The quarters assigned to Gallico, Creed, and Giffon looked to have been those of palace servants at one time. They were warm enough, situated next to the kitchens, but lightless, poky places. The trio hardly cared, being content to have eaten their fill along with the kitchen-staff, regale goggle-eyed maids with tall tales of derring-do, and then stretch out like logs to sleep without dream or fear of cockcrow. When Rol found them, they were back at the long refectory table in the kitchen; the immense cooking hearths to their rear were banked down to sulking coals, and they were supping on heavily watered, steaming oatmeal leavened with salt and a little barley spirit. Around them the night shift was turning up for duty, yawning and stretching and stirring the fires and consulting lists.
Rol stood in the doorway of the place, felt the welcome heat of it soak into his bones, and sucked in the smells, savoring them. This beat any palace. In places such as this, he felt he could almost be himself, and leave behind the sneering little doppelganger of Michal Psellos, which sat on his shoulder ever more often these days.
“If you two are going to stay here, then you’d best sit down and loosen those tight collars,” Rol told his escorts. Sweat was trickling down their faces already. One shrugged, and they did as he suggested. They were served bowls of food without comment, and tucked in with a will, supping the watery porridge with horn spoons.
Looking around at the growing bustle of the kitchens, the low, buttressed ceilings, the hanging hams and onion-strings, Rol wondered that his friends had been accommodated down here, treated like folk of a lower order than himself, but he decided not to dwell on it.
“Oatmeal gruel, is that all we have for supper?” he asked Gallico. The halftroll sat cross-legged on the floor but his eyes were still on a level with the maids’. They seemed unabashed by his appearance and flirted outrageously with Creed and Giffon as they prepared food around them; more results of the siege perhaps. Creed was grinning but Giffon had his nose almost in his gruel, and his ears were scarlet.
“We had a decent feed earlier, but most of the good stuff goes upstairs, it seems,” Gallico told him, wiping his mouth. “Almost four months they’ve been blockaded, but the cooks tell me that a great deal of foodstuff still makes its way in through the hills on pack-mules by night. Merchants from the west pay Bar Asfal’s soldiers to look the other way, and are recompensed by the great and the good here in Myconn, in gold, silver, family heirlooms, whatever they’ll take. You can pay a silver minim for a chicken, they tell me. The poor, they live on lentils and oatmeal and horsemeat. They’ll be skinning cats soon.”
“We’ve eaten worse,” Rol said. Like most mariners, he was fairly indifferent to what he put in his mouth as long as it did not poison him. He joined his shipmates and the two guardsmen at the table and leaned his elbows on the smooth wood. A knot of the kitchen staff gathered in the corner and whispered and peered at him, and whispered again. He still felt too sick to eat, and pushed away the steaming bowl that was set down in front of him, but smiled at the girl who set it there. She looked like a rabbit made to wait on a fox. Rol sighed, and rubbed his face with the palms of his hands, squeezing bursting patterns of amorphous light behind his eyelids. The heat of the long room was soporific, tempting him to lay his head down on the table.
“Still some sleep to catch up on, I see,” the voice said, and he jerked open his eyes to see Rowen seated in front of him. The two guardsmen had risen to their feet in wooden alarm, but all the rest of the folk in the kitchen, Rol’s friends included, seemed wholly unfazed.
Rowen took Rol’s untested porridge and began to eat it with every appearance of appetite. She jerked her head at the guardsmen. “Off you go, back to Mirkady. Cortishane has no further need of you.” The men bowed deep and left, tugging close their loosened collars and smoothing down their tunics as they went. Rowen went on eating her porridge composedly. She was dressed in dun-colored peasant clothes, and her long hair hung free down her back, a raven mane that shone in the firelight. A slim throwing knife hung from her waist in a wooden scabbard. She looked very young.
Rol leaned back on his long bench. Creed glanced at him. “What’s up-you seen a ghost?”
“Elias, this lady here-”
“She served us our food last night, after we got in,” Creed interrupted. He winked at Rowen. “A handsome lass. But girl, you could do with a little more meat on your bones.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Rowen said dryly.
