“Silence!” the king hissed. His face was a rawboned mask of fury. “Love! Does it remain after worms have gnawed the bones? I do not know that word.”
Elias slowly turned back to Camaris. The old knight had not moved from his spot on the floor, but now, as though some power in the king’s attention compelled him, he crawled a few steps closer, Thorn scraping across the stone tiles before him.
The king’s voice became curiously gentle. “I am not surprised to see that the black sword chose you, Camaris. I was told that you had returned to the living. I knew that if those tales were true, Thorn would find you. Now we will act together to protect your beloved John’s kingdom.”
Miriamele’s eyes widened in horror as a figure that had been blocked from her sight by Camaris now became visible. Josua lay crumpled just a little to one side of her father, arms and legs splayed. The prince’s face was turned away, but his shirt and cloak were sodden crimson around his neck, and blood had pooled beneath him. Miriamele’s eyes filled with blurring tears.
“It is time, Majesty,” said Pryrates.
The king extended Sorrow like a gray tongue until it nearly touched the old knight. Although Camaris was visibly struggling with himself, he began to lift Thorn to meet the shadowy blade in the king’s hand.
Fighting against the same force that bound Miriamele, Binabik gave a muffled shout of warning, but still Thorn rose in the old man’s trembling hands.
“God, forgive me,” Camaris cried wretchedly. “It is a sinful world ... and I have failed You again.”
The two swords met with a quiet click that cut through the room. The noise of the storm diminished, and for a moment the only thing audible was Camaris’ moan of anguish.
A point of blackness began to pulse where the tips of the two blades crossed, as though the world had been ripped open and some fundamental emptiness was beginning to leak through. Even through the bonds of the alchemist’s spell, Miriamele could feel the air in the high chamber suddenly grow hard and brittle. The chill deepened. Traceries of ice began to form in the arches of the windows and along the walls, spreading like wildfire. Within moments the chamber was furred with a thin surface of ice crystals that shimmered in a thousand strange colors. Icicles were growing on the great bells, translucent fangs that gleamed with the light of the red star.
Pryrates lifted his arms triumphantly. Glinting flakes clung to his robe. “It has begun.”
The somber cluster of bells at the ceiling did not move, but the bone-shaking sound of a greater bell rang out once more. Powdery ice fluttered as the tower trembled like a slender tree caught in storm winds.
Simon tugged at the handle and cursed quietly. This lower door was wedged shut—there would be no easy entry into the room beneath the missing floor—and now he heard footsteps coming up the stairwell again.
His joints still hurt fiercely, but he scrambled back up the stairs to the other door as quickly as he could, then stepped inside, taking care this time to stand at the very edge of the flooring, which had held his weight before. He was forced to move far to the side of the door as it closed. As the footfalls passed outside, he carefully made his way along the strip of wood to look through the door slit, but by the time he could reach it he glimpsed only a small dark shape vanishing up the stairwell, lurching strangely. He waited a score of heartbeats, listening, then crept outside and took a torch from the nearest bracket.
To his vast relief, Simon saw by the torch’s light that there was indeed a bottom to the chamber below, and though parts of that lower floor had rotted through as well, it was mostly intact. Bright-Nail lay gleaming in a pile of discarded furniture. Seeing it lying there like a piece of splendid jewelry thrown onto a midden heap, Simon felt a violent pang. He must get it back. Bright-Nail must go to the tower. Even from a distance, he could feel its yearning.
A faint thread of the blade’s song coiled through his thoughts as he found what seemed the most stable spot on the floor below, gripped the butt of the torch between his teeth, then slid his legs over the edge of the strip inside the doorway. He let himself down to the full extension of his arms, then dropped, his heart fluttering as he landed. The wood creaked loudly and sagged a little, but held. Simon took a step toward Bright-Nail, but his foot sank as though into muddy ground. He hurriedly pulled it back to see that a section of the floor a little larger than his boot sole had crumpled and fallen in.
Simon got down onto his hands and knees. He made his way across the treacherous surface with slow caution, taking more than a few splinters as he probed before him. The cry of the wind outside was muffled. The torch burned hot beside his cheek; its quavering flame threw his shadow up on the wall, a hunched thing like a beast.
