The Rose of Sarifal (38 page)

Suka could see the eladrin’s delicate nostrils flare as she stepped backward to Marabaldia’s side. Not ten minutes before she had been irritated and frustrated at the giantess’s condescension, her increasing habit to treat the gnome as if she were a child or a toy. But now she reached up to grab hold of Marabaldia’s blue dress. She yanked importunately on the rich cloth, and then peered up into her friend’s noble face, its pale purple skin touched with an angry cast of red.

Marabaldia reached down to touch Suka’s shoulder, a comforting, encompassing gesture, while at the same time the membrane over her evil eye slid open, and the surface of the eye itself bulged from the plane of her flat cheek.

Askepel put up his hand. “You will not coerce me with your sorcery,” he said, and nothing more.

Whatever image Marabaldia had conjured to disarm him, the effect was instantaneous. He stood immobile, an expression of disgusted rage on his smooth face. The rest of the eladrin drew their swords, and some had carried double-bladed axes down the steps, along with the giant spits; a dozen or so knights of Llewyrr, in silver fish-scale armor, white capes, and spiked helmets. Ughoth lifted up his hands palm out, as if in a gesture of surrender, then drove his naked fist into the face of one of the eladrin and knocked the lance out of his grasp.
The others grabbed at him. Eleven feet tall, he looked like a man wrestling or playing with a knot of boys, buffeting them about their heads with slaps of his great hands. Even now he wasn’t trying to kill them.

The hall filled up with soldiers. Marabaldia had slipped Askepel’s sword out of its sheath. It looked slight as a poker in her big fist. Two fomorians had already fallen, hewn down on the steps before they could reach the dais. Their dark blood exploded out of them. At the top of the hall, a third was on his knees.

Suka kept one of her secret knives in the crease of each hand. Standing in back of him, for a moment she considered whether she should cut down Askepel as he stood helpless, cut him across his hamstrings—no, she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t do that again. Already she’d disgusted herself by what she’d done in Synnoria, the unnecessary foolishness that had started all this, and that now seemed likely to get them killed, regardless of how she punished Askepel for insulting her. It wasn’t as if he’d had no cause.

The three remaining guardsmen had come down to stand together with Ughoth and Marabaldia, and it was possible, Suka thought, that something could be done to save them all. She turned toward Lord Mindarion, still slumped in his chair, and the Lady Altaira stood beside him, a horrified expression on her face, her almond-shaped eyes wide with terror and distress. Suka climbed onto the tabletop and ran down to stand on the useless documents in front of the old lord. She kicked some of the parchments off of the marble surface then leaned
forward and grabbed hold of Mindarion’s long nose, and forced her fingernails into his nostrils—not to hurt him, but only to wake him. The lady scarcely glanced at what she did. She stood leaning on the tabletop, her yellow hair around her face. All around her there was chaos and fighting as the eladrin pushed down the steps, but Suka pushed her fingers into Mindarion’s nose until he came awake under her hands.

A puzzled frown knotted his white brow, and he opened his bright eyes, blinked, and sat up, a smile of happy recognition on his lips—she’d let go of his nose by this time, and squatted back on her heels.

“My small friend,” he murmured, “how I am happy to see your face. These others were boring me—” which was as far as he got before he realized something terrible was happening. “Stop!” he shouted, leaping from his chair.

Ughoth was wounded, his shoulders drenched in his blue blood, but he had gotten hold of two of the giant-spits, one in each hand, and with them he did deadly damage to his attackers, his yellow eye blazing fire. Marabaldia, also, had skewered several of the Llewyrr knights, though Askepel unfortunately (in Suka’s modest opinion) had escaped.

“Stop!”
shouted Mindarion again, as another of the unarmed fomorians went down. No one heard him or paid attention. But he lifted up his hand and grabbed the gnome’s shoulder, pulled her toward him, and told her to jump down and close the eyes of the sun, words which would have made no sense if Suka had not passed under
the table earlier and seen its etched and painted twenty-foot-long underside, in contrast to its smooth marble top. She did as she was told, and had to duck to see the pattern that ran along the narrow ceiling; constellations, individual stars, the phases of the moon, and at the far end the likeness of the sun, its rays inset with gold, its face a human face surrounded by shaggy yellow hair and a shaggy beard, its eyes wide and deranged. Suka jammed her fingers into them, and pulled down the clockwork metal lids, which shut with a click that was audible to her even in the noise of the assault.

