It was all Vash could do not to turn and run away. How could anyone speak to the Living God on Earth like that and survive? But again, the autarch seemed barely to hear what Olin had said.
“Of course you can feel it,” Sulepis said. “That does not make it a curse. Your blood feels the call of destiny! You have the ichor of a god inside you but you have always tried to be nothing but an ordinary man, Olin Eddon. I, on the other hand, am not such a fool.”
“What does that mean?”the northern king demanded. “You said there is no such curse in your family, that your ancestors and you are no different than other men.”
“No different in blood, that is true. But there is a way in which I am
nothing
like any other man, Olin. I can see what none of the rest of you can see. And here is what I saw—your family’s blood gave you a way to bargain with the gods, but you didn’t understand that. You have never used this power . . . but I will.”
“What nonsense is this? You said yourself you do not have the blood.”
“Neither will you after it has leaked out of you on Midsummer’s Night,” the autarch said, grinning. “But it will help give
me
power over the gods themselves—in fact, your blood will make me into a god!”
King Olin fell silent then, his footsteps slowing until one of his guards had to take his elbow to make him move faster. The autarch, on the other hand, appeared to be enjoying the conversation: his long-boned face was lively and his eyes flashed like the golden plating on his costly battle armor. Earlier that year Vash had almost lost his head when he had been forced to tell the autarch they could not make his armor suit entirely from gold, that such weight would cripple even a god-king. He had learned then what was now becoming obvious to Olin—you could not reason with Sulepis the Golden One, you could only pray each morning that he would spare you for one more day.
“Come, Olin, do not look so offended!” the autarch said. “I told you long ago that I would regret ending our association—I truly have enjoyed our conversations—but that I needed you dead more than I needed you alive.”
“If you think to hear me beg ...” Olin began quietly.
“Not at all! I would be disappointed, to tell you the truth.” The autarch reached out his cup and a slave kneeling at his feet instantly filled it from a golden ewer. “Have some wine. You will not die today, so you might as well enjoy this fine afternoon. See, the sun is bright and strong!”
Olin shook his head. “You will pardon me if I do not drink with you.”
The autarch rolled his eyes. “As you wish. But if you change your mind do not hesitate to ask. I still have much of my story to tell you. Now, what was I saying . . . ?” He frowned, pretending to think, a playful gesture that made Vash feel ill in the pit of his stomach. Could it be true? Could the might of the heavenly gods really come to Sulepis—a madman who was already the greatest power on the earth?
“Ah, yes,” the autarch said. “I was speaking of your gift.”
Olin made a quiet sound, almost like a little sigh of pain.
“You know, of course, how your gift comes to you—the Qar woman Sanasu captured by your ancestor Kellick Eddon, the children that he fathered on her who became your ancestors. Oh, I have studied your family, Olin. The gift is strongest in those who show the sign of the Fireflower, the flame-colored hair sometimes called ‘Crooked’s Red’—or ‘Habbili’s Mark’ as it is called in my tongue. I suspect the gift runs in the blood of all of Kellick’s descendants, even those who do not bear the outward signs....”
“That is not so,” said Olin angrily. “My eldest son and my daughter have never been troubled by the curse.”
The autarch smiled with childlike pleasure. “What of your grandfather, the third Anglin? Everybody knows he had strange fits, prescient dreams, and that he once almost killed two of his servants with his bare hands although he was considered a very gentle man.”
“You truly have learned . . . a great deal about my family.”
“Your family has attracted much attention in certain circles, Olin Eddon.” The autarch leaned toward him. “You must know that even though your grandfather Anglin showed every sign of this . . . tincture of the blood . . . he was not one of the red Eddons, was he? He had the pale yellow hair of your ancient northern forebears, just as your daughter and eldest son.”
“You mock me. My daughter bears no taint,” Olin said tightly.