He stretched out his hand. Nearer ... nearer ... there! His fingers closed around Bright-Nail’s hilt, and instantly he could feel its song intensify, vibrating through him, making him feel welcome ... and more. Its need became his need.
Up, he thought suddenly. The word seemed a glowing thing before his mind’s eye. It’s time to go up.
But that was easier said than accomplished. He sat back on his haunches, wincing as the floor creaked, and removed the torch from his teeth. He lifted it and looked around. This room was wider than the one above; the half of the ceiling that had not been the wood floor of the upper chamber was a slab of pale stone, seemingly without support. The walls were bare except for a faint scrawl of carvings, overlaid with dust and soot. There was nothing to afford any holds for climbing, and even if he jumped, he could not reach the bit of flooring that edged the doorway above.
Simon pondered for a moment. The sword’s pull was a shadow behind his thoughts, an urgency like a quiet but steady drumbeat. He slid Bright-Nail into his belt, reluctantly releasing the hilt, then resettled the torch handle in his jaws. He crawled back across the floor toward the door he had tried from the stairs, but it was just as impassable from the inside: either damp weather or shifting timbers kept it firmly closed no matter how he pulled. He sighed, then crept back to the middle of the room.
Moving with extreme care, he dragged bits of broken furniture across the floor, setting each piece carefully on or beside the last, until he had made a shoulder-high pile near the sealed doorway. As he was sliding the scarred surface of a discarded table into place at the top of the heap, he again heard someone mounting the steps.
It was hard to tell, but this time there seemed to be more than one set of feet. He crouched in silence, steadying the tabletop with his hand, and listened to the footfalls move past the door beside him, then, after a few dragging moments, echo softly past the door above. He held his breath, wondering which of his many enemies might be climbing the tower, knowing that he would discover the answer all too soon. Bright-Nail tugged at his thoughts. It was hard to sit still.
When the noises had faded, Simon prodded at the pile until he was certain it was steady. He had tried to point all the jagged edges and snapped legs downward in case he fell, but he knew that if he did, he and the spiky pieces of broken chairs, stools, and heavy tables would probably break through the floor together and tumble down into yet a lower room. He did not think much of his chances if that happened.
Simon climbed the pile as gently as he could, laying his body flat across the tabletop until he could draw his legs up behind him. The flame of the torch he held in his teeth sizzled the ends of his hair. He clambered to his feet and felt the unsteady mass rock gently beneath him. Balancing carefully, he removed the torch and held it up, looking for the sturdiest spot on the edge of flooring overhead.
He was moving toward the edge of the teetering pile when the bell rang for a third time.
Even as the thunderous peal grabbed the entire tower and shook it, and the pile of wood fell away beneath him, Simon let go of the torch and leaped. One piece of the flooring overhead broke loose in his hand, but the other held. Panting, he grasped another section with his free hand and struggled to pull himself up, even as gusts of purple fire chased themselves across
the walls and everything shifted and blurred. His arms, already tired, trembled. He pulled himself higher, reaching out a hand to grab at the doorsill, then lifted his leg until it was on the strip of floor. The echo of the bell faded, although he felt it still in his teeth and the bones of his skull. The lights flickered and died, but for a faint glow beneath him. He could smell smoke rising from the torch that now lay among the shards of the piled furniture.
Grunting with the strain, Simon dragged himself the rest of the way onto the safety of the narrow band of wood. As he lay gasping for air, he saw flames beginning to lick up from the floor below.
- He scrabbled to one side as cautiously as haste would permit, pulled the door open, then sprawled forth onto the stairs. He tugged the door shut, leaving a few orphaned tendrils of smoke to float and dissipate, and waited for his hands to stop shaking quite so violently.
He pulled the sword from his belt. Bright-Nail was his once more. He was still alive, still free. Hope remained.
As he began to climb he felt the blade’s song rise inside him, a chant of joy, of approaching fulfillment. He felt his own heart speed as it sang. Things would be set right.
