Follow me!" the boy cried, and stepped into the passageway his mind had carved in the mountain.
Shivery air tickled his face, like a fizz of bubbles around a swimmer. The stone glowed the silvery white of the moon. Magestone shone for mages. He was no mage. Only a runner. A frightened, angry warder had called him "that lightless boy" in a voice hard and cold as stone. But there were mages behind him. Enough to turn the tunnel into an underground river of light. Injured mages. Counting on him to save them.
Triads could craft magestone, but it could not be cut with metal tools. Yet he reached out a fingertip and touched the smooth wall of a corridor that had not been there scant breaths ago.
I did this, he thought. I did this, with my dreams.
The only thing his dreams had ever wrought before was razored darkness. His face and arms were scored by the shadows' teeth and talons. His sleeves were torn and blood-soaked. His mind had fought hard to keep the Ennead off him.
Now, at last, the chance to be free. But what if he failed? What if they were caught? What if the Nine did to him what they'd done to the mages behind him?
"Follow me!"
His cry went out a plea. He forced himself to move forward.
The argent luminance of magestone cast no shadow, and there was no telling depth or distance or where the passage turned. He would have to feel his way through the light. The chill of stone seeped through the thin soles of his softboots, but a glance at his feet showed them suspended in pale nothingness.
He swayed with vertigo, and came up against the wall he had shaped. He laid his hands flat against it. Hang on, he thought. He crabbed along the stone, and his body found a memory of doing something very like, once, long ago—
Hang on, but don't look back. Looking back was like looking down. He could not keep his balance if he looked back.
The stone gave off a scent—strange, and not pleasant. Something like the heart of a daisy, but not as clean. Like all stone, it drew warmth from the flesh. Like all stone in the Holding, it felt of magecraft, like the twinge in a dinged elbow. But it was waxy. There was something about laying hands on it that was like laying hands on a live thing. It made a whispery silver sound. He did not know how or why. There were veins of magestone throughout the Holding, but if they spoke he'd never heard them. Here in the silver depths of the mountain, there was only magestone, and here its whispers were as loud as surf.
"This way!" he cried. Sound changed in this tunnel. He firmed his voice: "Follow me!"
Follow me. How many times had he said those words? He had summoned young mages to this Holding, delivered the Ennead's call to the brightest when they took the triskele. He had ridden out of this mountain fastness into what felt like freedom, and never was, and he had brought mages back with him, full knowing, never warning. Every Holdingward step had been an agony of submission—
Were they coming? The whispers were too loud. He would not be able to hear the tread of their bare feet. He did not trust mages, now, to follow the boy who had only ever led them to their doom.
He turned, an effort of will. The chamber he had left was lost to sight. The passageway had curved without him sensing it. Would the mages follow him if they couldn't see him? He should have herded, not led. Suppose they lost themselves in the watery light and could not feel their way?
Where his scored flesh had slid along stone there was a smear of black. Blood was black in the magestone's glow. The line hung on the wall like a wordsmith's mark—hovering in the shadowless space, as if he could scribe in blood on frozen currents.
"I'm here!" he cried, urgent now. "It's this way! Follow my voice!"
My voice, not my blood. There was not blood enough in him to guide them all the way to freedom-and if they were pursued, it would guide their killers just as clearly.
My voice. It must be a strong voice, a voice worth following. A voice worth staking your life on. He had never spoken much. He was shy, he knew that, but it was fear, too—fear of saying the wrong thing, divulging too much.
If the Ennead caught him, or their men did, no sleep would protect him. Behind him, good folk would soon be fighting for their lives against Ennead killers. Perhaps he should have stayed. Dying on a longblade might be better than what lay ahead if he tried to run, and failed.
Ennead. Just the brush of the word against his mind was enough to set his heart pounding.
"Come on!" he cried again. His voice held and did not crack, as it had been wont to do of late, from grief, from fatigue, from the passage between childhood and manhood. It was a voice worth following. He would get them out of here.
He had taken three steps back to see what was keeping them when the magestone's glow began to fade.
He had come too far. He was not a mage. The walls would not glow for him. He had never shown a magelight, though an illuminator had believed there was a light inside him, obscured by the years of pain and fear. He knew his life had been hard, but he didn't think it was so hard that it would seal off his own magelight.…
No. This magestone, this fulgent river—it wanted him to remember. If he gave in to it, it would dissolve him where he stood. He would drown in memory as darkness pressed in, and he would lose the only hope he'd ever have of making things right.
Groping along the solidity of stone, he moved back around the turn, and a silver crescent took shape, magestone lit by the presence of mages. They were following. They would dispel the darkness. The walls would glow again, for them.
"This way!" he called, and now he could hear them: the wincing drag of a useless foot along the stone, the grunts and guttural sounds of the tongueless speaking among themselves.
The magestone responded. Whatever the Ennead had taken from them, they still had light enough for that.
Now there was light to see them by.
Most of them were naked, or close enough, shreds of warders' white and reckoners' black hanging off them, the peeled skin of their former Holding positions. Their flesh was a webwork of white lines, deep scars carved by the Ennead's knives. Every third was missing one hand, or both; the eyelids of many others sank into hollows. The ones with no visible injury must be the binders, their songs forever silenced.
The Ennead had prevented them using their light as thoroughly as if they'd cored and sealed them. An illuminator could not cast without a casting hand. A wordsmith could not scribe if she could not see. A binder with no tongue could not control a bindsong; a binder with no feet could not gather casting materials. Three dozen of Eiden Myr's elite reduced to limping, sightless, inarticulate husks. He had heard them cry out for death, and he had heard the silence of those who were beyond hoping even for that.
