Guardians Of The Keep

CHAPTER 18

It’s hard to remember much about my escape with Captain Darzid. I held on to his waist and kept drowsing off as we rode through the cold night. It didn’t make sense that I could hold on for so long or that the horse could go for days without rest, but when we made camp somewhere on the far side of the Cerran Brae, several days’ travel from Comigor, I couldn’t remember having stopped even once.

The weather blocked the way. We came down from a pass through the mountains and were traveling north when the snow and the wind became so fierce that the horse refused to go further, even when the captain whipped him. When I buried my face in Darzid’s back to keep from freezing, I could hear the curses rumbling through his bones. “Perdition to this weather and this world and all lazy, sniveling beasts.”

We dismounted in a clearing, and I sat stupid and numb on a fallen tree while Darzid started a fire. “Come on,” he said, kicking a log close to the fire and jerking his head toward it. “No need to freeze. The weather’s a nuisance, but perhaps our pursuers will run into something like.”

“Pursuers?”

“Your mother has sent out search parties, of course. Those who murdered your father and your nurse are likely among them. But we have a good day’s start.”

One would think that with all the sleeping I had done on horseback, I’d be wakeful once we stopped, but it wasn’t so. The rocks and trees and sky all had blurry edges, and my mind seemed to slide off of anything it tried to settle on. That worried me, for it would be easy to make a slip and show Darzid that I was the very thing he was trying to protect me from. The captain gave me two blankets to wrap up in. The wind was howling, and even so near the fire, my hands and feet felt like ice.

While I wandered in and out of sleep, Captain Darzid was talking to himself. “Do they even suspect? Fate has rewarded our patience… We’ll need to be quick. They’ll be on our heels. The test of parentage will be the key… Everlasting night, to be home again, to reclaim what’s mine!”

Somehow all these things got mixed up with dreams of the strange old man from Grandmama’s garden and the words he’d spoken to Seri on that day. My own voice kept repeating his words over and over.

Then it was morning. The sun was blinding on the snow, the sky was bright blue, and the wind had died away. I was colder than ever, even when I drank the cup of hot wine the captain put in my hand. “Time to move on, young Lord,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“To a place of safety. I have friends-powerful friends- who have a fortress in a land far from Leire. You’ll be safe there, even from such dangerous enemies as you have. There you can grow strong and plan your revenge.”

“Revenge?” I still felt thickheaded and stupid.

“For your father’s murder and that of your friend, the nurse. I heard you swear to avenge them. I assumed your sworn oath would be as unbreakable as your father’s… but, of course, you are so young. Perhaps I’ve misjudged…” He lifted my chin with his black-gloved hand and stared into my eyes…

Lucy was rocking in her chair, smiling and cheerful, waiting for me. She held out her hand, but it wasn’t to me. She looked curious, then scared, because the hand that held hers wouldn’t let go. The person that wasn’t me raised a knife, a silver knife that gleamed so bright in the lamplight that it made it hard to see anything except the crest engraved on the hilt. The knife cut into Lucy until the blood ran out all over the front of her. She tried to scream, but of course she had no voice, and she fought with the person that held the knife, but he was much too strong. She was crying and held her hand to her apron, trying to stop the bleeding. The one who wasn’t me pulled her other arm away from her and cut her on that one too, and then held her in her chair until she stopped struggling. I carried her over to her bed and laid her down, but when I looked at her face again it wasn’t Lucy, but Papa. He was lying on the floor of a huge chamber full of clouds and fire that was dark and cold instead of bright, and he was bleeding from a terrible wound in his belly. Before I could say anything, before I could tell him that I was sorry I was evil, his eyes got wide and scared. He shuddered and blood ran out of his mouth. Dead. On the floor beside him was a bloody sword, marked with the same crest as I’d seen on the knife that killed Lucy. The dark fire burned its way into my head, until I was full of it…

“Yes!” I shouted, startling the dream away. “Yes, I want them punished. They murdered the two best people in the world, and I don’t care what I have to do to make them pay for it.” I was full of such hate and anger that I thought Captain Darzid would see right away how evil I was.

But he just smiled and said, “That’s more like it. I’ll help you grow strong enough that you can do whatever you want… even to men as powerful as Seri’s friends. Trust me. I know you don’t as yet, but I served Tomas faithfully for seventeen years, and I’ll do far, far more for you.”

“Help me avenge Papa and Lucy, and I’ll give you whatever you want,” I said.

“Exactly so,” said Darzid. “Come along now. The road to our safe haven will lead us through some strange places.” He pulled me up behind him on his great black horse, and we turned onto a road that was a ribbon of unmarked snow. My face felt hot, especially when I thought about Papa and Lucy, but inside all the rest of me was cold, and I didn’t think I’d ever be warm again.

“What is this place?” I asked the captain when we rode across the mud fields toward the bare white walls.

“This is the destiny of those who do not know their place in the universe.”

