The Rose of the World (16 page)

Ten

Smoke and Mirrors

The old man turned and surveyed his visitors with satisfaction. The two who were conscious were staring about them in open-mouthed awe, as was only right and proper. Even if he said so himself, the Great Hall was a glorious achievement. His stronghold was probably the most magnificent building in all of Elda. Or rather, in all of
known
Elda, he corrected himself, remembering the extravagance of the basilica he had commissioned in his former capital, with its gilded mosaics and marble-inlaid floor, its fabulous carvings and gleaming golden dome. It had taken over a century as men measured time to complete the task of the vast mosaic alone, so intricate and finely worked was it. A sudden pang went through the Master then.
Just think
, came an unbidden voice,
you could have had all that and the Lady, too, if you’d been more careful. You wouldn’t have had to flee to this gods-forsaken corner of the world and make do with shadows and turnips . . .

‘Now then,’ he said, firmly pushing the annoying voice back into the darkness where it belonged, ‘let me take the boy and see what I can do for him.’ Then he lifted Fent Aranson from the shoulders of the giant as if he was no heavier than a reed, turned on his threadbare heel and vanished suddenly and silently into the deep shadows beyond the Great Hall, leaving the two men gawping after him.

It was some time before Aran Aranson came back to himself sufficiently to take in the full import of where they were. He stared about his surroundings in wonderment. No man of his generation – and perhaps no man in history – had ever stood where he now stood: in the very heart of famed Sanctuary.

The hall was dominated by arched windows filled with some mysterious transparent substance which appeared to let the light in and the cold air beyond them out. These made the room seem chillier still, for the light that issued from them was so bright it seemed almost as tangible as the icy interior it illuminated. What saved the chamber from unrelieved austerity was a collection of hides of the most massive snowbears that could ever have stalked these arctic wastes, which were scattered here and there across the hard-packed floor; and a vast tapestry hanging above the hearth at the far end. Everything else was of ice – the tables, the chairs, the settles, even the lamps – great globes on stands which emitted an eerily pale and unnecessary light. He watched Urse walk like a man in a dream across the floor to the hearth and stretch his hands before its leaping fire. In another context, it might have seemed a comfortingly mundane gesture: a man in a cold place trying to warm himself. Except that the flames were green and blue and violet: every colour alien to any natural fire.

‘Urse!’ he said loudly and cringed as his voice echoed noisily across the hall and fled away into the vaulted ceilings high above. Gazing up fearfully, he was alarmed to note that his call had disturbed a horde of tiny translucent creatures which had set to flitting and diving madly about in the deep blue shadows, their movements visible as a momentary flicker and shimmer amidst the gloom.

‘What are they?’ breathed the giant, a look of apparent puzzlement creasing his ruined face. It was hard to read the big man’s facial expressions when half of them were either missing or vastly distorted, but his brows were knit and he could not stop pulling at his single remaining ear, a tic the erstwhile Master of Rockfall had previously noticed Urse resort to in times of confusion and discomfiture.

Aran shrugged. ‘I thought they might be bats . . .’

The giant shook his head. ‘They’re like no bats I ever saw.’ He looked down at the fire again, then shook his head sadly. ‘This is a terrible place, Aran. We have come to a terrible place.’

His companion gave no answer to this, but crossed instead to one of the great windows and stared outside, as if in the hope of refuting Urse’s statement. In one direction, all he could see were vistas of endless ice; in the other a vast and sculpted parkland of snow with a mirror-flat lake gleaming in its centre. Nothing moved on that sheeny expanse, though here and there it seemed that the corpses of ducks and oddly shaped swans floated upon still waters. A pair of graciously proportioned balustrades flanked a sweep of stairs which ran from the stronghold out towards the lake and on these were also strewn a number of strange objects – what looked much like half a sheep appeared to have been draped along the bottom step, and a number of smaller and even less identifiable creatures lay scattered across the frosted lawn.

Frowning, he turned back to his companion.

‘It’s not what I imagined,’ Aran said quietly. Who knew what the old man might hear in this unnatural place?

Urse cracked what might have been a rueful smile. ‘You mean, where’s the gold?’

‘Ssshh.’ Aran moved softly to the doorway and peered out into the maze of corridors. But of the Master and Fent there was no sign. It had been hard to consign the boy to the mage’s care, but somehow when the old man had taken him he had found himself unable to object, unable even to move his feet to follow, and then it seemed he had simply forgotten to be concerned: that, or the old man had made some spell over him. For Aran Aranson had no doubt that Sanctuary was a place made by and filled with sorcery.