“Do you often slum it down here with the lower orders?” Rol asked her.
“I like it here,” she said. “The staff are used to seeing me. I like the heat, the smell. I always did like kitchens. You should know that, Rol.”
“I remember.”
“What’s this?” Gallico said archly. “You know this wench, Rol-what is she, an old flame?”
“In a manner of speaking.” A smile went between their eyes as Rol and Rowen stared at each other. She set her hand on the tabletop, and he placed his own down next to it so that their fingers touched. A moment, no more.
“This is Rowen Bar Hethrun, Gallico. Some call her Queen of Bionar.”
“And I’m the Queen of the May. Don’t let him mock you, lass.”
“I won’t,” Rowen said. “And if he lacks the manners of his friends, I will not hold it against him. Some folk are not so well brought up as others.”
“Aye.” Gallico grinned. “You must watch this one. He’ll have you on your back given half a chance, and then walk away afterward with nothing more than a wink and a fare-thee-well.”
“See? Now you’ve been warned,” Rol told Rowen.
“I will keep it in mind,” she said. She stood up, and seemed to hesitate a second. Then, leaning over the table, she took Rol’s face in her cold hands and kissed him, a feather touch, no more. “I must go. They want me upstairs.”
Giffon was staring at her in open adoration, porridge dripping from his forgotten spoon. Rol knew now why she had billeted his friends down here. It was a place she felt comfortable.
“They will want to talk to you later,” she said. The weariness was slipping back into her face now.
“Who?”
“The nobles. My officers. I’m sending couriers to Canker through the hills. In two days, we make our move.”
Rol’s momentary happiness was snuffed out. He wanted her to stay there in the busy warmth of the kitchens, and exchange banter with his friends, and be an ordinary woman who touched his fingers with her own.
“Until later, then.”
“I see you got your sword back,” Rowen said, and with that she left. No fanfare, no roll of drums. Just another serving-maid.
Gallico was sucking his teeth thoughtfully. “She was, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, Gallico, she was. Elias, you just told the Queen of Bionar she needs fattening up.”
Creed picked soggy oatmeal out of his beard. “Well, she does.”
It was late, but Abel Harkenn was an insistent man, and Rol was too tired to argue with his deeply held conviction that a fellow invited to the Queen’s Council Chamber must look the part. So when the breathless page-boy came to fetch him, he found a tall man with pale eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, dressed in sable doublet and hose and bearing a light scimitar on a baldric of black leather. Buckled halfboots completed the attire. The clothes were a little musty from long storage, but the doublet had panels of dyed leather stitched in the shoulders and back, which supported Rol’s torso agreeably as he made his way through the bewildering passageways and corridors of the Bar Madivar Palace, steadily gaining height by way of staircase after staircase, until he stood before towering teak double-doors. Two guardsmen with silver-pointed halberds asked him his name and his business. The Queen of the May, he almost answered, here to steal away a serving-maid. But he took his tongue out of his cheek and told them.
He had a couple of copper minims for the page-boy, who scampered off brim-full of gossip and bursting to spread it, and the doors opened before him on soundless hinges, though they must have weighed a half ton apiece.
Imperial Bionar, eldest of the Kingdoms of Men. Well, here it was, in all the pomp and finery it could muster.
Tall windows, looking out onto darkness. Some were broken and boarded up, but enough remained to give a sense of the night looming beyond the glass. The snow was falling again, in the blue dark, and down at the walls men would still be trying to kill one another across a shell-holed purgatory of beaten ground.
In here, the high ceiling was corniced and painted and hung with three tremendous chandeliers, fifty candles burning in each and reflecting off an infinity of faceted crystal. Three large fireplaces covered the length of the room. The fragrant tang of the flames within them caught at Rol’s memory. Peat, like that he had once burned in a cottage on Dennifrey. He had not known there were peat-bogs around Myconn.