This was how the Ennead repaid its brightest lights.
And he had called them. He had appeared in their towns, in his mage-crafted, nine-colored cloak, and conveyed the Ennead's summons, and they had come with him, to be vocates in the Holding, to ward and protect all Eiden Myr, to practice magecraft at its highest.
He had called them, all of them, by proxy, even the ones he hadn't fetched, because he had never run away. Time and again he had had the opportunity, and he had fetched and returned as he was told to do. He had never said the word "complicity" aloud. He had said few words in his nine years and six, except the words the Ennead sent him to say. But that word hung in the air between himself and the mages like a line of blood.
Don't you know me? he thought. Was the pain so bad that you forgot who brought you to this? He could not speak. Their smell came to him slowly through the still air of the tunnel: captivity, filth and blood and terror sweat and festering wounds. He gagged on it.
"Well?" came a woman's hoarse voice. She stood in the center of the group. "I can't see you, boy, but you're the only one of us with boots, and I don't hear them moving."
I'm sorry, he tried to say.
"You cast passage," said another woman, nearer the front. Irony darkened her voice. Her eyes were flat as she gestured up the tunnel with the stump of a wrist. An illuminator. Their injuries made the triadic roles obvious as they were never meant to be. "The spirits of our dead found their own way, but you're going to have to lead the rest of us."
I'm sorry, he tried again, but when he drew breath he inhaled only the damp choking tang of shame.
"I saw a warder cut her throat rather than walk out the open cage door," called someone from the back. "There's some still believe the only way out is death. But we'll follow you, boy—so long as you bloody get on with it."
I'm sorry, he thought, and he could have managed the words out loud now, but what he said was "Yes. Come on. Come ahead. I'll help you."
He moved to the side of the group, prompting with hands and voice as they shuffled forward, just wanting to be sure of them before he took point again.
Far behind them, he heard a voice cry out. Someone else, trying to catch up. How could it be so far away? They hadn't come that far down the passageway. He turned, but could see nothing. The voice called again: "Ilorna!" He recognized it now: the warder who had scorned him as lightless, no use to them in the trap they'd been in. The trap he'd freed them of. Now she was trying to escape, using the passages he had dreamed. "Ilorna, I'm coming!"
A honey-haired wordsmith near the front of the group went very straight, then turned in blind response, started to go back.
"No," said the illuminator next to her. "Let her catch up. She's got two good feet."
But the calls were getting fainter.
"She's gone down some other tunnel," Ilorna said.
There were no other tunnels.
"I've got to go to her! She's my cousin, I can't leave her!"
"You can. You must go on. We must go on."
They struggled briefly, the illuminator wrapping her arms around the wordsmith to hold her back. The boy let go his purchase on rocky reality to go past them, into the middle of the group, trying to see down the depthless silver length of the tunnel behind them. The warder's voice had grown very faint. Where in the bloody spirits could she have gone? There were no other tunnels—
Someone nearby cried out, and he saw a hobbling man tumble sideways—into the wall? Could he have dreamed awry, could the walls be softening? He ran to help the man sit up—hit was the leg that dragged, he'd been using the wall to prop himself up as he hopped along—and found the corridor as firm and wide as ever. The man had fallen into an opening. Forcing one good foot in front of the other, the boy made his way in—a threft, two threfts, six, and again the wall fell away into silver space under his hand—
The tunnel branched.
That was why the warder couldn't reach them.
He froze. The tunnels turned, and the tunnels branched. How would he find the way?
"I've got him, lad," said the blind woman who'd spoken first. A word-smith, once. She had the man's arm over her shoulders. She would be a good right leg for him. The others were helping, too—being each other's limbs and senses, trading hands for eyes and eyes for hands. "Which way, now?"
The clang of iron blades, the first death cries drifted faintly along the passageway, carried on silver currents from the chamber they had left. It seemed a nonned leagues away, and a lifetime ago. But the battle was happening now. It would be for nothing if they just stood there until the dying was done.
The close huddle of folk who had been mages turned ravaged faces to the boy and waited for his answer.
"This way," he said, moving into the main passage and past them to the front. He struck off up the incline, the way he had been going. He had always known his way through the Holding—most of it, anyway, even in the dark where the torchman had neglected his duties. He must trust that he knew it still. He had dreamed this. He could negotiate the twists and turns. "This way!"
He did not know how he made the choices he did. Sometimes space yawned under his hand, and he changed course and entered it. Sometimes he passed the branchings and continued down a straightaway or around the curve of a turn. But it was always upward, and the angle of ascent grew steeper. It took a long time for the sounds of battle to fall away, even faint as they were, even with the turnings. But when they did—because of distance, or the battle's ending?—he realized with a jolt that he would never know the outcome. He would never know if his friends had lived or died. His path had well and truly branched away from theirs now.
He was alone.
It's all right, he told himself. He'd been alone before, on the trail, in his campsites; he'd been alone in the beds that strangers gave him as a passing traveler, alone in the midst of tavern revelries. He'd been alone when—
"Are you all right, boy?" said the illuminator.
"It's this cursed stone," said the wordsmith who'd first spoken to him, who'd helped up the fallen man. Their voices were raw from screaming, the ones who still had voices at all, but he could tell them apart now. "It does something to the mind. They burned out my eyes, but my life's passed before my mind's eye as we walked. Don't let it plague you, lad."
"What's done is done," someone else agreed.