The sword was warm in his grip. It seemed a part of his arm, of his body, a new organ of sense as alert and attuned as the nose of a hunting hound or the ears of a bat.
Upward. It is time.
The pain in his head and limbs flowed away, to be filled with the ever-rising triumph of Bright-Nail, clutched firmly in his hand, safe from all harm.
It is time at last. Things will be set right. It is time.
The sword’s urging grew stronger. He found it hard to think of anything but putting one foot before the next, carrying himself up toward the top of the tower, to the place where Bright-Nail longed to go. Knotted, red-shot clouds showed in the windows he passed, scarred by the occasional jagged flicker of lightning, but the noise of the storm seemed curiously muffled. Far louder now, at least in his thoughts, was the song of the sword.
It’s finally going to end, he thought. He could feel that, Bright-Nail’s promise. The sword would bring a halt to all the confusions and dissatisfactions that had plagued him for so long; when it joined its brothers, everything would change. All that unhappiness would end.
There was no one else on the steps now. No one moved but Simon, and he could feel that everyone, everything, waited for him. All the world hung on the fulcrum of Green Angel Tower, and he would be the one to shift that balance. It was a wild, heady feeling. The sword pulled him on, singing to him, filling him with imprecise but powerful intimations of glory and release at every upward step.
I am Simon, he thought, and could almost hear trumpets flare and echo. I have done mighty deeds—slain a dragon! Won a battle! Now, I bring the Great Sword.
As he mounted up, the stairs shimmered before and behind, a downward-flowing river of ivory. The pale stone of the stairway wall seemed to glow, as if it reflected the light that burned within him. The sky-blue carvings were as heartbreakingly lovely as flowers strewn before the feet of a conqueror. Completion was ahead. An end to pain awaited him.
The bell tolled a fourth time, even more powerfully than before.
Simon staggered, shaken like a rat in a dog’s teeth as the echoes boomed and resounded down the stairwell. A blast of freezing air rolled past him, blurring the carvings on the wall with a milky skin of ice. He almost dropped the sword again as he lifted his hands to his head and cried out. Stumbling, he grabbed at the frame of one of the tower’s windows for support.
As he stood, shivering and moaning, the sky outside changed. The broad smear of clouds vanished, and for a long moment the full blackness of the sky opened before him, dotted with tiny, cold stars, as though Green Angel Tower had torn free of its moorings and now floated above the storm. He stared, teeth clenched against the bell’s fading echoes. After three heartbeats the black sky clotted with gray and red and the tower was surrounded by storm once more.
Something tugged at his thoughts, fighting against Bright-Nail’s unslackening pull.
This ... is ... wrong. The joy that he had shared, the feeling that he would somehow make things right, ebbed away. Something bad is happening—something very bad!
But he was already moving again, mounting the stairs toward the dim glow. He was not the master of his own body.
He struggled. His limbs felt distant, numb. He slowed himself, then managed to stop, shuddering in the freezing wind that blew down the stairwell. Tiny whiskers of ice hung from the walls, and his breath clouded about his head, but he could feel an even greater coldness lurking somewhere above him—a coldness that somehow thought.
He fought for a long time on the stairs, struggling to regain control of his own arms and legs—a struggle against nothing visible that went unobserved except by the cold, inhuman presence. He could feel its hungry attention as the sweat beading on his skin froze and fell tinkling onto the steps. Steam rose from his overheated body, and where the warmth left, deadening chill crept in.
The cold took Simon at last, filling him. It moved him like a puppet on a stick. He jerked and began to stagger upward once more, screaming silently from the prison of his skull.
He stepped up out of the stairwell and into the vaporous bellchamber; the ice-blanketed walls glimmered and sparkled. Storm clouds surrounded the high windows, and light and shadow moved sluggishly, as though the cold gripped them, too.
Miriamele and Binabik stood beside the door, writhing slowly, caught somehow like flies struggling in amber. His eyes widened as he saw them and his heart thudded painfully behind his ribs, but he could not call out or even stop his feet from carrying him forward. Miriamele opened her mouth and made a muffled noise. Tears filled his eyes, and for a moment her pale face held him like a lamp in a dark room—but the thing that gripped him would not be denied. It swept him past his friends like a river current, tugging him toward the cluster of pillars at the center of the chamber.
