Book of Iron

Four

Maledysaunte glanced at Kaulas and touched her throat with two fingers, shaking her head lightly.

“She can’t speak now,” Riordan translated unnecessarily. “Not until her voice grows back.”

“Grows…back?”

The bard spoke as mildly as butter. “She is an immortal, Wizard Kaulas. She will heal.”

Bijou would have given anything to see the expression on Kaulas’ face behind the veil. Just a glimpse of the thin band of nakedness revealing his eyes showed her awe and avarice.

He glanced quickly aside, as if he did not care to see her reading him. “It wasn’t this bad last time,” he said, voice still muffled by his veil.

“Indeed.” Prince Salih pulled a fold of cloth across his face as if in unconscious imitation of the necromancer. “Would you say that something has their guard up?”

“I’d say,” said Salamander. She reached to take Maledysaunte’s arm. The necromancer shook her off and stepped forward, making a hooking gesture with her left hand. Follow.

She led them across the trampled sand, down into the center of Ancient Erem. The ghuls drew back before her. They lined the path, enormous eyes staring. Bijou found herself walking with the others, three abreast in two ranks. They measured their strides. The stamping, undead stallion followed them, shying and switching his tail as if the flies had not long ago had their way with him. Ambrosias lay flat and scrunched its forelegs into the cushion of Bijou’s hair.

A line of cold froze her spine straight and stiff. She had made such a promenade before, down lines of hostile observers, at the beginning of the long walk that had brought her to Messaline as a girl.

She hoped this time the pejorative gazes would not be reinforced with hurled stones.

One ghul, gray and starveling as the others, pushed through to the front rank and prostrated itself before Maledysaunte. It hissed; it glibbered. Prince Salih moved forward, ready to intervene, but the ghul came no closer as Maledysaunte checked her step. Her lips formed words; no sound emerged. But its eyes watched the shapes her mouth made avidly, and it answered.

“It wants to know,” said Kaulas, who spoke the language of ghuls, “if we seek the treasure-hunter. If we do, it says she went beyond the water.”

“Do you trust a ghul?” Salamander said.

Kaulas and Maledysaunte, as one, shook their heads.

The ghul retreated, scuttling backwards on all fours. Bijou started forward again as if it had not accosted them. Out of the corner of her mouth, she spoke to Salamander and Maledysaunte as they came up beside her. “So, what say you tell us exactly what it was that Dr. Liebelos did, in Avalon? And what the results were?”

Maledysaunte just shook her head. No sound from her lips: not yet anyway. Bijou kept an ear on the footsteps of the men close behind them, but she wouldn’t turn her head to see them. Instead she cleared her throat, a sound meant for encouragement. With some urging—it was heavy, being made of stone and metal and bone—Ambrosias slid back down Bijou’s body and twined through the sand beside her.

From beyond Maledysaunte, the Wizard Salamander spoke reluctantly. “You’ve heard of the Glass Book of Erem?”

Despite herself, Bijou could not quite hold back the chuckle. “It figures prominently in the history of Messaline.”

“There’s another such text.”

The moonlight was so bright that Bijou could see the color rise in Maledysaunte’s white cheeks. It stood out in stark, discrete spots like the rouge on a porcelain doll from the outermost East. Her eyes flicked again, following some movement that Bijou could not. This time, Bijou understood it, and wondered how long one could endure, aware of things no one else could perceive, before it drove one mad.

“I see,” Bijou said.

“The Iron Book of Erem. Also called the Black Book of Erem.”

“Where is it?”

“Nowhere in the world, any more.”

“Destroyed?”

“No,” Salamander said.

From the set of Maledysaunte’s chin, Bijou imagined she understood what the Hag of Wolf Wood was feeling. Bijou knew what exile felt like, the repudiation of one’s family. But Maledysaunte’s pride and distress were clues, and Bijou could not afford to pass those up, currently.

“I think,” Bijou said, as they passed the last rank of ghuls, who turned to watch their backs retreating as they walked deeper into Ancient Erem, “that we’ve earned a few answers.”

“When the Black Book has been read, it translates itself.”

“Into…another language?”

The footsteps of the men grew ragged as they began to climb a slope to the lowest terrace of stone houses. The undead stallion’s hooves slid in sand.