His hand crept down to the dagger which hung at his belt and he unhitched the blade and brought it up into view, ran a thumb along its edge. Keen, it was, and of good Eyran iron, forged by his own daughter in the Rockfall smithy. But could even the finest blade be keen enough to cut the throat of a sorcerer? His heart quelled at the very thought, now that he was here and the deed imminent. Shaking, he sheathed the blade, and ran a hand across his face.

Despite the arctic setting, sweat was pouring down his cheeks and neck. Embarrassed, he rubbed it away. At his collar, his fingers ran across the thong of leather he wore around his neck, then moved down to the pouch which hung from it. There they fluttered like moths at a flame. Without a moment’s conscious thought, Aran reached in and touched the curl of parchment which nested inside. As if it were indeed a flame, it gave out a tremendous heat, comforting, reassuring; compelling. He pulled out the map and gazed at it. At once, clarity returned, a warm glow of confidence and certainty. He turned to the big man.

‘When the mage returns my son to me, then we will kill him.’

Urse One-Ear regarded his captain mildly. ‘It would be a shame to kill an old man.’

‘We came here for his gold; I will not leave this place without it.’

‘If you kill the old man, you may never leave. Besides, he does not look like a rich man to me, a man who has a lot of gold. Not with those ragged clothes and holed shoes.’

‘Pretence and deception. We will make him tell us where it is,’ Aran declared mulishly. ‘And then we will kill him.’

‘Tell me how will we leave this place – with or without the gold – when we have no ship to bear us? Shall we fly like eagles bearing carrion, or like bumblebees laden with pollen?’

But Aran Aranson was immune to the big man’s jibes. ‘When he returns I will make him tell me where the gold is. And then he will reveal to us where he keeps the ship on which he travelled here.’

‘A ship?’

The Master had reappeared in the doorway, his footsteps soundless on the ice. Behind him, Fent Aranson followed like a sleepwalker, eyes unfocused, his long face with its fringe of auburn beard showing no hint of expression. The old man smiled, cunning as a fox.

‘A ship, you say?’ Then he laughed, a huge sound which set the pale creatures in the shadows to wheeling and flapping again. ‘Ah, the naivety of men. Charming, so charming.’ He caught Fent by the arm and propelled him forward. ‘Go to your father, my boy,’ he whispered, and as if set in motion by the turn of a key, Fent marched across the floor of the Great Hall with leaden legs and came to a halt in front of Aran Aranson. There, he issued no word of greeting, indeed gave no sign of recognition of either of the men who stood watching him, their eyes as round as plates.

‘As you can see,’ the Master said. ‘I have restored him, as well as I can, for now, at least.’

Aran tore his gaze away from his miraculously restored son and stared at the mage in consternation. Had the old man heard him planning his death? Surely he must have done, for he was smiling still, and it was not a smile to gladden the heart.

‘May I see that?’ the Master asked, inclining his head towards the parchment in Aran’s hand.

Aran looked down guiltily, then back at the sorcerer, his panic rising.

The old man reached out a hand, flexed his fingers, and as if magically summoned, Aran Aranson found himself crossing the room, his hand outstretched before him, the map lying curled, exposed and naked on his palm. He wanted to clutch the parchment into a ball, to hide it beneath his clothing, to make it disappear. But his hand remained strangely unwilling to do his bidding, as if it now belonged to another master than the man to whom it was attached. Two strides away from the mage he halted, then watched in appalled wonder as the map rose into the air and floated into the grasp of the old man. Immediately, despair set in. He was lost; all was lost. It had all been such a waste, the entire enterprise – the kidnap of the shipmaker, the building of the
Long Serpent
, the selection of its crew, the disastrous voyage and the treacherous trek across the ice – all seemed no more than a sequence of follies, follies which had whipped up a maelstrom of madness and taken the lives of many good men. For the sake of sheer greed, he had lost what he held dear: his family, his steading, his reputation. He was a broken man. For the first time in his life, Aran Aranson felt the most profound shame. He hung his head and wept.

For his part, the Master took no notice of this display of emotion. He did not even bother to look at the map a second time, but merely held it to his nose and sniffed the parchment as if its scent brought him comfort.‘Ah,’ he sighed. ‘Squid ink mixed with cat’s urine. Bëte, ah Bëte, my dear, I shall have you back yet.’

