The High King's Tomb (62 page)

K
arigan was about to remove the book from King Zachary’s sarcophagus and tell Agemon he was wrong when the book shimmered with pale blue light, then absorbed the illumination from all the nearby lamps until it was so saturated it seared the eyes with hot white-gold light.

Karigan staggered back from the sarcophagus shielding her eyes, as did the others.

She felt on the brink of some other world. Images assailed her, images of an ancient battle raging in which magic was used as a weapon to devastate opposing sides. Banners fluttered in the breeze, horses reared, swords clashed, arrows rained from the sky, and magical forces exploded. Amid the chaos, she thought she heard the horn of the First Rider and felt herself stirred to the call and—

The images shifted to laborers, bare backs glistening with sweat, pounding on granite blocks, cutting them, shaping them. Hammers, hundreds of hammers ringing on stone. But there was more, a rhythm, a song to it, a song of strength and binding and endurance.

The building of the wall,
Karigan thought.

To her horror, sweat turned to blood as stoneworkers, still singing their song, drove knives into themselves, falling dead upon granite blocks and bleeding into them. The granite blocks pulsated with the rhythm, carrying on the song, taking on lives of their own.

Others who were not stoneworkers also came forward to give their lives to stone, hungry stone, and all the while one man watched, leaning on a staff, his face impassive. He was encircled by a black wall of Weapons.

As if he could see Karigan, he turned to her and said,
I am Theanduris Silverwood, and this is my book.

When others were brought forward who struggled, who refused the knife, the Weapons gutted them, making sure their bodies fell over granite blocks so the stone could drink their blood.

And on the visions went, showing the placement of the granite, masons at work, the song and rhythm unceasing…

When the vision faded, Karigan found herself holding onto the edge of Estora’s sarcophagus, the others looking equally stunned, including Agemon, who adjusted his specs. No one spoke. No doubt the visions gave the Weapons present something to think about.

Karigan took shaky steps to King Zachary’s sarcophagus and peered cautiously at the book. Glimmering golden lettering, like fire writing, filled the pages. When she lifted the book away from the sarcophagus, the lettering faded. Hastily she returned it, restoring the writing to its full brilliance. She tried to read it, but realized it was in Old Sacoridian and gave up.

Agemon, to her surprise, joined her and flipped through the pages, the golden lettering reflecting against his face. He turned to the first page and read, “I am Theanduris Silverwood and this is my book; my account of the end of the Long War and the building of the great wall.”

“You can read Old Sacoridian?” Karigan asked in surprise.

Agemon gave her a much offended look. “Yes, yes. Of course I can. One must know it down here.”

It made sense, Karigan thought, when the early tombs included script in the old tongue.

Agemon turned his attention back to the book and added, “And I know Rhovan, Kmaernian—”

“Kmaernian?”

“Just because a civilization is dead does not mean its language cannot live on. Yes, yes, the Kmaernians live on through their words. And of course I know Arcosian, as well.”

“Of…of course,” Karigan said, regarding the caretaker with newfound respect.

Just then Cera returned with a man in black robes, masked and hooded so only his eyes were visible.

“Who am I to tend?” he asked in a low, dark voice.

Karigan shuddered and wanted to hide behind Fastion, but before anyone could speak, Ghost Kitty reappeared, rubbing his cheek against the corner of King Zachary’s sarcophagus, then leaping up on the lid. Confronted suddenly with the marble terrier, he hissed and swatted at it, jumped down, and tore away through the gallery.

“Must have encountered the real thing up above,” Fastion mused.

Karigan took the diversion to look around at everyone—the Weapons, the forbidding death surgeon, the marble King Zachary, and Agemon, who continued to study the book.

“I’m going to bed,” she announced.

Her words were at first met with silence, then a babble broke out around her, but she just walked away, right past the Weapons and death surgeon, retracing her steps into the main chamber of the Hillanders with its heroic statue of King Smidhe, and kept going, dimly aware of others following her. She was done. It was time for others to take care of the rest.

