Light atthe Bottom of the Stairs "The Soterian monk and scholar Kyros believed strongly that the Qar were not things of flesh and blood but instead the unshriven souls of mortal men who lived before the founding of the Trigonate Church. Phayallos disputes this, saying that the fairies, 'while often monstrous, are clearly living creatures.'" -from "A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand" EVEN THE OPEN SKY felt dangerous, but people were gathering again in the little square in front of the Throne hall, setting up stalls, haggling over what someone had discovered in their root cellar or the morning's meager catch of small fish from the unguarded East Lagoon. Like everyone else, Matt Tinwright kept looking fearfully over his shoulder, but although the massive black trunks of the Twilight People's thorn bridge still bent above the castle's outer walls, the immense, bristling shadows throwing much of Market Square into darkness, the fairy folk themselves had truly left the outer keep.
Not left for good, though, Tinwright feared: from atop the walls they could still be seen through the smoke and mist, moving around in their camp on the mainland as though the slaughter of the last few days had never happened.
Nobody trusted this sudden peace because the retreat itself made no sense. The creatures had entirely overrun the castle's walls, a swarm of horrors like demons out of a temple fresco; despite the best efforts of Avin Brone, Durstin Crowel, and even Hendon Tolly himself, the fairies had utterly routed the humans from the outer keep. Much of Market Square and the great Trigonate temple had been burned-parts of the neighborhood just southwest of the gate wall were still smoldering. The streets of the inner keep were now clogged with human wreckage, those without homes huddling against the walls in tents made from scraps of cloth, untreated wounded lying everywhere, so that it looked as though some great flood had crashed through the Raven Gate and broken against the throne hall, scattering flotsam on all sides. Tinwright had seen sights already this morning that would haunt his sleep for years-children still black with burns, beyond help but still pitifully crying, whole families ill or starving, slumped in a fevered pile outside shuttered houses, warmth and help only a few uncrossable yards away.
But then yesterday, after all this destruction, after bringing such horror to so many, the Twilight People had simply stopped their siege of the inner keep as though hearing a silent call and had begun an orderly retreat. They took nothing, not prisoners, not gold-the ruined but otherwise untouched Trigonate temple was now surrounded by Hendon Tolly's men to keep out looters-and disappeared back into the mist as though the entire siege had been nothing more than a murderously bad dream.
But whatever the reason, Matt Tinwright, like his fellow Southmarch citizens, had been given some breathing space-he could not afford to spend it wondering about the fairies and their incomprehensible motives. He had a family to provide for now, of sorts: Elan and his mother were staying with Puzzle's niece in Templeyard, a relatively quiet neighborhood in the southwestern part of the keep, but the pantries were bare and, in a household of women, the task of going out into the city for food had of course fallen to Tinwright. He hadn't wanted to be the one to do the marketing, but even the narrow streets of Templeyard were so full of refugees he feared to send any of the women out on their own. He was also terrified that his mother, full of self-righteous prattle as always, might say something in public that would give away who the girl she was caring for truly was.
So, as seemed to be his lot these days, he had been left with two bad alternatives, sending his mother out for food or going himself, and had chosen the one that seemed least dangerous.
It was strange, Tinwright thought as he made his way through the unsettled crowds, stepping over the helpless and trying to harden his heart against the pleading of injured men or mothers with hungry children. The soldiers who only a scant day earlier had been fighting on the walls against creatures out of legend were now forced to break up scuffles between hungry Southmarch folk. Just in front of him now two men were wrestling in the mud over a scrawny marrow grown in someone's window box. For a moment he considered making it the subject of a poem-how different from the usual matters!-but Matt Tinwright was serving so many masters that he had no time even to think these days, let alone write. Still, it was an interesting idea-a poem about people fighting over a vegetable. It certainly said more about the times he lived in than a love poem written for a courtier on the subject of a young woman's white throat.
He was on his way back from Market Square with a slightly moldy heel of bread rolled in his cloak beside a small onion and his most exciting find, a length of dried eel that had taken most of his shopping money. The eel stews his mother had made were one of the few happy memories of his childhood. Anamesiya Tinwright had only bought eels on the days the boats came back with too many and the prices were low, so the meal had been a treat that would bring both Matt and his father to the table early, hands and faces washed, mouths watering in anticipation.
