The Master of Heathcrest Hall (95 page)

Her own heart was beating swiftly in her chest. Around her, the trees swayed and trembled, as if they too suffered the chaotic swirl of thoughts and feelings that passed through her. Her husband was gone. The sun perished in the sky. The Ashen hungered to consume the world. How could she possibly consider anything that had to do with light or joy or life?

And yet—

“No,” he said softly. “I beg you, do not answer me. If somehow I should survive this long night, if any of us should survive it, then
you can tell me what your answer is. Tell me when it is day again. Until then, while it remains night, let me continue to dream.”

Ivy let out a breath. The trees around the clearing grew still. She met his eyes in the gloom.

“I will see you again, Mr. Rafferdy,” she said. “After the dawn.”

He gave a deep bow. Then he turned to lay a hand upon the gate, and in a blaze of azure magick, he was gone.

F
IVE HOURS LATER, Rafferdy climbed out of the pit in the ground. He clambered over the heaps of dirt that had been rapidly thrown aside by a score of men armed with shovels.

Weary, he sat down on a stone and wiped his brow. A private handed him a tin cup of water, and he drank it gladly. Around him, in the faint half light, infantrymen ran to and fro in great haste as sergeants barked orders and cavalry soldiers galloped by. It was the last press to shore up their position and form their defenses ahead of the battle.

At least now they would have but one army to fight. Rafferdy cast a glance over his shoulder, back down in the pit. At the bottom lay the arch of reddish stone that had been uncovered, seeming to glow in the eerie light of stars and planets that fell from the sky.

It had taken over two hours of furious digging until the first shovel struck red stone. Rafferdy had feared the men thought him mad as he barked orders, but the bright sparks thrown off by his ring had convinced him that they were digging in the right place. And perhaps it was the ring that had also convinced the general to listen to him, and to believe the outlandish tale he had told.

It had taken Rafferdy over two hours to reach Pellendry-on-Anbyrn, and in that he was lucky. Speaking a litany of runes, he had managed to escape the grove of Wyrdwood unharmed after appearing through the gate. After that he had started down the road to Pellendry, but he soon realized that even if he were to run the whole way, he would never make it in time. Above, the sun had become no more than a fiery corona around Cerephus. The final occlusion was approaching.

And then something else was approaching as well, something far more welcome—a company of cavalrymen coming up on the road behind him. They stopped when they reached him, and when they saw the stripes on his coat they greeted him warmly. They were riding hard for Pellendry, and they had a spare horse. In short order he was thundering down the road along with them.

As soon as they reached the rebel army, Rafferdy sought out the general’s tent. He told the lieutenant outside that he had crucial information about the coming battle, and at once was shown inside. There he explained to the general what had to be done.

“If you had told me all of this a month ago, I suppose I would have had you put in confinement for a day,” the general had said, stroking his gray-shot beard. “But after some of the things I’ve seen of late—men who do not bleed, and attacks by what seem to be wolves when there are no wolves in this part of the country …” He had glanced at Rafferdy’s ring, which was even then glowing, and gave a grim nod. “Take a company of infantry, Captain Rafferdy, and do what you must.”

So he had. And now the task was done. In the pit, timeworn symbols covered one side of the ancient stone arch, while on the other, sharp new runes marked the stones—runes carved by Rafferdy himself, copied from the symbols in his black book. The magick was done; the gate was redirected. And none too soon, given the thickening gloom.

Now all he had to do was seek out his company, which had to be here somewhere, and lead them into battle. It was rash, of course. Even without the Ashen involved, the odds were likely to
be against them. Yet running headlong toward a line of Valhaine’s soldiers seemed positively sane compared to what he had done in the grove of Wyrdwood near Heathcrest. What had he been thinking, to speak to Mrs. Quent like that?

Except he knew the answer. A soldier could only throw himself into the fray, no matter how mad it seemed, when it was for a cause he believed in with all his being. If he became a casualty as a result—so be it.

“Captain Rafferdy?”

He looked up, thinking the private wanted the tin cup back. Only, by the bars on his coat, it was a lieutenant.

“Yes?” Rafferdy said.

“The commander wants to see you, sir.”

Rafferdy nodded and followed after the lieutenant. It was only when they approached the large tent that he realized this was not the place where he had spoken to the general. A banner with a green hawk hung by the door. That should have been warning enough for Rafferdy. But such was his weariness that it wasn’t until he stepped inside that he realized it wasn’t a commander who had summoned him.

Rather, it was
the
commander.

He turned from the table where he had been poring over maps of the battlefield. In the lamplight, he looked a little older and more careworn than Rafferdy expected. His red hair was touched by gray at the temples, and silver flecked his copper beard. He was not so tall as Rafferdy, though he was broad and powerfully built, and he moved with an assured and easy strength. In no way did he look like a man who had been coddled in the court of a foreign prince. This was someone who had spent his entire life preparing for war. For
this
war.