"It's getting less," said another. "It's not all magestone now, there's blackstone marbled in."
"Then we'll be in the dark, soon," the blind wordsmith said. "I'll wager no torchman's ever passed this way."
"Trust the boy," said the illuminator. "He made these tunnels. He'll see us through."
"Do you know where we'll be coming out?" said another. "There's some of us would do best in Crown, I think, and I don't know about the others. We'll all need care, and healing."
He'd thought the Ennead had broken them. But there was spirit in them still, and they were with him, and their words carried a double meaning: forgiveness. He was not alone.
They deserved an honest answer. "I don't know," he said. "It's sowmid. Still cold out. We'd starve. Before we got across the Aralinns. I think. We're going through them."
"Away from the sea, I hope," said the wordsmith.
"Yes," he said, though he couldn't say why he was so certain. "Into the mountains. Through them."
"Back into the Holding," said the illuminator.
"I don't know," he said, as the marbled walls became more nightstone than magestone, the flecks of mica in the one not sparkling in the glow of the other. "Maybe," he said.
"Let the boy be," said the wordsmith. "Let him do what he has to do."
There were grunts from the binders, sounds that had the inflection if not the shape of words. He heard no objection in them, or accusation, or mistrust. Given time, he thought, he might come to understand them as they seemed to understand each other. Perhaps they would all make a home together somewhere, if the stewards won their battle, if the rumored Darkmage and his rebel horde succeeded in bringing the Ennead down. They could start a village of their own, band together to put the horror of this place behind them forever, work to make a new life. He'd never had a real home. What joy, to find friendship, to find unity in survival, among those who understood where he had been.…
He shook off the waking dream. They had been mages, and could be mages no more. They would fight bitterness the rest of their days. They might go mad, as mages denied the use of their light were said to. They would have families somewhere, most of them, and they would want to return and be comforted in loved ones' arms, but they would fight pity the rest of their days, too, and helplessness. What the Ennead had done to them, no mage could heal.
But they had chosen life. They had chosen to follow him to freedom. He could not be responsible for how they used it, or hope for lasting bonds. He was still alone, in the end. No family to run to. He must see them on their way and then go on his. Whether or not he had anywhere to go.
As they came into full darkness, he let go of the future as he had let go of the past. He concentrated on the next step, on the feel of plain stone under his hand, on the cold smell of a rocky corridor new-cut in the mountain and not warded against damp. His nose caught a whiff of burning pitch as the passage abruptly narrowed, but he startled when splintery wood came under his hand, then the metal banding it. His fingers found a handle and the iron tongue that would lift a latch on the other side.
"Stop," he said softly, before the mages blundered into him. "There's a door."
They stood for a few moments, silent except for labored breath. He could smell their fear, and taste his own.
"We could go back," someone said at last. "Try a different turning."
"No," the boy said. "No. There'll be doors at the end of the others, too. Or blank walls."
"These tunnels are your mind, aren't they?" said the rasping voice of the blind wordsmith. It was close beside him. He felt her breath on his neck. "You dreamed these passages. They're a reflection of you."
"I guess they are," he said.
"They must have used you ill, that you could not even dream your way to freedom."
Not as ill as they used you, Wordsmith. He drew himself up. "I'm going through. You should wait. Let me look."
He felt movement, and when she spoke he knew it for a shake of the head. "We're together in this. Unwise, perhaps—but what's left to us if they capture you?"
"A chance," he said; but he grasped cold iron, levered the latch up, and pushed the wood outward to open their way back into the ancient corridors of the Holding.
Flickering torchlight, a tarry odor, a waft of smoke diverted into the doorway. In the more populous areas there were lampwells, not torches. Perhaps they had lucked out. Once he had his bearings, he might get them to the stables. He thought most of them could sit horses, and he knew which were the quiet mounts. He stood aside to let the three dozen mages limp and carry and guide each other into the greasy air of the corridor. He formed and discarded plans in his head as they moved. They would not do well on stairs. He did not know who watched the stables now or whether they were safe haven. Best to find a little-used chamber to hide the mages until he could see how things stood. He would scrounge food and water for them somehow—they were all skin and bones. Or park them in a pantry; who'd bother to prepare food now, with battles raging throughout the Holding?
"I don't smell any lights," the wordsmith said, her face raised as if she were actually sniffing the air. Mages could sense each other's lights, some as a taste, some as a scent, some as a warm glow as from a candle's flame. No warders or reckoners nearby, then; that was good. But it didn't mean there weren't stewards. Too many stewards supported the Ennead they'd served for generations.
"Good," he said. "But stay here. For a moment." He crossed the corridor to try a door on the other side. He heard someone shut the door they'd come through. Something told him to turn, make them open it again, not cut off the retreat. Before he could form the words he heard exactly the sound he'd feared: the tread of many boots on stone. Approaching along a cross-corridor. Moving fast.
"Friend or foe?" the illuminator asked him, as if stewards could sense in each other something like the quality of light a mage could sense—as if as a runner boy he was even a steward at all.
"I don't know," he said, but then they rounded the corner and he saw the ripple of nine-colored Ennead cloaks, saw pale faces never graced by sunshine floating over the dark velvet livery the Ennead had lately adopted for their private stewards. A dozen of them, with longblades sheathed at their sides. As they caught sight of the ragged mages, the first rank of three drew their blades, and the middle man of them called a halt and stepped forward.
"By all the spirits…" one of the stewards murmured before he was shushed by the man next to him.