I should see if I can find some Marashi pepper pods somewhere in this wreckage of a city… he was thinking when he abruptly found himself face to face with Okros, the royal physician, who had just stepped out of the doorway of a chicken butcher's yard.
"Oh! Good day, my lord," said Tinwright, startled, his heart suddenly drumming. Does he know I know him? Have we ever actually spoken, or have I only spied on him?
Okros himself looked, if anything, more startled than the poet. He had something under his cloak-something alive, it quickly became clear. Even as the smaller man tried to step past Tinwright, a bright, desperate eye and yellow beak popped out where Okros was trying to hold the garment closed at his neck. It was a rooster, and quite a handsome one from its brief appearance, with a red comb and shiny black feathers.
Okros barely glanced at Tinwright, as if it might hurt to look someone directly in the eye. "Yes, yes," he said, "good day." A moment later he was gone, hurrying back toward the castle as though possessing a chicken might be a crime against the throne.
Perhaps he is afraid of being robbed, Tinwright thought. Some people here would kill for a smaller meal than that. But the whole encounter seemed strange. Surely there were more birds to be found in the castle residence than down here in the ruins of the outer keep-and why should the physician seem so furtive?
As he made his way back up the hill toward the Inner Keep a memory floated just beyond Tinwright's reach-something from a book he had read, one of his father's…
The love of reading might have been the only gift the old man had given him, he sometimes thought, but it had been a good one: a nearly endless supply of books, mostly borrowed (or perhaps stolen, Matt Tinwright suddenly thought now) from the houses where Kearn Tinwright had been a tutor-Clemon, Phelsas, all the classics, as well as lighter fare like the poetry of Vanderin Uegenios and the plays of the Hierosoline and Syannese masters. Reading Vanderin had inspired young Matt with visions of a courtly life, a career of being admired by fine ladies and rewarded with gold by fine gentlemen. Strange that he should finally be living that life and yet be so cursedly miserable…
The thing that had been tickling his memory came to him suddenly-some lines from Meno Strivolis, the Syannese master poet of two centuries earlier: And took she then the black cockerel Laid it on the stone, took up her sharp knife Let out the salt wine that Kernios drinks…
That was all-just a morsel from Meno about Vais, the infamous witch-queen of Krace, a few lines which spoke of a black cockerel like the one the physician had been hiding. Nothing else to it-but it was odd that Okros should come so far just to buy poultry. Better and fatter birds could be found in the residence henyard, surely…
But perhaps not birds of that particular color, Tinwright thought suddenly. More of the poem had come to him: Always it is blood that calls the High Ones From their mountaintops and hidden shadows From their deep forests and ocean strongholds, And blood that binds them, so they may be asked To grant to a soliciting subject Some gift, or ward 'gainst threatening evil…
The fear that had seized him when he bumped into Okros came back to him threefold, so that for a moment Matt Tinwright couldn't walk straight and had to stop in the middle of the narrow street. People shoved past him with angry words, but he barely heard them. So it was she spilled the cockerel's blood And prayed the ancient Earthlord give to her Deathly power against her enemies…
Could that be the reason? Had Okros walked all the way down from the safety of the residence to the outer keep because he needed a rooster of just the right color for some kind of ritual? Did it have something to do with the mirror Brone wanted to know about?
Full of confused, fearful thoughts, but also afire with excitement that felt a bit like a fever, Matt Tinwright hurried back across the crowded, brawling inner keep.
His mother was predictably furious. "What do you mean you are going out again? I need wood for the fire! It is all well for you to come in here like some petty lordling, calling for eel stew, demanding that I break my back cooking. What devilry are you up to?"
"Thank you, Mother, and a good day to you, too. But I am not going out quite yet." He bent his head so he could go up the narrow stairwell without dashing out his brains.
Elan was sitting up in the large bed she was sharing with Puzzle's grand-nieces, working at a bit of embroidery. He was glad to see her stronger, but she still had the haunted look he had hoped to see banished from her face forever.
"My lady, are you alone?"
