“How?” Binabik. shouted. “I do not know this castle. What places might there be for escaping?”
Miriamele was having trouble thinking. The noises of wind and combat made her want to scream and cover her ears; the whirling clouds overhead dizzied her. She abruptly remembered Cadrach, who had been trailing along behind them, silent and unresponsive as a sleepwalker. Miriamele turned, certain that he had taken advantage of their confusion to sneak away, but the monk was crouched in the doorway, gazing up at the tempestuous, red-shot sky with a look of resignation.
“Perhaps we could get out through the seagate,” she said to the troll. “If Josua’s army is at the walls above Erchester, perhaps there will be only a few ...”
Binabik’s eyes widened. “Look there!” He thrust his hand through the slitted railing to point. “Is that not... ? Oh, Daughter of the Mountains!”
Miriamele squinted, trying to make sense out of the madness below her, and saw that there was more to the antheap-swirl of activity than just defenders running to and from the moat-bridge that led to the Middle Bailey. In fact, there seemed to be a fight of some kind taking place on the bridge itself. A large knot of armed men in the Middle Bailey was forcing a smaller troop of riders and footmen back across the moat. As she stared, one of the horses reared and tumbled from the span, taking its rider with it into the dark water. Were Josua’s forces inside the wall already, and pushing toward the Inner Bailey? Could those few on the bridge be the last of her father’s defenders? But then what of all the armored men just below her who were doing nothing to support the retreating horsemen? Who were they?
And then, as the small troop on the bridge was forced back even farther, she saw what Binabik had seen. One of the riders, standing almost impossibly tall in his saddle, swung his blade high overhead. Even in the false twilight she could see that the sword was black as coal.
“Oh, God, save us.” Something cold clutched at her innards. “It’s Camaris!”
Binabik was leaning forward, his face pressed against the stone rails. “I am thinking I see Prince Josua, too—there, in the gray cloak, riding near to Camaris.” He turned to her, his face fearful. Another jagged lightning flash silvered the sky. “And there are so few with them—they could not have been fighting their way inside the walls, I am guessing. Somehow they have been tricked into bringing the sword into the castle.”
Miriamele hammered her palms against the balcony floor. “What can we do?!”
The troll peered out through the rails again. “I am not knowing,” he half-shouted. “I have no thoughts at all! Kikkasut! We will be cut in pieces if we go down to them—and they have already been bringing the sword! Kikkasut!”
“There are flames in the tower window,” Cadrach said in a loud, flat tone.
Miriamele glanced briefly at both Green Angel Tower and Hjeldin’s Tower, but except for the clot of writhing clouds above the tall spire of the first, she could see nothing unusual.
“See!” Binabik called. “Something is happening!” He sounded angry and puzzled. “What are they doing?”
Josua and Camaris and their small company of allies had been driven across the bridge and onto the soil of the Inner Bailey. But the rest of the mercenary troops milling haphazardly inside the bailey did not step up to cut them off; rather, a ragged gap formed in their ranks, a split which gradually opened into a path that led from the base of the moat-bridge to the front steps of Green Angel Tower. As the rest of the king’s soldiers pushed their way across the bridge, Josua and his followers were forced toward the tower. Astoundingly, the mercenaries on either side did not menace them at all until Camaris, on his pale horse, tried to turn the troop sideways to cut his way through the wall of enemies. The king’s forces resisted fiercely and the small company was thrown back, then driven again across the open space toward Green Angel’s waiting steps.
“The tower!” said Miriamele. “They’re forcing them to the tower! What... ?”
“The Sithi-place!” Binabik sprang up suddenly, all thought of hiding now gone. “The place where the Storm King was making his last battle. Your father and Pryrates are wanting the swords there!”
Miriamele stood. Her knees were weak. What monstrous thing was happening before them, as relentless and inescapable as the clutch of a nightmare? “We have to go to them! Somehow! Maybe ... maybe there’s still something we can do!”
Binabik grabbed his pack from the floor inside the balcony window. “Where and how are we going to them?” he asked her.