“It matters not—she is of little interest to me,” the autarch told him. “I have what I need, thanks to Ludis, and that is you . . . or rather, that is your blood. The one thing on which the oldest and most trustworthy of tale-tellers on both continents agree, as well as those alchemists and thaumaturges of my own land who performed secret experiments and lived to describe them, is that only the blood of Habbili—your people’s Kupilas—can open a path to the sleeping gods. Why is that important? Because if the path can be opened, the sleeping gods that Habbili banished so long ago can be reawakened and released.”
“You are mad,” Olin said. “And even if such madness were true, why would you do it? If we have lived so long without them, why would you let them walk the earth again? Do you think even with all your armies that you could stand up to them? By the Three Brothers, man, even the tiniest drop of their diluted blood in my veins has turned my life topsy-turvy! In their day they threw down mountains and dug oceans with their bare hands! Why would you, loving power as you do, free such dreadful rivals?”
“Ah, so you are not entirely naïve,” said the autarch approvingly. “You at least ask,
but if it were true, what next?
Yes, of course, I would be a fool to let all the gods go free. But what if it were only one god? And more important, what if I had a way to rule over and command that god? Would that power not become mine? It would be like having mastery over one of the ancient
shanni
—but a thousand times greater! Anything within the god’s power would be mine.”
“And this is what you plan to do? ” Olin stared. “Such hunger for more power and wealth in one who already has so much is ludicrous . . . sickening.”
“No, it is so much more. It is why I am who I am while other men, even other kings like yourself, are merely . . . cattle. Because I, Sulepis, will not surrender what I have when Xergal the master of the dead comes with his cowardly hook to take me away. What point conquering the earth if the bite of an asp or a piece of stone fallen from a column can end it in an eyeblink?”
“Everybody dies,” said Olin. There was contempt in his voice now. “Are you so frightened of that?”
The autarch shook his head. “I feared you might not understand, Olin, but I hoped the magic in your own blood might make a difference. What is a man who settles for what he is given? No man at all, but only a brute beast. You ask what a man who already rules the world can possibly desire? The time to enjoy what he owns, and then, when he ceases to enjoy it, to tear it down and build something else.” Sulepis leaned so far that Vash was terrified he might topple from the litter. “Little northern king, I did not kill twenty brothers, several sisters, and Nushash knows how many others to seize the throne, only to hand it to someone else in a few short years.”
Somebody was shouting outside and the platform began to slow.
“So, we near your old home, Olin. It is true, you do not look well—it seems you were right about being close making you ill.” The autarch laughed a little. “Still, that is another reason for you to be grateful to me. I shall make certain you do not suffer such unpleasantness for too much longer.”
“Golden One, why have we stopped?” Vash asked. He had visions of some of Olin’s people springing out of the woods in ambush.
“Because we are only a short distance away from the place where this coastal road comes out of the forest,” the autarch said. “We have sent scouts ahead to determine where we should make our camp. It is likely we will have to dislodge the Qar, who have been besieging our friend Olin’s castle for some months. Their army is small but they are full of tricks. However, Sulepis has some tricks of his own!” He laughed as gleefully as a young boy riding on a fast horse.
“But why are we even here?”Olin asked. “If you believe you must kill me to pursue your mad ideas, why come all this way? Simply to punish those of my family and subjects who still care for me? To taunt them in their helplessness?”
“Taunt them?”The autarch was enjoying this playacting. At the moment, he pretended to be insulted. “We have come to save them! And when the Qar are driven off and I am done here, your heirs may do what they please with this place.”
“You came here to save my people? That is a lie.”
Again the autarch refused to take offense. “It is not the whole truth, I admit. We are here because once this was the very place the gods were banished. Here, now buried beneath the buildings your kind made, lies the gate to the palace of Xergal—Kernios, as you northerners call him. And here Habbili fought him and defeated him, then pushed him out of the world forever. Here is where the ritual must take place.”
“Ah,” said Olin. “So as I suspected, it has nothing at all to do with anything but your own mad schemes.”
The autarch looked at him almost sadly. “I am not greedy, Olin, whatever you think. When I have the power of the gods at my service I will not need to quibble over this castle or that castle. I will rebuild the heavenly palaces of Mount Xandos itself!”
