The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5)

The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5) Page 299

With a thrust from the butt of a pick hard into his back, they shoved him over the edge, and he fell.

XXVI

AMONG THE DEAD

1

SILENCE did not come easily to Zacharias. Words screamed in his head every waking moment, but he had only vowels left him, a babble of ooo ah ee eh, all those strong glorious sounds shaped twixt tongue and lip cut clean off. He was a mute beast who could only moan and groan. It would have been better to be dead.

It would have been better to be dead than to have betrayed his sister.

Yet he did not die. Like a whipped dog he staggered at his master’s heels cringing and slavering, communicating with gestures and a grotesque vocal mush that Lord Hugh sometimes deigned to interpret, for after all whatever Lord Hugh wished him to be saying surely was what he meant to say, wasn’t it? He was a shadow, kept close by the iron chain that was Hugh’s will and by fear. What if Hugh choked him again with the daimone?

At the end of a miserable summer they left Darre and journeyed north to the town of Novomo, where Novomo’s mistress, Lady Lavinia, entertained Presbyter Hugh and his entourage lavishly and showered Hugh with attention and praise for his role in saving her daughter from an unnamed but obviously gruesome fate. Here they lingered only one day, however, because the heavens remained clear, and in the afternoon of the second day his retinue loaded pack mules and a pair of wagons with a king’s ransom in provisions and traveling gear. With their escort of forty of Adelheid’s crack Aostan cavalry they rode to a hillside outside Novomo where an old stone crown stood above slopes turned to white-gold after summer’s searing heat.

The dozen servants, forty soldiers, and half a dozen clerics who made up Hugh’s retinue waited in marching order as the sun sank toward the rugged western hills. Hugh led Zacharias forward to a patch of sandy ground—the only part of the hill not covered with brittle grass—and placed Zacharias directly in front of him, back to chest, placing into Zacharias’ hand the arm’s-length wooden staff used to weave threads of starlight into stone.

This mathematical weaving Hugh had been teaching him for months now, and tonight his learning, and his memory, would be put to the test. His knees trembled, his palms were damp, and his lips were cracked. Was it worth the price of his tongue to have the secrets he had so long wished to uncover revealed at last?

His tongue, perhaps. But not Hathui.

“There,” said Hugh. “Do you see it? The first star. We must seek east and north to weave our path. We will hook the Guivre’s Eye, rising to the northeast, and weave a net around the Eagle rising to the east.”

They would snare the Eagle, who had already been betrayed by her own brother. The staff quivered in his hand as rage shivered through him, but Hugh guided his arm. The staff rose as Hugh chanted words Zacharias would never be able to speak, although he now knew them by heart.

“Matthias guide me, Mark protect me, Johanna free me, Lucia aid me, Marian purify me, Peter heal me, Thecla be my witness always, that the Lady shall be my shield and the Lord shall be my sword.”

With Hugh’s hand directing him as the first stars shuddered into visibility in the purpling sky, he caught the threads of the stars with the staff and wove a pathway into the stones. The stars strained against this tether as the heavens churned inexorably onward, turning and turning with the wheel of night, and the entourage hurried nervously through the gleaming archway to vanish as if into thin air.

The threads pulled taut against the stones, stretching, thinning, and unraveling, before Hugh clapped him hard between the shoulders and shoved him forward after the final pair of riders in the rear guard. Zacharias stumbled through the gateway with the music of the heavens ringing in his ears and his legs as weak as an invalid’s and his forehead and neck running with sweat. A steady throbbing buzzed up through his soles and all at once

he sees a girl asleep within a circle of attendants, a motley crew, certainly, for one of them is Anna to his utter surprise, and just as the vision flashes into darkness he realizes that it is Blessing, grown so large, trembling at the edge of womanhood

Sanglant rides at the head of an impressive army, Wendishmen and marchlanders and the ungodly banners, a dozen or more, of Quman tribes, a host of them to strike fear so deep that he wets himself. The prince does not ride in chains as their prisoner. He leads them, and yet he wears no griffin feather wings because he leads a pair of living griffins as easily as he might bring along a prized stallion and mare, their iron feathers gleaming so brightly that Zacharias is blinded

his head hurts

night drowns him as stunted shapes scuttle along rock and through tunnels, voices chattering and clacking as they converge on a pale corpse lying at the base of the shaft beside bronze-bound buckets half filled with nuggets of silver. They are so hungry that it gnaws his belly and he weeps with the pain of this constant starvation so many of them and all trapped here where they must labor in return for the merest dregs of foul nourishment without which they will all die and not merely the many who have already succumbed. They swarm, ready to descend on the corpse, but a sorcerous light bleeds from the arm of the dead man for he isn’t dead at all and that precious totem they recognize as a sign passed down through their generations. They back away, their whispers echoing through the stone halls within which they are trapped