There. It loomed before them out of the seabed. Looking up, he stubbed his toes on stone. She led them up a shallow-sloped stone ramp that emerged seamlessly from the sea floor as from a forgotten city buried beneath the sand. As they walked, the water swirled in around them, swallowing the glistening sands and the narrow channels, all of it subsumed until only they on the stone ramp walked dry-footed as the sea returned and with it the night wind. The moon rode high in the sky, drowning the stars.
His grandmother had named the moon “the Pale Hunter,” she who watches over the life and death of animals, and at full moon her strength was greatest.
“I pray you, Great Hunter,” he murmured, trying out the words, feeling awkward, “give me strength. Lend me some of your power.”
An island rose steep-sided before them, a stone fort with gleaming marble walls. They climbed until the ramp ended at the base of an ebony gate. A path paved with black stone curled away on either side, a wall rising sheer on one side and cliff dropping away sheer on the other.
She led them to the left, deocil, along the path as the waters rose along the base of the hill, slowly submerging the ramp.
“What if it comes up higher?” he asked nervously. She did not answer him, only walked forward on the black path that circled the island. He tried to remember the prayers his grandmother had spoken, but the words had fled long since, leaving only the memory of her, old and gnarled but hale, with a wicked sense of humor. She had after many years agreed to pray before the altar of the Circle God, and the frater had rejoiced and given the entire village a great feast to celebrate her conversion, and his parents had wept with joy that she had walked at last into the Light. But he had seen her hide a carved wooden figure of The Fat One, the bringer of wisdom and plenty, in the skirts of the hearth; every time she knelt and prayed before the holy image of the Mother and Father of Life, she was really praying to The Fat One.
They walked forever on the black path, but when they returned to the ebony gate, the waters lapped the stone ramp two man-lengths from them. It was still rising.
“Now we are outside,” she said. She drew her knife and drew the blade over her palm. She smeared her blood over the ebony surface of the gate, then cut Zacharias’ hand in the same manner, and nicked the horse on the shoulder; this blood, too, she smeared on the gate.
Her fingers probed the shadows beside the gate, caught a lever, and pulled. The door swung open outward on silent hinges. She stepped over the threshold, and he followed her only to find that he stood in a narrow lane that ran parallel to the black stone path outside. High stone walls rose on either side. The horse balked, but when seawater lapped the threshold to drown its hooves, it bolted inside.
She tugged the gate closed against the rising tide. He glanced up anxiously: were the stone walls high enough, and watertight enough, to keep them safe from the waters? But when he knelt to brush the ground, it was as dry as bleached bone racked by a summer of rainless heat. She began to walk to the right, widdershins, and he followed her. After about the time it would take to sing the service of Terce, a short hour, they returned back to where they had started, at the ebony gate.
“Now we are inside,” she said.
His hand smarted. He was very thirsty, but she offered him nothing to drink. He was abruptly so tired that, trembling, he leaned against the stone walls—
“Grandson.”
He jerked back. “What is that?” he demanded. “There’s something alive in the stone. It’s speaking to me in my grandmother’s voice.”
“There is nothing alive here,” she said firmly. “We have entered churendo, the palace of coils. Here the three worlds meet. Do not be surprised by what you see and hear.”
“What are the three worlds?” he asked, but she had already started walking left, deocil, and he had to follow her with the horse in tow. “What’s the use of walking around again?” he demanded of her back. “Isn’t there a path that leads up?”
She stopped abruptly and turned. Her stare shut his mouth, and when she began walking again, he followed silently, humbled.
They walked the dusty path, grit scuffing and slipping under his toes. They circled the hill deocil, as they had outside, but when they returned to the ebony gate it was no longer ebony; it was no longer the same gate but rather a gate of palest rose stone. He gazed out to see the sea surging and rising below. Craning his neck, he could even see the corbeled entrance that marked the ebony gate, now half underwater below them. Then he saw the moon. They had been walking for a scant hour yet the moon lay low on the horizon, almost swamped by the sea, a waning quarter moon surely a good six days past full. Feeling dizzy, he swayed and caught himself, bracing a hand on the stone. But when he touched the stone, he saw through rose quartz onto a different sea, not a sea at all but a river snaking up through sharp-spined hills.
Ships ghost up the river, slender and predatory. The prow of the lead ship is long and lean, carved into the shape of a dragon’s head. Creatures like men but not men stroke at the oars and sometimes, as they skate the shallows, their oars break through a skin of ice. Stone and metal spearheads gleam as sun catches them, rising low over the northeastern hills. Ahead, the river swirls white around a series of posts; someone has staked the river so that ships can’t sail up it.
But the creatures in the ships merely anchor their ships to the stakes and from this base they harry the countryside, burning and killing. Halls and cottages blaze under the pale light of a sun that never rises more than halfway up the sky. Soon night falls, gray and icy. Fires dot the slopes and valleys like an uneven procession of torches. Late into the night they gutter and fade as a storm sweeps in. There is only darkness.
She vanishes around the curve of the lane, still winding up deocil. He grabbed the horse’s reins and followed. He did not want to be left behind. He felt the ground slope under his feet, growing steadily steeper. They were climbing.
The next gate shone with a pale iron gleam. The tide was low. Dawn’s light rimmed the eastern horizon, a sullen gray along the rocks. Stars gleamed fiercely above. He saw no moon. Was that its reflection in the torpid waters below? He leaned forward, pressing a hand against the gate.
* * *
A woman sits in a chair carved with guivres. She wears the gold torque of royal kinship at her throat and a coronet on her brow. Her hair runs to silver, and her face is lined with old angers and frustrations. Her tower chamber is elaborately and richly furnished, but the two guards standing just on the other side of the door betray its purpose: it is a prison, nothing more. She lifts a hand and beckons forward the messenger who has come, a nondescript woman dressed in the robes of a cleric.
“What have you brought me?” she asks in a voice too low for the guards to hear, and in any case they are bored and at this moment chatting with an unseen comrade out on the stairs. “You are certain Biscop Constance knows nothing of this?”
“Nay, Your Highness,” replies the cleric. “The biscop had a new cote built, but this pigeon came to the old one. That is how I came to know of it, through certain faithful of your servants who do not approve of a Wendish biscop being set over them as liege lord and biscop both.”
“Give it to me,” orders the woman. The cleric obediently hands it over, and the woman unrolls a thin strip of linen, rather dirty and damp, marked with letters. She returns it to the woman. “Read it to me.”
The cleric puzzles over it for a while, since some of the letters are stained and blurred, but at last she reads aloud. “To she who is rightfully queen over Varre and Wendar. Hold fast. Do not despair. There is one who has not forgotten you and who will return to aid you in time.”
“That is all?” demands the woman.
o;Now we are inside,” she said.