“I am told you were digging for something, Captain Rafferdy,” Huntley Morden said, his voice low and touched by only the slightest Torland accent. “Did you find it?”

“We did, sir,” he said, not entirely certain how to answer. “It was …”

The other man sensed his hesitation. “You may speak freely
with me, Captain. I would be aware of all things that occur under my command, and I will never fault a man for speaking the truth.”

Rafferdy nodded. “It was a gate, sir—an artifact of magick.” And he explained, as clearly and succinctly as he could, what the gate was, how it functioned, and how he had come to learn of it.

As he spoke, Huntley Morden’s gaze had returned to his maps. For a long minute he was silent. “I have heard of such things,” he said at last. “My grandfather used to tell me tales of shadows that prowled at the edge of the world, and of a hungering darkness from across the void—one that could never be sated. I used to think they were simply stories meant to frighten a young boy.”

“And what do you think now, sir?”

The other man looked up. “Now I am no longer a boy, and I know that we should indeed be frightened.”

Rafferdy swallowed. “Yes,” he said, “we should.”

Huntley Morden nodded. Then, all at once, he grinned. “I imagine you are anxious to join your company, Captain Rafferdy. I believe my lieutenant can tell you where to find them. I trust you and your men will help me send Valhaine’s soldiers running from the field.”

Rafferdy found himself grinning in return. “With their tails tucked between their legs, sir.”

Morden held out his hand. Rafferdy shook it and thought,
I am shaking the hand of the next king of Altania
.

Then he left the tent and went to find his company, and to find a gun, and to fight for king and country.

E
VEN AS, when the hands align themselves together on the face of a clock, an hour is struck, so it was in the heavens. The celestial spheres turned one last fraction of a degree. The twelfth planet—dim Memnymion—stood in line precisely with the others. After ten thousand years, the cycle had reached its terminus. One after the other, a shadow fell upon each of the great orbs, casting all but one of them in absolute darkness.

Only the newest wanderer, the one called Cerephus, remained alight in the firmament, and it burned like a hot coal in the void: an eye gazing with a ravenous hunger at the other worlds arranged before its gaze—particularly the orb that was closest. The umbra cast by Cerephus reached out, closing around that small, green-blue world like a burnt fist. And then …

The red eye flared suddenly, its crimson light now tinged with blue. For several minutes it blazed so brightly that it shone like a violent sun, drenching that little orb nearest it with a livid illumination.

Then the red eye blinked, and went dark.

At the same time, on a small green island on the small green-blue planet, the few stands of ancient forest that still remained awoke from their slumber. The trees recognized the shadows which had abruptly intruded into their silent groves. They knew these things—and they remembered what to do.

For many hours the long night endured, well after the forest groves fell still once again. A rime of white ice tinged the little green-blue world, like frost upon a windowpane. Then, at last, the celestial spheres turned another tick. The first of the orbs to have
fallen into line, capricious Eides, was the first to break the ranks. The others followed suit.

The long night was over.

T
HE SKY WAS A COLD, crystalline blue that day.

Eldyn stood amid the throngs of people on the edges of Marble Street, not far from the Halls of Assembly. He was glad for the press of bodies around him, for despite the sunshine a chill yet hung on the air. Three swift days had come and gone since the long, terrible night ended, but still the world had not fully grown warm again.

For a while, Eldyn had feared it might freeze solid altogether. He and the other illusionists had huddled in the parlor above the theater as the darkness went on and on. They stoked the stove with coal, but it hardly seemed to make a difference. Soon they could see their breath fogging on the air, like illusory clouds, and they could not stop shivering.

Still the night continued. After thirty hours of darkness, the coal for the stove ran out, and the frost was a half-inch thick on the windowpanes. They began breaking apart wooden props and pieces of scenery to feed into the fire. Forty hours passed. Fifty. The shouts and distant screams they had heard outside ceased. To venture outside would be to perish in minutes.

The world grew utterly still, and they began to run out of stage props to break apart and burn. Sixty hours of darkness. Seventy. The final hours found them silently pressing around Master Tallyroth’s chaise, attempting to keep him—and themselves—from freezing. Then, abruptly, a pink glow touched the windowpanes.
Eldyn thought at first it was some trick of Mouse’s. Only as the glow brightened, he saw it was no phantasm.

Dawn had come at last.

How many people in the city had perished from the frigid cold was still not truly known, though the number could only be very high. Despite this, a carnival atmosphere now filled the city. People jostled along the street, trying to get a better view down the broad avenue. Makeshift banners of hastily dyed green cloth fastened to broomsticks snapped in a crisp wind.