Brienne caught up and strode next to her. “You really ought to allow the death surgeon to—”

“I’m not dead,” Karigan said.

Fastion crutched up beside her. “Not quite, anyway,” he said. “The death surgeons are also menders down here.”

“I’m going to bed.”

“Do you know the way?” he asked.

“No, I don’t,” Karigan replied.

Brienne chuckled. “Then we’d better show you.”

“Yes,” Karigan agreed.

The environs of the tombs became a blur to Karigan. She no longer cared that she was surrounded by corpses. A few times she thought longingly of Queen Lyra’s bed, for the walk back to the corridors of the living seemed so long to a body that had endured so much in so short a time. Fastion and Brienne distracted her with questions about Estora and her role in the noblewoman’s rescue and about her remarkable journey back to Sacor City. Karigan answered like a sleeper, did not even know if the words that tumbled from her mouth were coherent.

She never even noticed when they left the tombs and was hardly aware of others appearing on the periphery of her vision, barraging her with questions. Colin Dovekey was there, and so were Garth and Captain Mapstone.

“I’m going to bed,” she told them. She perceived Brienne and Fastion explaining things that required explaining, but they did not leave her side. If people wanted explanations, they had to keep up. Her chamber was going to be crowded if they all stuck with her.

Even the king, surrounded by more Weapons, appeared in the corridor. Karigan briefly paused, and bowed. “My pardon, Your Majesty, but I must continue on.”

“She’s going to bed,” someone said. Captain Mapstone?

This time Fastion left her side to explain. One did not expect a king to follow.

Ordinarily Karigan would have desired a chance to spend a few minutes with the king, to talk with him, but not tonight. Or was it already morning?

When they reached the Rider wing, tears of exhaustion and relief ran down her face. She perceived curious Riders peering at her from behind cracked doors.

When she reached her own chamber, she pushed the door open, and disregarding the clumps of white cat fur on her blanket, she dropped into bed.

I
t was a wearisome journey through the white world, and they’d made all haste, Grandmother, Lala, and half a dozen others. She’d opened a portal and crossed a bridge onto the stark plains. She warned her people against straying or believing what they’d see there.

They’d been tantalized by groves of lemon trees, like those of Arcosia, only to have the fruits rot and fall to the ground and the trees shed their leaves and die before their eyes. There were other images that came and went, including one of the accursed horse of death the Sacoridians worshipped, standing off in the distance and watching them with a vulture’s gaze. Her people obeyed her, sticking close, and disregarding such illusions.

Grandmother navigated the white world with an enchanted ball of yarn she rolled across the plains. It unspooled enough yarn that it should have run out, but it stretched all the way to the last bridge, leading them true.

The white world was both unsettling and tantalizing, for it must have been centuries since any of her people crossed into it. The Kmaernians had built the bridges long ago, long before Sacoridia had been a mote in the emperor’s eye, but it had been Mornhavon the Great who learned the secret of the white world after his forces were ambushed one too many times by the enemy seemingly appearing out of nowhere when they were
known
to be much farther away. Once Mornhavon had acquired the secret, the empire had also been able to travel the ways and ambush the Sacoridians in like fashion. Soon battles raged not only across the landscape of Sacoridia, but in the white world as well, battles that had been mostly fought on a magical plane by great mages of both sides.

She nudged her horse off the final bridge with some regret into a forest full of natural light, color, and damp smells, smiling when she heard the exclamations of relief from her people as they followed her. When the last horse plodded off the bridge, the bridge vanished from existence. She supposed she could visit the white world again when she wished, but the chronicles warned against traversing it too much, with vague warnings of madness and death resulting, and something about lost souls.

In any case, she knew more intriguing places lay ahead, like the D’Yer Wall.

Before they reached the wall, Grandmother had made spells that rendered them invisible. Indeed, when they entered the encampment, the soldiers and laborers there went about their business unaware that eight members of Second Empire stood in their midst.