She smiled grimly. "As you see. The girls are visiting the neighbors', trying to cozen an extra blanket-their mother and yours are now sleeping on the couch downstairs, if you remember."
He did. The whispered struggles of the two older women crammed together on the narrow couch like two bad-tempered skeletons in a single coffin were the reason he was back sleeping with Puzzle in the crowded royal residence, unsatisfying as that was. "I saw Brother Okros in the market place. Do you know anything of him?"
Elan gave him a strange look. "What do you mean? I know he is Hendon's physician. I know he is full of odd ideas…"
"Like what?"
"About the gods, I think. I never paid much attention when he was at table with us. He would talk on and on about alchemy and the holy oracles. Some of it seemed blasphemous to me…" She curled her lip. "But blasphemy never bothered Hendon."
"Does he… have you ever heard that he is a magic-worker?"
Elan shook her head. "No, but as I said, I scarcely know him. He and Hendon would often talk late at night, at strange hours, as if Okros were working at some important task for him that could not wait. Hendon once had a man beaten almost to death for interrupting him during an afternoon nap but he never lost his temper with Okros."
"What did they talk about?"
Elan's expression had become something painful to see, and Tinwright suddenly realized he was making her think about things she did not wish to remember. "I… I cannot remember," she said at last. "They never spoke for long in front of me. Hendon would take him to another part of the residence. But I heard the physician say once that… what was it, it was so strange! Oh, yes, he told Hendon, 'The perfection has begun to change-it is telling a different truth now.' I could make no sense of it."
Tinwright frowned, thinking. "Could it have been 'reflection,' not 'perfection'?"
Elan shrugged. He could see the darkness in her eyes and wished he could have spared her this. "Perhaps," she said quietly. "I could not hear them well."
The reflection has begun to change, he thought. It is telling a different truth now. It made a sort of disturbing sense if they had been talking about the mirror Brone had mentioned. And Elan had mentioned the gods. Meno's poem spoke of a heartless queen sacrificing a black cockerel to Kernios so she could curse her enemies. Was that what Okros planned to do? That would be no ordinary sacrifice, but some kind of witchcraft instead.
He had to tell Avin Brone. Then, duty discharged, Matt Tinwright could return to the somewhat flea-ridden bosom of his family and enjoy a well-earned bowl of eel stew.
Brone motioned to a spotty young man who was leaning against a threadbare tapestry, cutting his nails with a gleaming knife-Tinwright thought he was probably one of the count's relatives from Landsend. "Bring me some wine, boy." He turned back to Tinwright. "Very well. Here are some coppers for your new information, poet. Now find Okros again-he is probably in the herb garden this time of day, especially with so many wounded in need of physic. Follow him wherever he goes, but do not give yourself away."
Matt Tinwright could only sit and stare, open-mouthed. "What?" he said at last, barely able to get the word out of his mouth. "What?"
"Don't gawp at me, you knock-kneed pillock," Brone growled. "You heard me. Follow him! See what he's up to! See if he leads you to the mirror!"
"Are you mad? He's a witch! He's going to cast a spell on someone, or… or try to raise demons! If you want him followed so much do it yourself, or send that pimpled lad."
Brone leaned forward across the writing desk on his lap, his doubleted belly spreading until it almost knocked over the inkwell. "Have you forgotten that I have your tiny little poet's jewels cupped in my hand? And that I can have them snipped off any time I wish?"
Tinwright did his best not to appear terrified. "I don't care. What are you going to do, report me to Hendon Tolly? I'll just tell him that you're spying on him. Your jewels will end up on a knacker's table next to mine, Lord Brone. Then he'll kill us both-but at least I'll still have my soul. I won't be carried off by demons!"
Brone stared at him hard for a long time, his mouth working in his bushy beard, which was now mostly gray. At last, something like a smile appeared in the hairy depths. "You've found a bit of courage after all, Tinwright. That's good, I suppose-no man should remain an unmitigated coward all his life, even a wastrel like you. So what are we to do?" Brone suddenly reached out, far faster than Tinwright would have guessed possible, and grabbed the collar of the poet's cloak so tightly that it threatened to strangle him. "If I can't report you to Tolly, I suppose the only thing I can do is throttle you myself." The smile had become something much more menacing.
