The sundered seal

Chapter Fourteen: The Truth of the curse

The east postern of Valdris was a narrow iron door set into the foot of the outer wall, so low that a tall man would have to stoop to pass through it. At dusk, as the last light drained out of the sky, it opened a hand's breadth, and a pale face looked out.

"You came," whispered the young woman in the grey cloak. "I was not certain you would."

"We nearly did not," said Lyra. "Your captain was very persuasive."

"He is afraid. They are all afraid." She glanced over her shoulder, then pulled the door wide. "Quickly. Before the patrol returns."

Her name was Isaura Venn, and she was twenty-six years old, and she was one of the only two Ascendants in the Citadel. Her gift was warding, the weaving of invisible walls out of will and breath, and it was by threading a thin ward across the corridor behind her that she bought them a quarter of an hour of privacy in the damp stone passage beyond the postern. She did not waste a moment of it.

"Lord Castellan Voll has lost his mind," she said, without preamble. "I say it as plainly as I can. When the first soldiers returned from the northern watch with bites on their arms, he had them hanged on the battlements. All of them. Forty men. He said it was mercy, that the sickness could not be cured, and that the rest of us must be protected. But I think that he was afraid, and I think that the fear has eaten him."

"We saw the bodies," said Kaelen quietly.

"There are worse things below." Isaura's voice cracked. "I could not do it. When they marched the next group to the walls, I hid eleven of them in the lower vaults. The old cisterns, behind a ward. They are not dead, but they are not well. I give them water. I sit with them. I do not know why. I only know that I cannot hang a person who is still looking at me."

Lyra and Kaelen glanced at one another.

"Take us to them," said Kaelen.

It took two nights.

The vaults were as Isaura had described, a labyrinth of cold stone beneath the lowest tower, damp with seep and lit by a single shuttered lamp. Eleven figures lay chained in a long chamber, some grey and some half grey, some conscious and some not. Kaelen freed two the first night and two the second, and each time Lyra counted his breaths, and each time the voice rose in his head, and each time he told her so. It was becoming a ritual, almost a prayer.

On the second night, as he sagged against the wall with a freed girl weeping on his shoulder, Isaura stood very still in the doorway, her ward flickering faintly around her.

"I did not believe it," she said. "I thought it was a rumour. A story to give the frightened something to hold."

"It is not a story," said Kaelen. His arms were black to the shoulder now, and he did not hide them.

"No." She was quiet a moment. "Then there is something else you should know. The Castellan has been receiving visitors. Not by the gate. In the night, in his private chamber. I have heard him speaking, though the room is always empty when I enter. And last week, a messenger arrived with a sealed letter bearing no crest. The Castellan read it, and laughed, and has not slept since."

Lyra frowned. "What did the letter say?"

"I do not know. But the paper was grey."

They left Valdris on the third dawn, with Isaura's promise that she would hold the eleven alive, and that when the time came she would find her own way to Dawnhollow. As they cleared the outer wall, Kaelen looked back and thought he saw, high in the highest tower, a pale face watching them go.

It was a man in plain grey clothes. He lifted a hand in greeting. Then the window was empty.

The Hollow Stones stood on a bare moor to the east, a ring of nine grey pillars, each taller than three men, leaning slightly inward like the fingers of a half-closed hand. They were older than any settlement. No one living knew who had raised them, or why, and the shepherds of the old days had said that the sheep would not graze within a hundred paces.

The twins arrived at midnight, under a thin and watchful moon.

The air in the circle was strangely still. No wind stirred the heather. The stones themselves seemed to hum, very faintly, a low vibration that crept up through the soles of the feet and set the teeth buzzing. In the centre of the ring lay a flat slab of black rock, rimmed with frost, and on it, shimmering, a single drop of red light hung suspended in the air, like a bead of blood caught in amber.

"I think we are in the right place," murmured Lyra.

"I think so too," said a voice from the dark.

Vorthak descended without a sound. One moment the sky above the ring was empty, and the next his vast shape was settling into the heather beyond the stones, folding his wings with surprising delicacy. The great eyes glimmered in the moonlight, and they were clearer than before, golden and sharp and calm.

"The tide has ebbed," he said. "I have perhaps until dawn. Will you hear me?"

"We will," said Kaelen.

"Then sit. It is a long story, and a bitter one."

They sat on the cold slab. The dragon lowered his head until it hung just beyond the pillars, and for a time he said nothing, only gazed up at the stars as though counting them.

"I will begin," he said at last, "with the seal.

"Ten thousand years ago, my people and yours were not strangers. There was a war, a terrible one. It was fought over a wrong that no one now remembers, and it was bloody, and long, and when it ended, the wise among both peoples agreed that it must never be fought again. So they made a pact. They called it the Accord. Humans would keep to the surface, and my kin would keep to the deep, and between them they wove a seal, a door of old magic, to hold the two worlds apart. It was built by Ascendants and dragons together. It was meant to last forever."

