The City in the Lake (16 page)

“You should have known better,” the Bastard said when the captain came to set men on his door and beg his pardon for it. “You knew perfectly well she would punish your defiance with the pain of those for whom you are responsible. You were there when she did it to me. How is the boy?”

Galef, shadows of humiliation and rage hidden in his eyes, bowed his head. “Badly burned.”

“Will he recover?”

“He will. Though likely he is ruined for a guardsman. Not for his feet,” the captain added when the Bastard raised his brows. “But how can he trust those he serves, if they would command such a thing to be done to him? Or me, as his captain, if I cannot prevent it? He thought all he faced were the moods of the King and the high temper of the Queen, and he found this. All he will want now is to go back to his mother’s house in the City, and who can blame him?—My lord, if I do not report to her as she commands, I think she will know it.”

The Bastard moved restlessly to his window and looked out across the City. From above, and to an ignorant observer, the City would have looked peaceful. The air was cold and still. Crystalline. Fine threads of smoke led straight up in narrow lines from chimneys. There was no movement to the air, and little upon the frosted streets. To the Bastard, the City’s quiet seemed . . . fraught.

“My lord . . .,” said the captain tentatively.

“Of course you must report to Lelienne,” the Bastard said impatiently. “Of course she will know it if you do not. She hears everything. I think she sees a great deal. Don’t defy her. Report to her as she demands. Obey every command she gives—especially those directed against me.” He looked straight at the captain, held his gaze.

The captain took a slow breath. “My lord. Yes, my lord.”

And whether he understood what the Bastard had not said was hard to guess. The Bastard said a little more explicitly, “If she is not made angry, everyone will be safer. Far better she should hear nothing that will anger her. Least of all defiance from you. Now, is that quite clear?”

“Yes,” breathed the captain.

“So don’t try to protect me.” The Bastard emphasized the last word with no stress in his voice, only with a sudden direct stare into the captain’s eyes. “We want no more boys hung over fire. Do we, Galef ?”

“No,” said the captain with only the faintest downward flicker of his own eyes to suggest he had heard the Bastard’s meaning. He said, with absolute sincerity, “I would eat a great deal of humiliation to prevent that. As you have done, Lord Neill. As you do. Very well. If I must be her man, so I will be. There will be men on your door. They will go where you go. I will ask that you do not try to prevent them.”

“No,” said the Bastard distantly, and turned back to the window, resting his hands on its narrow sill. “Has she commanded that you cease reporting to me? Or that you refuse my orders?”

“No, my lord.”

“Has she ordered a guard set on Trevennen?”

“No, my lord.”

“No?” The Bastard thought this was interesting. “Very well. I order it, then. As my mother does not seem concerned with Trevennen’s movements and activities, perhaps you need not trouble her with this guard’s reports. Although of course you must decide what risks you will take, Galef. In any case, unless you are prevented, you may bring such reports to me.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The Bastard turned back to the guard captain, crossing his arms and resting his hip on the sill of the window. “Very well, then. Thank you, Galef.”

“My lord,” acknowledged the captain, bowing, and withdrew.

Turning back to the view, the Bastard gazed out of his window with eyes that saw nothing of the City. What he could not understand was why his mother continued, over these quiet days in which she amused herself torturing his guardsmen, to wait. He had no doubt whatsoever that she intended some precise object in her presence here, in all that she had done. So why, then, did she hold her hand?

It was the mage Trevennen who gave him, at last, the answer to this question.

C
HAPTER
9

ince there was nothing else to do, Jonas walked in no particular direction, among pillars that were all the same, over a floor that might be made of black ice. The darkness fell through space like light and struck the eye with its presence. The pillars glowed with it, while their shadows drank it in and swallowed it, creating a strange textured blackness.

When Jonas lifted his eyes and tried to look ahead, he found a kind of radiant darkness along what might have been a horizon, far in the distance. It was not like light or even the promise of light, but it was a less heavy kind of darkness. He hoped—since he must hope for something—to reach it eventually and see what it might be.

Although the pillars were abundant, save for their presence this place seemed to Jonas to be absolutely empty. Where he had heard at least wind in the branches when he walked in the forest, here he heard nothing at all. The air was very cold and still.

He walked until he was too weary to go farther, and then sat down and rested, with his back against a cold pillar for want of any other shelter. For warmth he had only his jacket, which was not meant to protect against real cold. It had been only autumn when he left the village, and he had expected to find himself in the City before the descent of winter. Now he longed for warmth even more than for water. Neither seemed likely to be found in this desolate place.