"Nnnh! Dnnn't!" It was really quite painfully tight around Tinwright's throat. The Landsend relative returned with the wine and stopped in the doorway, watching the spectacle with interest.
"If you are no use to me, poet-even worse, if you have become a threat to me-then I have little choice…"
"Buh umm nuh uh thrt!"
"I'd like to believe that, boy. But even if you're not a threat, you're still no help to me, and in such hard times-such dangerous times-there's no need for you. Now, if you were to help me by doing what I ask, well, the crabs and starfish would keep coming-you must enjoy having a little money, eh, especially these days, with everything so dear and food so rare?-and I wouldn't need to rip your head off."
"Ull hlp! Ull hlp!"
"Good." Brone turned loose of his cloak and he fell backward. The Landsend youth stepped politely out of the way to allow Tinwright to collapse onto the floor where he lay gasping.
"But why me? " he asked when he had finally struggled back onto his feet, rubbing his aching neck. "I'm a poet!"
"And not a particularly good one," Brone said. "But what choice do I have? Limp around the residence myself? Send my idiot nephew?" He gestured at the youth, who was paring his dirty fingernails again, but lifted the knife toward Tinwright in a sort of salute. "No, I need someone who is allowed and even expected to be in the residence-someone too foolish to be feared and too useless to be suspected. That's you."
Matt Tinwright rubbed his aching throat. "You do me too much honor, Count Avin."
"There you go-a little spunk. That's good. Now go find out what's afoot and there'll be more in it for you-perhaps even a jar of wine from my own store, eh? How would that be?"
The idea of being able to drink himself into oblivion for a day or two was the first real inducement he'd heard to keep serving Brone, although not dying was a close second. He made a cautious bow before leaving, half worrying that his head would fall off.
"Do you know what I think, Mother?" Kayyin spoke as if in continuation of a conversation briefly interrupted, instead of after an hour or more of silence.
Yasammez did not look at him and did not reply.
"I think you are beginning to feel something for these Sunlanders."
"Other than to hasten your death," she said, still not looking up, "why would you say such a preposterous thing?"
"Because I think it is true."
"Have you any purpose other than irritating me? Remind me-why haven't I killed you?"
"Perhaps you have discovered that you love your son after all." He smiled, amused at this conceit. "That you have feelings as base and sentimental as the Sunlanders themselves. Perhaps after all these centuries of neglect and open scorn, you have found that you desire to make things right. Could that be, Mother?"
"No."
"Ah. I thought not. But it was entertaining to consider." He had been pacing; now he stopped. "Do you know what is truly strange? Having lived so long in the guise of a mortal-having lived as one-I find that in some ways I have become one. For instance, I am restless in a way none of our people ever has been. If I stay too long in one place it is as though I can feel myself dying the true death. I become impatient, discontented-as though the body itself commands my mind, instead of the other way around."
"Perhaps that explains your foolish ideas," Yasammez said. "It is not you, but this mortal guise you have taken on, that offers this nonsense. Interesting if so, but I would still rather have silence."
He looked at her. She still did not look at him. "Why have you withdrawn from the Sunlander castle, my lady? It was all but yours, and you have also nearly conquered the tiny resistance in the caverns beneath it. Why pull back at such a time? Are you certain you have not begun to pity the mortals?"
For the first time her voice betrayed something, a descent into a deeper chill. "Do not speak foolishness. It offends me that a child of my loins should waste the air that way."
"So you do not pity them at all. They mean less to you than the dirt beneath your feet." He nodded. "Why, then, should you ask me to tell them the story of Janniya and his sister? What purpose could there have been for that, unless you wanted them to feel something of our pain… of your pain, to be more precise?"
"You tread on dangerous ground, Kayyin."
"If I were a farmer pledged to destroy the rats that ate my crops, would I take the rats aside before passing sentence and explain to them what they had done?"
"Rats do not understand their crimes." She turned her dark eyes on him then, at last. "If you say another word about the Sunlanders I will pull your living heart from your chest."