There was a long table, as long as the one he had sat at in the kitchens, but finer, and instead of benches there were twoscore gilt chairs with scarlet leather upholstery and a coat of arms painted on the back of every one. More candles, set at random in a forest of candelabras, and sheaves of paper, light-catching decanters, brass dividers, maps, inkwells of cut glass with silver rims, quills, and the knives for trimming them. The stuff of committees, of decision-making, of discussion. He wondered how much of it all was really necessary.
The nobility of Bionar. Some two dozen men sat the length of the table, their eyes turning toward him as he entered. Rowen sat at the head. The serving-maid had disappeared, and in her place there was a severely elegant woman all in black, no ornament save a silver fillet in her hair. He knew now the reason for his new wardrobe; it matched Rowen’s perfectly. They were an exercise in sable.
“Beside me, Rol,” she said, and patted the chair to her left. Rol took his seat, and found Gideon Mirkady’s handsome face opposite him. The Guard commander smiled and inclined his head slightly. Rol did likewise. He felt he had just walked onstage, and the curtain had risen.
“Continue, gentlemen,” Rowen said. “Introductions can wait. In any case, you all know this man is my brother, Rol Cortishane. Lord Brage, you had the table.”
A florid-faced man with a heavy nose, Lord Brage looked like a soldier who had fallen in love with the bottle. His stare outdid courtesy. For a naked moment, Rol sat at the end of the endless table, and the great men of this old, broken empire feasted the greed of their eyes upon him without shame.
Collecting himself, Brage peered at a leaf of paper before him, eyes watering.
“Yes, Majesty. To continue, I must report that we lost thirty-eight men today, fourteen of those killed and only half a dozen of the remainder ever likely to fight again. That leaves our current strength at just over six and a half thousand, all told.” He looked up the table at Rowen. “The dysentery that plagued the sections around the Palestrinon Gate has been contained, for now. We filled in two wells, which seems to have done the trick.”
“Very good, my lord. Gideon, how many of the garrison would you recommend we could take out without exposing the city completely?”
Mirkady’s face was bleak. “We can barely maintain a defense of the circuit as it is, Majesty.” His hand flapped helplessly on the table. “If we left a bare minimum-a dangerous minimum-to man the barbicans and, say, one in four of the wall-guns, then we could sortie with some four and a half to five thousand.”
The table murmured at this. Rowen’s face was unmoved. Her steel-gray eyes looked them up and down, and the murmuring ceased instantly.
“Very good. We shall take out five thousand. Cavalry?”
“Two hundred at most, Majesty. We’ve lost heavily in horses these last months.”
“Ammunition?”
“No shortage of that, or arquebuses either. We’ll outfit every man of the sortie with half armor and fifty rounds.”
“Field artillery?”
“Plenty of demi-culverins, twelve-pounders, but nothing to haul them with, Majesty. The wall-guns will support us.”
“Very well; we will do without. As you say, the wall-”
“Men can draw guns,” Rol said. Up and down the table, the assembled officers stared at him in astonishment. Because he had interrupted Rowen.
The Queen’s eyes were cold as glass. “Explain.”
“A dozen men can move a twelve-pounder as fast as any mule-team, if it’s over broken ground-and that ground beyond the walls is shot up all to hell. Charge them with canister, park them hub to hub, and you could stand off an army.”
There was a somewhat chilly silence.
“My men are not draft animals,” Mirkady said with a curl of his lip.
“They are not,” Rowen said softly. “They are soldiers, and as such will obey orders. You will ready as many batteries as you see fit, Gideon, and assign men to move them as well as crew them.”
Mirkady bowed his head in answer.
“Your Majesty,” another man said, a broad, blue-jawed fellow with a broken nose and the look of one who would whip his dogs, “how many men does Lord Canker have with him?”
“He has enough, Blayloc, and all of them veterans from the northern commands, hard fighters who have held the line of the Embrun these six months. What’s more, he will have surprise on his side, and a thousand cavalry to guard our flanks. Bar Asfal’s host in the Gallitran camps numbers some eighteen thousand. If we can break them before his forces in the Destrir and Palestrinon encampments can come up, then the battle will be already won. Gentlemen, these next few days will see the culmination of all our efforts. I mean to make this the end of it; Bionar has suffered enough.”