"What's this?" the leader said. His glance passed right over the boy, found no one worth addressing among the half-naked huddle of adults, then returned to the boy with a flicker of acknowledgment of his torn, but whole, black tunic and leggings. "A runner, are you? Where's your cloak? What are these people?" He squinted again at the mages. His eyes widened as he caught the glint of triskeles at their necks: the pewter pendants mages wore until the bonefolk took their corpses and left all metal things behind.
The boy thought quickly, his heart pounding. He didn't know these stewards, and their Ennead livery meant that invoking his master's name would not help him. Brondarion te Khine had standing only among stewards who opposed the Ennead. "The deepest chambers have been breached," he said, and if his voice shook it only made his case more plausible. "The Nine sent me to get these mages out before the other stewards killed them."
"Why would they kill them?" said one of the two standing behind the head steward, frowning. The other stood agape, his face drained of color.
The boy didn't know.
"To deprive the Ennead of their lights," said the leader. He'd lowered his blade, but was running a thumb back and forth along the crossguard. "Mages pledged their lives to the Ennead's needs in defense of the Holding against the Darkmage. Rebels would kill loyal mages, not spirit them away." He looked at the boy and came to a decision. "We'll bring you to the presence chamber, it's not far." He spoke in headlong bursts. "The Ennead will be glad to see you and you'll need an escort. We've put down most of the uprising but there are still rebels running loose. We'll see you safe."
No! Not the Ennead! He bit down on panic. What could he offer instead? Who could he trust these mages to? Who would be known to loyal stewards as loyal? He didn't think there were any head warders anymore, and he'd never known any warders to trust anyway. There had been reckoners he trusted, once. Now there was no telling who remained in the Holding. Or what side they were on. "I'm supposed to…" he started. No name came to him. "I'm supposed to bring them to…"
"Out with it, boy!" the leader said. "If you've orders from the Ennead let me hear them or I'll do with you as I see fit."
"Saraen, you're frightening the lad," said the man to the leader's right. Craggy-faced, with stooped shoulders. He had taken a step away from his commander. A subtle shift, but the wary evaluation in his eyes said he was wavering. The boy looked at the other stewards, saw shock mixed with some grim set jaws. He could use this, but he didn't know how. One of the mages behind him was tugging on what was left of his sleeve, murmuring something in his ear. The sound was so low he could barely hear it, and the shapeless moan of a binder to boot. He stopped trying to evaluate the stewards, and listened. The sound resolved into a name. Pelkin? Pelkin had been head reckoner. Pelkin was dead, or pledged to the Darkmage. Wait, not Pelkin…Burken. Yes, he knew Burken, a reckoner, a kind man others deferred to, retired from the field. But was he known as a loyalist? One name could bring the whole construct of his story crashing down.
"I don't care if he's frightened," Saraen was saying, "we're all bloody fr—"
"Burken," the boy said, and swallowed hard.
Saraen frowned. "I thought he was staying out of this. But yes, all right. You're thrice lucky we came upon you in that case. The reckoners' level is the least secure part of the Holding. You'll need us to get there."
The other stewards were shifting, murmuring among themselves. "What's been done to them?" one burst out, a world of doubt on his face, doubt in everything he'd believed about the Ennead he served.
"What had to be done," Saraen said curtly. "They gave themselves up for this. Come on, you lot, turn out, it's back the other—"
"By Eiden's bloody balls, we did not," the wordsmith said.
Dead silence followed.
The mages were straightening, standing taller, in bitter display of their own mutilation. The wordsmith let fall the stained gray strips she had been holding across her body, the remnants of white velvet that would have held such authority as could have made these stewards bow to her. "I was a warder in this Holding," she said, "and two moons ago the Ennead bade me come to aid the defense against the Darkmage. It was not a request. They had use of my light, and that use required such torments of my flesh as nearly broke my spirit. Mark me, I didn't pledge myself to that."
"They never told us they were using anyone so!" cried the young steward to Saraen's left. "Grieving spirits—"
Saraen had turned and struck him so fast that the boy didn't register the blow, only the stagger and the other stewards catching him. The young steward raised his head and said, through bloody lips, "I pledged my life to them, and may all the powers of goodness forgive me." He shook off his fellows, unbuckled his belt, and let his sheathed blade fall to the stone. His eyes were wild, dazed from shock and the blow. "May you forgive me, mages." He turned and took two unsteady steps away.
"Hold," the leader said, and the young steward hesitated, turned. The other one, the craggy one with caution on his face, had moved behind Saraen now, awaiting the turn of events. Good, the boy thought, that was good, the wordsmith's words were convincing him, and now he was between the leader and the others.
Saraen said to the mages, "These are terrible times. The Ennead must take terrible measures. I grieve for your pain, but if what they asked of you was more than you could give…if you regretted your pledge to serve once you understood what they required…"
The wordsmith's mouth twisted. "What I've told you isn't enough, eh, steward? They burned out my eyes, that I might never scribe again, never again wield a wordsmith's tools. Their dark craft fed on my despair, their castings were fueled by the blazing light of my agonies. That is how they used me, and nonneds more—we you see here are but the survivors, those unlucky or late-come enough to have not yet escaped into death." Ripping off the rag that wrapped her eyes, she cried, "We did not pledge ourselves to this!"
Some stewards cried out at sight of her ruined, festering eyes, some turned their heads, some cast beseeching looks at their leader, desperate for denial or explanation. The mages, pressed close for warmth and support, had instinctively been hiding or protecting their injuries, but now they spread out to fill the corridor, raising blunted limbs, letting filthy wrappings fall, opening their mouths. Some stewards at the back broke and fled, ignoring Saraen's orders to stop. Helpless, swearing, he commanded the rest to form ranks and stand firm, then turned, shaken.