Then he tore the precious chart into tiny pieces and, uttering a single word of power over them, dissolved the fragments into thin air.

‘Now,’ he declared in a voice which permitted no objection, ‘come with me.’

They followed the Master out of the Great Hall, the Giant, the Madman and the Fool, their feet obedient only to his word. He led them down corridors embedded with precious stones and seamed with pyrites which glittered its tawdry seductive gold and they saw nothing of it, for he wished it not; he led them up stairways carved into the ice, up and up and up until their breath filled the air with clouds of steam and their lungs protested. But no sound did they utter, for it was not his will that they should.

At last they surmounted the hundred and sixty-eighth step, and there an intricately carved door stood closed before them. On the Master’s word of command, the door swung open without a creak. And now they could not help but cry out, for the light hurt their eyes, so bright it was, so radiant and many-coloured.

‘Behold the world!’

One spell had lifted; but it seemed another had fallen over them. At first, they had no idea of what they were looking at: it was too strange, too unexpected, too hard to fathom. Then, one by one they were able to descry a huge oval bowl set upon a plinth of ice, bathed in ever-changing light. Above it, the centre of the roof lay open to the grey arctic skies, and this was where much of the light was sourced. But all around, amidst a spider’s web of chains and levers and pulleys were crystals great and small, some thinned by some unimaginable force to slivers as long as a man’s arm, yet only as thick as his smallest finger; some whole and polished to facets so that fractured light from them rebounded from the ice, the other crystals, the surface of the bowl, the men’s faces. Aran Aranson stepped boldly up to the plinth, and Urse followed, dragging the oddly languid Fent in his wake. There, they gazed into the bowl, and were mightily confused by the vista offered therein. It appeared to be a swathe of dark ocean, jammed with frazil ice which was intermittently lifted and let fall by invisible rollers, so that the entire surface rose and fell, undulating like some great sleeping beast. In the far left of the scene, a broken ship lay on its side, wedged amidst the ice. It was not the
Long Serpent
, which had gone to its demise beneath just such dark waves of ice, but a similar vessel; even so, a chill of memory and recognition ran through their bones at the very sight of it. The Master let them dwell on that sorry image for a few more seconds, then he laid hold of a lever, adjusted the angle of a large crystal, and the scene veered crazily, racing through colours like seasons flowing one into another and out the other side; and then suddenly where there had been frozen sea, now there was another landscape entirely – an expanse of ochre stretching as far as could be seen. This, too, seemed full of waves, for it was striated with long curving lines, great crescents and arcs, elegant as birds’ wings. Aran frowned. He had never seen anything like it.

Smiling, the Master turned another handle and the focus shifted, closing fast, diving vertiginously from crow’s view to ant’s. ‘It’s sand . . .’ breathed Urse One-Ear, amazed. ‘Fields of sand.’

Just like a sea
, Aran thought, remembering travellers’ tales of such, tales dismissed as fable, of thousands of miles of wasteland so parched that a man lost there would die in a single day under the pitiless eye of the sun, if he had not luck or aid.

Fent Aranson simply stared at this inimical place unblinking and said not a word.

‘They call it the Bone Quarter now,’ the old man mused. ‘Though I remember when it was a fair land of tall reeds and gentle rivers frequented by ibis and dove.’

Aran and Urse could make nothing of this statement. Instead they watched, amazed, as he turned the levers again and brought another vista crashing into view. A black volcano ascended into glowering red clouds, indeed, was making those very clouds, belching out gouts of cinder and glowing ash as if it would burn up the whole world. None of them had ever seen such a thing in their lives. They had heard the word ‘fire-mountain’ from the tales that the old folk told on winter nights, for this was how Elda had come into being according to one legend of the North: a great sea of fire had covered all the surface of the world, islands and continents had formed from the shooting cinders as they cooled; and the First Men – their most distant ancestors – had been ejected in spurts and falls out of the flaming depths. But it was hard to give credit to such tales; for an equal and opposite myth about the birth of Elda had it that Umla, the Great Mother – who was, according to varying versions, either a vast milch-cow or a huge cat – had given birth to a single offspring which she called Elda and which at first seemed no more than a formless lump until the Great Mother had licked it into shape, thus making the mountain ridges and the islands, the rivers and the seas, and had poured herself into the heart of the new world, and from that inner being had poured forth all the birds and animals, the men and the women so that Elda would have them to love and care for.