“Into the soul of whoever read it. It ceases to exist in the external world. In a very real sense, that reader becomes the book. And there it remains until that reader dies.”

Bijou actually blinked, understanding running hot and habituating through her veins. The rush cleared her of the pall of sorrow and cobwebs Maledysaunte’s incantation had left behind. She drew a deeper breath in reaction, thinking of rotten teeth and withered skin. “Which usually happens quite quickly, I imagine.”

“I imagine,” Salamander agreed.

“But Maledysaunte is immortal.”

“She is.”

Behind them, Kaulas cleared his throat. “That doesn’t explain what brings your mother here, however.”

Finally, a dim smile flickered across Salamander’s face. Bijou caught it from the corner of her eye. “It’s said that the one way to win the Book free of its…host…is to summon it back to the anvil where it was forged.”

“Here in Erem,” Kaulas said.

“Here in Erem.”

Prince Salih asked, “What would that do to the host?”

Maledysaunte turned over her shoulder and smiled, a terrible grin that showed the gaps in her teeth and her blackened tongue.

“I see,” said Salih.

“You could have warned us in advance,” Kaulas said dryly. “Instead of spinning tales—”

“Spinning tales is what I do. Besides, would you have helped us then?” Riordan asked.

“We’re heroes,” Salih said.

Bijou shot Kaulas a sharp glare when he laughed.

They came to a funnel-shaped depression in the ground. Bijou turned left to skirt it.

“Watch out for that,” said Prince Salih to the newcomers, interposing himself, one hand on the hilt of his scimitar. Gently, he laid the other fingertips on Maledysaunte’s arm to guide her away. She turned to him, eyes wide with surprise, and Bijou did not think it was offense. She was just shocked that anyone would touch her so informally, so without thought.

The flesh around her mouth was already plumping again.

“Myrmecoleon pit-trap,” he explained gently. “If you fall in, you slide to the bottom—”

“Oh,” she said, her voice rusty and worn—but present, and that was something. She swallowed wincingly. “That’s not in the book.”

Wordlessly, Bijou held out her water-bottle, and watched as the Hag of Wolf Wood took a painful sip.

“Maybe they’re new,” said the prince.

She rinsed the water around her mouth, swallowed, and said, “So. I suppose we’re looking for the blacksmith’s shop.”

“Of course,” the prince answered. “Where else would you keep your anvil?”

Logic led them, along with the memories of Bijou and Prince Salih. An anvil would be on the ground floor; a forge would be well-vented. They decided rapidly that neither was likely to be located in the terraced houses stacked one tier on the next in the sandstone hills, turning instead to the largest excavations—the ones with pillared facades stretching up into the cliff-heights. But poking among them at random proved unhelpful, and every one of the adventurers was too aware of the lurking ghuls and of the remaining duration of the night wearing thin.

“There are a dozen,” Riordan said. “Did your spider have better intelligence than we’re likely to gain by choosing at random?”

“What about what the ghul said?” Riordan asked.

“A forge would be near water.” Bijou volunteered the information as she realized it, having some experience with such things.

Salamander nodded. “I’m afraid my new friend was left behind in the stampede. But I got a sense of water from her, yes.”

“Good,” said the prince. “Water is this way.”

“How do you know that?” Riordan asked—nevertheless following unhesitatingly.

They hadn’t made it this far into the city last time. And there were no maps of Ancient Erem—none remaining, anyway, to Bijou’s knowledge.

“Can’t you smell it?” It was a testament to the prince’s diplomatic skills that no trace of helpless wetlanders crossed his expression. Bijou was glad Kaulas went veiled, after all: there were none so scornful as those who had had to learn the hard way.

“Is that what that metal smell is?” Salamander asked.

“Yes,” said Bijou.

“Then yes,” she said. “I can.”

The way tended downhill again, which was a good sign, and the night still darkened. Moons set, and soon they were walking only by starlight—but the starlight was enough. They avoided two more myrmecoleon dens, eventually coming upon a tall tongue of sandstone riddled with tunneled doorways. They might once have had rectangular corners, but over centuries the wind and sand had worn their edges smooth. The path downward led them around it, and here the drifted sand had blown back from an ancient road paved with cracked white slabs of stone.

As they walked, Bijou became aware of the brightening of the sky, even though the moons had long slid out of it. At one horizon—not where she thought East lay, in reference to Messaline—a dim glow appeared behind the canyon walls—a line of peach and gold and lavender tracing the top of the cliff face.

