Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

“Books of sorcery!”

“Those, too.”

“And your history, that the others speak of.”

“A small thing, compared to the rest, although naturally I am pleased it survived the storm. There is truth to be found in these books. I know it in my heart. Yet what if the truth is a truth we do not want to hear?” Her expression darkened as she glanced up at the sky. When she looked back at Hanna, her gaze was so stern that Hanna took a step back.

“What could be wrong with the truth?”

Rosvita shook her head and, without replying, touched Hanna on the elbow and went to find her mount.

4

IN the Heart-of-the-World’s-Beginning coils a labyrinth as intricate and bewildering as the configuration of the human heart. Down deep, and deeper yet, the stairs descend. To find answers, or release from its prison, the questing soul must plunge into what seems all that is darkest but which is in fact a world of its own far below the outer world of light and air.

It was not her world, the land she knew well, nor yet was it the world of the upper spheres, where she had briefly journeyed and glimpsed her soul’s true home. Here beneath the weight of the earth lay a fastness whose existence she had never truly suspected.

At the base of the stairs she found herself in a circular chamber whose polished walls bore a strange manner of ornamentation: they were carved and jabbed with tiny ridges and holes detectable most easily by touch. Eight corridors opened off at even angles; one looked the same as another, all of them smoothly paved and wide enough that four horsemen might ride abreast in procession and still have room to clear their heads and have a groom walk alongside.

These were the spokes of a wheel. She chose a direction at random, and walked into a maze, where she soon became lost. She sensed as much as heard that creatures were following her at a distance.

At first, pausing, she listened; then at length called; then, receiving no answer, walked down a corridor whose walls reflected back the ruddy glow of the smoldering rope she carried. In the next chamber, which was also the next branching, she waited, but no one and nothing came into view.

Yet she did feel them. She knew they were there. She knew what they were, because her grandmother had told her the tale.

For a while she stood, motionless, and felt the weight of the earth, the weight of family, resting as on her entire body. To think of having a living grandmother still stunned her. She could not quite grasp that even knowing it was true.

The whispers—not of voices but of muted, skittering movement—ceased. They were waiting, as she was waiting.

Because she could not go back, she walked on.

The chief thing she learned after some hours of wandering: The knife edge of the spell woven in ancient days had severed this hidden world into two. On one side of that cut stretched tunnels and branching corridors whose walls were planed as by an adze; she emerged into spacious chambers, each proportioned with geometric precision, or happened upon narrow waterfalls pouring over sheer walls into fathomless pools.

Yet the other side, crossed into with a single step, had sustained immense damage: here a rockfall, there a ceiling collapsed that blocked the passage, and in another place a chasm where the ground had actually split apart to leave a gash far wider than she dared leap.

Pausing on this lip, she dropped a fragment of rock into the darkness and listened, but she could not hear the splinter strike bottom. A distant burning odor welling up from the deeps, a sour taste on the palate.

Up to now, the creatures had continued to track her at a distance, heard but never seen. They had kept a strict and precise distance from her except in this one case. They had not followed her down this particular branch, even though the corridor split by the chasm was large—a thoroughfare like the regnant’s road—and must surely once have seen heavy traffic.

She had made the detour because of that strange taste in the air wafting from one of the tunnel openings. Backtracking to the last chamber she had paused in, she halted to lick dust off her lips and consider her choices.

Mother Obligatia had called the creatures living in the tunnels beneath St. Ekatarina’s Convent “the Ancient Ones.” Liath had heard other tales as well, speaking of goblins, small people, who lived in caverns deep underground, who mined the mother lodes, and who, perhaps, nourished themselves on human flesh. Diggers and hewers of stone, the folk who scuttled in the earth and in the rock, where darkness reigned.

Ancient Ones had spoken to her before, when she lay entombed in rock beneath the central crown, waiting for the night when the Crown of Stars crowned the heavens. But these did not feel the same as those slow voices. These felt restless, skittish, sharp, metallic.

She blew hard on the glowing end of the rope, and put it out. Now she saw them—not their bodies, but a faint gleam, as though their recent presence left its trace as a phosphorescent glow. Any true human would not have been able to distinguish them at all, but of course, Liath herself had more than once been told that she emanated a breath like light off her own body.

Was there some aetherical connection between her and these earth people? It was hard to imagine there might be.

Of the six corridors that branched off this chamber, only one had in its dark mouth that scantling blush, the luminous trace of their retreating presence. Of course, they were leading her; they had been all along, and she had missed it because of her dependence on the lamp she had made of her coil of rope.

It was, really, the only choice left to her. She would never find her way back to the cavern in which Kansi had imprisoned her, nor did she want to return there.

On she went, walking, trudging as she tired, on down a broad tunnel that shot straight—with perhaps the slightest curve to its trajectory—as though an arrow had bored this passage. On and on, until even the trace glow faded and she had perforce to call fire to the rope. She had learned to finesse the fiber, burning it at such an ebb that the smoldering ends gave her just enough light to see the ground, so that she might not step unwittingly into a chasm.

But walking with no break, no light, no known destination, and in solitude, demanded its cost in the end. Just ahead, the tunnel branched like a forked stick, splitting into two corridors each one the same as the other. Nothing to choose between them. No hint of where to go next. No light but her own.

were the spokes of a wheel. She chose a direction at random, and walked into a maze, where she soon became lost. She sensed as much as heard that creatures were following her at a distance.