Miriamele stared at him, then at silent Cadrach. For a moment, her mind was empty of everything except the howling of the wind outside. At last, a memory fluttered up from the depths.
“Follow me.” She shouldered her pack and Norn bow and ran across the damp stone toward the doorway and the residence stairs. Binabik hurried after her. She did not look back to see what Cadrach did.
Tiamak and Josua scrambled up the stairwell, silent except for their labored breath, struggling to stay close behind Camaris. A flight above them the knight climbed steadily, unheeding as a sleepwalker, his powerful legs carrying him upward two steps at a time.
“How could any stairs stretch so high?” Tiamak gasped. His lame leg was throbbing.
“There are mysteries in this place I never dreamed.” Josua held his torch high, and the shadows leaped from crevice to crevice along the richly-textured walls. “Who knew a whole world still remained down here?”
Tiamak shuddered. The silver-masked Norn Queen hovering over the Sithi’s sacred pool was a mystery that the Wrannaman wished he had never discovered. Her words, her chill invincibility, and especially the dreadful power that had filled the cavern of the Pool of Three Depths, had haunted him all the way up the great staircase. “Our ignorance is thrown back at us,” he panted. “We are fighting things we only guessed at, or glimpsed in nightmares. Now the Sithi are locked in struggle with that ... she-thing, fighting, dying ... and we do not even know why.”
Josua turned his gaze from the old man’s back to peer briefly at Tiamak. “I thought that was the task of the Scroll League. To know such things.”
“Those who went before us knew more than we do,” Tiamak replied. “And there is much that even Morgenes and the others never learned, much hidden even to Eahlstan Fiskerne, who they say was a true if secret friend to the Sithi. The immortals have always been tight-fisted with their lore.”
“And who can blame them, after the harm mortals have done with nothing more than stone and iron and fire.” Josua glanced at the marsh man again. “Ah, merciful God, we are wasting breath on talk. I see pain on your face, Tiamak. Let me carry you a while.”
Tiamak, climbing doggedly, shook his head. “Camaris has not slowed. We would fall farther behind, and if we leave the stairs we might lose him again, with no Sithi this time to help us find our way. He would be alone, and we might wander here forever.” He mounted several more steps before he had the breath to speak again. “If need be, let me trail behind. It is more important you stay with Camaris than with me.”
Josua did not say anything, but at last nodded unhappily.
The terrible sensation of shifting eddied away, and with it the dancing lights that, for a moment, had made Tiamak think the great staircase was burning. He shook his head, trying to clear his rattled thoughts. What could be happening? The air seemed strangely hot, and he felt the hairs on his arm and neck prickling.
“Something dreadful is happening,” Tiamak cried. He staggered in Josua’s shadow, wondering if the increasing force of the strange slippages meant that the Norn Queen was defeating the Sithi. The thought fastened on him as though it had claws. Perhaps she had escaped the pool. Would she follow him and the prince up the darkened stairs, silver mask expressionless, white robes fluttering...?
“He’s gone!” Josua’s voice was full of horror. “But how can that be?”
“What? Gone where?” Tiamak looked up.
The torchlight revealed a place where the stairwell abruptly stoppe
d, capped by a low ceiling of stone. Camaris was nowhere in sight.
“There is no place he could have hidden!” the prince said.
“No, look!” Tiamak pointed toward a fissure in the ceiling wide enough to allow a man to crawl through.
Josua quickly lifted Tiamak up into the hole, then held him steady while the Wrannaman probed for something to grasp. Tiamak found he could almost push his head above the surface on the far side. He pulled himself up and through, fighting against his treacherous, weary muscles, and when he lay quivering on the stone floor he called down through the fissure: “Come! It’s a storeroom!”
Josua tossed up the torch. With a helping hand from Tiamak, he struggled upward through the crack. Together they raced across the room, dodging the bits of wreckage strewn about, and climbed a rickety ladder through a hatchway. Beyond this was another storeroom, this one with a small window high in the wall. Threatening black clouds roiled in the box of sky visible there, and cold wind bled through. Another hatchway led to yet one more level.