A silence met this last remark. The assembled officers lowered their eyes, or in a few cases exchanged discreet glances with one another. Looking up and down the table, Rol realized that Rowen’s hold on these men was fraying. If this adventure failed, they would desert her, seek terms with the loyalists. If she did not die in battle, these men would be among her executioners.
He caught her eye with this knowledge still in his own, and she nodded fractionally. She knew also.
“What about timings?” Blayloc asked.
It was Mirkady who spoke up. “We take out the army at dawn, two days from now. Blayloc, your regiments will be in the van. Cassidus, your brigade will follow. Remion, yours will bring up the rear. We sally forth from the Warder, at the double, and do not begin to deploy until halfway to the enemy lines.”
“Their guns will tear up our columns before we’ve even shaken into line,” someone protested.
“We need to cover that ground quickly, Remius; and more importantly, all regiments must clear the gate as swiftly as possible. We stay in column for the first quarter-mile.” Mirkady looked somewhat dogged as he said this. Rol guessed that he was of two minds about it himself.
“If we do haul out artillery with us, it shall be at the rear.” Mirkady looked at Rowen, and she inclined her head.
“Canker’s men had best be on time,” Blayloc said savagely. “Or we shall all die there, in column or line or whatever way their guns find us.”
“Canker knows his duty,” Rowen said coldly. “As do we all. Gentlemen, this meeting is adjourned. Go to your commands. Quartermaster Affrick, you will fulfill any and all requests for supplies and equipment that are presented to you. No man shall leave Myconn’s gates who is not fully kitted out and carrying as much ammunition as he can bear. That is all, my lords.”
The long lines of men stood up, Rol included. Two dozen formidable, ambitious, pride-filled lords of men, and every one there aware that the best of them was not a man at all. They bowed to her as one, then trooped out without speaking another word.
Rowen shook her head at Rol, waved on Mirkady when he hesitated. The Queen and her brother sat on as the nobles and officers of her last army left the room, and the great doors banged hollow at their backs.
“You have a wolf by the ears,” Rol told her, helping himself to brandy from a shining decanter.
“And what would you know about it?” She stood up, energy crackling out of her. “Do not presume to interrupt me in front of my officers, Fisheye, ever again. We are not sat here playing at pirates. If you have some homespun wisdom to impart, make sure you do so with the proper deference.”
Rol’s fingers creaked about his glass. “What will you do, Rowen, take me out and have me whipped?”
“If necessary, yes.” That cold light in her eyes, akin to his own. He knew if he pressed her that they would be at each other’s throats, here, now, in the very Council Chamber of Myconn. The training clicked in, and he found himself automatically mapping the way she stood, how she stood poised there on the balls of her feet like a dancer. There were throwing stars holstered along her ribs; he saw the tiny lined bulge under the dress for the first time.
Rowen’s white, taut face relaxed a little. Her hands sank to her sides.
“Do not forget where you are,” she said in a low voice.
“I came here because of you, and you alone.”
“You came here because of a memory. Things cannot ever be the way they were, Rol. You are my brother.” Her voice cracked.
“That does not matter to me.”
“It matters tome. ”
There was a knock on the discreet side door. “Enter,” Rowen said without shifting her gaze from Rol’s face.
In came a small, bent man with a wisp of beard and a silver basin. He bowed without meeting their eyes, and padding over to Rowen, he set down the basin and began unwrapping a silken bundle he held in the palm of his hand. “It is time, Majesty.”
The tension left Rowen’s body. She sagged, looking instantly ten years older.
“Already?”
“Yes, Majesty. Forgive me. Your own orders…” The little man was plainly frightened.
Rowen tugged her sleeve up over her forearm to the elbow. With a start, Rol saw that the inside of her arm was covered in tiny little crescent-shaped scabs and older scars, all following the line of the blue vein that coursed through her pale skin.
“The usual amount?” the old, bent man asked. From his silken bundle he had taken a blade, a whetstone, and a needle threaded with white silk.