He bowed. "As you wish, my lady. I will walk on the seashore instead and think about the enlightening conversation we have had today." He rose, then moved toward the door. Yasammez could not help noticing that whatever was mortal in him now, or whatever feigned it, had not entirely diminished his grace. He still walked with the insolent silkiness of his younger days. She closed her eyes again.
Only moments after he had gone out she felt another presence-Aesi'uah, her chief eremite. Aesi'uah would stand silently for hours waiting for acknowledgment, Yasammez knew, but it was pointless to make her do so: the elusive point that Lady Porcupine had been chasing through the labyrinth of her own long memory was gone.
"Has the time come?" Yasammez asked.
Her adviser's complexion, usually the soft, warm gray of a pigeon's breast, was noticeably pale. "I fear it is so, my lady. Even with all the eremites mingling their thought and their song, he has withdrawn beyond our reach." She hesitated. "We thought… I thought… perhaps if you…"
"Of course I will come." She rose from her chair, her thoughts heavier than her thick black armor. For the first time that she could remember she felt something of the vast weight of her age, the burden of her long-stretching life. "I must say farewell."
The eremites had taken a cave for themselves high in the hills above an empty stretch of windswept beach a short distance east of the city. Quiet and solitude were the walls of their temple, and they had picked a good place for both things: as Yasammez followed Aesi'uah up the rocky trail she could hear only wind and the distant creaking of seabirds. For a moment she was almost at peace.
Aesi'uah's sisters and brothers-it was not always easy to tell which was which-were all gathered in the dark cavern. Even Yasammez, who could stand on a hilltop on a moonless, starless night and see what a hunting owl could see, could make out no more than the dull glitter of eyes in their dark hoods. Some of Aesi'uah's youngest comrades, born in the years of twilight, had never seen the full light of the sun and could not have survived its bright heat.
Yasammez joined the circle. Aesi'uah sat beside her. Nobody spoke. There was no need.
In the dreamlands, in the far places where only gods and adepts could travel, Yasammez felt herself take on a familiar shape. She wore it when she traveled outside herself, both in the waking world and here. In the waking world it was as insubstantial as air, but here it was something more-a fierce thing of claws and teeth, of bright eyes and silken fur. The eremites, given courage by her presence, streamed behind her in an immaterial host like a swarm of fireflies. The Firef lower did not burn inside them as it did in her; without protection, they could only travel so far.
Aesi'uah had spoken the truth, though-the god's presence was weaker than it had ever been, faint as the sound of a mouse walking in new grass. Worse than that, she could feel the presence of others, not the other lost gods but the lesser things that had been driven out with their masters when her father had banished them all. These hungry things smelled change on the breeze of the dreamlands and sensed that the time might come when they could return to a world that had forgotten how to resist them.
Even now, one such thing sat in the middle of the path, waiting for them. The eremites flew up in distress, circling, but Yasammez paced forward until she stood before it. It was old, she could tell that by the way it shifted and changed, its form too alien to her understanding for her eyes and thoughts to order it properly.
"You are far from your home, child," it said to one of the oldest creatures that still walked upon the earth. "What do you seek?"
"You know what I seek, old spider," she told it. "And you know my time is short. Let me pass."
"You are rude to a neighbor!" it said, chuckling.
"You are no neighbor of mine."
"Ah, but soon I might be. He is dying, you know. When he is gone, who will hold me and my kind back?"
"Silence. I want no more of your poisonous words. Let me pass or I will destroy you."
The thing shifted, bubbled, settled again. "You have not the strength. Only one of the old powers can do that."
"Perhaps. But even if I cannot end you, it may be that I will hurt you so badly that you will be in no condition to cross over when the time comes."
The thing stared at her, or seemed to, because in truth it had no eyes that Yasammez could see. At last it slithered aside. "I do not choose to contest with you today, child. But the day is coming. The Artificer will be gone. Who will protect you then?"
"I could ask you the same." But she had wasted enough time already. She passed and the eremites followed her like a cloud of tiny flames.
Yasammez moved as swiftly as she could through places where the wind howled with the voices of lost children and through others where the sky itself did not seem to fit correctly, until she came at last to the hillside where the doorway stood, a solitary rectangle crowning the grassy peak like a book standing on its end. She climbed the slope and crouched before it, curling the tail of her dream-form around her, ears laid flat against her head. The eremites hovered, uncertain.
