Bertana and Deorwen, following, were uncomfortably near.
The locking angles of rooftops turned above them as they walked what turned out to be a crabbed circle of narrow corridors taking them fully around the entire monastery before they could turn inward. Lamoric's pace allowed the others to move well ahead.
Finally, Durand and his lord turned the corner onto an empty passageway and silence—alone. Durand spotted a low door standing open. As he ducked under, the abbot faced him. The scratches marking the old man's face and knuckles stood starkly against his skin.
'This is where you'll be. And don't think I don't know what you are, you lot. You're no pilgrims, and you're no honest household guard. The Patriarchs don't hold with these orgies of extortion and butchery your kind has fallen into, and I don't care what you call them. You will mind where you go while you're here, and you'll keep silent."
The abbot winced tightly, noticing Lamoric.
"And him to the infirmary; two of you can take his arms. And those two." He gestured with the head of his staff to Deorwen and Bertana. "They'll go to the women's—"
Deorwen protested, just a heartbeat late, "I must stay with my—"
"They
will go to the women's quarters and keep quiet." Two monks appeared to take the women out. Deorwen's eyes caught Durand's for the first time that day, and then she was gone.
There was silence in the gloom while the abbot waited. The men had been caught off guard.
The captain stood in the center of their group.
"Agryn?" Coensar said. "You'll give Durand a hand with His Lordship?"
Agryn nodded—after the briefest hesitation.
"Come," said the abbot.
"All right," said Coensar. "Ev
eryone get comfortable. There are alcoves in here somewhere. And likely a candle."
"Rushlight," the abbot corrected from the corridor.
Durand and Agryn followed the old man into the passage, Lamoric between them.
"Wait," the abbot said.
Astonished, Durand watched as the old man pulled a black ring of keys from his belt, rattled the door shut, and turned the key on an armed conroi. Sigils had been painted over the door.
"Right. Follow me," the old man said and tramped off between the sheer, dark walls at a pace that curled Durand's lip.
Their small party
walked another hitched circle round the maze, then turned inward once more where a vast well gaped at the heart of the monastery.
Durand hesitated on the threshold of the shaft. It might have been a keep hollowed from the storerooms to the open Heavens, or a mine, opened to the air. They were at the bottom of an emptiness, thirty paces wide and nearly twenty fathoms deep.
Beyond a screen of pillars, he heard shovels.
Monks, bent in prayer, shuffled in an open square. None looked up. As Durand wavered, he understood what he was seeing: They had locked a turf maze at the bottom of the stone one, the scuff of countless sandals wearing knee-deep tracks in the earth.
Lamoric's weight hung on Durand's shoulder. Agryn shot a look over the lord's neck:
come on.
They were losing the ancient abbot, and Lamoric could not last much longer on his feet. As it was, he hardly moved his legs.
Durand held his questions, and they passed two more shrouded bodies as they slipped through the deep garth. Fresh earth lay strewn on the flagstones.
The abbot with his yellow-smeared forehead stood, his arms crossed round his staff like some Banished thing from a mountain cave.
"Here," he said. "Bring him this way."
And, with a nod, they did, hauling Lamoric into another dim chamber. This one, however, was not empty. Wounded men—the abbot's brother monks by their garb—occupied several pallets.
Durand looked to Agryn. "What's happened?"
But the abbot silenced him with a raised hand:
Wait.
"Leave him and go," the abbot said. "He'll be right again in no time. The warder will let you back." He gave Agryn another of his pointed looks. "I expect you can find your way, brother."
"Yes, Father Abbot," said Agryn, and caught Durand by the arm and rushed him out to retrace their steps through the stone maze.
"What's going on?" Durand demanded. He heard the bite of spades once more around some distant corner. "It is difficult to be sure," Agryn hedged. "He seems to know you."
"Aye, he knows. A man must be hard to live this way. They are watchers here. Pacing the maze since the
Cradle.
I do not know the story of this hill, but some wild chieftain will have called up some fiend here. And, whatever it was, seventy generations have not tramped it down. The people of this land were desperate when Saerdan and his Sons of Atthi first came. Your Heremund will not tell you that, I fear, but here you can feel it, even under this sacred weight of masonry."
The slap and rattle of their boots and scabbards followed them down the passageways.
Durand suddenly had a glimpse of the hill in his mind's eye: packed with clawed things. He imagined the solemn men in the cloisters, overwhelmed in a moment, buried or hauled under.
Agryn had truly begun to hurry.
"And they've lost men just as we nearly lost His Lordship on the Barrow Isle. All across the kingdom, it will be the same. It is a dangerous business to spill the blood of kings. People do not understand."
"That old man's stare," Durand said. "It's like a razor."
"He's blind, Durand. Cataracts."
Durand missed a step, but Agryn's pace was insistent.
"We must move," he said. "From what I can see of the Heavens, we are nearly at Last Twilight. I would not be abroad in this place after."
He was almost running, taking turning after turning with speed enough that Durand's flat soles caught and slid to keep up. Finally, Sir Agryn pelted into a corridor Durand recognized. A monk waited by a low and painted door, a ring of keys rattling in his shaking fist.
As the door shut them in darkness, the bells of the monastery's sanctuary rolled in their high towers, tolling for the last light of day.
The rushlights fluttered on a dozen amber faces against the dark.
"We're locked in," whispered Berchard, "but there's a half a wheel of sharp cheese, and a few pints of claret to wash it down."
