The Hidden Coronet

3

One day Soren was walking in the Fields of Eldaman when she saw a tiny flower under her foot. “What are you called?” she asked. The flower said it had no name. Soren picked it and wove it into a crown. She took it to Flain. “In our work,” she said, “we have overlooked the least and smallest of lives.”

Flain ran his fingers over the flowers. “From now on,” he said, “all men will know you. You will teach the highest how to be humble.”

Book of the Seven Moons

THE ROOM WAS VERY DARK. Galen would have only one lamp, and that was standing in the middle of the floor. Its yellow glow threw a great shadow over the keeper’s shoulder, edging his face with slants of light. Around it he was arranging the awen-beads, seven circles of green and jet, a peculiar formation new to Raffi.

Squeezed into the corner, his back against the dusty paneling, Raffi sat hugging his knees, then laid his forehead on them wearily.

The woman had fed them. A good meal—soup, mutton, and cheese, the best he’d had since they left Sarres, and despite his worry he had been hungry for it. She’d cooked it in the old kitchen below, where broken spits hung askew under the vast sooty throats of the chimneys, and she’d waited while they’d eaten it. But even Raffi had sensed the stifled fear in her, heard the small, impatient creaks her chair had made. She was desperate to get out.

At last Galen had cut a slice of cheese with deliberate care and said, “When you go, lock the doors from the outside. Whatever sounds you hear, whatever strange sights you may see, you stay away. Neither you nor anyone else is to come back to this house until full daylight. Do you understand that?”

Relieved, she had nodded, but at the door had turned and said, hesitating, “I could take the boy with me. Is it right to put the boy in danger?”

Galen hadn’t even looked up. “The boy is a scholar of the Order. How else will he learn?”

When she’d gone, they’d come up here, to the highest rooms; Galen had taken his time choosing this one. Raffi broke mud-clots off his boots nervously. He wished he were back on Sarres, or anywhere, even at the fair. At least that had been out in the open; he could breathe or run. Here he felt as if the ancient house was stifling him, all its shutters tight, the carpet of dust, the webs, the mildewed walls. It was quiet, all the sense-lines were still, but there was something wrong with them, bizarrely wrong—they were warped, as if something else was here inside them, bulging them out.

He wondered if Galen could feel it too.

Now the Relic Master sat back on his heels, the hook of his nose shadowed. Without looking at Raffi he said, “You knew a keeper was among the prisoners, didn’t you?”

Raffi clenched his fists. He’d been waiting for this.

“I heard something,” he muttered.

“And you didn’t tell me.”

“I thought you’d have heard it too.”

Galen glared at him. “And if I hadn’t? You’d have waited till they were dead, would you, before you cared to mention it?”

Raffi looked away, hot.

“For Flain’s sake, Raffi, when will you learn to have faith!” Galen’s fury was always sudden, an explosion of temper. “All the study you’ve done, all the things you’ve seen! Can’t you understand yet that the Makers are guiding us? We weren’t called to this place by accident! It’s not coincidence that one of the few keepers left alive is one of their prisoners. This is Flain’s will, as clearly as if he appeared and told us “Rescue them!”

He tugged the dirty string out of his hair angrily. “And you try and ignore it!”

“Because I never know what you’ll do,” Raffi said despairingly.

Galen laughed, scornful. “Rubbish. You know very well. And that’s what scares you.”

He rubbed a dusty hand through his hair, scattering the remnants of ash. Raffi was silent. He knew it was true. Bitter shame broke out in him. “Perhaps I’m not fit to be a keeper,” he snapped, his face hot.

Galen snorted. “That’s for me to say. I haven’t wasted all this time on you for nothing. You’ll be a keeper if I have to beat it into you. Now pick up that lamp. We need to look at this house.”

Raffi scrambled up and snatched the lamp. He wanted to march out with it boldly, down the stairs, into all the dark corridors, flinging open the doors, as fearless as Carys would have been. But he knew he’d falter at the first corner. In some ways learning the powers of the Order, sensing Maker-life in the land, the energy fields of people’s dreams, of trees and stones and creatures, just made things worse. Carys couldn’t feel all that. Perhaps that was why it was easy for her not to be scared.

Though Galen never was either.

As the keeper walked out onto the dark landing, Raffi followed him close. Together they looked over the banister, seeing the vast stairwell curl down into blackness, its walls stained with slow-growing lichens and the velvety mounds of mold that spread like vivid green stars.

Below, in the emptiness, nothing moved.

They could hear water dripping. Then a shutter banged. The house seemed immense, a labyrinth of rooms and courtyards and sculleries, buried in drifts of dust and memories, its timbers worm-gnawed and decaying. Raffi sent delicate sense-lines into it, infiltrating the whole tilted structure, scaring the slender-legged harvestmen that scuttled from its ceilings. Two floors below, a rat sneaked from a sooty hearth into a hole. The farther down his third eye searched, the uneasier it made him. Just as he was getting dizzy Galen said, “Stay close. Keep the lines out.”

They went down, step after step. The lamp sent vast wobbling shadows up the walls. On each floor, Galen walked stealthily along the corridors, opening doors, gazing into chambers that were empty but for a fireplace and high windows, mostly patched and shuttered. But outside a room on the first floor he paused, his fingers on the handle. Raffi felt it too, the faintest shiver of Maker-power. Galen glanced at him.

Then he went in.

The room was black. In the doorway, Raffi held up the lamp.

To his astonishment a small circle of flowers lay on the bare boards. There was nothing else. No one stood in the shadowed corners, though as he moved the lamp, vast darknesses flickered and jerked.

After a second, Galen went and kneeled over the garland, Raffi close behind, glad to shut the door.