"He can no longer be heard on this side of the door, Lady," they told her.
"I know. But he is not gone. I would know if he were." She sent out a call but he did not answer. In the silence that followed she could feel the winds that blew through the icy, airless places beyond the door. "Help me," she said to those who had followed her. "Lend me your voices."
They were a long time then, singing into the endlessness. At last, when even the inhuman patience of Yasammez had nearly gone, she felt something stir on the edges of her understanding, a faint, small murmur like the dying breath of the Flower Maiden in the stream.
"… Yessss…"
"Is that you, Artificer? Is that you… still?"
"I am… but I am… becoming nothing…"
She wanted to say something soothing, or even to deny it altogether, but it was not the way of her blood to try to bend what was real into what was not. "Yes. You are dying."
"It is… long awaited. But those who have waited almost… as long as I have… are readying themselves. They will… come through…"
"We, your children, will not let them."
"You have… you have not the power." He grew fainter then, small and quiet as a drop of rain on a distant hilltop. "They have waited too long, the sleeping… and the unsleeping…"
"Tell me who we must fear. Tell me and I can fight them!"
"That is not the way, Daughter… you cannot defeat strength… that way…"
"Who is it? Tell me?"
"I cannot. I am… bound. Everything I am… is all that keeps the doorway closed…" And now she could hear the immense weariness, the longing for the end of struggle that death would finally bring. "So I am bound… to keep the secret…"
His voice fell silent-for a time she thought it was gone forever. Then something came to her, wafting like a feather in a night wind. "The oracle speaks of berries… white and red. So it shall be. So it must be."
Surely there was nothing left of him now. "Father?" She tried to be strong. "Father?"
"Remember the oracle and what it says," he said, his quiet voice now slipping away into nothingness. "Remember that each light… between sunrise… and sunset…"
"Is worth dying for at least once," she finished, but he was gone.
When she was herself again, the Yasammez that breathed, and felt, the Yasammez that had lived each painful moment of her people's millennial defeat, she rose and walked out of the cave. None of the eremites followed her, not even Aesi'uah, her trusted counselor. Death was in her eyes and in her heart. No living thing could have walked with her then and every one of them knew it.
This was not how Matt Tinwright would have chosen to spend his evening.
He broke apart the last small piece of bread he had brought with him and soaked up the wine in his cup. Sops, when he could have had eel stew! Still, he was lucky he'd found the wine, and he did not feel the least bit sorry for whoever had set it down. He'd been hiding on the chapel balcony from the evening bell to what must now be almost midnight, keeping an eye on the door that led to Hendon Tolly's chambers, which was where the physician's apprentice said Okros Dioketian had gone. What could the man be doing in Tolly's rooms so long? More important, when he finally came back out, would he return to his own chambers so Tinwright could go and sleep? Surely Avin Brone didn't expect him to follow Okros into his bedchamber…!
He heard the creak of the door opening before he saw the movement. Tinwright crouched lower, his eyes just above the balcony rail, even though he was a stone's throw away and hidden by the shadowed overhang of the small chapel.
As he had prayed, Brother Okros came out of the door, his slight frame and bald head instantly recognizable despite his voluminous robes, but to Tinwright's surprise he was not alone: three burly men in quilted surcoats bearing the Tollys' silver boar and spears walked behind the physician, and another man in a dark, hooded cloak went beside him. Just the cloaked man's graceful movements were enough to tell him who this was. Tinwright's heart was pounding. Okros and Hendon Tolly, going somewhere together-he would have to follow.
He felt quite ill at the thought.
He had expected them to head for the physician's chambers, but any hope of remaining indoors was dashed when Okros led the little procession out of one of the residence's side doors. Tinwright did his best to remain well behind, and when he followed them out he tarried a few moments in idle conversation with the door guards, speaking of his own sleeplessness and the need for some cool night air to cure it.
Cool night air, indeed, he thought as he hurried across the side garden, trying to find his quarry again by the light of the torches they had brought from the residence. In fact, it was bloody freezing. All he had was his woolen cloak over a thin shirt-no hat, no gloves, and not even a torch to keep himself from stumbling. Curse Brone and his wretched, bullying ways!