Beneath the frost-furred bells three figures waited, one kneeling. The part of Bright-Nail that had entangled itself with him danced and leaped ... but the still-Simon part quailed as Elias turned toward him with a face like a dead man’s. The mottled gray sword in his two fists lay against black Thorn, and where they touched there was nullity, an emptiness that hurt Simon’s mind.
Shivering, Camaris turned to Simon, his hair and brows powdery with ice. The old man’s eyes stared in abject misery.
“My fault ...” he whispered through chattering teeth.
Pryrates had watched Simon’s lurching entrance. Now the priest nodded, smiling tightly. “I knew you were in the tower somewhere, kitchen boy—you and the last of the swords.”
Simon felt himself drawn closer to the place where Thorn and Sorrow met. Through Bright-Nail, whose song coursed inside him, he could feel the music of the other two swords as well: the dancing throb of life that was within all of them grew stronger as the moment of their joining approached. Simon felt it like the speeding current of a river’s narrows, but he could also feel that there was a barrier that somehow kept the blades apart. Although two of them were touching, and only a few cubits stood between them and the third, they all remained as widely separated as they had ever been.
But what was different now, what Simon felt deeply and wordlessly in his mind’s inmost, was that soon there would be a great change. Some mighty universal wheel lay loose on its axle, ready to turn, and when it did all the barriers would fall, all the walls would vanish. The swords sang, waiting.
Before he knew it, he was stepping forward. Bright-Nail clicked against the other two blades. The shock of contact traveled not just through Simon, but through the room as well. The black emptiness where the swords met deepened, a hole into which the entire world might fall and perish. The light changed all around: the star-glow seeping in through the windows deepened, turning the chamber bloody, and then the dreadful bell tolled a fifth time.
Simon trembled and cried out as the tower shook and the energies of t
he swords, still pent but fighting now for release, traveled through him. His heart stuttered, hesitated, and almost stopped. His vision blurred and darkened, then gradually came back. He was inextricably caught in something that burned like fire, that dragged like a lodestone. He tried desperately to pull away, but a supreme effort only made him sway gently, caught on Bright-Nail’s hilt like a fish dying on a hook. The bell’s echoes died out.
Even through the music of the swords, Simon could sense the chill presence he had felt on the stairs growing stronger, vast and weighty as a mountain, cold as the gaps between stars. It was closer now, but at the same time it hovered just beyond some incomprehensible wall.
Elias, who seemed almost unmoved by the exuberating power of the swords, raked Simon with mad green eyes. “I do not know this one, Pryrates,” he murmured, “—although there is something familiar about him. But it does not matter. All the bargains have been kept.”
“Indeed.” The priest moved past, so close that his robe touched Simon’s arm. A buried part of Simon shrieked with disgust and fury, but no sound passed his quivering lips: he was now little more than something that held Bright-Nail. The sword’s vaulting spirit, connected now to its brothers, uncaring of human struggles and human hatreds, waited only for whatever would happen next, eager as a dog expecting to be fed.
“All bargains are kept,” Pryrates rasped as he took a place beside the king’s shoulder, “and all is now set in motion. Soon Utuk‘ku the Eldest will have harnessed the Pool of Three Depths. Then we will have completed the Fifth House, and all will change.” He looked at Simon and his eyes glittered. “This one you do not know is Morgenes’ kitchen-whelp, Highness.” Pryrates grinned. “This is satisfying. I saw what you did to Inch, boy. Very thorough work. You saved me some tiresome effort.”
Simon felt a powerful rage bubbling up inside him. In the red light the priest’s smug face seemed to hang bodilessly, and for a moment Simon could see nothing else. He struggled to move his limbs, to pull Bright-Nail away from its brothers so he could smash out the murderer’s life, but he was helpless. The flame of anger blazed without release, so hot that Simon felt sure it would scorch him to ashes from within.