I didn’t understand him. It was an awful place, a burned-out ruin of a city, every building charred and broken, bones and skulls everywhere, even hanging from posts stuck in the ground. I’d seen ruins before. Papa had taken me to Vaggiere, a day’s ride east of Montevial, and to Mandebrol Castle, both destroyed by the Valloreans a long time ago. But those ruins had never made me feel sick and wretched like this one did. The bones were part of it. Anyone left alive-even if they were prisoners or wounded-would bury their dead. But then, not a blade of grass or a weed or a vine lived there, not a bit of moss, not a bird or beast or even so much as a spider or an ant creeping around. That made me think that maybe there had been no one left alive in that city.

We left our horses in front of what had once been a fine house, almost a palace. You could tell by the amount of stone fallen in on it and the broad steps that opened onto a grand commard-huge and round, paved in marble, with tall columns all around it. Lots of posts with skulls on them stood beside that house, and I tried not to look at them. The walls of the house were cracked and broken, some fallen away altogether. Charred roof timbers had crashed down into the middle of it. At least two people had died in the foyer, several more on the curved staircase that ended halfway up to the second floor.

“This was the lord of the city’s house. A sad place, is it not? I need to find something here before we can be on our way.” Captain Darzid’s boots clattered on the stone floor as we walked in, and his voice was very loud. I wanted to tell him to be quiet. It didn’t seem right to make noise in that house. But I didn’t say anything, lest he think me a coward.

We stepped over fallen pillars and tramped through frozen mud and dirty snowdrifts into a large courtyard in the center of the house. Lots of trees and plants had once grown in the courtyard-all dead stumps now, of course. Several statues had toppled over. Once I stepped right into a giant stone hand. From one corner of the cloister came a trickling sound. A small fountain was still running-the statue of a little girl emptying a pitcher of water into a shallow round basin. The pinkish color of the marble made her look almost alive. A stream of clear water ran from the pitcher to the basin of the fountain, and there was not a mark or a crack or a chip on any of it. The girl had a little smile on her pink marble face, like she knew she had escaped whatever happened to the rest of the city.

“Come along,” said the captain, when I stopped to look at the fountain. We climbed up steps that went nowhere, peered through doorways that had nothing on the other side of them, and pushed into dark holes under the fallen walls. “I’m looking for something like the little fountain back there, something that’s not burned up or ruined, but that has writing carved on it.” In and out we went until we must have covered every step of the house.

“It has to be here,” said the captain, kicking aside a charred timber. “They wrote it in stone, protected it with power, so it couldn’t be destroyed. Curse all Dar’Nethi bastards!”

Two days we searched that awful ruin for whatever it was Captain Darzid wanted. He said we were looking for writing that described a shortcut through the mountains to his friends’ fortress. I thought that surely we could have gone the long way around by the time we would find what he was looking for. We camped in the courtyard of the great house. I slept a lot of the time and had terrible dreams. Well, I called them dreams, but they seemed real. One was about Comigor, a vision so clear that I could smell the dry grass…

The tenants were tilling the fields. I could see them through the paned window on the stair landing. Nellia and James and the other servants were at their daily work. Nellia was singing. She always sang “The Warrior’s Child” in her rusty old voice when she sat with her sewing. I called out to say good day, but she didn’t answer, and the footman in the dining room looked right through me when I walked past him into the drawing room. Mama was there. She was very beautiful, dressed in white and wearing her favorite necklace-the one with the circles of diamonds all strung together. A harper played in the corner, and Mama was talking with her friends.

“Was there truly no trace of him ever found?” A woman in green with a crow’s face leaned toward Mama’s ear.

“None at all,” said Mama. She dabbed at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “The sheriff from Graysteve says that as no one has demanded ransom, we must assume he’s dead, I’m going to leave this wretched place forever. My poor lamb was such an unhappy child. It’s a comfort, in a way, a kindness that fate has saved him the pain of long life.”

“Come, Lady Philomena, enough of sad thoughts,” said a young man as he pulled her up to dance. Soon she was laughing again and drinking wine. Her diamonds sparkled in the lamplight as she danced.

“It’s as well the boy is gone,” said the woman in green to another woman. “He was so odd. I’ve heard rumors of murder and worse things… perversion… in this very house. The royal inquisitors were on their way when the boy disappeared…”

Another dream came, too, and like the other, it seemed more real than any dream. I knew all the people, but they couldn’t see me.

Two men-peasant men-were running through one of the rocky rifts that cut through the heath north of Comigor. One of the men carried a little girl in his arms. The other, an older man with a gray beard, was bleeding from a wound in his leg. The older man stumbled on a stone and fell. “A curse on the House of Comigor.”

“Hurry, Father Castor, they’re coming. We can’t stop.” The younger man was frightened. Choking smoke filled the air, and the young man couldn’t stop coughing. The little girl whimpered, and the young man pushed her face into his shoulder. “Hush, Ceillitta.”

“Go on with you,” said the older man. “I’ll hold them here as long as I can.” He pulled himself up to lean on the steep bank, unhitching a scythe from his belt.