It was the only time Durand ever heard old Agryn laugh.
A
rushlight's rancid
flame is short-lived, and the old abbot had spared no more than they needed, so soon the men subsided into their stony niches. Beyond their dormitory, chilling sounds bounded down the dark passageways of Cop Alder. Monks chanted. Distant screams shot through the dark. Agryn muttered; the click of his tongue and teeth matched the monkish rumble. Durand could feel the air shivering in his clothing like a living thing.
"Ah," said Berchard. "It's nights like this I see things with my Lost eye, you know."
"For God's sake,"
hissed Badan from the blackness,
"keep them to yourself. Talk of something else."
"What of Moryn then? What do you think of him tracking us north, eh?" said Berchard.
"Aye," Badan said. "What's that whoreson want now?"
Coensar answered, "He's bound for Tern Gyre, just like us." There were oaths and groans. "He'll be carrying his father's vote to the Great Council. They must all be there."
A yowl leapt through the passages beyond the door, the shock so strong the hinges clicked.
Shadows twirled the thread of light under the door, while knights and shield-bearers stared, mute.
Someone hissed,
"Gods."
"Sleep all of you," said Coensar. "I promised you beds, and you have them. Now sleep."
In his alcove of hard-edged slates, Durand rolled onto his shoulder, listening to Agryn's mutter and the thready sounds beyond the door. He wondered what had gone on in Yrlac. Nearly, he prayed that it was Radomor who'd been hounded to his death: a death at the hands of that grim-faced cadre of knights who surrounded Duke Ailnor. It would mean that this was the worst, and that the shock would pass and the kingdom emerge whole and sound. But he had seen Radomor, with his bald skull hot as a cauldron, glowering from his father's throne.
He must know. It was good they were going to Tem Gyre. The magnates were gathering: Beoran and Yrlac and Hellebore and Windhover and Gireth and all the others. Lying there in the dark, Durand knew that he needed to see what storm had struck the realm.
As exhaustion pulled him down into sleep, he heard many men threading their whispers with Agryn's muttered prayer.
Without warning, the
door rattled open, spilling watery daylight across the room. The abbot stooped in the gap, twisted and black as some hieratic sign.
"First Twilight, Milords. Time you were gone." He paused a mad instant. Then the bells tolled for the daylight. He grinned, saying, 'There. I wouldn't lie to you," and was gone.
Durand rolled painfully from his stone cot, planting booted feet on the flagstones and scratching fleabites on his neck. "Bricks and beds," said Berchard.
"Wha?" Badan was grimacing.
'Two things you shouldn't make without straw," was Berchard's answer.
Others groaned and brayed like a barnyard.
"I'll check on His Lordship," said Coensar, hands on his knees. His breath steamed in the chill air. "The rest of you see if you can pry something warm to eat out of these tight buggers. Remember, we'll see Tern Gyre in a few days, right?"
Durand's first need, however, was the privy. First on his feet, he ducked into the passageway and got directions from the warder monk—too many twists and turns—and set off.
It was strange seeing the place under the pale twilight after the wild sounds of the night before. Like memory, a mist swirled around his ankles and beaded the carved Powers and. beasts round the doors. Whatever Lost souls had been racketing through the place, they were sleeping now that the Eye had returned to the vault of Heaven.
Meanwhile, Durand's quest was getting urgent. Twice, he doubled back, certain that he must have gone the wrong direction. Finally, he ducked into a narrow room he had never seen. A stone bench along the wall sported six holes.
The blind abbot stepped out in front of him.
"You, is it? Wandering off?"
Durand wasn't about to explain.
The man grunted. "You're not at the center yet, but you will be, yes?"
"Father, that's not where I'm going." "What? What're you going on about?" He grinned in the pale light, showing gaps between wide yellow teeth. "You'll
find your way to the center yet, mark me. But there'll be trials: fire and water and faith and blood."
All
Durand wanted was to be left alone with the privy bench; he'd had enough of prophecy.
"Ah,"
the abbot said. "They've already been at you, haven't they? Have they called you Bruna?"
Durand took a half step backward.
"Bruna of the Broad Shoulders. It's a wise woman's game. They'd see Bruna in you, and say nothing—or warn you that honor and treachery are two sides of the same door. Hags. You're a big stone. You'll make ripples. That's all they see. They love to natter about the big stones, the wise women."
A white brow twitched over one bright, blind eye. There was still a cracked smear of ochre.
"Don't worry," said the old man, leaning close as a conspirator. "What I see is mine to know. I keep secrets." He was tapping his nose. "All of this business. Oaths and fear. Just remember what we're fighting here."
"Fighting?"
"The Son of Morning. His Host. The Banished. This is a kingdom that'll fall hard when it tumbles. It's like a net stretched tight over all those things—a net of knotted oaths. Creation is packed with Lost souls and creeping fiends, and, the Patriarchs of old, they stuck the king in like a finger holding all the knots. You think we're not all fear-mad in this place? That we would not run away if we could? Cop Alder's shaking like a fat man's buckles. But we've sworn oaths fit to curdle the blood, and, if we ran, who would hold the door behind us?"
The man's pale head nodded. "It is the same wijth you: hemmed in with oaths and fear and dreams and women."
Durand ducked past the man's leer, stalking down the narrow room. He could wait no longer, and, when he looked up, he saw that the ancient abbot had not left.
"Remember what is at stake," the blind man said. "Remember it is everything!"