“Yes, but be quick, Marmius. I have things to do.”
Rol watched with a kind of grim fascination as Marmius deftly sliced open the vein, and as the scarlet ichor within began to pour out, he set Rowen’s arm over the basin and watched it fill with an unpleasant kind of satisfaction. Rowen pumped her fist open and closed to keep the blood trickling. All at once, Rol was back in Psellos’s Tower, and the blood was his, his monthly payment. He turned away, tossing back the brandy in his glass, feeling sick with ebbing adrenaline, and a kind of grief.
It did not take long. When the process was over, Marmius left the way he had come, holding the silver basin as though it were made of eggshell. Rowen poured herself a tall glass of wine from a decanter and drank it off without a blink.
“What was it Psellos used to call it?” she asked. “Room and board. Well, here it buys armies, or the men who lead them, at least.”
“Is it worth it, Rowen?”
“I intend that it shall be. One day, it shall be.” She drank more wine. Her face was white as paper. He knew now there was nothing he could say to help her, no words that would recall the woman he had once known. Her face was that of a stranger, not the dream he had carried in his heart all these years. And yet, and yet…
“You have not seen the Turmian yet, have you, Rol?”
He smiled vacantly. “I’ve not seen anything beyond the walls of this palace.”
“We must fix that. We have time. There will be a ball the night before we take the troops out, but until then, the nobles will be busy with their regiments. We have some time. Would you care to ride out with the Queen?”
A closed carriage took them through the gates of the Bar Madivar Palace. It was a beautifully sprung vehicle, and the road passed smoothly under them. Apart from a trio of armed footmen, they were unescorted, their vehicle unmarked by livery of any kind. They passed without comment, and Rol peered out at the world through a chink in the curtained window. It was dark again-it seemed always to be dark here-and now that they were beyond the mighty confines of the palace, he could hear the artillery rumbling down at the walls, over a mile and a half away.
Myconn seemed crowded, and the streets were choked with traffic where they were not choked with rubble. Construction here had been going on in a grand scale for centuries, and on all sides monumental buildings reared up in waves of stone, though many had broken glass in their windows, and more lacked complete roofs.
“This is where it began,” Rowen said. “In Myconn itself.” She pulled her heavy black cloak more tightly about herself, stifling a shiver. “Mirkady was the first to come over, and then Blayloc and Brage. Their troops garrisoned the city, and were happy enough to change allegiances, given the right incentives.”
“Blood,” Rol said somberly. “Sex. Money. All three perhaps?”
Rowen’s eyes sparkled with anger. “All three indeed. Canker and I approached from the north, even as Bar Asfal has done, while Mirkady and the others raised hell within the city itself. Bar Hethrun-my father-was a popular man, and legend had made him more so. Bar Asfal is a greedy, small-minded wretch, and people were quite willing for the Lost Heir to return, even if she was a woman. Once he heard the boom of our artillery, Bar Asfal fled. Some of his folk made a stand in and around the palace, but by and large, Myconn remained intact. Only now it has been battered relentlessly for some four months of siege, and the walls are crumbling, as is the resolve of its defenders. The thing is nearly finished.”
“You may beat him in battle, but unless you kill Bar Asfal himself, the thing will never be finished,” Rol said. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past few weeks, it’s that these Bionari are stubborn bastards; give them a flag to follow and they’ll march behind it through blood and slaughter. As long as the loyalists have a figurehead, they’ll never give up.”
“Quite true,” Rowen said quietly. “That is why we must be sure Bar Asfal does not live through the coming battle.” Her eyes were fixed on his. There was almost a kind of pleading in them, but she turned her head away without saying anything more.
“You want me to kill him for you,” Rol said tautly. Rowen did not reply. “I don’t do knives in the dark anymore, Rowen; I leave that to you and Canker.”
“Not in the dark,” she said. “It must be public, in battle, at the height of the fight.”
Rol laughed. “Don’t you have an army at your back? What need have you of me to do your dirty work?”
“I know you can do it, if anyone can.” A bleak smile. “I trust you to do it, if you say you will.”