One of the fomorians lay full length beside the dais, his purple face turned toward her, his lips wet with blood and distorted with death. He looked not so much like a creature who had ever been alive, but like a leather mask that had been painted to scare children at the solstice festival or the Feast of the Moon—Suka closed her eyes. She was without hope. All of this was her fault.

But then she felt some movement, and opened her eyes to see the dais underneath the table start to turn, and the whole circular bottom of the council hall of Harrowfast turn like a screw, and sink down along a sloping, cylindrical shaft—slowly at first, and then at an increasing speed. Supported on iron wheels, revolving along a greased iron rail, the entire stone structure made a screeching noise and threw up sparks as it slid out of sight, away from the ring of enraged knights and down into the darkness. Lord Mindarion stood by the spinning table as if directing the descent, Altaira by his side. Marabaldia and Ughoth, also, had
retreated to the table as it began to sink, and the two remaining fomorian guardsmen, all of them protected by the dark. As they slid down the long decline, they looked up to see the faces of the eladrin peering down at them. The air was full of dust and cobwebs and the screech of iron brakes.

They slid down into the guts of Harrowfast, coming to rest finally on a bed of wrecked and rusted machinery, a system of clockwork pistons and counterweights, which Suka imagined had once driven the stone plug up and down its screw-shaped track, unused, perhaps, since the dwarves had fled more than a hundred years before. Light had followed them down the shaft, but the fomorians’ evil eyes were glowing now, spreading beams of yellow light around the chamber at the bottom of the track. They climbed down an iron ladder, Mindarion last of all.

“Sir,” said Marabaldia, “once again you have saved our lives.”

The old eladrin raised his hand to silence her. “Come,” he said, and led the way into the darkness down a sloping tunnel that led northeast, as far as Suka could tell after turning in so many circles.

Ughoth carried the dead guardsman, but after a few minutes he laid him down by the side of the passage, then took his time in getting up, because he was hurt. The guardsmen were carrying the giant-spits. Ughoth was on his hands and knees, and then with a shake of his great head he pushed himself upright and rose unsteadily, supporting himself on the brick wall.
Marabaldia watched him, but there was nothing to be done; they had to move.

“Will they chase us?” she asked.

Mindarion smiled. “Eventually, but they hate the dark.”

No lie. White-faced, Altaira looked around, not reassured, Suka guessed, by the fomorians’ glowing eyes. Down here, the air was warm and stale and hard to breathe.

“We’ll have to continue,” said Marabaldia. “What about the others?” Meaning, Suka supposed, the company they had left in Harrowfast.

Out of breath, Ughoth smiled. Sweat dripped from his broad face. “Give me a moment,” he insisted.

His cream-colored shirt was cut to ribbons over his enormous shoulders, but Suka suspected a deeper injury where he’d clasped his hand over his stomach, and his dark blood made a deeper stain. She wondered why Marabaldia didn’t go to him, didn’t touch him or ask him whether he was well, or make any of the small, useless, comforting gestures smaller folk might have made. Only she stood watching him with an unbearably rich expression on her face, heart-struck and proud, and hopeful and resigned all at the same time. And the gnome realized also, inconsequentially, that they were still virgins to each other, even after all this time, and the extreme delicacy of the way they treated one another was evidence of a connection too deep for her to understand.

“Give me a moment,” Ughoth said, and, gathering strength, he inflated his great lungs to their fullest, and
pressed out a shuddering low note that rose in volume and resonance until the walls started to throb, and Suka and Altaira clasped their hands over their ears. It went on and on, growing in power until Suka imagined it might dislodge the bricks above their heads, imagined also, far above, the cyclopses pausing and gathering and conferring, not because they had actually heard the sound, but because it had caused a motion in the dark, secret, interior tunnels of their brains.

It gave out finally in a series of grunting coughs. Ughoth had blood on his lips. “Come,” Marabaldia said gently, and without touching him she granted him some of her strength, enough to push himself away from the wall and walk with her, side by side, forward into the darkness, pierced by their yellow, evil eyes.

