The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“We know. We know. The tale passes from one to the next down the long watches. First the survivors fight for many watches, each with the others, one guild against the next. After long and long the fighting exhausts the few who are left and it is agreed that some will tunnel turnward and some will tunnel antiturnward. Long and long we seek in the depths, but the shining city is gone and so some speak of it as only a story. Across many watches an archive is collected, things found among ruins, in hidden corners, but the archive remains closed to us, as if it never existed. So the quarrels begin again. The shining city is a story only. It is the truth. No one can agree. Now we are scattered. The talismans are dead. The archives are lost to us without the key. This is how you find us, with your story of the shining city. We wish to believe. We fear to believe. Is it true?”

“It is true.”

All around they stamped their feet and tapped and clicked until Gold-skin lifted the dull armband it had once worn and everyone hushed.

“Proof,” it said. “Bring one from the archives. Bring one. Bring two. Bring three. That will be proof.”

“What are the archives?” He touched the bowl of water, but he had drained it dry. Pale-skin, who had grasped his needs, picked up the bowl and hurried off into the darkness.

“They are proof. Closed to us, or open to us, they are proof. Or they are baubles, nothing more. Now we wait. Now we find out.”

Waiting among the skrolin took hours or days; he had entirely lost track of time. Pale-skin brought a whole bucket carved out of stone and filled with water as well as a dozen loaves of clavas. Many times he had to relieve himself by leaving the amphitheater and walking out into the pillars for privacy. He drank that entire bucket and a second one and ate all the clavas before a dozen skrolin returned bearing three massive scrolls forged out of metal-pewter, maybe, since it seemed too hard to be silver. They set these on the ground in front of him, unrolled them, and without further ceremony stepped back. The sheets were as long as his arm span, as wide as the length of his shin, and yet as thin as a leaf. How they could lay flat when they had just been so tightly rolled up he could not imagine.

One by one, the eleven skrolin who bore an armband came forward to press their talismans into a square etched into the center of each scroll. After a pause in which every creature there seemed ready for nothing to happen, yet something to happen, the skrolin would remove the armband and step back.

When they had finished, they all looked expectantly at him.

He saw the pattern, but he didn’t know what it meant. He crouched beside the unrolled sheet, slipped his armband off, and pressed it onto the sheet.

Light flashed. The armband glowed red hot, and he yelped and released it, but it did not roll away; it was stuck to the metal. Light undulated down the length of the sheet in waves, a stark white light followed by successive ripples of gold, pale yellow, silver, and a last dark surge which drove furrows into the surface, gashes and gouges too thin to measure yet he knew what they were.

He recognized writing when he saw it, although these marks were alien to him.

No sound issued from the skrolin.

They stood, like stone, without speaking or moving, stunned or shocked or ignorant.

But he knew. He understood. The miracle had happened. All that had separated them from their ancestors was their access to the knowledge that their kind had accumulated in the ancient days. These scrolls held their memories, closed to them for untold years and centuries. In this same way the pain had choked off his own life from him, glimpsed in snatches as transitory as the tales the skrolin had told themselves over and over since that day when the great weaving had destroyed them.

How long they stood in silence he could not measure. In the depths of the earth, he possessed no gauge by which to quantify time.

They stood in silence for as long as they needed to absorb what he had wrought. They stood in silence while he unrolled the other two sheets, pressed his armband to the centers, and watched as these, too, revealed their secrets.

At length, Gold-skin turned to him.

“A life for a life. A payment. An obligation. You do not belong here, you consume too much fuel. We will trade. One among us will lead you to the Blinding so you can return to your own kind. That is your life, in exchange for the talisman.”

My own kind.

He no longer knew who his own kind were. He could only remember the wheel, and the garden of clavas growing among the rotting flesh of the dead.

“What of your kinfolk?” he asked. “The ones who are trapped? What of them? Can you rescue them now? I can help you. I made a promise to them.”

They gave him no more speech. Pale-skin clasped him tightly, pinning his arms to his side, and hoisted him with awkward strength.

“What of them?” he called, desperate for an answer, but none came.

For hours or days Pale-skin carried him through the labyrinth that is utter night, stopping three times to give him water and clavas, and depositing him at long last, and unceremoniously, on a shelf of rock where grains of soil slipped beneath his fingers although he still could not see.

“Climb up,” said Pale-skin. “Climb up. You have done us great wrong. You have done us great good. We will not forget.”

It rattled away, and he was left alone in the pit. But he probed and touched and sought for handholds, however useless it seemed, because he did not want to die in the pit. So he climbed up and up and up and just when he thought he had been abandoned at the base of the Abyss and must climb for an eternity without ever reaching the top, he discovered a certain alteration in the darkness revealing contours across the rock. He saw a crack of light far above.

He climbed, although he had to rest frequently and more than once slipped and almost fell. When he squeezed out through a narrow cleft, scouring his back against the rough rock, he spilled down a short escarpment, scraped through a bramble bush, yelping and cursing, and came to rest in the shade of a tree on a layer of decayed leaf litter. A bird shrieked a warning and fluttered off through the branches. The light hurt his eyes, but it gentled and mellowed as he caught his breath, dizzy, gasping for air. It was hot and muggy, but there was ease in it and the savor of freedom.

o;What are the archives?” He touched the bowl of water, but he had drained it dry. Pale-skin, who had grasped his needs, picked up the bowl and hurried off into the darkness.

“They are proof. Closed to us, or open to us, they are proof. Or they are baubles, nothing more. Now we wait. Now we find out.”