“I’ll fight for you, Rowen, but that’s all. Don’t count on any special favors.”
They said nothing more. The little candle-lamp in the carriage threw Rowen’s face into cruel relief. It was thinner than Rol had ever seen it, and her eyes were sunken. She did not look as though she relished what lay ahead. More than anything, Rol wanted to take her in his arms and kiss shut those tired eyes, but he knew he could not.
The carriage came to a halt and the driver opened a small hatch in the roof and spoke quietly. “The Turmian Library, my lady.”
“Very good, Badir. Wait here. We go in alone, my brother and I.”
Rol took her hand as she stepped down from the carriage, and she leaned her slim weight on it, swaying a little as her feet met the cobbles. “You’re draining yourself dry,” Rol said with a jet of concern he could not conceal.
“I’ll be all right. Help me up these damn steps.”
A towering portico loomed up in the wintry night, its pillars two fathoms wide at the base. They were in the higher streets to the south of the palace, and the sound of the guns was a dull flickering thunder off at the edge of the world. Myconn sprawled out below them, a sea of stone and slate teeming with half the refugees of a kingdom. Rol could pick out the outline of the palace over a mile away by the many lights in its windows. It seemed impossibly tall.
Rowen produced a key and a small lantern from the folds of her cloak. The Turmian’s doors were three times the height of a man, bound with bronze that had greened with age, but near their base there was a postern. The key turned smoothly, and Rowen pushed in the little door, then gestured to Rol with a small, cold smile. “After you, brother.”
There was a sense of echoing space, of moving air. It took a moment for Rol’s eyes to adjust to the utter, impenetrable blackness, and just when his unnatural sight was beginning to assert itself, Rowen struck a light and set it to the wick of her oil lantern, dropping the glass with a snap. At once, the half-guessed outlines of the building around them retreated into the golden confines of the lantern-light.
“Can you still see in the dark?” Rowen asked innocently.
“Now and then. This place is black as the inside of a tomb.”
“It stays locked at night, for fear of looters. During the day, only a few select scholars are admitted. Once, it was open to any citizen who had a mind to open a book, but times change. People are not so interested in reading anymore; they’re more interested in finding something to fill their bellies.”
“Who can blame them?” Rol asked.
Their footsteps echoed and the lantern-light sent their shadows capering up the walls. They were in a kind of foyer whose walls reared up into black shadow. There were tableaux carved in bas-relief into the stone, soldiers and horses and kings with expressionless faces, a long strip of chiseled stories, and writing that Rol could not read. Rowen raised the lantern higher.
“Old Bionese. Not many can read it now; they say it was related to Waric, the tongue of the Weres.” Her breath steamed out white as smoke.
“Come, this way.”
The foyer was long and empty, without furnishing. The only ornaments were on the walls. Below the line of bas-reliefs were a series of gilt-framed paintings, each taller than Rol. Within them, stern, pale faces gazed out from below a cracked glaze of varnish; men in archaic armor with crowns on their heads, dressed in regal robes and holding weapons too ornate to be of practical use.
“Who are these fellows?” Rol asked, gazing up.
“The Kings of Bionar-or the most recent ones, at any rate. In ancient times they lined this chamber as statues, but that stopped a century or so ago with the coming of the genius painter Ordivalle from Urbonetto. After that, the fashion was for portraiture, and the old statues were stripped out. They still dot the palace here and there.” Rowen stopped before one of the last paintings and held the lantern as high as she could. “See here; this is the man who began all the trouble. My father, Bar Hethrun.”
“I’ll be damned.” She was in his face. Bar Hethrun had been a man of great beauty, with features both delicate and hard. There was perhaps a weakness about the chin which had no place on Rowen’s face, and the color of the eyes was entirely different, but the resemblance was striking all the same.
“I am my father’s daughter, I’ve been told,” Rowen said. She moved on a few paces and raised the lantern again. “And here is the last of the line.”