The guardsmen followed them, and only Altaira hung back. “Courage, daughter,” said Mindarion. “Surely you can recognize courage, even if you can’t feel it,” he said, which seemed to Suka unduly harsh given the circumstances. The three of them lagged behind as if from some unspoken decision. “I am disgusted by my own kind,” murmured the old eladrin. “It is a curse to live so long. The curse of the fey, and my people are the worst, because we live the longest. After these centuries, we lose so much of what it means to be alive—not just love, and friendship, and suffering, and kindness, but also art and music. Instead it is the mere shell that persists, by which I mean pride, and snobbery, and self-interest, and cold intelligence—even that will dwindle over time. In Lord Askepel’s case it is almost gone, I fear. So I apologize for him.”

No need, thought Suka. I also apologize, she thought, looking miserably up ahead after the fomorians, after the lumbering dance of light in the black tunnel.

“Is it any wonder, finally, that we search out darkness?” continued the old fey. “We turn inward to ourselves, chase death through the corridors of our bodies—it is too quick for us to catch. Even beyond death sometimes we search for it.”

“I’ve heard,” murmured Suka.

“Yes! But that will not be my fate. Many thanks, my little friend, for what you did inside my nose, though the scratches already have begun to heal. In the woods above Caer Corwell, when I fought with the darkwalker, she showed me the empty spaces within myself, and that was what terrified me. But this is what I will do: I will walk away from Synnoria, walk away from Karador, walk away from Sarifal, and I will find something.”

“Father—” began Altaira.

“You need not accompany me,” he continued, “if you are afraid.”

She was afraid, Suka thought. Tears dripped down her cheeks. And Suka imagined, though she was weeping for herself, that she was also the outlet or opening or vent for Marabaldia’s tears, which otherwise could not show themselves. Up ahead, the two royal fomorians strolled side by side, though Ughoth moved slower and slower as he weakened, and she slowed with him, and all the others slowed as well, to leave them space. Finally, they were barely moving.

And then they stopped. Under the brick vault, Marabaldia helped Ughoth to lie down. Even now she didn’t hug him or embrace him, but sat holding his hand while the lights that had been separate, and the yellow beams that had been parallel, now glowed as one, as their evil eyes combined. They were looking at each other, and Marabaldia bent down, as if to get a closer look. As Suka watched, the light that had redoubled now redimmed to one, as Ughoth closed his eye.

In time, Suka moved up between the two soldiers, who stood on each side of the passageway, facing each other as if on guard, their spears extended at an angle. Behind her she could hear the iron-shod tramp of the cyclopses as they marched down from Harrowfast. Suka squatted beside Marabaldia, whose face was calm and placid. Together they watched the bright lights of the arriving company, their banner limp in the flat air—the torch in the purple fist, the sign of Ughoth’s house.

“I wonder if you might sing for me … a couple of verses of
Oh, Father Dear
,” said Marabaldia.

“Heck,” muttered the gnome. “I’ll sing you the whole thing.”

A R
EUNION

T
HERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT WAYS FOR A DRUID TO MOVE
back and forth between her animal and human shapes, depending on her circumstances and her state of mind. These skills are studied as a science, but mastered as an art, and like all arts, this one grew out of an inner soil of fears, desires, and needs. When Eleuthra was learning, back when it was painful to transform, to feel her bones reknit, her skin stretch and sag, sometimes she would isolate a single part of her body, a finger, first, and then a hand. She’d feel that she had thrust her hand into a fire. When she looked down to see the hair sprout and grow, she imagined that her skin was burning with a black flame. Later on, she learned to love the feeling, too intense almost to bear. Later on she’d feel a shudder in her flesh, and the hair would spread like a wave out of an underwater quake. An abrupt shock, and she would change all at once, as if from the inside out, in an ecstasy that was almost sexual. Sometimes she’d lose consciousness just for a moment. When she was frightened or in urgent need, then she’d lose
consciousness, or else enter a peculiar fugue in which quick intervals of oblivion were mixed with intervals of hyperfocused awareness, the more surreal for being interrupted. And in the unconscious moments she would dream, and her dream, also, would suffer from the same sequence of interruptions.