Grandmother guided her horse directly toward the breach, reining back when an oblivious soldier almost walked right into her, and she had to wend her way around a pair of laborers lugging water. Blackveil drew her. Its power wafted over the repairwork of the breach like a finger beckoning her on. She fairly quivered with energy.

She sensed also the weakness of the wall. Its cohesiveness was somehow undermined and she wished she had the book of Theanduris Silverwood at hand. She could bring the whole thing down now. But it would have to wait, for she’d been called to Blackveil. She had work to do there. Her destiny, and that of Second Empire, was about to be fulfilled. She would have the book later and the wall could come down then.

As she neared the wall, she felt the alarm of the guardians in response to her presence.
She comes, she comes, she comes…,
they shrieked. Yes, they recognized what she represented, but as disorganized as they were, they could do nothing to stop her.

She halted before the breach. “We must abandon the horses,” she said.

Lala was plainly unhappy, clutching the reins to her buckskin pony and frowning.

“My dear child,” Grandmother said, “we must leave the beasts behind. It would be cruel to take them with us. They’d be too terrified to bear us in the forest, and they’d prove a tasty meal for some predator.”

The little girl dismounted and wiped a tear from her cheek. Grandmother was touched by how much Lala had taken to the pony, for she rarely expressed much emotion. The others busied themselves removing baggage from the horses and strapping it to their own backs. Once the horses were released and wandered away from their masters, they would become visible to those in the encampment.

Grandmother surveyed the repairwork of the breach. The alarm of the guardians thrummed beneath her feet. “The stonework is well done,” she said, “but mundane for all that and no barrier. This shall take but a moment. Stand clear.”

Her people backed away, giving her space. Along their journey she had knotted and knotted a length of yarn knowing what she needed to do. She had used the indigo, and she now unraveled the knotted ball, speaking words of power, invoking the strength of water, freezing, thawing, wind, erosion, and time. The end of the yarn lifted itself from her palm snakelike, gravitating toward the stone. It glided along the joints between the facing, cracking mortar, weakening stone, and boring into it. Ice repeatedly etched across the stonework, and thawed so rapidly that in blinking one missed it. Tremors jostled the ground and Grandmother thought the guardians of the wall would bring about their own undoing.

The yarn, the knots, and the words of power did their work of weakening the stonework, aging and weathering it hundreds of years in moments. The repairwork of the breach buckled, crumbled, and thudded to the ground raising a veil of dust. The ground shook so violently that it almost knocked Grandmother off her feet.

“Come,” she said to her people even before the dust settled. “We must hurry across.”

Without a backward glance, she started picking her way across the rubble into the forest that beckoned.

T
he guardians sense the workings of the art. The stone in the breach does not live, but they nevertheless feel the reverberations of magic being used against it.

The art at first probes the stone, licks at it, soaks into the pores of granite. Spreads. There is a counter song, a song of aging and weathering, of weakness and erosion, freezing and thawing.

It reverberates into the weakened portions of the wall adjacent to the breach. The song of the guardians is in too much disarray to repel it. They try to rally, to find harmony and rhythm, but it is too long gone and they are in chaos, like an orchestra playing out of time, instruments out of tune, voices crying in agony rather than combining into melodious notes. The fear of the guardians is great, but they only mangle the song further. There is no single voice to bring them together, to help them.

Listen to me! Follow me!

But the voice of the one once known as Pendric is lost in the cacophony. He has spent so much time spreading distrust and hate that he cannot heal them.

The nonliving rock of the breach gives way as though it has undergone more than a millennium of weathering in but a few moments. Granite tumbles to the ground leaving a gaping hole in the wall.

At first there is nothing more, then the bedrock upon which the wall is built rumbles and the voices of the guardians near the breach rise up in a crescendo of pain. They begin to die. Mortar fails, cracks widen, ashlars edging the breach crumble and fall.

The cry of the guardians escalates into a scream.