"And it did," said Lyra. "Until now."

"Until now." The dragon's voice darkened. "But I must tell you, daughter of the wind, that the seal did not fail on its own. It was not struck down. It was undone, and carefully, by a man who spent forty years learning its flaws."

"Veyrath."

"Yes. And he did not begin with the seal." The great eye turned to Kaelen. "He began with the curse."

Kaelen's mouth was dry. "Go on."

"You have noticed, I think, that the villages that fell first lay along a line."

Kaelen stared. "The straight line. From the mountains to the sea."

"The Long Line." Vorthak's voice was grim. "He seeded each village with a seed of the sickness, one by one, over many years. A single bite in a single barn. A single coughing child. He moved slowly, patiently, a thread at a time. By the night the seal broke, every village on that line had a knot of curse at its heart, and those knots were joined together, like beads on a string. It was a spell, boy. A great one. And its purpose was not to destroy the villages. It was to carve a channel."

"A channel," whispered Lyra.

"A conduit. The curse, as he made it, is a forgetting, a poison of the spirit. It feeds on what a creature is and gnaws away at it until only the hunger remains. But it needed a way down. The abyss was sealed. No human sickness could cross that door. So he built a river of the stuff, flowing north to south, and when the seal broke, the river ran straight into the dark."

The moon slid behind a thin cloud, and for a moment the stones were black.

"We were not ready," said the dragon. "We felt the door shatter. We felt the light come in. And then we felt the poison pour down after it, like water into a well, and there was nothing, nothing we could do. It touched my sisters first. Then my brood. Then every creature that dwelt in the deep. One by one, they began to forget."

"But why?" said Kaelen. His voice shook. "Why would he want that? To curse humans, and then the abyss, and set them against each other?"

"Because he believes in the sieve." The dragon's eyes burned. "Did he not tell you? The curse culls the weak among your people. And the creatures of the abyss, driven mad and furious, will cull the strong. Between them they will crush the old world into dust. He is not merely trying to destroy you. He is trying to remake all of us, human and dragon alike, into something that suits his design."

"And what is his design?"

Vorthak was silent for a long moment.

"I do not fully know," he said at last. "I have heard whispers in the deep. I have heard the sickness murmuring its own plans. It speaks of a fourth rank, and a throne, and of a day when the last light goes out. But I cannot tell you more. The tide rises, and I lose the thread."

Lyra's hand had found her brother's. Neither of them spoke.

"There is one thing more," said the dragon, and his voice dropped. "Earlier, on the ridge, when my claw touched your palm, I felt the curse in you recognise the curse in me. I told you it was as kin. I did not know the reason. I still do not. But I have thought of it all these nights, and I believe that it is this."

He lowered his great head until it lay beside the slab, and the heat of his breath stirred the frost.

"The sickness was shaped by a human hand, and it remembers that hand. Wherever it goes, it carries something of its maker, a faint signature, like a smell. And you, Kaelen, are the first creature I have met who bears the sickness and yet is not lost to it. I think that the curse does not understand you. I think that it is afraid."

"Afraid?" said Kaelen.

"Afraid of what you are." The golden eyes did not waver. "I do not say it to comfort you. I say it because it may be the only hope this world has. A curse that fears its cure is a curse that can be broken."

For a long time, the three of them sat in silence. The red drop of light shivered above the slab. The stones hummed.

Then, from far to the north, there came a sound.

It was the roar of a dragon, but it was not Vorthak's. It was thinner, wilder, ragged with pain. The great creature jerked upright, and the gold drained slowly from his eyes.

"Ashkar," he rasped. "She is calling. The tide has turned."

"Vorthak, wait," said Lyra, rising. "You said you could sense things through the sickness. The clones. Can you tell where they are?"

The dragon swayed on his feet. His wings trembled. When he answered, his voice had begun to roughen, the words slurring into something older and darker.

"I feel them," he said. "Cold threads. A hundred, a thousand, scattered like frost across the land. Most are distant. But one is close, so close, moving south along the river, and it is not alone. It is not alone, human. It is not..."

His voice cracked. The golden eyes flickered yellow.

"Brackwater," he choked. "It is going to Brackwater. Go. Go now, before I..."

He launched himself into the sky with a roar that shook the stones. Within seconds he was a dark shape against the clouds, and then he was gone, and the hum of the Hollow Stones fell away into silence.

The twins did not speak. They were already rising, wind and light streaming from their hands, and as they cleared the ring of pillars and turned their faces west, Kaelen felt, deep within the black threads that crawled across his arms, something cold and attentive turn to follow them.