He found them again crossing the muddy main road that led to the armory and the guard barracks and began to follow them at a distance. One of the guards was carrying a large bundle wrapped in cloth, and another gingerly held a smaller package-could it be the cockerel? But why would they be carrying the rooster around at this time of the night, unless they planned to use it in some kind of sorcerous ritual? Tinwright felt his blood grow even colder than the night air had already made it.
A moment later, as the group of men turned away from the main road that led to the Throne hall and instead walked down a winding path beside the royal family's chapel, the poet's blood grew even chillier. Tolly and Okros were headed toward the graveyard.
It took everything he had to keep following. Tinwright had a horror of cemeteries and the overgrown temple-yard was one of the most fearful, with its strange old statues and its mausoleums like prisons for the restless dead. His fear of Avin Brone alone kept him moving-his fear, and a certain curiosity as well. What did Okros plan? Did he mean to invoke the gods here in this lonely place, at this haunted hour? But why?
The men stopped outside the door of the Eddon family crypt and Tinwright had to suppress a groan of horror. Hendon Tolly had a key around his neck. When the crypt door was open four of the men went down the stairs, leaving a single guard to stand sentry outside. The light of the torches dimmed as they disappeared below, but their sheen still glimmered in the doorway. Tinwright felt very glad that he was not in that house of death with them, watching the shadows jump and crawl along the walls.
The sentry, who at first stood erect and alert at the entrance to the tomb, after a while began to slump a little, and at last leaned back against the carved face of the tomb and propped his spear against the wall. Tinwright (who would never have imagined himself so bold) decided this would be a good time to creep closer and perhaps hear something of what was being said inside. Surely that would be worth a few extra starfish from Brone-maybe even a silver queen or two!
He moved in a wide semicircle beyond the torchglow spilling from the door of the crypt until he had almost reached the wall of the chapel. Tinwright could see the sentry's back, and the man's slack posture emboldened him to creep forward until he was only a few paces from the doorway. He crouched behind a monument that had been half-immured in ivy creeping down from the temple wall.
"… But not that way," someone in the crypt was saying, the words thin but clearly audible-Tinwright thought it was Okros. "It is not the sacrifice here that matters, but the sacrifice there."
"You are tiring me," said another voice-one that Tinwright knew all too well. Suddenly his moment of foolish optimism was over. What was a poet doing here in the middle of the night, playing at being a spy? If Hendon Tolly caught him he would be flayed alive! Only the fear of making noise and alerting the sentry kept Matt Tinwright from turning and bolting back to the residence. He was shaking so badly now he could barely keep his balance where he crouched. "And boring me," Tolly continued. "It is not my best mood, leech. I suggest you do something to make me interested again."
"I… I am trying, my lord," said Okros, plainly anxious. "It is just… we must… I must be cautious. These are great powers!"
"Yes, but at this moment I am the greatest power you know. Go ahead. Complete the sacrifice however you see fit-but complete it. We must find the location of the Godstone or we will have no hope of making the power serve us. If we fail this gamble, Okros, I will not suffer alone, I promise you…"
"Please, my lord, please! See, I am doing as you ask…"
"You are only poking, you fool. Have I promised you inconceivable riches just to see you poking at a reflection? Reach in, man! Make it happen!"
"Of course, my lord. But it is not so… so easy…"
And then, even as the physician's voice grew softer and Tinwright leaned forward to hear him better, a sudden shriek split the darkness, rising so swiftly and so terribly that it did not sound as if it could come from a human throat, then dropping just as quickly into a choking, gurgling noise for the length of a rabbiting heartbeat or two before it vanished beneath the sound of men scuffing and clattering up the stone stairs as they fled the tomb.
The first one out of the crypt was a guard who fell to his knees at the top of the stairs and began to vomit. The second ran past him, holding his own mouth with one hand and waving a torch in the other. The first got up, still spitting, and began to follow him across the temple-yard, the two of them running in awkward zigzags between the monuments.
The tall, hooded shape of Hendon Tolly appeared in the door of the crypt, the large cloth bundle in his arms. "Go back to the residence," he told the sentry, who stood now gaping.