In this painting, the sitter was in half armor of marvelous workmanship, and he stared down at them with none of the regal detachment of Bar Hethrun. A stockier man, if the artist had caught him rightly, he looked like someone who continually found fault with the world. He had a small, black beard and his eyes were dark as Laugran olives. A hint of jowl; he would flesh out as he grew older, though in the painting he looked to be in his early thirties.
“Bar Asfal,” Rowen said. “The man we fight.”
“He would be older now.”
“Yes, almost fifty. He has filled out and gone grayer since this was painted, but he is not so different.”
“You know him personally?”
“I was his courtesan for a year, back at the beginning. It’s as good a way into Court as any.” Rol stared at her.
“Come; we’d best move on. There’s still a ways to go.” She led Rol past Bar Asfal’s dark eyes, and the light went with her. For a long moment, Rol stood motionless in the dark as her footsteps went on ahead, then finally he followed.
Another tall door, another postern opened with a turn of the same key. Beyond it, the sound fell softer on their ears, soaked up by something other than stone. Lines of massive pillars trooped off into the darkness, and in between them were enormous shelved bookcases, scores of them, all piled high with scrolls and books and loose-leaved manuscripts, ten thousand years of reading all in one room.
“The main reading room,” Rowen said. “See? There are desks here for those who wish to browse. Only in Myconn could a man or woman sit down and read anything they had a mind to take off a shelf. It is part of this kingdom’s greatness. Psellos came here, many times. But this is only part of the whole. Under our feet, the hill has been tunneled out in centuries of labor, and there are whole libraries underground, more specialized knowledge, rarer books. Some are so fragile they can no longer be read. Some are written in languages no longer spoken. The Kings of Bionar were collectors of knowledge. Every time they fought a war, conquered a country, they brought that place’s heritage back here to line the walls of their library.”
“The most harmful kind of plundering I can think of,” Rol said. “It wasn’t enough to defeat a nation, they would steal its identity and bring it back here to molder in the dark.”
“They made a storehouse of knowledge that was open to all,” Rowen said crisply. “They preserved.”
“They raped,” Rol said.
“That is a matter of opinion.”
They found a steep set of stairs, and at their base yet another locked door. It opened on a deeper chill, and the dust-smell of dry paper. Rol sneezed. He felt he was descending deeper into the maw of a grave. Rowen’s face was set in white resolve, though she staggered slightly when they reached the foot of the stairs. Rol put his arm about her waist, slipping it under the thick cloak. She seemed lean as whipcord, with no warmth to her flesh. One moment, she leaned into him, then she drew away.
“The Formian Level,” she said. “Once, this was aboveground. Myconn has grown up around it. It was a scriptorium at one point. There are vellum books here older than the empire itself, but no one can read them. Psellos once searched ten years for a key to their alphabet, but in vain.”
Rol said nothing. All about him, the cavernous walls of the chamber echoed up out of the light. They were rougher here, and there was no mortar between their huge blocks. Instead of bookcases, shelved platforms of solid stone ran like lines of sarcophagi along the dust-strewn floor, and on them books and scrolls with rotted wooden spindles were piled up with no discernable rhyme or reason. The thoughts of men long dead committed to crumbling paper and parchment, and now rotting away quietly here in the dark. A tomb of books.
“You must help me with this one,” Rowen said. This time it took a different key, and the door was tiny, solid bronze. The key turned with an unwilling grate of metal, and Rol had to put his shoulder to the door itself and butt it open inch by inch. It opened on a set of narrow, crooked stairs going steeply down.
“What have you brought me here for, Rowen?” he asked, panting.
“There’s something you have to see.”
Phrynius’s words were coming back to him now. He did not want to go down those stairs and see what she meant to show him. He felt it would be turning a corner with the unknown waiting beyond it.
Rowen went ahead, the lantern-light shining off the silver fillet in her hair, the bones stark in the back of her hand as she held the light above her head. Under her feet, the stairs were half a fathom wide, pitted and uneven and untrustworthy in the dark. Rol touched Fleam’s hilt, but the sword was cold and aloof. He followed his sister down into the dark.