As Tiamak put his aching leg to the bottommost rung, a crash resounded back through the hatch door, a sudden and violent sound. Josua, who climbed above him, sped up the ladder and disappeared.
When Tiamak made his way to the top, he found himself in a small, shadowy room, staring at the flinders of a door strewn outward into the chamber beyond. He could see torchlight in the chamber, and figures moving. Josua’s voice rang out.
“You! May God send your black soul to hell!”
Tiamak hurried to the doorway, then stopped, blinking as he tried to make sense of the wide circular room that opened before him. On his left, the windows above the tall main doors streamed with scarlet-tinted light that vied with the dull glow of torches in the wall sconces. Just a few cubits before the Wrannaman, Camaris stood in the ruins of the smaller door which had blocked his own way out into the chamber; the old knight now stood motionless, as though stunned. Josua was only an arm’s length away from Camaris, Naidel unsheathed and dangling in his hand. Two dozen paces beyond them, on the far side of the stone floor, a small door in the wall mirrored the one Camaris had just burst into flinders. On Tiamak’s right, beyond a high arch, a great sweep of stairs coiled upward out of sight.
But it was the figures on the bottom steps of this staircase that caught and held Tiamak’s eye, as they had Josua‘s—especially the bald man in the flapping red robe, who stood tall in the midst of a strew of human bodies, like a fisherman in a shallow stream. One armored man he still held by the shoulders, though the way the soldier’s gold-helmeted head wagged suggested he had long since stopped fighting.
“Damn you, Pryrates, let him go!” cried Josua.
The priest laughed. With a shrug, he effortlessly threw aside ... Camaris, who clattered on the stone flags and lay still, black blade clutched in his fist.
Tiamak stared in numb astonishment. The Camaris he and Josua had followed still stood nearby, wavering slightly like a tree in a stiff breeze. How could there be two? Who sprawled there?
“Isorn!” Josua shouted, his voice ragged with grief. Tiamak suddenly remembered, and the terror that clutched him clamped tighter. The deception they had conceived with the Sithi had come to this—this clutter of motionless men? Nearly a dozen soldiers, including powerful young Isorn, and the priest had defeated them with his bare hands? What could possibly stop Pryrates and his immortal ally now? Josua and his companions had but one of the Great Swords, and its wielder, Camaris, seemed lost in a dreaming daze....
“I’ll have your heart for this,” Prince Josua snarled, leaping toward the stairway. Pryrates lifted his hands and a nimbus of oily yellow light flickered around the alchemist’s fingers. As Naidel came flashing toward him in a wide, deadly arc, Pryrates’ hand snaked out and caught the blade. The point of contact hissed like a hot stone dropped into water, then the priest grabbed Josua’s sword arm and pulled him forward. The prince struggled, flailing at Pryrates with his other, handless arm, but the priest caught that too and drew Josua toward him until their faces were so close it seemed that the alchemist might kiss the prince.
“It is almost too easy,” Pryrates said, laughing.
Tiamak, weak with fear, slid back into the shadows of the doorway. I must do something—but who am I? The Wrannaman could barely stand upright. A little man, a nobody! I am no fighter! He would catch me and kill me like a tiny fish.
“There is no hell deep enough for you,” Josua grated. Sweat streamed down his face, and his sword arm trembled, but he seemed as helpless as a child in the priest’s prisoning grip.
“And I will visit them all.” Pryrates extended his arms again. The yellow light wavered around him. “You are one of the few who have balked me, Lackhand. Now you will see that your interference comes to—nothing.” He flung Josua against the nearby arch. The prince struck hard and slid down to lie motionless beside a man dressed in his own gray surcoat and armor—the Nabbanai baron’s brother, Brindalles. The man’s right arm, like Josua‘s, ended in a black leather cap, but Brindalles’ arm was bent at an angle that made Tiamak’s stomach lurch. There was no sign of life on the impostor’s pale, blood-flecked face.
Tiamak shrank farther back into the shadows, but Pryrates did not even look at him. Instead, the priest moved up the stairwell, then stopped and turned to Camaris.