Salamander looked at her. “Should we be taking cover?”

“We’ll have a little while no matter which sun it is,” Bijou said. “I’d rather find your mother before she…”

…has time to kill your friend.

Salamander nodded.

Bijou said, “Pray one of the white suns rises first. If your gods are the amenable sort, pray that it’s just the nightsun, and we’re in a year where it rises far in advance of the others.”

“How many suns are there?” Riordan said.

“Four,” said Maledysaunte. “Three daysuns—the blue, the orange, and the white—and the nightsun, which is white also. The daysuns rise and set together; it is the blue one whose light is so feared. Sometimes the orange sun eclipses it, which is safer. A little. The nightsun is a wanderer. Like the moon of Messaline and the moon of Avalon, sometimes it shines alone in the dark, and sometimes it shines with its sisters. There is a pattern to its meanderings,” she finished. “But it lasts a little over 1,864 years. And I’m not sure where we are within it. Once I get a look at the suns, I’ll know better…”

The others had paused to stare, the dead stallion tossing his head in impatience as he checked his stride to avoid trampling Kaulas.

“Of course,” the prince said to break the silence. “It’s all in the book.”

“The Book. The burning Book, the Black Book. The Book of flame. The Book, the Book, the Book.” Her child-soft lips twisted apologetically. “My head is full of it. I could tell you their names in the Ancient Tongue—”

“Thank you,” Salamander said hastily. “All the same.”

Despite the pale light creeping up the sky, Bijou smiled. These foreign wizards had a sense of humor after all. Even if it involved a language whose every syllable was murder.

The adventurers rounded the end of that sandstone tongue and found themselves looking down into a deeper, narrower, and more shadowed canyon. Serried ranks of broken-topped pillars marched its width and length, showing that the whole thing had once been roofed in stone to form a hypostyle.

“They built in the valleys to stay out of the suns,” Riordan said. “Gods, what a life.”

“And what a death,” Kaulas added. “They’re all gone now, and what they built….” He shrugged.

They could not see a sun yet, but a pale brightness—like the light of four moons—crept down one canyon wall: the first light of the nightsun, Bijou hoped. The sky had not paled much beyond that dusty mauve they’d seen on arriving, and she thought it was not yet bright enough to herald the white daystar. Also the air still held the morning cool.

“I think we’re in luck,” said Prince Salih. “Or the gods are with us.”

“You trust them not to change their minds?”

“I think that ghul was trying to trick us,” Riordan said.

Bijou shook her head. “Why should it, when it could lead us to our deaths simply by telling the truth?”

She broke into a shuffling trot, her kaftan trailing in the air behind. Running on dry sand was no joy: her calves ached within strides and the sand that had sifted into her boot gritted between the sock and her sole. But she concentrated on steadying her stride and her ankles as the others fell in. She could see the lakebed now, baked dry, with the fragments of stone roof that had once protected it half-embedded in the hardpan. It was difficult to judge how far away objects lay in such a desert, with no haze to blur distant things, but Bijou guessed the hardpan ended no more than an eighth of a league on—in the long, low arch of a cavern behind it. In that deep shade, Bijou could just discern the glisten of water.

Limping heavily, Riordan was falling behind as they ran until Kaulas stopped the dead horse and let him mount. The bard might have been dubious before, but it wasn’t because he didn’t know how to ride. He vaulted onto the stallion’s back with the same agility he’d shown exiting the roadster, and then he was in the lead at a rocking-chair canter. Clothing flapping, water bottles sloshing, the others raced after.

Bijou felt the air warming as she ran, the too-swift brightening of the rock wall—top to bottom—and then the sand at its foot as the nightsun slid over the edge of the cliff. It might have seemed no more than a star—it was a speck, surely no larger than a very bright planet against the fixéd heavens, and if it had any diameter its width was lost in its glare—but it was brighter than four full moons, easily bright enough to wash the velvet purple-black from the night and bleach it a heavy shade of lilac.

As the nightsun’s rays caught Bijou she shaded her eyes reflexively, but in truth there was no need. The light was no more than a bright candle held over her shoulder, and far from enough to make her squint. What worried her was that the sky continued to brighten behind the nightsun’s rising, incandescent lashings of molten gold and crimson staining half the shard of sky they could see from down in the canyon where they ran. She’d have pulled her hat up, but it wouldn’t stay on her head while she ran.