Olin and Vash could only stare in amazement and horror, although of course the Paramount Minister did his best to hide his feelings.
A good part of an hour had passed as they sat motionless in the middle of the coast road. Olin had fallen into silence and the autarch seemed more interested in drinking wine and dandling one of his young female servants while he whispered in her ear. Vash was using the delay to look through his records—he would be hideously busy the moment they reached the place to make camp—when one of the autarch’s generals came to the platform and asked for a word with him. After an exchange in which the general did not raise his voice above a whisper, the autarch sent him away. For a moment he was silent, then he began to laugh.
“What is it, Golden One?” Vash asked. “Is everything well?”
“Never better,” said the autarch. “This will be even easier than I planned.” He waved his gold-tipped fingers and the platform lurched into movement once more, the slaves carrying it groaning quietly as they began to walk. “You will see.”
It was some time before Vash learned what his master meant. As they reached a bend in the road the slaves got up and pulled back the curtains, giving Vash a moment of panicky vulnerability, but a moment later he saw why they had done it.
On the coast side of Brenn’s Bay, the mainland city of Southmarch was deserted. Much of it had been burned, or was still burning, but the smoke and the dancing flames gave the scene its only movement. There was not a living creature in sight anywhere nearby, and even the castle across the water looked empty, although Vash did not doubt that plenty of Olin’s countrymen lurked inside, sharpening their weapons to shed Xixian blood.
“See?” the autarch said in triumph. “The shore is ours—the Qar have gone. They had no wish to be caught between our army and the bay. They have given up their claim to the Shining Man!”
Vash was distracted by a noise behind him, but the autarch paid it no attention. Sulepis was gazing over the scene with obvious satisfaction, as though this were not Olin’s long-lost home but his own.
The noise, Pinimmon Vash realized after a moment, was King Olin praying as he stared out across the water toward the silent castle.
39
Another Bend in the River of Time
“Some claim that the Qar are immortal, others that their lives are only of greater length than those of mortal men. But which of these things is true, or what happens to fairies when they die, no man can say.”
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand,” prepared by Finn Teodoros for his lordship Avin Brone, Count of Landsend
A
LL HIS LIFE Barrick Eddon had prayed the things that made him different from others, his crippled arm, his night-terrors and storms of inexplicable grief, all the terrible legacy of his father’s madness, would prove to have some meaning—that the truth of him was something more than simply a botched and meaningless life. Now his prayer had been answered and it terrified him.
I didn’t save the queen. What if I fail with the king’s Fireflower, too? What if it will not have me?
He stood on the balcony of the king’s retiring room. A shower had just passed over the castle; the towers and pitched roofs jutted like tombstones in a crowded cemetery, dozens of different shades of damp, shiny black. In the short time since he had come the skies over Qul-na-Qar had always been wet, shifting back and forth between mist, drizzle, and downpour as though the ancient stronghold were a ship sailing through the storms.
Still, there was something peaceful about the place, and not just its near emptiness: the seemingly endless maze of halls had the quiet air of a graveyard, but one in which the ghosts had been dead too long to trouble the living. He knew things lurked in the shadows that should have terrified him, but instead he felt at home in this god’s house full of uncanny strangers. In fact, it was odd just how little he missed anything that had been his before—his home in the sunlands, his sister, the dark-haired girl in his dreams. They all seemed very distant now. Was there anything worth going back for?
Barrick grew impatient at last with the shimmer of wet roofs and his own circling thoughts. He left the room and made his way down a steep stairway of cracked white stone and out into the covered colonnade beside a dripping, empty garden. Even the strange plants seemed muted in color, their greens almost gray, their blossoms so pale that their pinks and yellows could only be seen from nearby, as though the rain had leached most of their color. From down here the castle’s many towers looked less like cemetery stones and more like the complexity of nature, full of abstract, repeating shapes—pillars and bars and chevrons of the sort human nobles used as heraldic symbols to mark their family name, but which were repeated here in endless patterns like the scales of a snake. The profusion of these basic shapes both lulled and confused the eye, and after walking for a while Barrick found even his thoughts growing weary.