As a young man, Jonas had learned endurance. He had learned it marching down endless roads in summer dust and spring mud and winter cold, and also during battle, when one must go on and on and never stop, not for all the arrows that came down, not for any sorcerous traps that waited to turn a man’s bones to fire at his next step. He had learned it during long brutal months when his army besieged some stubborn town or, usually worse, found itself suffering siege behind its own walls. He remembered those years now, surrounded on all sides by darkness and silence. Pulling his legs up, Jonas wrapped his arms around them and bent forward, leaning his face against his knees. He rested that way, tucked up against the cold, for some indeterminate period marked by neither dusk nor dawn. When cramps in his muscles tormented him, he lay down on the icy floor, stretched out at his full length. And when the cold drove him back to his feet, he walked again, endlessly.

It seemed to Jonas sometimes that he could feel his lungs freezing, and his blood. He shivered continually, sometimes enough to send him staggering a few steps sideways. His fingers were numb, his feet also. He walked with his hands tucked under his arms to warm his fingers, but there was not a great deal he could do for his feet. He only walked on, on feet that eventually he could not feel at all, that might have been lumps of wood attached to the ends of his legs.

Almost as terrible as the cold was his thirst. If the pillars were ice, still he had no way to break off pieces so that he might melt them. His lips cracked with cold and lack of water. There was nothing to be done, and so he did nothing, but only went on, and on.

It was impossible for Jonas to tell how long he walked. He grew thirstier, and more desperately weary, and the tips of his fingers as well as his lips cracked from the cold and the dry air. He might have measured the passage of time by the extent of his misery, except it seemed always on the edge of unendurable. Sometimes he stopped, lay down on the black ice, and waited for either sleep or death to claim him. But he did not die and could not sleep. After a while impatience and cold would drive him back to his feet, and he would go on.

At first Jonas had feared to find himself again face to face with the Hunter, and had listened in terror for the cry of the storm hounds. Then the fear wore out, so that in time he waited with indifference for the sound of the Hunter’s bodiless voice and the sight of the twisting shadows of his crown. Eventually he came to long for this encounter. He remembered what the Hunter had demanded from him—
your name, your hands, your heart
—and thought he would give the Hunter all he demanded for one breath of warm air and one moment in the sun. Then in the next breath he was angry, so angry he could not think and could hardly breathe, and was sure that he would gladly die before he would surrender anything of his to the dark Hunter.

At last, when the encounter did not come, the anger itself wore out as well and he came to doubt that he had ever met the Hunter or spoken with him; he even doubted that the dark Hunter existed. Jonas thought perhaps he had dreamed the meeting. It even seemed possible to him that he had dreamed the Kingdom and the years in the village, and even Timou. He saw her in front of him sometimes, white hair falling down her back, light sliding through her pale eyes like a hidden laugh, a faint blush rising under her fair skin at something someone had said. He knew she was not really there before him. It seemed possible to him that she had never really existed.

Sometimes he looked over his shoulder, expecting to see burning Kanha behind him. When he turned his head to look, he tended to fall, and since the ruined city was never there, eventually he stopped looking for it. In time he also stopped seeing Timou before him. After that there was just the dark, and the necessity—he no longer remembered why—of continuing to walk forward.

He began to dream while walking. He dreamed he walked through a field beside a river with the sun overhead, but when he bent down to the water it was not there, and when he stopped in the sunlight it faded and lost its warmth. He understood after a time that he was hallucinating. He thought that men he had known from the past walked beside him. He dreamed they all walked through a desert night, thousands of them, so that those at the rear of the column swallowed the dust raised by those in front. He dreamed that huge stones burning with cold flame fell through the air all around them. The flames were dark, and every one gave off its little measure of cold as the stones fell. They shook the road as they struck the ground, and he fell, and blinked, and found himself on his hands and knees, surrounded by textured darkness and pillars of ice that glowed blackly.

“Get up!” commanded his sergeant, stopping beside him, urgent and furious.

“Up, boy!” a different voice seconded—his father’s voice, rougher, from much farther into the past: from a childhood that seemed infinitely distant and infinitely desirable. Jonas moved a little, murmuring, trying to get his feet under him and unable to find the strength to rise.

“You must get up,” said a much quieter voice, much nearer at hand, and Jonas blinked through the darkness and found Timou’s father standing beside him. In this place and in this extremity, this seemed perfectly reasonable.

“You must get up,” Kapoen repeated. He was standing quietly, his hands at his sides, not two feet away. The darkness lay on him like light. “Jonas. You must get up.”

It seemed a great deal to ask. “Help me,” Jonas protested, but though he reached out his hand, Kapoen did not move to take it.

“I would if I could,” said the mage. “You must do it on your own. You’ve come a long way. You can make it the whole way if you are stubborn enough. I know you are stubborn. Up. Stand up.”

Jonas put his hands on the ice, shoved away from it with arms that seemed to lack all strength. But he made it to his feet, and stood, swaying. When he looked for Kapoen, the mage was not there. This did not surprise him. He took a step, and another.