“I hope you brought a parasol,” Maledysaunte panted between steps. They were almost there. Less than a hundred canes distant, Riordan was already gentling the undead horse to a walk in safe shadow while those behind him pelted for safety.

“Smoked glass,” Salamander gasped back.

“Polarizing filter,” said Bijou, groping beneath her kaftan. The daysuns wouldn’t kill her instantly, and the scientist in her cried out for a glimpse. To come so far, to stand under the last memory of the sky of a destroyed kingdom—what Wizard could resist?

They hadn’t stayed for sunrise the last time they were here.

The sky overhead faded, and kept fading—through amethyst, orchid, lavender, to a horrible pallid shade, a white all dusty thistle-gray along the rim of the canyon. The heat fell down upon them, although the canyon was some protection: the cool air was trapped here and the savage heat only radiated in. Light burned down the canyon wall, brighter than any sun Bijou had ever seen, brighter by far than the twin suns of her childhood home.

Bijou thudded into the shade of the cavern with sweat washing tracks through the bitter dust that crusted her face, the corners of her mouth, the corners of her eyes.

“Kaalha be praised,” she murmured, falling against the damp sandstone in the shadow of the cave. Behind her, the hardpan across which they had just run blazed with light, impossibly brilliant. Too bright to look upon. Too bright even to look toward.

The cloth across Kaulas’s face was stuck wet to his skin. His breath made hissing sounds as he sucked air through it. And he was better off than Salamander and Maledysaunte, both of whom were crouched in the shade, hands on knees, gasping from the run.

“Polarizing filter?” said Prince Salih, wrinkling his brow.

Bijou fished it from her pocket. She pulled out a length of tight-woven beige cloth as well, draping it over her sunhat and her head as she edged around the shallow lake, back to the penumbra of the cavern’s welcoming shadow. She pinched the folds together around the lens, a cut of crystal magicked to protect her eyes even—she hoped—from the wrath of such a sun as this.

She wasn’t wasting time, she told herself. It would be a moment before the others had collected themselves enough to seek deeper in the cave.

Huddled in her makeshift blind, Bijou crept out into the light.

Even through the fabric, she could feel the heat instantly. It collected in the folds and scorched her fingers where she held the gather closed. But the suns—when she risked a quick glimpse—oh, the suns.

She had expected, perhaps, something like the suns of the veldt and the mountains—shining disks performing a stately courtship across the endless pale plane of the sky. But these were pinheads, negligible circles with an angular diameter no bigger than the sprocket-holes in a strip of silent-movie celluloid. The larger flamed a savage orange; the smaller burned actinic blue. It seemed as if only a diameter or two separated them, and a ceaseless tendril of flame curved across the space between to conjoin them. The fourth sun, as white and inoffensive as the nightsun, was a bright speck off to one side.

The heat was too much. Gasping in her shelter, Bijou ducked back inside the cave. How could that trifling thing drive her—already, after no more than a second or four—back into shelter, her skin prickling and sore where it had brushed the cloth? How could so much heat and brightness fall from so small—or so distant, more likely—a set of suns?

She groped for her water bottle and drank, swishing the water around inside her mouth so it would do the most good.

Back in safety, she folded cloth and lens and put them away. Her companions had gathered around Salamander, who crouched by the waterside. Bijou hoped they had remembered the warning not to drink. The dead stallion stood further down, sloshing water noisily with his skull as he tried to slake a thirst in flesh that no longer existed, but he was dead already: Bijou could not imagine the water would hold any terrors for him.

“That’s something,” she said, coming up to them. “Anyone else want to look?”

“Shhh,” Kaulas said without rancor. “Salamander has found a guide for us.”

Bijou looked down to see what the white Wizard held perched on her cocked forefinger. Orange as embers, and glowing softly in the shadows between a spatter of coal-black-dots…

“Of course,” Bijou said. “It’s a newt.”

“An eft, actually.” Salamander straightened up, licking her pinpricked finger again. Although it wasn’t her place to judge another’s magic, Bijou hoped there wasn’t too much newt slime on it. “She came this way.”

“Then by all means,” said Prince Salih. “Lead us, my lady.”