The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“In a single night,” he agreed, glancing up the hill, but the massive earthworks and the curve of the hill hid the crown from view. “Yet,” he mused, “what matter if six months pass in one night? We must wait here until Octumbre in any case, preparing for what is to come. I have a strong company to attend me, Deacon, as you have seen. We shall finish building your church. Then we will erect a palisade since this place was the scene of a fearsome battle not many years past.”

“True enough.” She nodded gravely. “We remember those days well, my lord. Prince Bayan and Princess Sapientia brought a strong force here, but the Quman overset them and drove them northwest. In the end, so they say, Prince Sanglant saved us. All the Quman are driven out and will never return.”

A shift in the wind made Hugh grimace, chaff blowing into his eye, but he smiled quickly and gestured toward the neat camp his servants had already begun to set up. “So we must pray, Deacon. If we are patient, and strong, all our enemies will be laid to rest.”

2

HE drowned under the bones of the world. A whisper teased his ears, and he opened his eyes into a darkness relieved only by a gleam of pale gold light that emanated from his left arm. Amazed, he waited for his vision to come and go in flashes, to fail again, but the gleam remained steady as he looked around.

He lay in a low chamber carved out of the rock by intelligent hands or shaped by more persistent forces. The floor had been swept clean of rubble. To his left the slope of the chamber created a series of benchlike ledges along the wall. Creatures crouched there, curled up with bony knees pressed to chests and spindly arms wrapped tight up against their shoulders. Many wore bits and pieces of ornaments slung around thick necks, odd scraps they might have scavenged out of a jackdaw’s nest, most of which glittered with sharp edges and polished corners. The creatures had faces humanlike in arrangement, yet where eyes should stare at him, milky bulges clouded and cleared. He could not tell if they watched him or were blind.

With a grunt, he sat up. The movement made his head throb, and he had to shut his eyes to concentrate on not vomiting. At last his throat eased and his stomach settled, although the pounding ache in his temples pulsed on and on. The air was comfortable, not truly warm or cold; the air hung so still that he could taste each mote of dust on his tongue.

One of the creatures moved, arms elaborating precise patterns as it rubbed fingers one against the others, against its arms, and against the rock itself, clicking and tapping. The voice was not precisely voice but something more like the grinding together of pebbles.

“What are you?” it said.

“I am,” he said. “I am …” It was like flailing in deep water as the riptide drags you inexorably out to sea: “I have lost my name. It is all gone.”

“You wear a talisman from the ancient days,” said the creature patiently.

He saw now a dozen of the creatures seated like boulders around the chamber, sessile except for slight gestures whose subtle configurations and variations in sound began to make sense to him, flowing together and apart in the same way that seams of metal work their way through rock.

“The ancient days are only a false story! We must set aside comfort and dig for truth!”

“Despair is not truth. The ancient days are no false story, but a record carved in air to tell us the truth of the ancient days and the city whose walls speak.”

“You are a fool! A dreamer!”

“You are trapped by falls of rock that exist only in the mind you carry!”

They spoke by means of touch and sound, reaching out each to the others, passing speech down from one to the next and back again, punctuated by the scritch of fingers on dust and the rap of knuckles against rock or skin, by the push and pull of air stirred by their movements and the intake and exhalation of breath. The words they spoke were as much constructs he made through his own understanding of language as uttered syllables.

“The talisman bears witness to the truth! This creature bears the talisman! This catacomb traps us because in the watch-that-came-before we walk here seeking luiadh. To find luiadh we follow the veins of silapu. One element leads us to the next. This creature leads us to this talisman, or this talisman to the creature. Do not pretend one comes without the other. Listen!”

They quieted.

The one whose skin gleamed like pewter, the one who had spoken first, shifted and addressed him. “What are you? The others of your kind, who descend from the Blinding, are empty when they reach us. You are not.”

“I am alive,” he agreed, before recalling the fate of the poor criminals cast into the pit. He shuddered. That shudder passed through the assembly like a venomous wind.

“It fears us!”

“It wishes to poison us!”

“It seeks silapu! Thief! Concealer!”

“Listen!” Pewter-skin stamped a three-clawed foot, and the others shifted restlessly before subsiding. When they crouched, motionless, they really did begin to blend into the rock so that he wondered if he still dreamed. They were only rocks, and he was hallucinating. But they kept speaking, and he kept hearing their words. “Let it speak. What are you? Why are you not empty? Why are you cast down like the empty ones? Why do you wear the talisman?”

“I don’t know.” Shards of memory flashed in his mind like lightning, burned into his eyes. “You are skrolin. My people called you that once. It was one of your kind who gave me this.” He brushed his fingers over the gleaming armband, cool to his touch although its surface burned as though it were hot. “I remember the great city. A shining city.”

“Ah! Ah!” They stirred, sighing and groaning, and fell silent again. Their milky eyes swirled and stilled. A few brushed fingers over rock before curling back up into their crouch.

Pewter-skin spoke. “Tell us of the city.”

“Are you going to eat me?”

“Eat you?”