"Is this true, boy?" he asked.
The boy blinked. "What difference does what I say make?"
Saraen gestured at his clothes. "You wear the black. You serve the reckoners, and the Ennead. You're one of us." He ran a hand through his hair, his eyes going wild for a moment, then spat at the wall. "I can't very well ask the Nine, now, can I? Tell me true, boy, or I swear you'll regret it."
The boy stood up straight and forced his shadow-haunted eyes to fix unwavering on the steward's face. "It's true," he said. "And worse besides. I've seen it. I've been party to it. We all have. Every steward in this Holding. The revolt is only the others trying to make good. Trying to stop it. As best they know how." He had not strung so many words together in a long time. It exhausted him. Too much responsibility. Too long without food, water, genuine sleep. The battles inside his mind and out, the long upward climb to bring these mages here. They had suffered far worse, but that didn't make his knees less weak. He was shamed to feel naked, trembling mages move close to support him.
"They should have told us," Saraen said. His low voice was steady. His blade sank.
I don't think they thought they could trust you."
The man rubbed a fist against his brow, his eyes shut tight, then mastered himself and said, "They were right. They could only have shown us. And they couldn't." He turned to his men. "But now they have. Are you—"
"Traitor," came a soft growl, and then a sucking gasp.
The boy understood what had happened only when Saraen fell. It cleared the way for him to see the craggy man beyond him with the blooded blade. The other stewards stumbled back in confusion and horror.
"Did you think defeating the Darkmage would not require terrible sacrifices?" the man said to Saraen as he died.
It had been Saraen's loyalty he was wary of. The boy had thought he was swayed by the mages' condition and considering taking over. He'd been only half right. He'd never been any good at gauging expressions.
This floated bemusedly through his mind as the corridor erupted in violence. Half the stewards lurched to craggy-face's side as the others attacked with bared blades. The two factions were evenly matched. For one suspended moment, iron clanged into deafening stasis. Neither side yielded.
Then mages were pushing past the boy to fall upon the nearer side. The mages who'd been supporting him drew him back and away. Blood flew through the air as some of the stewards turned blades on the mages and the others beat back the armed assault.
There were nearly three dozen mages and only half a dozen opposing stewards. Craggy-face's nearest cohorts went down under a mass of battering limbs. The rest, outnumbered, died on the blades of the stewards who had been their comrades. It was done in a matter of breaths, the stone floor of the corridor paved with death.
"Is that all they needed?" the blind wordsmith breathed into the awful silence. "To see us?"
The illuminator who had become her second raised himself from the crush of bodies, gave others his elbows to help pull themselves up, and staggered to the wordsmith and the boy and the weaker mages who had drawn back. He sank painfully to his knees on the blood-slick stone. Tears ran through the smears of red on his face. "It would seem so," he said, over the sobs of men who had just killed their friends. "Perhaps…" He took a moment to catch his breath. "Perhaps that is what we must do now. Show ourselves to the rest of them. Perhaps it isn't too late."
"Then you dreamed our way true," the wordsmith said to the boy. "Your mind brought us where we needed to go."
The boy looked at the corpses on the floor, at the shattered stewards beyond them, some on their knees beseeching forgiveness from the spirits, some standing in shock with their blades dangling from nerveless hands. Eiden Myr had never had blades before this last year. Eiden Myr had never had battles, or shed its own folk's blood. This Ennead had brought the world to this. He would never make good on his part in it. He was just a frightened boy.
One steward had made his way through the carnage to approach the mages. "You'll need care," he said quietly. "You'll need a place of safety. Let us take you to our quarters. We'll do what we have to do to see you safe."
"Will you help us turn the other Ennead loyalists?" the illuminator asked.
"We can try," the steward said. "It's too late, I think. But we can try."
Another came up beside him, her face a mask of hatred. "We can get close to the Ennead. We can put an end on this directly."
"Come with us for now," said the first. "I don't know how you got this far, in the state you're in, but if you can make it a bit farther we'll…help, a little. As we can."
Some mages had died on stewards' blades, but more than three nines still lived. They looked done in, but they rose up, they lifted each other, they allowed the remaining stewards to bear them away down the corridor, to help the uprising as they could, to do what they could against the Ennead. The boy hung back, and when the wordsmith, sensing his absence, called for him, he caught the illuminator's eye and shook his head. The illuminator leaned over to the wordsmith and spoke. She lifted a hand in salute, and then was gone around the turn, leaving the boy alone with the dead.
He sank down cross-legged, put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, and cried for a long time. Then he rose and went down the corridor closing the eyes of the dead. When he got to the end, he sat again. He was freezing. He could not bring himself to strip a corpse of its nine-colored cloak, no matter how badly he longed to wrap himself in wool-lined velvet. He knew he must get up and go on. But there was nowhere to go. He could still follow the mages and stewards—they'd be moving slowly, and leave a trail of blood—but he was neither mage nor steward, he did not belong with them, and he was too shamed and too afraid of how much he wanted to be one of them. He could go back down to the chambers where he'd left his master and his friend, but that battle would be long over, and he could not put himself in the Ennead's hands again just for the certainty of having viewed their bodies. He could return to the passageways he'd dreamed, and drown in memory. Or he could leave the Holding, leave the reek of blood and death and agony and find true freedom, his heart's desire, in the clean mountain air outside.