So he went on. He fell more often now. There was nothing to trip over. He fell when his knees failed to hold him, or when he tried to put his weight on a foot he could not feel. Sometimes he rested where he fell. The cold seemed to bother him less. It entered his bones, until he seemed made of cold, all his bones made of ice. Sometimes it seemed to him that he lay in a meadow, and sometimes in a bed: his own bed, from his boyhood, with his mother singing in the other room.

Then Kapoen would come back and peel illusion ruthlessly away. When Jonas tried to ignore him, the mage’s voice would become a whip in the dark, driving, demanding, punishing, until Jonas fought his way back to his feet. He walked blindly some of the time, eyes shut, letting the mage tell him when he wandered off his course, walking into one icy pillar after another with a bruising force that he thought might mean he was, at least, still alive.

“Where is Timou?” Jonas asked the mage once, thinking that if he was to be harried by hallucinations, he would rather it were she.

“In great danger,” answered Kapoen.

Jonas laughed and said, “Of course. How else?” It seemed to him that this warning had been inevitable from the moment the mage had started to walk through his waking dreams. “I came here to save her, you know,” he confided to Kapoen.

“Foolish and brave,” said the mage, “like so many young men. But it was you the Hunter marked for his need. If you had stayed in your home and barred the door, he would have come there and harried you into the dark even so.”

“He doesn’t exist,” Jonas said defiantly, and laughed again. When Kapoen made no answer, he looked for him, feeling suddenly bereft, and was sorry when there was no one there. It seemed cruel of Kapoen, to force him to keep on and on and on, and then just go away like that.

And then, in this place of silent darkness, Jonas found that the strange dark glow he had seen before him from the first, but very far away, grew suddenly stronger and stronger, as though at last he drew close to its source. He seemed to gain new strength just from the thought. He walked more quickly, even lifting his head and looking ahead as though he cared what he might find before him.

At last he came out from among the pillars and found himself standing on the shore of a vast frozen plain of black ice. It was from this that the strange dark glow emanated. It stretched off, unbroken, infinitely far to both sides. But in front of him, out in the midst of the plain, Jonas saw that there was something that loomed: a crag of ice or a broken pillar vaster than any behind him. Or a castle.
No. A tower.
When he thought of this, he knew at once it was indeed a tower, standing vast and solitary in the midst of all that ice. And he knew whom he would find within that tower, and knew that everything he remembered had really happened, and that the Hunter not only existed, but waited there for him to enter that house. He remembered what the widow Raen had said—
Do not enter any house or tower or castle you find, but if you do, there will be a price to pay before you get out
—something of that sort. He had asked what price, and the widow had not known. Now he knew. Rage and terror tried to rise up within him, fought briefly for life, and died, because in all the cold exhaustion within his heart there was nothing to sustain either.

Surrounded by cold and silence, Jonas put his foot on the ice.

It took a long time to cross the ice, but it did not seem so long, because always there was the tower before Jonas, growing slowly larger. Having a clear destination was so new and so welcome that Jonas found himself both more impatient to arrive and yet better able to endure the slow progress he made. He no longer fell, as though the ice itself sustained him as he crossed it, or as though he had gone at last beyond exhaustion to some other state where he might walk forever. Sometimes Jonas watched the tower as he walked, and sometimes he looked down into the black ice.

There seemed reflections within it, as though the frozen ice caught fleeting glimpses from someplace that was not empty and dark and showed them to Jonas as he walked. Even the strange insubstantial darkness the ice cast forth seemed to him a reflection of light, and he looked for light locked frozen into the ice. He looked and looked for light trapped below, realizing only gradually that he had stopped walking. A moment later he understood that he had somehow come to be on his hands and knees, his face inches from the ice as he stared into it. Shaken, he clambered slowly back onto his feet and looked around again for the tower. He found it unexpectedly rising before him, looming, immense, so near he could have taken one step and touched its black stones, though he had no memory of having come so close. His breath caught, and he staggered, falling again. Caught in the tower’s shadow, he found the shadow alone weighed on him so he could not get his breath, could hardly get to his feet. There was a door before him, three times his height, standing open to show a vast arch out of which darkness, heavy and absolute, fell like a chasm into night.

Jonas had believed himself beyond fear, but found now that he was paralyzed with it. This did not last. It could not: exhaustion will always defeat terror.
You will find nothing here, until you find me again.
Jonas had found nothing in all his long walking through the dark, and had come at last to this place, where he knew he would find the Hunter. He shut his eyes for a moment, longing to open them and find himself in the green forest, or in his room in the widow’s house in the village; longing to keep his eyes closed forever against the dark and never open them to see the black walls of the Hunter’s tower or the heavy darkness falling out of its open doorway.

He opened his eyes. The tower was there, rising harsh and uncompromising out of lesser shadows. The doorway was there. The dark was there, within it, waiting.