The stairs corkscrewed and wound first this way and then that. The passage narrowed further, until it was scraping at Rol’s shoulders, and he had to duck his head to avoid being brained by bristling excrescences of stone, fangs of rough rock. There was no architecture here; this was a natural fissure in the foundations of the Turmian. And this was no longer the Turmian. They had gone below it, every foot taking them back another thousand years. They were in a cave system now, and the air grew damper, the stone slippery underfoot, freezing drips of water falling on their heads and trickling down the back of their necks.
“The Turmian, it’s said, was built on the site of a shrine, a place of worship in times immemorial,” Rowen informed him. “We come to it now. Very few people know of this place. Psellos had read of it, and mentioned it to me one night, a long time ago. Canker knew also, though I don’t know how. It is not a place to visit on some whim.”
The stairs ended, and they shuffled along a level tunnel. There was dirt under their feet, black and muddy. Rol did not look down to watch for footprints. A growing sense of claustrophobia was rising in his throat, and it was all he could do not to turn and bolt back the way they had come.
The light Rowen held suddenly blossomed out. Rol saw stalactites far above his head, and there was the sound of running water. His breathing eased at the sense of space. They were in a large cave, and at the far wall, some ten fathoms away, a small underground stream cackled to itself and glittered in the glow of the lantern. Rowen raised the wick, and the light strengthened about them, sought out shadows and sent them reeling. She held the lantern high above her head, and her voice echoed as the cavern walls threw it back at her.
“This place has been here since God made the world,” she said. “The First Men found it when there was nothing above us but a green hill, and the Elder Race still walked the earth. Other things walked the surface of the world also in that lost time, and men worshipped them. Come.”
She took Rol’s hand and led him over to one wall. “They drew pictures of the things they saw, Rol.”
The wall was covered in images, all bright and brash with astonishing colors. Here was a bison delineated in half a dozen beautifully eloquent strokes. Here a gazelle running from the stick-figures of men with spears. There a huge, tusked beast with a serpentine nose that trampled the stick-figures underfoot and tossed them over its shoulders. And there were other things also.
Man-shapes, but taller than the others, and with what seemed to be flowing robes that plumped out the lines of their limbs. These shapes had bright, green blazing eyes, and they carried what could only be swords and shields. Rays of yellow pigment were spanning out from them like sunbursts, and behind them a great black wall spiked with blade-shaped towers reared up with banners or flags twisting from the battlements.
But the center of the picture was dominated by a single image. This was a huge thing, a shape manlike and yet not a man at all. The thing seemed to be floating in the air, looming over all the others like a cloud. In its head two eyes burned in streaks of yellow and scarlet, like stabs of flame, and the creature had wings, long snaking tendrils of light bursting from its back in feathers of flame. As it hovered in the air, the figures of the men below cowered either in fear or worship.
But it was the face that stole the breath out of Rol’s mouth. Bearded, long-nosed, it was recognizably that of a man. Beneath those terrible eyes, the face smiled, and there was still a glimpse of humanity in the expression.
“Your face,” Rowen said, looking from Rol to the painting and back again.
“It could be anyone,” Rol spat, voice shaking. “A coincidence.”
“And the light in the eyes, the great wings? Is that you, Rol? Has that ever been you?”
Rol glared at her. “What do you know?”
“I heard tell of a beast that slaughtered a crowd of people in Ascari as they were looting Psellos’s Tower. Or an angel, a bright-winged thing that had death in its eyes. And there are tales up and down the seas of a Black Ship whose captain can transform into a murderous demon at will. What are these, Rol, legends?”
“Tall tales.”
“Canker has a friend called Phrynius, a scholar who once worked in the Turmian.”
“I know him.”
Rowen paused. “I see.” She gestured up at the painting on the wall. “He has been down here, before the war. He’s made a study of this picture. Do you know what he believes this image to represent?”
Rol was mute.
“It is a depiction of the Final Judgment, a time when the Creator will return to the world and test mankind once again. And if they fail the test, then they will face His servant, a being that will exact His retribution on the face of the earth.” Rowen stared up at the wall, eyes wide. “This thing here, with your face on it, is the Angel of Death.”
Fifteen