The flowers were yellow; they were the sort known as Flainscrown, as bright and fresh as if they’d just been picked. Raffi stared in amazement. “Where did they come from? It’s winter!”

Galen turned a frail stem in his fingers. “They’ve been put here in the last few minutes.”

Rooms below, something slammed. Raffi froze, listening so intently it hurt. Then he whispered, “What if it gets upstairs?”

“That’s what I want. The awen-beads will draw it to the top room . . . Haven’t I taught you the spiral yet?”

Raffi shook his head.

Oddly stiff, Galen’s voice said, “Shine that light back here.”

The Flainscrown was withering. Even as they watched, the leaves dried up, the petals turned brown and flaked into dust. Galen held nothing but a dry stem. He snapped it thoughtfully.

“What does it mean?”

The keeper gave him a sidelong look. “I don’t know. Yet.” Outside, Galen turned left, but as Raffi closed the door his eyes caught a scuttle of movement on the stair.

“There! Look!”

The lamp shook, sending shadows flying. Galen grabbed his shoulder fiercely. “For God’s sake, keep quiet!”

Around them the house rang with the cry, agitated, like a still pool broken by a stone. All the ends of Raffi’s nerves quivered; he felt cold, instantly cold.

After a moment Galen said, “What was it?”

“A . . . small thing.” Raffi gripped the warm handle of the lamp with both hands to steady it. “It . . . crept.”

“A rat?”

“Bigger.” His heart was thudding like a pain. Galen didn’t move, as if part of him was reaching out, sensing. Then he said, “It’s coming. We’d better get back up there.”

Quietly they ran up the broad wooden staircase, and all the way Raffi felt the stirring in the house, the slow gathering of something far below, its energies twisting up the smooth balustrades, the invisible carved cornices high above his head.

In the top room Galen propped the door open, snatched the lamp, and put it in the center of the beads, its light opening a complex net of seven spirals, jet and green, small emerald sparks glinting in the dark. He pulled Raffi close, inside the pattern, and the raw tension of the Crow scorched, so that Raffi jerked away, breathless.

“Keep still!” Galen hissed.

Far below, something was coming. They couldn’t hear it but they could feel it; a pulsing energy, unformed yet, gathering itself out of cellars and deep courses of brickwork. It rose up along passageways, through halls, all the time knitting together, clotting into a swirling flux that crowded Raffi’s sense-lines so that he could barely breathe, and had to crouch down over the sharp stitch in his side.

Closer. Now the whole house creaked with it, as if it drew itself in filaments of darkness out of all the wooden stairs and warped doors, ran in trickles down the damp walls. And it breathed; he could hear its breathing, and its footsteps as it climbed. Staring in dread at the black rectangle of the open door he clutched his coat in tight fistfuls, feeling Galen draw himself up beside him.

The keeper was intent. A soft, rich scent filled the room, the muskiness of decay.

Then, in the doorway, a shape moved. Raffi saw it through the glow of the awen-spiral, a presence lurking out there in the dark.

“Closer,” Galen said. “Come closer.”

Slow, reluctant, it slid into the room, huge and dark, all the desolation of the house held in a loose human outline, featureless and blurred, as if it might break down at any time, might flood out.

Galen held his hand up. “Enough.”

It stopped.

Shivering, Raffi pulled back, shook off sense-lines. He didn’t want to feel it; the stink of it in his nostrils sickened him.

“Why are you still here?” Galen asked softly.

The outline blurred. A gap like a mouth opened in the smooth face. “This is unfair,” it hissed. Its voice was hoarse and crude; a patchwork of echoes and creaks and overheard whispers. “I wanted to go. He awakened me.”

“Who awakened you?”

“He did.”

“Do you want to be at peace?”

“Let me. Let me go. Into the dark.”

It squirmed, its outline breaking down, the body running and dissolving suddenly into a black pool, trickling and spreading over the floor to the very edge of the spiral. Small black fingers touched the beads and jerked back.

“In the name of Flain,” Galen said quietly, “I dissolve you and absolve you. In the names of Soren and Tamar I release the pain from you . . .”

The pool bubbled. Out of it rose a great mass of tentacles that soared and groped high over their heads. Raffi ducked with a yelp of fear but Galen’s voice went on, relentless. “In the name of Theriss I draw out your dark dreams. In the name of Halen I unfasten you, atom by atom. And in the name of Kest—”

The creature screamed. It slithered itself up into manshape and howled, arms overhead, bending and swaying as if in agony. The beads crackled and spat. Galen glanced at them anxiously.

“Not that name!” The voice broke into hisses of static, barely understandable. “Not him! He started it! The terror, the decay!” It squirmed into separate flames of blackness, wordless moans, then hurled itself forward at them, hands out.

Raffi leaped back; Galen lashed out and grabbed him.

“Still!” he snarled.

The awen-beads sparked. Smoke filled the room, blurring the light. The creature impacted on the invisible barrier and spread like a blot. It swarmed around them, hung over their heads, a black mass of despair. Raffi could feel its agony like a weight. He was dizzy, his chest ached.

“Let me finish!” Galen said.

“No! Not that name!”

“The Litany . . .”

“You must do it,” the voice howled. “I know who you are. I know the Crow. Let me go to them through you!”

Astounded, Raffi turned. The voice was everywhere—in his head, filling his veins. Back to back with Galen they were both swallowed in blackness, the lamplight gone as if some great beast had devoured it.

“It’s too dangerous,” Galen muttered.

“Please! Trust me!” It squirmed piteously. “I have been evil, done evil. Let me have peace, keeper.”

Galen cursed bitterly. Then he dropped Raffi’s arm. In the darkness his face was gaunt, eyes black. “Stay in the spiral,” he hissed.

“Galen!”

It was useless. The keeper pushed him aside and stepped over the beads, into blackness.