With a sad curse, the young man gripped the older one’s shoulder, and then ran on down the gully away from the castle. He didn’t get very far. Riders wearing King Evard’s red-and-gold livery galloped along the edge of the rift and shouted when they caught sight of the men. Two soldiers slipped off their horses, slid down the bank, and cut off the old man’s head before he could cry out. Another pair of soldiers caught the younger man and dragged the little girl away from him. The rest of the troop came up, their horses’ hooves swirling up dust to mix with the smoke. They were laughing and mocking as they dismounted. Two soldiers held the young man by the hair and arms, and the others threw the little girl on the ground, pulled up her dress, and fell on her, one and then the other. The young man cursed and wept and strained to get free, while the little girl screamed, “Papa, Papa.” By the time they were done with her, her scream was just a dry bubbling sound. The young man was about crazy.

“This is what happens to them as nurture sorcerers,” said the captain of the soldiers. “This is the evil they bring into the world. If you had given him up, you and the child and the old man would live.” Then he cut the little girl’s throat.

“A curse on them all,” the young man sobbed. “May they all burn.”

“Oh, they will. Never fear,” said the soldier. “You have the easier part.” And he stabbed the young man in the belly and threw him onto the rocks.

I climbed out of the rift onto the hillside. The smoke was terrible, choking, making my eyes burn and water. When I stumbled on something softer than a rock, I didn’t know what it was until I fell on top of it, and came face to face with Allard, the head groom. Only it wasn’t hardly Allard anymore since his nose and ears had been cut off, and he was dead. I jumped up and ran before I could get sick, and I came to the top of a hill where I could see all around.

Comigor was burning-the roof, the stables, the barracks, the fields-for as far as I could see it was burning. People were screaming. The soldiers cut down anyone who tried to run away. A few of the castle guard were fighting to clear a way through the main gate for a carriage, but they fell one by one. When the soldiers dragged Mama and Nellia out of the carriage, others were already sticking heads on poles.

“The devil’s dam-the witch! Where’s fire enough for her?”

I always woke up sweating and coughing about the time Mama started to scream. I told myself that these were only dreams, not things that had really happened. But they left me feeling sick and sad, as if I’d really seen them.

By the afternoon of the second day, Captain Darzid was tearing away rubble with his bare hands. I stayed out of his way. He said we would have to leave that night if he didn’t find what he was looking for. There were other ways to get where we were going, but a lot farther and more complicated.

“I’m going to get a drink from that fountain,” I said. The water in Captain Darzid’s flasks tasted like old boots.

“As you wish,” he growled, pulling more stones away from a buried hearthstone and cursing the avalanche of rubble that followed. I left quickly, before he could tell me to help him move the piles of stone that had undone his entire day’s work.

We were down to eating nothing but jack. Being so dry and salty, jack always made me thirsty, and we had used up all the wine in Darzid’s pack. I hadn’t told Darzid about my own supplies, because I planned to use them when I ran away from him. I had almost run away the previous night, but I hadn’t seen any towns or villages close by as we traveled. Besides, I didn’t relish picking my way through the ruin or the mud fields in the dark. I would have taken his horse, but the captain’s horse wasn’t nice at all. He was like Captain Darzid, bad-tempered underneath all his politeness.

The little stone girl was still smiling to herself in the corner of the courtyard, pouring water from her bottomless pitcher. I helped myself to some of the water and sat down on the rim of the basin, not at all interested in going back to help Darzid. The water was cool, not freezing like you might expect in the winter, and sweet, the best thing I had tasted in a long time. It seemed to clear my head a bit, too. For the first time since leaving Comigor, I had two clear thoughts together. The first thought was that this whole business of searching a ruin for the route to a friend’s house made no sense at all. And the second was that those very instructions were staring me in the face from the bottom of the basin.

“Captain!” I called. “I think I’ve found it.”

He was beside me before I could snap my fingers. “Where? Show me, boy.”

“There,” I said, pointing to the words carved in the bottom of the marble basin under the clear water.

Darzid looked very strange for a moment, then a smile spread slowly out from under his black beard. “Of course… I never thought of that. Tell me, young Lord, how do you read it? My eyesight is certainly not of the same quality as yours… no, not at all… in this dim light.” He grabbed a charred stick and drew on the white paving stones everything that I read from the bottom of the pool. I didn’t know the language, but the captain nodded his head as if he did.

“Now we can ride,” he said. “If this storm will hold off so we can see the moon, then by morning we’ll be safe in Zhev’Na.”

I was happy to leave. “What was the name of that city?” I asked, as we rode toward the mountain. “Who lived there, and why were they all killed and left like that?”

“It was called Avonar,” said the captain. “You’ll hear that name again. It was-and is-the home of your enemies, people of no vision, people of no understanding of the dimensions and possibilities of the universe. You’ll learn more of it when we’re safe. For now, you’ve had a tiring day. Feel free to sleep as we journey.”

And, of course, I did. I dreamed those terrible dreams over and over again, and when I next woke up, I was in a very different place.