He could make his way to the Shoulder and the High Arm, work for food; but he knew no trade except for the fetching of mages, and the care of horses he could not even shoe or stitch tack for—he was useless outside the Holding. He could take a mount and ride back through the Aralinns, back to the village he'd guided an illuminator from the last time he'd been sent out. There'd been sanctuary in a tavern there, a spill of warm light through the doorway. He might walk through that doorway again. But he could not go without news to give her folk, and he did not know what had become of her. He could go to Crown and take ship for the Boot or the Toes, clear around Eiden Myr, as far from the Holding as you could go, and see if some craftsfolk or traders would take on a boy too old to prentice.
Or he could sit here in torchlight with the dead.
Sitting with his head bowed, in a stupor of fatigue, he startled at a rustling sound as a long shadow fell across him. It would be some dead steward rising, some haunt sweeping down on him. The corridor was filled with them—
They were tall, clothed in tatters, white as the bones they consumed, silent in the presence of the dead they had come for. But they were not haunts.
He was too shocked even to scramble back. They seemed to come right through the stone walls, appearing like wraiths, but they were as solid and real as he was. One looked at him as they bent to their work—dark eyes, unblinking, too large for its thin face, swimming in tears that never fell—then looked away with no acknowledgment. They did not seem to mind that he was there, though no one had ever seen the bonefolk work. They would not come as long as humans held vigil; you had to leave the dead for them or the dead would rot where they lay. But he sat and watched, and they made no objection; and neither did they drag the bodies off around the next turn of the corridor, as they easily could have. They bent down, and lifted the dead in their spindly arms, gently, like cherished children. Perhaps he had dreamed so deep that he had seemed dead, and they'd come for him but gone off again on finding him alive. Perhaps he was a haunt himself, perhaps he'd died in the melee and had no memory of it now—was his one of the bodies whose eyes he had slid closed, had he failed to recognize his own face? He could feel his fingers digging into his own arms hard enough to hurt, but who knew what haunts felt—perhaps they believed they still had bodies, perhaps they didn't really know they were dead until the bonefolk took them. The bonefolk might be taking him now, and in moments he would fly apart, to haunt this corridor, forever unpassaged. No mages had cast passage for the stewards and other mages who'd died here. This corridor would be crowded with haunts. But if he were a haunt, wouldn't he see the others?
"I'm alive," he whispered, pulling back from the brink. The boneman who'd glanced at him stood holding a mage's body, and at his words it uncurled its long fingers, fanned them out and back in what looked like a rippling wave but might mean anything—a bid for silence, agreement that yes, he was alive…the flexing of stiff fingers.
The corridor went deathly cold. He'd been shaking already, but that was nothing compared with the chill that swept through now, an icy airless wind. The torches went dim without dying out, their flames burning low and smoky. In the gloom, the bonefolk became pale, insectile shadows, and for another moment of madness he feared he'd dreamed them, too. They would turn black and toothed and taloned and rend him. He would not have the strength to resist. He might have fallen asleep where he sat. He might be freezing to death, that would explain the terrible cold, and this a last, spectacular hallucination….
"I'm awake," he said softly.
Again the boneman fanned its fingers.
Telling him something. Telling him, Yes, you are alive, you are awake. Telling him, Yes, I see you. You may stay. You may live.
The bonefolk cradled the bodies. The bodies took on a greenish glow, so bright he had to squint and was no longer sure what he saw. The bonefolk threw their heads back, mouths open in pleasure or pain or supplication. The corridor filled with a chalky scent cut with a harbinger of storm. The floor became a luminous green where blood had pooled. The glow intensified, an eerie, impossible phosphorescence, like something seen in darkest swampland, or Galandra's light running up a ship's rigging, only tinged with the color of storm, of moonlight filtered through the earliest spring leaves. He saw the bones within the flesh, starkly outlined in their joints and sockets, beautiful and supple in connection, and then the bones, too, were subsumed into radiance, and what the bonefolk held in their arms were human forms made of light itself.
The lights that had been the dead blazed so bright it made him weep, and then were gone; his eyes, seared by the memory of that light, were unable to distinguish the precise moment of their passing. He blinked at the after-image, shifting his focus, and the bonefolk's arms were empty, falling back to their sides. A handful of pewter triskeles hit the floor, some knives, small tools, and a clatter of stones from a steward's pocket; the bag that had held them, like the clothes, the boots, the belts and scabbards, had been consumed along with the bodies.
Slowly the bonefolk's mouths closed, their heads came down, their eyes opened. Again one looked at him, with no expression, no recognition. Then they too were gone, stepping back into the walls, merging back into the stone.
The corridor was empty, the floor cleansed of blood, the air cleansed of smoke and the reek of dying. It smelled like a mountainside after a thunder-storm—every particle of existence scrubbed clean. The cold was gone, though there was no warmth to take its place, and the torches flared up, reasserting their presence with ordinary smoke that drifted off on ordinary air.
"I'm alive," the boy said. He fanned his fingers as the boneman had. "I'm alive. I have to go on."
He pushed himself to his feet and struck off up the corridor, opposite the way the stewards had taken the mages. A junction chamber at the end offered two other doors, and a spiral stair leading only down. One door was locked. The other opened on darkness. The stair, absurdly, ended one level down, and there were no doorways there.
He went back to the door he had come through with the mages. It opened on solid stone.
He looked down the corridor in the direction the stewards had gone. Back into the Holding. Back to the Ennead.
