seen and even done, he was not quite sure that he would have passed them up, even if given a choice.
As long as I can keep dodging She Who Waits to Take All Back a while longer, that is. I would not mind having a family some day. I would not mind a wife and children who would fill the house with some laughter when I am old.
But that would mean finding a Wran-bride, of course. Even had he any taste for the tall, fish-skinned women of the drylander cities, he doubted any of them would be eager to live on crab soup in a tree house in the marsh.
Tiamak’s thoughts were interrupted by Josua’s voice. He started to move toward the prince to deliver his message, but found his way blocked by several large soldiers who, caught up as they were with the spectacle before them, seemed in no hurry to make room for the small man.