"But… my lord…"
"Shut your mouth, fool, and get moving. Follow that idiot with the torch. We dare not be caught here. Too much to explain."
"But… the physician…?"
"If I must tell you again to be silent I will quiet you for good and all with a slit throat. Go! "
Within moments they had vanished into darkness, leaving Tinwright gasping and trembling, alone in the shadowed cemetery. The door to the tomb still gaped. Light still flickered there.
Matt Tinwright did not want to go down those stairs-no man with his right thoughts would do such a thing. But what had happened? Why was the torch still burning there in the depths, despite the silence? At the very least, he should go and pick it up-he did not want to cross the cemetery again without light.
Tinwright would never after be able to explain why he did what he did. It could not have been bravery: the poet was the first to admit he was not a brave man. And it was not ordinary curiosity-no mere curiosity could have overcome that terror-although it was something like it. The only way he could explain it was that somehow he had to know. At that moment, in the dark temple-yard, he felt sure that nothing would be more terrifying than to wonder ever afterward what had happened down there.
He put his foot on the first step and paused, listening. The light in the doorway below him was little more than a smear of yellow. Matt Tinwright went carefully and silently down the dark stairs until he reached the bottom. He could see the niches on either side, like dark honeycombs, and the torch lying on the stone floor. That was all he needed, really, he suddenly decided-let wondering be cursed. The burning brand was only a few steps away. He could crawl to it while staying close to the floor so he would not have to look at any of the empty stone faces atop the sarcophagi…
He saw Okros just as his fingers wrapped around the torch handle. The physician was just to one side, sprawled on his back with legs spread and left arm outflung, a piece of parchment still clutched in his hand. His eyes were impossibly wide and his mouth stretched in a silent scream, the face of a man so terrified that his heart had burst within the walls of his chest. But what was most frightening of all was his right arm-or, rather, the right arm he no longer had: all that remained was a short, shiny length of bone jutting from Okros' shoulder like a broken flute, the flesh peeled back all the way to his neck, showing the red muscle beneath. Nothing else was left from his right shoulder down except little strings and wisps of flesh, like the torn threads of hemp that remained after a rope snapped.
Worst of all, there was no sign of pooling blood in that entire wreckage of flesh and bone-not a single red drop, as though whatever had torn his limb away had also sucked his flesh dry.
Tinwright was still on his hands and knees, heaving out the contents of his stomach, when he felt something cold and sharp against the back of his neck.
"Look, now," a voice said, echoing against the walls of the crypt. "I come back for a scrap of parchment and find a spy. Stand up and let me have a look at you. Wipe the vomit from your chin first, there's a good fellow."
Tinwright climbed to his feet and turned around as slowly as he could. The cold, sharp thing traced its way up from his neck, bent his ear in passing, slicing the skin so that it was all he could do not to cry out, then was dragged ungently along his cheek until it stopped just below his eye.
By a trick of the light the blade of the sword was invisible: it seemed as though Hendon Tolly held him prisoner with a length of shadow. The Lord Protector looked feverish, his eyes bright, his skin glittering with sweat.
"Ah, my little poet!" Tolly grinned, but it did not look at all right. "And who is your true master, then? Princess Briony, pulling your puppet strings all the way from Tessis? Or is it someone closer-Avin Brone, perhaps?" For a moment, the sword threatened to slip higher. "It matters not. You are mine now, young Tinwright. Because, as you can see, I have lost one of my most important liegemen tonight and there is much still to be done-oh, much and much. I need a man who can read, you see." He gestured toward the one-armed remains of Okros Dioketian. "Of course, I cannot promise the job is without dangers-but nothing half so dangerous as refusing me. Aye, poet?"
Tinwright had to nod very carefully with the sword blade so close to his eye. He felt numbed, helpless, like a trapped fly watching the spider step slowly down the web.
"Then take that parchment from Okros," Tolly said. "Yes, pick it up. Now walk out ahead of me. Fortunate poet! You will sleep at the foot of my bed tonight-and every night from now on. Oh, the things you will see and learn!" He laughed; the sound was as bad as the sight of his smile had been. "A short time in my employ and you will never again mistake your empty, sickly sweet notions for truth."