He returned to the junction chamber, took an oil lamp from its niche, and entered the doorway full of darkness. The passage beyond sparkled with night-stone, and led upward. He followed it until his legs ached and never came to a door. He began counting breaths, and at a nonned he turned to go back—then turned again and continued. Nothing would have changed where he had been, but if he kept going up, he might get out.
Or, he had to acknowledge when his legs gave way and he could not draw breath to keep climbing, he might not.
He rested. His breath came easier. The air chilled his sweat-damp clothes. His legs seized; he flexed and massaged them. He rose again, and climbed—it was steeper now, had been for some time, and there were clefts scored across the stone floor as footholds—and rested again when he could no longer climb, then climbed again. His breathing and his scuffling boots made the only sound. The passageway had no curve to it, did not spiral up the Holding to the top. That he had not come out by now meant that it must have led him straight into the mountain. He tried to still his heart, but terror was taking hold of him. This was the price of cowardice. Unwilling to face the Ennead, he had brought himself to this.
This was the price of courage. Choosing, at last, not to go back to them, as he had done time and again despite every opportunity to flee, he had come to this.
He could no longer climb. His belly was clenched in on itself with hunger. His throat and mouth burned for water while his bones and muscles ached with cold. He had nearly dropped the clay lamp so many times that he knew the next time it would shatter. He could not see how much oil remained in it, but the thin slosh when he shook it wasn't promising.
He turned. He began the slip-sliding descent. His trembling legs could not be trusted on the decline. He sat down for another measured rest, and for the first time in many breaths looked up from the floor, to the end of the lamplight's oval.
Downward, the passage ended in a blank wall.
"No," he said, just a rasp from his dry throat.
He no longer knew if he slept or woke.
He set the oil lamp beside him. It made a dull clink as it met stone—a welcome sound, a different sound, a sound. There was not much sound in dreams, as he recalled. But it was a hollow sound. Little oil left. He couldn't blow out the flame to conserve; he had no way to light the wick again. He pulled off a boot and folded the sock under one end of the lamp, so it wouldn't skitter away down the slope, and so the oil wouldn't pool away from the wick.
He lay back on the rocky floor, groaning as his back and head were drenched with cold.
He willed himself to sleep.
He never remembered his dreams, so if he knew he was dreaming when he dreamed he did not know he had known it when he woke.
I'm thinking, he thought. I'm not sleeping.
If he slept, if he dreamed, he could change the world.
He could change the tunnels, anyway. The passage had changed by itself, or because he was dreaming it. Maybe it was the mountain that slept, and dreamed, not him.
Stop thinking.
Before, when he was angry or afraid, he'd always been able to escape into sleep. He'd lie down, think how badly he wanted to be away from wherever it was, and be gone.
He must have gotten braver during that brief time with the mages, and the bonefolk after, because he was still lying here thinking about sleeping instead of doing it. And he very badly wanted to be away from here.
Unless he was already dreaming. He did not know if you could dream that you had gone to sleep. A dream within a dream—what would that do, in dreams like his?
Stop thinking!
He opened his eyes. The lamp was still burning. It was hard to keep his eyes closed, from fear that when he opened them it would have gone out. Taking a deep breath, he turned his head, lifted himself a little, and prepared to blow the flame out.
His breath died. He could not bring himself to extinguish the light. He forced himself up, the hardest thing he had ever done, and with the last energy in his spent limbs climbed away from the lamp and its illusory golden warmth. In this, the passage aided him; it curved now, where it had been straight before, so that not so much climbing was required before the light was gone. If the lamp kept burning, he could go back to it. If not, it would have gone out anyway.
Now, in darkness, with only the memory of flame hanging before him wherever he looked, there was no distraction.
He lay flat again, closed his eyes, and watched the phantom flame fade. He focused on the frantic beating in his chest, the longer rise and fall of his breathing over it. Nothing but that: the pulse of his heart, the surf of his breath, the life inside him. Both slowed, after a while. After a longer while, he could not feel the cold anymore. That quickened breath and heart—he might die, if he let the cold make him sleep. But he could not get out of here from behind, where the passage had closed to him, and he could not get out from ahead, which was only stone for many days' walk, if the stone even chose to take him that far. He could only get out sidewise. Or die anyway.
He knew how long a night was. He had lain awake for most of many nights, fighting the sleep he sought now, when he'd begun to realize that his sleep brought deadly dreams. He lay quiet for at least that long. Sleep never came. He had never felt more awake before, his mind ranging over his deeds, his wants, his guilts. The cold didn't take him; it was not as cold as snow, not winter-cold, not cold enough.
His dreams had deserted him.
He found his body again. It took a long time. There was a hand…here was his mouth…here were his eyes, though they were useless now. His legs came back as a pair. Every part of him was in agony from the cold. It took him a ninebreath just to get his elbows under him, twice that to sit up. But everything worked. A lifetime later, he was on his feet. Fumbling with his breeches, nearly too late, he relieved himself in the general direction of the wall; it stung coming out, and the trickling sound maddened him with thirst. It would mark this place. If the passage circled back into itself, he would know.
He was at the mercy of the passage now.
He walked. One foot, push up the incline, another foot, push up the incline. In this way he crabbed over to the wall. He kept a steadying hand on the vertical stone. After a while he realized he was trying to pull himself along the stone, but there were no handholds, and his fingernails were wet with what must be blood, and the wasted effort weakened him. He let his hand trail along the nubbly rock as through water over the side of a drifting boat.
He walked. The thick darkness was like a giant dreamshadow enfolding him. He kept reminding himself that he could breathe. Foot down, push forward, breathe in. Foot down, push forward, breathe out. It was just ordinary darkness. If he was dreaming, the shadows were outside, wherever his body lay. If not, then there would be no shadows.