“Come, old one,” he said, and smiled. Tiamak thought his grin as empty and mirthless as a crocodile’s. “I can feel the ward solidifying, which means the time has come. You need carry your burden only a little farther.”
Camaris took a step toward him, then stopped, shaking his head slowly. “No,” he said hoarsely. “No. I will not let it ...” Something of his real self had returned; Tiamak felt a faint swelling of hope.
Pryrates only crossed his arms on his scarlet breast. “It will be interesting to watch you resist. You will fail, of course. The pull of the sword is too strong for any mortal, even a tattered legend like yourself.”
“Damn you,” Camaris gasped. His body twitched and he shifted his balance back and forth, as though he fought some invisible thing that sought to tug him toward the stairs. The old knight sucked in a breath with a painful gasp. “What manner of creature are you?”
“Creature?” Pryrates’ hairless face was amused. “I am what a man who accepts no limits can become....”
While his last words still hung in the air, there was a sudden booming concussion. Where the door on the opposite side of the chamber had been, a murky cloud billowed. Several shadowy figures stumbled through, indistinguishable in the smoke.
“How exciting.” Pryrates’ tone was sardonic, but Tiamak saw a certain animation creep into the alchemist’s face that had not been there before. The priest took a step downward and peered into the haze. A moment later he reeled back, gurgling, with a black arrow all the way through his neck, its head standing out a handspan beyond the skin. Pryrates stumbled in place for a moment, then fell and rolled down the stairs to lie beside his victims. Blood pooled beneath his head, as though his bright robes melted and ran.
Miriamele stared up and down the narrow hallways, struggling to regain her bearings. The Chancelry had been a daunting maze when she had lived in the castle, but it was even more confusing now. Familiar doors and hallways were not quite where they should be, and all the passages seemed the wrong lengths, as though the Chancelry’s dimensions had somehow become shiftingly fluid. Miriamele struggled to keep her head. She was certain she could eventually find a way through, but she feared the loss of precious time.
As she waited for her companions, the freezing wind which whistled through the unshuttered windows rolled a few crumpled parchments past her feet.
Binabik trotted around the corner. “I did not mean that you should be waiting for me,” he said. “I was stopping only because I saw these. They have come through the window, I am thinking.” He handed her three arrows of plainer workmanship than the Norn shafts she had scavenged earlier. “There were others, too, but they had been<
br />
broken by striking on the stone walls.“ Miriamele had no quiver to put them in. She slipped them into the open corner of her pack beside Simon’s prize and the shafts she had saved from the tunnels. Even with Binabik’s additions she still had far fewer arrows than she would have liked, but it was a relief to know that if it came to it, she need not sell her life cheaply.
Look at me, she marveled. The world is ending, the Day of Weighing-Out has come at last ... and I’m playing at soldier.
Still, it was better than letting the terror push through. She felt it coiling inside her, and knew that if she let go of composure for even a moment she would be overwhelmed.
“I wasn’t waiting.” She pushed away from the wall. “Just making sure I know the way. This place was always difficult, but now it’s almost impossible. And it’s not just this....” She gestured at the smashed furniture and the ghostly rags of parchment, the doors splintered off their hinges that lay across the passage. “There are other changes too, things I don’t understand. But I think I’m right, now. We must go quietly from here, wind or no wind—we’re almost to the chapel, and that’s right beside the tower.”
“Cadrach is coming.” The troll said it as though he thought she might care.
Miriamele curled her lip. “I’m not waiting. If he can keep up, then let him.” She hesitated for a moment, then pulled one of the arrows from her pack and nocked it, letting it sit loosely on the bowstring. Armed, she set off down the narrow hallway. Binabik looked back, then scurried after her.
“He has been having as much hurt as us, Miriamele,” said the troll. “Maybe more. Who can say what things he or she would be doing under Pryrates’ torturing?”
“The monk has lied to me more times than I can count.” The thought of his betrayals burned so fiercely inside her that for a moment she was not even afraid. “One word of truth about the swords, about Pryrates, might have saved us all.”