He walked. His legs gave out. He slept by accident, but no dreams came, or if they did they changed nothing. Still the sandy wall under his hand, the scored stone under his feet. He walked again, not so far this time. How long had it been? Another day? How long would it be until he died of thirst? Wondering that, he found himself lying on his face with no idea if he had fallen or lain down. He was scrabbling along the stone, thinking he heard running water ahead of him. But it was below him, just there below a thin veneer of nightstone, and he was digging down to it, except the stone would not yield.
He woke up. He felt surprisingly rested, though still numb with cold. A bad dream, then. A powerless dream. He got up. He walked. He trailed his hand along the stone. He recoiled when it slid through a shock of cold—but it was water, a seep of water. He fell to his knees and slurped greedily at the mountain's gift, sobbing his thanks to unheeding stone, laughing in giddy victory, as if he could take credit for the decision that had brought him here. The stone had herded him. But it had given him water. It had given him a few more days of life.
Refreshed and strengthened, he walked. He could hear the water now, soft trickling rivulets at odd intervals, the stone weeping for him. How long until he starved? Long enough that it didn't matter. The rest of my life, he thought, and giggled, and went on even when his belly cramped so hard he cried out. After a while he wasn't even hungry anymore. He filled himself with water at every opportunity, marked his passage with it as it went through his body. He pushed on until his muscles failed and he felt himself sinking into the stone.
He woke up. How could it be a certain waking, when only the blanket of darkness greeted him? He prodded at his eyelids to be sure they were open. He went on, step by frozen, agonized step. If he'd dreame, and his dreams changed the passageway, he would not know it in the dark. Groping along one wall, he might miss an opening or a door in the other. But where would doors lead to now? He was deep in the mountain, far beyond the reach of the Holding. No one ever came this far. There were no passages that led this far. But there was water. He would not die yet, not if there was water. Had he dreamed the water? Was it not the mountain's gift, but his own?
He woke up. He must have cried; he was trying to lick tears from his chin, scoop damp into his mouth with his fingers, which tasted of copper and salt. He screamed to the bonefolk, the only ones he could imagine reaching him here, but the scream came out a croak, and maybe it was better that way, because if the bonefolk came he wasn't dreaming, he was dead.
He woke up, still lying flat on the stone, still mad with thirst, no rivulets of water nearby, all the threfts he had covered gone with the dreaming, all of it to do again. I can't, he thought, I can't, and Get up, you must, you have to.
He woke, and woke, and woke, but never slept, and no change from the pitch dark and the numb chill. There was water, then there wasn't; there was thirst, then there was water. Which was real? There was never food. If he dreamed water, he could have dreamed food, but there was never food. If the mountain had given him water, it could have given him mushroom heather—that only needed spores and damp to grow, and no light or warmth at all. It was a cruel mountain. It taunted him. This was a cruel dream.
His foot caught on something, sent it skittering off to shatter against the wall. He followed it, bent down, touched wet shards of clay, sniffed oil on bloody fingers: his lamp. It had gone out. He sat down, held the broken pieces in his hands, and laughed until he felt faint. When he stopped to gasp breath, he could hear it: the river flowing over the clay bottom that had been dredged for the stuff to mold and bake into a lamp that would hold oil. Delighted, he followed the sound. He pushed damp fern fronds aside. He smelled mint and mulch and wet bark. Glorious smells. Life smells. They drew him into the blue-gold air, the tumbling buzzing dance of slipshod freedom. He could take it! He would be brave this time. No more the dragging chain of threat to haul him back. Death was good for blanking out the things you could lose. Not many, really—and that was a sad thing. Mostly his master. The other fosterlings. No friends. Well, the horses. But Purslane died. The mountain broke him. He flailed free of his grave, good strong brave fellow, brave Purslane, the color of brown river clay, knew his fool boy loved him and took every advantage of it, didn't he? But he was broken. He couldn't go on. Sometimes you were toobroken to go on.
That was a bad place, a behind place, a place back in the dark tunnel. Ahead was mint and emerald fern in a depth of greenness, and the blue-gold dancing invitation, and he would take its hand, he would, because there was nothing to fear now. But he feared he was wrong. Death was the easy thing; life was the terror. He could see it now, and oh, he didn't want to. He tried to burrow back into the dark, to wake again in drynumb coldweary hunger, but it was beyond him now, and anyway there was no choice, his attention wouldn't tear away.
Lights. A world of lights. A great plane of lights, shifting, growing, blazing, flickering, burning calm and true. They hurt his dark-craving senses. Some were trying to save the world. He could have told them. He could have. But they didn't ask. Just went right on, headstrong, casting impossibility. It was going to break! They were going to break it!
He reached out. To stop it. To touch it. The light. And cracked open like a shell. Bloomed like a flame after the first tinder caught. Swell of golden radiance, eclipsing the sparkling world of lights, joining it, spirits, joining never noticed the shy boy in the shadows breaking the world in the saving of it He screamed a name as the world-shell shattered and a burning hooked blade stabbed up through him and twisted, trying to withdraw, trying to core him like an apple, a blinding searing agony that left not ache, nor cold, nor thirst, nor hunger, nor shadows, nor anything at all beyond a yawning tunnel of darkness.
But it was only a dream, thought Mellas, spread flat on nightstone inside a dreaming mountain, a cruel fang of fired river clay clutched biting in his palm, and woke, shrieking, into the abyss.

Copyright © 2003 by Terry McGarry